“Weren’t you going somewhere else?”
“No, sir, I was not.”
“Why did you run off, Mr. Whitaker?”
“Initially Justin called me and said that the car had run out of gas, and I said, ‘All right, I’m going to bring you some gasoline.’ And I drove down there to get a little two-gallon can filled. I filled it up and was taking it to him. Right before I got to him, I received calls from a number I didn’t know. Then I got a call from my parents’ number. I didn’t answer either one, but thought there was no reason they would be calling me at two-thirty or three o’clock in the morning.”
Felcman again seemed almost as bemused as he was annoyed. “I just asked you, why you ran off?”
Bart seemed flustered, but managed to corral his composure. “Okay, I just freaked out. I knew something had happened. I didn’t know what, but I knew that there was no reason why my parents would be calling me at two-thirty in the morning. And then Justin told me he had gotten a call from someone—I think it was a police officer—and was asking if he was with me, did he know where I was, and I knew that something had happened. I didn’t know what, but I just thought…” Bart stopped speaking.
Felcman interjected, “You ran off because the plot had gotten discovered?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why didn’t you just tell the jury panel that?”
“I’m sorry,” Bart feebly responded.
“Now, you stay hidden until you were able to talk to your father and convince him there was nothing to it, right?”
“I think by the time I came back, the police had already thought that it was nothing, but I know I talked to him about three days after I left, two or three days after I left, and Justin had already told them that it was a drunken comment that had been made while watching a program about the Menendez brothers, and that’s what they believed.” Bart was referring to the Beverly Hills brats/brothers who killed their parents with a shotgun. “I talked to Justin also, and he said that. So I did come back, and I spoke with somebody with the Waco Police Department.”
“You convinced your father there was nothing to it?”
“Yes.”
“I want to know something.” Felcman addressed Bart as though they were two lifelong friends confiding deep, dark secrets that no one else was privy to. “You’re caught red-handed trying to kill your parents, but that, in and of itself, didn’t stop you from finally doing it, did it?”
“No, sir, it did not.”
“Now, Will Anthony doesn’t kill your family because the alarm goes off. What did you do, forget to turn the alarm off?”
“No, I couldn’t turn the alarm off.”
Bart’s vague response raised Felcman’s hackles. “You mean, physically you were unable to do it? Or for some reason, you developed a moral conscience and decided you just couldn’t do it?”
“I just couldn’t do it.”
Felcman again began to get agitated with Bart’s evasiveness. “I want to know,” he said in slow, dulcet tones, “was it moral, or was it you physically couldn’t do it?”
“It wasn’t that I physically couldn’t do it,” assured a defensive Bart. “It was a moral/cowardice combination.”
“This talk about you being a coward, that’s not true, is it?” Felcman glared at Bart and did not give him time to respond. “You just didn’t want to pull the trigger because then we’d have you in here as the shooter. The plan was to have somebody else as the shooter, so this jury over here would have to have evidence to show you’re a party [to the actual shooting]. That’s the whole plan, right?”
“No, sir. I couldn’t pull the trigger myself.” Bart again attempted to paint himself as a human being with moral choices and failures.
Felcman knew the door was now wide open. “Mr. Whitaker,” he intoned with a slightly raised voice, “you stepped across your dead mother’s body and stepped across your dead brother’s body and then got shot in the arm. You want to tell me that now you’re a coward?”
Bart began to fidget again. “No, I did all those things, yes, and I can only tell you that there’s just no way that I could pull the trigger. I don’t know where the difference is, or where the line is there. I just know I couldn’t do it myself.”
Felcman believed his sudden inability to directly kill his own flesh and blood was actually something much simpler. “You didn’t pull the trigger because—the jury already knows—if you did that, then you wouldn’t be a party to it, you’d be the shooter, right?”
“Well, that would be true, but I still couldn’t do it myself. I know that I couldn’t pull the trigger myself.”
Felcman looked square into Bart’s eyes as he said, “You understand they’re about to go back and decide whether you’re a continuing threat, and you want to give this jury panel the excuse that you’re a coward and you couldn’t pull the trigger?”
