The man who had pursued Ann Kurth so recklessly at Camp Rio Vista only ten months before, the suitor who had fallen into the lake and had come up laughing and clicking photographs, the dashing and apparently wealthy young surgeon who signed “Mr. Hyde” on motel registers and owned one of the most imposing mansions on Kirby Drive, had not turned out in a way to accommodate her fantasies. When Ann Kurth became, legally, the second Mrs. John Hill, she discovered her husband to be a moody man deeply in debt, a doctor whose practice was deteriorating, and a subject of intense scrutiny by lawyers, the DA’s office, private detectives, and the fountainhead of all these currents—his ex-father-in-law, Ash Robinson.
After the death of Joan, Myra Hill had come to comfort her son, and she stayed two years in Houston, her stern and pious presence hardly tolerable to a difficult marriage. The two women were, from the outset, as dissimilar as inhabitants of separate planets. “How John lived with that woman as long as he did and maintain his sanity, I’ll never know,” said Myra years later, when she could speak of that brief convulsion in the long story. “I used to stay awake at nights worrying about it, praying she would not hurt him, or maim his hands.”
By the end of October 1969 the four-month-old marriage was a shambles, and John asked his attorney to prepare a divorce action. Instantly Racehorse saw peril. The district attorney still had the death of Joan Hill under investigation. There was no word yet from Helpern in New York, no hint that his microscope had discovered any murderous needle mark or poisoned tissue—but until the report came in, until Ash Robinson eased up his pressure, then a divorce from Ann Kurth was dangerous.
Why? asked the plastic surgeon.
Racehorse would later describe his client as “your typical unemotional doctor, the kind who could look at a liver the size of Chicago and not show any emotion at all.” He sat him down and explained the very real facts of life.
Haynes liked to tick matters off for his clients, as if summing up for a jury. Item One: You would be a helluva lot easier to defend if you were still mourning your first wife’s death, wearing black, and having nothing more to do with women than escorting your mother and sister to church. Item Two: You rushed into marriage with Ann Kurth in an indecently short time. Item Three: Even if she is making your life one miserable hell, even if it is intolerable, then I still urge you to stay married to her.
Again John Hill asked, “Why?”
“John, if you divorce that woman she will join forces with Ash Robinson. And she will come to the courthouse and she will claim things on you—things she will say happened between the two of you—and it’ll be up to a jury to decide if she is telling the truth or not. Don’t sell her short, John. Ann Kurth is a dynamite woman, smart as hell, and she can make it bad for you.”
But already Ann Kurth had been subpoenaed by the first grand jury investigating Joan’s death, and her testimony was not harmful, said John. “All she told them was that we had an extramarital affair, which was true, and that she knew nothing about Joan’s death, which was also true.”
Dr. Jachimczyk, the Harris County coroner, released his new findings from the exhumation study. This was the third opinion as to the cause of death. In this version, he backed off from his initial ruling of hepatitis. “It is now my opinion that Joan Robinson Hill came to her death as a result of a fulminating infectious process, the specific nature of which is no longer determinable,” he wrote. “The immediate embalming and initial autopsy in an environment not equipped to perform adequate bacteriological, virologic, and toxicologic studies precluded pathological determination of the exact cause of death.”
Reading the document, Racehorse thought to himself: “In other words, the poor lady died of a bug that caused a big infection all over her body.” People die of infections every day and their spouses don’t get persecuted for murder. But wait! Jachimczyk was not through. He offered a suggestion:
“It is my further opinion that the exact cause and manner of death cannot be established from the exhumed body autopsy alone. In view of the unusual circumstances surrounding this death and the questions raised following the death, and a review of the hospital chart … a thorough Grand Jury investigation is indicated and herewith recommended.”
Clearly this was the reaction of a sorely embarrassed public official—chagrined over the first autopsy, and irritated at having the superstar coroner from New York flown in over his head to sort things out. Pilate-like, the coroner was herewith washing his hands of the matter, but throwing the case back to The People to let them get on with a Crucifixion if they so desired.
