by John Bloom
Fason counted to three and brought her out of the hypnosis.
“All right, Candy,” said Don, “I want to go over your testimony just one more time.”
“Are you kidding?” she said. “I hate to do that.”
“It’s important. Now start by telling me everywhere you went the morning of the thirteenth.”
Don led her through the events of that morning, and then, when he got to the most crucial moment of all, uttered the trigger phrase.
Candy looked confused for a moment. She twisted her face for a moment, and almost started to whimper. Then she suddenly hardened and gave Don a blistering glare.
“You bastard,” she said. “You set me up. Listen, you do anything you want, but you don’t mess with my mind.”
Don dropped his programming idea.
As far as Don Crowder was concerned, the technical part of the case was complete. Everything from now on would be psychology, strategy, outguessing the opposition. Don felt that he already knew what every single witness would say, including the ones that were subpoenaed by the state, and he had even gone so far as to try to make friends with some of them. The only important one who would not talk to him was, of course, Allan Gore, so Don successfully filed a motion to take a deposition from Allan. Mostly Don just wanted to make sure there were no surprises. He wanted Allan’s itinerary for Friday the thirteenth. He wanted a description of the Gores’ involvement with Marriage Encounter (to show that all was not well with Betty’s marriage). And he wanted to get Allan to say that Candy had no reason to kill Betty.
Don got most of what he wanted, but something about Allan’s responses to the questions disturbed him. For one thing, Allan flatly denied that he and Betty were having any marital problems. He also denied that he had ever told Betty about the affair with Candy. Don found that hard to believe in view of the fact that the Marriage Encounter program was all about “communicating feelings” and “honesty”—and that the Gores attended the Marriage Encounter weekend during the same month the affair ended. Near the end of the session, in the midst of a series of questions dealing with the affair, Don suddenly asked, “Have you seen Elaine Williams in the past, in the same regard that you saw Mrs. Montgomery?”
“No,” replied Allan.
“Have you ever had any affair with anyone other than Candy Montgomery?”
“No.”
Don had one more touchy bit of business to take care of before the trial. About a week before the scheduled trial date, he called Candy and told her that it was time to let a few more people in on the secret. She could tell Sherry Cleckler and Jackie Ponder. Then, a few days before the trial, Don set up a meeting at Lucas Church for Betty Huffhines, Barbara Green, Marie Childs, Sue Wright, Judy Swain, and Ann Cline.
“Ladies, what I’m about to tell you,” Don began, “is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Don’t interrupt me before I’m finished. This is a bizarre story, but compared to the alternatives, it makes sense.”
When he narrated the story, some of the ladies gasped audibly. Barbara Green began to weep. Betty Huffhines’ jaw hardened. All of them were too stunned to say anything.
“I realize some of you have been used,” Don admitted bluntly. “But it was necessary.”
Betty Huffhines was incredulous. “You expect us to believe that story now?” she said.
“I’m afraid it’s the only story that adds up.”
Four days before the trial, Jackie Ponder came from Wichita Falls to visit, and Candy knew she would have to tell her. Once she did, Jackie exploded.
“I refuse to believe that, Candy,” she said. “Why did you keep that from me?”
“I had to. But I never lied to you.”
“You did lie to me. I asked you point-blank and you lied.”
“I didn’t murder Betty Gore.”
The next day Don called Candy in to go over her testimony. He was mean and harsh as he ran through the questions. Candy was almost in tears by the time it was over.
“I hope you can cry on the stand.”
“I can’t do it, Don. I can’t let people see me like that.”
“Do you want to go to prison?”
Afterwards, Elaine Carpenter tried to soothe Candy’s nerves, by suggesting that Don sometimes overdid it a little.
“No,” said Candy, “Don’s just doing his job. I understand. I appreciate how nurturing he’s been through all this.”
After that final rehearsal, Don told Candy he didn’t want to see her anymore before the trial. He wanted to distance himself from her emotionally. He didn’t want to feel sorry for her. He didn’t want to feel anything except the rush of adrenalin a man gets when he’s ready to enter righteous battle.
