Sex and Violence in Hollywood (62 page)

Horowitz brought Waldo Cunningham back to the stand and confronted him with his son’s story. Cunningham blustered and backpedaled, but maintained that his son had told him he had been hired to blow up Michael Julian’s yacht. His story had been deflated, though, and even Lazar could not pump any air back into it.

Diz’s testimony was the lead story of every news report and the focus of all the talk shows. It was generally agreed by all the talking heads on television that Rona Horowitz had been doing an excellent job of casting doubt on the prosecution’s case. But they also agreed that Nathaniel Cunningham was a godsend for the defense. Diz added pathos to the already colorful story of California vs. Adam Julian. The public liked him, pitied him. And everyone loathed his father.

Adam decided not to ask Horowitz how she had managed it. She did not bring it up, of course. Neither did Max nor Lamont. Adam was afraid to jinx the maneuver by bringing it out into the light of day. It was the first time he felt with certainty that he would be found not guilty. A feeling he tried to shake because Horowitz had told him so many times that it was dangerous. After all, she’d only just started presenting her case to the jury. And juries were unpredictable.

But Adam could not help feeling that, after Diz’s testimony, the trial was over.

FIFTY-THREE

Over the following weeks,
Horowitz called to the stand a long line of extensively coached witnesses. She started with long-time friends of the Julian family—including Mrs. Yu—who, one at a time, claimed they had never seen any evidence of trouble between Adam and his father, certainly nothing more than the typical father-son tensions and the occasional testing of the boundaries of authority. If anything, they said, Adam had always been a little too quiet, polite but never very talkative.

Lazar questioned them vigorously, but his attempts to discredit or even confuse them met with little success.

Horowitz called to the stand several expert witnesses of her own. Dr. Locket and Dr. Remini, a couple other psychiatric experts, an expert in explosives, and even the designer of the yacht. The designer had very little to contribute and she could have done without him, but that sort of thing seemed to impress juries. Her explosives expert was puzzled by the question of whether or not there had been explosives on the yacht.

“If there were no explosives on the yacht, it wouldn’t have exploded,” he said. “Of course there were explosives on the yacht. The one we know about is fuel. There’s evidence that it was a boat, and it did blow up. But beyond that, I see nothing that could lead to anything resembling a conclusion one way or the other. Not without the involvement of the paranormal.”

“Could it have been accidental?” Horowitz asked.

“Yes, it could have been accidental. But it could have been hit by a meteorite, too. It could have been anything.”

Her next witness was actor Donald Sutherland. He recounted the incident in which Michael Julian had nearly burned down his own house while trying to cook trout almandine.

“Michael was...well, he was not very well-coordinated,” Sutherland said.

When Horowitz and Lazar were finished questioning the actor, Judge Lester adjourned for a thirty-two-minute-long fifteen-minute recess, which she spent in her chambers visiting with the star of M*A*S*H.

Alyssa took the stand and told of her relationship with Adam. She was an excellent character witness, and provided vivid descriptions of Adam’s behavior around the time of the explosion, which she thought perfectly normal. But most of all, Horowitz allowed Alyssa to be herself in front of the jury. To show them she was an intelligent, sensitive, lovely young woman. Not the kind of person who would hang around with a murderer.

Adam and Alyssa had been coached separately. Less time had been spent on Alyssa, but when Lazar questioned her, it did not show. She handled herself beautifully as he asked her how she possibly could know that Adam’s behavior was normal when she had known him for such a short time. Did she think the people closest to a killer were objective enough to realize he was a killer? Did she actually think Adam would have confessed his guilt to her? And what about her goth fetish? Wasn’t she a regular at a dance club called Jugular? Didn’t she hang out with people who drank each other’s blood? She answered the questions thoughtfully, sincerely, and truthfully, and remained unrattled by the hostility that crept into the deputy district attorney’s voice.

Horowitz called witnesses—two of Michael’s ex-girlfriends, a former personal assistant, a producer, and a fellow screenwriter—who had known Michael Julian and testified that he was a clumsy man. It was not an obvious clumsiness, they said, but the kind you noticed after you had known him awhile. Then you came to realize he could not get through a room without bumping into something.

But it was Horowitz’s next and final string of witnesses for which the press and the public had been waiting with such anticipation.

* * *

From the moment Horowitz claimed in her opening statement that Gwen Julian was wanted in four different states under four different identities, the news media had chewed on it like an entire neighborhood of dogs on a dinosaur bone. The District Attorney’s office reacted with outer calm while a frenzied investigation was conducted away from the press. The story began to unfold on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the internet. Starting with the evidence Max Vantana gave them, the FBI launched an investigation.

Photographs of earlier Gwen Julians began to surface in the media. She had undergone excellent cosmetic surgery at various times in her past, altering her features slightly. Along with changes in hair color and style, it was enough to make her look remarkably different in each picture, under each identity. Each face represented a dead rich man. A stockbroker in New York, the founder of a nationwide chain of electronics stores in Seattle, a rancher in Montana, and a retired architect in Maine. No one famous enough to make things too difficult for her. All four had died in accidents that were so clean, they almost did not look suspicious. But they raised just enough eyebrows to be investigated. By the time suspicions became certainties, she had disappeared as if she had never existed.

Horowitz questioned the detective in charge of each investigation in each state. The detectives identified the women they were looking for among the pictures of the surgically altered Gwen Julian. The agent heading up the FBI investigation took the stand and confirmed that all the women in the photographs were indeed Gwen Julian. He also revealed that no records existed of Gwen’s daughter Rain, nor was there any record of Gwen ever having a child. Technically, he said, Rain had never existed.

Lazar objected repeatedly on relevance, but was overruled each time.

