A Stranger in the Kingdom (59 page)

It did not seem like enough for a defense to be built on. A pair of pockmarked shoes. A delinquent's testimony and a zealot's raving. An old family skeleton, literally and figuratively, the baffling story of Pliny Templeton and my mad great-grandfather, who spent his last years in the lunatic asylum raving at a dead man over the use of a piano in his school—a story which, for some unknown reason, Elijah Kinneson did not want told. Yet that my old cousin would go so far as to murder an innocent girl for the purpose of framing an innocent man was nearly impossible for me to imagine. The facts remained that Claire LaRiviere had been killed with Walter Andrews' revolver, and at the time she had been pregnant, very probably with Nat's child.

What Charlie could make out of it all in his summary, and what the jury would make out of it, I had no idea.

Sigurd Moulton made the closing statement for the prosecution, and it was brief and bitter. He began by citing a number of serious breaches of standard courtroom procedure. He characterized the day's events as bush league, and stated that regardless of Elijah Kinneson's final testimony, and his silence, which he was guaranteed the right to maintain by the Constitution, there were still far more unanswered questions about Reverend Andrews than about Elijah, beginning with where the minister was at the exact time of the murder—on his way home from Montreal or already in Kingdom County.

Sigurd Moulton pointed out that the defense's chief witness was a juvenile delinquent who made Huckleberry Finn look like a model boy. Despite Elijah's theological differences with Reverend Andrews, Moulton said, the sexton had no reason to kill the girl or frame the minister over a piece of long-forgotten history and there was not a shred of real evidence that he had done so. Moulton emphasized that both the minister and Nat had plausible reasons for wanting Claire out of the way, but the minister had more reasons, whether the jury believed Nat's story that he was with the girl on the parsonage couch or not, and Nat had almost certainly been in Montreal at the time of the murder.

Moulton admitted that the case was more complicated than even he had realized at first. But he asked the jury to make the clearest distinction in their minds between complications introduced by my brother to cloud the issue, and the legitimate complications of any murder case. By far the likeliest chain of events, he said, involved Nat sleeping with Claire early on in their acquaintanceship and getting her pregnant, Claire informing Reverend Andrews that she was pregnant on the very early morning of August 6, and Reverend Andrews deducing that Nat was the child's father and killing Claire on the early evening of that day, after returning from Montreal, to protect his son's reputation and his own.

“Rely on the facts,” Moulton advised the jury. “Don't be misled by extraneous complications. Fact number one: the murder weapon was the minister's gun, which he had already used against a local citizen just two nights before the murder. Fact number two: Nathan Andrews has admitted that he repeatedly slept with the girl, who was found to be pregnant. Fact number three: the chief witness for the defense is a village outcast with a reform school record. Fact number four: the minister was overheard by a prominent local citizen and churchman making arrangements to help the girl take care of her pregnancy, and so was clearly aware of her condition. Fact number five: the minister has a history of protecting his son, which is good and admirable and natural, too, until it results in violence and murder. Fact number six: by his own admission, the defendant arrived home from Montreal on August 6 at nine o'clock and didn't notify the police of Claire LaRiviere's absence until ten—leaving a full unaccounted hour during which he had plenty of time to take her to or meet her at the quarry and kill her.

“Reaching the proper conclusion this evening, ladies and gentlemen, now requires only common sense. Common sense, as the defense attorney himself has pointed out, is a quality we Vermonters—and we are all Vermonters, whether we live in Kingdom County or Montpelier or Brattleboro or White River Junction—have valued and prized for generations. Exercise that common sense for which we are so justly famous and you can come to only one conclusion, despite the defense's extremely clever attempts to cloud the fundamental issues by dragging in irrelevant information and incompetent witnesses. Mere cleverness must not win the laurels tonight. The victory tonight, if victory there can be in the most gruesome murder case I have ever seen in this state, must result from common sense and a dedication on your part to preserve the law of this land, and particularly that most supreme law that forbids the taking of a human life. I don't envy you your task. But Mr. Barrows and I urge you to do your duty, however unpleasant you find it. We have every confidence that you will discharge it responsibly and correctly.”