“I told the jury the truth, sir.”
“But that you would plan the death of your family,” Felcman continued, “get shot in the arm, and actually break bread with them, knowing they’re going to be dead?”
Bart nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Felcman was incensed. “Do you find this absolutely chilling, Mr. Whitaker?”
“Extremely chilling,” Bart assented. There wasn’t an iota of emotion written on his face.
“That there’s absolutely no way anybody could ever find that you’re not a continuing threat to society, no matter how long you live?”
“Sir, I have no intention of hurting anyone else. The only people in my life I ever wanted to hurt are the ones I did,” Bart declared succinctly.
“These were the people that loved you the most, right? Right? Yes or no?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, why would a stranger like me mean anything to you, Mr. Whitaker?”
“I have no disliking of you, sir.”
“You sent me a Christmas card asking me to focus on my family.” Felcman referred to the unusual gift he received from the defendant.
“You took that in totally the wrong way. I must not have written it very well,” declared the man who believed he was a superb writer.
Felcman stood close to Bart. “You killed your mother and your brother, and then tell me to set aside the nastiness, and [to] focus on my family. How am I supposed to take that, Mr. Whitaker?”
“How I meant it, sir, was in reference to something you said about that you were asking somebody if they had become a cynic because of what they do. You said you had become a cynic. That was really what I was going for with that message, was that I hoped that you could put all of that aside for the holidays.” The kinder, more compassionate Bart was on display with his response.
“I can’t,” a furious Felcman declared, glaring at Bart. “It taints my soul! I look ten years older than what I am, Mr. Whitaker, because of people like you.” The last phrase flicked off Felcman’s tongue in disgust.
This, naturally, brought defense counsel’s objection, but Felcman immediately apologized to the court for his sidebar remark.
“Was that an attempt by you, Mr. Whitaker, to somehow manipulate me into this somewhere along the line?”
“I only wanted to talk to you,” replied a chastened Bart.
“All you had to do was call up your attorney and say, ‘I want to talk.’”
“I had done that, sir.” Bart then took the time to address his nemesis directly. “Mr. Felcman, it was my impression back when Dan Cogdell was my attorney that that was what I had relayed to him was what I wanted to do. I felt that if you and I could just sit down for a few minutes, an hour or two, that you would either decide I was lying or not, but if you decided I was lying, we wouldn’t be anyplace other than where we are today. But if you decided I wasn’t, that we could somehow save my family all of this. That’s what I wanted with the letter, more than anything.”
“You wanted to manipulate me through your family,” Felcman tossed back, “so I wouldn’t seek the death penalty.”
“No, sir. You turned my words around.”
“That was it, wasn’t it?” Felcman’s voice raised a pitch. “You used your father to get to me so you wouldn’t get the death penalty?”
“No, sir,” Bart flatly denied the accusation.
“You used your good father to get to me.” Felcman’s disgust was becoming more difficult to contain. “So I wouldn’t seek the death penalty?”
“No, sir. That was not how I thought about it.”
“That telephone call to your father on the anniversary of your mom and [brother]’s death, you used your father to get to me, so maybe I wouldn’t seek the death penalty.”
“No, sir. I was very confused. I guess by that point, it was in December. I had been locked up for about four months, and I was under the impression when I got back that I could just take care of it, and that we could put it behind us.” Bart rolled his shoulders as if to exorcise some deep-rooted kinks. “It had taken so long up to that point, I was just really confused about the messages I was getting [from] the various people that Mr. Cogdell, my attorney, was sending to me. I was just upset. I needed somebody to talk to that day. I knew my dad was coming that afternoon, but I had just got my phone privileges that morning. I just wanted to talk to him.”
“You know, we don’t have a recording, we’ve got to take your word for that.” Felcman chided Bart.
“You could take the word of my father,” Bart retorted.
“Your father perceived that you didn’t do anything for years. Understand?”
Bart did not answer; instead, he simply nodded his head.
