(2012) The Key to Justice

by Dennis Carstens

  “Did you bring in a crime lab team?”

  “Yes, we did,” Waschke replied.

  “The police searched the bathroom?”

  “Yes “

  “The living room?”

  “Yes.”

  “The kitchen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were Mr. Fornich’s possessions impounded for analysis, including the furniture?” Marc continued.

  “Yes.”

  “His clothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “The kitchen and bathroom items?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, Lieutenant, isn’t it true that every item of every kind was taken by the police and analyzed in the police lab?”

  “Yes, I believe that’s true.”

  “Was the apartment carpeted?”

  “Yes, it was. At least the living room and bedroom were.”

  “Was the carpeting thoroughly vacuumed and the debris analyzed?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “Now, Lieutenant, on any of the clothes taken from the apartment, was any blood found?”

  “No.”

  “Any hair samples, other than Mr. Fornich?”

  “No.”

  “Any fibers that could be tied to any of the victims?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really,” Marc said trying to hide his shock at this revelation.

  “Some denim fibers were found on the first victim, Mary Briggs. These matched some found in the defendant’s apartment,” Waschke explained.

  “Denim fibers. You mean blue jeans, don’t you Lieutenant?”

  “Yes. Levi’s 505 jeans.”

  “Levi’s 505. How many hundreds of pairs of Levi’s 505 jeans are sold in the Twin Cities every day Lieutenant?”

  “Um, several, I guess. We couldn’t nail it down specifically.”

  “I see,” Marc continued, relaxing again. “Suffice it to say, Lieutenant, that’s a fairly popular brand don’t you think?”

  “Objection,” Slocum said, dramatically rising slowly from his seat.

  “Sustained,” Prentiss said.

  “All right. Let me ask you this. Do you own a pair of Levi’s 505 jeans Lieutenant?”

  “Yes,” Jake answered hesitantly. “I believe I do,” he added as Slocum sheepishly sat down amid the mild laughter in the courtroom.

  “What do you think, Lieutenant? You think Mr. Slocum does? Mr. Kadella…” Prentiss started to say as the laughter became louder.

  “Withdrawn. Sorry your honor.”

  Marc took a moment to look at his notes, having forgotten where he had left off. He found his spot and continued by repeating his original question about fiber samples on the items taken from Carl’s apartment. For the next half hour he went over the list of impounded items. Slowly, carefully, methodically eliciting a negative response from Waschke about the evidence, or lack of it, found at Carl’s apartment.

  He went through the same procedure with Carl’s car. Having been impounded, it too had been gone over with a microscope in an effort to find something, anything that could tie any of the victims to Carl. Marc went much further than he had originally intended. His purpose, of course, was to show the lack of evidence against his client. A process he could have done with a carefully chosen ten or twelve questions. But he was rolling and feeling a bit cocky and decided to show the jury what a thorough job the police had done and how little they had actually come up with.

  “May I approach the witness, your honor? “ Marc asked Prentiss as he stood up.

  Unlike on TV, in Minnesota the lawyers are to remain seated while questioning a witness. Most people under those circumstances are nervous enough without a lawyer hovering over them. The lawyer needs permission from the judge to approach a witness, which is routinely granted.

  “Certainly,” Prentiss replied.

  Marc went to the table of the prosecution exhibits, picked up the plastic bag containing the knife and walked slowly, deliberately to the witness. He stood next to an impassive looking Waschke as he held up the knife and continued his questioning.

  “Lieutenant Waschke, I’m holding in my hand the knife you testified you found in the defendant’s apartment the day after Alice Darwin was murdered in Powderhorn Park, is that correct?” he asked setting the knife on the ledge of the witness stand.

  “That’s the knife, yes.”

  “You discovered this knife in the defendant’s closet, correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “On a shelf in the closet behind some empty boxes and clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was the shelf examined?”

  “I believe so,” Waschke answered narrowing his eyes slightly while looking at Marc.

