the Onion Field (1973) (59 page)

Prosecutor Raymond Byrne was a tall man with a long face and a crooked nose that bent to the left. He was forever pushing his drooping glasses up. He began staying during recesses or returning early to talk with Gregory Powell who seemed to enjoy the conversation and the cigarettes and sunflower seeds the prosecutor gave him.

On August 2, 1969, Byrne learned that it was Gregory Powell's thirty-sixth birthday. When Byrne came back from lunch that day he carried with him a cupcake.

"Happy birthday," said Byrne, giving it to the defendant.

From then on, the defendant talked freely to the prosecutor about life on Death Row, the thousands of things they planned, how they made home brew and whiskey. And his recent conclusion that homosexuality was at the root of his behavioral problems. And of his ambivalence toward his father and particularly toward his mother, who ruled the family in his absence.

One day Byrne asked the defendant, "How do you really feel about those kids, Greg?"

"What kids?" asked Greg.

"Campbell's kids," said Byrne. "And about Campbell?"

"To tell you the honest truth, Mr. Byrne, I feel nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing about them. Any of them. But I will send them money if I ever make any. Because I said I would."

There it was, Byrne thought. The sociopathic personality. Greg looked at the tall prosecutor apologetically. "It was as though he wished he could say he felt something about the murder," Byrne explained. "Wishing he could feel something, because he knew other people did. It was the first time I ever truly understood sociopa- thy. It just wasn't there. He just had no remorse in his makeup."

Deputy District Attorney Sheldon Brown was chosen to help prosecute Gregory Powell in the new penalty trial. He was dark and slim and walked as though his feet were always sore.

Brown found Greg ingratiating. "Good morning, Mr. Brown. Did you have a nice evening?"

Public Defender Charlie Maple, always resourceful and thorough, admitted to a completeness compulsion. When he had first learned that Karl Hettinger had been pensioned off the police force, he subpoenaed the personnel and pension files of the former officer. He had been astonished to learn that the former policeman had resigned under fire on a shoplifting charge.

The public defender read all of the psychiatric reports. He was by his own admission more "personally involved" in this case than any he had ever tried. He called Dr. George N. Thompson, whose report was so unlike the others. The report that said Karl Hettinger mentioned having been involved in a "gun battle" with two robbery suspects before he started shoplifting.

"You made a diagnosis," said the judge to Dr. Thompson, "that there is some type of a character disorder involved in this case, which some people might call kleptomania? And you have some mixed feelings as to whether it amounts to kleptomania or not. Is that right?"

"Well, I wouldn't refer to it as mixed feelings, but that I was attempting to, for the Pension Board, clarify the diagnosis to some extent. And so I discussed it further. That was an afterthought apparently, that one might consider a diagnosis of kleptomania. However, I thought it was probably not true kleptomania."

"Do you have any recollection," asked Prosecutor Sheldon Brown, "in reading those files, of anything being inconsistent in the file with relation to what Mr. Hettinger told you in the interview?"

"No."

"If the court please, I have here a department pension report, city of Los Angeles, and I ask it be marked for identification. Does that report appear to be one that you examined during your preparation of the report on Mr. Hettinger?"

"Well, I can't recall," said the doctor, "if this was in the file or not. If it was, I can only say that I know this doctor was one of the examiners before the board."

"If it was in the file then I take it that you would have reviewed it?"

"Yes."

"Now you will notice in the clinical history of this report that it's apparently over a year prior to your seeing Mr. Hettinger. It sets forth a statement of facts as to how Mr. Hettinger's partner actually met his death."

"Yes."

"Was there a statement in this other report that he and his partner were kidnapped and taken in the vicinity of Bakersfield where his partner was killed and he managed to escape?"

"Yes."

Charles Maple was anxious the day he examined Karl Hettinger on the inconsistency he had found in the Thompson report.

"In discussing the shooting out there in Kern County when Officer Campbell was killed, did you ever tell anyone that you were involved in a gun battle with two robbery suspects? That you and your partner were fighting the two suspects when one of the suspects shot your partner and your partner died?"

"I don't recall saying those words," said the witness. "Words were said to a medical secretary as to why I was there. She stated words to the effect, 'Was it a gun battle or a robbery?' or something to that effect. I didn't wish to go into it with her, knowing I would be seeing a doctor shortly."

"What doctor is that you are speaking of?" asked Maple.

"I don't recall his name."

"Do you recall what time of year it was?" "No."

"And did you relate to the doctor your version of what happened up there in Kern County?"

"I don't recall."

Out of the presence of the jury Maple argued to the court: "It turns out that he has a prior history of theft that's concealed from the police department. Never disclosed when he became a policeman! These kinds of matters it seems to me do have a bearing."

Deputy District Attorney Brown told his superiors:

"Maple believes Hettinger made an ego-enhancing statement to Dr. Thompson about a gun battle to impress Thompson, so it wouldn't jeopardize his pension chances. Even though Thompson had prior reports on Hettinger and knew all the facts. It's absolutely absurd, but the judge let him call Thompson as a witness."

"Now, sir," Maple said to the doctor, "in the course of that particular interview, did Mr. Hettinger in substance and effect state to you that on March 10th, 1963, he began to develop an emotional problem and did he state that he was in a gun battle with two robbery suspects, and that he and his partner were fighting with the suspects when one of the suspects shot his partner and his partner died?"

"Yes, so far as I know, he said something to that effect," said Dr. Thompson. "Perhaps not in those exact words."

"Would you state in substance those were Mr. Hettinger's words, in substance rather than exact words?"

"Yes. In substance. There may have been some alterations by the typist, but in general I would say that is what he said."

