Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (55 page)

When he claimed that Mae Fischer had a history of bladder problems, Tharp jumped up and said, "There is no evidence of bladder problems in the record."

The judge told the jurors that they could look at the medical records and make their own determination. He'd hardly completed his ruling before Aarestad hurried on. "She admits, and the charts indicate, that she is allergic to K-Y jelly as well as Phisohex. Again, how likely would a person like thai be for a victim of a sexual assault since obviously you are going to have some problems with insertion? . . ."

He discussed Annella St. Thomas. "Again, she can't tell if he is circumcised or not circumcised. . . . No, she just passively lies there and waits for him to come back in. Again, she is Aletha Durtsche's cousin. And I suggest to you that you might consider the blood-is-thicker-than-water issue. . . ."

He had just started on Wanda Hammond when one of the jurors fell asleep. She blinked her eyes open during another objection from Tharp, then dropped off again.

Both sides seemed relieved when the defense lawyer said that Julia Bradbury was "the last one that I want to cover with you." He noted the elderly woman's long-standing bladder problems, the fact that she'd neither seen Story's penis nor complained to the nurse afterward. "Basically she has no concept or recollection of time. Never saw any instruments in the room. Confirms her relationship with Emma Meeks. Again, has some discussion with this same Diana Harrison. . . ."

Story rubbed his eyes and yawned. The judge covered his mouth and turned away. Then Aarestad regained everyone's attention. "Again," he said, still speaking of Julia Bradbury, "looking at her physical condition, we see that she has stress incontinence. . . . How reasonable is it that she would be a victim of a sexual assault? A lady who, to be quite frank with you, has a high chance of urinating on you and making a very messy situation out of you— you know, having to walk out, see other patients, be around."

Knuckles flew to mouths as he said, "It just becomes completely and totally absurd . . . bizarre."

Terry Tharp scribbled on his notepad.

Aarestad looked at his watch again and softened his tone to discuss Marilyn Story. "She is the wife and married for thirty-two years. And I think a wife gets to know her husband during that period of time. And I don't think she would be in this courtroom if he was the deviant that the State would have you believe. She was always there. He would have to have fooled her.

"I believe that women, especially wives, are given a God-given intuition really to know what their husbands are up to . . . She testified they had a good marriage, a good sexual relationship. He is anything but crude, off-colored. . . . She had constant access to his exam rooms. She was there full-time for sixteen years, never found a door locked. Kept an eye on him. . . ."

The lawyer discussed the other supportive witnesses—Joe Brown, the nursing Giffords and Verda Croft, Barbara Shumway— and as he spoke, his sentences became even choppier, telegraphic. "Imogene Hansen worked in his office. . . . Same story. No patient complaint. Uses him as her own physician. No jokes. All business. Totally professional. A completely total moral man. Nothing suspicious ever occurring. Known him for over twenty years."

He was still describing character witnesses in short bursts when Hartman interrupted, "Counsel, you have two minutes left."

Aarestad thanked the judge and rushed on. "Every indication is that he is a straight arrow, about as straight an arrow as you can find. Seems to have three interests in life: his family, his medical practice, and his relationship with God. He is a religious, devout individual. He answered a call to come to Lovell twenty-seven years ago. He raised his family; he has always been here."

He asked the jury not to buy "this obscene case that the State is putting on. Think it through. Weigh it. Come up with your own concept of truth. ... I reiterate: he either did it or didn't do it. He either did all of them or he did none of them. And I ask that you bring in on his behalf a not guilty verdict as to each and every count. . . . And may God bless you, and may you have wisdom."

He had talked for 165 minutes in two completely opposite styles. The courtroom buzzed.

Terry Tharp's forehead was almost as red as his hair as he stood up for the last word. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said in a voice that snapped like a circus whip, "I won't keep you much longer. . . . First of all, I want to apologize for objecting during Mr. Aarestad's final argument. It's not often that I do that. I want to take this opportunity to counter a few things . . . the cheap shots, the insinuations, the distortions and misstatements made in that final argument.

"That drawing that you saw up there that he drew—that was distortion number one. That was Mr. Aarestad's concept of the pelvic examination. That wasn't a doctor's concept of the pelvic examination. You saw Dr. Flory position the skeleton. . . .

"The second thing he wants you to do, he wants you to nitpick your way to reasonable doubt. For example, if some dark night you see a cat cross the street ahead of you, you know it is a cat. You might not know what color it is, whether it is black, brown, gray, spotted, whatever. You might
not
know whether it is a tomcat or a she cat, a fat cat or a skinny cat, but you know it is a cat. Now Mr. Aarestad is going to say because we don't know whether it is a tomcat or she cat that there is reasonable doubt that it in fact was a cat. . . ."

The prosecutor noted that the defense had failed to address one subject: "Why would nine women come in here and accuse somebody of something like this when they stand to gain absolutely nothing?
Nothing.
On the other hand, what does the Defendant have to lose?
Everything!
Consider that when you consider the merits of the charges."

He said the victims had come forward when they'd realized that at last something was going to be done on their behalf. One had waited for eighteen years. "LaMar Averett didn't believe them. Joe Brown doesn't believe them. Cal Taggart doesn't believe them. The Wyoming State Medical Board didn't believe them in 1972. . . . It took a lot of courage for them to get up on that witness stand. Don't let anybody ever tell you that it didn't. It takes a lot of courage to make these kinds of accusations and get up on the witness stand and then go deliver mail to every house in town. ... It takes courage because they have accused an important man. They have accused somebody with following."

His voice rose as he spoke in defense of his witnesses and their reputations. He noted that there was no indication in any of the medical records that Emma McNeil had had VD, nor had anyone other than Story ever made such a claim. Tharp called it "a cheap shot."

