The prosecution called a fleet of witnesses to attest to the Hells Angels’ propensity for violence, and for violent retaliation against those who testified against other Angels in particular. And so the courtroom was filled with references to men named Dirty Bob, Big Tiny, and Pretty Terry, and stories told of men forced to dig their own graves before being shot and killed, and other horrors. Keeping in mind Hunter S. Thompson’s warnings about the overblown law-enforcement response to the Hells Angels, the collected weight of the testimony nonetheless spoke to a certain ruthlessness and efficiency in the dispatch of violence that could not help but be reminiscent of the events at Altamont. Cox would be allowed to testify. But the wily Walker, having fought so hard to keep Cox out of the witness stand, had other plans to discredit his testimony.
The jittery Cox, wearing a blue yachting jacket and baggy off-white twill pants that were almost bell bottoms, struggled to sit still in the witness box. He was undoubtedly thinking about how exposed a courtroom could feel, open to anyone interested in a case or intent on badgering a witness. Cox had seen Meredith Hunter’s death, been covered in the dying man’s blood, had caught a glimpse of the Hells Angel who had been responsible, and was so intent on justice for the dead that after some trepidation he had agreed to appear in open court. But anyone in Cox’s position would likely have been scanning the audience for associates of Passaro’s, wondering what might happen to him when he stepped out of the witness box, what would happen in a day or a week, when another biker might recognize him on the street, or at the supermarket.
So Cox bounced his knee up and down, up and down, loosing his jitters in the rocking motion of his legs, and the tapping sound of his heels against the courtroom floor. The presence of a handful of Hells Angels in the audience, staring menacingly, must have made a frightening experience even more unsettling. The rocking and tapping only increased when Walker pressed Cox on the question of whether or not he had been shown mug shots by the police before being brought in to pick out the culprit from a lineup.
Throughout his testimony, Cox was directed by the prosecution, led by John Burke, to step to the blackboard and point to his position relative to the stage, and to Hunter. Cox testified that he and Hunter were both in the scrum of concertgoers “scrunched together” to the right of the stage. The fight, Cox argued, had begun with the Angels grabbing Hunter by the head and knocking him off the box he was standing on. Hunter fell to the ground in a sitting position. He struggled to get to his feet, reaching into his coat and removing his gun. He gripped the .22 in his left hand as he arose, and began to run.
Cox heard a young woman he later determined was Patti Bredehoft, who “shouted not to shoot.” Hunter made to run off, but as he dashed away, “someone grabbed him,” Cox recounted, and “a man stabbed him in the back.” The man was “short and very stocky with a cut-off jacket on … I couldn’t see the insignia.” Cox spotted Passaro stabbing Hunter twice, and then Hunter fell to the ground once more: “I saw him fall down. Then still being kicked around. But this time he was underneath the scaffold.”
Cox used a pointer to pick out Alan Passaro as the jacket-clad Angel who could be seen lifting his knife above his head and bringing it down in a stabbing motion into Hunter’s back. Burke’s line of questioning established that Passaro was indeed the biker seen in the film footage. Cox’s testimony lined up with Bryant’s footage, but it also picked up the story a few crucial beats earlier. It established that before pulling his gun, Meredith Hunter had already been assaulted by a Hells Angel. The initial provocation was the Angels’, not Hunter’s.
Walker’s cross-examination sought to pull apart Cox’s unequivocal testimony. He tried to get the nervous but unshakable Cox to admit that Hunter’s gun had been pointed toward the stage when he arose, underscoring his assassination thesis. Cox demurred, responding that it was “not a fact.” But Cox’s narrative had notably shifted since his interview with Rolling Stone, and Walker capitalized on his inconsistencies.
Why, he wondered, had Cox told Rolling Stone that Hunter had been stabbed before he brandished his .22, if he was testifying to a different chronology of events under oath? Cox stated that Rolling Stone’s line of questioning had put words in his mouth, but his credibility as a star witness had been severely impugned. Cox had been exposed getting a crucial detail regarding Hunter’s death wrong, raising doubts about the remainder of his testimony.
