Cotter objected to the relevance of the question.
“You can connect this some way?” the judge asked Evenson, who changed his question.
“How long did she stay in the area?”
“That, sir, I don’t know,” Doris Ford said. “Bryan completed the rest of the school year, which may have possibly been the end of May or June.”
“Is that the last time you saw him?” Evenson asked.
“Object. Irrelevant.”
“I withdraw that question,” Evenson said, but he knew that the jury no doubt understood what he was getting at, that the Fords had been denied access to their grandchildren.
“I have no further questions,” he told the judge.
Cotter had none either, and Larry’s father, Henry, came to the stand to tell about his son’s military training.
“And did you ever have an occasion to see him handle a firearm of any nature?” Evenson asked.
“Yes, I did. I taught him to hunt squirrels.”
“And did he know how to load a gun?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you ever see him handle it?”
“Yes, sir. And clean it.”
“Did he ever own a firearm?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Before the lunch recess, officials of three different insurance companies came to the stand to tell of the life insurance Barbara had received from Larry’s death, one of them reading a letter Barbara had written just two days after Larry’s funeral, trying to collect.
After lunch, the deputy clerk of court from Randolph County testified about Larry’s will and the disposition of his estate.
Seeking to defuse the issue of Russ Stager’s name being forged, Cotter asked if there ever had been any question about the authenticity of Larry’s signature on the will.
“Not to my knowledge,” she said.
“Who told you that was his signature?” Evenson asked on redirect.
“There were three witnesses that came in, a Mary W. Terry, a James N. Terry and a Marva R. Terry came in and verified it was his signature.”
“And that was in 1978?” Evenson said, certain that the jury would see the similarity to Russ’s death.
“Yes, sir.”
Cotter had some more questions as well, getting her to say that she had turned the will over to the Durham County Sheriff’s Department on April 26, 1988, only a few days after Barbara’s arrest.
“So they had it over a year?”
“Yes, sir.”
“To do with as they please?”
“Right.”
Evenson came right back with another blow.
Michael Creasy from the SBI’s crime lab was called back to the stand to identify the pistol that had been the instrument of Larry’s death and the handwipe kit that he had received from John Buheller. The tests sent by Buheller, he said, had revealed that no gunshot residue was found on Larry’s hands.
Creasy said that he had fired the same pistol four times himself, once with his hand bent as it would have to be to fire the pistol at himself, and each time the gun had left what he called “significantly high” concentrations of residue.
Cotter had only one question:
“Your results are only as good as what was sent to you?”
“Correct, sir.”
Evenson came back to get Creasy to explain that the chemicals in gunshot residue do not break down and will not evaporate. The greatest loss of residue from those who had fired a weapon usually came when they had been handcuffed behind their backs or had washed their hands, Creasy said. On a dead person the residue would remain until it was removed.
The next question to tackle was the possibility of the gun firing after being dropped. SBI firearms expert Eugene Bishop returned to the stand to tell of tests he had conducted on the gun that had been found beside Larry’s bed. Using live rounds from which he had removed the projectile, he loaded the pistol and dropped it onto the floor from different heights to see if it would fire. Dropped from a foot in height, it didn’t fire, he said. Neither did it fire from two feet, three feet, four feet, five feet. Dropped from six feet, it fired twice.
What if it had been dropped onto a carpeted floor from a height of less than five feet? Evenson asked.
“Sir, it did not fire when I dropped it on a tile floor. so in my opinion, it would not fire on a carpeted floor.”
Evenson was pleased as Bishop left the stand, certain that he had shown the jurors that Larry’s death could have been neither suicide nor accident. They could only conclude, he thought, that Barbara had gotten away with murder once and had convinced herself that she could do it again.
30
Judge Allen and the attorneys for both sides were well aware that the second of the two most contentious points of the trial would come on Friday, the fifth day of testimony, but the day began peaceably with the jurors examining physical evidence, Barbara’s lawyer, Bill Cotter, objecting only to the evidence having to do with Larry’s death.
The morning passed slowly as the jurors, in groups of four, closely examined the photos of Larry’s body, the pistol, the box it had come in, his will, insurance policies and other items. As they passed the evidence from hand to hand, Evenson sat idly fingering the two pistols that had killed Larry and Russ. He twirled one, brought the barrel to his nose and sniffed. Later, as the jurors examined the pistols, the click of the safety on the gun that had killed Russ could be heard throughout the courtroom as they repeatedly pressed it off and on.
When the jurors were finished with the evidence, the lawyers huddled once more at the bench, mapping the plan for the battle that was to come. This day would decide whether the jurors would get to hear the tape recording that had been discovered just before the trial began.
The jury was sent out so the lawyers could argue, and Ron Stephens told the judge that he anticipated calling seven or eight witnesses about the tape. It was nearly eleven-thirty, he noted, and since the jury would not be involved in the maneuvering to come, perhaps the judge would want to release them for an early lunch.
That done, Cotter moved to sequester all the state’s witnesses if the tape were to be played, so that they would not be influenced by the testimony of one another. Stephens countered with a similar motion for defense witnesses, and both were allowed.
After the witnesses had departed the courtroom, the judge declared that he would hear the witnesses about the tape, listen to the tape, then decide whether or not the jury would be allowed to hear it.
Frederick Evans, a lanky young black man who had played football and baseball for Russ at Durham High School, came to the stand and said that he had known Russ for four or five years.
Was he close to him? Evenson asked.
