Deadly Vows

by Leif M. Wright

  Chapter 19

  GRECO V. ARENA

  By the time his trial neared, I hadn’t spoken to Sean since he had called me the day before he turned himself in and asked me to pray for him. A friend, however, asked him about me.

  “That guy,” Sean told Trevor Whitken, the piano player who had traveled with him, rolling his eyes after Trevor had mentioned me. “He hasn’t called, he hasn’t visited. Nothing.”

  It appeared that Sean was as upset at me as I was at him. And that was okay with me.

  At the time of Joy’s death and Sean’s arrest, polygamy was not a subject of primetime TV. There was no Sister Wives TV show on TLC, nor was HBO’s Big Love airing yet when Sean killed Joy—it started just before Sean’s case went to trial. So the topic of polygamy was still very taboo and the idea that a non-Mormon polygamist had murdered one of his wives after he had composed the Bible study materials for one of the world’s biggest evangelists seemed too juicy to pass up.

  But apparently, the news outlets weren’t paying attention. And I certainly wasn’t going to tip them off about the case, so it slid under the radar for three years until it was about to go to trial.

  In 2004, one of Sean’s lawyers called me and asked what kind of information I had about the case. I told them about the phone call, about the book idea and everything else, and that was the last I heard from them. Later, Sean unceremoniously fired them and hired Albert Arena, who would eventually defend him in court.

  Matthew Greco, the rookie assistant district attorney who was picked to prosecute the case, had his hands full with Sean, who began claiming he had killed Joy in self-defense. But Greco, who was prosecuting his first murder case, didn’t even flinch when he stared down a defendant he would later call a “super genius” and a “master manipulator.”

  Greco pounced like a tiger right from the starting gate: “The secret [was in] the tomb of Joy Risker, waiting to be found...so that the story of her murder by the defendant could be told; the story of nine, ten, eleven stab wounds to her chest by the defendant, who then cut off her fingers with a saw, her fingertips, gone. And then turned the saw to her teeth, sawing out the teeth. And then turned the saw to her face to cut it off from the top and from the bottom, and finally with something hard, strong, heavy like a sledgehammer, pulverized the face so that it wouldn’t be recognized,” he said in his opening statement. “This case was a calculated plan to preserve his reputation, a crime of pride.”

  It seemed like Greco had a bead on Sean, the motivation behind his despicable acts and the underlying fears of being exposed as the weakling emotionally that he always had been physically.

  Greco keyed in on Sean’s controlling nature and his belief that women needed someone to lead and take care of them.

  “He was controlling of the finances,” Greco said. “In fact, he bragged...that he had to control all of the money for both of his wives because they couldn’t do it themselves; the household would fall apart without him controlling their accounts. And literally what he said about his wives is...‘I give them an allowance.’”

  Sean watched dispassionately as Greco tore into his character, insinuating in so many words that Sean was so full of himself he had to murder his second wife rather than suffer the embarrassment of her leaving him.

  “On his computer...was a book that he began. It was entitled ‘If I can keep two women happy, why can’t you please one?’” Greco continued. “In it, he writes, ‘I have dealt with some of the greatest challenges in relationships a man will ever face and feel compelled to write about what I have learned so other men can benefit from my own successes and failures. If I can be successful living with two women at one time, surely I can help other men live successfully with one. Some people out there writing books and holding seminars on marriage...have lived through several failed marriages. Their knowledge is suspect, at best, and their success is based on a marketing machine. Don’t trust them. Trust someone who is successful in relationships.’”

  The irony hanging thickly in the air, Greco went on to accuse Sean of being a doppelgänger of sorts, assuming Joy’s life as he simultaneously sought to squelch the fire in her that attracted so many to her.

  “Not only was the defendant attracted to Joy’s life, but he ended up not really having any of his own friends and only associating with her friends.”

  And then Greco dramatically described Sean’s shopping trip a week before Joy’s death to assemble what Greco would later refer to as a “murder kit.”

  “He goes to [a hardware store] and he buys a hacksaw, a shovel, a pickaxe, an axe, a chisel, a sledgehammer, fifty feet of chain, two padlocks and seventy-five yards of rope,” Greco said. “Thirty-one minutes later, he goes to [another store], same day, same credit card, [and buys] a butcher knife, a butcher block, two rolls of duct tape, 500 square feet of plastic drop cloth, five five-gallon buckets, gloves, a stepladder and a very large cooler.”

  Then, Greco said, immediately after the murder, Sean didn’t seem at all upset or like someone who was shocked at the horrific things he had just done to his wife.

  “[A friend] calls him on that Saturday morning...” about a party she had invited them to, Greco said. “The defendant didn’t seem upset. He talked about this great dinner that he and Joy had had, and he said, ‘no, the romantic weekend is continuing, we will not be able to make it to the party.’”

  Joy was already dead and loaded into the SUV that Sean had rented when that phone call took place. The cover-up, however, had begun the night before, Greco said, because when Sean’s first wife returned later to the house with instructions to clean up the blood that Joy had shed after cutting herself during the argument, she found only tiny spots of blood, not the pools that would be expected during a stabbing death brought on by a struggle for a knife.

