Murdered Innocents (29 page)

Sawyer wanted to know what caused the dissolution of the friendships of the four boys after they were interviewed by police officers back in December 1991.

“Forrest was upset with Maurice because—I still to this day don’t know what it was he said in 1991. I have no idea.

“I was not upset, because I was not implicated in anything. But Forrest had a real problem with Maurice’s saying that they, or him, or whoever was involved. But I didn’t have a falling-out with Maurice.”

Springsteen explained he guessed at the .380 caliber of the second gun. He claimed Detective Robert Merrill asked him which large-caliber weapon was used in the murders. He claimed he once saw a .380 owned by an assistant manager at a convenience store where he worked. When Merrill asked him about a large-caliber weapon, the .380 was the only gun that came to mind.

Sawyer squared up in front of Springsteen. “Tell the jury. Did you participate in the killing of these four girls?”

Springsteen looked at the jury; then he looked down momentarily. “No, I did not.”

Prosecutor Robert Smith asked, “So, all of these facts that you knew, Mr. Springsteen, are lucky guesses on your part?”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call them ‘lucky guesses.’”

“No,” stated Smith. The door was now wide open. “They are, in fact, accurate information, aren’t they, Mr. Springsteen?”

“Well, I don’t understand what you mean by ‘accurate information.’”

“How is it you knew that Michael Scott could not get an erection at the yogurt shop? How did you know that?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You said it, didn’t you?”

“That is in the statement, yes.”

“Yeah, you said it. And you know what? Michael Scott said it too, exactly twenty-four hours before you said it. What do you say to that?”

“There isn’t anything I can say to that, sir.”

“It’s a fact that only you would know is true, because you were there. Right?”

“No, sir. I believe you are incorrect.”

“That’s just a couple of lucky guesses that crossed the universe; is [that] what you are telling the jury?”

“Well, sir, I believe I was led into that answer by the police officers.”

An incredulous Smith asked, “When they said, ‘What about Mike?’ that led you to say, ‘Mike couldn’t get it up’?”

“To my recollection, yes, sir.”

“You knew that Mike Scott threw up at the bridge, didn’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“You just said it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And as a coincidence, Michael Scott said it twenty-four hours earlier in a completely different state. That’s just another one of those inferential facts that crossed in the universe, you are telling the jury?” Smith asked, unable to conceal his sarcasm.

“Yes, sir. It must be.”

Smith became even more disgusted with the defendant. He walked up to the witness stand and faced Springsteen. “So tell us what you did on December 6, 1991.”

“Where would you like for me to start, Mr. Smith?”

“Just wherever you feel comfortable. Since you have all these different stories, pick one and tell the jury your version today.”

Springsteen gave the same story he told Merrill in the beginning of his interrogation in West Virginia.

Upon completion, Smith asked, “Tell us, then, Mr. Springsteen, how is it that you know, ten years later, the exact position of Amy Ayers’s body on the floor of the yogurt shop after she has been shot in the head with a .380. How do you know that?”

“I didn’t—until testimony here in court—know what the position of her body was.”

“Do you know that you demonstrated the exact position for the police?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe that’s correct.”

“Have you intentionally refused to look up at the photograph of yourself?”

“No, sir. I saw the photos up on the screen, just like everyone else did.”

“And you don’t think that looks anything like poor, dead Amy Ayers?”

“Well, sir, I don’t understand what you are asking me.”

Smith glared at Springsteen. “Oh, I think you do, Mr. Springsteen. You just can’t think of a good answer.”

“It doesn’t look like the same position to me.”

“It doesn’t? Well, I guess we’ll let the jury make that determination. No further questions.”

Judge Lynch dismissed Springsteen from the witness stand. The young man took his usual seat behind the defense table. Judge Lynch stated, “It’s my understanding that the defense is preparing to rest.”

“That is correct, Your Honor,” agreed Sawyer.

 

Court was back in session after a three-day Memorial Day weekend. It was a much-needed break for everyone involved. Both sides were prepared to make their closing statements.

First up, the state.

Darla Davis took the lead. The prosecutor started off by saying that Robert Springsteen is “not a very good liar.” She spoke of how the defendant changed his story so often he could not keep his lies straight.

Davis talked about Robert Springsteen’s cockiness. In regard to his interview, Davis described Springsteen as “very arrogant with the detectives. He has gotten away with murder for ten years. He is obviously smarter than the police. He has lied to them over the years, and they have never caught on to him. He’s bulletproof and also very curious. ‘Why are they here? Why did they come now? What have they found out? Who is talking? Did we leave something behind that nobody noticed until now? Have they found the .380?’”

Davis believed that Springsteen agreed to be interviewed because “he wants to know what the police know.” And also the defendant is “confident in his ability to beat them at their own game because he thinks he’s done it before.”

Davis also talked about the limited amount of physical evidence in the case. “Our ability to get meaningful scientific evidence from this crime scene went up in smoke when Mike Scott flicked on his lighter.” She felt the state should not be penalized for the lack of evidence. “If we are going to bemoan the lack of physical evidence in this case, we need to give credit where credit is due,” she said as she turned toward Springsteen. “The defendants in this case set out to destroy the crime scene and they succeeded.”

