To Hatred Turned (35 page)

“I would think that’s correct,” Gailiunas answered noncommittally.

“Why would anyone need Thorazine if he had a gun?” Lesser asked.

“If she were sedated, that would solve everything,” Gailiunas said, meaning it would make her entirely pliable. He did not mention the fact (although Lesser would later bring it up) that the killer would first have to inject the drug, then wait thirty minutes or longer for it to take effect.

Despite his persistent probing for soft spots, Lesser was unable to punch any major holes in Gailiunas’s claim to be nothing more than an aggrieved husband who reacted in a not abnormal way to the dissolution of his marriage and the fact that his wife was having an affair with someone with whom Gailiunas continued doing business.

When Chapman took over the questioning the next morning on cross-examination—anxious to get Gailiunas’s position unequivocally before the jury—he jumped right to the point.

“Did you go into the house that day?” he asked.

“No,” Gailiunas said.

“Did you inject her with a drug?”

“No.”

“Would it be reasonable for you to do that?”

“No, it would be unthinkable.”

“Does it make sense that you would be accused?”

“No.”

“How do you feel about your son?”

“I love him more than anything in the world.”

“How does it feel to be accused of these things?”

“I’m stunned that anyone would even suggest it.”

Without breaking stride, Chapman then popped the question most of the jurors would have liked to ask if that had been possible. “Who did you think had murdered her?”

Gailiunas, obviously ready for it, responded quickly and firmly: “Joy Aylor or Larry Aylor.”

While Chapman had the momentum going, he machine-gunned questions at Gailiunas in an attempt to destroy any possible headway Lesser may have been able to make the previous day.

Although Gailiunas had characterized his drinking as “occasional” when being questioned by Lesser, the physician admitted to Chapman that there was a period in the fall of 1982 and the summer of 1983, about the time Rozanne moved out, that he had “perhaps” imbibed too freely. And he had repeatedly claimed that his memory of events on the day Rozanne was attacked was either hazy or nonexistent. Although in response to questions from Chapman, he reeled off remarkable details of a conversation he had with his son late that afternoon, the conversation during which he first found out that there was a problem at Rozanne’s house. It was that call, he said, that sent him rushing to 804 Loganwood after instructing his son to lock the doors and not allow anyone inside.

A few minutes later, when he got the witness back on redirect, Lesser was openly skeptical of the reported telephone conversation between father and son.

“You told him to close and lock the door,” Lesser said. “How did you know it was open and unlocked?”

“I just wanted to make sure,” Gailiunas said.

“Were you aware that when the paramedics arrived the door was unlocked?”

“No,” Gailiunas replied.

“You had been taping conversations in and out of the house,” Lesser reminded him. “Was that conversation taped?”

“No,” Gailiunas said, explaining that the taping had been done earlier, before Rozanne moved out.

While he had been almost gentle in his handling of Gailiunas the previous day, Lesser was rougher on redirect, asking more pointed questions and firing them at him rapidly in an attempt to trip him up.

“Did your wife think you were a violent person?” Lesser asked.

“I don’t think so,” Gailiunas answered calmly.

The answer was hardly completed before Lesser bombarded him with a series of similar queries: “Did your wife think you had an ungovernable temper? Did she think you were unpredictable? Did she think you abused her?”

To each question, Gailiunas had an identical answer: “I don’t think
it
so.”

“Did she think you harassed her?”

“I think she was under the impression that I did,” Gailiunas answered. “She was under the impression I was having her followed. I told her if someone was following her, it wasn’t me.”

Lesser raised his eyebrows, pointing out that Gailiunas had admitted hiring two sets of detectives to tail his wife.

“That was earlier,” Gailiunas said. “That was in June or July. I’m talking now about August or September.”

“Was your wife in fear of you?” Lesser asked sharply, only to be cut off by a prosecution objection that was sustained by Judge McDowell. Although Lesser tried to go at it from a different angle, pointing out that Rozanne was able to get a restraining order against him, Chapman and Judge McDowell repeatedly blocked his attempts to go into detail on what the order said or why it was requested. The best he could do was question Gailiunas about his anger.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t angry,” Gailiunas said, “but that wasn’t my overriding emotion.”

If Dr. Bux had been a plus for the defense, the best Lesser and Mitchell could rate Gailiunas as was a draw. He had not fallen apart or exploded as they had hoped he would do, but his testimony about his unfamiliarity with Thorazine may have made him come across as less than credible.

However, since jurors typically have their own mysterious criteria about judging witnesses and their trustworthiness, the defense had to be content with the knowledge that they had done the best they could under the circumstances. The closer Lesser and Mitchell got to opening up testimony about possible participation of anyone other than Andy, the more frantic the prosecution got with its objections and, seemingly, the more Judge McDowell became inclined to agree with Chapman and Hagood.

Although it was obvious the prosecutors were trying to protect their case against Joy and others not tied directly to Andy—Bill and Carol Garland, for example—the attempts to keep Andy’s trial so narrowly focused was, at the least, frustrating for Mitchell and Lesser.

More seriously, it also could prove damaging to the prosecution—possibly undermining Hagood and Chapman’s own strategy—because the jury, which was not privy to much of the discussion about collateral issues, could end up totally confused.

Although the trial was almost two weeks old by the time Gailiunas finished his primary testimony (Lesser indicated he wanted to call him back later to ask him some more questions about Thorazine), the jury had been in the courtroom only about half that time.

A good example of just how tightly the prosecution wanted to restrict testimony was evident when the defense called its next unwilling witness, Larry Aylor.

36

Dapperly attired in a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a red, white, and blue rep tie, Larry Aylor grudgingly took his seat on the witness stand, looking like he would rather be in a proctologist’s office than by Judge McDowell’s left hand.

