Lethal Guardian (33 page)

New London Superior Court is on the corner of Huntington Avenue and Broad Street in downtown New London. It has been a fixture in town for as long as people can remember. Shaped like a boomerang, the tan-brick building has four floors, with entrances in the front and back. Directly across the street is the Garde Theater. Prime Media Services, which used to be the site of Haiman Clein’s law office, is directly next to the Garde. Down the block is the hustle and bustle of daily downtown life. There’s a bus depot and harbor, coffee shops and delis, sport shops, bars, restaurants and office buildings.

As Beth Ann and her relatives shuffled into the courtroom, alongside Buzz’s relatives and friends, to begin proceedings in the
State of Connecticut
v.
Beth Ann Carpenter
, the animosity between the families that had ignited back in 1992 seemed to build in resentment with the passing of time. The Carpenter family, many of them hugging Beth Ann in solidarity before she took a seat next to Keefe and Knight, sat directly in back of her, on the right, while the Clintons took a stronghold on the left, directly in back of Peter McShane and Kevin Kane. With only about five feet separating the families, the stares, whispers and unfriendly gestures that had become a common occurrence during preliminary hearings carried over into the start of the trial. In fact, Court TV reporter Matt Bean later described the tension in the courtroom between the two families as a reinvention of “the Hatfields and McCoys battle” waged nearly one hundred years before in West Virginia. In that case, a dozen or so family members had been killed throughout the years of the dispute.

In this feud, it would be about only one death—the murder of Anson “Buzz” Clinton.

There are no opening arguments in Connecticut. The judge simply gives his instructions to the jury, and it’s game on.

The state’s first few witnesses did nothing more than establish the fact that the body of Buzz Clinton had been found on March 10, 1994. Joe Dunn, the East Lyme cop and first law enforcement person on the scene, followed a woman who had discovered Buzz Clinton’s body. He told the jury how he recognized Buzz. Then, when Dunn began talking about the fight Dick Carpenter had had with Buzz sometime before Buzz’s murder, Judge Robert Devlin Jr. made the jury step out of the room.

After discussing it some, Devlin said it was hearsay. The jury wouldn’t be allowed to hear any of it.

Keefe and Knight had scored already.

Detective John Turner and Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the medical examiner who examined Buzz, rounded out the first day of proceedings. Both men were there to talk about the condition of Buzz’s body shortly after it was discovered. Carver, when asked, said he didn’t think Buzz had been run over, as Mark Despres had been saying all along. There was just no evidence, Carver insisted.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Carver concluded that Buzz had been killed by several gunshot wounds to the upper body.

It was groundwork. Kane and McShane were setting the stage for what would be the toughest part of their case: explaining the bitter battle for child custody, which was, in their argument, the actual motive for murder.

On February 6, 2002, Dee Clinton, the state’s first witness to that fact, began laying out how the seed of hatred for her son was planted in Beth Ann’s soul merely weeks after he had met Kim and the rest of the Carpenter family.

Dee wore clothing that would become a signature of hers throughout the trial: a dark black dress she had donned at Buzz’s funeral some eight years earlier. With her short-cropped graying hair, nearly unblemished skin and petite figure, for a woman in her midfifties, Dee certainly didn’t come across as someone who had spent the past years wallowing in self-pity, letting the murder of her son wear her down and add years to her life. She looked more like a woman hell-bent on justice. In recent years, Dee had become an outspoken member of a support group called Survivors of Homicide. Set up in the format of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, survivors of murdered loved ones could go to a meeting and voice their concerns, worries, fears, or just sit and talk with someone who could relate to what they were going through. The group was started in 1983 by Gary Merton, a Vernon, Connecticut, man whose teenage daughter had been murdered by a man who went on to kill again after being paroled early in the Merton death.

Just a month before the Beth Carpenter trial started, Merton stepped down as president of Survivors and Dee took over for him. In the wake of Buzz’s untimely death, Dee had made a solemn pact with herself to avenge her son’s death by helping others cope with the same loss.

For Dee, though, today was different: Buzz’s day in court was finally here.

