At that point, my life was really all about Eric and fighting for my freedom.
While preparing for trial with White and Allison, I also had to work forty hours a week. I had to take Eric to day care. I shopped for our groceries, cleaned our house, washed our clothes, and cooked our meals.
With Chris gone, Eric needed me in ways he had never needed me before. I needed him, too. I clung to him as much as or more than he clung to me. We were alone against the world—together.
One day, Eric said something unexpected, something I had waited for, looked for, and feared. I was on my knees, scrubbing the master bathtub and shower. Eric stood beside me. We were in what you’d call a conversational lull while I worked on making the tub sparkle, and he watched intently.
“Daddy,” he said. “Who was the man in the shower with his clothes on, the man with the blue shirt, purple shirt?”
I gaped at Eric, stunned. A thousand images ricocheted inside my head, images of that day, images of Chris, images I did not want to see. I just kept him talking, kept our conversation light.
The next day I told the therapist who had been working with him. I also told White and Allison. We talked about the significance of his comment, but they believed it would be ruled “hearsay” and could not be used at trial.
Still, the magnitude of Eric’s declaration forced me to think. My little boy had seen his mother’s killer—a man who had apparently stepped into our shower to wash my wife’s blood from his clothes.
I tried not to, but I couldn’t help picturing Eric pushing aside the shower curtain and seeing not his mother but her murderer.
Why, I wondered, had the man not harmed my son? Or had he?
What Eric said made me heartsick, but it gave me an almost taunting, tenuous lifeline.
He had seen someone. He had seen the man who killed Chris.
I had to hang on.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pretrial hearings began long before my actual trial started. Those sessions were valuable, giving me an introduction to the courtroom, the formality and ceremony of it all. They also offered me my first look at my adversary—Williamson County Prosecutor Ken Anderson.
He was not an imposing figure, sort of short and wearing ill-fitting clothes. He was struggling with a growing comb-over situation on a rapidly balding head. To counteract it, he looked to be in the process of growing a beard.
To me, Anderson seemed physically soft. But in court, with the power of the state behind him, he seemed to grow in stature, and his physique gave way to a hard and unyielding personality that clearly cared more about winning than anything else. He disputed even minor points with my attorneys, refused to agree with them on almost anything, and was very obviously preparing for the battle of his life. He felt dangerous to me, like someone who cared too much about his own grandiose ambitions and too little about the law. I knew enough not to underestimate him.
There were constant arguments with my attorneys about whether Anderson was turning over the information that he was required to give the defense team. He seemed to constantly try wiggling out of his obligations to give us official autopsy reports, detectives’ notes, and witness interviews, always claiming that he intended to but, in reality, making us fight for every detail.
Anderson’s decision to make us work so hard for the information we were legally entitled to would make a crucial difference in my upcoming trial—and the next twenty-five years of my life.
My parents arrived at our home in Austin about a week before our final face-off with Anderson began, helping me and Eric get accustomed to yet another new schedule. We bumped around the house together, cooking comfort food and doing anything we could to relieve the tension that hung over our heads like the glistening, sharpened sword of Damocles.
One night, a few days before the trial began, in another of my sometimes ill-fated ongoing attempts to make everyone feel better, I brought home a movie I’d picked up at the rental place. It was titled Runaway Train and starred Jon Voight. I didn’t even bother to read the back of the VHS box to see what it was about. Good grief, the title Runaway Train pretty much gave up the plot, right?
Wrong.
We all settled in to watch it and discovered, to our horror, that it was set in an Alaskan prison that looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno. My mother crumbled into a corner of the couch, whimpering. I felt like I had blown it again. But then, I had become accustomed to that feeling. I had become like the proverbial mule tied to the fence post in a hailstorm—all I could do was stand there and take it.
The night before the trial, I don’t remember what I had for dinner or how it tasted. I don’t remember how I felt, what I said to my family, or whether I held Eric especially close. I didn’t worry about what I would wear the next day or if I’d be late or if I was going to be on TV again. I don’t remember if I slept well or not at all.
I know I got up early enough to be at Bill White’s house on time. He handed me the keys to his beautiful, brand-new Porsche and told me to drive to the courthouse. And each day after that, he did the same.
Sitting in my prison cell, years later, I sometimes wondered if Bill’s act of kindness—and letting someone drive your new Porsche is a bona fide act of kindness—was something he did because he recognized the real possibility that his efforts and those of his partner might fail and I might be found guilty. Had he contemplated a far-in-the-future scenario where the burden of my time in prison would be lessened ever so slightly by the memory of rocketing down the freeway at the wheel of a beautiful car? Maybe someday I will ask him.
On the trip to the courthouse on the first day of my trial, he did most of the talking, including telling me where to park—a few blocks away so no reporter could make an issue of me hot-rodding to court, as if I were having my last fling before prison.
When we approached the courthouse, the giant clutch of cameras and reporters from radio stations, newspapers, and TV operations was waiting outside. When they saw us, they pounced. I knew they were all essentially working men and women, people just doing what they were paid to do.
