Outrage (2 page)

Shaking his head, Karp then turned to face the jury box, fixing his gold-flecked gray eyes on each juror for a moment before moving to the next. He nodded when he reached the last face, then began. “As you now have experienced, a capital murder trial has two separate phases. In law we say it is a ‘bifurcated’ proceeding. In phase one, the guilt phase, you the jury determined that the defendant is guilty of the murders for which he was charged. Phase two, the sentencing phase, deals
with whether in your opinion, and based on the law, the defendant should be sentenced to death.”

Karp let the finality of that sink in before continuing. “For the past couple of weeks, on behalf of the People, my colleague Ray Guma and I have presented evidence—what we call ‘aggravating factors’—that more than justifies sentencing this defendant to death. For example, you were shown additional crime scene photographs and heard from the People’s witnesses who graphically described the vicious nature of the defendant’s merciless attacks on the deceased, Olivia Yancy and Beth Jenkins. But other than a brief few minutes in which Olivia’s husband, Dale, spoke movingly, you heard very little about these women as real, living, breathing individuals.”

Turning to point at the defense table, Karp said, “And as you know, the defense then presented its case, arguing that there were mitigating circumstances for why the defendant committed these crimes. The defense hopes this will persuade you to vote against invoking the death penalty. As such, you listened to a great deal about the defendant—his abused childhood, the violence he may have witnessed at an early age, the absence of convictions for other violent crimes, and how he
may
have been sexually assaulted while serving time in a juvenile detention facility some five years ago.”

Karp walked slowly over to the defense table until he was standing in front of it. “If these things are true, then we certainly agree that no child should be abused or traumatized, and we may even come to understand what demons drive this defendant’s evil nature,” he said, fixing the defendant with a hard
look. “But I also ask you to remember the testimony of Moishe Sobelman and the horrors he survived at the Sobibor death camp. And then remember that understanding does not mean that we forgive or excuse the brutal, vicious, methodical, and inhumane horrors that evil men perpetrate on the innocent—that the defendant perpetrated on two innocent women, Olivia Yancy and Beth Jenkins.”

Without bothering to conceal the look of contempt on his rugged face, Karp stared down at the defendant. “He certainly doesn’t look like he’s capable of such horrors, does he? He’s young. Cleans up well—”

“Objection,” said Langton, an attractive thirtysomething brunette. She didn’t need to address the issue further. While a defendant may have been arrested looking like he’d been living in a sewer, the prosecution was not allowed to comment when the defense team cut their client’s hair, shaved and showered him, put him through detox if necessary, and then dressed him up like a preppy Dartmouth premed student.

“Sustained; continue, Mr. Karp,” Dermondy said.

Karp nodded to the judge and then turned back to the defendant. “Here in this courtroom, the defendant hardly looks like the killer we all know him to be. He even wept for you on that witness stand with those big, brown eyes blinking away the tears. Listen to his tragic story, look at him frightened and demoralized in his seat now, and it’s easy to feel sympathy for him.”

Karp whirled and strode over to the prosecution table, where he picked up two eight-by-ten portrait photographs depicting the murder victims as they’d appeared in life. He held them up
for the jurors to see. “But I would suggest that such sympathy is misplaced. It rightfully belongs to these two women. A young wife, Olivia Yancy, eager to move into a better, safer neighborhood, so that someday she could feel comfortable raising her children there. But she was instead ambushed by an evil and manipulative predator, the defendant, who stalked her because she was defenseless and vulnerable and lured her into his murderous trap under the guise of friendship.”

As he spoke, Karp handed the photographs to the jury foreman and again pointed at the defendant, who quailed but did not look up. “And her mother, Beth Jenkins, a sixty-year-old widow, who went to help her daughter pack her family possessions for the move but walked in on Olivia being brutalized by that man here in this courtroom sitting so meekly at the defense table.”

