But this logic didn’t wash with Judge Johnson. Dorfman had presented a case for second-degree murder at best, he said, and he would not allow Mrs. Hansen to testify as a rebuttal witness. The threats she planned to tell the jury about were threats that Theresa had made one to three months before the shooting. They were threats that were too old to be admissible in testimony, he ruled. “Such icing on a cake” might cause a perfectly sound conviction to be reversed on appeal, he told a dumbfounded Dorfman.
“Here I had evidence the wife made an earlier threat against the deceased and the judge refused to allow me to bring it in!” Dorfman recalled.
Judge Johnson told the young prosecutor that the only way he could put Mrs. Hansen on the stand was to convince the court that he should be allowed to reopen his whole case. To do that, Johnson wanted Dorfman to show him legal precedents that would justify Mrs. Hansen’s testimony.
“I’ve got proof that in the past she made a threat!” said Dorfman. “It’s pretty damn obvious that if I got a prior inconsistent statement where Theresa denies under oath she ever made a threat, I should be able to call in my witness to impeach that. In fact, the law is now in California that it not only becomes evidence of the impeachment, it becomes the evidence itself! But Johnson, he forced me to write briefs!”
Dorfman kept a secretary on overtime and worked all night. He met Judge Johnson’s challenge with a four-page brief citing five cases, plus two sections of the state penal code and the code of civil procedure, as reason enough to let him reopen his case.
Johnson remained unsatisfied. He let Zarick put Dorfman, Dorfman’s court reporter, and his chief investigator on the witness stand and grill them as to the pertinence of Mrs. Hansen’s testimony before he would rule on Dorfman’s request.
Finally, Johnson grudgingly reopened the prosecution’s case, but not without forcing a stipulation that the jury disregard all but the most specific of Mrs. Hansen’s testimony. Before Clifford Sanders’s sister ever took the witness stand, Judge Johnson had made sure that the jury understood that she might very well be committing perjury.
After the jury returned to the courtroom, Johnson had the clerk read the following instruction to them:
“You are about to hear evidence of statements by the deceased Clifford Clyde Sanders that the defendant threatened his life. This evidence is being received for the sole purpose of showing the state of mind of the deceased, and it must not be considered by you for any other purpose. Evidence that the deceased made these statements is material to the issue of self-defense, to show who was the aggressor, that has been raised in this case, but it does not in any way tend to prove that the defendant made those threats.”
When Lydia finally got to testify, she described her brother as a hard worker who never drank, gave his wife all of his money, never threatened her, and never hit her. While Dorfman questioned her she nervously tapped her feet. Theresa, facing her from the defense table, did the same.
“I believe with all my heart that Theresa Sanders planned to kill my brother,” she testified.
She said Theresa always drove Clifford to work because she wanted no other women looking at him. She kept him in threadbare work clothes for the same reason and allowed him only fifty cents for lunch money so that he wouldn’t go to a restaurant where other women might size him up.
Two months before Clifford died, Theresa had told her sister-in-law that she would shoot Clifford before she would let another woman have him.
“She said that she had a gun loaded and he’d better walk a chalk line or she’d kill him,” she testified.
Furthermore, Mrs. Hansen said that this was not the first time that Theresa had shot at her brother. Before he died, he had shown his sister a bullet hole in the floor of the home where the couple had lived in Sacramento. Theresa had shot and missed, said Mrs. Hansen.
“She said she’d thought of using ant poison but that an autopsy would show it and that she wasn’t ‘stupid’ and she’d get a gun and shoot him and make it look like an accident,” Mrs. Hansen said, adding this direct quote from her sister-in-law:
“‘He’s a man, ain’t he? Why not kill him?’”
Throughout her testimony, Zarick objected, calling Mrs. Hansen “a prejudiced witness trying to discredit my client on trial for first-degree murder,” but Judge Johnson overruled him and let her speak. When he got his chance to cross-examine her, however, Zarick pulled out all the stops.
“You loved your brother, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Hansen.
