Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Ernie Ernst was dissatisfied. “Suppose you had a dog that you loved very much and the dog got sick with nausea and diarrhea and everything else. What would you do for that dog? Leave it there so it would hopefully get better? Or take it to the vet?”

  John Hill sidestepped around the trap. “I’d treat it in the best manner that I could, to answer your hypothetical question, but if the dog was failing to improve, well, sooner or later, I would take the dog to the vet, of course.”

  “Sooner or later?”

  “Yes.” John Hill delivered to the room one of the looks that doctors hold a patent on. It said, “We know best.”

  John was braced for questions relating to Ann Kurth’s appearance before the grand jury. Finally one came.

  “Did you, prior to taking the Sodium Pentothal test for Mr. McMaster, conduct a study of the nature of that test?” asked Ernst.

  “Yes, I did,” answered the doctor. “Mrs. Ann Kurth, who became Mrs. Hill over that weekend, and I went to Dallas and took the kids to Six Flags Over Texas. And I was … well, I had agreed to go along with something that I didn’t really know the nature of, a Sodium Pentothal test, and I was a little bit concerned as to the reliability of the tests and whether or not I might perjure myself or where I might make statements that might be misleading or misconstrued. So I went to a library.”

  “As a result of that study, did you determine whether or not there was any medication which would tend to offset the effects of the truth serum drug?”

  “No, I did not. I don’t think that this would be possible because this is administered by an anesthesiologist, who puts you to sleep, and you are either asleep or you are not asleep, and this is something only he can determine.”

  “Did you administer any medication, or did anyone else administer any medication to you shortly prior to your Sodium Pentothal examination which would tend to affect the results of that test?”

  John dressed his face with an expression of sourness. I know where that came from, it seemed to say. “No. Mrs. Kurth indicated that she was going to come down here and allege such a thing if there was a divorce between us. I don’t know if you are relying on her information. Anyway, I did not administer any such drug.”

  “Were you asleep during the test? Under the influence of the drug?”

  “Yes, of course. My level of consciousness varied a great deal, I was more alert at times than at others, and I can vaguely remember a question or two at the outset. But the person who knows these things is the anesthesiologist because he is able to measure your blood pressure and your pulse and your respiration and check your pupils and various other responses.”

  Carole Pinkett had hung back silently during the doctor’s testimony, listening carefully, trying to make up her mind about this man. He was a little smooth for her, his answers were too pat. The fact that he sweated profusely, beads of perspiration dotting his forehead and dampening his crisp white collar, was the only crack in his shield.

  She asked John Hill how many times he had treated his wife medically prior to her final illness.

  “Practically every time she was ill,” answered the doctor. “I was responsible mainly for her treatment and that of my son for minor illnesses and also for the medical treatment of the Robinson family.”

  Ernie Ernst wrote down the answer on his yellow legal pad. Unknowingly, Carole Pinkett had asked the most telling question of the day. Then she moved to an area that had not been touched by the grand jury or the doctor. “Doctor, can you sincerely say that you loved your wife when she died?”

  For a moment, a fraction of suspense, John Hill seemed taken aback. “Yes,” he began softly in tones less measured than his previous answers. “I did love my wife.… We had some pretty serious differences. The nature of my love for Joan was one of respect for an individual with an unusual mind and a very fine personality, great administrative capacity and immense personal charm … not necessarily a lot of romantic love.” For a moment there, thought Carole Pinkett, he had almost dropped his guard and exposed his real feelings. But then he reverted to form and began describing his marriage as if it were fodder for a medical journal.

  “You did care for her?” she pressed.

  John nodded.

  “Did you love her?”

  “I was just making a point …”

  “Is that your definition of love?”

  “The character of love that I had for her was not any longer such a romantic, burning love.…”

  Carole understood. “The honeymoon was over?”

  John looked down. “Perhaps that is the way to put it.… Everything was over.”

