The Death Shift

by Peter Elkind

  And place such over them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens:

  And let them judge the people at all seasons…

  If thou shalt do this thing, and God command thee so, then thou shalt be able to endure, and all this people shall also go to their place in peace.

  Exodus 18:21–23

  Twenty-Seven

  Williamson County, Texas, had a long reputation for harsh justice. Stretching east of the Hill Country, to where the earth flattened into rich blackland, it was settled by stern European immigrants—Germans, Swedes, and Czechs—who grew cotton and worked cattle. Theirs was a world of thrift and backbreaking labor, where those who went astray could not pay too high a price. Back in the 1930s, the lawyer for a freshly convicted murder defendant in South Texas railed wildly that his client’s twenty-year sentence was unfair. Angry at the barrister’s behavior, the judge granted the defendant a new trial—in Williamson County, where after convicting the murderer again, a jury assessed the death penalty. A half century later, the county was swelling with new immigrants, as the Austin suburbs spilled north. But the modern arrivals were no less certain of the value of a stiff sentence. Many had moved to the county’s affluent subdivisions to flee the filth and crime of the big city. They were not disposed kindly toward those who intruded on their paradise.

  Jim Bob Brookshire, one of Genene Jones’s two new court-appointed lawyers, was well acquainted with the temperament of Williamson County. His ancestors had moved there in 1860, and his great-great-grandfather had served as county sheriff. Brookshire, forty-two, was a short, dapper man with curly white hair, silver temples, and a well-trimmed mustache. He practiced law by himself in Georgetown from a storefront office across the street from the courthouse. The son of a contractor and a schoolteacher, Brookshire had grown up in the tiny town of Granger, in the fertile eastern half of the county. After law school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and went to Vietnam, where he tried military crimes as a judge advocate general. After stints in private practice and with the federal government, Brookshire married and hung out his own shingle back in Georgetown. His personality retained a slice of small-town redneck, and his wartime encounters with the gruesome inclined him toward gallows humor. In his first murder trial, just weeks before Jones’s court date, Brookshire defended a man accused of dousing his wife with gasoline, then setting her on fire with a disposable lighter. In conversations with friends, he referred to his client as “Zippo.” Brookshire had a nickname for Genene Jones as well. Noting her penchant for wielding needles, he called her “Spike.”

  Working with Brookshire was Burt Carnes, from the nearby town of Taylor. A tall, lanky thirty-four-year-old man with straight black hair, a mustache, and glasses, Carnes looked like the gawky, overgrown center on a high school basketball team. He was the son of an FBI agent and had three years’ trial experience as a criminal prosecutor in Dallas and Austin. Where Brookshire enjoyed burying himself in the case’s complex medical evidence, Carnes was eager for the give-and-take of the courtroom. The Mutt-and-Jeff defense team had voluntary help from Laura Little, a tiny, blond-haired young woman who had spent her three years since law school researching cases for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Little, who had never participated in a criminal trial, was in the throes of a personal crisis. Her mother had recently died, and she was contemplating leaving law to become a doctor. She thought that this case—with its glimpse into both professions—might help determine her future.

  To the defense team, the forces arrayed against them seemed overwhelming. Ron Sutton had supplemented his own limited resources by tapping state criminal-justice grants; he had $50,000 available for travel and medical experts alone. Sutton also had important help from his Bexar County counterpart. Eager to aid—and share the credit for—the murder conviction of Genene Jones, Sam Millsap had given freely. His ace investigator, Art Brogley, had spent weeks assisting Sutton; Nick Rothe would join the Kerr County DA at the prosecution table. Sutton had enjoyed fifteen months to assemble his case; his list of potential witnesses contained more than seventy names. The defense lawyers, by contrast, had $10,000 for expenses. Brookshire had worked on the case just four months, Carnes only two. And like Chenault and Tuck, whom they had replaced, the new defense team had the handicap of its own nettlesome client.

