Pathological

by Henry Cordes

  From the defense table, Motta audibly scoffed at the statement. As soon as Beadle finished her questions, Motta launched into his second cross examination, cutting loose on Hoffmann’s words about fearing Yahnke.

  “Scared of what?” Motta asked. “Did you think he was going to harm you? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Hoffmann: “I didn’t know. I don’t know. OK? It scared me.”

  Motta began yelling. “Really?! So you have a guy sit there at a bar and tell you that he’s killed somebody, and that doesn’t terrify you?!”

  “Objection!” Beadle shot to Hoffman’s defense. “He doesn’t get to harass my witness!”

  Judge: “Mr. Motta.”

  “So I’ll re-ask the question,” Motta said. “You’re terrified of a guy who’s showing you a badge that says he’s a private detective ...”

  Motta marched up to Hoffmann, his voice building to a scream.

  “But YOU’RE NOT TERRIFIED WHEN SOME GUY TELLS YOU THAT HE KILLED PEOPLE?! THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT THIS JURY TO BELIEVE?!”

  Motta’s shrieking set off a din of simultaneous reactions.

  “Objection!” Beadle shouted again.

  “Sit down,” Judge Randall implored.

  Gallery members stirred uncomfortably.

  The drama subsided. That’s when Hoffmann quietly leaned into the microphone. In a soft voice, she answered Motta’s question.

  “When some pervert in a strip club tells me a joke,” she said, “it didn’t scare me.”

  At that, Hoffmann held a tissue to her glistening eye and dabbed at her running mascara.

  Several jurors squirmed in their seats. One, a young woman, shot a cold stare at the defense table.

  * * *

  In the male-dominated arena of Nebraska courts — where men make up more than 80 percent of judges and more than 90 percent of criminal defense attorneys — the Garcia case was remarkable. Women stole the spotlight at every turn. Consider:

  Dr. Bewtra and her candid and colorful critique of her one-time pupil, who she described at trial as “absolutely the worst resident in my 40 years of teaching.”

  The county coroner’s physician, Dr. Michelle Elieff, taking jurors through a gripping, graphic, and authoritative overview of all four killings — one that critically showed the jury the striking physical similarities in the pairs of deaths.

  Beadle, who standing alongside Kleine became the voice of the state’s case, serving as narrator through every twist and turn. She gave a stirring opening statement in which she seized on the Shakespeare quote Herfordt found on Garcia’s phone. She repeated it at key moments as she defined Garcia’s motive for all the killings: his failure, due to his Creighton firing, to secure a medical license and steady job.

  “If you wrong us,” Beadle said again and again, “shall we not revenge?” It became the theme of the trial.

  And then there was Hoffmann — clearly the trial’s most potent witness.

  Going in, it might have been hard to imagine a stripper — one who was even reluctant to testify — being a great witness for the state. But Hoffmann came off as both believable and resilient. “She was hugely important,” Mois would later say. “I didn’t have a lot of hope that she would come through. But she did.”

  Motta later defended bringing Hoffmann to tears on the stand, saying capital murder cases are serious business. But he likely didn’t do his client any favors, particularly in the eyes of the jury. Because during her testimony, she had come off to the panel as a likeable, empathetic figure.

  She told jurors how she had sobered up since her stripper days, kicking her addiction to alcohol, prescription pills and meth. How she now had a regular job to support her two children.

  She had scoffed at Motta’s suggestion that she wanted to testify in order to land a network TV interview. In fact, she said she changed her phone number in order to avoid reporters. Quite simply, she had no reason to concoct this confession. “I mean, I’ve gotten nothing — nothing good out of this,” she said.

  With the benefit of time and sobriety, Hoffmann said, she had looked back on her peculiar exchange with Garcia countless times. There was one thing she couldn’t get past. If he was so full of bluster and trying to impress her with how tough he was, Garcia could have said he had killed some bad guys or drug dealers or someone in self-defense. Instead, he told her he killed an “old woman and a young boy.”

