Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  According to her I said, "Cindy and you are both bitches."

  Seeing me with the gun, she said she replied, "Gary, I am sorry. I have been all wrong. I will do anything." Then she told jurors with a sigh, "And you always think you will be brave if somebody points a gun at you, but you're not. You will say anything."

  To buy time, she said she told me I could find the missing address book and letter back in the bedroom. Instead of walking back there to look, however, she said I forced her up from the couch and made her walk backwards into the bedroom.

  "He was trying to keep his eye on me and the gun and he was still really wanting to go for the closet," Catherine testified. "I'm not a very good housekeeper, which the pictures show, and my shoes were all over the floor of the closet. He couldn't reach the top shelf."

  In her version, I held the pistol with one hand and tried to maneuver that chair with the other so I could use it as a footstool to see the shelves in the closet. But I couldn't get past all those shoes in the floor. As I struggled with the chair, Catherine said she dropped to the floor.

  "Everything I have read about this," she testified, "you make yourself humble to the person shooting at you, and you make them back down."

  In her version, Catherine had stashed the larger .32-caliber pistol on the floor beneath her bed, where her kneeling position allowed her the chance to grab it.

  "I know this is going to look silly," she said, twisting in the chair to demonstrate for the jury. "I saw this in a movie. You hold yourself sideways, and the bullets don't hit you. I went like that, and I just shot. Then I fell on the bed rolling. I was just trying to get out the door."

  In her version, she said I then started backing down the hall in retreat.

  "He wouldn't drop the gun," she said. She apologized for confusion in describing the scene to the jury and said, "I was still shooting."

  She said she saw me exit through the front door. Then, she claimed that she was the one yelling, "Murder!" She said she followed me out the door.

  "I thought maybe he might have been shot, and he might fall down somewhere in the street and die, and I knew he was crazy and repentant for everything he did probably, and he was stoned. If he died, I didn't want it on my conscience. I was going to throw him down on the ground and call an ambulance or something."

  But I ran on to the grocery store, she said. So, she said, she returned to the house with the teenaged girls to await the police.

  Then Skelton sat down, surrendering Catherine to Bert, who wasted no time lighting her fuse.

  SIXTY-THREE

  June 11, 1980

  "Ms. Mehaffey, you know how to shoot a gun, right?"

  "Obviously I don't."

  Three jurors raised their eyebrows in surprise, Skelton banged his forehead against the wooden table, and Bert paused, wondering if he had heard that answer correctly.

  With her first response on cross-examination, Catherine set the tone for what would be a defensive disaster. Did she really think she had forged such a bond with the jurors that they could quickly share an inside joke? She was grinning all by herself.

  "Why did you say, 'Obviously I don't know how?'" Bert asked, hoping she would dig a deeper hole.

  "I don't know why I said that."

  Catherine's sassy response had given Bert a quick opening to delve into one of the darker events of her past. He questioned her further about her use of firearms over the years and then asked about the time she had shot a pistol at her first husband, Matt Quinlan, while living in Japan where Matt had served in the military.

  Possibly still enthralled by her viewing of The Long Riders the night before, Catherine finally snorted, "If you are making me Jesse James, Bert, I am not."

  Unable to resist, Bert just said, "Right. Maybe Jessica James."

  "I would object to your sidebar remarks, Jessica James," Catherine said before her own attorneys could rise to admonish him.

  "You don't like that?" Bert asked.

  "I don't think you would like it, either."

  Before Bert could respond, the judge intervened and ordered: "Both of you keep your remarks to yourselves."

  Catherine finally admitted firing a pistol while sitting in a living room with Quinlan but argued it had been accidental while he was teaching her to use it. Then Bert asked her about firing at an attorney named John Grant on another occasion, but she denied that one.

  "Why don't you subpoena John Grant and ask him," she said.

  Unknown to Catherine, Bert and his investigator had located Grant, who had moved to another city. But when the investigator flew there to deliver the subpoena, Grant had packed up and moved again, apparently unwilling to come testify against her. Unable to impeach her denial of the shooting with testimony from the target himself, Bert changed the subject and started asking about the tapes. Although he had no intention of introducing the Exorcist Tape again, Bert wanted to force her to repeat her threats from it. If she denied any of it, she knew he could play it then in an effort to show her as a liar, forfeiting any sympathy the tape itself might generate.

