Kingdom of Fear (10 page)

My own peacocks wander widely during the day, but at night they come back into their own warm cage. Every once in a while they will miss curfew & decide to roost in a tree or on top of a telephone pole—(and that is what happened last week).

It was not a Lightning ball that blacked out my house, but a male peacock that stepped on a power line & caused a short circuit that burned him to a cinder & blew half my Electrics. The power came back, but the bird did not. It was fried like a ball of bacon. We couldn’t even eat it. That tragedy occurred at halftime—so let the record stand corrected. Sorry.

I have consulted with many lawyers on the Lisl Auman case—which gets uglier every time I look at it. I don’t do this very often—Never, in fact—but this case is such an outrage that it haunts me & gives me bad dreams at night. I am not a Criminal Lawyer, but I have what might be called “a very strong background” in the Criminal Justice System & many of my friends & associates are widely known as the best legal minds in that cruel & deadly business.

It is no place for amateurs, and even seasoned professionals can make mistakes that are often fatal. The System can grind up the Innocent as well as the Guilty, and that is what I believe happened to
20-year-old Lisl Auman, who was unjustly found guilty of murder and sent to prison for the rest of her Life Without Parole.

In all my experience with courts & crimes & downright evil behavior by the Law & the Sometimes criminal cops who enforce it, this is the worst & most reprehensible miscarriage of “Justice” I’ve ever encountered—and that covers a lot of rotten things, including a few close calls of my own. Which might easily have gone the other way if not for the help of some hammerhead Lawyers who came to my aid when I was in desperate trouble.

I learned a lot about Karma in those moments, and one thing that sticks with me is a quote from Edmund Burke that says: “THE ONLY THING NECESSARY FOR THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL IS FOR GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING.”

That is what got me into the Lisl Auman case, and that is why I will stay in it until this brutal Wrong is Righted. That is also why the first contribution to the Lisl Auman Defense Fund came from Gerald Lef-court of New York, then the President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “This is not going to be easy,” he said with a wry smile. “But what the hell—count me in.”

Indeed. It is no small trick to get a “Convicted cop killer” out of prison—but it will be a little easier in this case, because Lisl no more killed a cop than I did. She was handcuffed in the backseat of a Denver Police car when the cop was murdered in cold blood by a vicious skinhead who then allegedly shot himself in the head & left the D.A. with nobody to punish for the murder—except Lisl.

February
5,
2001

I don’t think that people across the board necessarily identify with Lisl Auman as much as, God help them, they might identify with me. I’ve often frankly thought that Lisl’s case is possibly the worst case I’ve ever decided to get involved in. We’ve got a convicted cop killer—Help. It doesn’t matter who she is.

The few real facts in the case that were, and have been, and remain, evident—as opposed to the avalanche of hate-crime propaganda and “Off the Skinheads” hysteria that came with the conviction . . . along with the clear violations in the court record, and the police procedures at the time of the crime—are this: Somebody got killed. We know that. Two people came out of there dead. Beyond the vicious political circumstances surrounding Lisl’s case, we’ve got the vicious skinhead, Matthaeus Jaehnig, and the cop, Bruce VanderJagt, and Lisl, the supposed perpetrator. . . .

We may have to go outside the characteristics of the city of Denver for this. The points of the law that are going to be decided, once again, however vaguely, in this appeal hearing—and hopefully the retrial—are overwhelmingly odious and spurious. There was a carelessness in the way this case was handled that led us to a witchbag of strange problems within the law-enforcement system. We have the effective abuse of Lisl’s rights—but they were abused not by the cops necessarily, who were part of it; her rights were abused by all parties in the system. Lisl’s end of the case was taken very lightly: President Clinton was actively campaigning against cop-killing at the time; then his Hate Crimes bill passed in Congress, and the Denver police were understandably up in arms about the death of one of their own.

