And the Sea Will Tell (84 page)

Sunny, who seemed to have aged ten years since lunch, could say nothing. She just gripped my hand.

I returned to the counsel table and reached out to a dazed Jennifer. She took my hand and stood up. I put an arm around her and we remained standing as the drained jurors entered the courtroom. We would take the verdict, Jennifer and I, standing together.

Even the possibility of a mistrial had evaporated. We had a verdict, and we all knew what it had to be.

The clerk went forward to the jury box and accepted the verdict form from the foreman. She took it back to the judge, who read it silently, then returned it to her. This would be her show, for the judge’s poker face gave away nothing. There seemed to be a momentary suspension of breathing in the still courtroom.

I could hear only bits and pieces.

“We the jury…as to count…murder…Eleanor Graham…the defendant…”

With my arm still tightly held around her shoulder, I tucked Jennifer into my embrace, as if hoping to shield her from what was coming. “I’m sorry, Jen,” I said. “I was sure I’d be able to convince the jury that—”

“…not guilty.”

The courtroom burst alive. The tension broke and people jabbered, shrieked, hugged, and shook hands. Jennifer and I embraced, then turned to exchange hugs with others.

Len was next to me, beaming. He’d made an amazing return from the land of the dead. Color had returned to his cheeks. We shook hands warmly. “Well, Vince, we’re undefeated,” he crowed. “Maybe we should do this again.”

Ted Jenkins, despite his calm outward appearance just minutes earlier, admitted he’d never been more frightened in his life.

Sunny, unable to stop crying, hugged me tightly.

In the midst of this turmoil, Elliot Enoki and Walt Schroeder quietly picked up their briefcases and left, with Hal Marshall following close behind.

The jurors returned to the jury room to gather their handbags, coats, and other belongings. They were greeted privately by Judge King, who shook hands with each one and thanked them warmly.

A few minutes later, we mingled with the jurors in the lobby of the courthouse, eager to figure out just what had gone on during the deliberations.

About some things, we’d been right. The two jurors we had seen going to lunch together
were
for acquittal. Kathleen Archer and Irene Angeles
were
solid not-guilty votes.

“Mrs. Angeles, I have to ask you something,” I said. “When the jury was at ten to two, we noticed you had been crying. Why?”

“Mr. Bugliosi, it was the most emotional experience
ever
in my life,” she replied, the strain still evident in her voice. “And I was so upset because we just couldn’t convince the last two jurors to vote ‘not guilty.’” I smiled, outwardly and inwardly. How very deceptive this game of life can be.

Jury foreman Ernest Nelson and Francia Rico had been the last holdouts for guilty. It turned out that the impatience with the prosecution we’d observed in Nelson had stemmed from his frustrated feeling that he had already heard enough. He’d been convinced early on of Jennifer’s guilt and voted guilty on every ballot except the last one.

Juror Michael Nevins, one of the engineers on the jury, came up to me. “It was very effective,” he commented, “the way you separated Jennifer from Buck, and that you went after Buck.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nevins, for letting me know that.”

Nevins also said, “I think the jury had the picture of you as a prosecutor, and were surprised to see you on the other side.”

About one thing, I’d been dead wrong. Confirming my inability to read jurors, one of the jurors strongest for acquittal was none other than the Kansas Rock. The Rock had actually helped to convince other jurors that not guilty was the only proper verdict. His demeanor during the trial made no sense to me at all.

Irene Angeles had a word of advice for Jennifer.

Softly, but with conviction, she said: “Honey, next time make a better choice of boyfriends.”

T
HE VICTORY
party that night was hosted by Ted Jenkins at a downtown San Francisco restaurant named Vincent’s—“in your honor,” he happily informed me.

Two dozen family members and friends were gathered at one long table. Jennifer sat between Len and me. Appropriately, the first round was champagne, and Ted stood for the toast. “To my innocent sister,” he said, smiling.

Everyone sipped the bubbly and gave in to the very festive mood.

Ted wasn’t finished. “Innocence doesn’t win court cases, good attorneys do.” Holding his glass up again, he said: “To Vince Bugliosi and Len Weinglass. Two of the best attorneys in the country.”

It soon became apparent that Jennifer was not going to be so giving. Dinner hadn’t even arrived when she began criticizing me. I literally could not believe what I was hearing. “You shouldn’t have ever called Elliot Enoki by his first name in your summation,” she scolded me. “It sounded disrespectful, and patronizing.” In our entire time together, four whole years, it was the first time she had ever talked to me in this way. I should have also gotten more sleep during the trial, she said, because I looked tired during my final argument. And, she added, “I didn’t like your self-deprecating remarks to the jury, like that La Scala business.”

