And the Sea Will Tell

by Vincent Bugliosi

  “No. He misunderstood if he thought I said I found the dinghy on Paradise Island. That was just where I thought it had flipped over, by Paradise Island.”

  “Jennifer, did you tell Mr. Shishido the same thing you’ve testified to here in court about the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Mac and Muff?”

  “Yes. I told him the truth about what I thought happened to Mac and Muff.”

  “Did you tell Mr. Shishido that the reason you never notified the authorities about the Grahams’ disappearance was that you were afraid they would take the boat away from you?”

  “I probably said something like that.”

  “Was this the truth?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you tell him this then?”

  “Well, he asked me why I was on the boat, and why I hadn’t turned the boat in. And I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t tell him that it was because of Buck’s fugitive status. So I guess…that was just what popped out of my mouth.”

  I moved quickly to emphasize this important point.

  “You didn’t feel you could tell him the real reason, is that correct?”

  “Right.”

  “That you were trying to protect Buck?”

  “Yes.”

  In answer to my question, Jennifer testified that during the FBI interrogation, she found out for the first time whom they were looking for. They kept talking about Roy Allen.

  “And you never told them that Roy Allen was Buck Walker?”

  “No.”

  Since Jennifer’s effort to protect Buck was so central to my summation, I presented further evidence of her effort.

  “Jennifer, Mr. Shishido testified that you told him you first joined Roy Allen on the Iola in late April of 1974 while the Iola was moored in the Keehi Lagoon on the island of Oahu. You testified earlier, however, that you and Buck moved to the island of Maui in October of 1973, and Buck bought the Iola there that same month. And the boat, which you and Buck lived on, was moored in the Maalaea Harbor in Maui. Do you recall that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you change the date and location to Mr. Shishido?”

  “I was afraid that otherwise they would find out that Roy Allen was really Buck Walker.”

  “You felt the authorities would be able to check and ascertain that you were really with a Buck Walker at the correct time and place?” I prompted.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did you tell Mr. Shishido that you and Buck rationalized Mac’s statement—Mac’s alleged statement—to Buck to ‘make yourselves at home’ to mean that the Grahams would have wanted you and Buck to take possession of the boat if anything happened to them? Did you tell Mr. Shishido that?”

  “I’m sure I said something to that effect.”

  “Was this a truthful statement on your part?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you tell him this?”

  “Again, he was questioning me as to why we hadn’t turned the boat in. And I couldn’t tell him the real reason, so…I don’t know why I chose those words, except that was…as I knew it, the last words that Mac had told to Buck. And they just came out.”

  “The last words that Buck told you that Mac had said?”

  “Yes.”

  With respect to the toilet-flushing incident at the yacht club, Jennifer said she didn’t flush anything out of her purse. “I was in the rest room for a long time, longer than usual. My stomach was really upset,” she told the jury.

  “How long after you had originally set out to go to the bathroom were you permitted to do so?” I asked.

  “It seemed like forever. Probably at least a couple of hours.”

  Actually, there was another toilet-flushing incident, the details of which I decided to have Jennifer volunteer to the jury. “While you were at the FBI office in Honolulu, did you flush anything down the toilet from your purse that you did not want the authorities to see?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was this?”

  “When I was taking the things out of my purse—I think they were cataloguing everything—I found a piece of paper that had the name Buck Walker on it. So, I crunched it up, and when I went to the bathroom, I flushed it down the toilet.”

  “Had you emptied out the contents of your purse earlier that day?” I asked.

  Jennifer had told me that at the beginning of her interview on the Coast Guard cutter they had inspected the contents of her purse. (Later, at the FBI office, they had catalogued everything.) But after listening to me and Shishido go around and around on this issue, she now retreated, but just a bit. “It seems to me that when I went on board the Coast Guard cutter someone took my purse, but I really don’t remember what happened.”

  Jennifer testified that when she visited Buck in jail after she was released on bail he gave her a letter to mail to Mac’s sister, Kit Muncey, and she did so.

  “Did he ask you to write a cover letter for him to her?”

  “Yes. He said he wanted me to say that the letter he wrote was written while we had the boat in dry dock. When it wasn’t.”

  “And that something had happened to the letter to delay its mailing?”

  “Yes, he told me to tell her that the letter had gotten misplaced, and that I had come upon it and I knew that Buck would want her to have it.”

  “Actually, to your knowledge, his letter to her was written later while he was in jail. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you in fact write the cover letter that Buck requested of you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  I asked her why she had been willing to misrepresent to Kit when and where the letter was written.

  “I did it for Buck. And I thought it was a beautifully written letter, and all the events that were in it about what happened to Mac and Muff were true. There were some other things in it that weren’t true. But I thought that the main thing was that it talked about our relationship with Mac and Muff, and the accident, and what had happened on Palmyra.”

  “So, the contents of the letter referring to Mac and Muff’s disappearance, the heart of the letter, you felt that that was true.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was the main thing you were concerned about?”

