“There’s simply no way they can prove anything but Item 1,” he decided. Item 2 was an argumentative region of grayness in this husband-wife relationship. If necessary, Racehorse would summon prominent doctors of the city who would testify that, had their own wives displayed similar symptoms, they would have followed the same course of treatment and might have wound up with dead spouses. Item 3, Racehorse convinced himself, was even slipperier. Malice! If a man tells a crowded saloon crowd, “I’m going to get my gun and shoot the bastard who stole my woman,” and if he does just that, then murder with malice aforethought is not difficult to establish. “But how is the state of Texas going to convince a jury that John Hill, a gentle, churchgoing surgeon in good standing, deliberately killed his wife through medical negligence?” said the lawyer.
Both sides spent hundreds of yawning hours in medical libraries and in the company of physicians and scientists, trying to comprehend the ways that poisons and bacteria can harm the body. Racehorse decided he could rule out any claim that poison was administered to Joan Hill. She lived too long after she first became ill—more than four days—to have been slipped any quick-acting poison. Moreover, tests for “heavy metals” on the blood first drawn from her in the hour she was admitted to Sharpstown Hospital showed no evidence of such. And none of the pathologists who had autopsied the woman, including the great Dr. Helpern, had been able to discover any unexplained injection site on the body. “Scratch poison,” said Racehorse.
But death from bacteria was not only a possibility, it was a potentially dangerous opponent to Hill’s defense. The state could not prove that Joan Hill perished from a bacterial infection of sinister origin, but Racehorse fretted that they could damn well waltz around the idea long enough to make it sound feasible to a jury.
The lesions that the woman suffered were probably bacterial in etiology. The esophagus, liver, spleen, and meninges all had the kind of intense white-cell infiltrations normally found in serious bacterial infection, or, as the disease is also known, bacteremia. True, Dr. Jachimczyk, the Houston coroner, wrote in his very first autopsy report that he would rule out bacterial infection because of a negative blood culture run on blood taken from Joan immediately after her admission to Sharpstown Hospital. But one of Houston’s best-known research specialists on this type of disease took issue with the coroner. “We frequently encounter bacteremia even with a negative blood culture,” he said. “Maybe one out of six cases, in fact.”
The next question was, of course, How did the bacteria get into Joan’s body and kill her? One potentially deadly kind of bacteria are called E. coli, and they exist in every human being’s body. These are valuable and necessary bacteria because they help produce antibodies that kill harmful organisms that are swallowed and introduced to the system. They also keep intestinal function normal. They live in the colon and are supposed to stay there. But if they get out of the colon they become a deadly threat. A crumb of feces is basically all bacteria and dangerous. Occasionally a surgeon kills a patient by carelessly nicking the bowel wall during an operation, releasing millions of bacteria from feces into the blood stream, and propelling the patient into terminal shock. It is not a rare blunder; John Hill did it once during resident surgery. In one major American hospital there were 860 such fatal cases over a nine-year period. Alas, the grieving family is usually told, your loved one died of postsurgical complications and blood poisoning. Alas, the loved one really died of a surgical mistake.
But, as Racehorse happily reminded himself, Joan Hill did not have surgery.
The other two principal portals of entry for bacteria into a body are ingestion and injection. It would have been possible for John Hill to slip his wife a pathogenic (disease-producing) bacteria by mouth. He could have cultured the E. coli bacteria on an agar plate, a fundamental process known to any medical student, dropped a spoonful of the stuff into a glass of juice or even the cream portion of a chocolate éclair, and given it to Joan. There would not even be a foul taste. No taste at all, in fact. But it would take a massive dose of E. coli bacteria for someone to be killed by swallowing it. Researchers studying the subject at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston have fed volunteers straight spoonfuls of E. coli organisms in a jelly, and the principal complaint is little more than loose bowel movements. It would take continuing doses over a long period of time to kill someone. (A nurse in Houston committed a most bizarre suicide by injecting herself regularly with a solution made from her own parakeet’s feces.)
