Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (45 page)

Bert led her through our confrontation in the
press room when she grabbed my necktie. At one point, he asked her
about her law practice and triggered this exchange:

"It's none of your business who my
clients are."

"You made it our business when you
shot Mr. Taylor."

Guiding her to the night of the
shooting, Bert asked if Strong had been present when she told me,
"There is only one way this can end. One of us must
die."

Catherine snarled, "That is an
incredible statement. One of us does not have to die."

Bert led her back through her version of that
night and asked her about my demeanor.

"He was very upset. He was wigged
out," she blabbered, unable to stop. "He had been continuously
talking that night about the breakup of his marriage. He could be
divorced in the morning. His wife is a bitch. I said, 'I don't want
to hear any more of it. Whenever you run to her, you call me one.
Whenever you run to me, you call her one. I don't want your
problems.' I guess I didn't do right that night. I should have
listened to Mr. Taylor because he was a soul in
torment."

Well into her version of the shooting, Bert
started asking about discrepancies. He reminded her that one of the
teenaged girls testified she told them she had hidden her gun in
the living room under a table.

"That may have been her
misunderstanding. I might have been hysterical."

Then he asked about discrepancies when she
answered questions on the scene from the police.

"When the six policemen and the two
girls were there, they were all talking to me at once. It's like
the children's game where everyone whispers, and, at the end of the
game when the last person gets up and tells what he heard, it's not
what the first person started with. Nobody was asking me. People
would say, 'Would that be right?' And I would say,
'Yes.'"

Bert recalled testimony from a detective who
said she told him that night she had gotten her pistol from under
the couch.

"Yes, I remember that," she said.
"But you just can't jump up and say, 'No, that's not what really
happened.' Nobody would listen."

She tried to belittle my injuries
with another feeble attempt at humor. When Bert cited the wound to
my scalp and asked, "That's pretty close to your brain, isn't it?"
she replied sarcastically: "In his case?" But no one
laughed.

"You want this jury to believe that
is not a serious act, shooting somebody in the skull?" asked
Bert.

"I am not the murderer, either, who
goes over and tries to shoot an unarmed woman or whatever he was
trying to do."

"You wouldn't be here now if you
hadn't have shot him in the back," Bert said.

"Why didn't he drop the gun? What
was he doing in the house?" she demanded.

Asked about the number of shots she
fired, Catherine said, "You start, you can't stop."

When she finally admitted that my
wounds could have been more serious, Catherine spoiled the humility
by adding, "I don't think Mr. Taylor will ever again walk into
somebody's house and pull a gun on them like that."

And Bert invited her to share some
philosophy with jurors, asking if she had ever told anyone, "Don't
make a threat you don't intend to back up."

"I have heard that statement and
made it a truism," she replied. "Don't make threats to people. You
don't know how they are going to react."

"You shot him in the back somehow
when he was backing away from you?" Bert asked, emphasizing the
confusion in her story.

"I must have been the one," she
sighed, apparently worn down. "There was no one else there but he
and I."

SIXTY-FOUR

June 12, 1980

The jury had been deliberating barely an hour
when Judge Hughes summoned them back to the courtroom at the end of
the day. It had been a long one, too, and the judge knew the jurors
had a mountain of evidence and testimony to analyze. He figured
they had had time enough to elect a foreman. The judge wanted them
to go home, rest, and return fresh on Friday morning to sort it all
out, so we could have a decision before the weekend.

"I don't know how close you are to
a verdict, and I don't want to know," the judge began. "Unless you
want to deliberate longer, I am going to recess for the night and
let you come back in the morning."

"We have arrived at a verdict," one
of the jurors replied. His announcement stunned the small audience
that had gathered for what they expected to be a routine
adjournment. Catherine and her lawyers snapped to attention at the
defense table while Bert whirled his head to find me in the crowd.
Another assistant DA caught my eye and shot me a thumbs-down
gesture. He believed they could not have reached a guilty verdict
in so short a time with so much physical evidence and testimony to
discuss. He was predicting an acquittal.

"You hadn't buzzed," said the
judge.

"We were getting ready to buzz,"
replied the juror who apparently had been elected
foreman.

As Judge Hughes ordered him to
surrender the written verdict, I held my breath. I couldn't
tolerate an acquittal. In my mind I began rehashing this last day
of testimony in my mind, working to pinpoint what might have gone
wrong…

I remembered how the defense had
called only one other evidentiary witness besides Catherine. And
that, too, had backfired. Skelton had demanded that the state
produce Ralph Byle, who was Catherine's landlord and next door
neighbor. Bert had given Byle permission for a fishing trip because
the landlord-neighbor had not seen anything relevant the night of
the shooting. When Catherine and her attorneys realized this
witness had left Houston, however, they decided to demand his
presence in what Bert considered a ploy to accuse the prosecution
of hiding a crucial witness. In her own testimony, Catherine had
even set the stage for an accusation about the missing witness,
mumbling to Bert mysteriously in a non-responsive answer to one
question, "We wanted to call him, but you sent him away," She did
not identify him, leaving jurors to ponder the mystery.

So, Bert responded to Skelton's
request for Byle and sent a helicopter at taxpayer's expense to
fetch him from the Gulf of Mexico. Byle walked into court none too
pleased, still dressed in his fishing gear just so he could tell
the jury he had not noticed whether Catherine had a pistol in her
hand or not. Then Bert had him flown back to his trip.