  Bert asked if she had ordered Tommy Bell to burglarize Strong's house so he could get those tapes, and she denied it. So, he started asking about Bell.

  "He was a burglar and a robber, just as his girlfriend testified," she conceded.

  "So," asked Bert, "it was just a big coincidence that Tommy Bell happened to have burglarized Taylor's house?"

  Before she could reply, Will Gray objected to the question, telling the judge it was "invading the province of the jury." The judge agreed, leaving jurors to determine the degree of coincidence, and Bert was satisfied they would understand his point. So, he asked her about threats she had made on my life.

  "I never said, 'Gary, I am going to kill you.' I told him I was going to sue him," she said.

  When Catherine charged that the tapes had contained "intimate conversations" between us, Bert challenged her, saying the tapes actually contained her threats.

  "You never told anybody, 'He has to beg for my mercy?'"

  "I certainly made that statement," she admitted, aware that any denial would bring the tape into the trial in a way that would show her as a liar rather than a victim. Then she added, "He should have begged for an apology."

  "Did you make the statement, 'I never killed anyone before, but he has done so much'?" Bert asked, running down the list of threats from the Exorcist Tape. And Bert forced Catherine to continue admitting her threats.

  "And I am starting to hate him now," said Bert. "You re saying that?"

  "I dislike him intensely."

  "And you are sorry you weren't successful in your attempts to kill him?"

  "I am not sorry I was not successful in my attempt to kill him. I am very glad he's not dead. I wouldn't like to have any human being's death on my conscience, no matter what they had done first."

  "Are you saying you had tremendous hostility, and you cannot forget it?"

  "I do have and have had tremendous hostility, and it's been very hard for me to put out of my mind the events of that night and what he did."

  Bert challenged her further about the tapes, charging that she actually had wanted a tape that had exposed her "activities" to the district attorney's office. And Catherine countered with unrelated comments designed to generate as much sympathy as possible from the jury.

  "Any lawyer in Houston does not like to have Special Crimes have their wife or husband or girlfriend go and whine and moan—"she began, but Bert cut her off.

  "So anybody could go to Special Crimes and tell them about their activities, and they would be very concerned?"

  "Any lawyer would be. It's just making a fool out of you, going with somebody like that who is going to Special Crimes and making tapes about you."

  "If they didn't have anything to say about you that would cause you harm, anything not illegal, there wouldn't be any concern, would there?"

  "Your intimate relationships with another person do embarrass you."

&n
bsp; "You mean Mr. Taylor told the DA's office about your intimate relationships?"

  "I believe he did in the last trial. He sat here and talked about our intimate relationship, and I had to listen to it."

  "That gave you great concern, didn't it?"

  "It humiliated me. It caused me great grief. I was ashamed to face people that I had taken him around. I was sickened with myself that I had ever gone out with him. I thought he was a despicable person to do something like that."

  Although Gray and Skelton demanded Bert play the tape for the jury, they never asked the judge to order it played again. Neither side wanted the Exorcist Tape as evidence. So Bert just continued questioning Catherine about the things she had told Strong on the tape, forcing her to enter her threats as evidence without using the tape itself.

  "Isn't it true that the tape recording you talked about contained no intimate relationship or evidence of an intimate relationship with you and Mr. Taylor, but rather the kind of words on that tape that would cause some person great fear and concern if they were directed toward them? Isn't it true they played the tapes in the press room to show the other working members of the press why they were trying to keep you out? Wasn't there a time when a deputy was called to the press room when you were there?"

  Although Skelton had successfully objected to all those questions, Catherine intervened and said, "That's a question you asked that I didn't get to answer."

  Skelton stared at his client and asked the judge, "Instruct the witness to answer questions that are asked."

  Bert led her through our confrontation in the press room when she grabbed my necktie. At one point, he asked her about her law practice and triggered this exchange:

  "It's none of your business who my clients are."

  "You made it our business when you shot Mr. Taylor."

  Guiding her to the night of the shooting, Bert asked if Strong had been present when she told me, "There is only one way this can end. One of us must die."

  Catherine snarled, "That is an incredible statement. One of us does not have to die."

  Bert led her back through her version of that night and asked her about my demeanor.

