Angelo’s lawyers were as attentive as they could be, under the circumstances, to his physical comforts. One afternoon Gerald Chaleff appeared in the judge’s chambers to complain that Angelo’s red silk underwear had been confiscated. Although he did not see this deprivation as constituting cruel and unusual punishment, Judge George ordered the silk underwear returned to the prisoner.
Just after the new year, 1983, Judge George announced his ruling on the defense motion to dismiss or declare a mistrial because of Salerno and Finnigan’s alleged misconduct. The detectives resented the attack Chaleff and Mader had mounted against them, especially since the defense lawyers had notified the media ahead of time so as to get maximum publicity for their charges. Salerno and Finnigan did not like having their integrity questioned in the newspapers, and from that point on they tried to avoid any contact with Chaleff and Mader. On the night of the jury-view of Angeles Crest, the lawyers had asked the detectives to have dinner with them, as if Chaleff and Mader had not initiated an action potentially ruinous to the detectives’ careers, for surely they would be seriously damaged if found responsible for botching the Hillside Stranglers trial. The detectives refused the invitation, Finnigan saying, “I’m not that much of a hypocrite.”
The judge’s ruling was sweet to Salerno and Finnigan. In charging the detectives with willful misconduct, Judge George wrote, Chaleff and Mader “made the allegation recklessly, with disregard for the truth.” He castigated the lawyers for deliberately stirring up publicity for their motion, thereby endangering “the right of the prosecution—like the defense—to a fair trial free of prejudicial publicity concerning unsubstantiated charges.” Although Chaleff pointed out that information about Camden had originally been given to Buono’s previous attorneys, not the ones presiding at the trial, the judge ruled that it was not the prosecution’s fault if the defense, acting without “due diligence,” had failed to follow up on material that had been available to the defense in files since 1980, material that included Camden’s stay in the Indiana mental hospital. Nor was there any evidence that Camden had been “delusional” or “psychotic,” nor that he had spent, as alleged by the defense, “almost his entire adult life” in mental hospitals: forty-two days appeared to be the total amount of time in which he had been, voluntarily, institutionalized, and the detectives had been within reason in believing it to have been only two weeks.
The judge threw out the motion to quash the search warrant for Angelo’s house and suppress evidence found there, and he rejected as “totally unwarranted the conclusion voiced by the defense that [the detectives] perpetrated a fraud upon the court.”
When interviewed by reporters after the ruling had been issued, the judge suggested that the media ought to give as prominent coverage to the clearing of the detectives’ names as had been devoted to the smearing of them. For the most part, the press and television did this, and Salerno and Finnigan were able to feel wholly vindicated. It was after this ruling that Katherine Mader complained to the judge that Salerno and Finnigan had been smirking at her and had made obscene gestures to her in court; but since she gave as the sole source of these charges a “court-watcher,” an old man who came to court every day to doze and pass the time, the judge brushed off her complaint.
In April the prosecutors, having introduced over a thousand exhibits and called two hundred and fifty witnesses, were about ready to rest their case when they got an important break. Cheryl Burke, who had been in the Hollywood public library the night of Kimberly Martin’s murder, had testified that Bianchi had bothered her in the parking lot that night, but she had said nothing about Buono, who had stalked her in the stacks earlier that evening, frightening her into leaving the building. A couple of weeks after testifying, she happened to be at a party where a deputy attorney general, neither Boren nor Nash, was present, and he asked her what it had been like in court. Suddenly she confessed to him that she had been terrified. Not until she had gotten up on the stand did she recognize Angelo Buono as the man who had followed her around the stacks that night. “Predatory” was her word for Angelo. But she had not said anything about this in court. She had been afraid. The deputy attorney general convinced Mrs. Burke to go to Boren and Nash, and she testified again, placing Buono with Bianchi in the library that night. Her testimony, followed by that of Catherine Lorre, made what Boren and Nash thought was a powerful end to their presentation, which had taken more than a year to get through.
Ironical political changes had taken place during that year. John Van de Kamp was elected attorney general and was therefore technically in charge of a prosecution that as district attorney he had moved to drop. He kept distant from the case, however, not communicating with Boren and Nash at all, who felt oddly that they were working against the political interests of their new boss by going after Buono and that they were operating in a peculiar sort of vacuum as autonomous prosecutors. George Deukmejian had been elected governor, and the new Los Angeles County district attorney was Robert Philibosian, who had previously worked under Deukmejian in the Attorney General’s Office and had supervised Boren and Nash’s work on the Buono case. Philibosian had as one of his first moves as district attorney transferred Roger Kelly to Compton, which many observers considered the Siberia of the county for a deputy D.A. Occasionally Grogan would run into Kelly and would invariably snub him.
