JIM UPDIKE’S MISSION WAS TO EXPOSE ELIZABETH Haysom. Her parents, he was convinced, were dead because of her. She may not have killed them. In fact he had already conceded that she was not even present when they were murdered. But that did not diminish her responsibility, legal or moral. They were dead because of what she was. And she was a liar, a manipulator, a conniver, a seductress, and a self-centered, ungrateful daughter, not to mention a confessed accessory to murder. She also was proving to be a very articulate and astute witness. While Beever had noted that Jens had a way of answering a question with a question, Elizabeth’s technique was different. She
appeared
to be answering a question, but when she had finished, it was apparent that she had not answered it at all. She was a world-class evasionist.
Part of Updike’s plan to expose her consisted of demonstrating how virtually nothing she said could be believed. Not even the little things, the irrelevant things. Things like whose idea it had been for her to go skiing in Yugoslavia during the Christmas vacation in 1984. If Updike could show that she lied about things like that, he could prove that she was capable of lying about almost anything concerning her parents’ deaths.
Elizabeth claimed that she hadn’t wanted to make the trip, but that her mother had made her. Updike wanted to show that she was lying. Annie Massie had told investigators that Nancy had told her that it was Elizabeth who had begged for the vacation. Updike wanted to get to the heart of this issue.
“If one of your mother’s friends, Mrs. Massie for instance, testified that your mother was concerned about you
going to Yugoslavia, but that it was your idea to go anyway, and she consented to your wishes—”
“I’m sure my mother said that.”
“But you still maintain it was her idea, not yours?”
“Absolutely.”
“And then if your mother said that to Mrs. Massie, your mother was not telling the truth. She lied in other words?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said.
Updike bored in. “Would you agree that you’re calling her a liar?”
“I would say she wasn’t so much of a liar as somebody who—”
“Didn’t tell the truth.”
“Had fantasies.”
Updike pointed out that Elizabeth had written to her rescuer from Berlin, Colonel Herrington, about the Yugoslavia trip and that in the letter she had told him that it was her decision, not her mother’s.
Elizabeth responded that she was obliged to say that because her mother read all her letters.
Updike looked steadily at her. He felt he had made his point. “Ms. Haysom,” he said solemnly, “it seems that you pass responsibility for everything to somebody else, don’t you?”
Elizabeth wanted the last word. “I have done that,” she confessed.
UPDIKE WAS CURIOUS ABOUT AN INCIDENT SHE HAD DETAILED during her direct examination: the time Jens allegedly walked into her dormitory room and said, apparently without provocation, that he would like to confront her parents because he “could blow their bloody heads off.” Elizabeth had not mentioned that in any of her interrogations. Was it another of her fantasies? If it had occurred as she described, he asked her, what had she tried to do to stop him?
“Absolutely nothing, sir, and that’s why I’m guilty.”
Her response surprised him, but Updike was not interested in more of her self-flagellation. He wanted to know if
such an incident had actually occurred and what her response had been.
It would seem to him, he said, that unless someone actually wanted his or her parents dead, that person would react very strongly to a comment such as that.
Elizabeth repeated what she had said before. Several times. “I did not want my parents murdered,” she insisted. “But there was a large part of me which did want my parents out of my life.”
Updike considered that another nonanswer. He wanted her to be more specific. “Couldn’t you very well have said to Jens Soering, ‘Look, Jens, I don’t want them dead. I would like them out of my life, but I don’t want them dead. I love you, but don’t you ever say anything of that nature against my mother and father again.’”
Elizabeth conceded that the statement had made her angry and that she had told Jens it was a “disgusting” thing to say. Then she added: “But he obviously knew from my letters that I didn’t want them in my life.”
That was what Updike was driving at. She had already primed him with her letters about wishing them dead, and therefore he had been ready to act on her wishes. “So you admit that you placed the idea of your parents’ deaths in the mind of Jens Soering?” he asked, thinking he had boxed her in.
But she jumped away. “No, sir,” she said.
He exhaled. “You did absolutely nothing. You said absolutely nothing. And you say that you did not want them dead. So you just ignored that statement, is that correct?”
“To a certain extent.”
“To a certain extent!”
“What is your question then, sir?” she asked indignantly. “Excuse me, maybe I misunderstood.”
“Let’s just move on, Ms. Haysom,” Updike mumbled in frustration. “I think I’ve plowed that ground, and I’m not getting anything but rocks.”
