Blood and Money
Page 28
Connie Loesby was beautiful, a pale, serene, composed woman who resembled a hand-painted cameo from another century. Often she wore her lustrous brunette hair pulled back into a demure bun, emphasizing her eyes, which could look like enormous black opals, polished with a velvet cloth. A man would use old-fashioned words like “genteel” and “ladylike” to describe her. She was the antithesis of both of the women who preceded her in John Hill’s life. She seemed a woman who was born to sit attentively in drawing rooms, listening to complex music. The impression was genuine, for music shaped and dominated her life.
Raised in Seattle, Connie was the daughter of a woman who played piano and organ and led a church choir. Connie began piano studies at seven, dallied briefly at ballet, and moved effortlessly into singing in public before she was twelve. She attended the famous Westminster Choir College in New Jersey, taking a master’s degree in music, recording the “Missa Solemnis” with the choir under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. For a time she dreamed of an operatic career, and joined an opera workshop in Philadelphia. There she sang the principal soprano roles in La Bohème, Così Fan Tutte, even Madame Butterfly. Her voice was too sweet and lyrical for the heavy dramatic coloring needed for Cio Cio San, but she was staggeringly beautiful in kimono and taped-back eyes. When a romance with an organist in Philadelphia broke, she joined the Robert Shaw Chorale, touring Europe, cramming as many musical experiences as she could into each week. When she returned to America, she needed a teaching job to sustain her studies, but she found it difficult to obtain such a post. Finally one turned up at a junior college near Houston. She arrived in the city with little money and took a dreary furnished room in the wrong part of town. She fell ill with pneumonia and stomach flu, and during a six-month recuperation a thief stole all of her clothes and possessions. It was not a very encouraging beginning.
On an evening in early December 1969, Connie participated in a musicale at the University of St. Thomas in the old residential center of Houston. She played the harpsichord and later sang a Scarlatti cantata, and, with a partner, two Purcell duets. Afterward, backstage, in the crush of people offering compliments, Connie was pulled aside by a flautist friend who wanted to introduce John Hill. The name meant nothing to her. She was not the kind of person who read the front page. All she knew was that a tall, quite handsome, and rather boyish-looking man in his late thirties was shyly mumbling his congratulations. The man introduced his son Robert—and the boy also seemed shy. When they left, father and son, there was a buzzing backstage, but Connie failed to pick up the cause. Even when a girl friend complimented her on having caught the eye of the wealthy and notorious plastic surgeon, Connie professed never to have heard of him, his dead wife, or the controversy swirling about both. When John sent an invitation through an emissary that he wanted her to come to his home for a Sunday afternoon musicale a few weeks hence, Connie accepted readily. Later she would tell him, “When you first asked me, I was a little afraid to come. But I swallowed my apprehension and collected all my friends in my trusty little VW and arrived. Immediately I forgot any little bit of worry. Music was the thing we all had in common, and there is no danger in music.”
For a few months Connie attended the musicales in the ornate room. They were pleasant affairs, with a core of ten or so professional musicians gathering to play for one another. On occasion John would introduce some obscure piece of medieval music he had discovered and play it on his recorder. Or Connie would sing shimmering lieder, or a visiting performer with the Houston Grand Opera would present an afternoon of obscure Mozart and Verdi. Afterward there would be champagne punch in fine crystal goblets and polite talk. John Hill was in his element, master of a palatial room, impresario of splendid music. That he was also being investigated for the death of his wife seemed impossible for Connie to believe. Only rarely did she connect the man and the scandal, perhaps when listening to the classical radio station and hearing the doctor’s name in an intrusive newscast.
Suddenly, surprisingly, for there had never been a moment of intimacy between them—not even private conversation—John called Connie and said, rather stumblingly, “I have a gift for you.” Hemming and hawing, he wondered whether he should mail it or drop it by the doorman of her new apartment. Connie sensed that here was a man who wanted to deliver a gift in person. But she was as shy as her admirer. Finally he blurted, “I would really like to bring it personally.” “Then do,” said Connie, relieved.
