by Burl Barer
“Christopher was very upset when the police said they would help him, and then didn’t,” confirmed Father Matthew Demaria, a Catholic priest and frequent jail visitor. “He was very angry about that, and most of the time on our visits, I had to hear that over and over again, how the authorities said that they would help him by giving this evidence, and then they didn’t. He was very angry about that, and vented that frustration out on me.” This venting, however, didn’t prevent Father Demaria and Christopher St. Pierre from sharing an amicable relationship.
“He was always pleased that I came to visit him in the Pierce County Jail,” the priest recalled. “He prayed and received Holy Communion, and he was very grateful for my visit.” On the topic of Christopher St. Pierre’s involvement in the two homicides, Father Demaria said, “I get the impression that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Paul St. Pierre emphatically restated the identical sentiment during his meetings with Dr. Allison.
“He insisted that his brother Christopher shouldn’t be in jail,” Allison reported, “and that his brother was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and should have no involvement in this case.”
Christopher St. Pierre was irrevocably involved, as was Tony Youso. On July 31, during a pretrial hearing for Youso and St. Pierre, Judge W. L. Brown Jr. refused a defense motion to suppress Christopher St. Pierre’s sworn statement. A similar motion regarding Youso’s typewritten remarks was also denied. Brown ruled that both men’s statements were voluntary, given without coercion, and within legal guidelines. As of July 31, Youso and St. Pierre were scheduled to stand trial on August 13 on one count each of rendering criminal assistance.
Chris St. Pierre wasn’t upset about the criminal assistance charge; it was the first-degree aggravated murder charge that concerned him.
The Honorable Thomas Sauriol’s involvement with the St. Pierre case began with his assignment as presiding judge of the Damon Wells trial. “Judge Sauriol is professionalism personified, and his ethical standards are above reproach,” said Detective Robert Yerbury. On September 4, in Tacoma’s County-City Building, the trial began with a bang.
Seven
One solid gavel bang by Judge Sauriol signaled the onset of the most significant and closely followed Pierce County legal proceeding in decades. “The State of Washington versus St. Pierre, Paul St. Pierre, Christopher St. Pierre,” began Sauriol. “I take it those are the only defendants that the court is concerned with at this time.”
After a brief discussion of potential scheduling problems and probable resolutions, Assistant Deputy Prosecutor Carl Hultman presented his first pretrial motion. The state requested that the signed statement made to Detectives Price and Yerbury by Paul St. Pierre while in the Pierce County Jail be admitted as evidence.
Hultman recounted how on June 20, 1984, Detectives Price and Yerbury visited Paul St. Pierre in the Pierce County Jail. They advised him of his rights and arrested him for the murders of John Achord and Damon Wells. St. Pierre signed a form acknowledging that his rights had been explained to him, and when asked if he wanted to waive his rights, he declined to do so. Twenty-eight days later, Paul St. Pierre sent a written request from the jail, commonly referred to as a kite, directly to Detective Price. The kite read: “I would like to talk to you please. Thank you.”
Aware that they were not to initiate contact with the suspect outside presence of counsel, Detectives Price and Yerbury consulted the prosecutor’s office for advice. They spoke both to Carl Hultman and his superior, Ms. Chris Quinn-Brintnall, and were advised to go ahead and take St. Pierre’s statement without notifying Paul St. Pierre’s attorney. “The detectives acted responsibly, the statement was voluntary, and the court should admit it as evidence,” said Carl Hultman.
Ellsworth Connelly, Paul St. Pierre’s attorney, vehemently disagreed. “My client can only waive the assistance of counsel in the presence of his lawyer, and he had already served official notice that he wasn’t waiving his constitutional rights.”
It was clear and inarguable that on the day of his arraignment, June 22, 1984, Paul St. Pierre signed a notice advising that he wanted counsel present anytime he was questioned. The notice further stated that the Department of Assigned Counsel, representing Paul St. Pierre, demanded to be present “during any and all further contacts made by police authorities and/or their agents except during administrative jail contacts.”
