A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  “When you testified before, you had obviously forgotten that Walker had been in bed with you at the ranch?”

  “Nobody gave me a chance to get that in,” Hope muttered.

  “Mrs. Masters, how many times were you raped at the ranch?”

  “Well, I would say two, but altogether, at one time.”

  “Walker didn’t rape you?”

  “I don’t know,” Hope said.

  In legal terms, what Jim Heusdens had to do was “rehabilitate” his witness. “Now, Mrs. Masters,” he said, “you have lied, so to speak, about a lot of facts of this case at the time you were arrested and what you told your parents and so forth, isn’t this true?”

  “I only lied about one thing,” Hope said firmly. “The identity of the person up at the ranch.”

  “That was Mr. Walker, is this correct?”

  “Yes,” Hope said.

  “Now, you are not absolutely certain, though, that Mr. Walker was the first one who attacked you?”

  “No,” Hope said.

  Jim Heusdens took a long breath. “At this point, having considered everything and looked at the situation, have you changed your mind as to that?” Jay Powell objected, and Jim Heusdens rephrased. “After reflection, Mrs. Masters, do you feel that the same person who was the intruder is Mr. Walker?”

  Jay Powell objected again. “She’s had nine months to reflect on it,” he complained. “She’s testified under oath to it and now, after cross-examination, she is going to change her mind. It’s speculative and self-serving.”

  “Your Honor,” Heusdens persisted, “I don’t think she’s ever had a chance to answer this particular question. Especially after the questioning this morning, there seems to be some ambiguity about this, and we would like to clarify it.”

  “Go ahead, Mr. Heusdens,” Ginsburg said.

  The prosecutor turned back to his witness. “After reflection of what had happened on that particular evening, is it your opinion now that Mr. Walker was the intruder?”

  Jay Powell objected. “The term ‘after reflection’ is ambiguous.”

  “I think that’s probably correct,” Judge Ginsburg said. “You can ask her what her belief is now.”

  “What is your belief now as to who the intruder was that night at the ranch?”

  “I think it could well have been Mr. Walker,” Hope said.

  “Didn’t you tell Mr. Breslin it was Mr Walker?” Heusdens demanded.

  “Yes, I told him that’s what I thought,” Hope said.

  Walker returned for the redirect portion of the questioning.

  “Mrs. Masters, did you ever actually see the surgical gloves the defendant Walker had on?”

  “I could hear the sound of them, I could feel them on my skin,” Hope replied. “They sure seemed to be surgical gloves. I can’t recall if I saw them in the daylight.”

  “So you don’t really know if they were surgical gloves?”

  “Well, I have had a few babies,” Hope snapped. “I know what surgical gloves are like.”

  “Mrs. Masters, when did you tell your attorney that you thought the intruder was Walker?”

  “Within about a week after I got out of jail.”

  “Do you recall when you made the tapes with Mr. Breslin saying that when Taylor entered the bedroom that he was a different person than the intruder?”

  “I believe that I said that he seemed to completely change, or be completely different.”

  “Do you recall telling Mr. Breslin on the tapes that they were two different people, the intruder and Taylor?”

  “I may have said it could have been two different people. There was a great difference.”

  “And do you remember telling Mr. Breslin on the tape that Taylor was another guy?”

  “Acted like,” Hope corrected.

  In a final flurry of argument about speculation, relevancy, and ambiguity, Jim Heusdens asked one clear question.

  “Mrs. Masters, did you shoot Mr. Ashlock?”

  “No,” Hope said.

  Hope and Tom Breslin had coffee in the basement cafeteria of the courthouse, under a sign that read: KITCHEN CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS—I’M SICK OF COOKING. She had been begging Tom to let her reply to Walker’s notes, and Tom had been saying no. Finally she typed out a section from The Prophet, about how everybody walks together in a line, and if one stumbles they stumble as a warning for the one behind them, a warning against the stumbling stone, and they also stumble for the one in front of them, who didn’t bother to remove the stone; how black and white threads are woven together, inseparable, and thus everybody has some responsibility in everything. Tom gave in, and took it from her to give to Jay to give to Walker. “Well, it’s sort of religious, so it’s okay,” Tom grumbled. “But just this time.”