  He had dreaded the ordeal, but now that it was past John Hill felt elated. He told Racehorse Haynes that the grand jury’s questions had been tough but reasonable. “I don’t think they’re going to indict me,” predicted the surgeon. Extremely conservative politically, John Hill held great faith in the legal processes of the American system of justice. Once, before the scandal of Joan’s death had wrapped its grip about him, he had attended a forum held by the ACLU and he had sat on the front row, baiting the liberal panel. Only with a rigid, rightist attitude could America survive, he said. No mollycoddling of the downtrodden! At a coffee reception afterward, he told one ACLU member that he held no truck with those who would allow the poor, blacks, and Mexicans special favor under the law, to compensate for the history of their persecution. The system works, he said. Any man can rise to prestige and power—witness himself!—and any man can expect fair treatment under the law.

  Racehorse Haynes was no such idealist. Any lawyer who knows his way to the courthouse also knows that the system is majestic and at the same time maddening, corrupt, and pliable to the whims of politics, influence, and money. The next day after his client’s appearance before the grand jury, Haynes’s attitude was confirmed. The grand jury was requesting a one-month extension of their regular ninety-day term. Had John Hill’s appearance before the panel been all that satisfactory, Racehorse knew, then the matter would have been dropped altogether. It was time for another grandstand play. Racehorse called I. D. McMaster—and at the same time slipped the news to a reporter—to say that his client was willing to take a polygraph examination. Because the circumstances surrounding the truth serum test had been sullied by the accusations of Ann Kurth, then the doctor would agree to a test solely administered by police authorities.

  “No deal,” said McMaster. Not unless John Hill wants to stay in jail for forty-eight hours prior to the test, under constant observation. If a person bombs himself with tranquilizers before a polygraph test, it can drastically alter the results. Racehorse quickly refused, not relishing the spectacle of his client checking into jail for two days and nights. It was certain to be photographed and find a place on the front page of the city’s newspapers.

  The two assistant DAs, Ernst and McMaster, took off several days and reviewed the case. They reread the Helpern report, the transcript of John Hill’s appearance before the grand jury, the summation of Ann Kurth’s testimony, bits and pieces from all the others. “There’s not a doubt in my mind that the son of a bitch wanted his wife dead,” believed Ernst. “In fact, I think he probably did it. But I don’t think we’ve got enough to make a first-degree murder-with-malice charge stick.”

  He retired to the law library and spent a week searching for precedent to indict, try, and convict John Hill. Never in two decades of trial work had a case so tantalized him. The district attorney, Carol Vance, summoned Ernst and McMaster and asked for a summation of their feelings.

  “We think he ought to be indicted for murder,” said McMaster.

  But how would they prove a murder? demanded Vance. That remained the key issue. After all the autopsies by all the doctors Joan Robinson Hill lay in her grave, dead from still unknown causes. Racehorse Haynes would tear apart any accusation that the woman died of possible poisoning, unless there was real proof. There was no margin for speculation in this case, warned Vance. What can be proved?
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br />   What can be proved? mused McMaster. They could prove that John Hill had a rotten marriage, that he ran around on his wife, that he kept a mistress he wanted to marry, that he signed a financially imprisoning document that would force him to give up his beloved music room if he didn’t stop acting like a tomcat, that his wife got sick, that he treated her at home, that she got worse, that he took her to an out-of-the-way hospital, that she died, that he married his mistress before the dead wife was barely cold. That’s all they could prove.

  Out of all that, said Vance, only two remote criminal possibilities existed. Either John Hill intentionally let his wife die, or he was so grossly negligent in the matter that he hastened her death.

  Ernie Ernst asked for another day or two in the law library. He had come onto an obscure possibility. A risky one at best. “But,” drawled Ernst, “I just may know a way we can indict this old boy for murder.”