 

Charlie's summary speech was entirely different from what I had expected. I had expected a thunderous oration. There was none. My brother made relatively little reference to the ubiquitous lined yellow legal pads, which he, like Zack Barrows and Sigurd Moulton, had filled with notes during the past two days. He spoke instead extemporaneously in a down-to-earth, natural way, as though visiting with two or three of the jury members on the street in front of the brick shopping block or in the post office.

Charlie began by saying that several months ago a minister, a stranger from another country, had come to Kingdom County with his son to live and to work. He said that to the credit of this stranger and of our community, he had been well-received. He pointed out that Reverend Andrews had made considerable efforts on behalf of the church and the congregation. He mentioned Reverend Andrews' taking over the Academy baseball team, and reminded the jury how genuinely interested the Canadian minister had been in our community, its people and history, and how eager he had been to make himself and his son a part of it from the start. By incorporating himself into the community rather than imposing himself and his ideas on it, Charlie said, Reverend Andrews had quickly established himself as a leading citizen.

Speaking quietly but with feeling, Charlie conceded that Reverend Andrews had also earned a few enemies, to whom, for the worst possible reasons, he and all Negroes would always remain strangers. My brother cited the episode with Bumper Stevens at the cockfight back in late May and the shooting at the parsonage and the subsequent investigation of Reverend Andrews rather than Resolvèd Kinneson. Finally, he cited the murder charges, which he said were based on the flimsiest circumstantial evidence.

“In his summary speech,” Charlie said, “the hired prosecutor asked you to rely on facts. That's a spectacularly ironical request on his part because over the course of this trial he's presented so few of them. Nonetheless, I'm going to echo his sentiments here, because the only way you folks on the jury can come to a fair decision is by sticking close to the facts that we do have available.

“The first fact I'd like to remind you of is that in this country, everyone, stranger and native alike, is equal before the law. And in this country, everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. What constitutes a reasonable doubt? I'm sure Judge Allen will explain that to you in his final instructions far better than I could. I want to remind you only that you must base your decision concerning Walter Andrews' innocence or guilt on facts, not suppositions. And the facts all lead to the same conclusion—that this case is rife with reasonable doubts about the identity of the killer, who by the prosecutor's own arguments today could conceivably be any one of several persons.

“To make my summary as simple as possible, I'm going to focus primarily on the facts as they transpired on just three days this past summer, August fourth, fifth, and sixth. I want to ask you to review, first with me now and then later in the privacy of your deliberations, not whatever guesses and surmises and conjectures we may share about those days, and the weeks and months that preceded them, but what we know for a fact to have taken place during that seventy-two-hour interval.

“August fourth dawned raining. That was a huge disappointment for nearly the entire Kingdom. But under Reverend Andrews' sterling leadership, the sesquicentennial celebration went forward with great success despite the rain.

“As you know, however, there was an ugly incident afterwards at the parsonage, in which Resolvèd Kinneson saw Claire LaRiviere and Nathan Andrews together on the study couch, mistook Nat for his father, went home and got his shotgun, and fired two blasts of lethal buckshot through the minister's window.

“The prosecution has tried to make something, I'm not quite sure what, out of the fact that Reverend Andrews fired back in self-defense. But he fired only to protect his home, which I believe every man and woman in this room would have done.

“That brings us to August fifth, when, after a lengthy private conversation with Resolvèd Kinneson, Zack Barrows elected to charge him not with assault with a deadly weapon—but with
disturbing the peace.

“August fifth. What else do we know for a fact about August fifth? Well, we know from the testimony of both Reverend Andrews and Elijah Kinneson that in the very late hours of August fifth, or more probably the very early hours of August sixth, Claire LaRiviere went to Reverend Andrews and informed him that she was pregnant. We have no evidence, no facts, to suggest that either then or later did she or Nat Andrews indicate to him that she believed herself to be pregnant with Nat's child. Indeed, given the hand-to-mouth existence Claire LaRiviere had led in Canada and both while traveling to Kingdom County and during her first days here at Resolvèd Kinneson's, combined with the fact that she had been staying at the parsonage for only about five weeks, it can be very logically argued that Reverend Andrews had no reason to suspect that Nat, of all the possible candidates, was the baby's father. And I submit to you that without that suspicion, Reverend Andrews would have had no conceivable motive for doing what he is accused of doing here today.

