Broken Doll

by Burl Barer

  “No,” countered Doersch, “in order to kill this person, the knife had to be obtained, had to be employed, stabbing this person seven or eight times in a series of multiple stab wounds around her neck, that certainly indicates premeditation. It does not indicate, for example, the kind of second-degree murder, where a gun that was drawn in the heat of a moment and discharged, it does not—say a brick is picked up and in the heat of anger and smacked against the side of one’s head. These are the wounds that killed her and they occurred after the rape.”

  Thorpe nodded in apparent interest and possible agreement before offering Jaquette the floor. “Again,” insisted Jaquette, “there is no evidence as to what actually happened in the moment of the death, and a knife that was employed for purposes of threats is not proof of premeditation for killing.”

  Judge Richard Thorpe, wanting to make sure he understood Jaquette’s position, asked, “Are you suggesting that all of the evidence that could persuade a jury that the kidnapping and the rape were intentional has to be more or less set aside, and that there must be additional, clear evidence that the decision to kill was formed far enough in advance of the killing to be premeditation?”

  “Yes,” Jaquette responded. “Yes, that is exactly correct.”

  “And you,” said Thorpe, turning his gaze to the prosecutor, “suggest that having a knife there meets that criteria?”

  Doersch nodded. Jaquette buttressed his position. “I can create a scenario in which a knife used for a kidnap and rape would not be involved in an intent to kill. Something could happen—a struggle or some other event—that triggers an instantaneous decision to kill. I think the prosecution must present evidence that proves premeditation, and they have not done so.”

  “Oh, I agree,” said Judge Thorpe. Had he stopped there, Jaquette would have emerged victorious. His Honor, however, continued. “But I don’t think your ability to come up with some scenario that would negate premeditation is the criteria. The criterion is whether or not there is sufficient evidence, sufficient circumstantial evidence. Obviously, that is all we have is circumstantial evidence in this case, to persuade a finder of fact of premeditation beyond a reasonable doubt.

  “I am not persuaded that there isn’t sufficient evidence,” said the judge. “She obviously wasn’t killed in her bedroom. She obviously was removed from there, granted it could be for the purpose of kidnapping and for rape, but that along with the circumstances of the abduction, with the circumstances of the disposal of the body and that sort of thing and the fact that there was weapon all taken together, I think there is sufficient circumstantial evidence from which an independent trier of fact could find this beyond a reasonable doubt that there was premeditation. The motion will be denied.”

  That settled that. Jaquette simply responded, “Your Honor, we have one witness to call. It will be very brief. Linda Hein was a patron at the Dog House Tavern. We will then be done with the testimony that we have available. We would like to reserve an opportunity to formally rest on Monday. We don’t anticipate anything, but we want to be completely sure that everything that we can and want to present can be presented. I would anticipate this would not affect scheduling of events that we sort of come up with for Monday.”

  “Well,” responded the judge, “unless you got yourself a blockbuster. In that situation, they might be tempted to put on some rebuttal.”

  “You can bet money on that,” said Ron Doersch. “If there is a blockbuster, then all . . .”

  “. . . bets are off,” Jaquette said, completing Doersch’s sentence for him. “But I can give the court very strong assurances that will not happen.”

  “Any overwhelmingly and persuasive objection to that, Mr. Doersch,” asked Thorpe.

  “I guess not,” he replied.

  With that, defense attorney Errol Scott called their only witness.

  “I’ve known Neila D’alexander ever since we were in grade school. We pretty much grew up together,” testified Linda Hein.

  “Do you recall where you were on the night of March 31, 1995?”

  “Yes, I do. I was at the Dog House Tavern on C twenty-second and Colby,” she testified. “I got there about seven in the evening, and Neila came in between seven-thirty and eight P.M.”

  “Concerning Richard Clark,” asked Scott, “and about what time did you see Mr. Clark in the Dog House?”

  “Approximately nine or so,” said Hein. “I’m not real certain, but that’s pretty close.”

  “Is there anything that happened that night around that time to give you an idea of what time it was?”

  “Well, yeah,” she replied, “the gentleman that was standing next to Richard Clark was arguing with the barmaid about not being drunk, when he really was drunk. The barmaid wasn’t going to serve him, that’s why I noticed him. I’m not a clock-watcher or anything, but I happened to glance at my watch just before the incident occurred.”

