An Almost Perfect Murder (25 page)

On Monday, June 25, 2007, Linda Ramirez took the witness stand and gave her sworn testimony about the so-called flirtatious e-mails that she and Chaz Higgs had sent each other over varying periods of time. Over the course of the direct examination by the state in which Christopher Hicks questioned her, significant portions of her and Chaz’s e-mails were read aloud, followed by specific questions, and made a part of the public record in this case. Linda described how she had met Chaz prior to her twenty-first birthday in July 2004, and how he had given her a rose for her birthday, how they had become friends despite Chaz’s marriage to Kathy, and she told the jury some of the things that he had said about Kathy, such as how he hated her and called her a “controlling, manipulative bitch.” The young admissions clerk also explained how she had been fired for sending personal e-mails to Chaz using the hospital’s computers after Kathy had complained to hospital administrators about it and that how, after an absence, they had resumed contact via e-mail. Despite the flirtatious nature of the e-mails, Linda said that she and Chaz had never taken their relationship to the level of being physical.

Under cross-examination by Baum, Linda explained that between the rose incident near her birthday in July 2004 and up until January 2005, there had been no e-mails between them, only personal and friendly contact at work—but nothing inappropriate. The e-mails, she said, hadn’t started until January 2005. It had been during that approximate six-month period that Chaz had begun to share personal information with Linda, such as that he was married but that he was planning to get a divorce. She indicated that she had no intention of dating or seeing him while he was married, and she had told him so.

Her testimony showed that there were only two occasions in which she had met with Chaz outside of work—once when they had taken an hour-long drive together to talk, and again when she saw his truck in traffic on the way to work in which she had followed him into a gas station, where they talked for a few minutes. Upon saying good-bye at the hospital, however, Linda said that she had kissed him. At one point, Linda told the jury that most of the e-mails between her and Chaz had been deleted, and that she had only printed out a portion of them to save.

When Chaz had told Linda that he was planning to leave Kathy, he had also told her that he was looking for a place to live. He also wrote:
I did what I did with us to protect you from her.

“Didn’t you understand that to mean that he stopped corresponding with you, that he stopped having this flirtatious relationship with you because of what Kathy Augustine had done to you, actually getting you fired?” Baum asked. “You understood that.”

“Yes.”

“So what he did was he broke it off with you to the extent that you had a relationship with him because he didn’t want to cause you any more problems, right?”

“Right.”

A short time later, Baum brought up an e-mail in which Linda had said to Chaz:
I really, really want to see you. Maybe on one of your days off, you should rent a room at a hotel and let me know, and I could meet you there and we can do dirty things.

“That was your e-mail to him,” Baum said.

“Yes.”

“It was flirtatious, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, we know about the Internet and how people play roles and go into chat rooms and pretend they’re something that they’re not,” Baum said. “Isn’t that really what we’re talking about here?”

“No, not really,” Linda replied.

“Oh, you really wanted to meet with him?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Okay. But you never did.”

“I didn’t.”

“Not because you didn’t want to, but Mr. Higgs just simply didn’t take you up on that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Right?”

“Exactly. . . .”

“. . . And you kind of moved on with your life,” Baum said a few minutes later. “In fact . . . we now see you sort of referring to your relationship with Mr. Higgs as a friendship.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that how you considered it at that point?”

“Yes.”

“He never—Chaz never made a suggestion or an invitation to you, ‘Let’s meet. Meet me at this hotel, meet me at this weekend resort,’ anything like that. He never did any of that, did he?”

“No.”

“In fact,” Baum said, “the only invitation was when you wrote him about him getting a room and the two of you could be together, to which he never pursued, correct?”

“Yes.”

 

 

On redirect, Hicks asked Linda about a time when she and Chaz had made plans to meet. Linda had taken a day off from work, and Kathy had been planning a trip to Las Vegas. However, Chaz had backed out of the plan—Linda could not recall whether he had backed out because Kathy’s plans had been canceled, or whether it was because Kathy had wanted him to accompany her. Hicks pointed out, however, how Linda had candidly responded to Chaz that she would have gone through with the idea of getting a room at a hotel.