But being the focus of that kind of circus is all-consuming. We walked in tandem through a roiling, noisy mob alive with shouted questions, the whir of overworked camera shutters, and the constant presence of TV cameramen, usually adept at shooting while walking backwards, but occasionally falling onto the pavement—damaging their pride and, occasionally, their precious cameras. No matter what happened, the mob just kept moving, staying with us, staying on us.
We reached the front steps and began climbing, the media carnival coming right along. The reporters and photographers grew increasingly frantic as we got close to the front door, beyond which they could not follow. My attorneys’ faces were hard and set as if they were entering an arena, ready for a cage match. I was carried along by the crowd, at the center of it all but feeling like an outsider—like a man just learning the ropes on the first day of a new job.
I didn’t know what to do or where to look or, more important, how to feel anything anymore. I had become a zombie, someone who was going through the motions, almost devoid of feelings. I was in a trance—part of a public beating and completely incapable of affecting the outcome.
As our mob reached the doors and my attorneys scrambled to swing them open, I thought again of how much I missed and needed my wife.
Chris, can you see what’s happening down here?
CHAPTER TWELVE
For nine days in February 1987, I walked through Georgetown’s historic central square each morning and past the soaring statue of the Confederate soldier who served as a stone-faced greeter for the old Williamson County courthouse.
The figure of the young infantryman—a kid holding a gun and wearing a forlorn hat—was a powerful reminder that in this place, the past wasn’t past at all. It was in full swing.
The judge in my case was close to seven
ty years old—and even closer to being completely deaf. Judge William Lott had been on the bench for years. In deference to his diminishing hearing, the courthouse had recently installed a microphone stand for witnesses. Despite this assist, the court reporter must have struggled mightily to keep up with the judge’s frequent requests that arguments be repeated, testimony be restated, and points be made again—louder, please.
The call to “keep your voice up” appears in the transcript of my trial more often than the words “call your next witness.”
I had to wonder, if Judge Lott would admit needing this much help hearing, even with a microphone, what were the odds that he was missing more of the trial than we—or he—knew?
What I couldn’t miss on the first day in court was how the whole system seemed stacked against me.
Juries seemed smitten with the prosecution. The judge often deferred to the prosecutor as well, or at least gave him the benefit of the doubt. And Ken Anderson and Sheriff Jim Boutwell were as tight as members of the same small-town bowling team. They chatted easily, felt at home in the courtroom, and were unaccustomed to judicial decisions that didn’t go their way. They held an enormous amount of power in this place—they were in control and they were against me—and almost nothing else mattered.
A large pool of potential jurors had been called, and as they waited in the hallway, a bailiff literally shuffled a stack of cards, each with a juror’s name written on it, determining at random which locals to question. I had a sinking feeling the deck was stacked.
That was confirmed when, in the course of questioning by my legal team, one woman in the first group of potential jurors turned out to be Ken Anderson’s secretary. I recall thinking that if the pool of potential jurors was so small that it included someone that close to the prosecutor—and her obvious conflict was revealed only through close questioning—I was in deep trouble.
By the time the next group of possible jurors entered the courtroom, my attorneys were ready to try a new tack. Bill White asked for a show of hands by anyone with any kind of link—by marriage, employment, experience, friendship, or family ties—to the prosecutor’s office, the sheriff’s department, or anyone connected with the case. At least half of the potential jurors raised their hands. My attorneys turned to the judge, their arms outstretched in frustration.
The bailiff once again shuffled the cards, and another group of possible jurors filed in. Eventually, we whittled the group down to a smaller pool for closer individual questioning.
Everyone had heard of the case, through newspaper or TV, from neighbors or in church. One by one, they were called to the front if or when they voiced concerns about their ability to be fair in judging the case.
One potential juror turned out to be prescient. She told the courtroom, “I like to do my civic duty and all that. But . . . I wouldn’t want to be responsible if the man is innocent.”
She didn’t make the cut.
Another testified that it would be “very difficult for me not to believe” police officers. She would always “take their word over someone else’s, to be very plain about it.” Ken Anderson told her he hoped “everyone on the jury panel feels exactly like you do.”
That’s what I feared most.
As I sat in my chair, watching people who worried about convicting an innocent man be sent away and other, less conscientious folks make the cut, my hope for a fair trial dwindled.
Bill White and Bill Allison did their best. At that time both were in leadership positions with area criminal defense legal groups, and the courtroom was packed every day with attorneys eager to watch them work. Still, the odds were as stacked against my lawyers as they were against me. But my lawyers would not pay as dearly for a loss.
By the end of that first day, we had a jury in place, seven men and five women. I couldn’t help but think that any of them might have felt at home in the Eisenhower fifties. They were community minded and worried about crime. They admired and trusted the sheriff and believed the prosecutor represented them. I was just another of the many outsiders who had been moving into their neighborhoods in recent years and, in the process, rapidly changing their quiet corner of the world into a more crowded, more conflicted place.
