by Pete Earley
LaTourette’s need for an eyewitness was quickly solved. Two days after their clients surrendered, attorneys representing Greg and Richard independently telephoned LaTourette and told him that their clients were willing to negotiate. “The first guy to the courthouse door always does better with a plea bargain than anyone else,” LaTourette recalled, “and these attorneys knew that.” Both lawyers had been former prosecutors, LaTourette said, and they understood that their clients were not going to get off lightly. “They understood that their clients were going to have to plead guilty to substantial charges to avoid the death penalty.”
LaTourette decided to interview both Greg and Richard personally before deciding which one would make the better witness. He flew to Kansas City and met Richard first. “He was clearly still under Jeffrey’s spell. He was starting to come out of it, but he really thought that Jeffrey was capable of simply walking through the jailhouse walls and coming after him.” During their conversation, Richard told LaTourette that even if Jeffrey was convicted, he still might seek revenge. “Richard said his biggest fear was that we would strap Jeffrey into the electric chair and throw the switch and nothing would happen. He was afraid Jeffrey would just stand up.”
LaTourette met Greg Winship on January 19. He found Greg ill with a 104-degree temperature. “Greg was convinced that Jeffrey had caused the fever because he knew that we were talking that day.”
During the next few days, LaTourette flip-flopped over whether to use Richard or Greg. “Both said they would testify against each other, but they made it clear that they really would rather not, and I would not get their best testimony if they did.”
LaTourette decided to cut deals with both. “Winship was emotional. He cried through the whole interview. Brand was matter-of-fact; he laid it all out. Together they made a strong team.”
Richard Brand agreed to plead guilty to murder and Greg promised to plead guilty to complicity to murder. Both charges carried prison terms of fifteen years to life. Of the two charges, Richard’s was the more serious. This was because he had carried the Averys into the pit, while Greg had not directly been involved in the actual killing, but rather had been outside the barn operating the chain saw.
Now that LaTourette had two eyewitnesses, he felt confident that he had sufficient proof to convict all of the other men: Jeffrey, Damon, Danny, Ron, and Dennis. He now turned his attention to the women.
In February, LaTourette got a telephone call from one of the attorneys appointed to represent Alice. She was willing to plea-bargain. She was angry at Jeffrey.
After her arrest, Alice had refused extradition from California to Ohio. So had Jeffrey and Damon. Christ hadn’t helped his accusers prosecute him and Jeffrey wasn’t going to make things easy for LaTourette. But Alice had changed her mind and returned to Ohio on January 20, because of Kathy. Alice had suspected that Jeffrey had been hiding Kathy in San Diego, but until she was arrested, Alice hadn’t been certain. She was enraged when Kathy was brought into her cellblock. “She kept coming to my cell trying to speak to me,” Alice said later. “I would close the door and she would press her face up to the glass and say, ‘I love you, Alice.’ The bitch!”
An inmate approached Alice a few days after Kathy arrived. “Did you know she’s pregnant? She’s carrying your husband’s baby?” the inmate asked.
Alice ran into her cell and began to cry. A few hours later, she told her attorney that she would waive extradition. She couldn’t stand being in the same jail as Kathy.
“Alice wanted a deal in the worst way,” LaTourette said, “But I wasn’t sure that was a good idea.” Based on his interviews with Richard and Greg, LaTourette had become convinced that Alice had played a crucial role in the murders even though she hadn’t participated in the actual killing. “I came to believe that Jeffrey, all by himself, couldn’t have gotten the others to commit the murders. Alice knew that he had never had a job, that he had committed adultery, that he was stealing from people, that he was lazy as dirt, basically. And for her to all of a sudden say, ‘Hey, I’ve been married to this asshole for nineteen years and now he is a prophet of God’—for her to be his cheerleader and convince everybody that he was a prophet and to chastise them and so forth—was wrong.”
Just the same, LaTourette knew that his case against Alice was flimsy. “She wasn’t at the farm when the murders took place and I knew jurors might have a problem with that.” LaTourette decided that it would be better to negotiate a deal with Alice that required her to serve time in prison than to bring her case to trial and lose.
