Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

At 9:05 P.M. on the night of September 24, 1972, the coroner discovered Dr. John Hill shot dead in the front entrance hall of his home. He was the victim of three .38 bullet wounds, one in the left upper shoulder, one in the right wrist, “and the most significant in the right abdomen, just at the bottom of the right rib cage.” This bullet pierced the plastic surgeon’s diaphragm, stomach, aorta, and finally stopped in the lower back.

  Bob Bennett fished through the pile of documents on the state’s table and found the familiar manila envelope that had disturbed his conscience so many times over the years. With meticulousness approaching the rite of ceremony, the prosecutor withdrew the four color photographs of Dr. John Hill in death and pressed them against his bosom to keep them from the jury’s eyes. As he approached the bench with the photographs hugged against his body, each of the jurors strained with curiosity, which, of course, was exactly what Bennett desired. He moved to introduce the pictures as state’s exhibit one.

  Immediately DeGeurin rose in objection. Strenuously he argued that the pictures were “inflammatory and prejudicial and of small bearing on this case.” This was also exactly what Bennett wanted, for any secret becomes more tantalizing when someone tries to prohibit its disclosure. Judge Price calmly admitted the photographs, instructing the jurors to examine each and pass it on “without comment.” The coroner had spent half an hour droning out his description of the death of John Hill, but his words were hollow and weak when replaced by the horror of the camera’s eye. The images were awful, each a looking glass reflecting a juror’s face as they passed down the line. John Hill was to be seen lying on the floor, blood across his features, a strip of tape covering his eyes, as if he had been before a firing squad … another piece of tape had been pulled away from his mouth and trailed behind him, like a hangman’s rope … his nose was cruelly smashed and broken … a wide blob of blood flooded his belly button … his crotch was stained and soiled where he had voided in the death struggle.

  There was not much for DeGeurin to say in cross-examination, but he did ask the coroner if he had autopsied “Joan Robinson Hill under rather unusual circumstances.”

  “Yes, I did,” answered Jachimczyk, surprised—as was Bennett—that the defense attorney would open the bottom drawer of this case. Bennett was pleased that his opponent had, by error or by curious design, turned the jury’s attention back to the long-ago beginning of this tragedy, something that the state would have had difficulty doing.

  Now Bennett had to establish the weapon that was the agent of John Hill’s death. He called Dr. Orrin Staves of Longview, and after the shock of the photos, there was comic relief. The black doctor had balked in the days before the trial and informed the DA’s office that he could not spare the time to testify. Once he had come to court under subpoena and had to wait, and in the absence from his clinic a patient had died. “Well,” said Bob Bennett, “I’m sorry about that, and I’m also sorry you got involved with Marcia McKittrick, but you did, and if you don’t come to Houston and testify voluntarily, then I’ll send somebody up there to arrest you and you can appear in handcuffs.”

  The doctor took the stand in vivid sartorial ensemble—deep brown pin-stripe suit, hot orange shirt, thick-rimmed sunglasses, jewels flashing at his fingers. His voice was slurred, like that of a man just awakened from a deep sleep.

  Bennett went directly to the heart of the matter. Did the doctor know a woman named Marcia McKittrick? Yes, he believed he did, although he knew her under the label of “Dusty.”

  “Do you own a .38-caliber pistol?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Several,” said the doctor with an air of boredom. “Two or three. All .38s.”

  Bennett poked around the pile of envelopes on his table and found a bulky one from which he withdrew a rusted gun, cold and sad-looking. He cupped it in the palm of his hand and bore it to the witness stand for the doctor to see.

  “Did you give this pistol to—or was it obtained from you by—Marcia McKittrick?”

  Dr. Staves frowned in recollection. “Marcia obtained one of my guns,” he began, his words curiously disjointed and diffuse in tone, as if they were coming from several different voice boxes, “but I am not clear at this point in time exactly how. You see, my Eldorado had been stolen and I had a chartered plane standing by at the airport to fly me to Fort Worth.”

  Bennett interrupted the start of this promising story. “Are you or are you not sure that it was Marcia McKittrick who obtained your gun?”

