And the Sea Will Tell (60 page)

“Well, more and more at the end, we relied heavily on those foods that were available to us on the island. I was conserving our stores because I never wanted to fall below a week’s supply.”

Did a period of a week have any particular significance? I asked.

“Yes. We were planning to go to Fanning Island to get supplies. I wasn’t sure exactly how long it would take, but I knew that a week was the absolute outside. So, I didn’t want to go below a week’s supply.”

Although her two previous answers satisfied my next question, the subject was so critical I couldn’t leave the matter open for the jury to interpret. I had her turn to her August 23 entry, just seven days before the key day of August 30, and said: “It reads: ‘No dinner save a coconut milk shake.’ I asked: “Did that entry mean that you did not have any food left whatsoever at that point other than the coconut milk shake?”

“No, it didn’t mean that at all,” Jennifer insisted. “It just meant that all I had to eat that day was a coconut milk shake. By choice.”

I asked Jennifer if she considered herself a big eater.

“No, I’m not a big eater.”

“How many meals do you usually eat a day?”

“I usually eat one meal a day.”

“Do you sometimes go a day without eating?”

“Yes.”

“Jennifer, in late August of that year, did you have any sense of malnutrition at all?”

“No, not at all.”

“To your knowledge, how was Buck doing?”

“He looked fine.”

“Had either of you lost any weight on Palmyra?”

“No.”

I next asked her to describe briefly the couple’s relationships with the various visitors to Palmyra that summer. She told how Jack Wheeler and his son had helped free the
Iola
from the reef and how, in succeeding days, Jack had given them advice about how to live and eat on Palmyra.

Jennifer said Bernard and Evelyn Leonard “seemed cordial enough.” She described her efforts to barter with them for food. “Evelyn said she’d trade for some things, but when I went over to her boat to do so one day, she said she wasn’t feeling well. She said she had a tooth inlay problem,” and Jennifer didn’t go aboard.

“So you didn’t get the impression that she didn’t want you on the boat. She simply didn’t feel good that day.”

“Yes. She was always very friendly to me.”

“Would you look at your July 13th entry and see if there is any reference to this tooth inlay problem and your not going on the boat?”

“Yes. It says, ‘Evelyn wasn’t feeling well. A reoccurrence of tooth inlay.’”

Jennifer recalled the Leonards’ bringing books and rice pudding over to the
Iola
the day they left, her birthday, and Evelyn’s snapping her picture with Puffer. She described how Bernard shouted farewell from the bow of his boat. “He waved and yelled, “Goodbye, Jennifer. Have a happy birthday and a wonderful year.’”

Jennifer explained that she had baked for Don Stevens and Bill Larson, using flour and sugar they supplied, and exchanged books and magazines with them.

And though Tom Wolfe and Norman Sanders “weren’t on the island very long,” Jennifer said she got along well with both of them.

I asked her to relate the incident of Wolfe’s being bitten by one of Buck’s dogs.

“Tom came over to the Refrigerator House, and I guess he somehow startled Popolo, and Popolo lunged at Tom and nipped him.”

“What type of dog is Popolo?”

“He’s a pit bull.”

In response to my question, Jennifer went on to say that even before Palmyra, she and Buck had trouble with Popolo, who would chase cars down the street, barking ferociously.

I wanted to show that the attack did not indicate, as the Government wanted to suggest, that Buck’s dogs were starving. This particular dog, like many others of its breed, had been flat-out mean.

“You heard Mr. Wolfe testify that you didn’t apologize when he was bitten?”

“Right. And I can’t believe that I didn’t apologize to him. Buck was yelling and screaming at Popolo and hitting him, and I wanted him to get Popolo out of there. Tom went running off. I’m sure I apologized to him but perhaps he didn’t hear me in all the confusion.”

When I asked Jennifer about little Puffer, my witness grinned for the first time on the stand. She eagerly told the jury how much Puffer weighed (twenty-five pounds), how intelligent and sensitive she was, and how the two of them liked sleeping in the same bed. “On my last two jobs,” Jennifer added, “she came to work with me and she slept on a little pillow under my desk.”

