And the Sea Will Tell (59 page)

During a short recess before I called Jennifer to the stand, I told Judge King that Jennifer would be giving a lot of testimony relating to her state of mind. Although such testimony is normally admissible, it often engenders objections, and I told the judge that rather than having legal skirmishes before the jury or asking for a recess to argue each objection, I wanted to resolve, at least in general terms, the admissibility question before Jennifer took the stand.

Judge King declined. “I usually have the experience of ruling on objections at the time they are made. That’s about all I get paid for, actually.”

“I told you I’m giving you good grades on your handling of objections,” I said, deadpan.

“Thank you. A-plus would not be enough,” he replied.

The jury was summoned.

“Call your next witness, Mr. Bugliosi,” Judge King said.

“The defense calls Miss Jennifer Jenkins.”

W
HEN I CALLED
J
ENNIFER’S NAME
, I looked back at her and nodded encouragingly.
You’ll do fine
, I said with my smile.

She stood and walked purposefully to the witness stand. The heels of her pumps clicked softly on the waxed floor, the only sound audible in the hushed courtroom. Every eye bored into her, but she did not wilt. When she faced the clerk, she raised her right hand with determination and confidently voiced the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

There wasn’t an empty seat in the courtroom.

I scanned the faces of the transfixed jurors. Were they thinking that here was the one person in the courtroom who could solve the mystery surrounding the events on Palmyra Island? Did they wonder if she would tell everything she knew? Or did they suspect she’d turn out to be evasive and untruthful and keep what she
really
knew locked inside forever? One thing was for sure. It was obvious the jurors couldn’t wait to hear from Jennifer. It was written all over their collective countenance.

For her big day in court, Jennifer was wearing one of her smart new suits—a baby-blue ensemble with a white silk blouse—and little makeup. At Len’s suggestion, she wore no lipstick at all. “Your upper lip is very thin,” he had told her, “and lipstick accentuates this. Thin lips are cold-looking.”

When the clerk asked the witness to state her name for the record, the response came in a clear, steady voice: “My name is Jennifer Jenkins.”

Once she sat down in the witness chair, however, Jennifer suddenly looked vulnerable, and smaller. The microphone in front of her rose up nearly to her forehead. Of course, she
was
very vulnerable.

My direct examination of Jennifer would differ from most. Feelings are generally not a major part of a criminal trial. Testimony, in the main, concerns whether the defendant did or did not do certain things. But here, we had to get into Jennifer’s feelings in just about everything she said and did. It was the only way I had any hope of convincing the jury that behind Jennifer’s seemingly guilty conduct was an innocent state of mind.

After some preliminary background questions—she would be forty in July, she was unmarried, and so forth—I asked what I had long known I would first ask her of substance when she took the stand. “Jennifer, you’re probably going to be on the stand for two or three days,” I began, “but right at the top of your testimony, I want to ask you these questions. Did you kill, or participate in any fashion whatsoever, in the killing of Mac or Muff Graham?”

“No.” She looked away from me and toward the jury. “I swear”—her voice remained firm—“by all that I hold dear, that I’ve never harmed any human being in my whole life.” Her eyes began to fill with tears.

“Do you have any personal knowledge of who may have killed them?”

“No. I do not.”

Now we could get on with the rest of my direct examination.
^*

“When you were indicted for the murder of Muff Graham in February of 1981, did you turn yourself in?”

“Yes.”

“Were you released on bail shortly thereafter?”

“Yes, that same day.”

I brought out that she had continued to be free on bail, and “gainfully employed,” since that time.

Jennifer went on to say she was currently the branch office manager of a telecommunications company in Los Angeles. She told about meeting Buck Walker at the Hilo apartment complex in April 1972. “We were both there to visit friends. We caught each other’s eye.” She graced the bittersweet memory with the faintest of nostalgic smiles.

I asked her to briefly describe her relationship with Buck before the trip to Palmyra.

She sighed deeply. “I was twenty-five and he was about thirty-five when we met. He was a very strong, dominating person. He liked to have his own way, liked to be in charge. And I guess I’m the type of person who doesn’t make unnecessary waves.”

“Are you suggesting to this jury and this judge that you would do whatever he told you to do?”

