THE WOOD AND RED-BRICK TWO-STORY COURTHOUSE IN which the proceedings were being held dated from 1930. It was the latest in a series of structures in which Bedford County justice was administered since the town became the county seat in 1782. On the building’s first floor are the clerk of court’s office and various administrative cubbyholes. About one-quarter of the second floor is taken up by offices for the commonwealth attorney and his assistant. But the bulk of the space is reserved for the courtroom and its subsidiaries: the judge’s chambers, a jury room, a clerk’s room, a room for deputies and court officers, and three witness rooms, all of which branch off the main room. The courtroom itself, since remodeled, was a large, square-looking chamber lit by recessed overhead fixtures and six large windows, three on each side of the judge’s bench. The windows, usually covered with translucent, wheat-colored curtains to cut down on the glare, made the room look larger than it actually was. A bureaucratic decorator, trying to give it some warmth, had hung oil portraits of former judges, some of them dating to colonial times, on the beige-colored walls. The attempt was only moderately successful; there was still a palpable museum feel to the space. It was not a comfortable room, but neither was it anywhere near as austere as the magistrate’s court in Richmond where Elizabeth first learned that Bedford authorities had caught up with her and Jens.
TRADITIONALLY IN AN AMERICAN CRIMINAL PROCEEDING the prosecution has the first word. In a trial Updike would begin by listing the reasons he thought the defendant was guilty. In this case, since Elizabeth had already pleaded
guilty, Updike’s role was restricted to demonstrating her degree of guilt. The difference was subtle: Updike would begin essentially where he would in a trial, by demonstrating to Judge Sweeney that Elizabeth Haysom encouraged Jens Soering to murder her parents, helped him prepare for the murders, and aggressively assisted in the cover-up.
The defense role, in contrast, was to try to minimize her participation by presenting mitigating circumstances. The more convincingly Jones and Davis could draw Elizabeth as a victim, the more sympathetic Judge Sweeney would be. If they could convince him that she was an unwilling pawn of Jens Soering, her punishment would be less than if Updike persuaded the judge that she was the instigator of her parents’ murders.
By pleading guilty, Elizabeth removed much of the suspense. But what was still to come would be just as enthralling. The public was going to get its first look at what motivated a young woman, one who seemingly had everything, to systematically encourage her boyfriend to kill her parents ruthlessly, and then lie to protect him.
UPDIKE GLANCED AT ELIZABETH, WHO WAS SITTING eight feet away, slumped in her chair at the defense end of the long common table that stretched in front of the judge’s bench. For her first court session she wore a plain, lightcolored, floor-length dress that deemphasized her figure and made her look asexual. As far as Updike was concerned, it was the first of several Joan of Arc costumes she would wear in an attempt to make herself appear more homely and less like a seductress. She wore no makeup, and her hair, which by then had grown quite long and fell well below her shoulders, was combed straight back in a severe schoolmarmish style. Yet again, Updike was amazed at her ability to present herself in the most advantageous light possible. He recalled the mood that had prevailed in the region soon after the murders, when people were stopping him on the street and demanding that something be done to bring the killer or killers to justice. And the harsher the justice was, the better
they would like it. But that attitude had changed significantly. Now that he had one of the people responsible for the murders in the lockup, Updike could sense an undercurrent of sympathy on her behalf. Mentally shrugging at the incomprehensibility of public opinion, Updike cleared his throat and called his first witness.
Ricky Gardner popped through the narrow wooden door at the end of the room and strode briskly down the central aisle. His footsteps echoed in the half-filled chamber. Judge Sweeney, in anticipation of a trial, had summoned a roomful of Bedford County voters from among whom he had intended to let lawyers begin selecting a jury. When Elizabeth pleaded guilty, thus obviating the need for a jury, Sweeney dismissed the panel but invited any who wanted to stay to remain in the courtroom. A number of them did, and they filled some of the 175 or so available seats on the straight-backed, black, wooden benches. The public, figuring the first couple of days would be taken up by the monotonous questioning of potential jury members, stayed home. They would stay home later as well because the proceedings were broadcast on local cable television as part of an experiment with cameras in the courtroom. At first, though, they decided to wait for the more exciting days when lawyers would be calling witnesses. Even the army of reporters was smaller than expected. Some of them also decided to skip what they thought would be the jury selection phase. As a result, there were plenty of seats.
