In Self Defense (23 page)

It was hard to know, really, how impartial they were, but Sundstrom and his staff, as well as David Johansen and his staff, had done the best they could, studying each of them carefully, reading between the lines of their responses to both general and specific questions.  And now it was time for both sides to put their choices to the ultimate test.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Mark Sundstrom, and I represent the people of the State of Washington,” he began.  “It will be my job, through the presentation of testimony and evidence and argument, to prove to you, beyond any reasonable doubt, that shortly after midnight on October 20
th
of last year, the defendant in this case, Clare Durant, did knowingly shoot her husband to death.”

It was clear that Mark Sundstrom was an upstanding man, a dedicated public servant, doing his job as well as he could, understated and attractive, without being too attractive, who spoke forcefully, but not stridently.  The jurors liked him.

“In this proceeding, Mrs. Durant will be offering an affirmative defense.  What that means is, her attorney will claim that his client was acting in self-defense when she shot her husband, because she believed she was shooting an intruder, a serial stalker.  However, the evidence and the testimony you will see and hear will not back that up.  Now, we’re not saying that someone wasn’t stalking Mrs. Durant.  Someone well may have been.  What we’re saying is that she had ample opportunity to know, before she pulled the trigger, that the man she was shooting was not an intruder, but was in fact her husband.  To prove it, we will show you some pretty gruesome crime scene photos, and I apologize to you in advance for this.  We will also be introducing crime scene evidence and show you reenactments performed by the police investigating this crime.  And you will hear testimony from witnesses who will speak to issues present in the Durant marriage.”

Having set the scene, the prosecutor then got down to the specifics of the state’s case, naming the witnesses in the order they would appear, and describing what each would be testifying to, and how it would all tie together to prove the charge of murder.  Finally, he looked at each juror.

“Do I pretend to know what motivated Mrs. Durant to kill her husband?” he asked.  “No, I don’t.  But you will hear testimony that confirms her husband was seeking a divorce.  You will hear testimony that he was making plans to marry another woman.  You will hear testimony that, when she found out about it, Mrs. Durant was so furious that she threatened to have him removed from his position as CEO of Nicolaidis Industries.  And you will hear testimony that, apparently, even this threat of dismissal did not deter Richard Durant.”

Sundstrom paused for a moment to let his words sink in.  “Was it simply a matter of her husband’s infidelity that made the defendant pull the trigger that fateful night?” he concluded.  “Was it the personal humiliation of knowing she was about to be discarded for another woman, a younger woman, a socially prominent woman?  Or was it the inevitable public embarrassment that was bound to come when others would discover that, despite all her years of good works, her marriage had gone bad?  Ladies and gentlemen, in a relatively short amount of time, you’re going to know everything we know, and then I’m going to be perfectly willing to let you make that decision.”

With a little nod, the prosecutor sat down.  His opening statement had lasted two hours and twenty-five minutes, and immediately thereafter, court was recessed for lunch.

***

“He makes me sound like such a monster,” Clare said as she sat and stared at nothing out the window of a small anteroom next to the courtroom that she and her attorney would have at their disposal for the duration of the trial.

“Don’t worry,” David told her.  “He doesn’t know what we know.”

***

At ten minutes past two o’clock that afternoon, David stood up and smiled a bit shyly at the jury.  “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is David Johansen,” he said in a soft, pleasant voice, “and I represent Clare Durant, the defendant in this case.  Which means that, until she gets up on the witness stand and speaks to you herself, I’ll be speaking for her.  I’ll do that by listening, as carefully as you will, to each and every one of the prosecution witnesses, and asking them the same questions I think you would want to ask, if you had the opportunity.  I will also be speaking for my client when I challenge every aspect of the evidence that will be presented here at trial.  Because, there’s never just one side to a story, you know, and when you’re dealing with a person’s life and liberty, as I am, and as you will be, nothing is more important than holding the prosecution to the highest possible standard of accuracy.”

If the jurors expected slick, sharp, expensive, they were disappointed.  David Johansen was not as tall as Mark Sundstrom, not as trim or as easy in his suit and tie, not even as attractive, perhaps.  But there was something nice about him, something comfortable, something that remind them of a brother, or a childhood friend, or the boy next door.  The jurors couldn’t help themselves -- they liked him, too.

              “As I think you already realize, you have an awesome responsibility ahead of you,” he continued.  “You must hear all the evidence that is going to be presented to you, you must weigh it, and finally, you must to come to a unanimous decision.  And all Clare Durant and I ask is that you keep an open mind until you’ve heard the whole story.”

              With that, he nodded to the jurors, to the judge, and sat down.

              Judge Lazarus, a sixteen-year veteran of the bench, turned to the prosecutor.

“Are you prepared to call your first witness?” she inquired.

“We are, Your Honor,” Mark Sundstrom replied. 

And so began the trial of Clare Durant.             

Ten

              The King County medical examiner took the witness stand just after two o’clock that afternoon.  Roger Figg was a slight man in his late fifties, with wispy brown hair, prominent cheekbones, and a twenty-five-year, unblemished record.

