Almost Midnight (28 page)

“Yeah, he told me to tell the truth.”

Indeed, it was so. On at least two occasions during their fugitive days—once in Tucson, and again immediately after the arrest outside Phoenix—Darrell had communicated as much to Mary. If she ever found herself backed up against the wall, she should tell everything she knew, without worrying about the consequences. He expected she’d be reluctant to do so, but he gave her the green light, insisting this was what he wanted. Bringing this out here, Wendt was hoping to show the jury a side of Darrell, honorable, selfless, ingenuous, that might give them pause later on when they were chalking up the final score.

Wendt now returned to the main business of the morning, trying to show that Darrell was so freaked out by Lloyd, and so addled by crank, that he couldn’t possibly have killed Willie with cool deliberation.

“Now, then, Darrell was also concerned about Lloyd converting you into his girlfriend, was he—did he express that concern to you?”

“Darrell did, yes.”

“And I really don’t want to embarrass you but did you ever ingest any of these Lloyd Lawrence drugs at all? The—I guess it’s called crystal—do you remember, did you ever do that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Does—in your experience with Darrell, he was—there was a time during his relationship, was there not, with Lloyd Lawrence that he was—that Darrell was taking these drugs frequently?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t that cause a kind of a—I’ll use the word mental upset or emotional upset? When you—I call it paranoia … do you know what the term
paranoia
is?”

“Yes.”

McCullah objected to this line of questioning, saying it was a matter for expert testimony. Mary wasn’t competent to address a technicality such as paranoia. Judge McGuire brushed him off, one of the few times during the trial that the prosecution didn’t get its way.

“Now,” Wendt went on, “did Darrell get paranoid during this period of time building up to when he felt that it was either him going to get killed or someone else? Did he get paranoid and very suspicious?”

“Yes.”

Of course, as Wendt took pains to establish at this point, Darrell’s fear of being killed by Lloyd wasn’t entirely unreasonable. He may have been prone to paranoia, he may have been corkscrewed by crank, but the threat was acutely real. Lloyd was after them, and both Darrell and Mary were fully aware of it.

“Were you personally afraid for your own life prior to [the killings]?” he continued, driving the point home.

“Yes.”

“In fact, that’s why you and Darrell were running, is that not true, afraid of Lloyd and his crew?”

“Yeah, I was more afraid after the drugs were taken.”

Wendt took another slight detour at this point, trying to fill in some gaps in the narrative, then once again returned to his main theme.

“All right. Would it be proper for me to say that within—or to
suggest, I’m going to suggest—and tell me if it’s the truth—within a two- or three-month period prior to these deaths that you and Darrell were crazy with fear about being killed yourselves? Isn’t that true?”

“Yes, he was. I didn’t really know what was going on, I—”

“When Darrell spoke to you about Lloyd Lawrence the last three months before this terrible death or deaths, did he become upset, mad, and angry about Lloyd, not at you, about Lloyd?”

“Yes.”

“And he was that way when you dropped him off immediately prior to the deaths, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He didn’t—he was—didn’t say nothing, really.”

“But he was a different man those two or three days before you dropped him off, was he not?” Wendt asked, leaning in now. “From the man you knew and wanted to marry previously, he was a different man, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.” Mary losing it momentarily, sobbing, Judge McGuire handing her a box of tissue, Darrell thinking,
Forget about it, Bill. Leave her alone. It’s not worth it
.

“If you need a break, I’m sure the judge would give you one,” Wendt said, consolingly.

“I’m okay.” Mary, sniveling, apparently over the worst of it.

Maybe it was Mary’s small emotional outburst, but Wendt seemed to start sputtering here, the momentum he’d built up strangely halted.

“Okay,” he said. “And you and Lloyd at one time had planned to marry, I believe. Faux pas there, Judge—but had you and Darrell planned to marry?”

“Yes.”

“Had you ever dated Lloyd?” Wendt asked, incongruously.

“Dated Lloyd?” Mary said, voice raised, incredulous.

“Yes.”

“No.”

