04.Die.My.Love.2007 (39 page)

The first witness on the stand that morning was Kathy Molley, the Southwest Airlines ticket clerk. As Ashman began the questioning, she felt confident. Molley had talked about Piper’s luggage, her wig, the gun, even describing the shoes Piper had in her luggage. She’d been able to depict the way Piper looked and acted in detail, and had shown no hesitation when Kelley showed her the photo. But when Owen asked Molley if the woman she’d seen at the airport was in the courtroom, the ticket agent grew quiet.

At the defense table, dressed in a dark blue, double-breasted suit, Piper sat taking notes, head down, looking every bit the attorney. When Molley had seen her, Piper was not only substantially thinner, but wearing a blond wig; now her hair was her natural color, a dark brown.

“I don’t see her,” Molley said.

Ashman sucked in her breath, feeling a sense of panic.

288 / Kathryn Casey

Molley was removed from the courtroom, Ashman nervously took her seat, and Duncan Reid and Murray Janus approached the judge.

Before the judge, Reid contended the in-court and out-of-court identifications

were two different matters, and that while Molley hadn’t been able to pick out Piper Rountree in court, her identification of the photograph should be admissible during the trial. “There are a number of Virginia cases where out- of- court identifications are admissible,” Reid said.

“The lady looks around, as she did, the entire courtroom and says, ‘No. I did not see the person I’m talking about,’ ”

Janus countered.

As the judge read over the prosecution’s brief, Reid cited cases. He agreed the police had only used one photo, yet he argued, “The identification is nevertheless so reliable that there is no substantial likelihood of misidentifi cation.” Throughout the argument, he continually reminded the judge that Molley’s identification of Piper from the photo was within days of the murder, not three months later, as the pretrial hearing was.

After the arguments, the judge took the matter under advisement, and the ticket agent again took the stand.

To increase the chances that the judge would allow Molley’s identification of the photo, Ashman asked her, “How long did you talk to investigators before being shown a photograph?”

“Forty- five minutes,” Molley said.

“Okay, and when you were shown a photo, what was your reaction?”

“Right away, that’s her,” Molley said.

When Janus took over on cross exam, he pursued his theory that Kelley had presented the photo in an overly suggestive manner, asking, “Do you recall what Mr. Kelley said to you, ‘We have a picture here that we think is the person who purchased the ticket’?”

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“He asked me if this is the woman that you just described,” she said.

“But he did not tell you that we think this is the woman that you described?” Janus countered.

“No, sir,” she said.

“Do you recall that this woman paid cash?” Janus asked.

“No,” Molley corrected. “She paid with a credit card.”

Molley’s testimony wouldn’t be the end of the prosecutor’s problems that day in the courtroom. Boyd Adams, the man who’d checked Mac and Piper in at the 59 Gun Range, picked her out easily at the defense table. But Ray Seward, the Eagle rental car own er who’d checked the rented van in, couldn’t find Piper when Owen asked him to, despite having said he was a hundred percent certain he’d seen the woman in the photo. The same thing happened when Tina Landrum—

the Miller Mart assistant manager who said Piper had alcohol on her breath the morning of the murder—looked around the courtroom. Landrum wasn’t able to point to the woman in the photo.

The prosecutor’s hopes looked dashed again when Tarra Watford, the Eagle car rental clerk, took the stand.

“Do you see the woman who came into the dealership that day?” Owen asked.

“No,” Watford said.

“Keep looking,” Owen instructed.

Watford searched the room again, this time stopping and pointing at Piper. “It looks like her,” she said. “But her hair is dark.”

“Let it be known that she identified the defendant,” Owen said.

Then Piper said something, and Watford shouted, “That’s her.”

“Are you sure?” Ashman asked.

“Yes. When I heard her voice, it’s distinctive.”

With that, Piper looked up and stared at Watford. While 290 / Kathryn Casey

she may have intended it in a threatening way, Watford took the opportunity to look closer and came away more certain Piper was the woman to whom she’d rented the maroon van.

Still, even those who identified Piper often offered testimony fraught with discrepancies. Allan Benestante, the airport security agent, under questioning by Wade Kizer, was able to point to Piper in the courtroom, but he described the woman he saw as “up to my forehead.”

At five-eleven, Benestante towered over the petite Piper.

Kizer asked, “Do you know what kind of heels the passenger had on?”

“I know they weren’t sneakers,” the man with the deep circles around his eyes said.

