Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  The oath which all grand jurors must take in Texas swears each member to secrecy and then cautions each against indicting somebody out of “envy, hatred or malice.” The oath continues: “Neither shall you leave any person unpresented for love, fear, favor, affection, or hope of reward.” But Haden took his seat on the jury anyway and, in the very first week of sessions, proceeded to squirt new fuel on an old fire.

  To give him his due, grand juror Haden did not conceal the fact that he brought a special interest to the deliberations. “I told my fellow jurors that I had known Ash Robinson for forty years,” he would say later. “I told them Ash was a dear friend, the kind you may not see for six months, then run into, and pick up just where you left off. I told them I had known Joan Robinson Hill since she was in diapers. I said I had no presumption of anybody’s guilt or innocence. It was my proposal that we consider this situation from its beginning, and cut through the underbrush once and for all.”

  One of the jurors, a black man, perhaps a man who knew how pressures could be brought in Houston, stood in opposition. He suggested that Haden was unduly prejudiced.

  “Maybe I am,” answered Haden, as he would recall the episode later. “But put yourself in Ash Robinson’s shoes. Here is a father who lost his only child; a good man, a decent man, and a man about to go crazy. We must take this case up again and settle it forever.”

  The black juror nodded, convinced. The matter of Joan Robinson Hill and how she died was once more on the agenda.

  Racehorse Haynes began playing poker. First he laid down a very low pair, not calculated to win any pot but potent enough to win a small inside headline in the newspaper and a brief mention in the evening television news: “Haynes Demands Court of Inquiry in Hill Case.” The death of Joan Robinson Hill and its aftermath had become so enmeshed in intrigue, scandal, and mishandling that the only way justice could be served was through an open public hearing. DA Carol Vance shook his head patiently and denied the grandstand play. Whenever lawyers have time on their hands, they call for a court of inquiry, something the grand jury was already doing.

  Undaunted, Haynes played his next—this a concealed hand. He filed a ten-million-dollar damage suit against Ash Robinson—five million dollars in actual damages, five million dollars in exemplary damages-claiming that the old man was conspiring to get Dr. John Hill indicted for a crime he had not committed, that the plastic surgeon’s social and professional reputation was being slandered, thus causing him to suffer grave financial harm. When Ash heard of the suit he whistled, almost approvingly. “Ten million dollars,” he said. “At least old John Hill thinks big.”

  But the beauty part of the lawsuit was that it enabled Racehorse and his associate, Fullenweider, to subpoena everybody in town if they desired, and place them on oath for sworn depositions, under penalty of perjury. Ash Robinson would be giving depositions until Christmas, or until his rear end grew so weary of sitting in lawyer’s chairs that he would call off his dogs at the courthouse. Or so Racehorse hoped.

  Subpoenas went out—to Ash, his wife, to John Hill, to the doctors who aided Ash and observed at the exhumation, to Diane Settegast and Eunice Woolen, the Dallas women who were house guests the days before Joan Hill died. This was also a very clever way for Racehorse Haynes to discover just what the grand jury was finding out—by subpoenaing their witnesses and asking them the same kinds of question. The volumes bound in red leatherette began to grow, and quickly filled an entire closet at the Haynes office. The Joan Robinson Hill case was becoming an industry, with dividends for lawyers, doctors, court reporters, stenographers, private detectives, and purveyors of equipment from telephone bugs to telescopic lenses.

