“You tell me how you could be, any reason at all.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what they have in mind with it.”
It was now 4:40. Everybody was growing weary from the long day of testimony and haggling, and Evenson suggested that the jury be released for the day. The judge called the jury back and let them go.
The first day of testimony came to a close with Buchanan identifying all of the many planned exhibits seized from Barbara’s house, each marked and accepted by the court over Cotter’s unrelenting objections.
The second day of testimony would see twenty-one witnesses take the stand. Buchanan returned to start the day’s testimony, identifying the items that had been marked the day before and telling the jury where he had found each, as they were allowed into evidence. The jurors did not yet understand the significance of any of them, but Evenson would make sure they did by the end of the trial.
After all of it had been introduced, he had no more questions for Buchanan, and the detective braced himself for Cotter’s cross-examination.
Cotter reminded Buchanan that on the day of the shooting, he had told Barbara’s father that he considered Russ’s death an accident.
“Were you being truthful with him?” he demanded.
“At that time, yes, sir.”
“Did your feelings about whether or not this was an accident change between February first and February third?”
“No, sir. I was still trying to substantiate the accidental shooting.”
He hadn’t changed his mind, yet he had gone back to retrieve the bedding, Cotter said. “So by February third there was some reason for the examination?”
“I had received some additional information about the case.”
“And you became suspicious?”
“Yes, sir, there was a little doubt.”
Yet Buchanan had established a rapport with Barbara that was “fairly friendly,” Cotter brought out, and every time he talked with her he had let her think he was looking at the shooting as an accident. He even had been quoted in the press as calling it an accident.
“And the entire time you were misleading her and the general public by saying this was an accident, isn’t that true?”
“To the best of my knowledge,” Buchanan replied, “I am under no legal or moral obligation to inform her of the status of a criminal investigation.”
“I understand that,” Cotter said. “My question was—”
“In a sense,” said Buchanan interrupting, “to her and to the public it would be misleading.”
“Well, not ‘in a sense.’ It would be flat misleading, right?”
Cotter moved on to Buchanan warning Barbara of her rights before she talked with him on April 15.
“Isn’t it true that she asked, ‘Do I need a lawyer?’?”
“I do not recall if she asked that or not. She may have.”
“And you said that she did not?”
“No, sir.”
“What did you say?”
“I never tell anyone they do not need a lawyer.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I tell them it’s their choice. It’s up to them whether or not they want to have an attorney.”
Cotter and Buchanan liked each other and enjoyed sparring in court. Buchanan took no offense at Cotter’s effort to cast doubt on his truthfulness and thought the jurors would be able to see that in making those statements he simply was being a prudent detective.
Evenson had a few more questions before Buchanan stepped down, reemphasizing that Barbara had been told about her rights.
“And she voluntarily gave the information?”
“That’s correct.”
Dr. Tom Clark, the state medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Russ, used diagrams to show how the bullet had entered the back of Russ’s head, puncturing his skull just to the right of midline at eartop level, passing through his brain and fracturing his skull over his left eye before bouncing back into his brain where Clark had found it.
“This causes bleeding,” Dr. Clark told the jurors. “It causes swelling. It disrupts vital pathways that are essential to maintaining life.”
With such an injury, Dr. Clark explained, the brain swells but has no place to go. At the back of the skull is a small hole where the spinal column connects. The areas of the brain that control respiration and other vital functions are just above that hole. That part of the brain gets squeezed into the hole by swelling and cut off from oxygen. The consequence is inescapable.
As Dr. Clark described Russ’s injuries, Al Stager put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and pulled her closer.
Not only did Dr. Clark draw the jurors a vivid picture of the injury that had killed Russ, he also clearly showed that the angle of the shot was downward. Every juror already had seen the videotape in which Barbara had shown how the shooting happened, and never could the angle have been downward.
Risking no further emphasis of this, Cotter had no questions and the morning recess was called.
Sergeant A. C. Webster, the Durham County Sheriff’s Department firearms instructor and range director, came to the stand to tell the jurors of testing the pistol that killed Russ. He had tried to determine if it would jam, if it were prone to accidental discharges and in which direction it ejected shell casings. He fired eight rounds from a magazine, he said, and the pistol didn’t jam. He beat it on a mat to see if it would discharge accidentally, but it didn’t.
The shell casings, he said, ejected to the right and rear of the shooter, even when he fired the pistol on its side, as Barbara would have had to have fired it in her version of the shooting. The jurors already had heard several witnesses say that the shell casing was lying only inches from the pistol, near Russ’s head, which would have meant that the casing ejected to the front and left if Barbara’s version were true.
A telling flaw in her story was then revealed. The pistol had one unusual characteristic, Webster said. The safety was difficult to get to and to turn off. He demonstrated from the stand.
“It is hard for me to do it here,” he said. “You have to come back and get your fingernail on it and get it down.”
“But it does work?” Evenson asked.
“Yes, sir, it does work.”
Evenson had people lined up to say how safety conscious Russ had been, and he hoped the jurors would see that he would not likely have been sleeping with a pistol under his pillow and the safety off.
“So you’re saying it is difficult to take the safety off,” said Cotter, trying to dampen the impact.
