“I had slid over as close to him as I could in seeing that he was accelerating the car at a rapid rate, and I was sitting as close to the driver as I could.”
“Were you still in that position at the time he pulled out the needle.”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“What did you do in regard to the needle when he pulled it out?”
“I reached up and grabbed his hand and I said, “John …’”
Stunned, Haynes rose to object, more to break the impact of her story than anything else. For this was the first he had heard of the needle John Hill had allegedly tried to stick into Ann Kurth. At the defense table, John Hill was shaking his head in negation of the woman’s charge. “Is it understood, your honor, that our objection goes to all of the detail of this alleged transaction?”
Judge Hooey nodded, and in his attitude the defense lawyer read a note of uneasiness. Was the bench about to share the defense’s position that Ann Kurth was not only an ineligible witness against her ex-husband but one whose taste for high drama lent dangerous color to her testimony?
Hurriedly, McMaster bade his witness continue. A good tale cannot be interrupted too often or the listeners lose the thread of continuity. Ann was eager to go on. She knocked the first hypodermic needle out of her husband’s hands, she testified, only to see him coming at her with a second!
“And what did he do with that one, if anything?” wondered the prosecutor.
Ann Kurth edged forward in her seat and pitched her voice to a pulsating climax. “He tried again to get that syringe into me!” She was Pauline, lashed to the railroad tracks, saved only by the headlights of an approaching automobile.
Now wait a minute, suggested McMaster. Her husband was a doctor, and they had just been in a car wreck. How did she know he wasn’t fixing to give her a shot to calm her down, or treat her for something? “Was he attempting to treat you? Or harm you? Did you know?”
“Yes, I knew.”
“By something that occurred before this?” led McMaster. It was a question he would soon regret.
“Yes.”
“Immediately before this?”
“Yes …” Ann hesitated, then she blurted out a shocker. “He told me how he had killed Joan with a needle, and I knew that he …”
As a gasp rushed collectively from the spectators, Racehorse rocketed out of his chair. He rushed to the bench and asked for a sotto voce conference, out of the jury’s earshot. This woman’s testimony is not worthy of belief, he hissed. What the witness just slipped into the record is prejudicial, inflammatory, and irrevocable, no matter how many times the bench instructs the jury to disregard these statements. With passion to shake a Chatauqua tent, Racehorse demanded a mistrial.
“Overruled,” said Judge Hooey quietly, but he announced a luncheon recess. And he left the courtroom looking troubled.
During the break, the prosecutors warned Ann that she must expect exhaustive cross-examination from the defense. Racehorse would try to pulverize her. She smiled demurely, while newspaper photographers’ flash bulbs popped around her. “I can handle Mr. Racehorse,” she assured them. She always spoke his nickname with a heavy coat of mockery, often telling how disappointed she was at first meeting with the attorney. “I had been hearing about this man called Racehorse,” she once remarked, “and I expected to encounter a fantastic stud. Instead, this little squirt walks in to take my deposition. Quel disappointment.”
Before trial was to resume at 1:30 P.M., Judge Hooey summoned opposing counsel into his chambers. His face was grave. Over the lunch hour he had reviewed the Kurth testimony and Mr. Haynes’s motions of opposition to her appearance. “I have decided to grant Mr. Haynes’s motion for a mistrial,” the judge said.
And suddenly it was over.
Devastated, the district attorney’s men urged the judge to change his mind. “We begged, cajoled, pleaded, and cried,” McMaster would recall of the moment. “But his honor wouldn’t budge.” Judge Hooey said he would reset the case for another trial a few months hence. He asked the attorneys to apologize to their other witnesses under subpoena—Racehorse and Don Fullenweider alone had the equivalent of a small hospital staff ready to testify against the state’s medical negligence contentions.
When a newspaper reporter asked Ernie Ernst for an explanation of the surprising decision, he said, “It’s very simple. The judge just threw our ass out of court.” Privately, the two prosecutors came to believe that the judge simply could not accept all of the Kurth testimony. And it had been a mistake for her to quote John Hill as saying he had killed Joan with a needle.
