And the Sea Will Tell (80 page)

“The act of reregistering the
Sea Wind
was the single most affirmative act to conceal the fact that the
Sea Wind
did not belong to Buck and Jennifer. That was the official change of ownership on that boat.”

Buck Walker, guilty of the murders, had every reason to reregister that boat, I added. “Jennifer, being innocent, had no such compelling reason, and she refused Buck’s request that she do so.

“These are the registeration papers of the
Sea Wind
,” I said, holding them up in front of the jury. “‘Owner: Roy Allen. Co-owner…’ There’s nothing there. And the acquisition of this boat was obviously the very reason why these murders were committed. But Jennifer’s name
does not appear on these papers
.”

I admitted that the next point I was going to argue smacked of high camp. “But it’s a major, major point which demonstrates Jennifer’s consciousness of innocence,” I said.

I went over Jennifer’s learning from Joel Peters, on the morning of October 29, that the authorities were looking for Buck and her; their rowing to shore; their hearing Buck’s dogs barking on the deck of the
Sea Wind
; Jennifer’s suggesting they go back to the
Sea Wind
, put the dogs below, and bring Joel’s laundry back to him; and Buck’s exclaiming to Jennifer, “Are you crazy? Leave me off at the dock first.”

“So, Jennifer drops Buck off, goes back to the
Sea Wind
and puts the dogs below, then takes Joel’s laundry back to him. As you know, Joel Peters testified that Jennifer did, in fact, return his laundry, and shortly thereafter, he became aware of her being pursued in the harbor by the authorities.

“Could this set of circumstances possibly show a stronger consciousness of innocence? If Jennifer had been involved with Buck Walker in the murder of the Grahams, under these circumstances, even returning to the
Sea Wind
to put the dogs below would have been completely out of the question. It would have been preposterous.

“But bringing someone’s
laundry
back? As the expression goes, ‘Give me a break.’ Maybe,
maybe
someone who in their mind is only guilty, like Jennifer, of having aided and abetted a fugitive from justice might do this. But
not
someone who is guilty of having committed two murders.

“There’s no clearer, more dramatic, more unequivocal example of the difference between Buck and Jennifer in this case than what happened at this moment. Buck, knowing he had committed murder, did precisely what anyone in his shoes would have done. He had Jennifer drop him off at the dock, and he took off.

“Can there be any question that if Jennifer had also been guilty of these murders, she would have gotten off the dinghy with him?

“We’re all aware that the right picture speaks much more eloquently than any words. The Berlin Wall comes to mind because there was a picture of it recently in the newspaper.

“You know, whole forests die every year to feed the printing presses on both sides of the Iron Curtain—trillions of words being written to sell the virtues of democracy vis-à-vis communism and vice versa.

“But the Berlin Wall, which the Communists erected, tells the whole story without one single word being written or uttered. The concrete wall, with barbed wire and armed guards on top, is there not to keep people from getting in, but to keep them from getting out.

“Need anything further really be said?

“Likewise, no words of mine could evoke the picture I ask you to visualize in your mind’s eye. The authorities are in pursuit of Buck and Jennifer, and she knows it, yet there she is, rowing the dinghy to return someone’s laundry. Doesn’t that say quite a bit, folks? I mean, I think it does. I think it does.

“Jennifer returned that laundry because—isn’t it so very obvious?
—she was not running away from any murder
.

“Even if you don’t accept that reasoning, which, I submit to you, is inherently sound in its logic, don’t you at least have to accept the following:

“Would a human being who has such an exquisite and uncommon concern for a fellow human being that even when her own welfare is in jeopardy, she still finds it within herself to worry about returning another’s laundry, of all things, would she be the type of person who would sit down and cold-bloodedly plan the brutal murder of two precious human beings?”

I allowed the question to hang in the air a moment. “The answer is almost too obvious to state. It’s a loud, ringing, unequivocal,
no
, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.
The answer is no
,” I shouted out.

