A Mother's Trial (26 page)

Thoughts had raced in his head, darting in and out of his consciousness. He wondered about that damn polygraph Pris had taken a few weeks ago, whether maybe they should have pursued that some more. She had gone in for the test with the attitude that if she passed, it would impress the police, maybe force them to return Mindy to them.

But Pris had been in such a state about everything, Steve was certain every nerve in her body had jumped whenever the examiner mentioned Tia’s or Mindy’s name. He was positive he could be lying through his teeth and still pass one of those things, that he could make any part of his body lie quiet if he told it to. But Pris was as emotional and wrought-up as hell, and that’s where these tests fell down on the job. She had passed most of the exam: Later she had tried to reconstruct the questions and wrote down what she remembered and showed it to him. About half the questions had been control questions designed to establish a baseline for truthful and untruthful responses. There had been four questions directly relevant to the case, and she had done all right on three of them.

“When he asked me whether I
intentionally
induced a
sodium substance
into Tia or Mindy, I freaked out,” she told him. “You know I’ve been going around telling everyone I would never intentionally harm any of my children. I told the examiner that the use of that word was what I was responding to.”

“What did he say?”

“He agreed—because I passed the question about whether I had knowledge of what caused the high sodium to occur and the one about whether I felt directly responsible for Tia’s death. He said I should probably redo the test and reword some of the questions, that he would talk to Ragghianti about it.”

But the test had never been rescheduled. Everyone had focused on that one question, deciding that a report should not be written by the polygraph examiner because the results were inconclusive and wouldn’t help Priscilla.

It was the way this whole damn thing was going, Steve thought as he lined up to speak with the municipal court clerk about Priscilla’s bail. Here Steve ran into another snag. The court clerk was accustomed to dealing with bail bondsmen and didn’t know what to do with a certified check for $40,000. So they danced Steve back and forth in a kind of crazy waltz of frustration. The jail wouldn’t release Priscilla without a receipt, and no one would issue one.

Finally the transaction was completed. Then he waited. The processing for Priscilla’s release stretched into the afternoon. When she emerged, shortly after five-thirty, she flew into his arms. Ten minutes later they were knocking at the Doudiets’ door. Erik and Jason launched themselves at their mother, hugging and kissing and patting her. Everyone was crying. Priscilla was home.

8

The fire flashed, arced, and sped up the flesh of her arm to her shoulder and neck. Suspended for a moment on the point of understanding, Priscilla stared at the flaming cup of white liquid gas that she still clutched, watching it shrivel—the edges blackening and curling like a leaf blown haphazardly into a barbecue fire—in her hand. Then she was on the ground by the campfire, rolling.

“Priscilla!” Steve was by her side at once, pouring handfuls of dirt on her bathing suit as she twisted, trying to smother the flames with it.

Skip Schaefer sprinted across the Lake Berryessa campground to the clothesline and was back in a moment with an armful of wet towels. Nancy Schaefer added a bedspread, and with these they wrapped Priscilla.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Jason and three-year-old Scotty Schaefer were in hysterics. Marietta moved to comfort them, her face ashen.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured. “Oh, my God. What more can happen?”

“Someone call an ambulance!” Steve cried.

“Let’s get her in the car. It will be faster if we meet the ambulance at the turnoff,” Skip said. He helped Priscilla to the car. “Nancy, how is she?”

“She’s pretty badly burned,” Nancy said. She looked anxiously at Priscilla, watching her chest. “But her breathing is okay.”

“Skip and I will take her—you and Marietta stay here,” Steve said to Nancy.

“But Nancy’s a nurse—shouldn’t she go?” Marietta said.

“I’m so cold! Oh, I’m so cold,” Priscilla moaned from the car. The pain was suddenly excruciating, focusing in on her right arm. She began to shake. Quickly Nancy rolled up the car windows.

“I think I’d better stay here to help Marietta with the kids,” Nancy said. “It’s not life-threatening—I can see it’s not life-threatening.”

Priscilla sat and cried and trembled as Skip drove the ten miles to the crossroads where the ambulance would have to turn off.

“It’s going to be all right, Pris,” Steve kept saying.