That night the DA’s men drank whiskey. They grew rowdy and foolish, Ernst doing a funny imitation of Ann Kurth dodging John Hill’s flying hypodermic needles. McMaster laughed, as did everyone else in the room. But in his laughter was the cutting edge of defeat. He knew that the prospects of John Hill being tried again and convicted of murder were lessened now. The state had been blessed with favor from the bench until the trial aborted. Racehorse had made a blunder with the Effie Green deposition, something he would not do again. “We had gotten so much into the record that we could never hope to do again,” complained McMaster. And Ann Kurth was their big gun. Now that she had been fired, or misfired, her words would never have the same impact again. McMaster felt certain that the plastic surgeon would now get away with what he had done, whatever he had done.
A few blocks away there was celebration in the offices of Haynes and Fullenweider. It was not an unqualified victory, but on the other hand, neither was it defeat. Racehorse had asked for the mistrial mainly to protect the record in any appellate proceeding. But he was not disappointed to be granted one. A certain rhythm and momentum builds in the making of a murder trial, and when it is destroyed by mistrial, rarely can the tempo be regained. Many cases are simply dropped—quietly—or allowed to die from attrition, the district attorney feeling that his obligation to the peace and harmony of the community has been served by the attempt to convict the accused killer in the first place.
John Hill was not happy by the outcome. When he walked out of the courtroom, he told a reporter that he was “extremely disappointed at not being able to carry right on with this thing and get it over with … it’s been a burden on my shoulders, and on the people around me, for two years now.” Two of the jurors walked past him at that moment, and shook his hand and wished him good luck. Later it would be reported that the jury took an informal poll after being dismissed, and the sentiment was overwhelming to acquit the doctor on what had been presented up to that point. One juror said that the testimony of Ann Kurth was not well received. If he really tried to kill her, why had she stayed married to the guy so long? And would a fellow really try to murder somebody by crashing only one side of a Cadillac into a bridge railing? It seemed a rather major risk.
The morning Houston Post summed up the mistrial: “Ann Kurth, the 40-year-old divorcee who was the state’s bombshell witness, had blown the trial right out of court.”
Ash Robinson was furious. He was a man who had constructed a gigantic ship, only to witness its sinking during the maiden voyage. He had spent—he told a friend—hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to see justice done. And now it was money down a sewer.
But there will be another trial, soothed the friend, watching the tic seize Ash’s face and jerk the old man’s head in a violent pattern.
Ash nodded vigorously. “Well, they damn well better,” he said. “They aren’t about to let this one dry up and disappear.” The friend looked closely at Ash, wondering how he kept his momentum so far into his eighth decade. He was nearly seventy-five. Yet his passion for the destruction of John Hill was still at full flood. What kept him going?
“Hate,” answered Ash. “The god damnedest bitter hate that a man can imagine. You see, I am intensely loyal to anything I own. Here is John Hill, a man who married my only child, my beloved daughter. He came to town with a bicycle and a cardboard suitcase. I bought him a Cadillac auto
mobile. I bought him his clothes. I put him through medical school. I even bought him his wife’s wedding ring, and it cost me five hundred dollars. I introduced him to people who helped him build a practice. I gave big parties for him. I gave him everything that I would have given my own son. I gave him everything in the world—and he took away from me, in the twilight of my life, the one thing that was dearest to me in the whole world—Joan. Who would have done different than me? I can’t slow down, I can’t get sick, I can’t even die until someone punishes this man.”
