Barron earned her degree at the University of Florida, and it was there that she began her career reporting news and weather for the college station. Her first job out of school was out of town, anchoring and reporting for WHAG-TV in Hagerstown, Maryland.
She returned to Florida, reporting and anchoring at Sarasota’s WWSB-TV, before joining WFLA, and thrice won awards: Outstanding Excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists in Spot News, the 2004 Green Eyeshade Award, and the Jack R. Howard Award for Best Investigative Reporting from the Scripps Howard Foundation.
Barron noted that there were far more spectators present for the victim than there were for the defendant, but Murphy did have his supporters, most notably Mark Klothacus.
In his opening statement Lon Arend said that Joyce Wishart was chosen as Murphy’s victim because of her convenience and vulnerability.
“She was alone in the art gallery, offering privacy,” Arend said. “It was not a spur-of-the-moment attack. Murphy came prepared, carrying with him a knife and a ‘stretchy sock,’ which he used to bind her.”
Arend warned the jurors that they would hear a lot about Murphy’s mental illness, and urged them to think only in terms of what was and wasn’t criminally insane.
“In order to be criminally insane, the defendant would have to be unable to distinguish and appreciate the difference between right and wrong, and this defendant’s actions prove conclusively that he could make that distinction,” Arend said.
In Florida, insanity followed the so-called M’Naghten rule, which stated that two conditions must be met for a person to be ruled legally insane so that he or she cannot be guilty of a crime: First, if he suffered at the time of his crime from a mental disease or defect; second, if he did not understand the nature of his act, or, if he did understand, he did not know that it was wrong.
“Murphy planned the crime and planned to get away with it,” Arend said. “When he left the gallery after the murder, he managed to lock the door behind him in such a fashion that he left no fingerprints.”
If Murphy hadn’t been able to distinguish and appreciate the difference between right and wrong, he would not have told his victim not to scream, or, when she did scream, put his hand over her mouth.
It was probably at that point that the victim bit the defendant, so he bled at the scene, too—blood that eventually led detectives to their man.
Here was a man who stole his victim’s wallet and keys. To cover up his crime effectively, he did not do the simple thing, which would have been to throw away the keys and wallet in the nearest receptacle. “Instead, the defendant threw each key away individually, and cut up the contents of the wallet before throwing these pieces away in a variety of locations,” Arend noted.
Arend described the scene—a ghastly scene created by a wannabe artist—how Wishart had been left posed on the gallery floor to resemble a nearby piece of art, how a magazine article called “A Fine Madness” became part of the “scene” the defendant created.
There was really only one thing the jury could do. Find Murphy guilty of murder. Arend thanked the jury for their time and had a seat.
The defense’s opening statement by Carolyn Schlemmer emphasized the more bizarre aspects of his personality. There might have been times when Murphy wasn’t insane, but he most certainly was when he killed Joyce Wishart and brutally mutilated her corpse.
On the day of the murder, the defense argued, the defendant was “the Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy,” which was a manifestation of his mental illness. The defendant believed that this entity had a DNA link with God, had thousands of followers, and had killed Julius Caesar. When he killed Joyce Wishart, he did so because he believed God had told him to do so.
The defense promised the jury that they would hear from a quartet of psychologists, who would detail Murphy’s extensive history of mental illness.
Here was a man who once lost a job because he insisted that God was telling him what to do. He claimed to be able to speak in tongues, although those who heard him only heard babble. He’d been known to stare at scrambled television screens as a method of communicating with gods. He believed he was an alien and had been known to hide in trash bins. He once put a line of tomatoes across a parking lot.
“What you will not hear during this trial,” Schlemmer said firmly, “is an expert take the stand and say Elton Murphy was sane on January 16, 2004.”
Bottom line was, he was nuttier than a fruitcake—a sick, sick man, who needed to be in a mental institution receiving treatment, not in a prison being punished.
On the second day of the trial, the jury watched the nearly eight hours of interview by Detectives Grant, Opitz, and Glover.
Murphy, in retrospect, thought that those tapes were what hurt him the most during the trial. He was heard sparring playfully with the investigators, treating the murder of a living soul as if it were some kind of joke.
On the third day, as the jurors heard for the first time the graphic details of Joyce Wishart’s murder, Jackie Barron watched the defendant carefully. At first glance Murphy appeared to be sitting motionless. Upon closer scrutiny she noticed that there was a slight tremor in his hands and a rhythmic rocking motion in his legs.
As would be the case throughout the trial, Wishart’s friends and family sat in the front row, immediately behind the prosecution table. When the testimony got rough—and it was plenty rough on the third day—family members would clasp hands for support. Those hands were clasped particularly tightly as crime scene technicians described Wishart’s remains as they were found on the art gallery floor: nearly decapitated, disfigured, partially nude, posed. No mention of missing flesh.
Also sitting in the audience that day was the writer of “A Fine Madness,” Marcia Corbino, Sarasota’s premier art historian. Corbino was also coauthor of The History of Visual Art in Sarasota (with Kevin Dean and Pat Ringling Buck, University Press of Florida, 2003). The book was her idea and its intent was to tell everyone about Sarasota’s rich artistic past, something a lot of locals didn’t know about because they were new.
