I didn’t gain much from the interview, but Maclendon and I left the room with a backward glance and a laugh—the intimacy forged by meeting in embarrassing circumstances.
On my way back to the courthouse I picked up a packaged tuna sandwich and a sticky-sweet, weirdly flavored coffee that was supposed to be French vanilla. I managed to eat half the sandwich and gulped down the coffee, reminding myself that it was better than falling asleep in the middle of the hearing.
Maclendon was our first witness. On direct examination, I took him through his long history with the Aryan Brotherhood. It had started, Maclendon said, with growing up in a family of Hell’s Angels. When he’d been imprisoned at the age of eighteen, he walked into an immediate support system of older prison-gang members. “They looked after me,” he said, “and I tried to show them I was worth it. I worshiped those dudes; they showed me how to live in prison, not just survive.” Dave Leverett, one of the highest-ranking members of the Brand, sponsored him for membership when he was twenty-three.
I asked questions and listened, struggling to follow, as he explained the Byzantine and ever-evolving hierarchy of the Aryan Brotherhood: the chains of command, the manner in which moves against members and non-members were decided and voted on, the overlapping cells of members and associates given information on a need-to-know basis, the multitudinous ways in which information was covertly passed between prisoners and prisons. Notes were left in the law library, pushed under the bars of cells or passed by guards and lawyers; word was sent to inmates elsewhere through friends and family outside, by phone calls and innocuous-seeming letters containing coded messages, or by verbal messages memorized and passed along from inmate to inmate. It was, by his account, pretty efficient.
Maclendon said, as he’d told me, that he had been part of the circle that made the decision to greenlight Lindahl, but he hadn’t been personally involved in making the decision.
“I heard the actual order to put the guy in the hat came from Bensinger, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I heard that the guy paroled and that someone from his hometown had been sent to take care of him.” He’d heard Scanlon’s name before then, “but I didn’t know he was the guy, at the time. I didn’t even know until later that it happened—we ordered a lot of hits back then.”
“I got to know Steve around 2006 or 2007; we were neighbors for a while in Pelican Bay. Steve talked with me sometimes, through the pipes. Couple times he talked about the Lindahl hit. Told me how he did it; he seemed pretty proud of it.”
“Did he ever mention that anyone else was involved in it with him?” I asked.
“Other than the AB, no.”
“Did he ever mention someone named Howard Henley?”
“No. Until your investigator came to see me, I’d never heard of the guy.”
I showed Maclendon the letter from McGaw.
“We showed you this letter before; do you remember it?”
“I do.”
“You testified earlier that you have some familiarity with how the AB gets messages to its members in and out of prison. Does this letter appear to be communicating a message in some kind of code?”
“Yes.”
“Can you explain what the coded message is?”
“Well, it’s hard, not knowing the context.”
“Okay, suppose Mr. McGaw was writing the letter to an associate outside who had been assigned to kill someone who was in the hat.”
“Well, some parts of it could relate to that.”
“What parts?”
“‘Are you still working?’ That could mean he’s wondering whether the guy on the outside is getting the job done. Other stuff, like the martial arts and the guy’s letters being delayed could mean something, but I don’t know what.”
Laszlo’s objection was inevitable. “Your Honor, the witness is clearly speculating about what the letter means.” His objection was sustained, and, with an inward sigh, I moved on.
“I understand that you are no longer involved with the Aryan Brotherhood.”
“That’s right.”
“You left the organization and debriefed?”
“Yes, in 2010.”
“Was there a reason or reasons why you chose to leave?”
Laszlo objected that Maclendon’s reasons were irrelevant, but the judge let him testify, subject to a motion to strike.
“I began debriefing in 2010, after I was charged in a racketeering case. The Feds were coming down hard on the organization, and I’d been thinking for a while that the leadership was getting greedy and corrupt. There were all these factions and power struggles, and men were being killed for supporting the wrong set. Trust is everything to me, knowing that your friends have your back and your leaders won’t steer you wrong, and I was losing that. I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life in an underground supermax prison for the sake of the Brand as it is.”
“Do you have anything to do with the Aryan Brotherhood anymore?”
“Nothing at all.”
“You’re in prison out of California for a reason, no?”
“Yes. I dropped out, and I’m cooperating with the authorities, so I’m marked for death. I’m not safe in the California prison system.”
“Do you have anything to gain by coming here and testifying for Howard Henley?”
“No.”
“In fact, being brought back here puts you in danger, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does.”
“How is that?”
“Any AB who crosses my path has orders to kill me if they can.”
Walter Bensinger, our next witness, was a stouter version of Maclendon, except that his head appeared to be naturally bald, and his mustache was white. His history with the Aryan Brotherhood was less colorful, though the attraction of the gang was the same; he had fallen in with them because they seemed like real men, competent and disciplined, in contrast to the average run of prison inmates. He had risen through the ranks by the usual process of carrying out orders, and had eventually been made a member, though he was lower in rank than, say, Maclendon or Dave Leverett.
“Were you in Folsom Prison in 1998?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Were you involved in ordering that Jared Lindahl be greenlighted?”
