A Fever In The Heart

by Rule, Ann

  “Possible for them to speak fairly well.”

  “Some other people’s speech would be slurred?”

  “Yes, and some people would be out cold.”

  Dr. Richard Muzzall, the Yakima County Coroner, testified next. His voice was matter-of-fact as he explained the terrible damage done by the old .22.

  “Mr. Blankenbaker suffered three small-caliber wounds to the head— one passing through the upper lip and embedding itself against the base of the spine just below the skull, the other two entering behind the left ear, traversing the brain and lodging within the skull. Death, of course, was caused by extensive brain injury hemorrhage. I think it’s more likely that death was caused by the two behind the ear.”

  Because of the gun barrel “tattooing,” Muzzall estimated that all three of the wounds were the result of a gun held at almost point-blank range, and one was a contact wound.

  Olive kept her face expressionless, although she felt like screaming. Ned Blankenbaker’s normally ruddy face was bright red with pain. Each of them had loved their boy so much. It still didn’t seem possible that it was Morris that Muzzall was talking about.

  The coroner moved on to the complete autopsy he had performed on the body of Gabby Moore. Gabby had asked Dr. Myers where it was safe to take a bullet, but the shot to the ribs under his left arm had gone chaotically awry, and he had drowned in his own blood.

  “Somebody who had sustained that kind of wound,” Sullivan asked, “would it be possible to save him surgically?”

  “No, I think it would be extremely unlikely, even if it happened right in the hospital.”

  On cross-examination, Adam Moore wondered what kind of wound Gabby would have had if the .22 bullet had not deflected and tumbled.

  “If it had continued at forty-five degrees after penetrating the rib,” Muzzall answered, “it would have gone through the part of the left lung, would, in all likelihood, have missed the heart and come out somewhere in the anterior [front] chest.”

  “I see. Uh-huh. You thought that if it hadn’t been deflected by the rib, it would have been a nonfatal wound?”

  “The chances it were nonfatal would be much higher.”

  Dr. Muzzall said he had not noticed any powder tattooing on Gabby’s T-shirt, and he knew there was none on the skin itself.

  Adam Moore asked Muzzall to talk about the specks of dried blood found on Morris’s hand.

  “Your inference is that the hand was raised in a defensive—

  “It would be the only explanation … to explain the blood on the hand … In other words, the hand had to be somewhere in front of his head where blood could get on it… . Blood would shoot out of the wound … in the direction of a cone, just as any spray from a spray can.”

  “In your opinion, was the gun closer to the circular wound by the ear with the dense powder patterns or the lip wound?”

  “Of the two wounds, the one in the mouth would be the farthest away.”

  This did not seem to be information that a defense attorney would want to bring out. All of it seemed to bear out the state’s theory that Morris had been lured toward someone he trusted, shot in the lip and then twice in the back of the head— at near contact range— by someone who must have wanted to be sure he was dead. He had thrown up his hand in a vain attempt to stop the first slug.

  Eight photographs of the shooting site, Morris’s body, and the blood flecked hand were entered into evidence over the objections of the defense who called them “inflammatory.” Every defense attorney, everywhere, every time, objects to pictures of the victims as “inflammatory and of no probative value.” Some get in. Some don’t. For the average juror, unused to the sight of any dead human being, the photographs they must view are often the most jarring part of a murder trial.

  But what had happened had happened, and the jurors would need to see the crime scenes in order to make their decisions about the guilt or innocence of Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Well into the first week of Tuffy Pleasant’s trial, Jeff Sullivan called John Anderson, the Director of the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory in Spokane. Anderson had testified in more than nine hundred trials; he was a brilliant criminalist and an expert in firearms examination. Sergeant Bob Brimmer had sent the bullets and casings retrieved from the victims and the crime scenes in the Blankenbaker-Moore murders to Anderson. He had performed his forensic alchemy and connected that evidence to the Colt .22 found in the river.

