Evidence of Love

by John Bloom

  Don was a little disappointed. He had been looking forward to the headline-making drama of spending Saturday, his thirty-eighth birthday, in jail.

  The weekend should have been tense and nervous, a time for second-guessing the events of the past five days, but instead it was merely passing time. Candy, like everyone else, became mentally exhausted when she thought of the trial, so she put it out of her mind. On Friday night, she and Pat went to the Lucas parsonage for a dinner of barbecued chicken, potato salad, and ranch-style beans served by Ron Adams. The Greens were there, and the Sullivans, and they found it was remarkably easy not to mention the trial. They went to church on Sunday—against Don’s wishes—and on Saturday afternoon Candy drove to McKinney to be examined by Dr. Thomas Thornton, the court-appointed psychiatrist who would testify at her competency hearing.

  “Most people never get the chance to prove they’re sane,” she joked as she left.

  The newspapers found out Candy was competent to stand trial even before she did. The psychiatric results were in the Sunday Dallas Morning News, angering Judge Ryan so much that the next day he tried without success to find out who leaked the information. The newspapers and TV stations still couldn’t get enough of the case. Pat watched and read as much as he could but kept all the accounts away from Candy. Especially disturbing was an article by Bruce Selcraig in the Sunday News in which many of the trial spectators were interviewed.

  “I just wish they’d stop all this and put her away,” said one woman, speaking for the clear majority of the curiosity-seekers. “I know they have to hear all this evidence stuff—now don’t you dare use my name—but everybody knows what she did.”

  The depressing thing about the comments in the newspaper, Pat thought, was not that they were so vindictive. It was that, apparently, the women hadn’t bought Candy’s testimony about what happened in the utility room. If that were true of them, it might be true of the jury as well.

  Candy was subdued over the weekend but never morose. She cooked and cleaned and chatted with Sherry. She called Don to find out how much longer the trial might last. Not long, he said. On Sunday night she slept only fitfully. Sometime during the night she started unloading a dishwasher and noticed that her mother was looking over her shoulder, trying to help. Her mother spoke in a sweet, saccharine tone as she pulled a pocket knife out of her skirt and laid it on the kitchen counter. “You’ll need this to defend yourself,” she said. “Here, take it.” And then she disappeared. When Candy reached for the knife, she saw blood on her hand and stopped. She woke up sobbing.

  It took less than fifteen minutes to pronounce Candy competent, and then the trial moved quickly toward its conclusion. Don’s most important remaining witness was Dr. Fred Fason—and a magnificent witness he was. He was one of those people whose physical appearance is instantly likeable, a big bearish Santa Claus of a man, wise yet jovial. His deep rumbling voice was hypnotic, his manner smooth and confident without seeming arrogant. He seemed to be having great fun on the stand.

  Fason outlined the twenty or so hours he had spent with Candy, describing her as being in a “detached, mildly depressed emotional state.” He also backed up Dr. Green’s diagnosis of a dissociative reaction. What he meant by that term was entirely different, however. He said Candy’s dissociative reaction had begun before she was six years old and continued to the present—in other words, that it was a constant condition of her personality and not something that had been caused by the events of the thirteenth. She was a person excessively concerned about what other people thought of her—a common trait in people suffering from dissociative reaction—so she tried to keep up a public front at all times. She wanted others to consider her warm and loving and concerned for animals and children, a person who didn’t have a violent or vindictive bone in her body. No one is that pure, so she had suppressed a great deal of anger over the years in order to satisfy her ideal self-image.

  That’s why Fason turned to hypnosis. It was the one way to get past her conscious image of herself and find out what dark realms lurked behind her cool, reserved exterior. His explanation of how hypnosis works—short-circuiting the normal, conscious defense mechanisms, making a person childlike and ingenuous, subject to suggestion—was intelligent without being too academic.

