Authors: Unknown
As on every other morning, Brice Mack would rise at Hoover’s entrance, smile, and shake his client’s hand in an open display of affection and confidence. After which they would both sit and briefly confer. That is, Brice Mack would do the talking, while Hoover, betraying no emotion whatever, would sit im-perturbably, a vast cathedral calm within him, pencil in hand, entering notations on a legal pad as his lawyer engaged in a clearly one-sided conversation. For two weeks Janice had watched, fascinated, as Elliot Hoover filled page upon page with notes during the course of jury selection and, remembering his diary, wondered what deeply felt thoughts and emotions he must be expressing on those yellow legal pages. Then, late one afternoon, after court had adjourned and Hoover had been ushered out of the courtroom, she purposely passed the defence’s table and glanced down at several pages he had left behind. They were filled with neat rows of nearly perfect circles.
‘Do you believe in the resurrection of Christ?’ Brice Mack gently queried the pretty blonde in the jury box.
‘Well, I used to when I was a kid,’ she responded with a vague smile.
Brice Mack wasn’t sure that her answer was entirely acceptable. He begged the court’s indulgence while he conferred with his client. Since no objection was registered by the prosecution, Judge Langley banged the gavel and declared a five-minute recess.
Brice Mack leaned across to Hoover, his arm draped loosely around his shoulder, and spoke in a hushed tone.
‘We have one more challenge left. I’ll use it if you wish; however, I think this juror is going to be okay. What do you think?’
‘Fine,’ Hoover replied, ‘I have confidence in anyone you select.’
It had been this way between them from the first day they met. In Brice Mack’s mind, the luckiest day of his life.
He had been sitting in the courtroom of Judge Ira Parnell when he happened to glance up and notice a prisoner, flanked by two bailiffs, standing in the rear of the room, looking over at the section beyond the railing where he and several other lawyers were sitting. The prisoner seemed to be sizing them up. None of the other lawyers had noticed him, but Mack did. Their eyes met, whereupon the prisoner marched forward with bis two bailiffs and, halting in front of Mack, said, ‘My name is Elliot Hoover. Will you be my lawyer? I can pay.’ Although there had been no great ego satisfaction in having been picked at random, Mack welcomed a case where, for a change, somebody could afford to pay him and without hesitation said yes.
However, his first conversation with his new client sent a ripple of current dancing up and down his spine. For here was a case to sink one’s teeth into. This had angles. All kinds. Oblique, obtuse, bizarre, the stuff that galvanizes courtrooms, magnetizes the press, draws in the eyes and ears of the world.
Reincarnation? Hot damn! If the man wasn’t psycho and the court could be prevailed upon to accept the evidence as a competent defence, who knew where it could lead to, and where it might end?
During the first meeting with Hoover, Mack had tentatively offered his client the possibility of a defence based on temporary insanity. He felt it his duty as a lawyer to do so, but the notion, fortunately, was rejected by Hoover.
During subsequent meetings Brice Mack was filled in on all the events that occurred before, during, and after the abduction at 1 West Sixty-seventh Street, and each new disclosure was more delicious than the last. Mack was delighted to find Hoover a willing client who forthrightly maintained that he was simply trying to help Ivy Templeton and, through her, his deceased daughter, Audrey Rose, and who related substantial eyewitness testimony that his daughter’s soul was crying out to him through the vehicle of Ivy’s body for help and that in abducting Ivy, he was simply doing what any concerned father with the capability of helping his ailing child would do. On this point, Hoover made his position perfectly clear; he had the right to take Ivy, he felt, under the circumstances.
Somehow a defence would have to be formulated to convince a court and a jury not only of the sincerity of his belief, but of the reality of reincarnation.
The next stunning event was Hoover’s refusal to be released on bail, contending that he found the accommodations in the detention cell block of the Criminal Courts Building perfectly adequate to his needs. When Brice Mack pressed him to accept bail, Hoover resisted strongly, stating that his religious principles decreed that all mortal suffering is natural and necessary to purify the soul on its cyclic journey through earth life. Mack accepted this reasoning with a large grain of salt and informed his client that he had sources who would be willing to arrange for bail to be posted and also provide the necessary collateral. Hoover seemed genuinely offended at the suggestion.
