by Scott Pratt
”Is this all you’ve got?” I said. ”I see some photos of Tester, a photo of what looks like a shriveled penis, a photo of Angel, a couple of hairs, a couple of lab reports, and some bank records showing that Tester withdrew money from the strip club’s ATM.
Is that it?”
”It’ll be enough to convict that little bitch of murder.”
”It’s not enough to convict her of simple assault.”
”That’s what I like to hear,” Landers said. ”You just keep thinking that way.”
”The evidence in this case is as weak as any I’ve ever seen.”
”Since when is DNA evidence weak?”
”Her hair probably got on him while he was groping her at the club,” I said.
”Maybe. You can go ahead and try to sell that to the jury, but the fact is that her hair was found on his corpse in his room.”
”It’s not enough.”
”Our witness says your girl and Barlowe followed the victim out of the club that night. They were the last people to see him alive.”
”Your witness is a lying prostitute with a drug problem.”
”And your client is a mystery woman who was working in a strip club. A stranger. Not from around here. Jury won’t exactly love her, especially when they see that bruise on her face.”
”You don’t have a murder weapon or a motive.”
”Don’t need either one. We’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to get a conviction. And you know what? I think something else will come up before this is over.”
”Something else already has come up. You’ve heard of Virgil Watterson, haven’t you? I think you talked to him this morning.”
There was a long, tense silence.
”How the hell would you know that?”
”He called me first. He described what he saw on the bridge that night. He said he thinks you guys arrested the wrong person. Just trying to do the right thing, you know? I told him he should call you and tell you what he saw and maybe you’d try to make it right. He called me back after he talked to you.
Said you didn’t sound all that interested in his information. I should’ve known better.”
”He’s not reliable. He waited two months before he even bothered to call.”
”He’s worried about his marriage.”
”It was dark out there, after midnight. No way he could have made an identification.”
”He saw Erlene. She was alone. He saw the Corvette. It’s consistent with what Julie Hayes is saying.
What the hell’s the matter with you? You guys should be taking a closer look at Erlene Barlowe.”
”And you should mind your own fucking shop. I don’t need your advice.”
”So you’re going to ignore him.”
”Ignore who? Far as I’m concerned, he never called.”
Someone banged on the door, and it opened. A police officer named Harold ”Bull” Deakins walked in. He and Landers were drinking buddies, legendary carousers. Deakins’s nickname was well deserved. His shoulders barely fit through the door.
”They told me I’d find you down here,” he said to Landers. Landers’s eyes didn’t move, and neither did mine. Deakins stopped short. ”Everything all right with you boys? Are we playing nice?” His voice did nothing to break the tension.
”Your buddy and I were just talking about arresting innocent people,” I said, still locked onto Landers. He stared back, saying nothing.
”Watterson saw Erlene Barlowe on the bridge that night,” I said. ”She was alone. My client wasn’t around. You know what that means, don’t you?”
”It doesn’t mean shit. For all I know, you put the guy up to it. For all I know, you paid him to say he saw the Corvette.”
”Sorry,” I said, ”that’s more along the lines of something you’d do.”
”You know something, Dillard? You’re wasting your breath talking to me. My job was to investigate this case and make an arrest, and that’s what I did.
Now my job is to go to trial, testify, and make sure your client gets what she deserves—a fucking needle in her arm.”
He started packing up his little box as Deakins loomed over my shoulder. I turned to leave. As I was walking out the door, I stopped and faced Landers. He finished putting items in the box, picked it up off the table, and looked at me.
”She’s innocent,” I said. ”She didn’t kill anybody.”
His shoulders lifted the slightest bit. What was that? A shrug?
”Are you listening to me? She didn’t kill anybody. ”
He knew it. The sonofabitch knew. He looked back down at the table, and I walked out the door.
June 25
1:00 p.m.
I’d been going down to the jail to see Angel once a week, but the conversations I’d had with her were more personal than professional. I’d already heard her version of what happened the night Tester was killed, so I spent the time trying to get some background information out of her. She was reluctant, but during the second visit she decided she trusted me enough to tell me her real name and where she was from.
I gave the information to Diane Frye. She’d been working for weeks, and I’d also sent Tom Short, a forensic psychiatrist, down to the jail to interview Angel three times. I set up meetings with both of them on the same afternoon.
Diane had traveled to Oklahoma and Ohio, running down witnesses and documents. I was anxious to hear what she had to say. When I walked in, the conference room table was covered in papers.
”Your chickie is a ghost,” Diane said in her Tennessee drawl. She was nearly sixty, but she styled her light brown hair short and spiked. She was wearing her perpetual smile and her favorite casual outfit, a bright orange Tennessee Volunteers T-shirt—she was a rabid fan—with khaki shorts that exposed knobby knees and varicose veins, and orange high-top Converse basketball shoes.