He hoped to find more tillable soil in Colorado. Digging in his documents, he produced a copy of the letter Elizabeth
had written Jens during the spring break in 1985, shortly before Derek and Nancy had been murdered. On stationery from the Ramada Inn in Denver, Elizabeth had composed a fictional tale about how she had inherited valuable property in London from her cousin, Lady Astor, and about how her parents were wealthy but miserly and she would never get any of their money until they were dead. She wrote this, Updike emphasized, knowing that Jens was obsessed with financial security.
She nodded. “I tried to manipulate him in that letter,” she acknowledged.
“Ah,” said Updike, brightening. “You said that: ‘Tried to manipulate.’”
“Unsuccessfully, too,” she added hastily.
“At any rate, you are giving him an ultimatum here, aren’t you? That the only resolution to the dilemma, the only one, the only way you could have everything, is to kill your parents. Isn’t that what you were saying?”
“No, sir,” she said, refusing to give ground. “What I’m trying to do in this letter is I’m trying to manipulate him.”
“To do what?”
“To leave the university with me. That is why I go into this incredibly flamboyant and nonsensical description of how it’s okay to leave, that everything’s going to work out, that you can find money, do whatever is necessary.”
Updike paced. He had to find a way to break through her resolve, a way around her evasions. “What you were doing was you were emphasizing your background, your heritage, your potential wealth to this young man who was concerned about financial security, weren’t you?”
“No, sir,” she began, then paused. She made a slight concession. “Well, yes, you’re correct in a way,” she told Updike, who welcomed the small victory. “I was emphasizing the fact that there was lots of money there. But I was emphasizing to him that that money would never be available to me.”
“Unless your parents died?” he pressed.
She had given enough. She wasn’t going to bow too much. “No,” she said flatly.
Updike backed away slightly, preparing for another rush at the fortress wall. What she was doing, he suggested, was manipulating Jens.
She admitted that she was, and Updike considered that a major step forward. Encouraged, he pushed harder. “Your purpose, in this reference to the young man who’s talked about blowing their brains out, is to encourage him to free you so the two of you will have the freedom and the wealth to do whatever you want.”
She repelled the charge, denying that was her intent.
Well, why did she write that letter then? Updike all but screamed in frustration.
“I wrote it to manipulate him to leave the university with me,” she said, happy with herself.
UPDIKE SILENTLY CURSED TO HIMSELF. TRYING TO PIN Elizabeth down was like trying to grab a handful of smoke.
“Two weeks later, Ms. Haysom, you were in the Washington Marriott, and Jens Soering was on his way to Loose Chippings.” On his way to murder her parents, he added. “And now you are saying that this letter and the statements he made in February and the letters you wrote in December had nothing to do with it?”
Elizabeth refused to be cornered. Her strategy was first to evade, but when that was no longer viable, to deny. This time she denied. “No, I’m not saying that, sir.”
What was she saying? Updike asked. She had already said she wanted her parents dead.
“I did not want them murdered,” she repeated, insisting there was a difference between them being dead and them being killed. “I know to you who obviously are very logical and very clear-headed that doesn’t make any sense,” she said carefully. “I wanted my parents out of my life. I had this immature, ridiculous fantasy of them being dead. Not murdered. Not in actuality. Not in reality. My letters, my writings, they all have a very surreal and fantastic nature. It
was in my head, and Jens made it reality. But it wasn’t reality that I wanted.”
“You wanted them
dead
,” Updike persisted.
“I wanted them dead
to me
,” she said. “I wanted them disconnected from me. I wanted them to be out of my life.”
Updike was exasperated. “So this is just, oh, a lack of communication between you and Jens Soering, is that right?” he asked sarcastically.
Elizabeth was affronted. “I think that’s a very gross understatement.”
Updike shrugged. One more time, he told himself.
HE APPEALED TO HER SENSE OF LOGIC. THE STORY SHE wanted him and everyone else to believe, he pointed out, simply was not logical. Would she at least agree with that?
Yes, she conceded. Then she retreated into humility again. “You’ve said several times that I’m awfully bright. Perhaps that’s an overestimation of my abilities.”
Updike ignored that. Laboriously picking apart her latest version of what had happened in Washington, he pulled out several things that he could attack, statements he could point to and make her admit that she had lied to investigators.
“I know, sir,” she admitted. “I lied.”