“About as close as any other student. He was easy to get along with.”
“Did you find something, there at the school?” Evenson asked.
“Yeah, I did,” Evans replied, going on to say that it was during basketball practice the previous December.
“I was cleaning, getting the uniforms out of the dryer, and I walked downstairs and saw a tape up under one of the stalls of the bleachers in the locker room…. I knew my mom had a cassette that would play it, so I picked it up and took it home and gave it to her.”
It was early in the morning when he found the tape, he recalled. He had some orange juice and wanted ice for it, so he had gone to the locker room to get it. That was when he saw the tape.
Where was the tape in relation to the coaches’ offices? Evenson asked.
“The baseball coach’s office is inside the locker room.”
“Would you say fifteen or twenty feet?”
“Yes.”
“A little longer than a free throw?”
“Yeah.”
After finding the tape, Evans said, he had carried it upstairs, put it in his book bag and taken it home. Evenson handed him the tape, and he identified it as the one he had found.
Nobody had listened to the tape right away, Evans said, because the batteries in his mother’s tape player were dead.
“It just sat there for a while and then one day my little brother took batteries and put them in there, and I guess he was just curious to listen to it.”
“Did you hear it?” Evenson asked.
“Part of it. It was shocking to hear his voice.”
“Whose voice did you hear?”
“Coach Stager.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“It was shocking. Funny feeling on the inside.”
After hearing it, he said, he had talked with his mother, trying to decide whether they should tell someone about it.
“We decided we would give it to one of her friends.”
“Was that a police officer?”
“Yes.”
On cross, Cotter tried to get Evans to pinpoint the time he had found the tape. It was during the holidays, Evans said. School was out. The basketball team was practicing for a Christmas tournament. Nobody was in any of the coaches’ offices.
Cotter asked if the tape was difficult to see.
“Not really, because it was kind of leaning up against, leaning up against the table.”
Hoping to indicate that the tape could have been planted, Cotter got Evans to demonstrate how it was leaning, then he backed up from the witness stand to get Evans to tell him how far the tape was from the office that Russ once had occupied.
Durham Police Officer Ralph Mack next testified that he had received a call from a man who worked with Linda Evans. Then she had come on the line and said that she had something she needed him to listen to. He had gone to her place of work about an hour later, he said, and she showed him a tape player with the tape in it.
“We sat there and listened to it together, and when it was over, she said, ‘Someone needs this, because it could be some evidence.’ Well, to be quite frank, I had forgotten about this particular incident and didn’t even know if the trial had been held.”
He took the tape, he said, went to the sheriff’s office, called Detective Buchanan at home, then took the tape to his house.
Cotter had no questions.
Rick Buchanan followed Mack to the stand and told of making copies of the tape and providing one for Cotter. He said he had played the tape for Russ’s family so that they could identify the voice.
To ensure authenticity, Mike Robertson, an SBI crime lab audio and video technician, testified that the tape showed no signs of tampering. The case never had been opened, there were no breaks in the tape, no splices or alterations of any kind.
The tape was a minicassette, not a microcassette, he said, and they were rare. Few were made anymore. Radio Shack had ceased production in the spring of 1987.
“Your Honor,” Evenson said, after Robertson had identified the tape, “we would like to offer the tape at this time, and we would like to have it played.”
“How long is it?” the judge asked.
“The entire tape is slightly over thirty minutes,” Evenson said. “The voice portion is nine minutes and some few seconds.”
The voice portion could be played, the judge said. Robertson inserted it into the tape player, and for the first time publicly, Russ’s voice began telling of some of his concerns in the final days of his life.
“The last few nights, during sleep, Barbara has woke me up to give me some kind of medication. I have not taken it. Last night she woke me up and gave me what she said was two aspirin, but this was like four-thirty in the morning. She stood there to see if I took it. I did not take it. I placed it under the bed. She came back to check and make sure I had taken it, saying she wanted something to drink from what I was drinking.
“This morning—she normally is up and gone by seven—today at seven she was still in bed. She said that she was going to go to work at eight. Before I got up she was over around there on the side, acts like she was looking for what I supposedly took last night.
“Now this was the night of January the twenty-eighth, a Thursday night. So she stayed there looking to see if I had taken the stuff this morning. I got it out of there, although she was very … looking very close to see if I was trying to retrieve it.
“She made the comment that, ‘You didn’t take that … those aspirins that I gave you.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I did.’
“Well, I took the two capsules to Eckerd’s Pharmacy at Forest Hills, and they said that it was sleeping pills. Now, if I was already asleep at four-thirty in the morning,
why
would somebody wake me up to give me two sleeping pills?
“Also at one time a few years ago I had to get a post office box because a lot of the mail coming to the house—bills and stuff—seemed to be disappearing when she got home first. Now I’ve only got one key to this post office box. For the last couple of weeks, every time I’ve turned around, she’d taken the key off the key ring and supposedly gone to check the mail herself.
“Now, a couple of months—December and January—I haven’t even gotten the bill from Visa which she says she’s called them and they said there’s just been an, uh, misunderstanding. I don’t understand myself why a person wouldn’t send the bill if they had been sending it for a year every month and not missing—why all of a sudden they would miss. Here my question is, why every time I turn around she is taking that key and running over there to check the post office box unless there’s something in there she’s trying to hide, ’cause that’s the reason I got the post office box to start off with, so I would make sure I got all the mail and nothing got misplaced or destroyed.