A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (31 page)

She gave the. 22 to Turfy in October 1975. That she took it back from him on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

That he came to borrow it again on December 24.

That he told her she would read about this in the newspaper.

That he brought the gun back to her late on Christmas Eve.

That he came to her house on February 26, 1976, to ask what she had done with the gun. Nothing else really mattered as far as the outcome of the trial.

Mike Mcguigan questioned Chucky Pleasant, who was a last-minute participant in getting rid of the gun. Chucky proved to be the kind of witness who scarcely needs an attorney's questions to elicit information. He began by playing both roles. "What did Loretta ask of you?"

"Well, she came in and she said, Chuck, I think I know who killed Mr. Moore." And I said, You do! Who?" And she told me that it was Angelo.

And I said, No, you are kidding." I just couldn't believe it. And then she said, Yeah, it's true." And I said, How do you know?" and she said, lsecause I gave him the gun."" Chucky Pleasant said he had been totally shocked. He testified that he had gone along with pitching the gun in the Naches, which proved to be more difficult than it looked. On the day before his cousin Turfy was arrested, Turfy had called him in his dorm in Ellensburg. "He just said, Chuck, are you sure that you threw the gun in the river?" And I said, Yeah." And he said, Did you have gloves on when you did it?" And I said, Yeah, I had some gloves." And he had asked me, Don't you know you might get involved in all this stuff9'" The plan that the state alleged Gabby Moore had forged had clearly spread its poison until it infiltrated the Pleasant family, a tightly connected extended clan. Even so, Loretta and Chucky's testimony was almost lighthearted in contrast to what the afternoon witnesses would say. Much of the rest of that day would be taken up with forensic pathology and toxicology, and the evidence found at the autopsies of the two dead coaches. The participants in the Pleasant trial the attorneys, law officers, witnesses, and the defendant himself were in a strange city, in an unfamiliar courthouse, yet the halls were becoming familiar and so were the jurors' faces. The trial had taken on its own rhythm now, as all trials eventually do. The case had found its flow. Olive Blankenbaker's sister lived in Seattle, so Olive had planned to stay with her, but the trip to downtown took so long in the morning and the rush-hour traffic going home was so bad that they rented a hotel room in the center of the city so they could walk to the courthouse. There was such a sense of urgency, a kind of anxiety that they might miss something, some bit of information, that could never be found and then there would never be any closure. Although this was a trial marked with many sidebar argument sone where the jurors were often banished to their chambers for an hour or more at a time it moved along. Court started promptly each morning at 9:30, with a 10:15 midmorning recess, a noon to 1:30 lunch hour, an afternoon break, and then dismissal by 4:30 P.M. Because Judge Lay had noticed that the jurors often rode the same elevators as the gallery and were sometimes blocked by corridors thick with spectators, reporters, and family, he had ordered that the jurors were to arrive first and leave first. Thursday afternoon began with Dr. Ted Loomis, who was the Washington State Toxicologist. Loomis testified that he had had occasion to analyze blood samples taken at the postmortem examinations of both Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore. He said that Morris had had "essentially no alcohol" content in his blood.

Gabby, on the other hand, had had. 31. Asked by Jeff Sullivan to comment on what impairment this much alcohol in the bloodstream would cause, Loomis answered, "All people with a blood alcohol level of point thirty-one would have very significant impairment with respect to judgment and reasoning, with respect to vision, with respect to hearing.

They would have some impairment with respect to speech, but it might not be particularly noticeable. Some people, but not all people, would be impaired significantly with respect to their gross body muscle activity, that's walking, turning, standing, or sitting. Some people are so affected at .31 that they are actually out of contact with reality they are in a comatose state."

"But it is possible that somebody in that condition would be able to speak. .. and somebody else not feel that they were intoxicated? Is that correct?"

"Possible for them to speak fairly well."

"Some other people's speech would be slurred?"

"Yes, and some people would be out cold."

Dr. Richard Muzzall, the Yakima County Coroner, testified next.

