DeGeurin placed his hand over hers and patted it reassuringly. But his own stomach was pitching. What would Mary Wood tell on her mother?
Any other woman would have been proud at the stunning reproduction of herself who was now placing a hand on the courtroom Bible. Mary Wood was tall and exceptionally beautiful, a prize colt, with great long legs in Western pants, and a filmy blouse that covered large high breasts as provocatively as a sculptor’s drapes. There was the look of an Egyptian frieze about her. Of ancient nobility. Reddish-gold hair tumbled full down past high cheekbones, past huge eyes—those huge eyes of her mother—dark eyes shadowed by paint and worry.
Bennett approached his surprise witness with no small measure of frustration. He knew that she was fraught with fear. He had spent a turbulent hour on long distance with her the night before, beseeching her to come to Houston, promising that deputies with shotguns would meet her plane, guard her hidden hotel room, guarantee her safety in and out of town. She had responded with tears spilled heavily on the telephone. Why did the district attorney need her? Why must he demand that she walk into a courtroom and impeach the character of her mother? This would tear open barely healed scar tissue.
“Because,” Bennett answered bluntly, “I don’t think I can win this case without you. I can’t send your mother to the penitentiary unless you help.” He also pointed out that it would greatly assist her cause in the continuing fight over her grandmother’s estate if Lilla Paulus were behind bars.
Finally Mary Wood agreed, and Bennett made frantic arrangements for her midnight flight to Houston. And on this morning of her appearance he secretly cleared her testimony with Judge Price. For this was surely a “sticky” area. Bennett sought to use Mary Wood to illustrate a memoir of Lilla Paulus’ hidden life. The young woman told the presecutor she held vivid memories of guns in holsters dangling from the bathroom doorknob, of bedspreads filled with her father’s daily take from bookmaking, of police characters who graced her mother’s dinner table.
Judge Price forbade all of this. He instructed Bennett that the daughter of Lilla Paulus could be used only to impeach specific areas of the defendant’s own testimony. Mary Wood could not serve as a clothesline on which to hang out a dirty wash. “Very well,” thought Bennett, “we’ll do the best we can.”
“What is your name, please?”
“Mary Wood.”
“And where do you live?”
“In another state.” That was part of the bargain. Bennett had promised she would not have to give her address.
“And do you know the defendant? Lilla Paulus?”
“Yes,” said Mary Wood. “She is my mother.”
A wave of excitement broke across the room. The jurors swiveled from one woman to the other, trying to match the genes and bloodlines.
“Have you ever met Ash Robinson?” asked the prosecutor.
“Yes.”
“And where was the first meeting?”
“At my mother’s home.” The jurors turned again quickly. What was Lilla’s reaction to that? She looked directly back at them and, of all things, smiled.
“Did you know Joan Robinson Hill?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever go to the Hill house at the intersection of Kirby Drive and Brentwood?”
“Yes. I’ve been there before. With my mother.”
“Was Ash Robinson ever at that location when you went there?”
“He often was. Not always. But often.”
Bennett worked quickly. His witness was responding productively, but he noted a tightness at her mouth and a trembling in her hands. She could fall apart at any moment.
“Did your mother ever accompany you to … horse shows?”
“She always did.”
“Did you ever go to the Pin Oak Horse Show?” asked Bennett, invoking the name of Houston’s most glamorous equestrian event, where Joan Hill had starred for almost a decade.
“Yes.”
“When you went to the Pin Oak Horse Show with your mother, where did you sit?”
“Sometimes we sat in Ash Robinson’s box,” said Mary, adding, in emphasis, “… Joan’s father’s box.”
“On few or many occasions?”
“Quite a few over the years,” said Mary.
Bennett did not stretch out the suspense. He set off his detonation. Did Mary Wood remember anything significant about the Christmas of 1970?
“Yes,” she answered. She remembered dropping by her mother’s house a few days before the holiday, bearing gifts. While there she heard her mother make a startling remark: “Mother and Daddy were talking and Mother said, ‘Diane Settegast called and said Ash Robinson is looking for somebody to kill John Hill.’”