Stepping back from the jury rail, Karp allowed his voice to rise along with the genuine emotion he felt boiling to the surface. “So often evil men are made to seem like victims—they say they were only ‘following orders’ in Nazi Germany, or hitting back at the oppressors of Muslims everywhere … or they were abused as children. At the same time, it’s almost obscene how quickly we forget who the real victims are, that they weren’t just the numbers tattooed on their arms, or nameless, faceless office workers, or merely photographs to be passed around a jury box. Take a good look at the women in those photographs, ladies and gentlemen, and remember, they were real and they were the victims.”

Karp pointed at the defense table. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we can understand that outside forces may help lead a
man to commit evil deeds, but it does not justify or excuse the sort of horrors and suffering he may inflict on other human beings … as this defendant inflicted on Olivia Yancy and Beth Jenkins.”

He paused, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. “You may ask, ‘Aren’t all murders horrible?’ And ‘Isn’t the taking of any life equally reprehensible?’ Good questions. So how do we differentiate between a murderer who deserves life in prison and one who deserves to be executed? And isn’t it enough to remove the offender from the population and lock him away with no hope of ever getting out?”

Karp rocked slightly on his heels and leaned on the jury rail, facing the jurors eye to eye. “Make no mistake, my colleague, Assistant DA Ray Guma, and I considered these very issues before deciding to seek the death penalty in this case.” He then stepped back and continued. “And we decided that because the defendant’s outrages were so cruel, unspeakable, and inhumane, if there is to be a death penalty, then beyond any and all doubt, this defendant’s evil qualifies. Let me suggest that perhaps the best way to demonstrate to you how we reached our conclusion, and the conclusion we are asking you to reach, is by going through the same process we did of reviewing the evidence and recalling what happened on that terrible day a little more than a year and a half ago.”

The courtroom hushed; all eyes were on Karp. Even the defendant felt compelled to look up. “It was early afternoon when the deceased, Olivia Yancy, finished packing for the move to her new apartment and walked three blocks to her neighborhood grocery store. That night was to be the Yancys’ last in the old
apartment, and to celebrate, she was going to make a special dinner. She was happy. Her husband Dale had just been promoted to full professor at Columbia University. And the new apartment had two bedrooms, one for the child she intended to conceive…. Life was good.”

I
T WAS ONE IN THE AFTERNOON ON A SMOKING-HOT
J
ULY
day in Manhattan with the humidity and stench of the city hovering above the asphalt and concrete as a noisome translucent vapor. Ahmed Kadyrov wiped the sweat from his forehead as he watched the pretty young woman struggle with two stuffed paper bags, one in each arm, as she exited the mom-and-pop grocer on 110th Street on the Upper West Side. He waited until the auburn-haired beauty started off down the sidewalk and then hurried to catch up.

Despite being a methamphetamine junkie beginning to show the signs of his addiction—a deteriorating complexion with dark circles under his large brown eyes—Kadyrov was still a decent-looking young man of twenty-two who was often mistaken as Hispanic with his neatly coifed black hair and trim mustache. But he was Chechen, having immigrated to
the United States at age twelve, and still spoke with an accent, which women found attractive.

However, the only thing Ahmed Kadyrov liked about women was terrorizing and raping them, and then robbing “the bitches” to feed his demanding drug habit. Lately, he’d been getting a kick knocking them around a little too, and the last time had been particularly gratifying when he used the switchblade he carried in his pants pocket to draw a few drops of blood from his victim’s neck.

As a boy he’d watched as a Russian army squad raped his mother and sisters. It was an event the psychiatrist at the Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx, where he’d served a year for his first sexual assault, had told him was at the root of his “issues with females and predilection toward sexual violence.” But he didn’t give a shit what some “fag shrink” thought; if anything he identified with the Russian brutes. Women, especially pretty ones like his mother and sisters, were whores and got what they deserved.

Kadyrov found the areas around the colleges in the five boroughs to be good hunting grounds. There were lots of pretty young women, especially in this neighborhood near Columbia University, which increased his odds of finding one in need of a “Good Samaritan,” the ruse he used to win their confidence. They could be so incredibly gullible. For instance, he usually struck during the day, when such women thought they were safer accepting help from a neatly dressed stranger in a short-sleeved button-down shirt and khaki pants with a nice smile and friendly attitude.

