Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  The prosecutor asked DX to describe the relationship between Mr. Cochrane and Professor Jones.

  “They was getting to be good friends. They washed each other’s feet, like I said. And they went fishin’ out on the river and walking out in the Shawnee National Forest. The last time I went along too. Fishin’. There wasn’t no trouble.”

  “Could you tell us what happened on Professor Jones’s last visit?”

  “He was in pretty bad shape when he come down here on Thursday. He couldn’t hardly walk. His girlfriend had gone off to Mexico with another man and …”

  Stella objected. “Hearsay.”

  “Sustained.

  “He was pretty broken up about it …”

  Stella objected again. “Hearsay.”

  The judge told DX to stick to what he’d observed himself and not to say anything about what he’d heard from others. “Mrs. Rose from the Naqada Inn called Earl, and Earl went over there, and then he come and got me and we went over to the Rose where he was. Professor Jones. A lot of women from the church come over too, to pray over him. Mawmaw Tucker come. Everybody prayed over him real hard and he got to feelin’ better. Next day we went fishin’, him and Earl and me, and Professor Jones caught a real nice blue cat.

  “At supper that night Sally, my wife, fried up some cat fillets, or maybe it was sauger, and afterwards Jackson—Professor Jones —touched the snake when Earl was holding it. He put his hand right around it and didn’t want to let go. Earl asked him did he want to hold it and he said no, not that night.”

  The prosecutor drew out the story till the judge told him to move on.

  “Can you describe what happened the following night?”

  The prosecutor led DX through an explanation of a “brush arbor” and the “homecoming” gathering, which was attended by people coming all the way from West Virginia to East Tennessee. Probably two hundred people.

  “We sang some hymns and then Earl preached a while and then we sang some more, and Professor Jones, he was wailing pretty good on his mouth harp, and then Punkin Bates preached, and then some of the men got covered by the Spirit and started going to the serpent boxes, and Professor Jones, he come up to Earl and wanted to handle my two-headed snake, and Earl gave it to him, and then after a minute he got bit, and Earl and me come to him right away and asked him did he want medical attention, and he said no he didn’t. We got him back to Earl’s and then gathered around to pray for him.”

  “You didn’t call an ambulance?”

  “No. He was exercising his freedom of religion. He didn’t want no medical attention.”

  I could see that the prosecutor had coached him to say “exercising his freedom of religion,” but I guess that’s part of the game.

  DX hadn’t been in the room when I shot Earl, but he’d heard us fussing at each other in the hallway, and he’d heard the shot and rushed into the bedroom.

  The prosecutor asked his paralegal to bring a large diagram, mounted on some kind of Styrofoam, to the witness stand and placed it on an easel and asked DX if this was an accurate representation of the floor plan of Earl’s trailer. He said it was, and the prosecutor moved it into evidence as People’s Exhibit 3. Let the record show that Exhibit 3 is a diagram of the victim’s—Mr. Cochrane’s—trailer. He walked DX through the shooting, from the kitchen, where he’d heard us fussing at each other, into the hallway, past the bathroom, into the bedroom at the end of the trailer. Earl was on the floor, he said, and I was still holding the pistol.

  “She was still holding the pistol,” he said. “She pointed it at me and told me to call nine-one-one.”

  “So you were afraid she might have shot you too?”

  Stella objected. Leading question.

  The prosecutor withdrew the question and asked DX to describe the scene, which he did: Earl lying in a pool of blood with a big hole in his chest. The judge finally cut him off. The jury had already seen photographs of the crime scene.

  Stella tore DX apart on the cross-examination. I was glad to see some fireworks. She always dressed down for the trial and looked kind of frumpy, but that was part of her strategy. I was dressed down too in a white blouse and pleated skirt that Claire had picked out for me. None of the fancy clothes from Field’s. My “look” was “modest,” “nonthreatening.” Stella had advised me to look the jury members right in the eye without challenging them. I did my best.

  “Everything was perfectly normal? You didn’t see any reason to call an ambulance?”

  “It was in the hands of the Lord.”

  “Professor Jones was bitten on a Sunday night, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he became violently ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vomiting and diarrhea? Swelling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Instead of calling an ambulance, you put him in the cab of Mr. Cochrane’s truck and took him to Mr. Cochrane’s trailer, is that correct?”

  “Yes. We put him in the cab of Earl’s truck.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to call an ambulance?”

  “Truck was a lot quicker. Besides, there wasn’t no telephone in the arbor.”

  “And members of the church gathered at Mr. Cochrane’s trailer to pray for him?”

  “Yes, there was about ten of us at first and then more come after the brush arbor.”

  “You’re familiar with the symptoms of snake bite?”

  “Yes …” He started to say more but Stella cut him off.

  “You’ve been bitten yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you seek medical attention?”

  “No.”

  “Has anyone in your family ever been bitten?”

  The prosecutor objected. “Irrelevant.”

  Stella rephrased the question: “Has there ever been an occasion when you thought it was appropriate to call for medical attention when someone who’d been bitten by a rattlesnake declined medical attention?”

  “My wife got bit once by a copperhead.”