I had very informally begun my summation by jokingly telling the jury that I was standing behind a larger podium than they had seen throughout the trial in order to protect myself in the event they were displeased with what I would be saying and chose to “throw tomatoes” at me as the audience reportedly does at La Scala Opera House in Milan “if they don’t like the performance.” This kind of occasional self-deprecating remark to the jury is my style. It can also help relax the jurors.

At first, Jennifer’s criticism struck me as being funny, I guess because I can sometimes see humor in bizarre behavior. But I soon realized there was something about Jennifer’s psychological makeup that I clearly didn’t understand. Not one in a hundred thousand defendants would be reacting this way after an acquittal, when everyone else was celebrating and in a congratulatory mood. Of all the happy celebrants, she should have been the most ecstatic, most relieved, and yes, the most grateful. What manner of client was this?

In fact, at no time after the verdict that day did Jennifer say a single word to me indicating any kind of appreciation.

T
HE NEXT
day, a reporter who had covered both murder trials found a downcast Elliot Enoki in a borrowed office on the sixteenth floor of the courthouse, packing boxes for his return home.

They exchanged small talk. Then, out of the blue, the reporter asked: “What would happen if Mac’s body were found someday? Would you prosecute Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins for
his
murder?”

Enoki stopped what he was doing and looked up. His answer was delivered in a voice firm and resolute. “That’s a possibility,” the prosecutor said.

M
AC
G
RAHAM
, we can speculate with a degree of certainty, lies inside that last missing container. But are his remains still in their watery grave in the Palmyra lagoon, where at any time, like Muff’s, they could surface and wash ashore? Or has his makeshift coffin washed out through the channel into the murky depths of the sea that Mac so loved?

Someday, perhaps the sea will tell.

B
UCK
W
ALKER APPEALED HIS
murder conviction. On February 20, 1987, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, noting that “for over a decade, this court and district courts alike have been involved in the unraveling of the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Eleanor and Malcolm Graham in 1974,” unanimously upheld Walker’s conviction.

Inmate 17950–148 is serving his life sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution at Lompoc, California. Buck Duane Walker will be sixty-eight years old when eligible to apply for parole in 2006. From his cell, Walker types long, soulful letters protesting his innocence to his mother, daughter, one surviving brother, and assorted friends.

Still living in Simi Valley and working as her telecommunications branch office’s top salesperson (she earned close to $100,000 in 1990, has her own secretary, and drives a top-of-the-line Toyota equipped with a cellular phone), Jennifer, still single, shares her sprawling two-story home with two old friends from Hawaii and their two children. Like her mother, who lives twenty minutes away, Jennifer tends a rose garden. She enjoys backyard barbecuing on warm summer afternoons and going for walks through a nearby park. When asked if she no longer has any doubt that Buck murdered Mac and Muff, she says, “I guess I’ll always have some doubt.”

Jennifer’s beloved dog, Puffer, died ten days after her nineteenth birthday.

O
N
M
ARCH
24, a little over a month after Jennifer’s trial ended, I received a thank-you card from Sunny Jenkins: “Vince, you did such a fabulous job! We are forever grateful.”

But no word from Jennifer.

Three weeks later, on April 14, I received a letter from Ted Jenkins. “Over the past several years, your confidence in Jennifer’s innocence and eventual acquittal gave her strength and courage, and kept her going,” her brother wrote. “Without her testimony, for which you unwaveringly fought and tirelessly prepared, the jury’s verdict could certainly have been different. If Jennifer’s testimony was the turning point of the trial, and I credit you for its superb impact, then your summation was the knockout punch.” Without my summation, he wrote, “I dread to think of what the outcome might have been.”

Still, I didn’t hear from Jennifer.

In late August, six months after the trial, I returned home from the television trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in London. Sifting through a stack of mail, I found a card from Jennifer postmarked August 17.

Jennifer wrote that “words sometimes seem pitifully inadequate to express the deeper feelings in life,” and that she had “sat for hours over the last several months trying in vain to adequately convey” her appreciation for what I had done for her. She went on: “Thank you is something one says when someone holds open a door. Are these the only words available when one has one’s life saved? Perhaps it’s my own limitation. Perhaps more profound words exist. But I don’t know them. So, I thank you—for your belief in my innocence—for taking up the lance and shield of my defense—for restoring my life to me. I only wish I knew a bigger word than thanks.”

