the Onion Field (1973)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Once he even got blind drunk with Dick Howard when Stew }ames, who was a boy scout leader, got lost in the mountains, and they had hunted him frantically all night. When he showed up the next morning they got drunk in relief, the first time Karl had been drunk since college.

  Then there were evenings in camp when other policemen were there and Cannell told his autobiographical stories without pause:

  "And so my mother was a Hollywood girl and had to get married about nine or ten times and I ended up in the McKinley Home for Boys along with our good friend and colleague Officer Stew James sitting to your left or to your right depending on where you sit around this lovely fire. ..." He would pause only to drink beer.

  "And you talk about precocious. I ran away and hitchhiked to El Paso and bought a phony I. D. and ended up in the big towns all over the South. Nobody gives a shit about you down there. And I was a cab driver in St. Louis at fourteen, a pimp at fifteen. I been shot. I been everywhere, done everything. I went to the South Pole in Operation Deep Freeze just to say I been there. I've won the game. I believe when you're dead, eight people stand around you and you may as well've never been there. So you gotta live, my friends. Some of these young coppers today never been anywhere, never did anything. We got two in Hollywood that ain't ever been laid!"

  His wife, the Jehovah's Witness, at this point left her husband and went to the tent.

  "These new kids we're recruiting nowadays are scary. Scary! Either super-cop type goons or just the opposite."

  And then Cannell realized he was talking about police work and that was a subject they never discussed on camping trips so he changed the subject without taking a breath. "I got some records. You should hear these records, you vulgar bastards," he said loudly for the benefit of the Jehovah's Witness, who felt policemen were vulgar.

  "Who's talking about records?" one of the policemen asked.

  "I am. It's a good thing to talk about and I don't care how you feel about classical music. These symphonies would turn you on. I mean turn you on."

  And on he went. Keeping things going, performing always. They all enjoyed Cannell, especially Karl. But Karl was reminded of something, of another broad shouldered policeman, a quiet one, who enjoyed classical music.

  Karl would usually leave them at dusk to make the long drive home. He didn't like to camp overnight unless his family was along.

  "Which way you going home, Karl?" Cannell would invariably ask.

  "Think I'll go home the river way, the Bakersfield way," Karl would invariably answer, and Cannell would himself become depressed to think that his friend always chose to travel by way of Bakersfield, going close to where it happened-to a place which looked in the winter, at night, as desolate as the moon, especially near the foot of Wheeler Ridge, where onions grew.

  When Karl was gone, Cannell said, "Helen told me they once went to Bakersfield to find the tractor driver."

  "Tractor driver?"

  "The black guy. The guy who ran with him that night. He went to visit him but couldn't find him. I wish he wouldn't always go home that way."

  Stew James, the one they called the worrier, looked into the campfire with his anxious, worried eyes and posed a question to all of them.

  "All right. Six years ago Powell and Smith killed Ian Campbell. They didn't kill Karl Hettinger. Who is killing Karl Hettinger? That's what I can't figure out. That's what I want to know."

  And all the faces stared at each other in the firelight, but no one could answer him.

  It had been a hard day and he was glad his family had gone to bed early. He went to the kitchen for another beer. He had to sleep tonight. He had to be fresh tomorrow. It was the most important day of his life. Then he felt the diarrhea coming on just thinking about it. In the kitchen he saw a part of the newspaper which he hadn 't read tonight. That was unusual. He usually read the newspaper through from beginning to end. He began reading absently as he opened the beer. It was an article of the year in review done by a very hopeful reporter who believed the new decade was bound to be better than the last and see the end of riots, cult murders, assassinations. He decided the reporter was a fool.

