Fatal Vision (89 page)

In conference with Judge Dupree, Brian Murtagh said that the statements of the Stoeckley witnesses, "because of their inherent lack of credibility" and because they were hearsay, ought not to be deemed admissible.

"We have no physical evidence whatsoever to tie her to the crime scene," Murtagh said. "You know, you say, 'Well, why do you think you were there?' and she says, 'Because I think I was there.' You know, you go round in circles on that."

Bernie Segal was reaching new heights of indignation. "The fact that the government might want to attack her statement," he told Judge Dupree, "does not deny the defendant the right to introduce it. If it was the United States prosecuting someone for murder and it had these kinds of statements and so-called admissions by the defendant, would the court for a moment hesitate to let the government introduce it?

"I find it difficult to believe that any court would hesitate to let the government put it in. The fact that someone is crying and weeping when they are talking about a murder that is horrendous does not make it inadmissible.

"The fact that later on they say, 'I would like to pull it back and withdraw it,' can't affect admissibility. It goes to weight. That is the issue.

"We want everything that she said to come out. The fact that she both admits and denies, in my judgment and my experience, has never precluded a confession or admission from being put into evidence.

"Many a defendant has said, you know, to the police officer while being taken to the station, 'Yeah, I was involved.' Then he gets to the station and they get a formal statement. 'Oh, no, I will not admit that on paper,' the defendant screams. 'You cannot let that thing in. I mean, I said I didn't do it.' The court says, 'It's for the jury to decide which statements are admissible.'

"Why is the defendant here now being told that after he has done the job that should have been done by somebody else, he can't offer the evidence? It just seems to me that we have established beyond any reasonable argument the right to put this forward."

Responding, Brian Murtagh once again quoted that portion of Federal Rule 804 (b) (3) which pertained to trustworthiness of the statements. "Your honor," he said, "first of all, Ms. Stoeckley's statements are not clearly admissions of guilt. If anything, what they are is what has been brought out on direct and cross-examination: that the woman doesn't know where she was that night; that she was being constantly interrogated by the police; and that she began to have fears about not being able to account for where she was.

"And these statements cannot be taken out of that context and out of the context that the woman has been a drug addict, has had hepatitis, has been incoherent and—to use the description of one of the witnesses—hysterical. So it seems to me that these statements are not trustworthy, and they certainly are being offered to exculpate the accused."

Without commenting on whether or not her testimony at trial had seemed believable, Judge Dupree said, "I think her incompetency at the time she made at least some of the statements attributed to her has been more than adequately established."

"Your honor," Segal said, "I dare to disagree. As a matter of fact, there is a certain internal consistency that always has impressed me about what she has said. Now, while I truthfully do not think there is any evidence that Helena Stoeckley inflicted an injury, there is clearly evidence in my mind from all these witnesses that she carried a candle and was present."

Brian Murtagh would not budge. "Your honor," he said, "we are talking about whether a reasonable person making these statements at the time would so appreciate the gravity of the statements that they wouldn't make them unless they meant them.

"I don't think we have that in this case. What we are talking about here is somebody who is hysterical, perhaps hallucinating. Under those conditions, she makes various statements. Now, those statements are never of an unequivocal nature. It can all be drawn back to her lack of an alibi and the fact that she is constantly being interviewed, picked up, hassled by the police, and having to account for her whereabouts. I think you can't take it out of that context.

"And I still think, Judge, that the issue here is that the rule mandates that the statements should not be admitted unless there are corroborative circumstances which clearly indicate their trustworthiness. And I just don't see how Mr. Segal can argue that these various statements which are all over the lot are trustworthy or unequivocal."

"Your honor," Segal replied, "we are talking about the denial of the right of a defendant to show that there is evidence that could raise a reasonable doubt on his behalf, because it tends to show the involvement of someone else. Remember, that is all his burden is. And I think the fact that a great range of witnesses, coming from every side—police officers, people who do not know this person, people who wanted to help the person—this broad range of people coming forward to say that she has made statements which have the tendency to involve her in the crime are statements that deserve to be heard by the jury.

"And, as my last observation, your honor, I do say that these crimes were not committed by reasonable people. These acts are unreasonable. These acts are so consistent with the kind of culture, the kind of persons that Ms. Stoeckley was involved with, that they in themselves tend to be corroborative. I think we have a tendency—in our own sanity—to lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with, truly, acts of monstrous insanity."

"Your honor," said Brian Murtagh, "they've had Helena Stoeckley herself on the stand for the better part of the day. I think she was more than cooperative with both sides. The basic issue here is that the defendant has not been prejudiced by the exclusion of Helena Stoeckley's testimony. She was asked point-blank on the stand the sixty-four-dollar question about whether she was there or whether she did it. I think we have more than satisfied constitutional requirements in that regard. These further statements are not her statements, they are the statements of other witnesses, and I do not believe they meet the applicable standard of trustworthiness as specified in 804 (b) (3)."

It was four o'clock on Friday afternoon, the last hour of the last day of the fifth week of the trial. Franklin
T
. Dupree said, "The Court will rule on this motion Monday morning at 10
a.m.
Take a recess until that hour, please."

* * *

Helena Stoeckley spent the weekend in Raleigh, Bernie Segal still hoping that he might be able to turn her presence to advantage. Using Jeffrey MacDonald's money, he obtained a room for her and her fiance at a motel called the Journey's End.

On Sunday morning, Segal received a phone call from the manager of the motel. She said that someone had just tried to drown Helena Stoeckley in the swimming pool. Segal immediately dispatched a female assistant—a San Francisco attorney named Wendy Rouder—to the scene.

