And Never See Her Again (17 page)

Audrey and the rest of the Sanderford family stood in the security line, dropping cell phones, keys, and sunglasses into the small bowls provided outside the walk-through metal detectors just steps into the front doors of the courthouse. Women placed their handbags, men their briefcases, on the conveyor belt that traveled through an X-ray machine to guarantee the safety of those that entered.

Prior to the July 1, 1992, shooting spree of George Lott in the older historical Tarrant County Court- house,just blocks from where Franks would be tried, security had been minimal. But with the deaths of Chris Marshall, head of the Tarrant County District Attorney's Appellate Division, as well as Dallas lawyer John Edwards, and the wounding of three others, including two judges, security in each of the county's courthouses had been intensified dramatically.

The Sanderfords entered judge Gill's courtroom and sat on the right side reserved for them. Impartial spectators, along with area reporters, scattered themselves along the length of the benches in the center. The Franks family had reserved seats on the left side of the courtroom, closest to Ricky Franks. The first row of each of the three sections remained empty for security purposes. No one other than law enforcement personnel would be allowed to occupy those prime viewing areas.

Greg Miller, Robert Foran, and Lisa Callahan entered the doors of the 213th District Court from the front of the courtroom, armed with investigative reports and enlarged maps. Their private offices were housed on another floor of the Tarrant County Justice Center, a maze of small spaces secured behind a locked door only accessible by attorneys, staff, and those brought into the inner sanctum for interviews.

Leon Haley, Ed Jones, and Patrick Davis walked into the courtroom from the rear, toting binders filled with notes and witness lists, confident of their defensive strategy.

Everyone was present in the courtroom-everyone but Opal Jennings. The six-year-old had been gone for over a year. No one knew her whereaboutsno one, according to Greg Miller, but Richard Franks.

Miller, Foran, and Callahan were prepared to prove that Franks killed the child, although he was only being tried for aggravated kidnapping. Without a body, Miller knew it would be difficult, if not impossible, to convict the sex offender of murder. Thirty years earlier, the case would never have been prosecuted for murder without the victim's body, even if someone had confessed to the crime. But under the Texas Penal Code rewritten in 1974, the victim's body was not needed for prosecution. Circumstantial evidence was all that was considered necessary to take a case to trial for murder.

But even without a murder conviction, Franks faced life behind bars if jurors found him guilty of aggravated kidnapping. Because Opal was under the age of fourteen, prosecutors needed only to show that Franks took her somewhere, not that she was forced or restrained. By Texas law, children younger than fourteen cannot give their consent; therefore, any seizure of a child would be deemed a kidnapping.

Following the earlier pretrial hearing standoff between the prosecution and defense, speculation ran high that Miller would rely heavily on Franks's confession to secure a conviction. Leon Haley and Ed Jones, who had lost the motion to suppress Franks's statement the previous day, were set to counter the potentially negative impact Franks's confession might make. It appeared they would present a defense that would concentrate on Ricky Franks's mental retardation and charge that the confession had been coerced.

Sitting on a raised bench above the courtroom and flanked by both the Texas and American flags, Judge Gill asked both the state and the defense if they were ready to proceed. As each side responded in the affirmative, nausea gripped the stomach of Leola Sanderford.

Greg Miller, the lead prosecutor for the state, walked the short distance from the prosecutor's table to the jury box. Miller, whose gravelly voice resonated throughout the courtroom, was a seasoned prosecutor. He delivered his remarks with passion and conviction. What he may have lacked in substantial evidence, he made up for in his firm conviction that Ricky Franks was guilty.

Miller told the jury the state would prove through eyewitness testimony that Richard Lee Franks abducted OpalJennings. Miller stated that investigators had tracked down numerous leads and had tried to eliminate Franks as the possible assailant.

"Couldn't do it," Miller said. "You know why? He took her."

Miller declared that the crime was solved when Ricky Franks was arrested.