But we want to remember that two people came out of this thing dead, and there was no real explanation for it during the legal process, in Lisl’s first trial. That leaves critical questions: It’s not even known exactly
who
shot Officer VanderJagt and who shot Matthaeus, who was an over-the-line thug—I’m not convinced that he shot himself. Questions remain about Who Did What during this encounter, this weird encounter, which should not have happened, basically, because Matthaeus had a rap sheet as long as his arm; he should have been shot
yesterday. “I should have killed you a long time ago”—is it a case like that? If the cops had paid any attention to the dangers of the streets instead of weird chickenshit complaints, Lisl might not be in jail. The actions and behavior of the police in this berserk episode involving forty or fifty officers at one time were not examined—even the crime scene itself has never been developed. At least it has never been tested in any kind of court, because Lisl’s confession to a lesser crime is what avoided any examination of the case. This thing was guided through the system so that there
was
no examination. I’m not calling for an investigation—though I could, and I might. I am calling for a retrial.

The proper workings—and I say “proper” in the sense that it’s almost religiously vital to all of us—within the law-enforcement system, the judicial system, the court system, the system of right and wrong, who is responsible, that system has to function for all of us, because anybody could get involved in it at any time. A simple traffic ticket you don’t even know about if you run a red light and there’s a camera on you could get you into that system, and sometimes the system doesn’t work . . . and if it doesn’t, then everybody suffers—even Matthaeus and VanderJagt. Even me, or the publisher of
The Denver Post,
Dean Singleton—he and his family might suffer from the failure of the American judicial system to work as it should have, and as it was set up. With the way it’s working now—the way it’s dysfunctioning now—we’re in serious trouble.

Surrounded by a public and political atmosphere that supports the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the Lisl case suddenly stands up as a classic example of the one that fell through the cracks, or the one that was too awkward at the time to confront. A case of a college student who got mixed up with the wrong crowd, who was a good, orderly middle-class girl until—well, Lisl Auman was an anonymous person, and will remain so. Yet the question of her guilt or innocence is indelible. How could she be guilty of a crime that would put her in state prison for the rest of her life without parole, when she was locked up and handcuffed in the back of a police car at the time the murder was committed?

And that gets us into
attenuation.
This is clearly a crime that this woman didn’t commit, a crime that any one of you might be guilty of, every time you drive to a 7-Eleven, say, and the person next to you in the car—a friend perhaps, wife, lover, stranger—gets out of the car and
says, “Okay, I’ll run right in and get it. We’ve had a hard day and night with this goddamn legal stuff, I’m about to flip, we’re under terrible pressure, so I’ll go in and get us some more beer. I just wish they had a lot of gin in here, man, I feel like drinking gin.”

That’s what you’re dealing with: the kind of everyday attitude of a good friend, or a stranger, who gets out of your car and goes into a 7-Eleven store. It’s 11:30 at night, and you have a long night’s worrying ahead of you about some matter, maybe an addiction, who knows, but you’re not solving it, and your friend—say, Curtis—well, you can see he’s been agitated for a while about something, maybe everything, things are not going his way or necessarily yours, so he gets out of the car and you give him some money. Curtis says, “Oh, never mind, I have some,” but he takes your twenty anyway and gets out of the car, walking just like a normal person going into a 7-Eleven store on Christmas Eve, just part of the big American buying system. He goes inside and, let’s say, we add to Curtis’s life the fact that his sister, many years ago, married a Korean man, and that over the years Curtis has developed some
issues
—we may not want to revisit that story right now, so let’s just say that the marriage between the Korean gentleman and Curtis’s sister did not bear fruit, and in fact Curtis has hated Koreans ever since. (This guy who married his sister once belted him in the side of the head.)

So Curtis gets out of your car, and you’re relaxing, reading the paper; he’s being an old friend journalist who’s pissed off and has this tic about Koreans. He goes inside this 7-Eleven store, and there’s a Korean behind the counter. All Curtis wants is some beer, and he’s already pissed off that it’s only 3.2 beer anyway, it’s not real beer, and now he’s looking for the one thing he wants: He’s thinking that maybe there’s something in here that might have some alcohol, or, you know,
don’t they have any gin?
So he asks the Korean guy that: “Don’t you have any gin, Sport? Bubba?” And the guy says, “Gin? You want me to call the police? What do you mean? Of course I don’t have any gin. What do you want? Get out of here.”