I was presenting this evidence for the jurors to draw their own conclusions, presumably favorable. I was not about to argue in my summation, however, that someone who loved animals was unlikely to commit murder. Enoki could respond that Hitler also loved animals, once saying that the more he got to know humans, the more he loved animals. While millions were dying in his gas chambers, the Führer showered affection on Blondie, his purebred German shepherd. Charles Manson also said he loved animals more than human beings and would rather kill a person than a bird or even a rattlesnake.

I had saved the Grahams for last. “With respect to Mac and Muff, during your stay on Palmyra, how often would you see them or talk to them?”

“Just about every day we would see one or both of them.”

“And did you feel you got to know them fairly well?”

“Yes.”

“How would you describe Mac Graham?”

“Mac was a wonderful man,” she answered warmly. “He was full of life and very outgoing. He would come by the boat frequently and bring us fish he caught. I think he fished more frequently because he knew we could use it.”

And Muff?

“She was always very nice to me. Muff was much more reserved, kept much more to herself than did Mac. And she wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy to be on Palmyra.”

“Did you have any animosity whatsoever toward either Mac or Muff?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“To your knowledge, were you aware of any animosity or ill feeling that either one of them had toward you?” I asked.

“No.”

“So, if they harbored any bad feelings toward you, you were not aware of them?”

“Right. They were both always friendly.”

I asked if she or Buck ever had any kind of an argument with either Mac or Muff on Palmyra. Other than the problems with the two big dogs (which she set forth), she said, no.

“How would you describe the relationship that existed between the Grahams and you and Buck on Palmyra that summer of 1974?”

“It was friendly. Not especially close, I suppose, but definitely friendly.”

“Jennifer, you heard Tom Wolfe’s testimony at this trial that you told him
neither
you and Buck, nor the Grahams, wanted the others on the island. Do you recall telling him that?”

“I told Tom that both Mac and Muff, and Buck and I, had specifically chosen Palmyra because it was an uninhabited coral atoll. We had all come down there specifically to be alone, and I believed that this desire continued with—with Mac and Muff. But as it turned out, having Mac and Muff there was very good for us. Mac helped us in a number of ways. He brought us fish, and he tried to repair our outboard motor. Once our generator went out and he repaired that. So, having them there was good.”

“Did you ever try to barter with the Grahams for food?”

“No.”

“Inasmuch as you apparently did do this with the people on the other boats, why not with the Grahams?”

“Mac and Muff were down there for a prolonged period of time, so I knew they needed all their stores. I just offered, you know…wanted to barter with those people who were on their way to places where there were stores they could purchase.”

It was getting late. Jennifer had been on the stand for more than two hours, and she looked fatigued. I turned to the judge and suggested this might be a convenient time to recess for the day.

“All right,” said Judge King, taking my cue. “We’ll recess until 9:30
A.M.
, and it won’t rain hard tomorrow.”

Outside the whole day, cold drizzle had given jewel-like San Francisco the mournful aspect of an Iron Curtain capital in the 1950s.

W
EDNESDAY MORNING
, F
EBRUARY
19, 1986

W
E ALL
arrived in the courtroom with dripping raincoats and folded umbrellas generating small puddles. During the night, the skies had loosed another torrent of rain that showed no sign of easing. Mother Nature was most definitely in contempt of court.

For her second day on the stand, Jennifer wore a high-neck blouse and beige suit with buttons that were large, round, and brown, like her eyes. She had slept little the night before, Sunny informed me in a mother’s worried tone.

As usual, the courtroom’s gallery was packed.

At the podium, I said good morning to Jennifer, then commenced day two of my direct examination, continuing to take her through the events on Palmyra in essentially a chronological fashion.

I asked her if the entries in the diary concerning the Grahams constituted the total number of contacts she and Buck had had with Mac and Muff that summer. No, she said, the diary referred only to “some of the times we saw one another,” nor did it even refer to every time she and Buck together visited the Grahams on the
Sea Wind
, a total she estimated as “maybe three or four times.” She said it was hard to remember the exact number because it was “a long time ago.”

