Showalter backed off. “I can’t distinguish,” he said. “It would be totally inappropriate for me to speculate further on the personality characteristics of Mr. Soering. I’ve never met him.”
That response made Updike happy. That was the point he was trying to make. Showalter had just helped Updike weaken his own testimony. Updike pointed out that the fact that he had never interviewed Jens did not stop the psychiatrist from testifying that he thought Jens killed the Haysoms because he was afraid of losing Elizabeth.
“That was a very reasonable interpretation,” Showalter countered. “It fits with this balance between control, maintaining control, losing control, etcetera. Clinically, it fits together beautifully.”
“Clinically?” Updike asked.
Showalter nodded.
“Clinically doesn’t do Nancy and Derek Haysom much good, does it?” Updike said.
“Unfortunately not,” Showalter agreed. “You are so correct.”
DR. SHOWALTER WAS THE DEFENSE’S LAST WITNESS, BUT Updike had witnesses to call in rebuttal. The first was Dr. Howard Haysom, Nancy’s older son by her first marriage and Elizabeth’s half-brother. Updike called him so that Howard could contradict two points Elizabeth had made. The first concerned her allegation that she was raped when she was a ten-year-old attending school in Switzerland.
Howard said he had talked to Elizabeth about that as recently as March 1985, when she went skiing with him in Colorado. He and Elizabeth were riding a lift to the top of a mountain, Howard said, when he remembered the incident in Switzerland. He had not heard the story directly from her before, and he wanted to try to build a closer bond to her, so he asked her about it. She told him that a man had indecently exposed himself to her. She said the man had been standing on the other side of a wire fence at the time.
“She made no indication to you that she’d been raped?” Updike asked.
“No,” Howard answered emphatically.
The other point the prosecutor wanted to discuss with Howard Haysom was the statement Elizabeth had made about Howard asking her to help clean up the house in which her parents had been killed.
“Elizabeth Haysom testified that she went there and participated in the cleaning of the house because you asked her to,” said Updike. “Is that true?”
He said it was not. “I didn’t require that Elizabeth be in the house at all.” He said he and Elizabeth’s other half-brother, Veryan, had been discussing plans to hire a commercial cleaning crew to take care of the job when Elizabeth interrupted. “She said, ‘Why don’t we just go out and get
some buckets and scrubbing brushes?’ I was aghast and shaken by that. I’m a physician. I’m used to seeing a lot of blood. I’ve seen more than my share, but here was my twenty-year-old sister suggesting something that really astonished me.”
He said they did hire commercial cleaners, but Elizabeth was unhappy with the way they did the job and went herself to rewipe the front door.
“If she testified that she went to the house because you asked her to, then that would be an untrue statement, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s her perception of what I probably said. I do not recall specifically requiring her presence to clean up the house.”
As he had done earlier with Veryan Haysom, Updike asked Howard what he thought Elizabeth’s punishment should be.
“You know,” he said pensively, “I think that this revolves upon one thing and that is, is Elizabeth remorseful. It’s my judgment that she is not. The reason for this is that she continues, I think, to tell untrue statements, give twists, spins to pieces of information that are favorable to her but that are not true. I think that she has lied to me in the past and, frankly, continues to lie. I personally am not satisfied with the explanation that her guilty plea provided. I think Elizabeth was in the house at the time of the crime, and I have reasons for that, too.”
Updike knew what those reasons were—Howard had told him before. He claimed that he had talked to his mother a few days before she was killed and she had mentioned that she and Derek were expecting Elizabeth and Jens that weekend and that Elizabeth had promised “to do something important for us.” She had not elaborated. Also, he had said, he did not think his parents would have let Jens into the house unless Elizabeth were with him. Finally, there was the issue of some documents from Derek mailed to Veryan Haysom in Nova Scotia. The envelope containing the papers was postmarked in Washington on April 1, apparently two
days after Derek and Nancy had been killed in Lynchburg, some two hundred miles away. How that document got a Washington postmark on that particular date was one of the unsolved mysteries still haunting the case.
Updike did not want to get into these issues at the hearing. By accepting Elizabeth’s pleas to being an accessory before the fact, he had given up claim to trying to establish that she had indeed been present when Derek and Nancy were murdered. Despite Howard’s apparent eagerness to discuss those points, Updike cut him off.
