Before He Wakes (40 page)

Barbara’s close friend Carol Galloway said that she had known Russ for a year or so before she met Barbara and had played golf with him. She and Barbara hadn’t become close until Barbara and Russ joined their church, Homestead Heights, about a year before Russ’s death, she said.

“I will ask you is that Russ Stager’s voice?” Cotter said of the tape.

“In my opinion, it is not.”

Was she sure?

“Absolutely.”

Cotter took her through her actions after she had learned of Russ’s death. She had gone to see Barbara at her parents’ house, she said.

“What was she like? What was she acting like?”

“She was very emotional, very upset. It took probably forty-five minutes before we could even talk to her.”

When she had asked what she could do, Carol said, Barbara had told her that the funeral home needed Russ’s dress uniform. She offered to fetch it from Barbara’s house. While she and her husband were looking for the uniform, she said, she noticed soiled towels and clothing and decided to take them home and wash them for Barbara.

“I’d picked up a red flannel, red plaid flannel nightshirt, or shirt, man’s shirt, actually, that was covered in blood down the front and the insides of both arms. The sleeves had been rolled up, so it was probably this length,” she said, demonstrating on her own arm, “and there was blood in this area right here.”

Where would the length of the shirt reach on a woman Barbara’s size? Cotter asked.

“Four or five inches below the waist.”

Carol said that she had put the shirt into a laundry basket with towels and other items, and taken it home and washed it. On Wednesday night after the funeral, she called Barbara and told her about the clothes.

“She told me that was the shirt she had on that morning, and she would just as soon not ever see it again. I was standing in the kitchen at the time. I walked into the laundry room, picked it up and threw it in the garbage can.”

Cotter asked what she had found in the closet in Barbara’s bedroom. Clothing, she said, mostly Russ’s.

“On one side and a half of the other side were all men’s clothes, and only one half of one side contained women’s clothes and they were—do I go further?”

“Sure.”

“They were quite expensive clothing. My husband and I both commented on the fact that there were a lot of clothes there, and I primarily buy my husband’s clothes, so I am aware of the cost of men’s clothes.”

“Why is that important?” Evenson asked of her testimony about Russ’s expensive clothing.

“It was important I think at the time we mentioned it, because of the fact that we knew Russ was a teacher and didn’t work in a coat and tie, as my husband works in his business, so therefore we noted there was a lot of suits and a lot of expensive clothing.”

“You’re not trying to tell this jury that she didn’t have nice clothes?”

“No, oh, no.”

“As a matter of fact, she had real nice clothes and a lot of jewelry, didn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t say she had a lot of jewelry, no.”

“Wasn’t it true that just about every time you saw her, she had a new outfit on?”

“No, sir, it wasn’t.”

“She was well dressed, wasn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t say she was more well dressed than anybody else is.”

Had she shopped with her? Evenson asked. No. Seen her use her credit card? No.

Had Barbara been in a room away from the coffin at the funeral home on the night before Russ’s funeral?

“There was such a mob of people there that night that it’s kind of hard to tell who was where,” she said.

Did Barbara talk with anybody?

“As coherently as anybody could talk. At one point, she almost passed out and we had to take her out to an area where she could get some air. I never left her side that night.”

Following a fifteen-minute recess, Cotter called Barbara’s friend and former neighbor from Randolph County, Brenda Monroe, who recalled the activities at Barbara’s house on the night Larry was killed.

Soon after she got to the house, she said, Barbara asked her to call her parents and the Fords to tell them of the death.

“I did call the Terrys, but I just didn’t feel like I could call the Fords, and so I told them that we had called our pastor and to just wait and let him do that.”

“Is that why they were called significantly later than the Terrys?”

“Yes.”

How had Barbara acted? Cotter asked.

“She was upset. I was sitting beside her on the sofa, and I could feel her body shaking. She was trembling. I gave her a Valium.”

The Valium, she said, had come from their pastor.

Cotter asked Monroe to describe Barbara’s demeanor during the time she and the boys had stayed with them after Larry’s death.

“Well, there was times when she broke down. Some days were better than others. We spent a lot of time entertaining the kids. I didn’t discuss the thing much with her. We just tried to change the subject.”

“Did she express any sorrow or sadness?” Cotter asked.

“Yes, she did. She said she missed Larry and that she didn’t know what they were going to do without him.”

“Did she cry?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Were there times when she would cry a lot?”

“There was times when she cried, you know. I don’t know what you mean by a lot.”

Brenda said that her understanding of Larry’s death was that the gun had been dropped and went off. She was there, she said, when Buheller had come to the house to discuss the shooting with Barbara.

“That was what with me standing listening, that’s what I got had happened,” she said. “He was commenting something about the cartridge went under the bed, you know. That was discussed. I do remember that.”

Evenson went swiftly on the attack.

“Did she tell you that she went upstairs and she found Larry in the bed gurgling?”

“Yes, it was a gurgling noise.”

“Did she tell you she called her mother first?”

“She had already called her mother when I called her mother, but Mrs. Terry didn’t know then that Larry was dead.”

“So she called Mrs. Terry first, and Mrs. Terry said, ‘Hey, you need to call an ambulance,’ is that what happened?”

“I don’t know. I think she did call. I believe she did say she called her mother first, but I’m not sure.”

