A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  “As far as you know, did he reach a climax?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “About how long did this—”

  “He raped me a couple of times. If he wasn’t doing—having intercourse with me, he was pawing and grabbing at me. It seemed to me all one awful thing.”

  “Then what—what did he do, this person?”

  “The only thing he did that I could … that made any sense to me that wasn’t just a lot of dirt was that he knew or had heard somewhere that I was a real swinger, and he made suggestions about oral sex and anal sex and just all kinds of things. I mean, things I had never even heard of. And I said, ‘No, no, no. You know you can do whatever you want to, but I can’t do anything, I am just sick, you know, I am just sick.’ Then he raped me again.”

  “Other than this person and Bill, did you during this time see anybody else in the house?”

  “I didn’t see anybody.”

  “After the second episode, what took place?”

  “He kind of rolled me over to my side and grabbed my hands and feet behind me, and I could hear what sounded to me like adhesive tape coming off a roll, and I felt him taping my wrists and my feet, kind of like you hogtie a calf, together behind me. My legs were brought up behind me to meet my hands and I was on my side.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then he left the room and closed the door.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “No. I was trying to hear something, hoping that he had—that I would hear him leave, but I didn’t. I waited a little while. I had one wrist that was particularly painful with the blood being stopped up, and I began to pick at the tape very, very slowly so as not to make a ripping sound, in case he was there. I picked off, I would say, maybe four or five rounds of tape from this one hand that was hurting me, and then I kept the hand behind me so that if he came in again, he wouldn’t know. I thought he would become angry. During this time, and I don’t know at what particular point during this time, someone came into the room I couldn’t see and did something Bill used to do all the time, put his cheek up next to my face so that his mouth would be by my ear, said very gently, ‘I love you,’ and went out and closed the door.”

  “As far as the voice was concerned, did it sound like the same voice that you—”

  “I thought for a minute that Bill was alive. I didn’t know what or who, and I thought maybe I was hallucinating.”

  “Then did you stay in the bedroom?”

  “Yes. I was alone in there for a long time.”

  “Did somebody come back into the room?”

  “Later on, someone did come in and this time left the doors open from the living room through the connecting wing and into the bedroom. There was no light, but I had a chance for my eyes to adjust to what little light there was in the living room filtering through that doorway.”

  “And did you recognize this person?”

  “Not right away, but after awhile I did.”

  “About how much time?”

  “I don’t know. After a little conversation had taken place, I recognized the voice as being Taylor.”

  “The party you knew as Taylor Wright?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was that conversation?”

  “Well, he came into the room and he came over and uncovered me, whoever, if he had or—or whoever or whatever. I was covered up, underneath I was taped and there were blankets over me, and he came up and he said, ‘Well, let’s see what’s happening to you’ or ‘What’s happening with you?’ He pulled back the covers and said, ‘Oh, that’s cute, you got your arm loose,’ or something like that, and I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t trying to do anything, I just took it off because it was hurting me so much.’ He said, ‘That’s okay,’ covered me back up again, and began to talk. And this is where I lose continuity on the conversation.”

  “When he began to talk, where was he situated in relation to you?”

  “He was wandering around the room. Right away, I didn’t know it was him.”

  “When did you realize or recognize in your mind that it was Taylor Wright, or the man identified as Taylor Wright?”

  “I don’t know, but I know that I did know it was Taylor, because I said to him, ‘Please go see if Bill is really dead,’ so I sort of had the feeling that someone I knew was there. I was very confused. I said, ‘Please go see if Bill is dead.’”

  “At this time, did you recognize this person?”

  “I knew it was Taylor.”

  “When you said that about Bill, then what did Mr.—what did the defendant do?”

  “He said, ‘I have seen him, and he is dead.’”

  “What did you say, if anything?”