  “Yes.”

  I next explored further Jennifer’s relationship with Buck, by far the longest intimate relationship she’d had in her entire life. Yes, they had discussed getting married and had even gone so far as to take a blood test, she told the jury. She considered herself Buck’s common-law wife.

  “So in your mind your relationship with Buck was something akin to marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any further emotional attachment to Buck?”

  “No.”

  I paused a few moments.

  “Jennifer, as this jury here, and this judge, are your witnesses, as God above is your witness, did you have anything at all to do with the deaths of Mac and Muff Graham?”

  “No, I didn’t.” She looked to the ceiling for a moment, composing herself. “I never doubted that Mac and Muff had died in a boating accident.”

  “You may take the witness,” I told Enoki.

  CHAPTER 40

  ON THE WITNESS STAND, Jennifer waited, unsmiling, but evidently quite comfortable. All the work getting her ready for this moment had given her—and me—confidence that she was prepared for the pitfalls of cross-examination.

  Elliot Enoki approached the podium with no apparent enthusiasm. After putting his papers down, he made sure his coat was buttoned, then lingered, head down, looking as lifeless as a rag doll.

  Professionally, I could almost feel sorry for my counterpart. He was like someone about to give a speech identical to the one just delivered by the previous speaker.

  With two calculated exceptions, I felt assured I had conducted the major points of Enoki’s cross-examination for him. I had raised every negative, incriminating thing Jennifer had ever said or
done in connection with the case, and had given her ample opportunity to give plausible reasons for each and every action.

  My two calculated exceptions covered pieces of evidence that, if the two prosecutors were to overlook anything, seemed the most likely candidates to me.

  The first was Jennifer’s filing of a salvage claim on the Sea Wind on May 22, 1975, just two months before her theft trial. She told me this had been her lawyer’s idea. If she didn’t, he said, everyone would believe she and Buck had stolen the vessel. He reasoned that a thief wouldn’t have the audacity to file a salvage claim. Jennifer said she argued that it made no sense to do so because the Sea Wind belonged to Mac’s heirs, but he persisted in his urging and she acquiesced. She told me that the salvage claim never came to court, and she didn’t know what had happened to it.

  I viewed the salvage claim as particularly damaging to Jennifer, because if the jury did not believe that her lawyer was the instigator, it was completely inconsistent with her testimony that she intended to return the Sea Wind to Kit Muncey after two years. Even if the jury did believe that her lawyer had influenced her, it was just one more example of someone getting Jennifer to do something she didn’t want to do. His getting her to commit perjury was bad enough. I thought this salvage claim might slip by both Enoki and Schroeder, since they weren’t on the case at the time of the theft trials, and the only reference to it I’d found was one short article amid the sea of newspaper clippings.

  The second item I’d skirted was Jennifer’s testimony at a motion-to-suppress hearing in Honolulu on January 24, 1975, that the only alternative open to Buck and her on Palmyra was to take the Sea Wind because they “were stranded” on Palmyra. When I asked Jennifer about this devastating testimony, she said this did not, as it appeared, refer to a belief in the unseaworthiness of the Iola. Rather, it was a lie to go along with the other lie that the Iola had run aground in the channel.

  I had first seen a reference to the motion-to-suppress hearing in one of the documents furnished to the defense by the Government, but there was no copy of the transcript in our files. I asked Enoki for a copy and found the “stranded” remark in it. This appeared to be a highly damaging piece of evidence that confirmed exactly what the prosecution was saying, and I was greatly relieved when Jennifer had a satisfactory explanation. I didn’t, however, want her to have to give it before the jury. Since Enoki had up to then furnished the defense with every transcript of a court proceeding in the case, it crossed my mind that the prosecutor might not have had this transcript in his own files, had ordered a copy for me, and, in the rush of things, not taken the time to read it himself.

  “MISS JENKINS,” Enoki finally began, straightening up and tucking one hand in his coat pocket, JFK-style, “as I understand it, you deny stealing the Sea Wind after the disappearance of the Grahams?”

  “I never planned to steal the boat,” she answered evenly, “and I had no intention of keeping her.”

  “Okay. At the prior theft proceedings that Mr. Bugliosi asked you about, you steadfastly denied to that jury stealing the Sea Wind. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Enoki was already struggling with a subject I had covered matter-of-factly during my questioning.

  “Yesterday, you admitted, did you not, that you had no legal right to the boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew that you were doing wrong. You admitted that yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Concerning the letter Mr. Walker wrote to Mary Muncey, you did review it before you sent it off?”

  “I read it, yes.”

  “I think you testified that not everything in there was true. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, that letter contains the statement that the Iola wound up on the reef as you were leaving Palmyra. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, you knew Mr. Walker was lying to Mrs. Muncey about that?”

  “Yes.”

  At the podium, Enoki paused.

