Authors: Ken Englade
“It’s the primary responsibility of the medical examiner to obtain that blood. It was available, but they just didn’t get it,” he said. As a former hospital blood bank administrator, Bux said emphatically, he
knew
that such blood had been available from two separate sources because a hospital’s failure to keep such material would be a flagrant violation of blood bank rules. If a hospital was found in violation of that rule, he pointed out, it could loose its accreditation.
“Gilliland’s failure to get that blood doesn’t allow a judgment about the effects any drugs may have had at the time,” Bux said, leading up to the hospital report, made independently, that Thorazine had been found in Rozanne’s system.
“Hospital records show she had .22 milligrams per liter of Thorazine in her blood when she was brought into the emergency room,” Bux said, adding that it should have triggered a warning when it was discovered that Rozanne had been a nurse and her estranged husband was a physician.
“When you first saw that report on Thorazine, what effect did that have on your thinking?” Mitchell asked.
Bux paused, carefully composing his answer. “That is not a drug you typically see abused,” he replied, explaining that he had found it in cadavers only a half-dozen times in his career, and in every case the deceased had been a patient in a mental institution, where Thorazine is used fairly frequently because of its ability to control psychotics.
“The first thing I asked myself was had this drug been administered on a one-shot basis or had Rozanne been a chronic user,” Bux said.
Mitchell asked if the mere presence of Thorazine in someone being admitted to a hospital was unusual.
Yes, Bux replied, especially in someone who was not institutionalized. “Thorazine is used frequently on psychotics because it brings them closer to reality.” It also is used, he added, to control vomiting and nausea, but normally it is not administered in such situations outside of a doctor’s office or an institution.
Working backward from the amount of Thorazine found in her blood when she was admitted, Bux estimated that the initial dose, which probably had been administered intramuscularly with a hypodermic needle since no remains of pills were found in her vomitus, had been between 125 milligrams and 175 milligrams. That, he added, was a strong dose for someone who had not been a chronic user, that is, someone who did not use the drug regularly enough to build up a tolerance.
Under Mitchell’s guidance, Bux said if a dose of the size that apparently was administered to Rozanne had been given during the morning, she would not have been able to perform the functions that other witnesses had described: picking up her son at the day care center and then taking him to lunch and an ice-skating lesson. She would have suffered from blurred vision, her heart rate would have increased considerably, and she probably would have felt faint. “She would have been incapacitated,” he said.
With the morning eliminated as a likely time for the drug to be administered, Mitchell said, that left only the afternoon, sometime between 2:30
P
.
M
., when Rozanne picked up her son at the ice-skating rink, and 6:36
P
.
M
., when the paramedics arrived at her house.
Using those parameters, Mitchell asked, was it possible to tell if the drug was administered before or after she was shot?
Bux shook his head. “No,” he replied, “I can’t tell that. But I can say that if it was administered before the killer arrived, she would have been sedated and would not have been walking around.”
According to Andy’s confession, Rozanne answered his knock on the door, carried on at least a limited conversation with him, walked on her own to the bedroom, and struggled against the restraints.
“Was there any indication the drug was administered at the hospital?” Mitchell asked.
“No,” Bux replied.
“Was there any indication it was taken voluntarily?”
Bux looked mildly surprised. “No!” he said emphatically. “That drug is not going to make you feel good.”
Treading delicately since the answer to the next question was pivotal to the defense theory that Dr. Gailiunas had administered the drug in an attempt to push his mortally wounded but still breathing wife over the edge, Mitchell asked Bux what effect the drug would have had on Rozanne if it had been administered
after
she was shot.
“It would have sedated her and compounded the injury to the brain caused by the gunshot,” Bux replied without hesitation. “It would have had an effect on her breathing pattern and caused additional swelling of the brain. It would have made her chance of survival virtually nonexistent.”
Zeroing in for what he hoped would be an injurious blow to the prosecution’s case, Mitchell also carefully phrased his next question. “If you eliminate the Thorazine, is it possible that this was a survivable wound?” he asked.
Bux swiveled slightly to face the jury. “Yes sir!” he answered crisply.
Mitchell sighed in relief. Winding down his examination, he summarized Bux’s testimony.
“You agree that death was caused by the gunshot?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Bux replied.
“Hypothetically, if she had received immediate medical treatment and if she had not been given Thorazine, is it possible she could have survived?”
“Yes sir,” said Bux.
“Did the Thorazine sabotage her treatment?”
Bux answered unequivocally: “Yes!”
Chapman began his cross-examination with an apparent effort to rile Bux, hoping perhaps to get him to lose his temper and thereby weaken the effect of his testimony on the jury. During Mitchell’s questioning, Chapman had complained several times that Bux was giving narrative answers when he should have been responding to questions monosyllabically.
“Just answer my questions yes or no,” Chapman directed. “In other words, if I ask you what time it is, don’t tell me how to build a clock.”
The remark drew smiles from several jurors and a scowl from Judge McDowell.
“Thorazine alone would not have killed her, would it?” Chapman asked.
“No,” Bux replied. “There’s no doubt about that. It would not.” But, he added, if her brain was already swollen from the gunshot wound, the Thorazine would have made the injury worse.
“Do you think Peter Gailiunas came in and injected her?” Chapman asked.
Bux said he did not know the answer to that question.
Then, the ADA asked, was it possible that whoever shot her could have injected her?
Bux said it was, but he added that that person would have had to have access to medical supplies because Thorazine was not a “street” drug.