That was a step in the right direction, he thought. “You’re capable of lying and deceiving, should doing so meet your needs then?”
“I have lied, and I have deceived,” she admitted.
“To suit your own purposes at the time?”
“Yes, sir.”
But basically he was unable to shake her. She was especially stubborn about insisting on the different nuances between her wanting her parents dead but not wanting them murdered. “I’m sure you can tell from my letters that I lived in a world of fantasy to a large extent,” she said. “I deceived people. I lied to them. I exaggerated things. I played roles. But I had never known anybody who was particularly violent or criminal. To kill somebody—it’s so very definite and
so very real. I just never imagined somebody could do that. That somebody
would
do that. It’s just not something that people do. They don’t go around killing other people even if they have talked about it, have written about it.”
Updike was convinced she was evading again, that she knew exactly what Jens had had in mind when he had left her in Washington and driven to Boonsboro.
“You
knew what he was going to do, didn’t you?”
Elizabeth leaned forward, looking very intent. “What I want you to understand,” she began in a school teacher-ish tone, “and I don’t mean to minimize my guilt, is that what I did, what I said, what I failed to do—my irresponsibility, my manipulation of Jens—yes, in that I’m totally guilty. I’m totally responsible for my parents’ deaths. I accept that. But what I want you to realize is that Jens acted of his own free will. He had a choice. He had a four-hour drive. No matter what I said to him before that, no matter what I had written to him in the months before that, he had a choice whether he killed my parents or not. He sat and talked with them. He had some kind of meal with them or something. He didn’t
have
to do anything. Nobody forced him to do anything. And I never once believed that somebody like Jens could do something like that.”
It was Updike’s turn to clarify his position.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I’m not trying to minimize Jens Soering’s guilt. And if I live long enough, the time’s going to come when he’s going to be here. His day will come, so I’m not trying to minimize his involvement. I’m trying to lay a foundation for the court to determine
your
involvement. That’s why we’re here.”
Elizabeth nodded. “I understand that, sir.”
UPDIKE CONTEMPLATED THE SITUATION, STARING AT THE wall over Judge Sweeney’s shoulder while he gathered his thoughts. This was his first and last chance to question Elizabeth. The law allowed considerable latitude when de- termining mitigation, so his inquiries could be broad and far-reaching. But just how broad, how far reaching, did he want to make his inquiries? His goal was to prove that Eliz- abeth was deeply involved in the murder of her parents. Even though she had pleaded guilty, her testimony was de- signed to absolve her of culpability. Updike’s aim was to prove that that was not true—that there was no reason for Judge Sweeney to show leniency. The only mitigating factor that had not yet been discussed was her mental condition, but Updike did not see any problems from his end on that score. Still to come was testimony from a psychiatrist who had examined her, but Updike expected that to be simply another mitigation claim. She was not going to assert that she was legally insane even though her psychiatrist undoubt- edly would say that she suffered from a certain amount of instability, enough anyway to reduce her accountability. What Updike needed to do before he let her off the stand for good was to hammer some more at her, see if he could rattle her enough to make her change her story yet again. He needed to get her to admit all the opportunities she had to influence Jens, to confess that there was a dialogue between them that centered on murdering her parents. So far he had not done that. He was not surprised at her reluctance to admit her involvement, but he was frustrated by her shrewd- ness, her ability to work her way out of a trap no matter how skillfully he thought he had sprung it. He took a deep breath. Time to get on with it, he told himself.
He decided to begin with the knife and her ever-changing tale about the possible murder weapon. Undeniably, Derek and Nancy had been killed with a knife. But since the weapon had not been found, investigators could only guess about it. They thought they had a good lead when Elizabeth volunteered that she had bought a martial arts—style knife for Jens on the morning of the murder. Then, inexplicably, she flip-flopped. On the stand, she testified that her original story had been a lie, a tale she and Jens had concocted as a loyalty test between themselves. Updike was still puzzled by this. How was he, or anyone, to know what was true? he asked her. Did she initially conceive of the story as part of her alibi? he asked.
Elizabeth pondered the question for several seconds. No, she said finally, the story about the knife had nothing to do with the alibi. “It was an admission of guilt,” she said, explaining that Jens, when he feared he was going to be arrested, asked her to share the burden of the crime. The best way he could think of doing that was to have her become a part of the events that transpired. “I was supposed to say that I had bought the knife and that I had bought a can of mace and that I had given them to him and that I had made him go down there and do it.”
