“In our discussions, have we ever talked about anything with regard to any defense?”
“No, sir.” He repeated, “No, sir.”
“Have we always—since I’ve been involved in this since last April—tried to conclude this matter in a way that you are confined for life and we didn’t have to go through this? And we didn’t have to have these citizens come up and make this call?” McDonald asked, referring to his and Bart’s desire to forgo a trial, accept a sentence of life in prison, and avoid a lengthy and expensive capital murder trial.
“That’s what I wanted more than anything else,” Bart reassured his counsel, as well as anyone who might take pity on him in the jury box.
Many people in the gallery scoffed in hushed tones. Of course, Bart would want to avoid a capital murder trial at all costs—the young man wanted to live. He had no interest in setting a date with a needle in Huntsville.
“Now, one might say that you would be willing to do that to avoid the death penalty.” McDonald acknowledged the psychedelic polka-dotted purple elephant in the room. “You understand why someone might think you’d do that instead of taking a chance with the death penalty?”
“Yes, sir.” Bart nodded calmly.
McDonald mentioned the jury members again, and discussed with Bart the decision they were now going to have to make against him. “What I want to do right now, Bart, is I want you to tell them exactly what you did in this case, and why you are absolutely guilty.”
McDonald was asking Bart Whitaker to throw himself upon the sword of mercy wielded by twelve Fort Bend County residents. His demeanor, his intentions, and his sincerity would all now come into play and be questioned thoroughly. His connection to the jurors would determine whether or not his life would be spared.
Bart paused before he answered his attorney. He briefly glanced up at the jury and declared, “I am one hundred percent guilty for this. I put the plan in motion. If I had not done so, it would not have happened.”
The gallery was silent. It was a promising start for Bart’s contrition.
“I know that my perception of my parents, everything that they were translating to me when I was younger was love, and that I was receiving the signals wrong. I know, over time, that converted into a severe disliking of them.” Bart paused, had a sincere look on his face, along with a slightly arched eyebrow, and continued. “I tried to think about how I got from Step A to Point Z, and I don’t know…” His voice trailed off.
Every member of the audience had all of their attention focused on Bart Whitaker as he attempted to explain what drove him to massacre his family.
“I’ve had about three years to think about this, and I cannot imagine how I let myself get to that point where things got so out of control.” Bart continued on while trying to convey empathy with the family members he left behind, and simultaneously attempting to persuade the jury to believe his position. “I was in such a dark place that I lied to everyone, and I thought it was absolutely necessary that I do so.
“This is all my fault,” he added, “and whatever you decide…whatever you decide I deserve for this, I accept.”
McDonald returned to questioning Bart. “Of course, you could deserve the death penalty for this, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir,” Bart solemnly agreed.
McDonald asked Bart how it felt to hear his uncle and his father testify before him. “Do you realize, and have you recognized for a while, how devastating this crime is?”
“Yes, sir,” Bart responded. The presence of his uncle Bo seemed to hit him especially hard. “I haven’t seen Bo since 2004, and it touched me in a way that it had not done until today.”
“And do you realize you robbed your mother of a full life?”
“Yes.”
“You robbed Kevin of a full life?”
“Yes.”
“You actually even robbed your father of a full life?” McDonald asked, and turned around to look at Kent Whitaker for added emphasis.
“Yes,” Bart acknowledged; his head was facing down toward his clasped hands.
“And, of course, all of your other relatives?” McDonald continued the public flogging of his client.
“Yes, sir.”
“And because of your involvement, you also recognize that you affected other people’s lives that came into this courtroom?”
“Many, many lives,” Bart responded.
“And it’s all because you just developed this dislike for your parents and just lied about everything?”
“Yes, sir.”
McDonald paused and perused the courtroom. Most people in the audience sat stone-faced, while others seemed skeptical of the defense’s ploy. Others, such as Kent Whitaker, simply seemed sad.
“Did you know who you were then?” McDonald resumed the line of questioning.
“Absolutely not,” Bart responded steadfastly.
“Did you even know what you wanted to be?”
“I had no clue.”
McDonald began to paint the picture of Bart as an aimless drifter, searching the hinterland desperately for some guidance, some assurance, some pathway, that would steer him down the trail toward happiness and decency—a drifter who somehow managed to plunge completely over the edge into an abyss not of his own making.
“Now, that’s no excuse, obviously.” It was apparent, though, that was exactly what McDonald had hoped to conjure up in the minds of the jury members.
“No, there’s no excuse for it,” Bart agreed.
“And you understand that it is hard for someone like myself, as well as the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to even understand this conduct?”
“Yes, sir.”
The next question came as a shocker to most people in the gallery. “It wasn’t motivated by money, was it?” McDonald asked in regard to the plot to kill his family.
“No, sir, not at all.”
Several members of the courtroom shifted around uncomfortably in their seats.