  During her time on the stand, Hoffmann had recalled the response she gave to Anthony Garcia that night:

  “That sounds like the two most innocent people in the world.”

  CHAPTER 27: JUSTICE DONE

  Jurors had deliberated only 7½ hours before the bailiff was notified they had a verdict, creating a stir within the halls of the Douglas County Courthouse. On the ornate, century-old building’s upper floors, dozens of observers looked down through a wide atrium as nearly all the major players in this 8½ -year drama filed into Judge Randall’s third-floor courtroom.

  Garcia was up front with all the members of Team Motta, opposite the prosecution team the defense had clashed with so fiercely. His parents sat a couple rows behind him. The families of Tom Hunter and Shirlee Sherman also took up their places in the gallery. And sitting in the very back row of the courtroom, flanked by Police Chief Todd Schmaderer and the other leaders of the task force, was Derek Mois.

  Mois didn’t make a habit of showing up for the verdicts on cases he’d worked. But the detective felt compelled to be there for this one.

  Cecilia Hoffmann may have been the most memorable witness in Garcia’s trial. But no one spent more time on the witness stand than Mois — largely due to his Forrest Gump-like knack for being present at every important turn this case had taken. Dusting off his sports coats and ties, Mois was repeatedly called to testify on his ubiquitous role in the Garcia investigation.

  On day one and day two, he described the abominable scene he found in the Hunter home in March of 2008, a boy and grandmother with knives impaled in their necks. He was called back on day three to testify to the carnage he walked into in the Brumback home five years later, and to the eerie similarities with the Hunter scene that he and Warner noted right way.

  Then he took the stand again on day eight. On that day, he spent hours meticulously taking the jury through the winding path that brought him to Dr. Anthony Garcia: The black binder. The Creighton termination letter. The Honda CRV and pastel plate. The Iowa cell phone tower. The $7.69 wing purchase. The convenience store video. The SD9 on the side of the road.

  Every time he took the stand, he faced a grilling from Team Motta, nitpicking his technique and conclusions. Mois always kept his cool. He didn’t mind the scrutiny. In fact, he relished the chance to defend the work he and his colleagues had done.

  Each time he strode up to testify, Mois would look into the gallery and see Claire Hunter, an ever-steady presence in the courtroom. Bill Hunter had avoided the trial, largely out of his family’s concern that reliving the horror of Tom’s death could reignite his PTSD. Other than when he was forced to testify on finding his son’s body, and later to detail the events leading to the firing of Garcia, he stayed away. (The Brumback family likewise never showed any interest in being in court outside of testifying.)

  But Claire Hunter and sons Jeff, Tim and Rob regularly took in the proceedings, even during what she’d later call “that awful, awful first week” — when the death of her son was graphically, painfully, detailed by Mois, the coroner and others. She felt compelled to be there. “I had to have all the facts,” she’d later say. “I owed that to Tom.”

  When testifying, Mois would also never fail to note the presence of Shirlee’s family, who also kept a steady vigil at trial. Shirlee’s brother, Brad Waite, attended every pre-trial hearing and each day of the trial out of respect for the tough, hard-working family matriarch. Her son, Jeff Sherman, was also in court without fail
, a man Mois considered one of the strongest people he’d ever met.

  When you got down to it, these families were really the reason Mois was back in court for the verdict. All of his work in this case, literally thousands of hours, had been for them. And as was typical with Mois, he’d formed a close bond with them all. Mois had especially appreciated the phone call he’d received from Jeff Sherman just as the trial was winding down. “However this comes out, however it ends, I want you to know how I appreciate what you did and the sacrifices you made,” Jeff told him.

  Now, as Mois sat in the back of the courtroom, he was feeling an anxiety he didn’t often feel. Mois looked again at Tom and Shirlee’s families, seated just in front of him, and got a lump in his throat. Would these families hear the guilty verdict they deserved? What would he say to them if they didn’t? How much more pain can they endure? Yet again, Mois questioned whether he’d done enough.

