The Innocent Man (23 page)

Greg Saunders had instructed Dennis to ignore the jury, but he found it impossible to do so. Those twelve people held his fate, maybe his life in their hands, and he couldn’t help but glance over occasionally. Cecil Smith sat in the front row, and whenever Dennis looked at the jury, Smith was always glaring back.

What is his problem? Dennis thought. He soon found out.

During a recess, Greg Saunders was entering the courthouse when an old lawyer, one of Ada’s veterans, asked him, “Who’s the smart sonofabitch that left Cecil Smith on the jury?”

Greg said, “Well, I guess that would be me. Who’s Cecil Smith?”

“Used to be the chief of police here in Ada, that’s all.”

Saunders was stunned. He marched into Judge Jones’s office and demanded a mistrial on the grounds that the juror had not been forthcoming during the selection process and that the juror was obviously biased toward the police and prosecution.

The motion was overruled.

Dr. Fred Jordan testified about his autopsy, and the jury heard the gruesome details. Photos of the body were introduced and passed through the jury box, provoking the shock and outrage inherent in any murder trial. Several of the jurors glared in disgust at Fritz.

With the solid, unimpeachable testimony of Dr. Jordan still hanging in the air, the prosecution decided to slip in a few of its off-the-wall witnesses. A man named Gary Allen was sworn in and took the stand. Allen’s involvement was quite tenuous. He told the jury that he lived near Dennis Fritz, and that one night in early December 1982, at about 3:30 a.m., he heard two men outside his apartment making noise. He wasn’t sure of the exact date, but for some reason was certain that it was before December 10. The two men, neither of whom he saw clearly enough to identify, were in the yard laughing, cursing, and squirting each other with a garden hose. The temperature was cold, and the men had their shirts off. He had known Dennis Fritz for some time and thought he recognized his voice. But he wasn’t sure. He listened to the noise for about ten minutes, then went back to bed.

When Allen was excused as a witness, there were a few puzzled looks in the courtroom. What, exactly, was the purpose of his testimony? Things would get even more confusing with the next witness, Tony Vick.

Vick lived in the small apartment under Gary Allen, and he knew Dennis Fritz. He also knew Ron Williamson. He testified that he’d seen Ron on the porch at Dennis’s place, and that he knew for a fact that the
two had taken a trip together to Texas in the summer of 1982.

What more could the jury ask for?

The damning evidence continued to pile up with Donna Walker, a convenience store clerk who identified Dennis in court and said that she had once known him pretty well. Way back in 1982 Dennis was a frequent customer at her store, a regular coffee drinker who liked to chat her up early in the mornings. Ron was a customer, too, and she knew for a fact that he and Dennis were pals. Then, suddenly, after the murder, the two stopped drinking coffee at her store. They vanished, as far as she was concerned. Then, after staying away for a few weeks, they reappeared as if nothing had happened. But they had changed! How?

“Their character, their dress. They always dressed nice and were clean-shaven before, and they just went completely down, filthy clothing, unshaven, hair was a mess; their character had changed. They seemed kind of nervous and paranoid, I guess.”

When pressed by Greg Saunders, Walker couldn’t explain why she waited five years before sharing this crucial evidence with the police. She did admit that the cops approached her the previous August, after Dennis and Ron were arrested.

The parade continued with Letha Caldwell, a divorcée who had attended junior high school with Ron at Byng. She told the jury that Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson were frequent visitors to her home late at night, at irregular hours, and that they were always drinking. At some point, she became frightened of them and asked them to stay away. When they refused, she
bought a gun and showed it to them, at which time they decided she was serious.

Her testimony had nothing to do with the murder of Debbie Carter, and in many courtrooms would have been objected to as totally irrelevant to the issues.

The objection finally came when OSBI agent Rusty Featherstone testified. Peterson, in a clumsy attempt to prove that Ron and Dennis were carousing in Norman four months before the murder, put Featherstone on the stand. Featherstone had given Dennis two polygraph exams in 1983, but, for many excellent reasons, the results were inadmissible. During the interviews, Dennis had recounted a night in Norman that involved bars and drinking. When Peterson attempted to elicit this story from Featherstone, Greg Saunders objected loudly. Judge Jones sustained it on the grounds of being irrelevant.