  Brookshire’s first rude surprise from Genene Jones came when a reporter called him for comment about the nurse’s insistence that she was pregnant. One day in November, less than two weeks after her transfer to the Williamson County jail, Genene had begun screaming that she was having a miscarriage. She was rushed to the Georgetown Community Hospital, where doctors found no serious problem and sent her back to jail the next day. Playing out the fiction, Genene appeared for pretrial court hearings in loose-fitting clothes. Finally, Brookshire advised reporters that his client was not pregnant after all; somehow, she had been mistaken. While publicly critical of the circumstances that produced the cancellation of Genene’s bond, the defense lawyer was secretly delighted. Jones’s reimprisonment provided an opportunity to rein her in. Brookshire ordered jailers to allow Genene no media visitors and strictly limit her phone calls. At last, he thought, he had found a way to keep his client out of the headlines. But on December 20, Brookshire awoke to a new story in the San Antonio papers. Bill Thornton, the chairman of the Bexar County Hospital District board, had received a Christmas card from the murder defendant. “I feel compelled to write to you and wish you all the best,” Genene had written. “I feel we are comrades in this tragedy since we both know the real truth. I do want to ease your mind and doubts by telling you that under no uncertain terms have I injured or killed anyone.”

  A small consolation for the defense was that Garron Ray Turk had dropped out of sight. After Genene’s indictment in Bexar County, Garron had sued for divorce in San Angelo, bizarrely filing court papers with fake names. Instead of Garron Ray Turk and Genene Ann Jones Turk, the documents sought the divorce of “Ray G. Tucker” and “Ann G. Tucker.” Genene stopped signing her name “Genene Jones Turk” and spoke of Garron no more. It was as though her teenaged second husband had never existed.

  But Genene—always eager to manipulate those who influenced her fate—sought other affections, even in jail. On several occasions, she called deputy sheriff Jim Stinnett back to her cell, where he discovered her wearing nothing but an unbuttoned housecoat, which she made no effort to close. Others were more receptive to her charms. Ronnie Rudd, a thirty-three-year-old convicted auto thief and trusty, given the run of the jail, met Jones while delivering meals to the female prisoners. After the two developed a romantic relationship, Rudd was dispatched to a state prison to serve out his sentence.

  Despite being handled with kid gloves, Genene complained bitterly to the sheriff about her treatment. She demanded special favors and threw herself into tearful, screaming tantrums when she did not get them. The nurse was particularly enraged about the attention accorded another notorious jail resident—a one-eyed drifter named Henry Lee Lucas, who claimed to have killed more than a hundred women, including his mother. Lawmen were spending hours with Lucas because their chats seemed to prompt fresh rounds of confession. Genene thought he was disgusting. Why should she share the spotlight with him?

  Brookshire became so fed up with his client that he could barely stand to be in her presence. He left personal dealings with Genene to his legal secretary, Patty Jones, and to the young attorney Laura Little. Even to the eve of the trial, Jones tried to dictate the strategy of her defense. Smoking cigarettes, stalking back and forth in the visiting room, Genene acted as though in command. She patted her lawyers on the back like a football coach, voicing her certainty that they would win her acquittal.

  But Genene’s lawyers were deeply skeptical about the prospects for such an outcome. To begin with, Brookshire and Carnes—like Joe Grady Tuck before them—doubted their client’s innocence. In private strategy sessions, they spoke as though it were a
foregone conclusion that Jones was guilty. But their personal beliefs were not the issue; their job was to defend Genene Jones, innocent or guilty. Brookshire and Carnes decided to employ a classic legal strategy—the “inconsistent defense.”

  It is cynical wisdom that if you tell a criminal lawyer his dog has just bitten you, the barrister would first say he didn’t have a dog, then claim his dog didn’t bite, and finally insist that his dog didn’t bite you. Unable to contest that Chelsea McClellan was dead, Brookshire and Carnes planned first to challenge the prosecution’s claim that the child had died of succinylcholine; they would try to block admission of the Swedish doctor’s test as evidence. Failing that, they would battle to bar testimony about the incidents involving other children, known in legal language as “extraneous offenses.” Finally, they would suggest that if Chelsea indeed died of succinylcholine, Genene Jones had not done it—or at least had not done it alone. They would imply that someone else was involved, who wasn’t even on trial. That person was Kathy Holland. They would go after the prosecution’s star witness, in hope of muddying the waters.