  Anderson gave the jury a quick lesson in the way guns propel bullets. “Except for shotguns, which are essentially smoother bore weapons, if you look down the barrel, you will see a series of circular patterns. These are caused by indentations made by the cutting implement making the barrel. The land and groove is a high point and a low point … and gives the direction of twist. When a cartridge is fired and the bullet is forced down the barrel, the direction of twist and the land and groove impart a spin to the bullet, putting it on a truer course.”

  He pointed out that the lands and grooves in a gun barrel are designed to prevent a bullet from emerging and “flip-flopping,” going off course when it hits the friction of the air.

  The soft metal of a bullet is marked by these high and low swirls in the gun barrel, leaving striae. These are highly individual markings. The same tool making a half-dozen gun barrels will itself be worn down imperceptibly so that no two barrels are ever exactly alike, and the bullets propelled from each barrel will have slightly different striae.

  Bullets are compared in two ways: for class characteristics and for individual characteristics. Some are so battered that they meet the former criteria but not the latter. In this case, the bullet taken from Morris’s head and that from Gabby’s body were alike in class characteristics— each with six lands and grooves striae and with the same dimensions. Anderson, however, testified he could not say absolutely that they had come from the same gun.

  However, when he compared the shell casings— the one Vern Henderson had found at the edge of Morris’s yard, and the one found on Gabby’s kitchen floor— he had been able to match them conclusively in both class and individual characteristics. “When a round is chambered in the barrel,” Anderson said, “the extractor is a piece of metal that wraps around the cartridge case itself. As it is fired, the extractor will pull the empty shell case from the breech. Another piece of stationary metal hits the shell case— that is the ejectory and that will force the empty shell case out of the weapon.”

  Each of these actions leaves its mark on the base of the casing. Sullivan asked Anderson how he had concluded that the same gun had fired both bullets.

  “I found an ejectory mark at ‘eight o’clock,’ holding the firing pin impression at ‘twelve o’clock,”’ he said. “At ‘three o’clock,’ there was an extractor mark.”

  These marks were identical on both bullet casings— from each murder. Combined with the same firing pin mark stamped on the bottom of each shell, this left no doubt at all that the same gun had been used to kill both Morris and Gabby. And that was the gun found in the river. Everything dovetailed perfectly.

  Vern Henderson had not been exaggerating when he told Tuffy how much evidence can be detected when a crime lab has both a gun and bullets for comparison.

  Further, John Anderson testified that his test firings indicated that the person who shot Gabby Moore had been nine inches or, at the most, twelve inches away.

  That warred with Tuffy’s taped confession to Vern Henderson where he said he had been six or seven feet away from Gabby when Gabby had ordered him to shoot him. In reality, Tuffy had been very, very close to Gabby when he fired. Gabby’s bloodied T-shirt with a bullet hole just beneath the left armpit was entered into evidence.

  It was Friday, August 20, 1976. For the casual observer and the media too, trials are fascinating to watch. For the families of those involved— both victims and defendants— a trial is an ordeal to be gotten through, a reminder of horror and loss.
r />   Derek Moore took the witness stand to testify about how he found his father dead before dawn on Christmas morning. His girlfriend, Janet Whitman, followed him on the stand, and then his sister, Kate, and his grandfather, Dr. A. J. Myers.

  All of them related their memories of the final night of Gabby Moore’s life, remembering the last time they had ever talked to someone whom they had truly cared about, but someone they could not save from his own obsessions.

  Everyone in Judge Loy’s courtroom was caught in those hours between sunset and the first glimmers of light on Christmas Day, trapped, somehow, in the tiny apartment on Eighteenth Avenue, along with the dead man.

  And then Jeff Sullivan skillfully elicited testimony which summed up more of the weeks and months of investigation into the two murders. The jury had heard from all the police personnel who were present at the scene of Morris Blankenbaker’s murder, and now they heard about the scene at Gabby Moore’s apartment— right from the call: “Unattended death.”