After him had come
a parade of non-evidentiary character witnesses for both sides,
each called to answer just one question about Catherine or me: Did
we have a good or bad reputation for truth in the community? My
witnesses had included lawyers, judges, neighbors, and media
professionals who all agreed my reputation was good. The list
included Marvin Zindler, a flamboyant reporter for the local ABC
affiliate, Channel 13. A tremendously popular local character, he
had served as the model for the broadcaster lampooned in the stage
play and movie about
The Best Little
Whorehouse in Texas
. I had
known Marvin for years, and he easily ranked as the perfect
character witness. Thousands of Channel 13 viewers trusted him to
tell them about all kinds of consumer information. And there he sat
in the witness stand at Catherine's trial, telling her jury to
believe me.

Skelton and Gray had screamed foul,
complaining that prosecutors had no right to bolster my testimony.
But Hughes allowed it after Bert's assistant, Ira Jones, charged
that Catherine had called me a "fool" and a "liar" during her
testimony.

Besides calling witnesses for me,
they also had found a string of witnesses willing to describe as
"bad" Catherine's reputation for telling the truth. Those included
her former brother-in-law, working then as an assistant district
attorney in San Antonio.

These veracity witnesses moved quickly through
the proceeding since they were not allowed to elaborate on their
opinions unless prompted by an errant question from Skelton, who
did not make the mistake of asking any. But he did stumble again
when he offered testimony from a judge designed to attack my
credibility.

"What is Jimmy James doing on their
list?" Bert had asked me outside the courtroom. I started laughing.
Jimmy James was a state district court judge who had received some
unwanted publicity in a story I had written about his frequent
appearances as a character witness for criminal defense attorneys
charged with drunken driving. I enjoyed teasing Jimmy and often
would step inside his courtroom early in the morning to shout,
"What's happening today in the court of King James?"

"I guess he's been more offended
than I thought and is here to have a shot at me," I said,
explaining the relationship. "I consider it a badge of honor that
he thinks I'm a liar."

Bert grinned and, during
cross-examination, reminded Jimmy about my article after Jimmy had
throttled my reputation for honesty.

"Nope," said the judge, "never read
those papers."

Two of the jurors started laughing, and Bert
felt he had successfully neutralized the only character witness to
testify against me.

In final arguments, Skelton had ridiculed my
version of the events by calling it irrational for anyone to walk
into a dark bedroom closet while fearing for their life.

"I don't know what he's waiting
for. A piñata to hit him in the head? Or maybe it's like the bird
that used to be on Groucho Marx that comes down with the little
card," Skelton said.

He urged jurors not to fault
Catherine for trying to protect "what little dignity she had left"
and described the case as an effort to ruin a criminal defense
attorney. He addressed the tapes and told jurors he hadn't played
them because Catherine had not contradicted anything on them. And
he also played the gender card.

"Now this is Catherine Mehaffey's
big sin, and this is what infuriates me about this trial. For years
in our society, and I don't know why, we have some attitude it's
feminine to get beat up, or it's not feminine to defend yourself.
What an outrageous crime, not to sit there and defend your life
when some fool is holding a gun on you."

Bert and Ira had been forceful and articulate
in summarizing their case against Catherine for the jury. They both
urged jurors to follow the physical evidence, telling them it could
not lie and had no reason to deceive them. They called my version
the only one that reflected the facts and made sense.

"Physical evidence doesn't lie,"
said Ira. "It has no motive, no bias. It just exists. How in
heaven's name do we get bullet holes into this chair? She has no
explanation for that."

Ira also urged jurors to consider
Catherine herself and said: "You are going to have to hitch your
wagon to one woman who will not look you in the eye and give you a
straight answer."

He reminded them of Tommy Bell and
her apparent relationship with him. He also ridiculed her attempt
to characterize my wounds as superficial. He told jurors to take
the pistol into the jury room and hold it. He asked them to
consider: "Could you actually fire this thing with the intent to
cause a superficial wound?"

Bert focused on the unanswered
question of motive. He reminded the panel that he hadn't been
required to demonstrate a motive, noting that could only be done
with the power to look inside Catherine's brain. But he speculated
on a couple of options. Maybe she feared my knowledge of her
activities, whatever those might have been. Maybe she worried about
my pursuit of the burglary complaint. Or, he suggested, maybe she
had just felt like a woman scorned, unable to contain her rage.
Whatever the reason, he argued, jurors could consider only one
thing. The evidence showed she had tried to kill me.

Motive remains a question that has
haunted everyone familiar with my case. I can't count the times
I've been asked the pivotal question: "Why did she shoot you?" I
have usually laughed it off with a buzz line, such as: "She didn't
thrive on rejection." But I did have my own explanation, one I
needed to confront as I asked: Why did she shoot me? My answer has
not been one easily understood by anyone who has never peeked
inside her brain, as Bert had suggested. Why did she shoot me? I've
always believed she did it simply because she thought she could. I
had become just another potential notch on her narcissistic belt, a
skeleton to hang in her closet, and another statement to the world,
notifying it that she was smarter than everyone else.

Shifting gears back to the jury's
surprise announcement of a verdict, I tried to figure what might
have gone wrong as I watched that written verdict form pass from
the jury to the bailiff and on to the clerk in what seemed to take
an eternity. I listed the possibilities. Maybe Catherine had
generated pity from the panel. Maybe they couldn't understand my
plan to run an attempted murder sting on her, using myself as the
bait. Maybe they didn't like Bert. Maybe they feared a government
conspiracy. Or, maybe they just didn't like me and decided I
deserved to get shot.

That thought made me laugh. I
recalled Catherine's oft-stated philosophy: "How do you tell what a
person deserves? You look at what they get. And that's usually
exactly what they deserve."