“No.”
“Did he ever have a do-rag with him?” Magee asked.
“I don’t remember. I didn’t see one. It could have been hidden in one of his trench coat pockets.”
“You never saw him with a do-rag?”
“No.”
“Did you see him purchase gloves?”
“I . . . No. I remember him borrowing Michael’s.”
Magee was a smart lawyer. Through Katie’s testimony, she was pointing out that a lot of what Kyle had said didn’t actually happen the way he had said it did. What she was trying to do was show how complicated and messed-up Kyle was when he hung around them. It was as though whatever Kyle said was taken as gospel by the gang and no one challenged him.
“Did Kyle have a habit of making outrageous statements?” Magee asked.
“Not completely outrageous. I mean, they would be topics of conversation. I mean, he was usually very calm and didn’t do outrageous things very often.”
Magee finished with one more question concerning the “topics” Kyle often brought up, which Katie explained were no different than what they all talked about, “since we were all Wiccan. . . .”
CHAPTER 91
ON OCTOBER 9, 2002, it was time for the prosecution to bring in its arsenal of incriminating evidence against Clara. There was no better witness to begin that process than the well-spoken, seasoned LCSO investigator Greg Locke, who’d had the most interaction with Clara out of any law enforcement. Locke was a cop’s cop, a man who carried himself not as some brassy, in-your-face detective badgering witnesses until they cracked, but rather as the fun uncle type, who made you feel comfortable when talking to him. Locke would immediately bond with jurors, and Jennifer Wexton knew it.
Locke talked of meeting Clara and Michelle that first time at JMU and explaining to them that their father had been found dead. Wexton asked how Clara responded to the news—had she exhibited any emotion?
“No, she did not.”
From there, Locke explained the conversation he’d had with Clara, Michelle, and Jesse Schwartz that first time at the LCSO on December 12, 2001. What Wexton wanted to establish here was that Michelle, Jesse, and Clara all came in willingly and were not “restrained” in any way. They could have gotten up and left at any time they wanted. Locke didn’t get into the content of the interviews too much, or talk about what was said. He, more or less, gave Wexton the opportunity to admit several pieces of evidence: phone records, online conversation transcripts, and other items that would bury any defense claim that Clara might lodge of not knowing about the murder.
Wexton asked Locke next to focus on a few specific things Clara had said to him about her father.
Locke explained that Clara admitted to not having a good relationship with Dr. Schwartz, how growing up was difficult for her, especially after her mother had passed away. Then he talked about how she said her father hated the way she dressed.
“And she stated that there was some physical abuse, that occasionally he would slap her.... One particular occasion, he punched her in the arm.”
Then Locke added how Clara had said there was one instance of sexual abuse when she was in the ninth grade: how “he touched her butt. . . .” That was it, Locke said, as far as what she told him about any sexual abuse.
It was a butt slap as she walked by.
From that point forward, Locke talked about the entire content of the interviews he conducted with Clara after that first one and how she began to work Kyle into the conversations as a guy who perhaps took her stories a little too far and murdered her father by his own accord, simply to protect her.
Locke didn’t believe it, of course, but he allowed her to talk and he listened. As the questions and answers carried on between him and Wexton, Locke basically went through just about everything Clara had told him during the interviews.
Ultimately, there was a lot of objection that did not hold water.
At one point, Locke talked about how Clara came up to him after the interview, in the lobby, and Wexton asked if there was anything that Clara had said to him as they ended the interview that day.
Locke talked about Clara pulling him aside, closing the door so Michelle couldn’t hear her ask about the “estate” and if Michelle was going to be able to cut her out of her father’s will. This set up the state’s motive argument—Clara was driven by three things:
Money. Money. Money.
“‘If Michelle’s pissed at me,’” Locke recounted, speaking for Clara, “‘can she cut me out of the will?’”
There was silence in the room after he said it. Jurors were undoubtedly astounded by the audacity of Clara for asking this merely days after her friend murdered her father (which was an indisputable, unimpeachable fact), asking this cop if she was not going to get her share of the estate.
After that, Locke explained how Jesse had called him on December 19 and wanted to know if the LCSO needed them to come in, because they were heading back to school. This allowed Wexton to place into the record the transcripts of the interview that Locke had stealthily recorded.
They talked about Locke participating in the search of Clara’s dorm room.
The journals.
The trash.
The computer.
The conversations online with both Kyle and Patrick.
Then came the most damning line from the investigator: Clara had told him that she knew “in her heart of hearts” that Kyle would kill her father.
Confident the jury was getting a better, more well-rounded picture of who Clara Schwartz truly was, Wexton offered up the tape of the interview. Jurors could see and hear for themselves just how manipulative and uncaring this then-teenager had been.
When the tape finished playing for jurors and the gallery, Wexton said she was finished. What else was there left to say about a girl who, whenever she was backed into a corner, changed her story just ever so slightly in order to give the LCSO what they wanted to hear?
JAMES CONNELL BEGAN by asking Locke about the “death scene” and if he had gone to it.
Locke said he had.