  “I said, ‘Why? Why Bill?’”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said, ‘Someone wants you dead.’ And I said, ‘Me? Why me? I have never hurt anybody in my life.’ And he said, ‘Well, you are going to court next week, aren’t you?’ I was going to court for my divorce, and I said, ‘Yes, but all that’s at stake is a couple of hundred dollars. Nobody would do this to somebody for a couple of hundred dollars.’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t know, I don’t know what it’s all about, somebody wants you dead, that’s all.’”

  “What did you say, if anything?”

  Hope shook her head.

  “Mr. Haley, at this point, I can’t tell you what I said when. I know some of the things I said and some of the things he said, but I don’t know what I said at that particular moment. I asked who it was that wanted me dead, and at some point he told me my husband, and I said, ‘Which one?’”

  “Did he reply?”

  “He said he couldn’t tell me.”

  “Do you remember any of the other conversation?”

  “I remember a lot of the conversation,” Hope said. “Part of the time he would put on some surgical gloves, and he told me he was wiping off fingerprints he had left during the day, and he would leave the room at those times. After a little while, he came with a washcloth and a towel and he washed my face and hands and dried them, took the tape off me, but warned me that if I did anything, he would kill me.”

  “This was the defendant, is that correct?”

  “This was Mr. Walker, yes.”

  “Do you remember any other conversation?”

  “Yes,” Hope said. “Do you want me to just sum it up, because I got it in bits and pieces.”

  “Yes,” Haley said.

  Summing up, Hope said that Walker seemed to feel bad about Bill being dead, but he was going to have to kill Hope anyway because she was a potential witness against him. She figured out, from what he said, that her husband had gotten a loan from one of his friends in the Mafia—“or whatever you want to call it”—that her husband and another man had gotten into a hole to The Family for forty-two thousand dollars and had bought an insurance policy on Hope and then put out a contract on her, that a first man had been assigned the job and had been in a restaurant with her the previous weekend but hadn’t done the job. “Why did the guy miss you when you left the restaurant last weekend?” Walker wondered, and Hope had replied, “I think because instead of going home, we went to Bill’s apartment, which we almost never do.”

  Hope remembered Walker saying that the first man assigned to the job had been burned, which she later understood meant killed. He told her that when he was nineteen, he had been convicted of murder, then had escaped from prison and had fled to Europe, where he had lived the rest of the time. She remembered a lot of talk about her husband, whom Walker said he had met at the Beverly Hilton. Walker said he preferred killing by poison, or with an ice pick through the ear so it would appear that the victim had had a stroke; he said he had noticed an ice pick in the kitchen when he was in there after dinner, clearing dishes. But her husband had asked for “a bloodbath.” Walker told Hope her husband would have the baby all weekend, which Hope never recalled him ever doing before.

  Walker seemed to debate with hims
elf about what to do with Hope. “He really felt he ought to kill me, that it was the only sensible thing to do, otherwise I would become a witness against him, and he would rather die than go back to jail.” But he said he felt bad about Bill, that it was a terrible, awful thing, that he didn’t want to kill me and he didn’t know what to do.”

  “We kept negotiating, back and forth, back and forth, like a judge and a jury,” Hope said. “I gave the reasons why I should be left alive, why I was good, why I was useful, why it wouldn’t be good to kill me. I promised him that I would never testify against him and swore, on the lives of my children, that I would never testify against him.”

  Hope’s voice dropped. She glanced at Walker, then looked away quickly. He was smiling at her. She felt strange, light-headed. As reluctant as she’d been to testify, she wished, now, that Joe Haley would never stop asking questions; she knew that when he did, it would be time for the cross-examination. Although the court had ruled that either Jay Powell, or defendant Walker, as co-counsel, could examine a witness, and although Jay had handled a few witnesses on cross, Hope had no doubt about who would question her: the man she believed had raped her, terrorized and threatened her, the man who had pressed a cold gun up against her body and murmured, “I love you,” the man who had murdered Bill.

