The end of the night (2 page)

The first memo in the Wolf Pack file was written after his first few conferences with the parents of Kirby Stassen:

I HAVE EXPERIENCED a partial failure of communication with Kirby's parents. I understand why this must be, as I have seen it before. Everyone who works with criminals in any capacity is famihar with this phenomenon. It is, I suspect, a classification error. All their lives, they have been conscious of a great gulf between the mass of decent folk and that sick, savage,

dangerous minority known as criminals. Thus they cannot comprehend that their son, their decent young heir, has leaped the unbridgeable gulf. They beheve such a feat impossible, and thus the accusation of society must be an error. A boyish prank has been misunderstood. People have hed about him. Or he has fallen under the temporary influence of evil companions.

Their error lies in their inability to see how easy it is to step across the gulf. Perhaps, in maturity, when ethical patterns are firmly established, one cannot cross that gulf. But in youth, in the traditional years of rebeUion, it is not a gulf. It is an almost imperceptible scratch in the dust. To the youth it is arbitrary and meaningless. To society it is a life and death division.

Their son has aided and abetted and participated in the commission of illegal acts. And so he is a criminal. These acts have been of such a serious nature that he can never again lead a normal Hfe and, in fact, is in very grave danger of having life itself taken from him as a barbaric penalty.

They cannot comprehend this. They have the pathetic faith that somehow this will all be "ironed out," with suitable apologies, and they wlQ take their son home with them where he can sleep in his boyhood bed, eat weU, and forget all this unfortunate nastiness.

The father, Walter Stassen, is a big, meaty man, positive, driving, aggressive, accustomed to take charge of any situation. He is about forty-eight. In twenty-five years he built one produce truck into a tidy, thriving, one-man empire. He has lived hard, worked hard, played hard. I suspect he has neither patience nor imagination. Now, for possibly the first time in his life, he faces a situation he cannot control. He continues to make loud and positive noises, but he is a sorely troubled and uncertain man.

The mother, Ernestine, is a year or two younger, a handsome, styhsh woman with an eroded face, a body gaunted by diet, a mind made trivial by the routines of a country-club existence. She is highly nervous, a possible by-product of the menopause. I suspect that she is a borderline alcoholic. At our two morning meetings she was perceptibly fuzzy. If so, this situation will most probably push her over the edge.

I can detect no real warmth between these two people. They have measured their hves by their possessions. Most probably their emotional wells have been polluted by a long

history of casual infidelities. From the way they speak of Kirby, I believe that they have considered him to be, up until now, another possession, a symbol of their status. It pleased them to have a tall, strong son, athletic, bright, socially poised. They were amused at his scrapes, and bought him out of them. Such incidents provided cocktail conversation. They were an evidence of high spirits. For Kirby there was never any system of reward or punishment. This is not only one reason, perhaps, for his current grave situation, but also the reason why they find it so impossible to think of him, at twenty-three, as a person rather than a possession, an adult accountable to society for the evil he has done.

As I had suspected, I met with strong opposition when I stated my intention to defend all four simultaneously. They did not want their invaluable Kirby Stassen linked so directly to horrid trash like Hernandez, Koslov and Golden. They did not see why my services, for which they are paying well, should be extended to cover those people who have had such a dreadful influence on their only son. Let the court appoint defense counsel for them. Kirby would travel first class, as usual.

To convince them, I had to resort to an analogy to explain why this state had been able to extradite them, and why they were being tried for the particular crime committed approximately ten miles from where we were sitting.

I explained that there were several major crimes involved and, of course, many minor ones which we need not consider. The problem was jurisdictional, meaning who would get them first.

Addressing myself to Walter Stassen, I said, "Think • of each crime as a poker hand. They spread them face up. Then they selected the strongest hand, the one most likely to win the game. That's why they were delivered into the hands of this state. We have the death penalty here. And this crime is more airtight than the others. And the, prosecutor is dangerously able."

"What makes this one so strong?" he asked.

