04.Die.My.Love.2007 (45 page)

She’s a murderer with no remorse,” Ashman said, pointing at Piper. “Three shots, she took on October thirtieth. Three little lives forever changed. One life gone forever. She deserves life in prison.

“Do it for Fred. Do it for the children . . . Do it because it’s the right thing to do . . . Sentence her to life.”

In his closing, Murray Janus talked in a hushed, quiet voice. “It is a tragedy for the children because they lost 336 / Kathryn Casey

their father,” he argued. “It’s a double tragedy now because they’re going to lose their mother for a very long time.

“I don’t think there’s any question in anyone’s mind that Piper Rountree dearly loved those children . . . There’s no question they loved her in return. She was their primary parent . . . And what she’s done is out of frustration, disappointment, devastation because of losing these children . . . a special relationship between a mother and her children.

Don’t take their mother away . . .

“Use your common sense,” he pleaded. “Understand.”

Since Piper’s case didn’t have the special circumstances that Virginia law required to make it a death penalty case—such as the murder of a law enforcement officer, multiple murders, or murders coupled with additional charges including rape, abduction, and

extortion—Piper’s possible punish-

ments ranged from twenty years to life. While the jury was out deliberating their recommendation, Janus, Kizer, and the judge pulled out their calendars. No matter what the jury suggested, the final decision on Piper’s punishment would be up to Judge Harris. A presentencing report would have to be compiled for yet another recommendation to the court on a proper punishment. The date they chose for that fi nal hearing, the sentencing of Piper Rountree, was May 6.

Then, the judge, the prosecutors, the defense, and Piper all settled in and waited for the jury. It didn’t take long.

“ ‘We the jury, having found the defendant guilty of fi rst degree murder, Fredric Jablin, fix her punishment at life in prison,’ ” Judge Harris read.

A murmur went through the courtroom, the jury was thanked for their service, and then the judge dismissed them.

Later one jury member would look back at the decision and say they had all quickly agreed they would sentence Piper to life. Why? To benefit the Jablin children. “We didn’t want Piper Rountree to ever have the opportunity to come DIE, MY LOVE / 337

back into the lives of those children,” he says. “We made the decision the children were better off without her.”

Would Judge Harris agree? Three months remained before that question would be answered.

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As the sentencing hearing neared, Piper worried. What would she say to the judge, what would she argue to convince him to go against the jury’s recommendation?

If he didn’t, she’d spend the rest of her life in a Virginia prison.

Piper knew what she wanted to say, that the jury was wrong, that she was innocent, that she didn’t kill her ex-husband, leaving her children virtual orphans. She wanted the judge to know that her husband wasn’t the perfect man, the kindly professor he’d been portrayed. Yet that wasn’t what the judge wanted to hear. Now that she’d been convicted of murdering her ex-husband, the father of her children, the judge would be listening for signs of remorse.

The morning of Friday, May 6, 2005, more than two months after the end of the trial, was a somber one, a late spring storm drenching much of the East Coast. Inside the Henrico County Courthouse, both families collected in hallways where gray clouds blocked the sun from entering sky-lights, giving an eerie, quiet, somber effect. When the doors opened just before the eleven o’clock start time, the media filed in to fill the left quarter of the courtroom. Television cameras whirred in the now empty jury box, and notebooks were poised. In the center aisle, behind prosecutors Kizer, Ashman, and Reid, Michael Jablin and his wife, Elizabeth, DIE, MY LOVE / 339

sat together holding hands. He stared at Piper, appearing furious at all he’d heard at the trial.

In front of the Jablins sat the investigators, Jamison and Kelley, there to see the case through. Neither wanted to miss this final moment, the end of a case they’d pulled together from cell phone records and shreds of paper, receipts that tied Piper Rountree to Virginia and Fred Jablin’s murder.

Also in the courtroom were students from the University of Richmond, hoping a man they’d respected was given justice.

On the far right section, Piper’s family and friends collected anxiously. Two

were notably absent: Jean, who’d

given Janus the makeup kit with the Adderall, and Bill, who’d been questioned about coaching witnesses. They’d been replaced by Bill’s wife and Tina’s son, Mike Gano, there to support Piper and her mother Betty.

