To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Emilia dropped her head. Hawthorne grimaced.

  The judge polled each juror; all answered, “Yes.”

  Seven men and five women had found Emilia Lily Carr guilty of both crimes. That same jury, after a break, would then sit and decide Emilia’s punishment after hearing evidence in the penalty phase.

  Reporters tracked down Heather’s mother outside the court afterward. She had traveled from Mississippi with other family members to be there for the trial (they ended up staying with Ben McCollum, actually). Now that Emilia had been found guilty, everyone was curious to hear what Carolyn Spence had to say about one of her daughter’s killers.

  “I’m relieved,” Carolyn said, indicating that it was a just verdict. The woman was guilty and the jury did not believe her lies. Carolyn was satisfied.

  Neither Brad King nor Candace Hawthorne was willing to comment. The jury had spoken, sure; but they needed to gear up now and go back to the drawing board to begin preparations for the next phase. For Candace Hawthorne, she had one thought on her mind: saving Emilia’s life.

  CHAPTER 91

  THE MIND LIVES inside a bubble of past events, continuously calling up history, trying either not to repeat it or somehow to change it. While the heart, in a struggle of consciousness, thrives on the present, its focus strictly on the now, thus living for the moment. If Emilia Carr and her character witnesses were going save Emilia’s life with their testimony during the sentencing phase of this trial, now would be the time to stick to a plan that included the latter. There was nothing to be gained by talking about the past and the fact that Emilia did not agree with the jury’s verdict. Now was the time to concentrate entirely on the present and maybe—if Emilia was as smart as she claimed—even think about throwing herself on the mercy of the court, perhaps admitting her role in this murder and begging for forgiveness. If she did that, there was at least the chance of her walking away with a life sentence. The alternative, on the other hand, was not a good one.

  Up first for Emilia on December 9, 2010, after a day of opening arguments and the state’s one witness, was Sue Zayas, Emilia’s aunt, who talked mostly about the family and how often she and her husband (Emilia’s uncle, who had since passed away) would visit. This allowed Hawthorne to enter into evidence several family photographs depicting what seemed to be a close bunch of people that laughed, cried and did things together.

  Hawthorne asked Sue if she had ever talked to Emilia about her niece’s “aspirations” in life.

  “Emilia always had a plan,” Sue told jurors. “She was always looking for something to better herself,” adding how for Emilia, if one particular plan did not work, “always had a backup.” (Right: If not the snap of a neck, then a plastic bag would do!)

  Everything Emilia did, Sue insisted, she did for the sake of her children.

  Brad King had a few questions for Emilia’s aunt, most of which focused on Emilia’s above-average intelligence, thus leaving the jury with the impression that Emilia Carr was no dummy and should have known better.

  Emilia’s mother, Maria Zayas, walked slowly into the courtroom, with her stride a bit slower than normal. Her shoulders were a bit slouched; her expression was a bit sadder and more solemn. Maria was certainly feeling the burden of the verdict. Her daughter had been found guilty of the most monstrous crime imaginable. What could this mother, in all of her humility, say to these jurors to try and help save her daughter’s life, especially when Emilia was not yet ready to take responsibility?

  Maria began by saying she was born in Miami, but the family moved around a lot. They lived as “migrants . . . so we really didn’t have a steady place when I was growing up.” Anyone in the family old enough to put in a solid day’s work picked grapefruits, cherries, corn, tomatoes and cucumbers. “We did it all,” Maria added.

  Maria had completed only the sixth grade in school. She learned to read or write on her own, but not much more than “simple words.” Throughout her childhood and into her young adult life, Maria explained, her family chased work, wherever picking fruits took them: Ohio, Michigan, Texas and North Carolina. Still, they always wound up in Florida.

  At fourteen years old, Maria got pregnant with her first child, a daughter. Soon, Maria had a boy; then she met a man, married him and, two years later, had Emilia. Two years after that, Milagro arrived.

