Body Parts (41 page)

“And as the fog lifts off, you realize you did say or do something. That’s the closest thing I might be able to think of for us who don’t have mental disorders [to understand] the lack of deliberation that a person who has mental disorders might experience.”

Even “Sonoma County Doe” testified that Wayne was frantic and didn’t know what he was doing at times, he said.

Mapes defended his questions about victims experiencing arrhythmias due to their past drug abuse, reminding the jury about the pathologists’ testimony that this factor could have contributed to the deaths.

“The reason I asked my question is when it comes to intent to kill, it makes a difference. . . . My argument would be, ‘Well, no, a person may have experienced an arrhythmia after a much shorter period of time, and that doesn’t show an intent to kill.’”

As Canty began his portion of the closing the next morning, he warned the jury that he was going to speak for quite a while. By the time he finished during the afternoon session, the defense’s entire closing had lasted three hours.

His primary goal was to rebut Mazurek’s argument that Wayne made a choice to kill those women, and persuade the jury that Wayne was a victim of a mental condition over which he had no control. He argued that Wayne’s acts were the result of genetic, physical, and environmental factors from which he used alcohol to escape, and that his was a world in which he felt like the “unwanted product of a rape . . . [who] cannot understand women or relate to them.”

“I’m hoping that you’re going on this journey with me to try to put yourself in the place of a person who is, in fact, afflicted with these disorders: an impaired ability to think, concentrate, and make decisions. . . . Memory difficulties. A person who cannot make relationships work, unable to perform self-care and personal hygiene.”

Canty told the jury that Wayne turned himself in because his conscience and “goodness prevailed.”

“As you recall, in a conversation with Detective Freeman, Mr. Ford told him that he felt like God was involved and Detective Freeman indicated, ‘Yes, God sent you to me.’”

Canty took a swipe at Dietz and his bias, highlighting the doctor’s lack of a California medical license and the fact that he hadn’t treated a patient in twenty-five years.

“You might expect that a physician would be kind of interested in the welfare of the patients and ridding the world of disease and things of that sort. But that’s just too boring for Dr. Dietz,” Canty said, alleging that he was “unable to understand empathy and . . . understand the feelings of other people.”

“His business is testifying,” he said.

Canty listed a series of questions for jurors to consider as they deliberated how mental illness affected Wayne’s decision-making process, contending that the answer to one final question would answer all the others.

“How can you reason from one point to another if you have the mental illnesses described, and everybody agrees are present, in this case? And the answer is, you can’t. . . . You are stuck in a different world. You make choices based on what you see: hopelessness, loneliness, abandonment, self-destruction, misinterpretation of events. And you are frantic. And you’re very ill. And you can’t get help. This produces unregulated emotion. Departure of reason. Inability to plan. Panic. And you are controlled by your impulses.”

Canty said common sense dictates that someone who dismembers another is severely disturbed because it is a horrifying concept.

“Someone who turns himself in and wishes to stop killing must have suffered the same horror himself. He must have had difficulty in imagining that he could do these things. Isn’t that the reasonable and simple explanation? And then I guess my question is—why, then, are we looking for another?”

Canty pointed out that even Mazurek felt it necessary to defend “Sonoma County Doe” as a credible witness. Given the evidence that she had falsely accused others, and had engaged in criminal behaviors herself, Canty asked, “What specific facts that she testified to you about can we say are actually true?”

He also noted that the jury heard evidence that Wayne had sex with women with whom he did not engage in paraphilic behaviors, underscoring that “most did not die.”

“So I guess the question is, why are we going to transfer ‘Sonoma Doe’ over to the four homicides?”

Canty reminded the jury of Wayne’s head injury from 1980 and the three medical tests that showed he had brain abnormalities. Canty also revealed that Wayne had suffered a previously undisclosed boxing injury while in the marines.

“We’re mentioning them because sometimes head injuries can change a person’s personality,” he said.

Add in some stressors and the triggering event—Wayne’s visit with Max at the pumpkin patch—just before the first killing, Canty said, “and we suggest to you that that creates a considerable amount of reasonable doubt as to the various mental states that you’re presented to consider in this case.”

The fact that Wayne visited bookstore owner Andy Lowery month after month to try to understand what was going on in his life, Canty said, “is not consistent with the man who is out stalking and psychopathically killing women. You can’t do both.”

Alluding to the storyline of the ex-convict hero seeking redemption in
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo, Canty quoted from the book to illustrate Wayne’s dilemma: “If I speak, I am condemned. If I stay silent, I am damned.”

But, he said, Wayne, like Hugo’s protagonist Jean Valjean, turned himself in, carrying evidence in his pocket that would forever connect him to his crimes.

In conclusion, Canty prepared the jury to watch Wayne’s booking video with a few last questions in mind.

“Is he one of these people who turns himself in, in order to make a plea bargain to get something out of it? He didn’t ask for anything. In fact, he said he thought they were going to kill him. . . . Is this one of these persons who was just tired of running? Well, he isn’t running from anything.”

As in any trial, Mazurek, as the prosecutor, got to have the last word before the jury began its deliberations. His opening gambit was to ask the jury to consider what was real and what wasn’t.

“What is real in this case, and what we know for certain, is that four young girls lost their lives at the hands of this defendant while they were engaged in sexual acts with him. Their deaths are very real.”

Jumping onto Canty’s allusion to
Les Misérables
, Mazurek came up with his own cautionary tale—“The Emperor’s New Clothes”—to impeach the defense’s psychological expert witness.

