The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (18 page)

“No.”

“Did Michele do something to you?”

“No.”

“Did somebody do something to you?”

Sally looked at her mother. “Yes,” she said.

“Who?”

“James.”

“What did he do?”

“Don't know.”

“You don't?” Mr Noble said. “Do you mean by that you don't know or you don't want to tell?”

“Don't want to tell.”

“When James did something to you,” he said, “who was there?”

“No one,” Sally replied.

If Judge Thorpe should decide Sally was incompetent to testify against James, the DA's case would collapse and there would be no trial. But by April 5, he still hadn't issued a ruling.

“I'm drained of all my energy,” James said. “All I've been doing is taking naps and sitting by the phone.”

Later that day, Michele called me. “We're going to trial,” she said. “The judge ruled her competent. Can you believe this? Is this real?”

James, on the other hand, suddenly was exhilarated. “I had almost made up my mind to
insist
on a trial if it had been dropped,” he said. “I don't know if I actually would have gone through with it or not, but I like to think I might have. I'm so angry that I
want
to fight. I want to get into an arena where at last the truth will come out and I can have my say.”

Judge Thorpe set the trial for April 24. A few days before it was to begin, Mr. Noble learned that Fred wasn't planning to attend, that he would be out of town on business. Mr. Noble subpoenaed him. Darryl Hughes, the private investigator, took the subpoena to Fred's house and knocked on the door.

Fred answered. Sally was with him. Mr. Hughes handed Fred the subpoena. “Hello, Sally,” he said.

Sally smiled. “Hi.”

“How do you know my daughter?” Fred asked.

“I'm a detective,” Mr. Hughes said.

Stephanie was the first witness. “I considered us very close friends,” she said. “Our children played together daily. There was not a day that went by that they weren't at each other's houses…. Sometimes as many as four times a week, we would share meals together.” Sometimes she and Michele would drive to garage sales together, she said. Sometimes Fred would watch the children while they were gone, and sometimes James would.

Then one day, she said, she was drying off Sally after her bath, and Sally “asked me to put my finger in her. I said to her that we don't do that to other people. She said, ‘Yes, we do.' I said, ‘No, we don't,' and she said, ‘Yes.' I said, ‘Has someone done that to you?' and she said, ‘Yes.'”

Stephanie asked her if Clara had done it. Sally said she didn't. “I asked her if Michele had done it,” Stephanie said, “and she said, ‘No.' I asked her if her daddy had done it, and she said, ‘No.' I asked her if James did it and she said, ‘Yes.'”

Stephanie said Sally calls her vagina her “tushy.” She said Sally told her James touched her tushy during “parties” in his studio, where she and Clara were “finger painting and eating oranges.” Stephanie said she thought the molestation had occurred “on or about Nov. 1” because she remembered that the weather was cool when she went to pick up Sally and the child told her about the oranges and finger painting.

Sally followed her mother to the witness stand. She was self-possessed and cute and blond. When she sat down, only the top of her head and her eyes could be seen above the wall surrounding the witness stand. The six women on the jury leaned forward and smiled maternally at her.

“Do you remember back when you and Clara and James had parties in the studio?” Mr. Kirlin asked her.

“Uh-huh,” Sally said.

“Can you tell me what happened at the parties?”

“I don't remember.”

“Do you remember something that James did to you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what that was?”

“He touched my tushy.”

“Do you remember where that happened?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And where was that?”

“In the bathroom.”

“Do you remember where else it happened?”

“No.”

Mr. Kirlin never called Clara, the alleged eyewitness, to testify, nor did he call the physician who examined Sally, nor introduce the physician's report into evidence. But many witnesses would follow Sally to the stand.

Detective Gregston would try to defend her investigation of the case from Gary Noble's withering ridicule. “Do you mean to tell me you had a walking, talking, living, breathing eyewitness and never tried to talk to her?” he asked when she admitted she had never questioned Clara. “Do you mean to tell me you never warned the parents of the other kids on the block that there was a child molester in the neighborhood?”

Mr. Noble began his defense with Mary Frances Gassett, a schoolteacher who lives across the street from Stephanie and Fred. Mrs. Gassett testified that Stephanie approached her one morning last July and said: “I hate to tell you this, but James has been molesting Sally and Clara for over a year now.”

Mrs. Gassett said she replied: “You ought to be more careful before you go around accusing people of things like that.”

She said that Sally, who was with her mother, chimed in: “But Mom, Papa (her name for James) didn't touch my pee-pee.”

She said Stephanie picked up Sally and hurried back across the street.

During the five days of testimony, Michele would tell of Alice Umbach's visit and of James' goodness as a husband and father.

James would present a detailed calendar of his life from April 1988, when Stephanie and Fred had moved in next door, until Ms. Umbach's visit in June 1989, showing he had little opportunity for the regular abuse that Stephanie alleged. He would describe his household's daily routine, and his babysitting with Sally and Clara, and his cleaning-up of Sally's potty-training accidents. He would testify that there had never been any “parties” or finger painting in the studios.

Twenty-two neighbors and friends of James—many had traveled from as far away as California, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio—would testify to his good character and reputation, and to his devotion as a husband and father.

Julie Ogg, a lifelong friend of Michele's, would tell of a bizarre episode she said she had witnessed in which Fred came to Michele's house to get his daughter. Sally became hysterical and tried to hide from him, Mrs. Ogg said, and Fred threatened to “take her back to the orphanage.” The child then stopped crying, Mrs. Ogg said.

Fred would testify that the episode never happened, and that he hardly ever kept the children when Stephanie and Michele were away, but that James did.

Alice Umbach would deny that she had been rude or abusive during her visit to James' family.

