The Corpse as Big as the Ritz
Page 6
“By the time I saw the policeman I had heard that Mr. Whiting was dead,” Sarah replied. “This was when I was in a bad way.”
“Do you recall that conversation with the officer at all?” the Deputy County Attorney asked.
“No. I just told him what had happened.”
“But you remember what you told him at this time?” the Deputy County Attorney persisted.
At precisely this point Sarah burst into tears.
“The truth,” she sobbed urgently. “The same as I’m giving you now, I think.”
The courtroom was silent. At his desk, the Deputy County Attorney looked down at his hands as if in remorse for having trespassed the bounds of decency with his ferocious questioning. From his bench, the Justice of the Peace leaned over toward Sarah and patted her hand comfortingly. When Sarah had wiped the tears from her eyes, the Deputy County Attorney started an entirely new line of questioning and did not venture near the subject again.
There was one final moment of high melodrama at the inquest. The questioning was over, and Sarah, face flushed and stained with tears, asked to make two final statements. First, she declared, she had never resisted testifying before the inquest. “I was bulldozed by my husband, producers, Burt Reynolds, MGM,” she said. “I wanted to go as soon as I could…and I was not allowed to do this and for this I feel a grudge.”
And second, she said, there was the matter of David Whiting’s body, still languishing at that time in Mr. Ganley’s refrigerator wrapped up in a sheet. (As of this writing, about three months after his death, the body is still languishing unburied in the refrigerator of the Bayview mortuary in Berkeley, “awaiting further tests” and further word from Mrs. Campbell, who hasn’t been heard from in some time, an employee of the mortuary told me.)
“I hear from my attorney,” Sarah told the Gila Bend courtroom, “that somebody doesn’t want to bury this boy and that the state is going to bury him.”
Sarah rose up in the witness stand, eyes wet. “Well, I would like to bury him!” she cried. With that, she rushed from the courtroom.
Sarah Miles never contacted him, Mr. Ganley told me. “No sir. I’ve never heard from Miles or anyone of that type. In fact,” said Mr. Ganley, “they weren’t even interested in David Whiting after his death.”
I asked him what he meant by that, and he told me this story.
It was the afternoon of the death. Mr. Ganley was in room 127 with the body of David Whiting, helping the investigators prepare it for shipment to the County Morgue in Phoenix for an autopsy.
“Miss Miles was in the room next door, and she sent word over she wanted to come in and get a dress because they were having a party up at the bar and she wanted to get up there. And the investigators wouldn’t let her have the dress. They told her when they were through with the room she could get anything she wanted out of it.”
“But that was what she wanted—a party dress?”
“Yeah, she wanted to go to the Elks Club, they were having a barbecue for Reynolds’s birthday,” Mr. Ganley said.
Meanwhile, Burt Reynolds was in his room talking with a couple of his friends, trying to decide whether to go to that Elks Club party or not. The party was for him, of course, and he would disappoint a lot of the Gila Bend people if he didn’t show up. But then, there had been that unfortunate death, and that made it hard for him to feel like celebrating.
Finally, according to one of the people in the room with Burt, the decision came down to this. “Burt said something like if it had been an accident, that was one thing, then it was tragic, you know, and it was no time to party. But if it was suicide, if this guy was so worthless he didn’t have the guts to face life, then why spoil the party?”
Burt went to the party.
—Esquire
August 1973