Evil Season (30 page)

The murder of Joyce Wishart was almost five and a half years old by the time the trial of Elton Brutus Murphy commenced in the Twelfth Circuit Courthouse on Ringling Boulevard in Sarasota during the spring of 2009.

The location was convenient for Murphy. It was right across the street from the jail, which was next to the police station. And, for further convenience, they had a holding cell with his number on it right in the courthouse so they could efficiently keep him under lock and key when the court was in recess.

Murphy never got to see much of the outer building. It wasn't like they cuffed and shackled him and walked him across the street so he could have a look around.

He was cuffed and shackled, but he was taken from the jail into a garage, where he was put into a car. After a short drive he found himself in another first-floor parking lot. He was led through a side door, then another door, to his first-floor holding cell.

When it was time for Murphy to be in court, he was taken from his cell, marched down a hallway to an elevator, then up to the floor where his trial was being held. (There was even a courtroom holding cell where he could remain jailed during short breaks.)

Murphy thought the courtroom looked small—smaller than they appeared on TV. Trying to stare holes through him from the courtroom's spectator section were friends of Joyce Wishart, who were there every day, sitting directly behind the prosecution.

The defendant saw other familiar faces. Detective Glover was there, who had investigated the murder so hard and had questioned Murphy during one of his first postarrest interrogations. Also there was Mark Klothacus, best man at Murphy's first wedding. Klothacus sat directly behind Murphy, and Murphy even had an opportunity to talk to him for about a minute.

During jury selection Lon Arend asked the same question to every prospective juror: “When you think of ‘insanity,' do you think of ‘crazy'?” If he or she said yes, Arend would say, “Would it surprise you to know that ‘insanity' means ‘crazy'
and
‘not able to distinguish right from wrong'?” If they didn't get it, he rejected them. No one was going to sit on that jury without understanding what “insanity” was. Even crazy people were accountable for their actions under the law.

Judge Economou, who had presided over the preliminary hearings, recused himself from the case. He stated that after reading the doctors' reports on the defendant, he felt he'd already made up his mind about whether or not Murphy was insane.

 

 

On the bench for the trial was the Honorable Charles E. Roberts, who had served on the circuit court bench since January 2003. He earned his B.A. at Duke University, and his J.D. at the American University Washington College of Law. Judge Roberts gave the jury a brief course in how trials worked.

The judge's job, he explained, was to determine how the law was to be applied, and to see that everyone understood those applications.

On the other hand, it was the jury's job to determine what the facts were and to apply the law to those facts. They were a team. The jury was to base their opinions solely on the evidence—which consisted of the witnesses' answers, not the lawyers' questions—as well as any physical items that might be introduced by either side. It was entirely up to the individual juror as to how much weight he or she should give each piece of evidence. The words of a sincere-sounding witness would outweigh those of one who seemed insincere, and that was perfectly understandable. It was
forbidden
for jurors to come to any conclusion regarding the defendant's guilt or innocence until they had heard all of the evidence. Jurors were not to discuss the case with anyone, even fellow jurors, until the trial was over and it was time for them to deliberate.

The defendant, Judge Roberts noted, had a right not to testify on his own behalf; and should that happen, the jury was not to hold the decision against him.

Sometimes the jury would be asked to leave the courtroom and there would be some chitchat with them out of the room. Despite this, the jury would miss
no allowable evidence.
First they would hear opening statements, then the prosecution's case, the defense's case, and closing arguments.

 

 

Sitting in the journalist section of the courtroom during the trial was Jackie Barron, of WFLA-TV, who had been covering the Sarasota-Manatee area for quite a number of years.

She was a third-generation Tampa native, with roots that could be traced back to when her great-grandmother rolled cigars in Ybor City. She was a local—through and through—a factor she felt gave her an edge when reporting for her hometown station.

Barron earned her degree at the University of Florida, and it was there that she began her career reporting news and weather for the college station. Her first job out of school was out of town, anchoring and reporting for WHAG-TV in Hagerstown, Maryland.

She returned to Florida, reporting and anchoring at Sarasota's WWSB-TV, before joining WFLA, and thrice won awards: Outstanding Excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists in Spot News, the 2004 Green Eyeshade Award, and the Jack R. Howard Award for Best Investigative Reporting from the Scripps Howard Foundation.

Barron noted that there were far more spectators present for the victim than there were for the defendant, but Murphy did have his supporters, most notably Mark Klothacus.

 

 

In his opening statement Lon Arend said that Joyce Wishart was chosen as Murphy's victim because of her convenience and vulnerability.

“She was alone in the art gallery, offering privacy,” Arend said. “It was not a spur-of-the-moment attack. Murphy came prepared, carrying with him a knife and a ‘stretchy sock,' which he used to bind her.”

Arend warned the jurors that they would hear a lot about Murphy's mental illness, and urged them to think only in terms of what was and wasn't criminally insane.

“In order to be criminally insane, the defendant would have to be unable to distinguish and appreciate the difference between right and wrong, and this defendant's actions prove conclusively that he could make that distinction,” Arend said.

In Florida, insanity followed the so-called M'Naghten rule, which stated that two conditions must be met for a person to be ruled legally insane so that he or she cannot be guilty of a crime: First, if he suffered at the time of his crime from a mental disease or defect; second, if he did not understand the nature of his act, or, if he did understand, he did not know that it was wrong.

“Murphy planned the crime and planned to get away with it,” Arend said. “When he left the gallery after the murder, he managed to lock the door behind him in such a fashion that he left no fingerprints.”

If Murphy hadn't been able to distinguish and appreciate the difference between right and wrong, he would not have told his victim not to scream, or, when she did scream, put his hand over her mouth.

