Authors: Ken Englade
At the time of her arrest, it had been almost eight years since Joy, then forty-one, had allegedly begun planning the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas.
The French media delighted in telling Joy’s story, often referring to her as
la femme diabolique de Dallas
—“the devilish woman from Dallas.” She got particularly good coverage in
Paris Match
, a slick magazine best described as a cross between
People
and
Newsweek
. Her story was given two full pages in the April 1991 edition. French journalists, however, made few references to her alleged accomplice, Jodie Packer, a.k.a. Donald Airhart.
Authorities are circumspect in talking about Packer’s activities, but apparently he was somewhere in the vicinity when Joy’s deception was uncovered, perhaps en route to the villa for another visit. On March 18, two days after Joy’s arrest, he is believed to have left Nice for Zurich, where he purchased $49,000 in traveler’s checks. On March 19, he left Zurich and flew to Mexico City, returning to Dallas on March 21.
Almost two weeks later, on April 2, Packer was arrested at Joy’s family’s home at Cedar Creek, near Austin, and charged with passport fraud. In his possession were traveler’s checks totaling $9,500, and two airline tickets, one open-ended to Costa Rica, and the other an April 22 return ticket to Nice via Mexico City.
Three days later, Packer was released by a federal magistrate without bail and ordered to reappear on July 23. Soon afterward, he denied to reporters that he had been to France to see Joy or that he had helped her in any way.
When he failed to show up for his scheduled court date, he was declared a fugitive. On December 18, 1992, he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Dallas and accused of violating federal financial reporting laws by attempting to cover up transactions, allegedly in an effort to help Joy. If Packer is ever found, tried, and convicted of the crimes with which he is charged, he could be sentenced to as many as fifteen years in prison and fined a half million dollars.
In Dallas, District Attorney John Vance, a mere five days after Joy’s arrest, announced that he would be willing to forgo his plans to seek the death penalty against Joy if only the French, who have abolished capital punishment, would agree to return her to Texas, where prosecutors were attempting to tie up the loose ends and bring as many of the peripheral cases to trial as they could in anticipation of her extradition.
On January 7, 1991, two months before Joy’s arrest, Mike Wilson went on trial in federal district court in Dallas on the drug distribution charges. Testifying in his own defense, the forty-five-year-old Wilson claimed that alcohol and drugs had been problems for most of his adult life and that they were responsible for the breakup of his first marriage and the loss of a good job. After his addiction to cocaine, he confessed, he went rapidly downhill. When he was caught at the Dallas motel in 1988, he asserted, he had been on a cocaine high for five days and was not even aware of what he was doing.
The jury, but not the judge, believed him. Deliberations began on January 18 and, a few hours later, the panel came back with a verdict of simple drug possession, a conviction that carried a maximum sentence of one year in prison. However, Judge A. Joe Fish was less than pleased with the verdict. Utilizing his judicial prerogative, he set the decision aside and ordered jurors to return to the deliberation room and reconsider their action. Four days later, after pondering the situation over the weekend, the jury came back with a second verdict that was more to Fish’s liking. The second time, the group found Wilson guilty of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, a much more serious charge. The maximum possible sentence was life.
On April 30, 1991, Judge Fish sentenced Wilson to twelve years in prison and fined him $20,000. Fish said he ordered a relatively mild sentence, considering what he could have assessed, because Wilson had provided authorities with “substantial information” about a “person” in another case and had agreed to testify against that “person” at a future trial. Although the “person” was not identified (Wilson could have been handing over information about one of the drug dealers he had come into contact with during his period of drug abuse), it most likely was his former lover, Joy Aylor, who had hardly been mentioned at all during Wilson’s trial.
There is no parole in the federal system; Wilson will not be eligible to be released until he has served his full sentence.
While waiting for the trials of the major participants—i.e., Andy Hopper and Joy Aylor—to begin, ADA Kevin Chapman, who had been assigned full-time to the series of cases, decided to help clear the decks by disposing of the cases against Buster and Gary Matthews. They would be tried separately on charges of conspiring to murder Larry.
