THE LAST DEFENSE WITNESS BEFORE ELIZABETH TOOK the stand was her half-brother Veryan, who was Derek’s first child by his first marriage. Of all the siblings he probably had the least chance to know Elizabeth because he was twelve when his father and Nancy were married and sixteen when Elizabeth was born.
A criminal defense lawyer in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, Veryan Haysom said he had read news reports about Elizabeth’s reaction to the murders and was worried about her possible lack of remorse. Nevertheless, he said, he was encouraged when she decided not to fight extradition and when she pleaded guilty to the murder charges.
“Would it be,” asked Jones, “that you’re saying that her actions are speaking louder to you than the words?”
“Well, we haven’t exchanged that many words, really,” Veryan Haysom said, “but I took as very positive signs the ways she has dealt with admitting her guilt.”
Jones drew an objection from Updike when he asked Veryan Haysom what he thought Elizabeth’s sentence should be.
Judge Sweeney said he agreed with Updike in general. “I think by and large that’s my job.” However, he told Jones he thought it would be appropriate for Veryan Haysom to give his general feelings on the subject.
Inching his chair closer to the microphone, Veryan
Haysom shot a glance at his half-sister, who sat emotionless, staring straight ahead. “I accept,” he said, implying he had given the matter some thought, “that one day she will be back in society, and I just question what it will be that returns to society. Whether there is a person there who is capable of rehabilitation. It would be my real desire to see that happen. I don’t want to see her languishing in jail for a period of time. That does nobody any good. I just worry that simply forgetting about her and putting her in prison is not going to serve her or anybody’s long-term interest.”
When Updike rose to cross-examine, the matter of her punishment was the least of his concerns. The prosecutor was far more interested in talking to Elizabeth’s half-brother about the allegations Elizabeth had made to investigators concerning her sexual relationship with her mother and about the news stories concerning those allegations.
“To your knowledge and understanding, are those allegations true?” he asked.
“They are unfounded in anything within my experience,” he replied firmly, “and within anything within my knowledge of my family.”
FOR HER PREMIERE APPEARANCE, ELIZABETH PICKED from a handful of dresses brought to her by loyal friends a beige dress with long sleeves and a shawl collar, not unlike a monk’s robe. Her hair was combed straight back. It hung loose over her shoulders and behind her ears, exposing small pearl earrings. Her heavy brows cut straight across her forehead, giving her eyes a more sunken look. She wore no makeup, so her childhood scars on chin and cheek stood out prominently against her pale skin. In a soft voice, at Jones’ gentle prodding, she went through her life, beginning with her birth in Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe.
As she went along, she gained confidence. Her voice got stronger, and she swallowed less frequently, bit her lip less often, and stopped fingering her left hand. Her tone was different from the one she had taken with investigators. In the courtroom she was more submissive, more cooperative, more anxious to please. Her story changed, too, in sometimes small, sometimes radical, but always significant ways, both in content and in manner. This was her first time to tell her tale under oath, and from now on it would be impossible for her to change it yet again. The questions put to her and the way she answered them more strongly implied her innocence. If she could, she was going to dump everything on Jens.
Her deviations from what she had said to investigators earlier began with her explanation of the statements she made in her diary-like letter to Jens written during the Christmas holiday period in 1984 and a separate letter written to him from Colorado several weeks later. In her testimony she painted herself as an unwitting instigator of murder. She had been ingenuous in her letters, she said. She
had been dealing with subjects metaphorically, but Jens was taking her literally. Even when she had written that she and Jens could either wait until they graduated and leave her parents behind or “get rid of them soon,” she had not intended for Jens to take her literally. “What I was saying,” Elizabeth explained, “is that we can either wait until we graduate and leave them behind or we can leave them behind now.”
She looked at Jones, waiting for direction. His job was that of a guide, someone to help her navigate through the labyrinth of words that she had spoken and written and lead her down the path that would show her to her best advantage. What did she mean, he wanted to know, by her written reference to practicing voodoo on her parents?
Elizabeth was eager to answer that. As she had told Gardner in one of the interrogating sessions, and as she now wanted to tell the world, she had merely been taking a dig at Jens, who had a lot of crazy ideas anyway, half-baked theories about pop-psychology and psychological warfare. “I used to ridicule him about it, mock him about it,” she said as easily as she would have confessed to teasing him about his hair style. “I’m mocking him and his theories on these things rather than referring to my parents.” Remembering to show the proper remorse, she added, “Although I should never have referred to my parents that way.”
