And the Sea Will Tell (28 page)

H
ONOLULU

H
AWAII’S LEGAL
machinery turned full circle with the assignment of U.S. District Court Judge Samuel P. King to handle the two Palmyra Island murder cases. King had presided at the boat-theft trials of both defendants, and following their convictions, had meted out their prison sentences.

At Jennifer’s sentencing, Judge King had commented: “I’m satisfied that quite a few of your explanations of what happened were, if not untruthful, certainly not the whole truth. Though you’ve not been charged with murder in this case, there is the underlying nagging question of just what happened to the Grahams.”

With such a negative opinion of my client’s earlier testimony (though an accurate one given her obvious perjury), I wondered how King would treat Jennifer at her new trial.

King, of Hawaiian ancestry, was born in Hankow, China, in 1917, and had ascended to the bench in part because of useful connections, both political and familial. In 1953, his father had been appointed governor of the Hawaiian Territories by President Eisenhower.

The King family was staunchly Republican, and the younger King, a graduate of Yale Law School, served as Hawaii’s Republican Party central committee chairman from 1953 to 1955. During the 1954 elections, Sam King earned the sobriquet “Redbaiter” with this remarkable outcry: “No one is accusing
all
the Democrats of being Communists, but they are politically obligated to the Communists.” In 1961, King was appointed judge of the First Circuit Court of Hawaii.

In 1970, showing how deep his political roots ran, he stepped down from the state bench to run for governor. He won the Republican primary, but was defeated in the general election by Democratic incumbent John Burns. King spent the next two years in the private practice of law, meanwhile serving on the Republican National Committee. In 1972, King received his reward for loyal service to the GOP when President Nixon named him to the federal bench.

As early as January 1982, Honolulu attorney Peter Wolff, then representing Jennifer as Len’s co-counsel, had anticipated that King would be handling the Palmyra murder case. In a letter to Len at that time, Wolff wrote: “Both Earle [Partington] and I are concerned that Judge King has already made up his mind about the case. He has indicated pretty much that he has decided that both defendants are guilty of murder.”

That possible predisposition aside, in King the defense finally found a judge who agreed that the Palmyra murder cases should be moved from Hawaii. The defense filed with the court yet another change-of-venue motion on June 8, 1984. This motion, virtually the same that two other federal judges had earlier denied, was granted by Judge King on August 8, 1984.

“The defendants previously were tried and convicted in the District of Hawaii on theft charges relating to the
same set of events
from which the present felony-murder charges arise,” read Judge King’s order. “That trial, as well as subsequent proceedings involving the defendants, received extensive media coverage. As a result, the local community is all too familiar with the Palmyra story. In sum, the likelihood of prejudice to the defendants and the attendant probability of an unfair trial in the District of Hawaii far outweigh any inconveniences that a change of venue would cause this court or the prosecution. Therefore, it is hereby ordered that the defendants’ motion for a change in venue to the Northern District of California is granted.” As is customary in federal court, Judge King would follow the case to its new locale.

From the bench, King’s remarks to the attorneys were considerably less formal than his official order. “I’d like to be in San Francisco for the opera season,” he said, smiling.

S
EATTLE
F
EBRUARY
22, 1984

T
HE TYPICALLY WET, DREARY
winter in the Pacific North-west still dragged on. Deputy U.S. Marshal Dick Kringle was glad to have enough paperwork to keep him inside and out of the field for a few days.

Just past ten o’clock on this gray morning, the phone on his desk rang sharply. A deputy marshal was on the line from Los Angeles.

“Dick, we think Dougherty’s in L.A.,” the deputy marshal informed Kringle.

Joseph William Dougherty, forty-five, a hardened violent criminal, had once served time at McNeil Island, where he had become tight with Buck Walker and Terry Conner. Dougherty was now believed to be robbing banks in California.

“We staked out Dougherty’s mail drop and found correspondence from Buck Walker at Marion,” the L.A. deputy marshal went on. “Guess these guys are real tight.”