Now it was the defense’s turn. Boren and Nash wondered whether Chaleff and Mader would try to argue that Bianchi had acted alone or that he had had an accomplice other than Angelo. Angelo himself was privately feuding with his attorneys. He did not want to put on any defense at all and threatened to fire Chaleff and Mader. To Angelo it made no sense to try to counter the prosecution’s arguments beyond what had already been done on cross-examination. Angelo was afraid that more damaging evidence might come out the longer the case went on, and he did not want to see his lawyers recall witnesses who had already given the jury a damning portrait of his life and character. He wanted to gamble that Boren and Nash had not yet proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and leave it at that. One morning he refused to leave the holding cell in the courthouse. He had had enough, he said. Judge George had him brought into the courtroom without the jury present and talked to him, explaining that by law he had to attend and that if he insisted on staying in his cell, he would have to hear everything through a loudspeaker that would be rigged up in there.
“I ain’t comfortable in court,” Angelo said. “I heard enough.”
“But Mr. Buono,” the judge said in a voice that was at once soothing and condescending, “that big chair you sit in here in court, it’s much more comfortable than the hard bench in the holding cell, now isn’t it?”
Angelo relented. Chaleff and Mader opened their case by recalling Markust Camden.
Camden had been hitchhiking around the country—through Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Arizona—looking for a girlfriend he had lost. His life was one long improvisation without melody. In February he had started telephoning Mader and Chaleff regularly from pay phones at truck stops, hinting that if the defense would help him locate his girlfriend, he might just change his story. He might testify that he was unsure of his identification of Angelo Buono as the abductor of Judy Miller. He wanted one more chance with his girlfriend, he said, and he would do anything if Mader and Chaleff and their staff could help him get her back. When Mader, who was taping some of the calls, refused to make a deal, the conversations ended. But at the end of March, Mader located him back home in Indiana and told him that she wanted him to come out to testify again anyway, with no deals between them. Camden replied that he would shoot to death anyone who tried to approach him, or he would escape to Alaska. Mader told him that he would be found anywhere he went.
“What would happen if I didn’t come?” Camden asked.
“We’d harass you. . . . We’d harass you forever.”
“Oh, really?”
“What do you think I’d do, Markust? I’ve got a client who’s facing the gas
chamber and a lot of it is based on what you’re now saying is wrong information. You think I’m just going to give up? It’s not going to go away.”
Camden returned to California. Chaleff called him to the stand, this time in order to try to expose his mental problems to the jury, who knew nothing of them as yet.
Chaleff did a relentless, clever job on Camden, getting him to admit nervous breakdowns and brushes with the law. But Camden stuck to his original story and identification of Buono. Under Chaleff’s pressure, Camden became very angry on the stand. He felt persecuted. He felt used, abused, ridiculed. Chaleff asked why, if he had been worried about becoming a suspect back in 1977 and did not want to get involved, had he not simply kept quiet? The implication was that Salerno had somehow tricked or forced him into his story. But Camden said that he had talked then “because I didn’t figure you people would take and have that much disrespect for people’s private lives that you have to tear them down, Chaleff.”
“But you didn’t want to be involved, right?”
“I didn’t think you was going to drag me through the mill. I’m talking about any of you. State of California. Roger, Salerno, the whole damn bunch of you. Includes this man right here,” he said, pointing to the judge. Everyone laughed.
“So that we don’t have any ambiguity or unfairness,” Judge George said, “the record will reflect that I have been pointed out.”
“The whole State of California,” Camden added. “You all been driving me crazy.”
“Was it a long drive to get there for you?” Chaleff asked.
“I’m really getting off on that. Of course I understand you have to ask questions . . . but you just, you know, just ride, ride and ride and ride. Why don’t you just let it go when somebody says, ‘Yeah, I seen this person’? . . . You trying to make an ass out of me up here. You trying to make me look like I’m a damned nut or something because I had a nervous breakdown.” And then with a colorful idiom that summed up his defense of his story in spite of his mental problems, Camden concluded: “My dog had a cold, by God, but she had pups! Apparently something wasn’t interrupting her.”
Boren and Nash were pleased with Camden’s performance. He had shown more mental toughness than they could have hoped for in standing up to Chaleff’s attacks.
Chaleff also tried to impugn Catherine Lorre’s testimony by suggesting that she had lied earlier by saying that she had been returning home from a class at the USC medical school when Buono and Bianchi had stopped her. The idea was that if she had lied about being a medical student, which apparently she had, then she was lying or could easily be lying about meeting Buono and Bianchi. But since her story fit perfectly with Bianchi’s version of the incident, Boren and Nash did not feel that Chaleff had inflicted any serious damage on her credibility.
In a year and a half, many bizarre and shocking things had occurred in the courtroom. Much of the evidence was of an almost unendurable gruesomeness, especially the color photographs of the victim’s bodies. A set of these had been glued onto a piece of plasterboard the size of a double bed which was kept, along with the model of Angelo’s house, in the judge’s chambers because of its size and brought out when needed. The judge turned the photographs to the wall most of the time, but often, as when a reporter would interview him and question whether the length and expense of the trial were really worthwhile, he would turn the board around and, perhaps pointing to Jane King’s maggot-eaten face or the bums on Lauren Wagner’s hands, let the evidence speak eloquently for itself. It was disquieting to hear the most violent and obscene words in the language bandied about in the decorous setting of the courtroom by witnesses and lawyers alike: Angelo’s fondness for the word “cunt,” for instance, was much emphasized. But nothing quite equaled in its combination of repulsiveness and absurdity what Michael Nash would come to call Chaleff’s Great Ant Experiment. That the· defense planned to show that the sticky substance found on Lauren Wagner’s breast with ants crawling through it could not have been left there by the ants or by either Angelo Buono or Kenneth Bianchi. A third-man theory was in the works.
