A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (26 page)

home that night for Tequila Sunrises, a curious Christmas libation. One of the girls told the detectives that she had to plead with her mother to go out, and only got permission when she promised to be home by midnight. At midnight, while the others were raptly watching a horror film on television, the witness realized she wasn't going to make her deadline. In fact, it was before she could convince Kenny Marino to drive her home. It was close to one when she got home, and her mother was waiting up for her. Kenny Marino and the other two girls returned to his house. Over on Eighteenth Street, miles away, someone had just shot Gabby Moore. Figuring the times and the distances and the witnesses, there was no way Kenny Marino could have been the shooter. Although Turfy Pleasant would go into his trial still claiming to have been only an observer at the murders of Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore, Jeff Sullivan had his witnesses in place, ready to show that Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino could not have been the killers. Turfy agreed to waive his right to a speedy trial (within sixty days of his arrest) and was given a new trial date in early June. Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino had their trials joined at the request of Marino's attorney. Their new trial date was now May 24. With less than two weeks to go before their trial, Judge Howard Hettinger ordered that the Anthony Pleasant/Kenny Marino pretrial hearing be held in secret. No one in Yakima knew what was going on. Hettinger said that he would release a statement on the closed-door hearing as soon as a jury was sequestered. After defense attorneys argued that any reporting of the pretrial motions would "seriously jeopardize" their clients' right to a fair trial by an impartial jury, Hettinger issued an order excluding the press and public from the pretrial hearings. Turfy Pleasant's hearing, presided over by Judge Lay, had been open to the press although they agreed not to report on it beyond change-of-venue arguments until a Jury was sequestered.

Interest in the trials was at fever pitch among Yakimans. Court Administrator Charlotte Phillips said that the trials themselves would be open to the public and that the press could expect special seating arrangements in the largest courtroom in the courthouse. The trials would run continuously, including weekends, partly because jurors would be sequestered. Newspapers announced that security would be tight in the courtrooms. No one knew exactly why. No one beyond the principals involved and the police, attorneys, and prosecuting team knew the whole story, but everyone in town was curious. And then, four days before Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino were to go on trial, Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan moved for dismissal of the charges against them. The defendants' jaws dropped, they hadn't been expecting this. Sullivan would have preferred to postpone their trial, rather than have it dropped, but, in the interests of justice, he said he did not have sufficient evidence to bring them to trial. (Sullivan said later that the dismissal of charges against Turfy Pleasant's younger brother and his best friend not did not affect the case against Turfy at all.) Jeff Sullivan was between a rock and a hard place. He was not entirely convinced that Marino and Anthony didn't have some guilty knowledge, before or after the shootings, but he could not produce evidence linking them to the crimes. They each had witnesses who could prove that they were nowhere near the murder scenes at the time the shootings occurred.

Although he did not want to reveal that information in this venue, Sullivan had asked for "dismissal without prejudice," meaning that he could refile the charges should the investigation come up with new evidence. Defense attorneys did not object. Thirty minutes later, smiling broadly, Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino walked out into the sunlight. Anthony had been in jail for sixty-two days, and Kenny Marino for forty. "What' like to be in jail?" a reporter called out.

"God, I can't say," Marino said. "You'd have to go through it. I had nightmares and nightmares. .. every night." For them, at least, it was over. For Turfy Pleasant, a trial lay JUST ahead. Despite everything, there was still a grudging respect between Turfy Pleasant and Vern Henderson. Vern didn't exactly feel sorry for Turfy. How could he when Vern knew that Turfy had shot his best friend and, for that matter Tufty's best friend. But Vern sensed the waste, the tragedy, the loss for so many people, all because Gabby Moore had been ready to sacrifice anything and anyone so that he could regain what he had lost:

Jerilee. When Turfy's girlfriend, Rene, gave birth to her second daughter to Turfy's second daughter too it was Vern who took Turfy from the Yakima jail up to the hospital so that he could hold his new baby.

It was a bittersweet moment. Although Turfy's murder trial had been continued for a second time, until July 19, it loomed ahead like a dark tunnel. If he should be convicted, Turfy might not be around to see either of his children grow up. When Turfy Pleasant had waived his right to a speedy I I trial, he had allowed Jeff Sullivan the time he needed to bring the fragments of this peculiar case into some kind of order.