When it was over, three of the seven witnesses couldn’t pick Piper out in the courtroom. On the stand, Murray Janus cross-examined Coby Kelley about the way he’d obtained the identifi cations.

“Did you say anything to Mr. Benestante, such as ‘This is my suspect,’ or ‘I think this person committed the murder,’

or any leading-type statements like that when you showed him the picture?” Janus asked.

“No, sir,” Kelley answered.

“Was there any hesitation in Ms. Molley’s voice when she identified the woman in the photo as the one she’d checked in?” Wade Kizer asked.

“No,” Kelley said.

“Did you ever say, ‘I’m investigating a murder in Virginia and this person is the person I think did it,’ or any words to that effect?”

“No, sir,” Kelley said.

In the end, the prosecution won on every point. Piper would remain in jail and the trial would continue in Richmond, unless it became evident that an impartial jury could not be seated, and the prosecutors were able to put on evidence that the witnesses who couldn’t identify Piper in the DIE, MY LOVE / 291

courtroom had done so in a photo soon after the killing.

Another point Janus had argued was that the tape-recorded interviews Kelley had made of Piper were coerced.

Here, too, the judge disagreed, saying they would be admissible during the trial.

The defense, however, had won an advantage: They would be able to tell the jurors that at a pretrial hearing, three of the eyewitnesses didn’t recognize Piper Rountree. And they’d be able to point out discrepancies in the other witnesses’

descriptions of the woman they’d seen, many of which more closely resembled Tina than Piper. That helped lay the foundation for the alternative Murray Janus would offer in the courtroom: that rather than Piper, Tina may have committed the murder.

With that matter settled, one more piece of evidence remained fl uid. The only evidence Virginia law decrees a defense attorney must share with a prosecutor is the accused’s alibi. As the case progressed, Piper Rountree’s version of her whereabouts the weekend of the murder continually changed. At first she claimed she’d been home, at the house in Kingwood throughout that Saturday, the day of the murder. By mid-February she was saying something markedly different, that at three or three-thirty that Saturday afternoon, when the plane was still an hour away from landing at Hobby Airport, she’d been in Marty McVey’s offi ce.

As the trial approached, Duncan Reid sent Murray Janus information on the K-9 unit that had gone to the murder scene, to inform him that the dogs had not tracked by scent but “ground disturbance,” and that they had walked in front of the McArdles’ house, where the footprints were seen that day, then turned right at the corner and right on Helmsdale, the block that backed up to Hearthglow. The dogs had fi -

nally stopped at a manhole cover, which was pried open.

Nothing was found inside but a decomposing animal.

Meanwhile, from jail, Piper was still writing the children, 292 / Kathryn Casey

now telling them that angels were guarding them. She claimed her only fault was that she was too trusting in people, and theorized that hell was not in the afterlife but in the suffering experienced on earth. She seemed confi dent, promising them that they’d be re united and all would end well.

At about that time from Houston, Charles Tooke was still pushing the prosecutors to tell him about the phone call he said Kelley had described as originating in the neighbors’ yard the morning of the killing. In an e-mail, Owen Ashman told him, “It didn’t occur that way.”

As the trial date neared, more issues cropped up with Tooke’s testimony, with Charles insisting some of what he’d told Kelley about Piper was shaded in the offi cer’s written account to make her sound guilty. Concerned about playing fair, when Tooke e-mailed prosecutors to complain, he also sent a copy of the letter to the defense.

The week of the trial, Duncan Reid followed up on something Wade Kizer had noticed when looking at the checks cashed out of the Jerry Walters Wells Fargo account. At 9:55

on the morning Piper left Houston for Richmond, a check was written for $21.64 at an Academy Sports and Outdoors store near her home in Kingwood. When Reid received a detail of the purchase, another piece of evidence was slipped into the growing evidence file: The receipt was for a Master-lock cable-type, combination lock, the same type of lock Allan Benestante and Kathy Molley would testify they saw wrapped around the gun Piper had checked on the airplane.

“Bingo!” Reid said, grinning.