Buster, meanwhile, had helped the process along by requesting a speedy trial, mindful in his jail-smart way that it would be to his advantage to get the proceeding over with so he could serve the New Mexico and Texas sentences concurrently. Chapman undoubtedly figured it was not up to him to deny Buster’s request. In December 1991, Buster went before Judge McDowell, who also would be handling the Hopper and Aylor trials.
The prosecution’s contention was simple: According to Chapman, Buster accepted money from Joseph Walter Thomas to kill Larry. He allegedly waited for him outside the entrance to the Kaufman County ranch and ambushed Larry when he came along in his four-wheel drive. The fact that the attempt was conspicuously unsuccessful did not mean that the intent was not serious.
In his defense, Buster claimed that Larry had been described to him as a wife beater and child abuser who deserved whatever punishment was administered, that he considered he was performing a form of public service. Additionally, he said, it was his brother who did the actual shooting, not him. He had been little more than a bystander. Buster’s attorneys, Michael Byck and King Solomon, argued that to their client’s credit he later volunteered to help police clear up the case, going so far as to try to get Gary on tape admitting to the shooting.
Apparently, however, the jury was not impressed. After hearing four days of testimony and deliberating only briefly, jurors convicted Buster of conspiracy to commit capital murder and recommended a life sentence.
Gary was tried seven months later before Judge Gary Stephens, sitting in for a busy Judge McDowell. After two days of testimony and arguments, the jury, on Wednesday, July 15, 1992, took only a few hours to convict him. He also was sentenced to life in prison, which in Texas means a minimum of fifteen years.
On the civil side, as a result of default judgment, Judge Dee Miller, on October 15, 1991, ordered Joy to pay Donald J. Kennedy, who was slightly wounded during the attack on Larry Aylor, a total of $2,000,149.35, which included $500,000 for pain and suffering, $1,500,000 in exemplary damages, and $149.35 for medical expenses.
The trials of Carol and Bill Garland, Brian Kreafle, and Joseph Walter Thomas were put on indefinite hold because prosecutors feared that trying them would reveal too many details of Joy’s alleged part in the complicated murder schemes and would seriously damage chances of convicting her. The others would not be tried, DA John Vance decreed, until Joy could be extradited from France.
As a result, going into 1992, there was only one other trial that could be held before Joy was returned: that of Andy Hopper. In the end, despite the prosecution’s weapon, Andy’s confession, defense attorneys would drop a bombshell that almost wrecked the state’s case. As it turned out, testimony during the trial opened the door to a number of thought-provoking issues and prevented the proceeding from being the slam-dunk conviction that prosecutors expected.
PART III
1992
27
Andy’s first lawyer, appointed by Judge McDowell on December 29, 1988, was Jan Hemphill. However, when the charge is capital murder, as it was in this case, it is customary in Dallas County for a second lawyer to be named as well. The way it usually works is that the original lawyer, in this case Hemphill, is allowed to choose an aide.
Since courtroom tactics were her specialty, she planned to examine and cross-examine witnesses herself. For an assistant, therefore, she needed someone adept at taking care of the other details that always need attending to during a complicated trial. To perform this function, she chose Lawrence Mitchell, a balding, soft-spoken attorney, a former president of the local bar association, with a reputation as a top-notch appeals man, a talent that Hemphill figured would be very convenient if Andy were convicted. And, considering the gruesome blow-by-blow confession her client had made to McGowan, that seemed a good possibility.
When Hemphill picked Mitchell, she was aware that up until then he had never been involved in a trial in which a man’s life was at stake. But this was immaterial to her since his job would be primarily that of an observer. His responsibility would be to sit like a fly on the wall during the trial, making detailed notes on Judge McDowell’s perceived mistakes.
But then events took an unexpected turn. Before Andy could come to trial, Hemphill was appointed by Texas’s new governor, Ann Richards, to fill a seat on the district court bench. That left Mitchell as Andy’s lead counsel, a position in which he was decidedly uncomfortable since his experience was in the library rather than the courtroom.
