Savage Son (25 page)

“Well, do you feel any remorse for this?”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Bart replied with a respectable look of sincerity on his face.

“Who do you feel remorse for?”

Kent Whitaker’s attention perked up at the question.

“I feel remorse for everyone involved,” Bart responded. “Starting with my dad”—whom Bart acknowledged with a glance in his general direction—“my mom, and my brother. My whole…” Bart stopped momentarily and began to cry. He did not cry long and loud sobs, simply brief gasps punctuated with slightly damp eyes. A tear or two attached themselves to Bart’s eyelash and flashed briefly.

“…Everyone I ever met in my life,” he soldiered on. “I feel sorry for them having come in contact with me.”

“Bart, do you still feel this way?” McDonald wanted to know. “Do you feel like you can’t deal with it?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“What do you think the difference is now?”

“This whole experience has changed me in ways that I can’t even begin to express in words.”

Some members of the gallery muttered, while others actually rolled their eyes at Bart’s response. He was nonplussed, however, and continued on.

“I know that going to Mexico was a wrong decision. It was wrong for me to run, to hide from my responsibility in this. But a lot of things happened down there that made me a much stronger person than I’ve ever been in my life, and that’s continued through my experience in jail.”

Kent Whitaker beamed at the revelation. Many in the gallery, however, were steamed. Even some of the courtroom staff members had to stifle a chuckle or two. What had been a capital murder trial in the brutal slayings of a mom and her youngest son had now become the oldest son’s psychotherapeutic release. Through the tragic mistakes, a better, stronger, fully formed individual arose.

Bart’s personal rising phoenix was in full display.

He would not have wanted it any other way.

“I have come into a relationship with God,” Bart proselytized. More eyes rolled as the story of Bart’s jailhouse conversion was about to begin. “I grew up in the Church. I went to a Baptist high school and a Baptist college, but I always looked at Christianity through the eyes of people that I thought were Christians that knew me, and their hypocrisy just always turned me off. But I know, in the past year and a half especially, I have truly come to an understanding of the word of God, and I walk with him on a daily basis. That’s really why I am able to be up here today.”

“So, on that basis,” McDonald resumed, “it doesn’t really matter what verdict that they come up with?”

“No, it does not at all.” Once again, Bart would float above the fray, regardless of the price he himself would ultimately have to pay.

Now McDonald was finally able to drive home the point he wanted to make with this jury by having Bart get on the witness stand. “They should simply do what the law says. Follow the law and make a determination of whether, in answering those questions, that you deserve the death penalty, or whether you should receive a life sentence?”

“Yes, sir.”

McDonald and Bart spoke of his days at Baylor when he spent time with his friends Justin Peters and Will Anthony. McDonald wanted to know if Bart had even wanted to attend college in Waco.

“I didn’t want to go there in the first place,” Bart replied. “But I was too weak to do what I wanted, which was to join the navy. It’s the only thing I knew I wanted to do in my life at that point, but I was under the impression that that was not what a son from First Colony was supposed to do with himself. They were supposed to go to college. All of that. So that’s my fault. I should have done what I wanted to do. None of this would have happened, had I done what I wanted to do.”

Bart also spoke about his weakness during college. “Nothing interested me. Nothing was going on there,” he spoke, in reference to Baylor. “I tried so many different courses of study. When I went to class, I got decent grades. But the fact is that I stopped going to class because I couldn’t find anything that interested me in the least. I started to withdraw from that.” Bart’s supposed intelligence seemed to be rearing its head once again. He believed he was too smart for his own good, and that he was well beyond what a piddly first-tier institution of higher learning could provide him. “That’s when I started to grow close to Justin and Will, because they really felt the same way I did,” Bart added.

“Did you have any confidence in yourself at all?” McDonald wanted to know.

All signs to the contrary, Bart responded, “No, not at all.”

“And why is that?”

“I’ve never done anything as well as I wanted to. Not as well as I thought I was supposed to.”

“Did you impose greater expectations on yourself than even your parents?”

“I know at the time I was thinking that these were their expectations. I know that I put them far higher than anything they put on me.”

McDonald continued to humanize his client. “Obviously, you were failing in college?”

