Mary, Mary (Matthew Hope), page 11
“What is it?”
“Well, that’s what I’m about to ask you,” I said.
The jury laughed. Everyone in the courtroom laughed. Oh, how they loved their favorite old grandpa.
“Okay, I’m looking at it,” he said, and shrugged, and everyone laughed again.
“What is it, can you tell me?” I said.
“It says on top it’s a survey of Galin Park.”
“Is there a date on that survey?”
Farrow studied the drawing again.
“There’s a date here in the lower right-hand corner,” he said.
“Could you read that date out loud, please?”
“The date is December 17, 1990.”
“Your Honor, I would like this marked, please.”
“Mark it Exhibit A for the defense.”
“We’ve previously stipulated, Your Honor, that this is an accurate survey of the property—”
“Yes, yes...”
“...so I ask now that it be moved into evidence.”
“So moved.”
“Mr. Farrow, can you see the markings that give the width of the path that runs through the park?”
Farrow looked again.
“This figure here, do you mean?”
“Well, the width of the path is marked. Can you see where it’s marked?”
“Yes?”
“Can you tell me what that figure is.”
“Fifteen feet.”
“So then the distance across the path, from your bench to where the woman and the child were sitting, was not ten feet as you say it was—”
“Well, when I said ten feet—”
“Yes?”
“I was estimating.”
“But now you know the distance was fifteen feet, don’t you?”
“Yes, that’s what it says here.”
“Well, you don’t doubt the survey’s accuracy, do you?”
“No, I’m sure it’s correct.”
“Then the distance across the path was fifteen feet, is that right?”
“Yes, it was fifteen feet.”
“Mr. Farrow,” I said, “do you wear a hearing aid?”
“I do.”
“Are you wearing it now?”
“I am.”
“Can you hear all right with it?”
“Perfectly.”
“Were you wearing it on the day you saw that woman and child take the bench fifteen feet across the path from you?”
“I was.”
Atkins looked suddenly alert. He knew where I was going now, but he was helpless to stop me. Toots Kiley had first come up with the knowledge that Farrow wore a hearing aid, and then had suggested that we test his hearing during the deposition. Getting the survey afterward was a simple task.
“Were they talking in conversational tones, Mr. Farrow?”
“They were.”
“Just as we’re talking in conversational tones, isn’t that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And of course you can hear me, can’t you?”
“Objection!” Atkins said, and jumped to his feet. “I really can’t see what relevance the state of Mr. Farrow’s health has to do with—”
“Your Honor, the witness has testified that he heard a conversation—”
“Overruled. You may proceed.”
“Mr. Farrow, can you hear me?” I asked again.
“Of course I can hear you,” he said, looking astonished. “How could I answer your questions if I couldn’t hear you?”
“I’m standing right here, about three feet from the witness stand, and you say you can hear me, is that right?”
“Yes, yes, I can hear you.”
“How about now?” I asked, and took several steps back. “Can you hear me now?”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“From about six feet away...would you say this is about six feet?”
“Yes, about that.”
“And you can still hear me? Even though I’m speaking in a conversational tone.”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“How about now?”
Another step back.
“Yes.”
“And now? Same conversational tone, can you still hear me?”
Moving backward.
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“How about now?” I said, and stepped quickly to the defense table, where Mary sat with her hands in her lap. “The bluebird flew over the hill and up to the moon,” I said. “What did I just say, Mr. Farrow?”
“Yes, I can hear you,” he said.
“What did I say? Repeat what I just said. Here, I’ll say it again, in the same conversational tone. The bluebird flew over the hill and up to the moon. Repeat that, Mr. Farrow.”
He looked at me blankly.
“Your Honor,” I said, “with your permission, and in the presence of the jury, I would like to measure the distance from the defense table to the witness stand.”
“Go ahead.”
“Andrew?” I said, and took a tape measure from my jacket pocket. “My assistant and I measured the distance this afternoon, Your Honor...Andrew, would you hold this end, please? And discovered...”
Laying the tape on the floor, pulling it toward the witness stand, Andrew holding the other end...
“...that the distance was...”
Moving closer and closer to where Farrow sat, watching...
“...exactly fifteen feet.”
I looked up into Farrow’s face.
