And the Sea Will Tell (70 page)

Enoki, in effect, had just told the jury he believed that Mac and Muff Graham had been murdered
on
August 28, 1974. If this was true, then inferentially my client was a murderer.

He turned to Jennifer’s diary entry for that date. “There is absolutely no reference to a visit to the
Sea Wind
,” he said. “In fact, there is not even a reference to the Grahams, or to her baking on August 28th. Nothing. I would submit to you that it’s a pretty significant event to be taking not only this cake over to the Grahams, but both of them are going over to the
Sea Wind
. So, it’s not like it’s an idle visit, where she happens to wander over by herself.

“Here she is baking a cake for the Grahams, when she has been begging for flour most of the summer. And the week prior to this she is eating nothing but coconuts for at least three days. And she’s also giving this food, this cake, to people who didn’t even need it, when about two weeks prior to this, she was down to ten meals plus rice. And she is now about to go on a voyage to Fanning, for which she needs all the supplies she can keep.
This is not at all consistent with merely repaying the Grahams for the mere borrowing of the Fanning chart
. You’ll recall that’s the only thing she could think of as a conceivable reason.

“But baking a cake is one hundred percent consistent with getting on board the
Sea Wind
when you’ve been having problems with the occupants. It’s kind of like bringing a peace offering, in appearance. When in reality, this turned out to be, I would submit, more like a Trojan Horse to get aboard the
Sea Wind
.

“If she had visited the Grahams that day after having had difficulties with them, or even if she just baked a cake for them, the event would have been more significant to her than writing down that Mr. Walker was husking coconuts, or the other insignificant events she
has
written down for August 28th.”

Enoki flat out did not believe any of Jennifer’s diary entries for August 30, “the day Miss Jenkins says the Grahams disappeared.
There’s nothing to establish that date as the date of the Grahams’ disappearance, except her testimony and her diary!
And I submit to you that both of those things are false. There is nothing that would have prevented her from writing the entries in the diary
after
August 28th
—after
killing the Grahams. How much better a way to avoid detection than to falsify succeeding entries?

“There’s an absence of information in these succeeding entries about critical points that she says occurred or in fact did occur. There’s nothing about the
Sea Wind
or about taking the
Sea Wind
. Remember, she says she disagreed vehemently with Mr. Walker, and argued with him about it. Yet, there’s nothing about that in the diary.

“There’s also nothing in her diary about the
Iola
, and what happened to her. There’s nothing in it about not notifying the authorities. Recall that she said Mr. Walker told her not to do that. Remember, she called the diary a kind of journal of events, yet there’s not a word about
any
of these things. And most absurd of all, she claims that the reason she stopped keeping this diary was because it really was the log of the
Iola
, and the
Iola
sank on September 11th. The last entry is September 10th. And yet, there’s not a single word about what happened to the
Iola
.”

Enoki now reached his conclusion on this issue. “This diary was written to cover up a crime. But it isn’t just the crime of theft that’s being covered. It’s also the crime of murder.”

He next started summarizing the scientific and medical evidence in the case, arguing that it proved Muff did not die as a result of a drowning or shark attack, as Jennifer said she had assumed, but was murdered. Much of this recapitulated the prosecutor’s summation at the Buck Walker trial.

“In order to reconcile,” Enoki then went on, “this scientific evidence, and the other evidence in the case, with Miss Jenkins’s diary and with her testimony, let’s look at what Mr. Walker has to do all by himself, without any assistance, without being observed, and without any sound that Miss Jenkins can hear, except for the sound of the Zodiac going away from the
Sea Wind
.

“First of all,” the sincere but unemotional prosecutor continued, with no attempt at drama in his voice or gestures, “he has to find both Grahams. Then he has to kill them both. Then he has to try and burn Eleanor Graham’s head with an acetylene torch that he would have to get from Mac’s workshop. He has to get at least one, and undoubtedly two, aluminum containers out of the old rescue boat that, in 1974, was still in the warehouse.

“Then he would have to take at least one of these containers from the warehouse to wherever he’s killed Eleanor Graham. And I would submit he has to do that with Mac Graham as well. He would then have to find some wires to wrap around the containers so the lid wouldn’t just pop off when he dropped them into the water. Then he’d have to weight each container down so it would sink.

“Following that, he has to burn Muff Graham’s body in the container for, we were told by an expert, at least fifteen to twenty minutes.

“He then has to get both containers down to the lagoon and load them into the Zodiac by himself with the bodies inside. We’re talking about carrying that container with a one-hundred-and-forty-pound woman in it, another with a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound man inside it. They don’t call that dead weight for lack of any reason. It’s just dead weight in that container. And loading it into a soft-sided rubber Zodiac is not like loading it into a van or bus or something that’s parked there. We’re talking about a boat.”

Never pausing for effect, Enoki went on to say that Walker would then have had to take the dinghy out into the lagoon, dump the bodies overboard, return to shore—without Miss Jenkins hearing the Zodiac motor—beach the dinghy upside down, detach the gas tank, and walk half a mile back to the bath area, where Jennifer said she saw him that afternoon.

“In addition, if either of the killings were done on the
Sea Wind
, he would have to, of course, clean up whatever evidence was left behind, because there was nothing unusual aboard the boat, according to Miss Jenkins, when she arrived.”

Enoki argued that if Walker had caught up with the Grahams and murdered them on shore, then he would have had to break into the
Sea Wind
to set up the drinks Jennifer said were there when she arrived.

“And,” the prosecutor added, “he’s also, according to Miss Jenkins, making appearances periodically throughout the day at the
Iola
. During this time, he would have to have done all of this not only without Miss Jenkins seeing him do anything, but without her seeing any smoke or without noticing any evidence about him, such as blood, injuries of any kind, gasoline. She didn’t notice anything.