After meetings with Alice’s court-appointed attorneys, Mark A. Ziccarelli and Joseph Gibson, a deal was struck. In return for LaTourette’s reducing the charges against Alice, she would plead guilty to a charge that carried a maximum sentence of fifteen to fifty years, making her eligible for parole in as few as five years compared to a life sentence. Everyone involved seemed satisfied, except for the one court official who mattered most. All of the charges against Jeffrey and his followers had been filed in the Lake County Common Pleas Court, where they had been divided among three judges, each an elected official. Alice’s case had been put on Judge Paul H. Mitrovich’s docket. A no-nonsense, often blunt, and stern former prosecutor, Mitrovich was considered to be the harshest judge on the Lake County bench. Behind his back, he was referred to as “Maximum Mitrovich” because of his tendency to impose the maximum prison terms possible.
Cutting a deal with Alice was politically risky for LaTourette and Mitrovich. The 250,000 residents of Lake County had been deluged with sensational stories about Jeffrey and his cult, and if letters to the editor printed in local newspapers and the callers who jammed the switchboards of local radio talk shows were any indication, the 16,500 residents of Painesville were eager for blood.
After some deliberation, Judge Mitrovich nixed Alice’s plea bargain. She was going to be held accountable in a public courtroom for her actions. The public demanded it.
Once Mitrovich rejected Alice’s deal, LaTourette quickly turned his attention back to finding a woman in the group who could testify against the others. By chance, Sharon Bluntschly was the first group member scheduled for trial. Her case was scheduled to start in May. LaTourette knew that she was valuable and vulnerable. She had been the first woman to join Jeffrey’s group. She was also still in love with Richard, even though he made it clear to prosecutors that he despised her. Only a few months earlier, Sharon had given birth to Richard’s daughter. Obviously, Richard would be the state’s main witness against her and that would be emotionally difficult for Sharon. As her trial date got closer, Sharon’s attorney negotiated a plea bargain with LaTourette. In return for her cooperation, the prosecutor agreed to drop ten of the fifteen charges against her. She would plead guilty to five counts of conspiracy to murder, a charge that carried a sentence of five years.
Debbie Olivarez was in the Lake County jail when she heard about Sharon’s plea-bargain deal. Debbie was irritated. She didn’t think it was fair that Sharon was going to get special treatment. Debbie had her attorney contact LaTourette. She’d testify for the prosecution if he gave her a deal identical to Sharon’s. LaTourette agreed. A short time later, Dennis and Tonya Patrick also agreed to cooperate in return for reduced charges.
By the end of spring, LaTourette had negotiated deals with six of the group members. The only ones left were Jeffrey, Alice, Damon, Danny, Kathy, and the Luffs. As far as the public was concerned, Jeffrey, Alice, and Damon were the most important cases.
“I wanted to bring Jeffrey to trial first,” LaTourette said. “There was tremendous pressure being applied by the community that I was beginning to feel. There was a feeling of ‘Okay, you made these plea- bargain deals, now let’s see if they were worth it.’ The public was demanding that someone pay for this horrible crime—that justice be done.”
No crime in Lake County’s history had sparked as much revulsion as the Averys’ deaths. Unlike the bedroom communities that sprouted along the shore
s of Lake Erie east of Cleveland during the 1960s, Painesville was an established town with a strong sense of community pride. It was one of the first settlements in northern Ohio, dating back to 1800 when General Edward Paine and his sons bought one thousand acres and led sixty-six settlers from Connecticut into the area. By 1832, it was one of the few towns with its own newspaper, The Painesville Telegraph, founded by Eber Howe, a crusading editor who was later credited with coining the word bogus to describe the activities of a group of counterfeiters who operated there briefly before being caught and severely punished. When Joseph Smith, Jr., arrived in nearby Kirtland, Howe became his most vocal critic. In 1834, Howe wrote a book entitled Mormonism Unvailed [sic], considered by many to be the first expose of the new religion, and when Smith was forced to flee, Howe cheered. Although Painesville had mellowed over the years, it remained a tough, largely blue-collar community where criminals were dealt with sternly.
