AFTER HER TRANSFER TO GOOCHLAND, ELIZABETH KEPT a low profile, refusing interviews and visits by photographers. Only once, apparently, did she let that position slip. Early in 1989 she wrote a three-paragraph testimonial for the
Liberty Prison News
, the newsletter published by the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s prison ministry, attesting to her conversion to fundamental Christianity. Months later, a Roanoke newspaper, the
Times & World-News,
got a copy of the document and printed it.
In tones remarkably reminiscent of the contest-winning short story she wrote from her cell at Holloway, “The Sleeper Awakes,” Elizabeth wrote feelingly of her latest monomania. Although she was “fed and watered like a beast, trapped in a tiny room for years on end,” she had found the path to her personal freedom. “This is in the freedom and the love of Christ,” she wrote. “Christ released me from my prison. This time Christ is my defense counsel and the judge is God.”
There was no way to gauge the depth of her sincerity. When she testified before Judge Sweeney during the hearing at Bedford she appeared sincere, but truthfulness was another question—one which may never be satisfactorily answered. However, given her history of lying, deceiving and manipulating, it was not difficult to be cynical about her latest proclamation. A woman capable of convincingly inventing a contact with the IRA in an attempt to stay in jail is equally capable of inventing a contact with God in an attempt to get
out.
The
Times & World-News
also was dubious. In a biting comment, the newspaper noted that it was a useful rule for editorial writers “never to belittle someone else’s religion.” But in Elizabeth Haysom’s case it was willing to make an
exception. “She now says that after a lifetime of skepticism, she has found Jesus,” the newspaper remarked, observing that “signs of an inmate’s religious commitment have been known to help convince authorities of the wisdom of parole.” Urging prison officials to exercise caution in her case, it added: “Haysom may be reborn [but] her victims still are dead.”
ON JULY 7, 1989, THE HUMAN RIGHTS COURT ANNOUNCED its decision. By a nineteen-to-nothing vote, it found in Jens’s favor. The judgment, in part, said: “In the Court’s view, having regard to the very long period of time spent on death row in such extreme conditions, with the ever-present and mounting anguish of awaiting execution of the death penalty, and to the personal circumstances of the applicant, especially his age and mental state at the time of the offense, the applicant’s extradition to the United States would expose him to a real risk of treatment going beyond the threshold set by the Convention.”
Also of importance, the Court added, was the fact that Germany was conveniently available as an alternative trial site. “In the particular instance the legitimate purpose of extradition could be achieved by another means which would not involve suffering of such exceptional intensity or duration.”
The result of its decision, the Court added, was that Britain could not extradite Jens to Virginia until the Bedford County prosecutor promised not to seek the death penalty.
THE DECISION PUT BOTH BRITAIN AND JIM UPDIKE IN uncomfortable positions. Britain could send Jens to Germany, or it could ignore the decision and send him to Virginia. For his part, Updike could drop the death penalty idea and agree to try Jens for first degree murder with a maximum sentence of life.
Needless to say, Updike was not pleased with his options. Already frustrated because he had been unable to take an active role in any of the extradition battles, he announced
that he would not give in; he would not voluntarily drop the capital murder charge against Jens. To surrender, he said, would be the same as submitting to “international blackmail.”
At a news conference in the Bedford County Courthouse, Updike told reporters: “We have this red herring that Jens can be tried in Germany as a German national. That’s ludicrous. They have no evidence to conduct a meaningful prosecution. All the evidence is here. I can’t see spending thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money for a restricted prosecution dictated by a foreign government. If it occurs that this case becomes
Germany vs. Soering,
then as far as I’m concerned, Germany can go to hell.”
The Lynchburg
News & Advance,
not surprisingly, supported his position a few days later. A July 13 editorial fumed: “The ruling is contemptible, utterly divorced from reality and arrogantly abusive.”