  Fason described how he had led Candy, under hypnosis, through the events of June thirteenth, in an attempt to find the precise moment when she erupted in rage, went off the deep end, and killed Betty Gore. He found that moment: the point during the struggle when Betty Gore, bloodied but still battling, had pressed her body up against the utility room door, stared into Candy’s eyes, and said, “Shhhhhh.” Reaching that point in the chronology, Fason “age-regressed” Candy to try to find any other incident in her life when she had been that angry. He discovered such an incident at the age of four.

  As Candy recalled—still under hypnosis—she and an older boy were racing to see who could get to an outdoor water pump first. The winner got to pump water into a jar. Candy lost the race and was so mad that she took the jar away from the boy, threw it against the pump, and shattered it. A piece of glass popped up and struck her in the forehead, and blood streamed down her face. She was taken to the hospital for stitches, but in the emergency room she was so frightened that two attendants had to hold her down, kicking and screaming. Her mother came into the room.

  “Shhhh,” she said. “What will they think of you in the waiting room?”

  When Fason asked her to express her true feelings about the incident—it was not a conscious memory—Candy had screamed and moaned uncontrollably. She had never been able to express her fright before then, because of what the people in the waiting room might think. This was a woman who suppressed rage all of her life because of what others might think of her.

  Fason was quick to add that he was not saying Candy went berserk in the utility room. He was saying that there was a connection between the shushing by her mother at age four, and the shushing by Betty in the heat of the struggle. The blind rage was the result of a lot of things—the association in her mind between Betty and her mother, the association of pain with the sound “Shhhhhh,” the need finally to get rid of hostilities that had been building up inside her for twenty-six years.

  The “Shhhhhh” theory made Don nervous—it sounded too bizarre to be understood by a jury—and so he pressed on to more mundane explanations of Candy’s behavior. In Fason’s opinion, Candy had lied to the authorities because of her shame over being capable of such violence. It was a shame so intense, he said, that she still didn’t totally admit to herself that she had done it. And Fason stated his emphatic opinion that Candy never consciously intended to take Betty Gore’s life.

  Tom O’Connell suddenly felt trapped again. Fason was testifying that Candy’s urge to destroy Betty Gore was the result of a “disorder” but not a mental illness. She was sane enough to argue self-defense, but not sane enough to be responsible for the forty-one blows. It was like having a self-defense and a temporary insanity plea at the same time, and reaping the benefits of both. And despite his attempts to point out the inconsistencies in Fason’s reasoning, the doctor held firm on cross-examination. Candy’s initial impulse, he said, was one of self-defense. At some point during the struggle, she changed, lost control, was transformed into an unconscious killing machine. After that, she couldn’t even see Betty Gore. Hers was, quite literally, a blind rage.

  Don’s defense was complete, but he had one more duty, he felt. He wanted the jury to know that Betty Gore wasn’t a mild-mannered, sugar-and-spice schoolteacher, blameless and pure. According to the ancient custom of criminal defense attorneys everywhere, Don wanted to throw a little dirt on the victim.

  The parade began with Catherine Cooper, the Plano schoolteacher who had shared a team-teaching class with Betty right after the Gores had moved to Texas. Catherine testified that Betty had “more than the ordinary amount of conflicts that a teacher has with parents,” that she didn’t communicate well, and that
she could be extremely tactless. She was known as a harsh disciplinarian—perhaps too harsh—and her problems had led to her not being hired permanently by the school district.

  Ann Cline, a Marriage Encounter member, testified that Betty had once received threatening phone calls from a parent, that Betty was very moody, and that she would go through periods of deep despondency. She had little patience. She made derogatory comments about Ron Adams during church services. Ann was followed by Judy Swaine, who said many of the same things and testified about Betty’s spurning of her expensive shower gift. Don also used her presence on the stand to point out that Betty was a much larger woman than Candy.

  “By the way,” said Don, “are you about the same size as Mrs. Gore?”

