Body Parts (32 page)

Canty was similar to Whitney in that he, too, switched sides after a stint in private practice. During his time as a criminal defense attorney, Canty developed cancer. After battling the disease into remission, he joined the public defender’s office in 1990.

“He fought the fight and he prevailed,” Forbush said later. “He always had residual medical issues because of that, but he beat it.”

Forbush, who started with the sheriff’s department as a correctional officer, left as a homicide lieutenant on a disability retirement in 1977, shortly after a traumatic fatal shooting during an arrest.

He tried real estate for a while, then became a private investigator. While working for the public defender’s office, he was often paired up with Canty, who had since become lead attorney in the Public Defender’s Capital Defense Unit.

It was only natural that Canty get the high-profile Ford case, and for Forbush to join him.

Canty strongly opposed the death penalty, feelings that stemmed from his deep Catholic faith. An altar boy growing up, he attended a Catholic high school and later became a Eucharistic minister. He was known as “Papa Joe” to his nine children.

“He felt life is sacred,” said Forbush, who shared those feelings with Canty.

Meanwhile, Kevin Robinson, Wayne’s Humboldt attorney, still had a trial date on the docket, so he arranged for his client to undergo some medical tests in San Francisco.

Freeman tagged along with Correctional Officer Don Vizgaudis on the June trip, in case Wayne made any spontaneous comments. Freeman and Wayne spent much of the drive playing “Can You Top This?” a game that involves identifying the brands and years of passing cars.

Wayne made two remarks during the trip that later found their way into court papers. The first he said to a paramedic: “If I had been given Paxil ten years ago, it would have saved a lot of people.”

He uttered the second one on the way back to Eureka. They were approaching the Benicia Bridge on Interstate 680 when they saw a woman standing with her children at the side of the road next to a car with its hood up.

“It’s too bad that we can’t stop and help because we have a prisoner,” Freeman said to Vizgaudis.

“If we stopped to help her,” Wayne chimed in, “she could tell her grandchildren how one time she was helped by two nice cops and a serial killer.”

After learning that Wayne was going to be transferred to a jail in San Bernardino County, Robinson tried to block the move.

“What the district attorney is apparently attempting to do is deprive me of access to my client while I prepare for trial, on some theory that he gets to charge the same case in as many different counties as he can find are connected in their commission, and whichever district attorney wishes to go to . . . bat first gets to choose,” Robinson argued at a hearing before Humboldt County Superior Court Judge Bruce Watson.

Watson rejected the motion, so Robinson petitioned the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco to intervene.

But the momentum had already begun.

Wayne was transferred.

It didn’t take long for the media to find out that Wayne had arrived at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga.

In October, Wayne gave what appears to be his first and last interview to a newspaper reporter. He told James Rainey, a
Los Angeles Times
staff writer, that he had not understood “all the elements of the crimes” when he spoke to detectives back in November, and his requests for an attorney were denied at least nine times.

Since then, he’d clearly learned about the legal factors constituting murder, saying he’d realized that he “did not commit four murders.”

The
Times
story said he also claimed that Humboldt County authorities had “‘broken the law’ during his initial interrogation” and “coerced him into making incriminating statements.”

Wayne had not only been on medication since his confessions, he also seemed to have been educated about a possible insanity or diminished-capacity defense, based on the head injury he suffered in 1980.

But he exaggerated the facts surrounding that incident, telling Rainey that he’d been in a coma for nine days. He attempted to prove his claim by pushing the dental bridge holding his two front teeth forward with his tongue and pointing to a scar on his upper lip.

“I’m not saying I should be set free. Maybe I should spend the rest of my life in a hospital,” Wayne said. “This should have been treated medically from the very beginning.”

Still, Wayne said he didn’t expect to be let off the hook and was ready for whatever punishment came his way—whether it be time in a psychiatric hospital, “forty years in prison” or the death penalty.

“It’s in God’s hands,” he said.

CHAPTER 21

P
REPARING
FOR
T
RIAL

Rather than show his hand to Canty at a preliminary hearing, Whitney took the case to a grand jury in San Bernardino County in July 2000. With an indictment in hand, he was hoping to proceed directly to trial.

However, he was stifled by one delay after another. By December, dozens of motions had been filed in the case, including an unsuccessful challenge to the legality of the Rainey law.

Canty was so tenacious that he became the butt of jokes that played on his name, as in “Can’t he get the case to trial?”

But Canty didn’t mind.

“We thought it was humorous,” Forbush said.

Before a second attorney, Deputy Public Defender Steven Mapes, was assigned to the case, Canty and Forbush worked as a team to prepare for a trial that both sides expected to hinge on psychological testimony about Wayne’s mental state.

Their first goal was to explore Wayne’s social and medical history, which Forbush described as “Death Penalty 101,” so they could provide the jury with mitigating circumstances for Wayne’s crimes.

“The jury has to know these things so that they can make a competent decision on whether to take this person’s life or not,” Forbush explained.

Canty and Forbush each formed a bond with their client. Forbush did this by avoiding discussion of the gory details and focusing more on the outdoors or Jeeps. Canty had a good but different kind of relationship with Wayne, who often didn’t want to listen to his advice. That said, Wayne did give in to Canty’s better judgment about not taking the stand.