“Did his e-mail . . . where he proclaimed his love to you and stated that he had made a pact with himself that he was going to live every day making . . . his wife’s life a living hell, that he lived every day manipulating her and driving her crazy and that he hated her and wanted to make her break, and that he had nothing else to lose because you were everything he wanted and it was ripped away, so that it was his quest in life to drive that bitch crazy, did your inclination to go rent a room with him, did that e-mail have anything to do with that inclination?”

“Yes. . . .”

“Did you at that point feel that he was removed from his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Did it sound to you that Mr. Higgs just wanted a friendship?” Hicks asked.

“No.”

“When he wrote to you,
I can make you the happiest woman on this earth.... I know I can. I know me, and I know what I’m capable of and what I can do for you in every way. Again, I am not trying to freak you out here. I just love you, and that is a fact. You’re all I wanted since I first saw you. I remember the rose I gave you. I wanted to give you a million roses because that’s what I felt. I wanted to run away with you and never look back. I want to look in your beautiful eyes every day and tell you how much I love you. I do not want anything else in my life. It has been this way for two years. I want you with all my heart.
Did you perceive that as someone who wanted to continue a friendship?”

“No, not a friendship,” Linda responded.

“More than a friendship?”

“Yes.”

 

 

During his recross-examination, Baum pointed out that Linda Ramirez was not “engaged in a raging love affair with Chaz Higgs” in July 2006, the month that his wife had died. He reiterated that she and Chaz had kissed once, and that there had been major gaps in communication between the two of them. At that point, he stressed, the two of them had considered themselves just friends, and elicited a response from Linda indicating that there wasn’t going to be a love affair between them, at least not as far as she had been concerned. Baum reminded the jury that Linda had provided Chaz an opportunity to meet with her and to engage in a more intimate relationship, but that had never happened.

Chaz, it was inferred, had remained faithful to his wife.

Before the defense began presenting its witnesses, attorneys Alan Baum and David Houston filed two motions with the court—one for a direct acquittal of their client on the defense’s contention that there “is no direct evidence of any crime in this case,” and the other to throw out the testimony regarding the results of urine testing on the grounds that the state had failed to establish a reliable chain of custody for “whatever it was that the FBI tested in the way of urine.” Judge Kosach denied both motions.

With regard to the motion for acquittal, Kosach said that there was sufficient evidence to “get to the jury in regard to succinylcholine in the victim’s system.

“How did it get there?” Kosach asked. “And even though motive is not a legal element, it’s certainly been shown. So the motion is denied. I’m not going to . . . direct the jury to a not guilty verdict.”

As for the motion to throw out the scientific evidence that pertained to the urine testing, Kosach said that he didn’t see a break in the chain of custody.

The defense, it was recalled, had already presented their first witness, Dr. Anton Sohn, out of turn. With everyone back inside the courtroom, the defense team called their next witness, William Michael Higgs, Chaz’s twin brother.

 

 

In response to Houston’s questions, William Higgs told the jury that he had first become aware of Chaz’s marriage to Kathy Augustine when Chaz had called him in September 2003. Although he said that he had been surprised that they had gotten married, primarily because they hadn’t been dating all that long, he said that he hadn’t been particularly concerned because they had seemed like they were very happy to be together.

“They were bubbly,” William said. “They were like schoolkids. They looked like they were in love. I figured they were two adults and they knew what they were doing.”

William said that he had been living in North Carolina when Chaz told him about the marriage, and that he later came out to visit them in Nevada for about a week. He said that he didn’t think that they’d had enough time to learn much about each other, and he said at the time of his visit he hadn’t known what Kathy Augustine’s position had been with the state of Nevada.

William testified that his brother and Kathy were still happy by the end of 2003 and the early part of 2004 when the two of them had traveled to Washington, D.C., when she was being considered for the position of the U.S. treasurer. He said that he hadn’t seen them during 2004, due to serving in Iraq with the National Guard after his unit was placed on active-duty status, but that he had remained in contact with Chaz and Kathy throughout the year. He said that he began to notice that their relationship began going downhill shortly after commencement of the impeachment proceedings against Kathy.

“After that started,” William said, “their relationship . . . just turned bad.”

“Do you know why it turned bad?” Houston asked.

“Kathy was under a lot of stress, she was under a lot of pressure, and she took it out on Chaz.”