  Hope felt strongly that she had a responsibility to Walker, as he had to her. “Walker and I have always been real straight with each other,” she told Tom. “We had a brief relationship, but it was very intense, because of the jeopardy we were putting each other in. Each of us was a life-threatening force to the other, and that caused us to establish a kind of rapport. He was depending on me, to do what he told me to do, and I was depending on him. He began to trust me, and he said he would fix things for me, and he did.

  “What about that gold chain, Tom? Why do you think he left it on the shelf at my house? He could have thrown it in the trash, or flushed it down the toilet—he could have gotten rid of it in a million different ways. But he didn’t do that. He left it where it could be found. Doesn’t that say something about Walker, Tom?”

  Tom agreed that it said a lot.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “My name is Daniel Walker, more commonly known as G. Daniel Walker. However, I have used approximately ninety names in the past twenty-three years.”

  The witness smiled. The jurors stared. The prosecutor shifted uneasily in his seat; Jim Heusdens knew that when a defendant admitted something damaging up front, at the very beginning, it often made him seem honest and forthright and thus more believable as he unfolded his story.

  It was a long story. Walker said it began in the winter of 1965, when he’d met Hope Stagliano through a dancer on the “Shindig” television show. Between 1965 and 1969, when he came to the West Coast on advertising business, Hope often stayed with him at the Regency Apartment Hotel.

  Walker said he had met Bill Ashlock at an ad agency conference in Chicago in 1965, long before Hope and Bill had met, and that in 1969 he’d met her mother, but not her stepfather. He said that on Sunday, January 28, 1973, he had seen Hope and Bill together in Chicago.

  “Do you know an attorney named Marthe Purmal?” Jay Powell asked, reading from the list of questions Walker had typed on sheets of onionskin paper.

  “Yes,” Walker said easily. “Miss Purmal is, has been, and continues to be an attorney of mine, and Miss Purmal was a mistress of mine.”

  He explained that altogether, he’d had thirty-one attorneys representing him on various matters, and they’d all been subpoenaed to appear before a Cook County Grand Jury on February 5, 1973. He had called various friends around the country, including Hope Masters, looking for a hiding place, and on February 6, Hope had flown into O’Hare Airport, where he met her Braniff flight. When she flew back to Los Angeles on the seventh, he went to Vail for “hiding and skiing,” while waiting for someone to gather money that was due him for a liquor license he controlled in his wife’s name.

  He said he was in Vail on the night of February 9 and had not robbed Taylor Wright in Ann Arbor. Back in Chicago on February 10, he planned to meet Marcy Purmal and pick up his money, but when he found she was in police custody, he hid out in a women’s restroom at O’Hare for six hours. “I went into one of the little toilets. I took my shoes off and sat in one of them and hoped that no one would realize it was a man’s feet next to her,” Walker said lightly.

  When he got to Los Angeles two weeks later, on Wednesday, February 23, he met Hope and a friend of his, Danielle
Gantou, at a Hamburger Hamlet. He arrived at 12:30; Hope was an hour late. The trio moved on to Alfie’s, a place on Sunset Strip, where Bill Ashlock joined them after work. Since Bill was living at Hope’s, his apartment was available as a hideaway for Walker, who moved his things in that night. The four of them had drinks at the Beverly Hilton and, after dinner, visited two spots on the Strip, the Classic Cat and the Phone Booth. The next day, two airline stewardesses, Monica Jungnickel and Ingrid Kassler, joined Walker and Danielle on an outing to Disneyland. Back in Los Angeles, they met Hope and Bill for dinner at Scandia’s, then visited three or four discotheques. On Friday, Monica and Ingrid left town to go skiing; Hope, Bill, Walker, and Danielle had a long lunch at the Brown Derby.

  Early Saturday morning, Walker moved from Bill’s apartment to the Holiday Inn and, after breakfast, drove up to the ranch. He said he had two reasons for going: to take pictures for Bill’s ad layout—WHAT IF SHE DIES FIRST?—and to explore the possibility of hiding out at the foreman’s house, since Jim Webb, he said, was about to be fired.