ANOTHER OF HIS REBUTTAL WITNESSES WAS RICHARD Haysom, an architect from Calgary, Howard’s full brother and Elizabeth’s half-brother. Younger than Howard by a year, Richard was ten years older than his half-sister. Richard Haysom said he probably was the closest to Elizabeth both chronologically and emotionally.
Updike asked him the same question he had asked Veryan and Howard, carefully wording it so it would not appear that he was asking his witnesses to usurp the judge’s function in setting the sentence. “Do you have any feelings that you wish to express regarding the disposition of this case?”
“Firstly,” Richard replied carefully, “I’d like to establish that I’m not here for any vindictive reasons. I also wish to tell the court that today I still love my sister very much. But I feel we have an obligation under the circumstances, and because of the heinous crime that’s been committed here, we have an obligation to society to show what the consequences of such crimes are. Therefore, I would want to see the most severe penalty possible.”
Elizabeth, who had been sitting hunched over the defense table with her head in her left hand, looking down as though to escape the slap of the words, showed no reaction to Richard’s pronouncement. A few minutes later, when she was being led from the courtroom at the end of the day’s session, Richard leaned over the rail separating the spectators from the participants and kissed her gently on the cheek. She did
not turn or acknowledge the act; she merely kept walking as though it had not occurred.
ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, THE DAY AFTER THE PROSECUTION and defense made their closing statements, Judge Sweeney was ready to pass his sentence. For the session Elizabeth abandoned her dresses in favor of a striped blue blouse and a bulky blue and beige crew-necked sweater. Sitting with Jones on her right and Davis on her left, she focused on the bare tabletop and ducked her chin as Judge Sweeney, who had remained remarkably silent during the hearing, leaned forward and shuffled the papers in front of him. Slowly and deliberately, he began to read from a typewritten document he had prepared for the session.
In his twenty-two years on the bench, the judge said, it was not often that he lost sleep over a case in his court. But Elizabeth Haysom’s case had been an exception; it had caused him considerable apprehension. After reading all the documents that had been filed in the case, including her letters, and after listening to her in court for most of two days he had concluded that she was a “sensitive, poised, gifted, intelligent, articulate person.” It was these very qualities, in fact, that made his job more arduous. “It is difficult to pass judgment on someone whose IQ probably exceeds your own,” he said.
Still, he added, he had to consider the nature of the charges. She had pleaded guilty to two offenses, each of which carried a maximum sentence of life in prison. The fact that she had pleaded guilty threw a special light on the proceedings. The testimony presented during the hearing dealt only with the background of the case, as it should, and not with the crime itself. “Background testimony invokes sympathy for the defendant, but it cannot be used to lessen the seriousness of the crimes committed and admitted,” he said.
Updike and Gardner were not alone in their frustration in trying to find a motive for the murders. Judge Sweeney confessed that he, too, was unable to determine
why
Derek and
Nancy were killed. “We are left only with the feeling that the case is a grotesque monument to inappropriate response to parental hatred,” he said, implying that he felt that this was an inadequate description but that he was unable to offer a better one.
In reviewing what he had read and heard, Sweeney said, he had concluded that there were three mitigating factors in the case. One was that the prosecutor did not feel that Elizabeth had actually taken part in the crimes. Otherwise he would have charged her with murder. But just because she was physically absent when the murders took place did not mean that she was not culpable. “I am convinced,” he said, “that the crimes would not have occurred except for her involvement. Simply stated, I think that her parents would be alive today except for what she did and didn’t do.”
The second mitigating factor was her decision not to fight extradition and, despite attempts by her lawyers to convince her otherwise, to plead guilty. “This is the first step in rehabilitation,” he said.
The third factor had to do with how her brothers regarded her possible punishment. He regarded it as significant that they disagreed. Although they did not question her guilt, each had a differing opinion on how Elizabeth should be dealt with. Veryan was more forgiving, while Howard and Richard were in favor of a long sentence.