“I guess so. I brought it to the attention of the council that the guy was selling drugs on one of the yards and blowing us off about paying the tax.”
“And he was greenlighted for that?”
“Yes. We put the word out that he was in the hat, but he paroled before anyone could get at him.”
“Did you know Steve Scanlon at that time?”
“I did.”
“How did you know him?”
“He was in my yard, and so was Cal McGaw.”
“What was your impression of Steve?”
“That he was a good kid. Bit of a hothead, but willing, up for any kind of assignment.”
“Did you become aware at some point that Steve was going to be paroling to the same town as Lindahl?”
“Yes. I think Cal McGaw told me.”
“What did you do when you learned that?”
“Suggested to McGaw that he approach Steve about doing the job.”
“And did he?”
Hearsay, Laszlo said, and the judge sustained his objection.
“Did you learn at some point that Lindahl had been killed?”
“Yeah. I was a little sorry to hear that Steve got popped for the killing, but I guess he wasn’t as smart as he could have been in how he went about it.”
Mike showed him the letter and asked him if he could see a coded message in it.
“Knowing Cal, he wouldn’t write something like that just to say hello. He would have meant business. Looks to me like he was getting on Steve’s case about it; maybe he was dicking around, not getting the job done. Cal may have thought he was getting cold feet.”
Laszlo was on it, and the judge sustained his objection that Bensinger, like Maclendon, was j
ust speculating about the meaning of the letter.
“At some point, was Steve Scanlon himself in the hat?”
“Yes, he was.”
“How did that come about?”
“Well, he was in Pelican Bay, and so was I, for that matter. Steve made some half-assed attempt to escape and injured a guard pretty badly. Prison came down hard on the Brand for that, and a lot of us ended up in the SHU or even solitary confinement, as validated AB members. It was kind of a last straw, as far as Steve was concerned. He was starting to be seen as a loose cannon. We gave him one last chance to redeem himself by killing his cellie, but he wouldn’t do it. So the order was made—I wasn’t one of the folks who made it, in case you’re interested.”
“What came of it, if you know?”
“He was hit, stabbed by his cellmate, as I recall, but he survived, and he debriefed and dropped out.”
“You dropped out at some point, too, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. The powers that be greenlighted someone I knew, and I felt it was b.s. and said so. The way things were going, I figured it wouldn’t be long before I’d have a target on my back, too. So I left and debriefed.”
Like Maclendon, Bensinger didn’t know Howard Henley; he’d never heard of him before Mike and his investigator came to talk to him. He, too, had nothing to gain from testifying at this hearing. “Being back in California puts me in danger. But if the guy’s really innocent, I hope he gets justice.”
Laszlo’s cross-examination of both men went the same way: a catalog of the assaults and homicides they had committed in prison for the Aryan Brotherhood, and the fact that they had each left some of their crimes out of their debriefing statements. Maclendon had not included any reference to the Lindahl killing, even though he knew about it. “I couldn’t remember everything,” he had said. “I mean, the Brand ordered a lot of people hit, and frankly this Lindahl thing was no big deal.”
Willard and Laszlo closed by recalling Detective Springer, who testified that he had no recollection of meeting Forbush or showing him any photos.
“My God, it’s almost over,” Mike said over a celebratory dinner at Wheaton’s best Italian restaurant, with a bottle of pretty good Cabernet. “Now we go home and wait for the test results.”
“How do you think the hearing went?” I asked.
“Great! Of course we’ll win,” he said. “Shit—I wish I could believe it. It’s hard to fathom why we’re here with a client on death row when the real killer has been telling everyone who would listen for, what, seventeen, eighteen years that our guy is innocent. What is up with that?”
I had no answer. “Have another glass of wine,” I said. “I’ll drive us back to the hotel.”
40
At home again, while Mike worked out the hiring of experts with Willard, I caught up on my other cases and saw Walt Klum again.
Late in January, as I was preparing to make another visit to Walt, Abby called me. “Great news—Walt signed his attorney request this morning.”
“Wow, whew, congratulations!” I said.
“Yes—Melanie is driving to Sacramento with it right now, so we don’t lose any more time; we feel like every day counts. And we want it on file in case he gets wobbly,” she added.
“Wow,” I said again; I felt as relieved as Abby sounded. “What made him change his mind?”
“I owe it to Melanie,” Abby said. “She went to talk to Edna’s daughter Audrey, up in Grants Pass, and persuaded her to visit, got it all set up, and then made another trip up there, drove her down and back, and went to the visit with her, so she’d feel more comfortable. Audrey had gone with Edna once or twice to visit Walt and was on his list of approved visitors, but she hadn’t thought of seeing him once her mother became too ill. She’s a lovely woman, just like Edna, and seeing her seemed to turn Walt around. It was like a miracle. I mean he’s still awfully fragile, but at least he’s clinging to life, so to speak.”
