And Never See Her Again (13 page)

The Sanderford family was not surprised at the decision of the grand jury. Greg Miller had spent hours with the Sanderfords, keeping them informed of the investigative efforts, which continued to focus on finding Opal. He also counseled with them as to the prosecution's trial strategy, explaining that the case would be difficult, but pledging to do his best.

"We have such faith in the DA and the police," Teresa Sanderford, Opal's aunt, said. "We're just going to have to sit and wait to see what the judicial system has in store."

Teresa Sanderford didn't know Ricky Franks and had no idea if he was responsible for Opal's disappearance. She just knew the indictment of Franks gave the family little comfort. Even if Ricky Franks was eventually found guilty of taking Opal, she was still missing. More than a conviction of the person guilty of taking Opal, they wanted Opal back home.

The stage was set for trial. Richard Franks had been indicted for aggravated kidnapping by the grand jury. The next step was a trial based on the merits of the case. Greg Miller's prosecution team was ready to move forward. Ed Jones and Leon Haley were set to defend their client adamantly. A trial date of April 3, 2000, was set. Lawyers from the prosecution and defense would clash in one of the most anticipated trials in Tarrant County history.

Judy Franks visited her husband frequently at the Tarrant County Jail as he awaited his April trial. She stared at him through the Plexiglas window and spoke to him by telephone. Judy would have done anything for her spouse. Jailers at the downtown Fort Worth facility scrutinized Judy Franks closely each time she arrived to see the man accused of taking Opal Jennings.

Under that intense examination, early in January 2000, Judy Franks was again arrested while visiting her husband. Accused of attempting to smuggle a crack pipe into the jail for Franks, Judy spent one night in the county facility before her attorney posted a $1,000 bond and she was released. Judy was charged with possession of a controlled substance with the intent to deliver. Her troubles continued to mount.

Preparations were feverishly under way for the highly anticipated trial as searchers continued to look for Opal Jennings, and lawyers relentlessly reviewed all the evidence. Ed Jones, attorney for the defense, spent much of his time in the Cash America building in downtown Fort Worth poring over thirty-six bound volumes of FBI notes, exhibits, and evidence folders.

The six-story building housed the Fort Worth division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was there that the evidence against Richard Franks was secured.

On March 26, 2000, exactly one year after Opal's abduction, almost to the moment, the Fort Worth skies turned a ghastly green, the air stilled. It was as though the heavens were mourning the loss of Opal Jennings.

At 6:15 P.M., the shrill sounds of emergency sirens blared throughout the city. The reverberation warned that a tornado had been spotted; everyone should take cover.

The early-season tornado started near Monticello and north of West Seventh Street, just west of the city's center. The damage in that area was a category FO, or light. As the path of the tornado traveled across the Clear Fork of the Trinity River, its damage increased to F2, significant. It remained at that level as it rampaged into the heart of the city.

Hail, the size of softballs, bombarded the area, traveling at an estimated speed of one hundred miles an hour. A nineteen-year-old man, unable to find shelter, was struck in the head, his skull fractured by the tremendous force. He was the first victim of the devastating storm that tore a two-mile-long swath. Only two other deaths by direct hail strikes had been reported in the twentieth century.

Hardest hit were buildings in the downtown area, including the Cash America building, where windows were sucked from their frames and shards of glass blew out at 150 miles an hour. Trees were toppled, buildings crumbled, and only steel beams remained on a cathedral's five-story tower. Pieces of glass, chunks of metal and building panels, continued to fall an hour after the storm had passed.

A second tornado destroyed more than one hundred homes in neighboring Arlington and Grand Prairie and damaged more than one thousand others.

When the devastating winds had ceased, five people were dead and ninety-five injured. Of those who died, one man was crushed inside a collapsed industrial building, another was killed by flying debris, and another man drowned when his car was swept into the Trinity River. There was $500,000,000 in damage to commercial and public buildings. Downtown Fort Worth was in shambles.

Two days after the horrendous storm ripped through Fort Worth, FBI agents picked through paper strewn across the pavement near the Cash America building. They searched for any sensitive files that may have been blown out of the bureau's sixthfloor office. Wearing disposable gloves, twenty agents looked through even the smallest scraps of paper that had been scattered outdoors.

It was impossible to determine if any sensitive files had been lost. Paperwork had been left on agents' desktops when the storm hit, but sensitive files were believed to be safe in cabinets. The FBI planned to inventory its documents to determine whether any confidential papers were missing.

In his Arlington living room, Greg Miller sat stunned as he watched news footage of the Cash America building on TV. It was 7:00 P.M., just forty-five minutes after the tornado had struck downtown Fort Worth. Miller could see papers blowing out of the shattered windows and knew that anything left unsecured would be lost. His heart sank as he thought of the materials for the Franks case being held for safekeeping at the FBI office.

Miller grabbed his phone and called Andy Farrell. Farrell failed to call back, and by 10:00 P.M., Miller was growing frantic. He had to know the status of the case files.

The prosecutor's phone finally rang at a little after ten o'clock. It was Bruce Shinkle, another agent of the FBI.

"I have some good news and some bad news," Shinkle announced.

Miller drew in a deep breath. "Give it to me," he said, expecting the worst.

"Well, the good news is the notebooks were locked in the basement vault and we still have them," Shinkle said.

Miller let out a small sigh but knew the bad news was yet to come.

"However," Shinkle continued, "when the tornado hit, the fire alarms went off and activated the sprinkler system in the vault. The vault is flooded."

