Deadly Vows

by Leif M. Wright

  “Please, please. That’s absurd,” Greco continued. “Joy wasn’t with him. In the calculating cunning of someone who is a manipulative, super-intelligent liar, sitting on this stand, an act of genius, a really gutsy liar, to sit here and tell you it was Joy who picked out the weapon that ended up killing her. So the one item he had admitted to using in this whole cover-up never even occurred to him to purchase.”

  His first wife never saw the butcher knife or the cutting board, he said. Sean’s testimony had made it sound like it was a spur-of-the-moment shopping decision, like they were cruising the aisles and Joy said, “Oh, let’s get this.”

  “He had a list,” Greco repeated. “It was a flat-out lie, a gutsy move by the defendant. Let’s go and look at all of the items he purchased: a hacksaw, a shovel, a pickaxe, an ax, a chisel, a sledgehammer, the chain, locks and rope...then the knife, the butcher block, the duct tape. Duct tape again for painting? You would use masking tape. He has to come up with some explanation, but please. Drop cloth, five buckets, gloves, stepladder and cooler. He is a man of contingencies, ready for anything.”

  Then, he said, Sean rented the SUV and took Joy to Coronado Island, where he wined and dined her at that super-expensive restaurant.

  “Why would anybody who’s not earning much money, who has to rely on her inheritance and on his other wife working, who can’t make ends meet, why spend this much money?...There is only one reason, and it is not so they can patch things up. It is to get her defenses down, to get her guard down. It is easy to spend two hundred and twenty-three dollars when you know you will not have to spend anything more. That’s what this is. This is the last supper. It worked. It worked. She is happy. She knows there are problems, but you have to remember, this is the same person who is preparing his surprise birthday party. She is planning his surprise birthday party and trying to get his friend of twenty years to come out.”

  When his first wife phoned Joy after Sean and Joy had arrived back at the Kensington house after dinner, according to Sean, the argument was already in full swing. But, Greco said, Joy’s conversation revealed nothing of the sort.

  “How is she? ‘I’m about to leave? We are having problems?’ None of that. Why isn’t she talking about it? Because it never happened. This is truly to get her defenses down. It’s easy to spend that amount of money when you know that’s it. I mean, he just spent $400 on tools; must be a pretty important project for a guy that doesn’t want to mow his own lawn.”

  Sean, he said, also didn’t get any scrapes or cuts during the purported struggle with Joy in the bedroom.

  “This is a man with no defensive wounds, who struggled for a knife back and forth twelve times. Then we heard from Pinocchio on the stand, ‘Well, if the jurors want to look at my hands now, I have scars.’ Well, that’s very helpful; you also have quite a story two and a half years later. We are not interested in what your scars are today. Where are your scabs [in the photos taken 30 days after Joy’s death]? It didn’t happen.”

  Sean didn’t struggle with Joy for the knife, Greco said. Instead, he stabbed Joy at least twelve times—more, probably, but because Joy’s body was decomposed by the time it was discovered, only the bones could speak, not soft tissue—and twelve stab wounds are not self-defense.

  “What do we know about the stab wounds? Thank you, Dr. Fulginiti. Thank you, Maricopa Sheriff’s Department. Thank you, Detectives McVey and Powers. Thank you for not giving up on Joy Risker. She wasn’t just a bag of bones; she was a person. And they cared enough to take that case and make it their own and do the work and figure it out so we would have for you what happened.

  “It was a knife plunged so hard into her chest that it went right through the bone,” he said. “It severed it straight across. Let me tell you, you can’t be playing beach blanket bingo, struggling back and forth, dancing. No. She is on the ground. That cluster on the chest, that’s to finish her off. The first part, she wakes up, she is moving. He doesn’t have complete control over her. That last cluster, she is down on the ground face-up and he has something to keep her up against. To get through the bone.

  “We are talking about two huge stab wounds that are going all the way through bone. Look at where they are: right over the aorta. This is the kill zone.