Walker scored another point when he referenced the Rolling Stone interview to highlight Cox’s belief that a second attacker had also stabbed Hunter. Here was the prosecution’s foremost witness, inadvertently helping to build the defense’s own murky case, even as he insisted on Passaro as the culprit. The inconsistencies between Cox’s two statements, the first (to Rolling Stone) saying that Hunter had been stabbed before he had pulled his gun, and the second saying that he had been stabbed after he pulled his gun, had been savvily wielded by Walker to undercut the impact of Cox’s testimony on the jury, even as much of his testimony went unchallenged by the defense, seemingly damaging to Passaro’s chances. Walker sought to impeach Cox’s trustworthiness, thereby rendering all of his testimony moot.
The prosecution also called Patti Bredehoft to the stand, but her testimony was, like Cox’s, cannily mined by Walker to support his client’s case. She discussed Hunter’s fetching his gun from the Mustang’s trunk, and said she saw an “orange flash” from the gun during the fight with the Hells Angels. One of the investigating officers had already testified that ballistics testing indicated Hunter’s gun had not been fired, but Walker would later argue that more sophisticated ballistics testing might demonstrate it had indeed been fired. Walker would go on to argue that an orange flash, seen in the Maysleses’ film footage, was evidence of the gun being fired. The police had stated that Hunter had not fired his gun, but Walker’s line of argument made it seem just as likely that he had.
* * *
It would now be the defense’s turn to craft a counternarrative, in which Passaro was not a cold-blooded killer but rather a heroic defender of the helpless. After the court returned from its Christmas break, and 1970 turned into 1971, Walker concentrated his efforts on the placement of the knife wounds on Hunter’s body. The defense brought a store mannequin into the courtroom in order to mark the location of each of the knife blows. (The prosecution generously made no effort to disallow the mannequin, even though it was female.) Walker used the incriminating footage as a fence around his client, transforming it from an acute disadvantage to a source of protection. Of all the confusing or hard-to-see actions visible in the brief film clip, perhaps the clearest was that of Passaro lifting his knife above his head before bringing it down in a stabbing motion. The arc of Passaro’s knife implied an entry point on Hunter’s body roughly corresponding with the two shoulder-height wounds, neither of which was, according to testimony, life-threatening.
Doubts were raised about whether Alan Passaro was the sole stabber, or whether, as Walker hoped to convince jurors, there might have been another attacker who had dealt the fatal blow to Hunter. If Walker could limit the damage to his client to agreeing that those two wounds were his responsibility, and argue that the mortal stab wounds were the work of unknown others, then the burden of the first-degree murder charge would be lifted from Passaro. (Later in the trial, Walker argued that it was even possible one of Passaro’s two documented thrusts had not punctured Hunter’s skin, accounting instead for the scratch on Hunter’s neck.)
Walker called Dr. Robert Hiatt, the first medical professional to treat Hunter at the festival. He testified that when he examined Hunter, he was already unconscious, and “very close to death.” The laceration to Hunter’s left kidney alone would have likely been enough to kill him, and Hiatt believed that “major surgery” would have been necessary to save him. The chaos of the festival had also contributed to Hunter’s death, with the ambulance intended to rush him to the hospital blocked by a sea of parked cars. The defense’s multipronged approach simultaneously
implied that Passaro had been defending himself, that he had not been responsible for ending Hunter’s life, and that there would have been no way to save him, anyway.
Several defense witnesses testified that Hunter’s provocative actions had prompted Passaro to act in self-defense. A security guard named Stephen Ellis, who had been standing at the back of the stage when the fatal attack took place, stated that Hunter was “moving his gun in an unsure manner,” pointing it in the direction of the stage, and that the Hells Angels at the front of the stage had leapt down to the ground and surrounded him. “There was a scuffle,” he told the jury, “then the person with the gun was taken out of sight.”
Ellis was soon followed by twenty-eight-year-old Larry Tannahill, another of the Rolling Stones’ biker escorts. Tannahill, who stated in his testimony that he had possibly drunk more than twenty beers over the course of the day of the concert, had seen Hunter at the center of a disturbance in the crowd just below the stage. According to Tannahill, Hunter had been yanked out of his spot by someone in the crowd—not a Hells Angel. “He fell back,” he said of Hunter, “and then turned around, spun around and had a weapon in his hand … and he came back toward the stage with a gun in his hand … He stepped back on the box … I hit him and yelled, ‘He’s got a gun.’” Tannahill demonstrated the forearm shiver he delivered into Hunter’s chest for the jury.
