Twisted Justice

by Diane Capri

  “Do you know me?” Newton asked her, with a smile and a wink to the jury. Several of them smiled back.

  “Yes. We were married for five years,” she managed to answer, in a small, trembling voice. Without the microphone on the witness stand, no one would have heard her.

  “Do we have any children?” he asked, turning around to look at his youngest son, sitting with his other four sons in the first row of the galley behind his chair.

  “Yes. Nelson, Junior. He’s seven.”

  “Now, Jennifer,” he said gently, “I’m sorry to have to ask you this, honey, but please tell the jury why we divorced.”

  I remembered the divorce and it hadn’t been friendly. He must have muscled her to get her here at all. I was as curious as everyone else as to what she would say.

  She looked down at her hands and then out toward her son. Her eyes filled up, making them look even more like doe eyes than before.

  “You know the answer to that, Nelson. You fell in love with another woman.”

  And then she did start to cry. Not quietly, either. Great noisy sobs. Newton said he had no further questions and we took a recess so she could pull herself together for cross.

  Nelson had managed to pull the jury’s heartstrings and establish that he had been a husband and was a father. He’d also proved he was unfaithful to this young, attractive wife. Would the jury think those facts proved he wasn’t gay?

  When we returned, after Tremain got up and got himself adjusted, he said he would have to ask Mrs. Newton some embarrassing questions that he didn’t think children should hear. He asked me to have Mr. Newton’s children removed from the courtroom and offered to have one of his paralegals stay with them out in the hall.

  I granted the request and when the boys were safely out of earshot, Tremain began his cross examination.

  “Mrs. Newton, how many times was Mr. Newton married before he married you?”

  “Three.”

  “Was Mr. Newton married when the two of you started your affair?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, was Mr. Newton having an affair when the two of you were married?”

  “Yes.” She looked like she might start to bawl again, but Tremain waited until she blotted the tears from her eyes. “Mrs. Newton, how tall are you?”

  “Five seven.”

  “And how much do you weigh?”

  “About a hundred and ten.”

  “Have you always worn your hair short like that?”

  A tentative hand reached up and patted her ultra-short hairstyle similar to mine.

  “Nelson asked me to cut it short and I just did it for him.” She cupped her hand around the nape of her neck where the hair dipped to a point.

  “Now, Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to get personal with you and I certainly don’t mean to be offensive. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Her chin began to quiver again, but she said, “Yes,” in a tiny, little voice. She returned to twisting the now soggy tissue.

  “Ma’am, after you became pregnant with your son, did your husband ever make love to you again?”

  This started her to bawling again in earnest. She never answered.

  Tremain looked at her pointedly for a few moments and then said, “Please let the record reflect that the witness burst into tears and was unable to answer the question.”

  Since the court reporter takes down every word said in the courtroom, his words were automatically recorded. He’d repeated the request for emphasis, in case the jury missed the point.

  Then, he turned and went back to counsel table and sat down. From there, Tremain said he didn’t have any more questions and I let the fourth Mrs. Newton go. We could hear her caterwauling in the hall all the way to the elevator.

  The jury frowned at Tremain. Jennifer Newton had no doubt reminded them of their daughters and granddaughters. I doubted Tremain’s theory had reached any of the jurors.

  Newton called his third wife to the stand. She was sworn and seated.

  Belinda Newton Phillips was a physical copy of Jennifer Newton, but more flamboyantly so. She dressed to make a statement. About ten years older than Jennifer and a hundred years more sophisticated. This woman probably hadn’t cried since the doctor spanked her at birth. I, for one, was relieved that we’d be spared the waterworks this time.

  “Tell us your name, please.” Nelson, too, was less solicitous of her.

  “Belinda Johnson Newton Phillips,” she said, making sure the jury heard the full import of her impressive Tampa pedigree. Both the Johnsons and the Phillips’ were long-time, wealthy citrus families. Every juror was probably familiar with the names.

  “Mrs. Phillips, tell the jury how you know me.”

  “Unfortunately, when I was young and rebellious, we were married for a short time.” Her hauteur was off-putting.

  “It’s obvious you don’t like me, Mrs. Phillips. Tell the jury why you’ve come here to testify today on my behalf.”

  “Because, to my everlasting regret, I allowed you to father one of my children.” She smiled at another fair-haired boy who, even though he was very obese, bore an obvious familial relationship to Nelson and herself. “I don’t want Johnson’s life tarnished any more than it has to be by the fact that you’re his father. There is no question in my mind that you are not gay. That’s all I came here to say.”

  Newton quit while he had a chance of being ahead, and sat down.

  Tremain rose to face the fierce third Mrs. Newton. “How do you do, Mrs. Phillips?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that she’d like to give Tremain a sound thrashing, either for making her appearance on behalf of Newton necessary, or for embarrassing her son by making a public spectacle of his father. Hard to tell which.

  “Mrs. Phillips, I take it Mr. Newton wasn’t much of a husband to you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Two years.”