Jones nodded his approval. So far so good. His next question went a little deeper. When she was writing those letters, he wanted to know, had she ever considered the actual death of her parents?
“No,” Elizabeth said emphatically.
“Was it ever in your mind?”
“No.” It was Jens, she added, who had misconstrued what
she
was saying.
“Now before you left on Christmas break, had you had any conversations with Jens about your parents and your feelings in that regard?” Jones asked her.
“I had general conversations with him about my parents,” Elizabeth admitted. “He would discuss his parents at
great length, and at some point I sat down with him and said to him we all have problems.” Looking slightly embarrassed, she added lamely, “I did voice some resentments and anger.”
“Why?” Jones wanted to know. “Did you anticipate problems?”
Elizabeth looked slightly shocked by the suggestion. “Well,” she replied, “I said that we all had problems at home and expressed some of the problems that I had.”
Jones wanted a more comprehensive answer. What did she mean? he asked encouragingly.
She thought for a moment. “They didn’t like any of the young men I saw.” As an example she told how she had invited a male classmate to their home in Boonsboro one weekend so her parents could meet him. “My mother was very charming to him,” she said, “but she didn’t like him because he was Jewish.”
JONES LEFT THE ISSUE OF THE LETTERS ALONE TEMPORARILY while he pursued what he insinuated was Jens’s growing emotional dependence on Elizabeth, which colored his attitudes toward both her and her parents. To make his point, he brought up a comment she had made in a note dated January 6, 1985, in which she suggested that the two might be friends rather than lovers.
Jens had reacted strongly to that, Elizabeth said, telling her he wanted to be overwhelmed by her love. It was clear to her in retrospect that Jens “needed” her more than he “loved” her. “He wanted to be loved beyond reason. And at that particular time, when I wrote that letter, I was suggesting that I didn’t love him beyond reason.”
However, as time went on, the relationship became closer. “I still tried to escape from him from time to time. I still tried to acquire space, and there were arguments with my roommate about it. But we did become increasingly obsessed with one another.”
ELIZABETH DELIGHTED IN GIVING EXAMPLES, IN UNDERLINING her point with an anecdote. To show how unreasonable Jens had become in his attachment to her, she told about how she was studying in her room one day when Jens unexpectedly charged through the door. Without preamble, he screamed, “I could blow their bloody heads off!”
“What prompted that outburst?” Jones asked.
“I’m not sure,” Elizabeth replied, suggesting it may have been because her parents had ordered her to go on a skiing trip to Colorado with her half-brother Howard after she had promised Jens she would stay at the university during the spring break and work with him on a class project. That may have been the trigger, she said. But Jens was so unpredictable that it may have been something else entirely. “I don’t really know what it was. I was in my room. I was reading. He walked in. He said it, and it was definitely apparent that he was serious. He was angry, and he meant what he was saying.”
Jens hung around another half hour after that, she said, and she calmed him down. But the tantrum bothered her. Later, she wished she had suggested to him that he get some counseling. Perhaps she should have gone to the police, she said, or at least to her parents. For some reason, she and Jens were not on the same mental wavelength. “It has become more and more apparent to me as I have gone over Jens’s correspondence that he was not thinking the same way I was thinking. I was indulging in some grotesque, childish fantasies. I was feeling hate and resentment and frustration,” she said in majestic understatement, “but I wasn’t thinking about murder. And it seems that he was.”
IN HER OWN NAIVETÉ, SHE SAID, SHE MAY HAVE MADE Jens’s problems worse. One example of that was a long letter she wrote to him from Colorado while she was on the very ski trip he had been against. In the letter, she said, she let her imagination run wild while describing to Jens a whole series of circumstances that were totally untrue.
In the letter she told Jens that she would inherit a considerable amount of money from her parents, but only if she did exactly as they wanted. Jens had been pressuring her to go to Europe with him during the summer vacation, but she warned that her parents would never approve. If she went, she would risk losing her inheritance. So she passed the decision to him, appealing to his desire for financial security. “If you want to be rich we can’t go to Europe,” she had written to him. From the witness stand she confessed that the letter was a complete fabrication, an attempt by her to convince Jens to leave the university and run away with her.