“Yeah,” Kringle snorted, “they’re all members of the McNeil boys’ club.”

“The reason I’m calling is that I hear Walker is about to be paroled. What do you think of us following him to get to Dougherty? Would it work?”

“Whaddaya mean,
paroled
? Walker is waiting to be tried for murder and he’s not about to be paroled. You must have heard wrong.”

“Dick, Walker
does
have a parole date. I called Marion and they told me they’ll be springing him on March 7th. Two weeks from now.”

Kringle was suddenly alarmed. “There’s a foul-up somewhere,” he growled. Unbelievable as it might sound, he knew that such a nightmare was all too possible and he’d have to act fast.

Kringle had not thought much about Buck Walker in the past couple of years—there’d been no need to. Walker was safely tucked away at Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois, serving a series of sentences. Marion, the present-day equivalent of Alcatraz, is known among cons as “the End of the Line.” It has the highest security level of any federal prison in the country. Only the “worst of the worst” federal offenders are sent to Marion, the most secure prison in the nation. Those inmates who have recently been convicted of violent offenses are locked up in single cells for twenty-three hours a day for the first four years of their sentence, and are even shackled to go to the shower.

Kringle had finally met his longtime prey a few months after Walker’s arrest in Yuma. Walker had first been sent to Hawaii for arraignment on the murder charge, but was eventually brought to Seattle in handcuffs, leg irons, and waist chains to face the McNeil escape charge.
^*

Immediately after the call from the deputy in L.A., Kringle telephoned Marion and verified that Walker did indeed have a March 7 parole date. Kringle told an assistant warden about the murder indictment in Hawaii.

“There’s nothing in his file about any murder indictment or detainer,” the prison official replied.

It took Kringle several other calls to begin to put the pieces together. After Walker’s Seattle conviction on the escape charge, he was sent to Lompoc Federal Correctional Institution near Santa Barbara, California. It didn’t take long for someone in the prison system to decide that because of his escape Walker belonged at Marion, and he was transferred there in July 1982. Walker’s prison record at Lompoc was kept in the prison’s administrative offices, where inmates work in clerical jobs. When the file reached Marion, all reference to the murder charge had been purged from the file. Kringle had heard of such things happening before; all it took was a bribe, promise, or threat from one inmate to another, and Walker was capable of all three.

Kringle “called the world,” as he later explained, to tell anyone and everyone that Buck Walker should not be paroled. Within forty-eight hours, Walker’s parole date was canceled. He had come within fourteen days of being set free.

S
OMEWHERE IN
V
IRGINIA
O
CTOBER
5, 1984

N
OEL
A
LLEN
Ingman, a relocated witness under the Federal Witness Protection Program, sat across from Honolulu FBI Agent J. Harold “Hal” Marshall, the Palmyra case agent since Calvin Shishido retired from the bureau in 1982.

“Let me get this straight,” said Marshall, whose thinning hair, broadening girth, pale complexion, and rounded shoulders made him look more like a bus driver than a G-man. “The first time you met Buck Walker was at McNeil Island?” His southern drawl was almost soothing.

“Right,” said Al Ingman. “I’d already served three years in maximum security and had been transferred to the camp adjacent to the prison. I was working at the powerhouse when Buck was assigned there.”

“When was that?”

“Late ’77 or early ’78.”

“Who else was assigned to the powerhouse?”

“Terry Conner and J.W. Williams.”

Ingman, a former schoolteacher who had graduated from the University of Alaska, looked older than his fifty-three years. It wasn’t so much his graying hair or bottle-thick glasses as his deathly pallid, gaunt looks. A longtime heroin user, he had turned members of his own family into junkies.

