Chapter 7
According to his report, Jensen had turned Foster loose after the initial meeting. He didn’t have any basis to hold him and he didn’t have any information that an African-American man might be involved other than what the neighbor had said. And he didn’t have a photographic ID yet of the white man; the neighbors were still looking at mug shots. Then he received a call from one of the forensic techs in the Identification Bureau, or the I Bureau as was commonly called. They were still trying to identify all the prints they had lifted, but one of the beer cans in the victim’s kitchen had Foster’s fingerprint on it. And it was the same brand of beer as the cans that were near Lisa Farrow’s body, at least one of which it appeared had been filled with flammable fluid and poured on the victim in an attempt to destroy evidence. And they picked up another fingerprint from the kitchen that attached to a mug shot that both neighbors identified as the white man with Foster. Only the name in the report was Richard Sample, also known, based on his rap sheet, as “Rick.” Jamison suppressed his confusion about who Rick Sample was and kept reading.
Immediately Jensen had deputies pick Foster up, and this time there was no mistaking the circumstances. Gage and Cleary were waiting with Jensen when Foster was brought directly to a sheriff’s department interrogation room, but only after Jensen had let him sit in a holding cell for two hours. Jamison had used the same tactic a number of times, telling the deputy not to remove the cuffs and letting the suspect think about his situation before beginning the interrogation.
Guys like Foster who had been to prison wouldn’t like to cooperate with cops, even if they had nothing to do with a crime. But this was different. And it wouldn’t be hard for even his booze- and drug-addled mind to understand that murder wasn’t a short stay in prison. He had been told enough about the murder of Farrow to realize that whoever did it was probably looking at the death penalty.
Jensen would know that was a lot for a man like Foster to think about; he would want those thoughts to tenderize Foster a bit before he asked the first question.
The transcript of the interview was short. Foster said he had nothing to do with the crime, and he didn’t know how his prints got on the beer can, and he didn’t know any Rick. He offered that he frequently shared beers with men at the park and some of them were white. His print could have gotten on the beer can when he shared it. How the beer ended up in Lisa Farrow’s house he had no idea. He said he had been loaded that day on a combination of cocaine and meth, a “speedball.” He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. Maybe he had shared a beer with the person they were looking for and maybe he hadn’t, but he said he “didn’t kill no woman” and “asking him over and over wasn’t going to change that.”
Jensen and Gage stopped the interrogation but made it clear that whoever cooperated first in the case was the one who was going to get the deal. The reason they stopped the questioning was clear to Jamison. He didn’t need to be in that interrogation room to know that either Jensen or Gage had realized that Foster was very close to asserting his Miranda rights and telling them that he didn’t want to talk anymore. They had weighed the situation and decided that Foster needed a little more tenderizing. Jensen had deputies take Foster back to the jail and put a hold on him for suspicion of violation of Penal Code 187, murder.
The next report in Foster’s file was two days later, in the late afternoon. Jensen, Bill Gage, and Jonathon Cleary were all there, and the interrogation transcript made it very clear that Gage had laid it on heavy with Foster.
Apparently, the tenderizing worked. At first Foster again denied having anything to do with the murder. Now he claimed that even though he “was loaded” that day, he had a hazy memory of sharing some of his beer with a “white guy.” The description was general, twenty-five to thirty-or-so years of age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger, with brownish hair, and about five feet eight inches and maybe 175 or 180 pounds. Foster claimed his memory was that “the guy was rough-looking, like he had a job that involved dirty work or something.” Other than that he didn’t remember anything and claimed he had never seen the “white boy” before and didn’t know his name.
It was at that point that Gage pointed out that the neighbor had now positively identified him as the black man who had gone to Lisa Farrow’s house on the day of the murder and that he was with a white man. Gage reminded Foster that they had his print on one of the beer cans and that was enough right there to charge him with murder, which he would do “unless I hear something that makes me believe you weren’t the one.”