  "He was very upset. He was wigged out," she blabbered, unable to stop. "He had been continuously talking that night about the breakup of his marriage. He could be divorced in the morning. His wife is a bitch. I said, 'I don't want to hear any more of it. Whenever you run to her, you call me one. Whenever you run to me, you call her one. I don't want your problems.' I guess I didn't do right that night. I should have listened to Mr. Taylor because he was a soul in torment."

  Well into her version of the shooting, Bert started asking about discrepancies. He reminded her that one of the teenaged girls testified she told them she had hidden her gun in the living room under a table.

  "That may have been her misunderstanding. I might have been hysterical."

  Then he asked about discrepancies when she answered questions on the scene from the police.

  "When the six policemen and the two girls were there, they were all talking to me at once. It's like the children's game where everyone whispers, and, at the end of the game when the last person gets up and tells what he heard, it's not what the first person started with. Nobody was asking me. People would say, 'Would that be right?' And I would say, 'Yes.'"

  Bert recalled testimony from a detective who said she told him that night she had gotten her pistol from under the couch.

  "Yes, I remember that," she said. "But you just can't jump up and say, 'No, that's not what really happened.' Nobody would listen."

  She tried to belittle my injuries with another feeble attempt at humor. When Bert cited the wound to my scalp and asked, "That's pretty close to your brain, isn't it?" she replied sarcastically: "In his case?" But no one laughed.

  "You want this jury to believe that is not a serious act, shooting somebody in the skull?" asked Bert.

  "I am not the murderer, either, who goes over and tries to shoot an unarmed woman or whatever he was trying to do."

  "You wouldn't be here now if you hadn't have shot him in the back," Bert said.

  "Why didn't he drop the gun? What was he doing in the house?" she demanded.

  Asked about the number of shots she fired, Catherine said, "You start, you can't stop."

  When she finally admitted that my wounds could have been more serious, Catherine spoiled the humility by adding, "I don't think Mr. Taylor will ever again walk into somebody's house and pull a gun on them like that."

  And Bert invited her to share some philosophy with jurors, asking if she had ever told anyone, "Don't make a threat you don't intend to back up."

  "I have heard that statement and made it a truism," she replied. "Don't make threats to people. You don't know how they are going to react."

  "You shot him in the back somehow when he was backing away from you?" Bert asked, emphasizing the confusion in her story.

  "I must have been the one," she sighed, apparently worn down. "There was no one else there but he and I."

  SIXTY-FOUR

  June 12, 1980

  The jury had been deliberating barely an hour when Judge Hughes summoned them back to the courtroom at the end of the day. It had been a long one, too, and the judge knew the jurors had a mountain of evidence and testimony to analyze. He figured they had had time enough to elect a foreman. The judge wanted them to go home, rest, and return fresh on Friday morning to sort it all out, so we could have a decision before the weekend.

  "I don't know how close you are to a verdict, and I don't want to know," the judge began. "Unless you want to deliberate longer, I am going to recess for the night and let you come back in the morning."

  "We have arrived at a verdict," one of the jurors replied. His announcement stunned the small audience that had gathered for what they expected to be a routine adjournment. Catherine and her lawyers snapped to attention at the defense table while Bert whirled his head to find me in the crowd. Another assistant DA caught my eye and shot me a thumbs-down gesture. He believed they could not have reached a guilty verdict in so short a time with so much physical evidence and testimony to discuss. He was predicting an acquittal.

  "You hadn't buzzed," said the judge.

  "We were getting ready to buzz," replied the juror who apparently had been elected foreman.

  As Judge Hughes ordered him to surrender the written verdict, I held my breath. I couldn't tolerate an acquittal. In my mind I began rehashing this last day of testimony in my mind, working to pinpoint what might have gone wrong…

  I remembered how the defense had called only one other evidentiary witness besides Catherine. And that, too, had backfired. Skelton had demanded that the state produce Ralph Byle, who was Catherine's landlord and next door neighbor. Bert had given Byle permission for a fishing trip because the landlord-neighbor had not seen anything relevant the night of the shooting. When Catherine and her attorneys realized this witness had left Houston, however, they decided to demand his presence in what Bert considered a ploy to accuse the prosecution of hiding a crucial witness. In her own testimony, Catherine had even set the stage for an accusation about the missing witness, mumbling to Bert mysteriously in a non-responsive answer to one question, "We wanted to call him, but you sent him away," She did not identify him, leaving jurors to ponder the mystery.