She paused and looked at Updike, who was standing almost within arm’s reach, waiting expectantly for her to continue. “That’s what I was
supposed
to say,” she added. “But when I actually came to saying it, I talked nonsense about his little brother’s birthday and ended up saying that we both purchased it. However, I did say that I paid for it.”
Updike shook his head. “Help me understand,” he pleaded. To him, it made no sense because her alleged involvement did nothing to reduce Jens’s responsibility. Even if she
had
bought it, he still was the one who used it. How did her story help him?
Elizabeth tried again to explain Jens’s convoluted reasoning. Her desire to make herself clear on this point was evident. She displayed more patience now than she had so far with any of the prosecutor’s questions. Jens took the position,
she said, that she had forced him to commit the murders. “He believes—as he has portrayed very convincingly—that he’s an innocent young lad who was led astray by an older, more experienced woman.” This had to be kept in mind, she said as she continued her explanation that he developed the idea that she should acknowledge her culpability in some fashion. “His point was that I was to shoulder the responsibility for what he had done, that I was in control of his actions.” The best idea he could come up with for demonstrating this was her saying she was involved directly in the murders through the purchase of the knife.
Updike nodded. He understood what she was saying, he told her, but that story fell apart when she changed the other part of her story too. Her “knife” story worked only as long as she agreed that she had been manipulating Jens. If Jens had actually been manipulating her, as she said she later came to believe, why had he insisted on the knife story?
Elizabeth shook her head. That was the irony of it, she said. When she and Jens later underwent a role reversal, and he became the dominant party, it was he who began to manipulate her. It was then that he developed the belief that it helped him to have her admit to buying the knife. But he told her it was because she had manipulated him. “I believed very firmly that I had been the manipulator,” she said. “I believed what Jens said, that I had made him do it. I believed that I was the cause of his actions.” But then, she added, she realized that was not true. Her attempt to make him leave the university had not been successful, so she realized her influence had been minimal. “Since then,” she said, “I have seen correspondence of his where he discusses deliberately manipulating me to believe those things.”
Holy moly, Updike thought. Talk about intricate plots—wheels within wheels within wheels. Still, he remained unconvinced. But no matter whether he believed her or not, he could see no advantage in pursuing this issue further. “I see,” he told her, jumping to a subject that had worried him from the first: motive.
IF JENS HAD INDEED BEEN MANIPULATING HER, HE HAD to have had a reason for what he did. What did
she
think that reason was?
Elizabeth was not as eager to answer that as she had been to respond to his queries about the knife. First, she said it was her belief that sooner or later Jens would have murdered someone. It had been bad luck that their paths had crossed and that she had unburdened herself to him about her frustrations with her parents. This had given him a target and an excuse.
Updike shook his head. Her story did not sound right to him. He invited her to try again.
And again she evaded him. “I’ve asked him that many times,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.
Updike’s patience was giving out. He gave her a withering look. Come on, he told her, she could do better than that. They were lovers, he pointed out. They traveled all over Europe and parts of Asia together. They shared a bed and all their secrets. Certainly, in all that time, the two of them talked about what had happened. “Did it ever occur to you,” he asked sarcastically, “to say to Jens Soering, ‘Why did you do it?’”
Yes, she said grudgingly, she had asked him that. The first time had been when they were in Lynchburg soon after the murders.
And what did he say? Updike asked impatiently. What was his answer?
He didn’t say anything, she said. He just reached into his knapsack and pulled out a stack of papers. They were the letters she had written him.
Updike smiled inwardly. “Your letters did it then?” he said, struggling to contain his elation. “Okay, I won’t argue with you there.”
DURING HIS OPENING STATEMENT UPDIKE HAD SAID there was a witness who claimed to have heard Elizabeth make a grotesque comment about her father’s brains being
splattered on the fireplace that she was cleaning. If he could get her to admit that she had been so unfeeling, the admission would show how little remorse she actually had about her parents’ murders; it would give the lie to the story she told in court about how disturbed she had been about Derek’s and Nancy’s deaths. Was the witness right? Had she made such a statement?
Not exactly, Elizabeth said guardedly. She tried to evade an answer by claiming that she had been standing by the door, not the fireplace. When Updike contended it was why she had said it that was important, not where she was when she said it, she challenged his respect for the facts. “We’re supposed to be dealing here with accuracy of what happened and what did not happen,” she lectured.