‘I don’t need help of that kind. I have plenty of money.’
Brice Mack felt the same tingle of electricity prickle up his back as he casually asked, ‘How much do you consider plenty?’
‘Oh,’ Hoover replied, ‘by now it must be a quarter of a million at least’
Mack felt his throat go dry. Where is it?’
‘In a Pittsburgh bank. The First Fidelity Savings.’
Mack managed to swallow a thickness of dry phlegm. ‘Would you be willing,’ he gently put forth, ‘to spend some of it on your defence?’
‘All of it, if necessary,’ Hoover stated instantly.
That tore it. Every which way.
By some miracle of sheer luck and Buddha’s special grace, the case of the decade had dropped right into Brice Mack’s young and inexperienced lap. A fear of his ability to handle it properly briefly assailed his confidence, but he quickly suppressed it. With enough money to pursue evidence, gather information, call in expert witnesses from around the globe, the trial would become a classroom seminar. Here was a case that was precedential, textbook, a once-in-a-lifetimer, permitting the imagination its fullest range, opening avenues into legal terrain previously uncharted. The kind of case Darrow would have relished, that Nizer and F. Lee Bailey would drop everything to defend, free of charge. And here it was, all his, punk kid just out of law school.
His mind boggled. At age thirty-two, penniless, unmarried, struggling to survive in a cruel and alien profession, with two suits and one pair of shoes to his name, Brice Mack was suddenly plunged into the centre of the winner’s circle. He was made.
Still, his antennae for danger, keened by the proximity of fame, kept a tight rein on his enthusiasm, cautioned him to proceed slowly and with care as there were hurdles ahead, dangerous road slicks and sudden, unmarked dead ends. Three of which were identifiable. The first, and least important to Brice Mack’s long-range game plan, was the jury itself. By a process of careful selection, he would have to requisition jurors of compassion and sensitivity whose minds would be open to fresh concepts and whose imaginations would permit them to take the plunge into the penumbra of the occult and whose religious backgrounds would not cause them to discount the supernatural as entirely unthinkable. He knew he would have to be careful in his questioning, since his adversary, Deputy District Attorney Scott Velie, was certainly no fool and represented to Brice Mack the second and most dangerous hurdle to overcome.
Scott Velie was an old-timer in the trade. A mild man with a soft manner and a sleepy face, but a killer. Brice had studied Scott Velie in law school. His lethal string of convictions were classroom exercises.
Long before a court convened, Velie would have learned from the Templetons of Elliot Hoover’s religious beliefs; hence, he would be privy to the defence’s strategy and would be waiting in the wings to counter any move they might make in the direction of reincarnation.
This, the third hurdle, was the toughest - that of getting the court to accept reincarnation as a feasible defence. Velie could be expected to pull out all stops to discredit such a defence, and the odds were in his favour, unless Brice Mack lucked in on a sympathetic judge or was clever enough to convince an unsympathetic judge of its feasibility.
The assignment of the trial to the court of the Honourable Harmon T. Langley was a break of mammoth proportions.
Elderly, silver-maned, a political appointee from the days of Carmine De Sapio and the O’Dwyer landslide, Harmon Langley, having come to the end of a long and unspectacular career, poised, so to speak, on the edge of the great forgettery, would not be the one, reasoned Mack, to shun the mantle of sudden fame this baby offered.
In less than a day a group of prospective jurors was impanelled; the court clerk revolved the large drum of cards, and the business of selecting a jury got under way.
During the three weeks it took to select eleven jurors, Brice Mack gradually came to learn one disconcerting fact; Scott Velie was allowing him to pick the jury he wanted.
At no point did the district attorney register objection to any question Mack put to the jurors, and very often he agreed to seat a juror acceptable to the defence on the barest minimum of information. That he could be so sure of himself discomfited Brice Mack, but even more discomfiting was the thin, bemused smile Velie wore as he sat back relaxed, listening to his opponent’s deeply probing examination of a juror’s religious beliefs and biases. Either Scott Velie put little stock in the defence’s ability to build its case on the reincarnation angle and was thus permitting him a free hand, or he was waiting for a more opportune moment to smash him.