I charged that the prosecution throughout the trial had sought to portray Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins as a Pacific Islands version of the legendary desperado pair of the thirties, Bonnie and Clyde.

“Well, Buck Walker turned out to be a Clyde Barrow, but Jennifer Jenkins ain’t no Bonnie. It just didn’t work at this trial. It was like trying to rivet a nail into a custard pie. It didn’t stick.”

I spelled out, slowly, what the charges in this case really meant. “The murders are alleged to be premeditated murders. At a minimum, this means that with cold reflection Jennifer planned, she
planned
to eliminate Mac and Muff Graham. That she helped make the decision on the time they would die, the place, the deadly instruments to be used.

“Premeditation means she knew, in advance, the horrible, ghastly death that Mac and Muff Graham would suffer, and in effect, she said: ‘
I don’t care. Let’s do it to them
.’ That’s what premeditation means.

“This young woman who cared enough to return someone’s laundry even though she was being pursued by the authorities didn’t care if the lives of Mac and Muff Graham, people she liked and was friendly with, were snuffed out like ants on a sidewalk.

“Can the ineffaceable mark of guilt be placed on the head of Jennifer Jenkins? I say that such a thought is a perversion of all the principles of logic and common sense that we know.

“Let’s go on,” I said, amplifying on Jennifer’s consciousness of innocence.

Her conduct during her interrogation by the FBI on the day of her arrest was that of an innocent person, I maintained. “Not only doesn’t she want to talk to a lawyer, not only does she not remain silent, not only is she not closed-lipped and evasive, she can’t wait to blurt out what happened on Palmyra. She
wanted
to tell Shishido what happened. She was so eager she even interrupted him when he was advising her of her rights.

“Jennifer not only spoke freely to Shishido, she also gave an interview to the reporter from the
Honolulu Advertiser
. When I asked her on the stand why she talked to the reporter, she said, ‘Because he wanted to talk to me.’ I’m sure if the League of Women Voters had called her up, she would have talked to them, too.

“Snapshot glimpses, ladies and gentlemen, of an innocent mind.

“Another piece of evidence pointing to Jennifer’s innocence is this. Chances are the bodies of the Grahams were disposed of in the lagoon in the same area as where the remains were found. A heavy container would not be likely to be floating in all types of directions in the lagoon. We know there wasn’t too much motion or energy in that lagoon, the lagoon being placid even when the surrounding sea was tempestuous.

“Mr. Shishido testified that on October 29, 1974, Jennifer told him the location where the Zodiac was found overturned. And lo and behold, seven years later, Sharon Jordan finds Muff Graham’s remains in the same general area.

“Now, if Jennifer knew where the bodies had been disposed of, would she have directed the FBI to the location where the bodies were likely to be found? If someone commits a murder and hides the body, do they turn around and tell the authorities where the body might be?”

I let this argument sink in.

Then went on: “I’ve been discussing here the many examples of Jennifer’s conduct which show a consciousness of innocence, and the fact that guilty people don’t act innocent.

“What about the reverse argument Mr. Enoki might make that if Jennifer were innocent, she would not have acted in some instances the way she did? In other words, innocent people don’t act guilty.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the reverse argument cannot be fairly or comfortably applied to Jennifer’s conduct in this case for the simple reason that, in a real sense, Jennifer
did
have a guilty state of mind,
but not as to the murder in this case
. Rather, it was due to her helping a fugitive from justice escape, her not having reported the disappearance of the Grahams, and the realization that she was on a boat that did not belong to her.

“I say that Jennifer Jenkins’s manifestation of a consciousness of innocence has continued right up to the present time in this courtroom. For her to have been guilty of these two hellish murders and testify the way she did on that witness stand for over two days would require the performance and acting virtuosity of a Sarah Bernhardt.

“Jennifer Jenkins is not such an actress. She is a rather vulnerable, decent young woman whose misfortune it was to have gotten mixed up with the wrong man. As we travel this winding and uphill road of life, things like this happen.