The London
Times
, in a more restrained and erudite way, took much the same stance. It said the decision stemmed from a “most perverse reading of the Convention” and predicted “it will do nothing but harm to the principle of extradition [the purpose of which] is to ensure that fugitives from justice cannot escape due process in the country where the crime was committed.” It continued: “The Court’s justification is expressed in terms which suggest that it wishes to disapprove of extradition to any country which retains the death penalty.” Worst of all, the newspaper said, the decision promised to create an unfortunate precedent. “This could in time produce a situation in which fugitive European nationals could be certain of evading extradition to the U.S. for capital crimes, providing they took care to move to Europe ahead of the police.”
IN VIRGINIA, UPDIKE SAT TIGHT, WAITING TO SEE WHAT Britain would do. The answer came on August 1, 1989: Home Secretary Douglas Hurd said Britain would extradite Soering to Virginia only on the condition that he not be
tried for “any offense, the penalty for which may include the imposition of the death penalty.”
Updike glumly accepted the decision, pointing out that it was a compromise made at the federal level under the terms of the treaty between the two nations. The decision, he said, was equivalent to federal law and he was bound to obey it. For the record, though, he told reporters there had been no bargaining on his part. “I would like to think if I’d negotiated I’d have done a better job.”
AGAIN, THE BRITISH CRANKED UP THE MACHINERY TO extradite Jens. And again it ground to a halt almost before it got going. As soon as Hurd announced his decision, Jens’s lawyers filed another motion with the British High Court claiming that the Home Secretary had waited too long to make up his mind. Under the terms of the Anglo-American extradition treaty, the brief said, Britain had sixty days to either extradite Jens to Virginia or set him free. In actuality, the decision was not made for two years after the first extradition order was issued. But that was because Jens was appealing.
ON ONE HAND, UPDIKE WAS FRUSTRATED AND ANGERED by the delays. “This could go on and on,” he said, in discussing the case. “But on the bright side, I know he is going to be back. One day he’s going to be tried right here,” he said, pointing over his shoulder in the direction of the courtroom.
At times his mood lightened. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this, it’s patience. I’ve developed the patience of an oyster.” He added, “I think I’m going to need it.”
IN THE END, UPDIKE’S PATIENCE PAID OFF. FACED WITH the option of dropping his demand for the death penalty for Jens or risk losing the chance to try him altogether, Updike surrendered to expediency: he agreed to abandon his plan to seek Jens’s execution.
With that hurdle cleared, the British agreed to Jens’s extradition, but Jens was not yet giving up. First he appealed to a British court, which rejected his claim. He could have carried his fight still further by taking his case yet again to the House of Lords, which serves as the British supreme court. However, he apparently saw the futility of the exercise. Just before Christmas, 1989, he quietly gave in, agreeing through his lawyer not to contest his return any longer.
In January, he was flown across the Atlantic, back to Bedford. He had been gone almost four and a half years, but physically he had changed little, except he was a lot chubbier. He got off the plane wearing a green sweater, blue jeans and athletic shoes; his dark-framed glasses were perched precariously on his nose. To the casual bystander, the twenty-three-year-old Jens may have been a student returning tardily from the Christmas holidays. “He looks like he’s sixteen,” said one passenger who had been seated near Jens.
Updike gave him little chance to settle in. On January 17 only four days after his return, Jens was called into Judge Sweeney’s courtroom while his lawyer and the commonwealth attorney argued over technical details for the trial and whether cameras would be allowed in the courtroom, as they had been for Elizabeth’s hearing. Despite objections from Jens’s lawyer, Richard Neaton, Sweeney agreed to let a TV camera and still photographers into the sessions.
It also was agreed that Updike would not prosecute the capital murder charge against Jens, which was part of the agreement he had made with the British. When Jens came to trial, Updike promised, it would be only on first degree murder charges and the maximum penalty he could receive would be life in prison on each of the two counts.
The trial date was set for late spring.
TO ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH ELIZABETH’S PROPENSITY for continually muddying the waters, what happened between the time Jens was returned and his trial came as no surprise.
In May 1990, with the trial scheduled to begin on June 1, Elizabeth jumped back into the headlines. And, as common with events surrounding Elizabeth, exactly what happened is not clear.