“Excuse me,” he said as he moved slightly in front of the
young woman, forcing her to slow her pace and adjust her heavy bags, “may I help you, please, to carry?” He laid the accent and foreign word groupings on especially heavy when on the prowl; he perceived that for some reason, women also thought polite-seeming European types were less dangerous.

The young woman smiled but shook her head. “Thank you, that’s very kind,” she said. “But I’m only going three blocks, and I wouldn’t want you to go out of your way.”

Kadyrov was ready for the expected response and reached for what appeared to be the heaviest bag before she could protest further. “Is no problem, I am going this direction. Please, I help.” He turned up the smile a notch with a look in his eyes that indicated his feelings would be hurt if she refused his generosity.

“Well, sure, if you don’t mind,” the young woman said with a smile. “I’m Olivia.”

“Very good to meet you,” Kadyrov said. “I am Stefan.”

They talked as they walked. He said he was a prelaw student at Columbia University, an irony that made him smile inwardly. She told him that her husband, Dale, taught English lit there. “He just made full professor,” she said proudly. “It means more money, so we’re going to be moving into a nicer apartment. I’m supposed to be packing now.”

They reached the entrance to her apartment building, a ten-story, 1950s-era edifice of dingy yellow brick with graffiti scrawls on the walls as high as the “artists” could reach. Olivia stopped and turned to Kadyrov with a smile and reached out for the bag he carried. “I can get it from here, Stefan, thank you so much.”

Kadyrov shifted the bag away from her outstretched hand. “Is no problem I take in for you, then I go,” he said with a grin. “Job is, how do you say, only half-finished. No?”

Olivia hesitated, but she looked again at his smiling face and shrugged. “Well, sure, that’s very nice of you.” She stepped in front of Kadyrov so he wouldn’t see the access number that she punched in. There was an electronic buzz and click and she smiled over her shoulder as she pulled the security gate open. “Come on up.”

Kadyrov smiled. He loved this period of stalking just before he pounced, when his prey still didn’t know that she was about to be savaged. Beautiful women, like so many pampered, stupid sheep, could be so oblivious to the fact that the wolf was walking among them dressed in a Brooks Brothers shirt, khaki pants, and loafers.

Olivia led the way to the elevator, which they took to the fifth floor, and then walked down the hall to a corner apartment. Kadyrov was pleased that there were no sounds from the closest neighbors’ apartments. He slipped his free hand into his pants pocket and grasped the handle of the switchblade.

Olivia turned the key in the lock and opened the door. “Would you like a glass of water?” she said. “It’s all I have. The fridge is empty and—”

Whatever the young woman intended to say next was cut short by the hand that went across her mouth and the feel of the wickedly sharp knife blade held against her throat. “Don’t scream,
sooka
, or I’ll cut your fucking head off,” Kadyrov whispered in her ear as he kicked the door shut behind them. “Now we’re gonna get busy.”

S
ITTING ON THE
D
TRAIN AS IT RATTLED NORTH FROM
Manhattan into the Bronx, Amy Lopez lifted her copy of the
Post
so that the young acne-scarred man with the peroxide-blond hair sitting across from her couldn’t see her face. He’d been staring at her since getting on the train at the 125th Street subway station, and she’d caught him glancing at her purse, which she had tucked closer against her hip. She read the headline that screamed from the front page.

She turned the page to read the report about the murder trial of a Harlem imam named Sharif Jabbar. It was one of those stories that had the city riveted to the various tabloids and the evening television news. A young woman had been decapitated
in the basement of the al-Aqsa mosque in Harlem during some sort of frenzied buildup to a narrowly thwarted terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange the previous fall. And now, in April, the imam was being prosecuted for her murder.

According to the story, New York district attorney Roger “Butch” Karp, who was prosecuting the case, had called an unindicted co-conspirator, Dean Newbury, the senior partner of an old, established white-shoe Wall Street law firm, to the witness stand the day before. And while testifying against the imam, the old man had toppled over and died. The “official” word from a court spokesman was that Newbury had succumbed to “an apparent heart attack.”