The gift was a recording of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose voice both John and Connie loved. She put it on her cheap portable phonograph, and John frowned at the tinny sound. He noted her inexpensive piano. It reminded him, he said, of the one on which he and his brother Julian once played duets. They began to talk of their musical pasts, revealing little bits and pieces of their lives, awkwardly maneuvering toward a relationship.
When John went home and told his mother about the interesting new girl, Myra Hill grew alarmed. She warned her son that it was neither wise nor prudent to be seen in the company of a new woman, with his first wife mysteriously dead, his second wife angrily estranged and so often in the company of Ash Robinson these days.
It was thereby arranged for a charade to be enacted until the storm clouds were blown away. Connie would come regularly to the Hill mansion on the ruse of giving Robert music lessons, after which she would stay for dinner, and then join the master of the house in his music room where they would often sit silently for hours, listening to the classics. The news did not escape Ash’s attention for long, because he rang up the district attorney’s office in the spring of 1970, just before the indictment was voted, and informed the prosecutors that his former son-in-law had still another woman on his arm. “He’s got a whole string of women,” Ash said. “He fixes up their faces and they give him free sex.” The only trouble with this was that Connie was too lovely to need a plastic surgeon’s knife.
During the several months that they had known one another, Connie avoided asking John about his first wife’s death. After the indictment was handed down, and during an afternoon in which he seemed exceptionally tense and distraught, she brought up the subject quietly.
“I want to know about Joan,” she said.
He shook his head, as if there was nothing to tell.
“Please,” she pressed.
John Hill shrugged. “I made a poor choice of in-laws,” he said.
“How do you keep going? It must be very hard on you.”
He nodded. “It has been a very difficult time. It’s important for me to know that you believe in me. Do you?”
“Yes.” Connie’s answer was firm. She felt she knew this man, and he was a gentle man, one who could not have anything to do with murder.
One evening a few weeks later, John Hill came into the kitchen where Connie was stirring a cooking pot. He took her into his arms and kissed her and said, “Will you marry me?”
Connie put down the spoon and smiled. “I sure will. When?”
“Whenever you want.”
“Tomorrow?” asked Connie.
“I’d better ask my lawyers.”
Racehorse Haynes had a piece of paper in his hand and he threw it to the ceiling when John Hill informed him of his plans to marry for a third time. Then just drive on up to Huntsville and spend the wedding night so you’ll be close to the state prison, warned Racehorse. His most urgent counsel, said the lawyer, was to wait. In fact, he would rather that the doctor not be seen in the company of any woman save his dear old mother and extremely ugly and well-married surgical nurses. John Hill saw the hard light and agreed to wait.
Though Racehorse was sputtering indignance to the press and tender consolation to his client, he felt exhilarated within. The stakes on the table were, for a change, exciting. Most criminal lawyers spend a career running drunks, addicts, and hijackers past bored judges, all yawning, enacting a scenario prewritten with the district attorney. Texas is no different from any other state in America, wherein ninety per cent of all criminal c
harges are traded out in advance.
Haynes’s heart leaped when he considered this case. It was surely The One. A lawyer could go to his grave waiting in vain for the murder trial where the victim died mysteriously, where the accused was of high professional and social position (and thus able to pay a substantial legal fee) and the opportunity was rich for flair, drama, headlines, and notoriety.
Already Racehorse was being talked about as the heir apparent in Texas to the criminal law kingdom of Percy Foreman, the giant attorney with historic ability to get people off on murder charges, particularly murderesses, but who was, in 1970, in his eighth decade and nearing retirement. Haynes was the archetypal criminal lawyer, possessing a cunning mind with just enough deviousness to sniff out chicanery from the other side—the takes-one-to-know-one principal. His ego was as gigantic as his stature was small, a valuable and admired quality in a city where the most successful men—heart surgeons, astronauts, wildcatting oilmen—did not object when their names appeared in large public print. Moreover, Racehorse was witty, charming, good-looking (“I owe everything to clean living and constant prayer,” he liked to say), and a splendid actor, able to summon rage, grief, scorn, or the wrath of the Almighty if it seemed necessary to move a jury.