In an effort to undermine Bux’s contention that Rozanne might have survived the gunshot wound to her brain, Chapman tried to get the medical examiner to admit that if she had lived, she probably would have been in a vegetative state.
Bux conceded that may have been the case, but otherwise gave little ground.
Bux was a powerful witness, a bright light in a defense case characterized up to then mainly by disappointment and frustration. The best benefit that Mitchell and Lesser could hope to reap from Bux’s testimony was that it had created grounds for doubt among the jurors, that it might make them question if the prosecution’s case against Andy was as airtight as Chapman and Hagood wanted them to believe. However, the defense attorneys were astute enough to realize that the pathologist’s testimony alone was not going to save their client; they were going to have to expand upon the small opening that Bux had provided for them. One of the ways they hoped to do that was through the testimony of their next witness: Dr. Peter Gailiunas.
35
From everything they had heard about the kidney specialist, Mitchell and Lesser had him pegged as a volatile man, someone with a quick temper, a sharp tongue, and an overbearing, condescending attitude. However, when he took the stand on February 18 he exhibited none of those traits, much to the disappointment of the two defense attorneys.
Rather than being abrasive, Gailiunas spoke softly and rationally in a deep and not unpleasant voice devoid of a regional accent despite the fact that he was educated primarily in Boston. The only hint that he might have been nervous was the fact that he chewed gum throughout the time he was on the stand and admitted, after prodding from Lesser, that he had taken a tranquilizer before he was called to testify.
Under questioning from an unexpectedly restrained Lesser, Gailiunas detailed his training and explained how he had met Rozanne when their jobs threw them together in the late fall of 1977. They married and at his urging they moved to Dallas, where their son, Peter III, was born on April 19, 1979. In the autumn of 1982, he said, they decided to build a new house and contracted with a homebuilder whose name Gailiunas had seen on a sign. That man was Larry Aylor.
At the time, Gailiunas said, speaking slowly and deliberately, he had every reason to believe that his marriage was stable and that his wife, Rozanne, was content with him and their relationship, although she had been less than excited about being uprooted from her home in Massachusetts and being moved to the middle of the North Texas prairie.
“When did you first become suspicious that things were not going as well?” Lesser asked.
That would have been in late April or early May 1983, Gailiunas answered, but he did not begin to get really worried until June, when Rozanne announced that she was leaving him and moving into a house of her own. It was then, Gailiunas added, that he hired a team of private detectives to watch his wife in an attempt to reveal the identity of the man with whom she was involved.
He said the discovery that it was Larry Aylor shocked him to the core. After that, he said, he began taping all telephone calls coming into or going out of his house, including one in which Larry and Rozanne described their respective spouses in less-than-glowing terms. He then played the tape for Joy Aylor, he said, to prove to her that her husband was seeing another woman.
He was angry and hurt because of Rozanne’s decision to leave him for Larry. It left him dispirited to the point that he sought temporary relief in alcohol, he said. But even after he knew that Larry was Rozanne’s lover, he did not entirely give up hope of getting her back. One night, at the height of his despair, he asked his mother to accompany him when he went to confront Larry.
“Did you and Mr. Aylor have a friendly conversation?” Lesser asked disingenuously.
“I’m not sure it was friendly,” Gailiunas replied. “I told him I wanted him to stop seeing my wife and he denied he was seeing her.”
Up until then, Gailiunas, who had not appeared voluntarily as a witness but had to be subpoenaed by the defense, had indicated that he was willing to cooperate. But his mood subtly shifted when Lesser began questioning him about Thorazine and whether it was a drug commonly used by people in his medical specialty, nephrology.
Testifying that he was only “vaguely familiar” with the drug, Gailiunas said he did not use it in his practice and did not know what the normal doses were or what its effects would be.
“Isn’t it used by nephrologists?” asked Lesser, whose wife is a physician and was the one who had first alerted him to the significance of the Thorazine that had been found in Rozanne’s system. “Don’t they use it to help combat nausea and give it to patients who are undergoing kidney dialysis?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Gailiunas answered calmly. “There are other drugs that are available for that.”
Although he admitted that Chapman had told him several weeks previously that Thorazine might be an issue in the Hopper trial, he said he had not done any independent research on the drug in an attempt to find out more about it.
“And you were never aware that Thorazine was found in your wife’s blood before 1992?” Lesser asked, his voice rising in disbelief since Detective McGowan had testified that he discovered that fact as far back as 1985.
“No,” he replied. “The first I heard of it was from Mr. Chapman several weeks ago.”
“When you were told about the Thorazine in your wife’s blood, what was your reaction?” Lesser asked.
Gailiunas looked puzzled. “I was perplexed,” he said in a tone that made it sound more like a question than an answer.
“Do you have any idea why it was there?” Lesser persisted.
Gailiunas looked as though he were smothering a grin, as though that were a question he had been waiting for. “I was told there wasn’t a struggle and I’ve always wondered why,” he said. “When I found out about the drug, I figured your client used it to subdue Rozanne so he could murder her.”
Lesser looked as though he wanted to bite off his own tongue for asking such a question. “How about if you administered it?” he asked, trying to recoup.
“That’s ridiculous,” Gailiunas responded.
“Do you know how Thorazine would be acquired?” Lesser asked.
Gailiunas jumped on the opportunity to show a little disingenuousness of his own. “In a pharmacy, I suppose,” he replied sarcastically.
“Would it be fair to say that Thorazine would not be a drug your wife would have taken on her own?” Lesser ventured, hoping to damage the prosecution’s contention, which Gailiunas was not aware of, that Rozanne may have medicated herself with the drug because she was upset over her marital situation.