Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  Now she sat in the Montgomerys’ living room, trying to comfort them both and, at the same time, figure out what strange chain of events had led to her being a suspect. When Candy would leave the room for even a minute, Jackie would work on Pat, trying to find out what he knew.

  “Not much,” he said quietly. “She doesn’t want to say much about it.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Pat.”

  “I know, but I don’t want to put pressure on her.”

  “She’s not involved in any way, is she?”

  Pat paused just a second. “No.”

  “But you have doubts?”

  “Well, what do you think?” asked Pat. “If I know something nobody else knows, I should come forward with it, shouldn’t I?”

  “Do you know something?”

  “Just little things. Little suspicions.”

  “Like?”

  “Like why did she throw away her thongs? And why is she not allowed to talk about the case? And why does she have that cut and those bruises?”

  “Have you talked to her about those things?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “But what if she were guilty? Just assuming she was?”

  “If she were guilty, I guess I wouldn’t want her to get away with it. But no matter what happened, I wouldn’t give up on her.”

  Candy reentered the room, and Pat, starting to get worked up about the case again, said, “I don’t understand why you have to be so secretive.”

  “I told you, Pat, because the lawyers want it that way.”

  “Candy,” said Jackie sternly, “I think you should be more open with Pat.”

  “About what?”

  “Is there anything that happened that day you haven’t told us?”

  “Jackie, I did not murder Betty Gore.”

  “All right,” said Jackie. “I guess that’s good enough for me.”

  Pat still wasn’t satisfied, but he resolved not to make matters worse. That evening they decided to take the kids to see a movie called Herbie Goes Bananas—it would make things seem more normal—and on the way home they stopped at one of their favorite restaurants, Totino’s in Plano. The family outing suddenly turned sour when Candy noticed several people staring at her when they sat down at their table.

  “This is awful,” she said. “I’m going to have Sherry do my hair all over again tomorrow, so that people won’t recognize me.”

  “I’m not sure they’re staring,” said Pat.

  “This is awful,” she repeated.

  After Candy’s arrest, the police had turned the case over to the Collin County District Attorney, Tom O’Connell. O’Connell was a ruddy-faced thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who had learned to prosecute by the book, first performing court martials in the Army, later under then-District Attorney Tom Ryan. Known by Collin County as the consummate “gentleman lawyer,” he was serving his ninth year as DA, but none of the previous eight offered anything like the file that came to rest on his desk that Friday the twenty-seventh. All the police had given him, it appeared, was one fingerprint. He had handled enough murder cases to know that that wasn’t nearly enough to send anyone to prison, and certainly not enough to convict a woman with no prior record and a stellar reputation in the community. Since there had obviously been no witnesses to this crime, the case would rely on circumstantial evidence, and, as in all such cases, the more physical evidence he had—fingerprints, hair samples, photographs, and the like—the better his chances of winning. The trouble was, the police hadn’t bothered to collect any physical evidence. Candy Montgomery had been interviewed twice before she even had a lawyer, and yet her body had not been photographed, no blood samples were taken, no hair samples were taken, neither her car nor her house had been searched. It was a minor miracle that, when the woman was booked into jail, a guard had noticed the bruises on her body and the cut on her toe. The examination came two weeks late, but at least they got some evidence that there had been a struggle.

  O’Connell called in his two top assistants, Jack Pepper and William Schultz, and went over the possible defenses Candy could use. She wouldn’t be able to deny the bloody fingerprint, but she could easily say she went into the house after Betty Gore was already dead, saw the blood and the body, and freaked out. It wasn’t a strong alibi, but in the absence of eyewitnesses or a confession, it might be enough to raise doubt in the minds of the jury. The other possibilities were a defense of temporary insanity—not likely, because she had no prior history of psychiatric problems—or self-defense. That was even more unlikely, O’Connell decided, because of the number of blows and the fact that she’d lied to the police when they first questioned her. A person who’s defending herself doesn’t need to lie, and certainly doesn’t need to mutilate the body.

