by Rule, Ann
“And then I started screaming …”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The summer morning in Seattle was lost to everyone in Judge Loy’s courtroom. They were too caught up in listening to Jerilee Littleton recall a dark dawn in November. She explained to Prosecutor Sullivan how she had run to the phone where her husband’s brother waited. “I just ran inside and picked up the phone and said, ‘Mike, come quick. Morris has blood all over him!’ And then I went back outside and I was screaming— and then two neighbor people came over and asked me if I had called the ambulance, and I said no, and they told me to do that— so I went in and called the ambulance. And by the time I went back outside, the police had arrived then and I went back inside and stayed.”
There were photographs to be introduced into evidence. Sullivan began with the least upsetting. He handed Jerilee pictures of her car, the carport on North Sixth, the back of her house, of Morris’s car, and the side yard.
“The gate was always open,” Jerilee said, “I don’t know if the hinges weren’t working right or—”
“Jerilee,” Jeff Sullivan said gently, “I’m handing you what’s been marked as Identification eight. Can you tell me what that is, please?”
Her breath caught, but she managed to answer, “The fence and Morris’s body on his back.”
“Does that picture fairly and accurately portray the position of Morris’s body?”
“Yes.”
Sullivan changed gears and asked Jerilee about her sister’s conversation with Gabby Moore. “What did he talk to her about?”
“He would ask her to influence me or persuade me to go back to him.”
“And, in that regard, Jerilee, was there ever a time after you left him in July that you indicated to him that you would come back to him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you encourage him in any way?”
“No,” she said firmly.
“After Morris was killed, did you believe that Glynn Moore had something to do with it?”
“Yes, I did— from different things he said. He had told my sister that he knew people that would do anything for him. All he had to do was ask. I just felt that he felt that if Morris wasn’t there, I would be back to him; he was very confident that I would be back with him.”
This was a peculiar trial, indeed. Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant was the defendant, certainly. But Talmadge Glynn “Gabby” Moore was also on trial. The prosecution had to show how Gabby had cajoled, pleaded, sobbed, and, finally, blackmailed Tuffy into killing Morris and wounding himself. The defense didn’t really disagree with the portrayal of Gabby Moore, but they had to paint Tuffy as the self-sacrificing hero and lay the blame on Anthony and Larry.
The “ghost of Gabby Moore” was going to take a verbal beating in this courtroom, even if the man himself was beyond human reach.
Chris Tait cross-examined Jerilee. “After Morris’s death and before Christmas, did you talk with Gabby about his possible involvement in Morris’s death?”
“Yes, I talked to him once on the phone.”
“Did you tell him you thought he was involved?”
“Yes, I did … He said ‘No way.’ He couldn’t have. He just couldn’t have done it.”
“Did you believe him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Did you tell him that you would never come back to him so long as you thought he was involved in Morris’s death?”
“I told him I would never go back to him, no matter what.”
“Regardless?”
“That’s right.”
And, Jerilee testified, Gabby had insisted he could prove to her that he was innocent of any complicity in Morris’s murder. He told her he had ways, but he didn’t go into details. She told him again she didn’t care. Nothing would make her go back to him.
Nothing.
Tait elicited the dates of Jerilee’s three marriages, and then turned away from her as she said she had married Jim Littleton on April 18.
“April of this year?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Jerilee. I don’t think I have any further questions. “
Again, the courtroom was filled with a murmur of indistinguishable voices, whispers of shock that the witness should have married again so soon after her husbands’ deaths.
Sullivan’s redirect dealt mostly with having Jerilee draw a diagram of her house and yard for the jury. He could see that she was shaken and about to break into tears.
Just as Jerilee thought her ordeal on the stand might be over, Chris Tait rose with more questions. He wanted to know more about her marriages. How old was she when she married Morris?
“Eighteen.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“And how old were you when you married Gabby?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“And how old was Gabby when you married him?”
“Forty-two, I believe. “Morris—
“You had moved back with Morris … Did Gabby threaten you in any way?”
“Not me, no.”
“Okay. Did he threaten you the night he came to the house and got inside because there weren’t any locks on the doors?”
“No.”
“What did you mean,” Tait pounced, “when you said that he told you that if you didn’t unlock the door and come out of the bedroom into the living room that he was going to kick the door in and come in after you?”
“That’s just what he said. I don’t—”
“Was he threatening you when he said that, do you think?”
“I was scared, yes.”
“I can imagine you were. What was Gabby’s attitude about having you come back— did it seem important to him?”
“Yes, — very important.”
“Did you think it would be fair to say that it was probably the most important thing in his life?”
“He seemed to make it that way at that time, yes.”
“Talking about his blood pressure and the nosebleeds and the medication— did you ever know him to quit taking his medication on purpose, so that he would get nosebleeds?”
“No, he didn’t.”
Tait had put that thought into the jurors’ minds, however, to show how manipulative Gabby had been— to the point of hatching a convoluted murder plot.