  “I’m approximately the same height. I’m about a size larger.”

  “All right. And could you stand for the jury one more time?”

  She slid out of the witness box and stood beside it, furious at Don for using her as an example of how overweight Betty had been.

  Finally, to get the story from the horse’s mouth, Don called the object of Betty’s scorn, the Reverend Ron Adams himself. Ron quite willingly related instances of Betty’s open defiance of him, often manifest in childish ways. On cross-examination, O’Connell questioned Ron about his discussions with Candy since the killing, and at first he tried to avoid answering.

  “You asked her,” said O’Connell, “whether or not she was involved in the killing, didn’t you?”

  “I refuse to answer that, Your Honor,” said Ron, “on the parishioner-priest privilege.”

  “You’ll answer his question,” said Ryan.

  Don gave Ron a nod of the head, as though to say, “It’s all right.”

  Ron started his answer. “We talked about—”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted O’Connell. “Are you answering the question because Mr. Crowder says you can or the judge told you to answer?”

  “The judge indicated it was my responsibility to answer the question,” said Ron.

  Ron answered the question.

  Don was ready for his last gambit. He asked for, and received, a hearing to determine whether the jury would be allowed to hear the testimony of Don McElroy, the polygraph examiner who had questioned Candy about a week after the killing. Polygraph examinations are not accepted by the courts as factual evidence, and they are usually kept out of trials by the objections of defense attorneys. In this case, a defense attorney wanted the polygraph results admitted, because it bolstered his client’s testimony. After both sides questioned McElroy as to the relevant answers Candy had given during the examination, O’Connell—to the surprise of everyone—said he had no objection to the polygraph examination being introduced. Ryan said he needed the night to study the law.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he told the lawyers. “I’m not in the mood to change the law of the state of Texas over one case. Or attempt to. I know what’s going to happen.”

  But the next shock came Tuesday morning, when Ryan did admit the polygraph testimony after all. It was some indication of how desperate the prosecution had become. O’Connell was hoping to prove there were inconsistencies between what Candy had told the jury and what she had told McElroy. But Don was secretly exultant. On the important questions—like “Did you go to the house of Betty Gore with the intention of harming her?”—he knew Candy’s answers had been irrefutably truthful.

  The defense rested.

  For his rebuttal testimony, O’Connell tried to fight the self-defense story with everything at his disposal. Deffibaugh and Stone were recalled to testify about the sunglass lens found in the garage. How could Betty’s bloody lens be there if the fight had been confined to the utility room? Deffibaugh even said that, over the weekend, he had revisited the Gore home and tried to figure out a way for the lens to get from the utility room to the garage. Short of going into the garage and placing it, there was no way.

  Next O’Connell tried to repair some of the damage created by Don’s anti-Betty witnesses. He called JoAnn Garlington, the first witness who seemed actively hostile to the defense. JoAnn was now convinced that Candy was lying about the killing and, out of loyalty to Betty, took the stand to say the most extraordinary things.

  “I have never seen Betty being unkind to anyone in the six years that I’ve known her.… I’ve never even seen her raise her hand to her child.”

  Don felt sure he could dispel JoAnn’s vision of saintliness by reminding her of a conversation he had had with her only a few weeks before.

  “We both agreed [Betty] was an extremely moody person, did we not?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “We didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Was she a moody person?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Not any more moody than anyone else would be. Than any normal human being is.”

  “You didn’t tell me she was a moody person?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t tell me she had highs and lows? Almost constantly?”

  “No.”

  For the first time, Candy felt loathing for a witness.

  O’Connell called two of Betty’s fellow schoolteachers. Both of them said she was a nice woman. So did a friend of the family. In an attempt to show how cold and hostile Candy was, O’Connell also tried to introduce a television videotape taken one morning when Candy was arriving for the trial. The cameraman had stumbled on a tree root in his attempt to follow Candy into the courtroom, and when he did, she had angrily said, “I hope you fall.” Ryan ruled the tape inadmissible as evidence.