Gardner passed through the barrier separating spectators from court officials, in this case a low wall of fine-grain mahogany, and went straight to the witness box on Judge Sweeney’s right. His testimony was brisk and surprisingly abbreviated. Although transcripts and tapes of his numerous interviews with Elizabeth were filed with the court as supporting documentation, what Updike wanted from the investigator was interpretation. The record would speak for itself, but the prosecutor wanted Gardner to put it into context.
When asked what first made him suspicious of Elizabeth,
Gardner replied that it was the abrupt change in her statements about Margaret Louise. During the first interview Elizabeth was very defensive of her, but in a second interview eight days later she said that Margaret Louise may have committed the murders. Gardner said he asked her two years later, after she had returned from England under arrest, why she had given such conflicting statements about her friend.
“And what did she say?” Updike asked.
“She told me that she was just trying to save her skin.”
Gardner also testified that he thought it was strange that Elizabeth made such implausible comments about Nancy Haysom’s first husband and his alleged perversities and about how, when she knew investigators were looking for a motive, she sent them on a wild goose chase by claiming that her mother had a secret cache of money and that Annie Massie knew where it was. But what really made him and Investigator Reid suspicious, Gardner said, was the high mileage on the car they had rented to go to Washington.
Updike led Gardner through a quick overview of the case up until the time Elizabeth and Jens ran off to Europe. Then he called his second witness, Detective Constable Wright.
A lanky, bearded man with a receding hairline and a thick accent, Wright went into considerably more detail than Gardner had about the early days of the investigation of Jens and Elizabeth while they were being held for check fraud. Since Wright was the one who had laboriously plowed through the letters found in Jens’s and Elizabeth’s closet, Updike asked him to read many of the documents into the record. One of the most remarkable new facts that Wright contributed to the knowledge of Elizabeth’s and Jens’s saga was how close, how
really
close, the two had come to slipping away.
That April afternoon in 1986, when Elizabeth and Jens had been picked up for suspicion of fraud, they could have walked away free if only Jens had not agreed to let the detectives search their flat. If he had not consented, Wright said, he and Beever would never have known where they
lived and they never would have found the incriminating letters and the journal, along with the bags of Marks & Spencer merchandise, the checkbooks, the bogus IDs, and the travel documents showing their true identities.
Updike’s third and final witness in the first phase of the hearing was Detective Constable Beever. When he took the stand, his strong voice rang melodiously throughout the courtroom, his Upcountry accent a marked departure from
Elizabeth’s rounded tones.
In a crisp, professional manner Beever picked up the tale at the point where Updike and Gardner arrived in London and Jens and Elizabeth were remanded to the Richmond jail for a long weekend. Since it was Beever that Elizabeth chose to confess to, Updike asked him to go sentence by sentence through the June 8-9 statements. It was a long process and ate up the rest of the afternoon.
THE NEXT MORNING, TUESDAY, BEFORE A FULLER COURTROOM, Gardner was recalled by Updike so he could go through, in detail, the long statement Elizabeth made to him on the night she returned from England. Updike wanted to know if Gardner had asked Elizabeth the question he had not yet found a satisfactory answer to: Why her parents were dead?
Yes, he had asked her that, Gardner said. “Okay,” Updike prompted, could you read your question and her response?”
Gardner read:
Question: Okay, let’s go back to the original question, and I think that was why your parents are dead. Was the main motive for their murders the fact that you and Jens were so much in love and that they were bitterly opposed to any future that you and Jens may share together?
Response: Yes. And I also—also looking at my brothers’ situations, although they were cut away from the
fold, my family living far away, their daily lives were still manipulated and interfered with by my parents and I wanted them to, I suppose, really to leave me alone.