  I. D. McMaster, the assistant district attorney, had blown hot and cold on the case since the beginning, when Ash Robinson walked into his office on the morning of Joan’s funeral and asked him to stop the service. At first he had been caught up in the glamor of the case, the Cadillacs, the mansions that housed the people he needed information from, the owners whose power and influence could be valuable to any ambitious prosecutor. He had spent tedious hours interviewing neutral doctors, chemists, nurses, checking out almost incomprehensible medical books from the Texas Medical Center library on salmonella and shigella and E. coli bacteria, trying to determine whether it was possible for John Hill to inject somehow one of these deadly organisms into the body of his wife, cleverly killing her. But the case had thus far turned out to be little more than one perfect for the short hours, for dissection late at night in front of a roaring fireplace with a good bottle of burgundy. “Maybe he did thus and so …” began the prosecutor in his mind a hundred times, even waking up at night with new imagined solutions, but such ruminations were only entertainment, not sufficient to send a doctor to the penitentiary. Besides, there were nine hundred other active cases in his file, charges more specific, felonies to be traded out, sent to trial, thrown away, forgotten.

  One night in early spring, 1970, McMaster dropped by the gloomy old house of one of the doctors who had aided Ash Robinson in getting the exhumation. This doctor lived in a castle-like fortress with thick walls and darkly burnished paneling; even a knight in armor guarded the stone-floored entry hall. All in all, a perfect house for fantasizing murder. McMaster settled into a chair. He was sated by the case. The Milton Helpern report was now six months overdue. Maybe the imperious old coroner had found nothing and was reluctant to send down a negative report. Or, perhaps, he was onto something that just took time at the microscope.

  The doctor who was host for the evening nodded. He could well understand the prosecutor’s fatigue. He, too, felt that disproportionate time had been wasted in catering to the theatrical furies of Ash Robinson.

  There were moments, McMaster admitted, when he started feeling that maybe Joan Hill just got sick and died. On her own. It does happen to people.

  His host put forth a new theory: Let’s say that Joan fell ill with stomach flu. Now John Hill has stated that he gave his wife Compazine, an anti-nausea drug; Kaopectate; a broad-spectrum antibiotic called mystecline-F; and Lomotil, an anti-diarrhea medicine. But what if he slipped in Colace instead, a stool softener, which would increase her diarrhea? What if he gave her a diuretic that would drastically step up her urine output? What if these were administered in such tremendous amounts that Joan went into shock?

  McMaster followed this train of thought. That Joan Hill was in shock at the time of her admission to Sharpstown Hospital was not arguable. The hospital simply did not know what kind of shock she was in.

  The doctor went on. The hospital doctors gave her massive doses of potassium chloride, he recalled, and this brought on a hyperkalemic condition. The woman’s potassium level was so increased that an electrolyte imbalance occurred in the heart and it stopped beating. Joan’s last potassium level at Sharpstown was measured at 7.4, whereas normal is approximately 4.5. Her chloride level was 116, when normal is 95. These were tremendous elevations, suggested the doctor. Probably they were the actual things that killed her.

  But, put in McMaster, this was not a criminal act on the part of the Sharpstown doctors, was it?

  Of course not, answered the doctor. They were simply trying to counteract a perilously low blood pressure.

  In other words, summed up the prosecutor, a woman turned up at the hospital desperately sick. The doctors gave her too much potassium chloride. So she died. Sad. But not indictable.

  Oh well, said the doctor. Just a theory.

  Still another friend had been sitting in the room, listening to the host and the prosecutor. He interrupted in disagreement. It had to be remembered that Joan Robinson Hill was not a prisoner in her own bedroom in the big white house when she fell ill. She had a telephone beside her bed. It was not shut off. The wires were not cut. She could have called anybody she wanted to for help if she thought she was dying—even her mother or her father, just a few blocks down the street.

  That’s true, agreed McMaster. But what if she didn’t know how sick s
he was? Everybody gets the flu now and then. You just stay in bed until the bug has run its course. You do what the doctor tells you to do.

  And in this case, her husband was her doctor.

  Suddenly McMaster grew excited. So did his host for the evening. “Murder can be caused by what somebody does …” began the doctor.

  “Or by what somebody does not do,” finished McMaster.