*
Tour Honour’ - Brice Mack rose from the defence table and faced the bench - ‘the defence finds no reason to dismiss this juror.’ Then, smiling vividly at Miss Hall, he added, ‘In fact, we welcome her addition.’
Judge Langley turned to Scott Velie.
‘Mr Velie?’
Velie didn’t bother to stand or move, merely shifted the direction of his vision past the eleven seated jurors to the juror under examination.
‘Miss Hall, do you believe that criminals should be pampered?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Have you ever been arrested?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Are you acquainted with anyone who has had trouble with the law - say, a relative, or friend?’
‘No, sir.’
These were Scott Velie’s standard opening questions to each prospective juror. The prosecution could ill afford to take on a juror who at any time in her life might have looked on the law as an enemy.
‘Tell me, Miss Hall, if someone takes a child who doesn’t belong to him and removes that child from her legitimate premises and takes her to other premises without consent of the parents, and indeed against the strong objections of the parents, even if that person believed he was committing no wrong and, in fact, the law could prove he was wrong and liable for his actions, would you have any difficulty in finding that person guilty?’
Miss Hall thought it best to give the question a considerable amount of thought before replying, ‘No, sir.’
Bill’s eyes stole past a row of heads to where Hoover sat, composed and serene. The hated face was like alabaster, its equanimity insufferable. With the slightest shift of focus, Bill brought his vision to rest on the gentle and cherished face of his wife, sitting beside him. The perfect, exquisite profile remained immobile, her attention seemingly fixed on a time and space beyond the present. Bill wondered what thoughts lay on the other side of the glazed and vacuous eyes. He recalled those eyes on another occasion - reflecting a look of shock, revulsion, betrayal, a look that was fleeting, yet one he would never forget. He had deserved it, God knew he had deserved that look -letting go like that, putting her into the cauldron of his anger, pointedly accusing her, practically branding her a traitor. Yes, Bill sadly reflected, in that moment he had lost his most precious possession, more dearly prized than love - the confidence and trust of the only person on earth who really mattered to him.
They ate, they conversed, they made love, by rote and necessity. They smiled a lot. Bill constantly found himself pre-sampling and censoring each word and thought before uttering it. And when the need was upon him and he was able to muster the courage to reach out to her, he never failed to sense the momentary, slight stiffening of her flesh, the small sigh of resignation, the dutiful submission. It was all false. Both knew it. And in that knowledge the full measure of his loss was most painfully realized.
Their days and nights became computerized. Court from nine to four, cocktails and dinner, out mainly, from five to nine, the long walk home, and bed by ten. Weekends were spent in Westport with Ivy. They would drive up in a rental and stay at Candlemas Inn, the three of them.
Bill had agreed to the boarding school, but he didn’t like it. He hated seeing Ivy in uniform, her beauty camouflaged, shorn of individuality. Yet she seemed to love it. She had been readily accepted by the other girls and in three weeks had already made two ‘best friends.’
To date, newspaper accounts of the case had not travelled much. After the initial arrest and booking, which earned a second-page spot in the New York Times, the courtroom progress received minimal attention from the press. What coverage there was of the jury selection generally found itself in the back end of both the News and the Post. The Times printed an occasional squib. Connecticut papers ignored it entirely.
The time would come, Bill knew, when the case would rip its way into the headlines of newspapers around the country. For there was no doubt in Velie’s mind of the defence’s intention to put the issue of reincarnation into the record, although he would try to convince the court to rule it inadmissible as a viable defence. But by then the harm would have been done; the floodgates of publicity would have been opened.
Knowing what lay ahead of them, Bill had levelled with Sister Veronica Joseph, mother superior of Mount Carmel Parochial School for Girls, the day they had admitted Ivy, thus preparing her for the avalanche of publicity to come. While her bland expression had undergone a slight constriction of anxiety, she was quick to find the strength within her faith to cloak her shock and temper her misgivings with mercy. Bill saw her hand go instinctively to the large silver crucifix attached to a rope of black beads which fell from her habit as she softly intoned, ‘The poor child. We shall do everything possible to shelter her from the calumnies of the outside world.’ Which, Bill thought, was a quaint, yet certainly correct way of putting it for all of them.