But what about injecting the deadly bacteria into a patient with a hypodermic needle? Here Racehorse must have felt a tiny flutter of apprehension. One neutral doctor in Houston who studied the case out of curiosity felt that if you wanted to speculate on murder this was the best place to fantasize. He commented: “I don’t think John could have done it orally unless he used a very high-grade pathogen—like salmonella. And this assumes that he knew more bacteriology than we give him credit for. Surgeons are not particularly adroit at this kind of work, and as far as one knows, John Hill never went near a research lab. It is not a difficult to grow salmonella, but first you have to know it is salmonella, and you must go to a laboratory where they have it and get it.”
The specialist was a man who enjoyed paperback mysteries and he was willing to concoct a plot: “If you’re going to fantasize and speculate and go way out, then imagine that Joan Hill developed acute gastroenteritis on her own. She just got sick with a touch of stomach flu. It might have been something she ate. This began her illness. Now her husband was thinking about getting rid of her, and he took this as an occasion to administer medications intravenously. There is testimony from the two Dallas women house guests and from Effie, the maid, and from John Hill himself that he gave his wife two shots of Compazine. He could have made up a vial to look like any kind of medicine, only it had a heavy suspension of bacteria in it. Any bacteria. You would not have to be a trained bacteriologist to do this. You could go out into the yard and pick up a dog dropping. And he could inject this intravenously during the two or three days she was having the gastroenteritis problems. This would bring on the kind of disease she had—massive, overwhelming infection disseminated all over the body.
“And then, of course, the hasty embalming after her death in effect ‘sterilized’ the body. It removed the culture medium for the organisms to grow in, and it became impossible for anybody to find the fatal bacteria.”
But mind you, cautioned the doctor, none of this was provable. It was the stuff of policiers and nothing more. Racehorse had no intention of letting the district attorney’s office inject any fanciful scenarios into the trial record. He felt there were only two known possibilities of real trouble—Effie Green and Ann Kurth. The maid would once again come out and tell her now famous story of finding Joan Hill lying in a soiled bed. This had the same horror in the telling that the word “crucifixion” had in Racehorse’s earlier case. To counter Effie’s dangerous testimony, the defense lawyer planned to offer about one half of a mea culpa from his client. He would contend that John Hill slept in the same bed that next to last night of his wife’s life, so the feces could not have been all that terrible. And, the lawyer would suggest to the jury, his client simply “misread” the entire situation.
“Let’s put this illness in its proper context,” he was preparing to say, probably rehearsing his speech while shaving. “Here you have a husband and a wife who did not enjoy the best of relationships. Their marriage was at the breaking point. She was naturally upset over the fact that her husband had been dating another woman. He was, at this point, pretty fed up with his wife. He didn’t like her smoking, her personal health habits, her drinking, her nagging at him in public, and the fact that she wouldn’t take medication. So when she had the bowel movement he misjudged it. Several things were working on him—the deteriorating marriage, concern for his son, pressure from Ann Kurth, financial problems with the music room. He simply ‘misread’ that scene that night in bed.”
Bu
t then there was Ann Kurth.
What had she told the district attorney and the grand jury? What was she prepared to testify? Any conversations that went on between her and her husband during their tempestuous short-lived marriage were privileged and not admissible. But the defense attorney worried that Ernie Ernst was a clever enough prosecutor—even though he would be riding shotgun, in the second chair behind I. D. McMaster—to figure out a way to bend the law and get her on the witness stand and pump the fertile well. A few weeks earlier the lady had dropped a couple of worrisome hints during the taking of a deposition in property division from the divorce. She was talking at the time about how afraid she was of her now ex-husband, her fears having begun when he deliberately tried to kill her in a car accident. Haynes already knew of the event, but as the murder trial neared, he asked his client to elaborate.
Not much to it, said John. He and Ann were out driving late one night, near Chatsworth Farm. A quarrel began. Ann grabbed the wheel and the Cadillac hit a bridge abutment. Both were a little shaken up, but nothing serious. No real injuries.
“Is that all?” pressed Racehorse.
