The Lost Pilots

by Corey Mead

  “We ask you, in listening to the evidence,” Carson concluded, “not only to see whether it fits the picture of guilt, but in measuring any circumstance, to decide for yourself whether the circumstance is consistent with that presumption of innocence which the law affords the defendant.”

  It was now late in the afternoon; participants and spectators alike were weary from spending so many hours in the steaming, humid confines of the courtroom. Judge Atkinson recessed the court until 9:30 the following morning.

  Hawthorne kicked off the next day’s proceedings by calling Ernest Huston, the attorney, to the witness stand. Huston described how he’d been summoned to the Coral Gables house on the morning of April 21. Jessie had greeted him with a relieved “thank God you’re here,” and the two of them had rushed upstairs, where Lancaster, on the stair landing, said grimly, “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Huston entered the sun porch and saw Clarke moaning in his bed. Even outside the house, Huston had been able to hear Clarke’s tortured breathing through the open sun-porch windows.

  After Lancaster showed him the suicide notes, Huston continued, the two men headed downstairs to the living room. When Jessie fretted that the notes would cause a scandal if made public, Lancaster suggested ripping them up, but Huston, in his role as attorney, warned against it.

  “Was anything said about the gun to you by Lancaster?” Hawthorne asked Huston.

  “On the way to the Everglades Hotel I asked Lancaster if it was my gun and he said no.”

  “Did he make any suggestion about the gun involved in the shooting?”

  Before responding, Huston turned to ask Judge Atkinson a question of his own: “I presume that any questions between myself and Lancaster as my client have been waived?”

  Carson jumped at this opportunity to prove the defense’s transparency. “We waive nothing,” he told the judge.

  Huston said Lancaster had asked if he could claim that the gun belonged to Huston, or, failing that, to Latin-American Airways. To the courtroom, Lancaster’s questions sounded dubious. But Huston added that when he’d first loaned Lancaster his gun, “I told him that the gun had belonged to a friend of mine and I cared a great deal about it. He answered that he would take the best of care of it and if anything happened he would replace it.” Huston’s answer made Lancaster’s purchase of a pistol in St. Louis seem less suspicious than the prosecution contended.

  Carson began his cross-examination of Huston by displaying a picture taken of Lancaster’s bed a few hours after the shooting. “Is that a fair picture?” he asked Huston.

  “No,” the attorney responded. “When I first saw the pillow it was mussed.” Here the defense was implying an essential detail: that the police had smoothed out Lancaster’s pillow, which explained why later on it appeared to have been unslept on.

  Carson then raised another vital point for the defense: “Did Lancaster say he wished Clarke could speak so he could tell why he did it?” he asked Huston. This latter half of the question was the kicker.

  “He did,” Huston answered.

  Hawthorne’s next witness was the ambulance driver, Charles Ditsler, who described the scene in Lancaster’s bedroom, and how Jessie had vigorously objected to the removal of Clarke’s body.

  “Did Haden Clarke’s body strike the walls or banisters while being carried to the ambulance?” Hawthorne asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Ditsler’s answer appeared to catch Hawthorne off-guard. By acknowledging that the bruise on Clarke’s body might have resulted from the body hitting the walls or banisters, Ditsler loaned credence to the defense’s claim that Clarke and Lancaster hadn’t scuffled before the shooting. The assistant manager of the funeral home, who was next on the stand, confirmed Ditsler’s account.

  The following witness, Earl Hudson—the policeman with whom Clarke had been friends—told of meeting Lancaster and Jessie at Jackson Memorial Hospital on the night of Clarke’s shooting. He said Lancaster had asked repeatedly whether Clarke would be able to talk again. Carson returned to this issue during his cross-examination, asking, “Did Lancaster say he hoped Clarke would talk so he could tell how it happened?”

  “Yes,” Hudson replied.

  By again emphasizing the latter part of Lancaster’s question, the defense had scored another point. Moving on, Carson asked whether Lancaster had offered any reasons as to why Clarke might have wanted to commit suicide.

