First Lady (28 page)

“It's confusing.”

“Maybe that's why he does it.”

The Tyler Norris trial was coming to a close. The jury had heard two stories, one from the district attorney, Mitch Bazemore, and one from the defense attorney, Isaac Rosethorn, and Judge Margy Turbot was going to tell them they'd have to choose one. But either way, the press and the city council were going to blame Cuddy. If Norris were found guilty, it would be because a conviction-crazy police department had railroaded an innocent man. If he were found innocent, a biased and bumbling police department would have
tried
to railroad an innocent man. And either way, we needed to prove right away that we knew what we were doing. We needed to arrest Guess Who.

As for the two stories about what had happened to Tyler's wife Linsley, both were supported by evidence, coherent and plausible. The big difference was that Isaac's wasn't true. It went like this:

Tyler Norris, professor of mathematics at Haver University, stayed home from a New Year's Eve party at the Hillston Club in order to complete an academic paper he was scheduled to present the following week. His wife Linsley left their house on Tartan Drive in Balmoral Heights and drove to that party shortly before eight, leaving him upstairs in his study. The Norris house is large, thirty-five-hundred square feet. The defendant's study is in the far rear on the second floor. It is soundproofed. Mrs. Norris left most of the lights on the first floor turned off and left the house unlocked and unalarmed—because her husband was in it.

It was not unusual for Mrs. Norris to attend social events alone because of the demands of Tyler's academic work. But she stayed at this party only briefly. Dr. Josie Roth testified that her sister, who was two months pregnant, told her at the Club that she felt nauseated and was returning home. Dr. Roth thought their conversation took place at nine o'clock, but she was not wearing a watch and admitted that it could have been later. In Isaac's story, Mrs. Norris did not leave the club until ten and did not arrive back home until 10:30. He pointed out that she might have told her sister she was leaving but then did not do so, or she might have made an intermediate stop on the drive home, or any number of things.

Tyler's computer records showed that he saved the document he was working on at 10:06 P.M. and emailed it to his coauthor at 10:07. He then took a shower in the bathroom next to his study. He had decided to join his wife. After dressing in his tuxedo pants and shirt, he telephoned his parents, who were hosting guests at their home, to wish them a happy New Year.

Fulke Norris, the defendant's father, testified that his son joked on the phone about how all the New Year's fireworks being shot off in the neighborhood were making it impossible for him to work, so he was going to the club to be with his wife. The older Norris claimed that during their conversation, Tyler suddenly reported hearing a loud noise coming from the first floor and said that it sounded as if someone had shot off a firecracker inside his house. He told his father to stay on the line while he checked. Fulke Norris says that it was 10:35 when his son abruptly ended their conversation. In some alarm, he stayed on the phone.

In Isaac's story, the noise had in fact been the sound of a shotgun. A burglar in the process of robbing the house (and not realizing that someone was home upstairs), was startled by Mrs. Norris's sudden return home and had fired a single shot at her head at close range, killing her instantly.

Still on the phone seven minutes later, Fulke Norris heard a second noise; he thought it might have been fireworks, but he was so troubled by Tyler's not returning to the phone that he left his guests on Catawba Drive and drove to his son's house in Balmoral Heights. He arrived there twenty minutes later and found the front door not only unlocked but also ajar. Inside on the floor of the foyer he found the body of his daughter-in-law. She had been shot in the face and was dead. Stacked in the foyer next to the front door were personal possessions of the younger Norrises—two TVs, a VCR, a CD player, two Italian racing bicycles, a leather coat, and a case of sterling silverware. Mr. Norris said he found his son lying on the carpet just inside the living room door, shot in the abdomen, unconscious but alive. He called 911.