  “And your wife declined medical assistance, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you took her to the hospital in Rosiclare?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t trust the Lord in this case?”

  “It was my wife.”

  “I see.” Stella paused to let this answer sink in. “Have you ever seen anyone go into a coma before?”

  The prosecutor objected. DX wasn’t a medical expert. He couldn’t say whether or not Jackson was in a coma.

  The judge sustained the objection and Stella rephrased the question: “Have you ever seen anyone become totally unconscious after being bitten by a rattlesnake?”

  “No.”

  “So this was a new type of situation for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “At any point did you think that it might be appropriate to call for medical assistance for Professor Jones?”

  “He said he didn’t want no medical attention.”

  “After your wife was bitten by a copperhead, a bite that’s much less dangerous than a rattlesnake bite, she declined medical attention. But you used your own judgment and took her to the hospital in Rosiclare. Did it occur to you after Professor Jones slipped into a coma—became unconscious—that it might be time to use your own judgment?”

  “Earl said he didn’t want medical attention. It was in the hands of the Lord.”

  “Do you know of any reason Mr. Cochrane might have had to want to harm Professor Jones?”

  “Objection. Calls for speculation.”

  “Sustained.”

  Stella asked a different question: “Would it be fair to say that on Monday, June nineteenth, the day after Professor Jones was bitten, at two forty-nine p.m. you were concerned enough about Professor Jones’s condition to call Sunny in order to warn her that he’d been serpent bit?”

  DX looked at the prosecutor. He mumbled something, and Stella waited for the court reporter, who sat near t
he witnesses with her stenograph machine, to say that she couldn’t hear the witness. The judge asked him to speak into the microphone.

  “Yes.”

  Stella introduced the answering-machine tape, which Julie played on a small but expensive tape recorder: “Your boyfriend’s been serpent bit. You better get down here.”

  “Is that your voice on the tape?”

  DX hesitated. “Yes.”

  Stella moved to enter the tape as Defense Exhibit 1. Julie handed the tape to the clerk of the court.

  “So, Mr. Wilson. You were on the spot. You saw what was happening. Would it be fair to say that you thought that the time had come to call for medical attention?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You said, ‘Your boyfriend’s been serpent bit. You better get down here.’ Don’t those words suggest that you were worried about Professor Jones?”

  “I suppose. But she said he couldn’t of been serpent bit because he was in Paris.”

  “Let’s stay focused, Mr. Wilson. You knew something was wrong, but instead of calling for an ambulance, you called Sunny?”

  “You mean Willa Fern?”

  “She calls herself ‘Sunny’ now.”

  “All right.”

  “Was there any reason not to pick up the phone and dial 911?”

  “Earl said Professor Jones didn’t need no medical attention.”

  “Was Earl a doctor?”

  “He was a preacher.”

  “Would it be fair to say that you believed that Sunny would call for medical attention when you informed her of the situation?”

  The prosecutor objected: “Can’t testify to the defendant’s state of mind.”

  “I’m only asking him what he believed himself.”

  But the judge wasn’t buying it. “Objection sustained.”

  “No further questions.” But Stella reserved the right to recall DX “in our case in chief.”

  The state rested its case.

  On Thursday night I didn’t try to play Scrabble. I just watched TV and went to bed early. Jackson and Claire stayed in my room with me, as they did every night after the panic attack, till I fell asleep.

  Our turn came on Friday morning. Stella began by spending a lot of time with the two paramedics, who testified that Earl had sent them away, wouldn’t allow them to see Jackson. One of them had called the sheriff’s office.

  On the cross-examination the prosecutor had asked if Mr. Cochrane had had a weapon, if he had threatened them, if he had physically prevented them from entering the trailer.

  No, but Stella had made her point. As soon as they got back to the hospital in Rosiclare one of them called the sheriff’s office.

  The sheriff was our next witness. Stella asked permission to treat him as hostile, and Judge Macklin granted it. Stella showed him no mercy, asking him to read aloud the provision in the Illinois Dangerous Animals Act pertaining to venomous snakes.

  The prosecutor objected on the grounds that the Dangerous Animals Act was irrelevant to the present murder trial even if Mr. Cochrane had been doing something illegal. Stella said she wanted to establish that Mr. Cochrane was a dangerous man.

  The judge overruled the objection.

  “It’s just a misdemeanor,” the sheriff said, getting himself all puffed up. This was the sheriff that would have served the divorce papers on Earl.

  Stella kept asking him to read the provision that she had marked, and he kept stalling, till the judge threatened to hold him in contempt. This is what he finally read:

  Sec. 1. No person shall have a right of property in, keep, harbor, care for, act as custodian of or maintain in his possession any dangerous animal except at a properly maintained zoological park, federally licensed exhibit, circus, scientific or educational institution, research laboratory, veterinary hospital, hound running area, or animal refuge in an escape-proof enclosure.

  “We don’t bother them snake-handling people too much,” the sheriff said without being asked. “We let them mind their own business.”

  “In other words, you simply ignore the law?”

  “We don’t look on it like that,” he said.