What transpired is this: On May 11, Updike and Neaton —in a rare show of unity—appeared before Judge Sweeney complaining about a Charlottesville lawyer who claimed to represent Elizabeth. According to both the prosecutor and the defense lawyer, an attorney named Steven D. Rosenfield was trying to barter Elizabeth’s testimony.
Two months before, Rosenfield had written Updike saying that Elizabeth would not testify for the prosecution, as she had promised during her sentencing hearing, unless Updike gave her “some acceptable consideration and assistance … for her cooperation.”
What he was trying to do, Rosenfield said later, was pressure Updike into negotiating for a reduced sentence for Elizabeth, or get the prosecutor to recommend that she be transferred from the Virginia prison to one in Canada. She is still a Canadian citizen and apparently had reason to believe she would get support from the Canadian government if she requested to be brought back there. Always playing the angles, Elizabeth seemed to believe she would be paroled sooner in Canada than in Virginia.
When Updike ignored Rosenfield, the lawyer wrote Neaton claiming that Elizabeth’s role in Jens’s trial, if any, was still vague. Soon after that, he followed up the letter
with a telephone call in which he pledged that Elizabeth would cooperate with the defense instead of the prosecution if the defense would pay her. The amount of payment was not specified.
Rosenfield’s actions infuriated both Neaton and Updike, who went to Judge Sweeney to see if contempt charges could be filed against the Charlottesville lawyer. After a fivehour hearing on May 16, Sweeney ruled that Rosenfield was not guilty of contempt. Still, what he had done smacked to him of “extortion, blackmail, obstruction of justice and … meddling.” While Rosenfield may not have violated the letter of the law, Sweeney ruled, his ethics certainly were questionable. As a result, he said he was turning the matter over to the Virginia Bar Association’s disciplinary committee for investigation.
One of the witnesses called to testify about Rosenfield’s involvement was Elizabeth. When she strode confidently into the courtroom, looking cool in a sleeveless sundress, heads swiveled, first to her and then to Jens. The two had not seen each other in more than three years and their oncetorrid love affair had turned glacial. Although Jens stared fixedly at her, she acted as if he did not exist.
At her last appearance in court in 1987, Elizabeth had worn her hair long, letting it hang straight down her back. By May 1990, her hair was clipped as short as a soldier’s behind her ears while remaining long on top. In 1987, her cheeks had been full and she looked considerably younger than her years. But by the spring of 1990, her cheeks were hollow and she had a hard look in her eyes. Someone who didn’t know better would have guessed her age at 36 instead of 26. When she took the stand, though, it was soon evident that all the changes had been physical.
Laughing at the uproar she had caused by using Rosenfield as her frontman, Elizabeth denied she had ever told the lawyer she would refuse to testify for the prosecution. As usual with Elizabeth, the fault was someone else’s. But in the end, she said, whatever Rosenfield had done made no difference. Still smiling, she announced that she had fired
Rosenfield just before the hearing began. If she appeared calm and in control at the Rosenfield hearing, however, the facade collapsed a few weeks later when Updike called her to the stand to testify against Jens.
WITH THE ISSUE OF WHICH SIDE ELIZABETH WOULD TESTIFY for settled, Jens’s trial began on schedule on June 1 in the same drab courtroom where Elizabeth’s sentencing hearing had been held. Although the decor had been improved in the interim, the courtroom remained a decidedly cheerless place that projected little comfort and no emotional warmth, despite the fact that the air conditioning was subject to malfunction and the temperature inside often jumped into the nineties.
While Elizabeth had provided her little surprise just before the trial began, the real shock came when Jens’s chief lawyer, Richard Neaton, made his opening statement. Pacing before the six-man, six-woman jury, he claimed his client could not have killed Derek and Nancy Haysom in March, 1985, because he had not even been in Virginia at the time. While Derek and Nancy were being slashed to death in their Boonsboro home, Neaton said, Jens had been in Washington creating an alibi for Elizabeth.