  So the focus of their preparation, at least at first, would be on accumulating all the physical evidence they could. They would verify her wounds, take hair and blood samples, obtain search warrants for her car. Dr. Stone conducted an inch-by-inch search of the station wagon, poking among the seat cushions, going through the trunk, and finally finding exactly what they were looking for—a small, almost undetectable amount of blood on the parking brake pedal, and an even smaller amount on the floor mat underneath it. Since they now thought that their case might rest on proving that Candy’s blood was spilled inside the house along with Betty’s, they returned to the Gore residence and retrieved a bath mat, a candy jar, doormats, carpet samples from an area near the front door, and two Band-Aid boxes. Their hope was that, back at the lab, the microscope would pick up more blood matching Candy’s.

  O’Connell wanted to move quickly for an indictment, not least because the case was getting a great deal of attention in the press, so by the following Monday he started bringing witnesses before the grand jury. One of the first was Barbara Green, reportedly Candy’s best friend, who turned out to be both highly excitable and a stalwart defender of Candy’s innocence. When she kept insisting that Candy hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary on June 13, the prosecutors tried to get tough with her by reminding her of the perjury laws. As a result, she emerged from the grand jury room in tears and called Candy to relate what had happened.

  Don Crowder blew his stack. It so happened that reporters were calling that afternoon for more comments on the case, and Don gave them all they wanted.

  “The DA’s office out there has gone crazy,” he told the Times Herald. “They browbeat the hell out of that harmless little woman. It just shows you how desperate those men are. There’s no such thing as civil rights in Collin County.”

  When Doug Swanson called later that day to ask about the cut police had found on Candy’s toe, Don was still fuming.

  “That cut was caused by a totally innocuous situation,” he said. “In fact, we’ve got the instrument that caused the cut. I will have three witnesses that will testify to the cut and say how it was committed.”

  “What witnesses? What instrument?”

  “I can’t say anything about that right now, because of the way the police are handling this case. That examination they did at the hospital was against Mrs. Montgomery’s will. They took her to the hospital under the auspices that she was an injured person. They were really gathering evidence without a warrant. Candy even refused to sign the consent form for the examination, but a sheriff’s deputy did it anyway.”

  “I understand that the police believe there were problems going on between the Montgomery family and the Gore family.”

  “You’re talking about the affair,” said Don. “It was something everybody was aware of. All parties knew about the affair, and they also knew that it had ended seven months before. All those differences had been reconciled. That couldn’t possibly be a motive for murder.”

  Again, Rob Udashen didn’t know about the interviews until he read the papers the next day.

  “Don, you promised me you wouldn’t do that anymore.”

  “It’s just that I can’t take stuff like that lying down.”<
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  “Well, at least wait until she’s indicted.”

  “All right, okay. But I think the press is all we got on our side right now. Reporters like underdogs. That’s us.”

  “But every time you talk to reporters, you make the cops mad at us all over again. Don, you called ’em crazy.”

  Rob neglected to mention the most important information Don had given the press. For the first time, he had used the word “affair” publicly, as much as admitting what everyone had been afraid to publish before. From now on there would be no “female friend” euphemisms. The woman’s attorney had confirmed it: Candy had been Allan Gore’s mistress.

  For the next ten days the lawyers on both sides circled like wrestlers about to go to the mat. With grand-jury subpoenas pouring out of the DA’s office, and defense motions pouring out of Rob Udashen’s typewriter, both sides were playing a defensive game. Rob still held out hope of avoiding an indictment altogether, and to that end he convinced Justice of the Peace Swanner to schedule an examining trial for July 10. If the police didn’t produce their evidence by then, the court would be forced to let Candy go free. The DA’s office continued to parade witnesses before the grand jury. Often they were working on mere hunches: they subpoenaed Pat Montgomery on the off-chance that he was such an honest man that he would say something incriminating about his wife. They planned to subpoena Dee Cathey, a woman who had come forward with stories of how Candy Montgomery and Sherry Cleckler had sneaked out to a singles bar while their husbands were away. Her testimony would tend to indicate that Candy was neither truthful nor faithful. They also strongly suspected that Don Crowder had the clothing that Candy had worn the day of the crime, and they demanded he give it to them for blood testing.