“Yes, sir.”
“So if a person wanted to have this gun ready to fire, they probably would have the safety off, wouldn’t they?”
“It would kind of depend on the situation, I would imagine.”
“No, no. My question is regardless of the situation, if a person wanted to have this gun ready to fire, they would have the safety off, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because it might be difficult to get to the safety in time to fire as fast as they might want to fire, isn’t that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
After the lunch break, another firearms expert, Eugene Bishop of the SBI, showed the jurors how the pistol worked. He found it to have an erratic ejection pattern, he said. Eight times out of ten it ejected to the right and rear. But sometimes the casing hit the shooter in the face and at other times it went to the left, but always to the rear. The shell would travel two to six feet. In trigger-pull tests, he had found that it took four to four and a half pounds of pressure to make the hammer fall and cause the shell to fire.
“Could a child pull that trigger?” Cotter asked, on stronger ground here.
“It depends on the age, sir.”
“A young child.”
“How young?”
“Could a three-or four-year-old pull that trigger?”
“Possibly.”
It also would be possible for someone to try to put the safety on and not get it all the way in place, leaving it off but thinking it was on, Bishop acknowledged.
“And that could happen pretty easily, couldn’t it?” said Cotter.
“Yes, sir.”
“It is not a very safe gun, is it?”
“If it is treated like a normal gun, it is a safe gun, yes, sir.”
“It is not a safe gun to have under someone’s pillow, is it?”
“Objection,” said Stephens.
“I will let him give his answer to that,” said the judge.
“Sir, I would not sleep with a gun under my pillow,” Bishop said.
An SBI forensic chemist, Mike Creasy, told of examining the bedding and finding no sign that a weapon had been fired near it. He acknowledged that the bedding had been cleaned before he got it, and that would have removed any gunpowder or soot.
“I would still expect to find singe marks or actual damage to the fabric if a gun were discharged close to it,” he said.
“Can you give the jury some idea about distances?” Evenson asked.
“With this particular type of gun, I would say it would be probably within six inches or less. It does not have a large flash to it.”
On cross, Cotter made it clear that the singe marks would occur only on something that was directly in front of the muzzle when the pistol was fired. If Barbara had been holding the pistol above the sheets when it fired, no damage or residue would appear below.
“If you’re six inches below, no, sir, it would not.”
As for Barbara’s supposed ignorance of guns, Sandra Biddle, wife of Russ’s friend and fellow coach John, told jurors of a trip the two couples had made to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, only a few months before Russ’s death.
“She told me Russ was teaching her how to shoot a small handgun for protection,” she said.
Gilly Boaz, a fellow member of the National Guard pistol team with whom Russ frequently practiced off-duty, was brought to the stand for two reasons. First he described the elaborate safety procedures that Russ had followed on the firing range. He also revealed that Russ had attended a military pistol coaching course so that he could teach others.
“Safety was a number-one item there,” Boaz said.
Boaz also told of Russ bringing Barbara once to an indoor pistol range near Raleigh where they sometimes practiced. Russ showed her how to fire a .22 target pistol, he said.
“The clearest picture in my mind is of her standing there at the firing line and Russ instructing her how to use that pistol.”
“Did she fire?” Evenson asked.
“Yes.”
“How did she do?”
“She hit the paper, which is no small feat.”
“Did she appear to be comfortable with it?”
“No, she did not.”
Boaz said that the National Guard allowed pistol team members to check out .22 target pistols for extended periods and .45 match pistols usually for a week or less.
“Anything improper about him checking those pistols out?” Evenson asked.
“No, absolutely not.”
On cross-examination, though, Cotter deflated the safety-conscious issue with ease.
“It takes a great deal of effort and a great deal of training to know a lot about a handgun, does it not?” Cotter asked Boaz.
“To know a lot, I would think so.”
“And Russ Stager had a lot of training, didn’t he?”
“More than most.”
“How many guns do you have in your home now?”
“I have one.”
“Where do you keep it?”
“I keep it under my bed.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Why do you keep it loaded?”
“As a matter of expediency. It is hard to load a gun at night in the dark.”
The gun was a Smith and Wesson Model 686, Boaz said, and it had no safety.
“It has no safety? You keep it under your bed ready to fire?” Cotter asked incredulously.
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“And you know a lot about handguns, don’t you?”
Cotter was grateful for little victories such as this one. He had had few such moments to relish so far. His objections had been constantly overruled by the judge, and he had been able to do little to keep the state from showing that Russ’s death had been no accident and that Barbara’s version of events was highly questionable. Moreover, he knew that the worst was yet to come.
28
Evenson began laying out the motive for Russ’s murder on Tuesday afternoon, when he presented a series of witnesses who revealed pieces of Barbara’s tangled financial problems. All of it would become powerful ammunition when he tied it up for the jury in his final summation.
Teresa Long, a branch manager for First Union Bank, told of Barbara coming alone to the bank in January 1987 to get a $3,000 ninety-day loan to pay back a loan from a relative and pay off her First Advance card, which allowed her to get cash advances to a set limit. Barbara agreed not to use her First Advance card during the term of the loan, Long said. She also requested that any notices about the loan be sent to a different address than her home.