  TWENTY

  In 1893 a young woman lived with her aged spinster aunt, who was infirm and unable to care for herself. As the old woman grew more feeble and edged closer to death, the niece “continued to live with her and use her money to purchase food, but she failed to furnish the deceased with said food, provide medical assistance or notify anyone of her terminal illness.”

  In 1907 a man spent three days with his girl friend in what the vernacular of the era called “a weekend debauch.” During their vivid hours together, the girl took a fatal dose of morphine tablets. The man, aghast at the act and its potential for scandal, failed to call a physician who might have been able to pump out her stomach and save her life.

  In 1923 a man and his wife went out on a bar crawl in the middle of winter. The night was cold and stormy. Upon their return home, the woman tripped on the front steps, laughed drunkenly, and said she was going to rest a minute in the snow. The man went inside, passed out, and the next morning woke up to discover his wife dead, frozen stiff in a snowbank.

  In 1935 a distraught woman announced to her fiancé that she was going to fling herself out the window and commit suicide. Be my guest, said the lover. She did.

  What, hypothetically asked Ernie Ernst, what did these poor folk all have in common—the ungrateful niece who sponged off her dying aunt, the rake whose mistress overdosed herself with morphine, the thoughtless drunk whose wife went to sleep forever in the snow, the hapless man whose girl friend fatally left his apartment via his window? “They were all convicted of murder by omission, that’s what,” said Ernst, a little triumphant after his long sabbatical in the law library.

  Murder by omission! In the entire history of American criminal jurisprudence, there were perhaps twenty cases which could be categorized under this heading. “They’re damned difficult to prove,” cautioned Ernst, “and they often get overturned on appeal.” But, to his thinking, it was the only rap that could be pinned on Dr. John Hill. Ernst summed up: “The law is fairly clear on this. If you owe a duty to a person and if you fail to perform it, and death results, then you are guilty of homicide.” If, for example, you are driving across the Golden Gate Bridge and you see a potential suicide preparing to leap, the law does not require you to stop and pull that person down from the guard rail. But if a man’s wife jumps out of the car and climbs onto the rail and prepares to leap, then the law says that the man has a responsibility to prevent that death. If he lets her jump, it’s murder by omission. McMaster was fascinated. This was compatible with his murder-by-neglience theory, but it was stronger.

  “A doctor owes a duty to his patient,” said Ernst, “and a doctor owes a special duty to his wife if she is the patient.”

  Can this be murder in the first degree? asked McMaster.

  “I think so,” answered Ernst. If the state could prove that, through criminal negligence and by withholding proper medical treatment, John Hill caused the death of his wife, then it was murder one, the same as if he had seized a dagger and stabbed her to death in her bed.

  The two prosecutors waved their discovery in front of the boss, Carol Vance, who agreed that it was the best of a weak case. Take it before the grand jury, he said wearily, and explain the law, and let them decide.

  Grand juror Carole Pinkett was also tired and disenchanted. The idealism she had brought to this secret chamber on her first day of public service was now gone. In college she had studied government and political science, its machinations and intrigue, confident that in the long haul the system was fair. Now her virginity in matters judicial was broken. She listened to Ernst and McMaster droning on, explaining the strange-sounding new charge they had dredged out of old lawbooks, and neither their enthusiasm nor the excitement of some of the other jurors—Haden specifically—bothered her as much as the fact that she no longer cared very much. She found herself nodding, almost dumbly, like having explained a mathematical equation that she had not the remotest interest in. She felt now that there was an inexorable end to this drama, one forewritten before she even took her chair on the first day. Certain events and scenes that had nagged at her for almost four months seemed more comprehensible now. At that first session she had been pleased to discover four black faces on the grand jury. At that moment, in 1970, it was the rare panel that contained more than one or two. How fine, she thought, how excellent it was for black people to be assuming civic responsibility in something as basic and powerful as grand jury service! Still, as the weeks dragged on and the John Hill case became a torment to her conscience, she began to fret. She began to speculate that four black people were on this panel because it would be easier to persuade the meek and the subservient to vote in a certain way.