“Was the money what motivated the other people to be involved?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it really didn’t take much motivation or manipulation for those folks, did it?” McDonald asked in reference to Steven Champagne and Chris Brashear.
“No, sir.”
McDonald conveniently passed over the reality that Bart tended to seek out people who were down on their luck, for whatever reason, and were potentially vulnerable to financial gain, group acceptance, and even something illegal to possibly reignite the fires that had been doused in their own lives.
“When did it dawn on you how horrific a crime it was that you committed?”
“It began to dawn on me almost instantaneously, as I was lying on the floor.” Bart recalled having been shot and watching as Chris Brashear dashed out of the family’s back door. “But I don’t think it really hit me until the funeral.”
McDonald continued the barrage of negativity toward his client with the ultimate goal of pity and, hopefully, forgiveness for Bart Whitaker. “There’s evidence before the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that you continued to lie and deny culpability, and even plot with Adam Hipp to somehow get him to not testify,” he stated in regard to the bribe he offered his former friend and onetime cohort in the intended crime. “What do you think your motive was there?”
“Yes, sir, I did continue to lie,” Bart responded while looking down. He raised his eye forward to look at his attorney. “The inertia of the six years that I had been living—the way I had been living my life before that—just carried over.”
Most of the spectators in the gallery looked puzzled. Again, the skeptics frowned. A few, on the other hand, looked concerned for the young man on the witness stand.
“It was shortly after the funeral that I started praying again for the first time in a long time,” Bart continued. “I know that forgiveness, when you truly believe in Christ, is instantaneous. Spiritually, though, it’s a very slow thing.” Most of the words escaping Bart’s lips so
unded eerily similar to those of his father in the press and on the witness stand. Mentions of Christ, forgiveness, and redemption seemed to pour out of the young man.
Not so much when it came to Tricia and Kevin Whitaker.
“I was just very weak at the time,” Bart continued. “I continued to lie, even though I knew it was wrong.”
“Weren’t you a little bit scared that you would go to the penitentiary?” McDonald, ever the sensor of skepticism, smartly asked.
“Yes, sir. I was also scared of looking at myself in the mirror and realizing that I had done this.” Bart paused, wiped his brow, and continued on. “I knew I did it, but there was, on some level…” He sounded disjointed. “I just couldn’t look at myself and say that to myself.”
Having positioned his client to display full contriteness and acceptance of responsibility for his actions (though the words “murder,” “Mom,” or “Kevin” never entered the conversation at this juncture), McDonald was ready to attack the particular night in question.
“After this case, you did just like you did in April of 2001. You ran, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” came Bart’s response.
“Are you a coward?”
“Absolutely.”
“Are you owning up to every responsible party in this?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir, I am.”
“Is it your fault?”
“It’s one hundred percent my fault,” Bart owned up.
“And do you really want to give this jury any excuse for your conduct?”
“No, sir. I do not.”
McDonald seemed to be heading toward the point that everyone in the courtroom wanted to know more than anything—why did he do it? “Can you actually explain your conduct to us? Can you answer the question ‘Why?’”
Unfortunately, Bart’s response was less than forthcoming, but not unexpected.
“No, sir,” he replied simply. “I’ve come up with a lot of reasons for how I got to where I was going, but they do not explain it.”
McDonald then wanted to make sure that Bart understood that his admissions of guilt basically eliminated any chance he might have had to appeal a sentence of the death penalty. This led to an objection by Fred Felcman, who insisted that a defendant cannot plead guilty during the punishment phase and have his attorney tell the jury that his client has no grounds for appeal.
McDonald moved on once again, trying to ascertain the reason for the defendant’s actions. “Bart, you had everything going for you—loving parents, a good possibility for an education. What was it that caused you to go into this abyss?”
Again, it seemed as if a collective motion forward was made by nearly everyone in the gallery so as to get closer or to more clearly hear this all-important answer.
Bart was calm. He seemed in his element, having people hang on his every word. “I know, looking back on it now, I always felt that, whatever love they [his family] sent me was conditional on a standard that I just never felt I could reach.”
He was just getting warmed up.
“I know that’s not the way it was. I don’t put any responsibility on them for that,” he declared in reference to his parents. “That was my misperception of the way things were, but that’s really how I felt about everyone. My friends, my girlfriend, I just always felt like they loved the person that I could become if I tried really hard, and not the person I was.”
“But who were you?” McDonald queried.
“I don’t know,” Bart answered, slowly shaking his head. “I tried to figure that out for a long time. The more I tried different things, the more lost I felt.”
“Well, do you feel any remorse for this?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Bart replied with a respectable look of sincerity on his face.
“Who do you feel remorse for?”
Kent Whitaker’s attention perked up at the question.
“I feel remorse for everyone involved,” Bart responded. “Starting with my dad”—whom Bart acknowledged with a glance in his general direction—“my mom, and my brother. My whole…” Bart stopped momentarily and began to cry. He did not cry long and loud sobs, simply brief gasps punctuated with slightly damp eyes. A tear or two attached themselves to Bart’s eyelash and flashed briefly.