Stephanie's other next-door neighbor, Kathleen Maloney, would testify that she hadn't rallied to James' side as the other neighbors did after he was accused. She had had her locks changed instead.

But the crux of the case was simple: Would the jurors believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Sally was a reliable witness and what she had told them was the truth?

Sally was the only evidence in the case, Mr. Noble argued, and she had been coached for nearly a year by Stephanie and the Department of Human Services.

Sally was telling the truth, Mr. Kirlin argued, and James was “an artist, a master of deception.”

Sally was in the courtroom, sitting on Fred's lap, clutching her doll, while the lawyers made their arguments. The women on the jury kept looking at her.

At 11:07 a.m. Judge Thorpe turned the case over to the jurors, and they left the courtroom. Mr. Noble stalked into the hallway and exploded. “In all the years I've been practicing law, I've never seen a three-year-old alleged victim sitting in the courtroom during the arguments!” he said. “That may be a first in the United States!”

At 6:04 p.m. the red light beside the witness box finally flashed on. The jury had reached its verdict. James' friends streamed into the courtroom. “Bring in the jury,” Judge Thorpe said. An awful tension fell upon the room.

“We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty,” the presiding juror said.

Suddenly Fred and Stephanie and Sally and the grandparents were gone, and the women in the audience were weeping. Michele was weeping. Gary Noble was weeping. James rose from his chair at the defendant's table and numbly accepted the embraces of his friends. Darryl Hughes, who had had the bad feeling, whooped with joy. Everybody applauded.

“My daughter was in therapy for at least six months, and she went through hell before that,” Stephanie told me over the phone. “She started wetting her bed and has not been able to get past that, and that's a real hard stigma now that she's four. We went through night after night of nightmares and yelling in the middle of the night over this…. Listen, from my perspective, James did this. There is no doubt in my mind that he did this. Absolutely none.”

“Will you and your family continue to live next door to James and Michele?” I asked. “That must be difficult for all of you.”

“The difficulty for us is not living next door to them” she said. “The pain for us is how the neighborhood reacted to this. But no, we're not moving. It's our home. We chose to live there. I'm not going to be run out of the neighborhood.”

A few days after the trial, Michele saw Fred out in his yard and called to him: “There's the liar.”

He responded, “Michele, you told a few yourself.”

She said, “Fred, I didn't lie.”

Another day, a limb fell off one of James' trees into Fred's yard. Fred tossed it into James' yard. They tossed it back and forth for about four days. Although Fred wasn't in sight, James exploded: “Next time I see this limb in my yard I'm going to stick it…”

“If he had come out of the house at that moment,” James told me, “I think I would have murdered him. All the anger of the last 10 months came back at that moment.”

Including work they lost because of the time they had to spend on the case, James and Michele estimate it cost them between $50,000 and $60,000—much of it borrowed. “And a lot of emotional damage has been done to us,” Michele said. “It's going to take a lot of time to recover. It's so horrible to have somebody you thought was your friend do this to you. And they still believe…”

One day they looked out the window and saw Fred working. He was building a fence between their two houses. It is eight feet tall.

July 1990

GLORY DENIED

I graduated from Texas Western College in 1958, long before it was the University of Texas at El Paso. We had some good basketball teams in my day, but nothing like the Miners of 1966. I watched that NCAA final game on a black-and-white TV set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was a graduate student at Harvard. I had to explain to my classmates who watched it with me exactly what and where Texas Western College was. None had ever heard of it. But they rooted for Texas Western, and I don't think they did it entirely for my sake. By then, the amazing Miners had captured the interest of the nation. When the 1966 Miners gathered in El Paso to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their accomplishment, Arturo Vasquez, the editor of Nova, the UTEP alumni quarterly, invited me to attend the reunion and write about it for the magazine. A slightly different version of the story was published in the
Dallas Morning News,
and was reprinted in
The Best American Sports Writing: 1992.

A
S
THEY
ARRIVED
ONE
BY
ONE
AT
THE
HOTEL,
THEY
SHOOK
HANDS,
embraced, kidded each other about gray hair, bald spots, heavier bodies and slower feet. They marveled that a quarter century had passed since the remarkable thing that they had done. They were returning to celebrate the memory of it with their old school and the city. But first they would celebrate with their coach and each other.

“It's great to see all these guys in one place again, to tell the good old war stories,” said Nevil Shed. “It makes us feel warm inside to have a city as great as El Paso still remember something that we did for them. And we don't forget what they did for us.”

Twenty-five years ago, Coach Don Haskins said, it never entered his mind that they had done anything special. But few who saw it happen would forget it.

For the first time, an all-black team had played an all-white team for the NCAA national basketball championship. The black men had won. History had been made. The Texas Western Miners had changed college basketball forever.

But it was 1966. The march from Selma to Montgomery had happened only a year before, and the struggle for the rights of black people still held the country in turmoil.

Civil rights workers still were being shot. Arsonists still were torching black churches. Gov. George Wallace still was defying a school desegregation order in Alabama. A congressional committee was investigating the Ku Klux Klan. The Georgia Legislature was refusing to seat a newly elected black representative named Julian Bond. Rioting had broken out in a Los Angeles neighborhood called Watts. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was promising to take the civil rights movement northward to Chicago.

A lot of people in the country didn't like the kind of history that the team from Texas had made.

“I was so young and naive,” Coach Haskins remembers. “I hadn't thought of it as putting an all-black team on the court. I was simply playing the best players I had. It's what I had done all year. Then we came home, and the hate mail started pouring in. I got them for months. Thousands of letters, from all over the South.”

The letters were only the beginning of his bitter time. A dozen years after winning the greatest athletic triumph in his own life and the history of his school, he would say: “If I could change one thing about my coaching career, I'd wish we came in second in 1966.”