And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Eleven jurors had already decided how they would vote. When Simmonds sent a note to the court clerk asking to see some of the evidence, it was basically to satisfy the jury’s collective curiosity. They passed around some of the pictures that had been introduced at the trial, and each took time for close-up looks at the container, the bones, and the skull. When they read the postdated letter Buck had sent Kit, the jurors were both amazed and angry…amazed that Buck had written so articulately and with such obvious intelligence, and angry that he had had the colossal nerve to say the things he did to Kit.

  None of the jurors believed Al Ingman, the convict who claimed Buck had admitted murdering the Grahams. Nor did they believe the other two convicts, smiling Terry Conner and pitiable Ruth Thomas. “And Norman Sanders just wanted to get his name in the paper,” said one disgusted juror. While agreeing that they liked the judge, they also picked up on his bias in the case. “I think he’s looking to get Buck convicted,” said a juror. “So was the defense,” another quipped. Everyone laughed.

  After they exhausted their fascination with the various pieces of evidence and pondered to themselves over a cup of coffee, Simmonds asked if they should take a vote. The affirmative replies came in chorus. A woman juror passed out slips of paper for the secret-ballot vote. The foreman collected the slips and tabulated them: eleven for conviction, one undecided.

  It didn’t take long for the jurors to identify the lone holdout. The big, heavyset guy who had sat quietly in the back row was pleasant enough, but, some of them thought, a little slow upstairs. When they politely asked him why he was undecided, he replied that he just didn’t know exactly how Buck Walker had killed Muff Graham.

  “Wait a minute,” said Robyn Schaffer, at twenty-two the youngest member of the jury. “You do think Walker killed her?”

  “Sure,” said the holdout. “I just don’t know how.”

  Several people started talking at once, but the foreman took over. They did not have to solve all of the mysteries of the crime, he explained patiently. This was one murder case probably no one ever would. All they had to do was determine whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty. When the holdout juror smiled and nodded in agreement, Simmonds said, “Let’s take another vote.”

  AT 4:40 P.M., the jury buzzed the judge’s clerk to report they had reached a verdict. It took thirty minutes to collect all of the lawyers and bring Buck Walker back up to the courtroom.

  The jury, having suspended work for twenty minutes so that one juror could move his car from a lot that closed early, had deliberated for the incredibly short time of one hour and twenty-three minutes. The jury hadn’t even waited to have one meal together on the Government. Buck Walker hadn’t even left the courthouse yet! He had been sent down to the basement for return to county jail, so sure had everyone been that the jury would not return a verdict in its first few hours of deliberation.

  When the guilty verdict was read by the court clerk, all four attorneys who had lived with the case for so long remained curiously expressionless, as did Mac’s sister, Kit.

  Not so the defendant.

  He grimaced, tight-jawed, and stared down at the carpeted floor, as if steeling himself. Then he slowly lifted his gaze to the jury box and locked eyes with young Robyn Schaffer, who swore that if she lived to be a hundred she would never forget the stone-cold anger aimed at her by the convicted murderer.

  EIGHT DAYS later, the incorrigible Terry Conner and his prison pal, Joseph Dougherty, escaped while the two were being transported by a pair of rookie Deputy U.S. Marshals to an Oklahoma City courthouse.

  Dougherty had flipped out a sharp object and pressed it against the throat of one of the marshals, while Conner disarmed them. Charming Conner, who had entertained the jury and spectators at Walker’s trial, wanted to kill the two marshals, but a nervous Dougherty talked him out of it, and the marshals were left handcuffed to a tree. The escapees sped away in the U.S. Marshals Service vehicle.

  Conner was apprehended by FBI agents in a motel near Chicago on December 10, 1986. He was charged with committing several bank robberies while he was on the lam, including more than one in which the bank president’s family was held hostage at home while the bank vault was cleaned out. In one robbery, the take exceeded $700,000

  SAN FRANCISCO

  JUNE 28, 1985

  A PALE, HAGGARD-LOOKING Buck Walker remained mute when Judge King asked if the defendant had anything to say before he was sentenced.