The best way to understand Racehorse Haynes was to recollect one of his most celebrated events—the Crucifixion Case. He agreed to defend a gang of motorcyclists in a Southern state who were accused of punishing a female follower in a remarkable manner—by nailing her to a tree. Racehorse would come to call this “The Case of the Chick Who Was Tacked to a Stick.” He always told the story well: “My clients, whose names were Fat Frank, Spider, Super Squirrel, Crazy John, and Mangy, were upset at one of the ladies who followed their gang because she neglected to follow the first rule of the world’s oldest profession—that is, to turn in the money. They elected to punish her, and they nailed her to a tree. She was not killed, she wasn’t even hurt terribly bad. But all hell broke loose. It occurred to me that a pimp can burn his whore with a cigarette, or slice her up with a razor blade, or throw her out of a speeding car, or whip her to ribbons with a coat hanger, and nobody gets upset. People tend to think of these things as occupational hazard. But crucify one, and the entire Eastern seaboard and Southern states were up in arms.”
For his defense, Haynes took the position that (1) the girl in question sort of “volunteered” for what happened to her, and (2) nothing would have happened if the victim’s father had not been important. “We told the jury that the prosecution was caused not so much by the rage of the victim but by the anger of her father, who didn’t like motorcycle gangs very much. These boys had been roaring around his state for some time, even having the gall to ride into a sheriff’s office, put their feet on his desk, and say they were tired of being pushed around.”
Haynes won acquittal for Fat Frank et al. and the crucified girl is now, he claims, “quite celebrated around the bars of her area where she shows off her stigmata.”
There was, however, one point in the trial at which Racehorse felt his case needed bolstering. He wanted the jury to divorce the emotional and historical wrappings from the act of putting a nail through a human hand and affixing it to a tree. Hastily finding a doctor to advise him in private, the lawyer asked just how painful it was to have a nail driven through the hand. The doctor answered that it was serious but not necessarily life-threatening. “In fact,” he said, taking his hand, “there are places where you could put a nail through and barely feel pain.” Racehorse suddenly grabbed an idea that made him almost giddy with anticipation. He began to fantasize the scene. On the morning before the closing arguments, he would have his doctor friend secretly inject the top of his hand with a local anesthetic and mark it with a small red dot. Then, in the passion of his address to the jury, in dramatic proof of his contention that it did not hurt the girl all that much to be affixed to a tree trunk, he would slap his hand palm down, withdraw a hammer and nail from his briefcase, and nail himself to the defense table! Sort of an off-Broadway Crucifixion. Law students would surely talk about this defense for centuries thereafter.
“I have always regretted the fact that my case was so strong I was able to win without doing that,” Racehorse often said. “Yet I continue to dream of the day when I am cross-examining a witness and my questions are so probing and so brilliant that the fellow blurts out that he, not my defendant, committed the foul murder. Then he will pitch forward into my arms, dead of a heart attack.”
The John Hill murder case, felt Racehorse, was in that very category.
TWENTY-ONE
A year of anger and impassioned rhetoric spun by before John Hill was brought to trial. And in this interim Racehorse Haynes became convinced that the state of Texas had—at best—a wobbly case of malpractice against his client. “And I doubt seriously if they could win that,” he told his law partner, Fullenweider. As much as he wanted to try the tantalizing case, Racehorse leaned hard on the DA’s office to drop the charge. His position was this: if John Hill had been a schoolteacher or a bank clerk or any ordinary fellow, he would not be accused of murder by omission, whatever that is. And if John Hill had not been a doctor, and a society page doctor at that, and if his deceased first wife had not been an internationally famous woman and popular friend of power people in Houston, and if he had had any other man on the face of the planet for a father-in-law, John Hill would have been cleared and left alone long ago.
