Cover Story

by Brenda Buchanan

  Once the background was established, Mansfield hit his prosecutorial stride. With a neat series of questions, he had Shaw distilling witness interviews and summarizing technical reports, providing the jury with a far fuller picture of the O’Rourke killing than they’d had to date. Using a black marker, Mansfield wrote down the key details on a large pad of paper mounted on an easel positioned to give the jury an unobstructed view.

  On the day of the murder Dolores LeClair went to the Boothby home at six thirty in the morning to help Corrine get off to school. Shaw said it was the usual arrangement on mornings when Danny left to dig clams on an early tide.

  “How far is the LeClair home from the Boothby home?” Mansfield asked.

  “Ten houses down the road—maybe a three-minute walk.”

  I wrote that down and put a big exclamation point next to it so I’d remember to check that out, annoyed at myself for not tracking down the location of Claude and Dolores’s house earlier in the week.

  Numerous eyewitnesses put Danny at the Machiasport clam flats from 6:45 till 8:30 a.m. Later in the morning he went to the home of a guy named Jason Quill, where he helped rebuild a boat engine until about 3:00 p.m. Mansfield used his marker and oversized pad to draw a timeline into which he wrote all of these facts.

  “Did Mr. Quill tell you what prompted the defendant to leave at about three in the afternoon?”

  Cohen hopped to his feet and objected. “The question calls for hearsay, your honor.”

  “Sustained,” Justice Herrick said. “If you want the jury to know what Mr. Quill says about what Mr. Boothby said or did that afternoon, call Mr. Quill to the stand so he can be cross-examined.”

  “Were you able to establish what time Mr. Boothby arrived back at his own home?” Mansfield appeared unperturbed by the interruption in the flow of his examination.

  Shaw said that fact had not been determined.

  “How about Corrine Boothby? Do you know when she arrived home from school?”

  “Ten minutes to three,” Shaw said. “The school bus was running right on schedule that day.”

  “How long does it take to drive from the Quill home to the Boothby home?” Mansfield asked.

  “At the speed limit, twelve minutes and fifteen seconds.” Shaw pursed his lips. “Less if you’re going faster.”

  Mansfield chuckled. “I’m sure Mr. Boothby always obeys the speed limit.”

  Cohen was on his feet, objecting to the banter. “This is too serious a case for sarcastic remarks. I move that exchange be stricken from the record.”

  “Objection sustained,” Justice Herrick said. “Stick to the facts, please, Mr. Mansfield.”

  Mansfield walked over to the rail of the jury box and laid his right hand on its polished wood, as if to assure the jurors that he was remorseful. Bit by sneaky bit, he was crafting an impression of a guy whose work day amounted to bouncing from one thing to another. What kind of guy was that? Erratic. Impulsive. I searched the jurors’ faces, wondered if they were buying it.

  “Do you know when Frank O’Rourke arrived at the Boothby home?” Mansfield asked.

  Shaw’s grimace seemed inadvertent.

  “We believe it was sometime after three o’clock,” he said. “Mr. O’Rourke called the sheriff’s department to ask for a deputy to meet him at the Boothby home that afternoon. He’d called from the road to say he needed to execute an emergency removal of a child from the Boothby home.”

  “Was Mr. O’Rourke informed about the bait truck accident on Route One?”

  “The signal disappeared before the situation could be explained to him,” Shaw said. “After the line went dead, the dispatcher tried to reach Mr. O’Rourke on his cell phone to let him know backup wouldn’t be available, but it went straight to voice mail.”

  “Did Mr. O’Rourke say where he was?”

  “There was static on the line,” Shaw said. “Mr. O’Rourke either said he was in Whiting, or en route from Whiting.”

  “Assuming Mr. O’Rourke called from Whiting, when would he have arrived at the Boothby home?”

  “From Whiting, fifteen to twenty-five minutes. If he was already en route, less than that.”

  “Is it fair to say that Mr. O’Rourke arrived at the Boothby home sometime between 3:00 and 3:30?”