Curtis—who just happens to have gotten his permit two weeks ago from the local sheriff to carry a concealed weapon—is packing a 10-millimeter Glock, a very powerful handgun; it’s a little hotter than the 9, it takes a bigger bullet and it packs a punch, but it’s the same-looking
gun; and he’s been getting comfortable with it for a while. He may have pulled it on some Arab who he thinks may have been looking at his car too long in an underground garage, and when he pulled it, the guy fled, so he has confidence in it. And the Korean man behind the counter is suddenly extremely rude to him, and his mind dissolves into his sister . . .

You’d once shared something with Curtis that your father had explained to you in a moment of curiosity: You had asked him, “What’s the difference between a Korean, a Japanese, and a Chinese person?” It was during the Korean War, and you wondered why the Koreans were fighting—you didn’t know who they were, or what the difference was. And your father said, “Son, let me put it this way: The Japanese are clean on the outside and dirty on the inside; and the Chinese are dirty on the outside but clean on the inside. But Son, I really hate to tell you this, the Koreans are dirty
on both sides.”
You’ve spoken to Curtis about this—it puts him into kind of a flare—so you can identify with what happens when Curtis goes in there and gets fucked with by a foul-mouthed, apparently speeded-up, wiggy Korean. . . . And then the guy refuses his credit card; he says it’s not magnetic. You know,
This doesn’t say shit; this doesn’t ring my bell.
So, he can’t get the beer.

You know how Curtis is, with that redheaded temper spiral he gets into, where suddenly he goes from first floor to seventh floor, when you’re still going to floor two and you forget, talking to him, that he’s already spiraled up to seven. . . . So Curtis forgets about the money you gave him. He figures,
Fuck This;
he doesn’t really even think. The guy has pushed him in areas he’s unfamiliar with—and with his temper he gets properly angry. Let’s say the guy threatens him: “What are you going to do about it, Fat Man?” (I had a cop do that to me once, in Mobile: “Go back and sit down, Old Man.” That was when I was forty years old.) And here’s Curtis: His mind is on this frog-eyed Korean who hit his sister, beat her repeatedly, destroyed her beautiful life that Curtis was once morbidly in love and involved with, and he has every flare that’s possible sitting right there in that hot box on a Saturday afternoon in the sun. And BANG! He goes—as we all do from time to time, we lose it—and it’s his muscle memory operating now, he’s done this enough, he’s slapped leather, and he jerks the Glock out of his belt and points it at the guy; and then he senses some menace from the
back of the store. Somebody else—an extremely large guy, the guy’s brother, his cousin—comes out of the back and the guy says, “Come here and help me get this bastard, this fat bastard.”

Curtis is suddenly aware of what appears to be two or three more attackers, maybe one, maybe a friend in the aisles, some movement behind him—he feels threatened by more than this one foulmouthed bastard—and due to his self-defense instincts, he sees himself surrounded. So Curtis shoots the guy in front of him, in order to teach the attackers a lesson, and sure enough, they swing away. Then the guy makes a lunge at him, so Curtis pops him two more times. Not quite the best judgment. Since the beer is on the counter in front of him, and he was trying to pay for it with a credit card, let’s say Curtis leaves his card and takes the beer—that’s the kind of thing that could happen, even in our professional journalism ranks.

You hear the shots, but you don’t really hear them; you’re listening to the radio. You aren’t watching in there, necessarily; let’s say a cop car had pulled into the far side of the parking lot where the light didn’t reach, and you’re aware of that. You think,
Hmm, a cop, where’s Curtis,
and you look up just in time to see him kind of scurrying back, not galloping or fleeing, but in a hurry back to the car with a six-pack in his hand. He hurriedly jumps in, and he tells you, “Get out of here, man.” And you say, “What happened, what’s wrong?” He says, “Never mind, just get out of here, get out of here.” You mention the cops at the other end of the 7-Eleven parking lot, and that really freaks him out. The next time you have a thought you’re three or four blocks away. And Curtis is trembling, and then you start to tremble too, because you have a right to, because the next thing he’s going to tell you is “I think I shot that guy; I shot that guy. Goddamn that bastard, they attacked me in there, I had to shoot.”