However the decision was made, there was no turning back. One member of the defense team simply said, “Sawyer messed up and he knows it.”
After a long lunch, Lynch read his charge to the jury, then went back over the special issues they were to consider and reminded them that the closing arguments were those of lawyers making a case, and if they felt unsure or conflicted on any point, they should trust the evidence they’d seen and heard.
Each side got half an hour. Efrain de la Fuente took the state’s first fifteen minutes, stressing the need for accountability, Springsteen’s no-good life in the years since the murders and the evil nature of the crime itself: “Hey, folks. They planned this thing out…knew what they were doing…didn’t want to get caught, so…burn the bodies!” After reemphasizing the Ayerses’ loss, he finished up by asking the jury to vote no to mitigating factors, because Robert Springsteen “ain’t got no excuse for what he did.”
Sawyer alone presented the defense argument. He characterized Rob’s lack of remorse as a sign of his innocence. At a moment when biblical references were in order, he spoke of mercy and the New Testament. He encouraged the jurors, even if they believed him guilty, to have “the courage to spare his life.” Once again, he chose brevity over persuasion. His argument took only six of his allotted thirty minutes.
Robert Smith countered with graphic details. “It took time to have those girls disrobe. It took time to tie them up and gag them. And at any point along the way Mr. Springsteen could go right out the door and not kill anybody. But that’s not what he did….You have to realize that there are people in this world, and one of them is sitting right there, who will come up close to you and press the muzzle of a gun to your head and kill you. So that’s the person we are talking about here. He has that core in him….”
To accompany his description of Springsteen shooting the wounded Amy Ayers in the head while she attempted to crawl away, he projected the photograph of Rob with his arm up, bent at the elbow as he described how she was positioned.
In the hall outside the courtroom, Sawyer told the Statesman he thought his client would be sentenced to death, even though he was innocent, but that they would win the case on appeal.
The jury asked for read-backs. Late in the afternoon, Lynch banged court into recess and everybody went home for the night, including the jury. The next afternoon, after eleven hours of deliberation, the bailiff informed the judge that the jury had come to a decision. Everybody filed back in, including the district attorney himself.
While at least one juror wept, the foreman handed the decision to Lynch, who read it aloud. The jury had unanimously voted yes to continuing threat, no to mitigating factors and yes to intentional murder. Following his mandate, Lynch imposed a sentence of death by lethal injection. Other jurors began to cry. The families of the girls linked arms. The APD officers in attendance tried to disguise their excitement. But Robert Smith and Ronnie Earle hung their heads, some thought to hide their response to a decision they’d worked to avoid by presenting the defendant with an offer they didn’t think he’d refuse. Others disagree, having seen no sign of remorse in these two men’s behavior.
After Lynch informed Springsteen that a death sentence automatically guaranteed an appeal, which he would quickly set in motion, he thanked the jurors, attorneys and spectators for their patience and cooperation, banged his gavel and—court adjourned—swooped out.
“This is not about killing Robert Springsteen,” a sober Robert Smith maintained.
Barbara Ayres-Wilson said it wasn’t that they wanted anybody to die. In years to come, however, she’d change her mind. “He got death,” she told a reporter, “and we were happy about that, but it was still horrible we were hoping to take someone else’s life.”
Pam Ayers said they all needed some kind of ending.
The next day, flanked by the girls’ families, Ronnie Earle held a press conference. “This is,” he said, “a somber occasion. We are doing our job and we all together seek justice and truth.”
Rob’s mother: “I still think it was a railroad job. I’m appalled.”
Bettis: “He’s a proud man. He told the jury his story.”
When pressed by a reporter for an interview, one departing juror said, “Leave me alone. I’ve been through hell.” Jury foreman Phil Rodriguez said, “I think our whole community will appreciate this being over.”
Lynch headed to Colorado for a fishing trip with his son.
