by Adam Mitzner
“I did. Lauren brought me into Dana’s office and we talked for a few minutes. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I knew Lauren and Dana worked closely together. In fact, Dana and her husband had invited us to dinner at their home, and we reciprocated by having them out for the weekend at our house. Which is to say it was not as if Dana’s existence was a secret Lauren was keeping from me. And so it made sense that when I visited my wife, I’d say hello to Dana. I think, if anything, Lauren did it because that’s what she would have done if Dana and she had just been platonic work colleagues. So, rather than there being an implication that there was something odd about it, I think Lauren was guided by the fact that it would have been out of character for her if she hadn’t done it.”
“Were you ever alone in Dana Goodwin’s office?”
“I honestly don’t remember,” he says with a sigh. “I know that this is an important issue in this trial. That the defense is saying I killed my wife and took Dana’s cell phone to frame her for it. And so I know it would help me to swear that there’s no way I was in her office alone. But the truth is that at the time, it was just a visit to one of my wife’s colleagues. I wasn’t thinking that every detail of it would be important later. So as much as I’d like to deny being there alone, it’s more important that I tell the truth. And the God’s honest truth is that I just can’t swear that there wasn’t a moment that Dana and Lauren stepped out and I was left alone. I don’t think so. I don’t remember that. But I can’t swear it didn’t happen.”
This answer was born of compromise. Richard originally did swear it didn’t happen. Over and over again, in fact. It was only when we spoke with Rita DeSapio, the secretary who sat between Dana and Lauren’s offices, that he was persuaded to change his tune.
“Did you take her cell phone?”
“No. That I can swear to without any reservation. Never happened. Ridiculous that anyone suggests otherwise.”
“Did anything out of the ordinary happen at dinner?”
“No. It had been a particularly stressful day for me at work. And the fact that I had to leave earlier than usual to meet my wife’s friends . . . well, it’s something I did for my wife.”
“Were you drunk after dinner?”
“No. Again, because I didn’t realize how important that dinner would later become, I didn’t count my drinks that evening. And, I’m not particularly proud of this fact, but one thing I’ve done over the years is build up a pretty good tolerance to alcohol. So, if I had three, four, five, even six drinks that night, I would have been fine. I wouldn’t have driven a car, mind you, but I would have been in complete control of myself.”
“Please tell the jury what happened when you came home from dinner that evening.”
“It was just a regular night. We got home at . . . I think a little after ten. We watched some television, and I was asleep before eleven. The next thing I knew, I was receiving a call from our doorman saying that the police were there to see me. And this I remember so clearly. I was groggy when I spoke to our doorman, but then I rolled over to tell Lauren that the police were there. I mean, she deals with the police on a daily basis, so I assumed they were there to see her. That’s when I saw she wasn’t in bed. And that’s when I began to panic.”
“Last question, Mr. Trofino. Did you kill your wife?”
He clenches his teeth as if he’s disgusted that he has to dignify the question with a reply. Then he says, “Absolutely not.”
52.
DANA GOODWIN
LeMarcus has a herculean task before him. There’s no way Richard Trofino is going to crack on cross-examination. That means that LeMarcus has to make his points through his questions only, at the same time expecting that every answer from Richard will knock us back.
He goes straight for the kill, without any setup.
“Mr. Trofino, you lied when you testified that you didn’t know about your wife’s affair, because you most certainly knew about it. Isn’t that correct?”
“No, that’s not correct,” Richard answers calmly, exactly the way a witness should on cross. No matter how hot the questioner, you remain cool.
“You’re going to sit there and tell this jury that your wife didn’t tell you that she was in love with Dana?”
“She never said that, and I don’t believe it’s true.”
LeMarcus’s voice is so loud that he’s yelling, while Richard issues his denials the way you would address a lunatic—so as not to agitate them further.