  “Were any blood samples found on the shelf?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Any hair or fiber samples that could be tied to the any of the victims?”

  “No.”

  “Any water spots?”

  “What? What do you mean by water spots?”

  “Any spots on the shelf that would have been caused by water dripping onto the surface?”

  “Um, no. There weren’t,” Waschke answered.

  “Now, Lieutenant, the knife must have been washed, is that correct?”

  Slocum began to stand to object to the question as calling for a conclusion, thought better of it and silently dropped back into his seat. Obviously, if the knife had only minute traces of the blood of two victim’s on it, it must have been rinsed off at some point before it went on the shelf.

  “Yes, I suppose it was,” the big cop answered with a slight shrug.

  “The sinks in the apartment were taken apart and examined, weren’t they Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, they were.”

  “Was any blood found?”

  “No.”

  “Any samples of any kind?”

  “No.”

  Marc picked up the knife, placed it back on the table with the other exhibits and slowly, almost casually, walked back to his seat at the defense table. He took his seat and picked up the legal pad with his notes on it and went over the list while the courtroom silently waited for him. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular. In fact, he knew he had covered all of the ground he could and had scored the points he wanted. Enough, at least, to argue during closing that the knife had been planted. He looked over his notes simply as a way to buy himself a little time and decide if he wanted to press just one more issue.

  “Do you have any more questions of this witness, Mr. Kadella?” Prentiss finally asked after waiting patiently for almost two minutes.

  “Um, I’m sorry, your Honor,” Marc replied. “Yes, just a few more.”

  “Please get on with it then, Mr. Kadella.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be brief.” Marc answered the judge.

  “Lieutenant Waschke,” he continued turning his attention back to Jake. “Isn’t it true that among the kitchen utensils taken from Mr. Fornich’s apartment, there were two carving knives, other than the one from the closet?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Isn’t it true that both of those knives were analyzed?”

  “Yes, they were.”

  “And nothing was found on either one, was there?”

  “No, there wasn’t.”

  Marc stared silently at Jake, while Jake stared back at him. Both men maintaining a calm, relaxed expression yet neither man blinking. They stayed this way for ten or twelve seconds, Marc with his hands folded together on the tabletop, Jake with his arms casually crossed in his lap. Marc broke the silence by quietly, softly and still without breaking his trancelike expression or shifting his eyes, saying, “I have no further questions for this witness, at this time, your Honor.”

  The rest of the day was used up by Slocum conducting a redirect exam of Jake. The redirect is the opportunity the lawyer gets to rehabilitate his witness’ testimony. If anything is brought out during cross examination that requires a m
ore thorough explanation, this is the time. It is also intended to be restricted to only those things covered in the cross exam. The theory is that you had your chance during the direct exam to bring out testimony and new areas are not supposed to be allowed during redirect. Slocum played it pretty straight and the only testimony he wanted to explain were the alibis of the three men who had been investigated for the death of Constance Gavin. The other three men they knew of who had sex with her. Again, without the use of notes, Jake testified that all three men had been thoroughly checked out and their alibis held up.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  A few hours after Jake was completing his testimony in a Minneapolis courtroom, fifteen hundred miles almost due south, a man backed his Plymouth minivan into a garage in McAllen, Texas. As he turned the key to shut off the engine, his friend pushed the button of the garage door opener activating the electric motor to close the double door of the attached garage. Wally Bingham exited the vehicle, walked around to the passenger side, slid back the side panel door and the two men began working on the van’s interior. They quickly removed the two passenger chairs, setting them on the floor of the garage, while a woman leaned against the wall patiently watching. After removing the chairs, Wally got inside the van, peeled back the carpeting and the two men removed the screws holding in place a three feet by six feet section of the floor and removed it from the van as well. Hidden under this panel was an eight inch deep compartment large enough for Wally to transport the one hundred kilos of marijuana he had driven to Texas to purchase.

