A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  “I never did like quiet cops,” Walker said.

  Jay Powell objected to Walker being reshackled. He pointed out that three armed deputy sheriffs were watching Walker at all times, “and surely they can shoot faster than he can run.” When the hearings moved to City Hall, however, Walker was back in leg irons.

  As the preliminary entered its second week, Jim Brown and Gene Parker entered a new phase of their investigation, tracing Walker’s trail to other cities, other states. In fact, for two country cops whose official business had never before taken them beyond the rocky boundaries of Tulare County, Brown and Parker were becoming cross-country sleuths, and having themselves a ball.

  They had stayed on in Los Angeles for a while, after Walker’s arrest, interviewing and reinterviewing, and they’d met Hope Masters for the first time. As members of the prosecution’s investigating unit they were not, of course, on her side, but Gene Parker, especially, found her likeable, and Hope liked him. They met under slightly awkward circumstances. In the reception room at her lawyers’ offices, Hope thought the two nicely dressed men were some of Tom and Ned’s other clients. But when Tom Breslin arrived, it turned out they were detectives, Parker and Brown, come to collect samples of her hair. Everyone filed into a room adjoining Tom’s office and just sort of stood around—Hope and Lionel, Tom Breslin, Parker and Brown. Then Tom snipped a piece of hair from her head and dropped it into a manila envelope that Jim Brown held out; the envelope was sealed, dated, and signed, then everybody just sort of stood around some more.

  “Well, come on, you guys, there’s plenty of hair here,” Hope encouraged them, brushing her left arm with her right hand. “See, it’s like a wheatfield; it’s just hard to see because it’s blond.” Finally she took the scissors and cut off some arm hair herself. To Gene Parker’s great relief, only hair from the arm and head were taken. Jim Brown noted gravely in his report: “No hair samples were taken from Hope’s legs as she shaves her legs and none was available.”

  Parker and Brown talked with Sara Monaco, the receptionist at Dailey & Associates, who identified Walker’s picture as being of the man who had taken Bill Ashlock to lunch.

  They talked with Hope’s neighbor, Mrs. Smith, whose husband had done some business with Tom Masters. She told them Hope was basically a nice person.

  They talked with Licha, Hope’s weekend maid, who told them that when the stranger who came home with Mrs. Masters that Sunday evening drove Licha to the bus stop, he asked her how to get back to Hope’s house.

  When they talked with Richard Miller, Bill’s Checkmate partner, and a third partner, John Arnold, they learned that Miller had traveled a great deal as a filmmaker, that he had a top security clearance with the Secret Service, and had traveled with the White House staff. Both Miller and Arnold looked at Walker’s picture and said they had never seen him before.

  Once more, Parker and Brown talked with Sandi, who identified the yellow metal ring with the initials W.T.A., found in Walker’s car, as a keepsake she’d bought and given to Bill. She also told the detectives, this time, that just before Bill went to the ranch, he had told her that if she would marry him, he would stop seeing Hope Masters.

  They talked with the bartender and with the maitre d’ at the Brown Derby, who told them that on Friday, February 23, they had served approximately three hundred lunches, just as they did every day of the week, and they could not possibly identify any pictures.

  Sifting through the array of hotel receipts, car rental agreements, room keys, car keys, miscellaneous keys, matches, towels, and soap left in Walker’s wake, the detectives found that someone giving the name William T. Ashlock had been registered at the Towne House in San Francisco from March 1 to March 6, and at the Hilton Inn at the San Francisco Airport from March 2 to March 6. Registration forms at the hotels showed the guest had been driving a white 1973 Chevrolet Impala, Nevada license CBK 187. Parker and Brown searched for the car around the Towne House, at Eighth and Market streets, without any luck, and checked in there overnight. Next morning, after driving for what seemed like hours through what seemed like thousands of parked cars at the airport, they spotted the Impala, its windows so dirty by now that all they could see, as they peered in, was a paper bag and an apple on the floor of the back seat. While they waited for Vern Hensley of the crime lab to arrive on a flight from Fresno, Brown took pictures of the car with its inside-joke license: 187 was the penal code section for homicide.

