Lethal Guardian

by M. William Phelps

  To assure that she wouldn’t flee, her entire family was stripped of their passports. The court agreed with her argument that in order to prepare for trial, the best place for her was at home, working with her attorneys. The terms of her release were as strict as any court could have ordered: She was not to leave the house except for a medical emergency. Law enforcement and court officials were given complete access to the home anytime they wanted. Any visitors to the house had to be preapproved.

  Like the previous year, for the next twelve months, both sides continued to set the stage for what one newspaper billed as “the case of [Beth Ann Carpenter’s] life.” One motion after the other was filed. Everything was discussed in open court, from the sexually explicit letters Clein had written to the time Beth Ann had spent overseas to letters Hugh Keefe had written to her while she was in England.

  As far as Hugh Keefe and Kevin Kane’s being allowed to try the case, the court finally ruled during summer 2001 that both could indeed continue. If it came down to either of them being called to testify, the court would deal with it at the appropriate time.

  Chapter 44

  Jury selection took a lot longer than expected. Each member of the jury had to be thoroughly questioned about his or her biases, along with how much of the media coverage he or she had been exposed to. It was a tedious process, but by the end of January 2002, a jury of eight men, four women and three alternates was chosen.

  People around town were already saying it was one of the most sensational cases New London Superior Court had ever heard. The Associated Press was there, along with the local newspapers and television stations. With television cameras not allowed in the courtroom, Court TV planned to run daily updates on a Web page dedicated exclusively to the case.

  An hour south of New London, in Stamford, Connecticut, however, the entire country focused on the pretrial hearings of another sensational murder trial that had been under way for nearly a year now. Michael Skakel—“the Kennedy cousin”—was being tried for the death of his former neighbor Martha Moxley, a fifteen-year-old Greenwich, Connecticut, girl who had been bludgeoned to death with a golf club on October 30, 1975. CNN, FOX News, ABC, CBS, MSNBC and Court TV were all there, broadcasting live from the scene. Dominick Dunne, a Connecticut resident and guru of true crime, was covering the trial for Vanity Fair magazine. Sitting alongside Dunne on most days was his close friend Mark Fuhrman, a former detective and a writer of true crime books, who had broken the Moxley case wide open and sent it to the grand jury with the publication of his book Murder in Greenwich.

  The allure of the Skakel trial was obvious: America was sold on anything involving the Kennedy family. To see one of them go down was to watch royalty fall from the throne. But what drew people toward Beth Ann’s trial was something entirely different—something extremely rare: lawyers being accused of murder.

  As officers of the court, Beth Ann Carpenter and Haiman Clein had been sworn to uphold laws and live by a court’s ruling. They knew better. They were professionals. They weren’t your run-of-the-mill scofflaws with criminal records. They were respected members of the community. For many people, to be involved in such a horrific crime was a sign that anyone was capable of anything.

  What was even more bizarre was that a few years prior to the start of the trial, a man named Scott Pickles had been arrested and held on a bond of $3 million and was facing the death penalty for murdering his wife and two small children. Mrs. Pickles had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen. One child had died of asphyxiation and the other of blunt trauma to the head. Pickles, like Beth Ann, was not only from Ledyard, but he had been a lawyer at one time, too. Some of the same ED-MCS detectives had even worked on both cases simultaneously.

  Beth Ann had changed somewhat during the three years since she’d returned from Ireland. For one, at thirty-eight, she now had red hair that hung down below her waist. She was thin, attractive and professional-looking. And now that she had been afforded the privilege of prepping her case from home, she was completely ready to do battle with Kevin Kane and Peter McShane.

  Despite her knowledge of the law or her insistence that Clein had acted alone, Beth Ann’s fate was in the hands of Hugh Keefe and Tara Knight. To his credit, Keefe was no slouch of a lawyer who wore cheap, wrinkled suits and represented lowlifes. Keefe, some said, was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the Northeast. He had been admitted to the bar in 1967 and mainly had tried civil and criminal cases ever since. Since 1979, he had taught trial advocacy at Yale Law School, one of the more prestigious law schools in the country. In 1990, Connecticut Magazine named Keefe one of the state’s five best lawyers. His ties to politicians and wealth were endless.

