The Ability to Kill (8 page)

American courtroom scenes in films and books had prepared me for most of the differences of lay-out and procedure. What
I had not been prepared for was the informality of Western justice.

Each defendant was in the charge of a uniformed sheriff (in Miss Tregoff’s case, an attractive girl-sheriff) and they were brought into court via the public corridor. Once seated at their table to await the arrival of the judge, they were immediately surrounded by press photographers, television cameramen and reporters, who only moved out when the bailiff announced the judge’s entrance. During the frequent and lengthy recesses, the photographers and reporters would move in again. Photography in court was forbidden only during the actual hearing; but during the recesses lawyers and witnesses could pose for pictures re-enacting the proceedings. As the trial progressed a circus atmosphere developed that even the regular crime reporters began to find disconcerting. One Los Angeles paper was running a series of ‘impressions’ written by Hollywood actresses—a different one each day.
^‖
The sight of those ladies, pad and pencil in hand, dark glasses removed and skirts hitched up becomingly, being photographed while they interviewed the eagerly co-operative defendants, made one wonder if this really could be a murder trial, if perhaps the whole thing had not been engineered by one of the studio publicity departments to promote a new picture.

The bearing of the defendants themselves did nothing to correct that impression. They appeared relaxed and unselfconscious, even a little bored. The smiles they exchanged now and again were fondly rueful. They behaved a little like a pair of newlyweds separated for the first time by different bridge tables.

The Deputy District Attorney in charge of the prosecution made no noticeable contribution to the dignity of the proceedings. He was a lanky, soft-spoken, middle-aged man with the apologetic air of an amateur actor cast as Marc Antony in a charity performance of
Julius Caesar
, and worried about the draping of his toga. He smiled too often, as if to inform us that he appreciated the joke, too. He was, no doubt, a most capable lawyer. Unfortunately, he had a habit of mislaying his documents and exhibits. Photograph in hand he would advance on a witness. ‘I show you this photograph of a Cadillac car,’ he would begin sternly, ‘and ask if you can identify.…’ At that moment he would himself catch sight of the photograph, realise that it showed a house or a bullet wound, and break off. ‘Excuse me, Your Honour,’ he would say to the judge, and then pick his way unhurriedly through the contents of a big soap-flakes carton in which he kept his records of the case. If this failed him, he would cross to the courtroom filing cabinet, containing the already labelled exhibits, and try there. Usually, he found what he wanted in the end, but the delays were boring and gave the prosecution’s case an indecisive air.

Mr Grant Cooper (for Dr Finch) and Mr Egan (for Miss Tregoff) were more impressive; Mr Cooper in particular.

His cross-examination of the Swedish maid was in the best tradition. The young woman was harassed and confused. It would have been easy for him to have confused her still further. Instead, he handled her quietly and gently, obviously earning the liking and respect of the jury as he did so. He threw just enough doubt on her recollection of events to make room for the defence’s accidental death story which was to come later.

The stumbling block, however, was Mr Cody. If he were believed, the doctor and Miss Tregoff were conspirators with a very determined intent to murder. Accident would be out of the question. Cody’s evidence had to be discredited.

With his record, it should have been easy. It was not. He could admit to the basest motives and behaviour without a trace of embarrassment. He was the defence lawyer’s nightmare. It is hard to discredit the evidence of a man who insists so cheerfully on his own perfidy, his total
lack
of credit.

Cooper did his best. For example, he brought out the fact that the witness was an escapee from a bad cheque sentence, and that, in the period of a year, he had worked a total of four days at two jobs.

Mr Cooper: ‘What did you do?’

Cody: ‘I loafed.’

Mr Cooper: ‘How did you support yourself?’

Cody: ‘By my wit.’

Mr Cooper (later in reference to one of Cody’s girl friends): ‘Did she support you?’

Cody: ‘Yes.’

Mr Cooper: ‘Did she support you in Hollywood or did you live by your wits?’

Cody: ‘Both.’

Mr Cooper: ‘How about Las Vegas?’

Cody: ‘I got a job as a shill at the Fremont Hotel—for two days.’

Mr Cooper: ‘Was that very hard work?’

Cody: ‘Oh, no. I was forced to quit. I had to get a police card. They would find out where I was and take me back to Minneapolis.’