That same day, Don took a call from Bruce Selcraig, the investigative reporter at the News who had broken the polygraph story.
“Bruce,” he said, his voice full of bravado, “this will be a trial like none other in Texas. We’re going to do things that have never been done in an American courtroom. And I’ll guarantee you right now, they’re scared to death. I’ve got them right where I want them. If they put on some of the witnesses I’ve heard they will they’re gonna bomb. After the first day, I’ll have center stage and I’ll never lose it, because I’ve never been as prepared for a trial in my life as I am for this one.”
“What about Judge Ryan?” Selcraig asked.
“Ryan’s not a bad judge,” said Don. “He’s just very concerned about his image. He thinks he may be lionized after all this is over. He’ll be groomed like a stud horse for this. You remember when they made a film of the Tex Watson story and they had the scene for the extradition hearing in Collin County? Well, they had an actor for Ryan, and he was disappointed. That’s what we’re talking about.”
To get a little rebuttal, Selcraig then called Ryan at home and, much to his surprise, got him to talk. Apparently he was looking forward to Monday’s proceedings just as much.
“I run a tight courtroom, I’ll tell you that,” Ryan said, “and I call ’em the way I see ’em. I could care less about what the lawyers are calling me. I go to bed each night after the news and I think about my day for about fifteen seconds, that’s how much it bothers me. But I’ll tell you this, I love every minute of it. I’m really the nicest little old man in Collin County. I’m just no Casper Milquetoast.”
One person who wasn’t giving any interviews was Candy Montgomery. On the day before the trial, the family went to church, but Candy decided not to sing in the choir after noticing TV newsmen outside the sanctuary. That night, after the kids were in bed, Candy and Pat huddled together on the living room couch, his arms closed tightly around her.
“I’m so afraid,” she said.
Pat held her closer.
Five miles to the south, Don Crowder lay motionless under his sunlamp. The long hot Texas summer had given way to chilly fall nights and overcast days, but Don was undeterred. By 9 A.M. the next morning, his bronze tan would be perfect.
23 The Big Top
In the exact center of McKinney, Texas, ponderous, bulging at the seams, a solid stone fortress the color of coffee stains, the Collin County courthouse stood empty and abandoned. It was 106 years old, built when the frontier was young and a scaffold was kept in the basement for public hangings on the courthouse square. It was the same building where, in 1921, the whole state of Texas converged to find out whether a farmer named Ezell Stepp would get the noose for cracking the skull of a field hand and then stuffing his body down an abandoned well. (Stepp was found guilty and hanged promptly.) It was the same courthouse where Charles “Tex” Watson, the football-hero-turned-Manson-cultist, was held for extradition in 1970, before eventually being sent back to California for trial. More recently, it was the courthouse where Robert Excel White was sentenced to death in the electric chair with national television cameras rolling. White was one of the first men convicted under a new law that came into effect after a landmark Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty was constitutiona
l. The presiding judge that day was Tom Ryan. When he asked White if he had anything to say, the prisoner said simply, “Yes I do. I killed those people and my conscience bothers me.” Ryan, for the only time in his judicial career, couldn’t speak. He had to leave the bench for a half hour before he could regain his composure and pronounce the death sentence.
Yet since July 1979, the drafty old building had been vacant. Collin County had modernized and moved two blocks east, where the jail had electronic doors, the offices were centrally air-conditioned, and the tidy, compact courtrooms seated exactly sixty spectators each. Judge Ryan had decided that wasn’t enough. The new courthouse simply wouldn’t do as an arena for the battle of titans that was coming. This, Ryan had told everyone, would be his final trial before retiring. In terms of public interest, it would be perhaps the biggest trial of his career. He wanted it in the old courtroom, where he could squeeze in at least 250 people, with room in the balcony for all the reporters who cared to attend. The padlocks would come off the doors, and a four-man cleaning crew would spend a week getting everything ready. By the time they finished, it would be restored to all its former grandeur. The courtroom itself was three stories high, floor to ceiling, and it extended the full length of the courthouse’s second story. Ryan’s bench, standing on a raised platform at one end like a colossal altar, so dominated the room that even people sitting on the back row seemed to look up at him. From the three-sided balcony, once reserved for black people and now for the press, the view would resemble a crowd scene out of Ben Hur.
