I was assigned to the Juvenile Division, where, early on, I volunteered for the “county run.” That meant traveling an exhausting circuit of county juvenile court offices, some of them in neighborhoods so dangerous no one even went out for lunch. The advantage of the “run,” however, was that it allowed me to try one juvy case after another. In juvenile cases, unlike regular trials, the defendant almost always testifies. For the most part the defendants are kids pumped up on ego. They love the attention they get by simply taking the witness stand. It would have been sad, except that the juvy penalties aren’t terribly severe. Generally the kids get HOP, home on probation. So I logged in a lot of time cross-examining the accused. By the time I was finally transferred Downtown to Central Trials in 1984, I had a reputation as a hard charger.
Anyway, in 1984, the year I turned thirty, the district attorney, Ira Reiner, made it a policy to scout out the rising stars and apprentice them to veteran prosecutors. I was one of those who came to his attention. Reiner brought me over to the CCB and assigned me to a man I revered: Harvey Giss. Harvey was a courthouse legend. He was so handsome that women jurors swooned during his final arguments. He was also brilliant, irreverent, and one great trial attorney. To this day Harvey Giss remains the only prosecutor in L.A. County who has ever gotten a death-penalty conviction against a client of Leslie Abramson, the lawyer who would later mount the successful, if unorthodox, defense of Erik Menendez.
But a trial lawyer has only so many of those big cases in him. By the time I moved my files into the windowless office, hardly bigger than a utility closet, across from Harvey’s, he confessed to me that these cases were wearing him out. Harvey had been going through the wringer with a defendant named James Hawkins, a tough man to prosecute because his neighbors considered him a good Samaritan. One day, outside his father’s grocery store, Hawkins had shot a man who was supposedly trying to rob a local woman. Upon closer investigation, it turned out that our “hero” had gunned down his victim long after the woman had left the scene. That wasn’t all. Detectives looking into the murders of two drug dealers developed evidence that led to none other than James Hawkins. Harvey had fought like hell and won a conviction on the grocery store shooting; he’d just received that second case for filing. By the time I moved my files and scrawny potted philodendron into the CCB, the double homicide was nearing its trial date.
Harvey assigned me the ballistics part of the case. Every night I hauled home volumes of arcane texts on firearms, studying them until my eyes blurred. Eventually I gained such expertise that I could have passed the qualifying tests given to police firearms experts. As far as the Hawkins case was concerned, however, this was academic: we hadn’t found a murder weapon. A search warrant served on Hawkins’s home had turned up several different guns, but none capable of firing the bullets found in the bodies of our victims. Then, in one of several bizarre turns in this case, Hawkins escaped from a holding cell in the CCB and went on the lam.
In the wake of that escape, both Harvey and I were assigned around-the-clock security. For myself, I frankly thought this was overkill; the defendant had always been rather cordial to me. But Harvey, I knew, might well have been in danger. Hawkins blamed him personally for destroying his local-hero rep. Several weeks later, during a wild shoot-out, the fugitive was finally caught. The search of his car turned up two more guns—and they were the same make and caliber as the weapons used in the double homicide.
Hawkins had taken a metal file to the inside of both barrels, trying to obliterate the fine stria that leave their imprint on bullets. It wasn’t easy to tell if the guns had fired any rounds, let alone the ones that killed those drug dealers. But I finally got to put all my ballistics knowledge to use. Working with Sergeant Lou Barry of the Sheriffs Department, I was able to match the bullet from one of the victims’ bodies with the bullet Hawkins had fired into a wall during a random robbery. It was a coup, and it made me the deputy darling of the moment.
That trial was almost two years of pure hell. Hawkins’s attorney was a crafty, tenacious brawler named Barry Levin who made us fight for every motion. It took eight months to pick the jury and another excruciating thirteen months to try this monster. But I watched everything Harvey did, and I learned from him. I learned how to organize a big case, one with forty or fifty witnesses. I learned where you object and where you don’t. I learned how to keep my head up and take the hits.