“No, absolutely not.”

I proceeded to have Jennifer cite examples where she drew the line:

“Without going into all the things that two people living together might disagree about, Jennifer, did the two of you have any differences with respect to guns?”

“Yes.”

“What were those differences?” I asked.

“Buck liked guns, and I’ve always had an extreme aversion to them. On two occasions, he brought firearms into the house, and we had a number of arguments about it. Ultimately, he took them out.”

“Jennifer, you’ve heard testimony at this trial that Buck did, in fact, have a gun on Palmyra?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you go along with this?”

“Buck insisted that anyone who was going to sail in the open seas had to have some means of protection, and so I went along with that.”

I returned to examples of Jennifer’s standing up to Buck. “Did you tell me once about an incident involving spaghetti?”

She told how Buck had slung the pot of spaghetti against the cabin wall at Mountain View, splattering pasta and tomato sauce everywhere. “I just left it there. The next day, he asked when I was going to clean it up. I told him I didn’t do it. ‘You did. You clean it up.’”

“Did he, in fact, clean it up?”

“Uh-huh.”

There would be more examples of Jennifer’s standing up to Buck later in her testimony.

Getting before the jury Walker’s hard-core criminal history was an essential part of my continuing strategy to prosecute him. I anticipated an objection from Enoki whichever way I attempted to do it, but particularly if he first had the opportunity to argue the matter, orally or in a brief, to the judge. I decided that questions to Jennifer would be the best way, forcing Enoki to show the jury, if he objected, that he did not want them to hear this very relevant information. There was no ethical problem, since there was no question in my mind that the information, being part of the basis for Jennifer’s state of mind with respect to Buck (a key issue in the case), was legally admissible. However, because of improper rulings by courts, not all legally admissible evidence gets into the trial record.

I asked Jennifer when she had become aware of Buck’s “background.” Enoki did not object. She replied that he informed her soon after they started living together that he had been convicted of armed robbery, but explained that he was only nineteen at the time and that the gun had not been loaded.

The cat was out of the bag. For the first time in the trial, the jury now knew that apart from Buck Walker’s having been convicted of Muff Graham’s murder, Jennifer’s lover was a convicted felon.
^*

“Did you learn when you were living with him in Mountain View that he’d been convicted of a
second
armed robbery here in California, and that he’d also been convicted of a burglary in the past?” I continued on.

Again, Enoki did not object.

“Not at that point. I found out about that since.”

“Did you learn at that time that in 1966 and 1967 he was committed to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane in California?”

Again, there was no objection.

“He told me about that,” Jennifer answered. “He said he was just feigning insanity so he wouldn’t have to go back to San Quentin.”

“Even though you only knew at the beginning about the one robbery conviction, were you disturbed about the fact you were living with someone who had that type of a background?”

“Yes, but I had found out about this after we had started living together…and we were already in love.” I hoped the jury might begin to see that this four-letter word meant more to Jennifer than to more practical-minded people.

“Would you tell the jury and the judge what it was about Buck Walker that attracted you to him?”

“Well, Buck was bright and articulate and personable,” she answered. “I knew he had a bad background, but I felt he had a lot of potential and—”

She stopped abruptly. “I—I thought I could help him.” She took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself.

In the stilted decorum of a courtroom it would have been difficult for Jennifer to testify to her erotic attraction for Buck, but she would admit privately that in his arms, she’d experienced the most gratifying sex of her life. I planned to allude to this physical attraction whenever possible.

“Was there anything else about Buck that attracted you to him?” I asked, hoping that at least the women on the jury might empathize with Jennifer’s powerful feelings for a man others found so frightening and repugnant.

“I found Buck attractive. He was a big, strong man. He made me feel—safe and protected.”

I next had Jennifer summarize what led up to Buck’s arrest on the Big Island for illegal drug sales. She said it all started when “a friend from the mainland brought some pills” to Hawaii and asked Buck if he knew a buyer. Buck put him in touch with someone, and that person, who turned out to be an undercover agent, later came back twice to Buck promising him a lot of money “if Buck could get some more pills.” When Buck did, he was arrested.

“What was your state of mind with respect to what happened to Buck?” I asked.

