04.Die.My.Love.2007 (41 page)

304 / Kathryn Casey

When Piper visited with Loni at the jail, she insisted she had no reason to worry. “Piper seemed certain she’d be acquitted,” Loni says, running her fingers through her thick blond-highlighted hair. “I never said it, but I thought, ‘Peeps, are you looking at the same evidence I am?’ ”

At the trial each day, Michael Jablin, a tall, dark-haired, balding man with glasses, kept a photo of his murdered brother in the pocket over his heart. At times he took it out during testimony, ran his thumb over it, and his eyes welled with tears. When he glanced at Piper, she quickly looked away. He must have remembered the happier times, when Fred was head over heels in love with the artistic attorney who could be the life of the party.

“I think she looked ashamed to look at me,” Michael Jablin would say later. “It was hard for me to look at her.”

The second day of trial began late the next day, Wednesday, allowing the attorneys to attend the morning funeral of Judge Robert Merhige Jr, who’d died the previous Friday.

For Murray Janus, it was a personal loss. Merhige had been his friend and mentor, the man who’d taught him what it meant to be an attorney.

As Judge Harris called the court to order that afternoon, the prosecutors’ witnesses congregated in a secluded back room, waiting for their turns on the witness stand. Many of them had flown in from Houston and would remain in Richmond throughout the trial. Jerry Walters hadn’t wanted to come, but finally relented. Charles Tooke, Dean Lowry, Mac McClennahan, and Carol Freed were all standing by, while behind the scenes the prosecutors were considering their lineup. They had two concerns: Charles Tooke had been critical of the police, questioning statements Coby Kelley had made to him, and they weren’t sure they wanted to put him on the stand when Janus could use that to Piper’s advantage. And Carol Freed? Her testimony could be powerful, DIE, MY LOVE / 305

but did they trust her to be a good witness? None of them had forgotten how she’d behaved when they were in Houston. It didn’t help that in the witness waiting room the defensive driving comic cracked jokes, entertaining the other witnesses. At one point she suggested, laughing, that they all testify that they’d slept with Piper.

Some found her funny, but others were not amused.

“Cari was in-your-face,” says one who was there. “Loud and obnoxious.”

In the courtroom that afternoon, Susanne Shilling, Fred’s attorney, took the stand and described the acrimonious Jablin- Rountree divorce.

“How many times did you go to court?” Ashman asked.

Janus objected, but Judge Harris allowed Shilling to answer, “Many times. Innumerable times.”

Into the record, Ashman placed the final divorce decree, and rec ords of Piper’s arrears, $9,792.64 in 2003, and, by the time of the murder, still more than $7,000. Ashman also pointed out that Fred had fought Piper’s bankruptcy.

“It’s not unusual in divorce cases, particularly when custody is involved, to have them contested and get contentious?” Janus asked.

“No, sir, it’s not unusual,” Shilling answered.

In addition that afternoon, prosecutors offered another bit of financial evidence: Fred’s $200,000 life insurance policy that still listed Piper as the benefi ciary.

Yet a motive didn’t prove Piper Rountree had committed murder. The jurors would need more.

When Allan Benestante took the stand, the airport security officer described the gun he said Piper had taken onto the plane: a small chrome .32 or .38 caliber revolver. After putting the gun in Piper’s hands at the airport, Duncan Reid called a witness from Piper’s cell phone company, Sprint, to the stand, to place her firmly in Virginia.

Through Reid’s questioning, Crystalee Danko, a Sprint 306 / Kathryn Casey

rec ords official, explained how cell phones worked, bouncing off towers, their locations recorded at the company’s main office. Piper’s cell phone ending in 7878 had been used in Richmond the Thursday before through the Saturday of the murder, Danko testified. There was no doubt about it.

With that, Duncan Reid entered commonwealth’s exhibit number twenty into evidence, a summary of the cell phone rec ords of Piper Rountree.

Along with the whereabouts of Piper’s phone during the days preceding and the day of the murder, Reid emphasized one other insight given by the rec ords: Piper was a phone-aholic who commonly made dozens of cell phone calls daily; yet throughout the three days she’d spent with the children in early October, she hadn’t made a single call. At this point in the trial it seemed an unimportant detail, but Reid had a reason for wanting that spelled out before the jury, one that he and Kizer would reveal at the end of the trial.