  According to Hein, she saw the two men—Richard Clark and Jimmy Miller—talking to the barmaid. The condition of Clark’s companion, she said, was “not good. He had trouble even standing up. He was not standing too straight, he was having a hard time standing. That’s because I believe he was drunk—not just intoxicated, I mean drunk.”

  “What was Mr. Clark doing?” asked Scott.

  “He was standing there next to the fellow that was complaining.”

  “Did you see them leave?”

  “No, I don’ t remember them leaving at all.”

  “Now, did you talk with Ms. D’alexander anytime later that night?”

  “I carried on a conversation with her until she left,” Hein said.

  “Now, anytime later that night, did you see Mr. Richard Clark?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I think I saw him around midnight. That was about an hour before I left.”

  “Now, you were obviously in a tavern. Were you drinking alcohol then?”

  “Yes, I was. I hadn’t had that much to drink. At most, I had two beers the entire evening. Sometimes I don’t drink alcohol at all, but drink Pepsi instead. I was there from seven P.M. until closing. Richard Clark came in about an hour before Neila left, and she left around one-thirty A.M.”

  The importance of Linda Hein’s testimony can not be overstated. If she were correct, Richard Clark had enough of an alibi to create reasonable doubt. He could not have been at the Dog House and committing the crime at the same time.

  On cross-examination, Ronald Doersch had few questions, but they were also of vital importance. “What is it that drew your attention to Richard Clark when he supposedly came back at twelve-thirty?”

  “Just the door opening,” she said. “I turned and looked.”

  “At that time you had what, two beers to drink?”

  “At that time? Well, maybe three beers,” said Hein.

  “Maybe more?”

  “I don’t drink all that much at all,” she said again. The expression on Doersch’s face expressed his opinion, unverified by evidence, that Hein was mistaken by virtue of alcohol ingestion.

  The testimony concluded, the defense and prosecution prepared for their ultimate arguments for the guilt or innocence of Richard Mathew Clark.

  “We will now have closing argument of counsel,” said Judge Thorpe. “First for the plaintiff, Mr. Doersch.”

  “It’s every parent’s worst nightmare,” began Doersch, and he brought that nightmare vividly to the courtroom. “You have been introduced to the dark side, the underside of the world you live in. It’s a world where grandparents outlive their grandchildren. It’s a world where a parent is too tired or too drunk to do anything to save his daughter. It’s a world where the friend of a seven-year-old’s parents gives her stuffed animals, lets her play with his puppy and smiles and smiles. And he’s a villain. He takes her away, he rapes her, and he kills her.

  “You see how close evil is. And you see how commonplace evil can look. Take a good look, right there,” he said, pointing to Richard Clark. “Commonplace, evil,
brutish, nasty, and as this case overwhelmingly demonstrates, stupid.

  “You know what he did, and how he did it, and how badly he did it. In this case, evil has already won. Roxanne is dead.”

  Doersch then reminded the jury of the state’s extensive physical evidence, including the controversial bloody shirt. “Consider what was done to that shirt in an attempt to keep that away from you, to prevent you from considering it as evidence,” said Doersch. “It’s laundered; it’s kept away from the police for eighteen days after the occurrence. Carol Clark tries to tell you that it doesn’t look like the shirt. Two police officers testified that’s certainly the shirt she gave us, and we know, not just because we recognize it, but because we wrote down all the identifying characteristics of the shirt, and we got it from her—the defendant’s shirt that has Roxanne’s blood on it.

  “Do you really think there was a crisis of conscience that caused that shirt to be turned over?” he asked rhetorically. “Or was it more a fear of being somehow more deeply involved in this homicide, in its cover-up?”

  A litany of evidence, recited by Doersch, kept the jury tight-jawed and attentive. “Van evidence, pieces of carpet, blood is detected, two socks removed—there is saliva on one, probably from Roxanne—in fact, on both of them, spermatoza and blood on them, brown sleeping bag, clean, large bloodstain on it. PGM ST and EMG testing, consistent with Roxanne Doll’s, her blood is on the sleeping bag. That’s Urness’s sleeping bag, as you will recall, the one the defendant borrowed the day before. There is blood on the yellow pillow, some blood on the blankets, an air mattress.”

