You Only Die Twice (5 page)

“Raise your right hand,” I said. “I'm deputizing you to officially assist me on a story.”

“'Kay,” he said, doubtfully. “I'll finish my rounds, just take five minutes, then I'll be right back to help you out.”

I sorted the stories I wanted for my file and for Rychek's into a separate stack as I read. A business-page writer reported that the groom's father, Conrad Jordan, had put R. J. in charge of the chain's flagship downtown Miami store shortly after the wedding. He
apparently hoped the responsibility would commit his son to the family enterprise.

Instead, subsequent stories indicated, it seemed to be Kaithlin who developed a dedication to the business. At age twenty-five, she became the store manager.

I remembered my mother's praise for the woman's business acumen, style, and panache. Kaithlin Jordan blossomed into a sleek and stunning executive with leadership qualities and a commitment to civic responsibility in subsequent stories and pictures. She founded a mentoring program to help inner-city single mothers get off welfare by teaching them skills, then sending them to job interviews attired in business suits donated by the store. She personally saw to it that they were provided with matching accessories and confidence-boosting cosmetic makeovers. Who knows what more she might have accomplished had her success not been cut short, along with her life.

A gossip column item reported the first hint of trouble six years into the marriage, a trial separation while the couple “worked out their difficulties.” A Jordan's spokesperson confirmed that Kaithlin would remain executive manager of the flagship store and continue to serve on the board of directors, along with both R. J. and his father.

The marriage careened downhill. Kaithlin and her mother obtained restraining orders, alleging threats of physical violence. Soon after, R. J. was stopped for drunk driving, fought the cops, and was arrested. A gossip columnist reported that Kaithlin met with a well-known local divorce lawyer.

A business-page writer broke the story about scandalous financial irregularities at the flagship Jordan's. If it was embezzlement, it was big: three million dollars unaccounted for. R. J. and Kaithlin had been questioned, as was the chief financial officer he had hired and other executives.

Then Kaithlin Jordan vanished. Her mother and her best friend reported her missing on a Sunday night, February 17, 1991. The circumstances were ominous.

R. J. and Kaithlin had flown off together for a romantic weekend getaway, an apparent attempt at reconciliation. He was at the controls of his twin-engine Beechcraft King Air, their destination the Daytona 500. NASCAR races seemed an unusual choice for a romantic reunion, particularly after the couple's storybook Parisian honeymoon, but there is no accounting for taste, and R. J. always felt the need for speed. Racing was a passion.

Kaithlin's mother and Amy Hastings, the missing woman's best friend since kindergarten, said Kaithlin had expressed doubts about the trip but still hoped to salvage their six-year marriage. Kaithlin called Amy that Sunday. She said R. J. was angry, violent, and out of control. The trip had been a terrible mistake. All she wanted was to go home to Miami “in one piece.” Amy offered to drive the 250 miles to Daytona to rescue her friend, she said, but Kaithlin declined, saying she'd be all right.

But she was weeping an hour later in a call to her mother. She sounded frightened. “R. J. wants to kill me!” Her mother tried to calm her but they were abruptly cut off. Terrified, unable to recall the name of
the motel, the desperate mother dialed 911. Told to contact the proper jurisdiction, she phoned Daytona police, who left her on hold. Eventually, after being transferred from number to number, she was advised to call again if she did not hear from her daughter by Monday.

The couple had planned to return to Miami that night. The mother called Opa-Locka Airport. R. J.'s mechanic said the Beechcraft had landed an hour earlier. R. J. had already gone. Kaithlin? He hadn't seen her.

Reva Warren finally reached R. J. at home that night. When she asked for her daughter, her son-in-law lashed out with a string of epithets, she said, and slammed down the telephone.

She called police again.

The next morning, the Daytona police checked the motel room occupied by Kaithlin and R. J. and made an ominous discovery. A shattered mirror. Signs of a struggle. The telephone ripped out of the wall. Bloodstained bedclothes and a missing shower curtain.

The prosecution later hypothesized that Kaithlin, dead or fatally injured, was wrapped in the shower curtain, concealed in the trunk of R. J.'s rental car, and driven to the airport hangar where his plane waited.