After establishing the fact that Buzz was her son, and that she had two other kids, Suzanne, who was now a nineteen-year-old woman, and Billy, seventeen, Dee began to talk about how Buzz had met Kim. Within moments, however, she had to ask for a glass of water, saying, “It’s nerve-wracking up here.”

As Kevin Kane began asking Dee about Buzz and Kim’s relationship, Judge Devlin had to keep interrupting the proceedings because Hugh Keefe kept objecting. Most of what Dee had to say, Keefe was quick to point out, was hearsay. He wanted it stopped.

“Well, Your Honor,” Keefe said at one point, “I ask that the court instruct her not to tell us what anyone else says.”

Dee was confused. “Well, how do I do this?”

“Just try to answer the questions, ma’am,” Devlin said, “without saying what other people say….”

Kevin Kane continued asking questions, but Keefe kept objecting.

When Dee finally figured out how to answer Kane’s questions without bringing hearsay into it, Keefe said he couldn’t hear her. “I wonder if Mrs. Clinton could keep her voice up?”

As the morning wore on, Dee spoke of the first time she met Kim, then of the first time she met Rebecca.

“She had no verbal skills. She would put her head down and twirl her thumbs and wring her hair.”

For the next hour, Kane had Dee outline how the relationship between Kim and Buzz and the Carpenters progressed into a nasty struggle to gain control of Rebecca, and Kim usually came out on the losing end. At one point, Kane asked Dee about a phone call Kim had made to her mother, Cynthia, regarding a night when Kim wanted to stay over at the Clintons’ with Rebecca.

“Kim spoke with her mother. She started to shake. She turned white. Her whole body was trembling. And she got off the phone, and tears were in her eyes. And I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘I have to bring [Rebecca] home.’”

Keefe objected.

It was all hearsay.

From there, Kane moved into how the verbal battles between the families erupted into an all-out court battle for custody of Rebecca, who was now eleven, and perhaps struggling to understand what had happened.

After that, Dee talked about the night Joseph Jebran brought Rebecca back to the Clintons and they noticed her swollen vagina and had to bring her to the hospital because they thought she had been molested. Keefe, time and again, objected. It seemed as though Dee was having a hard time explaining things without quoting others.

“I respectfully ask the court,” Keefe said, fuming mad, “to tell her she can’t keep quoting other people!”

“Please limit your testimony to what you saw…,” the judge urged.

“Your Honor,” Dee said, “can I ask you a question? How do I get from [one place to another] without telling [you what] I was asked…? I just want to do this right.”

“Sure. And the only way to do it is to avoid saying what other people say….”

“How do I say that, though?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. The best way you can?”

“Well, I’m trying.”

Dee had no bombshells to drop. She was there to describe how her son had met Kim, the relationship they had with the Carpenters and how ugly the custody battle had gotten as Kim and Buzz’s relationship blossomed. The custody battle, Peter McShane and Kevin Kane knew, was the heart of their case. They had to show cause and effect. Yet there was still the lingering concern about how Beth Ann fit into the entire scope of the custody fight. Thus far, her name hadn’t even come up.

So Kane had Dee describe that first day she met Beth Ann. It was a night when Beth Ann and her brother, Richard, came over to her house to talk about Kim, Dee said.

“And could you please tell us what Beth said during that conversation?”

The court had excused the jury previously and discussed how they were going to handle the conversation Dee had had with Beth Ann and Richard. It was agreed Dee would simply tell the jury what Beth Ann and Richard had said to her and no more. Was it hearsay? Sure. But if Keefe wanted to dispute it, he would get his chance on cross-examination.

“Beth said that Kim was an unfit mother,” Dee told the jury in her direct tone. “She didn’t care about her daughter…. She sleeps with anybody, and that she’s a whore. And she asked if my husband and myself could do all in our power to stop the relationship.”

“Stop the relationship between whom?” Kane asked.

“Buzz and Kim.”

“And did she tell you why…?”

“Because Kim was a whore!”

The large pool of reporters, family members, well-wishers and trial gazers sat in awe as Dee put on record for the first time Beth Ann’s anger and hatred toward Buzz and Kim’s relationship.

