Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (39 page)

In February 1999, Burns was written up for breaking one of the jail rules and moved to another cell block. There, he was no longer afraid of reprisals from Durall. He asked his jailers to tell the Renton police he wanted to talk with them.

Clarence Burns said that his jailmate had told him that he had killed his wife because she was going to leave him.

Now Durall faced not only charges of premeditated first-degree murder, but on July 9, 1999, the deputy prosecutor, Patricia Eakes, filed to amend the complaint against him to add a charge of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. Already facing up to twenty-six years in prison if found guilty of killing Carolyn, he now faced many more years.

His fourth attorney, Michelle Shaw, had done her best to convince Durall to plead guilty, as his earlier attorneys had, telling him that the State’s case against him was extremely strong. But he was adamant that he wanted to go to trial. Shaw withdrew, and another attorney, Don Minor, agreed to represent him.

Two years had passed since Carolyn Durall’s murder when her husband finally went on trial in Judge Deborah Fleck’s courtroom in Superior Court in Kent in June 2000. The weather in King County was much the same as it was when Carolyn left her office for the last time, saying, “Wish me luck…”

Because the case had often been covered in the media during those two years, it wasn’t easy to pick a jury. Ten of Carolyn’s coworkers were in the courtroom for the opening statements, and at least one was present for the entire trial. It was usually her best friend, Denise Jannusch, who took careful notes so that she could share them with the staff at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. The company granted her a sad kind of leave; they wanted only to see Carolyn finally receive justice.

Judge Fleck ruled that both charges would be considered in this trial; she would not separate the murder charges from the conspiracy charges. However, the prosecutor’s office dropped the conspiracy charges halfway through the jury selection phase without comment. And they kept their promise not to tell the jurors that it was Bob Durall who led police and medical examiner’s deputies to Carolyn’s body deep in the lonely woods.

Now, finally, the trial, which took almost seven weeks to slowly unwind a complicated story of suspense and deception, had begun.

Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird made the opening statements for the State. They were succinct and horrifying.

“She wanted a divorce; he wanted her dead,” Baird told the jurors. “She searched for the best way to leave; he searched for the best way to murder her…. He crushed her skull, stuffed her in a garbage bag, and dumped her in the hills.”

While Carolyn was reading
Too Good to Leave: Too Bad to Stay
and trying to figure out if she had enough financial reSources to raise her children on her own, Bob was writing down those things important to him. The Renton police had found an ominous list in one of his filing cabinets, one that harkened back to the sites his fellow workers found on his computer. It read “bat, gloves, pillows.” Did he jot down those things after he read about “kill + spouse” and “suffocate…murder…poison (Sleep 2 pills (herbs), 3 Death?” He also wrote down chores he faced and forensic details: “disposal, tire tracks, footprints.”

Bob Durall was dressed for court in a well-cut gray suit and a crisp white shirt and tie. As he sat beside Don Minor, his attorney, he looked like one himself. He showed no emotion as Baird spoke.

The State had so many witnesses, each one verifying and validating what had been said by the others. There was a mountain of both circumstantial and physical evidence. How could any “prudent juror” not decide that the man at the defense table had indeed plotted, planned, researched, lied, and manipulated almost everyone around him before and after Carolyn Durall died at his hands in a brutal attack?

But jurors are never predictable.

Don Minor had said he wanted to delay his opening statement until the defense case began. Apparently, Bob Durall was now undecided about taking the stand in his own defense. Across the board, defense attorneys in major felony cases advise their clients not to testify. The moment they do, they open themselves up to cross-examination by the prosecutors. But Bob Durall himself was really all the defense had going for it.

So far, Durall’s witnesses hadn’t had much punch. There was the woman from the minimart who was sure she sold gas to Carolyn a few days after the night she disappeared, testifying that she recognized her when she saw the Missing fliers her friends distributed.

A physical therapist said that Bob Durall already had an arm injury before the night of his wife’s vanishing. Whether it was as serious as it proved to be when he consulted a physician a week later wasn’t clear. A torn biceps muscle can’t be fixed with physical therapy; it requires surgery to keep it from atrophying.

Would Durall testify? On Tuesday, July 25, he was still indecisive, and even Minor wasn’t sure what he intended to do. The end of the trial was approaching, but Minor had no choice but to request a delay. Judge Fleck agreed to stop the trial in midflight so that Minor could read the computer disk that contained email messages police had seized from Durall’s computers.

Even after Baird argued that the defense had had access to those disks for the past year, Judge Fleck went by edicts of discovery that said she had to grant the delay. She announced that court would reconvene the next Monday.

Jeff Baird was as frustrated as those in the gallery, a group that included relatives and supporters of each side. “This is a question about a defendant who has cold feet about testifying and, frankly, I think it’s time for him to fish or cut bait,” Baird said. “I don’t think he’s fooling anybody.”

Judge Fleck urged the defendant and his attorney to make up their minds whether Durall
would
testify on Monday. Don Minor answered only that he couldn’t promise. “On his way to the witness stand, he might change his mind,” he said, a hint of resignation in his voice.

It was Monday, July 31, and the courtroom was hushed, everyone waiting to see whether Bob Durall actually would take the stand.

He did. What followed was one of the most stunning demonstrations ever seen in a courtroom. It’s unlikely that even Don Minor knew what his client was about to reveal.

Bob Durall’s testimony veered completely away from the evidence that had thus far been presented. He said that even he couldn’t be positive about what had happened to Carolyn and then explained why. He discussed the night of August 6, 1998. “Nothing happened I consider way out of the ordinary,” he told the jury in a calm voice. There was no fight, no talk of divorce. They awakened early on Friday and he saw her only briefly before she left to go to work.