Did she remember Barbara and the Terrys staying in a separate room at the funeral home, while the Fords were in the room with the coffin?

“No.”

“You didn’t notice that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Barbara’s sister-in-law, Mary Terry, an accountant and mother of two, said that she frequently had seen Barbara and Russ at family Sunday dinners at her in-laws’ house. They also had gone to Duke football games with Russ and Barbara and often to their house to watch sporting events on cable TV.

The voice on the tape, she said, was not Russ’s.

Had Mary helped Barbara settle affairs after Russ’s death? Cotter asked.

“The day before, I asked her if she needed any help going through her paperwork. So we planned a time to meet, and we did that on Thursday after his death.”

Barbara had been out and had just gotten home, Mary said. There was little conversation. “It was more like staring at the wall.”

She asked Barbara if there were any insurance policies or notes that they could go through.

“She said, ‘Yeah, it’s around here somewhere. I’ll have to go look for it.’”

Barbara went to the bedroom and came back with an expandable file, went through a drawer in the kitchen and found some things. It took her nearly twenty minutes to come up with the stuff, Mary claimed.

“She just set it there on the chair, and I took the papers out and just went through them and I tried to account for everything I could,” Mary said.

She finally found several insurance policies, but some had old dates and she wasn’t sure if they were valid, she said. Some turned out not to be.

“Did she know the status of her insurance?” Cotter asked.

“I don’t think so. I would question her about different things … I would have to ask her two or three times just to get the information yes or no, if she knew anything about it. Most of the time I got a no. I just had to keep reading the policies until I could find something.”

Was she the person who had come up with the $98,000 figure that had been put on documents at the office of the clerk of court? Cotter asked.

“It was around that amount, yes.”

“That was your best guess at the time?”

She nodded.

“Did you find his or her will in that folder?” Cotter asked.

“I didn’t see hers, but his was there.”

After Larry’s death, Mary said, she and her son had stayed for several days with Barbara “to have somebody there.” Barbara had needed somebody to witness Larry’s signature on his will, she said, and she had done so, using a letter about business that Larry had sent her to verify the signature.

Had she witnessed Russ’s will as well?

She had witnessed the signature only, she said.

“I took the note payment from the Mustang, which was in his name only. I had that paper there and it was the same signature and that’s all I did.” Her husband also had signed it, she acknowledged.

“Was it notarized when you and Al signed it?”

“It was not.”

Cotter then assaulted the question of debt head-on, trying to show that Russ was just as responsible. Mary recalled an occasion when Barbara had called to borrow $200 from her brother to pay an insurance bill. She and Al were thinking about buying a new house then, and only a few weeks later, they had gone looking at houses with Russ and Barbara. “Russ was driving and we were just driving around.”

Russ mentioned that he and Barbara had just joined Croasdaile Country Club, she said.

“When I heard that, I got really hot, because here it was we were loaning our money out for someone to join a country club. We just brushed it off as a lesson learned, but it just really surprised us.”

Cotter asked about the cars Russ and Barbara had owned.

“It started off, I think, with a Cadillac, and it went to a BMW, no Mercedes, not BMW. Then it went to … they sold the Mercedes—I remember having a conversation with Barbara that it paid for a station wagon, a boat, and, I’m thinking, a motorcycle. And then next thing I knew there were two Jeeps, one right after the other, because it seems like one was green and one was blue, and then I kind of lost track. I know there was a 280Z. There was an RX7. These are two-seater jobs, which we thought kind of strange, the four of them, you know, having a two-seater.”

“Were they pretty free spenders?”

“Well, we couldn’t keep up with them, so we just stopped trying, you know. There was no way.”

“But you all made at least as much money as they did, didn’t you?”

“I think so. I’m pretty sure we did. I never could understand how they could manage their money.”

“Were they both equally spending money?”

“It appeared to me like they were. They had just as nice clothes as the other.”

“Did you know whether or not they had Rolex watches?”

“Yeah, when they got those, I remember Barbara coming and saying, ‘Look what Russ got me.’ It was a joint thing. I know he loved fine things and so did she.”

The final point to be made concerned the couple’s marital status. Mary had last seen Russ on Sunday, the week before he died, she said.

“Anything unusual about the way he acted?”

“No,” she said, going on to add that she actually was “kind of envious” of Barbara and Russ. “Because it really seemed like they got along great, I thought.”

Evenson was once again quick to attack.

“You say as far as you were concerned, they looked like they got along great?”

“I thought they did. They always seemed happy together. Half the time I saw them, they were holding hands. He always called her honey.”

“So he treated her nice?”

“Yeah, and vice versa. She always cooked him his favorite meal.”

“In all appearances he loved her, is that correct?”

“Both ways.”

“But it did appear he loved her, didn’t it?”

“It appeared both ways.”

“You’re not answering my question, are you, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

Evenson then challenged her on Russ’s will. Oma Smith had testified that she had notarized Russ’s will more than a year before his death, yet Mary had said the will had no seal. Would she say that Mrs. Smith was mistaken?

“I would.”

“She would be lying about that?”

“Right, because the seal was not there.”

Mary said that she didn’t remember the will being dated, either.

“Any idea who would put that date on there after you went ahead and put your name on it?”