  After removing the floor panel covering the hidden storage space, the two men went into the house through the garage doorway and began carrying the contraband out to the van. The woman, Wally’s girlfriend Marlys Fletcher, got into the van and started placing the tightly bound, cellophane wrapped one kilo bricks into the hidden space. After all one hundred bricks had been stored, the two men quickly, expertly replaced the floor panel, carpeting and chairs. The van now weighed two hundred twenty pounds more than it had a little while ago, but except for that, it’s appearance was no different than any of tens of thousands of suburban vehicles throughout America. Which was, of course, precisely the point.

  The next morning, Wally and Marlys loaded their luggage into the back of the van, gave Wally’s long-time friend and co-conspirator, Dante Gregore, a hug and a kiss from Marlys and headed north for the trip back to Minnesota. Several hours later they were cruising up I-35. Just another anonymous, middle class white couple in an anonymous minivan passing through America’s heartland.

  While Marlys snoozed in the passenger seat next to him, Wally allowed his mind to wander, to relieve the boredom in this extremely unscenic part of the country, and began day-dreaming about his life and where he was.

  He thought about Dante, the friend he had just left behind in McAllen. Now there was a story, he thought with a smile. A father who, three days after receiving the news of his widowed mother’s death in the late 50’s, laid down his Soviet army assault rifle and, literally, with no one watching him, put hands in the air and walked to the West German checkpoint to begin his journey to America. Another Soviet army border guard defecting to the West.

  Then, ten no, Wally thought, almost thirteen years ago now, Wally and the defector’s son met while serving in the Army, forming a life long friendship and criminal enterprise. Dante was a conduit. A weigh station in the pipeline moving marijuana, and marijuana only, from points South to feed the great American dope appetite. The smugglers brought in the supply to Dante five or six times a year and Dante would distribute it to the wholesalers, of which Wally was one. It was Wally who had set Dante up a few years ago and Wally who had given Dante access to other wholesalers. On the grand scale of the mountains of grass coming in, theirs was a tiny ant hill. But, Wally had it all figured pretty well. Keep it small, low-key and don’t attract attention. Stay away from the hard stuff, cocaine and heroin. And, as Wally had explained to Dante, retire with a couple million in the bank by the time they were thirty-five. Best of all, they were right on schedule and living a pretty comfortable life in the meantime. Beats the hell out of working for a living, he reminded himself.

  Wally had been busted twice, the second time getting him eighteen months in prison. In the beginning, the thought of any time in a serious prison had terrified him. He was initially sent to a medium security place that, except for the loss of freedom, hadn’t been too bad to deal with.

  After he had been there a few months, an asshole biker idiot decided to have a little sport with Wally, who was by no means a fighter but a good sized man in pretty fair shape. Before things really got going, Wally had landed one extremely lucky punch. He had drilled his antagonist squarely on the nose, smashing it flat causing an eruption of blood and sending the fool to the floor flat on his back. Before he could get up the guards were there and the next thing Wally knew he was in a cell in the maximum security prison in Stillwater, surrounded by real criminals which Wally definitely did not consider himself to be. In fact, now that it was over, the whole experience had not been nearly as bad as his imagination had led him to believe.

  Wally and Marlys took three days to make the trip back, a trip that could have been done in two. They paid cash for everything along the way. Gas, meals and the inexpensive motels they stayed in. No credit cards, no checks. Wally had several sets of false id’s to use for check-ins at the motels. No trail that anyone could follow between himself and Dante. Timing the trip he had made many times, just after sunset on Friday evening, the minivan came over the hill on 35W in Burnsville to see the cities lit up and spread out before them.

  He got into Minneapolis and dropped Marlys off at her apartment. The two of them mostly lived together but Wally insisted on maintaining a separate residence. A place where they could go when he needed a break from the business. He kissed her goodbye, assuring her as he always did that he could unload the merchandise by himself, got in the van and drove home. He pulled the van into the garage, hit the remote to lower the door, got out and began the process of dismantling the back of the van to unload the weed.

