The Professor and the Prostitute (24 page)

But the joint-trial law has a serious drawback. It requires a jury to understand that not all evidence presented during a trial is admissible against
both
defendants. Some evidence can be held against only one. For example, if one defendant in a joint trial confesses to the crime, that confession can be held against only him, no matter what it says about the role of his codefendant. Thus, the joint-trial law goes, in effect, against a natural inclination. It demands that at one moment a jury give certain evidence serious weight and that at another the jury screen that evidence from its consciousness.

Given what he knew of human mind and memory, Rothwax had long had doubts about the wisdom of the joint-trial law. Now he was being asked to try a case under it. In the end, he came to view the trial's outcome as a validation of the law and a vivid demonstration of a jury's ability to deliberate according to instructions. But early on he worried about whether the jury would be able to absorb the complex directions he was continually issuing.

For the Assistant D.A., Saracco, trying his thirty-eighth felony case, the murder victim herself was the challenge. During jury selection, numerous prospective jurors had snickered at the tidbits of Delia's lifestyle that were described. Saracco had begun to fear that most jurors would be incapable of feeling sufficient empathy for Delia to treat the murder with the gravity it deserved. As a result, he decided not to challenge jurors who were young or employed in the arts. “Our side usually goes for the kind of guy who hangs out in Rosie O'Grady's bar or has a big, traditional family with a lot of kids,” he later explained to me. “But how could we sell
them
Delia?”

The jury that was finally selected consisted mostly of youthful, white, highly educated men and women, including three actors. But would such a jury—the kind generally considered favorable to the defense—be capable of finding the defendants guilty? Saracco kept worrying.

Robyn Arnold's counsel, Rosen, was worried because he was not planning to mount a case—in the sense of putting forward an array of witnesses or calling his client to the stand. He was hoping to win almost strictly on the basis of arduous cross-examination. But he knew how risky this approach would be: many legal observers think juries never fully accept the notion of a defendant's presumed innocence when the defendant doesn't take the stand.

The person most challenged, however, was Robert's counsel, Robert Dilts. Mild-mannered and straitlaced, Dilts, whose services were being paid for by a friend of Ferrara's from the gay community in New Jersey, often spoke of his bewilderment with the lifestyle the case was exposing. “Here I am, a normal guy,” he mused to me outside the courtroom. “I mean, I've never had a desire to marry someone who had a fake vagina. Or even to hang out with someone who did. Or take drugs. Or go to clubs like these. I'm a normal guy. And I'm trying to understand all
this!
”

In the face of these concerns, the trial at last got under way. The prosecution contended that on the night of October 7, 1981, Robyn Arnold and Robert Ferrara drove Delia to a wooded spot in Rockland County and shot her, each firing twice. About two weeks later, according to the prosecution, Robert returned to the scene of the crime. Delia's body had not been discovered. Robert bundled Delia into a yellow blanket and dropped her into the Hudson, where she floated downstream. No murder weapon had been found, so with the exception of Giorgio, the prosecution witnesses would testify simply about Robyn and Robert's possible motives for killing Delia and about circumstantial evidence linking them to the crime.

On they came: Delia's family, her mother, stepmother, and father; Delia's pals, the habitués and managers of the bars and discos; and Delia's protégés, the female impersonators (one sporting a mustache, another with the improbable stage name of Dottie Fuck-Fuck). The witnesses all seemed to think that both Robyn and Robert had had a motive for murder. Each of the pair, for reasons of his or her own, had become fed up with Delia.

In Robert's case, the problem had been Delia's sex change. On the verge of tears, her eyelashes fluttering, Delia's mother said that shortly before she disappeared, her daughter had telephoned and, in the long tradition of mother-bride talks, complained, “My husband isn't as active in the bedroom as he used to be.” Robert, Delia's mother implied, had been disgusted by Delia's new sex and had seen no way out of the predicament of his marriage short of killing his anomalous wife.