He had been impressed, he continued, by Elizabeth’s accomplishments and her potential. At the same time, he realized, her punishment must fit the crime, not her background. One thing that still bothered him was that he did not have a clear idea of what type of person Elizabeth was at that time. Before she confessed, she had had a number of perverse attributes. At various times, he said, she had been a liar, a cheat, a manipulator, and a drug abuser. For
that
Elizabeth Haysom, he said, he had no sympathy whatsoever. That Elizabeth deserved all the punishment the law allowed. However, he felt there also had been some changes within her, that maybe there was a
new
Elizabeth. “For that person, if indeed there is one, I feel sympathy as a fellow
human being. And I feel sorry that she probably wasted a promising career.”
He said that he agreed with witnesses who believed that many of Elizabeth’s accusations against her parents probably were exaggerated or untrue. That included the vicious rumors of mother-daughter incest. On that score he did not believe Elizabeth had always told the truth, but he recognized that she had partially conceded her lies when she testified.
Looking over his half-glasses, he fixed his gaze on Elizabeth, who was sitting quietly between her two lawyers, her hands clasped in front of her, almost as if in prayer. In an avuncular voice he told her that he was ready to read her sentence and she could either stand or remain seated. She decided to keep her chair. Sweeney nodded. Speaking quickly and loudly, he sentenced her to forty-five years in prison on each count, a total of ninety years since the sentences would run consecutively. Under Virginia law she would be eligible for parole in 1999. There was no other recourse; guilty pleas cannot be appealed.
Elizabeth did not react when he read the sentence. She sat quietly, staring at her clasped hands.
Still in a kindly voice, Sweeney explained to her that the prison she would be going to was one of the best in the state. “I have visited there several times,” he said. “It is a prison, but it is a humane prison where you will be treated well and where you can receive counseling if needed.”
When he finished, Elizabeth, still looking down, rose slowly and stuck her arms out, wrists together, for the handcuffs offered by a deputy. Dry-eyed, she walked out of the room and down the steps of the courthouse. On the roofs of nearby buildings, clearly visible against the autumn sky, were sharpshooters Sheriff Wells had posted “just in case.”
WITHIN HOURS AFTER HE SENTENCED ELIZABETH, JUDGE Sweeney’s avuncular attitude began to disintegrate; he apparently began wondering if he might not have let her off too easy. The most he could have given her was two life terms, which on the books was not much greater than the two forty-five-year sentences he decided upon. But in practical terms she might, under the sentences he handed down, be back on the street much sooner than he originally anticipated. With two life terms she would have had to serve at least twenty years before she was eligible for parole. With the sentences he gave her, though, she could be out in twelve years, maybe less if she proved to be an exemplary prisoner. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he had to do something.
On October 15, 1987, exactly a week after sentencing, Sweeney did an unusual thing. For one of the few times in his career, he wrote the state parole board. He was worried, he told the board, that years down the road his intentions regarding Elizabeth Haysom might be misconstrued. He feared that the fact that he had not given her the maximum sentence might be interpreted to mean that he favored some leniency for her. He wanted to make it clear that he did not.
He realized, he wrote, that the most he could do was make a recommendation to the board because anything else would be beyond his jurisdiction. However, as the sentencing judge familiar with all the aspects of the case, he had strong feelings about the punishment. “Based upon the seriousness of the charges and the heinous nature of the crimes, I strongly feel that Elizabeth Haysom should not receive early release,” he wrote. “I think that she should be required
to serve a substantial portion of the sentence which I gave her.”
AFTER SENTENCING, ELIZABETH WAS SENT TO THE prison at Goochland where she quickly settled in, ordering some elegant envelopes and embossed letterhead that gave no clue as to the real nature of her current address or occupational status. On heavy off-white paper in tasteful gray letters, it says simply:
Elizabeth R. Haysom
P.O. Box 1
Goochland, VA 23063
U.S.A.
But the institution dulls the effect by stamping the backs of the envelopes with the message: “Department of Corrections has neither censored nor inspected this item.”
Like Holloway, Goochland is a campus-like prison—except it is more so. There are no high fences or massive buildings which hold tier after tier of cells. At Goochland, there are self-contained living units, each with its own kitchen and dining hall. The prisoners live in “rooms.” As recently as the summer of 1989, the population of the prison was fivehundred and thirty-five, which was above capacity. Elizabeth’s unit contained fifty-three women, which was too many to allow every prisoner to have a “room” to herself. Nevertheless, Elizabeth managed it. For recreation, there are tennis courts, a gym, a ball field and, particularly attractive to Elizabeth, a library with more than ten thousand books.