Ryan also ordered extra bailiffs, to keep spectators from mauling one another in the scramble for seating.
Candy rose at seven, left Pat sleeping in bed, and went downstairs to start fixing breakfast. No one had said things should be any different on this day. They had tried to keep it that way, make their lives as normal as possible. But now, in the cold light of the early morning, the only person moving through the still sleeping house, Candy grew frightened. The normalcy was no longer comforting. Things weren’t normal. She lit her first cigarette of the day and started breakfast. It helped when Sherry came over; Sherry had sensed what Candy might be feeling, so she showed up unexpectedly at the front door. Still, they didn’t talk about the trial. Candy only alluded to it once.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so dependent on other people as I am today.”
Don had been very explicit about what Candy was to wear. She was to look sober and matronly. Her hair was once again short and wavy. The colors she chose were dark and subdued. She wore earrings and a blue, loose-fitting dress with a hemline well below her knees. Over her shoulders she draped a white woolen sweater. The women asked Pat for an opinion when he came downstairs. He said he thought she looked fine. Soon Rob Udashen was at the door; Candy gave Pat a quick kiss and then was gone. Pat would follow in his own car.
Candy and Rob made small talk on the way to the courthouse. At one point, in her usual direct manner, she asked a brutally simple question.
“What are the Texas prisons like?”
“There are two women’s prisons,” he said. “There’s one that you definitely do not want to go to. The other one is not that bad.”
“How do they decide which one you go to?”
“You’d go to the good one.”
Rob entered McKinney on Highway 5, drove past the new courthouse complex, and turned left onto Louisiana Street. From two blocks away, he could already see his worst imaginings coming true. The crowds were thronged up and down the courthouse steps and ranged around the square, apparently trying to push up close enough to the doors so that they could rush in and claim seats. Cars were parked in every available space for several blocks around.
Rob was grateful when a deputy sheriff recognized his passenger and waved him into a special roped-off parking area near a side entrance.
At about the same moment, Don Crowder was turning his El Dorado onto Louisiana Street. Far from fearing the crowds he saw ahead, he got a great rush of adrenalin. He could almost feel the concrete runway of the Cotton Bowl beneath his feet.
For the people who waited so patiently on the courthouse steps on the trial’s opening day—most of them housewives from surrounding towns—the first few hours must have seemed tiresome. First Judge Ryan cleared the courtroom of all spectators so he could have room for the panel of two hundred people who had been subpoenaed for jury duty. Then the entire morning was taken up with motions, the formal reading of the indictment, and an explanation of the qualifications necessary to be selected as a juror. In an attempt to save time, Ryan asked a number of questions himself—and quickly eliminated thirty-two of the first eighty-four people called because they admitted they weren’t able to be objective. It was not until after lunch that the real winnowing process began, in which each side has the opportunity to question prospective jurors for evidence of bias or prejudice. O’Connell went first, straining to make his mild voice heard in the cavernous courtroom, slowly and carefully explaining legal concepts to the jurors: circumstantial evidence, “reasonable doubt,” the presumption of innocence, the range of punishment. He also pretty much summed up his case by saying, “The ultimate fact issue to be proved to a jury is that a defendant killed the deceased.”
After his speech, O’Connell asked fairly routine questions of the panel members, and only three had responses out of the ordinary. One woman admitted that she would find it “difficult” to convict a person if the case were based on circumstantial evidence. Another woman testified that Don Crowder had done legal work for her in the past, and was her neighbor in Lucas. And a man told O’Connell that Crowder was the track coach of his daughter.