“…Everyone I ever met in my life,” he soldiered on. “I feel sorry for them having come in contact with me.”
“Bart, do you still feel this way?” McDonald wanted to know. “Do you feel like you can’t deal with it?”
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“What do you think the difference is now?”
“This whole experience has changed me in ways that I can’t even begin to express in words.”
Some members of the gallery muttered, while others actually rolled their eyes at Bart’s response. He was nonplussed, however, and continued on.
“I know that going to Mexico was a wrong decision. It was wrong for me to run, to hide from my responsibility in this. But a lot of things happened down there that made me a much stronger person than I’ve ever been in my life, and that’s continued through my experience in jail.”
Kent Whitaker beamed at the revelation. Many in the gallery, however, were steamed. Even some of the courtroom staff members had to stifle a chuckle or two. What had been a capital murder trial in the brutal slayings of a mom and her youngest son had now become the oldest son’s psychotherapeutic release. Through the tragic mistakes, a better, stronger, fully formed individual arose.
Bart’s personal rising phoenix was in full display.
He would not have wanted it any other way.
“I have come into a relationship with God,” Bart proselytized. More eyes rolled as the story of Bart’s jailhouse conversion was about to begin. “I grew up in the Church. I went to a Baptist high school and a Baptist college, but I always looked at Christianity through the eyes of people that I thought were Christians that knew me, and their hypocrisy just always turned me off. But I know, in the past year and a half especially, I have truly come to an understanding of the word of God, and I walk with him on a daily basis. That’s really why I am able to be up here today.”
“So, on that basis,” McDonald resumed, “it doesn’t really matter what verdict that they come up with?”
“No, it does not at all.” Once again, Bart would float above the fray, regardless of the price he himself would ultimately have to pay.
Now McDonald was finally able to drive home the point he wanted to make with this jury by having Bart get on the witness stand. “They should simply do what the law says. Follow the law and make a determination of whether, in answering those questions, that you deserve the death penalty, or whether you should receive a life sentence?”
“Yes, sir.”
McDonald and Bart spoke of his days at Baylor when he spent time with his friends Justin Peters and Will Anthony. McDonald wanted to know if Bart had even wanted to attend college in Waco.
“I didn’t want to go there in the first place,” Bart replied. “But I was too weak to do what I wanted, which was to join the navy. It’s the only thing I knew I wanted to do in my life at that point, but I was under the impression that that was not what a son from First Colony was supposed to do with himself. They were supposed to go to college. All of that. So that’s my fault. I should have done what I wanted to do. None of this would have happened, had I done what I wanted to do.”
Bart also spoke about his weakness during college. “Nothing interested me. Nothing was going on there,” he spoke, in reference to Baylor. “I tried so many different courses of study. When I went to class, I got decent grades. But the fact is that I stopped going to class because I couldn’t find anything that interested me in the least. I started to withdraw from that.” Bart’s supposed intelligence seemed to be rearing its head once again. He believed he was too smart for his own good, and that he was well beyond what a piddly first-tier institution of higher learning could provide him. “That’s when I started to grow close to
Justin and Will, because they really felt the same way I did,” Bart added.
“Did you have any confidence in yourself at all?” McDonald wanted to know.
All signs to the contrary, Bart responded, “No, not at all.”
“And why is that?”
“I’ve never done anything as well as I wanted to. Not as well as I thought I was supposed to.”
“Did you impose greater expectations on yourself than even your parents?”
“I know at the time I was thinking that these were their expectations. I know that I put them far higher than anything they put on me.”
McDonald continued to humanize his client. “Obviously, you were failing in college?”
“Yes, sir. I was failing.”
“Even if your parents had high expectations of you, they loved you very much,” McDonald stated, sounding as though he was having a normal conversation with the young man. “What were you going to do one day when you had to tell them that you were a complete failure?”
“I don’t know how I would have that conversation,” Bart stated rather matter-of-factly.
“Then your lie was a complete lie for all those years?”
Bart repeated, “I don’t know how I would have that conversation.”
“That would be true, wouldn’t it?” McDonald asked, almost as if he were playing the role of the prosecutor. “Your life was a lie?”
“Everything about it,” Bart easily agreed.
“You didn’t know who you were or any circumstances by which you could live?”
“I know I presented myself [differently] to different people, because I went different ways, trying to figure it out. But, no, I had no idea.”
McDonald continued applying pity paints on Bart’s canvas, explaining to the jury, in the form of a question, that it was very understandable how someone like him—in the sad, confused, emotional state he was in—could make such a horribly wrong choice.
“The deeper I sank into that,” Bart stated, describing his own self-pity, “the further away I got from my morals.”
McDonald pointed out that Bart did not care for himself during this time, but he managed to project an image of self-appreciation and confidence to those on the outside world. “So you were projecting a lot, but deep down inside, you knew you were nothing?”
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