  “The reality is, this is an execution. He is finishing his job with these blows. These wounds are not something you could do on the bed on your knees. That’s not how it happened.”

  Sean’s entire claim of self-defense wasn’t just put to rest by the evidence that he lied about how the stabbing occurred, Greco said. The cover-up also gave a good indication that he was lying.

  “She didn’t come at him with the knife,” he said. “This is a man who is super-intelligent, by his own words. We all know if somebody’s coming at you with a knife, you have the right to defend yourself. That’s common sense. That is something that a third grader understands. It is universal. Despite what he says, that the death was instantaneous, we heard evidence that even with this number of blows, because of the bleeding, Joy had a horrible, horrible fifteen minutes, at least. None of us want to think about her bleeding out, fifteen minutes where she could have been taken to [a hospital] a mile and a half away. Why not? Because that wasn’t the plan. There was one goal, that’s it. And it was to kill her.”

  Seven of the stab wounds went through Joy’s bones, Greco said, which isn’t possible if there was the struggle that Sean had described. The knife was being repeatedly and violently plunged into her chest, not see-sawing back and forth during a struggle.

  Sean, he said, got rid of all the implements he used to kill, dismember and hide Joy. The knife? Gone. The cutting board? Never found. The towels he said he used? His first wife never reported any missing. No pools of blood. Even luminol failed to show that a lot of blood had been shed in the house. The duct tape? Maricopa County officials discovered some underneath Joy’s body. The sledgehammer? Contrary to Sean’s testimony, Greco said, the indentations in Joy’s face showed that he had pounded her face with the sledgehammer, not a lava rock.

  “He used it like a barbarian against a piece of cement,” Greco said. “All part of the plan.”

  Being prepared, Greco continued, meant that Sean was thinking about contingencies. “‘What if I need to get rid of her in water? What if I’m going to cut her up and spread her all over? What if I’m going to bury her?’ Get a shovel. Get a pickaxe. It doesn’t mean he is going to use everything. He is Mr. Contingency.”

  And everything Sean did from that point forward, according to Greco, was a lie intended to preserve his reputation as the head of his family—a man who was the shepherd of his children and the one obedient wife who remained, not the irresponsible, spendthrift drug addict who had fled her responsibilities under God and her husband.

  “This was a man willing to use his kids, play on family relationships, play on an image, a reputation as a God-fearing, loving man, to manipulate people,” Greco continued.

  Then Greco discussed the twenty-four pages of transcribed e-mails. “You can read all of the stuff back and forth to Joy. The important thing here is to realize that everything in here is a lie. He is sitting on the stand—‘Yeah, I lied about that.’ He goes to a family law attorney and tells him she has abandoned him and asks for child support. Why? Because it makes the lie more convincing.”

  “He conned everybody; the man is unbelievable. There is nobody he can’t dupe, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you that he is the type of person who has the personality that believes he can get on the stand and he can fool you. He can sit here, sit in this chair, raise his hand, cry and come up with a story and [assume that] you will believe him because you are stupid, because you are not like him. You don’t have a 145 IQ.”

  The pressure, Greco said, began to build on Sean after he killed Joy. First, Joy’s friends kept asking questions, kept demanding answers, kept e-mailing “Joy” when her responses didn’t satisfy their curiosity and concerns. Then the police kept digging ev
en though they believed Sean’s story, believed that the tears he cried when they interviewed him were real, believed that he was distraught over the sudden departure of his favorite wife. Then the pressure from Victoria Mack, who had told Sean he needed to come clean with his boss about having another wife at home or she would do it for him, and finally, Sean’s first wife, who freaked out when the police visited her at her work and who, when she got home early that day, screamed at Sean to turn himself in.

  “Right after that confrontation, he goes to the police,” Greco said. “He didn’t make this choice. It was forced on him by the moral compass of the family. And when he goes to the police, he is comfortable leaving Joy in the wilderness. Charles Risker and their family will have no one to bury. That’s who Sean Goff is.”

