Jens stewed about the situation for quite some time, she said. Then he got up from the table and headed toward the car, saying he was going to confront them. As he walked away he mumbled, “I could kill them.”
Jones stopped her there. Didn’t that ring some sort of alarm bell in her head? he asked. Didn’t that make her worried?
Elizabeth shrugged. “At the time, I was so involved in my own selfish, tiny, stupid, irresponsible world of drugs and self-satisfaction, that I was just like, ‘Yes, dear,’ and went on with my business.”
Before she continued with her story, Jones wanted to draw a moral from her experience. What did she think
now
of her actions
then?
he prompted.
She responded quickly. “Certainly in view of what happened and subsequent events, I felt I should have known, or I did know and didn’t care, and that I could have done something to prevent it.” When Jones nodded encouragement, she continued. “I feel that I should have done something, and because of my failure on so many occasions to do the right things, I’m indeed responsible for what happened.”
He wanted her to keep going. “And is it your failure to do something at that time?” he asked. “Is that one of the reasons that you have entered the plea that you did?”
“That’s part of it, yes, sir,” she said. “And obviously I felt responsible because of the vehemence with which I wrote in my letters. It was irresponsible. They were unfair in what I said, the fact that I hated my parents—” She corrected herself. “Well, hated my mother so much at times. I feel responsible for that hate and for cluing Jens into it and then allowing him, in a sense, to have killed my parents.”
Jones looked as though he wanted to cheer. Updike looked sick.
JONES WAS SATISFIED WITH THE WAY THINGS WERE MOVING, but there remained a number of issues to be cleared up before he turned Elizabeth over to Updike. For one thing, there was the very important point concerning Jens’s and Elizabeth’s alibi.
Elizabeth conveniently ignored everything she had told investigators previously about how she and Jens had planned the trip to Washington so they would not be suspects in the murders. The stories she had told police, she said when she took the stand, were what she and Jens had agreed to
after
the murders, not
before
.
When Jens came back to Washington and told her what he had done, her first reaction had been to try to protect him. So together they concocted a tale they would tell the police if they were ever asked. That had made her feel that she was demonstrating her love and loyalty to Jens. But now it was no longer necessary to take that position. To save herself, it was important that she renege on her earlier comments. If she continued to admit that she and Jens had planned the trip, she was placing herself in a position of responsibility equal to Jens’s.
She did not retract everything. Some of what she had told police about what happened that weekend survived her trip to the witness box virtually intact. For the record, she repeated how Jens had picked her up on the street after the late-night movie, how he had been covered with blood, and how shocked she had been. It was essentially what she had told Gardner, Beever, and Wright. Except for one important variation. What she had not told police, she said, was that when Jens picked her up, she had been so stoned that she could make little sense of the situation. She remembered
thinking: “This is a bad trip. He’s trying to freak me out.” She was so high, she said, she couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. At first, she thought he said he had killed a person. Then she thought he said he had killed a dog. Finally, it came through to her that he was saying he had killed her parents.
Her timing and sense of organization were impeccable. With her new story, Version 4 by conservative count, not only was she covering herself by, in effect appearing to lay all the blame on Jens while giving lip-service to her own responsibility, but she was further excusing her actions by saying she was under the influence of drugs. In essence, she was beating her breast and saying she was sorry out of one side of her mouth, while out of the other she was saying she had nothing to be sorry for because nothing was her fault anyway.
Then to her self-anointed attributes she added a highly developed propensity for self-preservation. After she had sobered up, Jones asked her, why had she not gone to the police?
“To be truthful,” she said, “my first feelings were to save Jens, to save myself. I was stunned. The situation was so huge, so overwhelming, so definite, so final, so extraordinary. I mean, Jens is a wimp. You can’t imagine him doing something like that.”
The more time passed, she said, the stronger her desire became to protect Jens. But there was a flip side to that as well. By sheltering him, she increased her own dependency on him; she became an emotional cripple totally reliant on her lover. “It was pathetic, my need of this person, my total obsession and need for him,” she said. “It was like a physical addiction; it overruled everything. It overruled all values, all concerns. I would have done anything for him, and I did do everything for him. I betrayed everything. I betrayed my family. I betrayed my friends. I betrayed my parents. And I sold my soul for him really because of this extraordinary need for him. And it sounds very peculiar, but after he killed my parents, I needed him more.”
THINGS WERE GOING SMOOTHLY, JONES WAS CERTAIN, but he wanted to help Elizabeth bury Jens a little deeper still. As undramatically as he could, he asked her if Jens’s personality had changed after the murders.
As enthusiastically as she had gone into this subject with Gardner, Elizabeth leaped into it now. Yes, she said almost eagerly, he changed enormously. For one thing, he found his potency. For another, he became extremely domineering. Again, she used an anecdote to underline her point.
“There was a problem when my family came for the funeral,” she said. “It was absolutely vital for me to spend time with my family, but Jens was very nervous and suspicious of me because I was spending time with them. He made verbal threats about different things that he would do if I didn’t spend more time with him. He threatened to turn himself in and make sure that I went down with him. He threatened to kill himself and leave a message to convict me. He threatened leaving me, which was the terrible thing. He threatened lots of different things.”
What made it especially difficult, she said, was that she was suffering alone. “In the public portrayal he was my loving boyfriend who was with me in my hour of need. But he didn’t trust me out of his sight.”
WHAT SHE HAD SAID UP TO THAT POINT WAS A PRACTICE session, a warmup. With no more hesitation than a championship diver going off the high board, Elizabeth plunged into the very crucial issue of the knife.