When it came time to cross-examine, Davis hammered away at Gardner, trying to show that Elizabeth’s statements to him were merely attempts by her to protect herself from Jens. Did she not often tell him, Davis asked the investigator, that she was under pressure from Jens, that she was afraid of him, and that she had lied repeatedly to protect him? She had, Gardner agreed. Rifling through a copy of Gardner’s May 14 interview with Elizabeth, Davis found a comment from Elizabeth indicating her reaction to Jens’s post-arrest letters. She had told Gardner that she felt she was betraying Jens by telling the truth, but she was not prepared to go on lying any longer—her list of betrayals had gotten too long.
When Gardner finished, Davis quickly pointed out that Elizabeth had voluntarily proffered Jens’s letters. He wanted to make sure Judge Sweeney understood that she was trying to cooperate.
Having made his point, Davis pulled a sheet out of the stack. It was, he said, a letter Jens had written Elizabeth on November 11, 1986, before she had told him she was going against his wishes by deciding not to fight extradition. “Jens said,” Davis began, reading slowly, “‘I really don’t think you have anything to worry about, especially since you’re not even guilty.’” He paused and looked at Gardner for confirmation.
“That’s true,” Gardner said. “That’s correct.”
“And as you understand it, that’s an accurate excerpt from his letter to her of November 11, 1986?”
“Yes, sir.”
Davis also asked Gardner to confirm that Elizabeth admitted to him in an unrecorded interview that she had been lying about being with Jens when he bought a butterfly knife on the morning of the day her parents were killed.
She had, Gardner admitted.
“Was she physically shaking when she was talking to you about Jens Soering?” Davis asked, anxious to demonstrate that Elizabeth was deathly afraid of her former lover. “Was she trembling?”
Gardner nodded. “She was nervous, yes, sir.”
“Trembling?” Davis pressed. He wanted
that
specific admission in the record.
“Yes, sir,” Gardner agreed.
BOTH THE PROSECUTION’S PRESENTATION AND THE DEFENSE’S cross-examination were accomplished quickly, much more speedily than they would have been in a trial,but at the same time in more detail than at a normal guilty plea proceeding. Usually in a case involving a guilty plea, Updike presented only enough evidence to substantiate the charges, like the player in a hand of draw poker who is asked to show his openers. But this time Updike went beyond what was simply necessary. For one thing, he wanted to establish a good base for questions when he got to cross-examine Elizabeth. For another, he was building a file for the eventual trial of Jens. It took him a day and a half to make his points.
When he finished, it was the defense’s turn.
But Elizabeth’s lawyers, not surprisingly, asked for additional time to prepare their case. Judge Sweeney agreed because he also wanted time for a probation officer to put together a presentence report. He gave Davis and Jones seven weeks, until the first week of October.
As soon as Jones and Davis left the courtroom, they flew into a new frenzy of fact-finding, which would include still more caffeine-boosted sessions with Elizabeth and a trip to England.
Not everyone went away as gratified as Jones and Davis.
A number of observers felt cheated when the proceeding was interrupted. They had heard dramatic evidence from investigators Gardner, Beever, and Wright, and they had sat spellbound as the officers took them through the process they followed in uncovering Elizabeth’s participation in the murders of her parents. But the public’s appetite was only
whetted, not satisfied. They had not heard from Elizabeth herself. She had sat meek and silent during the hearing, sandwiched between her two protectors, Jones and Davis, like a rare flower pressed between two panes of glass. And from an observer’s point of view her response to the state’s presentation had been disappointing. Only rarely did she show any emotion, no matter how damaging the testimony seemed. Although her reputation for theatrics was firmly established, thus far she had chosen not to demonstrate her proficiency. Even Updike was puzzled by her docility. From what he knew of her and from what he imagined her to be—at that point he and Elizabeth had not exchanged a single word—he expected a more vibrant, more aggressive woman. But from what he had seen, her submissiveness was total. He didn’t trust his own reactions; he knew in his gut that there was more to her than she had let show.