During the skirmish, Peterson, at a bench conference, said, “He (Featherstone) places both Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz as associating with each other in August of 1982.”

“Tell me the relevance of that statement,” Judge Jones demanded.

Peterson could not, and Featherstone quickly left the courtroom. It was another appearance by another witness who knew nothing about the murder of Debbie Carter.

The next witness was just as unproductive, though his testimony was somewhat interesting. William Martin was the principal of the junior high in Noble where Dennis taught in 1982. He testified that on the morning of December 8, a Wednesday, Dennis called in sick and a substitute teacher taught his classes. According to the
attendance records Martin brought to court, Dennis missed a total of seven days during the nine-month school year.

After twelve witnesses, the state had not laid a glove on Dennis Fritz. The prosecution had proven beyond any doubt whatsoever that he drank alcohol, ran with unsavory people (Ron Williamson), shared an apartment with his mother and daughter in the same neighborhood as Debbie Carter’s apartment, and missed school the day after the murder.

Peterson’s style was methodical. He believed it was necessary to slowly build a case, block by block, witness by witness, nothing fancy or slick. Gradually pile on the evidence and remove all doubt from the minds of the jurors. But Fritz was quite a challenge because there was no hard evidence.

Snitches were needed.

The first one to testify was James Harjo, brought in, like Gore, from prison. Dull and dim-witted, Harjo had not only burglarized the same house twice but used the identical means of entry—same bedroom, same window. When he was caught, he was interrogated by the police. Using a pen and sheet of paper, articles foreign to Harjo, the cops had walked the boy through his story with diagrams and solved the crime. Evidently, this had impressed Harjo greatly. When he was in jail with Dennis, he, at the urging of the police, decided to crack the Carter murder by doodling on a sheet of paper.

He explained this shrewd strategy to the jury. In the crowded bullpen of the jail, he had quizzed Dennis about the murder. At some point, when his Xs and Os
reached their climax, he said to Dennis, “Well, it looks like you’re guilty.”

Dennis, overcome by the weight of Harjo’s deft logic, withered under the burden and tearfully said, “We didn’t mean to hurt her.”

When Harjo first spun this yarn during the preliminary hearing, Dennis erupted and yelled, “You are lying! You are lying!” But with a jury watching closely, he had to suffer through it again without showing any emotion. While it was difficult, he was encouraged to see several of the jurors suppressing a chuckle at Harjo’s silly story.

On cross-examination, Greg Saunders established that Dennis and Harjo were housed in one of the jail’s two bullpens—small, open areas accessible to four cells with two bunks each. Each bullpen was designed for eight men but was often more crowded than that. Even in the bullpen the men were practically breathing on each other. Surprisingly, in the Pontotoc County jail, no one else heard Dennis’s dramatic confession.

Harjo testified that he enjoyed telling lies to Ron about Dennis, and vice versa. Greg Saunders asked him, “Why were you lying on Dennis and Ron Williamson? Why were you going back and forth and telling them lies about each other?”

“Just to watch and see what they say. They’ll cut each other’s throats if you watch them.”

“And you were lying to Ron about Dennis, or lying to Dennis about Ron; is that right, kind of to get them at each other’s throats?”

“Yeah, just see what—see what they’d say.”

Harjo later admitted he did not understand the meaning of the word “perjury.”

The next informant was Mike Tenney, the jailer-trainee who’d been used by the police to gather some dirt on Dennis. With little experience or training in law enforcement, Tenney began his career at the jail, and his first assignment had been Dennis Fritz. Eager to impress those who might hire him permanently, he spent a lot of time outside Dennis’s cell, chatting about everything but especially about the Carter murder. He had plenty of advice. In his learned opinion, Dennis’s situation looked grave, so the best thing to do would be to cut a deal, negotiate a plea bargain, save his own skin, and testify against Ron Williamson. Peterson would be fair.

Dennis had played along, careful to say nothing because anything might be repeated in court.

