Gang Mom (17 page)

In fact, because these kids had such rich fantasy lives, Mary Thompson initially didn’t believe Elstad and Brown’s claims of killing Aaron Iturra.

“The twenty-two caliber pistol that Lisa Fentress had was not given to her by Mary Thompson.” As for the way she was treated, “Over time, Mary’s opinion about law enforcement changed, especially when she came in contact with Jim Michaud.”

But I didn’t kill anybody
, Michaud thought in the back of the courtroom.

Chez continued: “Police were using their vast power with the gang members to get Thompson. ‘Tell us something that we can use against Mary Thompson,’ they pressured all of the kids they interviewed. Angel Elstad, who you’ll hear as a state’s witness, was involved in crime,” Chez pointed out, and she agreed to testify only because, “Police have the ability to make her life rough. And remember that the state has the power to grant immunity and other deals” with reputed gang members in order to coerce them to testify.

“Mary Thompson did not in any way request or sanction Iturra’s death,” Chez continued. When she found out what had happened, she felt tremendous guilt because she felt she could have stopped it from happening. It was that guilt she would have to live with for the rest of her life, not the guilt of causing the young man’s death.

JUNE 14

All through the year leading up to the trial, Michaud, Rainey and the other detectives who worked the case had interviewed the gang members, working quietly behind the scenes to get them to implicate Mary. Chez’s arguments to the contrary, most had been promised nothing in return for their cooperation. Promises really weren’t necessary anyway because most had neither committed nor been charged with any crime. What the detectives had, in effect, done was to de-brainwash them, and make them realize that Mary was anything but their friend. Instead, she was a scheming adult bent on benefiting from their criminal activities! And if they happened to be caught, they would just have to take one for the team while she continued to enjoy the spoils of their criminal acts.

The first gang member to take the stand was Linda Miller. She related a conversation she had had with Mary on January 14, 1995. Michaud recalled that the DNR had turned on a little after midnight.

“So anyway, it got all messed up and they know I know more than what I’m saying,” Mary began.

“Same with me, but there’s no way they can prove it,” said Linda.

“But they’re trying to f—ing indict me because of what Jim said. About me telling Jim to go do it.”

Mary, her paranoia kicking in, was convinced Jim had ratted her out to the cops, but nothing could be further from the truth.

“And my alibi is tight for that Sunday,” Mary continued. “’Cause Angel told them that I went over there for an hour and talked to Jim.”

“Uh huh.”

“And told him it needed to be done. Soon.”

“Uh huh.”

“And I never went over there, Linda.”

“Why would you go over to their house and say something like that?” Linda agreed. “I mean that’s gotta be a little obvious. ’Cause they got police reports. They got the police reports all screwed up too.”

“Mary often brought up the subject herself about getting Aaron killed,” Linda testified in court. “She wanted Aaron capped so he couldn’t testify against Beau about his role in the knife fight.”

At the defense table, Mary sneered at Linda but she seemed to squirm just a little.

“Mary originally recruited my boyfriend Wayde Hudson to do the job. She told Wayde he had to take care of his ‘family.’ Mary phoned me ten minutes before the shooting and again afterward.”

It was particularly damning testimony but Chez thought she was a liar and was determined to counter it.

During his cross-examination, Linda copped an attitude. Arms folded protectively across her chest, she gave monosyllabic answers. When she bothered to put more than one syllable together, her answers to Chez’s questions formed the labored phraseology of “I don’t know.”

Chez’s strategy had been to try to show the discrepancies in her story and her memories but it was proving difficult going because of her intransigence. When he asked her why she implicated Thompson in court after telling her during the January 14 phone conversation, “I know you didn’t tell them to do it,” Linda was vague in her response. Asked why she lied about her testimony to the grand jury investigating Thompson’s role in Aaron’s murder, Linda gave various explanations for the discrepancies: she lied to win Mary’s trust; she lied because she feared for her safety and her family’s safety; “She was the one who went to the police and told on everybody. Why should I tell the truth to someone who didn’t tell me the truth?” Linda asked Chez.