  Years went by and Maria’s husband, in 1988, was charged with an unfathomable crime and DCF took Maria’s children out of the home. They were placed in foster care.

  “Were you able to have unsupervised visits?” Hawthorne asked, trying to get Maria to point out what Emilia’s father had been charged with.

  “No, they were always supervised.”

  “And were the children allowed to visit with their father?”

  “No, he could have no contact.”

  “And why was that?”

  “He sexually molested Emilia.”

  Some time passed, Maria explained. She accepted her husband back into the home after he completed a court-ordered program and they soon got their children back.

  According to Emilia, the abuse continued. However, she excelled in school, Maria explained. She was always bringing home A’s and B’s and routinely made the honor roll. Emilia was a model student, never got into any trouble and never cut classes.

  After she graduated from high school, Emilia wanted to become a photographer, Maria said. She also got into modeling and went to Barbizon, a modeling school in Tampa. At fourteen or fifteen years old, Emilia was stunning, Maria told jurors. She had everything going for her. Maria was certain that Emilia was going to be the one in the family to make it out of poverty and avoid working the farms. She had a chance. She had even gone into the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps), a college-based program and first step into enlistment in the military.

  Throughout her line of questioning, Hawthorne stopped periodically and admitted photos of Emilia, a line of memories, essentially, detailing her life with her family. Through those photos, it became clear that Emilia was the center of attention, the one family member everyone seemed to look toward for hope and promise of the future.

  After discussing family history, Hawthorne moved on to a deposition Maria had given in 2001 regarding her husband, Emilia’s father. Hawthorne asked Maria about it, setting the tone of the testimony with a rather pointed question: “Do you remember why your husband was in jail [back then]?”

  “He molested my daughter Emilia.”

  “And did something else happen ... while he was in jail?”

  Maria seemed confused about the question, maybe conflicted. She became emotional. The weight of the trial, the guilty verdict, the idea in the back of her mind that each answer she gave had the potential to save her daughter’s life, it was implicit in her cracking voice. As any mother in the same position would have done, Maria wanted to say the right thing.

  Hawthorne rephrased her question. “Were you ever made aware of [a second] charge against him?”

  “It was me, my mom and my daughter [Emilia],” Maria said before stopping to collect her composure. This was so hard, so personal, so final.

  Emilia looked stunned. She could feel the pain from her mother, a woman who had always stood by Emilia’s side, no matter the circumstance. Maria had always helped Emilia when she could ... for forever, it seemed. But this ... Maria was helpless. How much could she do with only her words?

  Maria took a deep breath. Then she explained what happened, beginning with how her husband knew that she and Emilia and Emilia’s grandmother were going to be in court testifying against him in the sexual molestation case. They would each sit and describe explicit, graphic details based on their knowledge of “what he did to Emilia,” Maria said. But when Emilia’s father found out that they had planned to bury him in the courtroom with testimony, “he hired somebody on the outside.” Maria described how he had even given the person “directions to my bedroom ... to my baby’s bedroom [and my] momma’s. He wanted to get rid of us because we
were going to go and testify. He was going to prison for the rest of his life.”

  Emilia’s own father was going to have three women—one of whom was his own child, the other his wife—murdered because they had become a problem in his deviant life of molesting children. This type of direct testimony—revealing those deep, dark family secrets—gave jurors, without Candace Hawthorne having even to try, a vivid picture of how Emilia might have learned to deal with problematic people herself.

  Maria went on to note that “the guy he hired to kill us, it was an undercover cop.”

  Now Emilia’s father had two problems.

  When her father went to jail for what he did, Maria told jurors, Emilia blamed herself. She and her dad had been close, like a father and his son, Maria used as an analogy. They did everything together. So when Emilia’s words sent the old man to prison, she took on the burden of putting him there and it weighed heavily on her.

  “She even felt like she destroyed the family,” Maria said of Emilia’s courage to come forward and not only admit she was abused, but to testify against her father.

