That statement was made during Scott Johnson’s sentencing hearing, this spring. Johnson had never expressed any interest in an insanity defense—what he called, in a letter from jail to his mother, “playing the coo-coo card.” In one interview with a court-appointed psychologist, he said, “You don’t have to be crazy to do what I did, just angry.” The specialists who examined him agreed. They were unanimous in believing that he did not lack the capacity to understand the wrongfulness of his actions. In March 2009, Johnson had changed his plea from not guilty to nolo contendere, which has the effect of a guilty plea, and the circuit-court judge, Tim Duket, had scheduled a hearing at which victims as well as Johnson would have an opportunity to speak before a sentence was imposed. No matter what was said, Johnson was expected to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the most severe penalty the State of Wisconsin has to offer.
For the family of Bryan Mort, that wasn’t enough. Through a petition signed by local residents and the support of their congressman, the Morts pressed for a federal prosecution of Scott Johnson. Under a federal law passed after 9/11, acts of violence on railroad property—which is where Mort was, since the railroad’s right-of-way extends fifty feet on either side of the train bridge—can be prosecuted as acts of terrorism, with sentences that include the death penalty. Four days before the sentencing hearing, friends and family of Bryan Mort gathered at the Iron Mountain cemetery on what would have been his twentieth birthday. In the Daily News coverage of the event, the quote from Bryan’s father was succinct: “The Bible says ‘an eye for an eye.’ ”
—
The sentencing hearing was held in the county seat of Marinette County, a city that is also called Marinette, about an hour and a half from the scene of the crimes. The audience sat in a large, paneled room that is ordinarily used for meetings of the county board. In the earlier days of the courthouse, before an annex was built, it had been used for trials—EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL is still carved over the door—and it had been temporarily changed back into a courtroom to accommodate those who had a personal stake in the outcome of State of Wisconsin v. Scott J. Johnson. Except for lawyers, just about everyone was dressed informally, even those who were there to speak. Two people were wearing T-shirts that said SPIGARELLI EXCAVATING. Five women in one row, including Bryan Mort’s mother, Sylvia, were wearing T-shirts that said on the back BRYAN W. MORT 1989–2008 and on the front, under Bryan’s picture, ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS. Judge Duket began by reminding people that they were, in fact, in a courtroom, temporary or not, and that outbursts would not be tolerated. To back that up, more than a dozen officers from the sheriff’s office were stationed around the room. Before the judge began the proceedings, another employee of Marinette County—a woman responsible for the care of crime victims and their families—had handed out boxes of tissues and packages of hard candy.
Nine months had passed since the events at the train bridge, but there was no expectation that the anger felt by the families of those killed by Johnson had dissipated. From the release of documents such as police interviews, it had become clear that he was not inclined to express remorse or to beg their forgiveness. (“What do other guys in my position tell ’em? They’re sorry? What does that do for them?”) In fact, in a jailhouse interview with the Associated Press, Johnson had said that being upset over the death of the teenagers was like being upset over spilled milk.
Given the anger at Johnson, who sat at the defense table in an orange prison jumpsuit, it was not surprising that a lot of what was said in the Marinette County courtroom seemed designed to wound him rather than to describe the loss and suffering that his crimes had caused. Tiffany Pohlson’s uncle called him a “useless piece of garbage.” Johnson was regularly reminded that he had failed at everything he’d ever attempted—including even his horrific crime, since he’d apparently intended to kill even more people than he had managed to kill. David Spigarelli, Tony’s father, concluded his statement by saying that prison would give Johnson “a chance to finally achieve something for the first time in his life, when his cellmate, Bubba, says ‘bend over I’m ready to lay this pipe.’ He will finally have achieved his master plumber’s status….Me and Tony will be laughing our asses off, Scott Johnson.” Most of what Terri Bianco-Spigarelli said, through tears, seemed designed to memorialize her son rather than to excoriate the defendant, but she said that Johnson would burn in hell, because God forgives only the remorseful. “I never hated anybody,” she said. “I’m a people lover. I get along with everybody. I hate him, and I could kill him.”
Scott Johnson read a prepared speech. At the start, he said that the points he would make were based on a maxim that he’d devised when he was twelve: “The truth of the matter at hand is that the truth doesn’t count anymore. It is the quality of the lie that endures.” He had any number of complaints to make about police-interrogation quotes being taken out of context or psychologists being biased or the press getting the facts wrong, particularly about whether he had planned the shooting in advance. He reiterated his belief that no purpose would be served by saying that he was sorry for what he’d done. (“If I showed a hint of remorse, what would people say then? ‘Oh, he’s lying. Oh, he’s faking.’ ”) He said what he did regret was that he had to live among people who were liars, gullible, arrogant, and brainwashed. The audience controlled itself through most of the speech, but when Johnson implied that money donated to the victims’ families for funeral expenses exceeded the costs of the funerals, there was shouting in the courtroom. Sylvia Mort stood up and, before the judge could react, said, “Let me out of here!” As she stormed out, she said, loudly enough to be heard throughout the room, “Fuckin’ piece of shit!” When order had been restored, Johnson finished his remarks, closing by quoting two verses of the Louis Armstrong standard “What a Wonderful World.”