  In fact, what little blood was left told a sobering story, Greco said: a story of someone being executed, not of a blood struggle.

  “There is one DNA profile on those walls and on those floors,” he said. “And that’s Joy.”

  One DNA profile. One person bleeding, not two. Joy was the only one with wounds. Sean had none. And Joy’s wounds, which should have coated the house in blood, didn’t. When she died, she died in a “kill room” coated with plastic sheeting to keep her blood from getting everywhere.

  “There were little spots up on the wall, on the shower curtain,” he said. “The house was incredibly stuffy, all of the blinds were down, everything was closed up.”

  And when Sean had arrived back at the house on Monday in the filthy SUV with 1,200 more miles on it than when he had rented it, soil and little rocks all over the interior, there were two “big” gas cans in the back, Greco said.

  “Those were new,” he said. “What were those needed for?” A contingency plan, he would say later during the trial. It was Sean’s way of planning ahead. If one method of disposal didn’t work, he would have a backup plan: torching the body.

  But Greco wasn’t the only attorney in the room. Sean had hired one of San Diego’s best lawyers to sit at his table, a resilient defense attorney named Albert Arena. Arena actually bore a passing resemblance to Morris Cerullo, Sean’s former employer.

  He began by admitting that most of what Greco had said was true.

  “Those things did happen,” Arena said in his opening. “And a most difficult situation I have to get over in this particular case is the horrific nature of the postmortem actions by Mr. Goff.”

  But Sean, Arena said, wasn’t a cold, calculating killer. No, he was a man in a situation involving three consenting adults who had entered the arrangement with “eyes wide open.”

  Joy, he said, wasn’t a team player. She didn’t want to pool resources; she selfishly wanted to use the family’s money for her own ends, to go to college and have a career of her own. Joy was taking full advantage of all the benefits of polygamy, but she wasn’t contributing her full share to that situation. She had, he said, a “secret agenda” to promote her own self-in
terest. She was, he said, “draining” to the family, always taking and never contributing.

  The fancy dinner Sean took Joy to the night she was killed was an attempt by the longsuffering Sean to “reintroduce her to the life that she had committed to,” Arena said, “to the life of a loving husband, to what they all had; to try and explain to her that either you accept this lifestyle that we have all agreed upon or you will have to go.”

  Joy’s expensive last dinner, he said, had been discussed earlier by Sean and his first wife as a “shape up or ship out” dinner. Life is full of people who get angry and say things like “I could just kill you,” Arena said, but that doesn’t make them murderers.

  “He gets to bat first,” Arena said, referring to Greco. “I am in the outfield shagging flies. I am asking you to wait and hear the evidence that the defense will present, and then in closing, murder, manslaughter or self-defense. That is your promise—and your decision.”

  The stage set, Greco then hurled himself into building the case of a sensational crime that had to be told utilizing evidence from forensics experts who would testify about the information they could cull from Joy’s corpse and from the house in Kensington where she had been slain. He introduced receipts showing Sean buying a “murder kit” days before the killing. And through it all, Sean sat silently, watching the case unfold and awaiting his chance to get on the stand.

  Arena’s strategy was to allow Sean to admit that most of the forensic evidence was true. Admit that he had killed Joy. Admit that he had cut her fingers off, sawn her teeth out, removed her jaw and bashed her face in. Admit that he had left her in the Arizona desert. Admit that he had lied to her friends and family—and eventually to police as well. Admit all that. But then Arena introduced a new claim: that Joy had attacked Sean and he had been given no choice other than stabbing her to death to protect himself from her.

  Greco subpoenaed me to testify as part of his section of the trial, but met with me only briefly before he put me on the stand. The district attorney’s office paid to fly me out to San Diego and put me up in a hotel room.

  When I got on the stand, I felt Greco’s questions were not at all what I had expected. Had Sean ever asked me to use my middle name on an Internet forum instead of my first name? Yes. Did I reveal that to the people on the forum? Yes.

  It struck me as strange. I had been Sean Goff’s best friend for sixteen years. Joy had called me shortly before she died. Sean had called me shortly thereafter. I had posted on my personal blog about the conversation we had about the perfect murder just days after the revelation that Sean had turned himself in. Greco had not spoken with me before putting me on the stand or he would have discovered that Sean and I had talked at great length about how to get away with murder during our discussions of writing that book together. He thus was unaware that Sean had told me a very short time before he killed Joy that he felt that he had to “get rid” of her.

  I called the district attorney’s office from the airport and left a message saying I felt strongly that the office seemed to be missing a lot of evidence and questioning. And then I got on the plane to Oklahoma.

  As soon as I touched down in Dallas and turned my cell phone on, it beeped. The DA’s office had called while my flight was in the air. They asked if I had I known Sean for a long time.

  I explained to them that Sean and I had met in college, and suggested they should do more research on things he was saying and doing before he killed Joy. Of course, I had no way of knowing that they had already been trying just this and that my testimony would simply be icing on the cake they were already baking.

  The DA’s office thanked me and hung up. The next day, while I was at work, they called me again, asking if I would come back to San Diego and testify again about the things I had heard Sean say. I sighed. My newspaper job wasn’t going to be very understanding, I explained.