Public Defender Paul LaPlante was well aware of the local feeling in the community and the building pressure to bring Jeffrey to trial. He also knew that his staff of seven employees was no match for LaTourette’s office with its seventeen lawyers and twenty-four support personnel. Hoping to better the odds, LaPlante called in reinforcements from the Ohio Public Defender Commission, the better-financed state version of his county office. It immediately dispatched four investigators to help LaPlante. “I had decided that we needed to find out everything that we could about Jeffrey,” said LaPlante. The investigators began searching for a sign of physical or mental abuse in Jeffrey’s past that would win sympathy from jurors. Besides probing Jeffrey’s past, LaPlante had two criminal psychologists evaluate him. Both told LaPlante what he already knew. While Jeffrey suffered from a severe personality disorder, he was not insane, at least not by Ohio’s criminal standards. There was no way that LaPlante could mount a “not guilty because of insanity” defense.
Under Ohio’s speedy-trial act, all defendants must be tried within ninety days unless they request a delay. LaPlante assumed that Judge Martin O. Parks, who had been assigned the case, would automatically grant him a series of continuances. He was wrong. Parks had a full docket and he saw no need to drag out Jeffrey’s trial. He scheduled it for June. LaPlante strenuously protested, so Parks agreed to delay it until July. But that was it. LaPlante was unhappy, but he felt he could meet the July deadline.
And then in May, LaTourette’s office completely disrupted LaPlante’s schedule. Karen Kowall, an assistant prosecutor, convinced LaTourette that he could undermine LaPlante’s defense by demanding copies of all the investigative reports that LaPlante had received from the Ohio Public Defender Commission. Kowall shrewdly pointed out that the commission was financed by tax dollars and therefore fell under the state’s “sunshine laws,” which required public agencies to make their records available to the public on demand. In effect, Kowall’s scheme would force the commission to release all of the background material on Jeffrey that its investigators had compiled for LaPlante. LaTourette demanded the documents, catching LaPlante completely off guard.
The move outraged LaPlante and the director of the state commission. Both claimed that the investigators’ reports were protected by lawyer-client privilege. But LaTourette refused to back down and filed a writ before the Ohio Supreme Court demanding that the commission produce its confidential records.
As soon as LaTourette filed the writ, the four investigators working for LaPlante immediately stopped helping him. They were afraid that they might be forced to turn over their reports. “We were left with absolutely no one to help us,” LaPlante complained later. “Everything we were doing came to a complete halt.”
Three weeks before the trial, LaTourette dropped his request, but by then the damage had been done.
On July 12, LaPlante and LaTourette reported to Judge Parks’s courtroom to review how jurors would be selected the next day for Jeffrey’s trial. When the judge entered the chamber, LaPlante stood to be recognized. Once again, he asked Parks for a continuance. Once again, the judge denied it.
“Your Honor,” LaPlante calmly replied, “I will not participate any further in this case. Regardless of how anyone may perceive Jeffrey Lundgren, he is entitled to be cared about, he is entitled to have the best defense possible, he is entitled to have the best preparation and vigorous presentation of the case. . . .”
In effect, LaPlante was backing Judge Parks into a comer. The defense attorney felt his client’s rights were being trampled. He wasn’t going to stand for it. The judge had to either grant the continuance or find a way to force LaPlante to do his job. Parks adjourned court. When he reconvened it later that afternoon, he found LaPlante guilty of contempt of court and sentenced him to ten days in jail. He then suspended all but eight hours of LaPlante’s sentence and announced that Jeffrey’s trial would be postponed until August 13 so that LaPlante could have more time to get ready.
While LaPlante’s gutsy stand had won the defense more time, the continuance proved to be the worst possible move for Alice. Her trial was scheduled to begin one week after Jeffrey’s. Now the spotlight shifted onto Alice. She would be the first group member to actually go to trial. With emotions running high inside and outside the courtroom, Alice’s case gained a new prominence. LaTourette, who only a few weeks earlier had been criticized in the Cleveland Plain Dealer for the plea bargains that he had struck, was being forced to put his weakest case on first. The young prosecutor knew that he had to win Alice’s case or his political career would be seriously weakened.
Alice’s trial was to become the most sensational in Lake County history. What no one knew at the time was that it was also going to become one of the most vicious and melodramatic.