  Calling the killing of Muff Graham a “particularly heinous crime,” Judge King sentenced Walker to life imprisonment. He pointed out, however, that anyone sentenced in federal court to life is automatically eligible to apply for parole after serving ten years. For that reason, the judge ordered the life sentence to run consecutive to (that is, to follow) Walker’s earlier sentences.

  As a stoical Walker stood before the court that afternoon, he still had eleven years to serve on his various convictions for drug possession, escape, and interstate transportation of stolen property.

  CHAPTER 28

  LOS ANGELES

  ONE OF THE FIRST calls I received after the Walker verdict was from a Los Angeles Times reporter who had covered the Walker trial. “The swift verdict doesn’t bode well for Jennifer,” he said.

  It is extremely unusual for a jury in a murder trial to return a verdict so quickly. Even more so when there is such a dearth of hard, factual evidence, and when there is complicated scientific and medical testimony. CBS Radio went overboard and called the swiftness of the verdict “unprecedented.” Everyone connected with the case, including the judge and the prosecutors, had expected the jury to be out for a day or two at the very minimum. Though anticipating the guilty verdict, I too was surprised by the speed with which it was determined. It was now obvious that the typical rules requiring substantial evidence to convict didn’t apply here. The unique circumstances of the case were a substitute for evidence. In a normal case, if the defendant denies committing the crime, at least theoretically any one of millions of other people could have. But in the Palmyra case, if Buck and Jennifer didn’t do it, there was no one else. The prosecution didn’t need evidence in a case like this.

  Jennifer was jolted by Buck’s conviction.

  “I still find it difficult to believe that someone I loved so much could have been so dishonest with me,” she said sadly. “I guess I always felt I could keep him out of trouble. I figured once we left Hawaii, there would be less temptation. I mean, how much trouble could he get into on a deserted island?”

  Len, too, was shaken because he had approved of the Walker defense team’s effort to raise doubts, through scientific testimony, that a murder had occurred. Now Len reconsidered his position and decided that as of the moment, he was starting to come around to my position for Jennifer’s trial.

  In a telephone conversation, I told Enoki that I would concede the murder of Muff Graham in my summation, but only if he presented evidence of it in his case in chief. “You don’t have to do it in quite the same depth as you did at the Walker trial,” I said, “but before I concede it, I do expect you to put on scientific and medical evidence that a murder was committed.” Actually, Enoki had little choice. As the prosecutor, he had to prove the crime of murder.

  It soon became apparent that Jennifer’s trial would be delayed because of conflicts on Judge King’s judicial calendar. My dreamy client continued to be pleased with any and all such delays.

  But they worried me. Up to now, as I tried to make Jennifer understand, the prosecution had been concentrating mostly on Buck. Now that he had been convicted, all their time and resources would be directed toward fortifying their case against her. “There’s nothing to gain and much to lose by continuing to delay the trial,” I counseled. “We already have our defense, and it’s not going to get any stronger. Right now, the prosecutors and FBI agents are sitting around a table in Honolulu, wondering how they can make their case against you even stronger than it already is.”

  M
y principal fear was that federal agents would rush out to interview all of Jennifer’s former cellmates—as they did Buck’s—and come up with a witness willing to testify against her. I asked her if there was anyone she had talked to about the case at Terminal Island who, she felt, might be the type to lie that she had made an incriminating statement. She couldn’t think of anyone. How about outside of prison? Again, she drew a blank. She trusted the world.

  In late August 1985, the trial was set for February 3, 1986, giving us, and the Government, six additional months to prepare.

  As the trial was approaching, Jennifer received a letter from a man named Joe Buffalo, whom she described as a friend she knew in Hawaii in 1975. According to Buffalo (per Jennifer, a “part Indian with long thick hair and a big beard”), FBI agents had recently contacted him and tried to unearth something they could use against Jennifer. A rudely awakened Jennifer telephoned me anxiously with the news. “You were right,” she said solemnly.