If she was aboard, dead or alive, when he took off from Daytona, she was not when he landed in Miami. Airport witnesses, including his own mechanic, said R. J. arrived solo. He was upset, they said, and had stalked off, carrying only a single suitcase.

Police found traces of blood on the fuselage. Hounded by police and reporters, R. J. insisted the weekend was peaceful, the marriage patched up. He denied quarreling; the scratches on his face and arms had
been accidentally inflicted by Kaithlin's fingernails as they'd wrestled playfully.

Kaithlin had left the plane to buy soft drinks from a vending machine as they were about to take off for Miami, he explained. She never came back. Impatient, he went to find her. Even had her paged, he said. When she did not respond, he flew home, alone and furious.

Kaithlin's luggage, name tags inside, was found the next day, broken open alongside U.S. 9 west of Cape Canaveral. Her scattered belongings, torn and bloodstained, were identified by her mother and her friend Amy.

R. J. reluctantly conceded to police that he lied initially. They had quarreled, but she was fine when she left for the sodas. Police found no record that Kaithlin had been paged at the airport. Under siege, R. J. admitted he lied about that, too. But he never hurt her, he insisted; she just walked off. Detectives computed the time between takeoff in R. J.'s Beechcraft, with a range of a thousand miles and a cruising speed of 175 mph, and his Miami arrival, then plotted the areas over which he could have flown. Unfortunately they included Ocala National Forest, a thousand miles of ocean, the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, and the vast reaches of Lake Okeechobee. R. J. had filed no flight plan. Police aircraft equipped with heat sensors designed to detect decomposing human remains flew low over the forest. The Coast Guard was alerted that the body might have been dumped at sea. Authorities in more than a dozen counties between Daytona and Miami-Dade launched a major search for a body.

“Hell, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack,” a
detective said in one story. “He could have landed on any back road or at any ranch or farmland airstrip and put her in a shallow grave.”

As the furor mounted, R. J.'s parents issued a statement. Their son's marriage had “hit a rough spot, which all couples experience at one point or another, but he would never harm Kaithlin, whom we all love dearly.” They offered a $50,000 reward for her safe return. In public they proclaimed R. J.'s innocence, in private they hired South Florida's best criminal defense attorney.

“On advice of counsel” R. J. refused to speak to police any further. He'd made too many damning admissions already. But he did talk to the press. His attempt at damage control backfired when his temper surfaced. Swearing he had not harmed his missing wife, he departed from his lawyered script to send her a message.

“Stop playing these childish games,” he snarled, “and come the hell home!” He glared into the camera lights and refused to answer questions. He looked strained, scared, and guilty as hell in the accompanying photo.

Women's groups boycotted Jordan's and the women she mentored demonstrated at the downtown store, chanting “Justice for Kaithlin Jordan!”

When hope of finding her body faded, police and prosecutors took their case to a Volusia County grand jury. Jurors promptly indicted R. J. on first-degree murder charges. Police watched his plane and caught R. J. attempting to take off at midnight. In his duffel bag was $75,000 in cash, his passport, and a handgun.

Held without bond, he sat in a Volusia County jail cell for five months before trial. Though prosecutors
warned they would seek the death penalty, R. J. refused a deal, a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence. Insisting he was being railroaded, he trusted a jury with his life.

Our daily trial coverage was reported by Howie Janowitz, who was still with the
News
today. He had captured all the drama, the color, the detail.

Jury selection experts hired by the defense apparently considered R. J.'s charm and dark good looks appealing to women. They accepted eight, along with four men and two alternates.

Eunice Jordan, R. J.'s elegant mother, wore high-fashion black to court every day. The victim's mother, red-eyed, fingernails chewed to the quick, had to be warned frequently by the judge to control her emotions.

A powerful witness, Reva Warren focused a malevolent stare on the defendant as she described R. J.'s abuse of her daughter and what happened when she tried to intervene.

“He threatened to kill us both,” she wept on the stand.

Amy Hastings testified that Kaithlin knew R. J. was unfaithful and feared he was responsible for the missing money. But he had been the only man in her life since she was sixteen. When he refused marriage counseling, Kaithlin went alone. As he became more abusive, she had turned to the courts, even appealed to her in-laws—but the mentor who helped others found none for herself.