  In the trunk of the Impala, they found a brown briefcase initialed W.T.A. containing newspapers, bond typing paper, letterhead paper for “Borough & Carson,” and a map of Chicago. A green Samsonite attaché case in the trunk with the name Richard S. Powell was locked; to no one’s astonishment, a thin key among the pocketful of keys Jim Brown had carried around for a month fit the attaché case. Under the rubber mat on the floor of the trunk, they found personal checks imprinted Taylor O. Wright III and Patricia Wright.

  The green attaché case led Brown and Parker to the insurance salesman who had been robbed at the Hilton in Omaha in February, and that robbery, and a string of robberies at that time, led to a discussion with Omaha authorities of the two unsolved murders there that Paul Luther had described. Two unidentified bodies had been found in a ditch, each with a single bullet hole in the head, each wrapped in a blanket, with a pillow under each head.

  Honey cried so much on the witness stand that even Jim Heusdens was momentarily touched. “If you want to recess, you just ask the court for one and they would grant it,” he told her.

  Honey sniffled. “Thank you,” she said with dignity.

  Hope’s mother related Hope’s story of being awakened by an intruder at the ranch, who held a gun in her face, of finding Bill dead, of being raped and tied and then fainting, or passing out, and “at that point Walker arrived. Taylor.” Honey told of meeting Taylor at her house on Tuesday—“the Tuesday following this fateful weekend”—the day Hope had come down too, “in a terrible state of shock, and hysterical, and absolutely frantic. Her face was gray.” Honey related Taylor’s story of his arrival at the ranch on Sunday morning, finding Bill murdered and Hope tied up, moving the body, untying Hope, and driving her home.

  “Has your daughter ever told you any story different than this intruder story?” Heusdens asked.

  “She has given me a great deal more detail on it,” Honey replied. “And she has identified the intruder.”

  “You say your daughter changed her story?” the prosecutor demanded.

  “No, she didn’t change her story,” Honey insisted. “What she told me was the absolute truth. Hope does not lie.”

  Honey explained that Hope’s story had always been true except that, in the beginning, she had not identified the intruder. After she was released on bail, Honey said, Hope had awakened her one night and said, ‘Somebody has to know who he is, because if I’m killed, someone must know who did this horrible thing.’”

  “Did she tell you who did this horrible thing?” Heusdens asked.

  “Yes. She said Taylor did it.”

  “By Taylor, does she mean the defendant, Mr. Walker?”

  Jay Powell objected on grounds of hearsay, but before the judge could rule, Honey kept talking. “She made me promise not to tell,” Honey said, twisting her moist handkerchief in her hands. “She said it was Mr. Taylor. Because we didn’t know it was Walker until later, when the FBI brought his picture to us.”

  “When he came to your house on Tuesday, did you believe him?” Ned Nelsen asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Honey said.

  “Were you frightened?”

  “I was scared to death.”

  One of the most difficult questions put to Honey was why Hope had allowed Walker to take Hope Elizabeth to school.

  “She said that he was—she was going to be watched at school,” Honey replied, “and that Taylor was going to have her protected, and that she would be watched by his people.”

  “So Taylor was taking her to school to protect her
from someone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “And later you found out that the only person making a threat to your daughter was Mr. Taylor, who is now known as Mr. Walker?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if he’s the only one. To this day, I don’t know,” Honey said anxiously. “I wish I did know if he was the only one.”

  Some of the questions seemed irrelevant at the time.

  “Have you ever carried a gun in your purse?” Heusdens asked.

  “Never,” Honey said firmly.

  “You don’t own a gun that you have ever carried in your purse?”

  “Never.”

  “You don’t own a gun that you have ever carried in your purse?”

  “No,” Honey said, very emphatically. “I have never carried any kind of firearm at any time in my life in any way.”

  “Do you know a Mr. Edward Eugene Taylor?” Jay Powell asked.

  “I don’t recognize the name,” Honey replied.