I asked if there were times when either she or Buck would visit the
Sea Wind
without the other one along.

Yes, Jennifer said, “especially Buck. He used to go over to play chess with Mac more frequently.” And she would occasionally go over by herself with coconut butter and coconut milk she’d made.

I had Jennifer read aloud a diary entry that involved a social evening Buck and Jennifer had spent aboard the
Sea Wind
on July 9: “‘On our way to bathe took some coconut butter to Mac and Muff. Never got to bathe but had a very enjoyable evening with them, drinking wine, which tasted fine. And then some rum which was a bit too much for me on an empty stomach. Got pretty drunk—smoked two cigarettes. Mac had given R some Bull Durham earlier in the day. Then gave him a pack of some other cigarettes. He has a friend for life now.’”

“Jennifer, you’ve heard testimony from prosecution witnesses that they never saw you and Buck on the
Sea Wind?
”

“Yes.”

“From where your boat and the other boats were moored at the dolphins, could one see the
Sea Wind?
”

“No.”

“And why is that?”

“The
Sea Wind—
Mac had backed it into this little cove [as I had her indicate on the chart of the island]. And it was totally horseshoed by land. And there was a little jut of land that came out helping to form the cove. So, there was no line-of-sight vision.”

“Did this portion of Cooper Island jutting out into the lagoon have heavy vegetation and tall trees on it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

She estimated the distance between the
Iola
and
Sea Wind
as two hundred yards.

Between July 6 and August 26, there were a total of twenty-three entries concerning Jennifer’s and Buck’s contacts with the Grahams. I had Jennifer read each one to the jury.

“The contact, then, between and among the four of you was of a considerable nature? Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

The Walker jury had never heard this fact
.

With regard to the August 22 entry that the Taylors wouldn’t be arriving until the end of October, Jennifer said she and Buck had decided, upon hearing this news from their friends via Mac’s radio link with Shoemaker, that they would have to make a trip to Fanning to pick up food supplies.

“You heard Mr. Wolfe’s testimony that you told him that you and Buck were planning to go to Fanning?” I asked, reminding the jury of this corroboration of Jennifer’s present testimony.

“That’s right.”

I asked Jennifer how she and Buck had intended to pay for the food they were going to purchase on Fanning. She answered that they had sold their generator to Mac for fifty dollars. Also, she said, they figured they could get temporary work at Fanning to pick up some extra money. “All we really needed was staples. I wanted to get dog food, rice, flour, sugar, beans, things like that.” She also said they planned to trade some of their belongings on Fanning.

“After going to Fanning, was it your intention then to return to Palmyra?”

“Yes.”

I moved on to a new area, a highly critical one for which I’d laid much groundwork earlier.

“Jennifer, were you aware that Fanning was against the wind—if you were to sail from Palmyra to Fanning?”

“Yes.”

“Was that of concern to you?”

The nonchalance with which she answered was almost as telling as her words themselves. “When you’re sailing into the wind, all you have to do is tack.” She shrugged as if to say even nincompoops know that. “It’s a harder sail, but we’d tacked before.”

“Where did you have an opportunity to tack before?”

“We’d tacked intra-island among the Hawaiian Islands. And we’d tacked when we were approaching the channel to come into Palmyra.”

“Jennifer, looking at the June 21st entry in your diary, is there any reference to tacking on that date?”

“Yes. ‘Though winds were light last night and are brisk southeast today, we’re having trouble relocating our island.
Tacking
from east to southwest.’”

“Did you know one way or the other whether the
current
would be in your favor or against you en route to Fanning?”

“I did not know.”

“Even if you had thought the current as well as the wind were against you from Palmyra to Fanning, would that have affected your decision to go to Fanning?”

“No, it wouldn’t have. In talking to Mac about it, he said he didn’t think we would have a problem getting to Fanning. He said we might make it in as little as two or three days.”