“Perhaps Sartre, the French existentialist, might not agree, but I submit to you that Jennifer got caught up in a set of circumstances beyond her control. These circumstances, in a few instances, caused her to act in a manner not compatible with her true nature—acts which, in retrospect, she is not supremely proud of. But again, you know as well as I that things like this happen in life. When you enter that jury room to commence your deliberations, you don’t have to leave your human experiences at the portals to that room. You can take them with you, as I know you will.

“Put succinctly, Jennifer Jenkins fell in love with the wrong man, a man on the run. I hate to resort to clichés, but this case is a classic, textbook example of a good, decent person being the victim of circumstances.”

“W
HAT
I
WANT
to discuss now are three mistakes that Buck Walker made which, because of their nature, point towards Jennifer’s innocence. And because there were only four people on Palmyra, and two are dead, since these mistakes point towards Jennifer’s innocence, they necessarily point
exclusively
to the guilt of Buck Walker, inasmuch as he is the only one who remains.

“In other words, if the prosecution can play their game of four minus two leaves two, this is a variation thereof: four minus three leaves one.

“One mistake was probably instinctive in nature; the other two, because he committed these murders alone, he was literally forced to make.”

I explained that Walker’s instinctive mistake (which I said was merely “something for you to consider”) was his invariably referring to himself alone with respect to the
Sea Wind
. “He told Larry Seibert and Seibert’s boss, Joseph Stuart, ‘
I
won the boat in a chess game,’ and he told Joel Peters not once but twice, ‘That’s
my
boat.’ Not ‘That’s
our
boat,’ but ‘That’s
my
boat.’ Why did Walker find it so natural to say ‘I’ and ‘my’ and so unnatural to say ‘we’ and ‘our’? Because he, and he alone, committed the murders in this case. And I think it’s a reasonable inference that knowing this he instinctively said ‘I,’ not ‘we.’”

Concerning the second mistake, I told the jury that Enoki wanted them to believe that the burning of the skull and the fire in the container were evidence of the murder of Muff Graham. “Just as war sometimes makes strange bedfellows, trials sometimes do also,” I said, explaining that I also wanted them to accept that conclusion, but for different reasons.

“Let’s look at that evidence,” I said. “On the skull of Muff Graham there is a whitened area—which Dr. Uberlaker called calcinations—over the left eye and extending back about the size of my hand. Uberlaker said this calcination was a localized burning resulting from ‘extreme heat being applied to the bone.’ Dr. Stephens, the coroner, called it a ‘localized burn of high intensity.’ Both doctors stated that an acetylene torch could have been the burning agent.”

I reminded the jurors that Mac’s workshop had an acetylene torch.

“Then there was the testimony of William Tobin, the FBI metallurgist who conducted several tests on the container and concluded there had been a fire
inside
the container fueled by a hydrocarbon accelerant, such as gasoline or kerosene.

“I think we can safely assume that Buck Walker would not have had any reason to start that fire inside the container if Muff Graham’s body was not in the container at the time of the fire.

“Now, what’s the significance of all this? Winston Churchill once said that at the bottom of every problem, no matter how complex, is common sense.

“This problem isn’t even complex. What conceivable reason under the moon would Buck Walker have had to use an acetylene torch and to set an already dead body on fire if it was not to prevent the identification of that body in the event the authorities found it prior to total decomposition? Without the identification of the body, the chances of a prosecution would be considerably diminished. Hopefully, the fire would burn all the flesh, thereby eliminating Muff Graham’s fingerprints and other identifying characteristics such as scars and moles, and also consume all the teeth, another mode of identification. Yet we know that this did not happen in this case.”

I read the portion of Dr. Uberlaker’s testimony in which he stated that other than the burning over the left eye socket and “possible slight evidence of burning” on the right side of the lower jawbone, he found no signs of burning on any of the other bones.