Jamison could visualize a younger Bill Gage leaning over a seated Foster, Gage’s voice rumbling as he pushed his thick finger into Foster’s chest. According to the transcript, Gage put a picture in front of Foster and asked if this was the man who was with him, and told Foster, “I’ve had enough of your bullshit. You need to stop your lying unless you want a cell right next to this asshole.”
The next thing that happened jumped right off the aging pages of the interrogation transcript. Foster just said, “That neighbor says that’s him, the white boy she says was with me? She picked him too?” Gage didn’t answer.
Jamison had done numerous interrogations and he could lift the silence off the page, imagining the wheels turning around in Foster’s mind as he began to shrivel in his chair before answering, “That’s who you want? That’s what you want to hear?”
Gage had immediately responded, “Don’t feed me any crap about ‘what I want to hear.’ I want to know is this the man who killed Lisa Farrow?” Jamison didn’t need the sound from a tape recording to hear in his mind the bite to the words coming out of Gage’s mouth. There was no question that Gage’s voice carried a question wrapped in an unstated threat if Foster didn’t cooperate.
Foster replied, “I didn’t see him do it, man. I ran out of the house. That dude’s crazy. He was like an animal. I told you, man, I don’t know his name. What the fuck do you want me to say?”
Jamison could visualize Gage pushing his chest out and pointing his finger in Foster’s face as he said, “You think we’d have this picture if we didn’t know who he was, Clarence? Now I want answers and you need to give them to me. You got it? Let me hear them now. You know the name, now give it up. You want to protect this guy then you go down with him.”
“But I told you, man, I don’t know his name and I didn’t kill no woman.”
Jensen cut into the interrogation like a razor blade. “Bullshit and more bullshit. This is a waste of time. Let me book him and then they can share a cell together. How’s that sound, Clarence? Maybe you want to share a cell with this guy, and then you two can be bunkmates at San Quentin when they get the gas chamber ready.”
The fear from Foster seeped out of the dry ink on the reports as he began to blubber. “Maybe I heard guys call him Rick. I think so, I don’t remember. I told you I was high. Man, why’re you in my face? Okay, that’s him. There, I said that was him. You don’t need to keep pushing his picture in my face. He’s just a white guy that I seen around.”
The transcript showed Gage then said, “Okay, Clarence. No more of your shit and lack of memory. Right now, I want it all right now, and you better not hold back anymore. You understand?”
Jamison paused in his reading. That sounded like Bill Gage in full rant. He had seen it before but this was Bill Gage almost thirty years ago. He was an imposing man now but back then it must have been like a snorting bull right in Foster’s face.
Jamison hadn’t read enough of the reports to know the forensic details, but Gage and Jensen clearly were convinced that the photograph they had was of the white man in that kitchen and Foster had just verified it. Whatever Foster had been thinking about in the several days between interrogations, he had apparently made the decision to cooperate and regain his memory. Foster didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that whoever did this crime was somebody the system was going to swallow whole. And Foster was clearly no genius.
According to Foster
he had been drinking at his mother’s house and run out of beer. He walked over to the liquor store and bought two six-packs of Wild Horse Lager.
Jamison wrinkled his nose at the thought. Wild Horse Lager was only slightly above carbonated horse piss, at least that’s what he recalled from college when somebody brought over a six-pack. The basic attraction was low cost and high alcohol content. It would definitely get you there quick, as long as “there” was a drunken stupor. Usually a can of this stuff was drunk out of a paper bag to avoid embarrassment. At least now Jamison had a picture in his mind of Foster. He wasn’t just a drunk, he was a cheap drunk. No big surprise there.
Foster said he was walking out of the liquor store when “this white guy” was getting out of his truck. Foster knew him from “seeing him around” and they had been drinking buddies on more than one occasion when they and the rest of their drinking crew had to pool their money to achieve their daily alcohol level requirement. The guy had offered Foster a ride and he agreed. Foster kept claiming that he didn’t know the guy’s name, but he thought he had heard him called “Rick.” That was all he knew. At least that’s what he said.