  “That’s a fair estimate,” Shaw said.

  I wondered if there was a point to all this detail in the timeline, or if the goal was to convince the jury that the state police had done a meticulous job gathering evidence, which would help the state meet its burden of proving Danny Boothby’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “What evidence do you have about what was unfolding at the Boothby home at about that time?” Mansfield asked.

  “Mr. Boothby called the sheriff’s department at 3:52 p.m. to report a killing had occurred in the dooryard of his home. The sheriff’s department made repeated attempts to contact the Boothby home by phone after Mr. Boothby hung up, but the phone went unanswered. We have no information about the period between that phone call and the arrival on the scene by Trooper Nick Day at 4:16 p.m.”

  * * *

  I caught Emma’s eye when Justice Herrick called the morning break. Halfway down the corridor we found an empty conference room. I glanced back as we stepped inside. If anyone was watching they weren’t being obvious about it.

  “What’s up with you?”

  “A deputy told me last night the O’Rourke brothers or someone they’ve hired is eavesdropping on my conversations, and maybe tailing me, too.”

  “What?” Emma’s voice was so loud I shushed her with my hand.

  “I stopped into a townie bar last night. When I was driving back to the inn, a deputy pulled me over. He didn’t make me walk the line or anything, but he made it clear without saying the O’Rourke name that the Speaker or one of his lackeys is tracking who I’m talking to and what I’m saying.”

  “You’re a reporter. Aren’t you supposed to talk to people?”

  “The deputy left me with the distinct impression that some people don’t want me to do my job, at least not here in Machias,” I said. “Or maybe they don’t want any press at all. I’ve been trying to figure out all week why the reporter from Bangor has been floating in and out of the courtroom, not covering the trial in any systematic way. Every day her story is about the same. A two-paragraph summary of some aspect of the day’s testimony on top of twenty inches of background. And the TV people are nowhere to be seen.”

  “By contrast, your stories have been impressively full of not only detail, but analysis.”

  “Why thank you. That’s my job, after all. The public needs to know there are holes in the state’s case. That Mansfield appears to have met his match in Cohen.” I paused. “Last night, at the bar, I was sitting with some people who were saying some harsh things about Frank O’Rourke, worse than what I’ve written.”

  “Harsh along the lines of what that anonymous emailer said?”

  “No, not that. I think the lady from Biddeford was playing games, by the way. My colleagues in Portland can’t verify a word of what she said. But I sure got an earful last night about O’Rourke’s general unpopularity in Washington County. People didn’t like him and didn’t trust him.”

  “Not liking someone’s not a reason to kill him.”

  “Point taken,” I said. “So what made your night so interesting?”

  “Corrine was talking. Not about the killing. She never goes anywhere near that subject. She was taking about her grandmother. Corrine is worried there’s something’s wrong with her. They had a visit two nights ago, and Dolores was acting odd. She seemed confused about where she was, and who Corrine’s foster parents were.”

  “The stress of the trial must be getting to her.”

  “Maybe. Dolores has been her granddaughter’s Gibra
ltar, and it was upsetting for Corrine to see her acting like a mixed-up old lady. Upsetting enough that Corrine talked to me in actual sentences. Until last night she hadn’t done more than answer yes or no questions.”

  “I had the sense she wasn’t forthcoming, but I didn’t realize she was a total clam.”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell you. None of this is for publication, but friend to friend? Corrine’s sudden willingness to talk was striking. The poor kid needs an adult to lean on, and her rock is crumbling when Corrine needs her most.”

  “I’m guessing Claude’s not much help. He acts like he’s Mr. Self-control, but his temper is a fraction of an inch beneath the surface.”

  “Corrine didn’t talk at all about him, for what that’s worth. But that little girl sure adores her grandma.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thursday, January 8, 2015

  If I were scoring the trial on tactical points, the round went to the prosecutor for calling Shaw—an authoritative, professional witness if ever there was one—on the day when the week’s testimony would be wrapping up at lunchtime. Mansfield kept the veteran state police investigator on the stand for another hour and a half, making the state’s case that nobody but Danny Boothby could have killed Frank O’Rourke, leaving no time for cross-examination by Cohen.