Boren, Nash, and Tulleners spent the next few evenings studying what the laboratory had discovered about the sticky substance, and they read up furiously on ants. They also discussed ant behavior with an ant expert from the County Museum of Natural History. They guessed that the defense would try to show that the sticky substance was saliva and that it had come from a blood type B secretor. Both Angelo and Kenny were type AB nonsecretors. The conclusion would be drawn that Bianchi had acted with a third, unidentified man, not with Angelo.
But the prosecution team could not see how the defense could prove that the sticky substance was in fact saliva, the premise of their probable argument. It had not been proved to be saliva, and moreover, saliva was not sticky when it dried. Was it possible that the substance had been deposited by the ants or that the ants, feeding on the breast, manufactured or synthesized the substance in the process of, say, digestion? How and what did ants eat, and were they fastidious or sloppy in their dining habits? These and other aspects of ant lore Boren, Nash, and Tulleners found themselves spending hours researching, wondering whether the case had finally driven everyone into madness.
On July 7, Chaleff began elucidating his Great Ant Experiment, equipping himself with an elaborate chart and enlarged photographs of Lauren Wagner’s breast with the ants marching over it. He summoned the Berkeley insect professor to the stand, eliciting credentials: Ph.D., chairman of the department, associate dean of the Graduate Division, published ninety papers of which two were about ants, expert on the carpenter ant, had testified before the Structural Pest Control Board of the State of California at least fifteen times. The professor testified that last May, at the request of the defense, he had gone to the Lauren Wagner body site on Cliff Drive and had dug up ants. (Judge George interrupted at this point to clarify that the digging had taken place only two months earlier, five and a half years after the murder.) The species was the Argentine invader ant, the professor said. No other kinds of ants were found at the spot. He and his graduate assistant had transported the ants back to Berkeley in a container, feeding them honey to keep them alive. At the university they took a hundred of the ants, separated their abdomens, put the heads and thoraxes in one maceration tube and the abdomens in another tube, and ground them up with a macerator.
The sticky substance on Lauren Wagner’s breast had been found to contain amylase, an enzyme secreted with saliva and other substances, that indicated a blood type B secretor. The macerated Argentine invader ants had contained no amylase, the professor testified. Therefore, Chaleff concluded, the ants on Lauren Wagner’s breast had not deposited the amylase, and the sticky substance, presumably saliva, had been left there by someone other than Buono or Bianchi who had a different blood type.
But Roger Boren, who cross-examined the professor, already knew that the ant experiment was as scientifically flawed as it was ludicrous. To begin with, the professor had gotten the wrong ants! The ants on the breast in the photograph had been positively identified as fire ants, not Argentine invader ants, by the expert at the county museum. Evidently the Argentine invaders, more successful than their human cousins had been against the British in the Malvinas/Falklands campaign, had driven out the fire ants since 1977. Furthermore, all ants secreted amylase, whether the Berkeley professor had found any or not. It was likely that the fire ants had been feeding on the nipple of the breast and had drooled amylase. The sticky substance itself could just as likely have been brought there from somewhere else by the ants, who might have enjoyed an earlier meal that day.
Roger Boren asked the professor whether the ants on the breast had been coming or going. The professor replied:
“Sometimes it’s very difficult to tell whether they’re coming or going because they are coming and going all along the trail.” There was also, he said, the problem of “deviate” ants, who may be just wandering around aimlessly. But on the whole, ants are “coming
and going and there is some going and they are bumping into each other.”
It wasn’t easy for Boren to keep a straight face at this. He asked the professor whether ants ate human flesh. The professor said that he had “never seen anything in the literature to indicate that they eat human flesh.” Carpenter ants, he said, alluding to his specialty, fed off the anuses of aphids.
As any homicide detective knew, ants certainly did feed off human flesh: they did not crawl over corpses out of mere morbid curiosity. Boren now brought in his own expert, the entomologist from the County Museum, who established that the ants experimented with were the wrong ants, that ants do eat human flesh, that they secrete amylase, and that they drool.
“When ants with salivary glands eat something, let’s say a fatty substance, for example, do they eat that just as other animals . . . might eat? They chew?”
“Yes. They have mandibles and they chew just like we do.”
“Would their saliva be left in the same way, say, as a cat or a human might eat?”
“Yes. In proportion to their size, they probably drool at least as much as we do.”
Boren was satisfied that he had demolished the ant experiment. It had been amusing in its way, but it had been useless and, as Boren pointed out to the jury, it had cost at least ten thousand dollars in experts’ fees and wasted a great deal of court time.
Hillside Stranglers Page 39