Jealousy was suggested as Robyn's motive. Several witnesses testified that she had been obsessively in love with Delia. She had kept a kind of shrine to him, they said, with twenty or thirty photographs of him in and out of costume and all his wigs and shoes and glittery get-ups. She'd accepted his sex change, even paying for the operation, and accepted his marriage to Robert, even paying for the ring. But she'd apparently wanted to be, if not the only love of his life, at least the only woman in that life. The hair stylist Laura, with whom Delia had flirted, testified that Robyn had said wistfully to her, “If Delia can have a lesbian relationship, why can't it be with me?” Delia's stepmother, Patricia, said Robyn had told her she paid for Delia's penile inversion, and that she'd done so because “if I can't have Delia as a lover, I'd rather have him as a close girlfriend.” And Delia's mother, Joan, insisted that on the night before Delia disappeared, when all the clique with the exception of Robyn had slept together at Tony Poveromo's house, Robyn had in fact gone over in the wee hours to join the group, seen Delia and Laura locked in a nude embrace, and become so enraged that she fled.

Robyn had an alibi for the hours up to about midnight on the evening Delia disappeared. She'd been getting her nails done at the home of a friend, a professional manicurist. But the prosecution claimed that she had been with Robert later that night and proved that she'd even made a telephone call for him, dialing his boss at Zipperz and saying he'd been mugged, his face was all scratched, so he wouldn't be coming to work. Other prosecution witnesses testified that Robert had pawned Delia's wedding ring, which she had presumably been wearing until she was killed; that Robyn had become furious when she'd learned that Delia's purple shoes had been taken from her; and that she'd gotten extremely shaky when a friend had pointed out that her bed was missing a familiar yellow blanket, presumably the one used to wrap Delia's dead body. (Both the shoes and the blanket became the subjects of a legal tug-of-war.
Were
the shoes the ones that Delia disappeared in?
Was
Robyn's blanket the one in which Delia's body was found?)

For the first week and a half, the evidence against both defendants was basically circumstantial. Then, as if to justify Judge Rothwax's early worries about the joint-trial law, a written confession by Robert was introduced.

It was a letter that Robert had sent to Giorgio but that Giorgio had misplaced. In fact, a friend had somehow gotten hold of it and only during jury selection thought to bring it forward.

In the letter, Robert said, “Delia had sent me and Robyn to get the gun in Pennsylvania so that she could rob some man she met at Studio Fifty-four of cocaine and cash. We would split the goods. Supposedly she would set it up when we were in Pennsylvania.… Robyn, Delia and I went to Rockland to go to the Cuckoo's Nest.… [A friend] has supposedly stolen very expensive sound equipment from the Nest and hidden it in the woods. We arrived at the spot. Delia and I were walking toward the woods. Robyn shot her in the back of the head. I ran. [Then I came back and] I shot Delia twice to put her out of her misery.”

Consternation ensued once the letter appeared. Robert didn't deny having written it, so for Dilts, his lawyer, the key would be suggesting that the letter had somehow been illegally or unethically elicited by Giorgio. For Rosen, the letter raised fears that the jury would be influenced by an assertion about his client that, while not admissible as evidence against her, might nevertheless affect their reasoning. He again demanded separate trials, but Rothwax refused.

There was no choice but to go forward, and at last Dominick Giorgio was called. He had been the recipient of the fateful letter, and if he was to be believed, he was the recipient of oral confessions to the murder by both parties on trial. Giorgio told the jury that he had heard about the murder four times. Once he had overheard Robyn say to someone on the phone, “Look, you shot her, and I shot her.” Another time, she had blurted out something about the murder to Robert while Giorgio was present, then had said to Giorgio, “Now you're involved.” And twice Robert had verbally confessed the act. As in the letter, he'd admitted to Giorgio that he'd shot Delia. But, said Giorgio, Robert had claimed Robyn had already also shot Delia and he'd merely polished off his former beloved, as one would a wounded horse, in order to spare her further suffering.

Giorgio was the nucleus of the prosecution's case against both defendants. But could Giorgio be believed? After Delia's disappearance, he had become Robert's lover. “He told me I was his best friend in the world,” the pale, earringed male nurse said mournfully from the witness stand. Yet it was he who had told the police, after he'd been arrested for stealing drugs from the hospital, about Robert's confessing to having shot Delia. Robert had been promptly jailed, and Giorgio had received probation for his own crime. Afterward, however, they'd stayed in touch, exchanging love letters, and Giorgio had not only visited Robert in jail but once even smuggled drugs in to him. He'd been caught but had received a conditional discharge. What kind of person was he? A tormented soul or a conniving one?

