Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Q. Where specifically?

  A. In the arm.

  Q. In the forearm.

  A. Yes, sir. In the cubital vein.

  Q. Did you administer any shots in the hand?

  A. No, sir, I did not.

  (This was asked in response to Effie’s statement that she saw Dr. Hill allegedly rubbing his wife’s hand as he took her downstairs en route to the hospital.)

  Now McMaster moved abruptly to the doctor’s relationship with Ann Kurth, like a man walking a conversational path with another, only to make a quick and unexpected right turn, glancing back to see if the other kept up with him.

  Q. Sometime last year, Doctor, you separated from your wife, did you not?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. At that time were you going with one Ann Kurth?

  A. Yes, sir, that is correct.

  Q. And at that time, were you going to marry her?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And subsequently you went back to Joan Hill, is that right?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. At the time you went back to Joan Hill, did you have a complete break with Ann Kurth, or did you continue seeing her?

  A. I went back with the desire to have a complete break; however, I had left Mrs. Kurth in a difficult situation with her neighbors and where she lived, and so I did check back with her sometime within a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour period following my reunion with Joan.

  McMaster then jumped quickly back to Joan Hill’s final hours. John Hill journeyed with him effortlessly, betraying no discomfort at leaving his new wife and returning to his dead one.

  Q. Doctor, going back to your wife’s illness, on Monday evening, what was her condition?

  A. At that time I felt she was significantly ill, but I didn’t feel she was deathly ill. She was running fever and still lying in bed and obviously not feeling well.

  Q. You were not sleeping with her at that time, were you? While she was ill?

  A. Yes, I slept with her while she was ill.

  (Later on, Ash Robinson would read this part of the transcript and snort, “God damned liar! He wouldn’t sleep with her when she was well, much less in a bed filled with her own excrement.”)

  Q. On Tuesday morning what was her condition?

  A. Her condition was very serious. Early in the morning I felt like she was probably all right and I went and played a Young Audiences concert for some hour and a half to two hours, after which I came back and she appeared to be in shock. I took her to Sharpstown Hospital, much against her desire. She hated doctors and hated shots and did not want to go, but I led her down the stairs in order to take her to the hospital.

  McMaster began to press the fact that the doctor allegedly rose from his wife’s sick and soiled bed, called the maid to come and clean the defecation on the sheets, then went off to play a concert. Later, he would tell his associates in the DA’s office that these answers were the most shocking to him.

  Q. And when you called the maid up you went on to the concert? Is that correct?

  A. Yes … I did.… I slept with her and thought that she was all right and asked the maid to see that she took the medication that I had there for her and that she drank plenty of liquids as she seemed to be getting dehydrated.

  Q. At this time, Doctor, did you not consider that she was in shock? Tuesday morning, prior to going to the concert?

  A. Prior to going to the concert, I checked her pulse and … (Here, for the first time, the doctor’s words trailed off altogether, and his answer was unintelligible. Nor did the district attorney pursue it.)

  Q. Following her death, did you order an autopsy yourself?

  A. Yes, sir, I did.

  Q. Did you commission Dr. Morse to conduct that autopsy?

  A. I commissioned the hospital.

  Q. Do you know what the present result of the autopsies is?

  A. I heard hepatitis.

  McMaster then asked the question of the hour:

  Q. Doctor, did you at any time, prior to, or during your wife’s illness, cause her to ingest or did you inject anything that could have caused that illness or added any complications to it?

  In an almost whisper that the recorder did not pick up fully, he either said, “Do I have to answer that, Clyde?” or “I will answer that, Clyde.” He then responded: “No, sir, I did not.” Firmly. Positively. No qualifying tremor.

  Q. Not in any way, shape, or form?

  A. No, sir.

  The test consumed an hour, and when it was done, Dr. Smith pronounced the surgeon able to rise from the table and resume his activities—with the suggestion that he go home and rest for the remainder of the work day. First they all went to the hospital coffee shop. McMaster observed that Hill was exhilarated the test was over and kept asking, “Did I pass?”

