And the Sea Will Tell (24 page)

Attached to the letter was Jennifer’s “present,” twenty-four pages of poems. Most were love lyrics, more than a few spiced with erotic images. Lines from one effort—entitled “Shall I Begin?”—caught Kringle’s eye, and the deputy marshal smiled. Walker had written:

Although a former sweetheart or accomplice could often be of assistance in locating a fugitive, it appeared to Kringle that Jennifer could not offer such help, having apparently ended all contact with Walker a long time before his escape. But, Kringle decided, locating the
new
woman in Walker’s life could be the key to apprehending him.

Ruth Claire Thomas, thirty-nine, a short, bespectacled housewife, lived a humdrum existence with her stockbroker husband and two children in a tree-lined Olympia, Washington, housing tract. That is, until she joined the Aloha Club and went on one of its visits to McNeil Island to cheer up inmates from Hawaii. During regularly scheduled social hours in the prison’s recreation hall, Ruth joined other club members in handing out fresh leis to the convicts as taped Hawaiian music played in the background. On her first visit, Ruth met Buck Walker. Soon she was returning just to see him. The day after he escaped, Mrs. Thomas left her family and vanished, but not before cleaning out the family savings account to the last penny.

J
ULY
31, 1981

A
DUSTY PICKUP
pulled off Interstate 8 in Yuma, Arizona, stopping at a gas station. Two men climbed out of the truck. They were wearing blue jeans and cowboy-style shirts with snaps and pointed pockets. Dressed pretty much like the locals, Deputy U.S. Marshals Dick Kringle and Don Baker hardly resembled law enforcement officers hot on the trail of a dangerous wanted fugitive.

Kringle had left Seattle a week before, first checking out a Lake Tahoe address that Ruth Thomas had recently used to acquire a new California driver’s license. After he warned the residents of the penalties for aiding and abetting a fugitive, they confirmed that Buck Walker and Ruth Thomas had stayed there off and on that past summer and gave Kringle a Las Vegas address for Walker, which turned out to be a private postal drop. A few days later, Walker called the Las Vegas mailing center to request that his mail be forwarded to an address in Yuma, another private postal drop, located in an adult bookstore. Within the hour, Kringle was on his way to Arizona, where he rendezvoused with Baker.

At the local sheriff’s office in Yuma, the duded-up lawmen discovered a federal narcotics task force working out of the office and Kringle showed the undercover officers Walker’s mug shot.

“That’s Sean O’Dougal,” said Art Cash of the Drug Enforcement Agency. “We’ve seen him around but not for a few days. He’s tight with a guy named Terry Conner. Conner owns a house in one of Yuma’s nicer neighborhoods and drives a big Lincoln Continental. He likes people to think he sells enough greasy burgers at his hamburger stand to finance his life-style.”

“This hamburger stand in town?”

“No, it’s a truck-stop town called Wellton. About thirty miles east of here.”

“Where does Walker hang out?” Kringle asked.

“We know where he hangs his hat when he’s in town. I’ll show you.”

“By the way, what have you got on Conner?”

“Smuggling. Dealing. He’s bringing in large quantities of Thai heroin. Your guy O’Dougal—or Walker—makes drug runs for him south of the border.”

Kringle smiled narrowly. “That sounds like Bucky.”

Y
UMA
A
UGUST
4, 1981

B
UCK
W
ALKER
still hadn’t shown up.

Kringle decided against staking out the house on Elmwood Avenue where, according to the task force, Walker lived with a woman about forty named Luanne. “Walker is so con-wise, he might see our stakeout before we see him,” he told Baker. “I want him to think it’s safe to come home.”

But Kringle and his partner did drive by the place several times every day. They were looking for a cocoa-brown 1976 Oldsmobile sedan bearing Arizona license ALF752, reputedly Buck’s latest set of wheels.

As they drove for the nth time past the address at about nine in the morning on their fifth day in town, they saw a woman in a faded purple bathrobe taking the garbage out to the curb. She was in curlers, and she looked like bloody hell, but Kringle instantly recognized her.

“Ruth Thomas,” he told Baker.

Now known as Luanne Simmons, Thomas, oldest of the molls among the Conner-Walker gang, had been dubbed the Den Mother by the task force. Pathetically enough, her main man, Walker, was known to be traveling with the youngest woman in the group—the fetching nineteen-year-old daughter of a McNeil Island ex-con. Willingly or not, Ruth Thomas apparently condoned the relationship, for everyone seemed to be one big happily villainous family.

“Still no brown Olds,” Kringle said as they swung around the block. “Still no Bucky.”