Chapter 54
JUSTICE in Lake County is dispensed in a red-brick and stone courthouse built in the 1840s directly across the street from the Painesville town square. There is a clock in the courthouse tower and on top of it is a large metal dome. A cupola rises from the dome and at its peak there is a statue of a gold-plated eagle with outstretched wings. Two quotations had been carved into the courthouse’s front facade. THE RIGHT TO A FREE GOVERNMENT PRESUPPOSES THE DUTY OF EVERY CITIZEN TO OBEY THAT GOVERNMENT, says one. THAT REGARD BE HAD FOR THE PUBLIC WELFARE IS THE HIGHEST LAW, says the other.
On the morning of July 25, the first day of Alice’s trial, dew still clung to the dark-green grass in the town square. The iron-and- wood park benches were damp to the touch. Two squirrels chased one another across an empty whitewashed gazebo before scampering up an ancient oak. In one corner of the park, a stone monument honored the militia, men who had volunteered to fight “the Rebs” in the Civil War. A brass plaque nearby explained that Abraham Lincoln had passed through the Painesville rail station twice. The first time the train carried him to his presidential inauguration; the second time it carried his body in a coffin back to Illinois. No one had ever been tried before in Lake County as an accomplice to mass murder.
Prosecutor LaTourette had decided early on that his main job would be prosecuting Jeffrey, so he had intentionally appointed two women to present the state’s case against Alice. He had selected Karen Lawson and Sandra Dray, in part because he thought they could, in his words, “outbitch” her. Both women were tough-talking, hard-driving, bleached blondes who had specialized in prosecuting men accused of sexually abusing women and children. Weeks before the trial, Alice’s attorneys, Mark Ziccarelli and Joe Gibson, announced that their client was a battered wife who had been emotionally and physically abused. In an ironic twist, Lawson and Dray, who usually championed the cause of abused women, now found themselves on the attack.
The first legal skirmish came when Ziccarelli and Gibson asked the judge in a pretrial motion for permission to use “battered women’s syndrome” as part of Alice’s defense. Only a few months earlier, the Ohio Supreme Court had ruled that women accused of killing their husbands could cite long-term physical abuse by their spouses as a legitimate defense. If a woman could prove that she h
ad killed her husband during a moment of fear and in self-defense, then she could be found innocent of murder. Although Alice had not killed Jeffrey, her attorneys claimed that he had emotionally abused her for so many years that Alice had been incapable of stopping Jeffrey from murdering the Averys. They asked Judge Mitrovich for permission to bring in experts who could testify about the effects of long-term physical abuse. “There is sufficient evidence surrounding the circumstances of this case to indicate that the defendant believed herself to be in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm,” Ziccarelli told reporters, “should she not submit to the demands of her overbearing, insistent, and often violent husband. . . . She was suffering from battered women’s syndrome.” Alice was a victim, the attorneys argued, just like the Averys.
The prosecutor’s office objected to the request. In their court brief, Lawson and Dray argued that Ohio law permitted “battered women’s syndrome” to be used by defense attorneys only when a woman was accused of murdering her husband, not when her husband was on trial for killing a third party.
Judge Mitrovich agreed. He denied Alice’s request for expert witnesses, but told her attorneys that he would permit them to introduce a limited amount of testimony about how Jeffrey had treated Alice during their marriage.
From the start, Alice’s trial was explosive. One of the first witnesses called by Lawson and Dray described the exhumation of the Averys’ bodies in such horrendous detail that Alice’s attorney jumped to his feet in objection. They accused the prosecution of trying to inflame the jury. Seconds after that exchange, Lawson and Dray introduced photographs taken during the autopsies. One photograph showed Cheryl Avery’s face, which was amazingly well-preserved, in part because of the duct tape that had covered it. Her mouth was frozen in what seemed to be a scream. The photograph was so horrible that Mitrovich ruled that it was too grisly to be shown to the jury. The prosecution’s next witness methodically showed jurors each article of clothing that had been removed from the corpses. As soon as the first plastic bag was opened and a garment was removed, a stench permeated the room. The odor was so repulsive that Lawson held a tissue filled with Vicks VapoRub against her nose.