  A half hour later, when he was about half done storing the bricks of grass in the hole below the wood-burning stove, the otherwise silent garage interior was shattered as the small door leading to the backyard of his little house came crashing down. Within seconds, a half dozen heavily armed men and women came pouring through the door, flicked on the lights and leveled shotguns at Wally who was already spread-eagled against the wall.

  “Hi Wally,” one of them said putting his face next to Wally’s ear while another patted him for weapons. “How ya’ doin?”

  “Not too bad, officer,” Wally said quietly as his hands were roughly removed from the wall, jerked behind him and handcuffed. “It is officer, isn’t it?”

  “Yes indeed,” Eddie Davis said showing Wally the badge of a Minneapolis policeman. “And I guess you know you’re under arrest, dontcha Wally?” he continued with mild sarcasm.

  “Do you have a warrant, officer?” Wally politely asked.

  “Yes, we do, Wally,” he said waving the paper in his face. “And, I have a copy for you, too. Here,” he continued as he folded one of the carbons and neatly tucked it in Wally’s shirt pocket, “you can read it at your leisure. You’ll have plenty of time later. Since this is now what, Wally, your third time. Enjoy asshole.”

  A couple of hours later, during the booking process, while he was emptying his pockets for the inventory clerk, he removed the folded copy of the search warrant and took a minute to read it over. He didn’t have to go very far when a slight, involuntary smile turned up the corners of his mouth. He started to say something to the guard, caught himself and silently folded the single sheet up again. As the inventory guard was placing Wally’s possessions in a manila envelope he quickly thought about what to do with the paper. It occurred to him what to do with it while watching the guard begin to moisten the envelope on the wet sponge to seal it.

  “Here,” he said to the c
lerk while handing him the paper through the slot on the counter through the plexiglass. “Put this in there too. My lawyer will want it and,” he shrugged, “that’s as good a place as any to keep it.”

  The sheriff’s clerk took the paper and, without looking at it, placed it in the envelope with the other items and finished sealing it.

  While Wally was being led to his cell he couldn’t help smiling at the thought that the police were storing his get out of jail free card for him. For, what Wally had seen that had made him smile, was a mistake on the search warrant. The address was wrong. The address on the warrant was for 4348 Pallantine Avenue and Wally’s address was 4343 Pallantine. What really had Wally smiling was his own cleverness. Instead of blurting out the mistake to his jailers, he had enough savvy to keep his mouth shut, save it for his lawyer and not give the cops the opportunity to correct the mistake. Good thinking, Wally old boy, he thought to himself over and over as he was led upstairs.

  He was feeling pretty good, pretty confident about how it would all turn out and then, as he was shoved into his cell and the door slammed behind him, he remembered his merchandise. A quarter million dollars worth of good Mexican grass about to go up in smoke and not the way it was intended. Oh well, he thought as he sat down on the edge of a bed in the otherwise unoccupied cell, the price of doing business. He stared at his feet for a moment, silently removed his Nikes and, as he was about to lay back on the bunk, looked up and saw his neighbor in the cell across from him, staring back at him through the bars.

  “Well, hello friend,” he jovially said to Carl Fornich.

  SIXTY-NINE

  For the next three weeks the trial settled into an almost monotonous routine. The prosecution, which meant Steve Gondeck since Slocum didn’t want to bother with ‘B’ witnesses, plodded along presenting mostly the insignificant witnesses and evidence, what little there was of it. Some family members of the victims testified as to what a kind, decent wonderful person she had been. Friends and co-workers relating to the jury the last day of the of the victims’ life, none of which, of course, contributed to the question of guilty or not guilty. All of this was designed and presented solely for the purpose of tugging at the jurors’ heartstrings and playing on the emotions of the men and women selected to decide Carl’s fate. Try to paint the picture of the victims as people you would like to have as friends or neighbors and the accused some monstrous, psychopathic pervert that, at best, needs to be locked up and kept apart from all of us good, decent, upstanding citizens and should actually be castrated, shot and then hanged.