Davis questioned the fire analysis provided by defense witness Gerald Hurst. “Why would anybody bother to take bodies that are dead and move them and stack them on each other and stack them on trash and then go off and start the fire somewhere else? That’s why these girls were stacked like that. That was the whole purpose.”

Davis looked directly at the jury when she mentioned Springsteen’s lack of remorse. “On the videotape, he absolutely can recount the tale of these murders without a hint of it, without a hint of any sorrow, without a hint of remorse. He can sit there and light a cigarette and smoke it and have the most matter-of-fact conversation about the whole thing.” Davis continued to look at the jurors. “He displayed that same eerie calmness on the stand on Friday discussing the Fifth and the Sixth Amendment, like it’s no big deal, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Sitting there, sparring with the prosecutor, like he’s playing some sick kind of game.

“His attitude on Friday and his attitude on the videotape was enough to turn your insides to ice. I just wanted to walk up to him and say, ‘Look what you did. Was that part of your soul always missing, or did you have to carve it out so you could look at yourself in the mirror every day?’

“How could he sit there and lie so terribly,” Davis pondered as she glanced at the defendant. She returned her attention to the jury. “Lie to you, to this jury, lie to the families of those girls, lie to himself, and lie to God?

“How could he?” she asked quietly.

“I told you Bob Merrill was right about at least two things. Robert Springsteen is not a good liar, and God knows. Thank you.” Davis bowed her head down and returned to the prosecution table.

“Thank you, Ms. Davis,” said Judge Lynch. “Mr. Bettis, you may proceed.”

The skittish attorney tentatively approached the jury box. “Talk about nervous, me being here—to be honest with you, in twenty-five years of practicing law, this is the second time in my life I have ever actually gone to the trouble of writing out my remarks to a jury in a criminal case rather than just extemporizing them.”

Bettis composed himself. “In its simplest terms, the case of the state of Texas against Rob Springsteen boils down to this. It’s the confession, stupid!

“I want to help you understand why when you look at it closely, it’s a stupid confession. It’s a stupid confession because of the very fact that it was given.

“Rob, I’m sorry.” Bettis shot a furtive glance toward his client. “We called one rocket scientist to the stand and it was not you. You sit here today convicted by your own words of nothing more than what could be a capital crime of stupidity.”

Bettis spoke of the state’s lack of physical evidence against Springsteen. “But there is the confession, argues the state of Texas, so we don’t need no stinking proof. I tell you, it’s a stupid confession. Not only for the reason that it was given, but more importantly, because of the way it was taken.”

Bettis examined the Austin Police Department’s methods of interrogation. “The relentless pursuit of this purpose of extracting confessions by the Austin Police Department not only can, but it does, and in this case it has resulted in a confession which is false, that people who did not commit any crime have nonetheless made confessions when they were compelled and coerced to do so as Rob Springsteen was in this case.”

Bettis spoke about the setting of Springsteen’s interrogation. He described the sense of isolation, the feeling of being trapped his client must have felt. He alluded to the possibility that Detective Lara may have had a gun inside the fanny pack he wore into the interview room.

Bettis also slammed the lack of witnesses for the prosecution. “Two years after this investigation, the best the state can come up with is poor, addled Chandra Morgan to intone the accusation in a narcotized haze like some late-blooming opium poppy of an evidence ploy.”

Bettis continued down the path of evidence ploys.

“All these statements by the police are evidence ploys,” he informed the jury. “Police are allowed to lie in order to break down a suspect and reduce him to a state of hopelessness. And what does the descent into hopelessness sound like? Listen over a period of hours and you will hear it. I think it sounds something like this: ‘I thought we went to the movies, but I guess since you said they didn’t even have it that night, I guess we didn’t go to the movies,’” referring to the midnight screening of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
.

“Police interrogators are allowed to lie,” Bettis confidently informed the jurors again, “and reducing the suspect to that kind of state of hopelessness is the result they intend. But what they are not allowed to do . . . is overbear the will of a defendant so that as a result of compulsion or coercion, the defendant makes a statement which is involuntary caused by their motivators.”

Bettis argued that the detectives who interviewed Springsteen kept jerking him around from being the key to the crime to being a victim.

“Finally at this point is where Springsteen realizes what the game is and takes the carrot,” Bettis explained. “Merrill has offered him a scenario at this point where falsely admitting participation is less threatening than continued truthful denial.”

Bettis finished up his portion of the defense’s closing argument. “I told you it was a stupid confession,” he reminded the jury, “but it is more than that. It is worthless as a basis for the type of evidence that you should use to make a decision of the profoundest and the most awful significance. It is in Shakespeare’s apt phrase, ‘like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.’”

Bettis sat down. Judge Lynch called for a fifteen-minute recess.

After the break, Joe James Sawyer stood up from behind the defense table. He broke the ice by saying, “Somehow I think it’s not going to have a regretful response when I observe this is the last time I’m going to speak to you in this trial,” which elicited a few smiles from the jurors.

Sawyer began his discussion by referencing Memorial Day.

