Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  "One more time," he said. "That's all we can do. Who would have ever thought we would have all that stuff, and they still don't understand?"

  "Bert," I said, "I have a suggestion. You have to force her to the stand. Let's not confuse them with all this Tedesco background and the tapes and everything. Just give the next jury a plain old, garden variety lovers' quarrel. No frills. Show them we dated. No details. I don't kiss and tell. I tried to break up. She shot me. Keep it simple as that. Then she'll have to take the stand."

  But Bert was way ahead of me. He already had decided on a simpler strategy like that for the second trial and quickly agreed with my observation of the obvious. But he had plans to cut even more fat from his presentation. Next time, he said, he didn't even want Strong to testify, unless needed for rebuttal. And, as an evidentiary sword, the Exorcist Tape had shown a double edge. He believed neither side could introduce it and win. He would place the case totally on my back.

  But we also were about to recruit an important ally in a strange turn of events that would slice one more notch in Catherine's reputation.

  SIXTY-ONE

  June 10, 1980

  The evening after day two of Catherine's second trial found me back at Corky's, buying drinks for yet another dangerous woman. Actually, there were two dangerous women at the table along with Jim Strong. But I had focused on one of them. She was the sister of the late Tommy Bell, acknowledged that day in court as a professional burglar and alleged in a recent civil suit as the hit man for the murder of George Tedesco. While our conversation that night at Corky's would have its share of dark overtones, the mood nevertheless was decidedly celebratory, even though both ladies were still in mourning over Tommy's unexpected and violent death just a few weeks before.

  "I know that bitch was responsible for killing him," Bell's sister said, after lighting a cigarette and taking a sip of her beer. She was about ten years my junior and I found her exceptionally attractive in an earthy sort of way. She had been in court that day to lend support to the other young woman sharing drinks with us at Corky's—a woman who had identified herself during testimony as the former girlfriend of the late Tommy Bell.

  Her appearance had followed my testimony, much abbreviated from that first trial. As Bert and I had decided after that March debacle, I told a simple story of love gone wrong with Catherine. There had been no mention of Tedesco or the tapes. Jurors heard only my abbreviated account of the relationship that had ended with a burglary and my shooting. Then Bell's girlfriend took the stand to rock the courtroom and drive Catherine's legal team into the corner for a standing ten-count.

  Although Tommy Bell had never agreed to testify against Catherine, the pressure had grown intense in the weeks between the trials, with Bert seeking any sort of wedge that might force him to turn. The climax occurred on May 5 when police responded to an ambulance call at Bell's apartment and found he'd been shot to death while watching television. His roommate reported Bell had been playing Russian roulette with a pistol and had accidentally killed himself with a shot to the head. While they could find no evidence indicating anything different, the police did discover something that would prove crucial in the second Mehaffey trial. Right there at the death scene, connected to Bell's television, they found Jim Strong's Beta Max, which had been stolen in the January 15 burglary. Finally Bert had secured physical evidence linking Bell to the burglary. He just needed to link Catherine with Bell.

  And Bell's girlfriend was quick to oblige. She testified only briefly to make two points. She told jurors that her boyfriend had not acquired the Beta Max until after the middle of January. And she also told them that Bell had been a client of Catherine Mehaffey.

  "What was Tommy Bell's profession?" asked Bert.

  "Lots of things," she replied. "But he did rob and do a lot of burglaries."

  In his turn with her, Skelton drilled a little deeper into Bell's death and saw it backfire when he raised a question about the cause. His questions allowed her to challenge the assertion Bell had died in an accident, leaving jurors to question the mystery themselves and demonstrating Bell's girlfriend possessed a Medusa stare of her own, directing it at Catherine.

  "He had a shot to the head, but he wasn't playing Russian roulette," she testified in a steady voice that made clear these two women hated each other. "I have no way of saying for definite. The case hasn't closed."

  All that remained was for me to return to the stand and positively identify the Beta Max as the one stolen from Strong in the January 15 burglary. As quickly as that, Bert had shown jurors that Catherine was not the type to walk quietly away from a simple domestic dispute. He had linked Catherine to a professional burglar who had died violently in possession of something stolen from my home. Further investigation of Bell's death had produced no evidence to bring charges against anyone. The name of Tommy Bell would, however, fill another space on the list of Mehaffey associates and lovers to meet an untimely death. He no longer was eligible to receive one of our "Mehaffey Survivor" T-shirts since he had failed to survive. And his sister was convinced Catherine had orchestrated his death somehow.

  I had been sitting beside Bell's sister on a bench in the hall outside the courtroom and would not learn until later from reading a transcript exactly what Bell's girlfriend had said in court. Bell's sister had been subpoenaed to testify, too, but Bert had been reluctant to call her for fear she might say something to trigger a mistrial. Neither of us was allowed to sit in the courtroom and hear the testimony of other witnesses. So we had a little chat ourselves that led to the drinking session that night at Corky's.