His voice was matter-of-fact as he explained the terrible damage done by the old. 22. "Mr. Blankenbaker suffered three small-caliber wounds to the head one passing through the upper lip and embedding itself against the base of the spine just below the skull, the other two entering behind the left ear, transversing the brain and lodging within the skull. Death, of course, was caused by extensive brain injury hemorrhage.

I think it's more likely that death was caused by the two behind the ear." Because of the gunbarrel "tattooing," Muzzall estimated that all three of the wounds were the result of a gun held at almost point-blank range, and one was a contact wound. Olive kept her face expressionless, although she felt like screaming. Ned Blankenbaker's normally ruddy face was bright red with pain. Each of them had loved their boy so much. It still didn't seem possible that it was Morris that Muzzall was talking about. The coroner moved on to the complete autopsy he had performed on the body of Gabby Moore. Gabby has asked Dr. Myers where it was safe to take a bullet, but the shot to the ribs under his left arm had gone chaotically awry, and he had drowned in his own blood. "Somebody who had sustained that kind of wound," Sullivan asked, "would it be possible to save him surgically?"

"No, I think it would be extremely unlikely, even if it happened right in the hospital." On cross-examination, Adam Moore wondered what kind of wound Gabby would have had if the. 22 bullet had not deflected and tumbled. "If it had continued at forty-five degrees after penetrating the rib," Muzzall answered, "it would have gone through the part of the left lung, would, in all likelihood, have missed the heart and come out somewhere in the anterior [front] chest."

"I see.

Uh-huh. You thought that if it hadn't been deflected by the rib, it would have been a nonfatal wound?"

"The chances it were nonfatal would be much higher."

Dr. Muzzall said he had not noticed any powder tattooing on Gabby's T-shirt, and he knew there was none on the skin itself. Adam Moore asked Muzzall to talk about the specks of dried blood found on Morris's hand.

"Your inference is that the hand was raised in a defensive"

"It would be the only explanation. .. to explain the blood on the hand.... In other words, the hand had to be somewhere in front of his head where blood could get on it.... Blood would shoot out of the wound ... in the direction of a cone, just as any spray from a spray can."

"In your opinion, was the gun closer to the circular wound by the ear with the dense powder patterns or the lip wound?"

"Of the two wounds, the one in the mouth would be the farthest away." This did not seem to be information that a defense attorney would want to bring out. All of it seemed to bear out the state's theory that Morris had been lured toward someone he trusted, shot in the lip and then twice in the back of the head at near contact range by someone who must have wanted to be sure he was dead. He had thrown up his hand in a vain attempt to stop the first slug. Eight photographs of the shooting site, Morris's body, and the blood flecked hand were entered into evidence over the objections of the defense who called them "inflammatory." Every defense attorney, everywhere, every time, objects to pictures of the victims as "inflammatory and of no probative value." Some get in. Some don't.

For the average juror, unused to the sight of any dead human being, the photographs they must view are often the most jarring part of a murder trial. But what had happened had happened, and the jurors would need to see the crime scenes in order to make their decisions about the guilt or innocence of Angelo "Turfy" Pleasant. Well into the first week of Turfy Pleasant's trial, Jeff Sullivan called John Anderson, the Director of the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory in Spokane. Anderson had testified in more than nine hundred trials, he was a brilliant criminalist and an expert in firearms examination. Sergeant Bob Brimmer had sent the bullets and casings retrieved from the victims and the crime scenes in the Blankenbaker-Moore murders to Anderson. He had performed his forensic alchemy and connected that evidence to the Colt.

22 found in the river. Anderson gave the jury a quick lesson in the way guns propel bullets. "Except for shotguns, which are essentially smoother bore weapons, if you look down the barrel, you will see a series of circular patterns. These are caused by indentations made by the cutting implement making the barrel. The land and groove is a high point and a low point. .. and gives the direction of twist. When a cartridge is fired and the bullet is forced down the barrel, the direction of twist and the land and groove impart a spin to the bullet, putting it on a truer course." He pointed out that the lands and grooves in a gun barrel are designed to prevent a bullet from emerging and "flip flopping," going off course when it hits the friction of the air. The soft metal of a bullet is marked by these high and low swirls in the gun barrel, leaving striae. These are highly individual markings. The same tool making a half-dozen gun barrels will itself be worn down imperceptibly so that no two barrels are ever exactly alike, and the bullets propelled from each barrel will have slightly different striae.