Originally, Marcia Corbino had planned on writing about Joyce Wishart’s murder journalistically. After she ran into official roadblocks between herself and the details of the crime, she decided, instead, to write about the murder in a fictionalized way.
Corbino was frustrated by the experience of attending the trial. When it came time for the jury to see photos of the crime scene, and the images had been blown up and mounted on large pieces of cardboard, the exhibits were always held so that the press and spectators could not see.
“It was annoying,” Corbino later said. She tried to chase down the person whose permission she would need to view the photos, but she received the runaround.
“I got the impression that they’d never received a request like that before,” she recalled.
In hindsight, though, it was probably the offensive and unpublishable nature of the photos, rather than the request, that had officials nervous.
One thing was clear to Corbino. From what she knew about the crime scene, as an art critic she could tell the murder had been committed by a frustrated artist.
Marcia Corbino got some of the crime scene details she’d yearned for with the testimony of Valerie Howard. The criminalist stated that there could be no doubt that the attack had a strong sexual component.
“Some of the wounds were on her chest,” Howard said. She quickly added, almost as an afterthought: “And part of her groin area was missing.”
ME Russell Vega testified that the cause of death was twenty-three stab wounds. He had counted them all, adding, “I’ve never seen a case like this before.”
On Friday, May 8, 2009, the defense put on its case. With the jury outside the courtroom, Judge Roberts noted that in order to put forth an insanity defense, the defendant had to admit that he had committed the crime. There could be no such thing as “if I did, I was insane.” Judge Roberts wasn’t sure that Murphy had ever officially confessed,
so he straight-out asked Murphy, “Did you kill Joyce Wishart?”
Murphy’s words were loud and clear. “Yes, Your Honor, I did.”
“Bring the jury back in,” Judge Roberts said, and the defense was allowed to proceed. The first defense witness was a coworker at the Regis salon in the Brandon Town Center.
“I had problems with staff being afraid,” said Sylvie Tarlton, the salon’s former manager. “They didn’t want to work with him.”
Frank Burns testified that Murphy placed a ladder up against his and his wife Stephanie’s house in Tallahassee. By way of explanation Murphy said that aliens had led him to do it. Murphy recognized the guy as the one with the baseball bat who’d refused to let him down off a ladder until a sheriff’s deputy arrived.
According to Burns, “I approached him and asked what he was doing, and he said he was sent there to fix my roof. I asked him who sent him and he said people from another planet.”
The prosecution’s cross-examination made it clear that Murphy might have merely been pretending to be crazy, that this was his standard method when he was caught trying to rob a house. If you get caught, act crazy—that was just part of Murphy’s method, right?
The defense then called four psychologists who had examined Murphy. The psychologists said Murphy was psychotic and had convinced himself that he was related to God, that he was part alien, and that he had acted with God’s grace on a mission to find believers. Murphy claimed to have more than a thousand followers who were under his control. He told one psychologist that he had replaced the soul of one of his lawyers by surrounding him with books and magazines—a line that tied in with the murder because Murphy had indeed left a magazine under Joyce Wishart’s left hand.
First up was Dr. James McGovern, who had originally been asked to evaluate Murphy’s competence to stand trial by the state, but was now appearing as a defense witness.
“In the construct of his universe, everything he did was acceptable,” said Dr. McGovern. “Anything he did to hide his action was aimed more at continuing his mission than on evading responsibility,” the psychologist testified.
Lon Arend argued that yearning to stay free so Murphy could continue his mission—that mission being to kill and rape women—was hardly a heartwarming defense.
Arend was going to agree with everything the doctors said, as long as it concerned Murphy’s mental illness. But he was going to disagree with just about everything that dealt with insanity.
Psychologist Mary Elizabeth Kasper said, “He felt the laws would not apply to him.” Murphy, for example, felt that he had gotten permission directly from God to rape and kill Joyce Wishart.
Arend hammered away. The only thing that mattered, when it came to Murphy’s mental state, was if he could distinguish and appreciate the difference between right and wrong.
Everything else was irrelevant.
Arend was particularly effective when cross-examining Dr. Kasper. One spectator in the courtroom recalled Dr. Kasper flailing her arms and growing uncomfortably loud as she tried to answer his questions. She was so annoyed with Arend, and—according to eyewitnesses—she had difficulty maintaining her composure. (Her performance was so dramatic, and helpful to the prosecution, that one juror remarked upon it after the trial.)
“What is the definition of ‘wrong,’ Dr. Kasper?” Arend asked at one point.
There was a pause as the question caused the witness to temporarily tilt.
“Not right?” was her eventual response. Arend was making her look bad. She was furious.
When the lawyers were through questioning the psychologists, the jury was allowed to submit questions. The jury asked, “What is psychosis?” They were told that it was a loss of contact with reality. They were told that no, there were no brain scans or biological tests that could prove insanity, and that at no time during his examinations did Murphy show remorse.