  Then he noticed an article on Apollo 12 which was scheduled to go next week. The picture showed the photos of the moon ys surface taken by Apollo 11. There was something about these photos which made the gardener look at them carefully. The surface was bleak and gray, flat and desolate. It was lonely, so lonely. It looked like a place where the dust would choke you and the wind would howl in your ears in the darkness. He sat down at the kitchen table. He saw an article about the naval hearings of last January, about the surrender of the USS Pueblo. He looked at a picture of Commander Lloyd Bucher. It was a kind and weary face. He felt very strange while he read. It was about a high ranking naval officer condemning Bucher for surrendering the Pueblo, for not fighting to the death. Suddenly he was sweating and cold and trembling. He had to stop reading. Reading was making him dizzy. He threw the paper in the trash and got a blanket to put around himself.

  Tomorrow would be November 6, 1969. The people would make the final argument to the jury in the Jimmy Smith trial. It would then be over. It would really be over. Then they could decide whether to give him death or life or something else. He didn yt care what they did. He didn yt care if they released him. He only wanted it to be right. That everything would be right. He only wanted it to end. That's all the gardener wanted. That's all he dared hope for.

  Chapter 18

  "It was a different ball game this time around," the prosecutor complained. "The statements weren't admissible anymore. I couldn't get in any of those copouts to Pierce Brooks, those terrible damaging statements that showed what kind of people they were."

  Pierce Brooks, retired L. A. P. D. captain, now chief of police in Springfield, Oregon, just sat in court each day, having been subpoenaed from so far away, and shook his head sadly at the reversal which brought him back to Los Angeles.

  "We could've just put Karl Hettinger on back in 1963," he said, "Karl and the coroner. A two-witness trial. One week. If only we'd known what the Supreme Court was going to do.

  "I was just trying to be thorough. To get at all the truth. Why don't they tip you off when they're going to make monumental changes? And when they do, why does it apply ex post facto to cases already tried? Just because they're still on appeal? That doesn't make sense. Ex post facto isn't legal in any other human endeavor. Why?

  "They criticized me for getting too much of the truth. For too many confessions," said Brooks. "We're only here now to protect the court record, to say the right things so a higher court can't reverse the case. Nobody cares about the truth."

  In the early summer of 1969 the chief witness against Gregory Powell was a different man from the one who had testified in the emotion charged 1963 trial. His husky voice was stretched to a rasp.

  393 He stared lifelessly at the wall in the rear of the courtroom. His testimony was flat and riddled with: "I don't recall." He had managed to retain enough of the salient points to be what former detective Pierce Brooks would still say was a fine witness. But the detail had all vanished, along with names, faces, other events from his past. It was hard for him to believe he had ever been something other than what he was.

  "Would you say," asked Deputy Public Defender Maple, "that the trousers they wore that night were darker than the jackets?"

  "I don't recall."

  "Were the jackets of a black leather type?"

  "I recall them being a leather type. I don't recall if they were black or brown."

  "Did they have collars? Did they come up close to the neck line?"

  "I don't recall."

  "Do you recall whether they were buttoned or zippered?"

  "I don't recall."

  "Were they long sleeved?"

  "Yes, as I recall."

  "Were they open at the neck?"

  "I don't recall."

  "Would you be able to tell me, sir, if Mr. Powell had a shirt on beneath it?"


  "I don't recall."

  And still later:

  "Did you tell Officer Brooks that Jimmy Smith was facing you with a .38 in his hand but you weren't sure which .38 it was?"

  "I don't recall saying that."

  "Did you tell Brooks that Powell stood to Smith's right, facing Campbell?"

  "I don't recall."

  "When you were being interviewed by Brooks, were you aware that Mr. Powell had been arrested?"

  "I don't recall."

  The witness sat at the stand, his sunburned face like a baked apple, and listened in resignation to the district attorney explaining the well-worn chart to these jurors, as it had been explained to other jurors.

  "The green arrow points to a farm area called the Coberly West. The blue arrow is the Mettler ranch. The white arrow is another Mettler ranch. The light blue arrow is a place called the Opal Fry ranch. The red arrow depicts the place where a police officer died."

  Red arrow, thought the witness. There was something about a red arrow once. What was it? The witness scratched his memory and planted the seed but it was not like scratching friendly soil. Most of the time his memory would not bear. The soil of his mind was inhospitable and barren like the choking dusty soil of the southern San Joaquin Valley when no water is brought to it.