  “The guy’s hyperactive,” thought McMaster to himself.

  Later, in the hospital parking lot, the assistant DA, his associate, T. C. Jones, and the private detective, Clyde Wilson, talked beside their automobiles. Jones spoke first. “Well, I guess he’s clean. He passed.” The young investigator was convinced of the surgeon’s innocence.

  McMaster shook his head in disagreement. “Only if you take it at face value. I think he knew everything we asked him.”

  Later, questions would be put to the anesthesiologist, Dr. Smith, questions seeking reassurance that John Hill was indeed knocked out by the drug and not somehow faking his responses.

  Bluntly, is a person able to lie under Sodium Pentothal?

  “Well,” Smith responded, “it’s arguable. There is a bone of contention in medicine. A psychopathic liar who doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies might beat the test.… John Hill went all the way from being paralyzed by this drug to being, at times, semi-aware. At one point during the test I felt he was not under deep enough, so I increased the dosage. At another point, the guy even stopped breathing, but a little oxygen brought him back.”

  The anesthesiologist had a brusque comment to make about the experience. “Bullshit,” he said. “The whole thing’s bullshit. John Hill is innocent.”

  SIXTEEN

  The spring grand jury ended its term in 1969 without acting on the death of Joan Robinson Hill. Assistant District Attorney McMaster thanked the panel for hearing the various witnesses who testified. But he did not even ask for an indictment. Beyond circumstance, there was not a shred of hard evidence. Some of Ash Robinson’s medical allies were critical of the manner in which John Hill treated his sick wife, and of the hospital he chose to take her to, and McMaster was not wholly convinced that the truth serum test prodded John Hill’s conscience as fully as it was supposed to do. “But I haven’t got enough to convict this boy of running a red light,” McMaster informed a highly chafed Ash Robinson. The old man thundered to friends with the now familiar storm of accusations and speculations.

  “Great God almighty!” cried Ash, invoking a deity in whom he professed no belief. “Just what in hell-fire does it take to bring this man to the bar of justice? He killed my daughter so he could marry his paramour. It’s that simple. He took her to a remote hospital where he was part owner and he hired doctors nobody ever heard of to care for her—one of ’em, I understand, used to be an exotic dancer—and when Joan died, they practically stole her body to get it out of the hospital that fast and onto the undertaker’s table. Somewhere along that line is enough evidence to convict somebody!”

  McMaster had heard all of this before, a score of times before, and he was tired of the old man, fed up with his ravings, worn by the raw thrust of money and power. The prosecutor envied the security of wealth, but at this moment he was full of its abuse. In effect, he told Ash: Show me some evidence and I’ll get an indictment. No grand jury is going to indict, and no trial jury is going to convict, solely on the basis of what you feel!

  Ash telephoned the foreman of the retiring grand jury and asked him for a summation of the panel’s attitude. The foreman, Dr. Lancaster, minister of the large and sociall
y prestigious First Presbyterian Church, had already visited with Ash at one of the old man’s midnight sessions. This struck some courthouse observers as bordering on the ethically dangerous, but the preacher moved and spoke with such an apparent pipeline to the good and the righteous that no one made complaint. How could there be criticism of a man who began each day’s jury deliberations with a prayer that asked for “divine guidance”?

  Dr. Lancaster was willing to make his feelings known to a reporter after the panel was dismissed. “We just didn’t have enough evidence to indict John Hill,” he said. “I recognized the anguish that Mr. Robinson was going through over his tragic loss, but you cannot indict on anguish.”

  Considerable testimony was presented showing that John Hill was—and here the minister grew discreet—“not a very good husband.… We heard and saw a lot of human frailties and passions, but we were not asked to return an indictment for adultery.”

  And the Rev. Mr. Lancaster had one parting comment which at the outset did not particularly interest Ash Robinson, for it seemed subsidiary to his goal. But it planted the germ of an idea in the head of I. D. McMaster. “Of course, we also heard testimony that indicated medical negligence,” he said. “But how can that be proved with a husband and wife involved? That becomes a very private matter, a very complex area for the law to enter.”