Two weeks after Paul Cox took the stand, providing the closest thing to a definitive narrative of Hunter’s death, Walker summoned his client to the stand to tell his version of the story. Passaro was nearly unrecognizable now, his hair neatly trimmed and styled into a slicked-back pompadour, his upper lip no longer covered by a drooping mustache, his cheeks shorn of the messy mutton-chop sideburns that had once adorned them. In his leather jacket, neatly pressed gray pants, and black shoes, Passaro could have passed for a baby-faced colleague of Walker’s, not the greasy-looking biker accused of ending a young man’s life.
Walker led Passaro through the outline of his story over three days of testimony. Passaro said he was one of the Hells Angels assigned earlier that afternoon to escort the Rolling Stones from their helicopter to their dressing room, where a member of the band—Passaro did not remember that it had been Mick Jagger—was accosted by a bystander. “Was the man subdued?” Walker wondered. “Sure was,” Passaro answered, a note of swagger entering his otherwise deliberately mild testimony.
Passaro had positioned himself at stage right for the Stones’ set, but moved over to stage left to provide additional assistance when a gallon jug of wine thrown from the crowd toppled over one of his fellow Angels’ motorcycles. According to Passaro, he had seen the jam-packed crowd open up on the right side, and noticed a scuffle taking place near the stage. He spotted Hunter taking out his gun, which was pointed in his direction, and lunged at him. “I reacted in fear,” Passaro said, describing his instinctual response as “self-preservation.” He had only taken out his knife after Hunter had already fired his weapon: “The flash in his gun hand I saw. I think the gun went off. I wouldn’t want it to be more than that.”
Passaro saw the gun pointed in his “general direction.” When Hunter swiveled, his back made contact with Passaro’s chest, and Passaro leapt onto Hunter’s back, straining to reach for his left hand, which held the gun. “I went for my knife. I attempted to get his gun hand. I tried to shake the gun loose. I struck at him on the upper shoulder with the knife.” Passaro described himself as “riding” on Hunter’s back as he stabbed him twice.
Once the other Hells Angels took notice of the threat, Passaro went on, “everybody started flying all around,” and he was “knocked away.” He landed on the ground: “I couldn’t see the guy no more.” When Passaro spotted Hunter next, “they were carrying him to the hospital tent.” Passaro claimed that he had had no intention of killing Hunter, wanting only to rip the pistol out of his hands, and keep him from firing again.
Walker sought to downplay the bloodiness of his client’s testimony. Passaro was careful to say that, in the scrum of hand-to-hand combat, he was not even sure if he had actually stabbed Hunter. Moreover, Walker took pains to avoid using the word “stab.” In the cautious language of his defense lawyer, Alan Passaro had never stabbed anyone. The defense described him as seeking to “strike” and “blow,” or having “struck” or engaged in a “striking motion.” “I struck at him twice,” Passaro stated, deftly matching Walker’s phrasing. “I didn’t have no intention of killing.” Even Passaro’s knife, which had been tested and found to have traces of human blood on it, might have been bloodied, the defendant suggested, by his cutting his finger while eating some turkey legs for lunch on the Angels’ bus.
On Passaro’s final day of testimony, Walker sought to walk back some of the more damaging assertions he had made to the police during his interrogation. He had not been smoking marijuana that day; he had lied to the police out of fear when they threatened him with the gas chamber. He may have drunk some beer, but that was all. He also sought to clarify what he had done with his clothing and weapon after the incident. After stabbing Hunter, Passaro had stuck his knife into the ground next to a van belonging to one of the Angels. (How it had gotten back into his sheath, and then his car, was left unexplained.) He had also removed his windbreaker because there was blood on the collar and the right elbow, as well as across its front.