Just after 11:00 a.m., Piper entered, accompanied by two uniformed deputies. She’d lost the excess pounds she’d gained pretrial, when witnesses had to identify her in the courtroom. She wore the same navy pantsuit with double-breasted brass buttons as throughout much of the trial, only now she was a convicted murderer, and when she entered, her hands were tethered behind her in handcuffs.

As a deputy unlocked the cuffs, she looked over at her mother and smiled, as Betty cried softly. Then Piper took her place next to Taylor Stone at the defense table.

The first order of business was the presentencing report prepared for the court. Janus rose and addressed the court, the

elder-

statesman-like man offering his objections. He looked tired and beaten. The case had been a diffi cult one, with so much evidence against his client, and she had tied his hands. Maintaining her innocence had cost them dearly, closing off any argument that could have formed extenuat-ing circumstances and cut her sentence.

“On page one,” Janus began calmly. His client hadn’t gone 340 / Kathryn Casey

to the Volcano to set up an alibi, he argued again, merely to see if anyone remembered her. He proceeded to object line by line to everything he considered a discrepancy in the report.

Many were small points, that Piper’s father had suffered a stroke when she was only six, leaving her devastated, implying that this had affected her entire life. She couldn’t take hormone replacement, he said, because she had no spleen to process the medication. Then there was the main issue. Janus wanted it noted that at the motion hearing three of the witnesses hadn’t initially recognized Rountree. They couldn’t identify her.

“That’s in there,” the judge said. Janus nodded. He knew it was.

All the while, Piper whispered to Stone, as if urging him to interrupt Janus and to tell him to say more. Janus didn’t listen. Perhaps he knew what was important even if she didn’t. He was setting up the grounds for the appeal. This trial was over and his eye was on finding a way to set it aside and secure her a new day in court, another chance to fi ght the charge of murder.

After Janus sat down, Kizer rose. He had his own issue to raise, one Janus had already conceded. Piper had implanted a lie in the presentencing report, one easily discredited.

She’d claimed that her ex-husband had been arrested for felonies in New York, Colorado, and Virginia. A search of the rec ords by both prosecutor and defense attorney had found no such record for the deceased professor. Fred Jablin’s only arrests had come at the behest of his wife, when, in the months preceding the divorce, she claimed he’d abused her, charges dropped after police found no evidence and she failed to show up at a hearing.

“There is no such record,” Wade Kizer said, frowning at the judge.

Even now, with the trial over, Piper was lying, and about something so easily discredited. It was as if she couldn’t DIE, MY LOVE / 341

help herself. Perhaps she no longer knew the difference between the truth and her complicated web of lies.

The report corrected, Janus called his fi rst witness, Lavon Guererro, Piper’s childhood friend. “Piper is a tremendous homemaker . . . she was one hundred percent there for her kids . . . a beautiful, gentle spirit,” she testified. “Since we were children, she talked about having children, wanting a family.”

After eliciting testimony from Guererro that showed the two women had lost touch after Piper moved to Virginia, Kizer barely bothered to question her, allowing Janus to move on.

Second up for the defense, Annie Williams, Jocelyn’s soccer coach. She, too, drew the picture of Piper as a super-mom, the one who stood cheerleading her kids from the bleachers during soccer games and gave the Brownie scouts arts- and- crafts lessons.

“She gave her career up to be with her children,” Williams said.

“She didn’t pass the bar in Virginia, did she?” Kizer corrected.

“I don’t know,” Williams admitted.

Next was Betty Rountree. On the stand, she, too, talked about her daughter in glowing terms, the delightful child who’d become the dedicated, loving mother. “Was she ever the same after she lost custody of the children?” Janus asked.

“No. Never,” Betty said. “You don’t take children away from a mother. They have a special bond.”

It was a risky course for Janus. He was trying to humanize Piper, to show she’d been devastated by the custody battle, perhaps explaining in a small way what happened. Of course, the testimony also bolstered the prosecution’s claim of motive, that Piper had killed to get back her children.

