04.Die.My.Love.2007 (37 page)
Read 04.Die.My.Love.2007 Online
Authors: Kathryn Casey
Meanwhile, in the Henrico jail, with time on her hands, Piper wrote letters to her children at Michael Jablin’s house in northern Virginia. She’d been trying to call them, she said, but she assumed no one had told them of her messages.
She included instructions on how to accept a collect call from the jail, and said that she understood their world had been dealt a horrible blow. Yet, she contended that she didn’t understand why she was being charged, and even claimed that the police had told her she’d been cleared.
In closing, Piper said she was close to them with every breath she took, and that, in her sleep, she sent her spirit to be with them.
272 / Kathryn Casey
There was no doubt that it must have been a confusing time for all three of the children.
At the end of November, Owen Ashman went to the Boyds’ home, and Michael Jablin brought the three children there to meet with her. Immediately, Ashman was struck by how beautiful the children were and how quiet, although when she arrived, they were with their friends in the kitchen, making cookies.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Owen began. “But there are some things we need to talk about. They may not seem important to you, but they could help us find out who did this.”
What the prosecutor didn’t say was that the evidence the children had to offer could help prove their own mother had murdered their father. That wasn’t something Ashman wanted the children to consider. And it wasn’t really true. Despite the potential damage their testimony could deal their mother’s defense, the children weren’t actually testifying against her, only telling the truth as they knew it.
That afternoon, Paxton was
matter-of-fact, saying his
mother had called him that Friday while he was playing poker with his friends in one boy’s garage. The poker craze was on across the country, especially on television, and the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds had been betting for nickels and dimes. Piper had talked not only with him but with his friend, Russell Bootwright.
Throughout the conversation, none of the children asked Owen questions, although their minds must have been reel-ing with them: Did our mother kill our father? Or, who killed our father? Owen understood. She knew they wanted their lives to go on and be normal, just as she and her brothers had wanted after her own father’s death.
“We didn’t want to talk about it, either,” she says.
By early December, Wade Kizer had brought on his right-hand man to work on the Rountree case, the chief deputy DIE, MY LOVE / 273
commonwealth’s attorney, Duncan Reid, an angular man with dark hair graying at the temples, a salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, and a passionate energy. In his twenty-eight years as a prosecutor, Reid had never gotten over the thrill of walking into a courtroom. Unlike many attorneys, he enjoyed trying a case in front of a judge and a jury. “I like being on the right side,” he says. “If I don’t have the evidence, I drop the case before opening arguments begin.”
When he looked at the Jablin case, Reid thought he understood how Fred had become so immersed in fatherhood. Happily married for thirty years, Reid was like that with his own children, taking them to intellectual competitions, swimming and soccer, working around the house with them and riding bikes. “Being a parent is a hard job, and I think the world of people who are single parents and do it well,” he says.
The week before he began on the Rountree case, Reid had tried a home invasion case where a gun had been put to the head of a two-year-old. Two people had been killed. After it was over, Kizer had promised Reid a break, but when he considered Reid’s talents, he recanted the promise and asked him to work with Ashman on the Jablin case. The talent he wanted was Reid’s ability to interpret cell phone rec ords.
With all the cases his office had pending, Kizer considered the Rountree cell phone rec ords a daunting task. They were two and a half inches thick, single spaced, with thousands of calls. Kizer’s payoff for enlisting Reid’s services came quickly. One of the first days he examined the rec ords, Reid singled out the 411 information calls on the bills. One, he noticed in particular, made on the Wednesday before the murder, had an unidentified number called immediately after it. When he dialed that number, the person who answered said, “Sportsman’s Outlet.”
“What kind of a place is this?” Reid asked.
“A gun range,” the man said, and in Richmond, Duncan Reid smiled.
274 / Kathryn Casey
* * *
What she didn’t do was rent a gun.
“She brought the gun with her?” Breck asked.
“Well, she didn’t rent one here,” the clerk told him.