The downside, if it can be called that, is that at Goochland every prisoner has to work. Authorities would not say what Elizabeth’s job was. They also would not discuss her conduct or reveal how she got along with fellow inmates. In other prisons and jails in which she has been held, however, Elizabeth has always been a praiseworthy prisoner and there is no reason to suspect she is behaving differently at Goochland.
Especially not if she, despite Sweeney’s letter, is working toward early release.
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, JENS SOERING CONTINUED TO fight his extradition vigorously.
On June 30, 1988, long after Elizabeth had settled in at Goochland, the House of Lords in London rejected Jens’s appeal of the magistrate court’s decision ordering him held pending extradition. Eight days later, with his last appeal in British courts out of the way, Jens filed a motion with the European Commission of Human Rights. It also was intended to keep him from being sent back to Virginia.
Just as Britain has an extradition treaty with the United States, it also has a treaty with the Council of Europe, a group composed at the time of twenty-two Western European countries, including West Germany. Jens claimed that his extradition to Virginia would violate rights which were guaranteed him under the terms of the treaty with the Council. Interestingly, Jens did
not
claim his rights were subject to violation because he might be executed, but because he might have to wait for six years or more for the sentence to be carried out. Jens’s lawyers called this situation the “death row phenomenon.” The real phenomenon was that the claim got as far as it did.
DESPITE THIS NEW APPEAL, ON AUGUST 3, LESS THAN A month later, Jens was ordered extradited to Bedford County. It never occurred. Jens actually was removed from his cell at Brixton Prison and was on the verge of being put on an airplane bound for the United States when he suffered a mental collapse. His extradition was postponed at least until the Human Rights Commission made a decision on whether it would hear Jens’s claim.
On August 5, a stressed-out Jens was transferred to a prison hospital. A psychiatrist, Dr. D. Somekh of Cane Hill Hospital, in the suburb of Coulsdon, Surrey, who had been visiting with Jens on and off since June 1987, was called in to examine him.
In a report he filed later, Somekh said that Jens had told him several times that he was convinced that if he were returned to Virginia for trial he would be convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. Worse than a speedy execution, he said, was the prospect of waiting on death row for his date with the executioner. He feared he would be an outcast among the other prisoners because of his nationality and his social class and would be subject to attack from other prisoners because of his race and relatively small stature. He was particularly terrified about possible homosexual assaults because that also would expose him to AIDS, which might kill him before the executioner.
Reacting to these fears, Jens began to behave obsessively. He insisted, for instance, on telling his lawyers, at length, how to handle his defense, and he spent weeks writing down every detail he could remember about his relationship with Elizabeth from the time they met until their arrest. He was beginning to crack under the strain.
“From time to time,” Somekh wrote, “Soering has begged me to supply him covertly with means whereby he would be able to kill himself at very short notice if he was informed that he was about to be taken to the United States.”
UNWILLING TO TAKE A CHANCE ON JENS COMMITTING suicide, prison officials ordered him kept in the hospital on the potential suicide ward. He remained there until November, 1988, when his spirits were buoyed by the Human Rights Commission’s announcement that it would listen to his claim.
Two months later, the Commission issued its ruling. By a narrow six-to-five vote it said that it did not think the alleged existence of the “death row phenomenon” violated the Council of Europe treaty. Instead of clearing the way for his extradition, however, the Commission kicked the entire matter upstairs. It recommended that Jens take his complaints to the Commission’s parent body, the European Court of Human Rights.
ON APRIL 24, 1989, WITH TWENTY OF ITS TWENTY-TWO members present, the Court held its hearing on the complaints at its headquarters in Strasbourg, France, on the Franco-German border. Most of the members of the Court are retired judges, lawyers or academics. The posts are elective and the terms run for nine years. Unlike rulings from the Commission, decisions from the Court are generally accepted as binding among the member nations.
Before holding its hearing, the group agreed to allow Germany to have a representative argue its claim that Jens should be extradited to his home country. That marked the first time in the organization’s history that a third party not directly involved in the dispute was allowed to participate. It would not be surprising if Germany’s decision to participate was influenced by the fact that Klaus Soering was a career officer in the German foreign service.
The main issue before the Court was the same as that before the Commission: If Jens were returned to Virginia, would his civil rights be violated because of the “death row phenomenon?”