  “And why did you divorce?”

  She looked at Tremain, then at Newton and finally, at her son. “Because Nelson didn’t love me. He never had. And I deserved someone who loved me. So, I left him.”

  “Nothing further.”

  We all waited while Mrs. Phillips and Johnson left the room together. She exited as regally as she had entered and left behind uncontested testimony that Nelson Newton was not gay. It was the first time the statement had been made on the record in the trial and I wondered just exactly how Tremain would rebut it.

  Only contested questions of fact would go to the jury. If, at the end of the trial, the only evidence on Newton’s sexual preference was the third Mrs. Newton’s testimony, I’d be obligated to direct a verdict for the plaintiff. Meaning Newton would win and Tremain would lose. I didn’t expect Tremain to let that happen.

  Newton next called the second Mrs. Newton, and I was beginning to question his sanity if not his trial tactics. The last two witnesses proved he lived with women and fathered children, but they also shed doubt on his sexual preferences and made him look like a cad. He had to prove The Review had published a false statement about him, and he’d made some progress. In his shoes, I’d have stopped while I was ahead. But he had a foolish plan and he intended to follow it, regardless of what happened.

  That, I understood. I was doing the same thing, wasn’t I?

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 1:00 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  MRS. ALICE NEWTON WAS closer to Newton’s age, but she, too, was a physical duplicate body type to the third and fourth Mrs. Newtons. That is, her physique was more that of a young man than a mature woman. She was tastefully attired, but not expensively so. She wore gloves and a hat. She was probably a sustaining member of the junior league, active in her church and a member of the Tampa Garden Club. She looked the part.

  Just as he had with his other two exes, Newton began by asking her how they were acquainted. B
y now, we all knew what was coming. “I was once your wife,” she said, with precision, and more than a little embarrassment.

  “How many children did we have together, Alice?”

  “Two boys, Matthew and Samuel,” and she smiled for the first time at her two sons. Both were short and had facial features more resembling Newton himself.

  “How long were we married?”

  “Seven years.”

  “And why did we divorce?”

  She looked thoughtful, and this was the first time I appreciated the true motives Newton had for keeping his sons in the courtroom. She didn’t want to hurt her children, any more than the third and fourth Mrs. Newtons had. But this woman seemed genuinely at peace with her past.

  “Mrs. Newton, please tell the jury why we divorced.”

  “I was young,” she said. “I got lonely. I didn’t understand why you had to work all the time. And I wanted you to spend more time with your sons. Divorcing was a foolish thing for me to have done and I’ve regretted it for years.”

  Newton wiped a crocodile tear from his eye and thanked the witness. Before he sat down, he went over to his sons and touched each of them on the shoulder. Alice Newton sat straight and tall in the witness box.

  Tremain said “No questions, your Honor,” from his seat, so we were spared the peacock routine this time.

  Newton declined to call the first Mrs., thank you God, and that concluded the day’s trial events. I couldn’t help thinking that Newton had made progress today and Tremain needed to have at least one or two rabbits in his hat.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 1:05 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  AFTER TRIAL RECESSED FOR the day, I planned to interview the general’s daughter, Robbie Andrews. But before I did, I went back to the ancient computer in my chambers and signed on to the Internet.

  Robbie Andrews is a licensed psychologist. A few years ago, she started a revolutionary online therapy service, which I planned to check out.

  The same people who had been writing to newspaper columnists for free advice seemed willing to pay money to write to an online therapist. Anonymous psychotherapy is a concept that would have Freud turning in his grave, but I had heard Robbie lecture about how popular online therapy was and how it really delivered a valuable service to those who would not seek therapy if they had to reveal their identities in public.

  What I suspected she meant was that her clients could receive online therapy without making an appointment with a therapist or payment by their employer sponsored health insurance plan.

  Anyway, I’d never looked for Robbie’s Internet column because I’d never been interested. Now I was. She’d told Ben Hathaway that she was working at the time her father was killed and she used her online therapy business to prove it. To test her alibi, I needed to understand her business.

  The police file interview notes said Robbie had offered Ben a look at her computer logs to prove she had been engaged in a therapy session on Saturday at five-thirty in the morning, the estimated time her father was killed. Exact times of death are impossible to establish without an eye-witness, but the police were going with the estimate. An electronic alibi. What next?

  To be fair, the session she’d claimed to be involved in had lasted the conventional fifty minutes, twenty minutes before and after the murder. How convenient.

  Robbie wasn’t the only one with an alibi for the exact time of the murder. I just wanted to investigate someone other than George and it was easy to start with my computer. If I could find a way to discredit her alibi, then Drake would have to consider her a viable suspect. Especially if her false alibi was disclosed to Frank Bennett, the reporter.

  “Live by the press, die by the press, Drake,” I said.

  Robbie’s online service was called Ask Dr. Andrews. I’d heard her say it was a blatant attempt to appear at the beginning of the advertising alphabet, but savvy marketing skills are no crime. Without them, all businesses would die.