Passaro’s defense was predicated on the idea of a logical and deliberate response to a potential threat, but little else from the concert indicated that the Hells Angels’ collective mind-set was capable of so thoughtful and measured a series of actions. Eyewitness testimony and the footage shot by the Maysleses’ crew documented a security force entirely out of control, intent on proving its own mettle through an overwhelming show of force. The violence had been doled out messily and unpredictably, its intensity only loosely linked to its supposed root cause. Given Cox’s testimony, it seemed more likely that, as in so many other encounters at Altamont, the Angels had wildly overreacted to a concertgoer’s efforts to defend himself, and then escalated even further after his calamitous decision to pull a gun. Nonetheless, Walker had masterfully sheared away each tent-pole of the prosecution’s case, undermining their argument at every step.
In his closing statement, Walker asked the jury to acquit his client, on the grounds that he had acted in self-defense in stabbing Meredith Hunter. Hunter, he argued, was a misguided young man with a liability for recklessness, and some combination of amphetamine haze and aggression had led him to wave his gun in front of three hundred thousand concertgoers, the Rolling Stones, and the Hells Angels.
Walker’s task was to downplay the damage done by Passaro, arguing that he had not inflicted the fatal blows, while Burke’s was to emphasize the tragedy of Meredith Hunter’s death. But the prosecution, surprisingly, had little to say about the eighteen-year-old who had been the victim. Meredith Hunter was little more than a name in court, a specter in a lime-green suit with a girlfriend but seemingly no family, no past, and no future. In a typical murder case, witnesses would be called to speak to the victim’s character, not because good character was a prerequisite for justice, but for the jury to feel the burden of the dead man’s worth. The prosecution presumably chose to avoid all discussion of Hunter’s past out of the fear that his juvenile record would be entered into the proceedings. Why allow the defense to tarnish the victim as a thug with a criminal record, a repeat offender who had undoubtedly graduated to attempted murder on that Saturday?
This resulted, though, in a victim whose death felt secondary to the matter being adjudicated. What was the worth of this black life? The prosecution’s unwillingness to talk about Meredith Hunter as a human being who had assumed he, too, would return home to sleep in his own bed that night rendered the crime unexpectedly bloodless. Hunter’s life was not valued as others’ might have been. In the California of 1970 and 1971, a black teenager was promised equal treatment under the law. But its delivery was inconsistent, and the prosecution ultimately
chose to treat Meredith Hunter as a name without a face—or a body—out of the fear that he would be judged more severely for his youthful missteps than the man accused of ending his life.
The trial ended January 23, the same day that Charles Manson’s fate was decided for the murder of Sharon Tate. The next day, the jury asked Judge Hayes to clarify his instructions on the various charges in play, of which there were five. They also requested another showing of the Maysleses’ footage.
The jury was out for twelve and a half hours before returning with a verdict. Jury foreman Charles J. Shields declared Alan Passaro not guilty of all the charges related to the death of Meredith Hunter. Passaro, freed from the straitjacket of respectability imposed by the trial, released a primal howl of relief, and his wife Celeste, sitting behind him, burst into tears. Passaro blew kisses to her and their four-year-old son Michael. Smoking a cigar that had been handed to him by a guard (had he brought one to the courtroom that day in case Passaro was acquitted?), he told a reporter, “I’m happiest for my mother.” The bailiffs took Passaro back to prison, and his wife exulted: “Oh, Lord! This has renewed my faith in humanity.”
Burke blamed Cox’s testimony, and the diligent work Walker had done to counteract it, for sinking the prosecution’s case: “He was impeached by his inconsistent statements.” But much of Cox’s testimony had stayed the same from the Rolling Stone interview to the trial. Hunter had been assaulted by Hells Angels, had been pursued by them, had fought back, had been stabbed and then beaten to death long after any potential threat was subdued. Cox had told Rolling Stone that Hunter had been stabbed before he pulled out his gun, and the jury that the stabbing had happened after. This undoubtedly damaged the jury’s trust in Cox’s testimony, but it distracted from the larger question of Passaro’s culpability in the violent assault on Hunter. Walker successfully changed the conversation to one more conducive to his client.
Just a Shot Away_Peace, Love, and Tragedy With the Rolling Stones at Altamont Page 26