William Higgs indicated that there were a number of e-mails between him and his sister-in-law due to the fact that Chaz had informed Kathy that he wanted out of the relationship. William said that he began playing the role of a marriage counselor of sorts, in part because he had been receiving requests from Kathy for advice on how to keep the marriage together. He said that he told her, “Just stick with it. It will all work out. You guys haven’t been together that long.” He said that Chaz hadn’t made any secret out of the fact that he wanted out of the marriage. He said that the purpose of his e-mails was to encourage them to remain together.

“Why did you want to see them stay together?” Houston asked.

“Because I remembered how I saw them together the first time,” William replied. “They were very much in love. And I thought they hadn’t been married long enough to just give it up. I felt they should stick it out.”

“What do you think about that advice today?” Houston asked.

“In hindsight, when things really got bad, I probably should have just told them to do the opposite. I probably should have just told them to split and get it over with.”

 

 

The defense also called Dr. Earl Nielsen, a clinical psychologist with a specialty in life crisis, grief reaction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, to testify about his evaluation of Chaz Higgs. Nielsen had been brought on board by the defense less than a week earlier, and hadn’t had much time to fully study the case or to interview people associated with it, besides Chaz Higgs. He agreed early in his testimony with Houston that a person needs to know something about a person in order to decide the appropriateness of their response centered on a grief situation.

Nielsen said that some people experience grief with shock and panic initially, and others react with numbness and act as if they don’t respond at all. Still, others react with denial and simply won’t believe what they’ve been told, and the list, he said, goes on to include many possible responses to grief. It would be difficult, he indicated, to put a label on it, and he agreed that the calmness displayed by Chaz during the “crisis” (as opposed to grief) may have been appropriate considering his “exceptional training in repeated settings to deal with (the) most extreme kinds of crisis” and the years he spent serving in the military. Such a response wouldn’t mean that he didn’t care about his patient or what had happened, but instead would indicate that he had been taught to isolate his own feelings from what was happening at the moment.

Nielsen said that as he attempted to study Chaz Higgs a little further, he had concluded that he was a man who entered relationships with great romantic fantasy and great hope.

“He basically enters personal, intimate relationships wanting the perfect life,” Nielsen testified. “I don’t think that’s real different from the way most people start out. But everybody wants to succeed, and I think he does, too. The weakness that I observed in Mr. Higgs is that he does, in fact, have some trouble with the concept of commitment with no back doors. And he’s been married four times, he’s been divorced three times and had intended to divorce a fourth. Each of those marriages were very short, really. I think the longest was six years, but they weren’t together for six years.”

Nielsen said that what he had observed from Chaz’s descriptions of each of his marriages was that they were all different people, all different situations, but “the consistency is that he started out wanting it to be perfect.” As he discovered that it wasn’t going to be perfect, he looked for ways out, Nielsen said.

“He looked for an escape,” Nielsen said. “That may also be part of his romantic fantasy. . . . I don’t believe that he had a relationship with anyone that he left for someone else. Each of the relationships that he had before, he ended the relationship before he went on to another relationship. . . .”

With regard to Linda Ramirez, Chaz had begun another romantic fantasy, “a back door, a way out,” because he had not yet resolved his conflict with Kathy, Nielsen said. He had not yet figured out a way to leave her, but he didn’t want to leave her without an alternative, according to Nielsen. Nielsen testified that he had not seen anything in this case that would cause him to believe that Chaz Higgs would resort to murder.

“And when Mr. Higgs basically says,
I will live every day making her life a living hell. I live every day to manipulate her, driving her crazy.... I hate this woman, and I will make her break,”
Houston said, “how is that consistent with a man who can still say, ‘I care for Kathy Augustine’?”

“He has this conflict,” Nielsen said. “He—on one level, he entered the relationship with Kathy Augustine with great excitement. This is going to save me. This is going to be the best thing I ever did. My life is finally going to change and be perfect. When he deduced that that was not necessarily true, he started to think about other ways to make his life necessarily perfect. And that meant some other object. But he can do both at once. We can have fantasies. We can have wishes. And sometimes that helps us go on with the thing that we struggle with.”

“Dr. Nielsen, what’s a sociopath?” Tom Barb asked during cross-examination.

“Well, it’s a . . . term describing essentially a person without a conscience,” Nielsen responded.

