Wasted (35 page)

Two days later, on December 6, 2007, in the jury’s seventh day of deliberation, at 3:33
P.M.
, they returned a verdict. Justin Thomas was found guilty on all counts. He made faces, snickered, and even downright laughed.

 

 

On December 10, 2007, dressed in his orange jail clothes and surrounded by five deputies, Thomas was disruptive in the courtroom again. He talked throughout the proceedings. He made a speech to the judge announcing one more time that he wanted to serve as his own attorney. The judge questioned Thomas’s understanding. Thomas assured Judge Boren that he did understand what he was doing—he was going to get a lot more financial resources for his defense.

Thomas spent the next day listening to Riverside County sheriff’s deputies Thomas Montez and Dirk Webb tell the jurors how Thomas had been found with shanks, and then to the testimony of Dawn Thomas Bothof, his ex-wife.

When she’d walked into the courtroom, her long, brown hair flowing over her shoulders and gleaming, even in the green glare of the courtroom lighting, Justin Thomas fell in love all over again. Just as he had with Kim LeBlanc Reeder. And just like Kim had, Dawn appeared to have turned her life around. She was working as a real estate agent with a nationally known firm.

Dawn Bothof looked over at Justin Thomas. She hadn’t seen him since 1994. Their divorce hadn’t been finalized until 1998, two years after he’d been convicted for the murder of Regina Hartwell. But when she testified that he’d been captain of his high school football team, he thought he saw pride on her face, as if she still loved him.

“How do you feel about Mr. Thomas today?”

“Just disgusted,” Bothof answered. “I mean, there’s being scared, disgusted, angry, embarrassed.” Also just like LeBlanc Reeder, she didn’t want to be in that courtroom.

“You’re afraid that he’ll somehow hurt you?”

“Yes.” She recalled an argument that had ended with Thomas firing a shotgun, the blast exploding past their son and her and into a wall. She recounted a night when Thomas left the house in a drunken rage, threatening to kill a bouncer, only to return many hours later, threw Dawn on the bed, climbed on top of her, wrapped one hand around her neck, and choked her. “I was blacking out.” She thought she was going to die.

Her sister ran into the room and yelled, “Stop! What are you doing?”

“And then he just, kind of, like, stopped. It was like he—like he just changed, like a different person.” Bothof and her sister ran out the door and raced to a friend’s house. When they eventually returned home, they found six-four Justin Thomas on the toilet, his head down, the gun propped against it, a slimy substance running from his noggin to his lap. “I thought he was dead.” He was only feeling guilty.

They took the gun from him, loaded him in the back of his truck, and drove him to his uncle’s ranch. But Thomas jumped out of the truck, crying that people were after him, watching him. “They’re out here.” He pounded on the window and then was gone. “He probably stayed the night in the dirt in the hills somewhere. . . .”

There were “many times” that Thomas said he knew how to kill people and where to dump their bodies. “He even showed me where he would dump bodies.” She described the hills behind the ranch. “And he said nobody would find any bodies there. There’s tons of bodies out there.”

“Did he actually say he dumped a body out there, or he was talking theoretically?”

“He would say that and take it back. He did it. I did it. ‘Oh, I’m just trying to scare you.’ Stuff like that.”

“Was there a time after he came back from Texas where he said to you that ‘I’ve done it before. I can do it to you’?”

“Yes.”

“Referring to killing?”

“Uh-huh.”

She recalled the Valentine’s Day fight in Hawaii, the result, she said, of telling Thomas that she was leaving him. “He got hysterical. Got a knife.” For the next three days, she said, he held their son and her hostage, while on their couch, threatening to kill her with the knife if she took away their son.

“He didn’t leave the couch for three days?” Hughes asked.

“Well, he went to the bathroom.”

“Why didn’t you leave while he was in the bathroom?”

“It was right by the door.”

“Did you see him sleep at all?”