  There were more charges against Clark than murder, and Doersch dealt with each of them. “One of the counts involved here is one in essence of forcible rape,” he remarked. “And you know from the damage to Roxanne, and from the damage to that pair of pants, that she was forcibly raped. Greg Franks examines and sees sperm cells on the anal swab, the vaginal swab, and the vaginal wash. Hair evidence is examined. Long, light brown hair is found on one of the socks.

  “There is fiber evidence from the training bra and the diapers, fibers from golden brown carpets. Using a microscope much more powerful than they use to compare rifling characteristics on fired bullets, photographing the results, this is what it comes up with. Note the similarities. Remember the testimony. Similar microscopic, chemical, and color characteristics to the van, the brown van carpets, and it could have originated from the gold brown carpet and from the other carpet as well, and that’s as strong as you can get apparently in fiber testing.”

  Doersch piled on fact after fact, test result after test result. “The DNA from the sperm on the anal swab is consistent with Richard Clark’s genetic profile. You heard the numbers,” said Doersch emphatically, “only one in fifty-four-hundred Caucasians have that genetic profile. Other people are excluded, including Iffrig and Miller.

  “In the excess of caution,” he reminded the jury, “testing is done on people in order to exclude them, to show that it can’t be them. The DNA from the sperm in the vaginal wash is consistent with Clark’s genetic profile. Again, Iffrig and Miller excluded. The DNA from the bloodstained shirt that Richard Clark wore the night Roxanne Doll was murdered is consistent with Roxanne’s genetic profile—not Clark’s, Iffrig’s or Miller’s. Only one in twenty-nine hundred people have that same genetic profile.

  “The DNA proves the defendant’s semen was in the victim’s vaginal area, and trickled down into the anal area. And it proves her blood was on a sleeping bag in the defendant’s van. How did it get on the defendant?” he asked rhetorically. “When he was stabbing her, she bled on him. Kiesel talked about there being some spatter, expecting to find blood somewhere. Well, that is exactly where you would expect to find it. Someone stabbing a little girl, it’s on the front of the person stabbing her, that’s how it got there, not by some bizarre transfer mechanism, the sleeping bag to the defendant.”

  The forensic evidence, Doersch asserted, was as good as or better than a fingerprint. “Scientific tests don’t lie, they don’t have an agenda, and all the scientific evidence points to the defendant. They tell us for certain Roxanne was raped by the defendant and they point overwhelmingly, with the other evidence in the case, to the defendant having killed Roxanne as well.” Having recapped the forensic evidence, Doersch turned the jury’s attention to Richard Clark’s erratic behavior.

  “Look at Richard Clark scrambling that night, that following week, trying to set up an alibi, trying to cover. He’s everywhere on that night, and yet there are still times that are unaccountable. You recall who we are getting these times from. Look at what he does, the scrambling that he does, trying to get his alibi together, covering himself, conceal evidence. It starts, I submit to you, when he takes her—when he takes Roxanne. He knows, I submit to you, that he is never going to bring her back.”

  At this point, deputy prosecutor Doersch did everything in his power to convince the jury that the murder of Roxanne Doll was premeditated. “Why is he never going to bring her back? Because she is seven years old, and a seven-year-old talks. They speak.”

  Knowing that sexually violated children are often frightened into silence, threatened never to reveal the identity of their violator, one would question the imperative nature of murdering the victim. Doersch, curious as to the answer, consulted the FBI and shared the explanation with the jury.

  “Even if the victim was too scared to tell who did exactly what to her, the one responsible knows that if she even pointed her finger at him in any way, even indirectly, detectives and FBI agents would be after him in a heartbeat.

  “Recall too,” continued the prosecution, “that after he does these things, other witnesses remark upon his change of appearance, because they notice that he’s shaved off his mustache. And suddenly we have the black-rimmed glasses that, according to some witnesses, have never been seen before.

