Body Parts (36 page)

Mazurek walked her through the escalating events of that night, establishing the point where consensual sex turned to rape.

“Did you ever tell him no?”

“I probably did once or twice, but then after I realized it wouldn’t even have been an option for me, I don’t think I said anything more after that,” she said, feeling Wayne’s stare as she testified.

“What’s going on now after he’s tied you up and flipped you on your back? Is this part of the deal that you made, to engage with the defendant in this type of sex?”

“No.”

When they got to questions about Wayne getting aroused as he punched and hit her between the legs with a belt buckle, Rachel asked if she could take a break. The judge called a ten-minute recess.

After they came back, Mazurek asked, “While you were on the floor, did you say anything or make any complaint to the defendant?”

“I couldn’t too much, because he had me to where I couldn’t. He had some kind of tie or something tied around my mouth. Like, I was kind of gagged.”

Mazurek said he knew this was hard for her to think about. “Have you tried to put this out of your mind?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She testified that she couldn’t stop crying the whole time Wayne was strangling her, causing her to pass out, then reviving her.

“Was he saying anything to you while he was doing that?”

“All I can remember is that he just kept telling me to ‘shut up, shut up. Don’t look at me. Shut up or I’ll kill you.’ I couldn’t help but cry.That’s something you just can’t stop. And that’s all I remember.”

Reiterating Wayne’s defense, that “he put ties around women’s necks to cut off the carotid arteries, to give them pleasure,” Mazurek asked, “Did you feel like that’s what he was doing with you?”

“Oh, no.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause if I’m crying and it hurts, that’s not pleasurable to me.”

“And were you passing out?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Did he seem to be getting turned on by doing that to you?”

“It seemed like the whole time, mostly, he was still real frustrated . . . and really nervous.”

Mazurek reminded her that she had told investigators that it seemed as if Wayne “was getting turned on” by strangling her during sex.

“When you pass out and black out so many times and you’re scared, it’s, like, it’s hard to remember anything anytime later,” she said.

“Was he being kind and gentle during the sex, or was he being a different person?”

“Oh, no, no, no.”

“How was he being?”

“Rough and forceful and mean. . . . So, eventually, I just played lifeless, ’cause I didn’t know what else to do.”

Mazurek asked how long it took for Wayne to stop. Rachel said it seemed like it went on for five or six hours. She couldn’t say for sure because she didn’t have a watch and couldn’t have looked at it even if she did.

“It seemed like forever. I thought it was never going to end.”

Referring to the conversation they had about Wayne’s son and ex-wife after the rape, he asked, “So there was nothing, no—no conversation about that, that set him off to do the things that he did?”

“No.”

After the lunch break, Canty launched into his cross-examination and immediately began his mission to impeach Rachel by raising inconsistencies in her statements to investigators, including the defense’s own, Ron Forbush.

Rachel admitted she felt sympathy for Wayne as Canty reiterated her earlier testimony that he’d seemed very depressed when he apologized to her and displayed a remorseful expression she would never forget.

“Never. Never, ever, ever,” she said, confirming her previous statement.

“And you said that he cried for fifteen minutes . . . and he had his head on your shoulder, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you actually felt empathy, you felt sorry for him?”

“For a minute. At that time. But only for about a minute.”

Canty returned to his focus on impeachment, listing her many arrests for prostitution.

“Twenty, thirty?” Canty asked.

“It’s possible,” she replied.

When Canty asked about her pimp, Mazurek objected and the judge sustained it on the grounds of relevancy.

Canty asked for a bench conference, explaining that Rachel had told his investigator that she got into the truck because she was desperate. Canty said he believed that she may have needed money to pay her pimp, which gave her a motive to exaggerate the night’s events.

Mapes chimed in, saying, “Our theory is that she engaged in some S and M voluntarily, consensually, and it got out of hand. . . . She normally never gets into a big rig.”

Smith ruled in favor of the defense, overruling Mazurek’s objection.

Rachel went on to testify that her pimp was the first person she called from the pay phone when she got off the freeway in Cloverdale.

Canty returned to the subject of Rachel’s arrests, asking her to confirm them, one by one. She admitted to pleading guilty to a misdemeanor after being charged with felony hit-and-run. She said she didn’t remember being arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and she denied being convicted for burglary, although she acknowledged she was arrested on the charge.

“How about possession of a stolen auto?” Canty asked.

“No.”

“Back in West Virginia?”

“That was ten years ago. You expect me to remember that?”

Rachel began looking noticeably uncomfortable, fidgeting and shifting in her chair as she caught on to what Canty was doing. “What relevance does any of this have to do with right now in this case, anyway?” she asked.

So, Canty told her, bringing up a second rape report she made to police shortly after her encounter with Wayne.

“About a few months after your encounter with Mr. Ford, you reported another case, falsely, about being raped. Is that correct?”

“Falsely?”

“Yes.”

“I think if I’d been raped, I wouldn’t be falsely accusing anybody.”