“Mr. Farrow,” I said, “can you hear me now?”
“Of course I can hear you!” he said.
“Good. Then perhaps you’ll read the marking on this tape for me.”
Farrow leaned over.
“Fifteen feet,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “No further questions.”
Atkins took his time coming toward the witness stand. He had nowhere to go in his redirect and he knew it. He was searching for a handle, but none came immediately to mind.
“Mr. Farrow,” he said, “how do you like Mr. Hope’s voice?”
“Objection!” I said.
“Sustained,” Rutherford said.
“Would you say that his voice is similar to the defendant’s?”
“Not at all.”
“Or to little Jenny Lou’s voice? Her voice that you heard when she was still alive. At all similar to either of those voices?”
“No, not at all.”
“Incidentally, when you heard Jenny Lou calling the defendant by name...was she fifteen feet away from you at the time?”
“No, they were just crossing over to the other bench.”
“Would you say they were...well, how far would you say they were from you? When you heard Jenny Lou call her by name?”
“Six feet, I would say.”
“And you say she used the name ‘Mary’?”
“Mary was what she said.”
“No further questions.”
I went immediately to the witness stand and said, “Mr. Farrow, when they were crossing over to the other bench, were their backs to you?”
“No. Well, partially.”
“Mr. Farrow, I’m going to move to where I was when we were talking earlier,” I said, “to right about here...which you said was about six feet away, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m going to turn my back partially to you, and I’m going to say three names in a conversational tone, and I want you to repeat those names to me. Would you do that for me?”
“Sure.”
“First, tell me if this is the way they were turned partially from you,” I said, and turned my back to him.
“About like that,” he said.
“James, Alice, Frank,” I said, and turned immediately to the witness stand. “What names did I just say?”
I had done this less dramatically in my own office while I was deposing him, not running him through the drill, but simply ascertaining that he could not hear me at all from certain distances and could not hear me correctly from other distances when I was turned away from him. I was not shooting blind. I knew his answer before he gave it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t hear you.”
“Witness is excused,” I said.
Jenny Lou’s mother was quite another matter.
It was one thing to risk losing sympathy by exposing an old man’s hearing problem; it was something else to risk losing the whole ball game by attacking a still grieving mother.
Martha Williams was dressed in a simple gray dress that managed to convey a sense of mourning without being overtly black. A not unattractive woman in her midthirties, she took the stand, swore that she would tell the truth, and then sat looking somewhat bewildered. Big blue eyes, brown hair parted in the center and cascading on either side of her face to about the line of her chin. Hands folded in her lap now. Skirt demurely lowered over her knees.
“Mrs. Williams,” Atkins said, “are you the mother of Jenny Lou Williams?”
“I am,” she said. Voice firm. No anger in it. The anger was all gone. Only the grief was left. And the desire to see justice done. All this she transmitted to the jury through her bearing.
“Do you remember the afternoon of August twenty-eighth?”
“I will never forget it.”
This was somewhat unresponsive. But there was imminent danger in objecting to anything this woman said.
“What were you doing at ten minutes past three that afternoon, do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“Please tell us,” Atkins said, and virtually bowed her in to the jury, his arm swinging toward them, the palm of his hand flat, stepping aside to give her center stage.
It is Martha’s habit—her obligation, in fact, her maternal duty—to meet the school bus every weekday when Jenny Lou comes home. Jenny Lou is only seven years old, and in the second grade. She leaves for school at eight-thirty in the morning and boards the bus for the return trip home at approximately a quarter to three. The Judy Cornier Elementary School is on South Third and Michel, not too distant from Galin Memorial Park and very close to the G&S Supermarket on Orange and South Tenth. The bus makes stops all along the way, of course—well, all school buses do...
She is a powerful witness. She sits looking dignified, grieved, but in total control of herself, narrating the events of that afternoon in a calm, well-modulated voice. The only clue to her distress is in her hands: she keeps wringing the handkerchief clutched in her long fingers. The jury alternates its attention from her face to her hands.