—
Among closing arguments in a capital case, perhaps the best known is the one given by Clarence Darrow in 1924, when the state of Illinois wanted to hang Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold for the Chicago “thrill killing” of young Bobby Franks. Local response to what was called “the crime of the century” closely resembled Austin’s reaction to the Yogurt Shop Murders. The shocked city wanted an outcome; they wanted to understand; and they wanted blood.
On the first day of the trial, as the prosecution honed its opening statement and the press settled in for a long, juicy trial, Darrow—who represented both defendants—surprised the state, the judge and the world at large by issuing a last-minute guilty plea. The evidence against his clients was indisputable. If he couldn’t protect the boys from a guilty verdict, he might at least be able to save their lives. Darrow’s closing statement went on for a record twelve and a half hours. It has many quotable passages, some of which are applicable to Springsteen. Here is one that emphasizes the young age of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were also teenagers at the time of the murder:
I know that these boys are not fit to be at large. I believe they will not be until they pass through the next stage of life, at forty-five or fifty….I would not tell this court that I do not hope that some time, when life and age has changed their bodies, as it does, and has changed their emotions, as it does, that they may once more return to life. I would be the last person on earth to close the door of hope to any human being that lives, and least of all to my clients.
During his punishment argument, Sawyer had made a similar plea: “If you genuinely believe he did this, as I know you do, then tell me how important it is for him to at some point in his life discover what he has done.”
But Leopold and Loeb had entered a guilty plea. And they had Darrow, who directed his argument not to a jury, but a judge, who famously imposed a sentence of ninety-nine years plus life.
SCOTT
After Darla Davis read the grand jury indictment and Mike Scott’s plea of not guilty was recorded, Robert Smith followed his Springsteen opener pretty closely. He honed it stylistically, leaning even more heavily on his habit of connecting terrible events with a repetitive, hypnotically understated conjunction: “Something happened. And the ligature that was holding her hands together came loose, and the gag that was on her mouth came loose. And she fought and she tried to get away and they subdued her. And this defendant used that sock gag as a ligature and choked her to death. And this defendant, Michael James Scott, shot her in the top of the head with a .22-caliber revolver.”
His statement went on much longer this time—well over an hour and a half—leading Lynch to call for a break before he’d finished.
The defense attorneys divided their opening into three parts: Garcia first and last, Gilford in the middle.
Carlos began with a thesis: “This case is about one thing—the crime scene and the physical evidence. The two objective things leading to one real simple truth. Michael James Scott is innocent of this crime. Robert Springsteen is innocent. Forrest Welborn is innocent and Maurice Pierce is innocent.” And while he intended to stay on point with that, he kept veering off into unmapped territory and then had to backtrack. Once he got to the Paul Johnson task force, he managed to return to his main strategy, emphasizing that everything that could be manipulated, changed, pressured, persuaded—even memories, discrepancies and perceptions—had been, and for one purpose only: to make them fit this crime. He finished by reminding the jury that the prosecution’s mandate
was to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Gilford’s statement focused on the interrogation, covering false confessions, memory, coercive tactics and time itself. More colloquial than Garcia, he addressed the jurors as “friends” and told them that, hey, he’d been a prosecutor himself down in Bexar County. He’d prosecuted criminal cases; he’d heard confessions. But what the state had here, he assured them, “ain’t a confession.” Nearing the finish, he reminded the jury to “watch the theory of memory that they posit to Mike over and over again. Just as sure as God made little green apples, that is not how our memory works. We do not have a VCR in our heads and anybody that has studied it will tell you that…these are people who haven’t studied memory one lick, but they convinced him of it.”
By this time the two lawyers had gone on for two and a half hours, with Garcia’s finisher still to come. Lynch gave him half an hour, not a minute more, and when issued a five-minute warning, he quickly summed up. “They will do whatever it takes…to make these boys fit. The truth is that when this thing is over, we are going to be able to prove what we said this afternoon. You are going to understand why there will be no conviction in this case. There will be no conviction because if you are honest and if you are an independent thinker, if you are objective you will see, you will recognize reasonable doubt. You will see it. You will know it. Because it’s all over the place in this case.”