Horowitz skillfully painted a picture for the jury, in bold, colorful strokes, of a beautiful, brilliant, soulless black widow who so pathologically craved the money she made from killing her husbands, she was willing to undergo painful operations to change her appearance so she could continue killing husbands without getting caught.

Somewhere, Adam thought as he sat in the courtroom, Aaron Spelling is watching this and jerking off.

* * *

Meanwhile, the usual attention given the trial continued. Twice a week, a television screen lowered over Conan O’Brien’s desk showing only the very top of a black-haired head identified as Rona Horowitz. Off camera, a man spoke in a falsetto voice, mocking Horowitz’s clipped, abrupt speech pattern as he subjected Conan to a comic, hostile cross-examination.

On Saturday Night Live, guest host Alec Baldwin portrayed a bumbling, tripping, blithering Deputy District Attorney Raymond Lazar in a courtroom sketch that broke into a musical number a third of the way through.

Each night for a month, David Letterman introduced Rona Horowitz, and out walked a male dwarf in a replica of one of Horowitz’s suits with a fat cigar clamped between his teeth. And each night, he delivered a different absurd line in falsetto, many of which concerned the high-profile attorney’s plot to rule the world.

Everywhere, the gurgling of water coolers mixed with conversations about the trial, some loud with dissent. Many people believed Adam Julian to be a spoiled, amoral rich punk who possessed no values or conscience, and that he probably was responsible for the deaths of the six people on Money Shot, but they suspected he would never be convicted because of his wealth and Hollywood connections. The great majority, however, believed the prosecution’s case to be unforgivably weak, and thought if Adam was convicted, it would be due to his wealth and Hollywood connections, which the jury might resent. Groups on both sides of the discussion demonstrated outside the courthouse with signs and banners. Sidewalk vendors sold T-shirts and caps and buttons and coffee mugs and flags, all souvenirs of the Money Shot trial.

An “unofficial” version of the story would be the subject of a Fox made-for-television movie to air right after the trial. In it, a young, relatively unknown soap opera actor who had golden hair, a deep tan, pouty lips, and piercing blue eyes portrayed Adam, and Heather Locklear made a special appearance as Gwen Julian.

A small northern California toy company called RawSpot Toys—the manufacturer of dolls in the likeness of real-life serial killers like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and celebrity death scenes in the form of model kits—found itself at the eye of a storm of controversy when it added to its catalog an exploding model of Money Shot. The replica of Michael Julian’s yacht was eighteen inches long and flew into pieces with the ka-ching of a ringing cash register. Each Money Shot came with six tiny figures made to stand on the deck and fly in all directions when the yacht “exploded.” Once reassembled, it could be set to fly apart again. Newspaper columns and editorials expressed outrage at the company for making such an obscene toy. Call-in talk shows and Internet chatrooms boiled with the angry words of indignant people horrified by the depths to which some would go to make money these days. The owner of the small toy company received several death threats. But he was able to afford excellent security with the money he was making in bundles from Money Shot alone, which was so popular it was difficult to keep in stock. Not to mention the tremendous increase in overall sales resulting from all the publicity. Suddenly, his toys—aimed at rebellious teenagers and adult collectors of the macabre—were so popular, he had to get a new server for his website, which was mobbed daily.

* * *

As if the melodramatic story of Gwen Julian were not enough, Horowitz gave her audience one last surprise. She called Adam to the stand.

With no way of knowing exactly what might happen during cross examination, it is very rare for a defense attorney to put a defendant on the stand. An inarticulate, flustered, angry, or seemingly dense defendant is not typically a winning defendant. A flash of arrogance, an angry epithet exclaimed when cornered, and it could be all over, no matter how strong the case. Less than five percent of all defendants testify in their own defense. In most cases, attorneys will not let them, even if they want to.

Adam had known all along that Horowitz was going to put him on the stand. The very thought of it had paralyzed him with fear at first. Since then, he had been trained for it as a soldier is trained for combat. But it still paralyzed him with fear.

Lazar had tried to bring the liquor store security videotape into the trial during the pretrial procedures, but Judge Lester would not allow it because it was unrelated to the murder charge. But as she led Adam through the entire story he had told her, Horowitz herself showed the videotape to the jury. She used it to show what Rain had put him through, to establish that Adam was afraid for his life because of what Rain had threatened to do, and because of what he had overheard in her bedroom. There was a dramatic gasp in the courtroom when Adam said Gwen Julian and her daughter Rain had planned to kill his dad as well as Adam himself once he had outlived his usefulness.

“You knew your father’s life was in danger, Adam,” Horowitz said. “Why didn’t you warn him? Why didn’t you tell him what his wife and her daughter were up to?”

“I did,” Adam replied. “I told him everything. He came into my bedroom one day and I just...I laid the whole thing out to him. In detail. From top to bottom.”

“How did he react?”

“He thought I was pitching a script.”

“What does that mean, Adam?”

“He thought I was telling him an idea I had for a screenplay. He...he really liked it, too.”

Horowitz frowned, as if puzzled by Adam’s response. She asked, “How could he think such a thing? After you had told him everything?”

Adam looked down at his lap. Waited a few beats, just as rehearsed. Quietly, sadly, he said, “Dad and I, we...we never communicated very well.”

On the stand, Adam was able to address each and every point made against him throughout the trial. He and Carter, Adam claimed, had written bloody stories for Mrs. Boam in the eighth grade because they upset her so and made her screw up her face until she looked like the Grinch from the Dr. Seuss book, and it had made them laugh. He described the conversation he and his dad had been having when he made the remark Luci Therridge had interpreted as a threat on Michael Julian’s life. It gave Adam a feeling a satisfaction to answer all the questions the trial had raised.