When his boss called a few days later, Kringle had to admit he couldn’t anticipate when Walker would return to Yuma. “It could be tomorrow or it could be next month.”

The next day, Kringle boarded a plane for Seattle, leaving Art Cash in charge.

A
FTER MIDNIGHT
,
A
UGUST
12, 1981

A
BROWN
O
LDS
with Arizona plates rolled through the U.S. Customs checkpoint just south of Yuma. The tall, muscular male driver and a much younger female passenger were waved through after a glance in the trunk. The customs agent on duty failed to notice that this car was on the “Border Lookout” list.

At 2:00
A.M.
, a Yuma city policeman spotted the Olds in the parking lot of the Torch Light Motel on the outskirts of town. He radioed in an alert.

Art Cash and his men raced to the scene. All but Cash parked their cars down the street. He pulled his van into the lot next to the unoccupied Olds. He and the agent with him went into the back of the van to observe through the vehicle’s one-way windows.

Ten minutes later, Conner and Walker walked out of Room 16. Both looked around edgily. Walker got into the driver’s seat of the Olds and reached under the front seat for a paper bag. Conner opened the passenger’s door and slid inside. He looked inside the bag, then pulled out an envelope from his pants pocket and handed it over to Walker.

Within seconds armed narcotics agents were descending on the two men. Walker and Conner were yanked out of the car, spread-eagled over the hood, patted down for weapons, and handcuffed.

Cash leaned into the Olds and pulled out the bag and envelope. The envelope was full of cash—at least several thousand dollars. The bag held hundreds of bright-colored capsules. Cash popped one open and tasted the powder. Barbiturates. Fresh from Mexico, Cash guessed.

He looked the big man in the face. “Buck Duane Walker,” he said. “You’re under arrest. So are you, Conner.”

“There’s some mistake,” Walker said. “My name’s Frank Wolf.”

“Okay, Frank Wolf. You’re under arrest.”

NOTE
: In Book Two, a number of in-depth legal discussions have been included in the hope that they will help explain the motivations behind the actions of the participants in this case, and how such actions are viewed in the context of existing law. I believe that these passages will enrich the reading of the book. However, because there are those who may be distracted by such legal asides, wherever possible I have put these legal observations—along with certain other material—in the appendix.

 

—VB

L
OS
A
NGELES
M
ARCH
8, 1982

“V
INCE,” MY SECRETARY ANNOUNCED
over the intercom, “Miss Jenkins is here to see you.”

I greeted my visitor in the reception room and was surprised to see her accompanied by a shaggy little dog with a graying snout.

“Mr. Bugliosi, I’d like you to meet Puffer,” Jennifer said, leaning down to scratch the mutt behind an ear. “She’s my baby.” This was not the usual gambit of a murder suspect.

I ushered both visitors into my law library, and shut the door. Surrounded by wall-to-wall shelves of legal tomes, Jennifer and I sat across from each other at the long mahogany table that dominated the room. Puffer, with a quick wag of her tail, slipped under the table and curled up happily at Jennifer’s feet.

“Puffer goes everywhere with me. She was at Palmyra.”

“Maybe I should interview Puffer, too.”

Jennifer laughed politely, crinkling the laugh lines at the corners of her large brown eyes. The alleged killer of the newspaper headlines had a disarming little girl quality about her.

I had first heard of Palmyra Island only a few weeks earlier. A friend had given me a copy of a three-part series, “Murder on Palmyra,” that had appeared in the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
the year before—an account of Mac and Muff’s disappearance and presumed murder, the grisly discovery of Muff’s skeletal remains and the first-degree murder charges against Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins. My friend knew Ted Jenkins—“he swears his sister is innocent”—and asked that I meet with Jennifer to consider representing her.

Though I suspect I’ll always be thought of as a prosecutor, I have been a defense attorney since I left the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in 1972. I must take a brief moment to add a degree of qualification concerning my defense work, which will help explain what I was looking for in my first meeting with Jennifer Jenkins.