  “I submit that he goes as many places he can, running around here and there. And then there is the Jimmy factor,” said Doersch with a note of sarcasm. “He picks up Jimmy. Jimmy is leaning on a lamppost, as one witness said. Is he hitchhiking? All we know for certain is that Jimmy was at the Dog House earlier in the evening and that he was on the reservation sometime at eleven o’clock that night, and whenever the defendant brought him there.

  “When did Richard Clark really pick him up?” Doersch asked. “We don’t know—and the reason we don’t know is because the defendant is the only one who tells us, or anybody else.”

  Richard Clark’s eroded credibility took further hits as Doersch continued in the same vein. “He tries to get Elza to cover for him, the deer blood again. What’s it come down to really? ‘The detectives call you and ask you about blood in the van, tell them it’s deer blood.’ Let’s forget this story about deer guts spilled in the van. It’s nonsense. When tests are done on the inside of the van, it’s not deer blood at all. Nobody else is scrambling for an alibi either, only Richard Clark.”

  Addressing the contradiction between the recollections of Dog House customer Linda Hein and bartender Cheryle Galloway, he said, “Are you going to believe the bartender or the person drinking? The two people that address that issue, and I submit to you that Cheryle Galloway is far more believable in terms of when Richard Clark reappears at the Dog House.

  “Scientific tests don’t lie, they don’t have an agenda, and all the scientific evidence points to the defendant. Except for the Urnesses and Gail and Janice Cliatt, all these people have been drinking. They are not clock-watchers. The testimony that we have as to the time line outside of Cheryle Galloway, Gail, Janice Cliatt, and the Urnesses,” he insisted, “is largely that of people who are drunk, partyers, and barflies—people whose credibility is very much at issue.

  “So the net is closing around him,” stated Doersch dramatically. “The cops are starting to ask questions. They seize his van, and he is out there trying to secure his alibi. He goes out to Vicki, and she asked him point-blank: ‘Did you do anything to that lit
tle girl?’ What is the indicated response? The response is the same as you hear right now, silence. He picks up his dog, without a word, gets in the car and goes away.

  “What does he tell to Toni Clark after he is in jail? Well, the first thing he says to Toni is, ‘If I get the death penalty, don’t mourn for me, don’t grieve for me.’ Okay. ‘Did you kill her?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Did you rape her?’ ‘Don’t know, might have.’ ‘Did you kill her?’ ‘Don’t know, can’t remember.’”

  “Where in the statements to FBI agent Lauer and to Kiser is there any mention about blacking out? What does he tell Lauer? Clark tells him, ‘I didn’t hurt her, I didn’t hurt her, I didn’t hurt her,’ vain repetition, as it turns out. And to Hillius, he said, ‘They got my DNA out of her butt.’

  “When the defense speaks, you are undoubtedly going to hear about a time line,” said Ron Doersch. “You are undoubtedly going to see, pointing to the time line, that Clark couldn’t have been here, couldn’t have done this, couldn’t have done that. Okay. Perhaps Mr. Clark was then the victim of some huge frame-up; perhaps Mr. Clark was the victim of tremendous circumstance; perhaps in the turning of the earth, everything lined up just right to put her DNA on his clothes and the sleeping bag, with his DNA in her body. Don’t you believe it. Instead, think about the people who have testified as to that time line. I submit to you the only really reliable testimony that we have, with regard to that, is probably Janice Cliatt. Working, not drinking, not carrying on, who sees Richard Clark’s van at the site where Roxanne’s body is found.

  “Let’s talk about something else. Remember Tim Iffrig telling us that in essence the defendant never had any reason to be behind the house; that when they road motorcycles, Tim brought the motorcycle around the front of the house. No evidence that the defendant ever worked on the house in any way, yet his fingerprint is on the outside window to Roxanne Doll’s bedroom. Oh,” he suddenly added as if it just popped into his mind, “look whose fingerprint is on the girl’s window on the outside. Recall one of the panes is not secure. It’s open far enough to get your fingertips into. The other may or may not be locked, but we know for sure it’s got the defendant’s fingerprint on it in a place where he should not have been, where no one ever saw him, where he had no reason to be, unless he was trying to open a window. It’s clear that he could have opened the other pane, tested the one that has his fingerprint on it, or if it wasn’t locked, open that one as well, or closed it on his way out.”