  “We could subpoena you,” they offered. I told them that would probably be preferable, so I could show my boss that I had to go. I didn’t really want to go back; I just wanted to be sure justice was done for Joy. However, they seemed adamant that I come back and testify about the things I had mentioned to them in the voicemail I had left.

  But first, after Greco had finished his presentation, Arena signaled the desperation of his own case by calling the defendant to the stand—a move always seen as a last resort.

  “My family has always been a Christian family,” Sean started. “No matter where we lived, we always attended a local church and we were very involved in worship.”

  “As you developed, would it be correct to say that religion was a part of your life experiences, Mr. Goff?” Arena asked.

  “Yeah,” Sean replied. “I gave my life to Jesus when I was six and continued going to church basically throughout the rest of my life.”

  Arena moved on quickly. “Were you ever tested for your IQ at any time?”

  “Back in the ninth grade, I think. It was a long time ago.”

  “Try to be a little humble,” Arena said, “but could you tell us what the score was?”

  “145 or 150,” Sean replied. “I don’t remember exactly.”

  An intelligence quotient above 140 is generally considered profoundly gifted.

  “The activity in the church, how much depth did that entail?” Arena asked.

  “We would go on Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night,” Sean answered. “Any kind of special services we would attend. My grandmother was a minister, as are some of my uncles, so that was a big focus of our lives. I would say that was the focus of our life.”

  That focus led to him meeting both his wives, Sean testified. The first was back in 1988, Joy in 1995 or 1996.

  “She was attending church with her mother,” he said. “My first wife and I would show up at the services occasionally and talk to her. She hung out with us a little bit; she became friends with my wife’s younger sister, who lived with us at the time.”

  Joy, he said, was “the life of the party. She demanded attention when she came into the room.”

  But her commitment to church wasn’t as great as Sean’s, he testified.

  “She was kind of a raver, so she was a little torn between her commitment to church and doing those things.”

  That “raver” lifestyle was because Joy was being raised by a woman without a man around to guide her.

  “Her mother was very traditional,” he said. “But Joy was an only child and her father wasn’t in the home, so she had a lot of time on her hands.”

  And it wasn’t Sean who pursued Joy, he said. It was the other way around.

  “She was about...I guess she was sixteen and I was driving her home from the church,” he said. “She looked over at me and she told me she was in love with me.”

  Sean said he laughed.

  “I said ‘well, it happens sometimes,’” he said. “‘I’m just an older guy and next year you won’t even feel that way. Don’t worry about it. It is one of those big brother crushes or whatever.’”

  A year later, he said, he started studying polygamy as an academic exercise.

  “Being able to debate and prove that it wasn’t something that people ought to be doing,” he said. “But the deeper I got into that debate, the more I realized it was something I couldn’t win on a biblical basis...Someone posed a question to me and I wanted to answer it. And digging into it, I couldn’t really find a biblical basis for saying, ‘Hey, that is a sin.’”

  Sean’s research eventually branched out onto the Internet, he said, where he found a few sites hosted by people who were actually practicing polygamists. He reached out to them, though at the time, he said, he still wasn’t considering becoming a polygamist. He saw the issue the same way he saw alcohol, he said. Growing up, everyone in churches said alcohol was a sin but the Bible contained no such restriction.

  Then, he said, he asked his first wife about it, and she said she couldn’t find fault with polygamy either. Later in the trial he and his first wife both
would contradict that story but he continued:

  “Then we kind of accepted the idea that it was okay.”

  After that revelation, there was a “gradual change in” Joy’s feelings, he said.

  “She was growing up and she didn’t want to be treated like a kid anymore,” he said. “It began to progress.”

  Then, he said, he casually asked his first wife if polygamy was something they should engage in.

  “She said yes,” he stated, as if it was that simple. “And I said, ‘Do you think that Joy should be asked to join our family?’ And she said yes, so we did it.”

  After the marriage, he said, the family gradually got to a place where they believed they needed some concrete rules about finances. Sean had already filed for bankruptcy once, and having three adults and a child in one household was stressful.

  “My first wife made a suggestion that all the adults in the family get some type of monthly stipend that they could spend,” he said. “We decided each of us will get $300 a month.”

  In 1998, after I had “outed” him to Morris Cerullo, Sean and his family left San Diego and moved to the San Francisco area. In 2000, Joy gave birth to her first son, but the day after that her mother had died, leaving her depressed, Sean said. It was Joy, he said, who pushed the family to move back to the San Diego area after the death of her mother. Sean agreed a move back south would be a good idea.

  They leased the house in Kensington where Joy would eventually take her last breath. All three of them signed the lease—a signal that the polygamy was out in the open.

  In 2003, Sean said, “Joy was becoming increasingly unhappy with her life situation. She felt that she wanted more freedom, that she wanted to have more fun. She wanted to go to Hollywood.”

  Her unhappiness had a profound effect on him, Sean testified.

  “Unless we were out doing something, she seemed unhappy,” he said. “So it was an every day issue.”

  Then Arena asked Sean a question that would become a point of contention later on: “What was the money situation like in the house?”