The Unbidden Truth (33 page)

Neither Barbara nor Carrie ate much lunch. Carrie lay down for an hour, and Barbara walked up and down stairs, back and forth in the upper hall, then up and down stairs some more.

When Carrie rejoined them, they all told her she had done a wonderful job on the witness stand, and she smiled faintly. “Now comes the real test,” she said.

“Honey,” Frank said, “I doubt Mahoney will be as rough on you as I was.”

Actually, they agreed later, Frank's words had been well chosen. Mahoney was brutal in some of his questions, but Carrie maintained her composure and answered steadily. Frank had prepared her well.

O
nce, years before, Frank had said to Barbara, “You have to wonder if you've done enough, if you should have called another witness, asked another question or two, cleared up a point that might be ambiguous today. And you will wonder that in ten years, or twenty, or however long you practice law. But you have to remind yourself that the other side is probably having the same doubts. And the answer is always yes, you might have done more, but this is where you are and you have to go with it.”

And that was where she was, on the last day, prepared to make her closing statement.

The media was swarming like flies at a dead fish, she thought, when the police escort parted a path for her group the next morning. The courtroom was filled to capacity again, and she spotted Luther in the back row. Scribble, scribble, she
thought at him. The jury filed in, the judge took his place and they began.

Mahoney started in a low, almost mournful key. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a complicated case, no matter how many complications the defense has tried to introduce. We can't know what lies in anyone's heart, all we can judge by is the factual evidence before us, and the facts of this case prove that Carol Frederick is guilty of the crime for which she stands trial.”

He made the same case the newspapers had made months earlier. Carrie was homeless, a drifter, penniless and she saw a chance to enrich herself by a thousand dollars and seized it. Something went wrong, and Joe Wenzel ended up shot to death and the money gone.

“We know why Joe Wenzel wanted cash that weekend. He told his brother he intended to buy the defendant's favors. This was in keeping with all that we know about Joe Wenzel. Is this what he told the defendant when he followed her to her car? We don't know. We can only surmise. She got inside her car and he walked away. Did she then sit in her car thinking about a thousand dollars and what it meant to her? Her old car needed tires, and it needed major work. A thousand dollars could have been the difference between repairing her car and continuing her wandering life, or working for many more weeks weighing every penny. Minutes later she was seen entering his motel room. What happened inside that room is something else we don't know and can only surmise. He was known to be abusive to women when he was drinking, and he had been drinking that night….

“We know she was in the room. Fibers that matched her clothing were found there. Her hair was found there. And her
glass was found in the room with her fingerprints on top of the bartender's fingerprints. She was the last person to handle that glass and she took it with her when she entered Joe Wenzel's room that night, and she left it there.”

He talked about her assault on a customer in Las Vegas. “There's nothing in the police records about that incident,” he said. “No one pressed charges, and that often is the case, but it demonstrates that she could turn violent. She did become violent at that time.”

He said that she could have seen Joe Wenzel in Las Vegas, that she might have come to Eugene with the purpose of finding Joe Wenzel. That was more likely, he said, than believing that it was all a coincidence, their being in Las Vegas at the same time, her finding a job at a motel he owned jointly with his brother and attracting his attention there. But even without that background, the facts of the murder itself more than satisfied the requirement of the law to find her guilty as charged.

He dwelt on the matter of the cash she had when arrested, and the facts that she had put two new tires on her car, and that her rent was paid through the month, and he claimed that her tips alone could not account for her expenditures.

He talked for an hour and a half and concluded by saying, “This is a simple case of murder, committed for one of the oldest motives—greed.”

After a short recess Barbara stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen, any case can appear simple if two conditions are met. The first is a rush to judgment, and the second is that if no hard questions are asked and answers demanded. In this case both conditions have been met. One week after Joe Wenzel was murdered, Carrie Frederick was arrested and assumed guilty.
There was a rush to judgment. The second condition has also been met. Once guilt is assumed the questions stop, and that is exactly where they should have started in earnest. Since the prosecution did not ask the questions and demand answers, it will be up to the defense to pose them and up to you, the jury, to determine if truthful answers have been forthcoming.