  Emilia went to see various counselors, Maria said, to talk about the abuse and the feelings she was having surrounding blaming herself.

  “But nobody [could] seem to help her. I mean, she would just keep it all inside.”

  Some might argue that pain turned into rage.

  The cycle seemed to continue when Emilia met a man and became pregnant at sixteen. All her hopes of modeling and the ROTC suddenly disappeared and she was now a mother.

  The state stepped in at one time and removed her child.

  She’d always get her children back after the state took them, but it was forever a struggle for Emilia, Maria said.

  Brad King had nothing more than to ask Maria a few questions that cleared up some timeline issues he had a problem with. Maria was confused about a few dates. But other than that, King was confident in allowing this part of the trial to be focused on the defendant. It was Emilia’s show here. King didn’t need to prove that Emilia was a bad person; the jury already had agreed to that in finding her guilty. This was about Candace Hawthorne providing the jury with the information that could save Emilia’s life.

  CHAPTER 92

  EMILIA’S OLDER SISTER and grandmother testified on that same day, December 9. Each woman sat in the witness stand and gave similar testimony, telling jurors that the family had problems, lived a hard life of moving around all the time, working their fingers to the bone in the fruit fields, endured a host of medical issues and never had enough money to live even a simple, humble life. Throughout all of this testimony, the message Candace Hawthorne wanted to get across became clear: Emilia was a beacon of hope. She was the golden child with the smarts, the looks and the know-how to pull the family out of the societal doldrums they routinely found themselves in. Only it didn’t happen that way. Emilia, forever the healthiest and smartest of the bunch, had fallen into early marriage and early divorce, given birth at a young age, and was forced to place her dreams on hold and then finally abandon them altogether.

  What any of this had to do with Emilia killing Heather was a guess. If anything, the testimony spoke of a young woman growing up in poverty, developing an increasing bitterness at society and anybody who had it better than she did. Abused and frustrated, with a multitude of failed relationships in her wake by the time she hit her twenties, Emilia developed a reputation for becoming angry whenever someone crossed her.

  Candace Hawthorne rested her case after Miracle came in and said a few cheerful words about her sister; then Dr. Ava Land, a psychologist, talked for a few moments about Emilia’s state of mind and what sexual abuse in early childhood had the potential to do to a young girl.

  Closing arguments took place the following morning, December 10. Both lawyers kept their comments brief and followed a pattern one might expect at this stage of a death penalty sentencing phase. The central themes that attorney Candace Hawthorne focused on became utterly implicit throughout the testimony of character witnesses she had presented: Emilia was so young; this was her first and only felonious act; she’d had such a deprived and abusive childhood, she deserved a pass here in the form of life without parole. Part of Hawthorne’s argument was somewhat substantiated by Dr. Land, who had testified that Emilia might appear to be cool, calm and social—on the outside. “But I believe there is a good deal of anxiety and distress under the surface,” Land told jurors. In all she did, the psychologist then pointed out, Emilia perpetually felt the need to “protect herself.” Through that, she grew increasingly antisocial and disgusted with people who did not feed into her narcissism.

  Brad King had, perhaps, the most profound comments of the day. During his closing, while bringing the totality of the state’s case back down to reality—putting the victim up front and center (where she belonged)—the SA explained why the state had sought the death penalty. King said it was because of the brutal manner in which Heather was kidnapped, held hostage, emotionally and physically tortured, then murdered: “Those evils go to the very heart of our independence and dignity,” King passionately stated, adding that, at its core, that was “the evil” the state of Florida was “looking to punish” in seeking death over life behind bars. Jurors could never forget, King reiterated, regardless of what Emilia Carr had gone through as a child, how deplorably and heartlessly Heather had been treated before she was murdered in such a heinous and cruel manner.

