Wasted (34 page)

“Yes.” LeBlanc Reeder said she, too, was attracted to Hartwell.

“In a physical sense?” Scalisi queried.

“In a physical sense.”

“Were you having some sex with her?”

“We were having some intimate time, yes.” At Scalisi’s goading, Kim LeBlanc Reeder stated that in August of 1994 she and Regina Hartwell began having intimate time together, twice a week, which he called “some kind of sexual activity,” and she agreed.

Scalisi asked LeBlanc Reeder if she recalled being asked about her sex life with Regina Hartwell during the Texas trial—“when you testified under oath.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Would it refresh your recollection if I showed you your testimony?” He showed her page 117, line ten, of the Texas trial transcript, where she talked about touching Regina Hartwell’s private parts with a vibrator a week and a half before Hartwell was murdered.

LeBlanc Reeder read the lines and then stated in the California courtroom, “It says right here, ‘Did you have sex with her?’”

“What did you say?” Scalisi responded.

“I said that I did not. But I didn’t have sex with her,” LeBlanc Reeder protested. “But we did kiss. We did touch each other, but we didn’t have sex.”

“Earlier today, did you tell the jury twice a week you would sleep with her and have sex, some kind of sexual relations?”

“We would mess around. We would kiss. We would touch each other. We would do things, but I don’t remember exactly if we—I don’t remember what we did sexually. Obviously, it was intimate.”

Scalisi asked her what she was thinking when he’d used the word “sex.”

“Well, we were—we touched each other. We were—I mean, we’re two women.”

Indeed, Scalisi believed he was catching LeBlanc Reeder in frequent lies.

She turned and looked at the jury. “It’s very possible that a year after getting clean that I remembered something differently than I do thirteen years later at thirty-one. I mean, I really am trying to do the best I can to remember.”

Scalisi baited her about not phoning Hartwell and warning her that Thomas was going to kill her, despite believing that’s exactly what was about to happen. “So, to you, it didn’t matter if she lived or died?”

“It didn’t matter.”

He questioned her about her unsubstantiated alibi that she was alone in her apartment, sleeping, when Regina Hartwell was stabbed to death. Scalisi looked into LeBlanc Reeder’s eyes and plainly stated, “Did you kill Ms. Hartwell?”

“No.”

He asked her if she’d gone to Hartwell’s apartment between the time Regina was murdered and the time Kim went there to meet Anita Morales and Jeremy Barnes and helped file the missing person report. LeBlanc Reeder hesitated before answering, “I don’t think so.”

He quizzed her about her hesitation. “Let’s put it this way,” Scalisi said, “you can’t say for certain that you didn’t?”

“No, I can’t for certain.” She also stated that she didn’t know whether or not she’d been videotaped while being interviewed at the Austin Police Department.

Chuck Hughes had that videotape of the July 5, 1995, interview. Gregg Cox had provided it, as well as all of his work product, to Hughes. Cox, too, wanted Thomas to get the death penalty.

“Did you tell the police in that interview, that statement, that you wanted Regina Hartwell dead?”

“I don’t remember if I said that or not.”

“Do you think you said that?”

“I could have said that. Is it written down in there?” she inquired.

“Basically, yes,” Scalisi responded. He later asked her if she had fallen in love with Justin Thomas.

“I did.”

A smile crept across Thomas’s face.

“He took care of you and was protective of you?”

“He was protective.”

Thomas again sat up straighter.

Scalisi asked Kim LeBlanc Reeder if she’d ever been in jail for the murder of Regina Hartwell, other than being questioned by the police on July 5, 1995.

“I was sitting in that holding cell probably for five hours max,” she responded.

He looked at the jury to note their reaction. “Why did they drop the charge against you?”

“. . . Asking for the lawyer and not getting it was the loophole,” she stated.