Richard testifies that he did not take my cell phone, that he did not leave the apartment that night after he and Lauren came home from dinner, and most important, that he did not kill his wife, even as LeMarcus’s every query suggests the opposite.
LeMarcus closes by asking for permission to have Richard’s height measured. It’s a risky gambit, as anyone who saw the prosecution ask O. J. Simpson to try on the bloody glove knows.
“Five foot eight, and maybe a quarter inch,” the court officer says.
As the court officer is walking away, Richard says, “I know it’s my fault. I know it.”
It’s an obvious tactic. I can tell from LeMarcus’s expression that he knows it too.
“Mr. Trofino,” LeMarcus says, “there was no question pending, but if I heard you correctly, you just confessed to murdering your wife, is that right?”
“Objection,” Ella says.
She sounds hesitant. I suspect she doesn’t know where this is going either.
“Sounded like a confession to me,” LeMarcus says.
“If I may, Your Honor?” Richard asks, looking up at Judge Gold.
“It’s not my decision, Mr. Trofino,” Judge Gold says. “Mr. Burrows, still your witness.”
“I have no more questions,” LeMarcus says.
“I have some redirect,” Ella says.
The party offering the witness always gets a chance to clean up the testimony after cross-examination. In this case, I have no doubt that Ella will go where LeMarcus was too afraid to tread.
“Make it quick, Ms. Broden,” Judge Gold replies.
“It will be. In fact, I just have one question. Mr. Trofino, please explain to the jury why you just said that it was your fault.”
“I didn’t kill my wife. I swear that I didn’t. But I see now that when I told Ms. Goodwin at her office that we were having dinner that evening with you, Ms. Broden, Ms. Goodwin must have thought that Lauren was going to replace her with you. By committing this murder, Ms. Goodwin must have hoped that she’d not only avoid getting fired, but that she’d get a promotion to Lauren’s job—which is exactly the way it initially turned out, and it would have stayed that way if she hadn’t been arrested.”
LeMarcus is shouting “Objection! Move to strike!” over Richard’s answer, but the jury’s already heard it. That kind of testimony can’t be unheard. Richard Trofino has just given the jury the previously elusive why.
Usually, the prosecutor gets the last word. There is no second cross. But that’s a matter of the court’s discretion. Judge Gold recognizes the importance of what’s just occurred. Although it’s cold comfort, he allows LeMarcus to question Richard again, on this one point.
LeMarcus doesn’t say anything at first. Someone who didn’t know him might think he was formulating his question in his head. I’ve seen the routine enough to know he’s just being dramatic.
“Is that it, Mr. Trofino?” he finally says.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,” Richard replies.
“I wanted to know if you had anything to add. Maybe you want to tell the jury that Ms. Goodwin confessed to you?”
The jurors now get the joke. Most of them are smiling. Richard is not, however. He looks angry. Like a man using every ounce of his self-control to not spring out of the witness box and knock those smiles off the jurors’ faces.
“Please answer my question,” LeMarcus says.
“What question?” Richard says, still gritting his teeth.
&nb
sp; “I’m asking you quite simply, Mr. Trofino, if you now want to testify, under oath, that when you were in Ms. Goodwin’s office, at a time when you claim that you did not take her cell phone to put your own plan of murder in motion, that instead Ms. Goodwin told you that it was her plan to use her own cell phone to text your wife later that day to meet her in Central Park and then, when your wife showed up, to murder her.”
Ella objects. “Argumentative.”
LeMarcus smiles broadly. “I’ll withdraw it. I think we all know it doesn’t matter what Mr. Trofino says.”
After Ella rests her case, LeMarcus makes a halfhearted motion for a directed verdict. Judge Gold quickly rejects it. Although that ruling isn’t unexpected, it still jabs at my heart. The judge has ruled that the prosecution has met its burden of proof. In other words, that the evidence is sufficient for the jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that I murdered Lauren Wright.
“Does the defense plan on putting on a case, Mr. Burrows?” Judge Gold asks.