Williamson County, Texas, was being pulled into the present. I was being dragged into the past, into a setting where I had little history, no family, and few friends.
Opening statements pretty much set the tone.
I listened and watched the jury as Ken Anderson launched into what was not just an assessment of the case but a histrionic point-by-point assassination of my character. With colorful language and clear disgust, he painted me as a monster—a selfish, cruel, sex-obsessed man who brutally beat his wife to death in a porn-fueled rage.
The imagery he used was as stark and as extreme as possible. I came to recognize this technique as simply his courtroom style—making statements so outrageous, so beyond comprehension, so disturbing, that juries would fill with collective anger against the defendant and the terrible things that Ken Anderson said he had done—even when the actual evidence did not support his awful imaginings.
This habit of his, along with the lurid descriptions he gave to the jury about my character, about what had happened to Chris, about what had happened in my house, left me wondering about his character. What the heck was going on inside his head?
Ken Anderson’s partner on the prosecution team was Mike Davis, a former cop now armed with a law degree—a dangerous man to have against me.
The first witness the prosecution called was my mother-in-law, Rita Kirkpatrick.
She was asked very few questions, but made an impact on the jury when she told them that she could never accept that Chris was dead—that “she would always be part of the family.”
Then she stepped down and asked for permission to stay and watch the rest of the trial, saying she wanted “to make my own decision based upon the evidence.” My attorneys had no problem with that.
She took a seat, positioning herself right behind my chair. My attorneys told me this seating arrangement must have been planned in advance by the prosecution—so that every time the jury looked at me, they would see Chris’s mother and her pain, and they would want to ease it. They would want to hurt me in order to help her.
The next witness gave them plenty of reasons to hate me.
Elizabeth Gee, her husband, and their little boy had lived next door to us for a year. We saw them often as we walked to or from the front door, and in the evenings, both couples would sit and watch the two boys play together in the yard. Elizabeth was, to be honest, not someone I felt close to. Chris and I both thought she was harmless, if a little high-strung. But Elizabeth was the person who’d found Chris’s body, and her story became an important part of the narrative.
On the day she testified, Elizabeth wore a sailor dress and a bow on her head that stuck out as far as her ears on each side. She told the jury how, on the morning of the murder, she had seen Eric sitting on our front steps—going in and out of the house—and occasionally peeking around the car in our driveway to look at Elizabeth as she worked in the yard. She said hello to him but didn’t think anything was amiss.
She began to wonder what was going on around noon, when she realized she hadn’t seen Chris with him at all. She walked over to Eric and picked him up. She said his diaper was heavy and desperately needed changing. So she pushed the front door in and walked through the house calling for Chris. She changed his pants, then walked around and through the house a couple of times. She left Eric at her house playing with her son, then came back and looked further.
In our darkened bedroom, she noticed dresser drawers dumped on the floor, but thought nothing of it. Then she saw that the bedcovers were pulled up all around the bed and tightly tucked in. She knew that wasn’t the way Chris made the bed.
At the top, where the pillow should be, she saw a pile of ba
skets and a blue suitcase. She felt around at the base of the bed through the bedspread. Eventually, her hands could make out what seemed to be feet and ankles. She went to the side of the bed, lifted the covers, and saw a wrist. She felt for a pulse.
Nothing.
Terrified, she ran out and called the sheriff’s department from her home. When they arrived, saw the body, and found the snarky note I had left in the bathroom, she was told that I was a suspect.
And she ran with it. Everything I had ever done—or almost done—was now seen through the prism of my status as a suspect in Chris’s killing. Elizabeth came to court with a long list of my sins—transgressions she said she had observed from her front-row seat in the driveway, on my back deck, and in both of our homes.
I was a rampant jerk, and she had the inside scoop. She told the jury that Chris and I argued about “all kinds of things, what plants they’d plant in the yard,” the cost of the deck, even the weights I had bought. She was primed to tell the jury that I didn’t like our dog and had even kicked our collie in her presence. My attorneys were able to keep that bit out of her testimony.
Elizabeth did say that I had barked at Chris, “Bitch, go get me a beer,” in front of others. She even recounted how I had turned on a Big Bird performer Chris had hired for one of Eric’s birthday parties, saying that as I held my son—within earshot of all the other children, no less—I had snapped at Chris, “Pay the bitch and get her the f*** out of here.”
There was truth to that story. Big Bird had been a big bust at the party. Eric was absolutely terrified by the giant, bright yellow-feathered, long-necked critter. Of course, we didn’t know that until we had planned his whole party around the Big Bird theme, had a house full of kids, and promised to pay the heavily sweating performer. It happens to a lot of parents—clowns are notorious for scaring birthday boys and girls.
The Big Bird incident happened, only it was hilarious. Chris and I had to keep Eric and Big Bird apart throughout the event. Our little boy couldn’t even catch a glimpse of a yellow feather sticking out from around the corner without melting down. But if I had said anything remotely like Elizabeth claimed I did, it was said with a laugh at our ridiculous predicament.
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