And what did Claude Paulus, her father, say to that?
“He had a fit,” answered Mary Jo. “And he warned Mother not to have anything to do with it.”
Bennett paused. There were a hundred other questions he could ask this witness, but he sensed that revelations she had made were powerful enough to stand without buttressing. But, oh, one more thing. He gestured toward Lilla Paulus: “Is this defendant’s reputation such that she can be believed under oath?”
Without hesitation, Mary Jo Wood shook her head fiercely. She looked squarely at her mother and she said, “In no way.”
Dick DeGeurin now had to climb out of a ten-foot hole with two feet of rope. He was in the most excruciating of defense predicaments. His chore was denigration of a witness for whom he was not prepared.
From whatever options crossed his mind, he chose one that he would soon regret. Logically it seemed the only thing to do; ram home to the jury the bitter estrangement between his client and her daughter.
DeGeurin cleared his throat and began. Was it not true that Mary Wood had a “falling out” with her mother?
Yes. That was true.
“Do you now harbor animosity toward your mother?” asked the defense lawyer.
“No … not animosity as much as regret.”
DeGeurin pounced on the word like a hungry lion on a miraculous piece of meat. “So much regret that you would come here today and tell lies and perjure yourself?”
Mary Wood shook her head sadly. “I have not committed perjury,” she said.
DeGeurin threw his hands in the air like a man so disgusted he could find no further words to waste.
Excitedly, Bennett climbed up out of his chair. He felt DeGeurin had given him a new opportunity.
“Mr. DeGeurin mentioned you had a ‘falling out’ with your mother.”
“Yes,” nodded Mary. “In 1967.”
Now DeGeurin tensed. He saw the highway Bennett was preparing to barrel down at full speed. At its end was potential disaster for Lilla Paulus. Even as DeGeurin rose to throw out an objection for roadblock, Bennett was hurrying into his next question.
“Were there several reasons? Or just one?”
“Mainly one,” said Mary Jo. But her answer was drowned out by the defense lawyer’s shout, “Objection, your honor!” DeGeurin hurried toward the bench, words spilling on the way. “She is apparently going to say something totally prejudicial toward my client.”
Judge Price impatiently sighed and led the squabbling attorneys to his chambers. At least fifty per cent of the day seemed to pass in the privacy there, where the judge was glad to shed his robes, always looking even younger then than the antagonists he had to referee.
“Mr. Bennett, just what are you up to now?” asked Judge Price.
“I feel I now have the right to explore the entire background of Mary Wood’s life with her mother,” began Bennett.
“You have no right at all …” interrupted DeGeurin.
“Hush! Both of you,” said the judge. “Now let Mr. Bennett make his point. He is responding to your objection, Mr. DeGeurin.”
Bennett nodded mock gratitude. “Mr. DeGeurin opened the door by attempting to show that there was a harmonious mother-daughter relationship, that the defendant was a sacrificing person who
‘laid down her all’ for this witness … riding lessons … Brownie meetings … expensive schools.… We all know there was another side to this home life.”
DeGeurin jumped in again. “What on earth value would be in this … this … ‘girl’ … saying that five years before the offense charged here, she had a falling out with her mother because her mother ‘turned her out to prostitution,’ which I take it will be testified. And this in no way has any bearing on whether Marcia McKittrick and Bobby Vandiver killed John Hill, or whether Lilla Paulus hired them, encouraged them, or commanded them to do so. The prejudicial effect of this girl saying these things before a jury, in effect proving some sort of extraneous offense, could not be weighed by any lay person.”
The defense lawyer sensed he was in deep trouble. He should not have had his client speak of her daughter in the first place, and he certainly should not have probed the “falling out” between them. The laws regulating a murder trial seem at times like a child’s game, not far in dictate from Simon Says. You cannot touch your nose or scratch your elbow unless Simon says you can. Nor can a lawyer examine certain forbidden areas of a defendant’s character unless one side or the other makes a mistake.