  At about five feet eight inches, slenderly built, Keefe wore an almost inflated-looking heap of bright rust red hair that spoke greatly of his Irish heritage. Usually soft-spoken and easy to get along with, he could sometimes let his temper rear its ugly head. There was no middle ground between Keefe and his colleagues; one either liked Hugh Keefe and respected him or hated how he practiced law. And, some later claimed, Keefe enjoyed that part of the game immensely.

  On February 5, Keefe filed a motion to have Chris Despres submit to a voice analysis. In what had turned out to be a surprise move on Mark Despres’s part, he had made it known that he wasn’t going to testify against Beth Ann. In fact, he was now telling people he wanted out of his plea bargain with the state.

  Why?

  Mark was saying that he wasn’t the person who had pulled the trigger on the night Buzz was murdered. Instead, he was claiming it had been Chris, his own son.

  Chris Despres was not the fifteen-year-old boy he was back in 1994 anymore. He was a twenty-two-year-old man now. He had been married back in 1999 to Margaret Long, and had bought a house in Windsor, Connecticut, on the opposite side of the state. Further, Chris was no longer a long-haired, hippie-looking teen, full of fear and angst; he wore his hair cropped in a quarter-inch military style, and he had put on a considerable amount of weight. Rarely caught smiling, Chris had a stoic and dark aura about him. It was obvious the years hadn’t been good to him. He had suffered, both emotionally and spiritually. He had spent years beating himself up over what had happened, yet he refused, a friend later said, to get any psychiatric help for it.

  Mark said he had proof that his son had pulled the trigger. While confined to his cell back in the fall of 2000, Mark said he’d just happened to be listening to the Dr. Laura radio show one day and heard Chris call up and ask Dr. Laura for advice. In the process of talking to Dr. Laura, Mark was saying Chris admitted to the murder.

  When Mark heard the show, he asked Jocelyn Johnson to get a copy of it. Johnson later said she went on-line and accessed Dr. Laura’s Web site and downloaded a file of the show. When she told Mark she had the show on tape, Mark told her to “hold on to it.”

  In December 2001, Johnson, under orders from Mark, turned the tape over to the state’s attorney’s office. From there, John Turner took over and immediately contacted Premiere Radio in Sherman Oaks, California, the company that produced the show. It told Turner that Dr. Laura had her own Web site that might archive files, but it wasn’t policy to keep files of the show on-line. Furthermore, the Web-master for the station, Radio Owen Sound, in Canada, said it “never provided audio files of the show on [its] Web site.”

  By the end of January 2002, Turner had a copy of the show in his hands. What he heard, however, gave him pause to speculate that the entire incident was just one more fabrication by a man who was determined to get out of jail any way he could.

  “Chris…Chris, welcome to the program,” Dr. Laura said as she finished with one caller and picked up on a “caller named Chris.”

  “I have kind of a weird question for your show,” the caller who identified himself as Chris said. “When I was fifteen years old, I…I…I was involved with a, um…a murder for hire…and now I’m married and, well, um—”

  At that point, a chagrined Dr. Laur
a, her voice cracking, broke in. “And what role did you take in this murder for hire, Chris?”

  “I was the one that actually did it.” There was brief pause. “And…um…”

  “You’re right!” Dr. Laura said immediately, interrupting. “This is different for the show.”

  The caller then laughed nervously. “I don’t know if I should let my family-in-law know if I—”

  “Does your wife know?” Dr. Laura asked, talking over him.

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.”

  “She knew when she married you?”

  “She knew when she was dating me.”

  “Huh! Gee. Okay,” Dr. Laura said, and went silent for a moment. Then she became incredibly direct in her tone, almost angry. “No! I don’t recommend—assuming you’re a nice guy—I don’t recommend that you make this public. I recommend that you get on with life…because the reaction [from the family] will be just like mine: I’d wish my daughter were not married to you!”

  “Okay…”

  “So, nice guy that you are, there’s somebody still dead—and I have a real problem with that.”