Racehorse had entertained the idea of hauling Ash into court and trying to toast the old man over flames for at least a few minutes. But he decided it would have been incalculably dangerous to the defense. In Texas, when one side or the other in a trial calls a witness, then that side—be it prosecution or defense—vouches for the witness’ veracity, “sponsors” him or her. The defense attorney came to realize that in no way could he “sponsor” Ash Robinson as a truth teller. But it was certainly in his mind to bring up the old man’s name often, injecting his off-stage presence so many times into the record, developing the notion that these murder proceedings were largely the result of his avenging hand, so digging at the absent Ash that the state would have been forced to call him to rebut. And if the state was predictably fearful of putting the volatile old man on the stand, the the jury might well have thought, “Well, why didn’t the state give us Ash Robinson?” Racehorse was prepared to hypothecate for hours about Ash’s participation in the events. He had several witnesses ready to testify about harassment from the old man, even a gravedigger who was primed to tell how Ash stood over his daughter’s plot and said: “I have millions to spend, and I will—to get John Hill under this ground.”
Throughout the ten days of trial John had forbidden Connie Loesby to attend and she obeyed, knowing that he would have been embarrassed by her presence, even though she was perhaps the most knowledgeable human guide through the entire morass. She had read all of the depositions, documents, transcripts, motions, countermotions, private detective reports, and had even listened to secret tape recordings of conversations between principals in the case. She had prepared a cross index to the thousands of pages of depositions being taken in the ten-million-dollar slander suit her fiancé had filed against his ex-father-in-law. “If that girl can have the most intimate access to John Hill’s life,” mused Racehorse, “if she can read all of those documents and sift through all of that garbage, and still love the guy and believe in his innocence, then that’s a feather in his cap as far as I’m concerned.”
Now that the trial was over and the second one in the distant future, if ever, John asked his lawyer if he could marry Connie. Racehorse considered the situation carefully. “Well, I’m not going to tell you that this won’t be used against you in case of a second trial,” he cautioned. “On the other hand, you’re a lucky man. Go on. Marry the young lady. And blessings on you both.”
John Hill thus took his third wife in June 1971, four months after his mistrial for the murder of his first. But the ceremony was marked by the terrors still loose and prowling about the beleaguered surgeon. The wedding was to be held in Seattle, at the home of Connie’s parents, and the preparations were secret. John did not want the gossip columns to trumpet the news until it was a fait accompli. The couple planned a honeymoon in Europe where they would drench themselves with the great music of Vienna and Paris and Milan. While Connie flew to Seattle, John stayed behind a few days to arrange his practice for a long vacation and to make the travel arrangements.
Just before he was scheduled to leave, the bank where John had borrowed money totaling $25,000 abruptly called in the loans. Open and unsecured, the loans were subject to repayment at any time. He had originally borrowed the money to pay his lawyers and keep his practice going.
“I’m wiped out,” he said to Connie over long distance. He was near tears, the first time that she had heard his voice break in the more than a year and a half they had known one another. He could not prove it, he said, but he suspected the fine hand of Ash Robinson in the bank’s action.
“Well,” said Connie calmly, “we can still get married, can’t we?”
Of course, answered John. But there was no money for the trip to Europe. “I’m so ashamed,” he said, “I know I’m disappointing you.”
“We’ll go to Europe another time,” answered Connie. “La Scala is not going to go away. Now hurry up here. I love you.” One last cruel act occurred before the marriage. A packet arrived addressed to Connie’s parents. A rough hand had scrawled “Thought you might be interested in these.” When opened, the entire tragedy spilled out—newspaper clippings of Joan’s death, the investigation, John’s indictment, John’s trial. Once again, John Hill had a good idea from whence they had come. But they failed to work their intent. Already John had sat down with Connie’s mother and her father and he had answered every one of their questions. They believed in him, they said. Even more to the point, they believed in their daughter’s judgment. If she loved this man, then they would happily welcome him as their son-in-law.
After the ceremony, before sixty-five friends and relatives, the couple embraced. John brokenly whispered both his love and his happiness. Both of them wept. “Let’s consider this our beginning,” he said. And for a few fragile months it was that—a world gentle and filled with music.