“I never asked Mary Wood why there was a falling out,” insisted DeGeurin, trying to put his finger in the broken dike. “If you’ll remember, I then went immediately to another subject, without probing, without ‘opening any door.’ If you let this in, Judge, if you admit what this girl apparently wants to testify to … then you might as well admit every enemy Mrs. Paulus ever had before the jury to say whatever they want to say. Because it would have just as much bearing on the case as this girl testifying.”
The judge agreed. Mary Wood could not, under the present climate of the trial, tell the jurors that her mother trained her to be a prostitute.
Bennett started to crank up a new plea, but the judge shook his head firmly. He was tired. Everyone was tired. Mary Wood’s day in court was over.
If Dick DeGeurin found an hour of sleep during the night, his face did not show it the next morning. His eyes were aflame with fatigue, but his manner was positively exuberant. He sailed into the courtroom with a briefcase full of new tricks. First, he told Judge Price, he had spent hours on the long-distance telephone with the manager of the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans. There was no registration record for Mrs. Joan Jaworski Worrell for the period of time she swore she was in that city and coincidentally espied Lilla Paulus and Ash Robinson dining in a French Quarter restaurant. DeGeurin wanted an emergency subpoena issued and he had a crisp, unused hundred-dollar bill in his hand to pay for the manager’s flight to Houston. Next he handed the judge a bulging packet of old hospital records that told of Mary Paulus Wood’s three-week stay in a psychiatric clinic in 1967. The defense wished to introduce these, the purpose being to shed a little light on the kind of young woman who had so harshly accused her mother. Judge Price retired to his office and hurriedly perused them. The records were poorly copied and difficult to read, but they were powerful. Lilla Paulus had committed her then seventeen-year-old daughter to St. Joseph’s Hospital for treatment of an “emotional disturbance” and possible use of heroin. The young woman underwent three weeks of enforced therapy whereupon she was given a pass to leave the clinic for a beauty parlor. But she never returned. She ran to the arms of her lover, Larry Wood, the twenty-nine-year-old society pimp with four previous broken marriages, and they eloped.
When Judge Price returned to the courtroom, he was disinclined to admit the medical documents. They seemed far afield from the murder charge against Lilla Paulus. He asked DeGeurin for specific reasons why they should be given to the jury for consideration.
“We want to show bias, prejudice, and animosity on the part of Mary Wood toward the defendant,” answered DeGeurin.
Bob Bennett made strenuous objection to the idea—the jury at this point had no information that Mary Jo Wood was anything but a beautiful woman who did not like her mother. Her credibility was not tainted. But the prosecutor had his tongue hidden carefully in his cheek. He had to act as if he wanted to keep these old documents away from the jury, when in truth he was eager for their admission. Once into the record, he could recall Mary Jo to the witness stand and have her begin with memories of the hospital stay, then “tack back” to a remarkably interesting childhood in the home of the widder lady Brownie leader.
Judge Price refused to admit the hospital records. “Then, your honor,” snapped DeGeurin, his anger unhidden by legal courtesy, “we move to introduce these records on a bill of exception.” This was a slap at the judge. A bill of exception keeps material away from the eyes of the jury, but the disputed information goes into the official trial record that is placed before the Court of Criminal Appeals. That high court can thus determine whether or not the judge was correct in his decision to exclude them.
“That is your privilege, Mr. DeGeurin,” said the judge.
But rather than enter the entire package, DeGeurin chose to dictate into the record only those choice portions which most tarnished the character of Mary Wood, implying that she was “emotionally disturbed” and a girl who fled from those who were trying to help her.
“Wait just a minute,” said the judge. He felt defense counsel was being a mite too selective. There were two sides to this sword. In his quick reading of the medical file, the judge had come across material equally beneficial to the reputation of Mary Wood. To balance DeGeurin’s editing, the judge pointedly dictated several long paragraphs to the court reporter, one in particular. It had been written by a hospital doctor: “Testing displays no evidence of psychotic process. Patient is in tune with reality. Was told by nurse of mother’s carrying gun in her purse during visit to patient. During interrogation I saw no thought disorder. Mother seems to be major problem.”