"We will call two inmates who heard Franks confess to the crime," Miller told the twelve-person panel. "One will tell jurors that Franks said, `If they find her body, they will find the evidence to link me to this crime."' Miller paused to let the statement sink into the minds of each juror.

Then Miller mentioned that there was Franks's statement, which judge Gill had ruled admissible the previous day, in which Franks said he gave Opal a ride to a convenience store, but he dropped her off safely after rejecting her repeated sexual advances.

Miller planned to build his case around Franks's own words and persuade the jury to find him guilty of aggravated kidnapping.

The defense was just as determined to do all it could to help the jury find their client innocent of the horrendous crime that had gripped Tarrant County for more than a year.

"None of the state's witnesses will testify about physical evidence linking Ricky Franks to the case," Edward Jones stated in his opening remarks. "This isn't a case of circumstantial evidence, but of absolutely no evidence whatsoever. The person responsible for the disappearance of Opal Jennings is not in this courtroom," Jones said, putting emphasis on "not" as his voice grew louder.

Jones set the stage for their defense when he told the jury that Ricky Franks had below-average intelligence and was coerced into making a statement, which he later recanted.

"This case is about the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office overreacting in an attempt to solve this terrible, terrible disappearance."

Then looking at each juror individually, Jones challenged them by saying, "You, as Tarrant County citizens, deserve better and Opal deserves better. At the close of all the evidence, you tell the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office, you tell the Saginaw police, you tell the FBI, to go get Opal's abductor."

Opal's mother, Leola, squeezed Teresa's hand and took a deep breath. The trial of the man charged with kidnapping her daughter was about to begin. She sat quietly, remembering Opal.

Everyone in the courtroom took in a breath as the defense concluded their opening statement and the prosecution waited to call their first witness. Tension was high on both sides of the aisle.

Teresa Sanderford glanced at her husband, Clay, as she heard Robert Foran call her name as the state's first witness. She pushed the low swinging dark wooden door that separated the inner courtroom from the gallery. She walked slowly to the stand. Her long brown hair brushed the shoulders of her dark clothing. Teresa's hand shook slightly as she raised it in order to swear to tell the truth.

The court reporter, sitting just in front of the witnessbox, poised her hands over the keys of her machine, ready to take down every word of the Franks trial.

Teresa was nervous as she sat before Judge Gill, the filled gallery, the jury, and the accused, Ricky Franks. While other witnesses waited in an adjoining room for their turn to take the stand, Teresa kept her eyes on Robert Foran. She deliberately avoided the intense stare of the defendant.

Teresa explained that at the time of Opal's abduction, she was living with Audrey and Robert Sanderford, her grandson Austin, and other relatives on North Hampshire in Saginaw, Texas.

"How old was Austin?" Foran asked.

"He was twenty-two months old," Teresa replied.

Opal, Teresa's great-niece by marriage, was described by Teresa as a six-year-old kindergartner who loved school, did well, and was very bright. Teresa's shoulders relaxed and she smiled as she spoke of Opal.

Foran produced an enlarged photo of Opal, her eyes sparkling and her smile radiant. Teresa's voice broke slightly as she identified the endearing girl in the photo as Opal Jennings and confirmed that it was how she had looked at the time of her disappearance.

Using additional photos that had been blown up for easier identification, Foran had his witness point out various streets and houses in her small Saginaw neighborhood.

"Now I want to direct your attention back to March 26, 1999. Were you at home that afternoon?" Foran asked.

"Yes. I was waiting for my husband to come home because we were all going to go out to dinner," Teresa answered.

"Were other people at home?" Foran questioned.

"Yes. Opal was there. My grandson Austin, my mother, Audrey Sanderford, and her husband, Robert Sanderford," Teresa said.

She then explained that she had been in the family kitchen while Robert was in the living room watching the news with Audrey.

"At any time that afternoon, did they leave?" Foran asked.

"Robert had gone outside because the kids were get ting a little bit far away. You could hear their voices. The windows were open and everything. He told them to come back up closer in the yard," Teresa said.

"Did you see them there in the front yard?" Foran asked.