“These families have you pegged perfectly,” Judge Duket said to Johnson, when it came time to impose a sentence. He portrayed the defendant as someone who blamed others for his constant failures, who thought that he was smarter than everyone else, who craved attention, and who responded to his own problems by murdering innocent children. In addition to the harm Johnson had done to his victims and their families, the judge said, he’d brought great suffering to his own family. Johnson’s mother had said, “The pain is so bad I wanted to die. This is like a living death,” and the daughter he professed to love, now twelve, was, according to Theresa Johnson, terrified that Scott Johnson would get out of jail and come to Ohio to kill her. “If ever there was a constellation of criminal activities that called out for maximum consecutive sentences this would be the case,” Judge Duket said. What the prosecutor had asked for, after enumerating the cases of murder, attempted murder, and sexual assault, was three life sentences without the possibility of parole, to be served consecutively, plus two hundred and ninety-five years—a sentence that sounded as if it required something beyond longevity, in the direction of reincarnation. On the subject of sentences that can obviously not be fulfilled, Judge Duket quoted a Wisconsin Court of Appeals decision holding that such sentences can, among other things, “properly express the community’s outrage.” The judge imposed everything that the prosecutor had asked for. Outside the courtroom, Sylvia Mort, who vowed to keep pursuing the death penalty, said of the sentence, “It’s a beginning.”
—
Near where the path through the woods to the train bridge begins, there is now a memorial to the three teenagers killed in what the inscription calls “a senseless act of violence.” A small section of ground has been bricked over, and on it two benches face each other, on either side of a rectangular granite monument that contains pictures of Tony Spigarelli and Tiffany Pohlson and Bryan Mort. The monument is also inscribed with the first verse of a William Cowper hymn, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Other than the memorial, the train-bridge swimming hole is unchanged from the time the three teenagers pictured on the monument went there to swim a year ago. It remains id
yllic—a scene that could be a calendar painting depicting lazy summer days in some bucolic patch of the upper Midwest.
The young woman who was assaulted by Scott Johnson had mentioned the beauty of the spot when, to the surprise of everyone involved, she showed up at the sentencing hearing to deliver a victim’s statement about how Johnson had betrayed her with an act that still haunts her every day. The train bridge was also mentioned in the speech that Johnson made before he was sentenced. “The train bridge has been washed in the blood that I spilled,” he said. “The beauty of that place has been cursed by my actions. My memorial is made of iron and concrete.”
Covering the Cops
* * *
Miami Florida
FEBRUARY 1986
In the newsroom of the Miami Herald, there is some disagreement about which of Edna Buchanan’s first paragraphs stands as the classic Edna lead. I line up with the fried-chicken faction. The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the homicide for the Herald—there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a homicide without her—and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”
All connoisseurs would agree, I think, that the classic Edna lead would have to include one staple of crime reporting—the simple, matter-of-fact statement that registers with a jolt. The question is where the jolt should be. There’s a lot to be said for starting right out with it. I’m rather partial to the Edna lead on a story last year about a woman set to go on trial for a murder conspiracy: “Bad things happen to the husbands of Widow Elkin.” I can, however, understand the preference that others have for the device of beginning a crime story with a more or less conventional sentence or two, then snapping the reader back in his chair with an abbreviated sentence that is used like a blunt instrument. One student of the form at the Herald refers to that device as the Miller Chop. The reference is to Gene Miller, now a Herald editor, who, in a remarkable reporting career that concentrated on the felonious, won the Pulitzer Prize twice for stories that resulted in the release of people in prison for murder. Miller likes short sentences in general—it is sometimes said at the Herald that he writes as if he were paid by the period—and he particularly likes to use a short sentence after a couple of rather long ones.
These days, Miller sometimes edits the longer pieces that Edna Buchanan does for the Herald, and she often uses the Miller Chop—as in a piece about a lovers’ spat: “The man she loved slapped her face. Furious, she says she told him never, ever to do that again. ‘What are you going to do, kill me?’ he asked, and handed her a gun. ‘Here, kill me,’ he challenged. She did.”
Now that I think of it, that may be the classic Edna lead.
—
There is no dispute about the classic Edna telephone call to a homicide detective or a desk sergeant she knows: “Hi. This is Edna. What’s going on over there?” There are those at the Herald who like to think that Edna Buchanan knows every policeman and policewoman in the area—even though Dade County has twenty-seven separate police forces, with a total strength of more than forty-five hundred officers. “I asked her if by any chance she happened to know this sergeant,” a Herald reporter once told me. “And she looked at her watch and said, ‘Yeah, but he got off his shift twenty minutes ago.’ ” She does not, in fact, know all the police officers in the area, but they know her. If the desk sergeant who picks up the phone is someone Edna has never heard of, she gives her full name and the name of her paper. But even if she said, “This is Edna,” there aren’t many cops who would say, “Edna who?” In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.
