by John Bloom
Before recessing for the day, Ryan told the jury not to discuss the case with anyone, especially reporters; not to watch television; and not to read the newspapers. Then he held everyone else in the courtroom while the jurors were escorted by bailiffs to their cars. Only then did he release the rest of the spectators.
When it was over, Pat walked to the front of the courtroom and wrapped his arms around Candy, and she felt like collapsing. She brushed tears out of her eyes and politely turned away the reporters who had come down from the balcony in hopes of getting a word or two. Don told Pat to get her on home, and then he quickly left the building, not wanting to talk to Candy.
Outside, on the steps of the courthouse, a television reporter saw Don leaving and stopped him on the way to his car. Don tossed his jacket over one shoulder and agreed to a quick interview. Little did he know that, even as he spoke, a mobile transmitter was piping his remarks directly to the 6 o’clock news.
“All I know,” he was saying, “is that two of those women in there were crying their eyes out.”
That night Allan Gore called Bob Pomeroy in Kansas.
“They selected the jury today,” he said, “and they want me to go down there tomorrow.”
“I’m gonna come down, too, Allan. Bertha just couldn’t stand it, but Ronnie says he’ll go with me.”
“Okay, fine. And you should know that they kind of threw everybody a curve today. They’re going to plead it was self-defense.”
“What?”
“That’s what they told me.”
“They’re saying Betty tried to kill that woman?”
“I guess so.”
Bob was incredulous. He couldn’t sleep again that night. He and Ronnie got up early Tuesday morning and started the long drive to Texas. On the way they talked about the latest shock in the year’s long series. They also talked about Allan—and wondered why he kept acting so strange. He didn’t seem to care about this trial. He’d called several times during the summer to give them news of the case, and he would constantly make references to how hard the whole thing was on the Montgomerys, how much money Candy was losing. Once Bob had grown tired of it and gotten angry.
“Allan, I could care less,” he said. “If she killed Betty, I don’t care if it costs her every cent she has.”
“Well, yeah,” Allan said, “I can see that.”
Allan had never given the slightest indication of whether he thought Candy was guilty or not. Bob figured that maybe the Montgomery woman was still in love with Allan, and when she found out he was planning his second honeymoon, she’d flown into a rage and killed Betty. But that was only theory.
The police hadn’t been any more helpful. Bob had called Chief Abbott a couple of times, but Abbott never would say anything about the evidence. Then he kept trying to contact Tom O’Connell that summer, but the district attorney wouldn’t return his phone calls. It was driving Bertha crazy, the not knowing. He had tried to make it easier on her by taking her on a vacation up through Colorado and Utah, but on the very first night she broke down in the motel room. “I just don’t know if I can ever get over this,” she said. Bob didn’t know if he could, either.
“Ronnie,” said Bob, now that they were on the highway, headed for the trial they hoped would explain everything, “how does a person commit some crime like that and then say it was self-defense four months later? You don’t say, ‘I had to do it,’ four months later. That’s something you say right after you kill somebody.”
“Seems that way to me, too,” said Ronnie.
Ronnie could only stay one day. He had to be back at work. Bob thought he’d get himself a motel room in McKinney and stay as long as it took.
Like everyone else, Bob Pomeroy was taken aback by the crowd scene outside the courthouse. It was even worse on Tuesday. Some women from the First Assembly of God of Princeton, Texas, had set up tables on the courthouse square, where they were conducting a bake sale. There were three mobile television vans at curbside. And everywhere you looked, there were lines of women, waiting patiently in the hope that a seat would be vacated and they would be allowed into the inner sanctum. At first Bob despaired of getting into the courthouse himself, but he went around to a side door and told a deputy sheriff who he was.
“Hey, Mr. Pomeroy,” the deputy said, “you don’t ever have to wait out here. Every morning when you’re ready to come in, you just knock and you can go in and get a seat before everyone else.”
“Thank you,” said Bob. He would later remember it as the first and last act of kindness he received from the government officials of Collin County. Bob went inside and chose his seat—on the front row, slightly to the right. He wanted to have a clear, unobstructed view of every witness.
On Tuesday, the expected feud began. Before the first witness was called—even before Candy had been formally arraigned—Judge Ryan announced, “I have one other matter before the court.”
“Counsel will recall,” he began in his deep, growling voice, “that on the eleventh day of July, 1980, this court issued an order restricting news releases.… Among the parties enjoined was the law office of Mr. Crowder.… Yesterday afternoon, this court, after the jury was selected, was leaving the courthouse at 5:35 and observed within the immediate proximity of the court, a news conference with a television media being conducted by one of the defense lawyers, Mr. Don Crowder. In the court’s opinion, it was a direct violation of this court’s order.
“Is there any reason or do you have anything to say, sir, why this court should not find you in contempt of this court for violation of the order this court entered on the eleventh day of July, 1980?”