  Mansfield finished up by getting Shaw to describe his questioning of Danny Boothby in the hour before they placed him under arrest. Shaw said the conversation happened in the Boothby kitchen soon after he arrived at the scene, fresh from the tiny Machias airstrip.

  “I introduced myself to Mr. Boothby, who didn’t get up from his seat but nodded in my direction,” Shaw said. “I asked him if I could talk with him about what happened. He shrugged and gestured toward a chair.”

  “Was Mr. Boothby forthcoming?” Mansfield acted as though he didn’t know how Shaw would respond. “Did he answer your questions?”

  “I wasn’t asking questions. I was simply talking with him, saying that it appeared something terrible had gone down in his dooryard that day, and I knew he must be upset about it. My goal at that time was to establish rapport with Mr. Boothby.”

  “Were you successful?”

  “Somewhat. When I came in, he was sitting slouched over the table with his head in his hands. When I spoke to him, he sat up straight and looked me in the eye. He appeared to be listening, but he didn’t say anything for several minutes.”

  “How would you characterize his facial expression?”

  “Scared,” Shaw said. “Scared and sad.”

  “Did he talk with you?”

  “After five minutes or so, he said ‘It never should have happened. I shouldn’t have allowed it to get to this point.’ I tried to get him to clarify, asking ‘What shouldn’t you have allowed to get to this point?’” Shaw paused. “Mr. Boothby didn’t respond at first, then he said ‘This whole goddamn mess.’ And he started to weep.”

  “What happened next?” Mansfield paced off a dozen steps toward the jury box.

  “I asked the trooper to stay with Mr. Boothby and went into the living room to confer with the chief deputy. He gave me a status report and that’s when I decided it was time to place Mr. Boothby under arrest.”

  “What led you to make the decision to arrest him at that time?”

  “The sum of the evidence that had been gathered. The victim’s body was on Mr. Boothby’s front porch. We had the murder weapon, and while it hadn’t been fingerprinted yet, it appeared by the handle to be a filleting knife like one Mr. Boothby reasonably would be expected to have, and he’d made statements that at least implied his involvement in the killing.”

  “Did he make any additional statements after his arrest?”

  “No. He was taken to the Washington County jail. During the booking process, he called his lawyer. Since then he has never uttered another word to any law enforcement officer involved in the investigation.”

  Mansfield stopped his pacing and looked up at the big clock in the rear of the courtroom where the hands showed it to be 11:42 a.m.

  Justice Herrick raised her eyebrows and inclined her head toward the big windows to her left. “Counsel, is this a good stopping place?” She gestured at the wind-blown flakes that were plastering themselves against the glass.

  Mansfield laid his hand on the rail of the jury box. “Certainly, your honor. I can see the storm seems to be on its way.” He smiled at the jury and strolled back to his table.

  Let the jurors sleep on that testimony over their long weekend snowed in at the motel, I thought. Well played.

  Justice Herrick spent five minutes warning the jury about letting cabin fever cause them to break the sacred rules of jury sequestration. Like a camp counselor trying to get a reluctant bunch interested in a game of Capture the Flag, she told them a separate motel room had been set aside and stocked with two dozen movies on DVD for their viewing pleasure. She wound up her summary with the now-familiar admonition about not talking about the case with anyone, even the other jurors. “The time for deliberation is after all the evidence is in,” she said. “Have a relaxing weekend, and I’ll see you all back here Monday morning at eight sharp.”

  I watched Danny Boothby turn and scan the courtroom while the deputies snapped handcuffs on his wrists. He was seeing mostly people’s backs, because the courtroom was emptying as fast as a classroom on the Friday before school vacation week, but Dolores LeClair walked to the front of the spectator section. Danny said something to the deputies, and they went with him to meet her, then stepped back to permit them a hug. As the moment ended, Dolores reached out and patted Danny’s shoulder. He smiled, eyes shiny, and put his head down as he was led away. Claude LeClair stood next to the courtroom’s rear door, a grumpy look on his wide face.