  Then he remembered! A red arrow. It had made him cry once. He had seen a big one on a billboard. He thought it made him cry but maybe something else made him cry. He never was sure what made him cry. He had to force himself to think of something else. Quickly, what? The yard. Yes, the one with the stately pine he loved. No, tomatoes. That was it. Fat. Red. Meaty. Dew-wet and succulent. Acres and acres of tomatoes. His own land and he kneeling in the midst of tomatoes. In the sunshine, and it never turned to night. He loved the tomatoes. The tomatoes were so quiet.

  Charles Maple believed that Gregory Powell may have been a victim of a brain injury. And he never thought of brain injury without thinking of Donald, the son of an old friend who suffered an injury to the dominant side of his brain at age seven. Charles Maple handled legal matters for the boy and helped him be placed through the years in one institution after another, pitying the explosive, suffering boy, even taking him into his own home at some personal risk.

  He believed in his client and was now glad that the Public Defender's Office had given him entirely to the defense of Gregory Powell. The case had become an important part of his life after so many months of back breaking work.

  Charles Maple was accustomed to caring for people with special needs. Both his wife and pretty daughter were partially crippled by hip disease, though, ironically, his other child, Charles Junior, was an accomplished ballet dancer. Maple was an elder in the Presbyterian church and be proved in his life that he was totally committed to the tenets of faith. But he was aware that there could exist a paradox of injustice when an advocate had too much faith.

  A video taping was done in 1969 through Maple's request, at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Clinic. It was the first time that a videotaped interview involving sodium amytal was done in Los Angeles and later introduced in court.

  His opponent, Deputy District Attorney Joe Busch, said, "Oh, the sodium amytal is a lovely defense tactic all right. It enables our boy to tell only the part of the story he wants, without being subjected to cross examination."

  A jury eventually saw the interview. Gregory Powell was on a bed in a room with draped walls. The bottle containing the drug was gradually dripping into his arm to achieve the desired effect. There were two nurses and three doctors in the room. During the interview the defendant spoke in drunken halting speech to a Dr. Suarez:

  "What happened in the car?" the doctor asked the patient.

  "There were several colloquies in the car," said Greg thickly. "What?"

  "Colloquies," said Greg, annoyed at the doctor's unfamiliarity with legal jargon.

  "What did you discuss with Jimmy?"

  "Nothing. Jimmy was my subordinate," said the patient testily. Greg then smiled drunkenly and said, "I told Hettinger to get his ass in the car. If he didn't he was gonna be in reeeel trouble."

  Then Greg closed his eyes when talking about the shooting. He wore a tiny gold cross around his throat, on a very short chain so that the cross was at the base of his long neck. The gold cross was clearly apparent to anyone viewing the taping.

  "Just explain what happened," said the interviewer, as the patient's speech got more halting.

  "Hettinger got out at my demand and moved past. . . Hettinger . . . past Campbell . . . so the . . . outside Campbell, and I raised my gun and shot Campbell. . . ."

  . "What?"

  "I walked around the back and I raised my gun and I shot Campbell."

  "How did that happen?"

  "I don't know. The gun had gone off by accident before ... It had a real funny hammer and trigger . . . pull it halfway back and let it snap forward and it would fire ... I don't know . . ."

  "Well, how did you feel about Campbell getting shot?"

  "Felt pretty sick."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He was a nice guy. He'd been joking with me about the marines and everything and I just... uh ... he was one hell of a nice person."

  Later, when asked if he meant to shoot Karl Hettinger, Greg would deny that he had, saying, "Oh, hell, I could shoot a jackrabbit in the head thirty yards away when he'd jump out of the brush, no sweat."

  During the final address to the jury, Deputy District Attorney Raymond Byrne, the co-prosecutor, commented on the tape which had been introduced by Maple over the objections of his client Gregory Powell, who was unsatisfied with it.

