Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Now he offered nothing but frustration to the detectives. Yes, he did remember a conversation between Lilla Paulus and Bobby Vandiver about a contract to kill a doctor. But no, he would not sign a statement or testify in a court of law. “What good can you guys do me now?” he told Gamino and Carpenter bluntly. Mart was sophisticated enough to know that snitching has a perishable shelf value and that two cops from Houston, despite their pressures and promises, could do nothing to extricate him from a North Carolina prison.

  The detectives and the prosecutor flew home with corroboration, but it was not admissible in court, not even worth writing down.

  Just before he secretly took the case before a grand jury, Bob Bennett baited a trap for Ash Robinson. The ethics of the matter were shadowy, but in the light of the history of the events, principles were at that moment subordinate. Attaching a tape recorder to his office telephone, Bennett instructed Bobby Vandiver to call Ash Robinson. The conversation was terse and urgent.

  “Mr. Robinson? This is Bobby Vandiver. I did a job for you.”

  After several moments of suspenseful silence, the old man spoke one word, “Yes.” But it was not the kind of “yes” that affirmed what the caller was saying, only the kind that meant, “Get on with it.”

  “I need to get ahold of Lilla real bad,” Bobby said, as per his stage directions. “I can’t find her. Do you know where she is?”

  Another stretch of agonizing quiet. And finally, another unhelpful reply. “No. I haven’t seen Lilla in six months and don’t know how to get in touch with her.” Ash Robinson hung up. He had not nibbled at the bait.

  On April 25, 1973, the Harris County grand jury voted secret indictments of murder in the first degree against Bobby Wayne Vandiver, thirty-three, and Marcia McKittrick, twenty-three, and an accomplice to murder accusation against Lilla Paulus, fifty-four. Assistant DA Bennett did not ask that an indictment be voted against Ash Robinson, for the state as yet had no case against the father of Joan Hill. His name did not arise during presentation of Vandiver’s confession before the panel. The state’s case against Lilla Paulus was, in truth, as fragile as onion skin, but the hope was that as soon as Marcia was arrested she would bolster the positions. The cops and the DA were betting on the come.

  Joe Gamino had been spending time shadowing the quiet neighborhood where Lilla Paulus lived. He knew that she was often away from home, staying with a man named Meyers of whom she seemed to be enamored. To coincide with the issue of the grand jury indictments, a posse of nine lawmen, including Bob Bennett, who armed himself with a revolver, went to the Meyers home. Jerry Carpenter carried an AR15 Colt rifle, the kind United States soldiers used in South Vietnam. Inside the house, Lilla Paulus was sitting on a couch in the den watching afternoon television. She rose and opened the front door. The first thing she saw was the terrifying long gun balanced provocatively in Carpenter’s hand. The first thing she heard was Carpenter reading the standard “blue card” Miranda warning that must be given any suspect before an arrest is made. Lilla Paulus listened almost respectfully, like a civics teacher observing a student deliver a homework project. Indeed, she looked like nothing less menacing than a nice, graying lady of middle years who had permitted herself to be surrounded by a pack of neighborhood youngsters playing at cops and robbers. Soon she would surely clap her hands in mock annoyance and go to the kitchen where cookies were cooling for her tormentors. Then Carpenter threw wrenching handcuffs on her wrists and ordered her to sit mute while police searched about the house. Two loaded pistols and a bit of marijuana were discovered, but nothing to connect her with the murder of John Hill. “I was frightened,” she would later say. “Jerry Carpenter told me he was disappointed I didn’t go for a gun. He wanted to shoot me on the spot.”

  Quickly she was put in a police car and chauffeured to her own home on Underwood Street, where Bobby Vandiver claimed the murder plot had been formulated. En route, Bob Bennett hastily scribbled a “consent to search” paper and asked that she sign. If she refused, he contended, then a court order would be easy enough to obtain. Until this very moment, Lilla would later say, she did not know why she was so urgently the object of police attention. “Why?” she asked. “Why am I under arrest?”

  Bennett said, “Well, hit her with it.”