Cooper became impatient with this frankness. Concerning the transaction with Dr Finch and Miss Tregoff he asked: ‘You felt that, regardless of what the agreement had been, you had swindled Dr Finch and Carole?’

Cody: ‘Well I don’t know if I would call it swindled.’

Mr Cooper (sarcastically): ‘Cheated?’

Cody (accepting the distinction): ‘Yes.’

Mr Cooper tried another gambit. ‘You wanted to co-operate with the law enforcement officers. Was that out of the goodness of your heart?’

Cody: ‘No, on the advice of my lawyer.’

Laughter in court. Mr Cooper turned in his hand.

Mr Egan also tried. He adopted the classical mode of attack. After a build-up based on the witness’s lamentable record, he delivered what he hoped would be the
coup-de-grâce.

‘You’ve testified you’ve been hired to murder someone for money. Is that right?’

Cody: ‘Yes, sir.’

Mr Egan: ‘Would you lie for money?’

Mr Egan was silent. Cody thought about the question. Obviously he wanted to give a helpful, reasonable reply. Finally, he nodded. ‘It looks like I have,’ he said thoughtfully.

His meaning was plain. He meant that he had lied to get money out of Dr Finch and Miss Tregoff. There really was nothing to be done with the man.

With the departure of Cody (he returned to a cell in Minneapolis), the trial left the front pages for a bit. Asian flu and bronchitis claimed one of the male jurors, who was replaced by a female alternative—seven women and five men were the arbiters now. Important witnesses were also ill. Miss Tregoff’s attorneys scored a minor victory when they eliminated some of her self-incriminating statements from the record. There were scenes of jubilation and kisses were lavishly bestowed. But everyone knew that there were real charges for the pair to answer and that the only man who could answer them was Dr Finch.

As the moment approached when we would hear Grant Cooper outline the arguments for the defence, the tension rose. The queues waiting to occupy the seats reserved for the public lengthened. There was pushing and shoving. And not only in
the corridor outside the courtroom. The press box became crammed. A San Francisco paper sent in a columnist noted for the trenchant advice he gave to his readers about the joys of mixed bathing in the nude. It was even rumoured, on the basis of the appearance in the press room of a tall, thin man with a bright blue suit and a long ginger beard, that the beatnik paper
Underhound
was covering the trial. Actresses with reporter’s notebooks were two-a-penny.

On February 3, a month after the trial had begun, Cooper rose to address the jury.

The defence was that Dr Finch had lied steadily to Mrs Finch about his relationship with Miss Tregoff and that, until he had been served with the divorce papers in May, had believed that he had lied successfully.

When he learned that he had not, all his efforts had been bent to preventing a divorce, which would, he had feared, damage both his business prospects and his professional standing.

He had had two courses open to him. He could stall by pretending to want a reconciliation, or he could try to get evidence that his wife had been going with other men and was not, in fact, the innocent party she claimed to be.

He had tried to do both. When the reconciliation idea had not worked, he had employed private detectives to follow her. They had proved useless. They would follow her for a couple of hours and then lose her. And they had proved expensive. He had asked Miss Tregoff if there were not someone in Las Vegas who could do the work.

Dr Finch was also prepared to admit to discreditable behaviour. When Cody, whom he had hired to follow his wife, had suggested that, if it proved impossible to get other evidence against Mrs Finch, he himself should seduce her in order to provide it, the doctor had agreed dubiously that he
could try. That had been all that Cody had been paid to do.

As for the alleged assaults on her, Dr Finch’s case was that his wife had been a neurotic woman, who had imagined things and spread stories of his violence solely in order to substantiate her charges of cruelty in the divorce case. As for her being scared to death of guns, she had been able to hit a beer can at twenty feet with the very revolver that had killed her. In happier days, they had used it to practise target shooting on a hillside behind the house.

All in all, some very questionable behaviour; but murder, no.