  None of the defense lawyers believed that this approach would sway twelve Williamson County citizens. Their hope was to instill a reasonable doubt in the mind of a stray juror or two—enough to produce a hung jury. Then maybe Kerr County, which was footing the anticipated $100,000 bill for staging the trial, would decide against trying Jones again. Their prospects for success would rest equally on judge and jury. It would require the jurors to focus sharply on the seams in Sutton’s circumstantial case. And it would be up to the judge to decide whether the jurors would hear the most damning evidence in the first place.

  The change of venue to Georgetown had placed Genene Jones’s fate in the hands of the Honorable John Rice Carter, a relative newcomer to the bench. Carter, forty-two, had grown up in the Houston suburb of Bellaire. After moving to Williamson County, he had become active in Republican politics and run unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1980. When Williamson County’s population boom forced the creation of a second district court, Texas’s Republican governor appointed Carter to the judgeship in 1981. He won election on his own the following year. Carter was a swarthy man, with a three-hundred-pound frame and a close-cropped thatch of salt-and-pepper hair. Charming and voluble off the bench, he affected a no-nonsense demeanor inside the courtroom. Local attorneys liked him. Carter was tough, but he worked hard and didn’t play favorites. The judge also shared a rural Texas tradition: He dipped snuff, even while presiding in court. Carter camouflaged his habit by keeping two Styrofoam cups on the bench, which he lifted alternately to his lips. From one he sipped coffee; into the other he spat.

  The Genene Jones murder case was Carter’s first big trial, and the judge was determined to keep it from becoming a circus. Press interest was so great that a local university had set up a special media center with sixteen phone lines. On Sunday, January 15, 1984, the day before jury selection was to begin, Carter met with reporters and cameramen to dictate rules for their behavior. The judge explained that he was issuing a gag order barring witnesses, attorneys, jurors, defendant—and anyone else connected with the case—from making statements to the press. As a second step, Carter barred cameras and recording devices not only from his second-floor courtroom, but also—with specified exceptions—from the entire courthouse. Cameras were to be permitted in the first-floor lobby for three forty-five-minute intervals, just long enough to film the comings and goings of the principals for the evening TV news. And even then, rather than being free to chase their suspects, cameramen were required to remain within an eight-foot square in the center of the lobby. The box was marked with white tape. The confined cameramen quickly dubbed it “Carter’s Corral.”

  The murder trial of Genene Jones was to take place on a worthy stage. The Williamson County courthouse, which dated back to 1911, was a hulking four-story fortress. Built of beige brick with limestone trim, the Greek Revival building boasted a triple-arched stone entryway, with a set of two-story Ionic columns above, on each of its four sides. Crowning the building was a giant copper dome with a large clock face on each side. And atop the dome stood the figure of Liberty, bearing her sword in one hand and the scales of justice in the other. Easily the tallest structure in town, the courthouse stood visible for more than a mile in every direction. In the early 1920s, it had hosted a famous series of trials that helped whip the Texas Ku Klux Klan and launch the political career of a future governor.

  Georgetown did not appear to have changed very much from those days. The city was named for George Washington Glasscock, builder of a local water mill, who had donated ten acres to establish the community in 1848. Bestriding the Balcones Fault, which divided the rich farmland to the east from the Hill Country to the west, Georgetown grew up as an agricultural center. The nearby junction of two rivers made it a stop on the Chisholm Trail, along which Texas cattlemen drove their giant herds north to Kansas. Now the vital byway was Interstate 35, a ribbon of concrete that sliced from the Mexican border in Laredo, through San Antonio and Austin, up through Dallas and Fort Worth. I-35 had carried the émigrés from Austin, many of them employees of new high-tech plants, who settled in the southern half of Williamson County. But the population boom in the early 1970s stopped short of Georgetown. In 1930, 3,583 people lived in Georgetown. A half century later, its population was still less than 10,000. Although Main Street had been gussied up for tourists and there were plans for a fancy new subdivision just outside the city limits, Georgetown remained a simple place. The busiest restaurant in town was the L&M Café, where the specialty of the house was chicken-fried steak with white cream gravy.