"All right," said Sheldon Brown impatiently, when it was his turn. "When a girl is in with you typing an interview as it goes along, a good deal of discretion is left to her, clarifying what is told to her, is that correct?"

"Yes."

"A typist just types in substance, in effect paraphrasing what has been said. Is that correct?"

"That's correct."

"Is there any doubt in your mind," asked Maple on redirect examination, "that Mr. Hettinger, in answering the questions in your interview stated what we have referred to as the version recorded in your notes?"

"Not in a general way," said the doctor, "but I do think some of the wording may be an interpretation of the typist."

"If you felt the typist didn't accurately reflect what was being said, you would have asked her to correct it, is that not true?" asked Maple, now seeming impatient with the equivocation of his own witness.

"I think not in this instance. I was really not concerned with the details of the shooting at all. Only the fact of it, you see?"

"Dr. Thompson was one of the best known psychiatric witnesses in the county," Sheldon Brown said later. "We've faced him dozens of times. It was obvious he was going to hurt Maple's cause more than help it. Using Thompson like he did engendered great sympathy for Hettinger. Yet Maple seized on anything that might save Gregory Powell's life.

"It was strange," Brown went on. "Maple's an ethical attorney, but he so completely identified with Gregory Powell that he was ignoring physical facts. The Dr. Thompson affair was a case in point. The whole ludicrous gun battle thing. It was obvious the doctor didn't know what the hell had been said on this issue and cared less. Maple said Thompson 'dragged' the story of that ordinary childhood pilfering out of Hettinger, and Maple implied that Hettinger was some kind of lifelong thief.

"Christ, Hettinger had confessed to every one of the shrinks about this pitiable kid stuff. And in much greater detail. Maple just seemed to've rejected the other psychiatric reports as though to him they didn't exist. Thompson's report, he felt sure, proved Hettinger to be a lifelong thief and liar. I don't think even Gregory Powell bought his thesis. Nobody on the jury did, I'm sure.

"Maple had been on the case too long. He was giving money to Powell, getting him clothes, acting as liaison, confessor, psychiatrist to Powell and his whole family. He was even trying unsuccessfully to get Powell and his girlfriend married, that poor black woman Powell had conned into helping him escape and who got herself in trouble for it. He just set logic aside as far as his client was concerned. The devastating Lindbergh statement, all of it. He said Hettinger and Smith were both lying about that. He believed in Gregory Powell implicitly. I don't think any defendant ever got a more faithful defense."

Charles Maple had very pale blue eyes and almost no eyebrows. The church elder had a black dot on the iris of his right eye and a powerful voice which was as much at home before a congregation as a jury. He gestured with his hands when he talked, and when he frowned, his hairless brows made the pale blue eyes penetrate. Maple had the oratorical style of an evangelist, but the Harvard lawyer did not damn, he defended. He offered forgiveness and could extend his compassion to all men, all but the one whose testimony had to be a lie.

The defender was positive beyond any doubt that Gregory Powell was innocent of a calculated murder, that he stood to die in the gas chamber because of one man. Charles Maple had no charitable thoughts for that man, and his voice trembled prophetically when out of the jury's presence he discussed the star witness.

"It's ironic," Maple said, "that Hettinger, like Powell, has been a sociopath all his life. He's been a thief since an early age. He reverted under stress to his preadolescent behavior. And he'll lie and manipulate to make himself look better, just like any guiltless sociopath. He said there was a girl secretary in Dr. Thompson's office and that she took the gun battle story from him. It's a boldfaced lie. Why did he lie? I don't know why he lied. I only know that he did.

"Why did he steal? Because he might as well make it while he could. He'd been Chief Parker's chauffeur. His career was ruined because of innuendo. He stole because he felt it was owed him. He feels no guilt, not for stealing, not for being inadequate as a policeman during his confrontation with Powell and Smith. He's a true sociopath. The kleptomania thing was all an act. He doesn't know the meaning of guilt!"

Gregory Powell had a much more fatalistic view of the witness:

"In 1963 he was a shadow figure to me. Not quite real in many senses. In later years it was very odd, this man was about the most important figure in my life, and I knew hardly anything about him."

Joshua Hill was one of the six men brought down from San Quentin Death Row by Gregory Powell to testify for him as a character witness. Hill was a young man who had shown a startling vocabulary when he was a baby, and despite his limited education, he had an adult I. Q. of 140. But Joshua Hill had not been toilet- trained until he was seven years old. He was known on the row as "Batman" because of a homemade cape he wore. When the Batman mood would strike, he often challenged one or several guards and had to be tear-gassed and subdued. It was said by Hill's mother that the Batman's father had beaten him up countless times during the boy's formative years to make him tough. If true, the father had done his job well. Joshua Hill was very tough.

On two occasions Hill seriously assaulted other condemned men, fracturing the skull of the row's only Eskimo resident, and slashing the throat of another, though neither attack was fatal. Hill was darkly handsome, liked to pass for an Italian mafioso, and called himself Vito Giuseppe Cellini during his days on the street.

It was a terrible disappointment to some of the other inmates in the county jail high power tank when jailers found a handcuff key in Joshua Hill's mouth. His Green Beret training and natural fierceness had induced some of them to bet that even without a gun he could escape a courtroom if unmanacled. Perhaps the gamblers were even more disappointed than Gregory Powell and Joshua Hill.

In the spring, jail deputies had found Gregory Powell in possession of an Allen wrench which was used to try to remove steel screens from jail windows. Now, in the summer of 1969, after all escape plans had been thwarted one by one, it was a short-tempered Gregory Powell who was as usual being led from the courtroom to the jail elevator at day's end.

He saw an old man, one of the railbirds who spend their days as spectators in criminal cases, prowling the corridors and courtrooms of the Hall of Justice, Hall of Records, and County Court House.