When Miller replaced the phone in its cradle, he leaned forward, resting his head in his hands. Months of work literally could be going down the drain.

The next morning, Farrell and Shinkle made arrangements for the notebooks to be specially treated. First they were placed in a vacuum chamber, the air removed, and the temperature dropped to some point well beyond freezing. The process extracted all of the water out of the notebooks. The pages, in essence, were "freeze-dried." After there was a stabilization period, the temperature was gradually raised back to room temperature. The notebooks had been saved, but each and every page contained in the thirty-six volumes had been stuck together.

The job of carefully pulling each of the hundreds of pages apart fell to Miller and Farrell. The task was tedious. The two men grew tired of the painstaking work, but it had to be done. Through it all, they knew they had been lucky. Most of the FBI files that were upstairs in the bureau's offices were never seen again.

In light of the extreme natural disaster, the recovery process of the evidence notebooks, and a request by the defense for more time in reviewing the thousands of pages of FBI files, judge Robert Gill ordered a two-month postponement of Franks's kidnapping trial. Greg Miller was ready to go forward, but he admitted the delay could help with the effects of pretrial publicity. The trial originally had been set for one week after the one-year anniversary of Opal's disappearance. There had been substantial media coverage concerning Opal and the upcoming trial, which might have caused the defense to ask for a change of venue to another Texas city. Miller didn't want that to happen. He wanted the trial to take place in Tarrant County-the place where the crime had occurred and where he knew citizens wanted justice for Opal.

It would be June 2000 before Richard Lee Franks would finally be tried for the aggravated kidnapping of Opal Jennings.

In April 2000,Judy Franks appeared before Tarrant County district judge Sharen Wilson on charges of aggravated perjury. The stout, forty-year-old wife of Ricky Franks lowered her head, the dark roots of her tinted hair showing. Judy stood before the bench and admitted she had provided a false alibi for her husband when she testified before the grand jury. In exchange for her guilty plea, two unrelated chargesone for forgery and the other for theft concerning an IRS check-were barred from prosecution. The charges weren't dismissed, but she couldn't be prosecuted for them in the future.

Judge Wilson, known for her stern demeanor and tough judgments, granted Judy Franks five years' deferred adjudication probation. The perjury conviction would appear on any criminal background check but would not be denoted as a felony conviction. Judy would retain her right to vote and maintain other privileges not allowed convicted felons.

Deputy District Attorney Greg Miller told reporters, "The plea agreement was basically what I offered from the beginning of the case." Miller had no interest in sending the mentally slow wife of accused kidnapper Ricky Franks to prison. His focus remained on convicting her husband for the aggravated kidnapping of Opal Jennings.

Judy's false alibi was not seen as a deliberate criminal act by her attorney, or by the lawyers for Ricky Franks. They understood that Judy had made the bogus statements out of affection and concern for her husband. Ed Jones and Leon Haley claimed they had had no plans to call Judy to testify in the June trial, stating she didn't figure into the defense of her husband.

Jones and Haley were too busy working on pretrial maneuvers to worry about Judy Franks's grand jury testimony. Their strategy was to put their client in the best position possible prior to the beginning of trial.

The defense team filed a motion to have judge Robert Gill removed from the case based on Gill's early involvement in the investigation. According to the motion, in the first sixteen hours after Franks's arrest, Gill had learned too much about the case to be an impartial jurist. After being supplied with enough information about the defendant to support the issuance of both warrants, Gill had signed each document.

The motion read, `Judge Gill, based on his involvement and participation in the investigation of the defendant, is biased and prejudiced against the defendant such that a fair trial cannot be had by the defendant."

In addition, the motion asked for Gill's removal as trial judge based on the fact that it was Gill who set Franks's bail at $1,000,000 and that the district judge had never appointed counsel to help Franks during the long hours he was in custody.

Patrick Davis, a third attorney to join the Franks defense team, claimed the motion didn't question Gill's competence or character, but it was filed to make certain the judge hadn't been a witness to any issues or material facts that could prevent their client from getting a fair trial. The motion would give the experienced judge the option of removing himself from the legal proceedings, or appointing another judge to decide the matter.

Two additional pretrial motions were also filed. One asked for a hearing on the admissibility of Franks's statement given to police soon after his arrest. It was important to the defense team that the prejudicial words of their client admitting he had picked Opal up at her residence not be heard by the jury. They certainly didn't want the twelve-person panel to hear that Franks claimed the six-year-old child made sexual advances toward him.

In the second motion the defense asked the court to throw out any other written or oral statements that might have been taken from their client shortly after his arrest and detention. Haley, Jones, and Davis knew that any statements Franks had made concerning Opal's whereabouts were potentially devastating to their defense.

Two months after the disastrous tornado had spun through Fort Worth, the city that Will Rogers declared was "where the West begins," some high-rises, including the Cash America building, were still closed. Plywood covered broken windows, making the building look as deserted as an Old West ghost town.

The building initially was thought to be so severely damaged that it would have to be demolished, but tenants eventually were informed that the building could be repaired and they would be back in their offices in about eighteen months. Many offices, like the FBI, had made arrangements to share space with others. Some worked from card tables set up in their living rooms, and one operated from his car on a cell phone. It was basically back to business for those who worked in the downtown area.

And it was back to court for Richard Franks. The two-month postponement, asked for and received by his attorneys, was over. It was time for the much anticipated trial of Richard Lee Franks for the aggravated kidnapping of Opal Jennings.