To Hatred Turned (23 page)

Before long, Mulder had carved out his own reputation not only as a relentless and persuasive prosecutor but as a ruthless administrator. He became Wade’s top trial lawyer as well as the office hatchet-man. In some circles he was snidely referred to as “Mad Dog” Mulder.

The beginning of the tarnishing of Mulder’s extraordinary reputation as a prosecutor had begun shortly after midnight on November 28, 1976. At that time, a Dallas patrolman named Robert Wood, a full-blooded Choctaw Indian and a veteran of two tours in Vietnam, stopped a car on a quiet street in West Dallas to warn the driver that his parking lights were on.

Wood, whose friend and fellow policeman Alvin Moore had been shot to death when he answered a domestic-violence call in a nearby neighborhood earlier in the month, cautiously approached the car from the front. As Wood walked up to the vehicle, the offending driver rolled down his window. Before Wood could deliver his warning, the driver opened fire with a .22 caliber revolver. One hollow-point bullet hit Wood’s finger, causing only a minor wound, but another struck him squarely in the chest. As he began to fall to the pavement, two more bullets slammed into his back and a fifth bullet hit him in the back of the head. Wood’s female partner, shocked by the sudden violence, pulled her pistol and fired several shots, but by then the driver was speeding away. Minutes later, Wood was pronounced dead at nearby Parkland Hospital. Almost a month later, a twenty-eight-year-old itinerant laborer named Randall Dale Adams was arrested and charged with the policeman’s murder.

Adams told officers that on the afternoon before the morning Wood was shot, his car had run out of gas as he was returning to his motel apartment. He was trying to get more fuel when he was picked up by a youth whose name he later learned was David Harris. Harris took Adams back to his stranded vehicle, Adams said, and he put some gas in the tank while Harris waited. Then Harris followed Adams back to the motel where Adams left his car and the two of them drove away in Harris’s vehicle. After a stop at a pawnshop to get some ready cash, Adams and Harris had a few beers, picked up a bucket of fried chicken, and went to a drive-in movie. After the movie, Adams said Harris dropped him at his motel and drove off. He was back in his room in time to watch the ten o’clock news, Adams contended. Wood was murdered more than two hours later.

Officers traced Adams through Harris, who had been arrested on another charge in a city in southeast Texas several hundred miles away. Harris, seemingly anxious to curry favor with the local authorities in order to clear the charges against him there, volunteered that he knew who had killed the policeman in Dallas. The cop killer, he said, was Randall Dale Adams.

A Dallas County grand jury, acting on Harris’s words, indicted Adams. Mulder was the prosecutor. The trial began on March 28, 1977, almost exactly four months after Wood was killed. After listening to the testimony and deliberating for more than nine hours, the jury convicted Adams of capital murder and sentenced him to death in the electric chair.

For Mulder, it appeared to be simply another capital murder conviction. During his career in the DA’s office he sought the death penalty twenty-four times. And, incredibly, he notched up twenty-four victories. However, the Adams case, far from being routine, would turn into a nightmare for the gung-ho prosecutor.

In June 1980, more than three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Adams’s death sentence because of irregularities in the jury selection process. After the reversal, DA Wade asked Governor Bill Clements to reduce Adams’s sentence to life in prison so another trial would not be necessary. Although Mulder was not involved in the jury selection snafu that led to the appeals court reversal, the Adams case would soon come back to haunt him in a much more significant way.

Almost five years later, in 1985, the Adams saga took another strange turn. In March of that year Adams was approached by a film producer named Earl Morris, who was working on a documentary on a Dallas psychiatrist, Dr. James P. Grigson, commonly called Dr. Death or Dr. Doom because of his frequent testimony in favor of execution in capital murder trials. One of the many defendants Grigson had testified against had been Adams.

As he progressed with his research, Morris angled away from Grigson as his main subject and began focusing on a handful of cases in which Grigson had testified. He later refined his search still further, zeroing in exclusively on Adam’s case.