  “You are under arrest,” said Jerry Carpenter, “for the murder of Dr. John Hill.”

  “Who?” asked Lilla, convincingly out of focus.

  “Dr. John Hill.”

  “You must be kidding,” she said, in absurd dismissal. Then she signed the “consent to search” as the police car sped across a southwest loop of the city. She did so, she later claimed, because her hands were throbbing from the pain of the cuffs, and she was frightened of the police and their guns.

  Jerry Carpenter and his men were unable to locate the mate to the green pillowcase, but they did find, in a back bedroom, a few interesting slips of paper. One appeared to be a partial gin rummy score with a long-distance telephone number on the back and the word “Dusty” below. The second had the name of the downtown Houston “spot” hotel where Marcia McKittrick occasionally worked as a prostitute, plus what seemed to be various airline flight schedules. And the third was a blank check on the account of Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Paulus. Written on the back was a cryptic message: “You had better tell Ash they are trying to subpena Ma.” In the depths of Lilla’s handbag, the searchers found another scrap of paper with the telephone number 523—3746 written on it.

  And in a kitchen drawer was found a letter written by Marcia McKittrick dated August 6, 1972. Apparently it had never been mailed, and its designee was unknown. The letter had no mention of the Hill murder, but it would tend to place the prostitute in the Paulus home.

  That night, after the story broke and confused newspaper reporters were trying to learn what a Dallas hijacker, a fugitive prostitute, and a seemingly respectable widow from a good part of town had to do with the murder of Dr. John Hill, Bob Bennett, Carpenter, and Gamino decided to ride one more bluff. Unannounced, they would visit Ash Robinson. It would be the very first time since the death of the plastic surgeon that the law had gone knocking on the old man’s door. Perhaps, Bennett thought, the power of the day’s sudden events would so frazzle Ash Robinson that he would let something slip or, conversely, be so sure of his insulation that he would permit a search of his house. The police had no legal right to interrogate him and certainly none to look about his home. But there was nothing to prohibit them from stopping by for a “visit.”

  Near midnight, the three men drove along Kirby Drive toward the Robinson home. As they passed the white colonial house where John Hill had been shot to death, Bennett noted that it was bathed in floodlights, with others burning inside, as if in readiness for a great party. But the lights had shone every night since the doctor died. Connie Hill had elected to remain in her slain husband’s home, raise his son, and sit in his music room where she respected his memory by filling it with the sounds of the music he loved.

  Ash Robinson was in his pajamas, but on balance, polite, as he opened the door, presenting himself as a respectable member of the city’s most prestigious neighborhood, a bit disturbed that the law would pound unannounced on his door so close to midnight. But he asked the three young men to sit in his living room, and he assumed his favorite armchair, directly beneath a photographic montage of Joan and her social and equine triumphs.

  Joe Gamino began haltingly. “We want you to know that we have just arrested your friend Lilla Paulus for the murder of John Hill.” He waited for a response. None was forthcoming. “… And we think you might have something to do with it.”

  The old man looked almost amused, as if he knew his opponent was trying to win a big pot by making an outrageous bet on a busted flush. After a very long time of total quiet, after Ash’s cold eyes had swept across the face of each of the men in his living room, he shook his head negatively. “Well, boys,” he said, “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  Bob Benn
ett noted that on a table beside the old man’s chair was a carefully cut out newspaper clipping of the day’s indictments and arrest of Lilla Paulus. “If you wouldn’t know anything about this, Mr. Robinson,” the assistant DA said, “then why do you have those clippings there beside you?”

  Ash picked them up, fingered them, let them flutter back to the table. “I’m interested in everything that comes out in the papers about my son-in-law,” he said. “The bastard murdered my daughter.”

  The visitors all had further questions, but Ash rose imperiously. He yawned and gestured toward the door. “I don’t believe I should talk to you gentlemen further unless it is in the presence of my lawyer,” he said. “And I might remind you gentlemen—and I stress this strongly—that you should be very careful what you say about me.”