No one at the gun range could identify the woman in the photo, but when Kelley went in to tell Captain Stem what McDaniel had discovered, Stem was pleased. “Despite being an attorney, Piper Rountree left a lot of bread crumbs lying around. She thought she was smarter than the rest of us,” he told him. “Too bad for her when she fi nds out she’s not.”
Kelley had described the Volcano bar and the cast of characters in Houston for the prosecutors: Piper’s lover, Jerry Walters, the cowboy oilman with the gruff voice; Carol Freed, the brash comic; Mac, the rock and roll DJ and Tina’s long-time boyfriend; and Charles Tooke, the guy who’d had a crush on Piper. In early December, Owen and Kizer fl ew with Kelley to Houston, where they’d be able to personally size up their future witnesses.
Their first day there, they met with Carol Freed at HPD
headquarters, and Wade presented her with an immunity agreement to sign, one that said if she cooperated and testified truthfully about all she knew, she wouldn’t be prosecuted as an “accessory after the fact to the murder of Fred Jablin.”
The woman Tina called “Cari” had brought two things DIE, MY LOVE / 275
with her to give them as well: the business card Piper had given her with a hand-drawn map to the Kingwood house on the back, and a purple long- sleeve T-shirt Freed said belonged to Piper.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said to them. “Piper gave this shirt to me and asked me to get rid of it.”
Looking at the shirt, they wondered what forensic evidence it might offer. They immediately bagged it and had it shipped to Henrico for analysis.
Kizer then told Freed that he wanted her to show them the places where she and Tina had retrieved the garbage bags.
Following her Geo Metro with Breck McDaniel, in his unmarked car, the prosecutors and Kelley drove through Houston until they hit a point where McDaniel questioned where Freed was taking them.
“We’re not going the right way,” he said.
Kelley dialed Freed’s cell number. “What’s up?” he asked.
In the backseat, Ashman and Kizer were chuckling about something unrelated to the case, but Kelley surmised from the tone of her voice that Freed thought they were laughing at her.
“I know,” Freed said, sounding angry. “I’m making a U-turn.”
Minutes later they pulled into a Texas Medical Center parking lot and drove up the entrance ramp, until Freed pulled up in front of a Dumpster. With that, they all got out of their cars.
“You really need to work on how you talk to people,”
Freed, still furious, said to Kelley.
“Cari, have I done something to offend you?” he asked.
Seething, with no explanation, Freed got back in her car and drove off.
“Did I say something to offend her?” Kelley asked, turning to Kizer.
The prosecutor shrugged.
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Freed returned minutes later and got out of the car, calmer.
“I know I’m in a bind,” she said. “I need to cooperate.”
Ashman knew she was still furious. The prosecutor saw the entire episode as odd, as if Freed had just “snapped.”
“Cari, is everything okay?” Ashman asked. But she didn’t answer.
An hour or so later they were in the convenience store parking lot, looking at the second Dumpster, when Freed snapped again with no explanation, driving off and leaving them behind.
“Let’s give her a little time,” Owen said.
But this time Carol Freed didn’t return.
The first time Kelley went to the 59 Gun Range, no one volunteered that they’d remembered seeing Piper. This time, with Wade and Owen beside him, the response from one of the men behind the counter was markedly different.
“I remember that woman, the one you were showing the picture of last time you were in here,” said one of the fi rearms instructors, Boyd Adams. “Someone else was helping her and the guy she was with at first, and then I went over and helped them.”
Kelley was skeptical. Why would Adams suddenly remember now when he hadn’t earlier? Then the man said something that got all their attention. “I noticed her because she was really pretty, and we don’t usually get attractive women in here,” Adams said. “And because that woman said she had her sister’s identifi cation.”
When Kelley again showed Boyd the photo of Piper in the red dress, he immediately said, “That’s her. I’m ninety-fi ve percent sure.”
“Did she rent the .38 she shot?” Kelley asked.