“And he supposedly decides to kill two people and hide it from his girlfriend, when she could take the
Iola
dinghy ashore at any time and catch him in the act. This person, who supposedly thought enough in advance to go and set up the drinks on the
Sea Wind
, didn’t think about taking the dinghy away from her.” Her story just didn’t add up, the prosecutor said.

“But worst of all about her version of what happened, she claims she never even had any suspicions of foul play. Yet, she knew Mr. Walker was convicted of armed robbery. She knew he loved to carry guns. He had a ‘firecracker personality’ that could explode on the spot. She knew he was arrested with a loaded gun in the drug deal. She knew he kept booby traps when they lived on the Big Island. Yet her testimony is she did not suspect any foul play.”

The prosecutor looked directly at Jennifer, not a flicker of feeling on his face. “No one has described her as naive. She was twenty-eight at the time, not sixteen or eighteen or twenty. She has been described as intelligent, and she appeared to be intelligent on the witness stand. How could any intelligent person
not
suspect foul play with a man of Mr. Walker’s background? And yet that’s what she would have you believe. She suspected
nothing
.

“I submit to you that her story about what happened in the Grahams’ disappearance, and what happened on Palmyra, was just the beginning of a continuous stream of lies about the events on Palmyra that she told, and has told, ever since she left that island.”

Enoki’s tone of voice and whole demeanor seemed to be: “We all know that she’s guilty of the murders, and has told one lie after another in the hope that you won’t see the obvious.” He condensed the stream of lies: “Miss Jenkins tells Lorraine Wollen she got the boat from a man who was tired of doing maintenance on it after fourteen years. It got even worse when she gave her statements,” Enoki charged. “She told Bernard Leonard they found the Zodiac near Paradise Island. Her defense is that Mr. Leonard is mistaken about that. But there is no misunderstanding about the other lie she told Bernard Leonard: that she and Walker tried to
sail
the
Iola
off Palmyra, but it ran aground in the channel, so they went back and they got the
Sea Wind
. Leonard tells her it’s not believable they would have left on the
Iola
with the
Sea Wind
sitting there, so she changes her story, and instead tries to make it more believable. When she spoke to Agent Shishido a few minutes later, instead of sailing the
Iola
out and running up on the reef, now it’s that they were
towing
it out, and it got hung up on the reef. When she told Agent Shishido about the
Iola
winding up on the reef, she had forgotten she took these photos of the
Iola
on the open sea. When she gets to her theft trial, she still says the
Iola
wound up on the reef, and she denied taking the photographs. Another lie.”

These photos proved at her theft trial that her story was a lie, the prosecutor said. “So she knows that story wouldn’t fly here. So she tells you that the
Iola
really didn’t hang up on the reef after all. And that Walker and her attorney told her that these were the lies that she should tell to the theft jury.”

Enoki’s next point could alone,
if believed
, convince the jury Jennifer was probably involved in the murders. “Here’s another example of the same changing of the story,” he said. “She told Shishido the Zodiac was found overturned
in
the water, and the gas tank was floating nearby. Now, she disputes meaning that the Zodiac was in the water. But it’s clearly what Agent Shishido remembers from that interview, and what he understood her statement to mean. And there’s certainly no misunderstanding about something floating. You can’t float if you’re on the beach. Agent Shishido had no misunderstanding about where she said the Zodiac was, because what did he do? He took the Zodiac motor to Ken White to see if that motor had ever been underwater. He would never have done that unless his understanding was that she meant it was in the water. Then when she hears Mr. White’s testimony at her theft trial that the motor couldn’t possibly have been underwater, her testimony became, after that, that it was not found overturned in the water, but on the beach.

“She testified that when they found the Zodiac it was one to two feet from the water. And that it was not high tide at the time they found it.

“Well, you’ll recall Mr. Bryden testifying that there were two highs and two lows in tides every day at Palmyra. And supposedly Mr. Walker, according to Miss Jenkins’s version of what happened, left the Zodiac out there sometime between 4:00 and 5:00
P.M.
because that’s when she heard the motor going away.

“And it’s there overnight, supposedly, and into the next morning when they find it.
Now, it would have to have gone through at least one high tide at that point
. And I would submit to you that being one or two feet from the water, and
not
being high tide, would mean that at high tide that motor must have been
in
the water for some period of time. But there’s no evidence of this in Mr. White’s examination.”

Enoki went on. “I would also like to point out to you that she wrote a letter to Mac Graham’s sister, but only after she was arrested. She did not inform the sister, or any relative, or anyone else, about the disappearance until
after
her arrest.

“Even in her letter to Mrs. Muncey, she lies about Mr. Walker’s letter that’s enclosed, saying it was written much earlier when, in fact, it was written in jail.

“You can see the pattern that Miss Jenkins has illustrated, in that she doesn’t admit something until either she’s caught in a lie on it, or she knows that it’s not going to benefit her to keep up this particular story.

“But she can’t escape the one thing that is really obvious about this situation. If someone winds up dead, and the only motive for the murder is stealing their property, then when you show up with their property, you are it.

“The motive of the killing is a theft of the
Sea Wind
and its supplies. There’s no other motive.
And Miss Jenkins has the same motive as Mr. Walker
. She even thought nothing of using the clothing of Muff Graham and taking the four hundred dollars that was on board.”

Enoki reminded the jury that at her theft trial, Jennifer testified that she intended to return the
Sea Wind
to Mac’s sister and, therefore, wasn’t really stealing. “But she denied at this trial that this was in defense to the theft charge. What do you think the defense was, if it wasn’t that? I mean, she was on trial for
theft
, and she was found sitting on the boat, so she told the jury: ‘I was going to return the boat.’ Of course it was for the purpose of defending against that charge.”