W
HILE CONTINUING
to practice law but taking only selected cases, I have nearly completed a book on the drug problem in America, perhaps the most serious internal crisis this nation has faced since the Civil War. I am also at work writing an in-depth book on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, one that I’m confident will shed a different light on the tragedy that altered the course of American history.

The television trial of Lee Harvey Oswald was the closest thing to a real trial of Oswald that the Kennedy assassination will ever have.

Remarkably, a British television company, through painstaking and dogged effort, managed to round up and persuade most of the original key lay
^*
prosecution and defense witnesses in the Kennedy assassination, many of whom had refused to talk to the media for years, to testify. (Because nearly all of them, fortunately, were relatively young at the time of the assassination, they were still very much alive, although many now live in various parts of the country.) They also secured a jury chosen from the actual rolls of the Dallas federal district by the clerk of the court, and a federal district court judge from Texas. I was the prosecutor. The British production company selected Wyoming’s Gerry Spence (of Karen Silkwood and more recently Imelda Marcos fame) to represent Oswald. Reportedly, Spence had not lost a jury trial in seventeen years. I organized and prepared the prosecution of Oswald in virtually the identical fashion I have my many other major murder trials, and worked exclusively on the case for close to five months. In the process, working with the witnesses and the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission and twelve volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations on a daily basis, I became very familiar with the case.

All of the trial participants were flown to London for the equivalent of about four court days of very concentrated trial. There was absolutely no script, and no actors were used. Spence and I went at it with the same intensity we would have in a real trial. Though only a television trial (five hours of which—out of a total of twenty-one—were shown in the United States, a few additional hours in European countries), the historical importance of it was that when these witnesses testified before the Warren Commission, it was in a nonadversarial context, and therefore they had not been exposed to cross-examination, as they were in London. At the end of the evidence and Spence’s and my final summations to the jury, and after six hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Oswald for the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

L
EONARD
W
EINGLASS
went back to handling the types of cases that had made him so popular with the political left. He successfully defended Amy Carter, daughter of the former President, and his old friend Abbie Hoffman (since deceased) against charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct stemming from a November 24, 1986, protest against CIA recruitment on the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Elliot Enoki still is the First Assistant U.S. Attorney in Honolulu. Because of a bad back, Walter Schroeder took a medical retirement from the Justice Department in May 1990.

Judge Samuel P. King still sits on the federal bench in Honolulu. Now assigned to “senior status,” which for judges means semiretirement, at the age of seventy-four Judge King carries a relatively light caseload. In mid-February 1991, a member of a Northern California water district wrote to Judge King, explaining that his order from the bench during Jennifer’s trial for it to cease raining in the Bay Area by February 16, 1986, “worked all too well…that was the last real storm to have visited here in the last five years.” Now, in the middle of one of the worst dry spells in California history, the water board member pleaded with the judge to set aside his order. In a February 26, 1991, reply to the board member, Judge King, his tongue firmly in cheek, revoked his order and ordered that “rain should fall in California beginning February 27, 1991.” That very day the rains came as ordered. What the weather experts described as a “large warm storm coming from Hawaii” deluged drought-stricken Northern California with its heaviest rainfall in five years—more than eleven inches in six days. In retrospect, there was considerably more risk than I had thought in challenging Judge King’s authority.

By coincidence, my coauthor, Bruce B. Henderson, crossed paths on June 26, 1988, with the foreman of Jennifer’s jury, the retired chicken farmer Ernest Nelson. They were both in Santa Rosa, California, to see the play
Inherit the Wind
, based on one of Clarence Darrow’s most famous cases, the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. During intermission, Nelson and Henderson discussed the Jennifer Jenkins trial. “You know, she got away with murder,” Nelson said casually. He explained that he’d finally voted “not guilty” only because of the reasonable doubt I’d raised in my summation. “That Eyetalian fellow, Bugliosi, was very clever,” he said.

Despite the jury foreman’s blunt remark, I’m confident that the jury system returned proper verdicts (for Jennifer Jenkins
and
Buck Walker) in the Palmyra murder case, unquestionably one of the most fascinating and enigmatic true murder mysteries of our time.

In May
1988, at Honolulu’s Keehi Marine Center, a sleek new racing yacht with two tanned young men aboard pulled into a slip on a windswept morning. As they went about securing the bow and stern lines to the pier, the men couldn’t help but notice the old wooden ketch in the adjacent slip.