Updike could not believe her arrogance. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, bowing slightly. “But you did make the statement nevertheless, didn’t you?”
“No,” she said coolly. “I did not make that particular statement.”
Here we go again, Updike thought. Placing his hands on the witness box rail, he stared at her. “If you did not make it,” he said just as coolly, “how do you know where it occurred?”
Elizabeth appeared not at all flustered. She said that her brother Howard had asked her to come to Loose Chippings to help clean up the bloodstains. She was working on the door when she saw several of her father’s hairs glued to the surface with dried blood. When she saw that, she said, she gulped and announced that she thought she was going to be sick.
Updike looked at her closely. “How in the world did that get confused?” he asked. “How did it come out, ‘Well, I’m just cleaning up Pop’s brains’?”
“I did make some comment about these are the hairs of my father’s head,” she said. “Then I went to the bathroom, and I was sick.”
Regardless of the exact words of the statement, Updike said, he was curious as to why she was there to begin with.
When Updike had interviewed Howard Haysom, Howard had told him that going to clean up the house had been Elizabeth’s idea, not his. Even though Howard was a surgeon and saw blood all the time, cleaning up the blood of his mother and stepfather was something else. He had suggested they hire a professional cleaning crew, but Elizabeth had insisted that they do it themselves. “I want to make sure of this,” he said. “You’re saying that Howard Haysom, your brother, asked you to go there?”
“Yes,” she said emphatically.
Updike made a mental note to be sure to ask Howard about that when he took the stand.
UPDIKE WAS FASCINATED BY ELIZABETH’S STATEMENTS concerning Jens’s metamorphosis. He simply did not believe that a person could change so quickly, that one could go literally overnight from a submissive person to a domineering one, that after months of sexual inadequacy Jens could suddenly develop potency. He wanted Elizabeth to run through that one more time. Was it true, he asked her, that it was only on the night of the memorial service for her parents that she and Jens made love for the first time?
It was true, Elizabeth acknowledged, only if you could call what they did making love. After the memorial service they went to a friend’s house to spend the night because they could not go back to Loose Chippings. She had been sleeping in a separate room with her college roommate when Jens awakened her and asked her to return with him to his bed. He said he was lonely and frightened. Thinking nothing of it, she said, she went with him since up to then he had been impotent. Because she was so upset by events, she had been taking sedatives, and when she got into Jens’s bed, she fell asleep again immediately. Sometime later, she said, she awoke and Jens was making love to her.
“Making love to you?” Updike repeated.
“Well,” she replied, “for want of a better term you could say
making love
.”
“Are you saying he raped you?” Updike asked, intrigued by her response.
“No,” she said, she would not call it
rape
because she had not put up a struggle.
Updike shook his head sadly. “This is the man known to you as the murderer of your parents,” he said. “The funeral service, the remorse that we have heard about, the attendance at the service for your slain parents must have had no effect on you, did it?”
To the contrary, Elizabeth answered heatedly, it had a very profound effect on her.
“Then how in the world could you lie in the same bed with the man who had killed them and make love to the man?”
She mea culpa-ed. “I don’t know, sir. I’ll never forgive myself, and I don’t expect anyone else to either.”
Updike thought he knew why. “The only logical explanation is that this lover had done as you requested,” he said. “Isn’t that it?”
She was not to be trapped. “No, sir,” she said, glaring at him.
IT WAS ALMOST TWO O’CLOCK AND THEY HAD NOT YET taken a break for lunch. Elizabeth had been on the stand for nearly four hours. Updike was sure he was not going to get any more direct answers out of her than he had already, but there was still one question he wanted to ask, one issue that was haunting him. He wanted to know why
she
thought Derek and Nancy had been murdered. “Why did your parents die?” he asked.
She did not hesitate. “My parents died because Jens and I were obsessed with each other and he was jealous of anything else in my life.”
Was that why he killed them? Updike asked. Out of jealousy?
Yes, she said. He killed them because he knew how important they were to her and because she had told him that
she was reconciling with them. He feared that he was going to lose her.
Updike flipped through a copy of her May 8 session with Ricky Gardner. What she had just said was interesting, he said, but it was not what she had told Gardner when he asked her the same question. She had told the investigator that she believed Jens had killed them because he believed that Derek and Nancy were determined to break them up.