04.Die.My.Love.2007 (43 page)

Tina, too, often used her 7878 telephone, despite Piper’s friends’ testimony that they’d always called Piper on that number. She contended that she knew nothing about the Southwest Airlines ticket in Tina’s name. The gun she’d shot at the 59 Gun Range, despite testimony to the contrary, 320 / Kathryn Casey

she said, had been supplied by the shooting range. And, Piper said, she wasn’t the one using Tina’s identifi cation the following day at the Sportsman’s gun range. In fact, she said she’d never had Tina’s ID.

From the stand, Piper insisted she’d never gone to Hobby that week, and that she’d never checked a gun with Kathy Molley. She offered no explanation as to why Allan Benestante believed he’d seen her with a .38 in her luggage. She claimed that someone else must have used the Jerry Walters debit card and that the last time she saw it was the Monday before the murder.

“Would you tell us whether or not you recall seeing the debit card after that?” Janus asked.

“No,” she said. “Jerry and I had a big argument about that, too.”

In Piper’s version, Cheryl Crider not only recognized her from that Friday night at the Volcano but knew her by name, saying, “You’re Piper, aren’t you?”

Not only did Piper claim her voice sounded like Tina’s, but she said they looked so much alike that their own mother couldn’t tell her apart from Tina in photos. “At least black-and-white photos,” Piper said.

Like Janus, McVey would later say he’d believed Piper should not have taken the stand. And in the audience, Bill Bootwright winced as he listened to her testimony. Throughout the trial, he’d been convinced there was reasonable doubt that Piper was guilty. Now, listening to her, he no longer felt that way. “Her eyes were all over the place, and she couldn’t answer half the questions. She couldn’t explain things, like why her car was at the parking garage,” he says. “She looked guilty.”

When Wade Kizer rose to cross examine Piper Rountree, he began gently, having her reiterate that the relationship between her and her ex-husband was cordial.

“When you found out he’d been murdered . . . did you immediately come to Richmond?” Kizer asked.

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“I—I asked, uh . . .”

“My question is, did you come to Richmond immediately?”

“I tried,” Piper said.

“Did anyone prevent you from coming?”

“Not physically, no.”

“Did you go to Fred’s funeral?”

“Um, I couldn’t.”

“Isn’t it true that as of the time of his death, you weren’t on friendly terms, and that it was a contentious divorce?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“You lost custody of your three children . . . wasn’t that devastating to you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Wouldn’t you do anything for your children?”

“I wouldn’t kill for them, no.”

Then Kizer zeroed in on Piper’s behavior at the Volcano, her words that afternoon, that her boyfriend, not her husband, had been murdered. Throughout the trial he’d been firm yet calm, but now the commonwealth attorney’s voice rose in anger.

“Why didn’t you tell them the truth?” he asked.

“I didn’t know where, you know, where he’d sit down and start talking to people about—”

“Is it hard to say it was my husband that got murdered?”

“Yeah.”

“Because you did it. Right?”

“No,” she said quietly.

Murray Janus jumped up and objected. “There’s no need to shout at the witness.”

Kizer pointed out that on the stand Piper had exaggerated the differences in her height and Tina’s. While she’d made it sound like four or five inches, according to their drivers’ licenses they were only two inches apart.

“I was trying to be accurate, sir,” she said.

Piper claimed that she didn’t understand the cell phone 322 / Kathryn Casey

bill rec ords, and then said that not only Tina, but Jerry and Mac, had sometimes used her cell telephone.

“Why did you throw pieces of the telephone away?” Kizer asked.

“It wasn’t working,” she said.

Why, Kizer asked, if she’d been at McVey’s that Saturday, had she filed an alibi with the court, an official record, not revealing that information but saying that she’d been at her home in Kingwood the entire day?

“I think you’re asking two different questions,” Piper answered, sounding like a lawyer parsing a question. “One is a legal alibi, and what I was doing at the time. No one asked me that. The police did not ask me that before.”

If she had been at the house in Kingwood, why hadn’t she answered the door that Saturday afternoon when Investigator Breck McDaniel knocked and rang the bell, even calling her house phone to let her know he was outside? Kizer asked. Piper claimed she was in the shower, and that her car was in the garage.