“It is phrased as a demand,” countered Hultman in his argument to the court, “but the Department of Assigned Counsel has no rights in this situation with respect to whether or not Mr. St. Pierre talks to detectives or not. It’s Mr. St. Pierre who has those rights. These are not Mr. Connelly’s rights. He doesn’t have the privilege and the power, and with all due respect to Judge Healy, nor does the court have the power to prohibit Mr. St. Pierre’s communications with the rest of the world.”
The circumstances surrounding St. Pierre’s communication with Detectives Price and Yerbury were, in Connelly’s view, highly irregular and suspect. “Was there one court reporter present who wrote down one single word as it happened at the time in shorthand, on machine, or otherwise? No. Was there one single inch of tape recording to take down the two hours that are represented in this page and a half that takes five minutes to read? No. Why? I don’t know why,” said Connelly to Judge Sauriol, “and you don’t know why, and neither of us know what was said and done in there simply because they chose not to do this. Do you think for one second that would have happened if they had simply picked up the phone and said, ‘Your man wants to make a statement. We have him down at the police station. Will you come down?’ Of course it wouldn’t.”
The fact that neither Price nor Yerbury saw the court order insisting that St. Pierre not be contacted or questioned without his lawyer present was an endless source of dismay to Connelly, and an embarrassment to Carl Hultman. “Judge Healy directed the prosecutor to make copies available to everybody,” Connelly informed the court. “Well, did he? No. The prosecutor never told the detectives about this, and they never received copies as directed by Judge Healy.
“Was there any effort made to contact Paul St. Pierre’s attorney, or the Department of Assigned Counsel, or myself?” asked Connelly rhetorically. “No, none at all, she—Chief Deputy Prosecutor Brintnall—just said, ‘Well, go ahead and talk to him.’ They could have phoned, but they didn’t. Why? Because they were simply eager to get a statement from Paul St. Pierre, and to do that, to hell with any kind of court order, or direction from the court, or notice or anything like that.
“Had they called me,” he further explained, “the first thing that would have happened would have been a conversation with the defendant discussing the advisability or inadvisability of giving the statement. If he decided to do it, I would demand that it be taped in full so that we don’t have two or three pages of boilerplate, which the officer says is what he dictated to them, and we know that simply is not so. Do you think that if I had been there I would have gone along with this? I say it should never come in,” he told Judge Sauriol. “It’s contrary to law. It’s contrary to common sense and good morals and it shouldn’t come in. That’s all I have to say, Your Honor.”
“Do you want to try to top that?” Sauriol asked the other attorneys, indicating his admiration of Connelly’s presentation.
“I’m almost devastated, Your Honor,” responded Hultman. The prosecutor’s sardonic delivery didn’t impress the court. “Don’t make light of it,” said Sauriol. Hultman then assaulted Connelly’s argument, entreating the court to accept St. Pierre’s statement.
“It was Paul St. Pierre who initiated contact, motivated by a desire to explain and express his part in some grisly incidents, and to describe and explain other people’s conduct in those same incidents. There is no indication that he was motivated by fear. There’s no indication that he was motivated by intimidation. He sent out the kite saying he wanted to talk to the detectives.”
The court could not find that St. Pierre was
motivated by ignorance because he was advised of his rights, said Hultman. “Paul St. Pierre did something that he would not have done if Mr. Connelly had been there. I don’t think that rises to the level of unreasoned impulse. Detectives Price and Yerbury specifically asked Paul St. Pierre if he were initiating the contact of his own free will.” As verification, Hultman called attention to this phrase in St. Pierre’s statement: “They were not to talk to me without my attorney being present, but I chose to talk to them.”
“This is a very unusual case,” Hultman said. “I’ve never seen one like this before. I’m impressed with the detectives, the way they honored what they believed was his assertion of rights, the way they checked with counsel before they made a decision, and that they took his statement in a way free from interrogation. They simply let him tell them what he wanted to say, and I think the statement should come in.”