Wendt’s moment had passed. He continued to press Mary, even taking a second shot at her in re-cross before lunch, but nothing
much came of it. At one point Mary confirmed that Darrell “was insanely obsessed with the fact that Lloyd had men trying to kill us,” but mostly she took refuge behind one-word, yes-or-no answers, rarely elaborating. Wendt never stopped trying but his resolve seemed weakened. He was like a guy dutifully seeing some unpleasant business through to the finish, perhaps wondering why he’d taken it on in the first place. In the end the road he’d been trying to take the jury down petered out in a thicket of detail. Bad drugs, shady arrest warrants, backroom deals: everything was laid out, but the thing he’d most wanted to impress the jury with, namely Darrell’s manic and fearful state of mind prior to the killings, had been lost in the scenery. He’d pointed it out, danced around it some, but he hadn’t succeeded in fixing it as a primary point of reference.

All eyes in the courtroom had been trained on Mary throughout the morning, but Bill McCullah occasionally stole a glance over to the defense table, trying to get a read on Darrell, to see how he was reacting to being betrayed by his girlfriend. If Darrell was hurt, angry, or disappointed, if he even saw Mary’s testimony as a betrayal, he wasn’t letting on. He simply sat there, calm and dignified, almost stoical, watching Mary intently, flashing her smiles of encouragement, silently cheering her on.

With Mary’s testimony wrapped up, the court was recessed for lunch. Escorted off the witness stand by Jim Justus’s wife, Mary was forced to pause for a couple of seconds by the defense table, waiting out a bit of congestion as people in the front rows of the gallery filed out into the aisle and made their way to the door. All morning long and the day before, Mary had avoided making direct eye contact with Darrell, but now here she was, practically standing in his shadow, Darrell looking up at her from his chair, wordlessly pleading for some kind of connection, anything. Perhaps feeling his hopeful gaze brushing the side of her face, Mary turned and for a brief moment, three or four seconds, they locked in.

“You done good, baby. I love you,” Darrell said, grinning broadly.

Mary nodded, a trace of a smile on her lips, then she was hustled out the door and into the corridor.

With its long counter, private booths, and bargain-priced menu, Hamby’s Steak House was a favorite lunchtime hangout for the courthouse crowd. The place was usually a smorgasbord of gossip, but today it was the Mease trial and not much else. An old-time lawyer, white-hair and three-piece suit, sharing a booth up front with a younger colleague and a reporter, the old courthouse visible across the street, suggested that a guilty verdict was all but signed, sealed, and delivered.

“It’s all over but the crying,” he said. “The girlfriend did him in. Wendt can call in the cavalry now, it’s not gonna do him any good.”

“It wasn’t the girlfriend,” the reporter volunteered. “It was a lost cause to start with. If Wendt can save the guy from the needle, get him life without parole, he’s done more than anybody could have expected.”

“I don’t know, let’s not sell Wendt short,” the younger lawyer said. “He might still have a card or two up his sleeve. I’m going back over for the summing up, see how it comes out.”

“You’re wasting your time,” the first lawyer said, wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “When it’s done, it’s done. And this one’s good and done.”

If anyone still had a card up his sleeve, it was Jim Justus, not Wendt. After lunch Jim called Jack Merritt to the stand again. He questioned Jack in detail about the circumstances surrounding the taking of Darrell’s videotaped confession and then played the videotape for the jury. Wendt tried roughing Jack up in cross-examination, accusing him of wheedling the confession out of Darrell, but the investigator stood his ground, insisting that he’d played it strictly by the book.

With the case for the prosecution now completed, the ball was in Wendt’s court. He wasn’t able to do much with it. He had no moves left—at least none he thought worth making. He summoned no witnesses, and he decided against putting Darrell on the stand. Wendt had taken his best shots, almost worn himself out, cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses. Anything he had left, he’d save for the closing argument.

By this point Jim and McCullah smelled blood; they were eager
to go straight for the kill. During a brief conference in the judge’s chambers they told McGuire that they wanted an instruction for first-degree murder only. They didn’t want the jury to have the option of convicting Darrell for murder in the second degree. It was all or nothing—a calculated risk, but the two young and hungry prosecutors were oozing confidence. They felt they couldn’t lose. Over Wendt’s protests, McGuire acceded to their request. The jury would have the option of either acquitting Darrell or convicting him of first-degree murder—nothing in between. The odds for acquittal were about a million-to-one. Under Missouri law there were only two possible penalties for a first-degree murder conviction: life without parole, or death by lethal injection.