“He was entrapped,” she said boldly. “He wasn’t selling drugs before the undercover officer started enticing him. I thought it was unfair.” She recalled Buck’s concern that the drug bust would send him back to San Quentin. “He was terrified of that place. He told me terrible stories about San Quentin.”

“Did he make any vow with respect to not going back to San Quentin?” I asked.

“He said he would
never
go back to San Quentin.”

“How did you feel about Buck’s decision to jump bail because of his fear of San Quentin?”

“Well, at first I didn’t think running was the right thing to do. But—I loved Buck too much to see him return to San Quentin.”

Jennifer related her family’s unsuccessful efforts to dissuade her from running away with Buck. “It was very hard to go against their wishes, but I felt Buck needed me.”

During this testimony, Sunny and Ted, though after all these years still plagued by their failure to keep her from sailing off into harm’s way, remained expressionless in their front-row seats.

Moving on, I elicited from Jennifer that Buck had acquired a passport under the alias Roy Allen before they left for Palmyra, but that she had used her real name on hers.

Jennifer next explained, in response to my question, that she soon realized that flour, sugar, oil, and other supplies were dwindling more rapidly than she had estimated, fully one-third having been consumed on the trip down.

Eliciting Jennifer’s admission about these food problems was consistent with the pattern I would pursue throughout my examination. With two calculated exceptions, I intended to raise every negative circumstance, every inconsistency, discrepancy, and incriminating thing she had said or done. I wanted to cross-examine Jennifer myself, on my terms, leaving nothing more than a plate of leftovers for the prosecutor;
in other words, I wanted to conduct Enoki’s cross-examination for him
. If he reprised the points I covered, he’d be going over old ground with the jury, with the impact almost surely being diminished.
^*

“As you know, Jennifer, there has been testimony at this trial that you and Buck were in relatively poor shape as far as food was concerned during your stay on Palmyra. Did you consider the situation desperate?”

“No. It wasn’t great, but it
definitely
wasn’t desperate.”

“Was it your state of mind, when you arrived on Palmyra, to live solely off the provisions you had brought with you?”

“No. We planned to supplement our provisions by living off the land, off foods available on Palmyra.”

“On a given day, if your diet, as indicated by your diary, consisted of fish from the lagoon and coconuts from the island, would this mean that your food provisions on board the
Iola
had been completely depleted?”

“Absolutely not,” Jennifer said. “It just meant exactly what I said. We were supplementing and using those foods available to us on Palmyra in conjunction with our stores.”

“You were trying to stretch out the stores you had as much as possible?”

“Right.”

She went on to explain that they quickly learned which fish from the lagoon could be safely eaten. She noted the many uses she’d discovered for the wealth of coconuts on the island. “We made milk shakes, ice cream, cookies, sour cream, butter. Coconuts are a very nutritious food.”

After establishing that Jennifer would frequently need her “diary” to refresh her memory about events that occurred on Palmyra, I handed her a photostatic copy of the
Iola
’s log. It had, she explained, become more of a daily journal or diary during her sojourn on the island.

“What other foods did you find on Palmyra?”

“There were lots of crabs.”

“Would you read your July 17th diary entry to the jury?”

“‘I never saw so many land crabs in my life,’” she recited, “‘and they tasted delicious.’”

“Did you attempt to grow a vegetable garden?”

“Yes. I had brought all kinds of seeds down, vegetables and fruit seeds, and we attempted to grow a vegetable garden.”

“Were you successful at all in growing vegetables in the garden?” (A far better question than a prosecutor’s “Isn’t it true, Miss Jenkins, that your effort to grow food on Palmyra to help sustain you was completely unsuccessful?”)

“No,” Jennifer answered. “The hermit crabs used to climb up everywhere and raid them.”

“I take it, Jennifer, you would have preferred, during this period of time that you were on Palmyra, to have had a more diverse diet—more meat, fruit, and vegetables. Is that correct?”

She smiled at the understatement.

“Yes.”

By late August 1974, their food supplies had fallen to about
seven days
’ worth of food, Jennifer said. Pointing out the apparent discrepancy that an earlier, August 15 diary entry estimated only about “ten meals” left, I asked Jennifer how they could still have had seven full
days
of provisions remaining by
late
August.