  At the ranch, Bill and Hope and Walker ate and drank and talked about Tom Masters, about a movie Hope had seen in which a girl had a gun shoved into her mouth. They walked down to the river to take pictures. Back at the house, Walker was introduced to two men, Buddy and Lionel. Bill asked Hope for thirty-five dollars to pay Lionel for drugs he’d brought, but since Hope had only fourteen dollars, Bill borrowed the money from Walker.

  In the bathroom, while Walker was changing the wet bandage on his infected leg, Hope came in “to play nurse, and when she observed that I had a first-aid kit with Band-Aids, she took a Band-Aid.”

  “Hope does not wear a brassiere,” Walker explained. “The entire time I have known her, she’s always worn two Band-Aids in place of a brassiere.” He said he rolled the old tape that had been around the Ace bandage on his leg—he’d lost the customary metal clips—into a ball, along with the used Band-Aid, and threw it into the kitchen trash can.

  When Lionel and Buddy left, in a little green foreign car, Hope, Bill, and Walker drove into town, where Hope played with a baby at the grocery store. After dinner, which Hope barely touched, she stretched out on the sofa. After a final drink with Bill, Walker left about 8:30 to drive back to Los Angeles, with one stop for gas at a station in Earlimart.

  He described his Saturday night in Los Angeles: stopping at the Casa Bella restaurant, with a light rain falling; shopping at a drugstore near the Holiday Inn, where he flirted with a blond woman and took her back to Bill’s apartment with him.

  On Sunday morning, he took her to her own place, the Hyatt House on Sunset, then went back to the Holiday Inn, where he found a nasty note from Monica, whom he’d been scheduled to meet the night before, written in lipstick on the door. He drove Monica and Ingrid to the airport, then he drove back up to the ranch, stopping to buy gas and coffee, stopping again to buy apples at a fruit stand.

  He estimated he got to the ranch about 10:30 Sunday morning. The gate was locked, but he remembered the combination: thirty-ought-six. Up at the house, he saw that Hope’s car was gone. Hope was sitting in the orange grove.

  “Was she crying?” Jay Powell asked.

  “No, she’s not a crier,” Walker said. He sounded very proud of her.

  Hope waved to Walker and ran toward him. He could make no sense of what she was saying, only that she had to get away from that awful, terrible place. Walker wanted a drink, so Hope dashed into the house, through the back door, and returned with a can of beer and a soft drink. They drove in Walker’s car up the winding road past the foreman’s house and the lower lake, up into the meadow. Hope was annoyed when Walker wanted to take pictures. “You dumb ass, will you stop!” she told him. “Bill is dead.”

  Walker didn’t take her seriously, but he listened, since she was obviously upset.

  “Was she crying then?” Jay asked.

  “No, Hope is not a crier,” Walker repeated. “I don’t think I have ever observed Hope cry.”

  Hope told Walker she had been asleep in the bedroom when she heard a gunshot. She sat up in bed; the light was on. She screamed for Bill. A dark figure with a flashlight appeared in the doorway; she was knocked unconscious. When she came to, she was nude and tied. Through the open bedroom window, she heard two voices: one was Tom Masters’s.

  She slipped free from her bindings and ran into the living room, where Bill was sitting on the sofa. She thought he was asleep until she shook him and saw that he was bloody, with part of his head missing. She screamed. Someone grabbed her and said, “He can’t help you; he’s dead.”

  Hope was taken back into the bedroom and tied again. The person left; again she heard two men talking outside, again she recognized Tom Masters’s voice, in a conversation about getting gasoline to burn the house down. She heard a car start up and leave. A man came into the bedroom and proceeded to place his penis into her mouth; when she resisted, he struck her in the stomach and told her she was to be killed “for whoring around and neglecting the children.”

  Eventually a car drove back up. The voice she recognized as Tom’s was complaining that he’d had to drive all the way to Porterville to find an all-night gas station.

  Walker said that at this point, as Hope was telling him this story up in the meadow, she contradicted herself by saying she had made arrangements with the man in the bedroom to spare her life. She heard a car go by, in front of the house, and she heard Tom say, “Jesus Christ, let’s split, some guy just drove by and he happened to see me.”