Linda recalled that she hung out at Mary’s house where, three days prior to the murder, she saw Angel Elstad there with a .38 tucked in the waistband of her pants. Linda said she took the gun from Angel for Angel’s safety, then gave it to Thompson at the request of gang member Larry Martin.

“Me, Mary and ‘Truth’ [Martin] went into the bedroom and Mary handed the gun over to Truth in a holster. Mary said it was the weapon that would take care of our problem.”

Linda went on to say that she was afraid of the gang members after the killing, claiming that Truth threatened that “… whoever talked was going to be taken care of” in the same way Aaron was.

Chez felt her fears were groundless. Asked if she had had second thoughts about being present when her gang friends were laying out the plot to kill Iturra, she answered with a reluctant “No.”

JUNE 18

Wayde Hudson, all of seventeen years old and already a gang veteran, took the stand.

Hudson related how, in September 1994, at the beginning of burning season, Mary Thompson drove to a local park and watched as one teen after another was jumped into the gang she had formed, the 74 Hoover Crips. He said that he, Joe Brown and Lisa Fentress were all jumped in on that night.

“Mary had a certain routine I guess she wanted done, an order of the people she wanted beaten in,” Hudson testified under direct examination by prosecutor Steve Skelton. Mary let him join up without being beaten because he said he’d lie to the cops about Beau’s involvement in the knife fight. Hudson figured he could take the blame himself because, being a minor, it wasn’t such a big thing.

After she accepted him into the gang, Mary gave him the blue rag. “She told me to treat it like my best friend, like it’s part of me, and to never let anyone disrespect it.”

Mary went on to “freak out” over Beau’s arrest and truly believed that Aaron was lying about Beau’s involvement in the knife fight. Hudson said that while gang members hung out at Mary’s house, where they drank and took drugs, Mary told them that they should “… take care of business. At first it was like, we thought she meant beating Aaron up but after some of the gang got a stolen thirty-eight,” what she really wanted was Aaron killed.

“At first, Mary chose me and another guy to do it. She would come to me and say, ‘We have to take care of business, court’s coming up. He can’t testify.’” Soon after that, Hudson maintained, he started to leave the gang’s sphere of influence. “I didn’t want to be around it [the gang] because it was getting out of control. I knew something was going to happen,” a fact he was assured of when, a few days before the murder, he heard his best friend, Jim Elstad, and Crazy Joe Brown say that they “… were going to be the ones taking care of business.”

The tape of Mary’s statement to Rainey and Raynor was played for the jury, followed by Mary’s conversation the same day with Angel Elstad in which Angel told Mary, “You said it needed to get done and it needed to get done soon.”

With the afternoon moving on toward evening, the judge recessed court till morning.

JUNE 19

Hudson once again took the witness stand, and Skelton continued his direct examination.

Hudson testified that he’d lied to detectives when he was originally interviewed. At that time, he had told them that Mary had tried to persuade the gang members to forget about murdering Aaron. He also stated that he lied when he said that Mary had had no role in the murder. At the time of his interview, he was in juvenile jail and didn’t want to be labeled a “snitch.”

Under Chez’s skillful cross-examination Hudson admitted, “She never said ‘Kill him.’ It was kind of like beating around the bush. It was pretty obvious what she meant.” Still, aggravated murder required intent and if the state could not prove that, Chez knew the jury would have no choice but to acquit.

Hudson went on to say that he didn’t learn that Thompson had implicated Brown and Elstad until January 1995, because at that time, he was in the Skipworth Juvenile Detention Center, where news of the outside world was sometimes received a little late. Chez, challenging Hudson’s reasons for testifying against Mary, asked him if the news had made him angry.

“Yes,” he said. “In my opinion, a lot of what happened was her fault … and she goes around and gets everybody else in trouble.” He wanted revenge against Mary. And, if the jury bought that, they would have to disregard his testimony.

After Hudson finished, Skelton scanned his witness list and decided to throw in a curve ball. There were more gang members who’d testify, but he thought it might be interesting to hear first from someone else who knew Mary.

“The state calls Kristine Clooney to the stand.”

