Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (42 page)

Should something go wrong? Bert
didn't' know the circus was headed for town with plans to set up
tents at the trial of Catherine Mehaffey and turn all his
assumptions about jury psychology and presentation of evidence
inside out.

FIFTY-NINE

March 24, 1980

"Gary, are you all right? I am such
a bad shot. But I still don't know how you got out of
there."

Catherine was sitting alone with me
beside the desk in the chambers of State District Judge Jon Hughes.
Just before jury selection in her attempted murder trial, she had
made another of her bizarre requests—one that had led directly to
this strange conversation. I had not even seen her since that night
in her apartment, when I peeked around that chair I held as a
shield in her bedroom before she fired the first shot. Back then,
she resembled a zombie. With the trial set to begin this day,
however, she was cleaned up, now perky and composed, ready to crack
a few jokes and charm the world. She asked Bert for a private
audience with me so we could sort some things out. Bert, of course,
was skeptical, called it "highly unusual," and recommended I ignore
her. But, of course, I couldn't resist. And the judge, eager to
facilitate any meeting that could eliminate a trial, offered his
chambers for our chat.

"No, I thought you made a pretty
good attempt," I replied with a compliment, rubbing my back for
affect.

Catherine tilted her head, batted
her eyes, and cackled. Then she stared into my eyes and said,
"You're not wearing a wire, are you? With you, I can never
tell."

"I'm not. But I'm also not going to
let you search me this time. You'll just have to take my
word."

"Of course, I believe you. We have
to talk."

"What's on your mind?"

She sat in a high back chair with her legs
crossed. Her blonde hair was curled and bouncy, a lot like her
demeanor. She was vivacious and smiling. Catherine had something to
sell, and she wanted me to buy.

"Gary, we are making fools of
ourselves. Don't you realize it?"

"I don't understand."

"This trial. You know, every lawyer
in town thinks it's a big joke. I can't work."

I already knew that. The State Bar of Texas
had suspended her license pending the outcome of this case. That
organization will ignore a lot of misbehavior from its members, but
an attempted murder charge tested its limits.

"And you," she said. "Look at you.
You're ruined."

"I'm ruined? How so?"

"Oh, c'mon. They've got you back in
the office running errands, hiding you, and hoping nobody knows
you're there anymore."

"So, what's the solution?" I asked,
unwilling to engage in debate over her deliberate
mischaracterization of my job status and eager to get the trial
under way.

"Call it off. Tell them you
withdraw the charges. Forget about it. You know, I have two great
lawyers handling this for me. And they are going to make you look
very foolish."

I knew both of them. I had great
respect for Catherine's trial lead, a lawyer named Jim Skelton. I
had interviewed him numerous times and even shared a few drinks on
occasion. But I had to chuckle as I thought of his associate on
this case. He was an older, bearded man named Will Gray who already
had a legendary reputation as an appellate wizard. I respected him,
too, and knew him better. I knew him so well that I had asked him a
few weeks back to serve as a character witness on my behalf if we
needed anyone to testify about my stalwart reputation for the
truth. He had quickly agreed. Then he called back a week later and
withdrew. Sounding a bit sheepishly, he explained Catherine had
hired him for her team. As a result, of course, he could not
testify for me. Then he said something else that made me laugh:
"Don't tell her I agreed to testify for you, will you?" I didn't
mind losing Will as a character witness because I recognized that
her retention of a crack appellate counsel for the trial itself
spoke volumes about her concerns. She wanted Will Gray at the
defense table raising every objection and finding any technical
misstep that might eventually overturn an inevitable
conviction.

"They are good," I
agreed.

"Skelton is the Last Cowboy, you
know. He is a real man who wouldn't betray his lover no matter what
happened. He knows there are lover spats, and you just work around
those things. I wish I had met him before I met you."