Foster claimed they opened their first beer before Rick pulled his truck out of the liquor store parking lot. Rick drained part of his can of Wild Horse and then refilled it from a whiskey flask.
Instead of driving Foster to his mother’s house, Rick said they should go over to the home of a woman he knew. When Rick banged on the screen, Lisa Farrow opened the door. Apparently, she knew Rick because he walked right in and Foster just followed him into the kitchen.
At that point, Foster claimed he didn’t remember much of what happened. They started drinking beer and then he left because he had “things to do.” Then the transcript stopped. There was a gap in time because Gage had Foster taken back to his holding cell. About twenty minutes later, according to the transcript, Jensen said that for the record they had taken a break and Foster had been put back in the holding cell.
There was no explanation for the break, but Jamison could easily infer that Gage and Jensen wanted to talk about how to push Foster into providing more details that they evidently thought he had. That his assumption was correct was borne out by the rest of the transcript.
Gage wasn’t mincing any words. Jamison could almost feel the whiplash of Gage’s tone of voice cracking off the transcript pages. “Now listen to me, Foster. This asshole that you say you know only as Rick murdered this woman. Her name was Lisa Farrow and he assaulted her first and then he burned her. Your prints were on a beer can in the kitchen and you were there with him. You admitted you were there and we have a witness that puts you there.
“So now is the time for you to choose which side you want to be on. You either start telling us what happened or I’m going to wash my hands of you and you’re going to be charged with murder, just like Rick. Do you understand me, Clarence? Is this real clear to you? Because I’m tired of your bullshit and your ‘hazy memory.’ It should be obvious even to you that we know who he is or we wouldn’t have his picture. You already identified him—you’ve already given him up. We have his prints. We know it’s Rick Harker. So you better either get very specific about what happened or you can figure out real quick how the rest of this is going down on you like shit dropping on a bug in the barn—and you’re the bug.”
Jamison looked away from the aging paper for a moment, wondering how Gage and Jensen had moved from Rick Sample, whose prints were in the house, to Rick Harker, but he knew that would come out in the reports. And the forensic reports had shown that Harker’s prints had also been found at the crime scene, so it was clear Harker had been in the house where Lisa Farrow died. He continued reading.
“Now you’ve had time to think. I’m out of patience. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you except for what you can give me, and if you can’t give me anything then it’s your sorry ass. What’s it going to be, Clarence?”
While Jamison couldn’t see the sweat that must have been coming out of Foster’s pores, he could almost smell the sour stink that spurts out when a man breaks. He had smelled it a number of times and the odor had no color or ethnicity. It was just the smell that came with submission and the collapse of resistance when a man realized that he was cornered, and all his choices were gone. Clarence Foster must have, at that moment, felt his bladder pushing down and his sphincter tightening as he made his choice and let it all out like air hissing from a deflating tire, slow and steady.
The rest of Foster’s statement read like a horror story. “All right, it was like I told you, man, all I know is his name’s Rick. We went to this Lisa’s house because Rick wanted to. I didn’t see no harm in it. He acted like she would be okay with it. She let us in and that Rick guy sat down in the kitchen. I was just standin’ there, man. Just lookin’. Then Rick, he starts comin’ on to her, telling her to let him have some. You know what I mean? And she wasn’t havin’ nothin’ to do with it. She told him to leave her alone, that she didn’t want him touching her. I told him to let it go and we should leave but he wouldn’t do it.
“She kept tellin’ him to leave her be, but he started getting rough and then he hit her. Man, you shouldn’t hit no woman. I don’t like that shit at all. I never hit no woman just ‘cause she said no. That ain’t right, man. That ain’t right.
“Then Rick, he started tellin’ her that he brought beer and the two of them should party. He grabbed her and she pulled away and that’s when he hit her again. She grabbed a pan from the sink and held it in front of her. Said she would hit him with it. Then he said for her to shut the fuck up or he was gonna kill her. I mean he scared the shit out of me.