  The doctor nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Because I remember now. She promised to give it back, and she never did.”

  Satisfied, Bennett handed the offensive object to the witness for identification. The doctor accepted his .38 as a prodigal come home. Examining it quickly, he pronounced it dirty and worn, but definitely his. He had wanted it back, and now seemed like a good time for reclamation. Incredibly, the doctor began to put the gun into his coat pocket. Judge Price threw out a startled arm of prohibition. “Please, sir,” said the judge. As the jury laughed, Dr. Staves shrugged and returned the exhibit to the district attorney, obviously upset that he could not walk out of the courtroom with his weapon.

  The best the defense could hope for was that the jurors would find the doctor’s social tastes so offensive that his story of the gun would be discredited. With fervor that waltzed perilously close to racism, DeGeurin tried to draw from the doctor the fact that he patronized white prostitutes.

  “Did you ever give Marcia McKittrick money in return for her sexual favors?” asked DeGeurin.

  Shooting back a look of hauteur, the doctor was insulted. His vanity and his position were not to be abused. “You mean, ‘If I give you money, you give me sex,’ that sort of thing? No, not that way.” The doctor could not even recall if he had ever had sex with the lady. The implication was she was but one player in a cast of many.

  “Well,” DeGeurin moved along, “why does a doctor of your importance need to own ‘two or three .38s’?”

  Dr. Staves launched into a rambling monologue about “the System,” which he employed to take care of missing medicines, to run security checks on employees at his clinic, and to counter any trouble that arose in his life. From the description, it seemed a sort of combine of black muscle, lawyers, and guns.

  This gave DeGeurin a wild notion. “Do you deny that ‘the System’ had Bobby Vandiver murdered in Longview?”

  Bennett shot out of his seat faster than a man propelled from a circus cannon. “Objection!” His face was flushed with outrage at the suggestion.

  “Sustained,” said the judge. DeGeurin was not rattled. The question had come out of left field, and its only apparent purpose—a standard defense maneuver—was to offer the jury a small and mysterious non sequitur, never to be mentioned again.

  Returning to the gun, DeGeurin pressed Dr. Staves for details on how it originally escaped from his custody. “The best I can remember,” he said, openly belligerent now to the handsome young lawyer, “… you see, my chartered plane was waiting … I may have given her that gun and told her, ‘I can’t take a gun on that plane … I’m too mad … That may have been what happened. I was angry, so I didn’t want a gun with me.”

  DeGeurin arched his eyebrows. “You might have used it?”

  “I might have used it,” agreed the doctor.

  “Are you carrying one now?” wondered DeGeurin.

  In fury, the doctor glared at the lawyer. “I didn’t think I’d need one.”

  DeGeurin smiled, a point of minor sorts made, and he passed the witness.

  With portraits of a dead man and the gun that killed him now firmly etched on the jury, Bennett moved into the circumstances of his execution. He went for emotion, for the power of an echo. “Robert Hill, please.” The child of Joan Robinson and John Hill marched erectly into the courtroom with the rigid posture of a young aristocrat. At fourteen, he was just changing from boy to man. His hair was as bright as a sunflower and his eyes were deeply blue. In his crisp navy blazer, he was a start
lingly handsome but somber youngster. Later this day a newspaper would publish his photograph on the front page, and Ash Robinson would clip it hungrily, holding it like an icon. From his home in River Oaks, the old man was desperate for news of the trial, and when a friend called him to give him an account of the first day’s events, Ash first demanded information about his only grandson. Did the boy look well? Was he well fed? Did he look like Joan? And, finally, “Did he say anything bad about me?”

  Robert was a superb witness. Well coached by Bob Bennett, the boy, in firm voice, delivered a chilling account—of answering the doorbell and discovering, instead of his father and stepmother, a stranger with a gun standing on the porch, of being tied up with tape, of licking his lips so that the tape would not hold, of hearing a taxi arrive, of trying to scream a warning from behind his gag. “I heard the man say, ‘Now give me your money’ … and then … four or five shots.”