Being a rookie, Tenney had not testified much and had not fully rehearsed his lines. He began by trying to recall a story about Dennis and Ron hopping bars in Oklahoma City, a story not even remotely connected to the Carter murder. Saunders objected. Judge Jones sustained.

Then Tenney stepped into hot water when he testified that he and Dennis discussed the issue of a plea bargain. Twice he mentioned a plea bargain, a highly prejudicial issue because it strongly implied that Dennis had contemplated pleading guilty.

Greg Saunders objected loudly and moved for a mistrial. Judge Jones overruled.

Tenney finally managed to testify without the lawyers jumping to their feet. He explained to the jury that he had spoken often with Dennis, and after every conversation he had hustled back to the front desk at
the jail and written down everything that was said. According to his handler, Gary Rogers, this was the way things were done. Good police work. And during one of their little chats Dennis allegedly said, “Let’s say it might have happened this way. Maybe Ron went to the door and broke into Carter’s apartment. And then, let’s say, he went ahead and got a little. Ron got a little bit carried away and was going to teach her a lesson. She died. Let’s say it happened this way. But I didn’t see Ron kill her, so how can I tell the D.A. something I really didn’t see.”

After Tenney, the trial was recessed for the day, and Dennis was taken back to the jail. He carefully removed his new suit and put it on a hanger. A guard took it up front. He stretched out on his bunk, closed his eyes, and wondered how the nightmare would end. He knew the witnesses were lying, but did the jury?

The next morning Bill Peterson called to the stand Cindy McIntosh, who admitted being in jail on bad-check charges when she met both Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson. She testified that she overheard the two talking, with Ron asking Dennis about the crime scene photos of Debbie Carter.

“Was she on the bed or on the floor?” Ron asked Dennis.

On the floor, Dennis said.

McIntosh admitted that she was not convicted on the check charges. “I paid off the checks, and they let me out,” she said.

With the snitches out of the way, Peterson returned to more credible proof. Slightly more credible. He called to the stand four consecutive witnesses who worked for
the state crime lab. Their impact on the jury was profound, as it always is. They were educated, trained, certified, experienced, and they worked for the state of Oklahoma. They were experts! And they were there to testify against the defendant, to help prove his guilt.

The first was the fingerprint expert, Jerry Peters. He explained to the jury that he examined twenty-one prints lifted from Debbie’s apartment and car, nineteen of which were Debbie’s. One matched Detective Dennis Smith, one matched Mike Carpenter, and not a single fingerprint belonged to either Dennis Fritz or Ron Williamson.

Odd that the fingerprint expert would testify that none of the fingerprints were left behind by the accused.

Larry Mullins described how he reprinted Debbie’s palms the previous May when her body was exhumed. He gave the new prints to Jerry Peters, who suddenly saw things he hadn’t seen four and a half years earlier.

The prosecution’s theory, the same one to be used against Ron Williamson, was that during the prolonged and violent assault Debbie was wounded, her blood somehow ended up on her left palm, and this palm touched a tiny portion of Sheetrock just above the floor of her bedroom. Since the palm print did not belong to Ron or Dennis, and it certainly could not belong to the real killer, it had to be Debbie’s.

Mary Long was a criminalist who worked primarily with body fluids. She explained to the jury that about 20 percent of all people do not show their blood type in body fluids such as saliva, semen, and sweat. This segment is known in the trade as “non-secretors.” Based on
her examination of the blood and saliva samples from Ron and Dennis, she was certain that they were non-secretors.

The person who left the semen at the crime scene was probably a non-secretor too, though Long was not certain because the evidence was insufficient.

Thus, 80 percent of the population was eliminated from suspicion. Or “around” 80 percent, give or take a few points. Nonetheless, Fritz and Williamson now bore the ominous tag of “non-secretors.”

Long’s math was blown away on cross-examination when Greg Saunders forced her to admit that most of the blood and saliva samples she analyzed in the Carter case came from non-secretors. Of the twenty samples she examined, twelve were from non-secretors, including Fritz and Williamson.

Sixty percent of those in her pool of suspects were non-secretors, as opposed to the national average of only 20 percent.

It didn’t matter. Her testimony excluded many and helped raise the suspicion hanging over the head of Dennis Fritz.