“I would suggest to you the little tale about the emperor has no clothes relates directly to the testimony of Dr. Meloy,” he said, referring to the expert’s claim that Wayne’s driving around and having sex with Tina Gibbs’s body could be consistent with remorse.

“Now, I know I was not the only one in this courtroom that raised my eyebrow and went, ‘What? What are you talking about? What are you trying to sell us?’”

By the same measure, Mazurek asked the jury to question whether any of Meloy’s testimony was credible. Comparing Meloy to a snake oil salesman, Mazurek urged the jury to weigh the qualifications of Meloy versus Dietz, noting that Meloy relied on the
DSM
as a standard, while Dietz actually wrote parts of the book. He also attacked Meloy for relying on selective details that fit his theory, even in the face of conflicting information.

“Dr. Meloy chose to believe that Dad raped Mom, even though Dad said, ‘No, I didn’t,’ and Dr. Meloy chooses to accept the fact that the defendant was abandoned by his mother as a child, even though Mother says, ‘We were divorced, son wanted to go live with Dad.’”

Mazurek said Meloy relied on unreliable information for his findings, some from Wayne himself, even after admitting the defendant was a liar.

Why, Mazurek asked rhetorically, would Wayne say he had been in a coma for three or nine days back in 1980?

“It’s part of his malingering, part of trying to make things in his past sound worse, so that it benefits him now. ’Cause if you believe he had this coma, then you believe he has this head trauma, then you believe he can’t control his actions. There is no independent evidence of a coma . . . so we know that it’s not real.”

Neither, he said, was the alleged trauma of losing his son, Max. Mazurek reminded the jury of Elizabeth’s testimony that Wayne’s relationship with Max was virtually nonexistent.

“He didn’t care. He wasn’t actively involved. He was more interested in trying to get back with Elizabeth than he was with his son, Max.”

Claiming there was no evidence that Wayne was severely depressed, Mazurek contended that Wayne was cunning, manipulative, and faking his symptoms during his interviews with the detectives so they would sympathize with him, just as he cried to “Sonoma County Doe” so she wouldn’t report the rape to police.

Mazurek defended Dietz’s résumé, noting that it described his practice as forensic psychiatry in consulting,
not
treatment and diagnosis.

“What the defense wants you to believe is that just because he hasn’t got a medical license, when he crosses the border from somewhere else into California, he becomes a moron, that his opinion isn’t valid. . . . If he weren’t qualified, do you think the FBI would” ask him to be a criminal-profiling consultant?

Mazurek also reminded the jury about Dietz’s testimony that Wayne was not psychotic.

“Paraphilic behavior is not an illness. . . . He is sick and twisted . . . but he is not mentally ill, and he is not mentally impaired.”

Mazurek contended that Wayne didn’t surrender out of remorse, but rather to catch a break from authorities.

“Rodney Ford is the true hero in this particular case,” he said. “He is the person that saves lives and solves crimes, and he is the one that did the right thing.”

Wayne may have seemed depressed in the booking video the jury just watched, he said, “but what is he depressed about? Is he depressed about the killings? Or is he now depressed and in a panic . . . that now the police are looking for him because he’s killed four people, and when you’re caught, they’re going to give you the death penalty. That would make you incoherent and inconsolable.”

Finally, Mazurek said that the defendant has a constitutional right to a jury trial and “for all twelve of you members and voices of this community to tell him that he is guilty of first-degree murder. Go back and tell him.”

After delivering instructions to the jury of seven women and five men, Judge Smith told them to take the weekend off and begin deliberating Monday morning, June 19.

On the third day of their deliberations, the jury broke around 1:00
P.M.
, leaving two questions for the judge, who answered them in the jury room the following day.

First, the jurors wanted the date of the “Orange County Doe” rape, which occurred on June 16, 1998.

Second, they asked: “Was there a photo of the evidence from the campsite when it was all laid out at the crime lab? We saw it during Judy Taylor’s testimony, March 15, ’06.” Smith directed them to the photographic exhibits that illustrated those items.

That Friday, the jury had four more queries.

One, the jurors wanted portions read to them from the testimony of pathologist Robert Lawrence.

Two, they wanted to make sure they had the stipulation concerning DNA evidence from April 3.

Third, they asked: “Do we get to look at the autopsy reports themselves?” The answer was no.

And finally, they asked for a legal definition of “mayhem.”

After discussing these questions with the attorneys, Smith explained to the jury that it should disregard the mention of “mayhem” on the transcript of the Freeman interview because Wayne had never been charged with that crime.

The jury deliberated for all or part of seven days. Because the material was so intense, some days the panel could only manage to debate for two or three hours; others, they went a full five hours.

The jurors agreed not to take a straw vote until they had sorted through all the evidence in the case, which took a couple of days.

On the first vote, for the murder of Jane Doe in Humboldt, the group was split between first-degree and second-degree murder. Initially, some members had difficulty going for first-degree because of the slim autopsy evidence, but that got hammered out within a day or so after they went over the forensics again. The final vote was unanimous.

After that, the deliberations progressed fairly quickly. The jury had no trouble agreeing on first-degree for the other three murders and the special circumstance allegation.

Finally, on Tuesday, June 27, 2006, at 11:52
A.M.
, the foreperson told the bailiff that the jury had reached a verdict.

Smith set a time of 2:00
P.M.
so the media and other interested parties had a chance to get to the courthouse for the announcement.

Once court was in session, Smith asked his clerk, Evi Roberson, to do the honors.

Wayne showed no emotion as Roberson read each of the four verdicts.