“Did you hear him testify there was no vehicle there?”

Kizer asked.

Janus objected, and the judge sustained the objection.

Point by point Kizer skillfully went through the evidence, and Piper had little response other than to say she didn’t know. When it came to the children’s testimony that they’d talked with her on October 29, she said she’d stipulated to it but didn’t agree with it.

“You want the jury to think that Tina committed the murder, don’t you?” Kizer charged.

“I have no idea what happened,” she snapped back.

“You have none?”

“I don’t.”

After Piper left the stand, the jury was excused, but the lawyers and judge stayed in the courtroom. Wade Kizer an-DIE, MY LOVE / 323

nounced that he planned to call Paige Akin, the
Richmond
Times- Dispatch
reporter who’d been covering the case, to the stand. Weeks earlier, in January, Akin had traveled to Houston to write an in-depth feature article on the Rountree case. While in Houston, she’d interviewed McVey. In the subsequent article that ran in the newspaper, Akin had quoted McVey as saying that when Piper showed up at his office followed by police officers on that Sunday, October 31, the day after the murder, it was the first time he’d seen Piper that entire year.

An attorney for the
Times- Dispatch
argued against putting Akin on the stand. Judge Harris, however, ordered that she testify, limiting the questions strictly to the matter at hand. Akin, tall with straight dark blond hair, reluctantly took the stand, and, with the jury back in the room, Wade Kizer asked her about her interview with Marty McVey.

“Did you ask him when prior to Sunday, October thirty-first, he had last seen Piper Rountree?”

“Yes,” Akin responded. “He said it had been quite a while, uh, about a year, I believe.”

After Akin stepped down, Janus called McVey to testify on rebuttal. Yes, he admitted, he’d only told Breck McDaniel a week before the trial began that Piper had been in his office that Saturday. But, he still insisted, she was there.

“And you deny that you told [Paige Akin] . . . that the fi rst time you had seen her, Piper Rountree, that weekend was on Sunday, October thirty-first?” Kizer asked.

“I deny I told her that. Yes.”

With that, the testimony ended.

Was McVey lying? Was the circumstantial evidence in the case enough to cancel out reasonable doubt? Was Piper Rountree guilty of murdering Fred Jablin? Closing arguments would begin the following morning, and then the jury would have to decide.

19

It was a Saturday morning, yet Judge Harris’s courtroom buzzed with activity. The jurors and attorneys had agreed they’d forgo the day off to hear closing arguments and work toward a verdict. The judge thanked them all for coming in on what was a cloudy day in Richmond, and Wade Kizer began by thanking the jurors for their attention throughout the four days of testimony.

“It’s an important case,” Kizer said, looking directly at the jury. “It’s certainly an important case to the defendant, Piper Rountree. It’s also an important case to Fred Jablin.

The defendant has had the opportunity since Tuesday, with each and every day this week, to sit here in the courtroom.

Fred Jablin, obviously, can’t be here.

“It’s easy without him here to not take notice so much of his death and not think about it. But don’t ever forget that less than four months ago, also on a Saturday, at fi ve-thirty in the morning, this man was alive . . . Two days later, on Monday morning, Fred Jablin was in the Medical Examiner’s Office on a steel table and cut apart.”

At that, Kizer explained the court’s instructions to the jurors, the law they were to use to come to a verdict. Then he went through the long list of evidence against Piper Rountree, repeating much of what the jurors had heard in testimony, and now taking the additional step of structuring the clues to DIE, MY LOVE / 325

reach a specific conclusion: that Piper Rountree had murdered Fred Jablin.

First Kizer talked of the defense witnesses. None of them had really helped Piper, he argued. Charles Tooke’s testimony didn’t put Piper in Houston that day. As to her sister, Jean? She’d said their voices were similar, but admitted on cross exam that she could tell her own children’s voices apart. “This is important,” Kizer said, because two of those who put Piper on her cell phone in Virginia were Paxton and Callie, Piper’s children.

Marty McVey, Kizer argued, was a personal friend of Piper’s, and he hadn’t told the police about his Saturday meeting with Piper until the week before the trial. Paige Akin, Kizer insisted, was an impartial observer, a journalist who didn’t want to testify. “Was Martin McVey biased? Was Paige Akin biased? It’s your decision,” Kizer said. “. . . The evidence, ladies and gentlemen, is overwhelming. There can be no doubt that the person who murdered Fred Jablin, who shot him in the back and shot him in the arm Saturday morning, was the person who flew up here from Texas and flew back Saturday morning.”