  "You're Gary Taylor," she said, introducing herself. "We have a lot in common."

  "We should get a drink," I offered and made plans for Corky's.

  The rest of the trial that day had gone well. Bert called a parade of police officers, forensics experts and other witnesses who assembled the jigsaw puzzle of my shooting for the jury. One detective told of finding both pistols outside near the street. A forensics expert testified that the bullet hole in the seat of the chair had entered from the bottom in a manner consistent with someone holding the chair out as a shield. The two teenaged girls told about my race from the apartment and Catherine's pursuit. And my surgeon testified about removing a .32-caliber slug from my back where it had been lodged about half-an-inch from my chest cavity. Still, Will Gray tried to get the doctor to say I had not been in mortal danger from the wound because the bullet had stopped before killing me. It seemed like a strategy that jurors might find deceptive.

  "I saw him after the injury and at that time he was up, walking around," the doctor said when Gray asked if the wound posed the possibility of permanent injury or death.

  "Wasn't any thanks of Catherine Mehaffey that bullet didn't go into the heart?" asked Bert sarcastically, with his question interrupted by the expected shouting of objections by both of Catherine's attorneys. But he had made his point.

  Then, at Corky's that night, Bell's sister was making her point about Catherine, vowing the vengeance of a feud that would continue until one of them was dead. Admitting her role as a fence for selling the property her brother had stolen, she said she also had worked with Catherine from time to time. She said she knew Catherine owed her brother a large sum of money for a secretive job he had done for her, but Catherine had never paid. Although Bell had never confided the nature of that job to his sister, she just assumed it had been the murder of George Tedesco.

  "Taylor, you know, I don't want to offend you, but your stuff was really shit," she said, changing the subject with a giggle. "I knew right away I couldn't sell that stereo, so I just threw it into a dumper behind a convenience store."

  "I'm not offended. My luggage by Kroger days are over now, and I bought a nicer stereo already. That stuff was junk, wasn't it?"

  "But Jim Strong," she said, nodding at him, "that man had some quality equipment. Tommy wanted the Beta Max for himself. But the pistol and the other things I turned into cash."

&
nbsp; Jeez, I thought, looking right into her eyes, I would really like to fuck you tonight.

  Then I wondered if I hadn't slipped and mumbled that out loud because she grinned and winked at me. I looked at Strong and realized he must have been eavesdropping on our subliminal conversation because he started shaking his head in the negative, reminding me how dangerous a fling with Bell's sister would be. Bert Graham had become something of a probation officer for me, ordering me to avoid controversial situations that could disrupt the trial. I knew he would have had a palsy attack to learn I had taken Tommy Bell's sister out for drinks in the middle of the trial. And his eyes would have popped right out of his head if he were to learn from some defense witness later in the week I had started a sexual affair with that girl. Jurors would likely find some way to convict me of something if they heard about that. So I sighed and made a mental note to myself: Some day figure out why I find bad girls so irresistible.

  "Say," I said, changing the subject, "what do you think would have happened if I had been in the house the night your brother came by? Think I could have taken him?"

  She tilted her head and ran her eyes down the front of my body, humming as she did. Then she said, "You are bigger than he was. But he was quick and wiry with street smarts. It might have been a pretty good match."

  I doubted that I would have given Tommy Bell much trouble at all. But I would have tried, and I was glad there hadn't been a chance to find an answer.

  "You know," Bell's sister said, "after today we're all on Catherine's list now. When she gets around to settling all of her debts, she'll want payment from us."

  "I don't know what we can do about that," I said.

  "I do," she said. "I want us to make a pact. If any one of us turns up dead, the other three will go after her."

  I looked at Strong, who blinked long and hard. We'd been invited to join a death pact.

  Well, I thought, why not? We've had just about every other silly thing in this adventure, why not this, too?

  I could predict with some certainty I'd never see these girls again, anyway, so I didn't see the harm in a drunken promise of this sort.

  "All for one?" I said, with more than a twinge of sarcasm, and raised my beer bottle to the center of the table.

  "One for all," said Strong, snickering and clanging his bottle against mine. Then the molls of the depleted Bell gang joined our salute. We all drank up and went our separate ways, our paths never to cross again.

  SIXTY-TWO

  June 11, 1980

  "I went to the movies last night, Gary, and you'll never guess what I saw."

  Catherine had returned from the lunch recess really full of herself and startled everyone in the hall outside the courtroom by walking straight to me with her chatter about the movies. It marked the first time we had spoken since the start of her first trial—when she had explained my survival as evidence that only the good die young. Now she wanted to talk movies. Sitting beside me on the bench outside the courtroom, Strong's head snapped around to look, and his mouth flew open.