The pathologists who represented John Hill at the exhumation cheered him about this time by chiming in with their findings. The chairman of the Hill team, the gray-bearded coroner Dr. Robert Bucklin, medical examiner of Galveston County, wrote in a terse report: “I believe the basic lesion and the cause of death is a bacterial meningitis with septicemia.” Moreover, Bucklin wrote that he found no evidence whatsoever of poison or exotic bacteria in the slivers of tissue he studied from the exhumation. His two colleagues in the matter, both respected pathologists, concurred. Thus three neutral pathologists, working only from microscopic and laboratory studies, came to the conclusion that Joan Robinson Hill died of natural causes.
But this failed to impress Ash. Weren’t these fellows hired by John Hill? he demanded of his allies.
Not surprisingly, John Hill found this development so helpful to his cause that he slipped the results to a reporter on the afternoon Houston Chronicle. Furious, Ash called his circle of cronies to complain that John had broken the ground rules. “Nobody was supposed to say anything until Dr. Helpern made his ruling,” cried Ash. But when was that going to happen? Four long months had already gone by since the dark and thunderous Saturday when Joan’s body was lifted from her grave. At least half a dozen times Ash had called Helpern’s office in New York City, but each time he was put off, delayed, promised that the studies were being made. The old man’s patience was running thin.
One of those doctors supporting Ash in his cause became interested in the matter of Joan’s missing brain, and the curious manner in which it was delivered to the exhumation autopsy by Sharpstown pathologist Morse. It occurred to this doctor, who did not have a license to practice medicine in Texas at the time, that if meningitis was found in Joan’s brain, then meningitis should have also been discovered in the spinal cord. The two go hand in glove. The doctor thus corralled a respected neurologist, one Dr. William S. Field, professor of neurology at the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and led him to the coroner’s office to study tissue specimens from Joan Hill’s corpse. One week later Dr. Field delivered a brief report, the thrust of which was that he found “cellular exudate” in the brain tissues—but in specimens of spinal cord tissue he found no such thing:
“In the opinion of this examiner, the spinal cord material shows no pathological abnormality, particularly no evidence of meningitis such as is observed in the brain sections. This is, in my opinion, incompatible with the findings of cellular exudate diagnostic of acute meningitis observed in all brain sections. Based on previous experience, I would expect as extensive a meningeal reaction as is seen in this case … to also involve the spinal cord. I find it impossible to explain this obvious discrepancy if I assume that all of the material presented to me represents tissue from one and the same individual.”
Somehow this information also found its way into the Houston newspapers, obviously planted by the Ash Robinson allies, and the implication was that because there was no evidence of meningitis to be found in the spinal cord of Joan Robinson Hill, then the brain that Dr. Morse produced from his car trunk must have been from another cadaver. Was a “mistake” made?
Once again, John Hill went to his attorney and said that he could not live with Ann Kurth another moment. He must divorce her. She tormented him every hour they were together. John claimed that Ann was so eager to uncover his assets that she even disguised herself as a nurse and
went to his office after hours and rummaged through his desk. Moreover, she was bad-mouthing him around town. The plastic surgeon played a taped telephone call for his lawyer in which Ann was heard to say: “His practice has gone down to zero. He’s now to the point of removing tattoos and warts to have anything to do at all.”
Once again, Racehorse pleaded with his client to stay married, at least until the investigation of Joan Hill’s death was concluded. Racehorse read the cards this way: The other side is not going to have any hard medical evidence to link you with your wife’s death. The best thing they’ve got is your affair with Ann Kurth when Joan was still alive, the speed with which you married her, and—God help us, man—the even quicker divorce of wife number two. Juries do take notice when a man goes through women like Kleenex.
“Whereas,” said Racehorse, summing up, “if you stay married to Ann Kurth—legally married—she can’t hurt you. You don’t have to live with her, in fact I don’t blame you if you split, but you’ve got to stay married. Because if we ever had to go to trial on a murder charge, she could be incompetent as a witness. A wife cannot testify against her husband, etc.”