  “Yes,” Hudson said. “He said Clarke had contracted a disease which preyed heavily on his mind.”

  The front page of that morning’s Miami Daily News featured a story headlined “Love Affairs with Lancaster, Clarke Bared by Keith-Miller.” An editor’s note below the headline informed readers that the “following unusual document is the signed statement of a world-famous woman who is willing to sacrifice her own reputation to save the life of a man she admires.” The article had been Carson’s brainchild, part of his strategy for raising much-needed money to fly important witnesses to Miami for the trial. Though a reluctant participant, Jessie had agreed to grant an interview to the International News Service, which then used the interview to craft a supposed first-person account of events. The article was blatantly trashy, more suited to a dime-store pulp magazine than to a respectable newspaper—it featured phrases like “our love had found most violent expression for about two weeks,” referring to lovemaking. But Carson argued that not only was the money essential, but the article painted Lancaster in a flattering light. So it was that on Wednesday, August 3, mere hours before Jessie began her testimony, the most intimate details of her love life were broadcast to an eagerly waiting international audience. Jessie read the article in her new room at the Everglades Hotel, having been forced from her Coral Gables house by endless sightseers traipsing on the lawn and looking through the windows.

  To Jessie the Miami courtroom, as she had observed it thus far, seemed chaotic, the proceedings almost ludicrous. “Everybody was excessively friendly,” she later recalled, “the prosecution and the defense laughing and joking together. It seemed to me more like a stage comedy than a trial where a man’s life was at stake.” The constant waving of fans by onlookers made the stultifyingly hot room appear as if it was in perpetual motion.

  Now, as she approached the witness stand, following the morning’s testimony by Huston, Ditsler, and Hudson, Jessie was so nervous that she was physically shaking. She was terrified that she would say the wrong thing and somehow imperil Lancaster even further. Hawthorne began his examination by leading her through the basics of her relationships with Lancaster and Clarke, including Lancaster’s growing realization, during the Latin-American Airways trip, that Clarke had stolen her affections.

  “Did you anticipate trouble when Lancaster received the letters [in St. Louis]?” Hawthorne asked.

  “Not trouble, but I knew he would be upset.”

  “Did he intimate that he was upset by telephone or letter?”

  “Yes,” Jessie responded.

  Hawthorne was laying the groundwork for his argument that Clarke’s shooting was premeditated, and he continued to question Jessie closely about the tensions that had marked Lancaster’s return to Miami. Jessie was so nervous that her lips trembled and her voice dropped to a whisper; Hawthorne repeatedly had to ask her to speak up. But his questioning only gained so much ground. When Hawthorne asked Jessie if she knew who killed Clarke, she responded, as she had all along, “I am convinced he killed himself.”

  As Hawthorne pressed Jessie for reasons why Clarke might have committed suicide, she spoke of his heavy drinking, and added, “He had a nervous, violent temper. I have frequently seen him in a rage of temper with his mother.” Jessie attributed this anger to the fact that Clarke’s mother “nagged him. She was always talking about what she had done for him, what he had cost her, and what an ungrateful son he was.”

  Jessie also testified that Clarke had frequently talked of suicide, an assertion that Hawthorne planned to dispute via subsequent witnesses. But Jessie
deepened her claim by saying that, on the night of Lancaster’s return to Miami, “I was frightfully wretched over what I had done to Bill, and I told Haden that I wished we could end it and both go out together.” Clarke, she said, had agreed with her.

  Hawthorne shifted his questioning to Jessie’s testimony in his office following Clarke’s shooting, when she had declared that Clarke rarely drank, and that his demeanor was always gentle except on the few occasions when he had imbibed.

  “I certainly did not say that Haden seldom got drunk,” Jessie protested. “If I did, I was trying to shield his memory.”

  At this, Hawthorne leaped. “Are you not equally anxious to protect Lancaster?” he asked. “In trying to save Lancaster, did you not say that you would issue a statement to the newspapers that you killed Clarke yourself if Lancaster was held?” This was the crux of Hawthorne’s examination: Jessie had freely admitted that she was willing to lie for the men she loved.