  “If you’ve got her clothing and you don’t give it to us,” said Pepper, “I’m gonna haul you down here for concealing evidence.”

  “I’m not concealing any evidence,” said Don, “and the clothes are exactly where they should be.”

  Despite his public defiance, though, Don was secretly afraid.

  “They’re like a pack of mad dogs,” he told Rob. “It’s a goddamn runaway prosecution and a runaway grand jury, and they’re trying to railroad this thing through before we have a chance to prepare a defense.”

  In point of fact, Don did have Candy’s clothing. After Schultz and Pepper started asking for it, Don told Candy to bring in the jeans and blouse. He placed them in a paper sack, sealed it, had the sack signed and dated by a witness, then told Elaine and Rob, “We’re gonna play a little musical chairs.”

  For the next few days, the three attorneys passed the clothing among themselves. Don kept it for awhile, then Rob, then Elaine, and periodically each person would transfer it from car to house to office. Whenever Pepper or Schultz would call to ask where the clothes were, Don would simply say, “Right where they should be.”

  “This way,” he told Rob, “there’s no way they can get a search warrant, because they can’t show probable cause that the clothes are in any particular place.”

  Finally, they turned the brown paper bag over to Pat and told him to put it on a closet shelf, where it remained until the day of Candy’s trial.

  Schultz and Pepper were tireless. Next they subpoenaed Don McElroy, the polygraph examiner Don had hired to test Candy the week before, and Don flew off the handle all over again. The attorney-client privilege is supposed to extend to experts and other professionals employed by an attorney, which meant that McElroy wouldn’t be allowed to testify about the substance of Candy’s story. On the other hand, a grand jury in a small county can do just about anything it wants to, and Don wouldn’t be there to see that they played by the rules. Increasingly, Don heard noises in the night and saw shadows on the wall. He began to fear his phone was tapped. On several occasions, he told Rob he thought he had been followed.

  On July 2 both Dallas papers reported that the police had found blood in the Montgomery station wagon. To Don, it was yet another infuriating attempt by the police to win the case in the newspaper, and when the reporters called that morning, he unloaded.

  “They’re looking for Betty Gore’s blood on the brake pedal of that car,” he told the News. “But if that’s Betty Gore’s blood, there’s only one way it got there. It was planted.”

  “Great,” said Rob when he saw the paper. “Now you’ve accused them of a crime.”

  As it happened, a preliminary hearing was scheduled that day to deal with the prosecution’s motions to take hair and blood samples from Candy. But before it even started, Judge Ryan issued a stern admonishment to both sides to stop discussing evidence in the press.

  “I would hope in 1980 America that law enforcement and the legal profession have progressed so that pretrial publicity is completely unnecessary,” he said. “There is no reason that this case should be tried on the streets of McKinney, Dallas, or anywhere else. Now, I’m speaking my piece in advance even though I’ve determined that I don’t have jurisdiction in this case. Since there’s been no indictment, I’m referring these motions back to Justice of the Peace Swanner. That means you guys can still run off at the mouth.

  “But let me tell you this. As soon as the case is transferred back to me, there will be no more press conferences and no more discussion of the evidence in this case with anyone.”

  As it turned out, the press knew everything anyway. Most of what the police knew was distilled for the public on July 8, when the front page of the Dallas Times Herald hit the streets with a bold banner headline streaming across its front page:

  CANDY MONTGOMERY: IS SHE A KILLER?

