Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  So, Bert responded to Skelton's request for Byle and sent a helicopter at taxpayer's expense to fetch him from the Gulf of Mexico. Byle walked into court none too pleased, still dressed in his fishing gear just so he could tell the jury he had not noticed whether Catherine had a pistol in her hand or not. Then Bert had him flown back to his trip.

  After him had come a parade of non-evidentiary character witnesses for both sides, each called to answer just one question about Catherine or me: Did we have a good or bad reputation for truth in the community? My witnesses had included lawyers, judges, neighbors, and media professionals who all agreed my reputation was good. The list included Marvin Zindler, a flamboyant reporter for the local ABC affiliate, Channel 13. A tremendously popular local character, he had served as the model for the broadcaster lampooned in the stage play and movie about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I had known Marvin for years, and he easily ranked as the perfect character witness. Thousands of Channel 13 viewers trusted him to tell them about all kinds of consumer information. And there he sat in the witness stand at Catherine's trial, telling her jury to believe me.

  Skelton and Gray had screamed foul, complaining that prosecutors had no right to bolster my testimony. But Hughes allowed it after Bert's assistant, Ira Jones, charged that Catherine had called me a "fool" and a "liar" during her testimony.

  Besides calling witnesses for me, they also had found a string of witnesses willing to describe as "bad" Catherine's reputation for telling the truth. Those included her former brother-in-law, working then as an assistant district attorney in San Antonio.

  These veracity witnesses moved quickly through the proceeding since they were not allowed to elaborate on their opinions unless prompted by an errant question from Skelton, who did not make the mistake of asking any. But he did stumble again when he offered testimony from a judge designed to attack my credibility.

  "What is Jimmy James doing on their list?" Bert had asked me outside the courtroom. I started laughing. Jimmy James was a state district court judge who had received some unwanted publicity in a story I had written about his frequent appearances as a character witness for criminal defense attorneys charged with drunken driving. I enjoyed teasing Jimmy and often would step inside his courtroom early in the morning to shout, "What's happening today in the court of King James?"

  "I guess he's been more offended than I thought and is here to have a shot at me," I said, explaining the relationship. "I consider it a badge of honor that he thinks I'm a liar."

  Bert grinned and, during cross-examination, reminded Jimmy about my article after Jimmy had throttled my reputation for honesty.

  "Nope," said the judge, "never read those papers."

  Two of the jurors started laughing, and Bert felt he had successfully neutralized the only character witness to testify against me.

  In final arguments, Skelton had ridiculed my version of the events by calling it irrational for anyone to walk into a dark bedroom closet while fearing for their life.

  "I don't know what he's waiting for. A piñata to hit him in the head? Or maybe it's like the bird that used to be on Groucho Marx that comes down with the little card," Skelton said.

  He urged jurors not to fault Catherine for trying to protect "what little dignity she had left" and described the case as an effort to ruin a criminal defense attorney. He addressed the tapes and told jurors he hadn't played them because Catherine had not contradicted anything on them. And he also played the gender card.

  "Now this is Catherine Mehaffey's big sin, and this is what infuriates me about this trial. For years in our society, and I don't know why, we have some attitude it's feminine to get beat up, or it's not feminine to defend yourself. What an outrageous crime, not to sit there and defend your life when some fool is holding a gun on you."

  Bert and Ira had been forceful and articulate in summarizing their case against Catherine for the jury. They both urged jurors to follow the physical evidence, telling them it could not lie and had no reason to deceive them. They called my version the only one that reflected the facts and made sense.

  "Physical evidence doesn't lie," said Ira. "It has no motive, no bias. It just exists. How in heaven's name do we get bullet holes into this chair? She has no explanation for that."

  Ira also urged jurors to consider Catherine herself and said: "You are going to have to hitch your wagon to one woman who will not look you in the eye and give you a straight answer."

  He reminded them of Tommy Bell and her apparent relationship with him. He also ridiculed her attempt to characterize my wounds as superficial. He told jurors to take the pistol into the jury room and hold it. He asked them to consider: "Could you actually fire this thing with the intent to cause a superficial wound?"

  Bert focused on the unanswered question of motive. He reminded the panel that he hadn't been required to demonstrate a motive, noting that could only be done with the power to look inside Catherine's brain. But he speculated on a couple of options. Maybe she feared my knowledge of her activities, whatever those might have been. Maybe she worried about my pursuit of the burglary complaint. Or, he suggested, maybe she had just felt like a woman scorned, unable to contain her rage. Whatever the reason, he argued, jurors could consider only one thing. The evidence showed she had tried to kill me.