By the time he was called, it was late Wednesday and he had been in town for five days. His weekend was spent meeting with members of the defense and prosecution teams. Since then, he had been kept on hold, nervously twiddling his thumbs, waiting to be called.

He had not wanted to be a witness in the first place; Lesser and Mitchell had to get a court order to drag him back from his new home in Virginia so he could point an accusatory finger at Dr. Gailiunas as a possible principal in the murder of Rozanne.

In Larry’s view at that point,
everybody
was the enemy, including the prosecutors. For their part, Hagood and Chapman feared that he inadvertently was going to say something on the stand about his former wife, thus giving the defense a priceless wedge into opening up the testimony.

Once he was seated in the witness chair, Larry stared straight ahead and clenched his teeth. All four attorneys stared back at him. The defense team wanted to bleed him for every little fact, but if Larry and the prosecution team could have their way, his testimony would consist of two words: No comment.

The former Dallas homebuilder had hardly settled into the witness box when Hagood asked Judge McDowell to send the jury out while attorneys held an impromptu hearing on the admissibility of what he might say. These hearings, or procedures within a procedure, were becoming commonplace in the trial. There had been so many in just the first fifteen days that everyone had lost count.

With the jurors confined to their quarters behind the main courtroom, Hagood launched into an argument against allowing Larry to testify about a long list of items, especially about details of his affair with Rozanne and his suspicions about Gailiunas’s involvement in Rozanne’s death. To allow Larry to testify about these subjects, Hagood said, either would be a violation of the hearsay principle, which prohibits a witness from commenting about anything beyond his own personal range of experience, or irrelevant as far as Andy’s guilt or innocence was concerned. “Hearsay” and “irrelevance” had become prosecution mantras.

For example, the prosecution claimed it would be hearsay if Larry were to be allowed to tell the jury anything that Rozanne had told him about Gailiunas if Larry himself had not been present. This would include several alleged incidents that the defense desperately wanted the jury to hear, such as Larry’s claim that Rozanne told him how she and Gailiunas once engaged in a literal tug of war over young Peter, each of them pulling on one of his arms. The incident allegedly ended with Gailiunas brandishing a shotgun and threatening his estranged wife. There was another time, Larry related, when Rozanne told him how Gailiunas had threatened to inject himself with an unknown lethal substance. And there was a third, more innocent tale in which Larry related how his and Rozanne’s affair had begun.

After listening to this preview of what the defense wanted the jury to hear, Hagood urged McDowell to purge it
all
, particularly the testimony about the alleged threats with the hypodermic needle.

Judge McDowell rejected the prosecution request to censor the testimony about how the affair began, but he quickly agreed to disallow any testimony about the shotgun incident. He seemed puzzled about the needle episode. Why did the defense think that was important, he asked, since it did not involve a threat against Rozanne?

Lesser jumped at the chance to answer. “We think it shows Dr. Gailiunas’s predisposition to use a needle as a means of death,” Lesser replied.

The judge shook his head. “That’s too farfetched for me,” he said, ruling that the jury would not be allowed to hear the tale.

The first thing Larry told the jury when they returned to the room was about his lunch with Rozanne that marked the beginning of their affair. The second major incident he recounted was about the telephone call to Rozanne’s house on the evening of the attack. Since he had personally participated in that event, the prosecution could not score with a hearsay objection. It was one of the few even mildly controversial issues about which Larry was allowed to testify without a torrent of protests from Hagood.

“On October 4, 1983, did you call Rozanne at home?” Lesser asked.

“Yes,” Larry said, “and young Peter answered the phone.”

Larry said when he asked to speak to Rozanne he heard a man in the background yell, “Hang up the goddamn phone.” After that, the connection was severed.

Lesser asked if Larry thought he knew whose voice that had been.

“In my opinion,” Larry answered emphatically, “it was Dr. Gailiunas.”

After his unsuccessful attempt to reach Rozanne by telephone, Larry said he drove to the house and found that police were already there. He identified himself as “Rozanne Gailiunas’s boyfriend” to an officer at the door.

“And then what?” Lesser prompted.

“I asked him what had happened,” Larry said. “I asked, ‘Did the doctor beat her up or shoot her?’”

A few minutes later, he said, he was asked to go to the police station for questioning and for chemical tests designed to determine if he had recently fired a weapon. After he was accused by one of the detectives of committing the crime, Larry said, he called an attorney and asked him to come to the police station to represent him.

“After October 4 did you ever tell Dr. Gailiunas that you thought he had killed his own wife?” Lesser asked.

Before Larry could respond, Hagood leaped to his feet. “I object, your honor,” he bellowed at parade-ground volume. “That’s irrelevant to what we’re discussing here.”

“Sustained,” Judge McDowell said tiredly.

Lesser tried from a different direction. “Do you believe,” he asked Larry, “that Peter Gailiunas had anything to do with Rozanne Gailiunas’s death?”

“Yes, I do,” Larry answered smoothly. “I’ve had that belief since 1983.”

During cross-examination, Chapman tried valiantly to discredit Larry’s version of the telephone incident. Chapman succeeded in getting Larry to admit that he was only 50 percent sure it was Dr. Gailiunas’s voice he heard on the phone, and that in his initial statement to police he had said only that it was “a man’s voice.” Homing in on the telephone call, Chapman said, “Tell me
exactly
what happened.”

Chapman listened carefully to Larry’s recitation, then asked him if he remembered that he had first told officers that he had made the call at 6:40
P
.
M
., which would have put it five to ten minutes after police arrived at the scene. The implication was that it was one of the police officers who had ordered young Peter to hang up, not Gailiunas, as Larry believed.