  Wisely, for there was no way to impeach either the character or substance of the child’s words without risking anger from the jury—some of the women were dabbing at misted eyes—DeGeurin elected to pass the boy with no questions.

  A floor below, waiting in Bennett’s office, was Myra Hill, primed to deliver her eyewitness account of the night she lay bound and gagged with strips of her own sweater while her son was murdered in the next room. But Bob Bennett made a snap decision not to use her; she had a tendency to ramble and the prosecutor’s worry was that she would tell too much, perhaps pepper her testimony with biblical quotations, and, despite her best intentions, snag the careful cloak of prosecution he was weaving. Instead, the district attorney summoned Connie Hill to the stand. Not only did he want her to tell of her husband’s death, but it was important that she establish the hatred between her husband and Ash Robinson.

  The third wife of the murdered plastic surgeon was the perfect choice to follow the child. She wore a beige dress of simply cut elegance, with her hair in a modest bun appropriate for a church choir director. Obviously this was a quiet woman of taste and culture, and if Dick DeGeurin ever began using the backhanded defense technique of savaging the reputation of the murder victim, then his task would be difficult. If John Hill could sire a son as poised as Robert, and win the love of a woman as desirable as Connie, then it would be hard to belittle him.

  After Connie told once again the story of finding a masked gunman in macabre homecoming, Bennett asked, “Do you know Ash Robinson?”

  “Not personally,” answered Connie. She had only seen him in his black Lincoln, circling her house now and then.

  “Was there animosity between your husband and Ash Robinson?”

  “Yes … a great deal.”

  This was the first mention of the old man’s name and Bennett turned to see if it made impression on the jurors. One, a matronly, heavy-set woman who lived on the fringe of River Oaks and who, guessed Bennett, had unfulfilled social aspirations of her own, nodded perceptibly. It seemed to say, “I wondered when his name was going to come out.” But Bennett went no further. The business of the prosecution was to plant tiny saplings of suspicion, then, through shrewd nourishment, hope that they would grow sturdy enough to support a noose.

  Now the first day of testimony was almost over and Bennett had fired all of his dependable big guns. He knew that his witnesses had been powerful, but thus far he had presented absolutely nothing that would implicate Lilla Paulus in the gruesome death so emotionally described. His mind raced, his few options tumbling about the weary canyons of his senses. He could ask for a recess, but it was not yet 4 P.M. and he knew Judge Price liked to work a long, full session. He could summon Marcia McKittrick but the risk was that she would only stare at him sullenly and silently, accepting the judge’s threat of contempt. The only other choice was to offer the state’s “evidence” against the defendant, and he knew that, unbolstered by Marcia, it was as thin and fragile-looking as Lilla herself. Throughout the day she had maintained extraordinary composure, showing not even a raised brow of discomfort at the terrible words raining about her, breaking her silence only to cough, perhaps by happenstance, perhaps by design, for her most fitful sieges seemed to occur during the grimmest moments of witness recollection. Some of the jurors had been watching her with what Bennett took to be sympathy.

  “Jerry Carpenter,” announced Bennett. Lilla suddenly stopped coughing and turned with her first discernible emotion of the day—hostility—to watch the homicide detective stroll into the room. Bennett wished he could have dictated the cop’s choice of costume for his crucial appearance, but Jerry Carpenter was his own man, and if he chose to wear a sunset-hued shirt with matching tie and a gold Mexican coin dangling from his neck, then the jury would have to disregard the fact that he looked eminently capable of flipping the peso across his knuckles. Bennett often worried about police witnesses. He had lost more than one case not because of the strength or weakness of their testimony, but due to the hidden attitudes that citizens hold toward lawmen. Buried among those twelve people in the jury box might be a fellow who got chewed out by a surly traffic cop, or a lady kissed off by a dispatcher when she tried to complain about a neighbor’s noisy party. The prosecutor knew that DeGeurin would surely seek to depict Carpenter as a gun-slinging menace who had terrorized his frightened client at gunpoint and had searched her house unlawfully to obtain evidence, and who had tempted the narcotic-hungry Marcia McKittrick to bear false witness.