“We do. Our first witness is Stuart Goodwin.”
Watching my husband walk to the witness stand for some reason causes me to flash back to my walk down the wedding aisle. Aside from the fact that Stuart’s blond curls are now almost entirely gone, replaced by a shiny, bald pate, he doesn’t look much different. He’s the same weight as he was on our wedding day—something he’s quietly proud of—and Father Time hasn’t laid a hand on his face. He doesn’t even have crow’s feet around the eyes, whereas mine tell the world that I’m no longer in my thirties.
With his hand raised, Stuart swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help him God. He looks nervous in the chair and fidgets a little to get comfortable. His hands rest in his lap, and he rubs his fingers together like a nervous Nellie.
No matter how much you practice with a witness, you can’t break them of their little tics. More often than not, who they are comes through to the jurors. The twelve men and women who are passing judgment on me probably already have a fair impression of my husband before he utters a single word.
He’s weak, I imagine them thinking. The kind of man whose wife might just prefer female sex partners.
LeMarcus begins the direct with the normal background questions, eliciting that Stuart and I have been married for six years and have a five-year-old son.
Then it’s time for the lying to begin.
“Mr. Goodwin, on the night of Ms. Wright’s murder, where was your wife?”
“With me. At home. From about seven o’clock, when we had dinner with our son, until the following morning when she left for work.”
“Any time during that period when she was out of your sight for more than . . . let’s say ten minutes?”
“No. We have a small home, and we spent the evening together. First reading in our living room, then watching television in our bedroom, then asleep. Wait—I should amend that. There was one period of time when she was out of my sight.”
I hold my breath. This wasn’t in the script.
I know LeMarcus doesn’t want to inquire further, but he has no choice. “When was that?”
“If memory serves, Dana read to our son that night and put him to bed. That process normally takes anywhere from twenty to forty minutes. So during that time, Dana was with Jacob, and I was cleaning up after dinner.”
“Understood,” LeMarcus says, no doubt as relieved as I am that Stuart’s going off script has been effective.
“Did your wife have her cell phone with her on that evening?”
“She did not. I remember that very clearly because we searched throughout the house, and it was nowhere to be found. I assumed she’d left it at the office. But of course, when she was arrested and they told us that text had been sent from her phone, I knew that someone had stolen it.”
Ella objects, but she’s a beat too late to stop Stuart. Judge Gold sustains the objection and instructs the jury that Stuart’s speculation as to what happened to my phone is to be disregarded. Then he directs the court stenographer to strike Stuart’s last statement—the line about someone stealing my phone—from the record.
LeMarcus finishes his direct at four. If he’d timed this better, he would have run out the clock, giving him the weekend to work with Stuart on how to handle cross-examination. But stalling for an hour will be too transparent. Besides, I know LeMarcus has already spent hours with Stuart. They’re well past the point of achieving anything more than they already have—only diminishing returns would be achieved through further preparation. Still, my husband is not a man who does well under attack.
53.
ELLA BRODEN
Back when I was an ADA, I joked that I’d cross-examined more lying spouses than any lawyer in America. It must be something in the DNA of sexual offenders; unlike most defendants, they like to take the stand. A police shrink once told me that she believed it gave them a feeling of power, the same rush that caused them to become predators in the first place.
Stuart Goodwin is a different kind of lying spouse. He isn’t the bad guy here. He’s doing what many people would say was the honorable thing: exposing himself to a perjury prosecution in order to protect the mother of his son. But my task is no different than with any other lying witness. I’m here to rip him to shreds.
From the look of him, I don’t imagine that will be difficult.
“It must have been something of a . . . shock to learn that your wife was engaging in a months-long extramarital affair with another woman,” I say.
He flashes a little grin—more baring his teeth than smiling. “Yes. It was shocking to me. I would have never imagined it in a million years.”
“Prior to learning about the affair, would you have said that your wife kept no secrets from you?”