Several of the jurors looked away from her. Some in the courtroom thought she was cold and calculating, but Pete Scalisi savored every admission Kim LeBlanc Reeder had made, from the fact that she and Regina Hartwell had been sexual partners to the fact that she would have been incriminating herself for murder if she’d testified in Texas without immunity. She’d even testified that she hadn’t known Regina Hartwell had been in love with her.

 

 

The following day, the jurors listened to investigator Martin Silva’s audiotaped 2000 interview with Justin Thomas, during which Silva outlined Kelly Smith’s story.

“And you tell me where he’s full of shit,” Silva said to Thomas. Smith was at Dorothy Brown’s house when Thomas and Noriega agreed to meet that night to trade marijuana for crystal meth. Smith and Brown then followed Thomas to the ranch. “And he doesn’t really know what happens up there, but there’s some gunshots that go off and then eventually . . . he goes up there after that. . . .”

Thomas audibly chuckled on the tape.

“Now he says he doesn’t see what happens to the guy. He doesn’t see a body, doesn’t see anything.... You tell him [to] take the car back to the house, and he’s going, ‘No, no, no,’ and you said ... you better take the car back to the house.” Terrified, Smith jumped into Noriega’s vehicle, drove one hundred yards, stopped, jumped out, and ran to a friend’s house. There he told the friend everything that had happened. Silva found the friend in Tennessee, and he confirmed Smith’s story.

Silva then recounted Dorothy Brown’s story for Thomas, including Thomas yelling, “Yoo-hoo,” as he rode in the truck bed with Noriega’s dead body, and looked into the duffel bag full of drugs.

Thomas laughed.

“Of course, she claims, you know, ‘I didn’t know anything was gonna happen.’ You know, ‘I didn’t have nothing to do with it....’ I mean, she just tries to minimize . . . as much as possible.” But she, too, had told a friend what happened, and that friend had corroborated her story. Still, Silva wanted to know Thomas’s side of the story.

“Two things I can tell you from jump,” Thomas answered. First, he and Noriega had never met at night. Second, they’d always met in public places. Plus, Dorothy Brown and her friends had planned on “jacking” Thomas for his drugs. “I know you don’t know about that.”

“Right, I don’t,” Silva said.

“You’re in front of these dudes, you know, who wanna fuck you over and take your shit, you know what I’m saying, and you kill and you don’t even know it.”

 

 

Court didn’t resume until six days later, on November 7, 2007, when Anita Morales, now an officer with the Travis County Sheriff’s Department, Jeremy Barnes, Terry Duval, the volunteer firefighter, and John Barton, from the Bastrop County Sheriff’s Department, all testified.

Again, court recessed for a week. But on November 13, 2007, Chuck Hughes was wrapping up his “Texas trial” by calling Austin witnesses Mark Gilchrest, Don Nelson, Gary Molina, Texas Ranger Rock Wardlow, and Travis County coroner Roberto Bayardo, M.D. All provided the same photographic evidence and testimony that they had in 1996, all about the murder of Regina Hartwell, nothing concerning the murder of Rafael Noriega.

Ninety-five percent of the State’s case, defense attorney Scalisi declared that day, was the Texas case, not the California case. The only evidence the State presented that connected Justin Thomas to the murder of Rafael Noriega was that of the dead Dorothy Brown. Kelly Smith never set foot in the courtroom. Scalisi was ticked. Per capita, Riverside prosecuted more death penalty cases and got more death penalty convictions than any other county in the state of California, often on cases with weak evidence. In other words, Riverside was the Houston, Texas, of California.

Still, under normal circumstances, Scalisi believed,
The People of the State of California
v.
Justin Heath Thomas
would not have been a death penalty case because it was the trial of one drug dealer killing another drug dealer. But because of Thomas’s conviction in Texas, because he didn’t get the death penalty for murdering Regina Hartwell, California intended on doing what Texas hadn’t done—kill Justin Thomas.