Yes, he admitted that he told her worried coworkers that he didn’t know where she was or why she hadn’t come to work. But he actually suspected that she was with another man. He had desperately searched for her van in motel and hotel parking lots but couldn’t find it anywhere. “In my mind, I knew she was somewhere with somebody.”

He had called the police later that day and attempted to file a missing persons’ report, but he was still thinking that she was cheating on him with another man.

He didn’t want to disappoint his children, and he wanted to be with them, so he had gone alone to the San Juan Islands to spend the weekend with his three youngsters and his mother- and father-in-law. When his 9-year-old son asked where his wife was, he said he had gently told him, “We can’t find Mommy right now.”

So far, Durall hadn’t deviated much from the story he originally told the Renton detectives. Then Bob Durall suddenly began an incredible tale with a whole new cast of characters.

He testified that had returned from the San Juan Islands on Monday, August 10, in the early morning hours. (This would have been several hours after police had called to tell him that they had located Carolyn’s van two miles from his house.) That was when he had become involved in a terrifying situation. While he was standing in his bedroom, a man with a gun had appeared. The man had held a gun on him, Durall said, and tied him up in a bathroom, all the while threatening to shoot him.

Everyone in the gallery, not to mention those at the defense and prosecution tables, stared back at the man on the witness stand, bemused and bewildered.

Durall continued to tell the story of what “really happened.” Next, he said he was forced to drive several miles—he wasn’t sure how many—to a place where they met a second man, who was waiting in a parking lot somewhere in Issaquah. The second man was shorter and quite tan and had bushy hair. He was sitting in a large SUV. Both men forced the still-bound Durall into the SUV and drove for what he estimated was about two hours until they came to a forested area off I-90. (It would not take anywhere near two hours to drive from Issaquah to the region Durall was describing; it was only about twenty-four miles east.)

It was of course the place where Carolyn’s body was found. The mysterious strangers dumped a large bag there, which, he said, contained Carolyn’s body, but he didn’t ask.

Durall testified that he could not describe either man in detail, but knew they were both Caucasian. The one with the gun was taller and partially bald, while the other had a thick head of hair. “Bushy hair.”

One of his captors told Bob Durall, “There wouldn’t have been a problem. She should have kept her promise. She got caught on the phone.”

He didn’t ask about that either, apparently fearful that they might kill him too and leave him in the woods.

The men who had abducted Durall eventually returned him to his Nissan Pathfinder and warned him that he must not tell anyone about what he had seen. They ordered him to clean the bedroom of his home and remove all signs of blood in his house. If he told anyone, they threatened to harm his children, telling him that they would make him watch while they killed his children “one by one.”

And so he had obeyed them, he said in a flat voice devoid of any trace of feeling. He had cleaned up the blood, and never told anyone what had really happened—not until now.

Unwittingly perhaps, he had invoked the most familiar of all phantom suspects—“The Bushy-Haired Stranger”—so familiar that cops and prosecutors usually just say “The BHS,” for the little man who wasn’t there, and never shows up at all.

After Bob Durall testified for most of two days, Jeff Baird approached him for cross-examination.

Just as his computer betrayed him by spitting out the websites he’d checked and his search for romance at Match.com, his emails came back to haunt Durall.

In one, he had written about hiring “an attorney and a private investigator” to find his missing wife. This was within days after he claimed that he had been warned not to talk to police or tell anyone.

Baird asked him if the “bushy-haired man who had a good tan” or the “taller man with the gun” had said, “No police, but go ahead and hire a private investigator?”

“No, those were not their words,” Durall answered stiffly.

Hadn’t he been suspicious that his wife had been killed in their bedroom? “When you removed the carpet,” Baird asked, “did you associate the big bloodstain with the murder of your wife? There was a lot of blood there. You cleaned up the blood, knowing or assuming it was evidence of a murder?”

“I thought there was a good chance my wife was killed there but did not know for sure.” He added that he didn’t know the “definition of murder.”

It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Durall’s story of the deadly strangers would have been unbelievable even in a soap-opera script.

When he was asked about his list of “bat, bag, pole, hill, gloves, pillow, place, tire, tracks, footprints and disposal,” he said none of these words referred to what had happened to Carolyn; instead, he had written them down to remind himself of baseball, his property in the foothills, and a trip out of town.

His affect was so flat that it was easy to see why an acquaintance had said, “He’s a cocky guy, but I wondered ‘Is anybody in there?’ ”

At a time when even a trace of emotion would have helped him get through to the jurors, he spoke of ultimate horror as if he were an automaton.

Would any of these jurors believe the tale of the killers who had just waltzed out of left field to confuse a flabbergasted gallery?

Jeff Baird called Durall’s testimony absurd and termed it “the desperate act of a desperate man.”

After the two hundred exhibits that were entered into the record, the DNA evidence, the scouring of the internet by the experts, and the sophisticated forensic science that connected the defendant to the crime, after dozens of witnesses, things looked bleak for Bob Durall.

Don Minor did his best, insisting there was no direct evidence. “What you have been presented with is circumstantial evidence,” he told the jury. “You should understand that circumstances can be misleading.”

Minor wisely did not put Durall’s assertion that he had been abducted by the real killers and then released into the main thrust of his final argument. It’s quite possible that even he didn’t know about that tale until he heard Durall’s testimony along with the rest of the bewildered courtroom. He tried to make the State’s case look as if it were made of smoke and mirrors and assumptions not based in fact.

“Things that were innocent in nature have been given a sinister meaning,” Minor argued. “Mr. Durall has a need for attention but not a need to kill his wife.”