Tyler testified that because of his soundproofed study and the noise of the shower, he was unaware that a burglar was robbing his house or that his wife had unexpectedly returned from the party and found herself confronting this armed intruder. He said he heard nothing unusual until a loud shot-like sound while he was on the phone with his father. Suspecting there was a prankster inside his house, he ran downstairs to the foyer. There he saw a man with a shotgun standing over the body of his wife. He ran toward the intruder, who raised the shotgun and shoved him back into the living room where he fired a single shot at him at pointblank range. He and his wife were each shot a single time with a twelve-gauge, over-under, double barrel Weatherby shotgun, an ornamental trap gun given to the defendant as a gift by his father. Tyler kept it (and an accompanying box of shells) on a shelf in his basement den. He had never loaded the gun and said he didn't know how one would even do so.

When Mitch Bazemore had asked, “Why would a burglar, hurrying to rob a house, even if he assumed the house to be empty, stop to load two shells into a shotgun he was stealing?”, Isaac had objected that the D.A. was calling for an opinion. Margy had sustained the objection and that was that.

Tyler described the intruder as of medium height and stocky build, in his twenties or thirties, African-American, wearing a stocking mask, a Navy pea coat, and black gloves.

We never found such an intruder or any other suspect. But, as Isaac (and the judge) pointed out, the defense was under no obligation to produce an alternative. We found no one else who'd heard gunshots; no one who'd seen a burglar breaking into the house; no one who'd observed a strange car in the neighborhood. But, as Isaac pointed out, Balmoral homes are on heavily wooded lots of two or more acres, and the Norris neighbors on both sides were away for the holidays. There were no signs of forcible entry, no unexplainable fingerprints or footprints or tire prints at the Norris house. Isaac pointed out that the door had been left unlocked, the burglar wore gloves, and the trampling of the crime scene by Sheriff Louge and his deputies obscured the traces of the intruder. If Louge had been the murderer's paid accomplice he couldn't have done more to help him.

Inconsistencies that Isaac might have had trouble explaining were excluded from evidence because of the contamination of the crime scene. For example, that there were traces of Linsley's blood on the banister leading to the second floor although her body was in the front foyer. Or that her blood was splattered
beneath
two items the burglar had presumably placed in the hall, as if they'd been put there after he shot her.

For everything else, Isaac had plausible explanations: no other houses had been robbed because they all had their alarm systems activated. No subsequent burglaries happened in that area because the burglar, guilty of homicide, immediately moved elsewhere.

Tyler said that after being shot, the next thing he remembered was waking up in intensive care and being told by his mother that his beautiful, wonderful young wife was dead.

Isaac said that Tyler was, like his wonderful wife, the ill-fated victim of a random act of panicked violence.

Witnesses said that the Norris marriage was a very happy one. Other witnesses gave testimonials to Professor Norris's national standing in his field, his high position in civic and church circles, his harmonious relations with his parents and with his wife's parents, his heroic stoicism during his long ordeal. Isaac cried when he ended his story by begging the jury to let these good people mourn in peace. “Don't take the son as well as the daughter, don't add the evil of injustice to the tragedy of misfortune. Tyler had no motive to kill his poor wife. If you have no motive, you have no murder. It's that simple.”

The State told a different story. There was no intruder, there was no attempted burglary. Tyler Norris ingeniously plotted to murder his wife and planned it very carefully. He chose New Year's Eve because he knew his wife would go to the Hillston Club, his neighbors would be out of town, and the noise of the fireworks (despite their illegality, common that night) would mask the sounds of his shotgun.

Whatever work he may have needed to do for the academic article that ostensibly kept him home from the party, he had done it well in advance. As soon as his wife left for the club, he began to create a burglary scene in his own home—stacking appliances, bicycles, and such in the front hall as if a burglar had put them there. His plan was to meet his wife at the party late in the evening (emailing his document just before leaving the house). He would bring her home, and as soon as she walked into the foyer, he would pick up the shotgun left ready there and shoot her. After calling 911 and claiming he'd just heard a burglar, he would then shoot himself (not critically, of course) and wait for the ambulance to arrive.

But things went wrong: his wife, feeling ill, returned home unexpectedly. Dr. Josie Roth was right that she had left the Hillston Club no later than nine. She arrived home at 9:30 and caught Tyler staging the burglary. He had to plot an elaborate new murder scheme immediately. But then this was a man who at the age of eight had defeated five adult opponents in chess games simultaneously. He had no trouble thinking fast. He picked up the gun, shot and killed her, and wiped the gunstock.