“Yes, sir. I was failing.”

“Even if your parents had high expectations of you, they loved you very much,” McDonald stated, sounding as though he was having a normal conversation with the young man. “What were you going to do one day when you had to tell them that you were a complete failure?”

“I don’t know how I would have that conversation,” Bart stated rather matter-of-factly.

“Then your lie was a complete lie for all those years?”

Bart repeated, “I don’t know how I would have that conversation.”

“That would be true, wouldn’t it?” McDonald asked, almost as if he were playing the role of the prosecutor. “Your life was a lie?”

“Everything about it,” Bart easily agreed.

“You didn’t know who you were or any circumstances by which you could live?”

“I know I presented myself [differently] to different people, because I went different ways, trying to figure it out. But, no, I had no idea.”

McDonald continued applying pity paints on Bart’s canvas, explaining to the jury, in the form of a question, that it was very understandable how someone like him—in the sad, confused, emotional state he was in—could make such a horribly wrong choice.

“The deeper I sank into that,” Bart stated, describing his own self-pity, “the further away I got from my morals.”

McDonald pointed out that Bart did not care for himself during this time, but he managed to project an image of self-appreciation and confidence to those on the outside world. “So you were projecting a lot, but deep down inside, you knew you were nothing?”

“That was sort of my defense, I guess. If people thought I was one way, they wouldn’t see how I really was.”

“So you would hide the true you, which, in your own mind, was basically a worthless person?”

“Yes, sir.”

McDonald paused; then he looked up at Bart. “And so if you’re worthless, is anybody else meaningful?”

“No. No one else means anything,” Bart described with a steely-eyed stare.

McDonald questioned Bart on how he could attempt to go through with the murders the first time, have the plan fail, and then still believe it was okay to try it again a second time.

“No,” Bart answered, “I think I knew it was always wrong.”

“But you went forward, anyway?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“You couldn’t face your parents with the truth of how miserable a person you were. Is that what you were saying?”

Prosecutor Fred Felcman had just about had enough of the self-flagellation that was taking place on the witness stand. Instead of making a scene, however, he simply objected to McDonald’s leading question; to which, Judge Vacek agreed. Bart, nonetheless, still wanted to answer the question.

“Can I answer the question?” Bart asked, almost pleading with the judge.

Judge Vacek turned to face the young man. “You know Mr. Felcman is going to come up here and he’s probably got lots of questions for you. You understand that?” he asked, almost as if he felt a bit sorry for the young man.

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“And you understand that you’ve provided absolutely no defense for your conduct?” Judge Vacek continued.

“I don’t believe there is a defense for my conduct,” Bart assented.

The defense attorney was not done admonishing his young charge. “The jury’s going to have to be answering questions about you in the future—what it might be like if you are in the penitentiary or whether you’re a future threat. Do you have any designs on any conduct that would, in any way, shape, or form, [or] hurt another individual?”

“No,” Bart responded calmly. “The only people I’ve ever hated—I know it’s not for the right reasons—but the only people I ever hated were my parents and my brother.”

“The irony of it all is that your dad is actually the one that’s come to the rescue and put you back on track?”

“He’s become my best friend in the last year,” Bart replied, and looked out for his father. Kent saw the glance, yet remained stoic.

McDonald was ready to close. “Bart, I want to get back to it one more time.” The attorney paused and looked at the jury before returning his attention to his client. “Tell the jurors how you really feel about yourself and what you’ve done.”

Bart paused before answering. “I feel horrible about myself. About what I’ve done.” Suddenly he began to cry again. It lasted only for a brief moment and was barely noticeable. He then regained his composure, but he did not speak anymore.

“Do you have anything to say to your dad, who’s in the courtroom?” McDonald wondered.

Felcman again had enough of the grandstanding. “Judge, at this time, I’m going to object.” It took every ounce of his being to restrain himself. “It’s not evidence. It’s a self-serving statement on the part of the defendant.”

Judge Vacek sustained Felcman’s objection.

McDonald continued by rephrasing his question. “Have you come clean about all this stuff?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Think you’re on a different path, a different direction?”

“I know I am, sir.”