“Was there any intent in your writing of that letter to encourage him to murder your parents?” Jones queried.
Elizabeth did not hesitate. “No,” she said, “not at all.”
Jones took his time in his questioning, leading Elizabeth down one trail and then another. On one trip he led her to the weekend of her father’s birthday, the weekend before Derek and Nancy were murdered. Jones was interested in trying to prove that the weekend had been a glorious one for Elizabeth—that it went so swimmingly that the last thing in her mind was getting rid of her parents.
“It was a really wonderful weekend,” she said. “I managed to sit down and talk with my parents. We discussed many issues which needed to be discussed. And there were some problems in the nature of the discussions, but we had progress. It was a lot of progress between myself and my father about the future.”
They agreed, she added, that they would allow her to move out of the dormitory and into an apartment. Her father also promised to open a bank account for her and discontinue his practice of simply giving her an allowance. Best of all, she said, they talked about how she was going to spend her summer. She was either going to work with an organization called the Goethe Institute, so she could really learn German, or she was going to work for the United Nations in Vienna.
As soon as she got back to the university, she ran to tell Jens the good news. “I was jubilant. I was overjoyed. And I
steamed up to the dorm, and I said, ‘It’s fantastic. It’s everything that I have been working for. Everything that we’ve talked about is going to happen.’”
Jens, however, was less than enthusiastic. He felt threatened, she said, about her moving into an apartment without him. “He was very angry,” she said. “He felt that I was letting him down, abandoning him in some way.”
SATISFIED THAT HE HAD BUILT A FOUNDATION DEMONSTRATING his client’s good intentions while simultaneously illustrating Jens’s instability, Jones progressed to the weekend of the murders and Jens’s and Elizabeth’s decision to go to Washington, D.C.
Originally, Elizabeth said with minimal guidance from Jones, she planned to stay in Charlottesville that weekend because she had to sign a lease on her new apartment. When the signing got postponed, Jens suggested they go to Washington. Jens, she said, was deeply troubled by his impotence, and he felt he might be able to overcome it if they could get away by themselves for a few days. Since they had virtually no privacy at the university, it might help their relationship to check into a motel far away from the pressures of the university.
She readily agreed, she admitted, not only because she wanted to help Jens but because she was running low on money and she wanted to sell some of her jewelry to help get her through until the next allowance check arrived from her father. She could get a much better price for the pieces in Washington than she could in Charlottesville, she added.
When she said this, Updike’s draw dropped. Never in all her statements to investigators had she ever mentioned anything about selling her jewelry.
Almost on impulse, she said, she and Jens took off for Washington that Friday afternoon, March 29.
Never mind what she had told investigators about how she and Jens had planned the trip in advance, Updike thought. Never mind about how she had said the whole purpose of the trip was to create an alibi. He clenched his
jaw. He knew what was coming next: She was going to deny everything she had said about how she and Jens had gone to buy a knife to use on her parents.
He was right.
On Saturday morning, Elizabeth testified, she made the rounds of capitol pawn stores. When she was through, she had several hundred dollars in her purse. Overjoyed, she invited Jens to lunch to celebrate her largesse and split the money with him since they divided everything half and half. Instead of being happy, however, he was angry, furious that her parents did not give her enough money to live on and that she was forced to sell her possessions to survive.
“He said my parents weren’t providing me with sufficient funds, and they were supposed to be so incredibly wealthy, which was not true. He became very angry over that, and the conversation went into other resentments and angers about my relationship with my parents,” she said.
You have to admire her, Updike thought, captivated by her tale. Her imagination is fantastic.
Jens was so angry, Elizabeth said, that he insisted on immediately driving to Boonsboro that afternoon to tell Nancy and Derek what he thought about their penny-pinching. At first she tried to talk him out of it because, first of all, her parents’ money policies were none of his business. But worse than that, if he drove to Boonsboro, they would find out that she and Jens were spending the weekend together in Washington, and then they would be furious because they held her to very rigid moral standards. But the more she thought about it, the more she decided not to try to stop him. With him out of the way, she would be free to spend some of her new-found wealth on drugs. She would not be able to do that with Jens around because he disapproved intensely of her drug use.
“Once I thought about my drugs, I just became so self-centered, so selfish, so totally involved in my own desire to get my fix that I wanted to get him away from me so I could go and score. And so I didn’t really care about the long term. I just wanted to get him out of the way.”