Released in 1988 under the title
The Thin Blue Line
, Morris’s film hinted strongly that Adams was innocent of Officer Wood’s murder. Of equal importance, the film also revealed discrepancies in the prosecution. On March 1, 1989, twelve years after Adams was convicted, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the verdict and cited Mulder for suppressing evidence and allowing perjurious testimony during Adams’s trial. The DA’s office, by then under a new chief, John Vance, decided not to retry Adams, who was released from prison three weeks later.

Harris, who had exonerated Adams of shooting Wood by admitting that Adams had not been in the car when the policeman was shot, had in the meantime been convicted of another murder.

But what ended well for Adams ended badly for Mulder.

In the aftermath of the appeals court decision, two Houston lawyers, proclaiming that they had to do it because no attorney in Dallas would dare to attempt such a move, asked the Texas Bar Association to investigate Mulder for his role in the Adams trial. It was not the first complaint dealing with Mulder’s conduct at the trial. Shortly after Adams was convicted, his then-attorney Dennis White went to the bar association with an almost identical grievance.

In both cases, after studying the charges, the TBA dismissed the complaints. Still, Mulder’s reputation was heavily damaged. Adams’s defender, White, who had known Mulder in law school and had worked with him as a prosecutor before becoming a defense attorney, was so unnerved by Mulder’s actions that he quit practicing law altogether. Tracked down by a reporter for the
Dallas Morning News
thirteen years after the Adams trial, White said that in his mind Mulder was no better than Stalin or Hitler, and labeled him a “disgusting” attorney who deserved to be disbarred.

But by the time Adams was freed, Mulder was long gone from the district attorney’s office. In December 1980 he had been offered $100,000 to defend a man accused of murder. Since he was earning only $65,000 a year as a prosecutor, the possibility of earning half again as much for handling a single case was a powerful temptation. By then his mentor, Henry Wade, had retired, leaving Mulder faced with having to start over again with a new boss as he reached the peak years of his career. Mulder had no desire to begin again at the bottom. He resigned as a prosecutor and took his first job as a defense lawyer. The man he was hired to champion never went to trial, but Mulder collected his fee anyway.

His next case involved the son of a wealthy surgeon who had been charged with killing a college student during the commission of a burglary. Not only had the victim been brutally killed (he was stabbed a dozen times), but the accused had signed an eight-page confession.

While many skilled lawyers would have been hesitant to take on such a case, Mulder leaped at the chance. Claiming that his client acted in self-defense, Mulder put on such a convincing defense that the jury returned a verdict of guilty to a much lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. For Mulder, it was a remarkable victory.

Mulder walked the tightrope again in the late 1980s when he agreed to represent an ambitious Methodist minister named Walker Railey, who was suspected of trying to murder his wife so he could continue an extramarital affair with the daughter of his former bishop. Railey’s wife survived a horrible physical attack, but has never regained consciousness and remains in a vegetative state.

When a grand jury was asked to investigate the case and Railey was called before the group, Mulder gave him a single piece of advice: Take the Fifth. Railey apparently did just that; he reportedly answered practically every question with a refusal to answer claiming the right of protection from self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment.

Although Mulder was severely criticized for allegedly trying to stymie an investigation into an attempted murder, he shrugged off the verbal attacks by arguing that his primary responsibility was to his client. As a result, the grand jury failed to indict the minister. At least at that time.

Several years later, late in 1992, a different grand jury, after a new review of the case,
did
indict Railey, who again hired Mulder as his lawyer. The former minister’s trial began in March 1993 in San Antonio, to where it was moved because of the excessive publicity the case had received in Dallas. On April 16, 1993, Railey was acquitted of all charges.

According to those who have watched him in action, there are several elements to Mulder’s success in the courtroom. One is the amount of time and energy he is willing to spend on preparing a case for trial. Reportedly, he interviews virtually all the witnesses in a case himself rather than delegating that chore to an associate. Mulder routinely works seventy-hour weeks, longer ones when he is involved in a major trial.