I also learned how to hold up in the face of a difficult judge. Ours, Marsha Revel, was a former prosecutor, and like a lot of old D.A.s who’ve gone on to the bench, she seemed intent upon demonstrating her impartiality by favoring the defense. She lost no opportunity to discredit us. Harvey’s objections were overruled so frequently that I had to count paper clips to distract myself from the pain of it all. The worst came during closing arguments, when the defense objected over and over again, intent on throwing Harvey off stride. Though this is regarded as a bush-league tactic and most judges won’t tolerate it, Revel refused to intervene. The objections increased to the point that Harvey couldn’t utter three consecutive words without getting cut off. The judge called for a recess and Harvey returned to his seat. He looked beaten.
“Marcia,” he told me wearily, “it’s time to cut my losses. I’m going to end after the break.”
“But Harvey,” I replied, “you can’t just leave out the rest. It’s important.”
“You can cover it in your argument,” he told me. “Barry won’t want to bully you in front of the jury. This is best for the case. You can do it.”
It’s possible Judge Revel caught the look of panic on my face, because—in an uncharacteristic gesture of thoughtfulness—she recessed court for the weekend immediately after Harvey concluded.
If anyone was going to finish our opening arguments, it would have to be me. Yet, I found myself paralyzed. Over the months, I had been ground into the dirt by the same stresses that had gotten to Harvey. My spirits were at an all-time low. I didn’t have much fight left. Above all, I was inexperienced. I’d never delivered a summation where this much was on the line.
That weekend I went to a cousin’s wedding in a suburb of L.A. I shouldn’t have even attempted a social ordeal like this. I knew perfectly well that I was physically and mentally exhausted, that I should have spent my two days preparing, or better yet, getting some sleep. Instead, I tried to put on a happy face in front of friends and family. I was doing all right until I caught sight of my mother standing off to one side. You remember how it was when you were a kid? You’d fall and scrape your elbow and you could hold in the tears—until you caught sight of your mom? Then the dam would burst.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me. That’s all it took.
I threw my arms around her, sobbing. “I can’t do it, Mom. It’s just too much. I’ll never be able to pull it together.”
This was not the kind of scene that is welcome at a wedding. And, anyway, these outbursts were not my mother’s style.
She patted me on the shoulder.
“You’ll pull it off, Marcia. You always do.”
Her words hit me like a splash of cold water. But she was right. I wasn’t a child anymore. I was an adult. A professional. I couldn’t count on my mother—or anyone else—coming to my rescue. I realized, as I stood sniffling in the reception line, that if I were to be saved, I’d have to save myself. Life’s hardest lesson.
The following week, I marched back into court and delivered the rest of the damned summation. I don’t know that I did such a brilliant job of it. Probably not. The point is, I finished. I didn’t give in to despair. The memory of that experience gave me a world of confidence during the years, and trials, to come. As Lillian Hellman once said, “Half the battle is being able to take the punishment.”
We got our conviction. Harvey transferred out to a quieter post in Santa Monica. I moved into his office and became one of five deputies at Special Trials, the unit that handles L.A. County’s high-profile cases. Over the next five years, I caught some of the cases that might ordinarily have come to Harvey. One of these was the case of
People v. Robert Bardo
.
The Bardo case was known more popularly as the Rebecca Schaeffer case, after its victim, a pretty twenty-one-year-old actress who played Pam Dawber’s sister on the sitcom
My Sister Sam
. An obsessed fan named Robert Bardo wrote Rebecca a series of letters. Unfortunately, she wrote one back. It was just a generic thank-you-for-your-interest, but it was enough to make the twisted son of a bitch think they had made some kind of connection. He hired a private investigator, who turned up Rebecca’s address. Then he showed up at her apartment with a bag containing copies of his letters to her, a paperback of
The Catcher in the Rye
, her publicity photo, and a gun.
When he rang the bell, Rebecca answered it herself. That caught him off guard. I guess he was expecting she had servants to sweat the small stuff. She was gracious enough to shake his hand, but then eased the door shut on him. Bardo, apparently offended by the rebuff, retreated to a nearby restaurant to collect his wits. He went into a men’s rest room to load the last chamber in his handgun. Then he went back to Rebecca’s apartment. This time, when she came down to answer the buzzer, he gestured that he wanted to give her something. For whatever reason, she opened the door. And he shot her point-blank through the heart.