  Motive remains a question that has haunted everyone familiar with my case. I can't count the times I've been asked the pivotal question: "Why did she shoot you?" I have usually laughed it off with a buzz line, such as: "She didn't thrive on rejection." But I did have my own explanation, one I needed to confront as I asked: Why did she shoot me? My answer has not been one easily understood by anyone who has never peeked inside her brain, as Bert had suggested. Why did she shoot me? I've always believed she did it simply because she thought she could. I had become just another potential notch on her narcissistic belt, a skeleton to hang in her closet, and another statement to the world, notifying it that she was smarter than everyone else.

  Shifting gears back to the jury's surprise announcement of a verdict, I tried to figure what might have gone wrong as I watched that written verdict form pass from the jury to the bailiff and on to the clerk in what seemed to take an eternity. I listed the possibilities. Maybe Catherine had generated pity from the panel. Maybe they couldn't understand my plan to run an attempted murder sting on her, using myself as the bait. Maybe they didn't like Bert. Maybe they feared a government conspiracy. Or, maybe they just didn't like me and decided I deserved to get shot.

  That thought made me laugh. I recalled Catherine's oft-stated philosophy: "How do you tell what a person deserves? You look at what they get. And that's usually exactly what they deserve."

  Her words floated ironically through my head as the verdict form finally arrived in the clerk's hands, and she began to read the jury's decision:

  "We, the jury, find the defendant, Catherine Mehaffey, guilty as charged in the indictment."

  While the judge polled the jury to ensure a unanimous verdict, Bert turned in my direction and smiled. I grinned and watched Catherine, seated stoically between Will Gray and the Last Cowboy. She looked as if she had used the Medusa stare in a mirror and turned herself to stone.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Friday the 13th, June 1980

  Catherine and her legal team knew she faced a real dilemma. Now would come her turn to beg for mercy in sentencing from the same group of people who had rejected her story the day before by taking only an hour to convict her of attempted murder. Obviously they had concluded her version lacked some significantly persuasive element—perhaps even the truth?

  They have to be pretty pissed, I thought, arriving in the courtroom that morning for this punishment phase of her trial. They obviously think she lied. Even worse, though, she offered a whopper. She insulted their intelligence like she does with everybody. She just told them, "Fuck you, fools. Eat this load of crap." But they threw it back in her face, and now they'll want to feed her some more.

  I tr
ied to imagine what must have transpired for the jury to reach such a quick decision. They likely had used fifteen or twenty minutes alone to elect a foreman. Then they probably had taken a straw vote, just to see how best to proceed. Even if everyone voted guilty on that first poll, I knew from my years covering courts that they normally would have reviewed some of the evidence, at least for appearances. I had seen juries delay their verdicts on slam dunk convictions just to demonstrate their respect for the system. But it looked like this jury just wanted to race back to the courtroom and share their decision as fast as possible.

  In most states, the trial judges handle the sentencing of defendants convicted in their courtrooms, following extensive investigations by the local probation authorities. Those investigations probe the defendants' backgrounds and potential for rehabilitation in an effort to determine the best punishments for their crimes. The process can delay sentencings for months while shifting the focus from the emotion of the trial itself. In contrast, the Texas system requires the convicting jury to reconvene and determine the punishment after another court hearing in which prosecutors and the defense can present additional evidence to sway jurors on the proper sentence.

  Of course, a defendant can opt out of that system and request a sentence from the judge. In Catherine's case, however, that would have presented more risk. Texas law limits prosecutors in their punishment phase presentations to jurors. Bert would not have been allowed to present allegations about Tedesco, for example, unless Skelton and Gray inadvertently opened that door during their questioning of new witnesses. But Catherine's team also had to assume that any in-depth pre-sentence investigation would uncover more details about her troubled past for the judge to consider in his decision. They would have expected him to deliver a harsher sentence than the jury, which might still be swayed by pity for her. So, they wanted to take their chances with the panel of twelve citizens who had only just met her.

  Bert's witnesses could answer only general questions on their opinion about Catherine's reputation as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen. That morning, he offered three who took an oath and called her reputation "bad." One was a judge and another was a homicide detective. The third was a former FBI agent named Kent Ferguson, who had served as the lead private investigator for the Tedesco family's investigation of the doctor's death and Catherine's claim on the estate. When offered his turn to question those witnesses, Skelton quickly declined, knowing that any misstep might unleash a torrent of really damning condemnation as they explained the reasons behind their opinions.

  In her second turn on the witness stand, Catherine sat in a black dress and wept softly, asking for probation on this first conviction and promising to abide by the terms. She also presented a couple of lawyers who vowed to help her stay out of trouble. Bert pressed her for an apology on my shooting and she grudgingly agreed. The punishment hearing had ended on schedule without any of the characteristic high drama and the court broke for lunch. Just as soon as jurors had left the building, however, I learned from Bert that our lunch break would last a little longer than expected.