The defense’s final witness was their most effective, Mike Gano, Tina’s son and Piper’s nephew. She’d been a loving 342 / Kathryn Casey

aunt, he testified, one who’d played with him on the fl oor as a child, who introduced him to the beautiful things in life, art and drama, passions he’d carried with him into adult-hood. Visiting Fred and Piper in Austin, he said, had been a happy time, a house filled with laughter, love, and nature.

Piper made the world around her beautiful, he said, and she deeply loved her three children.

“How did the children feel about their mother?” Janus asked.

“They loved her,” he said. “They were emotionally and spiritually inseparable.”

Mike Gano appeared a son anyone would have been proud of, preppy and proper, and deeply devoted to his aunt, grateful for all she’d done for him.

“Will you be there to support her now?” Janus asked.

“Yes,” he said. “She was always there for me.”

With that, the defense portion rested and Wade Kizer took center stage. He called no witnesses to the stand; instead he reminded the judge of the events leading up to the murder. Piper had prepared for Fred’s murder for more than a week, planning it carefully, taking steps to hide her identity and give the impression her sister, Tina, had been the one to fly to Richmond to gun down Fred Jablin.

“At any time she could have turned back, and we wouldn’t be here now,” Kizer said. “But she didn’t . . . three shots, one, two, three, and Fred Jablin was cut down . . . it was an execution . . . she shot the father of her own children.”

Piper was intelligent, well educated, with a supportive family. She had much going for her. Yet she chose murder.

“And she’s shown no remorse,” he said. “The three children are as much victims as their father. They lost their father.

Their mother to prison. If they live to be eighty years old their lives will be forever changed.”

After her attorney made a few more brief comments, urg-DIE, MY LOVE / 343

ing mercy for his client, Piper rose to address the court. In a hesitant voice, her hands shaking, she rambled, reading from sheets of paper she had on the table before her. “If someone had asked me months ago, I would have told them my children need a father,” she said in a tearful voice. Her face flushed, she read on. “I’ve always maintained the children need a father. They also need a mother.”

She talked in circles, saying over and over again that she would never have taken their father from her children, that she loved them, implying that taking her from them would only harm the children further. She gave up her career for them. Implicit was the idea that she had given up everything to get them, killing their father, but in the process losing them forever.

“I have been punished already,” she said, casting herself as the victim. “The loss of my reputation, my assets, my children. I request for the children compassion and mercy.”

Over and over she said it, just as she had throughout the contentious years of the divorce, “for the children . . . for the children . . . for the children.” Yet no one in that courtroom could have doubted that in her quest to reclaim them, Piper Rountree had dealt her own children the most devastating of blows.

With that she sat down, folding her hands before her face as if she were praying.

Finally, it was Judge L. A. Harris’s turn. Piper never looked up at him, but he sized her up squarely.

“In any first degree murder case there’s an element of premeditation, willful, deliberate,” he said. But he went on to say that in this case it went beyond that, taking in a full week of planning. He didn’t replay the trial for those who’d gathered, knowing they’d all heard of the wig, gun, lock, and fake identity before. Instead he went on. “The victim, Fred Jablin, was not only an ex-husband, he was a father . . . if there were 344 / Kathryn Casey

ever equal victims in a case it’s the three children . . . at home sleeping as their father is gunned down in their own driveway.”

A look of revulsion on his face, the judge continued,

“. . . I am not going to do the easy thing in the case. I intend to do the right thing.”

Undoubtedly knowing what was coming, Piper appeared to steel herself, her back rigid. Then the judge delivered her sentence: life in prison. Her first possibility of parole would be in twenty years. Piper cried, and her family and friends clasped hands, tears streaming down their cheeks.

It was over.

Minutes later Piper Rountree, attorney, artist, and self-described loving mother, was again handcuffed. She held her head erect, her face blank, as she was led from the courtroom through a back door, behind which she’d disappear for the rest of her life into the Virginia prison system. Despite all the evidence against her, she had never said the one thing that might truly have made a difference, what so many had waited to hear: that she was sorry.