John Hill understood his lawyer well. But he would not obey him. “Hell no,” he said. “I understand what you’re telling me, but I’m not guilty of anything except choosing the wrong women, and I’m not going to let my life be ruined any more. File the divorce papers. Get her out of my life.”
Racehorse sighed and began what he would later refer to as “The War on Kirby Drive.”
If ever there was a woman whom a man should have eased gently out of his life, as delicately as carrying a basket of eggs across a tightrope, it was Ann Kurth. Yet John Hill put on a catcher’s mitt and ski boots for the task. Realizing that it would be difficult to evict the lady from his big house—and John could not bear the notion of moving out himself and being deprived of the music room—he and his lawyer hit upon a scheme that was staggering in its lack of tact and good sense. The plan called for John to feign a new-found affection for his wife and suggest a brief, spur-of-the-moment overnight trip to Hodges Gardens in Louisiana. En route, John would become overwhelmed with apparent passion, park the car in a romantic, bushy spot, and make love. Following that, he would break bad news. His phraseology, according to Ann’s later memory of the day, was “Racehorse Haynes thinks he can best defend me if you and I are no longer married and thumbing our nose at the rest of the world.” While all of this was going on, a moving truck was backed up to the house on Kirby Drive with men packing up all of Ann Kurth’s belongings and transferring them back to her own home in Memorial. John had thoughtfully broken a windowpane at her home to accommodate entrance.
When Ann returned to discover what had taken place while she had been so gallantly romanced, she was furious. Promptly she drove to Ash Robinson’s house and spent a long afternoon there. Immediately she became a new and valuable asset in the old man’s vendetta.
Referring to the episode of the moving men in absentia, Racehorse would later admit, with a tinge of red to his face, “In retrospect, this was not one of our better ideas. But that was the only way we could get control of the castle, so to speak.”
On December 16, 1969, John Hill sat for a sworn deposition in the matter of his divorce against Ann Kurth. In his testimony, subject to the penalties of perjury, he set forth a catalogue of grievances against his second wife. Somehow a copy of this slipped out of official hands and became the hottest reading in River Oaks. “Poor John,” laughed one hostess. “Talk about your ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire.’”
Q. You allege that Mrs. Hill has been guilty of excessively cruel treatment towards you, such conduct being of such an outrageous nature as to render your living together insupportable. Will you briefly describe that conduct to me?
John Hill certainly could: “Well, Ann Kurth had an extreme jealousy of my deceased wife, constantly bringing that up and elaborating on it, referring to Joan in unkind terms constantly, and indicating that whatever I might have done for my former wife, that I should do for her much in excess. As an example, I gave my first wife a monthly allowance of seven hundred fifty dollars, the present Mrs. Hill demanded that I give her a thousand dollars per month plus much more. She ferreted out every single item that had belonged to Joan, that had any sentimentality attached to it whatsoever, and either systematically destroyed it or disposed of it in some way.”
Moreover, testified the beleaguered plastic surgeon, Ann “was constantly threatening to take my son down and give him to Ash Robinson if I didn’t accede to certain demands.…” The woman’s wrath extended even into the surgical suites, claimed John. “She was extremely destructive toward my practice, in such a manner as constantly calling the operating room in attempt to dress me down about various things. Sometimes I asked the nurses to simply hang up the telephone, because I was in the middle of surgery. She called back using false names, but the switchboard operator … recognized her … and started blocking her calls to the operating room because they were so harassing and made my surgery so difficult. She’d do things like hiding my surgical instruments prior to an operation … or withhold my keys to the car, making me late to an operation.… She kept me awake at all hours of the night so that I’d have very little sleep that night and very little opportunity to rest for the next day’s difficult surgery. And the following day, of course, I would be extremely fatigued … while she was home resting up for the onslaught to follow the next night.”