Rouder was told that it had been Stoeckley's fiance, Ernie Davis, who had been holding her head under water in the pool. In addition to her broken arm, Stoeckley, by Sunday morning, had a swollen and blackened eye where it appeared that someone had punched her. She told Rouder that this had occurred the day before when she had stepped into a hallway to buy a can of soda from a machine and a complete stranger had walked up to her and struck her.

Rouder, concerned that Ernie Davis, perhaps, was not reacting well to recent stresses, and fearing that he might have been the cause of the black eye as well as the "drowning" attempt, persuaded him to step into the motel corridor while she spoke privately to Stoeckley for a moment.

"Helena, do you want him to leave?" Rouder asked.

"Yes," Stoeckley said. "I want him to go." She immediately began placing his clothes and personal belongings in a suitcase, adding, as well, all the motel ashtrays she could find.

Red Underhill had accompanied Rouder to the Journey's End and was prepared to see Davis to the bus terminal and to give him twenty dollars (of Jeffrey MacDonald's money) for a oneway ticket out of town.

"Will you be all right?" Rouder asked. "Or would you like somebody to stay with you?"

Stoeckley said she would prefer to have a companion. "How about you?" she asked Rouder. "Could you stay?"

Rouder agreed to spend at least the afternoon with Helena Stoeckley, but left the room briefly to permit Stoeckley to inform her fiance privately that his presence in Raleigh was no longer desired. Ten minutes later, the door swung open and Davis, bare-chested and carrying the suitcase, ran down the hall.

Re
-
entering the room, Rouder and Red Underhill found Stoeckley in the bathroom, bleeding profusely from the nose. She said no, Davis had not hit her, she had simply walked into a door.

With Stoeckley holding towels to her nose and tilting her head back in an attempt to get the bleeding to stop, Wendy Rouder
spent the afternoon with her in her motel room. As the bleeding gradually subsided, Stoeckley and Rouder began to talk. It was mostly small talk—Stoeckley described to Rouder how she had had, at one time, a magnificent singing voice, and how, had it not been for the stroke she had suffered, she might have had a career in opera.

Eventually, there came a lull in the conversation. Then Stoeckley said, "I"still think I could have been there that night."

"What makes you think so?" Rouder asked.

"I don't know." There was another pause. Then Stoeckley said, "That rocking horse. That rocking horse in Kristen's room." Seeing the toy horse depicted in one of the crime scene photographs had brought back to Stoeckley a flash—of memory? of imagination?—in which she had been sitting on the horse, trying to ride it, but had been unable to, because "the wheels were broken and it wouldn't roll." (The rocking horse, as it happened, had been on runners, not wheels.)

Then, after another pause, Stoeckley added, "You know, Kristen. Kristen Jean. Those pictures. When I looked at those pictures, I knew I had seen her somewhere before."

Rouder kept talking to Stoeckley throughout the afternoon, taking notes on the conversation. At one point, she asked if Stoeckley still felt guilt about her involvement.

"Of course," Stoeckley replied. "What do you think I have taken all these damn drugs for?"

"If MacDonald were convicted," Rouder asked, "do you think you could live with that guilt, too?"

"I don't think so."

"Isn't there anything you could do to get rid of the guilt?" "Maybe sodium pentathol, or hypnosis, or something," Stoeckley said.

The conversation was interrupted by the manager of the Journey's End, who called to say that Stoeckley was no longer welcome at the motel.

A room was obtained for her at a nearby Hilton. Later in the afternoon, as Rouder and Stoeckley sat together in an automobile, en route from one motel to the other, Stoeckley again said, "I still think I was there in that house that night."

"Helena, is that a feeling you are having or a memory?" Rouder asked.

"It's a memory," Stoeckley said. "I remember standing at the couch, holding a candle, only, you know, it wasn't dripping wax. It was dripping blood."

* * *

Punctual as always, Judge Dupree strode quickly into the courtroom Monday morning and immediately asked to see counsel for both sides at the bench.

"Since court adjourned on Friday afternoon," he said, "I have spent a substantial portion of my waking hours researching and deciding the rather interesting evidentiary question which was posed—the question being whether statements by the witness Stoeckley should be admissible through other witnesses— statements made outside of court in far distant times.

"I will rule," he continued, "that these proposed statements do not comply with the trustworthy requisites of 804 (b) (3). In fact, far from being clearly corroborated and trustworthy, they are about as unclearly trustworthy—or, clearly untrustworthy, let me say—as any statements that I have ever seen or heard.

"This witness, in her examination and cross-examination here in court, has been, to use the government counsel's terminology, 'all over the lot.' The statements which she has made out of court were 'all over the lot,' also, so it can't really be said that the hearing of those statements would lead to any different conclusion than what the jurors got while she was here in open court.

"This testimony, I think, has no trustworthiness at all. Here you have a girl who, when she made the statements, was, in most instances heavily drugged, if not hallucinating. And she has told us that herself. She has stated that in person. I think that this evidence would tend to confuse the issues, mislead the jury, cause undue delay, and be a waste of time. She has already told this jury everything that you proposed to show by these witnesses.

"And, Mr. Segal, let me say that I did not reach this decision lightly. I spent roughly seven hours on this thing on Saturday. I spent the entire day Sunday until 11:30 last night wrestling with this thing. And, as I do routinely in criminal cases—I lean over backwards to make sure that no criminal defendant is ever deprived of a defense.