And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “If Jennifer had given you a good explanation for what happened to the Grahams, and why she was on the boat, you would not have considered her a suspect, is that correct?” I sensed that we were finally near the crux.

  “That’s true.”

  “But in point of fact, in your mind she did not give you a good explanation.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, right near the beginning of your interrogation of her, she did become a suspect in your mind. Is that correct?”

  The veteran agent frowned. “That’s correct,” he at last said.

  “In fact, at that point, if she had said to you, hypothetically, that she had an appointment at the beauty parlor and she didn’t want to stay on the cutter any longer and she wanted to leave, you would not have let her go.”

  “I would have detained her at that point.”

  Finally: “Now, isn’t it standard routine procedure in the FBI, Mr. Shishido, to have a suspect at that point empty their purse, or bag, or what-have-you, to protect the agent from any hidden weapons?”

  Shishido looked distinctly troubled. “That’s true.”

  “Another reason why this is done is that many times incriminating evidence is found in the purse or bag, is that correct?”

  “That’s true,” he acknowledged again.

  “And in this case here, you did have Miss Jenkins empty the contents of her purse in your presence aboard the Coast Guard cutter. Isn’t that true?” He had to agree, I thought.

  “That’s true…well…on the Coast Guard cutter, I don’t remember that I asked her to empty the contents of her purse. I thought it was later, at the FBI office, that I did that.”

  “So, you’re telling this jury, then, that even though she was a suspect in a case possibly involving murder, you let her leave your presence on the cutter and go into a rest room with a purse that you hadn’t looked into? Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “That’s right. Now, you may say she’s a suspect—”

  “We’re talking about what you considered her situation to be, not what I’m saying. You’ve already testified you thought she was a suspect.”

  “Right. But a suspect in the theft of a boat.”

  “We’re also talking about murder, Mr. Shishido,” I said loudly.

  “Well, it’s just…well, I really don’t know about the murder yet, at this point.”

  I shook my head solemnly for the jury and laid the issue to rest at that point, going on to a series of miscellaneous matters characteristic of my method of establishing bases for summation:

  I had Shishido confirm that he had seen and heard the Grahams’ Zodiac being operated and the motor “made a very loud noise” that at the time he interviewed Jennifer, he thought the man she was with was named Roy Allen, and Jennifer had never informed him that Roy Allen was Buck Walker; that when Lieutenant Wallisch of the Coast Guard tried to take Puffer away from Jennifer so an animal regulation official could impound her, Jennifer had refused (although Shishido could not remember Jennifer’s having cried) and eventually she had been permitted to turn the dog over to Joel Peters, etc.

  I next handed the witness Government exhibit 16, the inventory of items from the Sea Wind that had been turned over to FBI custody.

  “Item number 26 reads: ‘Navigational logs contained in a five-by-eight plastic folder.’ Could that have been the log of the Sea Wind?”

  “Well, I really don’t know.”

  “You testified on direct examination that there was no log of the Sea Wind found aboard the boat. Are you willing to amend your testimony now to state that the navigational logs, inventory item number 26, may have been the log of the Sea Wind?”

  “Well, no, I wouldn’t change my testimony because I still don’t remember seeing any logbook for the Sea Wind.”

  “Yet these ‘navigational logs’ certainly were not the log of the Iola. You agree on that?”

  “Yes. Because we have the log of the Iola.”

  “So, item number 26 is some other log, and you don’t know what it is.”

  “That’s right,” Shishido said. “I really don’t know what that is.”

  “And you don’t know where item number 26 is at the present time?”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  I switched topics.

  “Jennifer told you in 1974, to the best of your memory now, that they found the overturned dinghy about three-quarters of a mile west of where the Sea Wind was moored. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, as it turns out, the skeletal remains of Muff Graham were found in 1981 in the same general area in which Jennifer said the dinghy was found overturned.”

  “That’s true.”

  Shishido had testified that during the November 1974 search, the Coast Guard’s frogmen had dived only in and around the areas where the Sea Wind and the Iola were known to have been moored.

  “The reason for the limited search was that the lagoon was lousy with sharks, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “And the sharks were coming in, getting too close to them. And we feared for their safety.”

  “So the entire lagoon was never dredged at the bottom to try to find Mr. Graham’s body or the second container?”

  “That is correct.”

  Finished with the witness, I returned to the defense table, interested now in seeing where Enoki would try to plug the holes. Surprisingly, he started off in a direction I thought would prove helpful to the defense.

  “Now, Mr. Bugliosi asked you about Miss Jenkins’s eagerness to answer your questions,” Enoki began. “Did she also refuse to answer some of your questions?”

  Shishido regained some of his self-contained, confident manner. “She did. She refused to answer some questions.”

  “Do you know the subject area of the questions that she refused to answer?”

  “Well, my recollection is—I believe it was based around the identity of Roy Allen.”

  I had no questions on re-cross.

  During Shishido’s testimony on the witness stand, the defense had clocked some serious mileage.

