The hand saw, Greco contended, was used to saw out Joy’s teeth. The knife was used to murder her and cut the tips off of her fingers. The duct tape was used to secure the plastic sheeting, which was employed to keep Joy’s blood from staining the bathroom, leaking all over the place as Sean brutally stabbed and then mutilated her en route to dumping her body. The shovel was used to dig her in at the roots of the palo verde tree. The cooler, Greco contended, was used to keep her body hidden en route to its final destination. The sledgehammer was wielded to bash Joy’s face in after she was dead and her teeth had been hacked out of her head. The chisel was probably intended for the teeth if the saw hadn’t worked, and the pickaxe was probably used to help dig her shallow grave underneath the stones.
But Arena had posited what he deemed reasonable explanations for all those items. So when Sean’s first wife got up on the stand, Greco wanted to know if there would be any kind of acceptable reasons for Sean to buy all those things. Was Sean planning some big home improvement project?
“Was Sean the kind of person that had...hobbies like woodwork?” Greco asked.
She smiled and simply answered “No.”
Greco asked if Sean was into plumbing. She said no. Landscaping? No.
“What was his level of being a handyman?” Greco asked.
She laughed again. “None.”
The tools he had assembled, the ones that seemed so well-suited to creating the “murder kit” Greco had spoken of, were completely out of character for Sean, a guy who—even though he was nearly obsessive about making sure maintenance was done on his car—couldn’t change the oil by himself. A chisel? Would Sean even know what to do with one in a handyman setting? His first wife said he wouldn’t—at least not that she knew of, and she had been married to him for a long time.
Greco also asked the question that was really on everyone’s minds concerning his first wife: How could a woman who had married a man with the expectation of them being a couple—and only a couple—“til death do us part” then allow her husband to add another wife to the mix?
“I felt I didn’t have a choice,” she responded. “It was either that or lose my son and the relationship I had with Sean.”
Greco raised his eyebrows. “Why did you believe you would lose your son?”
Sean’s first wife was tired of the whole subject. My memory was that she had told me years earlier that Sean had threatened to leave her and keep their son if she didn’t comply. However, when Greco asked why she thought she would lose her son if she left Sean, her answer was different from the one I remembered her giving me: “I don’t know.”
But Sean had made it clear to her—and as Joy’s friends had testified earlier, to Joy as well—that leaving Sean meant you left the children with him, and if you didn’t like that, you’d better dig yourself in for a long custody battle, because there was one thing that was not going to happen in Sean’s world: you weren’t going to take his children away from him if you left him. Joy knew that, her friends had testified to it and I felt that Sean’s first wife had told me the same thing. Sean knew he had precious little real leverage in the relationships but he wasn’t above using what he had and that meant threatening mothers with losing their children.
And it had worked. Sean’s first wife testified that the fear of losing her son was the deciding factor in prompting her to allow Sean to add another wife to their marriage, even though she later told me she hated it. But she had gotten to know Joy and, despite the fact that Joy was technically the “other woman,” his first wife had grown to love Joy, probably more than she loved Sean. The women were, in some ways, fellow prisoners of the Sean Goff regime. They both operated under the same strictures of his religious and secular control. They did what he said.
So they formed a bond, and that bond in many ways was stronger than the ones they individually shared with Sean.
The night Joy was killed, Friday, September 19, after Sean had spent over $200 on Kobe beef for the dinner on Coronado—the last food that Joy would ever eat—Joy had called Sean’s first wife at 8:36 P.M. so she could say what would turn out to be the last words she would ever say to her sons: “Good night.”
Joy, the first wife testified, sounded happy during the call; she certainly didn’t sound like there had been any sort of argument. She wasn’t angry, upset or distressed. Instead, she seemed to be her normal self, and there was nothing in Joy’s voice to make Sean’s first wife believe anything was amiss at all. The fact that she didn’t hear from them on Saturday was further indication that things had probably gone well, she thought.