Mitchell had come to Dallas from Wichita, Kansas, in the Seventies to attend law school at SMU. After he graduated, he and a classmate, an expatriate New Yorker named Peter Lesser, went into practice together, specializing in criminal defense law. The partnership eventually dissolved, with Lesser branching out and building a reputation as a controversial trial lawyer and unsuccessful politician, while the quieter, less flamboyant Mitchell concentrated on more scholarly pursuits, serving as an associate justice on the court of appeals in Texas’s Fifth District while honing his talents for searching out and highlighting potential legal errors. But even as the two went their different ways, they remained good friends. By the late Eighties, they even shared an office on the seventh floor of a modern building not far from Dallas’s downtown airport, Love Field.
In light of the unanticipated developments, Mitchell knew that his first duty to his client was to find someone to fill the role that Hemphill had assigned to herself in Andy’s case: someone experienced in courtroom roughhousing. What he needed, Mitchell felt, was a blunt, aggressive, knowledgeable attorney who could work under pressure, who could be merciless on cross-examination and was unafraid to mix it up with witnesses and prosecutors alike, and who would not be intimidated by the well-oiled machine known as the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. The only person he could think of who best met those requirements, even if he too had never tried a capital murder case, was his old friend Peter Lesser.
A slender, long-limbed, aesthetic with fiery, dark eyes, midnight black hair that tumbled below his shoulders, and a bushy, wiry beard turning rapidly gray, Lesser was a man with a well-deserved reputation for making waves. In two attempts to win election as district attorney and one unsuccessful race for mayor, Lesser had won the attention, if not the ballot-box support, of Dallas residents. Not only had he retained enough of the aggressiveness he had developed while growing up in New York City’s Washington Heights to be painted as a Yankee-hippie-troublemaker among ultra-conservative Dallasites, but he was also a high-profile Jew in one of the country’s most aggressively fundamentalist Christian cities.
Before he and Mitchell opened their practice, Lesser worked as a courthouse reporter for Channel 13, a local PBS station, winning the grudging respect of the city’s other journalists, most of whom had little inclination or training to actually try to comprehend the workings of the local legal system. Virtually alone among the local newspeople, Lesser became known for his ability to fathom the issues involved and then explain them in terms comprehensible to the majority of television viewers. During this period he also developed a reputation as a committed iconoclast, a description that follows him to this day and one illustrated superbly by his handling of a 1991 case that drew more than its share of public attention.
That summer, about the time Joy was beginning her fight against extradition, Lesser signed on to defend Glen Anthony, a twenty-six-year-old handyman with a previous felony conviction for theft. It was one of the more sexually and racially explosive cases in the city in many years, one in which a black man, Anthony, was charged with kidnapping a thirty-seven-year-old white woman named Nancy Jane Taylor, the socially prominent wife of a member of the board of DART, the city’s high-profile public transportation system.
Anthony was accused not only of kidnapping Taylor and holding her hostage for eleven hours, but of assaulting her and forcing her to cash a $1,200 check.
At the trial, a standing-room-only event for the entire two weeks it lasted, Taylor testified that she had never seen Anthony before the afternoon of the attack when he came to her house posing as a deliveryman. Once he talked his way inside, she said, he pulled a .357 caliber pistol from his belt and forced her to leave with him in her black Jaguar, subsequently performing the other actions leading to the charges against him.
Anthony, on the other hand, told a completely different story. When he took the stand in his own defense, Anthony denied
kidnapping
Taylor, swearing that the white, well-to-do socialite willingly went with him. In fact, he said, to the shock and revulsion of Dallas’s upper crust, the two had been involved in a secret but nonetheless highly charged sexual liaison for several months. Anthony asserted that the affair began weeks before the alleged kidnapping incident when Taylor, out for a jog through her exclusive Highland Park environs, stopped to compliment him on the work he was doing on a neighbor’s garden. A little later that day, he said, they met at his modest apartment and had sex for the first time. That encounter, he claimed, led to three other trysts preceding the incident in which Taylor said she was kidnapped.