“No. He was accustomed to not sleeping.” But she sneaked a call to 911. And as Thomas raised the knife to stab her, and Dawn cried, “Let me go, let me go,” the police stared through the glass of the front door. Thomas suddenly stabbed at the cast on his leg, trying to get it off. A cop drew his weapon and yelled, “Stop. Stop. Right now.” He tapped on the window. Thomas stopped.

Dawn had been pregnant at the time. “That’s why I left.... While I was staying with him, he kicked me in the stomach and threw me down to the ground and stuff like that.”

On cross-examination by Darryl Exum, Bothof admitted she’d started some of the fights with Thomas, though never the physical aspects. However, she had slapped her current husband, the police had been called, and she’d been arrested for assault.

As she walked out of the courtroom, Justin Thomas turned to her and said, “You know, Dawn, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He then tried to ask her about their son. But that didn’t go well, and he immediately fell out of love. In fact, he became so upset that he started talking to himself—though Justin Thomas talking to himself wasn’t unusual.

Despite his client being inconsolably distraught, Darryl Exum had to board a jet for an emergency trip to the East Coast. Exum’s mother had fallen seriously ill. As his jet lifted off the ground, Exum thought the defense case was going to proceed without him. Instead, it was postponed until he could return. Chuck Hughes feared that Thomas might later charge ineffective assistance if Exum wasn’t there. Pete Scalisi agreed.

But the fact that court hadn’t proceeded as Exum had expected, along with the fact that Thomas was demanding that he testify first in his defense, had destroyed Exum’s tactical plan. So when court reconvened on Monday morning, December 17, 2007, Exum begged for a one-day postponement to prepare for direct examination.

He argued that he had to “make sure” his “client’s rights are protected.” Additionally, if Thomas chose to testify about certain things that his attorneys opposed, which Exum expected him to, he and Scalisi needed to make sure they weren’t involved in such: “I’m trying to save my client’s life. . . .”

But Thomas wanted to proceed. Chuck Hughes wanted to proceed.

Judge Boren gave Exum thirty minutes to talk with Thomas and prepare.

 

 

When the jury slipped into their chairs, Justin Thomas already sat in the witness-box. Exum quickly directed the testimony to Thomas’s childhood, revealing that Jim Thomas had given his son drugs before Justin was seven years old, due to that Justin was snorting methamphetamines and cocaine by the age of nine or ten, and by age fourteen, he was injecting speed with his father’s help.

Suddenly Exum stopped to emphasize to Thomas that this was a death penalty case, while stressing to the jury that Thomas was testifying against the recommendation of both of his attorneys. He asked Thomas to tell the jurors why he was testifying.

“We didn’t talk about that, Darryl.”

“I understand I didn’t ask you, but could you tell the jury?”

“When it comes time to read them this”—Thomas gestured toward a piece of paper—“yeah, I’ll tell them.”

“Justin, you’re not answering my questions. Is that correct?”

“No, I’m not answering that.”

With the judge’s permission, Exum led his client. “Justin, it’s correct you told Mr. Scalisi and myself that you want this jury to give you a death verdict. Is that a correct statement, or is that incorrect?”

“It’s worded incorrect.”

“You want the jury to come back with a finding of death. You don’t necessarily want to get death, but you want the jury to come back with a finding of death?”

“That’s correct.”

“Now, you understand—and you don’t want me to, but you understand I’m not going to do that, ask the jury to give you death, correct?”

“I understand.”

“And that’s against what you want?”

“Yeah, that’s very against what I need.”

Exum pointed out that Thomas didn’t want to answer any questions about his drug use because his client didn’t “want this jury to know the truth about those things.”

“You make it sound like I’m trying to hide or manipulate their mind. I’m not. I’m not trying to do that,” Thomas testified.

“No, but ... you have said to me and Mr. Scalisi that you don’t want this jury to have that kind of information because that might be the kind of information that might make them think you should get life without parole.”

“Yeah.”

And with that, Exum returned to Thomas’s drug use, with Thomas begrudgingly admitting that by the time he was thirteen years old, he was using LSD “weekly at times.” Exum then asked Thomas for details of when he first injected drugs.

“You keep asking me things that I know we didn’t talk about, Darryl.”