  Negligence. McMaster wrote the word down on a yellow legal pad. And underlined it. A few inches away he wrote, Murder. Just doodling. Then he drew two lines to connect them.

  In late June, Ash bustled into the office of his attorney, Frank Briscoe, and announced a new scheme, or, more accurately, the warming up of an old one. One of his medical counselors kept speculating that perhaps valuable information could be obtained if the body of Joan Robinson Hill was dug up and autopsied again. This time, insisted Ash, “with the best doctors in the world present.”

  Briscoe was annoyed. Neither coroner’s ruling nor the truth serum examination, nor the grand jury’s failure to indict, nor the district attorney’s rapidly failing interest in the case had dissuaded this old man a whit.

  “I want you to get it done for me,” ordered Ash. “I already asked John Hill and he said quote I do not want her body disturbed end quote. Well, that’s the first time he was ever considerate of her.”

  Briscoe knew the law on this point. An exhumation cannot be done without permission from the next of kin, which, in this case, was the widower.

  Ash had done his homework. But a court can order it done! A grand jury could request it, and a judge could sign the paper. “I want the best god damned pathologist in the world,” Ash said, “I don’t care if he’s Egyptian or Eye-talian or on a spaceship halfway to the moon. I want him here, I want my daughter’s body autopsied, I want some answers, and hang the cost. I’m paying for the whole god damned thing!”

  Briscoe took the new outburst as only the latest in a continuing line of nuisances from his meddlesome client. Surely Ash would find some other street to investigate and forget about this one. But when the telephone began ringing at the Briscoe home before the sun rose, and when the old man began barging into his office with no forewarning, Briscoe called up Dr. Jachimczyk and asked what, if anything, could be accomplished by an exhumation.

  He trod carefully on the coroner’s ego, for Jachimczyk was a proud man who felt that, as a professor of both legal and medical degrees, he was above most criticism. Recognizing this, from the relationship they had as DA and coroner, Briscoe was canny enough to point out that in this exasperating matter, mistakes were made long before Jachimczyk was even notified about the death. Thus any areas of dispute were the fault of other men.

  In his long career as coroner, Dr. Jachimczyk had performed several exhumation autopsies, cutting into bodies that had been buried for eight weeks, and others that had been in the ground as long as eight years. Sometimes, the coroner told students, the eight-year internees are in better condition than the fresh-planted ones. “It all depends on the embalmer’s art, the environment of the grave, whether it’s in a marshy area, or on high and dry ground, whether it’s a concrete vault, or whether seepage got into the casket,” explained the coroner. “There are just so many variables that you can’t predict whether it’s worth the time and effort—and anguish—for the family.”

  Specifically, Briscoe wanted to know, what information might be obtained from an exhumation autopsy? Jachimczyk’s answer seemed sensible to him, so much so that he dictated it into his case file: “Dr. Joe feels that nothing would be gained by disinterring the body for further tests except for the very remote possibility of finding needle marks in an unusual place, or from the surrounding area of such needle marks possibly being able to locate traces of some chemical substance. He doubts if anything new would be discovered that was not found in the first autopsy.…”

  Briscoe repeated this to his client and suggested that the idea of exhuming Joan be dropped. Ash responded by firing his lawyer.

  Not at all unhappy to be rid of the old man, Briscoe remarked to a reporter, “Ash has an absolute fixation on his daughter’s death. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  In search of succor, Ash dropped in on a crony, Cecil Haden, the prosperous, portly owner of tugboats and oil barges. In his serge suit and vest straining to cover a well-filled belly, in black shoes spit-shined, in unadorned and sensible bifocals, Haden would be cast, in dramatic endeavor, as the banker who says no to the farmer. An elder of the Houston establishment, he engaged a former astronaut to work for his firm, perhaps because he was thus able to display prominently on his office wall a framed dollar bill. “It went to the moon and back,” he told visitors. Cecil Haden was a non-related uncle to Joan Robinson Hill, he adored her as much as Ash, and he was not only a pallbearer for her coffin, he wept bitterly at her grave.