I shrugged. "You've certainly followed the case in the papers. Witnesses, opportunity, sound poUce work, clear evidence of significant participation in the crime by each one of them."

Ernestine broke in. "I read where it said that Kirby actually

... He couldn't do a thing like that! What has this got to do \^ith your defending Kirby separately anyway?"

"The State will not entertain a motion for a separate trial for any defendant, Mrs. Stassen. They shared in the commission of the crime. They will be tried together. I can represent Kirby separately. Someone will be appointed to defend the other three when they are arraigned on Monday. Maybe that person will approve of the line of defense I am developing. Maybe not. It is a good way to guarantee that all four will be —electrocuted."

"What is your line of defense?" Walter Stassen asked in a husky voice.

It took a long time to explain it to them. On the basis of preliminary investigations, I did not feel that I would find any significant holes in the State's case, any room for reasonable doubt. I told them I would admit the conmiission of the crime. At that point Ernestine Stassen tried to walk out, weeping. Her husband grasped her roughly by the arm, whirled her back and pushed her into the chair, and snarled at her to be quiet.

I went on, saying I intended to show that the four defendants came together in the first place by pure accident, that due to the personalities involved, due to the interaction of those personalities, compounded by the indiscriminate use of stimulants, alcohol and narcotics, they had embarked on their cross-country career of violence. I meant to stress that the group, as a group, had performed acts which would have been outside the desires and capacities of any individual member of the group. I explained how I meant to stress the randomness and lack of logic of their acts, the meagemess of their gain, the flavor of accident throughout the entire series of incidents. I explained the legal-historical precedents for this Hne of defense.

"And if it works, Mr. Owen," he asked, "what's the verdict ■you're shooting for?"

"I hope to get them off with life imprisonment"

Mrs. Stassen jumped to her feet again at that moment, her eyes wide, mad and glaring. "Life!" she shouted. "Life in prison? What the hell kind of a choice is that? I want Kirby free! That's what we're paying you for! You're on their side! Well find somebody else!"

He managed to silence her. He said he would give me their decision later. 1 had arranged for them to visit Kirby in his

cell, for much longer than the usual time allotted. When Mr. Stassen came back to my ofi&ce I could see for the first time, just what he would look like when he became very old. His wife was not with him. He told me they would go along with my wishes in the matter. He said he had put all his business affairs in the hands of a competent associate, and that he and his wife would locate an apartment and take up residence in Monroe until the trial, so as to be near their boy. I assured him that I would do my best.

I was then free to visit each of the defendants in turn, taking along Miss Slayter to transcribe pertinent comments which I might find useful in my preparation of the case.

I do not know if I can put the precise flavor of the presence and personality of Robert Hernandez down on paper. He is almost a caricature of the brutishness in man. Cartoonists give him a spiked club and draw him as the god of war. He is about five ten, and weighs maybe two hundred and thirty pounds. He is excessively hirsute, thick and heavy in every dimension, with a meager shelving brow, deep-set eyes, a battered face. It is a shocking thing to realize he is not quite twenty-one years old.

His intelligence is at the lowest serviceable level. But unlike the majority of people with a dim mind, he has no childishness or amiability about him. He gives the impression of an unreasoning ferocity, barely held under control. His eyes are quick to catch every movement, and he holds himself with an unnatural stillness. It was curiously unnerving to be in a cell with him. There was a musky tang in the air, like that near a cage of lions.

The only surprising thing about his history is that this is his first arrest for a major offense. The rest of it is what you would expect. Foster homes. Three years of schooling. At twelve he looked like a man, and began to hve like a man. Trucker's helper, stevedore, farm hand, warehouse work, road work, pipelines. A drifter, with artests for drunkenness, assault and the like.

His voice is thin, and pitched rather high. He has only the most vague idea of his own personal history, where he has been and what he has done. He has a low level of verbal communication. Such a creature is wasted in our culture. Attila could have found good use for him.