Connell then brought up how the homicide was quite the media event, apparently suggesting that the pressure was on to solve the case of the high-profile scientist murdered in his own home.
That idea went nowhere.
Then Connell moved on to the visit on December 10 that Locke made with his colleagues to JMU. Locke had stated that Clara showed no emotion.
When she answered the door, Connell pointed out, “her eyes were red—correct, sir?”
“Yes, her eyes appeared to be red.”
“As if she had been crying, sir?”
“Either an irritation or crying.”
Connell became a bit abrasive with his sarcastic “sir” tag to just about every question he asked Locke. He was trying to put out that fire of Clara not being unhappy or sad at the news by making jurors believe that Locke and his colleagues might have been a bit pushy and judgmental right off the bat with Clara.
It didn’t work. Locke held firm that he was only doing his job by notifying her and she did not respond the way in which they’d expect a daughter to react to such bad news—the way that Michelle had, in fact.
Connell pointed out that Clara actually hugged her sister and comforted her—“Right, sir?”
“Yes.”
For the next half hour, Connell essentially picked and chose—what else could he do?—those moments during the interviews that might help him project a theory of reasonable doubt, which was his only hope here. He did this by saying how forthcoming Clara had been with information, which wasn’t the sign of a guilty person.
Connell stressed how Clara gave up Kyle, gave up Katie and Mike, and gave up the fact that she had a storage unit with knives inside.
Locke agreed to all of it.
Yet, any mindful juror could tell that she gave up her knives because she knew she hadn’t killed her father with those weapons. And she also knew that Mike, Katie, and Kyl
e were actually at the crime scene.
Sure, she helped.
Whenever it helped her.
The testimony became monotonous and mundane. Locke answered all of Connell’s questions to the best of his knowledge. He said, over and over, that yes, Clara cooperated with the LCSO. Yes, she voluntarily came into the LCSO a few times to talk. Yes, she gave them pertinent information about Kyle and Mike and Katie.
Big deal.
Connell kept pushing back, trying to hammer the point home that Clara never “took Kyle seriously” when she heard him speak of killing or hurting her father.
Locke agreed—but only that, indeed, was what she had said. Still, the fact remained for Locke (and the evidence supported it) that she also said she sent Kyle $60 the day before the murder. Just a couple weeks before, Clara had Kyle stay near her house in the woods. And on the night of the murder, she knew who had done it, when, and how, but she did nothing to call the police and let them know. Time and again, Greg Locke spoke of facts as he’d uncovered them.
There wasn’t much a defense attorney could do with a client who had spoken to the police on a number of occasions without a lawyer. Clara had broken the Golden Rule when being questioned by cops for anything: She had opened her mouth—several times—without legal counsel in the room to advise her. Here was that evidence in court now coming back to bite her in the ass.
The only real contentious issue the defense was able to pull from questioning Locke was to ask him why he hadn’t recorded all of the interviews.
But Greg Locke had a great excuse for that. During those first few days, he said, they were simply on a “fact-finding” mission and not really sure who was involved in the murder, so there was no reason to record conversations or interviews. The more they spoke to Clara, however, the more they believed she might be involved. As a result, they then began to record the conversations whenever they spoke, to make sure they had a record of it.
CHAPTER 92
OVER THE NEXT several days, the prosecution got on a roll, calling expert witnesses to bolster its case against Clara along the lines of forensic (computer) and anecdotal evidence, explaining perfectly how Kyle might be a bit mentally incompetent, but what he said happened, happened. He wasn’t making up things to try and pull Clara into a sinking-ship situation.
One of those witnesses was Brandy, Kyle’s ex-girlfriend, who said there came a time when Clara called the house “every day asking for Kyle, no matter what time” of the day or night. Additionally, Clara never wanted to talk to her. “She always asked for Kyle.” That is, Brandy told jurors, until the afternoon of December 8, 2001. Clara called and asked for Brandy and, out of the blue, wanted to chat for “two hours.”
“She told me that she hated her father, her father was abusing her, and he was trying to kill her.”
“Did she say anything about [how] he was abusing her?”
“Sexually.”
Was there anything left to say after that?
CHAPTER 93
THE FIRST INDICATION that the trial might take a turn toward exonerating Clara came when her attorneys brought in what might have at first sounded like a dramatic bombshell. Attorney Connell called LCSO investigator Rob Spitler, who had done a comprehensive search of the computers inside Clara’s dorm room and at her home. Spitler had testified for the prosecution already, but Clara’s team had some questions for him pertaining, specifically, to what was found on a laptop computer that Robert Schwartz had used at home.
Spitler didn’t mention who, but he said someone had made a “personal” request of him “asking” to check Schwartz’s laptop for “additional information.”
“And what in particular were you searching for?” Connell asked.
“Images depicting young children and any information related to these groups.”
“Young children in general?” Connell asked, knowing quite well where this was headed.
“Depicting children, child pornography, or images of young children in various stages of undress or sexual activity.”
If the defense could prove that Schwartz was downloading child porn, that information was certainly a game changer. Clara was walking.