Tait asked about the disintegration of Morris’s relationship with Gabby: these two men who had hunted together, worked out at the YMCA together, and discussed coaching together, these men who had faced death on the river together. Jerilee recalled that Morris had become disenchanted with Gabby sometime after December 1973, when Gay Moore had begun divorce proceedings. It had not been too long after Gabby had moved in with the Blankenbakers.
“After the divorce with Gay,” Tait asked, ” … the relationship between Morris and Gabby started to deteriorate? Did they see each other often after that— or not at all? How would you characterize it?”
“In January of 1974—” Jerilee’s voice was too soft to be heard, and Judge Loy asked her to speak up.
“In January of ‘74, Glynn Moore moved in with Morris and myself for a couple of weeks while his wife and he were trying to settle problems, so he saw him very often, yes.”
“So they were still friends, then?”
“Yes, to a point.”
“But not as close as before?”
“That’s right.”
“Did this relationship deteriorate gradually or just come to an abrupt halt?”
“It pretty much came to an abrupt halt. Morris could just see a change in Glynn … He took a gun up to his ex-wife’s house and he made threats toward her, and Morris could just—he lost respect for him.”
She answered queries about Gabby’s prodigious drinking.
“Was it only when he was drinking,” Tait asked, “that his behavior was unpredictable?”
“It was all the time actually. Glynn used whatever he felt could get an effect or something fr
om his wrestlers. He had been in coaching so long that it just ran into his own life.”
That was an answer Chris Tait savored. The manipulative coach pulling the strings of his wrestlers to get whatever effect he desired.
He asked Jerilee when Gabby Moore had begun to change.
“Well, after looking back, I would say that it began in December and just continued until his death.”
“December of what year?”
“December of 1973.”
“So we’re talking about a period of approximately two years?”
“Yes.”
“And would you say that things got worse— or better?”
“Worse.”
As, indeed, they had. Gabby had lost two wives, his best friend, his job, and his self-respect.
“What kind of difficulties did he have at school?”
“It was his temperament. He would yell— sometimes bodily shake people that went in the car when they were driving [in Drivers’ Training] if they didn’t do as he asked.”
“Do you think that’s the only reason he was asked to resign, or do you know?”
“I don’t really know.”
Jerilee was wary of Chris Tait. She didn’t want to talk about her short-lived relationship with Gabby any more than she had to. She recalled that Gabby had blamed her for his losing his job.
“He told you that? He said, ‘I’m losing my job because of you’?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Do you think that he was trying to make you feel bad when he said that?”
“Yes.”
“Was that a tool that he was using to try to get you to go back to him?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Do you think,” Chris Tait summed up, “that it would be fair to say that this idea of his to try to get you back sort of consumed his life?”
Jerilee looked down and then into Tait’s eyes. “I would say so.”
“No further questions.”
Jerilee Karlstad Blankenbaker Moore Blankenbaker Littleton walked out of the courtroom free to go on with her life. She paused to speak with reporters and to pose, unsmiling, for a few more photographs. And then she disappeared down the hallway and into the elevators.
She would not be seen again at this trial. Even so, her testimony had made her the prime prosecution witness, but, in a strange way, also one of the best witnesses for the defense. She had described a man possessed of a power to control and exploit those who trusted him, an obsessive man who never surrendered. The Glynn she had fallen in love with had turned out to be Gabby the master puppeteer, who dangled lives from unseen strings.
Jerilee was one of the few trophies that Gabby had grasped— and then lost. And one way or another, his losing Jerilee had killed Gabby.
And Morris too.
Olive Blankenbaker had listened to Jerilee testify and felt more pity for her than anything else. She was the mother of Olive’s grandchildren, and Olive knew that Jerilee had loved Morris, perhaps more at the very end of his life than at any other time. They had both lost him.
Bitterness wouldn’t help anyone now and Olive knew that cruel gossip would follow Jerilee for years. She wasn’t going to contribute to it. Jerilee’s mother and sister supported her emotionally. Only time would tell if her marriage to Jim Littleton had been a sound move or one made out of desperation and panic at being all alone.
A lot of Yakimans expected Jerilee and Jim to move away to Seattle or Spokane, but they had no plans to do that. The best way to deal with the rumors and disapproving stares was simply to stare back. After time had passed, maybe people would find something else to talk about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The most avidly awaited witness had already testified, but the trial of Tuffy Pleasant had weeks to go, and there were surprises yet to come. The battle plans were clear now, and Adam Moore and Chris Tait would have an uphill battle if the jury was allowed to hear Tuffy’s own voice confessing to murder.
In the meantime, Jeff Sullivan continued laying out the state’s case in neat progression. Dennis Meyers, one of Tuffy’s escort officers, was also one of the first Yakima police officers who had responded to the scene of Morris Blankenbaker’s murder. He testified to what he personally had observed. He listed the other police personnel who were there: Officer Rosenberry, Sergeant Green, Sergeant Brimmer, Sergeant Beaushaw, and Lieutenant Kline.