Wendt’s closing argument wasn’t one of his finer moments. He sputtered and stuttered, never quite finding his stride, three times referring to Darrell as Lloyd.
Lloyd! Calling his own client Lloyd again!
Only toward the end did he muster a bit of the flourish for which he was famous, insisting there was reasonable doubt that Darrell had acted with deliberation, the key element in first-degree murder.

“Now, then, we’re talking about deliberation,” he said, facing the jury. “What did the State’s own witness say about the defendant’s state of mind? I’m talking here about cool reflection upon the matter for any length of time: What did she say, Mary Epps, about Darrell’s state of mind at the time he was let out of the car prior to these deaths? She used the word ‘obsessed.’ And then I asked her, I said, well, was he extremely disturbed mentally?—and I think Bill here complained about the use of the term ‘mentally,’ but she said, yes, he was disturbed mentally. I said, Was he mad? Yes. Was he frightened? She said, Yes. I said, Was he upset? She said, Yes. So, the last evidence that we have on the state of mind, this element of deliberation, Darrell, is from Mary. Now if you believe that Mary’s telling the truth, if you believe that she was in fear of her own life from Lloyd Lawrence and that Darrell was in fear of his own life, you’re not going to be able to find deliberation beyond a reasonable doubt. And I ask you to find him not guilty and let the prosecutors
go to the law books and start all over again, however the law will let them do that.”

Jim Justus, summing up for the prosecution, wasted no time coming to the point.

“Willie Lawrence is asking you to protect him,” he told the jury. “He was killed because he could identify Lloyd’s and his grandmother Frankie’s killer. That killer is Darrell Mease, who intentionally planned, who for a period of three days laid in wait in the woods with the arsenal that he had for the one sole purpose of killing someone. And has the State proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he deliberated on it? They most certainly have. And that’s why when you go from this room to deliberate, we’re asking you to come back with a finding of guilt of first-degree murder.”

The jury of nine women and three men left for the jury room at five-forty. Less than an hour later, early-evening sunlight slanting through the courtroom’s high windows, they returned with their verdict.

Guilty. Murder in the first degree.

Willie’s dad, Buck, was in the courtroom when the verdict was read, a stocky, big-faced man wearing glasses and a sports shirt open at the collar. Several minutes later, surrounded by reporters out in the corridor, he said, “I just feel like it was a fair verdict. It couldn’t come out any other way.” Not sounding vindictive, taking no real pleasure in it, just breathing some relief.

Buck’s wife, Anita, was an exemplar of class and compassion. After the verdict was announced she sought out Darrell’s mom and sat with her for a couple of minutes on a wooden bench in the corridor, commiserating, whispering words of condolence, one deeply religious woman to another. A bit later, buttonholed by a reporter, tearful, her voice quaking, she expressed sympathy for Darrell’s family.

“I feel for them because I know what I had to go through losing my son,” she said, “and I’d hate to think anybody else has to go through what we have had to go through.”

Lexie was momentarily shaken but when she stood to face the
cameras, Rita beside her with mascara-streaked tears running down her cheeks, she spoke with brave conviction. “Darrell still has his faith in God, and we just go from here,” she said.

T
HE PENALTY PHASE
of the trial took place the next day. Since there were only two possible punishments for Darrell’s murder-one conviction, execution or life without parole, Wendt’s job was straightforward: save his client from the execution chamber. The key was to present as many mitigating circumstances as possible, lighten the load of guilt, so to speak, and also to humanize Darrell, show the jury the boy behind the man, the man behind the outlaw. Show them the sweet hillbilly kid, the kid with the infectious smile who aced Bible drills every Sunday at his hometown church, the Vietnam veteran who couldn’t catch a break after returning home from a war he’d wanted nothing to do with in the first place.

In preparation for just such an eventuality, Lexie had been rounding up character witnesses, putting in the call to old friends and family members, folks who knew Darrell before the sky caved in and who’d be happy testifying on his behalf. In a matter of days she’d landed more than forty people; she easily could have managed twice that number. Boyhood friends such as Mike Langston; old stomping buddies such as Ronnie Dickens, Keith Thurman, and Bruce Broomfield; cousins and aunts and uncles: they all said they’d be pleased to help out any way they could. Nobody turned her down.