A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Both Jay Powell and Jim Heusdens received letters from a New York law firm, with an obscurely worded inquiry about a CIA client. Neither man answered the letter.

  In Los Angeles, Gene Tinch often teased Tom Breslin, who had left Ned Nelsen’s prosperous office, with the jar containing a million dollars in shredded money, for a job as public defender in a poor section of the city. When Tom declined to discuss why he had traded his paneled office for clipboards and stubby pencils in a clamorous environment where he defended as many as sixty cases at a time, Hope said it was because her case had convinced him the justice system wasn’t so just, and the best lawyers ought to work for people who couldn’t afford them. “You’re Tommy Goodshoes,” Gene told Tom, who nodded ruefully. “I am Tommy Goodshoes, dammit,” Tom said.

  Hope was still living on the Drive. Her house was still boisterous with pets and people, noisier than ever, seeming to be always filled with teenagers parading through, rummaging for food, listening to loud rock. Amid the din, Hope was still lonely. Her older boy, Keith, whom she had confided in, seemed to have grown up suddenly; he had graduated from high school and was working as athletic coach at a school for handicapped children. At 18, he had his own friends. Hope still played chess with Michael Abbott once in a while, but much of the time she would shut herself in the bedroom to read or to watch religious talk shows on television.

  She still had almost no girlfriends. She saw Phyllis occasionally, but never at Chips gatherings. Although, as a founding member, Hope was in Chips for life, she found the socializing awkward. When she made her first social appearance in public, after the trial, at the annual Colleagues’ sale at the Santa Monica Auditorium, she and Phyllis had noticed the sudden silences, the scattering, as they walked among the racks of furs and designer dresses, the excited whisperings. Nancy Reagan wasn’t there, but Betty Haldemann was, and a lot of prominent women who knew Hope, but no one seemed to have anything to say to her. “Most of them think I’m guilty,” Hope decided. “Maybe not guilty of shooting Bill in the head, but guilty of something.” Anyway, the Chips didn’t have much to do. They didn’t serve punch and cookies at Christmastime anymore at the home for unwed mothers, which had been turned into a daycare center. Hope was dropped from the Southwestern Blue Book.

  She and her mother stayed in constant touch, in their usual way. Honey was planning to send Hope Elizabeth to boarding school in England; Hope resented her mother’s attempt to mold the young girl into the pliant princess Hope herself had refused to become, and she resented Honey’s statement that the events of 1973 had had a catastrophic effect on Hope. A year after the trial, FBI agent Paul Luther had called on Honey and Van, for a friendly chat. He said he had always wanted to know what effect random violence had on a family, afterward. Honey told him that Hope had been hardened, toughened, virtually destroyed.

  In fact, Hope felt she had survived quite well. In a stab at financial independence from her mother and her ex-husbands, she had taken a real estate course and gotten her license at a fortuitous time in southern California; the subsequent flow of commission checks seemed to have brought her closer, finally, to her stepfather.

  Van died of a heart attack one night in the spring of 1978. Soon afterward, his secretary, Mary Bowyer, who had fenced with Walker on the phone the day of Hope’s bond hearing, had a long talk with Hope. “She said Van told her I was very competent and he could find no fault with any of my legal paperwork,” Hope repeated. “You know,” Hope went on, wistfully, “I think Van and I just got off on the wrong foot, in the very beginning. He told Mary he was very proud of me.”

  Hope had not been to the ranch since 1973. After Van died, when Honey threatened to sell her partnership in the place unless Hope showed some interest, Hope drove up with her children one July weekend. Except that the Webbs had been replaced with a young deputy sheriff and his wife, nothing had changed.

  Hope swam in the river. She walked up the ranch road past the lower lake to the high meadow and sat among the wildflowers, in the shadow of Snailhead Mountain, looking down on the house and the orange grove. The children rode Bonnie. Hope slept in the same bed in the corner bedroom she’d slept in five years earlier and found it wasn’t scary or traumatic at all. “I felt very peaceful, very content,” she said. “Maybe because it’s as close as I can ever come to being with Bill.”

  Back on the Drive, though, Hope locked herself in her bedroom with a stack of Bill’s favorite records and cried for four days. In the chaos of the time after his death she had had no chance to grieve. She cried for Bill, she cried for herself, and she cried about Walker. Her thoughts were a mixture of fear and anger and guilt, and even a kind of pride, a feeling she had influenced Walker in a beneficial way. “Walker and I have a very deep, odd thing together,” Hope told Tom Breslin. “He told me he was never going to commit another act of violence, and he hasn’t. He hasn’t harmed a single person.

  “I know, I know, he hurt me a lot. But at the same time, he helped me. He stuck around and helped me. He taunted the police with those phone calls, which he knew damned well were being monitored, and he really did make a big effort, for whatever his reasons were, to make it clear that there had been another person at the ranch and that he was still around.

  “He promised me, over and over, whenever he phoned, ‘I won’t leave you.’ And he didn’t. Tom, at one point, on the phone—do you remember when I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And he said, ‘Hey, you take all your life, sometimes it’s your turn to give.’

  “He said to me, at the ranch, ‘I’d rather die than go back to jail.’ By hanging around and helping me, he risked going to jail forever. And he has gone to jail forever. I know what jail is like now, and the thought of being in jail forever is unbearable. And the only thing he was asking in return was that I write to him. That isn’t a hell of a lot to ask. At least to me it isn’t.

  “What if Walker had left the country, Tom? What if I’d had to stand alone?”