“Yesterday is one of my least favorite holidays. With the exception of my two youngest brothers, every male member of my family has been a soldier, starting in World War II, going through Korea.

“What you ponder on a day like yesterday is that concept of duty. It is the cruelest and meanest four-letter word in English.

“I wish there were a universal draft. I really do, like it or not, because I think the times we live in invite an ability to simply do what we want and believe what we want and have no concept of that word and what it means to us, duty.

“The police in this case,” continued Sawyer, “the investigators in this case, had duties. And we are about to hand this case over to you, and you will have the most terrible duty I can think of—I think worse, really, than being a soldier.

“What you will have a duty to do in the long hours ahead of you is discerning the truth.”

Sawyer proceeded to dissect the jobs of the parties involved at the crime scene. He castigated the DPS crime scene team for spending less time at the scene than it took for them to get there. He questioned Sergeant Jones’s desire for media attention. He harangued about the lack of control at the crime scene. He bemoaned the lack of a crime scene log and spoke of contamination.

“The most terrible threat running through this case is the use of the word ‘confession.’ A confession only invites you to believe and not to think, to substitute emotion for reason. That is the dark adjure of a confession. It says, ‘Just believe me.’ It appeals to the part of you that says, ‘I could never do such a thing. I could never confess to something I didn’t do. Therefore, no one else can either. Therefore, I believe this thing.’”

Sawyer concluded with an appeal that the jury not be overcome by the emotional aspects of the crimes, but rather focus on the evidence, or lack thereof, in the case.

“There is no one who has touched this case that hasn’t been affected by it. There is no one who has looked at the photographs of these little girls and not shed tears for them. I am the father of a daughter. I think every parent has that terrible fear that somehow their children will die before them. And I can’t even begin to contemplate what it was like to have a child murdered, particularly in this way, with this kind of savagery. I can’t.

“But that is not to stand in front of your duty to pursue the facts and align them and see if there is sufficient reliability here for you to undertake what the state wants.

“Be guided by your conscience,” Sawyer concluded, “and your sense of duty and fairly examine this evidence. I promise you it is there if you will look, if you will do your duty, if you will perform the hard work. And I believe that reason will lead you to the only answer here, and that’s not guilty. Thank you.”

Prosecutor Robert Smith made the final closing argument.

“I will agree with one thing Mr. Sawyer says, and that is the evidence speaks to you. You cannot speak to it. And I firmly believe that. And I intend to tell you that this defendant right here told you the truth when he confessed to this murder. And Michael Scott told you the truth when he confessed to his participation as well.”

Finally someone mentioned the girls.

“These two girls were closing. They locked the door. They start doing the dishes, thinking about fixing their car tomorrow, thinking about how much they love Sam, how much fun they are going to have with Amy tonight. They are sweeping up. They are cleaning the dishes. And men with guns come through the back door.

“Imagine what is going on in their heads. Here is the one place you should be safe. It’s the back room. There [are] no windows. There [are] two metal doors that always stay locked. Men with guns come in and they want money. And you give them what is in the cash register, but it’s not enough. They want more. And so you tell them, that’s all there is. It’s already been dropped. You can’t get to it. That’s not good enough. Then, what was just a robbery turns into something much, much worse. These children are forced to take off their clothes.

“I have always found it especially telling that Sarah Harbison took off that ring of her boyfriend. She knew what was coming. Then each one of them are bound and each one of them are gagged. Sexual assault. You decide.

“Then it got worse still. They executed them one at a time. My friend. My sister. Myself. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do.”

Smith singled out the struggle of Amy Ayers. “We will never know exactly what happened, but I can tell you she put up a fight.

“A man took that ligature and wrapped it around her neck—so that her eyes started popping and her blood vessels started popping—and a man put that .22 at the top of her head and shot her, just as sure as you are sitting there. But that didn’t kill Amy Ayers. A man pressed the muzzle of the .380 to the back of her head and killed her. That’s it. She’s dead.

“But those people weren’t through yet. They stacked the bodies. Sarah’s body has been positioned by some sick person who wants to put the ice scoop back in there.”

Smith switched gears to Springsteen’s confession. “You have a videotape of this defendant’s confession. You get the whole story from beginning to end from Robert Springsteen.

“I swear, only lawyers could make that seem like an involuntary confession, could even argue that it’s not a voluntary confession. We don’t have a warrant for him. He is not under arrest. The law says you don’t read them their rights. You tell them they can leave. If they want to leave, they leave. If they want a lawyer, they get a lawyer. Otherwise, they can interrogate them.

“And then the lawyers want you to penalize those cops and make it seem like there is some sinister plan.”

Smith looked at Springsteen and said, “But there is something about being guilty that sticks their butt to that chair.”

Smith concluded by asking the jury to remember the photograph where Robert Springsteen imitated the pose of Amy Ayers’s dead body. “That’s the one girl they didn’t move. And if he can see that, then he can hear the terror and he can see her crawling across the ground and he can remember pressing the muzzle of the gun to her head.”

Smith again approached the jury to summarize the case. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are sitting in the room with the man that killed Amy Ayers, and he’ll still be here when you return your verdict.”