McDonald spent the next several minutes letting the jury know, via questions to Bart, that Bart manipulated several people to get what he wanted, but that he was only being charged for partaking in the murders, and not for his mastery of manipulation. McDonald wanted to make sure the jury’s heads were not poisoned with images of cultlike leaders, such as Charles Manson, Jim Jones, or David Koresh.

“So, when Mr. Felcman asks these questions,” McDonald warned, “with regard to manipulation and those things, you need to be honest with him.”

“Yes, sir,” Bart acquiesced.

“He’s going to try to make it look like you’re manipulating the jury right now,” McDonald stated in regard to his adversary. “Are you?”

“No, sir,” Bart declared.

“Pass the witness.” Randy McDonald had ended the direct examination of his client.

Fred Felcman wasted no time in cross-examining Bart Whitaker. His patience had worn thin during Randy McDonald’s direct examination of the convicted killer. Now he wanted to bring the jury back to his version of reality, which just so happened to coincide with most people’s version of reality.

“Mr. Whitaker,” Felcman broadcasted in a booming voice, punctuated by his unique physical appearance of a white, handlebar mustache and corresponding head of salty hair, “when did you decide you were going to testify in this case?”

“Many, many months ago,” Bart answered, not intimidated in the slightest by the prosecutor’s demeanor or question.

“Many months ago?” Felcman repeated. “Way before this jury was ever picked, you and Mr. McDonald decided you were going to testify in this case?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Whitaker,” Felcman stated as he sauntered up toward the bench directly in Bart’s line of sight. “If this jury over here,” he stated, motioning with his hand toward the twelve assembled citizens of Fort Bend County, “[if] these fine ladies and gentlemen over here had made a monumental mistake and found you
not guilty
of this after the argument by Mr. McDonald, how were you going to correct that?” He was insinuating that Bart should have testified during the guilt phase, if he truly believed he was guilty of the crimes committed.

“I didn’t think there was any possibility that they would find me anything other than guilty,” Bart responded.

“But you took the gamble that maybe they would make the mistake, didn’t you?”

Randy McDonald was already getting hot under the collar based on Felcman’s methods. “Calling for a legal conclusion, the way I’m trying this lawsuit,” he objected.

“Overruled,” Judge Vacek declared without a second’s hesitation.

Bart went ahead and answered Felcman’s question. “Do you mean by not pleading guilty?”

“Yeah,” Felcman responded. “See, these people over here,” the prosecutor motioned again toward the jury as he spoke, “listened to everything, okay? They had to go back, and they deliberated for a little bit over two hours. They got instructed from the judge that I was the one who had to prove everything and you didn’t have to do anything.”

Bart sat compliantly as Felcman continued.

“If somebody up there,” Felcman referred to the jury members, “had come back with a not guilty [verdict], I want to know just what you would have done?”

“I don’t know,” Bart answered. “That never entered my mind, sir. I was always under the impression, from the very beginning, that there was no other outcome for this. That there would be no other outcome other than a guilty verdict.”

“How could there not be another outcome from these ladies and gentlemen when they decide guilty or not guilty?”

“That was my feeling, and the impression that my attorney had given me,” Bart answered without ever acknowledging the fact that if he truly believed he was guilty, then there should never have been a trial at all.

“Well, then, what was this, ‘I refuse to plea,’ and make the judge up there enter a plea of ‘not guilty’ if you didn’t think maybe this jury panel may have found you not guilty?”

“I don’t know. That was not what I wanted to do. This is all huge to somebody sitting in my chair.” Bart reached out for more sympathy from the jury and the members of the gallery. “When you have an attorney that’s been practicing law for thirty years tell you you’re not going to do something one way—I listen to him. I didn’t agree with it at the time, and I don’t agree with it now, but that was the way it was done.”

Felcman pounced on Bart’s rising insolence. “You don’t want to really drag Mr. McDonald into this, do you, that somehow he made you do this?”

“I took his advice, sir, so it was my decision. But it was his very strong decision,” Bart mistakenly stated, when he probably meant to say “opinion” or “suggestion.”

“You were in this courtroom when these jurors heard from Mr. McDonald that he’s trying to seek justice on this case, were you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now, if this jury had made the mistake of finding you not guilty, I want to know what Bart Whitaker would have done.”