“I understand,” the attorney responded. “But I still want you to answer these questions for the jury. Will you do that?”

“No.”

However, Thomas eventually admitted that he shot drugs before he was sixteen years old.

“Where did you get the needle?”

Thomas laughed. “I don’t remember.” Thomas reluctantly provided the details of how he injected meth at age fourteen. “I was scared, so I needed my dad’s help. . . . [Pops] instructed me on how to do it right, and not to use no one else’s needle, don’t share needles, how to clean it.”

“Anything else? Did he hold your arm?”

“How to tie off. How to pop the vein. How to hit the vein.”

Exum insinuated that there were times when Jim Thomas wanted his son to do drugs.

“I guess it would be fair to say,” Justin Thomas agreed.

Exum displayed childhood photos to the jury: Justin with his father, Justin as a baby holding a ball, Justin at eight years old—an age when he was doing drugs. He noted that Thomas had made good grades in school, as long as he paid attention, which wasn’t something Justin was very good at.

“Let’s talk about a typical time when you got drinks.”

“The adults aren’t paying attention, and me, being the demon seed that I was, tried to talk my cousins into getting a couple of snorts of whatever they had to feel so good.”

“Why did you say you were a ‘demon seed’?”

Thomas laughed once again.

“Aren’t you just saying that because you want the jury to think that?”

“No,” he said. “I mean, it’s pretty true.”

“Right. But you want the jury to think that, don’t you?”

Thomas was silent. “Aren’t all young boys at that age referred to as ‘demon seeds’?”

“My question is this, Justin, you want the jury to think that you were a demon seed, right? You want the jury to think you’ve been bad your whole life, right?”

“What I want is for them not to do me any favors.”

“And not doing you any favors means you want a death finding from them?”

“Yes.”

“And you know to get a death verdict from them they’ve got to think you’re bad?”

“Yes.”

Court clerk Heather Chavez had thought Thomas was bad. That’s why one day in court when the lights had gone out due to a blackout, she’d run, in panic, in fear of Justin Thomas. When she’d returned to the courtroom, Thomas had looked at her and said, “You scared of the dark?”

“Fuck you,” she’d responded.

But in the weeks of the trial, they’d chatted. She’d gotten to know him. She no longer feared him. In fact, she admired the way he read and constantly studied. Every day he studied. Every day he meditated. Every day he did calisthenics.

“I don’t want to manipulate them into anything,” Thomas responded. “If they think that, they need to come to that their own conclusion.”

“Is it the reason you’re testifying so that they will give you that verdict, but you don’t want them to feel bad about doing it? Is that fair?”

“That’s fair.”

“That’s one of the reasons why you don’t want me to call any witnesses?”

“It’s not important. It has no bearing to the case.”

“I’ll ask it differently. You don’t want me to call witnesses in this case. Why is that?”

“Because I know, genuinely, they don’t care, and, genuinely, I don’t care.”

“What is your understanding of why I would call those kind of people?”

“To bring out the good character and the good things I’ve done throughout my life.”

“Why would you not want the jury to know about that?”

“It doesn’t suit my best interest.”

“What is this best interest that you keep talking about?”

“I feel if I answer that that I’ll be manipulating them or they’ll think I’m trying to. I’m not trying to do that. I’m trying to give them the facts as they know it and ease their minds and hearts.”

Exum asked Thomas to help the jury understand why he wanted the death penalty.

“No,” he flatly stated.

“Even if the judge orders you to answer, you’re not going to answer?”

“No.”

“Is it your feeling, Justin, that you want this jury to say if he doesn’t care, why should we care? I mean, isn’t that part of it?”

“In essence, but it’s not the context of my argument.”

“Because, isn’t it true that you—I mean, it’s true that you believe if they don’t care, it will be easier for them to have a finding . . .”

“Yes.”

“Of death?”

“Right.”

Exum asked Thomas to recall his laughter at the guilty verdict. Thomas laughed again at the memory. “Wasn’t that a manipulation?” Exum asked.

“How?” Thomas questioned.

Exum repeated, “Wasn’t that a manipulation?”