He accused her on the stand of threatening defense witnesses, being removed from the courtroom for causing a scene, and using obscenities to describe Theresa’s own two hours on the witness stand.
He also asked her if she knew whether her brother had beaten or mistreated his wife. All Mrs. Hansen could remember was Clifford slapping her once.
“You have no interest in convicting Theresa Sanders, do you?” he asked.
Oh yes, she testified, she did not want Theresa to get off scot-free. But despite her unwavering belief in Theresa’s guilt, Mrs. Hansen added one more paradox to a trial that—from the jury’s point of view—seemed to be loaded with contradictions.
Mrs. Hansen asked the jury to acquit her sister-in-law of the murder of her brother so that she would “be allowed to raise my brother’s children.”
“I was miserable,” Dorfman recalled. “I wanted to get rid of Johnson if I could. Still, I was told that just wasn’t done. Today there are fifty to sixty DAs and fifty to sixty judges and they’re constantly challenging each other. The prosecutors have as much flexibility as the defense does. But one did not challenge judges in those days. It just was not done by most lawyers, and the DAs never did it.”
On September 17, Zarick pressed his newfound momentum and, in the absence of the jury, asked Judge Johnson to set bail for Theresa.
She had a little boy who missed her, he said, and, besides, the county jail was no place for a pregnant woman. To underscore his point, he told Johnson that Beatrice Howard, a Rio Linda woman who had been taking care of Theresa’s baby, would give Theresa a place to stay while her trial wound down. Mrs. Howard was a capable woman, but little Howard Sanders needed his mother, said Zarick.
Dorfman railed against the unprecedented and questionable request for bail for a murder defendant, especially in the middle of trial, but again, Judge Johnson ruled against him. He granted Theresa’s freedom in exchange for $4,000 bail.
Mrs. Hansen was followed by Tom Sanders, who ranted from the stand that his little brother had, in fact, been murdered “by that bitch.” It didn’t matter that he was admonished for his language. Tom was angry and didn’t care who knew it. In his heart, he knew that Clifford had been gunned down.
“I’m gonna get a gun! I’m gonna get a gun!” he shouted, storming from the courtroom. His sister ran after him, shouting “No, no, no!”
Dorfman called for a recess and caught up with both of them on the street, where he calmed Sanders and warned him how his behavior might influence the trial.
At the same time, Judge Johnson openly proclaimed before the jury and everyone else in his courtroom that Clifford Sanders’s relatives, particularly his brother, Tom, were an unruly bunch. He stated that they might be as dangerous as Sanders himself had been. He assigned two extra bailiffs to the trial after Tom’s outburst and ruled that Zarick would be allowed to carry a loaded gun into the courtroom each day for protection.
“Each day he would take the loaded gun out of his briefcase and cock it and turn back to the deceased’s family, in the presence of the jury,” said Dorfman. “As if he were saying, ‘You people are as dangerous as he was, but you’re not gonna get me like he tried to get little Theresa here.’”
Dorfman found three coworkers who were willing to take the witness stand and testify about Clifford’s fears of what his volatile young wife might do to him. He also put Lydia Hansen’s husband, Edward, before the jury, to give his version
of his dead brother-in-law’s escalating warfare with Theresa. Like his wife, Hansen maintained that Clifford had reported more than once that Theresa was a jealous, violent woman, capable of plotting and carrying out her husband’s demise.
But Zarick countered by putting Theresa back on the stand in the afternoon, along with Martha Hafner. Mrs. Hafner recalled the night Theresa and baby Howard came to her home in abject fear of what Clifford might do to them. At the end of the day Theresa was released on bail.
The trial continued. By Friday, September 18, Tom Sanders had calmed down, but the two extra bailiffs remained in the courtroom anyway, just in case. Zarick put Martha Hafner back on the stand, followed by her brother-in-law Floyd Norris, and a surprise witness for the defense: Dr. Stanley Weitemier, a physician who testified that he had treated Theresa for facial injuries in 1963—injuries she claimed she received when Clifford hit her.