  The grand jury contained a suitable cross section of Houstonians, including a lawyer, a postman, a retired schoolteacher, a merchant, and four black people, all upstanding citizens who had never been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor involving moral turpitude. On their first meeting, a foreman was elected, a retired businessman named Wayne Jones. But there was never any doubt who was the dominant force inside the secret chamber. It was Cecil Haden. While his colleagues waited for the Milton Helpern autopsy report, they could start gathering additional information in the case. If the Helpern report was sufficient to indict John Hill for murder, then whatever the grand jury’s investigation unearthed could be served up as garnish for the main course. Haden discovered that his group, if they desired, could employ the investigators of the district attorney’s office to run down its various leads, most of which were supplied by Ash Robinson. But secrecy seemed important at this stage of the game, and it was difficult to keep anything quiet in a courthouse where reporters cultivated news sources, particularly in the district attorney’s office where young Turks needed repertorial friends for support and sustenance in future political battles.

  A previous grand jury had left two hundred dollars behind in a fund for “investigative purposes,” but this was not enough to pay a good private detective for two days’ work. Haden therefore went to District Judge Wendell Odom, who kept a paternal eye on the jury’s activities and who would receive all their indictments and no bills. “I have two requests, Judge,” said grand juror Haden. “Can we hire our own private investigators, and, can we put up our own money? I don’t want to do anything improper.”

  The judge was presiding on the bench at that moment, and he asked Haden to let him think on the request. Again, political realities had to be considered, as Odom was planning to seek a seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. It would not serve him well to make a snap decision in this headlined affair. The intent of Haden was clear. He wanted to spend his own money to hire private detectives to run around the city in the clear hope of finding enough evidence to indict John Hill. And behind Haden stood Ash Robinson. The connection was, or should have been, if it was known, troubling. Nonetheless, as Haden later told it, Judge Odom summoned him the next day and said, “Go ahead. You have my blessings.”

  When Ash Robinson heard the news he was content. It was the first anniversary of his daughter’s death, and before the second one came, the old man felt reasonably sure John Hill would be standing before the bar of justice accused of murder.

  The district attorney, Carol Vance, felt some discomfort over what was happening in the Hill matter. He knew that a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money had already been spent in futile attempts to prove murder had been done, that two grand juries had failed to indict, that it was time to close this melodrama. But his deputy, McMaster, was recharged. He was now convinced in his mind that John Hill was somehow connected with his first wife’s death. And that somehow a case could be constructed and a conviction obtained. It would simply take time. And now that private money—Haden’s money—was being employed, why worry?

  The DA must have fretted, for he then took an unusual step. He summoned his top prosecutor, a legendary assistant DA named Erwin (Ernie) Ernst. Here was a man unique, particularly in Texas where men so often seemed cloned, formed identically from a hundred pounds of bones, forty-five pounds of spare flesh, with a working vocabulary of perhaps two hundred words. Ernst was a romantic, a stocky, loquacious, philosophical lawyer with a common-sense voice from the cracker barrel. Yet he was on intimate terms with Roman poets and Greek philosophers. He had prosecuted hundreds of murderers in a long career and sent many of them to the electric chair, or to life in prison. He was a practical joker, the favorite of the courthouse, and a fellow around whom anecdotes hung like ornaments from a Christmas tree. On one occasion—perhaps apocryphal—in the course of a trial, he had to prove that a young woman was in truth promiscuous—just after she had offered herself to the jury as a virgin. Before trial began that day, the first four rows of the spectator section were suddenly occupied by sturdy young men. A legal wrangle ensued between Ernst and opposition counsel over whether the young woman’s reputation was valid in the case. The judge ruled that it was not. Ernst then turned to all the young men and said, “The first four rows can go home. I won’t need you now.” His point was made. But behind the foolishness and pranks reposed one of the best criminal law minds in the country. Everyone said Ernst should have occupied the DA’s chair someday, or a seat on a court of appeals. But it was also said he lacked the gut lust for power. He was content to serve on the next rung down.