But then Sunday, as she was headed home to San Diego with the boys, she got a call from Sean. The indications she had gotten from Joy that things had gone well were wrong, Sean told her. They had had a big argument when they got home after the meal, and then they had broken up and Joy had left. Oh, and also, during the argument, Joy had cut herself, Sean had said. Nothing big, but there were a few spots of blood. Could she clean them up when she got home with the boys?
His first wife, conditioned by so many years of doing exactly what she was told when she was told to do it, didn’t question Sean’s version of the story for a second. Instead, when she arrived home to the empty house that had once been so full of Joy’s personality and laughter, she went to the bathroom and cleaned up the tiny, almost imperceptible, spots of blood Sean had mentioned. She had been meaning to throw her shower curtain away anyway, so instead of spending too much effort cleaning it, she tossed it and decided to finally get a new one.
Sean didn’t arrive home until Monday.
When he did, he pulled up in an SUV he had rented, his first wife testified. And it was filthy. He said he had rented the SUV and gone for a long drive so he could work out his emotions about the end of his and Joy’s relationship. She testified that she never thought anything other than what Sean was telling her was the truth. So she went to the drive-way with Sean and helped him clean up the SUV so he could return it to the rental company.
“I really didn’t believe he would do something like that to our family,” she testified when she was asked why she didn’t suspect something might be amiss.
Greco, who described Sean’s first wife as “easily led”—a description that might have been true at the time of the murder but I strongly felt was no longer true by the time she testified—didn’t pursue charges against her for helping with the cover-up because he believed that she really didn’t doubt what Sean was telling her. There was no reason to. Sean wouldn’t kill someone, especially his favorite wife. And if he had, there would certainly be a lot more mess to clean up than a few tiny spots of blood.
It was all Joy’s fault; that was Sean’s story.
The jurors weren’t buying it. The story was too convenient and it absolved Sean of all the things that would appear to make him less than angelic. But more than anything, it was the lack of tears that pushed the jury over the edge, jury members later told a television news program.
The way Sean had bald-facedly lied to the jury was “insulting,” one of them said later.
“He was so full of himself,” another told the news show. “It was his world and we were all living in it.”
That same juror said Sean’s crying was the ultimate deal-closer.
“Like, come on, just give us one tear. One tear.”
When Sean had picked up a tissue and blotted his dry eyes, that had sealed the deal.
Chapter 20
CLOSING ARGUMENTS
The judge gave his instructions to the jury, then said soberly, “Now is the opportunity for counsel to argue their respective positions on the case. And Mr. Greco gets to go first. The burden is on him.
“Mr. Greco?”
San Diego County Assistant District Attorney Matthew Greco was positively in attack mode as he began his closing arguments.
“Thank you, your honor.
“This case remains about one thing,” he said. “A calculated plan by a calculating man, a man consu
med with control and preserving that control and his reputation at the same time, a man who believes he is smarter than the judge, myself and all thirteen of you. It is a simple case.”
Sean, he said, was the kind of man who would do anything to preserve that view of himself as above others, as being an authority.
“A man who will thumb his nose at the world,” he said. “Do it when you plan the crime, cover it up and then when you sit in this chair, turn over, cry those crocodile tears, those false, phony tears, lie to this jury, to their faces, thumb your nose at the world. That is his definition of being a man.”
The choice, Greco said, was simple. Either Sean Goff had planned and executed a plot to kill Joy Risker and dispose of her body or he had merely been defending himself against the attacks of a woman who was nearly the same size as he was. If the jury believed Sean was attacked by Joy and simply defending himself, they couldn’t find him guilty of manslaughter or second-degree murder, he said. They would in that instance have to find him innocent—period.
But if they believed he had planned to kill Joy and hide the evidence of his crime, they had to find him guilty of first-degree murder.