His client nodded. The lawyer studied his handsome face carefully. John Hill was the frostiest man he had ever encountered. Nothing seemed to faze him. Not for one fractional moment since the relationship between lawyer and client began more than a year earlier had John permitted himself any emotion. No despair. No exultation. No tears. Lately, he at least seemed happy, and it was easy to trace. Connie had become invaluable not only to John but to his defense. She was spending scores of hours each week working at the Haynes-Fullenweider office, typing depositions, preparing cross indexes, familiarizing herself with millions of words of sworn testimony so that she could instantly find it should the lawyers need a passage quickly. “She is a most remarkable woman,” thought Racehorse. Funny thing about fate, he mused. John Hill should have met this woman first. They should have married and now they would be at home, in the music room, playing Scarlatti duets on the Bösendorfer, living graceful, elegant lives. Instead, he goes on trial for murder next week, and she is walking around a law office with carbon-stained hands.
One other item in Ann Kurth’s divorce deposition testimony caught Racehorse’s attention. Her lawyer, out of left field, asked if Mrs. Kurth had ever seen some “petri dishes” in the bachelor apartment that John Hill leased during their love affair.
Yes, she had, answered Ann. But the line of questioning was dropped. Racehorse read the entire transcript over again, just to make sure he had not overlooked something.
Then he searched for the definition of “petri dish.” It can be found in a medical dictionary: “A shallow, circular, glass or plastic dish with a loose-fitting cover over the top and sides, used for culturing bacteria and other micro-organisms, named after R. J. Petri, German bacteriologist.”
Racehorse called up John Hill and read him the bothersome portion of Ann’s divorce testimony. Did this have any significance?
A moment passed before the surgeon said, quietly but emphatically, “No.”
TWENTY-TWO
Houston is a city whose pulse is quick, and murder trials have a similar tempo. Rare is the case that consumes more than a day or two in jury selection, a week of testimony, and a few hours of deliberation by the jury. If the jurors remain out for more than a day, the worry is that deliberations are hung on dead center. The spirit of the frontier is not far back, and there remains an attitude of “get it on, get it over.” When a Houston lawyer reads of a faraway trial in, say, New York, where all concerned are in court for six tedious months, the attitude combines disbelief with thanksgiving.
By the end of the second day a jury of eleven men and one woman had been chosen to try Dr. John Hill for the “murder by omission” of his wife Joan. Both sides had come to court not exactly sure as to the kind of juror most desirable to their cause. The prosecution, to Ernie Ernst’s way of thinking, had a Sunday tabloid sort of case, with the emphasis heavy on emotion, adultery, lost love, and romantic mischief on the richest boulevard in town. At first Ernst toyed with the idea of putting as many women on the jury as possible, for he felt that churchgoing matrons would respond unkindly to a philandering doctor. Then he began to remember that many women are in love with their doctors, one way or another, and that he might blunder by relying on them. “A lot of dames think with their vaginas,” he would say later on. “I couldn’t run the risk of having them get misty-eyed over that good-lookin’ doctor at the defendant’s table. They wouldn’t vote to convict a good-lookin’ doctor for anything.” Better to fill the jury box with hard-laboring middle-class white men, the kind who endure from Friday’s pay check to Friday’s pay check, overly mortgaged, not very content, inclined probably to think that George Wallace might have the political answer, that doctors charge too much money and cover up for each other, that Dr. Fancy Pants who plays the piccolo probably killed his wife.
Conversely, Racehorse wanted women. He felt that only females could properly evaluate the testimony of Ann Kurth. “She’s the key,” he mused. “I suspect she’s going to get up there on the stand and tell something horrible on my boy, and we’ve got to have jurors who can perceive what axes this woman brought to court to grind. The ideal juror for us,” reasoned Racehorse, “is a woman between twenty-five and forty-five, who will sit in judgment not so much on John Hill, but on Ann Kurth.” He compared it to a rape case, where defense lawyers often accuse the victim of taking liberties with the truth. “Women tend to be very critical of a woman testifying against an alleged rapist,” said Racehorse, who had defended his share. “Whereas you put a bunch of guys on the jury and they’re ready to hang the son of a bitch.”