It was a shrewd move on Neaton’s part. Although Elizabeth’s story had changed numerous times in varying particulars, the basic line she preached—that Jens had committed the murders out of love for her—remained unchanged. Seemingly, the accusation was substantiated by Jens himself in his various statements to investigators and psychiatrists. But when it came time to prove it, the prosecution’s case proved remarkably skimpy.
Although Updike laboriously presented items of evidence (the total eventually reached more than 300 separate pieces, including everything from a hair and a fiber to the linoleum meticulously peeled intact from the kitchen floor), he found it difficult to provide incontrovertible evidence that Jens was the killer.
Although there were several fingerprints found in the
house that were not Derek’s, Nancy’s or Elizabeth’s, they were not Jens’s either. And while several small drops of blood of Jens’s type were found at Loose Chippings, the prosecution had to admit grudgingly that almost half of everyone in the country has that same type. The strongest physical evidence the prosecution had—a clear, bloody sockprint—diminished in value after Judge Sweeney ruled that the prosecution’s expert could not testify that, in his opinion, the print had been made by Jens. While the art of identifying shoeprints and fingerprints and prints of bare feet has been raised to a science, the same is not true of a sockprint, especially when no sock has been found. The best the expert could do was point to specific points on Jens’s prints and show how those same points were duplicated on prints found inside Loose Chippings. He was, however, expressly forbidden from interpreting those findings. Further weakening the prosecution’s case was the fact that there had been no witnesses placing Jens at the scene. Neither had a murder weapon ever been found.
What it boiled down to was a test of credibility: Was the jury going to believe Elizabeth, or Jens?
WHEN ELIZABETH TOOK THE STAND LATE IN THE AFTERNOON on June 13, she was not the poised, almost cheerful witness she had been at the Rosenfield hearing. Again ignoring Jens, she walked shakily to the stand and sat half-swiveled away from the defense table. Dressed demurely in an ill-fitting, two-piece blue pantsuit, Elizabeth was pale and nervous. When the courtroom camera zeroed in on her hands clutched tightly in her lap, they were shaking. Her voice was steady but weak, a little girl’s voice coming from the body of an experienced woman.
While Updike had been aggressive and unrelenting during his cross-examination of Elizabeth in 1987, his role was now reversed. In 1990, Elizabeth was
his
witness, and he treated her gently and deferentially. In a quiet, unhurried tone, he took her back to the first days of her relationship with Jens and, step-by-step, brought her up to the day of the murder.
In 1987, Elizabeth had testified that she had been virtually blameless in the murders of her parents, saying she had expressed her unhappiness with the way Derek and Nancy had treated her but denying that she had wanted Jens to murder them. In 1990, that story changed. Verily, she said, she had wanted them dead and had worked hard to manipulate Jens to kill them. Together, she said, she and Jens had planned a confrontation with her parents; worked out how she would stay in Washington to provide an alibi while Jens drove to Boonsboro.
“I’ll go down there and see what they have to say,” she quoted Jens as saying. “Then if I don’t like it, I’ll kill them.”
Elizabeth said she hesitated not a second with her reply: “That’s fine.”
Over and over that afternoon before he left, she practiced forging his signature so it would look as though they both had been in the Washington Marriott when the murders took place. She bought two movie tickets and carefully saved the stubs. Then she went back to their motel and dialed room service. While waiting for the waiter to appear, she quickly stripped and started the shower. When the room service order arrived, she exited from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her. Asking the waiter to hold on, she went back into the bathroom as though to get Jens’s signature on the bill. Once inside, she closed the door, forged his name to the ticket, and returned it to the waiter. That ticket was later destroyed in a routine purge of the motel’s records; it could not be produced to substantiate either Elizabeth’s or Jens’s claims.
Late that night, Elizabeth said, she left the motel and went to the theater where
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
was playing. Although she was supposed to buy two tickets, she had only enough money for one. But she went anyway.