  She noticed other things as well. It was worrisome to her when Cecil Haden became a benevolent white father figure, currying favor with the jurors, sending out for sandwiches and fried chicken—and paying the bill for everybody himself—when it was necessary for the group to continue past the lunch hour. Often she noted Haden leaving for the day with his arm draped pointedly around one of the juror’s shoulders, sometimes a black who had never felt the pressure of a rich and powerful white man’s touch and comradeship. The sight reminded Carole of a Washington lobbyist strolling down a congressional corridor with a lawmaker in tow. Toward the end of the jury’s term, Carole encountered difficulty keeping her mind on the witnesses. One thought tore at her: “No matter what I do or say, the stage is set and a script is being acted out.” When she rose to attack a theory or a flimsy piece of speculation from the prosecutors, she could sense a collective, if silent, groan from her peers. She began to feel talked down to, abused of her independence, treated like a nigger and a woman and thus twice removed from the possibility of rational thought.

  She cared little for John Hill and, during his appearance, felt that he was too glib and cold. But she did not like what was happening to him. “What has the district attorney offered us?” she asked her fellow jurors. “Where is the proof? How can we indict this man? All we have been offered are some shady characters—a doctor who played around, a vengeful father bringing pressure. After three autopsies, we still do not know the cause of death! Can we possibly indict a man on this and refer him to a trial jury?”

  The foreman thanked Mrs. Pinkett for her remarks, then passed out secret ballots. “What’s the use?” surrendered Carole Pinkett to herself. “I’m tired, everyone else is tired. Everybody’s probably thinking the way I am—which is to say, to hell with this. Joan Hill didn’t mean a thing to me. John Hill doesn’t mean a thing to me. I’ll just pass this on to a trial jury. I’ll pass them the buck. I’ll let them decide if this doctor should go to the penitentiary forever. I’ll let everybody go to sleep.”

  The vote was ten to two in favor of indictment. Carole Pinkett never knew who supported her in opposition to the charge. No one locked eyes with her, or nodded imperceptibly as she studied the jurors’ faces during the counting of votes. It did not matter, for John Hill was now formally accused by the People of Texas of murder by omission of his wife.

  That night Ash Robinson cried might
ily, in exultation!

  That night Carole Pinkett uncharacteristically poured herself a large drink and sat alone, in a dark room, wondering at the enormity of the deed. As tired as she was, sleep eluded her.

  Racehorse Haynes turned the rare indictment upside down for a newspaper reporter and tried to read it. “It reads just as intelligently this way as it does right side up,” he said. The attorney reported that his client’s reaction was the same as his, “shock and disbelief.” He had never read a document quite like it in his entire career in criminal law.

  “But,” said Racehorse optimistically, “maybe this grand jury has inadvertently done us a favor. Maybe a no-bill would not have been adequate. Maybe a full jury trial and acquittal are needed to restore Dr. Hill to his rightful place in society.”

  The indictment was brief:

  On or about the 19th day of March, 1969, John R. Hill was a licensed medical doctor and was the husband of Joan Hill, and had undertaken, and then and there was responsible for the medical treatment of her … and the said Joan Hill was then and there sick and thereby in a helpless condition, which was known to Dr. Hill, and the life of Joan Hill was in danger if she did not promptly receive proper medical attention and treatment, and this was known to Dr. John Hill, and the said Dr. John Hill did voluntarily and with malice aforethought kill the said Joan Hill by wilfully, intentionally and culpably failing and omitting to administer to her proper medical treatment, and by wilfully, intentionally and culpably failing and omitting to make timely provisions for her hospitalization and proper medical treatment.

  The plastic surgeon was severely shaken by the indictment, but he was reassured by Racehorse’s attitude. Moreover, he had a new source of comfort in his life. Her name was Connie, and on the night the state of Texas formally accused him of murdering his first wife, she put her arms around him and vowed to stand by him—whatever.