  “I know that…that,” the caller tried saying, but Dr. Laura wouldn’t let him talk.

  “I understand. But I’m suggesting that this will not…make the relationship within the family better. So, no.”

  “My worry,” the caller then began to say, “is that—”

  Dr. Laura cut him off midsentence once again, getting louder and more defensive as she spoke. “Okay, Chris. I don’t care that your worry is that they might find out something in the future. On the off chance that anybody does, you don’t do it now.”

  The caller fell silent.

  “That’s my opinion,” Dr. Laura said.

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t say there might be a flood,” Dr. Laura added, “so I’m going to burn my house down now.”

  “Gotcha!”

  “Okay?”

  “Thank you.”

  After Chris hung up, Dr. Laura did one of her famous reenactments of the call. In a mocking, squeaky voice, she said, “Mommy, I’d like you to meet my boyfriend. He killed people several years ago, but he’s really nice now.” Then she spoke directly to her audience: “That would…make your average mother break out in hives. I’m Dr. Laura.”

  With the news of the tape made public, Hugh Keefe wanted Chris to submit to a voice analysis to see if he indeed had called the show. Chris had denied calling the show, and most assumed that Mark, in desperation, had put someone up to the call. Kevin Kane argued that the state’s case against Beth Ann had no bearing on who actually pulled the trigger.

  Still, from Hugh Keefe’s standpoint, Chris was going to be a key witness for the state. Anything that could undermine his testimony might help Beth Ann.

  Someone close to Chris later said there was no way it was Chris who had made that call; the mannerisms and speech patterns in the voice were definably different from Chris’s. What’s more, the caller had made it a point to tell Dr. Laura that the reason he was calling her show was because he wanted to come clean with his in-laws about being involved in a murder for hire. Not true. Chris’s in-laws had known about Chris’s involvement in Buzz’s murder shortly after they met him almost four years before the call had been made. The ED-MCS had even tailed Chris’s in-laws at one point. On top of that, Buzz’s murder had been all over the news for years.

  The most compelling evidence, however, was that Chris and his wife had split up at the time and were talking about getting divorced. In fact, a year later, in 2001, they filed for divorce. Why would the caller, if he were Chris, be worried about telling his in-laws a disturbing fact like that if he was in the process of divorcing himself from the family?

  None of it made any sense.

  In the end, the judge agreed, ruling that the court had no jurisdiction to make Chris submit to voice analysis.

  Chapter 45

  New London Superior Court is on the corner of Huntington Avenue and Broad Street in downtown New London. It has been a fixture in town for as long as people can remember. Shaped like a boomerang, the tan-brick building has four floors, with entrances in the front and back. Directly across the street is the Garde Theater. Prime Media Services, which used to be the site of Haiman Clein’s law office, is directly next to the Garde. Down the block is the hustle and bustle of daily downtown life. There’s a bus depot and harbor, coffee shops and delis, sport shops, bars, restaurants and office buildings.

  As Beth Ann and her relatives shuffled into the courtroom, alongside Buzz’s relatives and friends, to begin proceedings in the State of Connecticut v. Beth Ann Carpenter, the animosity between the families that had ignited back in 1992 seemed to build in resentment with the passing of time. The Carpenter family, many of them hugging Beth Ann in solidarity before she took a seat next to Keefe and Knight, sat directly in back of her, on the right, while the Clintons took a stronghold on the left, directly in back of Peter McShane and Kevin Kane. With only about five feet separating the families, the stares, whispers and unfriendly gestures that had become a common occurrence during preliminary hearings carried over into the start of the trial. In fact, Court TV reporter Matt Bean later described the tension in the courtroom between the two families as a reinvention of “the Hatfields and McCoys battle” waged nearly one hundred years before in West Virginia. In that case, a dozen or so family members had been killed throughout the years of the dispute.

  In this feud, it would be about only one death—the murder of Anson “Buzz” Clinton.

  There are no opening arguments in Connecticut. The judge simply gives his instructions to the jury, and it’s game on.