“Jens was supposed to be back by then and he was to come in [to the theater] and we were to make a disturbance so people would remember us being there.” At that point she paused and almost smiled. “That was very feeble,” she
confessed. “
Everybody
makes a disturbance at
The Rocky Horror
.”
All that afternoon and much of the next day, Updike patiently extracted details from Elizabeth designed to show how she and Jens had planned Derek’s and Nancy’s murders. While much of her story was the same, the difference this time was how much more readily she admitted her culpability. It was easier, because this time she had nothing to lose; her sentence could not be amended and if she had to assume more guilt to tighten the noose around Jens’s neck, that seemed to be a condition she could accept.
When Neaton got his chance to cross-examine, he was as rough and unsympathetic with Elizabeth as Updike had been when he was trying to shake her story in 1987. It was a painful process to witness. Elizabeth’s hands shook even more violently than they had when Updike was doing the questioning, and her face took on a sicklier hue; it was the color of a newspaper left to sit all day in the sun. As Neaton fired his questions in a calm angry voice, Elizabeth leaned forward, almost over the edge of the box, and followed his every word. Obviously, she was making a valiant effort to keep her testimony consistent. She was successful. In the end, Neaton proved no more able than Updike had been two and half years previously in getting her to change the basics of her tale. The best the defense attorney could do was get her to admit, not once but many times, that she had repeatedly lied. Whether that would make a difference to the jury was yet to be determined.
BEFORE UPDIKE RESTED HIS CASE, THERE WAS ONE MORE witness he wanted to call. Earlier in the trial, he had summoned Ricky Gardner, Ken Beever and Terry Wright to the stand so they could testify about incriminating statements Jens had made soon after he was arrested in London. In one interview, which was recorded, Jens admitted he was at Loose Chippings on the night Derek and Nancy were murdered. But he would not admit he killed them.
On the tape Ricky Gardner asked: “Did you stab Derek Haysom with a knife? Yes or no.”
Jens’s reply, clearly audible, was: “I really don’t want to answer that.”
Two days later, there was another crucial session with investigators. That time, at Jens’s request, the recorder was turned off. It was during that meeting, Gardner said, that Jens confessed to fighting with the Haysoms.
He had been arguing with the couple about Elizabeth, Gardner quoted him as saying, and when he abruptly stood up from the table, Derek shoved him. His head bounced against the wall, setting him off.
“I freaked out,” Jens told the three detectives. It was then that he sliced Derek along the left side of the throat. “He said he saw blood rushing into Mr. Haysom’s lap and also onto his right hand,” Gardner said. “He remembered Mrs. Haysom screaming, coming at him with a knife.”
According to Gardner, Jens then detailed how he had grabbed Nancy and tried to use her as a shield against a resurgent Derek. In the process, Nancy also was cut on the throat. At that point, Gardner quoted Jens as saying, things began to get vague.
“He said the last thing he saw was Nancy Haysom going into the kitchen. She had her hands up [to her throat].” Derek was looming in front of him ‘like a big bear.’”
It was then, Jens said, that he left. As he hurried out the door, Derek told him: “My God, you must be crazy, man.”
If that tale were to be believed, both Derek and Nancy were alive when Jens exited Loose Chippings, but in that version he at least admitted cutting both victims.
The fact that the interrogation session was not preserved on tape could damage his case, Updike felt, so he wanted some insurance. Over defense objections that Jens had not been warned in advance that his words could someday be used against him in an American court, Updike succeeded in introducing records from an interrogation session that was taped. It took place on December 30, 1986, almost six months after Jens admitted partial culpability to detectives
Gardner, Beever and Wright. Present at that session, held in the prison at Essex, England, was a prosecutor from Bonn, Germany, one of Jens’s German attorneys and a British policeman. Although no Americans had been there to read Jens his Miranda rights, he was given the British Caution, which essentially is the same thing. The fact that he also gave the interview in the presence of one of his own attorneys also undoubtedly played a part in Judge Sweeney’s decision to allow the jury to hear what Jens had said. The session had been conducted in German but it was translated into English by James Ogier, professor of German at a college in nearby Roanoke.