  Judge Carter was a kindly man. He even felt compassion for the various attorneys. He knew the tension and pressure they worked under, so he let a lot of things go by that he felt weren’t relevant to the case. He knew very well that Honey’s testimony was hearsay—double hearsay, really—but he admitted it for two reasons. “One, I wanted to see what the entire picture was. Also, very few women who come before me cry.” His sympathy, however, stopped abruptly at Hope’s edge of the counsel table. “Mrs. Masters, I would appreciate it if you did not make your head go yes and no,” Judge Carter told her, during Honey’s testimony.

  “I’m sorry,” Hope said, in a most uncontrite voice.

  “Whether it’s involuntary or not, pay more attention to it and desist from it,” he went on.

  “I will look in the other direction then, okay?” Tom Breslin gave her a definite poke in the side. “I’m sorry,” Hope said again. “I don’t mean to do it.”

  Another cartoon came in the relay: Walker to Powell to Breslin to Hope: “LOVE IS … listening to her while she talks and talks and talks.”

  “We talked to her briefly during the trip,” Sgt. Henry Babcock testified, regarding Hope. “She had been contacted by counsel. I had read her her rights. I could see no real gain by talking to her. She understood her rights, and she would rather talk to her counsel before talking to us. We did chitchat during the trip, though.”

  Hope was furious and asked Tom at the recess whether she couldn’t give testimony about the conversation she remembered in the drive to Tulare, which she recalled as containing threats involving “black dykes,” and “lynching.” Tom said she couldn’t and not to get upset about it.

  “Well, okay,” Hope said, “but it was the most un-chitchatty, chitchat I ever heard.”

  Van related Hope’s account of the night at the ranch, saying that after she was raped, the intruder was in and out of the room a number of times during the next four to six hours. “He left, on one occasion at the end of this period of time, and did not return.”

  “Did your daughter tell you what happened after that?” Jim Heusdens asked.

  “My daughter told me that, after that, she thinks she blacked out. She awoke when it was daylight. And at that point my daughter stopped talking because Mr. Walker interrupted her and said he would take the story from there.”

  “Since that day, has your daughter told you any stories that are different from the original story she told you?”

  “Yes, she has,” Van said. He explained that Hope had told him Walker had arrived at the ranch on Saturday, not Sunday, and that she had described to him the day, up to her going to bed, being awakened with a gun, discovering Bill dead. “She said that she learned, in the course of the post-rape time, that—that the rapist was Walker.”

  “What did she say about the intruder, when he first came into the room, how could she say who it was?”

  “She said that the light was not good enough for her to see who the intruder was, or even to get a good enough look at him to identify him or even to recognize him, and that condition continued until after the rape took place, at which time the conversation between her and the rapist was such that it became clear that it was Walker.”

  Van said he had learned some details after the visit from the FBI, and he admitted he had known these changed details on March 9, when he gave his second statement to Parker and Brown at the Beverly Hills station.

  “Why did you not recite the change of the story that your daughter had told you?” Heusdens demanded.

  “Because my daughter had been charged with murder, and I thought it would be inappropriate for me to talk any further about the details of this matter with the police.”

  Lemars Blount, one of the fishermen the Webb brothers had seen up at the ranch, said that as he and his buddy drove by the big house, that Saturday, heading up to the lake, he saw a girl through the picture window. “They are out of school early,” he said, forgetting, for a moment, that it was Saturday. “What’s a school kid doing up here this time of day?” He said he saw a small car, like a sports car, a Lincoln, and a third car. He saw a man about five foot ten or five foot eleven, with a mustache and a beard.

  Allen Bounds, the second fisherman, said he had seen three cars at the main house that afternoon: a Lincoln, a Vega, and “a small, dark-colored car.” He saw a man with a mustache. No beard.

  Sometimes the hearing seemed more like an elementary art class than a criminal proceeding. Gerald Webb was surprised, then dismayed, when he was asked to draw pictures of Hope and Bill and Walker, as well as himself and the horse, to establish the placement of people at the time he’d heard Hope make that remark. “Will stick figures do for people?” Gerald asked uncertainly. Ned Nelsen assured him stick figures would be fine.

