“Yes, they did.”
Felcman focused on the killings again. “Did you tell Chris Brashear where to stand to kill your family?”
“I told him the layout of the house, and we discussed it. So, yes, I did tell him.”
“My question was really simple…,” responded Felcman.
“Yes, I did.” Bart would try to answer definitively.
“Did you tell him where to stand?”
“Yes, I did,” Bart repeated.
“Where did you tell Chris Brashear to stand?”
“In the foyer.”
“And to shoot your family as they came in, correct?”
“Yes.”
“This was not a random burglary. This was an execution of your family, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know Steven Champagne was following you over to Pappadeaux?”
“Yes, I did.”
“That was part of the plan?”
“Yes, it was.”
“So, Steven Champagne was telling the absolute truth when he came in here?”
“About that part, yes.”
“You told Officer Prevost the guy sounded black,” Felcman stated.
“Yes, I did.”
“Why?”
“That was something we had come up with before, that I was supposed to say.”
“Do you know how dangerous that makes you, and how offensive that is?” Felcman decried. This confrontation recalled the Susan Smith child-drowning case and the Charles Stuart Boston wife-killing case, when both perpetrators calculatingly blamed unknown, fictional black males for committing the murders.
“Yes, sir, I absolutely do.”
“Why couldn’t you have just said, ‘I don’t know’?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You know exactly why you told Phillip Prevost that the guy sounded black.”
“That, I do,” answered Bart. “I thought you were asking why I couldn’t just say he was white. That, I don’t know. I know I said that he was black, because it would take the blame off Chris.”
Fred Felcman wanted to paint an even more devastating picture of Bart Whitaker for the jury. He turned his focus to how Bart allowed himself to be shot. “What kind of man are we dealing with here, Mr. Whitaker, that you would actually have that done to yourself to throw off suspicion?”
“It’s just part of the plan,” Bart replied nonchalantly.
“This is such evil that it’s hard to even imagine, correct?” Felcman asked, nearly hissing his words.
“Yes, sir.”
“I told the jury that you rushed in there quickly because you had to get shot by Chris Brashear, and he had to get out of there. Was I correct on that?”
“Yes, sir, you were.”
“Why did Chris Brashear leave the Glock there?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What was the plan? Was he supposed to take it with him?”
“[He was supposed to] leave it in the backyard, yes, sir. It was not supposed to be in the house.”
Felcman backed up just a few steps to paint an even more vivid picture of the death scene. “You see your brother when you ran in, right?”
“Yes, I did.”
“He was gurgling in his own blood, wasn’t he?”
At the mention of Kevin’s death rattle, Bart began to cry soft tears. Not many in the gallery were buying it. Bart was unable to answer the question.
Felcman looked astonished. He turned directly toward Bart and, in a state of bemusement combined with seething hatred, said to the defendant, “I’ve watched this whole trial.” He paused, looked over at the jury panel, and continued on: “You’ve never cried until now.”
“I did earlier,” Bart answered, weeping with barely audible sobs.
“Why are you crying now?”
“Horrible memory.”
“Well, you heard it for the past five days with this jury.”
“And when you showed the video, I cried also.” Bart recalled the videotaped crime scene footage of the Whitaker home, with Kevin, dead, sprawled out in the foyer.
“You know this jury was watching you?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
Felcman quickly diverted the jury members’ attention away from Bart’s tears, in the event that they were persuaded by his alleged trauma. He began talking about Bart’s false graduation celebration. “Tell me something, I’m curious. How were you going to handle the fact that Marshall [Slot] and Billy Baugh were going to eventually find out that you hadn’t graduated from Sam Houston?”
“I was in such a dark place,” Bart responded. “Locked into the plan, I don’t think I thought about it after that.”
“Is that the answer you want to give me? That you didn’t think this through?”
“As to what happened afterward, I didn’t give it much thought, no.”
“All you were going to have to do was tell the police that you had told your mother that you weren’t graduating, and that you were going through this because you didn’t want to upset your father, who was dead, right?”