  Finally, in an effort to counteract the testimony of Dr. Green and Dr. Fason, O’Connell called a Dallas psychiatrist named Dr. Clay Griffith, who testified that in his opinion Candy did not suffer from a dissociative reaction, and in fact had acted with calculation and self-control before, during, and after the crime. Since he had never examined or met Candy, Dr. Griffith’s testimony was based entirely on a reading of the court record. And his knowledge of the case was so sketchy that his opinions were almost entirely discredited on cross-examination.

  Shortly after that downbeat session, the prosecution rested. The jury was sent home and final arguments set for the following morning, a Wednesday.

  Don Crowder was looking forward to his summation as the crowning moment of his legal career, an hour he had looked forward to for so long that he had dozens of pages of scribbled notes, phrases dashed off here and there, quotations that came to him in the middle of the night, numbered points he reminded himself to make. He had rehearsed the speech in broad outline the night before he addressed the jury. Once he began, he was a possessed man, feeling every bit of the outrage that he had so carefully nurtured. It wasn’t that he felt the authorities had been unjust to Candy—he had put her out of his mind entirely—but that he felt he had the only logical explanation of the killing, and there was no way O’Connell could shake it.

  He opened his speech to the jury with some reminders about the presumption of innocence and the concept of “reasonable doubt.” Then, using large posterboards placed on an easel, he reviewed the testimony of each witness, emphasizing the references to Betty’s size, her moodiness, her obsession with Marriage Encounter. He stressed that the affair had been over for eight months. He reminded the jury of the carelessness of the crime. He said the medical testimony indicated that most of the ax blows were rendered after Betty was already dead. He pointed out that an ax was an extremely clumsy murder weapon, and that more practical ones—like knives and scissors—were readily available. He tried to explain “dissociative reaction” one more time.

  “She was aware of doing the act,” said Don, “but didn’t comprehend what she was doing. Much like a defensive back in the National Football League when a receiver enters his defensive area of the playing field, tends to hit that man as hard as he can. Maybe even harm that man. But it’s not a conscious thing. He’s reacting to the ball and the man. He may think about it afterwards. He might ha
ve thought about it beforehand. But he’s conditioned to inflict punishment.”

  In reviewing the testimony of Dr. Fason, Don avoided mentioning the “Shhhhhh” anecdote, because the newspapers had had a field day with it, and Don didn’t entirely believe it himself.

  Don moved on to Betty—her depression, her tactlessness at school, her problems in communicating with others.

  “Judy Swaine,” he added, “testified she was approximately the same height and one size larger than Mrs. Gore, and if you recall, Mrs. Swaine was a very good-sized woman.”

  And finally Don tried to deal with the most troublesome aspect of his whole case: the overkill, the forty-one blows.

  “I know that there are things in this case that still bother you,” he said. “I’d be a fool not to recognize that. How in God’s name could one human being inflict the kind of punishment Candy Montgomery inflicted on another? Well, I’ve got an answer. When Betty Gore came at Mrs. Montgomery she was no longer a human being. She was an animal. She had turned into something less than a human being. She was an animal in search of prey. She was ready to attack.…

  “John Steinbeck once wrote that there are those among us who live in rooms of experience you and I cannot enter. But if you’re worried about whether or not Mrs. Montgomery is ever going to be punished in this case or has not been punished in this case, don’t worry about it any longer, because she lives in that room of experience and we can’t enter it. She lives in it and she’s locked in it and it now constitutes a cell—a jail cell. And her family has moved in it and Betty Gore threw away the key on June 13th.

  “They’ve lost their home. They’re heavily in debt.… They’re moving away from this area to start anew. They’ve been punished and they’ll be forever punished. There won’t be a day in the life of Mrs. Montgomery that she’ll ever put out of her mind that she committed this act on June 13th, 1980.