“Let us consider the question of the thousand dollars,” she said in a conversational tone. “Joe Wenzel had more than fifty thousand dollars in the bank, he had received an electronic transfer of fifteen thousand dollars on the first of the month. There was no need for a check, for a drive to his brother's house to take Nora Wenzel home, and then a dash back to the bank to cash the check and withdraw the cash. The only statement we have heard concerning the request for that money and the reason came from his brother.

“Both employees of the bank questioned his signature, and it was excused on the basis of a wrist brace that made writing difficult. No one else ever saw him wear a wrist brace, not his former wives, no one at the motel or lounge, not Mr. Vincent, the architect who had been with him on a daily basis for weeks. His brother's statement that he sometimes used such a brace is the only testimony relating to it.

“And where did the wrist brace go after that visit to the bank? It was not among his possessions in his room inventoried by the police following his death.

“When he visited the safe-deposit box, he had the key to it but, like the wrist brace, the key vanished afterward. It was not among the possessions inventoried in his room.

“Both bank employees questioned his appearance, which they said was unlike his photo ID, and that was excused on the basis of being an old photo in which he had been neat and
clean, and they testified that the man they saw was disheveled, dirty, unshaved, ten years older than the man in the photo, and that he smelled of alcohol. His driver's license was not in the inventory the police made following his death.

“Where would Joe Wenzel have accumulated so much dirt that Friday? He had not been to the house site where Mr. Vincent waited for him all day.

“The security questions they asked Joe Wenzel were of the sort that anyone who knew him well could have answered.”

She referred to the calendar she had been filling in and, pointing to it, she went over the dates. “There is the question of when Mr. Larry Wenzel could have talked to his brother about the complaint Carrie made.”

She gazed for a moment at the jurors, all intent, all impassive, and said slowly, “You have heard a great deal of conflicting testimony during the past two weeks, sometimes so contradictory that answers have been on the order of black
and
white, or yes
and
no. In each instance you will be required to ask yourself which answer to accept, which witness to believe when both can't be right. That will be your task.”

She moved to the night of the murder then. “Carrie was never known to have taken her glass with her when she had a break, or when she finished playing for the night. When she was seen walking toward her car, the witnesses saw her shoulder bag with her right hand on it, and they saw that her hair was up in a ponytail. They did not see a glass. The two witnesses who saw someone enter Joe Wenzel's room did not see a shoulder bag, and that person's hair was loose. The right hand was on the door frame, the other one presumably on the doorknob and they did not see a glass. They could not identify that person as Carrie Frederick. All they saw was long
black hair, a white blouse, and a black skirt, and they would not have seen that much if that person had not made a noise loud enough to attract attention.”

She paused a moment. “After being hired to play the piano at the lounge, Carrie bought three white blouses and two black skirts at Wal-Mart, inexpensive garments available from most discount stores. She took them home and immediately washed and ironed them. The fabric fibers found in the motel room still had the manufacturer's sizing, the finishing they put on all new garments, which is removed when the clothing is laundered. The fibers could not have come from her clothing.”

She talked about the hairs on Joe Wenzel's coat. “I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to consider the hairs on the coat. Is it plausible to think that Carrie would have entered that room, would have gone to that closet and pulled hairs from her own head violently enough to damage or pull out the follicles on a coat hanging there? Of course not. They were pulled out when Joe Wenzel got too close to her as she played the piano, and she jerked violently away. He wore that coat on his early visits to the lounge, and then stopped wearing it, and it hung in the closet from then on with the hairs caught on the button.

“And consider the other hairs in that room. You heard the foremost expert talk about those hairs. They were cut from a human head, or else from a wig made of human hair. They were not pulled out or broken off. They did not have traces of arsenic, and Carrie's hairs do have traces of arsenic. Those cut hairs were not from Carrie's head. He also said that the only way to state positively whether hairs that look similar are actually the same is to do a DNA test. No chemistry test was conducted, no DNA test was ordered.”