  AS MATTERS now stood, there would actually be more incriminating evidence against Jennifer at her murder trial than there had been against Buck Walker (informant Al Ingman would not appear, but we now knew the jury hadn’t believed his testimony against Buck anyway), and he had been convicted in almost record time.* With only a few exceptions, all of the circumstantial evidence that convinced him would be used against Jennifer. But in addition, there were the preposterous lies she had told to the FBI’s Calvin Shishido, the conflicting story she had told to Bernard Leonard, the lies she had told Lorraine Wollen, and the provable perjury she had committed at her earlier trial in Honolulu—all of which, the prosecution would argue, showed a definite consciousness of guilt on her part. Additionally, although Walker’s boat-theft conviction had been overturned on appeal because of a technicality involving an erroneous instruction by the judge to the jury, Jennifer’s conviction in the theft of the Sea Wind had been affirmed. This, too, might find its way into the trial.

  At Jennifer’s murder trial, the prosecution would essentially use the same witnesses and evidence that they had relied on at her theft trial. The only real difference would be that there was now a dead body. But a dead body was not evidence against Jennifer. It only changed the charge from theft to murder. In effect, then, since the earlier jury that convicted Jennifer of theft had been presented with basically the same case that would be presented against her at her upcoming trial, they had implicitly convicted her of murder. This was so because the conclusion that Muff’s death was somehow tied in to the theft of the Sea Wind was irresistible. I just hoped that nothing new against Jennifer would surface, no matter how small.

  It’s hard to get too much smaller than the outer shell of an ant, but, unbelievably, this subject suddenly took on considerable importance.

  In a second reading of the cororner’s report on the postmortem examination conducted on Muff Graham’s remains in April of 1985, I noted something potentially explosive that the prosecution had not brought out at the Walker trial. “In the marrow of the long bones there is deposited coral and sandy-like material which is layered in a fashion indicative of water exposure,” the coroner wrote. “From this, recognizable portions of insect exoskeletons [outer shells] are removed. These are portions of ants. The ants show anatomic features of a small, dark-colored ant approximately 4–5 millimeters in length.” Exactly when, I wondered, had the ants crept into the bone marrow?

  Within a few months after I got on the case in 1982, Len and I had agreed that he would handle all of the medical and scientific witnesses, since he wanted to contest the issue of whether Muff had been murdered and these witnesses would be establishing that fact for the Government. Because the coroner, Dr. Boyd Stephens, was therefore one of Len’s witnesses, I telephoned Len and asked him about the ant exoskeletons. Len said Dr. Stephens had told him that the ants would have crawled into the marrow only while the body still had flesh on it and was freshly deceased, not if the bones were dry of oil, which, I assumed, they would have been when they were washed ashore in the container in 1981. I realized that the ant exoskeletons could go directly to the issue that concerned me the most: whether or not Jennifer had been involved in the murders.

  My argument to the jury had to be that Buck murdered Mac and Muff without Jennifer’s knowing about it. Therefore, immediately after murdering them, he would have had to put their bodies in the containers to hide them from her. But if what the coroner told Len was correct, it would go in the direction of Jennifer’s having been involved, because it would indicated that the bodies were left out on the ground long enough for the ants to get into the bone marrow. If Buck had not been rushed, then he was not hiding the bodies from Jennifer—powerful circumstantial evidence, the prosecutor could argue, of her involvement in the killings.

  Since the ant exoskeleton evidence would go only to the issue of Jennifer’s guilt, not Buck’s, it was understandable that the prosecution had not introduced it at the Walker trial. But if they had done their homework, they would undoubtedly use it at Jennifer’s trial. This type of hard-to-controvert physical evidence could illuminate a critical part of the darkness cloaking the Palmyra murders.