Bardo was my first “celebrity” case. I didn’t ask for it; it simply landed on my desk. The deputies at Special Trials do not as a rule clamor for big assignments like hounds after hush puppies. Our office has learned from hard experience that every celebrity case carries with it the potential for disaster. Though it can be a career-maker, as the Manson case was for Vincent Bugliosi, it is just as likely to be a sinkhole. And the more titanic the celebrity, the deeper the potential drop.
When Bardo landed on my desk, I’d never really had any experience with the press. To me, the attention this case attracted only created annoying complications. The trial was covered, gavel-to-gavel, by a new cable network called Court TV. In the Bardo case, the fact that hearings were broadcast seemed to have little impact on the proceedings. The real problems began when TV and print reporters “interviewed” witnesses, causing several to drop out of sight before
we
could get to them. Journalists invariably wound up telling their sources things about the case, which meant that the integrity of the witnesses’ memory was compromised. Only after I sat down with each of them and did a careful remedial interview was I able to get clean statements, unencumbered by hearsay.
It was my job to convict Bardo of the heinous crime of murder while “lying in wait”—one of several “special circumstances” that can put a defendant in line for the death penalty.
Bardo was claiming he suffered from a peculiar if convenient mental deficiency that precluded premeditation. Had he made this argument fly, he would have avoided the special-circumstances sanction. The defense hired Park Dietz, a psychiatrist of national renown, to examine Bardo. Then it submitted two hours of videotaped interviews between the two, offered as proof that the defendant could not have premeditated his gruesome crime.
At one point on tape Bardo reenacted his killing of Rebecca Schaeffer. As I watched that scene, something bothered me. I rewound it and watched it again. And again.
Bardo had claimed that the gun was in his bag, and that when he pulled it out to look for something else, Rebecca panicked and grabbed the weapon. In the struggle, he claimed, it discharged accidentally, killing her. But in Bardo’s reenactment, he kept his right arm behind his back and drew it out as though he were holding a gun. That was the physical equivalent of a Freudian slip—something that would tip the court off to the fact that this was no accidental or impulsive shooting. It did precisely that.
I played the tape for Dino Fulgoni, the brilliant no-nonsense judge who sat on this case. (Bardo had forgone his right to a jury trial.) Fulgoni could see with his own two eyes that this was no accidental or impulsive shooting. He sentenced Bardo to life without parole.
Over the two years I worked on that case I got to know Rebecca Schaeffer’s parents—particularly her mother, Danna—extremely well. If anything will remind you that the practice of law is not just an intellectual exercise, it’s observing the effects of a homicide upon those who loved the victim. Misery spreads out from a murder in ripples, blighting everything it touches. Some survivors are too damaged to be helpful. Others are so driven by the desire for revenge that they can actually obstruct a prosecutor’s efforts. The Schaeffers were neither. They managed their grief with patience and dignity.
I was always happy to take Danna Schaeffer’s calls. Sometimes we talked about the legal aspects of the case. Sometimes she’d just want to talk about Rebecca. On a couple of occasions I sent her letters to express thoughts too painful to convey in person.
“Even as I’m writing this I’m crying again,” I wrote her on one occasion. “As I feared, once you start letting yourself feel, it’s an endless thing… . If all goes well, the miserable slimy piece of cow dung will be convicted of everything. I can offer only that I will do everything in my power to see that her loss is avenged—I cannot promise justice because to me justice would mean Rebecca is alive and her murderer is dead. The one thing I can promise you is that when this is all over I will honestly be able to tell you that I gave it my all, my very best, without reservation. Beyond that you have my love and my empathy forever.”
After receiving that letter, Danna actually called to comfort
me
. She was so intelligent, so sensitive and caring—the kind of mother everyone should have. A guilty verdict was such a small thing to give that family in light of what they’d lost, but it seemed to bring them some measure of peace. It felt good to be their champion. It was the sort of feeling I’d missed during that year I spent in management: the exultation of exhausting myself for the sake of a principle, and in some small but significant way, avenging someone whose life had been stolen. The long days and late nights; my desk strewn with coffee cups, Werther’s candy wrappers, notepads, and dog-eared briefs: I missed all that.