The whereabouts of Piper’s cell phone established, Reid then carried the testimony one step further, putting on the stand witnesses who could testify that the person who’d made those calls on the 7878 number was Piper.

The first was Steve Byrum, whom Piper had called twice on October 28, two days before the murder. Both were calls Sprint recorded as being made in the Richmond area. Whose voice was it on his telephone voice mail? Reid asked.

“Piper’s,” Byrum replied.

The prosecutor had made his point: Byrum said Piper had made the calls. Sprint showed that the calls were in Richmond. Therefore, the inescapable conclusion was that at the time the calls were made, Piper Rountree was in Richmond.

As he’d do with each of the coming witnesses, Reid then had Byrum write his name next to his phone number on the exhibit, labeling his calls from Piper.

On cross exam, Janus asked Byrum, who’d had a brief DIE, MY LOVE / 307

relationship with Tina during a trip to Houston, if she and Piper had similar voices. “They’re similar but I knew them well enough that I could tell the difference,” Byrum said.

“Do you recall asking Piper on the telephone if she was in Richmond on the day of the murder?” Janus asked.

“I may have,” Byrum answered.

“Do you recall her telling you she was not?” Janus asked.

Kizer objected. Judge Harris agreed and sustained the objection, but Janus had skillfully slipped into the testimony his client’s denial that she’d been in Richmond without putting her on the stand.

After Byrum, Dean Lowry testified. Yes, Piper had called him on the twenty-ninth, the day before the murder, he told Kizer, and he’d had no doubt she was the one on the telephone. Lowry also testified that in the days following the murder, Piper had told him she’d thrown her cell phone away in pieces, and that rather than run to Virginia after Fred’s death to comfort her children, Piper hid out at a Houston hotel, expecting to be arrested.

The Jablin children had been unseen but not forgotten throughout the trial. Susanne Shilling had testified how aggressively both parents had fought for their custody. When they entered the courtroom that second day, it was not a physical presence but through two statements read to the jury.

The decision had been made by the defense before trial: Rather than force Paxton and Callie to take the stand to testify that they had talked with their mother on her cell phone the day before the murder, at a time when rec ords showed the signal was bouncing off towers in Virginia, Piper would stipulate their testimony. That meant Owen Ashman could simply read their statements into the court record and to the jury. Yes, Paxton and Callie had talked with their mother that Friday. She’d told them both she was in Galveston on her 308 / Kathryn Casey

way home from work. And, yes, their father kept to a schedule. Fred Jablin routinely left the house between six-fi fteen and six-thirty, to retrieve the newspaper, something his wife of nearly two decades would surely have known.

Not forcing her own children to testify against her was, perhaps, the first truly kind thing Piper had done for them in a very long time.

Another youngster did take the stand that afternoon: Russell Bootwright, Paxton’s good friend, who testified about the day before the murder when he and Paxton were playing poker with friends in a garage. Paxton’s cell phone rang, and the youngster had appeared thrilled to hear from his mother.

To get some privacy, Paxton took the telephone and walked away from the others. As Russell testified from the witness stand, Piper smiled at him.

“Nickel and dime stuff, I hope?” Reid asked, regarding the poker.

“Yes, sir,” Russell replied nervously.

After she’d talked with Paxton, Piper had asked to talk with thirteen-year-old Russell, and he had gotten on the phone with her. From the audience, Russell’s dad, Bill Bootwright, watched, concerned about the toll the testimony was taking on his son.

“Did you recognize her voice?” Reid asked Russell.

“Yes, sir,” the teenager said.

In the hallway outside the courtroom, once Russell’s testimony was over, Bill comforted his son, who cried, upset at having to testify against a woman he and his family considered a friend. The Bootwright family had met the Jablins when their boys were in second grade at Pinchbeck Elementary, and they’d all grown fond of Piper, finding her fun and enthusiastic, a model mom. It was hard for them to believe she was capable of murder. He was so concerned that she be treated fairly, that Bill had been in the courtroom since the DIE, MY LOVE / 309

first witness and planned to stay for the duration, to judge her guilt for himself.

He didn’t believe Piper had murdered Fred. None of the family did.

After starting late, the trial continued into the eve ning to make up for lost time. One of the final witnesses before the court adjourned was a reluctant Jerry Walters. He, too, testified that it had been Piper using her 7878 cell phone in the days before and the day of the murder. For Reid, Walters wrote his name next to his cell phone number on the chart, filling in yet more of the empty spaces.