  Jessie, despite her nervousness, didn’t take the bait. “It sounds dramatic, but I did say that,” she admitted.

  When Carson took the floor for cross-examination, he immediately guided Jessie to the document she had provided Hawthorne’s office outlining the reasons why Clarke might have committed suicide. Carson wanted to show that Jessie had been truthful in describing the pressures bearing upon Clarke, and in saying that Clarke had exhibited regular signs of rashness and instability. Slowly, Carson led Jessie through the document, working to build in the jury’s mind a portrait of Clarke as a convincingly suicidal individual.

  Jessie’s manner on the stand, as in life, was forthright, a quality Carson felt would impress the jury. He thus asked her directly about her myriad efforts over the past three months to help Lancaster’s case. The jury, he thought, would interpret these efforts as evidence that Jessie believed Lancaster was innocent, not that she was trying to help him cover up a murder. After three and a half hours of close grilling, during which Lancaster appeared visibly nervous at Jessie’s obviously tormented state, the court adjourned until the following morning.

  Jessie seemed more composed the next day, August 4, with Lancaster, in turn, appearing more relaxed. Dressed in a light gray suit, blue shirt, and blue tie, Lancaster even joined in the laughter when Carson, in a mock down-home manner, told Jessie on the stand that what she described as a “face-washer” was called a “face rag” in his Florida hometown. As the questioning progressed, Carson took Jessie in painstaking detail through the events preceding Clarke’s shooting, as well as her subsequent arrest and release. By the time Carson finished, Jessie had been on the stand for almost six and a half hours.

  The day’s next big witness was Jack Russell of Latin-American Airways. A key element of the case against Lancaster involved the threats he had supposedly made against Clarke’s life, and for this Russell was a key informant. Under Hawthorne’s questioning, Russell recounted the forming of his relationship with Lancaster, and how worried Lancaster had been about Jessie’s “financial destitution and his failure to hear from her.” Hawthorne then introduced one of the letters Russell had received when he and Lancaster were out west, in which his wife had described Jessie and Clarke’s burgeoning relationship. Hawthorne wanted to show that this letter had helped set Lancaster on his murderous path. “I told him that he had lost out with her,” Russell testified, “and that . . . Clarke had the inside path. Bill asked if I thought Haden had double-crossed him. I said I thought he had. Bill turned on his heel and muttered, ‘I’ll get rid of him.’ ” The letter itself was so damaged and unreadable that the next day Carson questioned its authenticity.

  Carson’s cross-examination of Russell, which took place on the morning of August 5, relied on a simple strategy: painting Russell as a liar and a thief. That task was made easier when Carson forced Russell to admit that he was currently serving a six-month jail sentence for drug-and-illegal-alien smuggling, the latest in a long string of such sentences.

  Russell didn’t help his cause by acting both antagonistic and comically vague on the stand. At one point Carson questioned him about a letter Russell had written to Lancaster identifying the spot in Arizona where Lancaster was to drop the drug-carrying Chinese nationals smuggled over from Mexico. “Is that it?” Carson asked Russell, handing him the letter for verification. Russell examined the letter in silence for such a long time that the court grew restless.

  “I only asked if you wrote it,” Carson finally said.

  “I can’t tell unless I read it,” Russell responded. At this the courtroom exploded in laughter, which continued until the bailiffs called for order.

  Humor aside, Carson’s grilling of Russell was sharp. “When Lancaster left you standing on the ground at the Burbank Airport, did you think it was a dirty trick if there were federal men waiting at the other airport?” he asked.

  “I hold no feelings against Lancaster,” Russell said. “There was no federal officer waiting at the other airport.”

  “They found you, didn’t they?”

  “No.”

  “They didn’t?”

  “No,” Russell lied. “I gave myself up at El Paso.” Carson didn’t pursue the point.