  AS THE Government’s case wound down, Sharon Jordan was summoned. Her light summer dress and white sandals suggested an afternoon of croquet upon the lawn of a country manor. She still wore her long raven hair straight down her back and was still a naturally pretty woman who, without a smidgen of makeup or trendy fashion accent, could cause men’s heads to swivel. She smiled at the judge before taking her seat. Judge King beamed back like a raffish uncle.

  She had traveled twelve thousand miles from her native South Africa to tell yet another jury about her macabre discovery of Muff’s skeletal remains in 1981. What had first caught her attention as she was walking on the beach of the lagoon, she told a rapt jury, was something “glittering in the sunlight.” She approached the object. It turned out to be a “gold tooth in a skull.”

  “A wristwatch and what was found in the lid?” an elderly lady whispered to another spectator as Jordan continued her story.

  “A bone.”

  “A boat?”

  “A bone.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Schroeder asked if a high tide would come up past the spot where the remains were found. Yes, Jordan said, high tides would reach all the way up to the naupaka bushes, some feet farther in. (In fact, it was almost preternaturally fortuitous that the skeletal remains were not only washed ashore when someone was on the island, but that this someone, Sharon Jordon, just happened to be walking along that precise part of the beach when she was. The very next high tide would probably have pushed the bones into the undergrowth out of sight or dragged them back into the lagoon where they would have sunk and most likely been lost for eternity. The box alone would have meant nothing.)

  After describing how she and her husband had raised the old Air Force rescue boat from the bottom of the lagoon, Jordan said there were four storage-hole compartments on the boat “but only two of the compartments had con
tainers in them.” The other two had been missing, she said. The jury knew that one of them was sitting before them right in the courtroom and the other was most likely Mac’s coffin in the lagoon or sea.

  There wasn’t much for the defense to ask the young woman, but Len brought out her well-founded opinion that no one could starve on Palmyra. “The food situation was super,” she offered in her pleasantly accented English. “There were coconuts, lots of different types of crabs, the fishing was good, there were eggs, palm hearts. We ate pretty well in the five months we were there.”

  THE ONLY white person now living on Christmas Island, John Bryden was a rugged outdoorsman who spoke with a Scots brogue as chewy as haggis. Weary of contemporary life in Scotland, he had moved in 1969 to Christmas Island, part of the Gilbert Islands (which included Fanning, Washington, and numerous other islands), seeking a blend of adventure and peace of mind in a less complicated society. He’d found both in his island kingdom. In 1979, he had been hired to start a coconut plantation on Palmyra, which was three hundred miles to the northwest of Christmas. As general manager, Bryden brought with him sixteen young Gilbertese men as laborers. Along with his men, whose Micronesian dialect he spoke fluently, he spent fourteen months on the atoll before determining that conditions militated strongly against a profitable commercial venture.

  Bryden testified that in May 1979, after deciding that the old rescue boat, which they had found in a cluttered shed located a few feet from the water’s edge, was beyond repair, he had his crew drag it down the seaplane ramp into a fairly deep part of the lagoon, where it sank.

  From a photo produced by Enoki, Bryden identified the rescue boat found by the Jordans as the same craft his men had unceremoniously scuttled. He could not remember whether any of the containers inside the boat’s four storage-hole compartments were missing at that time.

  Bryden confirmed that he was familiar with the lagoon shoreline in the area where Jennifer claimed she and Buck had found the overturned Zodiac (and where Jordan had found Muff’s remains).

  “How big is the beach in that area?” Enoki asked, trying to shore up the probability that lagoon waters would have reached the allegedly overturned dinghy, and therefore gotten salt into its motor.

  “There really isn’t much beach. At low tide, it’s dry. At high tide, it’s covered by about eighteen inches of water at the most. The sandy area is just a little strip along the water’s edge at high tide. It would be about a foot wide there.”

  “After that foot or so, you would hit the brush line?”

  “Well, you would hit the jungle even before that in some spots. The bushes grow out into the water in some places there.”

  During one of Len’s two trips to Palmyra he had stopped off at Christmas Island and interviewed Bryden in his rustic beachfront cottage home as his young, native wife served coconut milk laced with gin. But there was little to cross-examine Bryden on.

  Weinglass: “It’s true, is it not, that you found, in your living on the island of Palmyra for fourteen months, the island to be a foreboding place?”

  “There were times when it felt like that,” said Bryden, who didn’t look at all like the kind of person who scared easily. “It sometimes felt a little bit spooky.”

  A discussion of the food supply on Palmyra resulted in this exchange.

  “Did you bring pigs with you to Palmyra?” Len asked.

  “Yes. We had two pigs, but we never got to eat them because we…they were…we lost them.”

  Judge King, incredulously: “You lost them?”

  “Yes,” the Scotsman answered soberly. “They fell in a hole, sir, and they…they drowned.”

  IN AN obvious attempt to retrieve the damaged credibility of Curt Shoemaker, the Government had flown in FBI Special Agent Tom Kilgore from Honolulu. Involved in the initial stages of the investigation, Kilgore had interviewed Shoemaker on October 30, 1974.