"The Last Cowboy," I said with a
grin, stroking my beard. It sounded like they had kindled more than
an attorney-client relationship. Maybe that's how she is paying for
the high-priced legal counsel, I mused. I had heard rumors that she
and Skelton had hooked up, and, with her gushing praise of his
manhood, I couldn't help but suspect Catherine viewed him as
something more than her lawyer. I also saw her glowing comments
about the Last Cowboy as a feeble attempt to trigger a jealous
rage. But she hadn't even been able to make me jealous when I liked
her. So I ignored her discourse on the Code of the West and pressed
for a quick end to our private session.

"So, what can I do for you?" I
asked.

"I told you. Drop the charges. Tell
Bert Graham you changed your mind, and you don't want a trial. It
will only destroy both of us."

"I can't do that. It's really not
my case, is it? It is styled 'The People of the State of Texas
versus Catherine Mehaffey.' I'm just a witness in that
case."

She frowned and snarled, "Don't
give me that technical crap! You know in a case like this you could
smash it with a single word, maybe even leave town."

"Leave town?" I asked, looking
shocked. She had suggested this alternative a couple of times and
friends had recommended it, too. She considered herself more of a
Houstonian than me, having lived here since childhood, and had
boasted to me once that Houston belonged to her. So I used this
opportunity to challenge her territorial imperative.

"Houston has become my home," I
said. "If anyone is leaving town, it's going to be you."

Then, before she could close her wide open
mouth and respond, I delivered my final decision on her
request.

"Catherine, we are going into that
courtroom now and pull a jury. Then I am going to tell them
everything I know. Then they are going to deliberate for about ten
minutes and send you straight to fucking jail."

She sat back in her chair and delivered
another Medusa stare. After a half-minute of that, I rose to leave.
But before I could walk off, she offered her conclusion on the
question of how I escaped that night.

"Now I know how you got away," she
said. "Billy Joel is right. Only the good die young."

SIXTY

March 31, 1980

By the time my testimony had ended
on the second day of trial, Catherine's reputation should have been
in shreds. Jurors had learned as much about the unsolved murder of
George Tedesco as they had about the attempt on my life. I believed
I had been an effective witness. In my career, I had covered at
least a hundred trials from start to finish, plus bits and pieces
of hundreds more. I didn't require much coaching from Bert. I knew
to look at the jury and answer the questions succinctly. When
Skelton took his turn on cross-examination, he didn't ask many
questions at all. I thought he was being cautious. But he did say
he expected to recall me to the stand at a later time.

Since court rules
prohibit witnesses in a case from hearing the testimony of other
witnesses, I couldn't stay in the courtroom for the rest of the
trial. As the defendant, of course, Catherine was allowed to face
her accusers and assist her lawyers at the defense counsel table.
So, I didn't hear the first part of the testimony from Jim Strong.
But I did return to the courtroom at Catherine's request while
Strong sat on the witness stand to present the
Exorcist Tape
. And during that second
visit I had a strange premonition: "The state's case is falling
apart."

Catherine and her
attorneys wanted jurors to watch me while Bert played the
Exorcist Tape
and
introduced it as evidence through testimony from Strong. So they
asked the judge to have me return and sit in the front row behind
the bar. I felt a strange transformation occurring in the
courtroom. Every time we had listened to that tape in the confines
at home, she had sounded spooky and chilling as her raspy voice
threatened: "He has to beg for my mercy." In the sterile
environment of that courtroom, however, she sounded more like a
pitiful trapped animal. She sounded like a small, defenseless woman
victimized by two large men who had recorded her weakest moment and
ridiculed her with it for their own amusement. I wanted to
puke.

Listening to that tape in open
court, I felt embarrassed and ashamed. And I'm sure my face
betrayed it. In contrast, Catherine sat weeping tenderly at the
counsel table, looking every part an innocent forced to withstand
this greatest of public humiliations by yet a third bully in her
story, prosecutor Bert Graham. I could see the Last Cowboy had
succeeded in making every defense attorney's dream come true for
Catherine. He had turned his client into the victim.