  Jury selection began on Monday, January 16, with the summons of 329 Williamson County citizens—about three times the usual number for a murder trial. Both sides were worried that the widespread publicity might make it difficult to locate twelve unbiased jurors. To avoid any possibility of taint, the defense also wanted the jurors sequestered for the duration of the trial. Carter decided it wasn’t necessary; he promised to warn them to avoid media reports and discussions of the case outside the courtroom. The first day cut the pool of prospective jurors to 111. It also brought the first flare-up between the press and the testy judge.

  As the routine of jury selection droned on into the afternoon, Carter asked his bailiff to open a window. The judge gazed outside and spotted a TV cameraman in a second-floor window across the street, zeroing in on the proceedings through the open courtroom window. “Deputy!” barked Carter. “Go across the street and arrest that son of a bitch!” Dragged before the judge, the cameraman insisted that he was merely filming the exterior of the courthouse for his Austin station. Carter was not amused. He advised the cameraman that he would make a point of watching his station’s broadcast that night. He warned he would throw the man in jail if a second of film of the courtroom was shown.

  Launching three days of jury selection, Ron Sutton had opened his remarks by making a production of loosening his tie, saying he never liked the darned things anyway. Then the DA began spooning out legal formalities with dollops of hayseed charm. Describing himself as a country lawyer, Sutton explained that his great-grandfather was buried in Williamson County, next to the grave of a famous outlaw. And he joked about the courthouse in Concho County, part of his district, where the only ventilation came from a sheep feedlot down the road. Sutton apologized for the time occupied with formalities. “But, you know,” he went on, “anything important in life…takes a little bit of time; whether you are out preparing your fields in plowing or whether some of you ladies are making a real nice cake or preparing a Sunday dinner, it takes some time. Just think how much more important it is to do justice.”

  When the defense turn came, Brookshire told the prospective jurors he was “nervous as a cat”—and he was. Most of his experience was as a civil attorney, where pushing paper and out-of-court negotiations were more important than courtroom eloquence. The defense attorney reminded the jurors th
at his client merely stood accused, “that as she sits here today, she is innocent, just like you…So I am not going to refer to her as ‘the defendant’ or as ‘the accused,’ because simply because someone says she did something does not take away her humanity. She is a human like the rest of us. And I ask that you look upon her as a human and not as a thing or title.” As Brookshire spoke, his client shuffled from chair to chair at the defense table, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  On the first day, a media throng had gathered outside the courtroom, awaiting the defendant’s arrival from jail. Genene stepped out of the sheriff’s car like a movie star emerging from a limousine to greet a crowd of paparazzi on her way into a glitzy Hollywood premiere. For trial, the nurse had undergone a dramatic physical transformation. Gone were her baggy maternity clothes and scraggly hair. Thinner after weeks in jail, Genene wore a neat tan outfit with a gold medallion around her neck, blow-dried hair, eye makeup, and bright nail polish. It was the work of Brookshire’s legal assistant, Patty Jones, who had purchased her five new outfits, a slip, and panty hose. Patty had given Genene a permanent and would dress her carefully each morning before court.

  After thirty-two jurors passed the preliminary screening, each side had the right to strike ten more at will. In making their decisions, the lawyers would rely on the prospects’ responses to individual questioning, on their body language, and on instinct. The jurors had also filled out a three-page questionnaire probing their education, family background, contacts with the legal system, and tastes in music, religion, politics, film, television, and literature. Among the twenty-nine questions: “Have you ever had unpleasant experiences involving medical or hospital personnel?” Sutton put great stock in such information. From last names and religion, he made judgments of political philosophy. Italians, Latins, and Jews tended to be liberal, Germans, Scandinavians, and Lutherans conservative. Prosecutors loved crime victims; defense lawyers invariably struck them. A prospect married for many years tended to be a compromiser, unlikely to become a holdout on a jury. Military service was a plus. Sutton liked men who belonged to the National Rifle Association, women who read Better Homes and Gardens, and anyone whose favorite book was the Bible. He automatically cut candidates who belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union.