  She heard a scurrying noise, a door slamming, a car pulling away. Eventually she freed herself, got out of bed, dressed, went outside, and sat under the orange trees, which was where Walker found her.

  Walker didn’t believe her story, which made her angry. But when they drove back down to the house and Walker went in, leaving her in the car, he found Bill’s body. He moved the body so no one could see it through the picture window, into the back bedroom, where he placed it on a bed. He gathered the drugs and stashed them in a secret compartment in a cabinet. Neither he nor Hope cleaned the house. She packed her bag and, while Walker carried her things out to his car, she made sandwiches for the trip back to the city.

  On the way back, Hope told a new version. She said she and Bill had been sitting on the sofa when a man came up behind the sofa and shot Bill with a long gun. Hope fainted. When she came to, she was in the bedroom, either with or without clothes on, and bound. She told Walker she’d made a deal with the man in the bedroom and had written him two checks made out to cash. She said that Tom Masters had tried to have her killed earlier, one night when she and Bill had gone out to dinner and then, instead of returning to her house, had gone to his apartment. While they listened to music there, Bill got up to close the draperies; a gunshot was heard, and a bullet hit the building above his head. Hope said she and the man she wrote the checks to discussed that incident.

  Back in Los Angeles, Hope directed Walker to a house at 1122 Gordon Street, where she visited a man named Taylor, whom she used to date. Walker waited in the car about an hour, until Hope brought Taylor out and introduced the two men. Hope and Walker then drove to Bill’s apartment where Walker moved his things out, and Hope carried something out. At Farmer’s Market, they bought bread and cold cuts, then went up to the Drive.

  Walker took the maid to the bus stop and ordered pizza for the children. He and Hope showered together, then went into her bedroom and had sexual relations. Hope begged him to stay, because he was the only person who could prove she hadn’t killed Bill.

  So Walker stayed. To make it appear that Bill Ashlock was alive, Walker was to use Bill’s credit cards around town. Hope gave him a set of Bill’s cards, although Walker already had some, given to him by Bill. Hope left the house in Walker’s white Lincoln, saying she was going first to her mother’s, then to meet Taylor on Sunset Strip.

  Monday morning, Walker jogged and drove Keith to school. He talked on the phone to Honey, who told him that the famil
y had been agreeable to helping him when the police were looking for him, and now that the shoe was on the other foot, it was his responsibility to stick by Hope. Honey told Walker she would try to reach Jim Webb to arrange that the body was not discovered that day.

  Hope drove Bill’s Triumph to the Beverly Hills Hotel, then, in the Lincoln, she and Walker drove to Bill’s apartment, where they looked for his insurance policies and where Hope wished to pick up some personal items—photographs, songbooks, a collage. As they were leaving, they met the postman.

  Walker said he did not sit up all night, on the Drive, guarding Hope and her children with a rifle. But he said Hope had produced a rifle of Bill’s—thirty-ought-six—that Walker put into the trunk of the Lincoln. Walker went shopping with Bill’s credit cards, first by himself, later with Keith. He took Hope and the younger children to the Hamburger Hamlet for lunch, then to the supermarket, to her stepbrother’s house, and to a park. He talked again with Honey, who said she was having difficulty reaching someone at the ranch. Hope and Walker drove down into Hollywood and picked up a yellow and brown car that Hope drove home, Walker following in the Lincoln.

  They slept together Monday night. On Tuesday, Walker drove Hope Elizabeth to school, then went shopping again, and rented a room at the Wilshire Hyatt House with Bill’s Bankamericard. Hope went down to her mother’s house. When he telephoned her there, Hope said Jim Webb had been observed at the house, cleaning up, and wanted to call the police.

  Hope and Walker, Honey and Van gathered in the living room and discussed the story Hope was to tell the police: that she had been rescued by a newspaperman, that she’d been told by the killer it was a Mafia job, that she had been taped in such a manner that she couldn’t have killed Bill, that the newsman had brought her home and protected her for two or three days.

  Walker left to call the police. He said he had not told Hope’s parents he was a newspaperman and that both of them already knew who he was. He said none of their court testimony about the story he’d told them on Tuesday was true.