“Oh, it hurts—it hurts so much.” She struggled to turn her mind from the pain. This was supposed to have been her last weekend of peace. The preliminary hearing was scheduled to start Monday. The twenty-four days since her arrest had been one of the worst periods in her life.

They had not appeared in court to plead for Mindy’s return. After Priscilla’s arrest, such a petition was no longer feasible, and they had been forced to abandon the effort. It had been an active pursuit—Priscilla had seen to that. She had asked friends to write to Catholic Social Service recommending that Mindy be returned home; Mary Vetter told Priscilla that she had received over twenty-five favorable letters and not a single negative one. But after the arrest, Priscilla realized the futility of their situation.

Until then, Mary had not been pushing to place Mindy in a new adoptive home, although she indicated that there had to be some reasonable time limit. The foster home arrangement could not be allowed to continue indefinitely; it would not be good for Mindy. But after Priscilla’s arrest, Mary called. She was not unkind, but she was firm.

“I’m afraid things have changed nownow. If you persist with the petition to have Mindy returned, we’ll have to take it to court and get some kind of a determination.”

“Well, I know how a judge would rule at this point,” Priscilla said bitterly.

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right. And in any case, I’m certain you realize it just wouldn’t be fair to Mindy—waiting for the outcome of the trial. It could take years. I’ll start thinking about a new family for her,” Mary said.

Priscilla burst into tears. “She’s mine, don’t you see? She’s mine!” she had said.

The camping trip with the Schaefers had been designed as a quiet interlude between Priscilla’s arrest and the furor certain to be generated by the preliminary hearing. Priscilla had vowed not to think about the case. The Schaefers had a sixteen-foot sailboat they could putter about on to help distract her.

That Saturday broke shimmering hot. Priscilla, Steve, Skip, and Nancy drifted on the lake in the boat, baking in the sun, while the boys paddled around on rafts and Marietta sunbathed on shore.

At dinnertime they came off the lake for hamburgers. Priscilla discovered a paper bag of charcoal briquettes in the camper but no one had remembered the lighter fluid.

“Maybe I can just light the bag and start it that way,” Priscilla said. She knelt by the fire pit and lit the paper, watching it as it flared and burned quite merrily for two minutes. Then it went out.

“Here, I’ll go down to the store and pick up some fluid,” Steve said. He started to leave, then paused and came back. “But you have a Coleman stove, Skip. Can’t we just use some of your gas?”

“No, no,” Nancy said immediately. “We shouldn’t; it’s dangerous.”

“Well, just put a little in a cup. That should be all right,” Steve said. Skip crossed to their supplies and returned with a Styrofoam cup. Priscilla took it out of his hand and poured a little on the dead coals.

“Go ahead, pour it all on,” Steve said. And so she had.

The ambulance, lights and siren flaring, met Skip’s car at the turnoff to Berryessa and drove Priscilla to the Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa. The attendants poured saline solution on the burns while Priscilla writhed and shivered. In the Emergency Room, the doctor administered Demerol, started an IV, and washed the burns that covered her right arm and shoulder, her neck, and patches of her chest and abdomen. He charted her burns as first and second degree and arranged to transfer her to Kaiser-San Rafael. It was the last place Priscilla wanted to go, but continued hospitalization in any but a Kaiser facility would not be covered by Steve’s hospital plan.

Steve rode with her in the ambulance, back through Napa and Sonoma counties to Marin, but for Priscilla the trip was a blur of half-drugged pain.

“Hang in there, honey,” Steve repeated continually in her ear. And under his breath once, she heard him mutter, “C’mon, God, this is enough.”

After a stay in Kaiser’s Emergency Room, they transferred her into a room and Dr. Ritchings, a surgeon, came in to examine her. She was fogged with pain medication but she could hear Steve.

“Pris, we’re not going to leave you. The Schaefers have notified the Doudiets already, and they’re setting up a sheet for everybody to sign to make certain you’re not alone here—ever. I don’t trust these suckers—and I’m going to tell Dave Neukom when I see him exactly why not. Don’t worry, he’ll watch his backside while you’re here.”