Talking to the authorities had become another kind of habit for him. Under the Witness Protection Program since 1982, Ingman had already given testimony that helped convict a number of his former accomplices, including Terry Conner and Ruth Thomas. On the stand, he had admitted to complicity in Conner’s drug-smuggling operation and described its inner workings. Conner helped finance the deals by committing bank heists, Walker transported the illicit drugs from Mexico into the United States, and Ingman himself acted as distributor for the ring.

In prison lingo, Ingman had turned snitch. In return, his whereabouts were kept a closely guarded secret, not even appearing on official reports or in-house documents. He was a marked man. The federal government had taken responsibility for keeping him alive.

Marshall had sought out Ingman because Ingman had passed the word that he had potentially damaging information about Buck Walker.

“What were your duties at the powerhouse?” Marshall asked, ready to take notes.

“The boilers were computer-operated, so we just sat in front of the computer and watched some dials. We took turns working eight-hour shifts. It was pretty laid-back. We smoked lots of dope.”

“Marijuana?”

“Yeah, and Thai sticks. With the right connections, you could get about anything you wanted. We’d sit around all night, getting high and telling stories.”

“True stories?”

“I didn’t have the feeling that anyone was making stuff up. We all had been involved in a lot of—well, adventures over the years. Talking about them”—Ingman shrugged—“helped pass the time.”

“What did Walker say about the Palmyra case?”

“Lots of things,” Ingman said. “He told us how he dived into the water after his girlfriend was arrested in the harbor in Honolulu and how he swam under the pilings. After he was arrested, he said he managed to get a gun into jail, but that the gun was found before he could use it to escape.”

“You’re not telling me much, Ingman.” Marshall, despite his easygoing manner and avuncular looks, could be tough and direct when necessary. He could stare like a basilisk.

Ingman got the point. “I remember Buck telling some story,” he went on, “about being on Palmyra Island. There was this other boat with a couple on it. I guess they had gotten into some kind of hassle with them. Anyway, he made the couple walk the plank.”

“Come again?”

“Yeah, you know, like they do in pirate movies. There was some comment about raw meat being thrown into the water by Walker to attract sharks.”

“Did he
make
them go overboard?” Marshall asked.

Ingman took his time lighting a cigarette.

“The man went out on the plank, but I don’t know if he jumped in with the sharks.”

“Did Walker say whether his girlfriend, Jennifer Jenkins, was present during the murders?”

Ingman paused for a moment. “I don’t remember,” he finally said. “But I did ask him once whether he trusted her.”

Marshall looked up from his notepad. “And?”

“He described Jennifer as a ‘stand-up broad.’ He said she would never talk.”

H
UNTSVILLE
, T
EXAS
O
CTOBER
9, 1984

M
ARSHALL FOUND
J.W. Williams in a Texas state prison. A four-time convicted bank robber who had twice escaped from federal prison, Williams had recently been convicted of raping a woman and leaving her for dead on a Gulf Coast beach. He was serving a minimum forty-year term for aggravated rape and attempted murder.

According to Al Ingman, Williams had been there the night Walker gave his version of the Palmyra murders, and was later involved in the Yuma-based drug-smuggling operation run by Conner and Walker.

Williams, a big man of about forty, had short-cropped brown hair and brooding dark eyes. Marshall guessed him to be of below-average intelligence.

Serving a long sentence and with other charges still facing him, Williams reportedly wanted to work out a deal. But Marshall insisted he wouldn’t make any offer without knowing what Williams could tell him.

“You worked at the McNeil powerhouse in 1977?” Marshall began.

“Yeah.”

“Who else was there?”

“Walker, Al Ingman and Terry Conner.”

“Were there any guards in the powerhouse?”

“Naw. There were only two guards for three hundred and fifty inmates in the entire camp. It was pretty loose. We were pretty much on our own. We had a stereo, a television, even a sauna.”

“Did you guys talk about your past activities?”

“Oh, yeah. We rapped all the time.”

“Did you know what Walker was serving time for?”

“For selling MDA, I think.”

“Did he ever talk about a Pacific island?”