  I wanted a comment from Mansfield for my last story of the week, but he’d left the courtroom while I was tweeting that the coming storm halted the trial and postponed Cohen’s cross-examination of the chief investigator. Emma was waiting, and we walked down the stairs together.

  “When are you heading out?”

  “Right now. I’m supposed to meet Dorcas Simonton at her office in Ellsworth at two, but it’s possible by the time I get there, state offices will have closed for the day.”

  “Who’s this Simonton woman again?”

  “The woman who brought me into this case. She knew about me from the college alumni notes.” Emma stopped at the bottom of the stairs to wrap her scarf around her neck. “She’s the one I give reports to, and I want her to know Corrine was talking last night. Upset, but talking.”

  “I’m going to try to find someplace to write my story before I take off. If driving is slow, I don’t want to get hung up on the road and miss my deadline.”

  Our cars were sitting side-by-side in the parking lot, covered with a couple of inches of snow. Emma unlocked her Honda and reached inside to start the engine. “Can you work here at the courthouse?” She extracted a snow brush from her back seat.

  “They’ll be locking it up, but maybe the library’s open, or I can always go back to the inn and ask to sit in the parlor.” I used my gloved hands to help brush snow off her car. “It’ll only take me an hour or so, then I’ll hit the road.”

  “Don’t linger too long.” Emma put her hand on my sleeve. “The roads are going to be nasty before you know it.”

  “I’m a great snow driver. Me and my Subaru could drive to the Arctic.”

  Emma squeezed my arm, her smile on high beam. She dug into her parka pocket.

  “Just in case, here are my phone numbers—home and cell.” She handed me her card. “Even Nanook of the North gets stuck in a snowbank every now and then.”

  I extracted one of my own cards from my computer bag. “Here’s my number for the same reason. Or any other reason, for that matter.”

 
She took my card with a mittened hand and used the other to open the driver’s door of her CR-V.

  “Be safe, Joe Gale,” she said as she climbed inside.

  “You be safe, too, Dr. Abbott.” I waved as she rolled away through the snow.

  I preferred not to go back to the inn to write my story. Willow might be there and I suspected she and her boyfriend had seen me bathed in blue lights the night before. I didn’t want to talk with her about that sorry incident, both because I didn’t have the time and I didn’t know if I could trust her to keep her mouth shut.

  Earlier in the week I’d noticed the Porter Memorial Library—a handsome granite structure that looked almost like a small church—across from the front door of the courthouse. As luck would have it, the librarian was not the sort to close the library’s doors at the sight of a few flakes of snow. Five feet tall with gray hair hanging loose to her waist, she peered at me through granny glasses when I asked about internet access. She said the library had Wi-Fi so I could work from any seat in the house. I found a quiet corner, reviewed my notes and began to write.

  Ninety minutes later I scrolled through my story, frustrated by the undeniable fact that it didn’t sing. In fact, it didn’t even hum. I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and my mind kept shooting back to the events of the previous night. The result was an awkward lead and a disjointed narrative. I went to the john, washed my face, returned to my seat and tried again.

  MACHIAS—Jurors heard today that Daniel Boothby sat in near-silence in the kitchen of his East Machias home last May 22 while all around him, police were gathering evidence to support the charge that he murdered social worker Frank O’Rourke, brother of the Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

  Testifying for the state, Lieutenant William Shaw, director of the state police evidence and criminal investigation teams, said before he was placed under arrest, Boothby said he “never should have let it happen.” The 33-year-old fisherman looked “scared and sad” at the time, Lieutenant Shaw said.

  With a nor’easter expected to dump as much as two feet of snow on Washington County, Justice Madeline Herrick adjourned the trial at midday and told the jurors there will be no court on Friday. Shaw’s detailed testimony took the entire morning, denying defense counsel Marcus Cohen an opportunity to cross-examine the veteran detective.