“I thought about that in the hospital,” Bart admitted, “to my shame. Yes, I did.”
“How in the world do you convince Lynne Sorsby to still want to be married to you, after all this?”
“I hadn’t actually proposed to her until after December tenth, but I know that when I was with the police, I lied to them every time I talked to them. And when Adam called, I sort of slipped back into the person I was when I knew him.”
“What kind of person is that?”
“Well, the tapes show I was conniving and—”
“Manipulative,” Felcman interjected, “talking in cryptic terms, using people? Is that what we’re talking about?”
“Yes.”
“So, when I told this jury in my opening statement that’s what kind of person we’re dealing with here, I was absolutely correct, right?”
“Yes, I think you blew it out of proportion, but, yes, you are correct.”
“How can I take it to any higher proportion?” a befuddled Felcman demanded. “You killed your mother and your brother.”
“Yes, but I…You’re right.”
“So, when I told the jury what we’re dealing with is a person who’s purely manipulative, I was absolutely correct about it, right?”
“Sir, that’s such a loaded word”—the comment elicited several sighs from some of the participants in the gallery—“and I know that I did offer these people money. But if you’re talking about…I’m not really sure what you mean by manipulative. I did offer them money, but I think you mean something above and beyond that.”
“You have a tendency, Mr. Whitaker, to talk in cryptic terms. You don’t come out and say what you really mean. You don’t speak forward with people and tell them how you really think. You use manipulative terms, correct?”
“I know I did some of that in those days, yes.”
“You did that throughout the case.”
“Yes, in regard to the police.”
“Even the letters you wrote when you fled were still in manipulative terms,” Felcman added.
“The last section, yes.”
“The only time you actually told them the truth in the letters is when you said,
Hey, the longer you keep anyone from knowing I am gone, the better the chances are.
That’s the only time you actually talked about the truth. Everything else, you talk about,
I’ll be the only one that has to go through the fire,
and so forth like that.”
“I believe that was the truth, sir.”
“You’re not the only one who has to go through the fire. I do, these people do”—Felcman gestured toward the jury members—“a whole community does.”
“I know that now.”
“Did you ever make a comment to anybody, Mr. Whitaker, that the way you manipulate people is you give them what they want?”
“Well, that’s what I did in this case, yes.”
“Lynne Sorsby wanted to believe you, that you didn’t do this. Lynne Sorsby loved you and wanted to marry you, and that’s the reason you were able to get her to say, ‘Yes, I will marry you,’ despite everything here, correct?”
“There was much more to it than that, but that was a part of it.”
“Really? What else?” Felcman wanted more information.
“After all this happened, I think the six months after this all happened was the best time in our relationship. I think the shock of this hit me in a way, like Will Anthony said, it didn’t become real until it actually happened. It was sort of that way with me.” Bart paused to let that bit of information sink in. “I knew it was going to happen, and I wanted it to happen, but on a level, I didn’t understand it, like I did afterward. I tried to distance the person that I had been by becoming someone else, by being better than I had been before that. I did love her, and that’s why I proposed to her, more than anything else.”
“You love Lynne Sorsby?” Felcman asked.
“To this day, I do,” declared Bart.
“Was she in any type of danger from you, Mr. Whitaker?”
“Certainly, she’s not.”
“Your mother loved you.”
“Yeah,” he answered unenthusiastically.
Felcman continued to hammer away at the phony exterior he believed comprised Bart. “You actually went to the rodeo with your father and held up one of those lighters when Pat Green played the song for Kevin?”
“I don’t remember that, but I might have done so.”
“All this emotion, of course, never once broke down your façade that you had about killing him, did it?”
“It broke me down, but not in a public place.”
“Really?” declared Felcman. “Tell the jury. I’m just dying to know how this broke you down.”
“It broke me down a lot afterward.”
“Tell us.”