  That was the lynchpin of Sean’s scheme, Greco said. It was his trump card, his ace in the hole. He was under the mistaken impression that a prosecutor wouldn’t prosecute if they couldn’t find a body.

  “He is under the misimpression that no body, no crime,” Greco said. “That’s not what happens. It took a long time to get the body, during which he never mentioned a knife or self-defense. No mention of drugs. No mention of anything. All of that is something he concocted for you on the stand.”

  Joy, he said, was nothing more than meat to Sean—meat to be butchered.

  “Imagine this case without a body,” he said. “I would be up here arguing to you that she is dead but in the back of your mind you would be thinking, ‘What if she walks through that door?’”

  Sean, he said, wanted to leave the case without a body, because without a body, no one would be able to show that he had stabbed her at least a dozen times, “...because even a genius, someone with a 145 IQ, can’t explain twelve stab wounds.”

  Greco had called Sean “Pinocchio” several times during his closing statement, at one point saying his nose should be somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Toward the end, he seemed to reconsider that characterization.

  “Pinocchio is also cute and somewhat redeeming,” he said. “Do not misunderstand me. I do not think there is anything redeeming about this man. He is a liar. He is a murderer. He has no compassion. Make no mistake. There is nothing funny about him.”

  Finally, Greco attacked what he foresaw as a desperate tactic by Sean’s lawyer: an attempt to get the jury to convict him but reduce the charge to second-degree murder at worst, manslaughter at best. Albert Arena’s idea, he said, was to try to get a lesser charge ultimately for a lesser sentence.

  “This is a homicide. It is clear. You heard it from the judge, but I want to walk you through what murder is.”

  Manslaughter is when someone dies through the negligent or unintentional actions of another, he said. Second-degree murder is a spur-of-the-moment homicide with malice aforethought—even an instant beforehand. But first-degree murder, Greco said, is when someone plans a murder for a while and then executes that plan.

  “You have a very easy task in front of you,” he told the jury. “If she attacked him with a knife, he is not guilty of second-degree murder. He is not guilty of voluntary manslaughter. If you believe him, he is not guilty. If you think he is a truth teller, if you believe that and disregard all the physical evidence, all the people who say he is lying, if you believe that to be true, then your verdict is clear. But if you find his testimony uncorroborated, unreasonable and in fact, the People’s case proves it beyond a reasonable doubt, there is only one verdict and that is first-degree murder.”

  Sean, he said with a stern look on his face, clearly planned his crime for a long time beforehand.

  “What is the evidence we have of premeditation?” he asked. “The conversation with Leif, a perfect murder. Two weeks before, ‘I am going to get rid of Joy.’ The conversation with Victoria Mack, ‘she has to shape up or ship out.’ And ‘I love those Forensics Files, it’s hard to get away with anything.’ The murder kit. Getting the [SUV]. And his cover-up. He is thinking so far ahead, he is actually manipulating a lot of people on a lot of different levels. Fairly sophisticated. You have to give him credit.”

  For the coup de gras, Greco recalled Sean’s inability to keep his story straight, whether he had shown Joy the photo or told her about it and then she had snapped, or whether she had snapped before she heard about it or saw it.

  “He is a liar,” Greco said. “This isn’t somebody else calling him a liar; it is him. Nobody put those words in his mouth. Two days later, he can’t remember his own story and he has told us why, because it wasn’t rooted in truth. It’s hard to remember lies. The purpose of having him tell everything all over again was because all of it was a lie.”

  Greco concluded that Sean “...has to look at you and conceive that you all believe what he tells you. ‘Yes, I am a liar. Yes, I have lied to everybody. But now I’m telling you the truth.’”

  Albert Arena, brilliant lawyer that he was, had just watched a fly ball cruise over the fence, just past his glove. Like a master illusionist, his only tactic, it seemed, was to misdirect the jury’s attention away from the details of the case and to the overarching law that he hoped would get his client a lesser sentence—or perhaps even an acquittal.