”No Social Security number, no driver’s license, no school records, no credit history, no nothing. She doesn’t exist, at least not on paper. But I’ve talked to everybody I could find and I think I’ve got everything pretty well organized. At least you’ll know a little more about what you’re dealing with.”
Diane said Angel was born in Columbus, Ohio, on March 15, 1989, to a young woman named Grace Rodriguez. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption the same day to the Columbus Freewill Baptist Home for Children. Angel was adopted five months later by Airman First Class Thomas Rhodes and his wife, Betty. They named her Mary Ann Rhodes.
Diane had flown out to Oklahoma City to talk to Angel’s adopted parents. They told Diane that when they adopted Mary, they thought they were unable to have children of their own, but Ms. Rhodes became pregnant a year later. She subsequently had three more children.
”They said they treated her like a princess,” Diane said. ”The mother called her a thieving, ungrateful little wench. She said her husband kept a stash of cash in a box in the ceiling, and Angel apparently cleaned it out before she left. But I always leave a card and tell people if they have any other information to give me a call. A couple hours after I left, I got a call on my cell phone. It was one of their daughters, a seventeen-year-old named Rebecca. She was scared to death and I didn’t get to talk to her for long, but she said her parents didn’t tell me the whole story.”
Diane paused and stared up at the ceiling. She loved drama.
”What?” I said. ”C’mon. Out with it.”
”She said her daddy did bad things to Angel.”
”What kind of bad things?”
”Sexual abuse. She said it went on for years, and she thinks Angel finally just had enough. She also said her mother used to beat Angel pretty badly.”
”I wonder why Angel never told anyone.”
”The mother is a religious freak. Their living room looked like a sanctuary. She said she homeschooled the kids and was particular about what they were allowed to watch and read. I got the impression she didn’t even allow them to have friends. Angel probably didn’t have m
uch of an opportunity to tell. Either that or she was just scared. Her sister told me Angel tried to run away a couple of times and the police had to bring her back, so I went down to the Oklahoma City police department and got copies of the reports. In 2001 she only made it ten blocks. She locked herself in the bathroom of a convenience store. The police came and took her straight home.
She took off again in 2003. They found her walking along the highway about seven miles from her house.
The police took her home again. If she told them about the abuse, they didn’t believe her.”
Diane then turned her attention to Erlene Barlowe.
I’d asked her to quietly check into a few things, and I’d paid her out of my own pocket.
”No criminal record. Her husband was the sheriff of McNairy County from 1970 to 1973. He resigned under some pretty suspicious circumstances and went into the strip club business. She was with him every step of the way until he died of a heart attack last year. She doesn’t seem to have any enemies, at least none I could find. I talked to a couple of her employees. They’re flat-out loyal.”
”Corvette?”
”No Corvette. Or I guess I should say no record of a Corvette.”
”And what about Julie Hayes?”
”Very naughty girl. Three drug possessions, two misdemeanor thefts, three prostitution convictions.
Most of the arrests are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Nobody had anything good to say about her. She’s a mess.”
”You talk to her?”
”I tried. The first time I went out to her place she was so stoned she could barely speak. The second time she told me to fuck off, so I fucked off.”
An hour later, I drove over to meet with the forensic psychiatrist I’d hired to examine Angel. Tom Short was head of the psychiatry department at East Tennessee State University, a short, wiry academic who seemed to spend a lot of time in a world no one else understood. I’d met him at a death penalty seminar in Nashville five years earlier where he taught a class on the role of psychiatric evaluation in mitigation. I’d used him in seven cases since then, and we’d become friends. I’d never placed a lot of faith in psychiatry before I met Tom, but his uncanny ability to diagnose personality disorders and psychotic illnesses made a believer of me. I trusted him completely.
”PTSD,” he said as soon as I walked into his office.
He was sitting behind his desk, chewing on the end of the pipe he kept in his mouth like a pacifier. I’d never seen him without the pipe, and I’d never seen it lit.
”Post-traumatic stress disorder?”
”Chronic and severe. But she’s being evasive about the stressor. I suspect she was raped by her adopted father.”
”Why?”
”Because if the stressor was a car accident or something she witnessed, she’d tell me about it. She became agitated and evasive when I asked her about her father.”
”Is she a candidate for murder?”
”Everybody’s a candidate under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, I don’t have a crystal ball.”
”I don’t see how she could possibly have killed Tester,” I said. ”For one thing, he was a two-hundred-sixty-pound man. What does she weigh?
One ten? I just don’t see her being able to overpower a guy like that.”
”His blood alcohol level was point two seven, and he was drugged. A ten-year-old could have killed him.”
”I know, but she just doesn’t feel like a murderer when I talk to her,” I said.
”I look at her clinically,” Short said. ”You look at her emotionally. Her beauty and vulnerability cloud your perspective.”