Meanwhile, Owen Ashman, without telling her colleagues, was doing a little investigating of her own. She and the other prosecutors worried about the Hobby Airport parking records that showed Piper’s Jeep was in the garage at 5:00 a.m.

on Thursday, October 28. The flight to Baltimore they contended Piper was on didn’t take off until eleven-twenty that DIE, MY LOVE / 293

morning. Now they also had the Academy check for the cable lock, which suggested she was in Kingwood at nearly ten that morning, nowhere near the airport. Their Hobby parking lot witness, John Guidry, theorized that all cars that entered the lot on a given day were logged in airport rec ords as having been in the parking structure at 5:00 a.m., but that seemed odd to Owen, and when questioned, Guidry appeared uncertain. On the stand, Kizer feared he’d be a poor witness.

To keep from confusing the jury, Kizer was considering not putting Guidry on the stand and foregoing entering the parking lot rec ords into evidence. But it was damaging to the defense, and Ashman wanted to use it. So she took a chance. Kizer was a careful man who didn’t like to open doors unless he felt certain he knew what was on the other side, and Owen knew he wouldn’t approve. So without telling him, she called Breck McDaniel and asked them to plant a car at Hobby Airport late one morning.

When the parking lot rec ords on the planted car came back, Ashman was elated: The second car showed up on the records just as Piper’s Jeep had, as having been in the garage at 5:00 a.m. After she went over the paperwork on the second car with Guidry, he was more confident, and Kizer, after reviewing the new evidence, agreed: He had no reason to keep Guidry and the parking lot evidence from the jury.

As the days counted down to the trial, the evidence continued to mount.

Over the telephone one afternoon, Jerry Walters mentioned something to Kizer that got the prosecutor’s attention.

Walters hadn’t been writing Piper, but she’d written him off and on from the jail. Her latest letter included a rather odd suggestion. “She asked me to marry her, so I wouldn’t have to testify,” Walters said.

“Would you send me the letter?” Kizer asked. Walters agreed.

294 / Kathryn Casey

When Walters’s letter from Piper arrived, Kizer read: “ ‘I wonder about the “us” in all of this . . . I hope and pray you will write me your thoughts . . . I know you always have plan A, B, and C . . . do you mind sharing them with me?’ ”

It was what Piper had written deeper in the letter that Kizer found fascinating: “I have wondered again and again how to spare you all of this. It has occurred to me that perhaps they can spare you further or any testimony if we are husband and wife?” From there, Piper explained that spouses couldn’t testify against one another and maintained that she and Walters could reasonably argue that, because of their relationship, they were common-law married. “I have to tell you that you
really
,
really
,
really
don’t want to testify if you don’t have to,” she wrote.

Much of the rest of the letter was classic Piper, in which she saw the world only as it affected her, including her rules for how a man should treat her. Jerry, she said, was to always be supportive and there when needed. “Always tell me you love me . . . always respect, loyal, wear a Superman cape . . . come to my rescue and protect me from evil and badness, always trust, hope, and have faith, no matter what.”

She even sent along a booklet, one entitled:
Building Blocks
to a Strong Marriage.

To Kizer, the letter with Piper’s proposal was another strong indication of her guilt. Why would she be worried about Jerry Walters’s testimony unless she knew what he had to say could hurt her?

As might be expected, all these last minute bits of evidence weren’t good news for the defense. When the prosecutors’ disclosures arrived, they delivered one disappointment after another. Owen Ashman’s gamble on the Hobby rec ords dashed Janus’s hopes of using Piper’s deposit at the bank around nine that morning to contradict the parking lot records. The information from Academy Sports about the cable lock was worse news, another link in the chain that tied DIE, MY LOVE / 295

Piper to the .38 caliber gun and the plane ride to Houston.

And then there was Jerry Walters’s letter, which Kizer included a copy of for Janus’s consideration.

It could be argued that at every turn, Janus was being sabotaged by his own client.

In the days leading up to the trial, both sides assessed their cases’ strengths and weaknesses. Wade Kizer saw the evidence against Piper Rountree as powerful. Yet, he knew it was ultimately a circumstantial case. Kizer had no eyewitnesses to the murder and no DNA or fingerprints that tied Piper to the murder scene. Evidence from the hotel room and the rented van had all come back negative of any trace of her DNA or fingerprints on the forensic reports. The T-shirt Carol Freed had given them tested positive for Piper’s DNA, but bore no sign of gunshot residue, Fred’s blood, or anything that tied it to the murder. The .38 bullet Jerry Walters had given Kelley didn’t match the ballistics of the one that killed Fred Jablin. And the only blood on the scene was the victim’s. Finally, Piper had made no incriminating statements or confessions, and police had never found the murder weapon.