“No,” Adams said. “She walked outside and came back in with that. She bought some ammo for it, but it was her gun.”
* * *
DIE, MY LOVE / 277
When Wade Kizer called Jerry Walters to set up a meeting, Walters was on his way to Victoria, Texas, 130 miles south of Houston, for work. He’d just gotten a call that his ten-year-old bloodhound, Bertha, who he’d spent thousands on to treat for bone cancer, had died. “Come if you have to. If you can find your way to the La Quinta,” he growled.
Before they left Houston, however, the phone rang. Carol Freed was calling. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I’ll be properly medicated in the courtroom, when I testify.”
They met her at a small Mexican chain restaurant called Chipolte. As soon as Freed saw Kelley, she walked up and gave him a hug. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” he responded.
“No, no,” she said. They talked for about an hour, Freed confirming for Wade and Ashman all she’d told Kelley.
Later that day, at the La Quinta Hotel in Victoria, Texas, Jerry Walters wasn’t in a good mood. He hadn’t looked forward to talking to the investigators anyway, and now Bertha was dead and he’d been up all night driving from Baton Rouge to get there in time to work that Monday morning. He was tired and out of sorts.
They talked, Jerry explaining what he’d told Kelley about the bank account and the cell phone calls. The prosecutors both wondered if he’d held back information. There was that phone call, eleven minutes, to him from Piper on the day of the murder. Had she confessed to him and he wasn’t admitting it?
“I don’t remember that phone call,” Walters told them, just as he’d told Kelley. “I’m sorry, but I can’t even tell you if we talked or not.”
The next day, at Hobby Airport, Allan Benestante, the security agent, and Kathy Molley, the ticket agent, both easily identifi ed the woman they’d talked with as the woman in the 278 / Kathryn Casey
photo again. By then Benestante had seen Piper on television, and he felt more certain she was the woman who checked the gun. And at the Volcano, Kevin O’Keefe told the prosecutors the strange story of Piper’s visit there that ended with her bringing in a notary to get signed statements. All went as Kelley and the others had expected. Much of the purpose for the trip was being fulfilled in just meeting the pivotal witnesses in the Rountree case, to become familiar with them so they’d be more relaxed when they were called to the witness stand.
The only glitch occurred when they sat down with Charles Tooke. He recounted to Kizer and Ashman the same events he’d told Kelley about, but then he asked the two prosecutors, “I wish you could tell me about that phone call from the neighbor’s yard,” he said.
“What phone call?” Ashman asked.
Coby Kelley, Tooke insisted, had told him that Piper had made a call on her cell phone from the neighbor’s yard just minutes before the shooting. Kelley would later say that Tooke had misunderstood, while Charles would maintain he knew he was right. The call had, in fact, been a few miles from the Hearthglow house early the morning of the shooting.
From that point on, Tooke’s relationship with the prosecutors cooled. In the end, as the trial approached, it would become frigid, and the defense would try to use that to their advantage.
In December, Duncan Reid filed a motion asking for saliva samples from Piper Rountree, swabs taken of her throat using a buccal brush that could be used to break down her gene tic material and process her DNA. They had the T-shirt Carol Freed had given them to compare it with, along with items from the rented van and the murder scene. The court granted the request.
Another matter came to light that month that caused concern in Murray Janus’s office: Prosecutors discovered that one of Fred Jablin’s life insurance
policies—$200,000,
taken out years earlier through TransAmerica—still listed Piper as the benefi ciary. All along the prosecutors had coupled two motives for the murder: Piper’s desire to regain her children and the possibility of financial gain. In the past, they’d had a rather circuitous argument to establish the money motive: If Piper had custody of the children, not only would the nearly $900 a month child support payments she’d been ordered to pay Fred end, but with Fred dead, Piper, as the children’s guardian, could have expected to control all the family assets—Fred’s money plus his substantial life insurance. Now the path was even clearer: With Fred dead, Piper individually stood to inherit a $200,000 bonanza.