  “On Tuesday, June twentieth at two o’clock,” Stella said, without commenting further, “your office received a call from George Barlow” —Stella pointed to Barlow, the paramedic who had testified earlier that he’d called the sheriff’s office—“saying that someone had been bitten by a rattlesnake and needed immediate assistance. Why didn’t you respond?”

  “No one was available at the time. There’s only three of us.”

  “But your office was notified by a paramedic from the hospital in Rosiclare that a man had been bitten by a rattlesnake and that they—the two paramedics—had not been allowed to take the man to the hospital, or even to see him.”

  “It was on the machine. We just didn’t get to it.”

  “What would it take to get you to intervene?” And so on.

  The prosecutor did his best to clean up the mess by focusing on the fact that the sheriff’s office got a certain number of crank calls every day and didn’t have enough deputies to answer every call, and by giving the sheriff a chance to say that he wasn’t so much ignoring the law as upholding the freedom of religion.

  “It wasn’t a call for help. It was just somebody’d got serpent bit. And like I said, we let these folks worship in their own way, however they want.”

  The prosecutor thanked him profusely, as if he’d just driven a nail in my coffin.

  Our next witness was the doctor from Memorial Hospital in Carbondale, who described the envenomation in some detail.

  The venom of the North American rattlesnake is hemorrhagic. It breaks down the lining of the smaller blood vessels and permits blood to diffuse through the tissues. The swelling then spreads to the heart and, in severe cases, like this one, may rupture the skin. Without medical intervention the swelling—depending on the quantity of venom and the location of the bite—may reach the trunk within twenty-four hours. The victim will experience confusion and extreme nervousness and—again without medical intervention—may lapse into a coma.

  Stella showed the doctor a photograph of Jackson’s arm, bigger than his thigh and purple-black, and moved it into evidence. The prosecutor objected again, on the grounds that the seriousness of the envenomation was not at issue, and offered to stipulate that the bite had been serious, but the judge reminded him that the death of Mr. Cochrane had not been at issue either.

  The doctor testified that the photo was an accurate representation of the condition of Jackson’s arm, and the photo was marked and passed around to the jury.

  The doctor described the fasciotomy performed to remove necrotic tissue. He had cut open the arm from the palm up to the middle of Jackson’s biceps to relieve the pressure that had built up in the arm from the rattlesnake venom. Professor Jones had spent the next three and a half weeks in Memorial Hospital in Carbondale and had undergone four more surgeries to clean out the dead tissue from his arm. Finally, the doctor had performed a skin graft, with skin from Jackson’s leg, to close up the arm. He’d been released from the hospital on July 14th with instructions to undergo a course of intensive physiotherapy.

  The doctor emphasized the seriousness of the bite and that Jackson was lucky to be alive. That he was near death when he arrived at the hospital. Lucky to have the arm. He had, in fact, lost a finger.

  On his cross-examination, which lasted only two minutes, the prosecutor pointed out that the seriousness of the injury was not in question. The issue was that the defendant shot her husband —former husband—at close range.

  The judge told him to ask a question or save it for his closing argument. It was time to quit for the week. The lawyers stood up as the jury filed out.

  “It’s a good way for us to end the week,” Stella said later. But it was an agonizing weekend for me. Jackson stayed right with me, morning, noon, and night.

  Stella and I went over my testimony, but we didn’t rehearse it
to death because she wanted it to keep some spontaneity. There were two stories she wanted me to get in front of the jury: the story of Earl forcing me to put my arm in a box of rattlesnakes, and the story of how I shot Earl the second time. She’d hold the door open for me; all I had to do was walk through it. On Sunday night, in my room, Jackson and Claire and I were like three people out on the river in a johnboat in rough weather. You can’t talk much. You don’t feel like talking anyway. You just want to get back to the marina.

  My alarm went off at six o’clock Monday morning. It was a very complicated clock with two separate alarms and two snooze buttons. I hit one snooze button, then another, and wondered what would happen if I just stayed in bed all day. Would the trial go on without me? I’d been determined to take the stand—to tell my own story in my own words. But when the time came, I was nervous. Stella and I had been over my testimony a hundred times, and Stella’s assistant had cross-examined me from every possible angle, anticipating everything the prosecutor could throw at me, including Earl’s version of the snake-shed story—his sworn testimony from the first trial. Stella had objected on the grounds that she would have no opportunity to cross-examine the witness; but the judge had said that Ms. Cochrane’s attorney at the time of the trial would have had an opportunity to cross-examine Mr. Cochrane, and that therefore she would admit the evidence. Stella could call it into question in her closing jury argument.

  “I can’t do it,” I said to Jackson.

  It was hard for us to talk. It was six ten. Jackson was looking out the window. There were still a lot of complex feelings simmering on the back burner—Paris, Mexico, his risking his life by handling, me risking prison to save it by shooting Earl. But it was as if we didn’t know what any of these things meant, as if we wouldn’t know how to think about them till the trial was over.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his fingers through my hair. It was getting late. He rubbed my back and tickled my arm and we went over the schedule for the trial.

  It was late, but he didn’t rush me.

  “I wish you could get up on the stand with me,” I said. “At least you’ll be in the courtroom, you and Claire. Along with a lot of folks from the Church of the Burning Bush who’d like to see me fry in Hell.”