Their house, she tells them, is on Pineview and Logan, near the oval with the development marker on it, Suncrest Acres. The bus, though, doesn’t come into the development itself, it stops outside near the entrance pillars on the main north-south road, Abbott Avenue. Abbott and Suncrest Drive. That’s where the bus stops. Every weekday afternoon at ten minutes past three. And that’s where Martha Williams is waiting for her seven-year-old daughter on the afternoon of August 28, a Friday, the end of the week, the beginning of a nightmare...
“Your Honor,” I said, “may we approach, please?”
“Yes, come on up,” Rutherford said.
This was delicate. The jury was already scowling at me, wondering why I’d stopped Martha Williams’s engaging narrative the moment she’d uttered the word “nightmare.” I could see some of the women leaning forward, frowning, as if hoping to overhear whatever we were about to whisper at the bench.
“What is it, Mr. Hope?”
“Your Honor, I don’t understand the purpose of Mrs. Williams’s testimony.”
“It will become clear,” Atkins said. He never said anything directly to me, the superior, supercilious son of a bitch. Everything to the judge, the jury, and the witness, nothing to me.
“When?”
“Your Honor?”
“When will it become clear?”
“In due course.”
“Make it clear to me now. Where are you going?”
“Your Honor, the chronological order of events will irrefutably link the child’s disappearance and subsequent murder to the defendant.”
“I don’t see how Mrs. Williams’s testimony will contribute anything substantive to that premise, Your Honor.”
“Perhaps the state can elucidate.”
“The time of the child’s disappearance is crucial,” Atkins said. “I intend to show—”
“Your Honor,” I said, “I think he’s—”
“Let him finish, please, Mr. Hope.”
“I intend to show that while Mrs. Williams was waiting for her child to get off the bus, the child was in fact with the defendant.”
“Haven’t you already established that?” Rutherford asked.
“Not to my satisfaction,” Atkins said.
“Mr. Hope?”
“Your Honor, I think the state has called Mrs. Williams simply to play on the jury’s sympathy. A woman waiting for her child to get off the bus...and I assume Mr. Atkins will wring from her that moment of panic when she realizes the child isn’t on the bus—”
“Please ask Mr. Hope not to try my case for me, Your Honor.”
“May I continue, Your Honor?”
“Please.”
“I’m merely saying that the mother waiting for the bus, the child not being on the bus, the mother calling the police to report the disappearance...all this does nothing to confirm or deny that the child was with the defendant. All it does is tug at the jury’s heartstrings, Your Honor. That’s all it’s designed to do, and that’s all it does.”
“Mr. Atkins?”
“I would like the jury to hear her story, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Hope, do you intend to cross-examine?”
“Not if she’s going to continue in the same vein. I consider all of her testimony irrelevant, immaterial, and inflammatory.”
“I tend to disagree, Mr. Hope. If the state can show that the child was not where she was supposed to be at such and such a time and can demonstrate that the child was somewhere else at that time—as has already been established, by the way—then it seems to me the circumstantial link is not only clear but very strong as well. You may continue, Mr. Atkins. But don’t milk it.”
“Your Honor?”
“I said don’t milk it.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Atkins said, and almost bowed to her. He went back to the witness stand. I went back to the defense table. Andrew looked at me hopefully. I shook my head.
“Mrs. Williams,” Atkins said, “was your daughter, Jenny Lou, on that bus as you’d expected her to be?”
“She was not,” Martha Williams said.
And now came the long heartrending narrative I’d tried to circumvent, the tearful mother of a victim relating first the uneasiness she’d felt and then the panic after a call to the school had ascertained that the last time anyone had seen her daughter was while she was picking up her lunch pail in her classroom at approximately two-thirty that afternoon, the call to a classmate who informed Martha that her daughter had not boarded the bus at all, and then the call to the police and the whole missing-persons routine and the subsequent fear and desperation when she and her husband realized that their daughter had been abducted, their daughter might in fact be dead.
“Your Honor,” Atkins said, “I would like this marked for identification, please.”
“Let me see it, please,” Rutherford said.
I knew what he was showing her. It was a photograph on his evidence list; I had already seen it.
“Show it to the defense, please,” Rutherford said, and handed it down to the deputy clerk.
“I have no objections,” I said, waving the photograph aside. This was calculated. If I objected to the jury seeing this picture, and if the objection was overruled—as I felt certain it would have been—the jury would wonder why I’d tried to suppress it.