Caught up in Howard’s case, I hadn’t realized how heavily Walt’s situation had been weighing on me. Unable to concentrate on work, I went outside, thinking I might do some winter pruning on my apple and pear trees. The day was fine and clear, with a chill, damp breeze from the ocean. Instead of going to the shed where my pruners were, I walked around my little acre, inspecting the scaffolding of branches and twigs on the small bare trees of the orchard, the raised beds with their dark earth and stands of chard, broccoli, and bok choy, the hoop house hiding its bed of greens, the ground everywhere covered in the soft new grass and tiny flowering plants of Mediterranean winter. Redwood and tanoak trees made a forest beyond the deer fence, and the sky floated, a tentative eggshell blue, above it all. I was filled with relief and gratitude. The world was a wonderful place, I thought, and I wanted to shout something, but I didn’t know what.
Charlie had followed me, and was alternately sniffing at some intriguing smell in the ground and looking up at me expectantly. I stooped and ruffled the hair around his ears. “Let’s go for a walk,” I said. He gave an answering bark, and we headed purposefully down the driveway.
41
When I went to see Walt the next week, he could talk about nothing else but Audrey’s visit. “She’s so much like her mother,” he said. “Just a great girl. We talked a lot about Edna; we both miss her so much. Audrey’s married, has a couple of grown kids. Hard to imagine that I have great-nephews, and young men at that.”
His heavy face brightened into something almost like a smile. “It’s been good seeing you, too. And Melanie—Ms. Stanhope’s investigator—is the best. She’s worked on a couple of other guys’ cases here; guys I know say I’m lucky she’s on mine.”
As I left, I said I’d like to come see him now and then, to say hi, if that was okay. “I think I’d like that,” he said.
After Walt, I paid a visit to Howard. Like most meetings with Howard, it was unproductive except as a chance to see him in action. I tried to explain what had happened at the last hearing. He had never heard of Forbush, Maclendon, or Bensinger, and he asked why we had bothered to call a bunch of witnesses who had nothing to do with his case. When I told him Forbush had said he’d sold a gun directly to Scanlon, and we’d found the gun, he said, “See, I never gave a gun to Steve; it was all a lie, like everything else.” He wondered, for the umpteenth time, why we hadn’t put on evidence that he was in jail the day of the murder and why we hadn’t proved that he had been prosecuted to silence him for speaking out against the corruption of the city government in Ventura. This moved into a complex, mumbling discussion of the significance of various numbers in his life and case and how they related to one another, and then a complaint that his doctors refused to make a medical order for him to get a vegetarian diet. It left little for me to do but sip at my Diet Pepsi, nod and say “uh huh” at strategic intervals. As the visit ended and the guard was walking him out of the cubicle, he called back over his shoulder, “You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
“I’m trying,” I answered.
“Think about it,” he said.
I came home that evening to a voicemail from Mike, asking me to call. It was past office hours, so I had to wait until morning. I dropped some groceries off at Ed’s, made myself some dinner, accompanied by a bottle of our cider, which was, as Vlad had said, better once it had produced some carbonation, though still sour. After that, too tired to work or think, I spent the evening watching an old Wallander mystery on PBS.
Mike was in court when I called the next morning, but I heard from him before noon. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Not too much. A little news. Willard called yesterday and said the DNA testing on the gun had come back, and the lab said it was uninterpretable. If I understand what he was saying, the gun spent too many Wheaton summers up in that crawl space, and the DNA is badly degraded.”
“I don’t know whether to feel good or bad,” I said.
“Me neither. But they aren’t letting go. There’s another test they can do on the sample,
called Y-STR. I looked it up online, and apparently it’s a test that identifies just the DNA on the Y chromosome, so it only picks up males, but that works for us. And it has potential to work on samples like this one, where the DNA is old.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess they’ll do what they have to do.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Willard says they’re holding up the firearms testing until after the DNA is done because they want to keep the gun untouched in case they need to try to get another sample from it.”
“We’ll get there when we get there, eh? Howard doesn’t understand much of what we’re doing, anyway.” I described my visit with him.
“Pretty much what I’ve been going through. Did you see Walt Klum?”
“I did.”
“Good news that he’s decided to go ahead with his case.”
“Definitely a weight off my mind.”
“Mine, too.”
“How long before we hear about the Y-STR testing result?”
“A week or two,” he said.
So more waiting. But at least the news so far wasn’t bad.
42
Life went on while we waited on the forensics. I planted apple, pear, and plum trees I’d grafted the previous year, including the one on which I cut my hand the day Mike first called about Howard. It was an Arkansas Black, and bigger than any of the others; apparently a little blood in its diet was a good thing. Then, taking my life into my hands, I grafted another generation of the little beasts, fitting scion wood into slices on rootstocks.
It was a calm period in my life, relatively speaking: Walt was saved, Gavin and Rita were safe and happy, and the anniversary of Terry’s death came and went with a minimum of emotional fanfare. It was easy to absorb myself in the work of making fruit trees and concentrate on slicing the wood with that razor-sharp knife. I managed, for once, to complete the year’s labor and produce a row of little potted stick trees, their small trunks bandaged with wax film and blue painter’s tape and each festively labeled with its variety printed on orange ribbon, all without any loss of blood.
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