"I think it is also a cheap shot to make the reference to Julia Bradbury that was made," he went on. "And then you wonder— then he gets up here and tries to tell you that these women are lying." He ran a hand through his thin hair and frowned in Story's direction.

"Just remember one thing as you go back in there," he said, turning back toward the jurors. "Be very careful,
very
careful, of the words of anybody who find themselves in a perilous position. Thank you."

The judge ordered the jurors to remain together and communicate only with the baliffs. They were not to discuss the case with outsiders or accept "any other materials such as dictionaries, books or newspapers." He instructed the audience to stand while the jury was escorted out. It was 2:25
p.m.

When the last juror had filed out of sight, the florist Beverly Moody said in a loud voice, "What is the name for Terry Tharp?
Snake?"''
The Nebels and other Story supporters rushed to the defense table.

Aarestad was talking to his client. ". . . So when I came back from lunch, the judge asked how much more time I needed. I said, 'An hour and a half or two hours.' He said, 'You got forty-five minutes.' It threw me out of my outline. I couldn't use my notes. I had to remember the salient points off the top of my head. Did I sound disjunctive?"

Rex Nebel was livid. "I watched the judge all day. He kept studying the jurors' faces. You were going too good, Wayne. That's why he shut you down."

The lawyer agreed. From the first witness to the last, the Story people had felt that the judge was proprosecution, that he'd treated the accusers like favorite daughters and vetoed defense objections willy-nilly. "Don't worry," the blond lawyer told the vocal group. "We're still on the right side. God won't let us lose this thing." Dr. Story wore the same small smile that he'd worn from the beginning.

The Reverend Ken Buttermore rallied two dozen of the faithful in the tree-shaded park next to the county building. "We'll pray here till the verdict comes in," he suggested. "Then we'll drive back to the church and offer thanks."

The anticipated acquittal hadn't come in by sundown, so the members drove north to the Lovell Bible Church to continue their prayers. At
10:40
p
.m
., word came by telephone that the jury had given up for the night and planned to return Wednesday morning. The prayers sailed upward till midnight.

Just before she turned in, Marilyn Story wrote in her journal,
"It
seems at every turn we get stopped." She was baffled by the way Judge Hartman had cut Wayne off. Wasn't it bad enough that John had to defend himself against Satanic liars? The least
an innocent
man deserved was a fair trial.

82

JUDGMENT

On Wednesday the jurors filed into the courtroom three times without a verdict. They kept wanting to look at the Ritter table, feel it, measure it, pull the stirrups up and down, even lie on it. The county building had turned from stuffy warm to hot; between morning and afternoon the outside temperature had climbed fifty degrees to an unseasonal 83. No one knew how to interpret the repeated inspections of the table.

Ken Buttermore sat on the hard wooden seat outside the courtroom, his large head bowed.
He
prayed that the jury lift the burden from Marilyn, her daughters Susan and Linda, and especially Elder Story. The pastor thanked God for giving him this opportunity to be of comfort to a suffering Christian family and for the honor of leading their church. There were bigger, tonier congregations and more prestigious pulpits, but none where the Lord's work was more appreciated or a preacher more rewarded with
respect
and love.

As he sat silently with his eyes half closed, reporters paced the hall and made strident phone calls from the clerk's office. "Naw, nothing yet," he heard them bark. The pastor had to draw on deep reserves of Christian charity to love these children of God. They'd written against Elder Story from the beginning. The busiest was Catherine Warren, a small-boned young woman who churned out daily articles for the Casper
Star-Tribune.
Just a few days before, she'd asked the Nebels to escort her to Bible Church services so she could write a feature article. Everyone knew what she was looking for: "smuts and gunk," as Buttermore expressed it. "She thought we were a bunch of freakos." He'd hammered the Book of Numbers at her and didn't utter a word about the case.

At 7
p.m
. the jurors sent out a note that they intended to work late. Three hours later Big Horn deputies chauffeured them to a motel. Over two days they'd deliberated fifteen and a half hours. There were no hints that they were nearing agreement.

Before he went to bed, Terry Tharp drank some tea and tried to stay calm, but he kept remembering Henry Two Crows, a hulking Sioux who'd been charged with beating a hobo to death in Greybull. Tharp's fifth grade class had made a field trip to Basin to watch the trial, and he could still recall how impressed he'd been by the court-appointed defense attorney, Jim Sperry. But right now he wished he could get that old case out of his mind. Henry Two Crows had been acquitted.

On Thursday, the third day of deliberations, Rex and Cheri Nebel waited all day by the phone. At 6
p.m
. it rang. "They've got a verdict," Marilyn told them in a quivering voice. She asked them to phone the others.

Soon a seventeen-car caravan was moving south toward Basin, with Doc in the lead in his old Chrysler sedan. Jan Hillman followed in her green two-door Thunderbird, with Rex sitting in front and his wife in back.

Cheri had forebodings. "It's no good, guys," she said as they drove past the entrance to the gypsum plant. "They're gonna find him guilty."

Rex told her to cool it. Jan said there wasn't a chance of conviction—the jury would have returned the acquittal three days ago but it wanted to look conscientious. At worst there would be a mistrial, in which case they would troop back to court and do it over again.

Doc drove at a funeral pace, even on the five-mile stretch of arrow-straight road across the desert floor. The orange ball of the sun touched the tips of the Rockies as they crossed the Greybull River and continued south toward Basin. "This isn't gonna be good," Cheri repeated. "I've got a feeling of impending doom."

Rex said, "The only problem we'll have is getting him home alive." He'd stashed two loaded .44s in Jan's glove box but didn't intend to take them inside the courtroom. He'd gone armed ever since a male voice had threatened Cheri on the phone. Other callers had promised to rape Dr. Wrung's daughter after he testified. The hotheads were everywhere.