Williams nodded. “He told us quite a bit about Palmyra.”

“Did he talk about the missing couple?”

“One time he told us he put them on a rubber raft and set them out to sea with no water or food.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I figured he probably took care of them, one way or the other, so there wouldn’t be any witnesses when he stole their boat. Another time, he told us about making the couple walk the plank.”

Marshall remained stone-faced. “Go on.”

“Well, Buck said they tied the couple’s hands behind their back and made them walk the plank.”

“They?”

“Buck and his girlfriend. He said they were smoking dope and were dressed up like pirates. Buck said he had taken some chicken guts or something out of the refrigerator on the couple’s boat and thrown it into the water to attract the sharks. I remember he said something about putting blindfolds on the couple at some point.” Williams tended to add details hastily, as if he’d just remembered, or just thought them up, but the agent stolidly kept taking notes.

“Was Walker on drugs when he told you this?”

“Yeah, we were all loaded.”

“What do you mean?”

“Smoking marijuana.”

“Would you describe Walker as being lucid at that time? In control?”

“Oh, yes.” He smirked.

“Were you still at McNeil when Walker escaped in July ’79?”

“Yeah. I helped him.”

“How so?”

“We built a raft using an inner tube from a tractor and a big sheet of canvas. We hid it in the forest near a cove.”

“You could do all this without being seen by guards?”

“They figured because we were on an island we couldn’t get off.”

“Why didn’t you escape with him?”

“I wanted to wait to be paroled. Not Buck. He was worried.”

“About what?”

“He was always afraid they’d find something on Palmyra. He wanted to be long gone when they did.”

“After you were paroled, you joined Walker and Conner down in Arizona?”

“Right. I was with Buck in Mexico when we heard about the bones being found on the island.”

“What did he say?” The agent poised his pencil.

“Buck said the feds were falsifying evidence because that’s not the way it went down.”

“How so?”

“He said they never put the bodies in metal boxes.”

F
OR A HOST
of reasons, including the avoidance of surprise at the trial, a criminal defendant has the right of “discovery,” that is, the right to inspect or copy certain designated evidence of the prosecution. In most state courts, for example, the defendant can discover the pretrial statements of prosecution witnesses
before
the trial. In the federal courts, where Jennifer was being tried, the prosecution by statute doesn’t have to release these pretrial statements to the defense until the prosecution witness has testified on direct examination
at the trial
. The defense is allowed only a short recess in which to examine the statement before cross-examination of the witness. In practice, however, only Assistant U.S. Attorneys who play unnecessary hardball avail themselves of this harsh rule. Fortunately for us, Enoki did not, and we received the FBI’s interview reports—typed out on FBI Form #302 (and therefore called 302s)—long before Buck Walker’s trial.

Enoki made an exception, however, for the statements of Ingman and Williams, which were kept from the defense until shortly before the Walker trial. Perusing them, I naturally recognized the possibility that Ingman and Williams were telling the truth. But prison informants are notoriously unreliable, not only because they are untrustworthy criminal types by definition, but also because they have a strong motive to fabricate—the expectation of a quid pro quo from the authorities. Moreover, the story Buck allegedly told Ingman and Williams at the McNeil Island powerhouse didn’t make too much sense. I had heard of no “plank” on Palmyra (though any board, of course, could serve as a “plank”), there was no evidence that Buck and Jennifer had “pirates’ clothing,” and the chicken-guts twist sounded farfetched on its face. Furthermore, if Muff had been fed to the sharks, how had she ended up in the metal container? In addition, the impression I had increasingly formed about Jennifer precluded her from being involved in a brutal murder. And for her to compound the murder by joining in the torture of Mac and Muff and feeding them to the sharks was totally unbelievable to me. Besides, even if Walker had told Ingman and Williams what they said he did, that obviously didn’t necessarily mean Walker had told them the truth. In fact, according to Williams, Walker had told him two completely different stories of how the Grahams met their death.