  "I could never guess in a thousand years," I told Catherine, chuckling a bit and inviting what I anticipated as a well-rehearsed explanation.

  "I saw The Long Riders—you know, that movie about Jesse James."

  "Like it?"

  "It was great. You know what happened to Jesse James in the end, don't you?"

  With that she whirled and entered the courtroom with attorneys Skelton and Gray in tow.

  "What the fuck was that?" asked Strong breaking into laughter.

  "Jesse James was shot in the back, just like me," I said, "She's getting ready to testify. She was pumping herself up so she could take the stand."

  We both leaped to our feet from the benches where we had sat in boredom all morning after our night out with the molls of the Bell gang. As witnesses, we could not enter the courtroom. But the rules could not stop us from peeping through the small rectangular windows on the double doors, and we smacked our shoulders together vying for a look at Catherine taking the oath before climbing into the witness box. I saw Bert sitting at his table—perched like a tomcat outside a rat hole. All he would have to do is wait for the Last Cowboy to guide Catherine gingerly through that minefield of physical evidence, where she would try to explain everything from the bullet hole in the seat of the chair to the placement of the two pistols, without anything blowing up in her face. Then Bert would have a chance for what might be the prosecutor's dream cross-examination of a lifetime. Catherine was considered a defendant who might even erupt in a violent outburst if forced to trip over her own lies. Word spread quickly around the building, and within minutes Judge Jon Hughes had standing room only left in his court. I expected Skelton would soon need to adjust his nickname and be looking more like the Lost Cowboy once she started to speak.

  Catherine really had no choice but to take the stand in her own defense, despite the dangers of offending the jury with obvious lies. Bert had executed his simplified strategy without a hitch, leaving jurors to decide between my testimony verified by the physical evidence and her explanation, if she chose to provide one. Besides Bert's successful streamlining of the case, the quality of the evidence against her had improved thanks to my courtroom performance. Courthouse insiders are constantly critiquing the appearances of each other whenever called to the stand, and I had won high marks from several observers for a polite but firm presentation to the jury. Although standing my ground during cross-examination, I had not argued with Skelton and projected honesty, according to more than one reviewer.

  But I also knew as Catherine strode to the witness stand, the jury would have my final words from the day before still ringing in their ears. Those words had followed an exchange with Skelton when he challenged my veracity about going back to Catherine's apartment despite concerns about my safety.

  "You sat there for two hours in fear of your life, I suppose?" Skelton had asked with disdain. When I volunteered to explain, he hastily ended his turn. But he left an opening for Bert, who jumped to his feet and asked, "Why did you go over to that house even though you were afraid she would explode?"

  "I wanted to get this thing over with without my kids being involved," I replied. "She had proven she was capable of sending people over to burglarize my house. I had my child with me, and it was time I either faced what she was going to have for me or not. So, I thought I should just go over there and see what would happen."

  "Did she, as a matter of fact, explode?" Bert asked.

  "She, in fact, exploded and justified every fear I had."

  I had seen the jurors watching intently as I explained my decisions that night. I could feel how the sympathy toward her from the tapes in the first trial had shifted to me in this second event. We had forced her to a point where she would have to neutralize the state's case with her version of the events. And it wouldn't be easy. Besides trying to contradict the physical evidence, Catherine had her own domineering attitude to overcome. Before her testimony would end, I knew, she would be objecting to questions from her own lawyer and overruling the judge.

  I learned later from reading the transcript that she wasted no time mentioning the tape recordings that everyone had been working so hard to ignore. Neither side wanted to hear that Exorcist Tape again. But there she was, telling jurors how desperate she had been to recover some tapes that I had made. She denied orchestrating the burglary but said she played along with my accusations in hopes of retrieving these tapes, even though she did not know for certain what was on them. She said she had just heard from someone that I had some tapes.

  "It sounded like this was my chance to get the tapes back," she told the jury. "I was sorry they had been burglarized. I played along."

  Then she started laying on the drama, describing why she began negotiating with Strong for return of the stolen property: "I said, 'Yes, yes. Whatever you say. I am sure I can help you.'"

  Catherine admitted taking my address book and also said she had taken a letter I had writ
ten to Cindy on an earlier occasion. She said she thought she could use those to negotiate for the tapes once she had taken me to her apartment on the pretext of returning items stolen in the burglary.

  "He had a bunch of private numbers for assistant district attorneys in the book—" she volunteered in an obvious attempt to hint that I might be somehow connected to a law enforcement conspiracy against her. But even Skelton cut her off on that charge and moved directly to the shooting. In her version, she decided I should leave. When she told me to go, however, she said I went to the kitchen instead. That was where I must have found her smaller .22-calibre pistol. To explain why the police did not find my fingerprints on that gun, she testified I emerged from the kitchen with it wrapped in a white paper towel and called her a "rotten bitch."