Sullivan remarked that each "fact uncovered led to another." He wanted to be very sure that the person (or persons) who had shot Morris and Gabby was the one on trial. There were more witnesses to locate. It was becoming clear, however, that the state could never try the person who had instigated the shootings even though statute made that person just as guilty as the one whose finger pulled the trigger. That person gabby Moore was dead.

The public didn't know that, of course. Every facet of the case had been shrouded in secrecy. Adam Moore, Turfy's attorney, had agreed to the continuance, saying inscrutably, "When the truth is finally known, a lot of questions will be answered." Loretta Scott was a vital witness for the prosecution. Sullivan needed her testimony to show the transfers of the murder weapon from herself to Turfy and back again. She would be granted immunity from prosecution on the weapons charges. It was possible that Kenny Marino and Anthony Pleasant, once suspects themselves, would end up being state witnesses too. In late June, without fanfare, Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Sullivan and Defense Attorney Adam Moore flew to Germany. "We left Sunday morning," Sullivan recalled, "and although we went to Worms, Frankfort, and Heidelberg, we were back on Wednesday." Although they were on opposite sides in this case, both attorneys had questions about the Colt. 22 and about unconfirmed rumors that they needed answers for. Working on minimal sleep, Moore and Sullivan took depositions from David Pleasant, Loretta Scott's brother, who was serving in the army in Germany, and from Anthony Pleasant's girlfriend at the time of Morris Blankenbaker's murder. Her stepfather was also in the army in Germany. One of the most rampant rumors around Yakima was that she had been told the "real" truth about the double murder, and David was supposed to know where the gun had come from. As it turned out, Anthony's girlfriend knew nothing about the killings. In his deposition given in Frankfort, Germany, on June 22, David Pleasant verified that he had once owned the. 22 and that he had given it to his sister, Loretta, when he went into the army. He had gotten it from a friend who had gotten it from a friend. The gun had come from Vietnam, and it was virtually untraceable. Had Loretta not panicked, the gun could never have been connected to he rand through he rto Turfy Pleasant Jeff Sullivan had now found out everything he ever would about the death weapon, and about Anthony Pleasant's movements on November 21, 1975. It was time to move ahead.

On July 8, Turfy Pleasant's pretrial hearing was held in Yakima, and the possibility that Anthony and Kenny Marino would move to the state's side of the chess game that is the law became reality. It was not a good day for the defense camp. Shortly before the hearing began, Turfy's attorneys learned that Jeff Sullivan was amending the charges against their client, instead of first-degree murder in Morris Blankenbaker's death, and second-degree murder in Gabby Moore's, the charge in Moore's death was also Jirst-degree murder. Appalled by what they termed "eleventh hour" tactics, Adam Moore and Chris Tait asked for more time.

And they had other motions. They renewed their request for a change of venue, and for two separate trials. They told Judge Lay that Pleasant could not get a fair trial if the two murder charges were heard by the same jury. They argued that the alibi witnesses the state intended to call to corroborate the whereabouts of Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino at the moments of murder would "sandbag" a jury. The philosophical question naturally arose: If a man is guilty of two murders, should a jury not hear the connection between those murders? And, then again, if a man is innocent of two murders, or of one of the murders, should the same jury hear about both crimes? Defense attorneys always choose to separate charges, prosecutors always prefer I l to let a jury see all the possible ramifications the similar transactions of conjoined crimes.

As it was, this trial promised to be one of the most expensive ever to hit the taxpayers of Yakima County. It would take an estimated three weeks, and jurors would be sequestered. That meant, of course, hotel costs and meals for the jurors on top of all of Turfy's lawyers' fees and money for the defense's private investigator. It was true, as Adam Moore argued, that "There is no place on the scales of justice for dollar signs on one side and fairness on the other," but moving the trial to another city would be even more expensive than the projected fifty thousand dollars to hold it in Yakima. (Today fifty thousand dollars wouldn't pay for half a day of a headline big-city trial such as O.J. Simpson's or the Menendez brothers, but fifty thousand dollars would cut a huge chunk out of the Yakima County budget. As it was, legal fees for Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino had cost thirteen thousand dollars.) In the end, Judge Carl Lay's rulings were split. He would grant the change of venue, he would not separate the two murder charges into two trials. The two murders had so many similar transaction aspects that Lay could not justify severing them. Turfy Pleasant smiled when he heard that there would be a change of venue, but Yakimans who had planned to attend every day of the sensational trial were disappointed.