“That’s right. Or I from her.”
“Do you own an iPhone, Mr. Goodwin? Or any cellular phone?”
“I do. And it’s an iPhone.”
“Do you have a passcode on it?”
He pauses for a moment. I suspect that his phone habits are not something discussed in prep with Burrows.
“I do. I use my thumbprint to unlock it.”
“So even though you trust your wife implicitly, you still lock your phone. Is that right?”
“It’s not because I don’t trust Dana—”
“You would say, wouldn’t you, that your wife deals with much more confidential information in her job than you do in yours?”
Burrows objects. I’m sure it’s to throw off my rhythm, to give his witness some time to regroup. He knows I’m entitled to this information. Judge Gold looks as if he can’t be bothered to issue a ruling and asks me to rephrase instead.
“Let me ask it as two questions, Mr. Goodwin. First, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m an art teacher.”
“At the college level?”
“No. Elementary school.”
“I see. So, finger painting, arts and crafts, that sort of thing?”
I might as well have called him a wuss. Still, he doesn’t look the least bit ruffled.
“We do other things too, but you have the general idea.”
“Can we agree that your wife, as an Assistant District Attorney, had access to much more confidential information than you do as an elementary-school art teacher?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you kept your cell phone passcode protected. It’s your testimony that your wife, who dealt with a significant amount of confidential information in her job, did not have a passcode on her phone, and thereby allowed whatever was on it to be accessed by anyone who happened to get hold of it?”
“Dana only used her BlackBerry for work. She often gave her iPhone to our son to play with. He’s only five. That’s why she didn’t put a passcode on it. There was nothing confidential on her iPhone.”
This is a small opening. But that’s where a good prosecutor makes her living, off the crumbs that defense witnesses leave behind.
“Nothing?” I say with as much
sarcasm as possible. “Not nothing, Mr. Goodwin. On her iPhone is a running record of her long sexual affair with her boss. Isn’t that something?”
He still looks unperturbed, which means that I need to provoke him further.
I begin to read the texts aloud. “My love, my life, last night was incredible. I have never come so many times . . .”
“Objection,” Burrows says.
“Sustained,” Judge Gold says. “The texts are admitted into evidence, Ms. Broden. No reason to read them aloud.”
I tilt my head in a slightly rebellious acknowledgment of Judge Gold’s ruling. He’s not wrong, but I want the jury to know there was a lot more X-rated material where that came from.
“Mr. Goodwin, don’t you think that your wife viewed these texts—where she goes on about the sexual prowess of Lauren Wright being so far superior to your own—as confidential? Don’t you think they were something she wanted to keep you from reading?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you are telling us that she didn’t passcode-protect her phone?”
“Yes.”
That’s when it hits me. Like a thunderbolt, although it was there all along. Maybe Stuart Goodwin is not lying. Maybe his wife’s iPhone never did have a passcode.
And maybe he did read her texts.
54.
DANA GOODWIN
Judge Gold breaks for the day at 4:45 sharp. It’s a union thing. Overtime must be paid to the court officers and stenographer if they work past five, and Judge Gold, for all his power in the courtroom, probably doesn’t have authority to authorize the additional expense without the chief judge’s sign-off.
No one looks disappointed by the early start to the weekend, of course. At the end of all the previous court days, LeMarcus and I left together as if we were a couple, although it was always to head back to his office to prepare for the next day. Stuart went home alone to tend to Jacob. Tonight, however, in view of the weekend, LeMarcus tells me that we should reconvene tomorrow morning at his office, so Stuart and I depart together.
We maintain appearances, holding hands as we leave the courthouse. The flashing of cameras as we exit the building is sufficiently blinding that it’s difficult for me initially to discern the location of the car that LeMarcus has ordered for us. But it’s double-parked on Centre Street, a sign in the window that says “Dana L.,” as if leaving off my last initial would fool the press.