  After Russell left the stand, Hawthorne introduced into evidence Lancaster’s personal diary from the Latin-American Airways trip, along with the letters Lancaster, Jessie, and Clarke had exchanged during this period. His point, Hawthorne explained to the jury, was to link Russell’s testimony to Lancaster’s diary entries. Hawthorne then read out loud the entirety of Lancaster’s diary, and though the process took hours, the fascinated audience appeared to hang on every word. (The text was repeated faithfully in the following day’s Miami newspapers.) An embarrassed Lancaster stared sheepishly at the ground as Hawthorne began his narration, but as the reading progressed, an unexpected shift—one that surely played against Hawthorne’s intentions—occurred in the room. Because Lancaster came across in his diary as a sympathetic, deeply human figure, the faces of the jurors and the spectators began showing signs of heretofore-unseen sympathy.

  Russell wasn’t Hawthorne’s only witness to claim Lancaster had made threats against Clarke. On Saturday, August 6, Mark Tancrel, Russell’s former Latin-American Airways partner, took the stand to level a similar accusation. Tancrel had another thing in common with Russell: both were currently occupying prison cells in the Dade County Courthouse. The so-called Captain Tancrel confessed that he’d been indicted for impersonating a United States Navy officer. But he still claimed to be a captain, saying he was “a master mariner of the United States Merchant Marine.”

  Under Hawthorne’s questioning, Tancrel outlined the founding of Latin-American Airways, and accused Lancaster of failing to meet his promise to contribute two planes to the venture. Lancaster only provided “half a plane,” Tancrel said, explaining that the aircraft was in such bad condition that it required a wholesale mechanical overhaul in Texas. But Hawthorne didn’t linger on the issue; he was guiding Tancrel to a more damning charge.

  “Lancaster and myself were at the Houston Hotel,” Tancrel said, in response to a follow-up question. “Going to our room I found Lancaster there with a stranger, who was introduced to me as Ince. I then went to bed and was reading while Lancaster discussed Mrs. Keith-Miller and Clarke with Ince. He said, ‘I don’t think Haden Clarke has double-crossed me, but if he has, well, I’ve seen a lot of dead men and one more won’t make any difference.’ ”

  Hawthorne then asked whether Tancrel had seen Lancaster after the latter had abandoned Russell in California.

  “Yes,” Tancrel responded, “he came to the hotel [in Nogales]. . . . He said, ‘I’m tendering my resignation. You fellows can paddle your own canoe.’ I said, ‘All right, if that is the way you feel about it.’ Lancaster asked me if Russell had shown me a letter he had received from [his wife] stating that there was no need for Lancaster to come back, as Mrs. Keith-Miller and Clarke were in love. Lancaster said, ‘I’ll go back east and get rid of that son of a bitch.’ ”

 
; “Who was he talking about?” Hawthorne asked.

  “He was talking about Clarke.”

  Carson’s primary goal in his cross-examination was to show that Tancrel was not just a criminal but a habitual liar, someone for whom telling untruths came as naturally as breathing, and who was deeply spiteful toward Lancaster to boot. The defense would be introducing evidence to underscore this second point.

  “How close to your cell is Russell?” Carson asked.

  “They put me in the same cell with him yesterday.”

  “Have you talked to Russell about the case?”

  “We can’t express ourselves; there are too many in there hanging around.”

  “Did Russell tell you what he testified about?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell him what you would testify about?” Carson’s tone made it clear that he thought Tancrel and Russell had concocted false testimony together.

  “No, that’s my private business.”

  “It’s rather public now, isn’t it?” Then Carson asked whether Tancrel had discussed Lancaster with his jail escort.

  “Yes, I said that I didn’t want to be placed in the same cell with Lancaster.”

  Carson seized upon the statement: “Did you tell your escort after your arrest on May 22nd that, ‘If you put me in a cell with Lancaster I’ll kill him. I’m back here now and I’m going to do everything possible to see that Lancaster burns’?” Tancrel denied the accusation, but Carson’s words hung in the juror’s minds.