  ‘Candy couldn’t do that,’ friends insist

  The article by reporters Doug Swanson and Tim Jarrell broke very little new ground, but for the first time it put all the evidence in one place: the affair with Allan Gore, the fact that Candy was the last to see Betty alive, the hour and a half that morning when nobody saw her, the bloody thumbprint on the freezer door that matched Candy’s, the cut found on Candy’s toe, the bruises on her legs, and the fact that the bloody footprints in the house were small enough to belong to a woman.

  By the time the article appeared, Candy was no longer reading the newspapers or watching the nightly TV newscasts. But Pat was heartened by the fact that, no matter what new evidence was leaked to the press, everyone continued to stand by them. The church had been overwhelmingly supportive. Scarcely a day went by that they didn’t receive at least a half-dozen greeting cards or “Have a nice day” cards or “Thinking of you” cards, some of them awkwardly worded, all of them well intentioned. People who hadn’t written or seen the Montgomerys in years were visiting Hallmark stores all over America, trying to find messages suitable for a family awaiting a murder indictment. The ones that read “Deepest sympathy,” as though intended for a funeral, didn’t seem particularly appropriate to Pat, but he filed those away with the others, and Candy wrote replies to them all.

  The “one-ringers” had started again, too. Every night before they went to bed, the phone would ring once and then stop. Sometimes it would happen four or five times a night. That was the universal greeting exchanged among Marriage Encounter couples. It meant, “We love you.”

  On July 9, at 4:18 in the afternoon, the grand jury of Collin County returned the long-awaited murder indictment, thereby formally bringing Candy Montgomery into the jurisdiction of District Judge Tom Ryan. There was a brief flurry of courthouse activity, as reporters at the scene put the word out via radio and wire service. But the more significant result was that now, at last, Bruce Selcraig could reveal what he had known for two days. The Morning News held the story out of its early editions, afraid that the rival Times Herald would have time to copy it and write their own version, but in the edition that arrived on most doorsteps the next morning, the page-one banner headline said it all:

  AX SLAYING CONFESSED, SOURCES SAY

  Mrs. Montgomery calls reports of admission ‘ridiculous’

  The pertinent parts of the article rea
d:

  Candace Montgomery secretly confessed to the brutal ax murder of Wylie schoolteacher Betty Gore following a polygraph examination one week after the murder, two independent sources told the Dallas Morning News.

  The sources said that during a lie detector test given to Mrs. Montgomery on June 20 by Dallas polygraph examiner Don McElroy, the 30-year-old housewife stopped the interview and admitted she killed Mrs. Gore.…

  McElroy, a former polygraph examiner for the Dallas Police Department, would not comment Wednesday.…

  In a telephone interview Wednesday night, Mrs. Montgomery denied confessing to the murder, saying: “I think it sounds ridiculous and I think you ought to call Robert (Udashen, one of her attorneys). I can’t talk to you anymore.” She then hung up the phone.

  Udashen, one of two attorneys representing her, would neither confirm nor deny the confession. “I think any communication between myself and Candy and Mr. McElroy is privileged and I’m not at liberty to discuss it,” Udashen said.

  Sources said McElroy was retained by Udashen in an apparent effort to clear his client.

  However, after about an hour-and-a-half on the polygraph machine, McElroy stopped the questioning and told Mrs. Montgomery he thought she was lying. At that point she admitted hacking Mrs. Gore to death with an ax, the sources said.

  Following the conversation, the sources said, McElroy telephoned Udashen and informed him of the confession.

  The sources said Mrs. Montgomery told McElroy she murdered Mrs. Gore sometime during the morning of June 13, when she had gone to the Gore home to get a bathing suit for the Gore’s 5-year-old daughter, Alisa. She had been babysitting for the daughter that day.

  Mrs. Montgomery said she got into an argument with Mrs. Gore about an affair she had with Mrs. Gore’s husband, Allan, the sources said.…