During my career as a prosecutor, I learned that our criminal justice system has a tried-and-true way of filtering out people unjustly accused of breaking the law. Although most individuals arrested
have
indeed committed the offense for which they were arrested, a significant number have not. That mistake is often made on the spur of the moment and under pressure by uniformed officers (who are in my view, because of their daily risk of death, the poorest-paid members of our society). Most such mistakes are corrected at the next level, when plainclothes detectives investigate the case and interview the witnesses. Only when the detectives think the right person was arrested do they seek a criminal complaint from the district attorney’s office. But the careful filtering continues. In Los Angeles County, for example, prosecutors reject about half of the cases brought to them. Most refusals to prosecute stem from a lack of sufficient evidence, but in some cases, the deputy DA may believe the wrong person has been arrested. Only when the charges against an individual seem both proper
and
strong enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law does the prosecutor file the criminal complaint. A preliminary hearing is then held before a municipal court judge, who decides whether the prosecutor has enough evidence to go to trial. As high a proportion as 15 percent of all criminal cases in Los Angeles County are dismissed at this hearing. Even when the judge sets the case for trial, the defense can file a motion requesting still another pretrial judicial review of the evidence, this time by a superior court judge, who determines whether or not there’s sufficient evidence to warrant a trial. (Jennifer, by the way, had been indicted for murder in a federal court, where the filtering-out process is less thorough than in the state court system.)

Once a defendant has gone through all of these levels and the case has reached the trial court, it’s probable that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the true robber, rapist, or murderer is sitting at the defense table. In other words, most defense attorneys necessarily spend their careers defending guilty people.

“Everyone is entitled to be represented by an attorney” is the idealistic chant often recited by defense attorneys as justification for representing even the most vicious criminals in our society. The concept is unassailable, but idealism is rarely what motivates lawyers who represent guilty defendants. They take the work because trying cases is their livelihood, and they are ambitious to advance their careers. These motivations, while perfectly proper, are clearly not idealistic.

True idealism would be involved in a hypothetical situation such as the following. Suppose a family is brutally murdered in a small town, and none of the six lawyers in town is willing to represent the suspect because the enraged citizens are all convinced of the suspect’s guilt and no lawyer wants to be ostracized in the community for attempting to get the suspect off. Finally, one attorney steps forward and says, “I don’t care what my friends at the Rotary Club and the First Baptist Church say. This is America, and everyone is entitled under the Sixth Amendment to our Constitution to be represented by an attorney.”

That would be idealism. I, too, would represent a defendant—even one I believed to be guilty of murder—if I were the only lawyer available, because the right to counsel is a sacred right in our society and much more important than any personal predilection I might have. But this type of situation simply does not exist in a city like Los Angeles, where 35,000 lawyers stumble over each other’s feet for cases. So I am free to follow my inclination.

Since nothing in the canons of ethics of the American Bar Association says a lawyer has to represent everyone who comes to his door, I choose not to defend anyone charged with a violent crime unless I believe he is innocent or, if guilty, that there are substantially mitigating circumstances. (By the latter, I don’t mean the question said to be asked about the victim by hard-bitten sheriffs in rural Texas at the start of any homicide investigation: “Did he
need
killing?”) I investigate my own cases, and if I become satisfied in my own mind that the person is guilty, with no substantial mitigation, I routinely refer the case to other lawyers. I simply have no motivation whatsoever to knock myself out working a hundred hours a week, as I frequently do, trying to figure out a way to get some murderer off. Of course, theoretical purists might say I am prejudging the accused, and that a person cannot be considered guilty of a crime unless brought to trial and found so by a judge or jury. But under that argument, Adolf Hitler never committed any crimes, Jack the Ripper never committed any crimes, and the only crime Al Capone ever committed was income tax evasion.

Obviously, if a person, for instance, robs a bank, he is guilty of having robbed the bank, irrespective of whether or not the prosecution can prove this fact to the satisfaction of the jury. A legal verdict of “not guilty” doesn’t change the reality of what he did.

My position is not a matter of high ethics. It’s just that I would have a difficult time living with myself if I did otherwise. As a prosecutor, I handled some twenty-one first-degree murder cases before a jury. Every one of the defendants was convicted, and eight were on Death Row when, in 1972, the California state supreme court ruled that the death penalty, as then being implemented, was unconstitutional. How could I possibly start defending these same types of people in order to earn a living? If it came to that, I would rather stop practicing law and find another job. I am also not unmindful of the fact that were I to secure a not-guilty verdict for one of these defendants I represented, and he went out and did it again, I could rationalize all I wanted, but I would be partially responsible. If I had not deceived the jury, there would not have been a second murder.

In a nutshell, although I’ve never been a law-and-order fanatic, I do believe that those who have committed serious crimes should be severely punished, and I do not want to be in a position of actively seeking to thwart this natural justice.