“Mark it Exhibit Two for the state,” Rutherford said.
Atkins retrieved the picture and carried it to the witness stand. His voice low, almost reverent, he said, “Would you please look at this, Mrs. Williams?”
She accepted the photo.
And burst into tears.
“Can you tell me what you’re looking at, please?” Atkins said.
“A picture of my...my dead baby,” Mrs. Williams said.
“When did you first see this photograph?”
“On the second of September this year.”
“Where did you see it?”
“In the Medical Examiner’s Office here in Calusa.”
Sobbing uncontrollably now.
“Why was this photograph shown to you?”
“So I c-c-could identify my baby.”
“Your Honor, I would like this photograph moved into evidence, please.”
“Mark it in evidence.”
“May I publish it to the jury?”
“Please.”
The photograph had been taken in the morgue at Good Samaritan. It showed the mutilated body of seven-year-old Jenny Lou Williams. Atkins carried it to the first juror—one of the men—who looked at it briefly and then passed it on. I watched the jury reacting.
“Mrs. Williams,” Atkins said, “I now show you this photograph previously marked for identification. Can you tell me what it is?”
She took the photograph. Her handkerchief was to her eyes. Tears were streaming down her face.
“That’s Jenny Lou when she was alive.”
“When was the picture taken?”
“Two weeks before she disappeared.”
“Your Honor, I would like this moved into evidence, please.”
“Mark it.”
“May I publish it to the jury?”
“Go right ahead.”
Atkins walked to the jury box, handed the photo in, and turned again to where Martha Williams sat waiting for his next question. As he walked toward her, he said, “Now, do you recall ever seeing anyone suspicious in your neighborhood?”
“Objection! Vague and unclear.”
“Sustained.”
“Did you ever spot any strangers going through? On foot...or in a car?”
“In cars, yes, there are always strangers going through. In Florida, as I’m sure you know, people drive into developments just to look at the houses. Or up canals, by boat. Suncrest Acres is a very pretty development. People are always coming through.”
“In cars?”
“Yes. Mostly. We’re not on any canals, and we don’t get too many people wandering in on foot.”
“Well, that’s what I’m about to ask you,” I said.
The jury laughed. Everyone in the courtroom laughed. Oh, how they loved their favorite old grandpa.
“Okay, I’m looking at it,” he said, and shrugged, and everyone laughed again.
“What is it, can you tell me?” I said.
“It says on top it’s a survey of Galin Park.”
“Is there a date on that survey?”
Farrow studied the drawing again.
“There’s a date here in the lower right-hand corner,” he said.
“Could you read that date out loud, please?”
“The date is December 17, 1990.”
“Your Honor, I would like this marked, please.”
“Mark it Exhibit A for the defense.”
“We’ve previously stipulated, Your Honor, that this is an accurate survey of the property—”
“Yes, yes...”
“...so I ask now that it be moved into evidence.”
“So moved.”
“Mr. Farrow, can you see the markings that give the width of the path that runs through the park?”
Farrow looked again.
“This figure here, do you mean?”
“Well, the width of the path is marked. Can you see where it’s marked?”
“Yes?”
“Can you tell me what that figure is.”
“Fifteen feet.”
“So then the distance across the path, from your bench to where the woman and the child were sitting, was not ten feet as you say it was—”
“Well, when I said ten feet—”
“Yes?”
“I was estimating.”
“But now you know the distance was fifteen feet, don’t you?”
“Yes, that’s what it says here.”
“Well, you don’t doubt the survey’s accuracy, do you?”
“No, I’m sure it’s correct.”
“Then the distance across the path was fifteen feet, is that right?”
“Yes, it was fifteen feet.”
“Mr. Farrow,” I said, “do you wear a hearing aid?”
“I do.”
“Are you wearing it now?”
“I am.”
“Can you hear all right with it?”
“Perfectly.”
“Were you wearing it on the day you saw that woman and child take the bench fifteen feet across the path from you?”
“I was.”
Atkins looked suddenly alert. He knew where I was going now, but he was helpless to stop me. Toots Kiley had first come up with the knowledge that Farrow wore a hearing aid, and then had suggested that we test his hearing during the deposition. Getting the survey afterward was a simple task.