  “Agent Kilgore, did Mr. Shoemaker tell you about his last radio contact with the Grahams?” Schroeder asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he tell you about an incident with respect to a cake coming from the other boat?”

  “Yes. He mentioned to me that the people from the other boat, who I was led to believe were the Allens, were either there [aboard the Sea Wind] or they were to be with them at a later time.”

  “And what did he say that they had with them, or were bringing with them?”

  “A cake,” the witness answered.

  “Now, did you include that cake incident in your 302 report?”

  “No. No I did not.” The agent explained that he didn’t imagine, at the time, that the cake had anything to do with the disappearance of the Grahams.

  “Was the case classified as a homicide investigation at that time?”

  “No, it was not. It was classified as a crime on the high seas.”

  “Mr. Kilgore,” I began on cross, “when is the very first time anyone ever asked you if you recalled Mr. Shoemaker telling you about a cake?”

  “A couple days ago.”

  “No one, prior to a couple of days ago, asked you if you recalled Mr. Shoemaker telling you about a cake?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Your interview with Mr. Shoemaker took place on October 30, 1974. This is mid-February, 1986, almost twelve years later. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve investigated hundreds of cases since then, have you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the time Mr. Shoemaker supposedly told you about this cake incident, in your mind, this was just two people bringing a cake to two other people. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was totally insignificant to you at the time you heard it. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “The obvious question: How can you possibly remember, twelve years later, something which, at the time you heard it, you admit was totally insignificant?”

  “I recall that particular instance of a cake, simply because…that it was quite difficult for someone to bake a cake on a boat.”

  I smiled at Agent Kilgore. “You mean you haven’t heard before about people making cakes on boats?”

  “I have never had someone serve me cake on a boat.”

  Kilgore had gone from the untenable statement that it is difficult to make a cake on a boat to the irrelevant observation that he had never been served cake on a boat.

  “With respect to this last radio contact with Mac Graham, Mr. Shoemaker didn’t tell you anything about a truce being mentioned by Mr. Graham, did he?”

  “No.”

  The last Government witnesses were close friends of the Grahams.

  Harry Steward, a very formal man in his seventies, was at one time U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California in San Diego. A yachtsman himself, Steward explained that he and Mac had hit it off when they first met by chance at a marina. “Mac was the most knowledgeable man about sailing I have ever met.” Steward estimated he’d been aboard the Sea Wind a hundred times or more.

  “And during that hundred or so occasions,” Schroeder asked, “did the Grahams ever invite you to go aboard at a time when they were not going to be personally present?”

  “No.”

  “Now, in your opinion, would Mac and Muff ever have invited someone they did not know well or did not care for to come aboard the Sea Wind at a time when they were not going to be personally present?”

  “No, no,” the witness said emphatically.

  Karl Kneisel, an Ichabod Crane type with dry, tousled hair and a flaming sunburned long nose, rated Mac “the best sailor I ever ran across” and concurred that the Grahams were fastidious in choosing guests to board their beloved boat. “They were old-fashioned about yachting etiquette.”

  “Did Mac have an acetylene torch aboard?” Schroeder asked.

  “Yes, he did. He considered it a piece of his cruising gear which was indispensable to do metalwork with.”

  After a parade of twent
y-seven Government witnesses, the prosecution closed with this final horrific image, one the Walker jury also had: Muff Graham’s corpse searing in the roar of her beloved husband Mac’s own acetylene torch. It was enough to curdle anyone’s stomach.

  CHAPTER 37

  FEBRUARY 12, 1986

  IT WAS A COLD AND drizzly morning in San Francisco, as a late-winter storm approached from far out in the Pacific, where all the bad weather on this coast originates.

  Soon to unfold inside the monolithic federal courthouse on Golden Gate Avenue, in the heated comfort of a nineteenth-floor courtroom, was the final act of a long-running murder mystery that had also begun far out on the world’s most turbulent ocean.

  The lineup of defense witnesses was considerably shorter than the Government’s. Our star witness would appear last. We had not publicly announced that Jennifer would testify in her defense, but everyone knew she had to explain in her own words why, if she was innocent, everything pointed to her guilt.

  Before summoning the jurors, the court heard two defense motions. The first was my motion for a judgment of acquittal on the felony-murder count under Rule 29(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. For the same reasons he had dropped the felony-murder count in the Walker trial, Judge King granted my motion forthwith. Next, Len made a lengthy motion under the same rule to dismiss the premeditated murder count. Since this was the only count remaining against Jennifer, he was asking that the entire case be dismissed. This motion, contending that the evidence presented by the prosecution “is insufficient to sustain a conviction,” is made by defense attorneys in virtually every case and almost as invariably denied. Nevertheless, Len made a good argument, and it was apparent that he held Judge King’s full attention.

  Weinglass asserted, “There’s no evidence as to how the death occurred. No proof to show what happened on Palmyra. There’s no evidence of any connection of Jennifer Jenkins to a killing. There’s no bloodstain, there’s no murder weapon, there’s no fingerprint, there’s no footprint. There is nothing that would tie her to the act of murder.”