It’s an old-fashioned name. Whoever picks up the phone at homicide when Edna Buchanan calls probably doesn’t know any Ednas he might confuse her with. Edna is, as it happens, a rather old-fashioned person. “She should have been working in the twenties or thirties,” a detective who has known her for years told me. “She’d have been happy if she had a little press card in her hat.” She sometimes says the same sort of thing about herself. She laments the replacement of typewriters at the Herald with word processors. She would like to think of her clips stored in a place called a morgue rather than a place called an editorial reference library. She’s nostalgic about old-fashioned criminals. As a girl growing up around Paterson, New Jersey, she used to read the New York tabloids out loud to her grandmother—a Polish grandmother who didn’t read English—and she still likes to roll out the names of the memorable felons in those stories: names like George Metesky, the Mad Bomber, and Willie Sutton, the man who robbed banks because that’s where the money was. She even has a period look about her—something that recalls the period around 1961. She is a very thin woman in her forties who tends to dress in slacks and silk shirts and high heels. She wears her hair in a heavy, blond shoulder-length fall. Her eyes are wide, and her brow is often furrowed in concern. She seems almost permanently anxious about one thing or another. Did she neglect to try the one final approach that would have persuaded the suspect’s mother to open the door and have a chat? Will a stray cat that she spotted in the neighborhood meet an unpleasant end? Did she forget to put a quarter in the meter? Despite many years spent among people who often find themselves resorting to rough language—hookers, cocaine cowboys, policemen, newspaper reporters—her own conversation tends to sound like that of a rather demure secretary circa 1952. Her own cats—she has five of them—have names like Misty Blue Eyes and Baby Dear. When she is particularly impressed by a bit of news, she is likely to describe it as “real neat.” When she discovers, say, a gruesome turn in a tale that might be pretty gruesome already, she may say, “That’s interesting as heck!”
Among newspaper people, Edna’s line of work is considered a bit old-fashioned. Daily police reporting—what is sometimes known in the trade as covering the cops—is still associated with that old-timer who had a desk in the station house and didn’t have to be told by the sergeant in charge which part of the evening’s activities to leave out of the story and thought of himself as more or less a member of the department. Covering the cops is often something a reporter does early in his career—an assignment that can provide him with enough war stories in six months to last him through years on the business page or the city desk. Even Gene Miller, a man with a fondness for illegalities of all kinds, turned rather quickly from covering the cops to doing longer pieces. The Herald, which regularly shows up on lists of the country’s most distinguished dailies, does take a certain amount of pride in providing the sort of crime coverage that is not typical of newspapers on such lists, but it does not have the sort of single-minded interest in juicy felonies that characterized the New York tabloids Edna used to read to her grandmother. When Edna Buchanan began covering the cops for the Herald, in 1973, there hadn’t been anyone assigned full-time to the beat in several years.
In the years since, Edna has herself broken the routine now and then to do a long crime piece or a series. But she invariably returns to the daily beat. She still dresses every morning to the sound of a police scanner. Unless she already has a story to do, she still drops by the Miami Beach department and the Miami municipal department and the Metro-Dade department on the way to work. She still flips through the previous night’s crime reports and the log. She still calls police officers and says, “Hi. This is Edna. What’s going on over there?”
&n
bsp; —
Like a lot of old-fashioned reporters, Edna Buchanan seems to operate on the assumption that there are always going to be any number of people who, for perverse and inexplicable reasons of their own, will try to impede her in gathering a story that is rightfully hers and delivering it to where God meant it to be—on the front page of the Miami Herald, and preferably the front page of the Miami Herald on a Sunday, when the circulation is at its highest. There are shy witnesses who insist that they don’t want to get involved. There are lawyers who advise their clients to hang up if Edna Buchanan calls to ask whether they really did it. (It could be libelous for a newspaper to call someone a suspect, but the paper can get the same idea across by quoting his denial of guilt.) There are closemouthed policemen. There are television reporters who require equipment that gets in the way and who ask the sort of question that makes Edna impatient. (In her view, television reporters on a murder story are concerned almost exclusively with whether they’re going to be able to get a picture of the authorities removing the body from the premises, the only other question that truly engages them being whether they’re going to get the picture in time for the six o’clock news.) There are editors who want to cut a story even though it was virtually ordained to run at least sixteen inches. There are editors—often the same editors—who will try to take an interesting detail out of the story simply because the detail happens to horrify or appall them. “One of them kept saying that people read this paper at breakfast,” I was told by Edna, whose own idea of a successful lead is one that might cause a reader who is having breakfast with his wife to “spit out his coffee, clutch his chest, and say, ‘My God, Martha! Did you read this!’ ” When Edna went to Fort Lauderdale one day to talk about police reporting with some of the young reporters in the Herald’s Broward County bureau, she said, “For sanity and survival, there are three cardinal rules in the newsroom: never trust an editor, never trust an editor, and never trust an editor.”
Killings Page 30