So, was Robert Schwartz, as Clara’s defense insinuated, a collector of child pornography? Was he a guy who surfed the Internet and downloaded the most vile images imaginable to most human beings—likely including the twelve sitting on the jury? If Clara’s team could prove it, this one fact alone would destroy the man and his reputation. Jurors might want him dead, in other words, and truly think maybe Clara had been viciously and sexually abused. She’d pull the sympathy card immediately.
Investigator Spitler went on to say that while searching Schwartz’s laptop, he found “three” different “newsgroups” that the computer had belonged to, each of which involved “kiddie porn” and “child pornography.” These were sites dedicated to pornography of a specific type: teen girls and teen redhead girls. They also had an element of sadism and masochism to them. There were forty-one images in particular that the LCSO had found.
“Did you examine all forty-one valid images?” Connell asked.
“Yes, I did.”
Connell asked what the images depicted.
“They depict minors, preteen minors, in various stages of undress and sexual activity.”
“Are we talking about seventeen-year-olds?”
“I would say twelve and younger.”
“Sir, did you come across one particular set of photographs involving a girl with a long braid?”
Spitler said he couldn’t recall exactly what each image portrayed. He’d have to go back and look to be certain.
Connell handed him a list from the LCSO investigation.
“Braided hair?” Connell asked after Spitler looked at the list describing each photo. The idea here was that the defendant was sitting in the courtroom with a braid curling down the front of her blouse.
“Yes,” Spitler agreed.
A few more questions and Basham took over for the state.
“Is this computer password protected?” Basham asked right away.
Spitler said he didn’t deal with that side of forensic computer science. The answer, the prosecution proved, however, was no—anyone could have gotten into that laptop.
The other extremely important fact about this evidence smearing the victim of a homicide that was brought up by the defense became the dates in which the alleged files were created. That one photo, for example, the one depicting the girl with the braid, was created and last accessed (meaning looked at and downloaded) on the day Schwartz was murdered, December 8, about thirty minutes before Kyle knocked on the door. The earliest any of those photos was downloaded and viewed was December 5, 2001. That was three days before Schwartz was murdered, Spitler testified under cross-examination by the state. No pornographic images were saved to that laptop earlier than December 5 of that year. Schwartz had images on that computer’s hard drive—family photos and other common photographs—dating back to 1997.
One might think that with pornography, it’s not something an offender simply decides to do on one particular day, but it happens over a period of time. It’s an obsession, really, that one cannot control.
MICHELLE SCHWARTZ THEN came in for the state sometime after Spitler and testified that Clara had access to that same laptop computer and that it was not password protected. She said Clara was home a lot. The computer was always on the table or on Schwartz’s desk. It would have been easy for Clara to hop onto it and begin surfing the Internet.
What’s more, the first time, Michelle said, that Clara ever mentioned anything to her about their dad hurting or poisoning her was right before that interview with police on December 20, 2001—the same one Michelle sat in on.
Perhaps the bigger question (of which no one brought up): Would Schwartz, if he was downloading child porn, leave a laptop, unprotected by a password, on the kitchen table—a computer that the family often used?
“Had she ever compl
ained to you about physical or sexual abuse by anyone?” Basham asked Michelle.
“No, sir, she did not.”
Had Clara Schwartz gone to such a length to cover herself as to download child porn onto her father’s computer?
The prosecution never presented evidence of such a claim, but it would appear that someone besides Dr. Schwartz downloaded those images to the computer. It was either that or Dr. Schwartz had a secret he had kept hidden for those three days before he was murdered.
CHAPTER 94
ON OCTOBER 11, the state showed a videotape of the interview Greg Locke conducted with Clara. Locke then came back into the court and, through testimony, verified and validated everything he could about the interview. After that, and a few general conversations with the judge, the state rested. They had put on the best case possible by simply presenting the evidence that Clara herself had given them. They didn’t need theatrics or fanfare, not even Kyle coming in and pointing a finger and telling jurors that she put him up to it. Jennifer Wexton and Owen Basham believed that Clara had dug her own hole in the sand and had put her own head into it by thinking she could outsmart the LCSO. It was that simple.
The defense could only do so much here with what they had in order to put on a solid argument that Clara had no idea her friend was going to murder her father. The best way for them to do it was to bring in Kyle’s psychiatrists and see if they could get one or two to testify under oath that Kyle was quite capable on his own of committing a horrendous murder. He was a bomb with a short wick. He didn’t need anyone telling him what to do, especially where violence was concerned.
In they came, one after the other, several of the psychiatrists and social workers and their supervisors that Kyle had seen. And all of them read from, essentially, the same narrative: Kyle Hulbert had been in and out of foster homes. Kyle Hulbert was volatile and explosive. Kyle Hulbert was in and out of treatment facilities. Kyle Hulbert had behavioral issues all his life. Kyle Hulbert was prone to listening to Ordog and Nicodemus. Kyle Hulbert was quite capable of acting on his own. Kyle Hulbert had reported visual hallucinations.
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