Bullets are compared in two ways: for class characteristics and for individual characteristics. Some are so battered that they meet the former criteria but not the latter. In this case the bullet taken from Morris's head and that from Gabby's body were alike in class characteristics each with six lands and grooves striae and with the same dimensions. Anderson, however, testified he could not say absolutely that they had come from the same gun. However, when he compared the shell casings the one Vern Henderson had found at the edge of Morris's yard, and the one found on Gabby's kitchen floor he had been able to match them conclusively in both class and individual characteristics.

"When a round is chambered in the barrel," Anderson said, "the extractor is a piece of metal that wraps around the cartridge case itself. As it is fired, the extractor will pull the empty shell case from the breech.

Another piece of stationary metal hits the shell case that is the trajectory and that will force the empty shell case out of the weapon."

Each of these actions leaves its mark on the base of the casing.

Sullivan asked Anderson how he had concluded that the same gun had fired both bullets. "I found an ejectory mark at eight o'clock,' holding the firing pin impression at twelve o'clock,' " be said. "At three o'clock,'

there was an extractor mark." These marks were identical on both bullet casings from each murder.

Combined with the same firing pin mark stamped on the bottom of each shell, this left no doubt at all that the same gun had been used to kill both Morris and Gabby. And that was the gun found in the river.

Everything dovetailed perfectly.

Vern Henderson had not been exaggerating when he told Turfy how much evidence can be detected when a crime lab has both a gun and bullets for comparison. Further, John Anderson testified that his test firings indicated that the person who shot Gabby Moore had been nine inches or, at the most, twelve inches away. That warred with Turfy's taped confession to Vern Henderson where he said he had been six or seven feet away from Gabby when Gabby had ordered him to shoot him. In reality, Turfy had been very, very close to Gabby when he fired. Gabby's bloodied T-shirt with a bullet hole just beneath the left armpit was entered into evidence. It was Friday, August 20, 1976. For the casual observer and the media too, trials are fascinating to watch. For the families of those involved both victims and defendants a trial is an ordeal to be gotten through, a reminder of horror and loss. Derek Moore took the witness stand to testify about how he found his father dead before dawn on Christmas morning. His girlfriend, Janet Whitman, followed him on the stand, and then his sister, Kate, and his grandfather, Dr. A. J. Myers.

All of them related their memories of the final night of Gabby Moore's life, remembering the last time they had ever talked to someone whom they had truly cared about, but someone they could not save from his own obsessions. Everyone in Judge Lay's courtroom was caught in those hours between sunset and the first glimmers of light on Christmas Day, trapped, somehow, in the tiny apartment on Eighteenth Avenue, along with the dead man. And then Jeff Sullivan skillfully elicited testimony which summed up more of the weeks and months of investigation into the two murders. The jury had heard from all the police personnel who were present at the scene of Morris Blankenbaker's murder, and now they heard about the scene at Gabby Moore's apartment right from the call:

"Unattended death." Adam Moore and Chris Tait knew that the time when Sullivan would introduce the tapes of Turfy Pleasant confessing to the two murders was approaching. They could not stop the tapes from being heard, but they sensed that Jeff Sullivan was about to wind up the state's case, and they were adamant that they did not want the jurors to adjourn for the weekend with those confessions ringing in their ears. If they expected an argument from the prosecutor, Sullivan surprised them.

He was not finished with his case, he said, and he had no objection to the tapes being played on Monday rather than Friday. The day was far from over. Adam Moore made a motion for mistrial, arguing that the state had made promises to Turfy Pleasant that they would not use a portion of the statements he had made against him if he should ever be tried for murder. In Brimmer's testimony, he had mentioned that two other people (unnamed) had been arrested and charged with murder before being released. The defense insisted Brimmer had breached their agreement and demanded a mistrial. The motion was denied, although Lay ordered the jury to disregard Brimmer's statement. "You cannot un ring a bell," Moore said ominously.