Moving on, Canty questioned her truthfulness when she claimed she hadn’t been doing drugs in 1999 when she was arrested for prostitution in Sonoma and offered to make undercover buys for the arresting officer.

“Not true,” she said. “Not true.”

“Odd,” Canty said. “So, if an officer wrote that in his report, he was lying?”

“Obviously, because I wasn’t doing drugs then.”

Canty circled back to the alleged rape incident, then started in on her again.

“What I’m asking is, you made up a story about being raped?”

“I didn’t make it up. I would never make up a story like that. Never.”

“Well, the reason you made up the story, am I correct, is that you believed that they had stolen your money?”

“Are you trying to make it seem like I’m a liar?” she asked. “I’m not. I would never make up a story like that because I believed somebody stole my money. That’s ridiculous.”

Clearly upset by the confrontational questions, Rachel turned to the judge and asked if they could take a break. He said yes.

But the break did nothing to interrupt Canty’s line of questioning. He pointed out that the nurse who examined her found no evidence of assault after the second rape. In fact, he asked, “When that was all over, the police arrested you for filing a false report, correct?”

“I don’t remember,” Rachel said.

Canty continued with the litany of her arrests, asking her to confirm that she’d been arrested for pandering and lying to an officer in Salt Lake City.

When Rachel said she didn’t remember, Canty asked if she remembered being arrested.

Rachel confirmed that she’d spent a few months in jail for pimping and pandering, but said the charge of “misleading a police officer” didn’t ring a bell.

On redirect, Mazurek tried to clean up the damage the defense had done to his witness’s credibility.

Asked what activities were to be covered by the $100 fee to which she and Wayne had agreed, she said, “Sexual intercourse.”

Mazurek then asked her a series of questions about whether she consented to any of the violent acts that Wayne had committed against her, including binding, strangling and beating her, and punching and burning her in the vaginal area.

“No,” she answered repeatedly.

“Did he ask you whether or not he could tie you up?”

“No, and if he had, I would have said no.”

Mazurek asked if she felt sorry for Wayne today in the courtroom.

“No.”

Asked to explain what she stole when she was arrested for burglary, Rachel said she took some clothes, which she planned to sell for money. Prostitution did not provide a very stable income, she said.

“In light of you told us everything that you’ve done in the past, including your convictions, your arrests, and the types of things you’ve been engaged in, if you had lied about the incident that Mr. Canty was talking about, would you tell us you lied?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Okay. Were you lying about that?”

“No.”

Mazurek closed by asking whether she’d been truthful in her testimony about being tied up, and engaging in vaginal and anal sex with the defendant, while being strangled, all without her consent.

“Yes,” she replied.

Even after Rachel left the stand, Canty continued to tangle with Mazurek over her truthfulness. This debate continued for weeks as Canty kept trying to impeach her testimony, arguing with Mazurek and the judge, and calling several witnesses to dispute her statements about her 1999 rape report.

In short, Rachel had told police that she’d been grabbed and dragged into a motel room, slapped, and threatened with a knife while a half-dozen underage males poured alcohol down her throat until she passed out. When she woke up, she said, she was missing $400 and her pager, and “felt different down there.”

Police subsequently found photos the young men had taken of her, posing naked and smiling. The men admitted to robbing her, and she, in turn, admitted to buying them beer. No rape charges were filed and it wasn’t clear from the testimony whether any sexual assault had actually occurred.

Canty was upset. He didn’t learn until after she’d flown back to San Francisco that Smith had granted Mazurek’s request to issue a bench warrant in case she tried to avoid testifying. To Canty, this suggested that she was coerced into testifying and he had missed his chance to question her directly about it.

Canty dragged out the witness credibility debate until Smith and Mazurek expressed concern that they were spending more time on this side issue than the murder case itself.

“It takes us down the path of an issue that is completely collateral to what we’re dealing with here,” Smith said on April 24, just before the defense began presenting its case. “We’re going to confuse the jury with these issues, and I don’t see for what.”

When all was said and done, Canty had succeeded in casting doubt on Rachel’s credibility. But ultimately, it was not enough to outweigh the horrors of what she’d described to authorities and again in court about her night with Wayne Ford.

In 2008, Rachel recalled that testifying had been very difficult for her. She not only had to face her attacker again, but she was also torn apart by Canty, who kept asking what she thought were irrelevant questions.

She said it was the hardest thing she’d had to go through since being raped by Wayne a decade earlier, but she’d had no choice. Mazurek had forced her to come and testify.

Before the trial, she said, she’d been successful in putting the experience out of her mind. But while she was testifying, she said, “[Wayne] stared at me the whole time. It brought back all the bad memories.”

The prosecution finished its case on April 12, 2006, sooner than anticipated, so Judge Smith called a recess until Monday, April 24, when the defense had scheduled its first witnesses. Given their prearranged flights, the defense team said it was not able to bring them in any sooner.

CHAPTER 23

D
EFENSE
: C
ONFUSED
AND
M
ENTALLY
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