  It seemed totally unreal, just as the night in the ranch bedroom seemed unreal, crazy scenes from a crazy movie: Bill sitting dead on the sofa, a drink in his hand, the fireplace embers lighting the room; the terror in the blackness, being raped and threatened and caressed with a gun. She had thought she must be imagining it all, trapped in the depths of some monstrous dream. Then daylight had come, and Walker was with her—Taylor was with her—helping her, protecting her, talking and explaining, showing her it all made sense. With Bill gone, Walker had taken care of her. She remembered how, in those two days at her house, she had dreaded a shootout between him and the police. Later, after the visit from Paul Luther of the FBI, she was convinced that, with Walker wanted so badly, any cop would kill her to get to Walker. In any shootout with the police, she had always hoped Walker would win, because she felt that she or the children might accidentally be shot by the police, in their attempt to get Walker. Whereas she knew, absolutely, that Walker would never shoot her, or the children. He would surrender first.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ninety-eight witnesses were called in the case of The People of the State of California v. G. Daniel Walker, in a trial lasting nearly two months. Some of the faces and some of the voices were familiar, some were new. Along with the usual pointless questions—Dr. Hayes was asked whether the body he had autopsied at Myers Chapel was indeed dead—there were some that seemed unusually pointed: a meteorologist was asked, not merely whether it had rained in Los Angeles on the night of Saturday February 24, 1973, but whether it had rained on the Casa Bella pizza parlor. There were the customary confusions and contradictions: one pathologist testified that Bill Ashlock had been shot in the back of the head, and a radiologist who saw the X rays taken just before the autopsy thought Bill had been shot from the front, into his mouth.

  Much of the early testimony echoed the preliminary hearing, although Honey was not permitted to repeat what Hope had told her, since it was hearsay. Still, with Hope out of danger, Honey was in good form, even excellent form. When Jay Powell, referring to notes Honey had made of the phone calls from Walker, asked whether in those calls she had asked him to “stick by” her daughter, Honey looked pained.

  “I don’t think I would ever use that expression,” Honey said.

  “I see,” Jay murmured.

  “I asked him to please come forward, to go to the police,” Honey explained.

  “But you did not ever ask him to ‘stick by’ Hope?”

  “That doesn’t sound like an expression I would use, Mr. Powell.” When Jay read to her from the preliminary transcript:

  Q:Did you ask him to stick by Hope?

  A:Yes, I did.

  Honey held her ground. “‘Stick by’ were your words, not mine. I don’t use the expression ‘stick by.’ Those were your words, weren’t they, Mr. Powell?”

  Van then was cross-examined by Walker, and the animosity between them charged the courtroom atmosphere. When Van referred to “the correct story” Hope had finally given him, in which she said Taylor had arrived at the ranch on Saturday, not Sunday, Walker sneered noticeably.

  “As I understand it, in the first story your daughter gave you, Walker was the hero who rescued her, is that correct?”

  “Correct,” Van snapped.

  “In her second story, Walker was the villain who had assaulted her, is that correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you knew the second version of your daughter’s story on March the ninth, 1973, when you gave your second statement to the police, is that correct?”

  The indignity of being quizzed by the man, the criminal character, who had called him on tape “a pompous ass,” rankled Van greatly. “I didn’t give a statement to the police,” he said coldly. “We had a meeting.”

  “Did you have a conversation with them?”

  “We had a conversation with them,” Van answered, with elaborate formality, “and the answer to your question, recognizing it as a conversation, is yes, I did know the second story and no, I did not give it to the police.”

  “Thank you,” Walker said pleasantly.

  Among the other veterans of the preliminary, Gerald Webb came back from Hazel Park, Michigan, where he had moved, to identify Walker as the man he’d seen at the ranch that Saturday afternoon. “I don’t think I would forget him,” Gerald declared. “I really don’t.”