Dr. D’Agostino was the state psychologist who’d evaluated Murphy in Chattahoochee when he was deemed incompetent to stand trial.
Arend asked Dr. D’Agostino about Murphy’s social skills: “Could he follow the rules if he were in a school or something like that?”
“If there were rules in place, the defendant would follow them,” Dr. D’Agostino testified.
Arend thought that was a powerful response. One of the symptoms of knowing right from wrong is the ability to follow society’s rules. To know right from wrong, you need to know what the societal norms are.
“That was the key point,” Arend later said. “You can talk all you want about hearing voices. I wasn’t arguing against mental illness. I conceded to the fact that the guy had mental problems.”
Arend impressively cross-examined all four doctors, made them admit that Murphy could distinguish right and wrong, but didn’t care.
Still, the prosecutor was kind to the doctors: “I thought they all did a good job. They discussed mental illness, which was their expertise. When I asked about the legal definition of insanity, they recognized that the jury was going to have to make that call.”
Arend believed that psychologists, especially forensic psychologists, should better gear their examinations of defendants with the law in mind. If they were going to say someone didn’t understand the difference between right and wrong, there should be a baseline for comparison purposes, a test featuring questions such as “Is this right? Or is this wrong?” A test of the defendant’s scruples. There should be a way, Arend believed, for the shrinks to quantify insanity as a measurable entity, based solely on questions relevant to insanity. The four doctors spent many hours with Murphy and there was little or no discussion regarding “What are the rules? And why don’t they conform to you?”
Looking back on the trial, despite Arend’s effective cross-examination, Murphy felt that the mental-health professionals were still the strongest part of his defense. Despite the prosecution’s negative spin on everything, the shrinks—Dr. Kasper in particular—testified that Murphy didn’t really understand the difference between right and wrong. He could distinguish it all right, but he didn’t get it. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t know the difference, but that he didn’t appreciate the difference. Dr. Kasper held on to her opinion that Murphy suffered from a severe schizophrenic disorder and was criminally insane at the time of the murder. All of this might have been more valuable to the defense if she’d better composed herself during Lon Arend’s frustrating cross-examination.
The doctors’ consolidated message to the jury was that Murphy had been schizophrenic when he killed Joyce Wishart. And during subsequent questioning, he was not malingering. He was not exaggerating his symptoms.
After her day in court Marcia Corbino had nothing but nice things to say about the prosecution. The way Lon Arend handled the defense psychologists was masterful, she said.
The defense psychologists, Corbino noted, all had similar opinions as to Murphy’s insanity, but they didn’t have any proof. They hadn’t taken a brain scan. They hadn’t given him a lie detector test. They sat on the witness stand and relied just on the notes they had taken. She found it strange.
She also didn’t have many nice things to say about Murphy’s defense.
“It was like they weren’t really trying” was her assessment.
The following day closing statements were delivered. Both sides claimed victory. The defense acknowledged that Elton Brutus Murphy knew the difference between right and wrong, but that did not necessarily make him legally sane. The law said that the defendant needed to both know and appreciate the difference in order to be sane. Murphy showed every sign of not appreciating the difference. He believed that the laws were all fine and good for mere mortals, but that those same laws did not apply to him. His DNA was different, he said. He was a god.
Lon Arend had an answer for that. If Murphy really believed that he was above the law, and the laws did not apply to him, then there was no point in him cleaning up after himself. If he really believed that he shared DNA with God, he would n
ot have hidden the victim’s flesh in a plastic bag when he left the Provenance Gallery. He would have held that bloody human flesh in one hand and the knife in the other and he would have proclaimed for the world that he was the Lord God Elton Brutus Murphy. But that wasn’t what he did. He covered up. He fled. He was afraid that something bad would happen to him—just like a sane man who both knew and appreciated the difference between right and wrong. He didn’t just dispose of evidence. He disposed of it in a wide variety of locations, just to further befuddle investigators. He locked the gallery door with the edges of his fingers so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints!
Would a god hide anything? No, a god would have walked right out that gallery door without a care in the world for what other people, including law enforcement, thought.
Arend went over the recordings that they had heard of Murphy being interrogated in Texas. “‘Joyce? Joyce? Are we rejoicing?’” He thought he was funny. Again and again those recordings showed that Murphy was sane, proud of his perversity. It wasn’t that this creepy man didn’t understand the law; it was that he thought he was above the law.
Following closing arguments, Judge Roberts gave the jury their instructions. He thanked the alternate jurors for their time and dismissed them.
He told the remaining panel that the first thing they needed to do was elect a foreperson, whose job it would be to supervise deliberation. All of their deliberation needed to take place in the deliberation room, which had its own bathroom.
A bailiff would be posted out in the hall, right outside their door, at all times. If a juror had a question, he or she was to write it down on a piece of paper and then knock on the door. The bailiff would open the door, take the written question, and Judge Roberts would determine if he was allowed to answer it. If he could, he most certainly would. All of the evidence would be sent back to the jurors’ room. They had a right to see all of it.
Evil Season Page 27