“Um.” Priscilla drifted off. She remembered little of the next few days, but she was vaguely aware of comforting hands. Later she noticed a considerable amount of activity outside her door. People wanting to see the burned murderer, she supposed bitterly. She recognized some of the nurses from pediatrics, but only Debby Roof and Maria Sterling came in. The rest just stared at her. Maria had been in the E.R. when Priscilla arrived, and had brought her up to her room. She had been sympathetic and kind. Of the doctors Priscilla knew, Dr. Arnhold, who had once been the boys’ pediatrician, visited several times. Sara Shimoda did not appear.

There had been no contact between Priscilla and Sara for some time. After Mindy’s removal to a foster home, Priscilla had agonized for several weeks over what Sara must be thinking. She asked Jim Hutchison to telephone Sara to assure her of Priscilla’s innocence. She questioned Debby and Maria about Sara’s attitude when they came over one day, but they could not tell her much. It had reassured Priscilla that the nurses continued to support her, to express shock and incredulity at the idea that Priscilla might be considered responsible for Tia’s and Mindy’s illnesses. But she was obsessed with wondering about Sara’s reaction; several times she woke from dreams about Sara. Finally she sent her a ten-page letter. Several weeks later, Sara finally telephoned. The conversation lasted for over two hours; Priscilla did most of the talking.

“I just wanted to see how you’re getting on,” Sara told her.

“It’s so hard! I can’t stand it here without Mindy—not knowing how she’s doing—where she is. Mary Vetter says she’s with an older woman so they wouldn’t have to worry about the foster mother getting pregnant.”

“Because of Mindy’s CMV?”

“Yes. But, Sara, it’s so terrible! Imagine how you’d feel if they had taken Elizabeth away!” She wept hysterically into the telephone.

“I know, Priscilla. I’ve been thinking about that,” Sara said.

The conversation had cheered Priscilla. Still, she was haunted by fears that all the doctors thought her guilty. Soon some of the other hospital staff called to reassure her. Rich Coolman told Priscilla that the San Francisco staff’s reaction had been disbelieving.

“The only thing they can figure is that you must have a split personality!” he told her hesitantly.

“But you know I don’t!” Priscilla answered.

“Of course,” Rich said.

Since the arrest there had been no further word from Sara. Once again Priscilla asked Jim to call her. “Just tell her I’m hurting so much over this,” Priscilla said. But Jim reported back that Sara had been cool.

And now Priscilla was forced to stay at a hospital where she knew herself to be hated and feared. But at least she was never alone.

Several times Jim Hutchison stayed the night with her, acting as a “special” nurse. He asked her about the status of the hearing.

“My lawyer had to appear with Dr. Ritchings to get the preliminary hearing put off. The doctor says I’ll be here two weeks.”

“You had a serious burn, Priscilla,” Jim said.

Once, in a feeble attempt at a joke, he gestured at the IV line and said, “Here, I’ll just put a little sodium in here!” But Priscilla didn’t laugh.

Later she turned to Jim and said, “Now I suppose they’ll be saying I did this to myself.”

Jim reached for her hand and said nothing.

9

On Tuesday morning, June 13, 1978, three weeks after it was originally scheduled to start, Priscilla Phillips’s preliminary hearing began in Municipal Courtroom Eleven at the Marin County Civic Center. The hearing—at the request of the defendant—was closed to the public, and a gag order remained in effect. The only people present were Deputy District Attorney Kathryn Mitchell, Detective Ted Lindquist, attorney Roger Garety, and his associate Sheila Reisinger, Priscilla and Steve Phillips, Judge Gary Thomas, the court reporter, clerk, and bailiff. The courtroom door was locked.

Normally, Kit Mitchell would have selected as her courtroom assistant the district attorney’s own staff investigator, Charles Neumark. But at the special session of the Phillips preliminary hearing the week before, she had requested that Neumark be replaced by Ted Lindquist. Lindquist had done all the investigative work on the case and was thoroughly familiar with it. Judge Thomas had agreed to the change.

Ted had anticipated this approval. He had already received permission from the captain and from Chief Benaderet to work full time with the DA on the preliminary hearing. Everyone in the police department recognized the necessity of this. In the last few weeks, Ted had relied upon and received the total support of the department. Without it, the pressures of this case would have overwhelmed him.

But he felt that now he had covered every possible base. He had spent hours working with Sara Shimoda and Evelyn Callas on the medical records, and he knew Kit Mitchell had done the same.