O’Connell asked each of the three if anything about their admissions would have a bearing on their ability to “follow the law” and “render a fair and impartial judgment.” They said they could be fair. Even though O’Connell could have struck them from the panel, all three were subsequently selected. Don Crowder was more surprised than anyone.
But Don took a different tack when it came his turn to question the panel. He began by making a joke about “this late hour.” After all his physical training for the trial, he said, he felt like he was about to collapse on his feet. He briefly touched on the legal concept of “reasonable doubt”—requiring the state to “prove beyond a reasonable doubt” that a person is guilty—and then asked routine questions about jurors who might be related to police officers or members of Marriage Encounter. Finally, in the midst of a rather tiresome recital of areas that had already been covered earlier in the day, Don paused for a moment.
“It’s not proper for me at this time to discuss the facts with you,” he said, “and of course Mr. O’Connell didn’t discuss the facts with you either. But there is something I’ve got to tell you now for me to be able to discuss the law with you.”
He waited for just one beat.
“On Friday, June the thirteenth, 1980, Candace Montgomery killed Betty Gore. She did so with an ax. She did so in self-defense.”
The sixty-two jury panelists were stunned. Two women started to cry. Candy, seated at the defense table, started to tremble. She fought back tears and held a clenched fist to her mouth. Don cast a quick glance over at the prosecution table, and thought he saw O’Connell’s face flush more deeply. He turned back to the panel.
“The homicide was justified,” said Don. “We haven’t chosen to try our case in the papers. That is the reason you’ve never heard that before from anybody until now. This is the place where the trial takes place. Right now. Right here. This is where it all starts. That’s where all of the evidence will come from. If you’re going to convict, then make sure it comes from there.”
Don pointed at the witness stand in front of the judge’s bench.
“We have quite a story to tell,” said Don, aware now that all eyes were riveted on himself. “Quite a story. And it hasn’t appeared in the papers. And you haven’t got a hint of it most likely. And you won’t until it comes from the witness stan
d. I hope it will make you feel better that Mrs. Montgomery will take the stand. She intends to testify. Testify completely and fully as to the event that occurred.”
He briefly ran through Texas law as it relates to self-defense, and asked the panel as a whole if there were any disagreements with that law. The room remained silent.
“Now if you’ve read the newspapers,” he began again, “you know that there is an affair involved here. Mrs. Montgomery sinned. She acknowledges it. But she is not on trial here for that sin. Some of you—I’m sure many of you—are Christians on this panel. I’m sure many of you have very strong feelings about the Seventh Commandment. About adultery. There’s nothing wrong with having those strong feelings, and I’m not asking you to forgive her. Not at this stage, or ever. Nor is she. But we’re asking can you decide this case on the evidence, without letting the affair muddle your mind? If you cannot, please speak up now.”
The room remained silent.
At the conclusion of the emotional speech, one of the panelists, a Mrs. Fiorini, raised her hand and asked to be dismissed.
“Why is that?” asked Don.
“Well, I’m already shaking like a leaf from what I’ve heard already and it really does make me nervous and I’m not sure I want to be in judgment of another person.”
Ryan immediately excused her. Another woman asked to be excused on the same grounds. Finally the attorneys made their strikes, and Ryan announced the jurors. Nine of the twelve were women. Conventional wisdom held that a majority-female jury is bad news for a female defendant, because women are, presumed to be harder on other women than men would be. But other aspects of the panel seemed more favorable to Candy. Two jurors, for example, had spouses who worked for Texas Instruments, Pat’s employer. Five others were connected to the electronics industry, including two with ties to Rockwell International, where Allan Gore had once worked. The men included a “sales engineer,” a quality control supervisor, and the head of corporate security for EDS, the huge electronics firm owned by H. Ross Perot. The women included a teacher, three secretaries, and five housewives. This was preeminently a jury of Candy Montgomery’s peers, for they inhabited the same affluent, white collar, suburban world in which she had spent all of her adult life.