  Virginia Anderson, the court clerk, and William Thompson, bailiff, who had identified Walker as the well-dressed stranger in attendance on the day of Hope’s bond hearing, drew the courtroom, the doorway, and the straight-backed benches, indicating where the stranger had been sitting. Mrs. Anderson especially got into the spirit of the occasion and drew the aisle, the railing and the empty jury box, as well.

  Finally, another witness drew a purse and a gun.

  A woman also named Anderson—Dorothy—said she had been employed as housekeeper at the ranch for about a year, starting in the fall of 1968, and that, one day, when she was at the big house with Honey, counting linens, they were discussing crime, and how people could protect themselves—karate, guard dogs, and things. Mrs. Anderson said Honey had opened her small, bone-colored leather purse and showed her a small gun, saying, “This is my protector.”

  Mrs. Anderson labored over her drawing, standing at the easel with a large piece of drawing paper. “This is the barrel, here, and then here was a little—kind of a little thing out here, where you pull the trigger.” She drew back, holding the pen, looking disappointed. “That’s supposed to be the trigger but, I don’t know, I’m not an artist. It may have been a little bigger, and this is the little barrel but, like I say, I’m not an artist, I can’t draw at all, I’m just not a draw-er. Do you want me to draw another one?”

  Jay Powell, for one, did not. “There is no end to this,” he said in annoyance. “Next she could draw the house and then the farm, item for item. Next we will have a picture of the kitchen.” So Mrs. Anderson simply drew a handbag and sat down.

  “Have you seen a great many handguns like that?” Ned Nelsen asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  “So you are not really sure whether that was a toy or a real gun, are you?”

  “I’m sure it was a real gun,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  She no longer worked at the ranch. She said that when she’d read about the murder in the newspaper, she remembered that incident with Honey, and she’d called the sheriff’s office to tell them about it. Mrs. Anderson remembered asking Honey, about the gun, “Do you think it’s necessary?” and Honey replied, “You better believe it.”

  Michael Abbott said he’d known Hope ab
out a year and a half. Jim Heusdens, then, wasted no time.

  “And what was your relationship with Mrs. Masters?”

  Tom Breslin objected that that was immaterial.

  Michael stalled. “At what time are you talking about?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Heusdens intoned. “Prior to now, what was your relationship with her?”

  “From the time I met her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I met her about a year and a half ago and we remained—or became—friends over a period of about three to four to five months. We had dinner a few times, played chess a few times, and became friends.”

  “Were you ever lovers?”

  Hope looked at Michael, and Michael looked at the floor.

  “Well, I guess so. Yes,” Michael said.

  Huesdens went on to suggest that there had been wild parties at the ranch. Michael said he’d never been to a party at the ranch, but that about a year earlier he’d visited the ranch with Hope and her children and two other men.

  “What took place?” Heusdens asked.

  “We rode horses, and barbecued on Saturday night, and we swam in the river.”

  “And nothing out of what you consider the ordinary happened on that weekend?”

  “It was a fairly normal weekend,” Michael replied.

  “This was a fairly normal weekend,” Heusdens repeated. “You understand, Mr. Abbott, that you are under oath?”

  “Yes,” Michael said firmly.

  Unable to bully the fledgling lawyer into some sort of admission, the veteran prosecutor dropped the subject.

  In the hall, Tom Breslin shook hands with Michael, and they chatted. Afterward, Tom told Hope he liked Michael a lot. “How did you ever let him get away?” Tom asked Hope.

  Hope shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess he just wanted to go.”

  Martha Padilla talked through an interpreter, Mary Estrada. Martha told about coming home to Hope’s house Sunday night, about ten or eleven or twelve o’clock, and seeing the man whom she now saw in the courtroom stretched out in the living room, face down, with no shirt on. About pants, Martha said, “I’m not too sure.” “She was massaging him,” Martha said. Another time, she said, she saw Mrs. Masters in bed, in Keith’s room, and the man was whispering to her.