  A friend of Hope’s saw Walker on television, talking about prison conditions. “He looks terrible,” she told Hope. “Can’t you do something?”

  Hope sent a Mailgram to “G. Daniel Walker, California Prison System,” since she didn’t know exactly where he was. “Life is hell, how are you?” she started out, and she ended with, “There’s always Hope.”

  Walker wrote back: “Your Mailgram opened unsaid, unvoiced, unadmitted things.” They began to correspond—over the objections of her mother, Tom Breslin, Gene Tinch, even her son Keith, who was growing up aware; Keith was angry at what he called his mother’s “love letters to that guy.”

  Hope denied that they were love letters. “I never wrote anything very meaningful,” she insisted. She sent jokes, a Star Wars comic book (adressed to “G. Darth Walker”), a packet of romantic greeting cards for him to send to his women friends. She sent him the newspaper obituary when Van died, and Walker sent Honey a condolence card.

  Walker sent jokes and clippings, and he sometimes referred to the song she’d played that Monday night on the Drive.

  Hope soon became unnerved—Walker seemed to know everything that was going on. He informed Hope that Fran Ashlock had remarried and moved back to the Midwest. Not long after Hope had had lunch with friends at an obscure little restaurant near Farmers Market, Walker wrote to describe that lunch, giving the exact place and time. When Hope Elizabeth got her own phone in her room as a birthday present, Walker called on that phone, even though it had been installed less than twenty-four hours, even though the number was brand-new and unlisted. For months after that call, Keith kept a twelve-inch knife by his bedside.

  Hope was even more frightened by little items in Walker’s letters. He told her to expect him “to stop by for a martini,” and he talked again of going to Rhodesia. When he referred to a book on her living room shelf, The Other Side of Midnight, Hope felt he was telling her he’d killed Bill after midnight that Saturday. He talked about crowded visiting days at the prison—“Weekends are murder”�
�and, most ominously, he informed her that, under a recent ruling, prisoners were now allowed to marry.

  So after five years, that question remained. It’s like an unfinished conversation, Hope thought. I’ve really got to settle things. I can’t live without wrapping it up. She couldn’t do it by mail. “I have to see his face,” she told Tom Breslin. “I’ve got to feel his vibes.”

  Early in the morning on his birthday, August 10, Walker telephoned Hope. A week later she flew to Fresno, stayed overnight, and got up before dawn to drive to San Quentin. She stayed with Walker until visiting hours ended. She stayed in Fresno overnight again, and visited him all the next day. Then she came home.

  Hope’s daughter had taped a new maxim on Honey’s refrigerator door:

  ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SIGNS OF MATURITY IS THE REALIZATION

  AND ACCEPTANCE OF, THE FACT THAT NO ONE WILL EVER FULLY

  UNDERSTAND

  Hope had accepted the fact that no one ever would.

  “Everybody thinks Walker let me live for one of two reasons,” she said. “Sex, or money. Either we were sexually mad for each other, or my parents paid him off.”

  Hope’s own reason echoed over thirty years, from her days as a lonely, eight-year old boarder at Westlake to the night she’d sat by the fire with Bill at the ranch, talking. “My number one need is to be important to somebody.”

  And what, finally, was one more irony in the life of the golden California girl with the bad back and the picky appetite, too thin, who lived at the million-dollar address and qualified for food stamps, whose life of apparent status and privilege was as uncertain as the ground beneath her feet?

  Hope brushed her long, champagne-colored hair back from her face. She had that look in her smoky green eyes that a man who knew her well called “opaque.”

  “It never seems to occur to anybody that maybe Walker let me live because he thought I was a good person, a useful person, a valuable human being.”

  Image Gallery

  Hope Masters

  The wedding of Hope and Tom Masters

  Bill Ashlock

  Bill in his office with Raquel Welch, John Gavin, and Charlton Heston

  The ranch

  Photo Walker took of Hope and Bill just before Bill’s murder

  Photo of Hope the day after Bill’s Murder

  G. Daniel Walker in prison shortly before his escape

  A note from Walker to his attorney, Marcy Purmal

  Taylor Wright

  Detective Robert Swalwell

  Detectives Jim Brown and Gene Parker

  Hope, charged with murder, and her parents at the Justice Court in Porterville

  Walker after his capture

  Walker with his legal files at court in Visalia

  Prosecutor James Huesdens

  Defense attorney Tom Breslin with Hope as she arrives to testify against Walker

  At the ranch, November, 1973. Left foreground, Tom and Hope, Right foreground, Walker and Detective Brown

  “What if she dies first?”

  About the Author

  Joan Barthel is an award-winning author of nonfiction and a contributor to many national publications, including the Washington Post Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Her first book, A Death in Canaan (1976), uncovered the miscarriage of justice in the case of a Connecticut teenager accused of murdering his mother. It won the American Bar Association Gavel Award, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and became an Emmy-nominated television movie. A Death in California (1981), the story of a Beverly Hills socialite caught in the thrall of the man who murdered her fiancé, was the basis for a television miniseries. Love or Honor (1989), the extraordinary account of a married undercover cop who infiltrated the Greek mafia only to fall in love with the Capo’s daughter, was called “fascinating” and “compelling” by Nicholas Pileggi. Barthel cowrote Rosemary Clooney’s autobiography, Girl Singer (1999), and is the author of American Saint (2014), a biography of Elizabeth Seton with a foreword by Maya Angelou.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1981 by Joan Barthel.

  Cover design by Rebecca Lown

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2822-6

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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