The interesting and significant aspect of his relation to the group in his attachment to Sander Golden. Apparently he had

fallen in with Golden a month or so before Kirby Stassen, the

final member of the group, joined them and the Koslov girl in Del Rio, Texas. He had met Golden in Tucson and from then on they had lived by Golden's wits. It was, I believe, similar to but less wholesome than the relationship of Lennie and what's-his-name in Of Mice and Men.

My question about Golden brought the best response from Hernandez—best in that for a few moments the wariness was lessened. "Sandy's a great guy. Only good buddy I ever had. Keep you laughing all the time, man." I did not care to inquire what would give this creature cause for apelike laughter.

His attitude was stolidly pessimistic. They'd been caught. When you killed people and got caught, they turned around and killed you. That was the rule. And it was worth it, because they'd had a "ball" before they were caught. He was indifferent as to who defended him. If it was all right with Sandy, it was all right with him.

I Imew he would make a terrifying bad impression in court, but I did not see what I could do about it. He had to be there.

During most of the time we were in the cell, Hernandez kept staring at Miss Slayter with a focused intensity that, in time, made her visibly uncomfortable. She kept licking her lips and turning her head from side to side like a cornered animal. I saw the shininess of perspiration on her upper lip, and heard her sigh of relief when we were at last able to terminate the interview and leave him alone.

Sander Golden is twenty-seven, but he looks much younger. He is five foot eight, with sharp sallow features, mousy, thinning hair, bright eyes of an intense blue behind bulky, loose-fitting spectacles which are mended, on the left bow, with a soiled winding of adhesive tape. He gives a deceptive impression of physical fragility, but there is a wiry, electrical tire-lessness about him. He is a darting man, endlessly in motion, hopelessly talkative. He can apparently sustain a condition of manic frenzy indefinitely. I hasten to add that this frenzy is pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-philosophical rather than personal and emotional.

He has a high order of inteDigence, a restless, raging curiosity and a retentive memory. These attributes are crippled by his unstable emotional pattern, his lack of formal education and his childishly short attention span. He does not seem to appreciate the extent of his personal danger. He

is enormously stimulated by the more subjective implications of his situation. His mind moves so quickly speech cannot keep up. During the time I was with him he lectured me in his pyrotechnic, disorderly fashion on the nature of reality as it applies to murder, on the entertainment value of criminal cases, on the special rights of the creative individual, on violence as a creative outlet.

I cannot attempt to reproduce his manner of speech, but I must report that it causes a curious condition of exhaustion and exasperation in the listener. After we left Miss Slayter covered it quite aptly, I thought, by saying that talking to Sandy Golden was like trying to swat a roomful of flies with a diving board.

It is difficult to reconstruct Golden's past. He veers away from all objective discussion, registering impatience with such trivia. He says he has no famUy. I do not believe Golden is his original name, but there seems to be no way to check it out easily, or any special reason for so doing. He has a record of two arrests, both on narcotics charges. He claims ten thousand close friends, most of them in San Francisco, New Orleans and Greenwich Village. His speech is a curious mixture of beatnik, psychiatric jargon and curious, sometimes striking, similes.

He seems unable to explain why, after staying out of serious trouble for so long, he and these relatively new companions embarked on what the papers have termed "a crosscountry reign of terror." He seems to feel that it started with the incident of the salesman near Uvalde, and just went on from there, as though some waiting mechanism had been triggered by that flash of violence.

He darted, whirled, paced, all the time we talked, pausing in a jerky way to fix us with his bright-blue eyes and speak of Zen and love, making such violent washing motions with his soiled hands that his knuckles cracked loudly.

It is too easy, I am afraid, to look upon this Sander Golden as a ridiculous being, an inadvertent comedian. After we left his cell. Miss Slayter categorized him as "spooky." There is an aptness to her word. Under the clown exterior there is a crawling, restless, undirected evU.

It is far too trite to say that life is a series of accidents and coincidences. It would take the largest electric calculator at M.I.T. to estimate the probability not only of these four disturbed people joining forces, but then driving through Monroe