  Though the case was a mystery, were we actually being reduced to studying ants and their habits in our efforts to learn what happened?

  After thinking about it further, I called Len back and asked him if he would mind if I handled the ant exoskeleton issue. He didn’t.

  Cursory research revealed that ants are strictly terrestrial creatures—they never go into water. Therefore, the ants had entered the marrow of Muff’s bones either before her body was put inside the container and sunk in the lagoon or after the remains were washed ashore. But the latter was not possible, according to Dr. Stephens, because the bones had no flesh on them by the time they washed ashore in 1981. But was the coroner right? Would ants enter the powdery marrow of dry bones? I had to find out, even if the answer was not something I wanted to hear.

  I soon learned that the study of ants was called myrmecology, a branch of entomology. Several phone calls eventually led me to Roy Snelling, an entomologist with the Los Angeles Natural History Museum for twenty-five years whose specialty happened to be myrmecology. Snelling and a professor at Harvard were considered the top two ant experts in the country.

  The next day, I drove to the L.A. Natural History Museum, located in a mammoth stone building across the street from the University of Southern California. The museum, Snelling had proudly informed me, contains the largest collection of ants (presumably dead ones) in North America.

  I finally found Snelling’s office, cluttered with books, professional journals, and stacks of papers. About fifty, Snelling was lanky and easygoing, though his face was deeply lined. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and a plaid shirt in earth tones. His long, braided hair was parted in the middle and kept in place by a headband, betokening his Cherokee Indian ancestry. He had taught entomology courses at USC and written many articles on ants.

  To my relief, Snelling told me that ants very definitely would go into the marrow of bones bare of all flesh. “Even when there’s no flesh on a bone, oil from the bone would still be present, and that’s what would attract the ants.”

  “So when the bones washed ashore in 1981, seven years after the murders, there would have still been sufficient oil in them to attract ants?”

  “Oh, yes. Oil from the bone, which is really liquefied fat, is very slow to volatilize [evaporate]. Even a bone twenty to thirty years old and apparently completely dry would still have enough oil to attract ants.”

  What about the fact that the bones in this case had been exposed to water? Wouldn’t water hasten the evaporation process?

  “Yes. Water does leach the oil out more rapidly than if the bones were in a dry environment. But it still would be a very long process, taking many years, particularly since the bones were in a container, which would cut off the rush of water against the bones.”

  “When you say many years, you mean what?”

  “
At least ten or more years,” Snelling said.

  The description of the ants in the coroner’s report, the entomologist continued, fit the genus Solenopsis, found in many parts of the world, including the Pacific. “They are also known as grease ants,” Snelling said, “because they are particularly attracted to oils and fats of any kind, human or otherwise.”

  Snelling went on to explain that bone marrow would be more prized by the ants than muscle tissue, since it is a “fatty” substance.

  All of what Snelling had said so far applied only if the ants got into the marrow in 1981. What if it happened in 1974, when there would have been far more oil in the bones to attract ants? I asked the key question: how long would it have taken for ants to get into the marrow of Muff’s bones if her body had been left exposed on the ground after her murder in 1974?

  “Well, to start out with,” he said, unconsciously tugging at the end of one of his braids, “ants can’t penetrate through bone, so there would have had to be a fracture of the bone for them to get into the marrow.”

  “The bones with ant exoskeletons in their marrow were fractured.”

  “Even with the fracture, it would have taken the ants days to penetrate the skin and get into the marrow.”

  I tensed. The probability that Muff’s body had lain out on Palmyra for days was extremely damaging. Buck would not have been hiding the body from Jennifer. And therefore…

  Snelling blinked at my palpable discomfort.

  “Is there any way, any way at all, that the ants could have gotten into the marrow quickly?” I asked urgently.

  “When I said ‘days,’ that assumed that the fractures were internalized. But if the fractured bones had penetrated the surface of the skin, as in a compound fracture, then the ants would have had immediate access into the marrow.”