  Bennett need not have worried. Carpenter was not only believable, he was, in a sense, somehow reassuring to the jurors and citizens of a typically violent American city. Here was a tough cop, but he was representative of a business where such was required. His voice was deep and solid gut-bucket Texan. Never did he search for answers. He had them—fast, direct, lean. No imagination or fancy fell from his lips. He told of the night he had been called to John Hill’s home to investigate the murder, of finding the briefcase and gun a week later under bushes a block away, of the pursuit of Marcia and Bobby that occupied him for six months. Then, locking hardened eyes to Lilla Paulus, a dozen feet away, he told of arresting her on April 27, 1973.

  At this point, DeGeurin rose in objection once again to the legality of Carpenter’s search of his client. In previous hearings over the past year, the defense lawyer had made the same complaints. But he needed now to let the jury know his contention that the search was unlawful. He demanded that the court suppress any of the alleged “evidence,” his tone cloaking the word with heavy sarcasm and disbelief. Dryly, Judge Price noted that his objections were already in the record, and he gestured to Bennett that he could continue.

  “Did you recover a number of items as the Paulus home, including pieces of paper?” asked Bennett.

  “Yes,” answered the homicide detective.

  Bennett located another envelope on his table, this one obvious in its slimness, and withdrew four small slips—two the size of a memo pad used to jot down telephone numbers, one apparently a blank check, the last hardly larger than a postage stamp. Easily concealing them in his hands, and once again whetting the appetite of the jury, Bennett asked that they be introduced as a state exhibit.

  With permission granted, Bennett paused. It was a good time to quit for the day. He could sense that the jury was lusting to know what the slips of paper contained, but he would let them remain tantalized overnight. Besides, an aide had just brought him a message that was far more troubling in its suspense.

  Marcia McKittrick had just sent word from the women’s jail downstairs that she wanted to see the prosecutor. Fast!

  THIRTY-NINE

  “What is your name?”

  “Marcia McKittrick.”

  “What is your occupation?”

  “Prostitute.”

  “I’ve reached a decision,” she told Bob Bennett the night before, blurting it out, afraid it would stick in her throat and slide back down to the reservoir of fear. “I’ll testify. I’m probably crazy to be doing it, but it just dawned on me that every time in my life I had to make a m
ajor decision, I always made the wrong one. Maybe it’s time to go against my better judgment.”

  “Did you know Bobby Vandiver?”

  “Yes. He was my chip.”

  “Your chip?”

  “My boy friend. And was so until February 1973.”

  “I’ve just been so mixed up. When Bobby died, I vowed I would keep silent because he would have wanted me to. But he’s gone! He has no claim on my life any more.”

  “And do you know this defendant, Lilla Paulus?” asked Bennett.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “When did you meet her?”

  “In January 1972.”

  “What type of relationship did you establish with Lilla Paulus?”

  “We became friends. I stayed at her house every time I was in Houston.”

  “Those people have no right to play God with my life and decide who can live and who can die. I don’t owe Lilla Paulus or Ash Robinson a god damn minute. I saw that little boy, Robert Hill, when he was waiting to testify today, and my heart broke. You know, I didn’t really realize until that moment that he has no real mother or father any more. And I have a little boy just like him who was about to be in the same fix. I should be spending every precious second with my own son.…”

  Bennett nodded, elated, but not daring to intrude until her declaration was done. He only wished that court was still in session, so he could whisk her into the box before she weakened again. He urged her not to see or speak to anyone, especially not Dick DeGeurin should word seep out from the jail that she would become a witness for the prosecution the next morning. “But I’ve already told him,” she said. “He was really upset. He was so shaken he was practically in tears. He urged me not to testify.” Bennett grew annoyed. DeGeurin had no ethical right to exhort this capricious young woman. Marcia saw the discomfort on the prosecutor’s face and sought to ease his mind. “I felt I had to tell him. It was a very upsetting conversation. And I told him the same thing I’m telling you. I know how bad he wants to win this case, but he’ll have to win it without my silence.”