“I don’t know,” Bart reiterated. “From the moment I was arrested, I knew from that moment on, I was going to spend my life, the rest of my life, in prison.”

Felcman believed Bart was not answering his question. “I want to know what you would have done, had they done that. Would you have just walked out the door? Would you have called them up and said, ‘Hey, you made a big mistake, I did this’?”

McDonald objected that Felcman was being argumentative, which Judge Vacek sustained, which meant he agreed with the defense attorney.

McDonald then asked for a sidebar to explain his position for having Bart on the stand to testify on his own behalf during the penalty phase. “The bottom line is, if he enters a plea of guilty, then the accomplice testimony is all that has to be offered. They are seeking the death penalty,” he stated in reference to Felcman and the district attorney’s office, “I am trying to get life. I am trying to actually get him to plead to life. He would have [pleaded] guilty if he’d have given him life.” McDonald seemed exasperated by Felcman’s actions. “But why are we going over this stuff, over and over?”

“Because he brought it up on the direct,” Felcman answered. “That it was his idea to do not guilty.”

After some bickering, the court resumed. Felcman grilled Bart on his desire to testify, after he had already been convicted. “Do you find it convenient?” he asked Bart. “You don’t have anything to lose now by getting up here and telling them what happened, because they already know, see? Do you find that convenient on your part?”

“No, sir.”

“You don’t find that convenient at all?”

“Since Mr. McDonald got on the case, this is pretty much the way we had said it was always going to be,” Bart countered. “I guess I didn’t think about alternatives as to why it could be any different. Pretty much from the beginning, we knew it was going to be a guilty verdict, that it would be tried on punishment.”

Felcman finally changed tactics and began to delve further into the territory that McDonald had dug for his client. “You said that you felt worthless.”

“Yes, sir.” Bart nodded obediently.

“When did this worthlessness that you felt come about?”

“Junior high.” Bart nodded as he answered.

“So, how old were you when you started feeling worthless?”

“Sometime in junior high, elementary school.”

“So you were thirteen, fourteen years old?”

“Earlier,” Bart answered.

“You told Lynne Ayres,” Felcman spoke of the educational diagnostician consultant/psychologist from the Tarnow Center for Self-Management, “that you were Atlas.”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“And tell me something”—Felcman looked directly at Bart, who seemed to stare right through the attorney without even being aware of his presence—“were you trying to manipulate her, or were you telling her the truth?”

“It was a lie,” Bart admitted. “A common lie that I told many people, not just Lynne Ayres.”

“You actually told her you had no need for anybody else.”

“Again, a common lie I told many people,” replied the nonchalant Bart.

“Who were the ‘lot of people’ you would tell that you didn’t have need for anybody?”

“I told that to a lot of people,” Bart replied. “It made me feel stronger. If I thought that somebody thought that I was strong, I sort of became that strong.”

“Why would you tell Lynne Ayres this lie?” Felcman wanted to know. “She didn’t know you.”

“She was trying to get to know me.”

“And you lied to her for what reason?”

“Again, I could not show her the true me, probably the greatest fear I had at that time.”

Felcman continued to suss out the truth from Bart, or at least when Bart believed he was telling the truth. “Which answers were the truth? That you felt like you were Atlas and could do better than anybody else?”

“That was absolutely
not
the truth,” Bart declared emphatically.

“What about that you didn’t need your girlfriend? That she had people she could pay to take care of her emotional needs?” Felcman asked in regard to Lynne Sorsby.

“That was not the truth.”

“What about the fact that you said your brother was a lazy, good-for-nothing bum?” Felcman continued.

“I probably did believe that at the time.”

“So that was the truth, as far as you were concerned?”

“As far as my perception of Kevin,” Bart replied, “yes, during 2002.”

“How did you draw that perception of Kevin?”

“During that time, he had discovered a video game called EverQuest that he was spending eight or nine hours a day on the computer. I could see how I could draw—the person that I was in those days could draw that conclusion.”

“Now, Lynne Sorsby,” Felcman continued, “who was your fiancée, were you lying to her about whether you loved her or not?”