“Were they talking in conversational tones, Mr. Farrow?”
“They were.”
“Just as we’re talking in conversational tones, isn’t that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“And of course you can hear me, can’t you?”
“Objection!” Atkins said, and jumped to his feet. “I really can’t see what relevance the state of Mr. Farrow’s health has to do with—”
“Your Honor, the witness has testified that he heard a conversation—”
“Overruled. You may proceed.”
“Mr. Farrow, can you hear me?” I asked again.
“Of course I can hear you,” he said, looking astonished. “How could I answer your questions if I couldn’t hear you?”
“I’m standing right here, about three feet from the witness stand, and you say you can hear me, is that right?”
“Yes, yes, I can hear you.”
“How about now?” I asked, and took several steps back. “Can you hear me now?”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“From about six feet away...would you say this is about six feet?”
“Yes, about that.”
“And you can still hear me? Even though I’m speaking in a conversational tone.”
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“How about now?”
Another step back.
“Yes.”
“And now? Same conversational tone, can you still hear me?”
Moving backward.
“Yes, I can hear you.”
“How about now?” I said, and stepped quickly to the defense table, where Mary sat with her hands in her lap. “The bluebird flew over the hill and up to the moon,” I said. “What did I just say, Mr. Farrow?”
“Yes, I can hear you,” he said.
“What did I say? Repeat what I just said. Here, I’ll say it again, in the same conversational tone. The bluebird flew over the hill and up to the moon. Repeat that, Mr. Farrow.”
He looked at me blankly.
“Your Honor,” I said, “with your permission, and in the presence of the jury, I would like to measure the distance from the defense table to the witness stand.”
“Go ahead.”
“Andrew?” I said, and took a tape measure from my jacket pocket. “My assistant and I measured the distance this afternoon, Your Honor...Andrew, would you hold this end, please? And discovered...”
Laying the tape on the floor, pulling it toward the witness stand, Andrew holding the other end...
“...that the distance was...”
Moving closer and closer to where Farrow sat, watching...
“...exactly fifteen feet.”
I looked up into Farrow’s face.
“Mr. Farrow,” I said, “can you hear me now?”
“Of course I can hear you!” he said.
“Good. Then perhaps you’ll read the marking on this tape for me.”
Farrow leaned over.
“Fifteen feet,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “No further questions.”
Atkins took his time coming toward the witness stand. He had nowhere to go in his redirect and he knew it. He was searching for a handle, but none came immediately to mind.
“Mr. Farrow,” he said, “how do you like Mr. Hope’s voice?”
“Objection!” I said.
“Sustained,” Rutherford said.
“Would you say that his voice is similar to the defendant’s?”
“Not at all.”
“Or to little Jenny Lou’s voice? Her voice that you heard when she was still alive. At all similar to either of those voices?”
“No, not at all.”
“Incidentally, when you heard Jenny Lou calling the defendant by name...was she fifteen feet away from you at the time?”
“No, they were just crossing over to the other bench.”
“Would you say they were...well, how far would you say they were from you? When you heard Jenny Lou call her by name?”
“Six feet, I would say.”
“And you say she used the name ‘Mary’?”
“Mary was what she said.”
“No further questions.”
I went immediately to the witness stand and said, “Mr. Farrow, when they were crossing over to the other bench, were their backs to you?”
“No. Well, partially.”
“Mr. Farrow, I’m going to move to where I was when we were talking earlier,” I said, “to right about here...which you said was about six feet away, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m going to turn my back partially to you, and I’m going to say three names in a conversational tone, and I want you to repeat those names to me. Would you do that for me?”
“Sure.”
“First, tell me if this is the way they were turned partially from you,” I said, and turned my back to him.
“About like that,” he said.
“James, Alice, Frank,” I said, and turned immediately to the witness stand. “What names did I just say?”
I had done this less dramatically in my own office while I was deposing him, not running him through the drill, but simply ascertaining that he could not hear me at all from certain distances and could not hear me correctly from other distances when I was turned away from him. I was not shooting blind. I knew his answer before he gave it.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t hear you.”
“Witness is excused,” I said.
Jenny Lou’s mother was quite another matter.