  Adam Moore and Chris Tait knew that the time when Sullivan would introduce the tapes of Tuffy Pleasant confessing to the two murders was approaching. They could not stop the tapes from being heard, but they sensed that Jeff Sullivan was about to wind up the state’s case, and they were adamant that they did not want the jurors to adjourn for the weekend with those confessions ringing in their ears.

  If they expected an argument from the prosecutor, Sullivan surprised them. He was not finished with his case, he said, and he had no objection to the tapes being played on Monday rather than Friday.

  The day was far from over. Adam Moore made a motion for mistrial, arguing that the state had made promises to Tuffy Pleasant that they would not use a portion of the statements he had made against him if he should ever be tried for murder. In Brimmer’s testimony, he had mentioned that two other people (unnamed) had been arrested and charged with murder before being released. The defense insisted Brimmer had breached their agreement and demanded a mistrial.

  The motion was denied, although Loy ordered the jury to disregard Brimmer’s statement.

  “You cannot unring a bell,” Moore said ominously.

  As an offer of proof, Jeff Sullivan prepared to call Stoney Morton, one of the coterie of young wrestlers who had made up Gabby Moore’s social circle. Chris Tait objected on the grounds of hearsay and irrelevancy. Morton’s testimony would not be a happy thing for the defense. He had accompanied Gabby Moore on a visit to Tuffy in Ellensburg the previous October. At some point, Gabby and Tuffy had told Stoney to go out and “start the car.” He had done so, but as the two had come out of the dorm, Stoney had overheard a conversation.

  “I got out of the car,” Stoney had told investigators, “and I heard Tuffy say, ‘But, they will know it was a black man.’ ” “No,” Gabby had said, “not if you wear a full-faced ski mask.”

  The defense prevailed, at least for the moment, and Stoney Morton was sent back to Yakima, to testify, perhaps, on another day.

  Although the jury was unaware of decisions being made over the weekend of August 21-22, those days marked the most agonizing part of the whole trial for Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Sullivan. And it all concerned lie detector tests.

  At the time, only three states in America allowed polygraph results into a trial without stipulation (agreement) by both the prosecution and the defense. Several lie detector tests had been given to both Tuffy and his brother, by Dick Nesary, the Yakima police polygrapher. And, ironically, the tests tended to suggest that Tuffy was telling the truth and Anthony was not.

  The defense team wanted Sullivan to agree to a stipulated polygraph, one whose results could be presented to the jury-no matter what the outcome was. They were prepared to call in an out-of-state polygraph expert, Dr. Stanley Abrams, to administer the test to Tuffy. Adam Moore and Chris Tait were obviously confident that Tuffy would pass this fourth and stipulated polygraph test, confident enough to offer the results to the jury.

  Jeff Sullivan’s first impulse was to say no to the stipulated polygraph. His case was flowing well, each witness building on the foundation laid down by the witness before. Unless Sullivan agreed to allow the fourth polygraph in, there would be no mention of any of the lie detector tests. A prosecutor’s political reputation is built on his win-loss record, and this was a huge case, particularly for a thirty-two-year-old newly elected prosecuting attorney.

  But, for Jeff Sullivan, there were other factors more compelling than winning for the sake of winning.

  “I was in the middle of a trial,” Sullivan recalled, “and I knew I could lose it all. But, morally, I could not risk convicting an innocent man.”

  After wrestling with the dilemma all weekend, Sullivan agreed to the stipulated polygraph. Everything in him agreed with Vern Henderson that Tuffy’s taped confessions were the real truth and that the polygraph by someone totally unconnected with the case or the Yakima Police Department would substantiate that. And yet, if Tuffy should pass the lie detector test, Sullivan’s case would be dead in the water.

  It was an awesome risk. But not as awesome as the prospect of convicting an innocent man without giving him every opportunity to prove his innocence.

  Jeff Sullivan’s decision proved to be the correct one. Dr. Abrams, a defense witness, was impressive. It was Abrams who had given a lie detector test to Patty Hearst (although the results were not allowed into her trial). His credentials were impeccable.