The entire scenario did not sit well with Judge Sauriol. “The court has been in the profession of law since 1953,” he stated emphatically, “and I can honestly say that during that entire time when I practiced law, I never had a communication with my opposing litigant under any circumstances while the litigation was going on.”
Sauriol was blatantly upset that Hultman’s superior, Chris Quinn-Brintnall, approved of Yerbury and Price taking St. Pierre’s statement without first contacting Mr. Connelly. “I don’t want anything I say to be taken in any way to condone the chief deputy prosecutor for doing what she did in this case. The reason I’m putting the blame at that doorstep is because I know, Mr. Hultman, that she’s your boss, and whatever you may have said would have her stamp of approval if she didn’t do anything to countermand it. This is a very serious case. It is as serious a case as this court has ever encountered as either an attorney or as a trial judge.
“The rule of law involved is whether or not the defendant’s statement to the police officers was voluntarily made with no evidence of duress, force, threat, intimidation, or the like,” said the judge. “In this particular instance, the situation has been complicated by the actions, and I’m not blaming the police officers, complicated by the actions of the chief deputy prosecutor. It annoys me. This case is going to be difficult enough without flirting with disaster, and that’s what’s happening. This better be a message to somebody,” insisted the judge. “I don’t want to see anything like this occurring again in this case. First of all, it’s probably going to give me an ulcer and, secondly, it may very well create reversible error. This case is going to be tried according to the rules from day one, and this is day one.
“I think the only thing that saves the state’s neck is the fact that Paul St. Pierre initiated this contact,” Sauriol said. “I don’t think we would be dealing with the violation of the canons of ethics in this case but for the fact the police were concerned with what they should do. They went to the prosecuting attorney’s office, and Chris Quinn-Brintnall said, ‘Go ahead, do your thing.’ She then made these two police officers an arm of the prosecuting attorney’s office. In my judgment, there is a violation of the canons and that’s flirting with disaster.
“Secondly,” continued the judge, “Judge Healy indicated that this order shall be complied with. Mr. Hultman took it upon himself to say, ‘I’ll advise the police officers,’ and he didn’t do it.” Sauriol then leveled his gaze directly at Carl Hultman. “I don’t know, Mr. Hultman, whether it’s because you have such a horrible workload, and the pressure of having to deal with that, that you didn’t do it, but you should have.
“I don’t think that the violation of the canon of ethics should have anything to do with the voluntary nature of the statement,” he said, speaking to the heart of the issue, “nor does the ethical violation make a difference as to the admissibility of the confession.”
The judge remained irritated and dismayed with the prosecution’s behavior, and offered additional critical comments. He noted that when Paul St. Pierre sent a second kite, Chris Quinn-Brintnall immediately notified Connelly’s office. “She should have done it with the first one, but I don’t think that should suppress the confession, but it does not speak very well of the chief criminal deputy’s adherence to the canon of ethics. The reason I’m saying all this is because the chief criminal deputy in Pierce County is one of the chief law enforcement officers, if not the chief law enforcement officer, in this community. The court will deny the motion to suppress the statement.”
Police officers acting as adjuncts of the prosecutor’s office, or any similar unethical behavior, is a sensitive topic for Tacoma residents. The slightest hint of corruption triggers unpleasant memories of the police department’s well-earned and decidedly unsavory postwar reputation.
Homecoming World War II veterans found their city in decay and notorious for vice. Racketeers, vice lords, thugs, and gangsters were the primary architects of Tacoma’s law enforcement policies. Honest cops treaded softly on the underworld-controlled streets while an undercurrent of civic dissatisfaction was rising day by day. Detective Yerbury’s father, Robert L. Yerbury, joined the Tacoma Police Department in 1947 when the troubled port city had devolved almost to the final depths of its downward spiral. At age twenty-three, Yerbury was either exceptionally brave or remarkably naive. The late-1940s Tacoma Police Department was riddled with corruption.