  "Catherine may have just attempted suicide," said Bert, shaking his head and whistling a bit as he approached me on the bench outside the courtroom. He had tossed out this comment so randomly it caught me off guard. He, too, had been hypnotized by the unpredictability of life with Catherine. He'd made it sound as if a suicide attempt were just another normal episode of the day, following a break for the bathroom and a sandwich for lunch.

  "Say what?" I asked, uncertain whether to be more confused by the first news of an attempt or his inability to report whether it actually had happened.

  "I don't believe it," Bert said. "She said she went into the judge's chambers and took twenty-seven Valiums. So, we sent her to Ben Taub to have her stomach pumped. The trial will probably be delayed a little."

  "Pumping her stomach on the lunch break? She will not like that."

  If she had designed her claim of a suicide attempt to delay the final judgment, Catherine not only failed but then had to endure more indignity as the judge withdrew her bond and ordered her handcuffed during the hospital exam. Then Bert insisted on testimony from the emergency room doctor outside the jury's presence to make sure the court record showed she still maintained the mental faculties to assist with her defense. After watching Catherine vomit the contents of her stomach, the doctor told the judge he concluded she had taken nothing. Jurors, of course, heard none of this and didn't even realize they had missed a rich luncheon performance from the star of this matinee. By early afternoon they were all back in their seats, waiting for the lawyers to again summarize their views on punishment that could range anywhere from probation to life in prison.

  Skelton did not try to insult them further by criticizing their decision. Instead, he told them his job was to "cauterize that wound, try to stop the hurt at this point." He employed a standard argument from his repertoire, citing the American literary classic Catcher in the Rye. He noted the section where the hero, Holden Caulfield, laments the tendency for pranksters to write "Fuck you" on clean white walls as soon as someone has painted them. Of course, Skelton didn't use the phrase itself. In his rendition, Holden lamented the writing of "dirty words" across clean walls. Then Skelton told them that, as Catherine's lawyer, it was his job to try and erase those "dirty words."

  Bert countered that he considered Catherine the author of her own "dirty words" written across my back with a pistol and told them "She is crying because she got caught."

  While the jury deliberated on punishment, I sat in the courtroom trying to digest the impact of all I had heard and reconcile that with an unusual phone call I'd received the day before. It had come from a lawyer in Washington D.C. who identified himself as a kindred spirit in the Mehaffey chronicles.

  "Congratulations," whispered Ferris Bond, identifying himself as a former boyfriend from her law school days. Things had not worked out well for them, either, after he'd decided they should split up. Before he graduated, he said, she had stalked him, assaulted his landlady, stolen and wrecked his car, and set his apartment on fire. Once he received his law degree, he had joined the military primarily to get away from her. He said he had waited many years for someone to bring her down.

  "Do you want a T-shirt?" I had asked. When he stammered in confusion, I just cut him off with a laugh and thanked him for the call of support. You can count on everyone to have a few skeletons in their closets, I thought, but here's a woman who needs a separate closet just to hold all of her skeletons. I couldn't feel guilty about my role in her demise. Had I unfairly exploited her for sex? I wondered. I just didn't buy that charge. She was a woman who used her demure femininity like a bully. Sooner or later, some poor schlub had been bound to trip her up. The timing just turned out right for me.

  The jury only needed another hour. They marched out before quitting time and ordered a sentence of ten years in prison. As a reporter, I had seen juries award probation to first-time offenders who actually had successfully murdered someone. Yet, here was Catherine as a first-offender female, headed for hard time on an attempt. I considered it a strong sentence.

  I realized the cops likely would never nail her on Tedesco. But any conviction is better than nothing. It's hard for an existentialist to consider concepts such as universal justice or destiny. But this turn of events made me wonder.

  What the hell, I rationalized with a chuckle. Maybe it's enough to say universal justice does exist as a law of nature. Then all an existentialist needs to do is acknowledge it.

  And, I reasoned, if the scales of justice do indeed occasionally perform some sort of cosmic balancing act, it probably had been my destiny to square things for Tedesco and lesser victims like Ferris Bond. Give people like Catherine enough rope, and they eventually will make a noose. Some would always say she got away with murder but who was I to know? I only knew for certain what she tried to do to me.

  Others would ask if I considered her pure evil, but I've never been
able to confirm that one, either. I have a hard time grasping what philosopher Roy Baumeister likes to call the "myth of pure evil." He views that concept as a way for folks to blame their problems on unknown outside powers. In a book called Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Baumeister offered this explanation: "In simplest terms, violence is a tool for taking power. The violent person in a relationship gains power over the other."