But this was no self-defense, he said. Joy “fell under the spell” of Sean Goff when she was just a teenager. She had barely graduated high school, he said, so Sean was attracted to her because of that as well.
“Why is he attracted not to the person with an IQ of 145 like himself, the super genius,” he asked, “but instead, someone twelve years his junior? Because he was living vicariously through her. She was a real person, and he latched onto her.”
The polygamy was all Sean’s idea, he said, not the way Sean had portrayed it as a family decision that was entered into equally by him and his first wife.
“It wasn’t a joint decision,” he said. “It was all about him. It has always been all about him, about exerting control over [his first wife], keeping the pressure on his first wife, the one who is honest and decent and obedient. It is not something she wanted. She said, in her words, she had ‘no other choice.’”
Joy, meanwhile, was the “life of the party,” as the jury heard from multiple witnesses.
She was “the type of person who made you feel good about who you are, that you are special, that you are important,” Greco said. “And the defendant is drinking that up. He can’t get enough of that. An ego the size of Texas. He can’t get enough of it.”
Sean’s entire reason for being tired of Joy, however, didn’t ring true, Greco said.
“I will remind you again of the defense promises to you of what this case was going to be about,” he said, “of somebody who was taking from the relationship and never giving. You have the tax returns and the testimony, and you suddenly find out she was making more money than he was. They are living off her inheritance but what was being portrayed to you was a calculated move to make a suggestion about Joy that just wasn’t right. This isn’t someone who was siphoning off or getting all of the benefits of a polygamous relationship and giving nothing in return. She was contributing, doing everything that she could, all the while the defendant is in control of all the money. He is a true control freak.”
Joy wasn’t a leech or the bad mother Sean portrayed her as being, Greco said. In trying to assassinate her character, Sean had revealed just how self-centered he was. Joy had told people over and over again that she would stay for her children’s sakes.
“She stuck it out,” he said. “As bad as things got, she was telling her friends she was not going to abandon them. She gave up a lot to support the family, all of her inheritance. She was a proud, hard-working, decent parent who was young and challenged.”
In one fell swoop, Greco was tearing down the support beams of Sean’s claims that he had been the poor victim of a rampaging woman who was draining the family finances and demanding to be supported as she abandoned her children and pursued a beauty education in Hollywood. Instead, Sean, a “man with murder on his mind,” had planned to kill her for exactly the opposite reason: she was going to fight him for custody of the children, something the prideful polygamist leader in him could not suffer.
“He had that conversation with Leif Wright,” he said. “Mr. Wright told you about it. He said ‘we were talking, it was an academic discussion. I didn’t think much of it at the time.’ In fact, it didn’t even really register until later on, when he assumed everybody must know. You might have that perception that police or the prosecutor are all-knowing. You heard the tape. He assumed that we knew. And now, knowing something about the facts, it does take on some significance. He talked to the defendant about how to commit the perfect murder, the way to do it, to hide the body, to obscure the identification of the person. An incredible coincidence, or is it the germ that tells you about something that is going on in the defendant’s mind?”
And then he said the jury had to decide who was telling the truth: me or Sean.
“There aren’t two right answers here,” he said. “The defendant on the stand looked at all of you and said, ‘I never had that conversation.’ Leif Wright had already testified, and he was brought in ostensibly to say the defendant had told him to lie—a minor point, and from the defendant’s perspective, he got off scot free: ‘They don’t know about the conversation.’ And you know what? He was right. He could get up here and lie and tell you ‘I didn’t know anything about it.’ Knowing Mr. Wright came from Oklahoma, we would have to fly him all the way back. Are they really going to do that just to prove a small little point that the defendant lied? Yes.”
He apparently had decided at that point that he had to deal with how Albert Arena had tried to sully my testimony.