“Dr. Figg,” Mark Sundstrom began, once the witness’s credentials had been established, “you performed the autopsy on the body of Richard Durant, did you not?”

“I did,” Figg confirmed.  “On Friday, October 20
th
of last year, at one-thirty in the afternoon.”

“And what were your findings?”

“I found that Richard Durant’s death was as a result of multiple gunshot wounds.”

At that point, Tom Colby, Sundstrom’s second chair, almost a carbon copy of the prosecutor himself, stood up and positioned a large monitor within view of the jury. Sundstrom then invited the medical examiner to step down from the witness box and stand next to the monitor.  From a computer back at the prosecutor’s table, Colby pressed several keys and a series of photographs began to appear on the screen, showing Richard Durant’s body, laid out on a metal table.  Meticulously, Dr. Figg took the jury through the various injuries that had led to the victim’s death.

“I removed two bullets from the neck,” he said, using a laser pointer, “three from the chest, two from the abdomen, one from the pelvis, and one from the right thigh.”  The red beam of light highlighted each entry wound.

“Do you know which bullet it was that actually killed him?” Sundstrom inquired.

“It could have been any one of three,” Figg replied.  “The one that bisected the aorta, the one that severed the spine, or the one that penetrated the heart.”

Clare sat at the defense table, with her hands folded quietly in her lap, and watched the jury watching the show.  It was gruesome stuff, but all twelve jurors, as well as the alternates, were sitting forward, at the edge of their seats, with their eyes fixed on Dr. Figg and his exhibits.

The medical examiner’s direct testimony lasted the rest of Tuesday and enough of Wednesday so that it wasn’t until almost the end of the day that Mark Sundstrom was satisfied he had gotten all the information and enough of the gore before the jury to turn the witness over to the defense.

David Johansen stood up.  “Nine bullets,” he said.  “Isn’t that a lot of bullets to kill someone standing less than fifteen feet away?”

“It doesn’t usually take that many, no,” Figg agreed.

“In your history as a medical examiner, Doctor, how many gunshot victims have you autopsied?”

“Perhaps five hundred.”

              “And how many of those five hundred had as many bullet wounds as Richard Durant?”

“In my twenty-five years, I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen,” Figg replied.

“What was the nature of these shootings?”

“Most were gang-related.”

“You mean, as in several people shooting one victim at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest?”

“One was a father who shot the man who had raped and murdered his daughter.  He fired seven bullets into his victim.  One was a teenager high on drugs who put six bullets into a postman because he thought he was the devil.”  The medical examiner sighed.  “And the last was a woman who killed her husband after years of abuse.  We recovered twelve bullets from his body.”

“And you can still remember every one of those shootings?”

“They’re some of the ones that are hardest to forget,” Figg said.

“Was there any way to tell, from the autopsies, why these people were shot?”

“No, of course not.”

“So this information you’ve just provided the jury came from other sources?”

“Yes.  From the associated trials.”

“I see.  So, based on your autopsy alone, there would really be no way for you to tell why Richard Durant was killed, would there?  I mean, you can’t say with any medical certainty that he was shot out of fear or panic, or anger -- or even that he was shot in cold blood, can you?”

“No,” Figg admitted, “I can’t.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” David said.

***

“What would you like for dinner?” Doreen asked.

              “To tell you the truth,” Clare said, “I’m not very hungry.”  Two days of watching gut-wrenching autopsy photographs flashing across a giant screen had left Clare with little appetite, and no interest in worrying about it.

              “All the more reason you have to eat,” the housekeeper, who wasn’t privy to the courtroom show, insisted.  “The children are going to have macaroni and cheese.  I’ll throw in a little sausage for you.”

Clare shrugged.  It didn’t matter.  Lately, picking at Doreen’s food had become something of a game, something done to placate the woman.  It wasn’t that Doreen wasn’t an excellent cook.  She was.  It was just that, whatever the outcome of the trial, Clare knew her days of being a hearty eater were over, and one thing had begun to taste more or less the same as another.

***

Erin Hall was next to take the witness stand.  Beginning on Thursday and continuing through Friday, she carefully recounted for the jury each step of her investigation, from the circumstances surrounding the initial discovery of Richard Durant’s body to Clare Durant’s ultimate arrest.

“How is it that you, your partner, and some sixteen other members of the Seattle Police Department happened to be outside the Durant home on the night in question?” Mark Sundstrom asked.

“We had reason to believe that Mrs. Durant was being targeted by a serial stalker,” Erin replied.  “We had reason to believe that the stalker was going to strike during the few days that her husband was supposed to have been out of town on business.”

“Initially, Detective, you believed that Richard Durant’s death had been merely a matter of mistaken identity, did you not?” the prosecutor inquired.

“Yes, we did believe that,” the witness confirmed.

“At what point did you begin to think that the defendant might not have been acting in self-defense?”

“When certain evidence began to come to our attention that seemed to indicate that the defendant might have known that her husband was coming home a day early from his business trip,” Erin testified.

“Evidence such as?”

“Such as a recorded telephone message sent by the victim to a third party in which he said he intended to tell his wife he would be coming home around midnight.”