“Fine. We know for a fact, from both Reverend Andrews' testimony and from Elijah Kinneson's, that during that conversation on the parsonage porch in the very early morning hours of August sixth the minister recommended to Claire that she go to the Mary Margaret Simmons Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, which he might or might not logically have done if he had known Nat was the father of the baby, but never, certainly, if he intended to murder her. We know furthermore that he even went to the trouble of calling the Simmons Home.

“Let's move along to the daylight hours of August sixth. Elijah Kinneson was a busy man that day. He had to change the locks on the parsonage and get back to the newspaper office where he worked by noon. Sticking just to the facts, we know that Elijah Kinneson has testified that he never left that newspaper office from noon until well into the evening. Yet Frenchy LaMott has testified that on the afternoon of August sixth he went to the parsonage and saw a man with short gray hair and green work clothes and shoes with holes in their tops go through the minister's desk and remove some papers and a revolver.

“Whether Frenchy LaMott actually saw this you must judge for yourselves. But I suggest that in making this judgment, you ask yourselves what conceivable motivation Frenchy could have for coming forward, at his own risk, and lying about what he saw. Keep in mind Frenchy LaMott's and his mother's reputation in this community for truthfulness when you make this judgment.

“What further facts can we be sure of? Well, that at ten o'clock on the evening of August sixth, after returning from Montreal, Reverend Andrews called the police to report that Claire LaRiviere was missing, which I, for one, can't imagine his doing if he were in any way implicated in her disappearance, and that late in the afternoon of August eighth, a minor and the so-called Dog Cart Man discovered Claire LaRiviere's dreadfully mutilated body in the granite quarry in the Kingdom gore, lying on a ledge just above the water approximately fifteen feet below the edge of the quarry, as though someone had thrown her down there after dark—supposedly assuming the body would sink out of sight in the water. Now I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, in the name of the common sense invoked by the Montpelier prosecutor, is it remotely believable to you that, not hearing the splash of that body striking the water, a murderer who wished to conceal the body would just go away and leave it exposed to plain sight there? Or, for that matter, toss the murder weapon after it into the water, where it would be bound to be found? Hardly!

“Now let's return to Elijah Kinneson. It is a fact that his name, more than any other except that of the Reverend Walter Andrews, persistently comes up in connection with this entire affair. We know that Elijah Kinneson was a most determined adversary of Reverend Andrews. We know that Elijah Kinneson, for whatever private reasons he may have had, above all else did not want the minister investigating the death of Pliny Templeton or the sad conclusion of the life of his father, ‘Mad Charlie' Kinneson, in the state lunatic asylum. And we know that Elijah Kinneson, and this is a
fact, refused to answer yes or no when I asked him here in this courtroom whether he murdered Claire LaRiviere and framed Reverend Andrews!
”

“That's more than enough, Charles,” Judge Allen said angrily. “I warned you about incriminating anyone else in any of your remarks. The jury will disregard Mr. Kinneson's last statement regarding Elijah Kinneson's refusal to answer that question!”

Charlie cleared his throat. His voice was raspy from talking all day. He looked carefully at each jury member—the same people he had seen on the street most of his life.

“When I asked Elijah Kinneson why he resented Reverend Walter Andrews, he had no real answer for me. The reason, of course, is that there is no answer to that question. That particular kind of hatred has no rhyme or reason. The most unfortunate and dangerous thing about any kind of human intolerance is that you'll find it wherever there are humans, because, ladies and gentlemen, it's potentially as much a part of the human heart, including yours and mine, as its opposite, tolerance, and we all have to guard against it every single day of our lives, whether we live in deepest Africa or up here in what we're pleased to call God's Kingdom.