For another thing, Mulder has a reputation as a genius for spotting holes in the prosecution’s case. Because of his experience as an assistant district attorney, he also knows how to take advantage of even the slightest crack. He is especially devastating when cross-examining opposition witnesses, skilled at opening up wedges in their testimony. He delights in cross-examining expert witnesses and ripping apart the occasional witness who tries to spar with him.

Plus, when it comes to picking a jury, Mulder is said to have a sixth sense about which veniremen will ultimately be sympathetic to the defense and maneuvers the process so he can get as many of them on the final panel as possible.

To jurors, Mulder appears as suave, charming, and extremely confident—a debonair, well-dressed straight shooter, the latter characteristic being one which is
always
appreciated by Texas juries. Among fellow lawyers, though, Mulder has a reputation as a snob. Even when he seems to want to be sociable with his colleagues, he comes across as aloof and superior. An often-repeated story about Mulder deals with the time a group of lawyers decided to attend a baseball game and Mulder was invited along. As they gathered in the parking lot to enter the stadium, Mulder arrived, fashionably late, in his chauffeur-driven limousine.

Mulder’s main recreational outlet is golf, and to hear those who have played with him tell it, he is a tough competitor. He should be, some of them say, since he brags that he has been playing the game since he was ten. In golf, as in law, Mulder is good and he knows it. There is little room in his life for amateur duffers, just as there is little room in his life for those who might criticize or belittle his lawyering skills. When the Adams case was at the height of its controversy, a reporter asked Mulder if he would concede a prosecutorial error.

Mulder shook his head. “I think we got the right man,” he said. “And I think he should have been executed.”

Weeks later, after Adams had been freed, Mulder was asked to speculate what the results would have been if he had been Adams’s attorney instead of the prosecutor. Mulder didn’t hesitate. “I’d have gotten him off,” he bragged. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”

24

Like Mulder, Mike Wilson had once been a rising star in the Dallas District Attorney’s Office. But his reputation had never shone as brightly and he burned out a lot quicker.

In the early days of his broken six-year career as a prosecutor, Wilson had been assigned more than his share of high-profile cases. Among those he prosecuted was a well-known madam named Sherry Blanchard, who kept a diary listing the names of prominent Dallasites who had been her clients. Her trial had created a media orgy, and Wilson reveled in the publicity. He also handled the case involving the infamous movie entitled
Debbie Does Dallas
, which was something of a classic in the hard-core porn era of popular entertainment.

A sandy-haired, cherubic-looking extrovert with a sharp sense of humor and a born-comedian’s instinct for the absurd, Wilson grew up in Winnsboro, a tiny oil town in East Texas, a town, Wilson liked to quip, that was so small its residents had to take turns being the village idiot. He was the quarterback on the high school football team and a recognized leader among his peers. Early on, it was apparent that he was going to leave Winnsboro behind and move on to bigger and better things. If he lived long enough, that is. Along with his budding talents, the young Wilson also proved to be something of a magnet for tragedy, a trait he carried with him at least into middle age.

When he was in high school, he and several friends were out Christmas caroling when he was run over by a hay wagon. The accident almost killed him. He eventually recovered, but for eight months he had to wear a colostomy bag as a result of the internal injuries. Then, when he was a sophomore at the University of Texas in Austin, he was out waterskiing with his first wife-to-be, a Fort Worth socialite named Lucy Brants, when he was bitten by a water moccasin. If a friend with whom they were double dating had not been along to rush him to a hospital, Wilson might have died then, too.

In 1965, while still a student at UT, Wilson married Brants and they eventually had three sons. But in 1969, after graduating from UT, he became worried that he was going to be drafted and sent to Vietnam. One way he might postpone his induction, he figured, was to stay in school. A friend of his had enrolled in law school at SMU and Wilson reckoned that sounded like a good idea.