I grew even more
nervous as I watched the jurors and reviewed my testimony,
imagining the questions they undoubtedly would be asking:
Is she on trial for Tedesco or Taylor? Why would
Taylor continue to see her if she had such a dangerous reputation?
Why would he even date her at all? What kind of person records his
lover's most vulnerable conversations? Could that small woman
really be as vicious as they say? What is this trial really all
about, anyway?

Indeed, I decided, my shooting had become just
a footnote to something larger, more confusing, and possibly
sinister.

Despite the boatload of incriminating evidence
against Catherine, suddenly I felt like the villain with Jim Strong
and Bert Graham as accomplices. Skelton and Gray just sat there
shaking their heads in disgust while Catherine wept. Even Strong
looked like he wanted to be anywhere but the witness stand. Then
Skelton rose and delivered the final blow.

"Your honor," he said, "the defense
demands that the state surrender all the tapes these men made of my
client without her knowledge."

Above the twelve
jurors I saw a single dialogue balloon disclosing their collective
reaction:
More tapes? These guys made even
more of these secret tapes?

When the judge agreed, Bert's
assistant, Ira Jones, opened his briefcase and dumped the contents
on the defense table with a loud crash that echoed around the room.
At least a dozen cassettes tumbled onto the wood. I had no idea we
had taped her that many times in the week after Thanksgiving, and I
didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Skelton had no intention of playing
any of those tapes, but he had made his point in dramatic style.
From that moment on, he controlled the case. He didn't even present
witnesses. Catherine did not testify. She just sat there crying. In
final arguments Skelton described Strong and me as "fat worms" used
by the district attorney's office in its single-minded and unfair
pursuit of Catherine Mehaffey for the murder of George Tedesco. The
jurors deliberated ten hours before declaring themselves hopelessly
deadlocked. Judge Hughes declared a mistrial and scheduled a new
trial for late May.

"Five? Five of them voted to
acquit?" Bert was flabbergasted, and he looked a bit like Wile E.
Coyote himself as he dissected the jury's reaction to this case. He
sat on the couch in his office shaking his head and mumbled, "I
thought maybe one would be fooled, but I can't believe five voted
to acquit her."

"We're trying this again, aren't
we?" I asked.

"One more time," he said. "That's
all we can do. Who would have ever thought we would have all that
stuff, and they still don't understand?"

"Bert," I said, "I have a
suggestion. You have to force her to the stand. Let's not confuse
them with all this Tedesco background and the tapes and everything.
Just give the next jury a plain old, garden variety lovers'
quarrel. No frills. Show them we dated. No details. I don't kiss
and tell. I tried to break up. She shot me. Keep it simple as that.
Then she'll have to take the stand."

But Bert was way
ahead of me. He already had decided on a simpler strategy like that
for the second trial and quickly agreed with my observation of the
obvious. But he had plans to cut even more fat from his
presentation. Next time, he said, he didn't even want Strong to
testify, unless needed for rebuttal. And, as an evidentiary sword,
the
Exorcist Tape
had shown a double edge. He believed neither side could
introduce it and win. He would place the case totally on my
back.

But we also were about to recruit
an important ally in a strange turn of events that would slice one
more notch in Catherine's reputation.

SIXTY-ONE

June 10, 1980

The evening after
day two of Catherine's second trial found me back at Corky's,
buying drinks for yet another dangerous woman. Actually, there were
two dangerous women at the table along with Jim Strong. But I had
focused on one of them. She was the sister of the
late
Tommy Bell,
acknowledged that day in court as a professional burglar and
alleged in a recent civil suit as the hit man for the murder of
George Tedesco. While our conversation that night at Corky's would
have its share of dark overtones, the mood nevertheless was
decidedly celebratory, even though both ladies were still in
mourning over Tommy's unexpected and violent death just a few weeks
before.