“You heard from Mr. Wright, a colorful character, to say the least,” he said. “But he gains a certain amount of credibility when he comes up to this stand and we challenge him, ‘Have you used drugs?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I have.’ Have you ever fought? ‘Yeah. I was a jerk. There was a time.’ What do you think of the defendant? ‘I still consider him a friend.’ What is his axe to grind? It was suggested he is playing to the cameras. What did he do? You got to see him when that was pointed out, when Mr. Arena made this big gesture, his response was to look over and say, ‘I didn’t know what that was.’
“Two weeks before that day, the defendant and Leif Wright had a conversation. ‘She is lazy and messy’—not ‘she is a drug user,’ not ‘she is beating the kids’ or anything else. ‘She is lazy. I’m going to get rid of her.’”
Blogs, Greco said, that the defense had introduced corroborated my story, not Sean’s. Sean, he said, had been insinuating throughout the trial that he was wanting Joy to leave because he was concerned that she might be doing drugs.
“There has been suggestion throughout this case that somehow she is this drug user and this made the defendant mad and upset him and as a father, as a parent, he was putting his foot down,” Greco told the jury. “But if you read the blog, about marijuana and the use of it, [Sean’s] response was ‘I agree with Leif. You should hold onto it and use it for the next creative meeting.’”
That blog, from a couple of days before Sean killed Joy, showed him endorsing the use of marijuana, not condemning it or putting his foot down about drug use, Greco said.
“He is not saying that drug use is wrong,” he said. “He is a chameleon. He’s trying to blend in. That undermines his position that he is the president of DARE, that he is the man standing there against his immoral wife with drugs. Not at all true.
“Two weeks before she disappears, he tells Leif Wright, ‘I’m going to get rid of her, she is lazy.’ Again, two weeks, at the same time, he tells Victoria Mack, ‘She has two weeks to shape up or ship out.’ and he tells her he enjoys those forensics shows. I mean, it just doesn’t get much better than that in terms of a man who is thinking about it. When you talk about premeditation and deliberation, it means if you are talking about getting away with something, that’s a pretty good marker that you understand the consequences of what you are doing.
”
Greco’s closing statements were shaping up to be a major attack. Kick by kick, he was tearing down every shred of Sean’s credibility, every plank on which he had based his story of the killing being a spur-of-the-moment act of self-defense and the cover-up being a shock reaction to the death.
“Very close friends end up weaving their way into Joy’s life and meet the defendant and he comments, ‘She will never be allowed to leave with the children,” he continued. “He is saying this as a man who is supremely confident that he is the man. The children are, in essence, the physical manifestations of his success as a polygamist. These are his trophies. ‘She will never be allowed to leave with them.’ This is a man who is all about control, all about power.”
Sean, he said, had begun marketing the idea before the murder that Joy might just pick up her bags and leave, telling multiple friends just that.
“Again, a man who feels he is smarter than all of us,” he said.
But the Rubicon was crossed, so to speak, when Sean made that fateful shopping trip on September 13. It was then that Joy’s fate was sealed, that she was dead already, though she wouldn’t actually be killed for six more days.
Pointing to the time stamps on the two receipts, Greco said that Sean, who checked out at the hardware store at 10:41 A.M., had to take the “murder kit” to his car, unload it all, leave the parking lot and drive through dense Saturday San Diego traffic to the big box store, three miles away. Assuming there was no traffic and he made it in four minutes, Greco said, Sean picked out seventeen items at that store in thirty-two minutes.
“He has got to be flying,” he said. “What does this mean? He has a list. The guy knew what he was doing. He has a list. And let’s make no mistake about it, there are no home-improvement projects. They are not painting; they are not going to make painting their Saturday project like he testified to. You heard from [his first wife], right? ‘Why would we paint? It is a rental. Why would we paint on the inside?’ What is he doing? The perfect murder. He had a gardener. This is a man who’s so lazy that he would rather spend his time in front of a computer and pay someone else to mow his lawn because he doesn’t want to do it himself. Yet he decides for the incredible task of pulling out a tree stump, that’s something he wants to do himself?
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