Authors: Tim Junkin
“Some reaction, yes, sir,” Capel answered.
“And did Mr. Bloodsworth have a reaction?”
“Yes, very definite.”
Stein was surprised at this. “And what was his reaction?” he queried.
“It was not an immediate reaction, but it was a long-term reaction.” Capel tried to explain. “He remembered everything we put on that table although we removed it.”
“Wait a minute, detective,” Stein pressed. “When Mr. Bloodsworth walked into that room, did he have a reaction?”
“No,” Capel answered, reversing himself. “When he walked in the room, I wasn't even sure he saw the items. He glanced aroundâ”
“Did Mr. Bloodsworth, yes or no, have a reaction when he walked into that room?”
“No. He showed no visible reaction.”
“And now you're telling us that a possible reason why he had no visible reaction is because you don't even know if he saw the items?”
“I do know now. I didn't know then.”
“Then what was the purpose of the test? If the whole purpose of the test was to have somebody look at the items, why did you then take the items off the table?”
Capel answered that he was only doing what the FBI behavioral science unit had recommended. Stein wouldn't let him off that easily.
“Detective,” he went on, “when you arrested Mr. Bloodsworth at three o'clock in the morning, you talked to him from approximately three o'clock in the morning to six o'clock in the morning, did you not?”
“Yes.”
“In all that time did you ever ask Bloodsworth if he saw the items in the room?”
“Never.”
“Because you didn't want to know the answer, isn't that correct? You didn't want to know the answer to
that
question, Detective.”
Stein moved to the lineup. “And before you put him in a lineup you called all of your witnesses, didn't you, and told them not to watch television because Mr. Bloodsworth was going to be on television?”
“It is a procedure we use, yes.”
“But it was done in this case, wasn't it, sir?”
“Yes, it was done in this case . . .”
Stein closed the loop. “Let me ask you, Detective: you were there at the lineup, were you not?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Show me a written report of any witness you ever asked did they see anybody on television.”
“I didn't ask it . . .”
Stein elicited from Detective Capel that the head hair found on the scene did not belong to Bloodsworth and that no other physical evidence found on the scene linked Bloodsworth to the crime. By the time he finished his cross-examination, he had pretty well bloodied up Detective Capel.
But Brobst and Pulver weren't finished. They called the witnesses
again from CambridgeâRose Carson, Thelma Stultz, and Tina Christopher. Christopher was the one witness, the only witness, who'd claimed that Kirk had said something suggesting that he was with the man who went into the woods with the little girl. Again, just like at the first trial, she had a hard time remembering, and Michael Pulver had to try to refresh her recollection by having her read over the statement the police had typed for her shortly after Kirk's arrest. When Stein rose to cross-examine her, he took a patient but firm approach.
“At the age of eighteen, in August 1984, you had a bad alcohol and drug problem, didn't you?”
“No, not a drug problem.”
“You had an alcohol problem, didn't you?”
“Yeah.”
“And this person known as Kirk, had you ever met this person before?”
“No, I have not.” Christopher had trouble with her grammar.
“Did you know of any reason in the world why this person would talk to you about these things?”
“No, I do not.”
“How long were you in the house with this person?”
“I don't know.”
“Well, you were paying so little attention to this person you wouldn't even be able to recognize him today, would you?”
“No.”
Stein tried to impress on the jury through his questions the intimidating situation Christopher had found herself in when surrounded by questioning police.
“Before you went to the police station, the police came to your house, didn't they?”
“Yes, they did.”
“And there were about ten of them, weren't there?”
“I guess. Seven, eight.”
“Ma'am, you have to understand something. This is very important. You just can't guess.”
“Well, I can't remember too much.”
“You can't remember how many; you can't remember much at all, can you?”
“No, I don't.”
“And you really can't remember all the bits and pieces of the conversations that you had, can you?”
“No, I cannot . . .”