When the judge was done, all of this having transpired out of the jury’s earshot, DeGeurin announced a surprise witness of his own. “Diane Settegast, your honor.” Into the courtroom steamed the strong-looking woman in her early thirties with a pocked face and eyes that smoldered. Her entire life had orbited around horses, and the manner in which she stalked to the box indicated she had ridden up to the courthouse on a stallion, lashed it to a parking meter, and rushed to stand at the side of her good friend Lilla, with sidearms blazing.
First she fired at Joan Jaworski Worrell. From September 1968 until February 1969 she had been in residence at Chatsworth Farm and she had never seen Mrs. Worrell there except on one occasion after Joan Hill’s funeral. This was in contradiction to the testimony that Mrs. Worrell remembered seeing Lilla and Ash there together on two occasions.
“Well, did you ever see Lilla Paulus at Chatsworth Farm?” asked DeGeurin.
“Once,” said Settegast. “Right before Christmas, 1968, when I invited her out for a drink.”
“Have you ever seen Ash Robinson in the presence of Lilla Paulus?”
“Just at horse shows … in passing … you know, in groups of people, ‘Hello, how are you?’ that sort of thing.” She was “sure” that Ash Robinson and Lilla Paulus did not know one another.
“Have you ever seen Lilla Paulus at John Hill’s home?”
“No!”
“Or at Ash Robinson’s home?”
“No. To my knowledge she has not been there.”
Settegast boomed out her answers in the manner of an oracle with sole possession of the truth. There was no stammering, no hesitant feints. This woman possessed only roundhouse punches.
“In the few days before Christmas, 1970, did you call up Lilla Paulus and tell her that Ash Robinson was looking for somebody to kill John Hill?”
“Certainly not!” The idea seemed absurd to Settegast.
Had DeGeurin quit then and there, he would have walked away winner. But he could not resist one more question, trying to sneak in the fact that Lilla Paulus’ daughter had been committed once to a psychiatric clinic.
“When was the last time you saw Mary Wood?” he asked.
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br /> Settegast leaned heavily into the microphone. “Before she decided to take up the practice of prostitution,” she spat, acrid fumes fairly curling around her answer.
From his seat, hearing the stir in the spectator section, knowing he must rise to make strenuous objection, knowing he would surely be sustained, Bennett nonetheless felt a twinge of sympathy for Dick DeGeurin. Diane Settegast, though well-meaning, had just opened the gates of hell.
FORTY-TWO
“I take it, Miss Settegast, due to your connection with the family, that Mary Wood discussed with you how she learned to be a prostitute?” Bob Bennett asked, his voice no longer courtly. Now he was mean. This was a cockfight, razors tied to fetters.
“Practice!” shot back the witness with heavy sarcasm.
“All right,” said Bennett. “Then do you know who began her practice?”
“She did.”
“And she began it at the interest of her mother, isn’t that right?”
Settegast disagreed with a furious shake of her head. “Larry Wood was pimping for her …”
“I believe the question was …”
“No, sir,” interrupted Settegast. “That is not where she began …”
“Wasn’t she first introduced to sexual activity at the insistence of her mother? Isn’t that true?” demanded Bennett.
Arrogantly, Settegast shook off the question. If looks could kill, she would have decapitated the assistant district attorney of Harris County, Texas. If intent could be guessed, she wanted to hurl his impudent head out the window to the chili parlor six floors below. “It doesn’t deserve an answer. But the answer is no!”
“Do you know that to be a fact by virtue of your knowledge of Mrs. Paulus’ reputation and …” Here Bennett hesitated; he could not come right out and charge that Lilla Paulus was once a whore, but he could dance around the edge. “… and the activity that she during her lifetime engaged in?”
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