Keefe continued objecting, stating that Dee’s testimony had no bearing on his client’s guilt or innocence. So what, Beth Ann didn’t want her sister to date what she and her mother had described as a jobless exotic male dancer? What did any of it have to do with the case against his client?

Kane said Dee’s information was not only “relevant,” but several other witnesses would substantiate it.

By the time Kane was finished with Dee, she had painted an ugly portrait of rage, bitterness, jealousy and hatred toward her son by Beth Ann and her family. There was no doubt that the Carpenter family wouldn’t lose any sleep over the fact that Buzz had been murdered.

It was obvious Dee held on to a bias—but one of the most important pieces of information Dee had put on record was how Buzz had made it a point to tell the Carpenters that he was planning on moving his family to Arizona to get away from what he saw as dysfunction. This, Kevin Kane would tell the jury later, was what pushed Beth Ann over the edge—the thought that she would
never
see Rebecca again.

But now it was Hugh Keefe’s turn. There was still a few hours left in the day, and Keefe wanted to clear some things up.

As a defense attorney, Keefe was loud and aggressive, even forceful and threatening at times, but he was also composed and articulate. Many felt Keefe stepped over the line once in a while. And perhaps he did. Yet, when it came down to it, he had a job to do. His client was facing a life sentence for something with which she said she’d had nothing to do. Keefe was prepared to do anything he could to prove her right.

As he opened up his questioning, first saying “good morning,” it was clear that just because Dee had lost a son, it didn’t mean she wasn’t fair game.

“Mrs. Clinton, beginning in July of ’93, you say your son, Buzz, indicated an interest in moving to Arizona. Is that correct?”

“Correct.”

“And did he have a job down there?”

“He had a…He had assurance from my husband’s friend.”

“Mrs. Clinton, let me ask the question again and see if you can answer it,
okay?
Did your son have a job down there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he have a lease down there for an apartment or a condo…?”

“I don’t know.”

For about ten minutes, Keefe tried poking holes in Buzz’s planned move to Arizona. He wanted Dee to admit that maybe the move wasn’t set in stone, that perhaps it was just something Buzz had mentioned, like a lot of other things. But Dee held tough. She knew Buzz was serious when he said he was moving.

During the next hour, Keefe shot questions at Dee one after the other in rapid-fire repetition about most everything she had previously testified to, trying to trip her up on dates, times, places, names and anything else he could muster.

At times, Dee and Keefe went at it toe-to-toe. For example, regarding a conversation Dee had had with Beth Ann almost nine-and-a-half years ago, Keefe wanted to know if Dee thought she had a good memory.

“On certain occasions.”

“But you didn’t make any notes as to what Beth Ann Carpenter was telling you about
nine and a half
years ago,
did
you?”

“I don’t have to write down,” Dee said calmly, “where I was on September eleventh,
sir
, either, and I know
exactly
where I was on that date!”

The thrust of Keefe’s questioning remained focused on Kim and the relationship she had with her parents and sister before Buzz entered the picture. Keefe was trying to let the jury know—and he did a good job of it—that Kim wasn’t necessarily June Cleaver, and that her parents had every right to want a good home for their grandchild.

Near the end of the day, Keefe brought up Kim’s first husband. He wanted to know if Dee had any knowledge of that relationship.

“I don’t know what I knew about her relationship with her first husband….”

“Do you know whether she got divorced from that first husband?”

“I’m assuming she got divorced….”

“Don’t assume
anything,
” Keefe shouted. “Just answer my question, please.”

Remaining composed, which Dee said later only added to Keefe’s frustration, she said, “No, have I seen the certificate, a document?” she thought maybe an exhibit had passed through her hands explaining the divorce.

“Did she tell you she was divorced?” Keefe asked.

“Yes.”

“She did?”

“But that’s hearsay,” Dee said with a smile.

“That’s good,” Keefe said. “That’s what
I
kept saying.”

“I know,” Dee said amid laughs from the gallery, “that’s how I learned it.”

By the end of the day, Keefe finished his cross-examination and Kane his redirect examination. During the early part of the next morning, Keefe concluded his re-cross-examination and Kane a second redirect.