Stein kept at her. “And now, you don't remember anything about any bloody rock, do you?”
“Not today, I don't.”
“And did you remember it then, or don't you even know what you remember?”
“Well, I must have remembered something because I gave them the statement then.”
Stein then directed his questions to that statementâthe one typed by the police that they had had her sign, insinuating that the police had put their words down, not hers.
“And you don't really remember even reading it, do you?” he asked.
“Not today, I don't remember,” she answered.
“And let me ask you this. Did you ever say to the police, wait a minute, I can write, why won't you let me write out my own statement?”
“No.”
Stein then asked Tina Christopher if she recalled that an investigator from the public defender service had interviewed her two months before, in January 1987. She did. She acknowledged that she'd told the investigator that her head was finally clear from drugs and alcohol and that she had no recollection of Kirk's ever saying
anything about a bloody rock or about another man he knew who was with the little girl. Christopher had even given a taped statement to the investigator, and Stein played it for the jury. With a clear head she had claimed she had no recollection of Kirk Bloodsworth's making any incriminating statements.
T
O BEGIN THE
defense, Stein started off with two witnesses from Cambridge. He first called Tom Collins, a man in the seafood business who had employed Kirk. Collins was called solely to establish that Kirk had worked for him in June of 1984, then just failed to show up one day. Stein called Billy Elliott, the crab-potter. Elliott too testified that Kirk had a way of quitting by just not returning to work. Stein was hoping to show the jury that Kirk's abrupt departure from Harbor to Harbor was not unusual for him, was typical of his past behavior, and was not necessarily because he'd committed a murder.
Stein called Fay McCoullough, the adult who had worked with Detective Capel to create the second composite sketch, the one he had thrown away. She told the jury how Capel had tried to use the foil transparencies with her to create a likeness of the strange man she'd seen. She described how he'd gotten frustrated and given up, and how he then told her he'd decided to go with the description given by the two boys. She testified that she'd attended the lineup in which Kirk Bloodsworth stood but that the man she'd seen at Fontana Village the day of the murder wasn't in it.
Douglas Orr testified that he had talked to Kirk in August of 1984, after Kirk had left Baltimore. Kirk told him he'd done a terrible thing. He'd left his wife and quit his job. That was the terrible thing he'd done. On cross-examination, Ann Brobst asked Orr whether Kirk had told her he'd forgotten to buy his wife a taco salad, whether, in fact,
that
was the terrible thing he'd done. Later Brobst introduced portions of the transcript of Kirk's testimony
from the first trial, where he said his failure to buy his wife a taco salad was the bad thing he'd done. Kirk had followed Stein's advice not to testify in order to keep the taco salad testimony from coming in. Here it showed up anyway.
Stein called Dr. Richard Lindenberg, a specialist in neuropathology. Lindenberg explained the mechanism by which medical examiners can tell from brain injury whether the injury was caused by the head being struck by an object, on the one hand, or the head being slammed into an object, on the other. A
contrecoup
injury, he explained, is brain damage occurring inside of the brain opposite to where the wound is made and suggests that the brain was slammed into an object. If a rock were used to smash Dawn Hamilton's brain, he said, the injury inside the skull would be to that part of the brain closest to the impact. That wasn't the case here. Her brain was damaged in an area away from and opposite to where her skull was impacted. She was not struck with the weapon, he concluded. Rather, her head was slammed down onto a hard surface. She was not murdered, he concluded, by the rock.
But Lindenberg slipped up on cross-examination. He made a mistake, trying to be too glib, perhaps, too much the knowledgeable expert.
“Doctor, now we are talking about a significant force, isn't that true?” Michael Pulver asked him. “We are not talking about a little girl falling on a rock in the woods?”
“Well, it could be,” Lindenberg answered. “Depends on how fast she falls, whether she slipped on muddy ground or just fell over on her buttocks and then hit the brain, hit the skull . . . You can get the same injury just by falling backward, particularly if you glide on a banana peel or something, or ice.”