  Sitting not far from Mois was Warner, who had also felt compelled to be there that day. Nick Herfordt wanted to be there, too, but made a conscious decision to avoid the courtroom. The reason? Had he been there, he probably would have punched Motta in the nose. “And I’m not joking,” he’d say later.

  Herfordt had testified at length during the trial about the methods he used to pull all that incriminating information off of Garcia’s phone and computers. But Motta Jr. in response told the jury Herfordt had fabricated it all. That despite the fact Herfordt showed that after he found the information on Garcia’s phone, he later went back to the original sources, like Apple and Whitepages.com, for proof that they had the exact same information stored on their servers. Had they made that up, too?

  So rather than join the cops in the back of the courtroom, Herfordt sat at police headquarters following the verdict on Twitter. He feverishly updated his feed every few seconds, looking for the first media reports. Ryan Davis, who had testified at trial about the search of Garcia’s home, had the day off that day and likewise was tracking the verdict from afar.

  As the clerk prepared to read the verdict, Rob Hunter threw his arms around his mother and brother Jeff. Count 1 — the murder charge connected to Tom’s death, would be the telling one. Given the weight of the evidence, if Garcia was convicted of that charge, he would likely be convicted on all of them.

  In the tense courtroom, Clerk John Friend began reading the template language from the verdict handed down by the jury. “We the jury, duly impaneled and sworn to well and truly try ... do find said defendant ...”

  Rob Hunter gripped the shoulder of his mother’s gray sweater.

  “... Guilty on Count 1, murder in the first degree ...”

  Claire Hunter clasped her son’s knee.

  “Guilty of Count 2, use of a weapon to commit a felony ...”

  Rob Hunter’s chest started to heave.

  On the verdicts went, straight down the line. With every successive guilty declaration, Rob gave his mother’s shoulder a squeeze.

  Behind the Hunters, Brad Waite wiped away a tear as his wife hugged him. Tears welled in Jeff Sherman’s eyes, too. Beside him, Madison, the granddaughter Shirlee wasn’t able to pick up the day she died, also cried. When her grandmother was murdered, Madison was just 6 years old. She was now a teenager, speaking to the family’s long wait for this day.

  For his own part, Garcia showed no emotion, only resignation. As the guilty counts rolled in one after the other, he cocked his head back to the left and leaned back in his chair, his left arm dangling off the arm.

  Two rows behind him, his mother cupped a tissue in her hands, dropped her head into a full weep and leaned into her husband. Frederick lowered his chin. Seventeen years earlier, when he had packed up that old van to drive his son across the country to his first medical residency, who would have thought it would have all ended like this?

  In the back of the courtroom, Mois felt more relief than elation. But he was so happy for the families.

  Upon seeing the first guilty verdict in a Tweet from a reporter, Herfordt’s first reaction was to text his wife to tell her he loved her. With all the time he spent away from home to do this job, he considered her support monumental — not just in this case, but in every one he worked. This was a poignant moment for him and every detective who had ever worked this incredible case.

  As the judge dismissed the jury, Garcia rose from his seat. “You ready?” he asked the deputies before shuffling back to jail.

  “The son of a bitch,” Brad Waite said after watching Garcia leave the courtroom. “What I can’t get over is how do you do that to a little boy? How could you do that to Shirlee, a grandmother who cared for everyone and wouldn’t hurt anybody? To Roger Brumback as he answers the door? And Mary Brumback, the hell she went through as she fought him off. He didn’t just kill them. It was torture.”

  Claire Hunter was surrounded by reporters and golden under the glow of TV lights as she exited the court. For all those years, she had desperately wondered who killed her son. Her conclusion after watching the past weeks’ proceedings:

  “They got the right guy,” she said. “They got the right guy.”

  Minutes later, Claire gathered with the other victim families in a courthouse conference room. More than a dozen family members, representing four generations, cried and smiled and shared a bond borne out of the vile acts of one man.