It was probably at that point that the victim bit the defendant, so he bled at the scene, too—blood that eventually led detectives to their man.

Here was a man who stole his victim's wallet and keys. To cover up his crime effectively, he did not do the simple thing, which would have been to throw away the keys and wallet in the nearest receptacle. “Instead, the defendant threw each key away individually, and cut up the contents of the wallet before throwing these pieces away in a variety of locations,” Arend noted.

Arend described the scene—a ghastly scene created by a wannabe artist—how Wishart had been left posed on the gallery floor to resemble a nearby piece of art, how a magazine article called “A Fine Madness” became part of the “scene” the defendant created.

There was really only one thing the jury could do. Find Murphy guilty of murder. Arend thanked the jury for their time and had a seat.

 

 

The defense's opening statement by Carolyn Schlemmer emphasized the more bizarre aspects of his personality. There might have been times when Murphy wasn't insane, but he most certainly was when he killed Joyce Wishart and brutally mutilated her corpse.

On the day of the murder, the defense argued, the defendant was “the Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy,” which was a manifestation of his mental illness. The defendant believed that this entity had a DNA link with God, had thousands of followers, and had killed Julius Caesar. When he killed Joyce Wishart, he did so because he believed God had told him to do so.

The defense promised the jury that they would hear from a quartet of psychologists, who would detail Murphy's extensive history of mental illness.

Here was a man who once lost a job because he insisted that God was telling him what to do. He claimed to be able to speak in tongues, although those who heard him only heard babble. He'd been known to stare at scrambled television screens as a method of communicating with gods. He believed he was an alien and had been known to hide in trash bins. He once put a line of tomatoes across a parking lot.

“What you will
not
hear during this trial,” Schlemmer said firmly, “is an expert take the stand and say Elton Murphy was sane on January 16, 2004.”

Bottom line was, he was nuttier than a fruitcake—a sick, sick man, who needed to be in a mental institution receiving treatment, not in a prison being punished.

 

 

On the second day of the trial, the jury watched the nearly eight hours of interview by Detectives Grant, Opitz, and Glover.

Murphy, in retrospect, thought that those tapes were what hurt him the most during the trial. He was heard sparring playfully with the investigators, treating the murder of a living soul as if it were some kind of joke.

 

 

On the third day, as the jurors heard for the first time the graphic details of Joyce Wishart's murder, Jackie Barron watched the defendant carefully. At first glance Murphy appeared to be sitting motionless. Upon closer scrutiny she noticed that there was a slight tremor in his hands and a rhythmic rocking motion in his legs.

As would be the case throughout the trial, Wishart's friends and family sat in the front row, immediately behind the prosecution table. When the testimony got rough—and it was plenty rough on the third day—family members would clasp hands for support. Those hands were clasped particularly tightly as crime scene technicians described Wishart's remains as they were found on the art gallery floor: nearly decapitated, disfigured, partially nude, posed. No mention of missing flesh.

 

 

Also sitting in the audience that day was the writer of “A Fine Madness,” Marcia Corbino, Sarasota's premier art historian. Corbino was also coauthor of
The History of Visual Art in Sarasota
(with Kevin Dean and Pat Ringling Buck, University Press of Florida, 2003). The book was her idea and its intent was to tell everyone about Sarasota's rich artistic past, something a lot of locals didn't know about because they were new.

Originally, Marcia Corbino had planned on writing about Joyce Wishart's murder journalistically. After she ran into official roadblocks between herself and the details of the crime, she decided, instead, to write about the murder in a fictionalized way.

Corbino was frustrated by the experience of attending the trial. When it came time for the jury to see photos of the crime scene, and the images had been blown up and mounted on large pieces of cardboard, the exhibits were always held so that the press and spectators could not see.

“It was annoying,” Corbino later said. She tried to chase down the person whose permission she would need to view the photos, but she received the runaround.

“I got the impression that they'd never received a request like that before,” she recalled.

In hindsight, though, it was probably the offensive and unpublishable nature of the photos, rather than the request, that had officials nervous.

One thing was clear to Corbino. From what she knew about the crime scene, as an art critic she could tell the murder had been committed by a frustrated artist.

 

 

Marcia Corbino got some of the crime scene details she'd yearned for with the testimony of Valerie Howard. The criminalist stated that there could be no doubt that the attack had a strong sexual component.

“Some of the wounds were on her chest,” Howard said. She quickly added, almost as an afterthought: “And part of her groin area was missing.”

ME Russell Vega testified that the cause of death was twenty-three stab wounds. He had counted them all, adding, “I've never seen a case like this before.”

 

 

On Friday, May 8, 2009, the defense put on its case. With the jury outside the courtroom, Judge Roberts noted that in order to put forth an insanity defense, the defendant had to admit that he had committed the crime. There could be no such thing as “if I did, I was insane.” Judge Roberts wasn't sure that Murphy had ever officially confessed, so he straight-out asked Murphy, “Did you kill Joyce Wishart?”

Murphy's words were loud and clear. “Yes, Your Honor, I did.”

“Bring the jury back in,” Judge Roberts said, and the defense was allowed to proceed. The first defense witness was a coworker at the Regis salon in the Brandon Town Center.

“I had problems with staff being afraid,” said Sylvie Tarlton, the salon's former manager. “They didn't want to work with him.”

Frank Burns testified that Murphy placed a ladder up against his and his wife Stephanie's house in Tallahassee. By way of explanation Murphy said that aliens had led him to do it. Murphy recognized the guy as the one with the baseball bat who'd refused to let him down off a ladder until a sheriff's deputy arrived.