  Abrams had examined the lie detector test results that Dick Nesary had administered to Tuffy and Anthony Pleasant. He had found that the first two tests given to Tuffy were “inconclusive” and he thought the third was leaning “slightly toward the truth.” Like Nesary, Abrams found Anthony’s test more untruthful.

  It was all moot. The jury never heard Abrams testify. They lingered all of Monday morning in the jurors’ room, curious about what was going on in the courtroom.

  Dr. Abrams was to have administered a fourth— and definitive— polygraph examination to Tuffy Pleasant that morning. However, after the pretest conversation with Abrams, Tuffy asked for some time to think. After fifteen minutes, he spoke to his attorneys. He had decided he didn’t want to take the polygraph from Abrams, after all.

  The defense team, who had been so anxious to have Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan stipulate to this polygraph, now backpedaled. They went back into the courtroom and told Judge Loy that they would not now–or ever–stipulate to a new polygraph test.

  “We will not agree to it,” Adam Moore said.

  The jury never heard a word about polygraph tests. Sullivan heaved a discreet sigh of relief. He had gambled on the side of his conscience and it had been the right way to go.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The state’s case was drawing to a close. Vern Henderson testified just before the two taped confessions were played. Adam Moore and Chris Tait cross-examined Vern fiercely, suggesting that the witness had tricked Tuffy into confessing.

  It didn’t fly. Vern Henderson was perfectly willing to discuss his friendship with Morris Blankenbaker. There had been no vendetta on his part. All he ever wanted was the truth. He told of finding the casing ten feet from where Morris lay dying.

  Chris Tait questioned why Tuffy had been put in a private cell the night of his arrest, and why he had given his confessions on two separate days. He suggested that Vern and Bob Brimmer had told Tuffy they were going to “pretend they were in court” and that a jury was listening to the story Tuffy was telling about the murders.

  “Yes, sir,” Vern said quietly. “He did say that to him.” Vern did not remember every word of the conversation between Brimmer and Tuffy before the tape was turned on.

  “Isn’t it a fact that Sergeant Brimmer told him they would never buy his story, and that he didn’t believe him?”

  “Yes, he did say that.”

  “What did Angelo say about this game of ‘pretend’?”

  “What do you mean what did he say, sir?”

  “How did he react to it?”
/>   “He was telling him what happened— that’s how…He told a story and Sergeant Brimmer told him that there weren’t any facts to back it up…He couldn’t tell us where he was between two o’clock A.M. and three o’clock A.M.” [the night of Morris Blankenbaker’s murder].

  “And you told him ‘There aren’t any facts to back up your story’?”

  “We told him to give us some facts to back up the story.”

  Chris Tait had a slight touch of sarcasm in his voice as he questioned Vern Henderson, but he didn’t shake the young detective. Vern had a cleanness in his testimony that no amount of cross-examination could sully.

  Yes, Tuffy had trusted him, but Vern had promised nothing, ever. He had bought Tuffy a hamburger and a Coke, but Tuffy had repaid him.

  “Did you loan him more money?”

  “Bought him a Coke out of the pop machine … Loaned him a quarter.”

  “Why was it that you didn’t participate in this pretending session that Sergeant Brimmer was the jury and Angelo was telling his story?”

  “Because he was talking to him, sir. He was the chief investigator. He didn’t need both of us talking to him at the same time.”

  “You didn’t take any part in that at all. You were just kind of along for the ride, sir?” Tait mimicked Henderson.

  “I wasn’t along for the ride, sir. I was sitting there listening.”

  “Did you call Angelo ‘sir’ every time he answered a question the way you are to me this afternoon?”

  “I really doubt that, sir.”

  The gallery laughed, and Judge Loy rapped for order. There had been so little to laugh about in this trial.

  Tait kept trying to box Vern Henderson into a corner, to get him to say that Tuffy had been tricked— promising him that he could continue his education in prison. “Tell us about that conversation,” Tait directed.

  “He was concerned about he was going to have to go to jail and lose out on all of the things that he really wanted in life— that he was working hard for his school and stuff.”