  “What the criminal defense attorney does is protect the constitution,” Arena began in his closing statement. “He prohibits a government agency from walking into a room and saying ‘my theory is this man murdered someone, and based on that theory, he should go to jail.’”

  He bemoaned how, in his judgment, modern society was prejudiced against defense attorneys because of the overwhelming public perception that prosecutors were the upholders of justice and liberty.

  “I wasn’t there the night of September 19, 2003,” he continued. “And guess what? Mr. Greco wasn’t there either. Everything Mr. Greco has talked to you about is his theory of the case, what he thinks the evidence shows. And it is only that—a theory for your consideration.”

  Reasonable doubt, he said, was far more encompassing than most people assumed.

  “If you are at a barbecue three or four months later and someone is talking to you about the case, you can’t think to yourself, ‘But what if? What if this was really what happened?’” he said. “Because if you are thinking that, you have reasonable doubt.”

  This case, he said, was more difficult because of the gruesome acts Sean had admitted to performing on Joy after he killed her.

  “I’m equally as bothered by it as anyone,” he said. “It was a poor decision by Mr. Goff, a decision he has to live with the rest of his life—a decision he has paid for with time.”

  But the trial, he said, wasn’t about the horrific things Sean did to Joy’s corpse, it was about whether Joy attacked Sean and he defended himself.

  “You have to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt that it was not possible for Joy Risker to have introduced that knife into the bedroom.”

  The sensationalism of the case—the polygamy, the cover-up, the mutilation of Joy’s body—was a mitigating factor that could sway a jury to ignore the actual evidence, he said, and convict a man simply because the jury didn’t like him personally. The jury’s responsibility was to make sure they weren’t swayed in that way.

  “Because if you are, I’m wasting my time talking to you,” he said. “Mr. Greco put up quite a display in his statement; quite impressive. But I thought about what Solomon once said: ‘any theory is good until it is cross-examined.’”

  Solomon was never actually recorded as having said that, but Arena was on a roll. He had sat silently through the prosecution’s case, because he wanted to wait for them to introduce their theory so he could pick it apart.

  “The people’s case relied, in part, on the ‘murder kit,’” he said. “Okay, a shovel, the pickaxe, the cooler, the chains, the chisel, among other things. And I chose to wait. What did I learn through examination? That none of those things had anything to do with this case.”

  Greco, he said, had provided a compelling case that the 145-IQ genius had prepar
ed for any contingency, with a rope and a chain for a possible plan to submerge Joy in water, or the two extra gas cans to possibly burn her body.

  “Perhaps it is best that Mr. Goff didn’t take the car and get the oil changed, because perhaps the prosecution would have said that he wanted the engine to be running smoothly so he could run Joy Risker over,” he said. “Anyone can draft a manuscript for murder, and that’s what Mr. Greco has provided for you—a manuscript. It is very, very strong and compelling. And if that’s all you had to consider, there would be no reason for you not to come back with a murder conviction.”

  But the jury would have to consider Joy’s part in this drama, he said. It was Joy, he said, who was selfishly draining on the family. Joy was the one who wouldn’t compromise on beauty school. Joy was the one who had come at Sean with the knife. Joy was the problem here. She was dead as a result of her own actions, not as the result of some plan by Sean.

  “Let’s talk about the deceptions of Joy Risker,” he said. “This isn’t easy; she is the decedent in this case. She never told her uncle about the relationship she had with Mr. Goff. That is deception. She never told Mr. Goff about her relationship with her ex-boyfriend. That is deception. She never told her ex-boyfriend about her relationship with Mr. Goff. That was a deception. She never told him she had two children. That was a deception.”

  Such deceptions, he said, spoke to the character of Joy.

  “If the prosecution wants you to look at the character of an individual and the propensity for deception as part of the overall proof that they are capable of attacking someone with a knife, I ask you to look at the deceptions of Joy Risker.”