”So you think she killed him?”
”I didn’t say that. I’m just saying it’s possible.
Some PTSD victims go into a dissociative state if the stressor is severe enough, and if it’s repeated. Let’s say her adopted father sexually abused her for years, which I suspect he did. She runs away. Then she finds herself being sexually abused by this Tester man. It’s possible she could have had sort of an out-of-body experience and killed him. It would also explain the extraordinary number of stab wounds and the mutilation.”
”Would she remember it?”
”It’d be like a dream, but she’d remember it.”
”Would she be responsible for her conduct, legally, if that’s what happened?”
”Probably not. I think I’d be able to testify that under those circumstances she would not be responsible for her conduct. At that point, she wouldn’t have been able to discern the difference between right and wrong.”
”The problem is that in order for us to assert that defense, she’d have to admit she killed him.”
”That’s right.”
”She says she didn’t kill him.”
”I know.”
”So where does that leave us?”
”She didn’t tell me she did it, so as far as I’m concerned, she didn’t do it. Everything I’ve told you is purely theoretical.”
”Have you made notes on all of this?”
”Of course.”
”Shred them.”
Since I had Tom’s attention, which was sometimes hard to get, I decided to ask him about Junior Tester.
I described to him in detail everything that had happened between us, including the look of torment and hatred on Junior’s face the night I went to his house.
”Was it a mistake?” I said.
”Actually,” Tom said, ”going down there wasn’t as bad an idea as you might think. You may have showed him there could be serious consequences to his actions. Maybe you shocked him back into reality, at least for a little while. Have you seen him since?”
”No.”
”You must have frightened him.”
”He didn’t look scared. Do you think I’ll see him again?”
”Can’t say for sure.”
”Is it likely?”
”I’d say it depends.”
”On what?”
”On how you portray his father in the courtroom if you go to trial. You might want to give that some serious consideration.”
June 25
4:00 p.m.
After the meetings with Diane and Tom, I was both confused and concerned. I decided it was time to go have a serious conversation with my client. I wanted to discuss some of the more incriminating evidence with her, but more important, I needed to see how well Angel would hold up under cross-examination.
If I could catch her in a lie, so could the district attorney.
She wasn’t shackled or handcuffed when the guards escorted her into the interview room—apparently she was no longer considered a security risk. I’d asked her what she wanted me to call her after I found out her real name. She said she wanted to be called Angel. Mary Ann, she said, was gone.
”How are you holding up?” I said.
”I’m okay. The guards are nice to me.”
Each time I went to visit, I was struck by something different: the smoothness of her skin, the contours of her face, the fullness of her lips. She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, a fact that made what I was about to do even more difficult.
”There are a couple of things I need to ask you about, some things that are bothering me. I want you to tell me the truth.”
A puzzled look came over her face, but she nodded.
”First off, I need to know about your relationship with Julie Hayes.”
”What about it?”
”Do you have any idea why she would tell the police that you and Erlene left the club right after Reverend Tester the night he was killed?”
”What? Julie said that?”
I reached into my briefcase, pulled out a copy of Julie’s statement, and set it down in front of Angel.
”This is a copy of the statement she gave to the TBI. Read it for yourself.”
Angel looked down at the statement for a few minutes and then back at me.
”Why would she say something like th
at?” she said.
”Good question. Why would she?”
”I don’t know.”
”Did you and Erlene leave the club right after Reverend Tester?”
”No.”
”Are you sure?”
”Yes.”
”Well, Julie says you did, and since she signed this statement, I’m sure she’ll testify at the trial. Is she mad at you about something?”
”I don’t think so.”
”Is she mad at Erlene about something?”
”I don’t know.”
”Was she jealous of the relationship between you and Erlene?”
”She never said anything to me about it.”
”Did you ever see Julie and Erlene argue or fight about anything?”
”No.”
”Did Erlene take you home that night?”
”Yes.”
”What kind of car was she driving?”
She hesitated. ”What?”
”What kind of car was Erlene driving that night?”
”I don’t know anything about cars.”
”Do you know what a Corvette looks like?”
”No.”
”Come on, Angel, it’s a sports car. Shiny and fast.
It would have been red.”
”I really don’t know anything about cars.”
”Was Erlene driving the same car the next day?”
She hesitated again and asked me to repeat the question.
”Erlene took you home with her the night Reverend Tester was killed, right?”
”Yes.”
”She gave you a ride home in her car, right?”
”Yes.”
”Did she have the same car the next day or a different car?”
”I don’t know. The same car, I guess.” She looked upward when she answered. I thought she might be lying, so I stayed with the subject of the car.
”Julie told the police Erlene was driving a red Corvette the night Tester was killed. She said Erlene got rid of it and was driving a different car the next day.
Is that true?”
”I don’t think so.”