The weary old vessel in slip F-3 had once been Mac Graham’s pride and joy. It now smelled musty, like rotting wood. Blisters in the wooden finish had been crudely covered with tape that was peeling. Hanging on the side of the cabin was a “For Sale” sign with the name “Alan” and a Honolulu phone number. (In January 1978, Kit Muncey had sold the
Sea Wind
to Ray Millard of Oahu for twenty thousand dollars. Millard, who said it had been his life’s dream to own a stately wooden-hulled sailboat, intended to do a major overhaul and refurbishing of the well-traveled
Sea Wind
, but he never got around to it. For years, the boat remained anchored off Millard’s seaside home at Pohakea Point in Kaneohe Bay, not being sailed and gradually falling into a state of disrepair. In March 1988, Millard gave Mac’s old ketch to Alan Horoschak, a friend from Honolulu. “With the condition she was in, I couldn’t have got much for her anyway,” Millard explained, “and only from people who wanted to break her up for parts. Alan promised he’d fix her up. He towed her over to Honolulu, hauled her out at a boatyard, replaced some planks, and did a few other things. At least she stayed in one piece.”)

Apparently in an attempt to facilitate the sale of the boat, new paint had recently been slapped on—pea green with brown trim. The quick-fix cosmetics wouldn’t fool anybody. The rotten smell told the story. All the galvanized rigging and chain plates were rusted and needed replacing. The wooden hull, which had once cut through the water so majestically, was now laced with long, deep cracks. There was little doubt that this cripple would leak like a sieve at sea.

“Will you look at that garbage scow,” said the man who had been at the helm of the racer.

His crewmate stopped what he was doing and stood, arms akimbo, studying a vessel that was considerably older than he, as if trying to peer beyond the obvious. “I don’t know,” he finally offered. “She has a salty rake to her masts. Looks like an ancient mariner, all right, but in her day, I’ll bet she was—something.”

A
S FOR
Palmyra Island, the remote atoll continues to serve up grist for the perpetuation of the belief in the Palmyra Curse for those who are so inclined.

While attempting a trip from San Diego to Hawaii in early June of 1989, a forty-foot sloop hit bad weather and its crew became seasick. Struggling with auxiliary-engine problems while trying to find their way by celestial navigation (most modern oceangoing boats are equipped these days with navigational gear that picks up positional signals from orbiting satellites), the inexperienced crew missed Hawaii and found themselves pushed far to the south…ending up at Palmyra Island.

After a brief stay on the atoll, the sloop reportedly departed Palmyra on July 27, 1989, headed for Hawaii. The boat was never seen again, nor were the four people aboard her. Some facts are coincidental enough with the
Sea Wind
mystery for pulp fiction. The missing boat’s name:
Sea Dreamer
. Home port: San Diego. Owner: Graham Hughes.

The Coast Guard instituted an extensive search between Palmyra and Hawaii, followed by harbor searches in Hawaii and on the West Coast of the United States for the
Sea Dreamer
, Graham Hughes, his wife, Sheri, and their two sons, Alex, twenty-one, and Ryan, sixteen. Authorities discovered that Alex had—prior to the voyage—registered at San Diego State University. He never showed up for classes. Friends of the San Diego family have not heard from them.

To this day, the
Sea Dreamer
and the Hughes family, last seen on an uninhabited island they didn’t even intend to visit, remain unaccounted-for.

W
E
do
know the fate of another sailor.

Just before dusk on July 26, 1987, a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 search plane, acting on a tip from a foreign fishing boat, reported spotting a sailboat drifting in dead-calm waters “just southeast of Palmyra.”

The plane circled in the darkening skies, its crewmen looking at the boat through binoculars. They could see no signs of life. The sloop’s mast was broken off, and the sails were torn. An attempt to contact the boat by radio raised only silence. Visible on the stern of the boat was the name, the
Marara
.

The forty-one-foot sloop and its owner, Manning Eldridge, a forty-three-year-old Garden Grove, California, attorney, had been missing since mid-February 1987, while on the last leg (Tahiti to Hawaii) of a three-year South Pacific cruise.

On August 2, a week after the aerial sighting, a 190-foot cutter intercepted the drifting sailboat, and armed Coast Guardsmen cautiously boarded the
Marara
. Below, in the cabin, they found human skeletal remains.

The Honolulu coroner subsequently identified the deceased as the missing attorney. Owing to the condition of the remains, the cause of death was listed as unknown.

Earlier, when Eldridge had not shown up on schedule in Hawaii, some friends wanted to believe that he had succumbed to the temptations of the tropics and swapped his law practice for life on a deserted island. For him, the solo cruise had been the fulfillment of a long-held dream to sail through the South Pacific, far from his job and the inexorable grind of urban living. But other friends were very worried, and they soon contacted the authorities.