A banana peel?
Even a young trial lawyer couldn't miss an opening like that.
“Assuming she didn't fall on a
banana peel
in the woods, Doctor, you also saw these photographs?”
“Yes.”
“Saw the injuries to the face, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Now, is it your opinion this was caused by her
falling
in the woods?”
“This could be . . .” he answered, trying to explain himself.
Pulver picked up a picture showing Dawn Hamilton's face bashed in, her head partially crushed and bloody, her eye damaged. He showed it to the doctor, then held it up for the jury.
“Now, if I understand your testimony, Doctor, these injuries to Dawn Hamilton were caused by her falling in the woods?”
Despite his expert's stumble, Stein might have ended his case there. He'd skewered the state's witnesses and raised the issue of whether the rock was even a factor. Rather, he called Richard Gray to testify, trying to implicate him as the murderer. Stein went through Gray's story, trying to raise the questions that had bothered Detective Mark Bacon. He even followed up by calling investigator Sam Wallace who'd gone to Gray's house and seen a red carpet rolled up outside. But Gray and the state were both ready. Gray had answers to every question. And in rebuttal the state called police officers to further confirm his answers to those questions.
The defense case ended. Kirk Bloodsworth had produced no alibi witnesses, no character witnesses, and had declined to take the stand to deny that he was the murderer. Leslie Stein had put his eggs in just a few baskets. The jury would have to doubt the quality of the state's evidence, would have to understand and agree with Stein's suggestion that the rock was not the murder weapon, and that this fact exonerated the defendant; or the jury would have to conclude that Richard Gray was more likely the murderer. But where was Mr. Bloodsworth? Some of the jurors had been waiting
for him to testify. Why didn't he tell us he didn't do this? several questioned afterward. And where was he that day? Wasn't he with
anyone
who could vouch for his whereabouts?
The jury heard closing arguments on April 6. Ann Brobst was calm, even-keeled, low-key. She told them that five eyewitnesses placed Kirk Bloodsworth at Fontana Village. Two of those who saw and identified Bloodsworth at the lineup were children who were terrified of him. Jackie Poling was too frightened of him to point him out at the lineup, she said. She asked the jurors to consider why. Why would little Jackie Poling be so terrified of this man if he weren't certain he was the killer?
Leslie Stein argued it wasn't the rock that killed Dawn Hamilton, and it wasn't Kirk Bloodsworth either. During his closing, he was solicitous of Detective Capel and praised his dedication to his job. Capel had just made a wrong assumption, Stein said. About the murder weapon, about the rock. And that mistake had led to the wrong man being put on trial. Stein tried to point the jury to Richard Gray. He went through an exhaustive critique of the evidence.
After the arguments concluded, Judge Smith instructed the jury on the law, on what they now were required to consider. Back in his chambers the judge was troubled. He had significant reservations about the reliability of the child witnesses' identifications. He told his staff that evening that if the verdict were up to him, he might very well find that there was a reasonable doubt.
Leslie Stein believed he'd tried a superb case. Still, he worried about the jury's take on the first conviction. Every day the Baltimore area papers had carried news reports on the developing trial. These stories referred to the “retrial,” and the fact that the defendant had been “convicted” before, been previously “sentenced to death.” The jurors had to know this. Obviously they knew that the police and prosecutors still believed Kirk was guilty. How hard
would it be, Stein wondered, to overcome all this in addition to the photos of Dawn, the horrendous nature of this crime?
That night Kirk lay awake until first light. He thought he had a good chance, pinned to Stein's strategic calls. Stein should know, shouldn't he? He was the savvy professional. But Kirk couldn't fathom why it should be so close. Wouldn't the system clear him of this ugly crime? Perhaps deep in his gut he knew that he was in trouble. But no. He could win. He told himself this. He tossed on his bunk. This jury would see the truth.