  From the day of Joan’s death, Haden had been privy to the most intimate confidence of his friend of forty years, and he well knew the desire of Ash Robinson to punish John Hill. Haden had even attended one of the armchair detective sessions and listened intently as the doctors scattered about Ash’s living room analyzed and dissected the medical information.

  Now his old friend was so irritated at his inability either to get an indictment against John or to obtain an exhumation of Joan’s body that he grew red in the face and began puffing like a thirsty hunting dog. Cecil Haden bade Ash calm down and collect his thoughts and reduce his blood pressure.

  He was angry, explained Ash, because his lawyer would not pressure the district attorney into an exhumation.

  Haden nodded in understanding. Did Ash really believe that this drastic act would help his cause?

  “You’re damned right it would,” said Ash. If the best pathologist in the world turned up in Houston to study his daughter’s body, “we’d see some scared rabbits runnin’ every which-a-way.”

  In that case, Haden had a valuable piece of advice for his long-time friend and co-investor in Florida oil and gas ventures. The best way to make the mule go in Houston was to hire a powerful law firm—one like Haden’s own attorneys, Vinson, Elkins, Weems, Searls and Connally. The last-listed partner was John Connally, whose name went up and down on the front door between government jobs. The enormous law firm, one of the largest in America, occupies six entire floors of a downtown Houston skyscraper, employed 230 attorneys, and is powerful enough to be, along with another firm or two in Houston and Dallas, an invisible second state government. One of the brightest and most highly respected young fellows in the firm was a lawyer named Richard Keeton, son of the eminent torts scholar Page Keeton. “That boy can do whatever needs to be done,” said Haden in glowing recommendation.

  Thus engaged, attorney Keeton made a few discreet inquiries at the courthouse to learn the attitude of the man whose authority was needed to order an exhumation, he being Carol Vance, district attorney of Harris County, Texas. Unlike previous DAs in his town, Vance was neither flamboyant nor possessed of an ego that required the nourishment of provoking his name in
to public print regularly. Neither was he considered a particularly brilliant courtroom warrior. His skill lay in administration, like a clever general who knows which lesser officer to fling into battle.

  By summer, 1969, District Attorney Vance was fatigued with the non-case of Joan Robinson Hill. Too much time and expense had already been drained from his budget. Had this woman been the daughter of a ship channel worker, and the wife of a garage mechanic, his office would not have spent one hour of investigation after the coroner ruled death from hepatitis.

  Yet Vance was not without political ambition, the general assumption around the courthouse being that he would one day run for attorney general of the state of Texas, and thence to the governor’s office. Lacking the evangelical fervor that can still stir voters in Texas, a state that likes its politicians to have a little cotton patch dirt under the fingernails and a mail-order wardrobe, Vance was colorless, a lean and rather elegant man who would have to run chiefly on his integrity and his skills as a legal office manager. Valuable tools for any public servant, but not assets calculated to raise a candidate triumphantly to the shoulders of the body politic. Though Vance privately hoped that the Hill case would go away—more than one lawyer connected with the matter counted up the number of years Ash Robinson had walked on the earth and speculated that his biblical allotment was almost up—the district attorney decided he had best keep the pot simmering on the back of his stove and keep an eye on the flame now and then. So he had let his deputy, I. D. McMaster, fool around with the old man.

  Now, suddenly, the potent law firm of Vinson, Elkins, etc., had entered the confounded case, in the person of attorney Richard Keeton, and Vance found two new reasons to tolerate further investigation. One was the potential blessing that the enormously powerful firm could award a candidate for high state office, and two—Vance was the protégé of John Connally, former governor of Texas, and the man who had appointed the district attorney to his job. Whether these factors influenced Ash Robinson in his choice of lawyers is speculative, but he missed few other tricks.