Adam Moore cross-examined, asking questions designed to make the police crime scene investigation appear inept and bumbling. It was standard defense stuff, and he did nothing to shake Meyers. Moore wanted to know when the body had been photographed, when it had been covered with a sheet, how dark it was as they searched for the missing bullet casings.
Sullivan sat implacably, unruffled. He knew the crime scene probe had been properly executed.
“Did you take custody of any objects, any evidence?” Moore asked Meyers.
“Only the objects I took from the car.”
“That … was a bank statement and … ”
“A set of keys.”
“To the car?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were the keys in the ignition or were they in a more subtle place?”
“They were laying on the floorboards on the driver’s side.”
“All right. Did you find any weapons? I assume you didn’t?”
“No, sir,” Meyers replied. “I did not.”
The jury was relegated to their quarters for forty-five minutes after lunch while Adam Moore and Jeff Sullivan argued a point of law before Judge Loy. Loretta Scott, Tuffy’s cousin who had loaned him the death weapon twice, was to be the next witness. Moore argued that Jeff Sullivan had overstepped his authority on February 27 when he had granted Loretta immunity from prosecution for disposing of the gun. He asked that Loretta be informed that she could be prosecuted at some future time by some future prosecutor because she had not truly had immunity when she gave a forty-page statement to the investigators in February.
Sullivan argued that giving Loretta Scott such a warning would undoubtedly frighten her and serve to make her a reluctant witness. He asked Judge Loy to compel her to testify, but at the same time, to grant her permanent immunity. She had not known about any of the murder plans beforehand, and she had come forward voluntarily to tell Sullivan and the Yakima detectives about the gun. Furthermore, she had had two attorneys with her to protect her rights at the time.
Without Loretta Scott, Sullivan pointed out, the state probably would never have been able to trace the gun to Tuffy Pleasant. He asked Judge Loy to grant her immunity to testify now and to restrain the defense attorneys from alarming her with scare tactics that would make her think she could go to jail at some time in the future because she attempted to dispose of a murder weapon.
Loretta Scott sat on one of the long oak benches in the hall, unaware of the argument inside the courtroom. In truth, she had no immunity from prosecution until the court granted it.
Judge Loy said that he would need time to rule on the motions.
Loretta’s testimony was skipped over, and she was told she didn’t have to wait in the hall that afternoon. But she would be back. It had been her visit to the prosecutor’s office that had resulted in Tuffy Pleasant’s arrest for murder several hours later. She was a very important witness. Good for the state. Potentially devastating for the defense.
Sullivan’s prosecution plan was to connect Tuffy to the death weapon, and also to connect Tuffy to the murder sites by tracing his movements on the nights in question. The state’s next witnesses were the trio from Pasco who had met a single guy in the Chinook Cosmopolitan’s lounge.
Sam Berber and his girlfriend, Sally Nash*, and Melodie Isaacs testified that they had met a man who introduced himself as “Angelo Pleasant” in the Chinook that night. To Sullivan’s question about absolute identification, Berber said he could not honestly swear that the man at the defense table was the man he had met, but he remembered the name well.
Sally Nash
couldn’t be positive either.
Melodie Isaacs was positive; she had been Tuffy’s date that night.
“So you recognize that man today?” Sullivan asked.
“Yes, I do,” she said, and pointed to Tuffy Pleasant. Melodie was as positive as Sam was that it was right at two a.m. when Mary looked at her watch as they let Tuffy out of Sam’s Cadillac at the Chinook Hotel.
“Yes. She [Sally] told me it was two o’clock and she better head hack home.”
“Did you have a baby-sitter at home too that you had told you would be home a little earlier than that?”
“Yes. I told my daughter— I have a fifteen-year-old daughter.”
Adam Moore hit on the trio’s drinking that evening, on Sam and Sally’s failure to absolutely identify Tuffy, and he even managed to confuse Melodie.
“And there’s no doubt in your mind that our man is Angelo Pleasant, the guy you met nine months ago?”
“I really don’t know, but I’m saying it’s him,” Melodie vacillated suddenly. “I wouldn’t know him, you know—
“Does he look like the same man?”
“He don’t to me. He had a little more hair.”
“He had more hair then?”
“Yeah.”
“Any other differences?”
“He looked like he gained a little weight— that’s about it. “
“Could this be the man? Is it possible?”
“Yes.”
“You said he was the man when Mr. Sullivan was asking you.”
“Yeah,” Melodie, a nightmare of a witness, equivocated. “I’m sure it’s him now since I seen him again.”
Melodie was certain, however, that they had dropped her date off that night at two a.m. at his car at the Chinook.
Joey Watkins, Tuffy’s former housemate and wrestling buddy, was the next witness. Joey might knit up the raveled mess of uncertainties the previous witnesses had left. That is the excitement of a trial. Players leave gaps, misinterpretations, outright lies, and prejudiced statements in the fabric of the case, and the attorneys must rush to present other players who will undo the damage, and maybe even push their side a few lengths ahead. Nothing is ever a given— nor should it be. Smug, overconfident trial lawyers can be humbled in an instant.