The day before the Thomas trial officially began, the
Riverside Press-Enterprise
ran a story announcing that the district attorney’s office would be giving 5 percent raises to the salaries of its attorneys who prosecuted death penalty cases. This “new approach” to “show appreciation and support” for its death penalty prosecutors was also intended “to keep those talented lawyers in the courtroom.” That, too, ticked off Scalisi—Hughes didn’t need to be handling this case. He’d been promoted already.

On November 14, 2007, after the People called Texan Michael Mihills, former classmate of Kim LeBlanc Reeder and a member of Justin Thomas’s posse that had met with him at Jim’s restaurant the night before Hartwell’s murder, the People rested. Jurors were dismissed until November 27, 2007. Thanksgiving was coming up.

On November 26, 2007, S. Alex Stalcup, M.D., an addiction medicine expert who had interviewed Justin Thomas in 2004, sent a letter to Pete Scalisi addressing Thomas’s lifelong problems with violence, the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome on Thomas’s brain development as a child, and Scalisi’s concerns over Thomas’s “disruptive” trial behavior. Thomas talked in court when he wasn’t supposed to, sometimes showed up in his jail clothes rather than street clothes, and snickered inappropriately.

Thomas’s difficulties were “the result of genetic loading for addiction and mental illness” due “in part” to “his mother’s daily drunkenness and her continuous use of cannabis (marijuana)” during her pregnancy with Justin, as well as her “continuing alcoholism and depression during his infancy, which severely damaged the essential maternal-infant bond with Justin,” Stalcup believed. That, combined with Justin’s own early drug addiction, “yielded a brain condition termed ‘hypofrontality, ’” which impaired Justin’s judgment abilities and impulse control.

Stalcup stated that the symptoms of hypofrontality were obvious in Thomas:
Fidgeting and lack of concentration, bizarre and inappropriate facial expressions, disregard for the effect of his appearance on observers, casual indifference and inappropriate behavior.

He wrote:
Having interviewed about 50 defendants in homicide cases, I recognize the damage done by early drug exposure.
For the last decade, Stalcup had served as medical director at the New Leaf Treatment Center in Lafayette, California. In 1998, he’d begun a research study on methamphetamine addicts. As part of that study, he’d done physical and neurological examinations on people who had been meth addicts for six to twenty-five years.
In all the interviews that I have conducted, Mr. Thomas started using drugs at the earliest age, by far, with a predictable tragic outcome for him.
Indeed, Stalcup referred to Justin Thomas as a “textbook case.”

The next day, Justin Thomas was back to wanting to represent himself, and the defense presented its case. Scalisi called one witness, Special Investigator Martin Silva.

 

 

“Now Kelly seems to think that he saw maybe two people firing at each other,” Silva said to Thomas back in 2000. “Now, you know, if that’s the case, you know, this guy tried to shoot you first or whatever, I mean, that’s important.... Whether you went up there and just ambushed the guy or whether you went up there and, you know, he—he tried to shoot you. . . .”

Thomas’s attorneys had urged their client to plead self-defense.

“Like why did it happen?” Silva asked. “Did you get attacked?” Time and again, Silva offered Thomas a self-defense out. “Maybe this guy was after you, or, I mean, if there’s a reason for this to happen . . .”

Time and again, Thomas had refused self-defense.

“You meet with him all the time, and then
boom
! All of a sudden you kill him? I mean, you know, that doesn’t sound right. Something had to, you know, something had to trigger something.... Whose fault was it, you know?”

Silva was on the stand for less than an hour, after which the defense rested.

At 3:56
P.M.
, the jury retired to commence deliberations. Four minutes later, they recessed for the day. For three days, the jury mulled the evidence, before adjourning for the weekend. They returned on December 3. And on December 4, 2007, while the jury still wondered what they were going to do about Justin Thomas, the Office of the District Attorney, County of Riverside, issued a press release announcing the promotion of Chief Deputy District Attorney Chuck Hughes to Assistant District Attorney. It was his third promotion in three years.