R. J.'s own mistress testified against him. Dallas Suarez strutted to the stand wearing a tight white
blouse and a black skirt, a bombshell witness for the prosecution. Now contrite, she provided motive. She was the flight instructor who had trained R. J. on the Beechcraft. Their passionate affair began in the cockpit. They scuba-dived, went flying, and air-boated in the Everglades while Kaithlin worked. R. J. bought Suarez a Jaguar convertible and made the payments on her condo apartment.

The high point of her testimony came when she flashed a soulful look at the stony-faced defendant and burst into tears, blurting, “I never thought he'd kill her.” R. J., she said, had vowed to dump his wife for her but never said it would be out of a plane.

Prosecutors theorized that R. J. embezzled the money to finance his womanizing lifestyle, then murdered Kaithlin to prevent her from exposing him to the police—or his parents. It was during the testimony of Dallas Suarez, Janowitz noted, that several of the female jurors began to glare unrelentingly at the defendant.

They continued to do so as Miami police officers testified about domestic battery calls to the big home R. J. and Kaithlin shared on Old Cutler Road. Other investigators testified that the embezzlement suspects had been narrowed down to three employees, Kaithlin, R. J., and Walt Peterson, the store's financial officer, an old college fraternity brother hired by R. J. himself.

Peterson took the Fifth, declining to testify about financial matters on grounds that he might incriminate himself.

The cash confiscated from R. J. at his arrest could
not be traced to any legitimate source. The prosecution contended that it was part of the money he and Peterson conspired to steal.

An employee at the Silver Shore Motel in Daytona testified that he heard a man's voice, loud and angry, in the couple's room.

The bloodstains in that room, on the plane, and on the clothes in the shattered overnight case were all the same type—Kaithlin's. Her mother had given a blood sample for DNA testing, and results confirmed that chances were astronomical that the blood could have come from anyone other than her child.

The defense was in trouble. R. J. was all they had. Still cocky, he took the stand. Sure, he had lied at first. Who wouldn't? he asked. The police were clearly out to get him. The weekend had been stormy, he belatedly admitted. They had quarreled. He did slap her. But that was all, only a slap. She had scratched him, he conceded, but R. J. swore he never hurt Kaithlin. He loved her. Dallas Suarez, he said, was a mere diversion because his wife was busy working and he was bored. His interfering mother-in-law, he stated bitterly, was the cause of their problems. The cash he had when arrested, he swore, came from his own private funds, gambling winnings kept on hand for emergencies. He had intended to use the money to launch his own investigation to prove his innocence, he said. The prosecutor caustically pointed out that R. J. must have planned to do so from a distance, since he'd been carrying his passport as well.

He last saw his wife, R. J. insisted again and again
under cross-examination, as she walked off across the Daytona Airport tarmac to fetch Cokes from a vending machine.

The defense used the usual blame-the-victim tactics, hammering on the theory that Kaithlin was alive, in hiding, to exact revenge on a cheating husband. If she was dead, they said, it was at her own hand, despondent over her marital woes.

The prosecutor scoffed. Did she commit suicide and hide her own body? He introduced Kaithlin's engagement calendar, crammed full of appointments and notes on future plans. If she was alive, why had none of her cash, checks, or credit cards been used? Nothing was missing from the Key Biscayne apartment she had occupied since their separation. Bank accounts, valuables, her driver's license and passport—all left behind. Her car, coated with dust, was still parked in her reserved space.

It was all proof she was dead, they said, and that R. J. had killed her.

Despite creativity and fancy footwork from a battery of high-priced defense attorneys, the jury returned a verdict in less than forty-five minutes: guilty of murder in the first degree. They took even less time to recommend death in a subsequent penalty phase. The judge agreed. R. J. stood sullen at sentencing and continued to proclaim his innocence.

Lead defense attorney Fuller G. Stockton later confided to reporters that the most he had hoped for was to save his client's life. The charge never should have been first degree, a death-penalty case, he said. It
should have been second degree, unpremeditated and committed in the heat of passion.