It was one thing to risk losing sympathy by exposing an old man’s hearing problem; it was something else to risk losing the whole ball game by attacking a still grieving mother.
Martha Williams was dressed in a simple gray dress that managed to convey a sense of mourning without being overtly black. A not unattractive woman in her midthirties, she took the stand, swore that she would tell the truth, and then sat looking somewhat bewildered. Big blue eyes, brown hair parted in the center and cascading on either side of her face to about the line of her chin. Hands folded in her lap now. Skirt demurely lowered over her knees.
“Mrs. Williams,” Atkins said, “are you the mother of Jenny Lou Williams?”
“I am,” she said. Voice firm. No anger in it. The anger was all gone. Only the grief was left. And the desire to see justice done. All this she transmitted to the jury through her bearing.
“Do you remember the afternoon of August twenty-eighth?”
“I will never forget it.”
This was somewhat unresponsive. But there was imminent danger in objecting to anything this woman said.
“What were you doing at ten minutes past three that afternoon, do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“Please tell us,” Atkins said, and virtually bowed her in to the jury, his arm swinging toward them, the palm of his hand flat, stepping aside to give her center stage.
It is Martha’s habit—her obligation, in fact, her maternal duty—to meet the school bus every weekday when Jenny Lou comes home. Jenny Lou is only seven years old, and in the second grade. She leaves for school at eight-thirty in the morning and boards the bus for the return trip home at approximately a quarter to three. The Judy Cornier Elementary School is on South Third and Michel, not too distant from Galin Memorial Park and very close to the G&S Supermarket on Orange and South Tenth. The bus makes stops all along the way, of course—well, all school buses do...
She is a powerful witness. She sits looking dignified, grieved, but in total control of herself, narrating the events of that afternoon in a calm, well-modulated voice. The only clue to her distress is in her hands: she keeps wringing the handkerchief clutched in her long fingers. The jury alternates its attention from her face to her hands.
Their house, she tells them, is on Pineview and Logan, near the oval with the development marker on it, Suncrest Acres. The bus, though, doesn’t come into the development itself, it stops outside near the entrance pillars on the main north-south road, Abbott Avenue. Abbott and Suncrest Drive. That’s where the bus stops. Every weekday afternoon at ten minutes past three. And that’s where Martha Williams is waiting for her seven-year-old daughter on the afternoon of August 28, a Friday, the end of the week, the beginning of a nightmare...
“Your Honor,” I said, “may we approach, please?”
“Yes, come on up,” Rutherford said.
This was delicate. The jury was already scowling at me, wondering why I’d stopped Martha Williams’s engaging narrative the moment she’d uttered the word “nightmare.” I could see some of the women leaning forward, frowning, as if hoping to overhear whatever we were about to whisper at the bench.
“What is it, Mr. Hope?”
“Your Honor, I don’t understand the purpose of Mrs. Williams’s testimony.”
“It will become clear,” Atkins said. He never said anything directly to me, the superior, supercilious son of a bitch. Everything to the judge, the jury, and the witness, nothing to me.
“When?”
“Your Honor?”
“When will it become clear?”
“In due course.”
“Make it clear to me now. Where are you going?”
“Your Honor, the chronological order of events will irrefutably link the child’s disappearance and subsequent murder to the defendant.”
“I don’t see how Mrs. Williams’s testimony will contribute anything substantive to that premise, Your Honor.”
“Perhaps the state can elucidate.”
“The time of the child’s disappearance is crucial,” Atkins said. “I intend to show—”
“Your Honor,” I said, “I think he’s—”
“Let him finish, please, Mr. Hope.”
“I intend to show that while Mrs. Williams was waiting for her child to get off the bus, the child was in fact with the defendant.”
“Haven’t you already established that?” Rutherford asked.
“Not to my satisfaction,” Atkins said.
“Mr. Hope?”
“Your Honor, I think the state has called Mrs. Williams simply to play on the jury’s sympathy. A woman waiting for her child to get off the bus...and I assume Mr. Atkins will wring from her that moment of panic when she realizes the child isn’t on the bus—”
“Please ask Mr. Hope not to try my case for me, Your Honor.”
“May I continue, Your Honor?”
“Please.”