  With the hint of a suit for slander dancing in the crisp midnight air, the frustrated interrogators left. Ash slammed the door behind them. As they drove out of the circular driveway, Bennett could feel the old man’s eyes burning through the peephole. Jerry Carpenter pronounced the day’s benediction. “That’s one cool old son of a bitch,” he said.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Marcia did not immediately learn of the events in Houston. Something else was troubling her. A tooth. It throbbed so painfully that no amount of aspirin—or the other more clandestine drugs in her purse—could give relief. She could not concentrate on the tricks who were coming to the motel in West Texas where she was ensconced. She flew home to Dallas in late April 1973, anxious to visit a childhood dentist in whom she had faith. After he filled her cavity, with lips still numb and swollen from the novocaine, she telephoned her mother for news of home and sympathy.

  “Listen, you’d better buy a newspaper,” her mother said. “You and Bobby are all over it. Now do what I say, Marcia. Go to a pay telephone and call the lawyer. Call Charles Caperton. For God’s sake, Marcia, for once in your life mind me!”

  Marcia ran to a corner and bought the afternoon paper. Police mug shots of her and Bobby decorated a prominent story about murder indictments in the death of Dr. John Hill returned the day before in Houston. Her first instinct was flight. But even as she dialed an airline to inquire about the next plane out to Las Vegas or Los Angeles, she realized the hopelessness of her position. The paper said Bobby was in the Houston jail; somehow the police must have pried information out of him, else indictments would not have been handed down. She dropped the telephone and it dangled from its cord as she sank down in the corner of the booth. “What am I gonna do?” she said to herself, making a song of the words. “Mama-mama-mama, I’m so scared.”

  Charles Caperton, the former prosecutor for the Dallas district attorney’s office and the lawyer who had first defended her on worthless check charges that were still pending in a musty folder in the courthouse, took her call and calmed her down. He was the Pepto-Bismol of lawyers, the very easygoing country boy who knew well both sides of the fence—them and us. Stop crying, he told her. This is only an indictment in Houston, he said. It is not a conviction. They are not making up your bed at the Goree (women’s prison). A hundred avenues are still open. But the first, Caperton decided, was an end run around the Houston police force. Enjoying his tactic immensely, Caperton promptly flew to Houston with Marcia cowering at his side, escorted her to the Harris County courthouse—a dozen city blocks away from the police station where Carpenter and Gamino were located—and surrendered the most wanted woman in Texas on the charge of murder. But even as one hand signed the document informing the district court that he was the attorney of record for Miss McKittrick, the other one was making the $15,000 bond set by the judge in this matter. Marcia’s parents had mortgaged their home to keep their girl out of jail. Hardly was Marcia in Houston before she was back on a plane headed for Dallas, once more evading the two detectives who had roamed the state of Texas in her pursuit. Gamino had even taken the precaution of appending an urgent note to the documents of her case at the sheriff’s office. If Marcia McKittrick should surrender herself, or be surrendered, or somehow show up in the courthouse, then, damnit, immediately phone Jerry Carpenter or Joe Gamino at city homicide, or at home, at any hour of the day or night! But somehow the plea written in red ink was overlooked. When Carpenter discovered that Marcia had once more slipped like a larded piglet from his hands, he stalked about homicide for an hour, cursing like a farm boy who lost out at the state fair.

  Charles Caperton told his client to go about and live her life, stay out of trouble, keep in constant touch, and, above all, shut up. “Don’t talk to anyone but Charles Caperton,” he cautioned. “Not your boy friend, not your mama, and certainly not to any representative of the law.” She had no obligation to give the time of day to any police officer.

  In Houston, Bob Bennett arranged a life for his star witness, Bobby Vandiver. It was imperative to keep his co-operation with the state secret. “If it gets out,” Bennett told Jerry Carpenter, “then they’ll waste him, sure as hell.” The lawmen were not afraid that Bobby would run away. On the day that he signed his confession he told them, “I’ll be glad to get this over. I’m so tired of peepin’ and hidin’.”