On the day that the doctor was to give his evidence the corridor outside the courtroom became packed to suffocation. For once, the air-conditioning seemed ineffective. One elderly lady, who fainted in the queue, came to as she was being borne away and piped a despairing ‘Hold my place.’ Nobody did. Inside, things were scarcely better. Five visiting South Americans somehow managed to get into the press box. All credentials had to be checked before the interlopers could be identified and ejected. A columnist famed for her appearance on the ‘What’s My Line?’ television programme was mobbed by autograph hunters. A woman juror got into a violent argument with one of the court sheriffs who refused to leave his post to get her book autographed. One cameraman was standing on the judge’s desk to get a wider angle on the scene. The court was a little late in getting down to business; but in the end order was restored and the great moment came.

Dr Finch took the stand with the air of an experienced pilot taking over for an instrument landing in dense fog—tense but steady, nerves well under control. He asked at once if he could dispense with the microphone and rely upon the strength of his own voice to carry. ‘If you can’t hear me,’ he instructed Cooper, ‘hold up your hand.’

After Cooper had taken him through his account of the events leading up to the night of July 18, the doctor described what had happened at the house.

He had approached his wife in the garage saying that he wanted to talk to her. She had pulled out the gun. He had closed with her in order to take it away. She had fought with him. He had had to hit her with the gun—hence the skull fractures. When he had put the gun down (presumably to deal with the maid) she had snatched it back and started running down the driveway.

He did not know where Miss Tregoff was. He thought that his wife had seen her. He ran after his wife. When he caught up with her, she had the gun in her two hands (as she had always held it in target practice) and was pointing it—not at him but in a direction that could have meant that she had seen Miss Tregoff and was going to shoot her.

He grappled with her and there was a second struggle. As he again wrenched the gun away from her and started to throw it into the bushes, she started to run.

At that moment—he did not know how or why, or even if the gun had been cocked—the gun went off.

When he reached his wife, who was lying on the ground, he did not realise that she had been shot.

He said to her: ‘What happened, Barbara? Where are you hurt?’

She said that she had been ‘shot in the chest.’

‘I told her not to move. I said, “I’ve got to get an ambulance for you and get you to the hospital.” Barbara said, “Wait.” She said, “I’m sorry, I should have listened.” I said, “Barbara, don’t talk about it now. I’ve got to get you to a hospital.” ’

At this point Dr Finch began to weep as he told the story.

‘She said, “Don’t leave me” and then she paused and said, “Take care of the kids.” ’

Dr Finch’s voice broke and he had difficulty continuing.

‘I checked her pulse right away. There was no pulsation. I turned up her chin. There was no respiration. She was dead.’ And then he repeated it. ‘She was
dead.
I said “Barb,” but she couldn’t answer.’

Dr Finch was not the only one weeping now. Some of the jurors were weeping with him.

But not all of them.

Cooper made the doctor act out the second struggle over the gun to show how it happened; but the demonstration did not really help.

Mrs Finch had been shot in the back and not at very close quarters. The doctor said that the gun had gone off as he had flung it away into the bushes. Could it have been defective? There was no way of knowing. The bushes had been searched and searched again. The gun had not been found, there or anywhere else.

The cross-examination of Dr Finch seemed curiously ineffectual. The first struggle in the garage was barely touched upon. Yet the doctor’s own account of it contained some clear contradictions. If, as he claimed, his wife had had the gun and he had merely been trying to get it away from her, why had he not done just that? Why, when he had had the gun in his hand, had he
then
battered her about the head with it, and with sufficient force to fracture her skull in two places? And how had this woman (who must at least have been dazed by the blows) then managed to snatch up the gun, and run so fast down the driveway that he had only caught up with her when she had stopped and appeared to be aiming the gun?

The doctor’s behaviour after the shooting seemed equally strange. Miss Tregoff said that she had hidden behind the bougainvillaea and remained there. Did her lover not try to
find her? Had he not even called to her? The rounding the house were not that extensive—little more than an acre. Did he think that she had run away and left him to it? There had been an easy way for him to find out. Her car, in which they had driven down from Las Vegas, was in Country Club car park at the foot of the hill. He had had to pass the Club in order to get to Citrus Avenue, where he had stolen the Ford. Had he not looked to see if her car was still there? We know it was because she drove back to Las Vegas in it later. Therefore, she had had the keys. Rather than run the risk of stealing a car, would it not have been easier to run back up the hill and find her? Or were the approaching police car sirens already audible?