“How did she keep you awake all night?” asked one of the lawyers.
“By constant talking. If I attempted to sleep, she would jerk the bedclothing off of me and there would be a physical exchange. She would dig her fingernails into me, pull my hair, slap me, anything to continuously keep me awake and harping on whatever she happened to be discontent about at the time.”
Ann Kurth gave a deposition as well. She contended that her husband was cold, rude, belligerent, cowardly, hostile toward her and her sons, and that he roughed her up “six or eight times” and tried to kill her twice. Such testimony flows forth a thousand times a day in lawyers’ offices across the land, as couples break the ties of marriage. But in this case the testimony was pertinent to other matters besides the divorce at hand. Ash Robinson read the deposition documents with keen interest. He underlined the key points and asked Ann Kurth to meet with him.
“God knows what they’re cooking up,” John told Racehorse Haynes. The lawyer restrained himself from saying, “I told you so, Doctor.” The broken marriage was less important now than what was going on at the courthouse. Haynes heard from well-placed sources in the DA’s office that a third grand jury might convene to hear new evidence in the death of Joan Robinson Hill. Moreover, the Helpern report was due any day, and the word was that it smelled like trouble.
EIGHTEEN
The February 1970 grand jury was the third such panel to consider the death of Joan Robinson Hill. Among the twelve solid citizens in this group was one particularly influential member of the community. He was none other than Cecil Haden, wealthy and portly barge builder, lifelong friend to the dead woman, patron of her horse shows, pallbearer at her funeral, and crony and sometime business associate of her father for four decades. Cecil Haden brought to this grand jury scant vestige of impartiality. However, neither the press nor the bar of Houston seemed to find Haden’s membership unusual or prejudicial to John Hill’s civil rights.
Only the plastic surgeon himself felt a wave of panic as he spoke with Racehorse Haynes. Did Haden have the right to sit on this grand jury? asked John. Here was a man who had attended Ash’s late night strategy meetings. Here was a man who had counseled his old friend since the beginning of this mad tea party. Here was a man who had done everything but put his foot on the shovel that raised Joan’s body for the exhumation.
Racehorse soothed his client. Two grand juries had already considered this matter and neither had taken action. As far as he knew, there was no new evidence in the district attorn
ey’s hands. And the defense lawyer had enough contacts at the courthouse to realize if any “hanging judge” vibrations started emanating from the grand jury chamber. First, Racehorse promised to find out how Cecil Haden managed to merit a seat on the panel. It took him but a single telephone call.
In Texas the grand jury process begins with a district judge who appoints from three to five commissioners. These are supposed to be reputable citizens from a cross section of the county. They in turn nominate twenty grand jurors, from which twelve are selected to sit for a ninety-day term. These twelve jurors consider whether the district attorney has built a criminal case sufficient to be placed before a trial court. The grand jury can either vote an indictment, vote a “no bill,” which is a dismissal, or take no action at all. They can also recommend that a succeeding grand jury continue study of a matter. The grand jury has extraordinary power; it can elect to investigate something itself, going above the heads of police and district attorney. It can become a star chamber, but this fortunately is rare. More commonly, grand juries in Texas are but obedient pets of the district attorney, biting whom they are told to bite.
All connected with the appointment of Cecil Haden insisted that it was “sheer coincidence,” and those of a generous spirit might concur. But the coincidence was stunning. One of the five commissioners appointed by the district judge to choose grand jury members was a lawyer named Richard Kolb, partner in the giant legal firm of Vinson, Elkins, Weems, Searls and Connally. This was the powerful group of attorneys who represented Cecil Haden. They also represented Ash Robinson. Attorney Kolb’s office was but a few steps down the corridor from that of Richard Keeton, the young lawyer who handled Ash Robinson. Kolb would later insist—and no one challenged his word, for he was considered a most reputable attorney—that it never entered his mind that Cecil Haden would be judging the activities of Dr. John R. Hill.
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