The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (14 page)

One afternoon this spring, I visited Charlie at the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston, the imposing, maximum-security prison that is best known for housing death row. Now nineteen, he looked impossibly young for someone who will never step beyond the guard towers and concertina wire again. He wore a starched white inmate’s uniform, a buzz cut, and a doleful expression. He was frank about the horror of what he had done and made no excuses for himself. “If I was sitting on my jury, I would have stuck the needle in my arm,” he told me. At the same time, he said, Erin was given ample opportunity to call off the plan. “It was her idea,” he said. “If at any time she would have said, ‘Well, we’re not going to do it after all,’ it never would have happened.”

He had no ill words for the people he had so viciously attacked. Of the Caffeys, he painted a nostalgic portrait. “You know them family pictures that they print in movies and stuff?” he said. “The old-timey ones with the white fence? When I was at their house, that was what the family was like. They were perfect.” When I visited the subject of his role in Tyler’s murder, he grew quiet and studied his hands, his eyes slowly filling with tears. “I don’t really like to talk about that,” he said.

It was when he spoke about Erin that his voice softened and grew sentimental. “I would have done anything for her,” he said. “She was very smart. Very caring. I don’t know why she wanted it done, why it had to be like that, but she was a very nice person.” Weeks after the killings, when he was being held at the county jail on $1.5 million bond, he had been devastated to learn from his defense attorney that Erin had, in fact, asked a previous boyfriend to kill her parents too. Sergeant Vance had interviewed the boy whom Erin was caught kissing at Miracle Faith, and he had told the Texas Ranger that Erin had spoken to him about her desire to have them killed—several months before she had started dating Charlie.

“It made me question a lot of things,” Charlie said, his voice trailing off. “After months of pushing me and convincing me and all this, I got to thinking that maybe all I was was just a tool.”
He had not spoken to her since the morning of the crime, and he is barred from communicating with her ever again; he will forever have to wonder if she wanted her parents dead so that she could be with him or simply so that she could be free of her family’s control. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her head,” he said. “She needs to have it looked at.”

But Charlie was more bewildered by Erin’s behavior than bitter. Knowing everything he knew, I asked him, did he still love her? He thought for a moment before answering my question, and I studied his face behind the Plexiglas. “Once you love somebody, you can’t quit,” Charlie said. “You always will.”

P
AMELA
C
OLLOFF
has been a staff writer at
Texas Monthly
since 1997. She is a graduate of Brown University and was raised in New York City. In 2001, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in public interest. Her work has also appeared in
The New Yorker,
and has been anthologized in the 2008 and 2007 editions of
Best American Crime Reporting
and the 2006 edition of
Best American Sports Writing.
She lives in Austin, Texas.

Coda

During fifteen years of writing about true crime, no other story has spooked me the way “Flesh and Blood” did. I did not sleep well while I was writing about this case. The innumerable questions it inspired preoccupied me. Was Erin Caffey mentally ill? What had Terry Caffey not told me? Were Charlie Wilkinson and Charles Waid both sociopaths? Was Bobbi Johnson completely blameless? What was I missing?

Because all four defendants chose to plead out before their cases went to trial, few details about the murder were publicly known when I began reporting this story. My very first interview was with Terry Caffey, who could not have been a more likable, generous, or gracious person. Incredibly, he had only kind words for his daughter, whom he saw as a naive teenager manipulated by an obsessed boyfriend. He placed the blame for the crime entirely on the two young men who committed the killings. It was only when I read the case file that I realized the disconnect between Terry’s account and the terrible reality of this crime. When my story was published, Terry wrote to express his disappointment in the way that I had characterized his daughter. “I know she had her part in it—I’m not saying she didn’t,” he wrote in an e-mail. But he was frustrated, he explained, that I had put “the blame all on Erin” and made it look like “Erin twisted their arms and made them do it.” He wished I had instead written “a story of hope and forgiveness and moving on.”

Had Erin chosen to talk to me, as her three codefendants did, that might have been easier to accomplish. While I was reporting this story, I sent her a long letter asking for the opportunity to sit down and talk with her, but never received a response. To my knowledge, she has still not agreed to talk with any reporter—or investigator, for that matter—to explain her side of the story.

