ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, THE STATE OF VIRGINIA’S CASE against Elizabeth Haysom for the murder of her parents moved into its last phase. Thirty months and four days after Nancy’s and Derek’s bodies had been found, 16 months and a week after she had been arrested in a London suburb, Elizabeth was nearing the end of her adventure. She was almost, but not quite, there. Before she could take the stand to testify in her own defense, she had to wait her turn in the queue.
The first witness that bright, early fall morning was Ricky Gardner, summoned yet again by prosecutor Jim Updike. Suspecting that something was coming, Updike was anxious to get one particular issue clearly on the record, the issue of the butterfly knife: who bought it and when, or, actually,
if
such a knife was involved in the Haysom murder case at all.
Butterfly knives, sometimes called
balisongs,
are illegal in many states. They are fearsome devices built on the same principle as a switchblade, such that the blade can be instantly accessible. Unlike a switchblade, which contains a spring to flip the blade into an “open” position, a butterfly knife relies totally on wrist action. The blade in a butterfly knife is encased in a handle that is split horizontally and is hinged at one end. With a flick of the wrist, one half of the handle flips open, exposing the blade. The two halves of the handle then fold together to form a solid grip. It is not a weapon for amateurs; it takes practice to manipulate a butterfly knife.
At Updike’s prompting, Gardner said he had no inkling that a butterfly knife may have been used to kill Derek and Nancy until Elizabeth had brought it up. Indeed, a murder weapon was never found. Elizabeth said that she and Jens
had gone together on March 30, 1985, to buy such a weapon from a martial arts store in Maryland. She told investigators that Jens had the knife with him when he left her to drive to Boonsboro, thereby implying that it could very well have been the murder weapon. She added that Jens had never told her exactly what weapon he had used to kill her parents. However, she obliged detectives by drawing a picture of the knife that Jens had allegedly selected and she had paid for.
Under cross-examination from Drew Davis, Gardner admitted that Elizabeth told him later in an off-the-record interview that she had fabricated the entire story about the butterfly knife.
Interviews with Jens could shed no light on the subject, Gardner agreed, because he consistently refused to talk to investigators about a knife, claiming an admission that he had a weapon of any kind when he went to Loose Chippings would indicate premeditation to murder.
After Gardner’s third and final appearance on the stand it was the defense’s turn. Before getting to Elizabeth, however, Jones and Davis called a string of minor witnesses to testify about the bright sides of Elizabeth’s character or to support issues she would later testify to herself.
First up was Cheetah Haysom, Derek’s niece and Elizabeth’s first cousin. An attractive woman with short blonde hair and outsize earrings, she explained in rounded Oxbridgian tones almost as fine as Elizabeth’s that she did not know Elizabeth well until her family spent some time with Derek, Nancy, and Elizabeth when Elizabeth was about eighteen. But after being around her for a while, Haysom said she was “very impressed” with her. Elizabeth, she said, was a “remarkably responsible and well-behaved teenager.”
Davis, eager to establish Elizabeth’s character as a devoted daughter, asked Cheetah Haysom about the relationship between Elizabeth and her mother.
“She appeared to be a very dutiful and respectful daughter,” Cheetah Haysom said. “She responded very well to her mother.”
Elizabeth sat expressionless at Jones’ elbow, staring placidly at her cousin.
WITH A CHANGE IN WITNESSES, THERE WAS ALSO A change in attorneys. Jones, his blond hair dipping over his forehead, rose slowly to his feet and called the second witness, Elizabeth Watson, a woman with a deeply lined face and striking silver-blue hair. Sitting uncomfortably in the witness chair, nervously twirling her strand of pearls, she told about attending a dinner party with Elizabeth and her parents.
“Elizabeth was telling me about when she was in school that a Middle Eastern sheik had offered her father a number of camels for her hand and her father corroborated it. And I said, ‘Elizabeth, how old were you?’ And she told me. I don’t remember exactly the age, but she was very young.”
She and Elizabeth got to be friends, she said, and they were close enough that Elizabeth later felt comfortable enough to write her asking for advice in her romance.
“She was a student at the University of Virginia and she wrote to me that she had met a man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, but that her relationship with him was destructive to her relationship with her parents and vice versa. That bothered her very much, and she asked my advice because something had to be done about it. So I wrote her a letter to the effect that as we’re growing we differ with our parents but in the end we would find what they wanted for us was the best that they knew.”
IN CROSS-EXAMINATION UPDIKE ASKED HER IF SHE WAS aware of Elizabeth’s acting abilities.
“She is a very talented young lady,” she replied. “She’s very versatile.”
“Also,” Updike asked, “aren’t there occasions when you have had to doubt the veracity of what she tells you?”
“I think there certainly were,” Watson agreed, “but I attribute that to drugs.”
“You attribute that to drugs,” Updike repeated, sounding almost sad.
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t think today you need to be concerned about her veracity.”
THE DRUGS ISSUE WAS EXPLAINED IN MORE DETAIL BY the next witness, a former neighbor and friend of the Haysoms named Jeff Taylor. A large, heavy-set man with a round face and a dark beard, Taylor testified that three months earlier he had received a letter from Elizabeth, who was then in the Bedford County Jail waiting to appear in court on the murder charges. At Jones’ urging, Taylor read from the letter, which eerily resembled, in style and tone, some of Nancy’s correspondence with Colonel Herrington:
For a long time I had a serious drug problem. Even after I was arrested in April of ’86, I was still using. In fact my habit grew with easy availability of drugs and alcohol in the English prison system. It took me eight months to finally realize that I indeed had a problem … so I became a member of Narcotics Anonymous and have been clean since January 2nd, 1987, seven months. That was or is something to be proud of and grateful for. It was not easy but my goodness, it has been better.