The murder, he said, wasn’t random, but personal. “This killing was an ambush,” he said. “It was an execution.”

What did they know about Piper? “She was the mother of these three children, and she lost custody. Wouldn’t that be devastating for any mother to lose custody of their children?

And she lost it, she didn’t get it, and Fred Jablin did.”

Fred was the one who blocked Piper’s attempts to declare bankruptcy. “A reason to kill him? Yes. She’s desperate for money. She can’t make a living as a lawyer, can’t in Texas or in Virginia. She’s gone to doing landman work.”

If Piper were innocent, when she heard Fred had been murdered, wouldn’t she have immediately flown to Virginia to be with her children? Kizer asked. She’d asked Mac not to 326 / Kathryn Casey

tell the police about the gun range and asked Jerry not to report the debit card stolen. Were those things an innocent person would do?

“Obviously, she believed that this murder was a vehicle to regaining custody of the three children, because what did she do in the days afterward? She came up here on November eighth and tried to move the court to give her custody of the kids. And instead, she got locked up for murder.”

Janus, Kizer said, would tell them Piper was too smart a person to have left so many clues. “Well, she’s a clever person,” Kizer countered. “And she thought she was going to get away with it. She made a lot of efforts to get away with it,” especially disguising herself as Tina to fl y into Norfolk, rent the van, and stay at the hotel.

Piper, the former prosecutor, had also gone to great lengths to set up her alibi, telling Mac she was going to a conference, calling her children and telling them she was at work in Galveston, calling Doug McCann and acting like she was in Texas and wanted to go out to dinner, and then going to the Volcano the eve ning after the murder, so she could return the following week and find someone who remembered her who might be confused and willing to say she’d been there on Friday night.

“Who was on that telephone on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday? The people who testified under oath told you that Piper was,” he said. “What were the reasons Tina didn’t commit this murder? Well, there’s absolutely no evidence that it was her.”

Then Kizer brought up something he hadn’t mentioned during the trial, something he wanted the jury to consider: the
T
on Tina’s driver’s license was written right to left. All the
T
’s in evidence, on the hotel registry, at the fi ring range, at Eagle renting the van, were all written left to right. And, if that didn’t convince them, he reminded the jurors that two witnesses had sworn that they’d seen Tina in Houston that Friday and Saturday.

DIE, MY LOVE / 327

“You either must believe Marty McVey and Piper Rountree, because, again, they are the only two people who have given evidence that Piper was in Houston over the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, or you believe the enormous amounts of evidence that shows that she was the one who fl ew up here with the .38 caliber revolver.”

“The police absolutely have done their job in this case. I believe that the prosecution has done its job,” Kizer concluded. “It’s time for you as a jury to do your job. And the evidence of her guilt is overwhelming. I ask you to fi nd her guilty of both charges.”

After a ten minute recess, Murray Janus took over the courtroom for his closing. He walked up slowly and appeared tired.

“What you’ve seen is a whole array of exhibits, a whole bunch of evidence, but what you need to think about is, is there evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Piper Rountree shot and killed Fred Jablin? Do you have your suspicions? Sure. Do you have probables? Sure. But that’s not enough.”

As Kizer knew he would, Janus then listed all the prosecutors didn’t have. They had no scientific evidence tying Piper to the crime. “You’ve heard a lot about cell phones, a lot about credit cards . . . how about fi ngerprints?”

The police hadn’t found any, not at the crime scene nor in the rented van, not on the hotel key found in the van nor on the airline baggage receipts. “You haven’t heard any handwriting expert testify that that was Piper Rountree’s handwriting, not Tina Rountree’s.”

And the DNA they’d found at the crime scene and in the van? None of it matched Piper. Kathy Molley and the people at Eagle had all seen Tina’s driver’s license and didn’t question that the woman who stood before them was the same woman in the picture. Others couldn’t identify the woman they saw as Piper, from the clerk at the CVS pharmacy to the Papa John’s deliveryman.