On the stand, Walters then read in his Louisiana drawl from the letter Piper had sent him from jail, now marked commonwealth’s exhibit number thirty-two, the one in which she’d proposed marriage. “I have wondered again and again how to spare you all of this,” Piper had written. “. . . By law, a husband could not testify against a wife, and vice versa.”

After the murder, Walters recounted how he’d checked the Wells Fargo Bank account in his name and discovered it had been used in Richmond the day before the murder. Soon the bank rec ords would be in evidence, detailing what the debit card had been used to buy, including the wigs and latex gloves, size small.

On the stand, the tanned, broad- shouldered Walters put on a pair of reading glasses to examine the paperwork for the Mail & More, P.O. box number 162. Yes, he said, it was Piper’s, and she’d added his name to the box.

The more evidence the prosecutors put before the jury, the more those who knew Piper wondered. Dean Lowry, for one, felt certain that Piper had a loophole to fall back on.

“She was too smart,” he said later. “I couldn’t believe she’d leave all that evidence out there, without a plan to explain it away.”

310 / Kathryn Casey

Meanwhile in Austin, Fred’s old assistant, Lora Maldonado, considered the same thing, how a woman with Piper’s intellect could have been so careless. At first it troubled her, then, eventually, she thought back to the Piper she knew, and it seemed to make sense. “In a way, it was just like Piper,”

she’d say. “She saw herself as brilliant and talented. I fi gured she thought the rest of us were too dumb, that we couldn’t figure it out. Piper thought she was invincible.”

Day four of the trial, Thursday, began with a hubbub outside the courtroom. Loni Gosnell and Jean, Piper’s sister, brought in makeup for Piper to wear in the courtroom, in a bag they’d gotten in the mail from Tina. Jean handed it to Murray Janus, who turned it over to the sheriff ’s guard. When the guard searched inside, under the makeup and a small box containing earplugs, he discovered three Adderall pills tucked between two pieces of cardboard.

Gosnell and Jean were immediately taken to an interrogation area and questioned.

Having never had anything like this happen to him before, throughout his four-decade career, Janus was speech-less. “I felt like the bag man,” he says. “I told the sheriff,

‘Hey, I didn’t know.’ ”

In the interrogation room, Loni and Jean were searched, and outside in the parking lot, Loni’s car was examined as well. Before being released, they were warned that passing a narcotic to an inmate could result in up to ten years in jail.

When testimony began, it would be a busy day for the prosecutors, as they put on one witness after another: from Tarra Watford and Ray Seward, from Eagle car rentals, to Tina Landrum, who testified that Piper smelled of alcohol the morning after the murder at the Miller Mart in Williamsburg. Among them were the nuts and bolts witnesses, those DIE, MY LOVE / 311

who brought rec ords to be entered into evidence, explaining the Wells Fargo debit card, the receipt for the cable lock at Academy Sports, and the two wigs from wigsalon.com. In between, the prosecutors showed the videotape on which a woman who looked very much like Piper Rountree wearing a blond wig used an ATM in Virginia, the day before and the day of the murder. In the 7-Eleven tape, even the rented maroon van was visible.

When Mac McClennahan took the witness stand, Owen did the questioning. He explained his relationship with Tina, that they’d lived together off and on over a period of years.

“I considered Piper a younger sister,” he said.

Mac had traveled with Piper early in the week of the murder to Galveston to learn to be a landman. On the way home that Tuesday, he recalled how he mentioned wanting to go to a gun range to Piper.

“I’d like to go, too,” he quoted her as saying.

At the range, Mac told the jury, Piper had rented a .22 to shoot, but ended up practicing with a .38 revolver. When Ashman asked what Piper was shooting at, an image fl ashed before those listening: the silhouette of a man’s torso attached to a line with clothespins. Along with the gun, Mac put the Time Warner cable bill used to rent the car at Eagle in Piper’s hands.

Piper had told him she’d be in Fort Worth on Thursday and Friday, and he’d worked at the clinic with Tina on Friday morning, before going to the Hill Country to see his parents. Ashman emphasized this bit of information. Later, the prosecutors would also put on one of Tina’s employees, to say Tina was in Houston, not Richmond, on the morning of the murder.