And there was more.
“I remember the torture that the husband had put her through,” recalled juror William Hanson. “He’d taken cigarettes and burned her behind her knee. She had several scars there, and that was one of the things that I remember.
“She [Theresa] was dressed pretty well. I remember she got her excuse to go into the judge’s chamber and take off her stockings to show him the burn.”
Then the defense rested and Judge Johnson recessed for the weekend.
On Monday, September 21, Dorfman went first with closing arguments. Theresa deliberately killed her husband, he said. There was passion. There was the heat of the moment. But she went to the bedroom, cocked the gun, and shot her husband. It was clearly premeditated first-degree murder by a jealous wife, he told the jury.
There was Ysabel May’s testimony about Theresa claiming that she didn’t think shooting the gun would “do that much damage.” Did that sound like the statement of a woman whose gun went off accidentally?
And what of Lydia Hansen’s testimony that she had heard Theresa say she had a gun loaded at home and would shoot Clifford before she’d let another woman have him?
“Not every murderer can look like the witch in ‘Snow White,’” said Dorfman, pointing at Mrs. Sanders. “It would be easier if they did. She is eighteen and pregnant, but that doesn’t overcome the fact she maliciously shot and killed her husband without provocation.”
Zarick’s closing argument could be summed up in his “Defendant’s Proposed Instruction No. 3,” which he wanted read to the jury before they retired.
“A homicide is justified and not punishable when committed by a person in the lawful defense of herself,” he wrote. Reasonable grounds included imminent “danger of death or great bodily injury,” Zarick argued. “To justify taking the life of another in self-defense, the surrounding circumstances must make the danger of great bodily harm apparent, present, and imminent, or must appear, at the time of the homicide,” he concluded.
It was an instruction that, ultimately, Judge Johnson did not formally deliver to the jury, but the jury, nonetheless, got that message.
“I remember the case all right,” said Jennie Cullers, one of the jurors who, thirty years after the trial, could recall little else about it except her gut feeling at the time. “I remember the girl who was acquitted of shooting her husband. She was abused and pregnant. That’s about the extent of my memory.”
On Tuesday, September 22, Judge Johnson instructed the jury on what it could and could not consider in deliberating behind closed doors. Among other things, they were to disregard much of Lydia Hansen’s testimony.
The jury retired at 11:03 A.M. and returned at 2:45 P.M. “There wasn’t too much dissension as I remember,” said juror William Hanson. “She really blew him all over the room. She struck me as a young woman who had gotten into a marriage she couldn’t handle. Abuse in those days was a big word. Now everybody’s abused.”
Wearing a baby-blue maternity smock, Theresa waited calmly for the jury to shuffle into the jury box. She put her hand to her lips, fingers quivering as the foreman stood.
Dorfman knew the verdict in his gut before foreman Gary Harrison even handed it to the court clerk.
“Not guilty,” read the clerk.
When Johnson asked him if he wanted to poll the jury, Dorfman waved his hand and spoke no for the record.
Johnson clapped his gavel and ordered Theresa Sanders discharged and her bail lifted. After a twelve-day trial, it had taken the jury just one hour and forty-five minutes, with an hour off for lunch, to set Theresa free. She approached the jury box to thank the jury, but could not stop crying. One female juror put her arm around the young mother, but neither of them spoke.
James Cross led his daughter out into the hall, rushing past the waiting reporters. Zarick later told one newspaper that his client had only one thing to say after she had left the courtroom: “‘All I want to do is go home and take care of my baby.’”
But she did not go home immediately.
“The next day, after the acquittal, she comes to my office and retrieves the gun she shot her husband with,” Dorfman said. “No emotion. Just, ‘This is mine.’ She was petite and pretty, but she’s got a very cold heart to her.”