She looked at the calendar again. “There was a wig, you'll
recall. First, a wig of long black human hair was bought in San Francisco on July 30 by a woman who called herself Blondie, and paid two thousand two hundred dollars. The wig had a serial number sewn into it. According to testimony, Mrs. Nora Wenzel spent the week of July 29 to August 3 in San Francisco. Again, according to testimony, Mrs. Wenzel bought a similar wig in Portland a day or two after Labor Day for four hundred dollars and paid cash for it, but she no longer remembers where she bought it and she did not keep a receipt. That wig had a serial number obliterated by a permanent ink laundry marker. It was delivered to a hairdresser toward the end of September. Ms. Love stated that it was of exceptionally high quality, in all respects like the wig purchased for two thousand five hundred dollars which you have seen in court. Looking at the calendar, we are faced with several questions. Mrs. Wenzel learned about the masquerade party on September 23, and before that date she had no need for such a wig. On the following day she and her husband drove to Ashland where they remained until Thursday evening, September 26. Their son, Gregory Wenzel, saw the wig before he left town for the weekend on the morning of Friday, September 27. The question is when did Mrs. Wenzel have time to go to Portland and purchase the wig? Not after Gregory Wenzel returned home, not if he saw it before he left and said it was neat, but also by then it was in the hands of the hairdresser.”

She paced back and forth for a time then as she talked about fingerprints. “There are a number of puzzling things about where fingerprints were found and where they weren't found,” she said. “Carrie's fingerprints were on a glass that had a residue of bourbon in it. No one ever saw Carrie drink alcohol at the lounge and, as she testified and also told the bar
tender, she can't drink alcohol because it makes her sick, except for a very little wine with a meal. Her glass was left on the table by the piano three times at least each night she played, after her two breaks and when she finished for the night. It was not in the bartender's sight constantly. At any of those times it could have been removed by anyone. You have to ask yourselves if it makes any sense for her to have carried it out, to have taken it to her car, and then to have taken it back to Joe Wenzel's room and to have left it for the police to find. But someone put it there, and that person was careful not to smudge her fingerprints. And the fact is that not a single fingerprint of hers was found anywhere else in the room.

“Also, consider that Carrie always put on hand lotion when she finished playing for the night, not before then since she did not want to leave traces of lotion on the piano keys. There were no traces of lotion on the glass with her fingerprints on it. There would have been if she had handled it after she finished playing that night.

“But there are other puzzling details. The person seen entering the room had one hand on the door frame, where no fingerprints were found, although the fingerprints on the doorknob were smudged, not wiped clean. That suggests that that person was wearing gloves that smudged the fingerprints on the doorknob and left none on the door frame. Since gloves were not seen from twenty-five or thirty feet away, they must have been clear or flesh-colored latex gloves or something of that sort. Or else you have to assume that someone carefully cleaned the fingerprints from the door frame and simply smudged the ones on the doorknob.

“Also, the gun was wiped clean of all fingerprints. Why, if the killer was wearing gloves? That suggests that there were
other fingerprints on the gun that had to be removed. The briefcase was wiped clean. Why? If Joe Wenzel had taken it to the bank, his fingerprints logically would have been on it, but if someone else had handled it there might have been other fingerprints on it.

“And where was the gun when Joe Wenzel went to Las Vegas? He couldn't have taken it with him in a carry-on. His house burned and his belongings were all consumed by the fire. No gun was found at the site. His two ex-wives testified that he kept the gun locked in a desk at home. How did it turn up in his motel room?”

She talked about the Maid Service card on the door. “Joe Wenzel had never put the card on his door. He had never left his room before twelve or later. Why put the card up that night? If the usual routine had been followed, and the room not entered until one or later, the time of his death would have been reckoned as between midnight and 4:00 a.m. or later in the morning.”