“I tried to stop him but that guy’s bigger than me and I was drunk, and then he hit her again. I know I shoulda stayed and helped her but I was scared. That dude was crazy. I ran, man. I just ran. I don’t know what happened after that. If he killed her, I didn’t see it and that’s the God’s honest truth, man. I didn’t kill no woman. I ran. I know that ain’t right and I’m ashamed that I ran, but I did. I’ll testify to it, but I didn’t kill no woman and that’s the God’s honest truth.” Foster showed them the scrapes on his hand and claimed he’d gotten them in the struggle to stop Rick.
Jensen asked the next questions to fill in the gaps but there wasn’t much. All Foster said was that he had run out of the house and woke up the next day in the park. He went to his mother’s house after that and he hadn’t seen Rick since. He admitted he had heard about the murder of Lisa Farrow but said he was scared of Rick and it wasn’t his doing. He was sorry he ran but he wasn’t a murderer. Rick did it all.
There were other reports of interviews with Foster, but the story didn’t change. Jamison scanned the notes in Foster’s trial file that were written by Gage and by who Jamison assumed to be Cleary as they prepped for trial. He would read those more carefully later but for now he pretty much had a picture of the case. Rick Harker was convicted because his fingerprints were at the scene, there was an eyewitness neighbor who placed him at the scene, and there was the testimony of Clarence Foster. And then there must have been an identification by Lisa Farrow’s daughter, Christine.
Jamison closed the Foster file, visualizing how it all must have gone down. After a jury heard the brutal manner in which Lisa Farrow had been killed and then heard Clarence Foster, the identification of Rick Harker by little Christine Farrow must have rung in that courtroom like church bells at a funeral. The jury gave Harker the death penalty. Matt Jamison had no doubt that Harker deserved it and he gritted his teeth that a weak judge had deprived Lisa Farrow of that final justice.
As for Harker’s claim that Foster had gone back on his identification, Jamison wasn’t concerned. He could already tell that Foster was a coward and a sniveler. Inside a prison with Harker, it wasn’t hard to figure out which side Foster would pick.
But Christine Farrow was another matter. She was innocent and her life had been ruined from its very beginning. Christine Farrow was still being h
aunted by the memory of that day, a memory no child should have to live with. And worse, somehow that memory had turned into subconscious guilt over the bottom-dweller that had murdered her mother.
Jamison could hear the breath coming out of him as he contemplated the raw injustice of it all. Rick Harker had ruined lives. He was still ruining lives. And the system was letting him do it. Even his name sounded like something you’d cough up and spit out.
Jamison picked up Christine Farrow’s trial file. Now he was going to have to do further damage to this fragile young woman. He was going to have to cross-examine her and he was going to have to inflict more pain on her. There was no choice. Whatever made Christine Farrow write that declaration recanting her identification of Rick Harker, Jamison knew in his heart it was simply more emotional wreckage from what Harker had done. He could feel his dislike for Harker building by the moment as he thumbed open Christine’s trial file. He had to start somewhere.
Chapter 8
For the next twenty minutes, Jamison scanned the pages of reports that began with Jensen’s interview with Christine Farrow. As he read the reports he had a growing sense of issues that were created by the declaration from the adult the child had become. And he had been rereading the reports that he knew were going to be the focus of the attack on Harker’s conviction.
His concentration was interrupted when his investigator Bill O’Hara walked in, the smell of the cigars he smoked drifting ahead of him. As Jamison had requested, he had gone to the sheriff’s office to see what they still had on the Harker case. O’Hara’s skin was the color of chocolate and his closely cut hair was beginning to show strands of gray. While he hated for anyone to notice, he had stopped trying to control the bulge that was once a flat stomach. But everyone knew that it would be a serious error of judgment to make the observation that he was showing the years a bit. O’Hara glanced at the stack of boxes, his rumbling voice grinding out, “That it?”
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