  In her most memorable statement of the defense’s closing (maybe during the entire trial), Candace Hawthorne said Emilia deserved a second chance at life because the molestation she suffered as a child until she was a teen stifled any progress and promise her life might have shown early on. In effect, that repeated sexual abuse by someone who was supposed to protect her took away her dignity and care for other human beings.

  “For a small child to keep that secret,” Hawthorne said of the sexual abuse, “she had to engage in fantasy to take her away.” Hawthorne stopped there, pausing for a brief instant. Anyone who was listening could tell Hawthorne believed this about her client and truly was fighting here to save a life: “She learned to fantasize.”

  A bit of drama unfolded before Hawthorne rested, when Brad King indicated during a sidebar conversation that he wanted to play a videotape of a recent prison visit from Emilia’s sisters and grandmother, in which Emilia and said family members were giggly as they reminisced about the testimony Dr. Land had given. They were actually having a laugh about it.

  Brad King believed this one moment of behind-the-scenes video portrayed the “real” Emilia Carr—the woman who thought a fight for her life was nothing more than a joke. It showed how cold Emilia had become, in King’s view, and that she hadn’t taken the court, the charges or the penalty phase seriously.

  In the end, King never argued further for the tape to be shown to jurors because Hawthorne soon rested and Emilia never testified during the penalty phase.

  CHAPTER 93

  THE JUDGE ORDERED a short recess after King and Hawthorne closed their cases, brought everyone back, and gave the penalty phase of this trial over to the jury for its review and vote.

  It was important to Judge Pope how the jury felt about life or death. In the end, though, it was not up to the jury to decide Emilia’s ultimate fate; all they were doing here was giving the judge a recommendation. Pope would be the final judge, literally, deciding at a later date whether Emilia lived or died. Legally, he could agree or disagree with the jury’s recommendation.

  It took two hours for the jury to come back. Shocking everyone in the courtroom, they had voted to put Emilia Carr on death row, by a margin of seven to five.

  Effectively, one vote had decided the jury’s recommendation of death.

  Judge Pope announced that it would be some time before he made his concluding voice heard in the matter of the State of Florida v. Emilia Carr. The jury’s opinion was important, Emilia and her attorney knew. By law, however, Candace Hawthorne explained to Emilia
and her family, the judge was bound to give the jury’s recommendation “great weight.” He could decide either way, however. And in Florida, judges were known to impose life without parole sentences instead of death. With the vote being so close here, many assumed, Emilia had a good chance—unlike Heather Strong—of escaping death.

  The judge set a hearing date for February 22, 2011.

  CHAPTER 94

  FROM BEHIND BARS, after the penalty phase of her trial was over, Emilia Carr spoke. Local reporter Natalia Martinez, who had covered the trial for WCJB-TV, the northern Florida affiliate of ABC News, interviewed Emilia on December 13, 2010. Emilia was waiting in Marion County Jail for her orders to be shipped off to one of Florida’s maximum-security prisons for women.

  The fact that the jury had recommended death for Emilia had perhaps sobered her thinking. Looking dumpy and deprived of sleep, Emilia wore white-and-red candy-cane-striped prison jumpers. Her hair was a bit disheveled and noticeably dry; there was a strange, obvious gap between her two front, upper teeth.

  “I thought when people saw the trial they would know that I had nothing to do with this,” Emilia proclaimed to Martinez.

  Here she was facing the hour of death and Emilia was still shouting from behind a bullhorn the notion that she was never inside that trailer while Josh was murdering Heather. Detectives Buie and Spivey, Emilia added, as soon as they started “questioning me, first thing they started doing was threatening me with my kids.”

  It was an old, tired argument—one that Emilia had tried already and failed. But she bantered on and on. The entire time she spoke to the police, Emilia explained to Martinez, she was making things up. Emilia had been totally convinced Josh was “trying to put it all on me from the beginning.”

  Most everyone had heard this all before. Emilia sounded desperate. What did she think would happen if she continued? The jury had spoken. All she was doing now was adding additional shovels full of dirt on a grave Judge Pope was perhaps preparing.