  It was arranged that Vicki could come down from Dallas to keep Bobby’s temperature normal, for he needed his woman beside him. Bob Bennett found an efficiency apartment at a motel—which the DA’s office paid for—and a job for Vicki as a waitress in a seafood restaurant. The prosecutor even managed a couple of hundred bucks pocket money for Bobby, dipping into an informal fund at the district attorney’s office. A token lawyer was engaged to handle Bobby’s court appearances, fully aware of the script that was to be played out. Bobby would plead guilty, get twelve years, and then give testimony against Marcia and Lilla Paulus. As summer began, Bob Bennett felt reasonably secure that the heart of his case was beating contentedly.

  How did the turn of events affect Ash Robinson? He told a friend that he was not surprised at the caliber of people charged in the death of his ex-son-in-law. That a thrice-convicted robber, a prostitute, and the widow of a bookmaker were accused only shored up his long-felt belief that John Hill had walked on the shady side of the street. “By his friends we shall know him,” said atheist Ash, using a quotation that, though garbled, seemed to him appropriate.

  None of the newspaper accounts were able to provide lay followers of the case with answers to the most asked questions: If these three people plotted the death of John Hill, then why? What was their motive? Money? Were they hired to execute the surgeon? If so, by whom? Ash? He remained a principal figure in the public eye. As he stood in line to cash checks at the bank or waited for his Lincoln to be brought around at the Houston Club garage, Ash could see people whispering about him. If did not concern him to be the object of secretive gossip, for he had come to relish being pointed out in a crowd. Still he must have fretted over what was going on in the office of that insolent young prosecutor who had barged unannounced into his home the night those three people were indicted. His lawyer, Richard Keeton, of the town’s most powerful firm, kept an ear to the courthouse and so far had picked up nothing that would indicate the old man was in jeopardy. Best to buy a little home fire extinguisher, though, reasoned Ash, just in case the summer heat provoked a little brush fire.

  Thus on a June day in 1973, in the New York offices of a lie detector firm, Ash Robinson offered himself for private polygraph examination. No representative of any law enforcement agency was present. After two hours of being hooked up to the machine, Ash emerged with a signed letter:

  … Davis Ashton Robinson voluntarily came to this polygraph suite for an examination.

  The main issue under consideration was whether or not Mr. Robinson was telling the truth when he claimed that he had no guilty knowledge of, nor had he participated in, the murder of Dr. John Hill.

  Dr. Hill, who formerly was Mr. Robinson’s son-in-law, was murdered on Sept. 24, 1972, in his own home in Houston, Texas. Three persons have been indicted in regard to this murder.

  The
facts concerning this case were provided the polygraphists by Mr. Richard P. Keeton, who is Mr. Robinson’s attorney.

  Before his pre-test interview, Mr. Robinson signed two copies of a form stating he was taking the tests voluntarily. One copy of this executed form is enclosed with this report; the other is incorporated as part of our case files.

  In the polygraph recordings, there were definite indications of truthfulness when Mr. Robinson was asked the following pertinent test questions:

  1. By last Oct. 1, did you then already know for sure who had murdered Dr. John Hill? Answer: No.

  2. Did you set up the actual murder of Dr. John Hill? Answer: No.

  3. By 7:30 P.M. last Sept. 24, did you then already know there was going to be an armed man inside the Hill house that night? Answer: No.

  4. In order to have Dr. John Hill murdered, by 7:30 P.M. last Sept. 24, did you promise to pay any of those three arrested persons? Answer: No.

  5. Have you now told me the entire truth as to what you really know about Dr. John Hill’s murder? Answer: Yes.

  It is the opinion of the polygraphists, based upon Mr. Robinson’s … examination, that Mr. Robinson is telling the truth to the above listed questions.

  Although lawyer Keeton bade his client to keep the contents of the letter quiet, Ash could not resist telling several of his cronies, including former grand juror Cecil Haden. Of course, for that was the intention, word soon reached Bob Bennett that Ash had cleared himself through a lie detector examination. Bennett almost laughed out loud. “If he’s all that innocent,” muttered Bennett, “then why does old Ash have to run all the way off to New York and get one done secretly? We’ll be happy to interrogate him here. We’ll even send a car.”