The knife was important because it was the major indicator of her involvement. If she had, as she told investigators, gone shopping with Jens for the weapon, indeed had purchased it herself, then the rest of her courtroom story about how Jens had been acting on his own in murdering her parents would not stand. If she admitted that she bought the knife, she acknowledged her culpability. By doing that, she also would be adding to the evidence that she had talked
Jens into the murders. And that was precisely what she wanted to deny.
In one respect Jens had been much more clever than she. Jens had refused from the first to discuss a knife at all, other than to say that Elizabeth bought one, because he correctly determined that if he told investigators he went to Loose Chippings with a weapon in his pocket, he would be demonstrating premeditation. Elizabeth, on the other hand, confessed to Beever and later to Gardner as well that she had bought the knife. That made her truly an accessory. Admittedly, she had pleaded guilty to that very charge, but if she hoped for leniency from Judge Sweeney, she had to minimize her responsibility. She had decided to do that by denying any involvement with a knife, and, by extension, denying any conscious attempt to manipulate Jens into committing the murders. The only reason she brought the subject of the knife up to begin with, she was saying, was because Jens made her.
Then she told a story she had never told before. When she and Jens first discussed the murder weapon, she said, Jens told her that that he had killed her parents with a steak knife. But they discussed the situation, and Jens felt she needed to be more a part of the crime of what had happened. So they devised the tale about how she should say that she had purchased a knife although she had not. Eventually, she said, it became a basic part of their narrative. But as far as the actual kind of knife it was, that wasn’t decided until they had been on the run for several months. “It was in England,” she said. “That was the first time he ever told me about a butterfly knife.”
While they were in London, she said, Jens showed her an ad from
Soldier of Fortune
magazine. In the ad was a picture of a knife. “That’s a butterfly knife,” he told her. “If anyone ever asks, tell them that’s the kind of knife you bought.”
Later, when Beever asked her details about the type of weapon she thought was used in the murders, she drew for him, from memory, a picture of the butterfly knife she had seen in the magazine.
“Have you ever seen a butterfly knife?” Jones asked.
“Only a picture,” she replied. “I’ve never seen a real one, no.”
“Were you able to talk to Jens briefly after those statements in London were completed?”
“You mean on June 9?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes, I was.”
“And what was his concern at that time?”
“He asked me if I had told them about the knife.”
JONES PERHAPS COULD BE LOOKED UPON AS A MASTER chef as well as a guide. He had to make sure just the right seasoning was added in the precise amount if he wanted his creation to be a success. At this stage he felt that it was time to throw in a dash of remorse, just to make sure Judge Sweeney had not missed Elizabeth’s change of attitude once she had broken her bonds with Jens.
Now that she had time to reflect upon things, Jones wanted to know, how did she feel about her behavior through the whole unhappy episode?
Metaphorically, Elizabeth gave her chest a solid thump. “I was just disgusting,” she said. “I not only lied to the police about what was going on when I had ample opportunity to do otherwise—I not only lied to them when I should have told them the truth, I betrayed my family.” Thump. “It wasn’t only just the betrayal, it was the whole acting out of this innocence.” Thump. “I was betraying everything.” Thump. “My behavior was completely unacceptable.” Thump, thump.
JONES WAS PLEASED. THE DIRECT EXAMINATION WAS GOing like clockwork, but he sensed it was about time to give it up. If they had not made their points by now, they never would. But before surrendering his witness to the prosecutor, Jones wanted to make one more pass at Jens. Tell everyone again, he urged Elizabeth, about how Jens evolved overnight into a first-class bully.
Elizabeth seemed delighted to comply. “He made it very clear that there was no point in me thinking about trying to tell somebody about what had happened,” she said, “although I have to admit that at that time I was not thinking about it. I loved him, I needed him, and I just wanted to blank out what he had done. But he was obsessed with the notion that I might speak to somebody. And he would say that if he went down, I would go with him.”
At the same time, she said, he was insufferably proud of what he had done. “He thought he was some kind of hero.” When he was in a mood like that, she added, he would brag about how he had done everything by himself: how he had plotted the murders; how he had carried them out; even how he had outwitted the police. “He thought he was incredibly smart for having outwitted Investigator Gardner.”
As all investigators do, there were some things Gardner told his wife and there were some things he did not. One of the things he had not told her, at least not at first, was Elizabeth’s assertion that Jens had planned to murder him. He had not wanted to tell his wife because he did not want to worry her. In any case, Jens was locked up now, and there was little chance he was going to get free anytime soon. But as the day for Elizabeth’s testimony drew closer, Gardner began to wonder if he should not confide in his wife. He did not want her to hear it first from Elizabeth. The night before Elizabeth took the stand, after dinner, he had told her that she might hear something in the courtroom that could come as a surprise to her. Then he related to her what Elizabeth had told him. Afterwards, he was glad he had. Elizabeth, in her determination to hit Jens with whatever ammunition she had, brought it up.
“He felt threatened by Investigator Gardner,” she said. “He felt he knew in some sort of way what he had done. So he plotted to kill him at his home, and I was to provide his alibi in Charlottesville.”
Elizabeth could have stopped there, but she did not. She wanted not only to blacken Jens’s name, but to put as much
shine as she could on hers. So she made herself a quasiheroine in the situation.
“There wasn’t any point in reasoning with Jens about killing people,” she said. “No sense telling him it was bad, that you shouldn’t kill people. He
had
killed people, and I wasn’t in a position to moralize to him.” So she interjected herself into the plot in the way in which she was most accomplished. She created a fictional situation. She told how she had invented a brain tumor and how that had distracted Jens so much that he forgot about Gardner. When she finished telling the anecdote, she looked very self-satisfied.