They’d gone on too long and they knew it. “Three hours?” Garcia says today. “If we’d have been ready, we’d have finished in an hour.”
The girls’ families will never forget one image he created that day. Describing the photos the jury would examine, Carlos said, “It was so hot in this area that that heat charred the body, sometimes splitting it, much like if you put a hot dog on a skillet and you put the flame under the skillet and it blackens and it bursts open, that’s what you are going to see.” As one, the families recoiled at the insensitivity of this phrasing. “So,” he says now, “after that the families hated me.” He regrets having made the remark but knows that apologies will get him nowhere. “We all make mistakes,” he tells himself.
Lynch thinks that while Carlos and Dexter were too long-winded and sometimes rambled far afield, they made sound points. And the prosecution knew it. The next morning, when Smith called his first witness, everybody in the courtroom—including the judge—expected Bob Ayers. Instead, he summoned Manuel Fuentes.
“This was not their original intent,” Lynch wrote, “and it took the defense by surprise; everyone expected a more chronological approach, as in the first trial….” When asked about this tactic, Efrain de la Fuente smiled. “We learned some things from the first trial,” he said. “And we wanted to start strong.” A skeptical journalist thought this fairly represented Paul Johnson’s investigative approach, putting final results first and letting the backup details follow.
Fuentes read Scott’s eight-page statement to the jury and, when asked to identify the person who made it, pointed out the defendant.
Because the defense wasn’t at all prepared for this strategy, Garcia’s cross took up most of the afternoon. Noting the many discrepancies between Scott’s written statement and the videotaped interrogation, he asked about a cutting knife Mike said he’d taken from the shop and thrown off a bridge, even though no knife had been mentioned in earlier statements and none had been reported missing; did Fuentes know about that? He did not. And in the statement, Mike said he remembered what happened to the .380. This didn’t appear in the videotape, nor did his erroneous description of the ICBY cash register drawer “being lifted and slammed back” or his memory of shoving a paper towel into a girl’s mouth. He also originally said the girls were naked when they were shot, then later remembered one of them wearing a white shirt. Was Mike given an opportunity to check the statement for mistakes? Yes, he went through each page, initialed corrections and signed the statement in the presence of witnesses.
These were excellent points, but Garcia’s cross-examination had rambled and stuttered.
“We didn’t have a choice,” he explains without sounding defensive. “We were figuring out what to do as we went along and had no choice but to cover every base, which meant we might get tedious and excessive.”
Scott opened on August 14, 2002, and would not end until September 24, making it the longest-running criminal trial in Travis County history. Lynch cast most of the blame for this on the defense’s “excruciatingly tedious and often repetitive” cross-examinations.
After Fuentes, the prosecution returned to chronology: the girls, the crime, the investigation. Bob Ayers, Barbara Ayres-Wilson, James and Maria Thomas; Sam Buchanan, Troy Gay, Garza, Deveau, Pennington. The next day, Irma Rios, Reese Price, Melvin Stahl, Marshall Littleton, the fingerprint expert Rachel Riffe, the medical examiner Dr. Tommy Brown.
Garcia did particularly well dismantling Reese Price’s testimony about the lock on the back door, especially after she identified the photograph of an obviously new device as the one that had been in the door on the night of the murders. Was she sure? Positive. Carlos pointed out that the lock was brand-new, whereas the only close-up photo taken that night showed one that was scarred and dull. In addition, the brass plate on the inside of the door had unusual scratches and gouges, perhaps having been damaged by a screwdriver or crowbar. Could the killers have perhaps become stuck in the back room? Did they have to pry open the back door? Did she know of anybody else using a crowbar? She couldn’t say. Bottom line, he reminded her, the original lock had been lost and nobody even remembered what kind of lock it was, right? And so there was no way of knowing whether or not Rob Springsteen had wedged the door open or if it had remained locked until the killers forced it open, right? Right.