  "At the end of the video tape, may I inquire," said the prosecutor, "would a person call for his lawyer? I would perhaps suggest that Mr. Powell had reasons, and he can certainly out-psyche the psychiatrist. And I would wonder why Dr. Suarez never asked anything about the Little Lindbergh Law. The video tape, I would suggest, was a work of art. Hopefully it may even be put in for an Emmy Award.

  "I would submit at this time that Mr. Maple, for his client, will inquire of you whether or not it was not Mr. Powell who did the shooting, but perhaps his mother-that familial concept. Or perhaps the shot was really fired by defendant Powell's sisters. Or perhaps by his brother. Ot by the parole officer. Or by the institution. Or the state of California. Or by the world. Just so you lay the blame of the dead man, the killing of that person, on somebody other than defendant Gregory Ulas Powell, because he is, of course, the only one here who is charged with murder.

  "I submit that you tell this defendant, Gregory Powell, by your verdict that his act that night was nothing less than a calculated expression of accumulated rage that resulted in the cold blooded, willful, premeditated killing of Ian Campbell, a police officer and human being. I thank you very much."

  In June, 1969, Helen Hettinger worried as she watched her husband stare at the television news without hearing. Gregory Powell had once more been found guilty. The penalty trial too was finished and the jury was expected to bring in a swift verdict of death.

  "Come on, Karl. Let me make you a sandwich."

  "No, I'm not hungry."

  "You didn't eat any dinner at all."

  "No thanks, Moms."

  "Well, the Powell trial's over. You won't have to go again on that yy one.

  "No. Once more with Smith. That's what the D. A. promised me the other day and maybe once more in Smith's penalty trial. Maybe two times more. Maybe."

  "Maybe they'll reverse it again," said Helen angrily and was instantly sorry she said it.

  "I don't think I'll ever do it again, Helen," he said, making his wife afraid.

  "Let me fix you a sandwich or something," she said.

  It was later that evening when the phone call came.

  "I'm sorry, Karl," said the voice on the telephone. "The jury hung. There was a holdout. It's a mistrial. We'll have to try him again on the penalty part of it. Damn! We'll have to select a new jury and of course they'll know n
othing of the guilt trial so we'll have to go into the whole thing in detail again. Damn, I'm disappointed."

  The new penalty trial would be as thorough as a guilt trial. All the witnesses were once more subpoenaed. It lasted four and one half months.

  Prosecutor Raymond Byrne was a tall man with a long face and a crooked nose that bent to the left. He was forever pushing his drooping glasses up. He began staying during recesses or returning early to talk with Gregory Powell who seemed to enjoy the conversation and the cigarettes and sunflower seeds the prosecutor gave him.

  On August 2, 1969, Byrne learned that it was Gregory Powell's thirty-sixth birthday. When Byrne came back from lunch that day he carried with him a cupcake.

  "Happy birthday," said Byrne, giving it to the defendant.

  From then on, the defendant talked freely to the prosecutor about life on Death Row, the thousands of things they planned, how they made home brew and whiskey. And his recent conclusion that homosexuality was at the root of his behavioral problems. And of his ambivalence toward his father and particularly toward his mother, who ruled the family in his absence.

  One day Byrne asked the defendant, "How do you really feel about those kids, Greg?"

  "What kids?" asked Greg.

  "Campbell's kids," said Byrne. "And about Campbell?"

  "To tell you the honest truth, Mr. Byrne, I feel nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing about them. Any of them. But I will send them money if I ever make any. Because I said I would."

  There it was, Byrne thought. The sociopathic personality. Greg looked at the tall prosecutor apologetically. "It was as though he wished he could say he felt something about the murder," Byrne explained. "Wishing he could feel something, because he knew other people did. It was the first time I ever truly understood sociopa- thy. It just wasn't there. He just had no remorse in his makeup."

  Deputy District Attorney Sheldon Brown was chosen to help prosecute Gregory Powell in the new penalty trial. He was dark and slim and walked as though his feet were always sore.

  Brown found Greg ingratiating. "Good morning, Mr. Brown. Did you have a nice evening?"