In 1946 through 1947, the times, if not rapidly changing, were shifting. The new consumer-centered climate of cold war America was inhospitable to what had been formerly acceptable. Corruption and the elimination of vice were the hot topics for political platforms, crusading district attorneys, grand juries, and citizens committees.
Tacoma’s change came from the Tacoma Police Department. On Thursday, March 28, 1946, forty rogue, or vigilante, Tacoma police officers raided seven gambling and “bootleg” operations downtown, arresting fifty-four persons and seizing over $1,000 in cash. Neither the chief of police nor the commissioner of public safety, tangentially connected to these enterprises, was informed of the raids, and both were furious.
The Thanksgiving weekend saw seven more raids and forty-two arrests. The twelve arresting officers were immediately suspended. Vigilante raids on illegal gambling dens continued through 1947, sparking a firestorm of controversy. Four officers were dismissed, and denounced by Chief William Farrar as “tools of the underworld.”
By summer, however, two constables from neighboring towns joined forces with the fired Tacoma cops and pulled a joint raid on the infamous Star Social Club. They arrested sixty-seven people and shipped them by bus to the town of Roy, where they each posted $25 bail for being in a place where gambling was being conducted.
By July 27, 1947, the four dismissed patrolmen were reinstated with back pay, and the raids ceased. But the reverberations continued to be felt throughout city hall. A succession of chiefs, some lasting as little as three months, began. Between March 1946, when the first raids were made, to July 1953, when the department was reorganized, eight men served as police chief.
Political interference in police operations was a daily fact of Tacoma life due to the commissioner form of local government. The commissioner, a de facto police chief, often knew nothing about law enforcement.
The proliferation of prostitution fueled accusations that police and vice lords were in bed together, and that the cops were accepting payoffs for protection. The American Social Hygiene Association declared Tacoma diseased, and the United States Army threatened to put the entire city of Tacoma “off-limits” to soldiers. Tacoma captured the title “America’s #1 City for Sexually Transmitted Disease.” This dubious distinction was not easily overcome.
Tacoma was America’s first major city to implement the city council–city manager form of local governance. This bold step directly attacked the roots of political and police corruption. On July 9, 1953, Chief Roy D. Kerr, an experienced officer with impeccable credentials, assumed office.
“That day marked the beginning of a new era for the Tacoma Police Department,” said Yerbury. “Chief Kerr was a t
rue ‘professional’ police chief, having previously served as chief of Topeka, Kansas, as well as a deputy sheriff and deputy U.S. marshal. He was also a graduate of the FBI National Academy.”
He put an end to graft and corruption, appointed the straitlaced John Hickey to head up the Morals Squad, and together they attacked vice throughout the city. Kerr also introduced the first classroom training for new recruits, revamped department forms, procedures, and policies. Gradually, Chief Kerr rebuilt the police department into a professional, modern agency.
“What made the Tacoma situation so unique is that it was the members of the police department, and not an outside investigation, who demanded the change that ushered in a new era for the police department and the city,” commented the second-generation Yerbury. “Today my son carries the same badge number that my dad carried. When he graduated from the state academy, Dad and I jointly pinned the badge on him. Of course, my dad is incredibly proud of him.”
The senior Mr. Yerbury, an eyewitness to his city’s turbulent history, served twenty-seven years with the Tacoma Police Department. “Through thick and thin, even in the toughest times, we had a great police department, and we still do,” he said. “I was always proud to be on the Tacoma Police Department, and I loved the job. As for corruption, I never took a dishonest dime in my life, and I can name lots of other good cops who didn’t get into that corruption at all. There were a few—that’s a fact. They were into small deals—none of them were getting rich at it, I don’t imagine. A few bad ones make even the good ones look bad—and that’s a shame. There were plenty of good, honest cops—and those are the ones I remember and admire. Of course, folks around here are sensitive to Tacoma’s old reputation, and that helps keep things on the up and up.”
The community’s sensitivity amplified the importance and relevance of Judge Sauriol’s strongly worded admonitions to the prosecutor’s office against even the appearance of impropriety.