All day they argued. The speakers for the three parties involved were Colin Nicholls, one of Britain’s premier experts on extradition, representing Jens; the German representative, Jans Meyer-Ladewig, and Sir Patrick Mayhew, the U.K.’s Attorney General who also represented the United States—which was not a member of the Council and could not take part in the discussion.
First of all, Nicholls maintained, if Jens were extradited to Virginia there was a very good chance that he would wind up on death row. “He has confessed to the murders,” Nicholls pointed out. “And the circumstances of the killings strongly indicate that the jury and judge will find them sufficiently vile to result in the applicant being sentenced to death.”
Once he arrived on death row, Nicholls continued, Jens could expect to remain there for eight years or more until his appeals were exhausted. “The applicant was eighteen
years and four months old at the time of the killings. At the time of the execution, if the proceedings run their course, he will be approximately thirty. The person executed at the age of thirty will be a different person from the eighteen-year-old alleged author of the crime.”
In addition to the age factor, Nicholls contended, there was the question of Jens’s mental state, the psychiatric syndrome he was suffering from while he was allegedly under Elizabeth’s domination. That factor, Nicholls reminded the Court, would not be viable at all in Virginia because the state’s courts do not recognize diminished capacity as a form of mental illness. “Atrocious or vile as the objective appearance of the crime was, the applicant cannot be held fully responsible for his behavior. The result is that the applicant risks the harshest punishment known to the law when he may not have been fully responsible for his acts. Punishment of death in these circumstances is disproportionate.”
The only way to make sure Jens’s rights were not violated, he said, was either to refuse to extradite him at all, or to extradite him to his native Germany. “His surrender to the United States is permissible under the Convention only if it is legally certain that he will not be exposed to the anguish and the psychiatric torment of the death row phenomenon.”
Arguing for the German government, Meyer-Ladewig said the possibility that an accused criminal would be set free if he were not extradited to the United States was hardly the issue in Jens’s case. Germany, after all, was readily available. “The United Kingdom can extradite the applicant to the Federal Republic of Germany without violating its obligations under international law towards the United States. And the applicant would receive a just penalty in Germany. The applicant would have no fear of the death penalty, but he would be punished according to his guilt.” Naturally, then, there would be no trauma as a result of the death row phenomenon.
Although a prisoner in Virginia can cut short his time on
death row by stopping his appeals, Meyer-Ladewig said, that is tantamount to suicide and not a viable alternative.
Rising to argue for the British and the Americans, Sir Patrick began by pointing out that while compassion was commendable, “these sentiments must not be allowed to divert the Court from its central task.” That task, he said, was to determine if Britain, by ordering Jens’s extradition to Virginia, would be violating the terms of the Convention.
In his undeniably pro extradition-to-Virginia stance, Sir Patrick asked why the Court was trying to interject itself into the policies of a non-member nation. “Put in a nutshell,” he said, “the British government’s position is this: That it is straining language intolerably to hold that by extraditing a person to a requesting state, that the requesting state has ‘subjected’ him to any treatment or punishment that he will receive following conviction within the jurisdiction of the requesting state.”
Look at the issue a little differently, he urged. “Suppose that the part of the girlfriend in the alleged deed had been greater. Suppose that she had joined with the killer in the actual deed. She, too, would then have faced the possibility of being sentenced to death. She, however, is not a German national. If she also had challenged her extradition from the United Kingdom—because, remember, she came together with Mr. Soering—could it reasonably have been argued that, while a violation would occur in the case of Mr. Soering because he is a German national and therefore the possibility existed of returning him to Germany, no violation would exist in the case of Miss Haysom simply because the possibility did not exist of her going to Germany or anywhere else?”
Also filed as one of the documents for the Court to consider was Dr. Somekh’s report. In summing up his findings thus far on Jens, the psychiatrist said he was worried not so much by Jens’s short-term response to the threat of being extradited as he was about the long-term effects. “The more serious question psychologically is the extent to which Soering has any hope for the future,” he wrote. “If things occur
which undermine Soering’s sense that there is hope of any kind for the future or any reason for him to carry on living, then I fear that the increased severity of the depressive feelings which he is likely to experience will either lead to an overt breakdown or to a successful suicide bid.”