  “You indicated in your testimony that you were not trying to disguise the Sea Wind at all by repainting it. Is that right?” he asked.

  “I did not believe that changing the color of that boat would in any way disguise her.”

  “And did you tell Mr. Walker that?”

  “I did.”

  “And what was his response?”

  “He just said he wanted to change the color. He said we were either going to paint her yellow or I could pick a color I liked better. Yellow is one of my least favorite colors, so I chose lavender.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Walker’s comments cause you some concern that he might be repainting the boat to disguise it because he was never going to return it?”

  “He had made a promise to me when I showed him Mac’s will. Buck promised me that we would get the boat back to the mainland of the United States within that two-year period specified in the will.”

  With respect to the swordfish incident, all the maneuvers Enoki had made to question the hole in the boat turned into smoke. Although he examined Jennifer in depth about the incident, none of his questions could in any way be considered challenging. They were more in the nature of simply finding out what had happened. Such as: “Now, did I hear you correctly that you discovered you were struck by the swordfish sometime later that evening? Is that correct?”

  Enoki asked if the gold figurehead of a woman was in place on the bowsprit of the Sea Wind when Jennifer and Buck took possession of the boat at Palmyra.

  “Yes,” Jennifer said. “At some point, the figurehead ceased to be on the boat, but…I don’t know when that was.”

  “I gather by your answer that you did not remove the figurehead yourself?”

  “That’s correct. I don’t remember seeing it after we left Palmyra.”

  “Do you recall whether the name Sea Wind was on the running boards of the vessel when you took possession of it on Palmyra?”

  “I don’t remember, but it probably was.”

  “Do you remember if it was there when you got to Hawaii?”

  “I don’t remember. It probably wasn’t. I think Buck had removed all the names. Mr. Wollen testified that the name Iola was on the boat. So…at some point in time, Buck must have removed all the Sea Wind names, and put the name Iola on. But I don’t remember where and when that happened exactly.”

  Enoki was making good headway in one important area: Jennifer was beginning to say she didn’t remember or recall certain things. Her memory, the prosecutor could later argue, had conveniently been much sharper on direct than on cross-examination. I hoped the jury would see that most of the things she couldn’t remember were more trivial than the matters we had covered on direct.

  Enoki touched on the subject of whether or not there had been a diary or log written by the Grahams aboard the Sea Wind. Jennifer said she “didn’t specifically recall” finding anything that resembled a diary or log book.

  “How about Mrs. Graham’s clothing? Did you look through what she had?”

  “I saw that she had clothing there. I didn’t go through it, per se.” There was a peevish tone in her reply I would have preferred she didn’t have.

  “Did you wear any of her clothing?”

  “I don’t recall wearing any of her clothing. I’m not sure.”

  “Do you recall the outfit in which you were arrested?”

  “No.”

  Enoki asked the clerk to hand the witness two mug shots taken on the day of her arrest.

  “Does that refresh your recollection in any way as to what you were wearing at the time you were arrested?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know whether that was…Muff’s blouse I was wearing. I mean, I’ve…I had a blouse just like that, too.”

  “You took four hundred dollars in cash that you found on board the vessel?” Enoki asked, repeating a point I had already elicited on direct examination. “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” she said.

&nb
sp; “You told Agent Shishido that you thought the Grahams would have wanted you to have the Sea Wind, is that correct?”

  “The problem with that conversation was he was asking me questions that I could not answer honestly without placing Buck in jeopardy, so I came out with certain responses. Did I think that Mac wanted me to have that boat? No, I knew Mac wanted his sister to have the boat.”

  “I understand that. But at some point in that conversation, you do admit telling Agent Shishido that you rationalized the Grahams would have wanted you to have that boat. Whether that statement was true or not, you did make that statement to Agent Shishido.”

  Jennifer grimaced slightly.

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t mention to Agent Shishido the will that you had discovered on the boat. Isn’t that right?”

  “I probably didn’t. I don’t recall mentioning it.”

  “Telling Agent Shishido about your discovery of the will would not have impaired Mr. Walker’s ability to escape, would it?” the prosecutor asked, leaning forward.

  It was a good question, but Jennifer was prepared.

  “No,” she said. “But I knew that the will didn’t give me any legal right to that boat. So why would I tell him about it?”

  “On direct examination, I believe you indicated that it made your mind feel a little bit easier that you had found the will,* and seen in the will that Mac at one time wanted someone to have his boat in certain circumstances.”

  “But I didn’t feel that the will was any justification for us keeping the boat, not legally. Not morally.”

  “You testified on direct examination that you weren’t sure where you were going after you left the Ala Wai yacht harbor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recall Mrs. Wollen saying that she had asked you where you were going, and you told her the South Seas?”

  “I could have easily told her that,” Jennifer answered. “I don’t recall.”

  “When you testified in your theft trial, you indicated to that jury that you were going from the Ala Wai to the mainland to return the boat to Mrs. Muncey.”