  The state’s first few witnesses did nothing more than establish the fact that the body of Buzz Clinton had been found on March 10, 1994. Joe Dunn, the East Lyme cop and first law enforcement person on the scene, followed a woman who had discovered Buzz Clinton’s body. He told the jury how he recognized Buzz. Then, when Dunn began talking about the fight Dick Carpenter had had with Buzz sometime before Buzz’s murder, Judge Robert Devlin Jr. made the jury step out of the room.

  After discussing it some, Devlin said it was hearsay. The jury wouldn’t be allowed to hear any of it.

  Keefe and Knight had scored already.

  Detective John Turner and Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the medical examiner who examined Buzz, rounded out the first day of proceedings. Both men were there to talk about the condition of Buzz’s body shortly after it was discovered. Carver, when asked, said he didn’t think Buzz had been run over, as Mark Despres had been saying all along. There was just no evidence, Carver insisted.

  Either way, it didn’t matter. Carver concluded that Buzz had been killed by several gunshot wounds to the upper body.

  It was groundwork. Kane and McShane were setting the stage for what would be the toughest part of their case: explaining the bitter battle for child custody, which was, in their argument, the actual motive for murder.

  On February 6, 2002, Dee Clinton, the state’s first witness to that fact, began laying out how the seed of hatred for her son was planted in Beth Ann’s soul merely weeks after he had met Kim and the rest of the Carpenter family.

  Dee wore clothing that would become a signature of hers throughout the trial: a dark black dress she had donned at Buzz’s funeral some eight years earlier. With her short-cropped graying hair, nearly unblemished skin and petite figure, for a woman in her midfifties, Dee certainly didn’t come across as someone who had spent the past years wallowing in self-pity, letting the murder of her son wear her down and add years to her life. She looked more like a woman hell-bent on justice. In recent years, Dee had become an outspoken member of a support group called Survivors of Homicide. Set up in the format of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, survivors of murdered loved ones could go to a meeting and voice their concerns, worries, fears, or just sit and talk with someone who could relate to what they were going through. The group was started in 1983 by Gary Merton, a Vernon, Connecticut, man
whose teenage daughter had been murdered by a man who went on to kill again after being paroled early in the Merton death.

  Just a month before the Beth Carpenter trial started, Merton stepped down as president of Survivors and Dee took over for him. In the wake of Buzz’s untimely death, Dee had made a solemn pact with herself to avenge her son’s death by helping others cope with the same loss.

  For Dee, though, today was different: Buzz’s day in court was finally here.

  After establishing the fact that Buzz was her son, and that she had two other kids, Suzanne, who was now a nineteen-year-old woman, and Billy, seventeen, Dee began to talk about how Buzz had met Kim. Within moments, however, she had to ask for a glass of water, saying, “It’s nerve-wracking up here.”

  As Kevin Kane began asking Dee about Buzz and Kim’s relationship, Judge Devlin had to keep interrupting the proceedings because Hugh Keefe kept objecting. Most of what Dee had to say, Keefe was quick to point out, was hearsay. He wanted it stopped.

  “Well, Your Honor,” Keefe said at one point, “I ask that the court instruct her not to tell us what anyone else says.”

  Dee was confused. “Well, how do I do this?”

  “Just try to answer the questions, ma’am,” Devlin said, “without saying what other people say….”

  Kevin Kane continued asking questions, but Keefe kept objecting.

  When Dee finally figured out how to answer Kane’s questions without bringing hearsay into it, Keefe said he couldn’t hear her. “I wonder if Mrs. Clinton could keep her voice up?”

  As the morning wore on, Dee spoke of the first time she met Kim, then of the first time she met Rebecca.

  “She had no verbal skills. She would put her head down and twirl her thumbs and wring her hair.”

  For the next hour, Kane had Dee outline how the relationship between Kim and Buzz and the Carpenters progressed into a nasty struggle to gain control of Rebecca, and Kim usually came out on the losing end. At one point, Kane asked Dee about a phone call Kim had made to her mother, Cynthia, regarding a night when Kim wanted to stay over at the Clintons’ with Rebecca.