“No, I wasn’t lying. I did love her. But I did lie to her also.”

“But you told Dr. Lynne Ayres that you didn’t have any need for her.”

“That was a lie,” Bart responded curtly.

“Tell me something,” Felcman directly addressed Bart. Felcman seemed peeved. “Why would you tell the educational diagnostician that you didn’t have a need for your girlfriend? What would be the purpose of lying to her about that?”

“That persona that I put on for her was a person that just didn’t need anyone,” Bart responded, discussing himself as if he were some other, outer-body composite of spiritual antimatter. “He was,” he continued, referring to himself in the third person, “he was complete, in and of himself, and he didn’t require other people, which was the total polar opposite of what I really felt. I was absolutely petrified of anybody knowing that.”

“You mean you were the opposite way? You were the kind that needed people?” Felcman quizzed the defendant.

“Yes, sir.”

“Needed people for what reason?”

“Very specific reasons, I imagine. Same as any other person needs someone else. I needed Lynne Sorsby more than anyone else, probably, in my whole life.”

“What would you need people for?” Felcman asked again in a slightly altered manner.

“I got acceptance from her that I didn’t feel I was getting from anyone else. I thought there were [fewer] requirements for that acceptance with her than anybody I ever met in my life,” Bart admitted.

Incredulous, Felcman addressed Bart directly. “Mr. Whitaker, you were getting acceptance from everybody in your life.”

“I know that now, sir. Yes, I was.”

“I know you say that now,” retorted the disbelieving assistant district attorney, “but that was true back then. You were getting acceptance from everybody in your life, right?”

“My perception,” Bart replied, “was that there were always conditions attached to that.”

Felcman became even more annoyed with the defendant. “Let’s start over. Back to the basics. See if I can get you to admit to a few things. Everybody in your life was accepting of you, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your mother, your brother, your father, your fiancée, everybody. Correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s the fact, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now you want to tell the jury panel [that] somehow you perceived that in a different manner?”

“In those days, yes,” Bart calmly answered. “I did perceive it in a different manner.”

“When are we going to get this new perception?” Felcman wondered. “When is the next time somebody accepts you, like your father has again, and you now perceive it in a different manner? When is the next time you’re going to come out with somebody, such as your father, who accepts you as you are.”

“I don’t believe I do that anymore.”

“Are you manipulating this jury panel here today? Are you telling them what you think they want to hear?”

“No, sir. I’m telling the truth today.”

“Of course, this was after my opening statement, right? About how you manipulate people and project as a chameleon what people want to see, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have any remorse at all for these poor people up here, having to put them through this?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” Bart turned and looked at the jury members and addressed them directly. “I’m very sorry y’all have to be here. I know y’all had better things to do with your time than to come here and deal with it.”

Felcman’s ire began to rise. “Had better things to do? Having to watch a video of a dead body. That’s what you want to tell them? That they probably had something better to do?”

“I just meant that they had…,” a clearly disconcerted Bart explained, “this is a horrible thing they had to come here and see, and I’m sorry they had to do it.”

Knowing he had burrowed deep into Bart’s thick skin, Felcman switched gears. “Let’s go over your background. When you burglarized all the schools, you wrote a confession. You said you did this as an adventure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you tell the jury panel what you meant as ‘an adventure’?”

“I had lived pretty much an invisible life, up to that point. I felt that I didn’t really have any real identity. I wasn’t part of a sports team or a club, or anything like that, and I just felt extremely bored.” Bart shifted in his chair on the witness stand. “I felt at that time—I know you don’t like me to say this,” Bart addressed Felcman, “but my perception from my parents was that I didn’t require any help, that my brother required all the help, that I didn’t need anything. So I felt what that meant was that I just wasn’t worthy of the attention that my brother was getting, and I did these robberies, and I wanted to get caught for them.”

“You did all these things because you wanted to get caught?”

“Yes. Also, the adventure, and then the idea that when it would go bad, because I think all three of us knew that it would go bad at some point,” he stated in reference to his juvenile criminal cohorts, Peter Keller and David Price, “that it would be impossible to ignore.” In other words, they were eventually going to get caught and suffer the consequences and potential punishment for their delinquent and criminal behavior.