Both defense attorneys insisted on the latter reading—although attributing different connivances to him. Giorgio had been no true friend to Robert, Dilts suggested, but had kept in contact with his client just in order to make him implicate
himself
—to get him, for example, to write those self-incriminating letters. Giorgio
was
Robert's creature, Rosen tried to show, and thus he'd made up the story of Robyn's involvement in the shooting, hoping that if Robert could claim Delia was already dead when he fired his shots, he might be guilty of something less than murder.

But, after all the theatrics and poses, the dramatic heart of the trial lay in the accumulation of detail about the life Delia and his friends had managed to pursue. Witness after witness reported that drugs and the kind of sexual decadence associated with cities, with Manhattan's ragged edges or Berlin's 1920s cabarets, had not only found their way to but taken root in the tranquil towns above New York. Despite their well-tended lawns and gardens, the suburbs were producing an underclass of drifting, disaffected, sensation-seeking young people. “This is the most intriguing expose of modern suburbia anyone ever dreamed of,” said Rosen, the defense lawyer. “There's a legitimate subculture up there that's beyond the wildest imagination.”

“You expect these things in the city,” said Detective Donald Longo. “Not up there. But it turns out we're all squares in Manhattan.”

Longo had hung around the gay clubs of suburbia during the investigation of the murder and had found their existence astounding. During the trial, as owners, employees, and patrons of the clubs came forward and as testimony about mood-altering drugs, orgiastic nights, and jobless days mounted, old images of suburbia began to seem like nostalgic dreams.

After three weeks of testimony, the case drew to a close. Neither defendant took the stand. In their summations, both defense attorneys focused on Giorgio. He had stolen drugs, Dilts reminded the jury, and smuggled them into Riker's Island. Given his proclivities, wasn't it possible that everything he'd said was a lie? Wasn't it even possible that the written confession itself, the one Robert had mailed Giorgio, had been elicited unscrupulously by a Giorgio who was cooperating with the police?

Attorney Rosen invented still another scenario involving Giorgio. “Imagine,” he intoned, “that it's a beautiful fall day, and you and your family are taking a drive up the Palisades Parkway. Suddenly you or someone in your car has a heart attack. You wind up at Pascack Valley Hospital. You are taken to the emergency room. There, at the door, stands Dominick Giorgio.” A shiver seemed to pass through the jury, and Rosen concluded in high emotional style, “If you wouldn't trust putting your life, or that of someone in your family, into the hands of Dominick Giorgio, don't put Robyn Arnold's life in his hands, either!”

Four days later, Robyn Arnold was acquitted of the murder of Diane Delia. The jury had apparently decided not to believe Giorgio. But Robert Ferrara was convicted. The jury had apparently decided to believe Giorgio.

Several of the jurors later commented on the seeming contradiction by explaining that, basically, they had been persuaded by Rosen's argument that Giorgio had hoped to lessen Robert's guilt by dragging Robyn into the case. But at the moment of the decision, none of that mattered. Robyn's family began weeping with relief, and she herself, guilty not of murder but merely of having been a hanger-on, seemed suddenly to alter. For the first time in weeks, her control broke: her hair became disheveled, her blouse came untucked, and she acted extravagantly, nearly swooning in the arms of her lawyer. He supported her, and while he did so, Robert Ferrara was led silently away.

Minutes later, outside the courthouse, the jury thronged Robyn. Several women jurors hugged her. She hugged them back and, her face wreathed in smiles, invited all the jurors to her upcoming wedding to the dentist. There would be a special jurors' table, she promised.

Her dentist fiancé went to get his car. Returning, he offered several of the jurors a lift uptown, and they piled in. The hubbub on the sidewalk swelled. Robyn was still surrounded. She was just starting to make excited farewells when a prison bus clanged its way up a ramp from the bowels of the courthouse and headed away down the still-crowded street. The bus was nearly empty. Inside, the only face to be seen was that of Robert Ferrara, staring.