  Then the door opened. Kleine and Beadle and Chief Schmaderer strode into the room. And behind them followed a procession of a dozen task force detectives, among them Mois, Herfordt and Warner.

  As soon as the Hunter and Waite families realized who had arrived, they broke into applause — a reaction that sent chills through many who were there. The long-searching families, the cops who finally cracked the case and the prosecutors who brought final justice home celebrated the verdict together.

  There were lots of hugs. Smiles. Words of thanks. Laughs. And tears — not just from the families of the victims, but from the detectives and prosecutors, too. “You kind of let it go a little bit and say, ‘OK, these families have got their answer,’ ” Warner later recalled.

  All the attention made Mois a little uncomfortable. He’d never experienced anything like this. But he’d never worked a case like this one, either. He was quiet, saying little. But he was touched by the words and hugs from the Hunter and Waite families. It was special. The hardened homicide cop, so accustomed to seeing humanity at its absolute worst, months later again got sentimental as he put into words the genuine emotions that swirled inside him at that moment.

  “I have a lot of feelings for those folks,” he said, his voice cracking. “What I do, I do for them. I don’t work for the chief. I don’t work for the mayor. I work for the Hunters. And the Waites. And the Brumbacks. And everyone else who is left behind.

  “I want to do right by these families. They’ve been through enough.”

  CHAPTER 28: EPILOGUE

  The doctor turned serial killer was wheeled into the courtroom, shoulders hunched, eyes scrunched. He looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, his beard, hair and nails unkempt. And either sleeping, feigning sleep or in some kind of catatonic state, Dr. Anthony Garcia appeared completely oblivious to the proceedings as Nebraska’s justice system decided he should die for his crimes.

  More than 10 years — 3,838 days to be exact — had passed since the day Garcia calmly walked Dundee’s quiet streets before ruthlessly knifing Tom Hunter and Shirlee Sherman. It had been 1,952 days since his return trip to dispatch Roger and Mary Brumback. But on Sept. 14, 2018, a three-judge panel finally decided the fate of Dr. Anthony J. Garcia, sentencing him to death for the quadruple killings.

  The ruling came after his newly appointed public defenders — the Mottas were out of the picture by then, as Garcia could no longer afford them, financially or otherwise — made a case for why his life should be spared.

  They conceded Garcia had murdered four innocent people. But t
hey argued there were mitigating circumstances that should spare him capital punishment: That he was never cracked up to be a doctor, pushed into the profession by his parents, and then became drunk and deranged when he realized he couldn’t keep up. Burdened by his profound failures, he came to fixate on the doctors he blamed for his troubles.

  But the judges’ panel didn’t find any legal grounds in Garcia’s sad personal story that could overcome the depravity and gravity of his crimes. The judges were unanimous in their decision to send him to Nebraska’s death row.

  Slumped in his wheelchair, Garcia seemed oblivious to it all. Not only did he continue to not talk to his attorneys, a silence he had maintained in the two years since his trial, he completely ignored efforts by his family to speak to him. “It appears Dr. Garcia is present to some degree,” one of his attorneys said at one point as he glanced over towards the zoned out Garcia.

  It would never be clear whether Garcia’s listless, lifeless appearance was simply a case of him tuning out the world or whether it was another sign of the years-long, spiraling degradation of his mental and physical capacities. Hours later when he arrived at his new home in the Nebraska penitentiary, his official prison photo showed his eyes scrunched shut, a prison staffer holding his head up for the camera.

  Garcia’s parents and brother sat just behind him during the sentencing and showed no reaction at all when the verdict was read. They had long before resigned themselves to Anthony’s fate. And they also for the first time seemed to collectively accept his guilt.

  “He was just totally sick if he committed the crime the way they said,” his father said. “He was totally mentally ill if it happened. He’s not that kind of kid. To know my son went through medical school, struggled but got through it, and then this happened. I’m shocked.”

  Garcia’s brother apologized to the families of the victims. “We hurt. We feel their hurt,” he said. “We hope somehow they find some closure.”