TWENTY-FIVE
The flat earth of Houston did not crack open nor did public scorn welcome the couple when they returned from the Northwest as man and wife. Actually no one seemed to care very much, save Ash Robinson, who muttered to friends about the latest ornament on John Hill’s necklace of women. “I just hope the lady calls in a consulting opinion should she suddenly fall ill,” he said. Coincidentally, an anonymous letter and series of telephone calls were made to the Harris County juvenile welfare office, suggesting that someone look into the situation of a child being forced to live with “a murderer and his third wife.” But nothing came of it.
Racehorse Haynes had the idea that perhaps an accommodation could be reached with the old man. He opened delicate negotiations through an intermediary, hinting that John Hill would drop the ten-million-dollar slander suit against his ex-father-in-law and, as further token of good faith, permit Ash to visit regularly with his beloved grandson. No more need to mosey around the mansion in the black Lincoln, scaring everybody in the neighborhood. All Ash Robinson had to do was ask the DA to drop the charges. “One word from that old man and I think there would be a unanimous sigh of relief around the district attorney’s office,” said Racehorse. But Ash gagged on the offer. Implacable, he spat it out like vinegar. “Hell, no,” he said. “Have people forgotten that my daughter is dead? I want John Hill to answer for her murder.”
The trial was reset for July 1971, then postponed at the request of the defense, later passed again that autumn by the state, scheduled once more for the summer of 1972. When it was delayed still again and set for the following November, Ash was angry. He picked up a rumor that the new stall was at the behest of another man named John Hill, this one a politician running for the office of attorney general for the state of Texas. “They tell me he called his friends at the courthouse and urged them to put the trial off so voters wouldn’t mix him up with John Hill, murder defendant,” Ash told a friend.
The old man resumed bombarding the DA’s office with telephone calls, demanding to know if another trial was ever going to be held. The response was always affirmative, but in truth there was no enthusiasm to commence the dance once more. Ernie Ernst was retiring after a long and successful career, moving to nearby Huntsville where he would teach law. I. D. McMaster ran successfully for a seat on the criminal court. Cecil Haden hailed the candidate as “a fine young man who will make an excellent judge.” McMaster found sufficient financial support to mount an expensive race, handing out “ID” cards with his name and credentials and using the theme in newspaper advertisements and billboards.
The case was passed about the
DA’s office like an old and unwanted relative, the kind children feel guilty over but would rather stash away in a rest home and forget. Sensing this, Ash Robinson tried mightily to revive the failing fire. He announced that he had uncovered a new “mystery witness” who would be willing to deliver an explosive new accusation against John Hill. His own investigation had turned up a nurse, he said, a frightened nurse from Sharpstown Hospital, who had made confession to her minister. Somehow this confession had reached Ash’s alert ears. “She will testify that John Hill gave her two poison pills to administer to Joan,” he revealed. “Her conscience finally bothered her so much that she had to tell someone about it.” But Ash refused to reveal her name—he was “protecting a confidence”—and the report went into a fat folder at the DA’s office of unfounded rumor and “nut calls” in the moldering case.
Racehorse Haynes and Don Fullenweider elected to hold the slander suit over Ash’s head as a Damoclean sword, feeling on the one hand that their client was justifiably entitled to financial repair from his avenging ex-father-in-law, but on the other hand not anxious to hurry the suit into a civil courtroom. It was more valuable as a potential roadblock in Ash’s hurly-burly path. From time to time the lawyers reviewed the case, dipping into the stack of depositions that spilled out of a closet in their storage room, documents grown taller than a six-foot man. And at each reading they marveled at the enterprise and machinations of old Ash.
But in every sworn word of testimony that he gave in these depositions, Ash brushed off each accusation of chicanery and importuning witnesses. He presented himself as only a grieving father, trying to build evidence against a man who had used his courtesies, then snuffed out the life of his daughter. “God almighty!” he roared at one point. “Would any man who loved his child have done any less? Maybe I am a meddler, but if I didn’t meddle, nothing would have been done in this matter.”
Blood and Money Page 33