  DA Vance told Ernie Ernst: “I want you to go into that grand jury room and play devil’s advocate in the John Hill case.” This was an unprecedented act, sending one prosecutor into the chamber as a rein on another prosecutor’s enthusiasm, but Vance was obviously nervous about the involvement of Houston’s power structure—medicine and oil. “I want you to pick that case apart,” ordered Vance, “and if there is still a case left when you are through, then it can stand on its merits.” Vance knew that if there were nothing to this matter but pride and prejudice and revenge, then Ernst would quickly destroy it. If there was more, if there was enough to satisfy a trial jury, then Ernst would nurture it, and eventually harvest it.

  In his first week of becoming acquainted with the evidence and the climate in the grand jury room, Ernst discovered two factions. The principal one stood behind Cecil Haden, willing to endorse his every more. If Haden said, “Let’s send our own private detective out to interview Joan Robinson Hill’s hairdresser,” then the jury would vote to do just that. And did. But a small note of contrariness was the presence of a feisty young black woman who was, at times, rebellious toward Haden. Her name was Carole Pinkett and she was a Yankee newly come to Texas, employed by a major oil company as an executive in the personnel division. Well educated, strikingly beautiful in a high-fashion sort of way, she was not willing to dance automatically to boss Haden’s cadence. She struck Ernie Ernst as a thinking, reasonable woman, the kind of deductive mind that any grand jury should cherish. Haden found her a nuisance, and other jurors felt she was holding up the progress of the case. But Ernst liked her. At this point in mid-spring, nothing he had read, or heard, or seen had convinced him that a murder had been committed.

  On March 12, 1970, one week shy of the first anniversary of Joan’s death, John Hill and Ann Kurth were divorced. Within twenty-four hours Ann was seated in a grand jury chamber, pouring out tales concerning the man who had thrown her out. Ernie Ernst listened to the new ex-wife rant on and he found himself being reminded of an actress in a solo turn, alone at center stage for an evening. Her voice rose and fell at moments of peak drama, her hand sometimes brushed her throat and slid slowly down across her breasts. It was a swooping, fluttering tour de force. “How much of her can we believe?” Ernst kept asking himself.

  Specifically, Ann Kurth told the grand jury:

  (1) John Hill not only killed his first wife, Joan, but he also tried to kill her, the second Mrs. Hill. On three occasions.

  (2) John’s Sodium Pentothal “truth serum” test was probably rigged. On their wedding trip to Dallas, John went to a medical library where he read up on the drug, searching for an antidote. Later, on the very morning that he was to undergo the examination, she discovered him giving himself a shot in the hip. It was, Ann said, something to counteract the strength of the truth serum. He was thus able to be aware of the questions and provide safe answers. “That’s crap,” said the anesthesiologist, Dr. Richard Smith, when he heard of this claim. �
��I don’t care if John Hill injected himself with holy water, he was still anesthetized,” he said. “There’s no antidote to the anesthetist’s skill and experience, and that’s what put John Hill under.”

  Nonetheless, Ann Kurth made this claim among others, describing her ex-husband as a violent man, chilling the grand jury room like a January norther from the Panhandle. The jurors had questions about her charges, one particularly pertinent one: why had Ann waited until now to tell these things? When she appeared before a previous grand jury in 1969, she had given not a hint of improper conduct on her then husband’s part.

  None of this had occurred at the time of her previous visit to the grand jury, answered Ann. Prosecutor McMaster pointed out that a wife could not testify against her husband. Only now was she an ex-wife. One of the jurors had another question: was the Kurth testimony thus usable in an actual court trial? Or was it privileged? McMaster replied honestly that he did not know.

  Myra Hill promptly moved back into her son’s house. She was delighted that he had divorced his second wife. “Now that it’s all over,” she asked, “why did you marry that woman in the first place?”

  John gave her a twofold answer, one that Myra would never forget. She even wrote it down on a scrap of paper, to add to the journal of clippings and documents she was keeping.