He was determined to show the jury that Mary Thompson’s predilection toward murder was not just one isolated instance and to do that, he needed Clooney’s testimony.

“Raise your right hand and repeat after me. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” intoned the court clerk.

“I do,” Clooney answered, and took her seat in the witness box.

As large and tough-looking a woman as Mary, Clooney had been “Gang Mom” ’s bunk mate in Lane County Jail from December 1995 to May 1996. While Mary occupied bunk number 14, Clooney was only a few beds away.

“She [Mary] said if she were convicted, she’d make sure Aaron’s mother [Janyce] was dead too,” Clooney stated. “She wrote a rap song about the murder itself and how she was like O.J. and would be acquitted.”

Clooney claimed that some of the jail’s deputies coddled Mary, perhaps because of her status as a celebrity defendant or her past work as an anti-gang activist. Because of this, Mary’s subsequent behavior was tolerated.

“One minute she’d be crying, the next she’d be throwing things around. Her mood swings were to the extreme. She also got herself assigned the easy laundry duty and always chose blankets, sheets and pillow cases for herself in blue, her gang’s
rag
color.”

In cross-examining Clooney, Chez got her to admit that she was in jail on theft and forgery charges, and that she had a long criminal history, including armed robbery. Then, Chez wondered, did the state offer her any sort of deal in return for her testimony?

“No, I haven’t been offered leniency for anything,” Clooney answered. “Look, my life isn’t a pretty picture. But I take responsibility for what I’ve done. I’m real tired and I’m trying to turn my life around.”

Still, Clooney wasn’t the best of witnesses. She admitted under cross-examination that she never trusted Mary, that they never got along, and that she neither liked nor trusted other women. “I have a high animosity toward any woman,” she said. It would be left to a therapist on a distant day in the future to figure out exactly what that was all about.

Mary had boasted about her gang to Clooney and another woman, jail deputy Jean Petersen, who testified the same day. “Mary carried on about how Crips were better people” than police officers and how “her son is a Crip and he’s the best Crip there is,” Petersen testified. “She said, ‘All I have to do is make one little phone call and this community could be hurt real bad.’”

JUNE 20

“They’ll never be able to hang me because my homies won’t talk,” Sam Warthan testified that Mary Thompson had said during a conversation with him and Beau in January 1995. He said that he, Thompson and Flynn were in a car when he and Flynn began horsing around. When he jokingly bragged about beating up Flynn, Thompson told him not to mess “with us because look what happened to Aaron.” Then he recounted a later conversation during which, “Me, Beau and Mark were
jockey-boxing
[breaking into cars and stealing stereos] a few days before Beau got caught when we spotted a Chevy Suburban with the keys inside.”

They stole the car and then drove around Eugene until they found a matching vehicle so they could switch license plates and thus fool the police into believing the car wasn’t stolen.

Skelton then played the tapes of Beau’s conversations on January 17 with Lisa Fentress regarding picking up the .22 at South Eugene High School, and then the tapes of Mary’s conversations with Mark Darling recounting the subsequent car chase and capture. The jury did not seem visibly moved by Mary’s crying as recorded on the tapes.

JUNE 21

Skelton’s strategy seemed to be paying off. The jury had listened attentively as the gang members testified. Now it was time to have Mary Thompson convict herself with her own words. With the court’s permission, Skelton was allowed to play some of the wiretaps recorded subsequent to Beau’s capture.

On some of the tapes in which Mary spoke to gang members, she expressed ignorance about Beau’s activities when he was caught. “All he [Beau] was doing was getting a ride to school,” she told Lisa Fentress during one conversation, a lie repeated in a number of subsequent conversations. Other wiretaps showed that she was deliberately lying to gang members in order to manipulate them, that she knew the Suburban was stolen, that the plates had been changed and that Beau was heading to meet Lisa for the gun exchange.

At one point while Beau was speaking with Lisa, you could hear Mary get on the line, urging Lisa to give him the gun. During another conversation, Mary admitted alibiing Beau, telling cops that Beau was asleep in her house at the time of the chase.