Erin Caffey is currently serving her sentence at a women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas, and is not due to be released until 2051, when she will be fifty-nine years old.

FROM
The New Yorker

O
N THE MORNING
of March 11, 1977, Detective Philip Vannatter, of the Los Angeles Police Department, arrived at his desk in the West L.A. division to find a report that had been placed there a few hours earlier. The document recounted how patrol officers had gone to the home of Samantha Gailey, a thirteen-year-old girl who lived in the San Fernando Valley, after her mother called police to say that Samantha had been raped by Roman Polanski, the movie director, who was forty-four at the time.

“In those days, I was too busy raising kids and paying bills to go to many movies,” Vannatter recalled recently. “But of course I knew who Polanski was, because of Sharon Tate.” Seven and a half years earlier, Tate, who was married to Polanski, and four other people were killed at the couple’s home, in Benedict Canyon, by members of Charles Manson’s “family.”

Vannatter read the file and went to interview Gailey and her mother, reported on his findings to prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, and then took the girl and the mother to speak to the lawyers themselves. According to Vannatter, “The prosecutor decided that we should go to the hotel where Polanski was staying and execute a search warrant”—to find, among other things, photographs of Gailey that she said Polanski had taken and quaalude pills like the one she said the director had given her. “The head of the D.A.’s office there told me to do the search but not to arrest him,” Vannatter recalled. “They said they didn’t want to do an arrest, but to do the case more slowly, through a grand-jury investigation. I was very unhappy when I heard about that. I thought we had plenty of evidence to arrest him, and that’s what I thought we should do.”

So, in the early evening, Vannatter and his partner went to the Beverly Wilshire hotel, in Beverly Hills, where Polanski was staying. “As we were walking through the lobby, I saw Polanski getting out of the elevator,” Vannatter said. “I walked up to him and placed him under arrest. I thought, The heck with this. I wasn’t going to let those D.A.s tell me how to do my job. Why not arrest the guy? Any other person would have been arrested. So I said I’m going to do what is right.

“After I read him his rights, I asked him to take me upstairs to his room, so I could do the search,” Vannatter went on. “I noticed that he had something in his hand, and he was just about to drop it. So I put my hand under his and said, ‘Why don’t you drop it into my hand instead of on the floor?’” Polanski placed a single quaalude in Vannatter’s palm.

In Suite 200, Polanski was jittery but cooperative. “As we say on the farm, he was nervous as a hen on a hot rock. He kept asking me for the quaalude back, so he could take it and calm down,” Vannatter said. “By the time we got back to the station house, he told me he had had sex with her.” (The question of exactly when Polanski first admitted having sex with Gailey is a matter of dispute.)

But the case did not end there, and, almost thirty-three years later, it’s still not over. On March 24, 1977, a Los Angeles County grand jury indicted Polanski on six felony counts, including rape by use of drugs and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. On August 8, 1977, pursuant to a plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to the least serious of the charges against him, having unlawful sex with a minor—statutory rape. On the eve of his sentencing hearing, which was scheduled for February 1, 1978, Polanski fled to Europe, and he has not returned.

Earlier this year, on September 26th, he was detained in Switzerland after American authorities made a provisional request for his arrest. Last week, Polanski’s lawyers provided the deed to his apartment in Paris, the final piece of security to raise $4.5 million for a bail package that had been approved by the local courts. Under the terms of the arrangement, Polanski was then released to house arrest at his chalet, known as Milky Way, in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, having spent sixty-seven days in a Zurich detention center. The large amount of bail, and a requirement for him to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet, might seem extreme for a seventy-six-year-old man; but, considering that Polanski is one of the most famous fugitives from American justice in the world, his release from prison under any terms at all may seem like a generous deal for him.

The question of whether Polanski’s celebrity has helped or hurt him hovers over his lengthy legal battle. For Vannatter, the lesson in Polanski’s long flight from justice is that celebrities enjoy special privileges in the legal system—a subject on which he possesses a unique vantage point. Seventeen years after arresting Polanski, Vannatter, with his partner Tom Lange, led the investigation of the murder of O. J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (Simpson was acquitted.) “I just think that celebrities get a sweetheart deal, more than the average guy does,” Vannatter, who retired from the L.A.P.D. in 1996 and moved, part-time, to a farm he bought in Indiana, said. “I never believed in that.”