The prosecutors, McMaster and Ernst, paid no attention to Racehorse’s exhortations. They were now caught up in the rush to trial, and both had private reasons beyond professional responsibilities and a shared belief that the plastic surgeon was somehow guilty of his wife’s death. McMaster had decided to run for a district judgeship, and he knew that a widely publicized performance in this murder trial would win him attention. Ernst planned to retire from public life and slip away to a small town somewhere to teach law and do some writing. The Hill matter would be a satisfactory peak from which to begin a trip down.
The defense considered an all-out pretrial attack on the curious fact that Cecil Haden was a principal force on the grand jury that indicted his client. “It is true that in our criminal law there is no provision per se against the godfather and pallbearer of the deceased sitting on a grand jury that indicts her husband for an alleged murder,” Racehorse said sarcastically. “But I imagine the Court of Criminal Appeals would nonetheless find it interesting. And it should scare the pants off the citizens of this town.”
But he elected to keep this cannon silent for a time. He could always fire it later on, during the appeals process, in the remote possibility that his client was convicted. Instead he threw a bitter motion before the district criminal court, claiming that the indictment against John Hill was “fatally vague.” The crime of “murder by omission” was not even specifically written down in the state’s criminal law, nor were there penalties provided for such. And even if it were written down, he argued, there can be no culpable omission unless there is a legal duty. “The present indictment attempts to plead two different duties—that of a doctor and that of a husband, and two different omissions—the omission to administer treatment and the admission to make timely provisions for said treatment—without putting the defendant on notice of which theory the prosecution intends to pursue, thus rendering it impossible for the defendant to present his defense.” In other words, contended Racehorse, the state had to try this guy as either a husband or a doctor. Couldn’t do both.
Most pertinently, the lawyer charged, the indictment did not even allege the cause of Joan Hill’s death. What did the lady die from? Pancreatitis? Hepatitis? Meningitis? Nor did the indictment allege what treatment John Hill should have given his wife. “What the hell did he omit?” wondered Racehorse sarcastically.
The prosecution fired back with an articulate brief, larded with emotional quotations from legal history:
“It is a general rule that a physician or surgeon who through criminal negligence
in the treatment of the patient causes death, is guilty of manslaughter.… And in a few cases arising from the negligent practice of medicine, the accused has been charged with murder.… Criminal negligence in this respect is largely a matter of degree, incapable of precise definition, and whether or not it exists to such a degree as to involve criminal liability is to be determined by the jury.… The courts are generally agreed that negligence exists where the physician or surgeon … exhibits gross lack of competency or gross inattention, or criminal indifference to the patient’s safety.”
And, furthermore, insisted the DA’s men, “a criminal liability is imposed upon a husband who negligently fails to furnish his wife with necessities.… Dr. John Hill was both the husband and the doctor of the deceased, and as a doctor he became responsible for her medical treatment, and he knew under the law he had some responsibility as a husband; and [he knew] that she was sick and in a helpless condition; and it makes no difference what she was sick with; as a doctor he owes her the duty to properly attend her, regardless of her malady. With malice aforethought, intentionally and culpably, he failed to administer proper medical treatment and failed to timely provide for her hospitalization.…”
Judge Fred Hooey, in whose court the case had come to rest, denied Racehorse’s plea to quash the indictment and ordered jury selection to begin on February 16, 1971, just three days shy of the second anniversary of the death of Joan Robinson Hill. Angered that his motion was denied, Racehorse nonetheless felt confident on the eve. The state of Texas would have to prove three things to convict John Hill: (1) that he was a licensed medical doctor; (2) that he undertook to be the physician of his wife; and (3) that he deliberately and with malice failed to treat her properly and failed to obtain timely hospitalization for her, thus causing her death.