Dorfman blamed the judge for a miscarriage of justice, but kept the silence that the DA’s office demanded of its junior members. Within a year or two, however, he wearied of the iron grip that all judges—both good and bad—had on the district attorney. He quit, went into private practice, and followed the example that Zarick and other trial lawyers had set for him. Early in his career he became so well-known for defending Sacramento’s prostitutes and pimps that he was nicknamed “the King of Tarts.” In later years Dorfman gained a reputation as one of Sacramento’s better-known criminal defense lawyers.
He never did question the jury members in the Sanders case as to how they reached their decision.
“She was just a simple gal, was married and abused, and not too smart,” said juror Hanson. But shooting her husband, and then being acquitted of murder, may well have been a turning point in Theresa’s life, Hanson conceded thirty years later.
Hanson has no regrets about the verdict, regardless of what happened later. “I never kept in touch with any of the other jurors,” he said. “At the time it just seemed like the right verdict. I just felt sorry for the poor little bunny.”
III
“I guess I was a sophomore in college when she was arrested for murdering her first husband,” said Charlotte Harvey. “I remember I sent a note to the jail. A good-luck note or something, asking if I could see her.
“But she didn’t want to see me, not then and not after. I felt we’d just gone off on different paths. I was just too much of a reminder of something she couldn’t do. I just knew that was why she didn’t want to see me.”
Rosemary and Theresa were not yet twenty-one and their lives were already twisted and stunted in ways that would keep many of their dreams out of reach forever. While Charlotte, their childhood friend, was off at college, Rosemary was living in a trailer in Rio Linda with an out-of-work husband who listed his occupation as “encyclopedia salesman.” And Theresa? Theresa was now a pregnant mother, fighting a murder charge.
When the younger of the Cross sisters had first been arrested in July, Chief Froelich followed her instructions and drove her baby some fifty miles north, to a trailer at the rear of an address on Tenth Street in Rio Linda. There, he handed Howard over to Floyd and Rosemary Norris.
Theresa’s sister reluctantly took the child, even though the young couple had problems enough of their own. Rosemary had her differences with her younger sister, but Theresa was family after all. Nevertheless, Rosemary really didn’t have time for a second child. For one thing, she had to work. From the start of her marriage, Rosemary’s meager bookkeeper’s salary had been their only steady income. Floyd could not seem to find and hold a job, but neither was he enamored of the idea of becoming a full-time baby-sitter for his sister-in-law’s child.
Now, besides their own son, the Norrises had a
nother mouth to feed. Theresa’s prospects of getting out of jail anytime soon did not look promising. And even if she did go free, she was due to have another baby in a few months. Rosemary and Floyd were simply not prepared, financially or emotionally, to add two more babies and a sister-in-law to their tiny household.
Rosemary immediately began looking around for a more permanent home for Theresa’s baby. She found it with Bea Howard.
Mrs. Howard ran a beauty parlor out of her home at 6608 Cherry Lane, just a few blocks south of the Norrises. She had grown children of her own by her first husband, but she had remarried at forty-one. Now, six years later, it was clear that she and her new husband, Craig, would have no children of their own.
“Since Craig and I were married, he often said he’d like to adopt a little boy,” Bea recalled.
Mrs. Howard casually mentioned to a neighbor once that she and her husband had thought about taking the leap and word got around. Within a day or two of Chief Froelich’s visit, Rosemary was on the phone asking her if she would consider keeping little Howard Sanders for a weekend. Bea panicked.
“I was going to a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration on that Sunday and I didn’t even have a playpen,” Bea remembered. “I told her I was busy and that I didn’t have any of those things you need for children. I really didn’t want to get mixed up in it.”
Rosemary was insistent, so Bea relented. She knew the story of the Cross family well enough: their father’s illness, their mother’s heart attack, and the hard luck the two girls had struggled to overcome following her death. Bea had been Swannie Gay’s casual friend and remembered her as a fine woman who had died too young. Mrs. Howard took pity on Rosemary as well as her sister.
“I thought maybe I better keep him,” she said.
Just five days after Theresa’s arrest for murder, Rosemary handed the towheaded toddler to Mr. and Mrs. Howard. According to Bea, Theresa’s first child looked like a Holocaust survivor.
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