Everything else happened after the murder: he emailed the document to his colleague. He showered, dressed himself in his tuxedo pants and shirt—leaving the jacket, tie, and damp towel on his bed—and telephoned his father, suddenly claiming to hear the noise of a shot downstairs. He ran downstairs barefoot, carrying his black silk socks so that his prints would not appear on the gun when he shot himself. He did so by holding the gun out from his stomach with one hand and pressing the trigger with the thumb of the other. He had deliberately left the phone off the hook so that his father—a man of impeccable reputation—would be aural witness to the second shot and would take steps to bring aid.

But why do it? What was the motive? True, Linsley Norris came from a wealthy family and her husband was her sole beneficiary. True, divorce would be difficult for she was a devout Catholic, as was the defendant's mother. But did he need money? Did he want a divorce? We found two of his colleagues in the mathematics department at Haver who testified that they had seen the couple arguing in public. These two men also testified that Tyler was subject to sudden if rare outbursts of uncontrollable temper.

On cross-examination, Isaac brought out that both witnesses had been in direct competition with Tyler, one for a Haver Foundation grant, one for a promotion, and in both cases they had lost out. And that was that.

Linsley's sister, Dr. Josie Roth, was a witness for the prosecution. A psychiatrist, she testified that she believed her sister to be unhappy in her marriage, neglected and even abused by her husband. She said that she had often encouraged Linsley to seek a divorce. But we could find no one and nothing to support Dr. Roth's view.

From his opening argument to his closing statement, Isaac had hammered at our failure to produce a compelling motive. It was his mantra. “If you have no motive, you have no murder. It's that simple.” For me, there was only one problem with that. I was sure Tyler was guilty.

• • •

Judge Margy Turbot was talking when I walked into Courtroom A. Her clean collegiate features and blonde pageboy hair looked even more youthful above the somber black pleated robe and neat knotted white collar that symbolized her position. On her desk was the little blue vase of fresh roses that she always brought into the court with her as if their brief fragile beauty were a necessary reminder that there is good to life that has to be cared for.

She sat behind her bench on a carpeted dais, beneath the gold-leaf seal of the State of North Carolina and the big clock with the gilded eagle that President McKinley had given Briggs Cadmean's father. She looked down to Miss Bee Turner at the clerk's desk and past the counsel tables with their plush leather chairs and out to the spectators crowded in pews. Courtroom A was a beautiful room, with sixteen brass chandeliers and sixteen tall windows painted Federalist colors. It was old Cadmean's loving refurbishment of an “authentic reproduction” of the 1912 remodeling of the 1835 original.

There was a picture of Carl Yarborough the mayor on a wall next to a picture of Andrew Brookside the governor next to a picture of the president. Cuddy often points out the picture as progress: in 1835, Carl would have come into this courtroom as a piece of property. In 1912, he wouldn't have come into it at all unless charged with a crime, (certainly not as judge, lawyer, or jury). In 1947, Carl could have sat in the tiered “Colored” balcony but not used the restrooms or the water coolers. Now Carl was the mayor of Hillston and could sit anywhere he wanted.

It was also a change that the judge was a woman. Despite her youth and sex, Margy Turbot was as fully robed in the authority of her office as had been her predecessor, the hawk-faced octogenarian Judge Shirley Hilliardson, a man so scathing in his contempt for ignorance that ill-prepared lawyers would start to stutter in his presence. Margy didn't scare people in the same way, but there was no question about who governed her courtroom.

So when Isaac Rosethorn stood up and headed over to Bee Turner's desk with an empty glass carafe in his hands and Judge Turbot stopped in mid-sentence and said, “Mister Rosethorn!” he instantly stood still.

“Your Honor?” he said, all courtesy.

“Sit down, please, counselor. If you are in such desperate need of water that you can't wait until I finish my instructions, go get it yourself and stop bothering Miss Turner. She isn't your secretary and even if she were, she shouldn't be waiting on you.”