One illustration of my dilemma in legal defense work is the case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, the Princeton-educated former U.S. Army Green Beret who was accused of savagely stabbing to death his pregnant wife and two young daughters in their Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home one rainy night in March 1970. He was first charged with the murders that year, but the case against him was dropped. It was sometime in late 1973 or early 1974 that a woman friend of MacDonald’s came to my office and told me that the doctor, who was then working as an emergency-room physician in nearby Long Beach, had learned that he was about to be reindicted. Would I be interested in representing him? We could talk about it, I said, if the doctor was innocent. “Tell him, though, that for starters I want him to take and pass a polygraph test.” I was interested because the MacDonald case could provide the kind of high visibility I needed to start changing my public image from that of prosecutor to defense attorney. While waiting to hear from him, I telephoned the federal prosecutor handling the case in North Carolina and asked what he had against MacDonald. The prosecutor would not say very much, but did mention a few pieces of evidence to me, one of which was that fibers from MacDonald’s blue pajamas were found embedded beneath the fingernails of his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. That evoked in my mind the horrifying scene of a little girl crying out, “Daddy, Daddy, no,” as she reached out and struggled against her father while he stabbed her to death. That was enough for me. I wanted nothing to do with the case. MacDonald’s lady friend called a week later anyway to say that he did not think it was necessary to take a polygraph as a precondition to my representing him. Convicted of the triple murder in 1979, he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison.
^*

Now, after reading the series about the Palmyra Island murder case, I was characteristically reluctant to defend Jennifer Jenkins. The way I saw it, if four people were alone on an uninhabited island and two were murdered, what was the likelihood that either of the other two people was innocent, particularly when both ended up in Hawaii with the victim’s boat, acting very suspiciously? The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Attorney in Hawaii, and a federal grand jury had examined the evidence and concurred that Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins had together committed the murders. And two juries had already found Walker and Jenkins guilty of stealing the boat together. Before I agreed to defend her, I had to be confident she was not a killer.

After the preliminary pleasantries, Jennifer told me her family had tried to contact me after the murder indictment in 1981. “My Uncle Harold called your office and left his name and number, but you were out of town.”

I couldn’t remember receiving any such message, but I had been in Chicago in the winter of 1980–81 for a three-month federal jury trial. In any event, Jennifer’s family hired Barry Tarlow, a prominent Los Angeles criminal defense attorney. Soon he was replaced by defense attorneys Brian J. O’Neill and Leonard Weinglass. O’Neill had since withdrawn from the case, but Weinglass would remain as co-counsel if I agreed to represent Jennifer. Though I had never met him, I knew a little about Weinglass, who some feel is the most respected trial lawyer for the political left in America. His most famous case was the Chicago Seven trial, in which he defended the late Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and two other defendants. He had also been a defense attorney in the historic Pentagon Papers case.

In a major criminal trial, particularly a murder case, it is common for the defendant to be represented by two or even three lawyers. (Buck Walker had already lined up two court-appointed defense attorneys, Earle Partington and Ray Findlay, both from Honolulu.) On the other hand, as a longtime prosecutor, I’d never envisioned the day I would be on the same side of the aisle as the likes of Leonard Weinglass.

I told Jennifer I hoped she’d had nothing to do with the murders of Mac and Muff Graham.

She sighed. “I’m guilty of making some mistakes in my life, but I didn’t kill Mac and Muff.”

I watched her intently for a moment. “Then I assume you’re willing to take a polygraph?”

“Yes,” she answered with no hesitation. “I’ll take whatever test you or the Government want to give me. Lie detector, sodium pentothal, you name it. And the jury can hear the results.”

“Whatever they may be?”

“Yes.”

What Jennifer had just said was extremely important to me. Most guilty people don’t want to take any kind of a truth-discovering test. Even those who are willing have been told by their lawyers that the results cannot be introduced at their trial without their consent, which, if they fail the test, they obviously never give. Here, Jennifer had offered to not only take any test I or her accusers wanted to give her, but to let the jury hear the results, whatever they turned out to be. How could she possibly be willing to do this if she was guilty?

Jennifer had made a significant stride toward convincing me of her innocence.

“Anyway,” she added, “Barry Tarlow had me take a polygraph test last year, right after the indictment. I passed.”

I made a note to confirm that.

Now I wanted to get to the case. “Tell me everything that happened. Start at the beginning, when you met Buck, and take your time.”

When I next looked at my watch, it was nearly 10:00
P.M.
, and Jennifer was far from finished with her story. I had, of course, slowed her down by asking for clarifications and interjecting questions.

“It’s late,” she said, trying to stifle a yawn.

“Let’s call it a night. Jennifer, I repeat that I will not be able to represent you if it ever appears that you had anything
at all
to do with these two murders.”

“Since I’m innocent,” she said confidently, “that’s fine with me.”

I handed Jennifer a fresh yellow legal pad. “Whenever you think of anything favorable to your case, I want you to write it down. Make another list of everything you think is unfavorable, along with any explanations you may have. Next time we meet, we’ll go over your notes.”