It is easy to see why Vannatter and many others find such a moral in Polanski’s story. Polanski has enjoyed a comfortable exile in Europe, where until this year he not only avoided prison but continued to make films. For decades, his conviction for a felony sex crime existed mostly as a footnote in a long and eventful life. But the Polanski story suggests an alternative view, too. Over the years, there have also been times when he has been penalized for his celebrity status. Mostly, celebrity warps the criminal process, and not always in a predictable direction. In Polanski’s case, the effect of his celebrity was doubly, and inconsistently, pernicious; it obscured both how badly Polanski treated his young victim and how badly the legal system treated him.

P
OLANSKI’S PERIOD OF HOUSE ARREST
will mark a return to an alpine village that has long been a favorite escape for him. Friends of Polanski brought him to Gstaad to help him recover from his grief over the murder of Sharon Tate. On that visit, in the late sixties, Polanski discovered that Gstaad was, he wrote in an autobiography, “the finishing school capital of the world [with] hundreds of fresh-faced, nubile young girls of all nationalities.” At the time, “Kathy, Madeleine, Sylvia and others whose names I forget played a fleeting but therapeutic role in my life. They were all between sixteen and nineteen years old…. They took to visiting my chalet, not necessarily to make love—though some of them did—but to listen to rock music and sit around the fire and talk.” He described sitting in his car outside the schools at night, waiting for his “date” to climb out over the balcony after roll call. At this age, Polanski wrote, the girls “were more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they ever would be again.” The autobiography, “Roman, by Polanski,” was published in 1984, seven years after his guilty plea, and suggests a lack of contrition about his actions. While exile and tragedy have been persistent themes in Polanski’s life, so, too, has a sexual obsession with very young women. He started dating the actress Nastassja Kinski when he was in his mid-forties and she was in her mid-teens. He has been together with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, since he was fifty-one and she was eighteen.

And then, of course, there is the criminal case involving thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. In his autobiography, he wrote of the day that Vannatter arrested him, “I was incredulous; I couldn’t equate what had happened that day with rape in any form.” In an interview two years after the crime, with Martin Amis, Polanski spoke in even blunter terms: “When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, the car radio was already talking about it…. I couldn’t
believe
…. I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realize, if I have
killed
somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But…fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls—
everyone
wants to fuck young girls!”

Roman Polanski has led the kind of life that has already called forth multiple biographies. He was born in Paris in 1933, and his survival into adulthood must count as something close to a miracle. His father, a Jewish émigré from Poland whom Polanski described as a “struggling entrepreneur,” made the extraordinarily unwise decision to return his family to Kraków in 1936. After Hitler’s invasion, the family was confined to the city’s ghetto. His mother, four months pregnant, was taken to Auschwitz and gassed; his father was carried off, too, but somehow survived. On March 14, 1943, the Germans completed the liquidation of the ghetto.

“He has a world view which has been informed by terrible events, unspeakable events, that have never soured him as a person. There is no bitterness, no anger, though there is memory,” Jeff Berg, his longtime agent, who spoke to Polanski while he was jailed, told me. “Roman is not defeated by anything,” Peter Gethers, who edited his autobiography and wrote two screenplays with him, said. “He doesn’t regret the things that happen to him, because he understands that things just happen. He is neither in denial nor apologetic about his life. He wouldn’t use the word, but it’s a very existential approach to life.”

Polanski’s early life seems to have instilled in him a voraciousness for experience—intellectual, physical, sexual. Amid the deprivations of postwar Poland, the young Polanski became an accomplished actor, skier, bicycle racer, fencer, mimic, and artist. Summer camp changed his life. “I became Troop 22’s head of entertainment,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Organizing, directing, and starring in all our Boy Scout shows. I had discovered my vocation.”

In the early fifties, Polanski joined the threadbare Polish film community in Lodz. He made a handful of experimental shorts. His first full-length feature was “Knife in the Water,” a dark, atmospheric drama about a married couple who pick up a young stranger on the way to an excursion on their boat. It earned Polanski an Academy Award nomination in 1963 for Best Foreign Language Film. “I flew into L.A. first class and was met by a huge limousine sporting a Polish flag on the fender,” he wrote. (He lost to Federico Fellini, for “8½.”)