"I saw them most of the time, but they could step out of my view," Teresa responded.

Teresa explained that she could hear Opal, Austin, and their friend Spencer running and yelling, being kids. Then she heard Austin crying.

"Would you describe for the jury what drew your attention?" Foran prodded.

Teresa took a deep breath. She would never forget the sound of her grandson's cry that day. She heard it in her dreams, on occasion even in her waking hours. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand.

"He was crying like I had never heard Austin cry before. He was just totally brokenhearted and devastated. I had never heard him cry like that," Teresa said, her voice a bit lower than before.

Ricky Franks sat expressionless between his attorneys. His head was held high, but his eyes avoided Teresa Sanderford as she continued to tell the jury about her grandson's cries.

"What did you do when you heard that?" Foran asked.

"I went immediately outside. He was sitting right outside the front door in a chair, a little settee my mother had set out there. He wasjust crying," Teresa explained.

"What did Austin say to you?"

"He told me that Opal was gone," Teresa said. "I asked him, `Gone where?' And he said, `Gone bye-bye."'

Spectators in the gallery shuddered as they heard the unsettling words of Opal Jennings's aunt. They could only imagine the terror the child's words had sent through her.

Teresa explained that Austin was able to indicate a direction in which he had seen Opal leave. He had pointed toward her sister's house, where Austin's cousin lived.

Foran asked Teresa to step down from the witness stand and move to one of the enlarged photos of her neighborhood that had been placed on an easel. She turned her back toward Franks as she pointed out her mother's house and the lot where the children had been playing at the time of Opal's kidnapping. She identified the house across the street from Audrey and Robert's as the one where she, her husband, and Austin were currently residing. With a trembling hand, Teresa then pointed to the house two doors down from her own, where Spencer Williams lived, and her sister's house on the corner of North Hampshire and Worthy.

She explained that after talking with Austin, she hurried toward her sister's house, stopping momentarily to ask a dozen kids who were playing in the area if they had seen Opal. She then returned to the Sanderford house.

"When we arrived back there, my mother called nine-one-one and she asked me to go to Spencer's house to see if Opal might have gone over there," Teresa explained.

"How much time had gone by since the first time you heard Austin crying and the time you went across to Spencer's house?" Foran inquired.

"Maybe five minutes, seven."

The state's witness explained that she first had asked Spencer's great-grandmother if she had seen Opal, then went to the door and spoke with Charlene, Spencer's grandmother. "I asked Charlene if I could talk to Spencer."

"Would you describe for the jury Spencer's demeanor at the time?" Foran asked.

"He was very excited. He wanted to tell me about Opal and what happened to Opal when I asked him. He was just really excited, superexcited," Teresa reported, her voice growing stronger as her testimony continued.

"When you say `excited,' was he happy or was he upset?" Foran asked to clarify.

"He was very upset."

"What did he say?"

"He told me Opal had been kidnapped," Teresa answered.

There was a gloomy stillness over the courtroom as Teresa described the child's words. The image cut deep into the hearts of the Sanderford family. The Frankses sat silent.

Teresa described how she had asked Spencer's grandmother if she could take him to her house. As they walked across the street, Spencer told Teresa a man had grabbed Opal and put her in a car. Spencer described the car as "purpledy black" and the man as having long hair and a baseball cap. The four-year-old had been keyed up and had talked rapidly as he described for Teresa the events surrounding Opal's kidnapping.

"Now," Foran began, "I want to direct your attention back to a time period before March twenty-sixth. Did you observe any vehicles in the neighborhood behaving in a suspicious manner?"

Teresa took in a deep breath. "Yes," she responded, "I observed a car, a black car with tinted windows that went extremely slow up our street. It was probably no more than five miles an hour."

Handing Teresa a photo of Ricky Franks's Mercury Cougar, he asked, "Does this bear a resemblance or similarity to the vehicle that you saw?"

Teresa studied the photograph before responding. "Very, very similar, yes."

"Do you remember approximately what time all of this occurred?" Foran asked, taking the photograph from her.