Don rose quickly to his feet. “Your Honor,” he began, “I thought the order was lifted, especially since we met last Friday and invited the news media into your chambers and invited photographic sessions to be taken between the attorneys and the court and there was no reason to believe at that time based on the comments you made over the weekend to the news media, that the gag order was anything but lifted at that time. Furthermore, let me ask you this—”
“Sir,” Ryan interrupted, “you’re not asking this court a question. I asked you if you would like to make a statement.”
“I’m responding. Furthermore, yesterday you instructed the jury they were to have no contact whatsoever with any medium, news or otherwise.… There was no reason at that time to believe … that there was any further need for the gag order. If I am in error, it is an innocent error. Certainly not intended. And I believed at that time that the order had been lifted and there was no further purpose for it.”
“All right, sir,” said Ryan. “This court will find you in contempt for violation of its order that was entered on the eleventh day of July, 1980. Your punishment is assessed at one hundred dollars fine, plus costs, plus twenty-four hours in the Collin County jail. But out of an abundance of precaution, so your confinement will not interfere with your proper representation of your client, I will suspend the issue of that commitment until the day next preceding the conclusion of this trial.”
Don sat down. The trial hadn’t even started, and already Ryan had made him fighting mad. The jury was brought in. Don tried to swallow the bile gathering in the back of his throat.
O’Connell rose and made a brief opening argument, which sounded more like a schoolteacher’s lecture on “What is a trial?” than an impassioned plea for justice. He asked the jurors not to take notes. He asked them to “bear with us” through the tedious parts. He told them how exhibits are numbered. He told them the names of the prosecution witnesses who would testify. And that was about it.
He called his first witness: Allan Gore.
Allan seemed wholly unemotional. His face was blank, indifferent. He answered all questions in the same monotonous, evenly modulated tone. At first his voice was so flat that the jury had to strain to hear him, but he finally raised it to a barely audible level. Allan’s cool recitation of facts was fine with O’Connell, who favored a logical, workmanlike
approach anyway, but it struck Bob Pomeroy—and the jury—as exceedingly odd. Wouldn’t a man show a little emotion at the trial of his wife’s accused murderer?
After reviewing the pertinent facts of Allan’s life, O’Connell led him very methodically through everything he did on the day of June 13. He mentioned that Betty had been upset that morning, out of fear that she was pregnant, but he noticed nothing else out of the ordinary. Allan described his frantic calls that evening, trying to locate Betty, including the four he made to Candy.
“When you told the defendant that your wife had been killed,” asked O’Connell, “what response if any did she make?”
“Shock and surprised,” said Allan. “Seemed like a normal shock reaction to something like that.”
“There was nothing that seemed to be out of the ordinary or unusual about her reaction to it?”
“No.”
O’Connell pressed on, skimming lightly over the visit the Montgomerys made on Saturday when they brought Alisa home, and had Allan point out on a diagram where he kept his ax (on a nail in the garage).
“All right,” said O’Connell, removing a three-foot, wood-handled ax from under the clerk’s desk. Candy, her face graven in stone, suddenly realized what he was doing, and turned her head away. “Let me ask you … whether that looks familiar to you.”
Allan looked at the ax indifferently. It was still splattered with dried blood.
“That does look like my ax.”
Don Crowder relaxed. He had been worried about Candy’s lack of emotion. This guy was a machine.
Next O’Connell set out to establish what he hoped would be sufficient motive for murder. He asked Allan to describe the affair. But when he got to the end—the difficult breakup—Allan acted as though everything had been quite cordial.
“What was the defendant’s reaction to your discussions with her with respect to not seeing each other again, as you recall?”
“The final decision to terminate the relationship was a mutual one.”
O’Connell dropped the line of questioning and, shortly thereafter, passed the witness.
As Don Crowder began his cross-examination, Bob Pomeroy received his first major shock. Asked Betty’s height and weight, Allan said he didn’t know.
Bob leaned over to whisper to Ronnie. “He’s been married to her ten years and he don’t know her height and weight?” Bob considered that one fact more damning than anything else Allan had said.
Don moved on to Marriage Encounter and had Allan give a brief description of how it worked. To emphasize just how immersed in Marriage Encounter Betty was, he also had Allan identify a number of photographs—one showing a Marriage Encounter bumper sticker on the family car, another showing a latch-hook rug hanging over the Gores’ fireplace, emblazoned with the Marriage Encounter emblem, yet another showing Marriage Encounter stickers she used on correspondence.
Next Allan was asked to testify about the friendship between Betty and Candy, detailing several occasions when they visited each other and mixed socially, including the baby shower for Bethany in 1979. At the end of this sequence, Don asked, “Do you know of any motive that Candace Montgomery would have had to have killed your wife?”
“No, I do not.”
The second shock for Bob Pomeroy came when Allan admitted that, on the night he discovered Betty was dead, the thought of suicide entered his mind. It was a thought that had certainly never entered Bob Pomeroy’s mind. He wondered why Allan would even consider it.
Continuing, Don also got Allan to admit that Betty was “extremely depressed” that day, then had him detail other times in her life when she was equally depressed, notably just after pregnancies. Finally, in an effort to further emphasize his point about Betty’s depression, Don introduced a copy of the newspaper found by police on the Gores’ dining room table—the movie review of The Shining, about an ax murderer, which originally led Chief Abbott to think the crime was the act of a cult.