Polanski landed in Hollywood at a propitious moment. “It was a great time in the movie business,” Peter Bart, then the vice-president for production at Paramount and later the editor of
Variety
, said. “It was possible to be a great artist and make pictures that made money, too.” Shortly after Polanski’s Oscar nomination, Paramount acquired the rights to Ira Levin’s book “Rosemary’s Baby,” a satanic thriller. After Polanski rejected Bart’s initial requests that he direct the movie version, Bart asked his boss at Paramount, Robert Evans, to intervene. “Bob called up Roman and said, ‘What have you got to lose? If you come to L.A., the worst thing that can happen is that you are going to have the best sex of your life.’ Roman said, ‘I’ll be there.’”

“Rosemary’s Baby” became a huge success, and Polanski found himself a member of a celebrated generation of young actors and directors, including Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma. “For the first time, we were making money,” Bart said. “Roman started to like this community. He loved the fast life. He became a real star. He got good tables in restaurants. That had not been part of his life. You could see him change, to a degree. The unthinkable happened to Roman—he was actually happy.”

Polanski even found a woman he loved, a young actress named Sharon Tate, and they married on January 20, 1968. When Tate was pregnant with their first child, she and Polanski rented a house on the quiet and remote Cielo Drive.

I
T WAS SHORTLY BEFORE DINNER
on August 9, 1969, when Polanski, who was in London, received the phone call. His maid had found the bodies: Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant; Jay Sebring, a Hollywood hair stylist; Wojtek Frykowski, a friend of Polanski’s from Poland; and Abigail Folger, Frykowski’s girlfriend and an heiress to the Folger coffee fortune. (Steven Parent, who had been visiting the estate’s caretaker, was shot outside.) Tate had been stabbed sixteen times, Folger twenty-eight, and Frykowski fifty-one (and shot twice). The word “PIG” was written in Tate’s blood on the front door.

For months, the crime was unsolved, and it became the subject of a torrent of speculation, with some insinuations directed at Polanski.
Time
noted that “Sharon and Polanski circulated in one of the film world’s more offbeat crowds.” The innuendo wounded Polanski, who assisted the police, and offered a reward for leads. Finally, on December 1st, the police announced that the case had been solved. Most of the Manson “family” members who had conducted the attacks were already in custody. Manson had no connection to Polanski, or to any of the victims.

“Sharon’s death is the only watershed in my life that really matters,” Polanski wrote. “Afterward, whenever conscious of enjoying myself, I felt guilty.” After months of wandering, and much skiing, and eventually running out of money, Polanski directed a movie version of “Macbeth,” which was a critical and commercial debacle. A little later, his friend Robert Evans asked him to direct a script, by Robert Towne, about the murky origins of modern Los Angeles. Polanski was reluctant, but Evans courted him by hosting a Passover Seder, with Kirk Douglas presiding and Sidney Korshak, the mob fixer, arranging the catering. Polanski agreed to direct “Chinatown.” That film, which came out in 1974 and features a victim of incest trying to protect her daughter from the same fate, earned Polanski his next Academy Award nomination. (He lost to Coppola, for “The Godfather, Part II.”)

In the years after Tate’s death, Polanski lived a gilded itinerancy, mostly in Europe. He shot “The Tenant,” a thriller in which he also starred, in Paris, and directed “Rigoletto” at the Bavarian State Opera, in Munich. In his autobiography, Polanski recounted an evening in Munich in late 1976 when he and a journalist friend went on a double date. At Polanski’s hotel suite, the journalist stayed with his date, whom Polanski knew only as “Nasty,” and “I took the other girl, a stunning blonde, to bed. By the time I surfaced the journalist had gone. Nasty was half-asleep in an armchair in the sitting room. Taking her by the hand, I led her back into the bedroom. We never repeated this threesome, though I saw a lot of both girls thereafter.” Nasty was Nastassja Kinski, an aspiring German actress. Kinski spoke little English, and Polanski spoke no German. She was, according to Polanski, fifteen years old.