“And a person without a conscience does what?”

“Sociopaths tend to be cold, calculating, manipulative. They have their own best interests at heart. They can be very friendly and kind and cooperative and social, until that conflicts with their needs, and then they can be brutal and vicious and very deceitful.”

“Sounds to me like you just described Mr. Higgs from what you’ve told us earlier,” Barb said.

“I think that if you string all the pieces together, almost each of the things that I said could be attributed to Mr. Higgs,” Nielsen said. “But it’s . . . a bit out of context.”

A short time later, Barb asked Nielsen if he thought that it was unusual that Chaz was reading the newspaper while riding in the ambulance with Kathy en route to the main hospital after being transferred from South Meadows.

“Well, again, I don’t know how to use a statistic to measure unusual,” Nielsen said.

“All right,” Barb responded. “You don’t think . . . we should think ill of him because he sat in an ambulance going lights and sirens from South Meadows to Washoe Main and read a newspaper?”

“No, I don’t.”

“What would it take for you to say to us, ‘Yeah, you should feel ill of him’?”

“I don’t know,” Nielsen replied.

“You don’t have any idea? Nothing in the world could make you feel ill of him?”

“Well, if someone in the ambulance had been able to observe him making some kind of overt comment or gesture that was derogatory—or demeaning—then certainly one would feel ill of him. . . . The problem I have with the newspaper is that we have to take that out of context and interpret what it meant, and its meaning can be many.”

“Out of context.”

“That’s all I said.”

“You’re in the ambulance, your wife is in the back, she’s near death, you are riding lights and sirens, and you read the newspaper. How can you take that out of context?”

“You can also read the newspaper, as I said, to avoid the grief, to avoid having to think about [it]. It’s used as a distraction.”

Nielsen had previously testified that grief usually sets in at the time of a loved one’s death, and that in Chaz’s case, he had been dealing with a “crisis” until Kathy actually passed away.

“But, Doc, she’s not dead yet,” Barb retorted. “There’s no grief yet. You just said that.”

“Well, okay. To avoid having to react to the fear or the anxiety of ‘this is terrible [that] this is happening. I don’t want to deal with it, and I don’t want anybody else to confront me about it. I’m going to escape.’”

“Okay . . . she gets in the hospital Saturday morning. Sunday morning, he asks—calls a nurse and says, ‘Will you bring my paycheck out . . . to the parking lot?’”

“Correct.”

“And he brings her doughnuts for doing that.”

“Yes.”

“And now, again—is he ignoring everything that’s going on just so he doesn’t have to deal with his wife being in the hospital? Is that what that’s about?”

“It may be. It may also be that he . . . has enough self-control and enough fear of being seen as weak that he focuses on getting the little daily things done that need to be done.”

“Okay. Ms. Augustine died July eleventh in the afternoon, about four-thirty. July the tenth he goes to PERS, which is the state retirement system, and he signs up for her retirement, with him as the beneficiary, and if she dies, he gets it. And he signed up for the immediate payment of that. Does that change your opinion about Mr. Higgs?”

“It raises some questions,” Nielsen said, somewhat taken aback. “That’s a piece I didn’t know.”

“Oh. Well, let me show you,” Barb said, grandstanding. “By the way, do you recognize his handwriting, or would you?”

“I would not.”

“May I approach the witness?” Barb asked the judge.

“Yes,” Kosach said.

“This says at the top, ‘Public Employees Retirement System of Nevada.’ It’s dated July 10, 2006, and it says, ‘Chaz Higgs.’”

“Uh-huh.”

“All right? And he marked, ‘Option 2.’ What is Option 2?”

“This option provides an actuarially reduced allowance for lifetime of the retired employee,” Nielsen responded. “After the retired employee’s death, the allowance will continue in the same amount to the beneficiary for the remainder of the beneficiary’s lifetime.”

“Who is the beneficiary on the front page?” Barb asked.

“Chaz Higgs.”

“Thank you, Doctor. Now, what does that do for your opinion of Mr. Higgs?”

A little later on, Barb again turned the subject toward Linda Ramirez and the e-mails between her and Chaz Higgs, and suggested that it was through those e-mails and his relationship with her that his sociopathic personality came to light.