If they wanted to watch all the action, they would have to travel 140

miles west across the Cascade Mountains to Seattle. Some of them would, King County promised to provide an adequate courtroom. Besides the family, friends, press, and gallery, there would be more than fifty witnesses traveling from eastern Washington for the trial in Seattle. In the end, the question of sequestration of the jury would be moot. The murders in Yakima might well have happened 14,000 miles away rather than 140, Morris Blankenbaker, Gabby Moore, and Turfy Pleasant were celebrities in their hometown, but very few residents of King County had heard of them or of the murders. Seattle and the county it sat in had its own homicides to think about. It was almost shocking to realize that out of the fifty-member jury pool of King County residents brought in for the Pleasant jury, only one had ever heard of the case, and that was because she had friends in Yakima. Bitter tragedy and shocking double murder in eastern Washington had not filtered through at all. Perhaps murder is an insular phenomenon, its impact diminished by distance and geography almost as if the looming Cascades that separated Yakima from Seattle had absorbed the shock and pain. But the pain would come brilliantly alive again on August 16 and continue through the weeks of trial in Seattle. The case would be featured not only in the Yakima Herald republic but in the Seattle Times and the Seattle Postlntelligencer. James Wallace, a Herald-Republic reporter, would file daily stories from the courthouse so that hometown people who could not make the trip could monitor the trial. Olive Blankenbaker and her sister would attend every session of the trial. A long time later, when she remembered those weeks, she would sigh, "It was so hard so hard." Ned Blankenbaker, Morris's father, his face reddened with emotion and unshed tears, would sit nearby. Andrew Pleasant, Sr Turfy's father, and Turfy's grandmother would be there, all of them at once linked and divided by the enormity of the crimes Turfy stood accused of. Many family members were barred from the courtroom because they would be called as witnesses. Turfy Pleasant would be housed in the King County Jail, a two-story elevator ride to King County Superior Courtroom West 1019. He would be accompanied to court each day by Yakima police officers Dennis Meyers and Marion Baugher. Seattle's media, caught up in the drama of this case, were prepared to be on hand. John Sandifer, anchorman for the nightly news of the ABC affiliate in Seattle, KOMO, marked off two weeks on his calendar, and photographers from the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-intelligencer did too. Defendants and witnesses alike would walk the gauntlet from the elevators, through the marble-walled corridors, to the King County courtrooms. Jeff Sullivan, Mike Mcguigan, his deputy prosecutor in l this trial, Vern Henderson, Court Reporter Lonna Vachon, and the rest of the entourage from Yakima County had trouble simply finding a place to stay in Seattle, there was a huge convention in town that August. Eventually, they found enough rooms at the old Roosevelt Hotel, which was more than a mile north of the courthouse and had yet to be refurbished. The sheer logistics of getting witnesses to Seattle to testify was a challenge. Jeff Sullivan was grateful for the transportation provided by the Yakima Police Department. "We had a number of teenage witnesses," he recalled. "We tried to bring them over in the morning and get them back home in the evening, so we didn't have to worry about their staying over in Seattle without adult supervision." And so it began. This long-awaited trial that might reveal the seemingly inexplicable reasoning behind the deaths of two most unlikely murder victims. Turfy Pleasant invariably grinned at the cameras, as insouciant as a rock star passing through a crowd of fans. Female photographers got an extra-large smile. He spoke with the Yakima officers who escorted him as if they were old friends and they talked just as easily with him. Were it not for his hands cuffed behind him, it would have been difficult to pick Turfy out as the defendant. He looked like the young athlete he had been until his arrest for double murder. His shoulders were broad and thickly muscled, his waist trim, his ears were the "cauliflower ears" of a longtime wrestler. Despite his situation, he seemed optimistic and smiled easily for photographers.