“I’m merely saying that the mother waiting for the bus, the child not being on the bus, the mother calling the police to report the disappearance...all this does nothing to confirm or deny that the child was with the defendant. All it does is tug at the jury’s heartstrings, Your Honor. That’s all it’s designed to do, and that’s all it does.”
“Mr. Atkins?”
“I would like the jury to hear her story, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Hope, do you intend to cross-examine?”
“Not if she’s going to continue in the same vein. I consider all of her testimony irrelevant, immaterial, and inflammatory.”
“I tend to disagree, Mr. Hope. If the state can show that the child was not where she was supposed to be at such and such a time and can demonstrate that the child was somewhere else at that time—as has already been established, by the way—then it seems to me the circumstantial link is not only clear but very strong as well. You may continue, Mr. Atkins. But don’t milk it.”
“Your Honor?”
“I said don’t milk it.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Atkins said, and almost bowed to her. He went back to the witness stand. I went back to the defense table. Andrew looked at me hopefully. I shook my head.
“Mrs. Williams,” Atkins said, “was your daughter, Jenny Lou, on that bus as you’d expected her to be?”
“She was not,” Martha Williams said.
And now came the long heartrending narrative I’d tried to circumvent, the tearful mother of a victim relating first the uneasiness she’d felt and then the panic after a call to the school had ascertained that the last time anyone had seen her daughter was while she was picking up her lunch pail in her classroom at approximately two-thirty that afternoon, the call to a classmate who informed Martha that her daughter had not boarded the bus at all, and then the call to the police and the whole missing-persons routine and the subsequent fear and desperation when she and her husband realized that their daughter had been abducted, their daughter might in fact be dead.
“Your Honor,” Atkins said, “I would like this marked for identification, please.”
“Let me see it, please,” Rutherford said.
I knew what he was showing her. It was a photograph on his evidence list; I had already seen it.
“Show it to the defense, please,” Rutherford said, and handed it down to the deputy clerk.
“I have no objections,” I said, waving the photograph aside. This was calculated. If I objected to the jury seeing this picture, and if the objection was overruled—as I felt certain it would have been—the jury would wonder why I’d tried to suppress it.
“Mark it Exhibit Two for the state,” Rutherford said.
Atkins retrieved the picture and carried it to the witness stand. His voice low, almost reverent, he said, “Would you please look at this, Mrs. Williams?”
She accepted the photo.
And burst into tears.
“Can you tell me what you’re looking at, please?” Atkins said.
“A picture of my...my dead baby,” Mrs. Williams said.
“When did you first see this photograph?”
“On the second of September this year.”
“Where did you see it?”
“In the Medical Examiner’s Office here in Calusa.”
Sobbing uncontrollably now.
“Why was this photograph shown to you?”
“So I c-c-could identify my baby.”
“Your Honor, I would like this photograph moved into evidence, please.”
“Mark it in evidence.”
“May I publish it to the jury?”
“Please.”
The photograph had been taken in the morgue at Good Samaritan. It showed the mutilated body of seven-year-old Jenny Lou Williams. Atkins carried it to the first juror—one of the men—who looked at it briefly and then passed it on. I watched the jury reacting.
“Mrs. Williams,” Atkins said, “I now show you this photograph previously marked for identification. Can you tell me what it is?”
She took the photograph. Her handkerchief was to her eyes. Tears were streaming down her face.
“That’s Jenny Lou when she was alive.”
“When was the picture taken?”
“Two weeks before she disappeared.”
“Your Honor, I would like this moved into evidence, please.”
“Mark it.”
“May I publish it to the jury?”
“Go right ahead.”
Atkins walked to the jury box, handed the photo in, and turned again to where Martha Williams sat waiting for his next question. As he walked toward her, he said, “Now, do you recall ever seeing anyone suspicious in your neighborhood?”
“Objection! Vague and unclear.”
“Sustained.”
“Did you ever spot any strangers going through? On foot...or in a car?”
“In cars, yes, there are always strangers going through. In Florida, as I’m sure you know, people drive into developments just to look at the houses. Or up canals, by boat. Suncrest Acres is a very pretty development. People are always coming through.”
“In cars?”
“Yes. Mostly. We’re not on any canals, and we don’t get too many people wandering in on foot.”