“There was a time he . . . may have wanted to testify, but on his lawyer’s advice, he accepted that it wouldn’t work out the way he thought it might have,” Forbush said.

Wayne would later jeopardize that decision, however, by confiding in an attractive woman who visited him in jail during his trial and recorded many hours of phone conversations for a documentary on his case.

As Forbush and Canty spoke with Ford family members, the issue of Wayne’s mother kept coming up. So, Forbush tracked her down in Dehradun, India, and traveled there to speak with her.

For him, the high point of the interview, which lasted about eight hours over two days, was her candidness about her shortcomings as a mother and how she focused more on the search for herself than she did on raising her two boys.

Forbush said he and Canty felt that Brigitte’s admitted lack of affection toward Wayne while he was growing up, and his feeling that she abandoned him, proved very important to the case.

One of the defense team’s challenges was to sift through the conflicting opinions of the psychological experts who had assessed Wayne. Canty and his team did not support the theories generated by the first team, which had been leaning toward a defense that Wayne’s brain was physically or structurally damaged. The new team attributed Wayne’s inability to remember how he’d killed these women to seizures or amnesia.

Canty and forensic psychologist Reid Meloy, whom he hired in March 2000 at $360 an hour, viewed Wayne’s deficiencies on a more psychological and emotional level. Ultimately, Meloy would spend about one hundred hours over six years on the case.

Among the psychological tests that Meloy administered to Wayne was the Rorschach, which he saw as a good way to show that Wayne’s thinking was not organized in a logical or sequential way.

The Rorschach consists of ten cards with inkblots on them. In Meloy’s view, the power of the test in a forensic case is that defendants don’t know how to fake their answers, so it tends to convey more about their personality and psychology than they are aware of. Because he had done research in this area, studying about four hundred antisocial children and adults, he was able to compare Wayne’s responses to normal people and those with similar diagnoses. Meloy was so interested in the Rorschach that he cowrote two books about it.

Wayne’s test answers were interesting, and many of them were, not surprisingly, quite sexual.

“What might this be?” Meloy said as he showed Wayne the first card.

“A spill on one side of a mirror,” Wayne said. “A bug that’s been squashed, poor bastard. A vagina down there.”

Meloy put the card facedown and handed him the second one.

“A face in there,” Wayne said, pausing. “A butterfly. Overall, I don’t like it. It looks bad. Like a vagina in a way.”

After seeing female genitalia on four out of the first seven cards, Wayne asked, “Am I undersexed?”

Wayne described the ninth card, which was in color, as “a gross picture, like an autopsy picture.”

Of the tenth and final card, he said, “Colorful. Some flowers. Spinal type of splaying open. I don’t like it. A spinelike structure. And then a clitoris at the bottom.”

Wayne wasn’t stupid. In fact, his IQ was 117, putting him into the bright-normal range. Meloy believed that Wayne was not only paranoid, but he also got his fantasies mixed up with reality. (Paranoid people typically have higher than average IQs.) To him, Wayne’s paranoia explained why he reacted so angrily and impulsively when women unwittingly said or did things that he viewed as provocative and malevolent.

Meanwhile, the wheels of justice continued to grind slowly along as Canty filed more motions.

In February 2002, he asked Superior Court Judge Michael Smith to throw out the indictment, contending that it violated state law and Wayne’s statutory right to a grand jury that was “randomly selected from a representative cross section of the population eligible for jury service in this county.” Canty filed another motion to throw out the indictment in October 2004; Smith denied both of them.

In late 2003, Smith heard Canty’s motion to exclude all of Wayne’s guilty statements—during the interviews with detectives and the prosecution’s psychologist, and his two remarks on the San Francisco trip—because he did not have an attorney present.

Smith issued a detailed fifty-five-page ruling in early January 2004, suppressing some, but certainly not the bulk, of Wayne’s statements. Smith ruled as inadmissible the portion of Wayne’s first brief interview with Freeman after he said he needed an attorney. Smith also suppressed the Berg interview, the three interviews with detectives that Wayne did that same day, and the following day’s interview with Jager and Parris, which included the polygraph examination.

Smith allowed the other interviews, however, ruling that Wayne understood he could have stopped talking at any time by asserting his right to an attorney.

Canty and Forbush believed that they should’ve won on the Miranda issues.

“I felt the sheriff’s people—they handled it pretty straight up,” Forbush said later. “I just think Juan [Freeman] wriggled a little bit. Juan knew what he needed to do and he made it work. I think Rodney was used by Freeman and duped, if you will. Wayne, of course, was pretty fragile when he was arrested. I mean, that’s pretty obvious.”

Wayne’s trial was scheduled to begin on March 1, 2004, but it was not to be.

At a hearing in January, prosecutor David Whitney announced that he was retiring and that Deputy District Attorney Dave Mazurek was taking his place.

“Having the case for so many years, it was hard to leave it,” Whitney told the
Press-Enterprise
.

Wayne agreed to waive his right to have a trial within six months of his next hearing in February to allow Mazurek to become familiar with the complex case.