  Jim Webb said again he’d seen two cars at the main house early Sunday morning, around six o’clock: a Vega and a Lincoln, and that Sunday evening, only the Vega remained parked alongside the house. Jim testified that he’d telephoned Honey around 7:30 Tuesday evening, the only call he said he made; he said Van had telephoned him later, around 9:00. Jim said that between those two calls, when he’d gone into the dark house with a flashlight, wearing gloves, and socks over his shoes, the living room draperies were open.

  The fishermen returned to tell of seeing three cars at the ranch Saturday afternoon: a Lincoln, a Vega, and a small, dark car. Lee Blount said a man with a beard had spoken to him, thinking Lee worked on the ranch, asking Lee what to do with the horse he was leading. Allen Bounds said that on their second fishing trip to the ranch on Tuesday, when they drove past the main house, the living room drapes were closed.

  When Joe Haley said “No further questions,” Walker stood up. He nodded politely to the judge, then turned his full gaze on Hope.

  The court reporter, Shirley Askins, a brisk, peppy-looking woman with curly gray hair, had noticed how Walker looked at people, even when he’d been questioning jurors. “When he looks at a person, he just gives them his full and entire attention,” Shirley said. Walker was looking at Hope with a gaze so intense, so personal, that it could only be called riveting. He had been ordered to remain at the counsel table when he questioned Honey and Hope, not to approach the witness; the distance emphasized the drama.

  Hope tried to look steadily back at him. Her head throbbed; all her muscles seemed to tense. Then Walker smiled.

  “Mrs. Masters, I’m going to have to ask you a few questions,” he said in a sympathetic, understanding tone. “I realize it’s probably tiring, and is this the first time you have ever testified in court?”

  “Yes,” Hope said. She smiled, a tentative, small smile, and relaxed in her chair. Tom Breslin, his eyes glued on Hope too, saw her relax at Walker’s soothing approach, and Tom in turn felt himself tense.

  “Mrs. Masters, let’s go back in your mind to Friday, February the twenty-third, 1973,” Walker said softly. “Was Mr. Ashlock living with you at that time?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hope replied.

  Walker smiled. “Let’s jump ahead in time now to Saturday, the twenty-fourth. Did you receive any tele
phone calls at the main ranch house prior to anyone arriving there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who called?”

  Hope was getting annoyed at his smoothness. “You did,” she said, a little testily.

  Walker led her into the arrival of “the visitor” and the drinking, the snacking, the chatting among the three people, the strolling around the property, the episode with the horse. “Now, Mrs. Masters, when the three of you went down with the horse to take pictures, did you take any pictures at all?”

  “You took the pictures.”

  “I took the pictures,” Walker repeated. He smiled. “Did I take many pictures?”

  “It seemed like not a whole lot,” Hope said. “But quite a few.”

  “Do you recall what clothing you wore down to have the pictures taken?”

  “I wore a beige—gee, I don’t know if it’s wool, but it’s some kind of a knit pants with a small stripe and a matching vest and a pink crepe man-tailored shirt.”

  “And you changed from this outfit into a different outfit?”

  “Because I got wet in the river down there.”

  “And what did you change into?”

  “I’m not sure, but I know I changed my pants. Either I would have changed into some red corduroy pants or some navy blue corduroy pants, because that’s all I brought, but I can’t remember.”

  “So I can get this straight in my mind,” Walker said kindly, “what, if anything, did you personally take to the ranch with you?”

  “I took the outfit I have described, maroonish corduroy pants with a maroon and white striped turtleneck and a maroon and multicolored vest, navy blue corduroy pants with a kind of purply-blue flowered shirt, and a nightgown, and possibly a sweater or a jacket.”

  “Now, the next day, when you left the ranch, what did you take with you?”

  “I know that I had my beige pants, my maroon pants, shirt, and vest. I wore my maroon pants and vest, and I carried my nightgown, my beige pants, and possibly my beige vest.”

  “So you actually packed before you left the ranch?”

  “No,” Hope said sharply. “I picked up what was lying on the bed.”