“I remember the first time we got back from the hospital. I was in the shower, and it just hit me in a way I just couldn’t believe that it happened, that I had done this. I don’t think I had cried for maybe fifteen years to that point.”
“You actually talked to Steven Champagne that you were upset that he didn’t kill your father. Remember that?”
“I did not say that.”
“So he wasn’t telling the truth on that?”
“No, he was not.”
“But you weren’t upset with anybody that they didn’t finish the job with your father?”
“No, sir, I never said that.”
“So Steven Champagne, who has no reason to lie about that particular thing, was lying about that?”
“There were other people at that lunch where that comment was supposedly said. If I had said it, they would have testified here.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir, they would have.”
“How do we know you just didn’t talk to them on a private basis?”
“Because they were not involved in this in any way and wouldn’t have been involved in it in any way.”
“We didn’t know you were talking to Adam Hipp, unless we tape-recorded it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If Marshall Slot hadn’t tape-recorded Adam Hipp’s conversation with you, what would have been your response to that? That you never talked to Adam Hipp?”
“Testifying today, no. I would admit it today. Back at the beginning, when the police were talking to me, I would have lied about it, yes.”
“But you told your father you didn’t know anything about it.”
“Yes, I did.”
“So, once we catch you at it, then you come in and admit to it. But before then, no, right?”
“That’s something that’s happened over the last year and a half, sir, two and a half years.”
“Well, you act like this is some minor thing. You’re being investigated for killing your mother and your brother, and your father’s asking you about Adam Hipp, and you say, ‘I don’t know what they’re talking about, and I still don’t know,’ right?”
“Yes, I did say that, but it wasn’t a minor thing. It was fear.”
“The fear was that Adam Hipp was going to come forward and tell them about you,” Felcman emphasized.
“Yes, sir.” Bart admitted to the only thing that truly worried him: getting caught.
“You also thought maybe he was talking to the police, because you thought, ‘I hope we’re on the same page here.’”
“I don’t know that I thought that at the time. I just thought that Adam would have gotten a better deal from them fiscally, financially. That meant he would have told them anything, yes.”
Felcman moved on to the money Bart was able to take with him and use to escape to Cerralvo, Mexico. “Ten thousand dollars from your father’s home. He said that you took it. He was right, correct?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Where was that money at?”
“It was taped behind a drawer.”
“Why couldn’t you just have left? Why did you have to take the man’s money, too, after killing his wife and son? Why couldn’t you have just left?”
“I didn’t have any money of my own.”
“You had eighty thousand dollars, according to the trust fund.”
“I didn’t know I could access that.”
“Everybody said you can access it,” Felcman reminded the defendant.
“I know that’s what they say. I didn’t know I could access it. I would have wanted it, if I could have.”
“Marshall Slot is able to track you down to the Lancaster Hotel. You had to spend four hundred dollars [on a hotel room] before you left. Tell the jury why?”
“I got really drunk and I wanted a last night out.”
“One last time after killing your mother and brother, huh?”
“One last time in America was what I was thinking.”
Felcman spun around and cornered the defendant. “Do you remember your attorney Dan Cogdell saying you ran away in fear?”
Bart nodded his head in his version of shame.
“You weren’t running in fear,” Felcman declared. “You actually had it planned for a while to spend a night at a nice hotel. You had it all planned. Then you skedaddled to Mexico, right?”
“Something I came up with that night, actually.” Bart again downplayed his planning skills.
Fred Felcman was just about finished with Bart Whitaker. “Is there any way you want to change your plea to guilty from not guilty now?”
“If I could go back and do this over, I would have insisted on that, yes,” Bart admitted.
Felcman, however, was not ready to stop painting Bart in the most negative light possible. “Why did you put ‘K. Soze’ on the letter,” he asked in regard to the letter Bart mailed to Adam Hipp, along with bribe money.
“It was something that me and Adam had joked about in the past, that we both enjoyed that movie
The Usual Suspects
.”
“You’re sending him bribe money to cover up you killing your brother and mother, and you have time to write something you think is a joke?”