  It took me several minutes to find the site. I marveled once again that anyone could find anything on the information super-highway. There are millions of web sites and the search engines are far from perfect. Nevertheless, after a few tries, I found Robbie’s site and several other therapy services, too. I decided to browse the others first, to gain familiarity with this odd concept.

  Some of the services were exactly like the Ann Landers or Dear Abby newspaper columns. They were open to the public and consisted of a letter of general interest followed by a no nonsense piece of advice. Easy answers are often the best, but hardest to implement. Without continuous support, these services wouldn’t be very helpful.

  Kate would disagree. She’s told me many times that a difference in perception creates a shift in reality. Perhaps, for their clients, these services provided such a useful shift.

  Another type of online therapy was a fee-for-service arrangement where the client wrote a confidential, encrypted problem of two hundred words or less and waited twenty-four to forty-eight hours for a two-hundred word response. The client paid a flat fee by credit card, in advance, and was then guaranteed a timely reply. I guessed that these sites must have assigned some kind of automatic date code when the questions were submitted and when the responses were returned.

  These services were confidential, unless you could decrypt them, which I couldn’t do. Typical problems were probably those for which the type of service was advertised. Management concerns, workers compensation issues and substance abuse claims seemed to be the gamut of choices. Each service advertised a specialist for every need on staff.

  I’d had no idea there were so many Internet psychotherapy choices. Maybe Kate should go online. Her particular brand of journal therapy wouldn’t be out of place and might even be very lucrative. I wondered if insurance companies would pay for it.

  Ask Dr. Andrews seemed to be a combination of the other types of services. She had a regular advice column that was new every day. The site also offered personal advice through an encrypted service.

  Like the other sites, Ask Dr. Andrews described the free services offered, as well as payment arrangements for those services Robbie charged for. Ask Dr. Andrews appeared to be unique because the confidential personal sessions were designed to be continuous therapy, much like the conventional type.

  She even offered real time sessions, which must have been done through some kind of instant messaging technology. At the courthouse, we had silent big brother technology installed on our computers that recorded all instant message sessions to prevent unauthorized uses.

  Robbie’s site would have something similar. Otherwise, she’d violate the medical record statutes that required psychologists and other medical providers to keep contemporaneous records of medical treatment.

  Yet, I’d seen no reference in the police file to hard-copy confirmation of any instant messaging session at the time of General Andrews’s murder. I added this to my list of unanswered questions.

  Robbie’s web page actually had a clever design and I wondered if Robbie had done it herself or if she’d had a professional designer. Not that it mattered, except the professionalism of the site suggested she was serious about the business.

  Robbie’s credentials were prominently displayed, including her licensure in Colorado and Florida and her length of experience: fifteen years. She was the “pioneer” in the field and “devoted herself exclusively” to online therapy.

  After my brief virtual tour of her competitors, I now breezed quickly through the sample questions and responses from the therapist, and a list of the types of common problems for which Robbie provided therapy.

  Unlike the other services, she was willing to accept patients with depression, anxiety, relationship problems, sexual orientation issues and antisocial behavior.

  The whole idea was a little scary, really. How could Dr. Andrews possibly evaluate antisocial behavior if she couldn’t see the client? The liability issues must be t
ough to overcome. Maybe she’d been sued over this, but if she was, I hadn’t heard about it, and it’s impossible to keep a secret in Tampa. I made a note to check for lawsuits against Robbie Andrews.

  I looked at Dr. Andrews’s columns for the past few weeks.

  They contained the usual human hassles that could be found in the agony columns of most newspapers. The letters disguised the names of the supplicants and reflected cute, anonymous signatures such as Torn in Temple Terrace or Curious Caretaker.

  There were more than a few letters about cheating spouses, wedding etiquette in the age of divorce and multiple families, and so on. The column had a search feature that would allow readers to search for common questions. Just for something to look for, I typed in suicide.

  Quite a few letters came up. Most were from anguished family and friends of suicides. Teenaged boys seemed to have killed themselves more than other groups. The smallest group of suicides were children under the age of ten, thank God.

  Almost universally, the survivors of suicide were deeply troubled over why they hadn’t anticipated the suicide. Dr. Andrews’s advice was along the lines of forgiving themselves and recognizing that the suicide was brought on by mental health problems like anxiety and depression. Robbie wrote often that once someone determined to kill himself, prevention was almost impossible. I wondered if such platitudes, though true, comforted the survivors.

  One of the letters was a little more unusual. The writer asked whether he should feel guilty about killing his boss and making it appear to be a suicide. He’d done it years before and had gotten away with the murder. Now that the writer suffered from a fatal illness, he wanted to confess his crime to “get right with God.”

  Dr. Andrews advised him that long kept secrets should go with him to his grave and he should ask forgiveness when he arrived wherever he was going. Since the death was so many years ago, she said, it would serve no purpose to bring it back up to the family now.