The defense attorney was not too worried about choosing purple-haired church soprano kind of women who might tsk-tsk moral indignation and/or condemnation toward a philandering doctor. In the first place, the state would have a difficult time getting such testimony into the record, specific acts of sexual misconduct being inadmissible. And secondly, he planned to offer his client as a highly religious, church-going doctor-father-husband. He had members of the Church of Christ laid on to testify about John’s devoutness. Lastly, he was not going to hide obvious facts. Sure the marriage had broken down. Sure they had contemplated divorce. Sure she was unhappy. So was he. People’s marriages crack and fall apart hourly in this town, like any other town. “But John Hill is not on trial for a bad marriage,” Racehorse planned to tell the jury.
Don Fullenweider, Racehorse’s partner, was worried about how the defense would cope with the damaging revelation that their client married his mistress just a few weeks after Joan was dead. Simple, answered Racehorse. “We put John on the witness stand, and we let him tell about how this woman appeared in his life, and how, after Joan’s death, she made herself necessary, almost vital. She seemed to show concern about his health and his son, and John needed a surrogate mother for his boy. Only after she finagled her way into the new nest did she reveal her true nature, whereupon John’s life became hell, and he divorced her.”
There are holes in it, suggested Fullenweider to his partner.
Of course there are, said Haynes. But come up with something better and they would use it.
The state spent most of its strikes to knock off prospective women from the panel. Only one, an employee of the personnel department of a Houston school district, survived the challenges. The defense encountered several veniremen who held grievances against the medical profession in general. Having expected that, the lawyer was careful to ask specific questions as to whether a prospective juror had ever had a bad experience with a doctor. He did not want a fellow on the panel whose wife had received a diagnosis of stomach ulcer, then died of cancer.
The eleven men finally selected to join the solitary woman in the jury box were relentlessly middle class, a brewery’s assemblage for a foamy commercial to be shown during Sunday afternoon football intermissions. Their jobs were fork-lift operator, airline skycap, chemical pla
nt security guard, paint company foreman, dime store assistant manager, heavy equipment operator. Law-abiding blue-collar citizens, they were men who the state felt would be able to understand deadly shenanigans among the rich. The defense hoped they were sophisticated enough to see through the state’s thin case. Their lives seemed to be devoid of frills and poetry and music—common-sense lives all, listing toward boredom. Racehorse felt confident that the events about to take place would hold their attention.
I. D. McMaster opened for the state and was a fine figure before the jurors. Lean, sinewy, his voice rumbled like distant thunder on the far side of the ranch. “We expect to prove,” began the assistant district attorney, whose involvement with the case had begun on the morning Joan Hill was buried, “that problems arose in the course of this marriage which resulted in the filing of a divorce petition on December 3, 1968, by the defendant, Dr. John Hill. An answer to said petition for divorce was filed by … Joan Robinson Hill … making the divorce a contested matter which could have resulted in a court trial.
“… Realizing that he had insufficient grounds for divorce and in fear of the adverse publicity in regard to his extramarital activities which might result from a court trial, Dr. John Hill dismissed his divorce case and agreed to a so-called reconciliation with Joan Hill as evidenced by a written instrument which contained, among other things, the following provisions: (1) A request that Joan Hill would forgive her husband’s past transgressions, (2) That in the event of a future separation, the defendant promised to deed the home on Kirby Drive to Joan Hill and further to make all payments thereon as well as taxes and upkeep.
“… Having failed to terminate the marriage legally, the defendant began to formulate a plan to rid himself of an unwanted wife.”
As he listened to the accusation, Racehorse looked at the jury intently, studying each face. In two decades of trying criminal cases, he had come to believe that juries sent out vibrations in the opening moments of the proceedings. He could sense either hostility and anger toward a defendant, or courtesy and even friendliness. Unless he was mistaken, Racehorse noted to himself, this jury seemed very much inclined toward John Hill. Beside him, the doctor sat frozen, his face ashen ice. That night he would tell both Connie and his mother that he could not connect himself with the reality of the day. “I kept stepping outside myself and seeing another person sitting there,” he said.
Blood and Money Page 29