Don’s questions about the affair were much more explicit than the DA’s had been. He got Allan to go into great detail about the Como Motel. Allan was also happy to admit that the affair had been less than passionate most of the time.
“Fact of the matter is, Mr. Gore, neither one of you were very good at this, were you?”
“No.”
“So what started out as a lukewarm affair and evolved into something that was nearly intellectual, finally ended up in nothingness, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Don then firmly established that Allan and Candy had never been intimate after October 1979, when the affair broke up, and he got Allan to say that, to his knowledge, Candy had never been in his garage or seen his ax. The final question of the day was whether Allan Gore could attest to the reputation of Candy Montgomery for being a peaceable and law-abiding citizen. Allan Gore said he could. Her reputation was good.
By Wednesday morning, when the prosecution case continued, Candy had decided she liked Tom O’Connell. From her seat at the defense table, she could look directly across the room and study him as he sat hunched over his papers or conferred with his assistants. She wondered why his face was always so red. She tried to think about anything except what was happening directly in front of her. Don had told her to stop taking Serax before coming to the courtroom, because it was starting to make her look like a zombie in the papers again, but she didn’t want to be emotional. She hated journalism. Every time she took a step or made a move there were twenty people there to record it, and she knew it would thrill everyone if she would totally break down. That’s the one thing she refused to do. She could wait until she got home to do that.
Still, it was almost impossible to keep her composure when Allan’s neighbors took the stand Wednesday morning. Richard Parker went first, followed by Jerry McMahan and Lester Gayler, and each time they came to the part where they opened the utility room door and closed it so quickly, Candy shuddered and felt a physical sensation of disgust. But that was not as bad as the testimony about Bethany, the baby left alone in her room for thirteen hours and covered in excrement when she was finally found. I don’t care, Candy told herself. I will not be interested in this trial, she kept repeating. They can’t make me look at the pictures of Betty. I’ll refuse to look at them.
Late that morning O’Connell called the first “church” witness, Betty Huffhines, who had been one of the first people to see Candy after the killing. A natural redhead, Betty’s hair seemed even redder than usual as she took the stand. O’Connell led her through her conversations with Candy at Vacation Bible School that day, which she said were wholly unremarkable. Then, on cross-examination, Don asked her a series of questions about the community and church projects she had worked on with Candy.
The same pattern applied to the testimony of Suzan Wright and Barbara Green. O’Connell established that they had seen Candy both before and after the killing, and that she had seemed normal each time. No one could testify with any certainty exactly what she was wearing. They did remember her “explanation” of where she had been that morning—first at Betty’s, then at Target, where she realized her watch had stopped. On cross-examination, Don simply bolstered what O’Connell had already established and got the women to add further information about Candy’s reputation for being a charitable, civic-minded housewife. He even managed to get into testimony, over O’Connell’s objections, that Barbara Green considered it “inconceivable” that Candy Montgomery could have committed murder.
After the women testified, Ryan broke for lunch. During the recess, he sidled up to Don.
“What the hell is O’Connell doing?” he said. “His witnesses have all turned into defense witnesses.”
Don smiled. “I know.”
The crowds were starting to get rowdy. By the third day people were literally shoving and pushing for seats. As the trial resumed, a woman holding a baby yelled at the deputies guarding the outer door.
“You mean I’ve been standing here holding this child for two ho
urs,” she said, “and you’re not going to let me sit down?”
Those who did have seats had learned to bring their lunches in paper bags, so they wouldn’t have to give them up during the midday break. But in an effort to restore order and give others a chance, Ryan banned food from the courtroom. The weather was unseasonably cold, and there were strong drafts in the old building, further adding to the discontent of the crowd.
O’Connell started his parade of police witnesses on Wednesday afternoon. Officer Johnney Lee Bridgefarmer, first at the scene, described the blood-soaked utility room and the body. A second officer, Michael Stanley, testified about how he found the fingernail and showed it to Dr. Stone. Peggy Sewell was called strictly to describe how she found the same fingernail the following morning, on the kitchen cabinet, and then gave it to Cynthia (Mrs. Richard) Parker, who testified she delivered it to Royce Abbott. Lest the point be lost on the jury, Don Crowder’s cross-examination stressed that this is not commonly the most expeditious way to preserve evidence. He also got Abbott to say that—given the amount of blood left in the house, the fingerprints, the hair, the fingernail, and the time of the offense—it was a “careless” crime.
Stephen Deffibaugh took the stand for one reason—to introduce the photographs he had taken that night. After the usual objection that they were “inflammatory,” Ryan admitted them. Candy averted her eyes as the grisly photo of Betty’s body was passed to the witness box. Don had tried to get her to look at it two or three times, but she refused. Now she tried to block out an unpleasant mental image. She felt some comfort in that. She didn’t have to look at anything.
“That’s not a pretty sight, is it?” Don said, gesturing toward the picture.