A productive, if costly, cross-examination. Although Price’s perfect certainty had been slightly dislodged, Garcia had again gone on far too long. As one juror told a newspaper reporter, “I thought if I heard one more word about that back door lock I would scream.” Ironically, one detail that went unmentioned was the receipt from Cothron’s Safe and Lock for that new lock and bolt, which had been purchased for $28.52 on December 7 by Jesse Vasquez and charged to APD Homicide. Garcia didn’t forget about it; the receipt had not been given to either defense team.
Melvin Stahl returned to give his change-of-heart testimony about the origin of the fire. On cross, Garcia pushed him hard. His conclusion of December 7, 1991, was that the fire appeared to have originated somewhere off the floor, maybe on the second shelf next to the south wall, near Jennifer Harbison’s body, yes? Yes. And he’d stuck with that conclusion from 1991 until he retired in 1997, and in all that time none of the other arson investigators he’d met with had questioned it, correct? Yes. How many times had he met with them? Five times, maybe ten. Then 1999 rolled around and Paul Johnson wanted him to talk to a person named Marshall Littleton, right? Stahl couldn’t remember who had called him; his report says it was somebody from the DA’s office. And he met with Littleton and at first refused to change his opinion, correct? Yes. And again, that meeting occurred in October 1999, maybe on the fourteenth? He didn’t recall the exact date, but that was close. And that was just after the police had gotten Mike to agree that he’d set these girls on fire, correct? Stahl believed it was. And by then there was also an eight-page statement Mike had signed, saying he’d piled the girls up and poured Zippo lighter fluid on them and lit it, right? Stahl hadn’t read the confession. Then he met with Marshall Littleton again, true? Yes. And his conclusions changed? After viewing photographs and reading additional reports, yes. Even though he was there on December 7, 1991, and Littleton was not, even though Littleton never saw what he’d seen with his own eyes, even though Littleton knew only what Paul Johnson had told him? No response.
“Mr. Stahl, in your opinion as of December 7, 1991, was the likely source of origin of that fire somewhere along those shelves?”
“That is correct.”
After more fire testimony from Marshall Littleton,
followed by the ME’s presentation of autopsy reports, photographs and Styrofoam heads with rods poked through to demonstrate the path of the projectiles, the state was ready to show the videotapes. Smith called Ron Lara. Once again the jury had been given transcripts, Garcia’s objection overruled. Lynch issued instructions and the lights dimmed and the tape ran. White room, white table, Lara, Hardesty, ponytailed Mike. On and on. By Thursday, August 29, a weary Lynch asked Darla Davis how many more of “these things” there were. The final tape ran that day.
During the next few days, the prosecution called Robert Springsteen III, who again didn’t remember calling Teleserve, and then Mary Ann Hueske, who recalled that he had. Then Kelly Hanna, Amanda Statham, her sister Sarah and their mother. On cross, Amanda said that when Mike told her he’d killed the girls, “the whole world sunk in on me.” But when Garcia reminded her that she’d said nothing of Mike’s confession until after his arrest, Statham simply said, “Correct.” On September 4, Chandra Morgan returned, this time to testify that the .380 was tucked into the waistband of Mike’s jeans, not Rob’s. She’d also been brought up to speed on the make and model of Maurice’s car. During cross, Gilford asked detailed questions about her previous version of the night’s events, her heroin addiction and her ten-hour session with APD officers after the arrests. Once again, the loopy Morgan proved less than helpful to the state’s case.
The prosecution revisited ballistics, unidentified hairs, mitochondrial DNA and Johnny Holder’s “sale” of the .22 to Maurice Pierce. Lusella Jones described what it was like to view the lineup photos, and APD Sgt. Bruce Boardman presented a sketchy account of his 1991 interviews with Scott and Springsteen.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 29