Felcman informed Bart that the only recording he had of Bart and Kent Whitaker was when Bart was upset because he could not get Felcman to agree to a life sentence.
“What I was really upset about,” Bart retorted, “was that we hadn’t come to some sort of agreement. The year count was, like, ninety years anyway. That really didn’t matter to me.”
“Really?” asked a mockingly surprised Felcman.
“It could have been a thousand years,” Bart declared.
Felcman knew better. “You just didn’t want a jury saying you should be subject to the death penalty.”
“Sir, what I wanted was to put it behind everybody.”
“A man who—several times multiplied—tries to kill his family, never gives up, despite numerous setbacks, and finally breaks bread with them before he actually does kill them, and you don’t think maybe you shouldn’t be subject to the death penalty?” Felcman shook his head, almost as if he felt pity for the delusional young man seated before him.
“I didn’t say that.” Bart was attempting to backpedal. “I just wanted it to be over for everybody.”
After a quick glance at his notes, Felcman steered the conversation back to the night of the murders. “You leave at four o’clock from Willis on the way to kill your family, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Chris Brashear was in the back of the Yukon, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So this jury knows that when Deputy Pikett did his good job and tracked it back to Chris Brashear, he was in the back of your Yukon, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Marshall Slot, the guy who had no idea what he was doing,” he stated sarcastically, “was also correct that Chris Brashear rode up there with you in the Yukon, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The gloves he had”—Felcman noted in regard to Brashear—“did you give those to him?”
“He had some latex gloves that I had given him.”
“What about the black gloves?”
“I don’t recall ever giving him that glove, no.”
“They were your gloves,” Felcman stated.
“Yes, sir. They were my gloves.”
“And what happened, then, is you went inside and celebrated your false graduation.” Felcman was sneering.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s absolutely correct?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Is that why I’ve got these pictures of you with your brother, Kevin, real happy?”
Bart nodded in the affirmative.
“And then there are the pictures of you and your family at Pappadeaux, right? Of course, you know they’re going to be dead in a matter of minutes.”
Bart bent his head down, as if in shame.
“Fact is,” Felcman continued, “your whole family is supposed to be dead, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t see any worthlessness here.”
“Sir, I was always very good at covering that up,” Bart insisted.
“You could present a real good image, right?”
“Of that, yes,” Bart conceded.
“That’s why you told the jury you were always able to hide the true you,” Felcman wanted to know.
Bart nodded silently.
“Which begs the question that probably every one of these jurors wants to know”—the assistant district attorney lined up his prey—“is this the true you now?”
“Yes, sir.” Bart paused before continuing on. “I tried to figure out how to answer that, but there’s just no way to answer that. I have to rely on the experiences you’ve had in your life.”
Bart’s comment drew puzzled glances from nearly everyone in the courtroom. No one was exactly sure what he meant, or toward whom it was even directed.
Felcman spun around and addressed his opponent forthrightly: “Do you understand that you have now created such a web of deceit, lies, and manipulation that there is no way of ever knowing the true you?”
Bart agreed with Felcman. “I believe it’s very difficult, under the circumstances, yes.”
Felcman paused again, before charging in. “Except for one thing—that you’re a pure sociopath that just uses people as tools.”
“No, sir. I disagree with that.” Bart denied the accusation quietly.
“That’s why Lynne Ayres said she had a very disturbing interview with you on August 20 of 2002, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the true you, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not true.” Bart’s smooth veneer began to show infinitesimal cracks.
“You don’t need anybody.” Felcman’s voice began to boom throughout the courtroom. “You can do everything better than anybody else! That’s the true you—isn’t it, Mr. Whitaker?”
“Absolutely not, sir.” Bart continued on with his demure façade.
“Now you go inside your house and your mother’s there. She’s all excited and she gives you a Rolex for your graduation. I mean, did you cry? Did you get happy? Did you say, ‘Thanks, Mom, I’m really looking forward to this?’”
“I suppose I was happy,” came the nonchalant response.
“Did they say they were proud of you?”