Thanks to the guidance offered through that program and others, she continued, she was looking at life differently. Writing in July, she said she was anticipating the August court hearing because it would allow her to “truly be able to close” an era of her life that began when she first was sent away to boarding school and thus began a spiral that resulted in the deaths of her parents. It would give her the opportunity, she wrote, to “build a real and positive and active future without anger and bitterness, fear and resentment.” She never would be able to outlive the guilt and shame she felt, she said, but she had learned to lead a constructive, as opposed to destructive, life. “As we say in NA,”
she wrote, “I am not responsible for my disease, but I am responsible for my recovery.”
Taylor was making a good impression, Jones thought. He was a believable witness, and he was giving testimony that was good for his client. Jones had only one more question for him: “Based on your personal contact with her, do you feel the thoughts she expressed in this letter were sincere?” Jones asked.
“Yes,” Taylor responded. He thought she was very sincere.
Elizabeth’s alleged drug problem was further elucidated by Johnny Horton, the defense’s next witness. A small, thin, A balding man with a dark mustache, Horton explained in sometimes hard-to-understand regional British argot that he was an ex-mental patient and a recovering drug addict and alcoholic who had been arrested more than a dozen times for armed robbery, robbery, and drug violations and, once, for attempted murder. Then, he said, he broke his addiction, got a regular job and became a counseler helping others break away from substance abuse. He was, he said, a cofounder in Britain of the program known as Narcotics Anonymous.
An NA member in Holloway Prison put Horton in touch with Elizabeth and he began visiting her and counseling her. “What impressed me about Elizabeth,” he said, “was that she was trying. I saw that she was very mature and very honest, and I trusted where she was coming from.” All told, he said, he had met with her about thirty times.
“Did you and I talk about Elizabeth conning you and everybody else?” asked Davis, who had alternated with Jones.
“Yes,” Horton replied.
“And what did you tell me about that?”
“What did I tell you? Well, I’m not now, but I used to be a con man. That means I could manipulate and lie. And I can tell if somebody else is doing the same, and I believe what Elizabeth has said to me was real and she was honest.”
Under cross-examination, Updike pointed out that Elizabeth
did not try to contact NA until soon after she had been ordered extradited to the United States.
“Yeah,” Horton agreed, “we have to make that contact sometimes.”
“That’s true,” said Updike. “And you said that you were a con man. She, of course, was locked up there for being a con, wasn’t she? Defrauding, bouncing checks, flim-flam, that kind of thing?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Horton, “but I don’t judge other people.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking what your English judicial system did. They found her guilty of that, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” Horton mumbled.
“And they incarcerated her as a result of that?”
“Yes.”
“So she’s something of a con herself, isn’t she? I mean, you have been asked your expert opinion as a former con man.”
“Exactly. And what I see is that we all make mistakes.”
“Yes, that’s true. Sometimes people die as a result of those mistakes, too, don’t they?”
Horton nodded.
On re-direct, Davis pointed out that Elizabeth pleaded guilty to the fraud charges in Britain and was not found guilty in a trial. “Is that your understanding?” he asked Horton.
“Yes,” he replied.
The defense’s fifth witness was a preppy twenty-three-year-old former fellow student named Christopher Keland who later shared a house with Jens and Elizabeth before they ran away to Europe.
Elizabeth was “an extremely neat lady,” Keland said in a resonant radio-announcer’s voice.
Asked if he had ever met Derek and Nancy, Keland said that he had, in the winter of 1985, when they had come to Charlottesville to help Elizabeth find an apartment. They had spoken to his mother, who had several units for rent.
“Would you please tell us what you observed of that encounter,” asked Jones, “particularly how Elizabeth seemed to relate to her parents.”
“It was very interesting,” said Keland, “because she did what a lot of college students would do when their parents are around, which is act a lot more like your parents. She seemed perfectly happy to be with them, but they are people who really did just drip with charm. When you walked into a room with them, you kind of straightened up your backbone and decided to all of a sudden to be very witty and very clever and very charming. I think Elizabeth had the same natural reaction. She acted a great deal like her mother and father.”
“Did you detect any animosity between them?”
“No, certainly no animosity,” Keland said.
Two or three months before the murders, Keland added, he was chatting with Elizabeth and the subject of parents came up. He asked her how she was getting along with hers. “And she said, ‘Well, a year ago or two years ago I really didn’t like them that much, but I’m really starting to like them, and we’re really starting to get along.’”
As far as drug use went, Keland said that Jens did not use them and neither did Elizabeth when she was going out with him.
“How about on other occasions?” Jones asked.
“Previous to that I think she undoubtedly used drugs, but nothing particularly serious. There were other people in the dorms who would have done a lot more drugs than she would.”
During the period he and a girl shared a house with Elizabeth and Jens, Keland said, he noticed that Jens was unable to control his temper. “He threw temper tantrums, but they never became violent.”
Jones asked for an example.
“Well,” Keland said, “it was just if a piece of machinery wasn’t working properly. If the toilet plugged up or something wasn’t working in the kitchen, he would just lose his
temper over that. He just really got extremely upset for no reason.”
From when he got to know them, Jones asked, which seemed to be the dominant personality?
“I do not believe that there was a dominant personality in that relationship,” Keland said. “They worked very well together as a team, and they both had very clear goals in life. They worked very carefully together to achieve those goals. I didn’t see one domineering the other, either in personal moments or in what they wanted to do with their lives. I’d say they were very much equal partners in the relationship.”