Empty Promises (39 page)

The Renton detectives felt they were at a breakthrough point with Gary Grant and they certainly didn't want to turn him loose now, so Hume and Phelan headed for a restaurant, where they ordered hamburgers for all three of them. Gary ate heartily. Spinning out the time, they drove out to the University of Washington and through the Arboretum. They might have been three friends out for a pleasant drive. Neither detective
brought up the subject of the double homicide. Instead, they spoke of innocuous things— the weather, sports. The next questions should come from Dewey Gillespie.
By the time they returned to the waiting area outside Gillespie's office, the two detectives could see that Gary was nervous and apprehensive. Several times he murmured half aloud, as if arguing with himself: "I couldn't have done something like that."
Hume and Phelan were thinking only of the murders of two little boys. Even though Antoine Bertrand was already under arrest for the killings, there was something about Gary Grant and his missing knife that made them wonder if they had arrested the wrong man. If Gary was holding something back, Gillespie would know. The polygraph machine was a formidable device for anyone to face. To the uninformed, it looked as if it could zap its subject with a jolt of electricity if it detected a lie. Leads would measure respiration, blood pressure, pulse, galvanic skin response, perspiration. A number of people are convinced it can somehow read human thought. It is certainly an intimidating machine.
Gary Grant was far from sophisticated, and he was already sweating and mumbling.
When the tests were evaluated, however, it would be the detectives who were shocked. They had no idea when they brought Gary in for a lie detector test that they had netted a much bigger fish than they could have imagined.
In the jargon of the polygrapher, Gary Gene Grant "blew ink all over the walls."
When the information he gave Dewey Gillespie was followed up by more questioning from Renton detectives and a careful reconstruction of his whereabouts in the prior eighteen months, they realized that one man
and one man alone was probably responsible not only for the murders of Scott Andrews and Brad Lyons but also for the violent deaths of Carol Adele Erickson and Joann Marie Zulauf.
Grant was not a flamboyant suspect, and that may have made it easier for him to move about Renton without being noticed. He was not in the least memorable. He was something of a loner who had few close friends and who worked at a low-profile job. What rage he carried within himself— and he did carry rage— he kept carefully hidden.
After his encounter with Dewey Gillespie and the polygraph, nineteen-year-old Gary Grant was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. As far as the public knew, he was initially arrested and held only as a material witness in the tragic murders of two six-year-old boys. They would have to wait until his trial to learn the whole story.
In the meantime, charges against Antoine Bertrand, the bearded and rambling man who had walked into the ER at Valley General Hospital, were dropped.
Grant's trial was set for July 6, 1971. Because neither he nor his parents could afford to retain criminal defense attorneys, two of King County's most able lawyers were appointed to defend him. One was C. N. "Nick" Marshall, who had been the senior deputy prosecuting attorney in the King County prosecutor's office until six months before. He was now a partner in his own firm. Marshall had successfully prosecuted some of the most infamous homicide cases in Washington State. The other was James E. Anderson, also a former deputy prosecutor with a solid conviction record. Now the onetime prosecutors would be on the other side in a very challenging defense case.
Judge David Soukup would preside over the trial. His black Abraham Lincoln beard made him look very judge-like, but spectators were sometimes surprised to see him
before
court began as he jogged to trials from his home. Racing through the marble halls of the courthouse in shorts and Nikes, Judge Soukup looked more like a marathon runner than a superior court judge.
Gary Grant's trial was a battlefield of legal experts all trained in the same school. Besides Marshall and Anderson, Judge Soukup, and both prosecuting attorneys— Edmund P. Allen and Michael T. Di Julio— were all either current or former deputy prosecutors. There was an expectant air in the courtroom as the gallery waited to see how the five men, trained to work together, would act in their new roles.
Gary Grant was noticeably thinner than he had appeared in early press photos, and he sat stoically beside Nick Marshall as the prosecution built its case against him. He was gaunt and pale. He gulped silently, his breathing rate increased, and he would occasionally lower his forehead to his hands.
A great deal of the testimony in the Grant trial was painfully explicit. The prosecution produced witness after witness who detailed the last hours of each victim's life. As they spoke, the victims came alive in the courtroom, and the enormity of their loss brought tears. Even Defense Attorney Marshall, who had a five-year-old son of his own, walked quickly from the courtroom during a break and ducked into one of the myriad marble niches to hide the tears streaking his face.
Over the defense's strong objections, the prosecution introduced graphic pictures of the victims' bodies. Medical Examiner Gale Wilson's testimony was lengthy, and Nick Marshall cross-examined him vigor
ously, particularly on the alleged sexual motivation of the killer. In the Carole Erickson case, he disagreed with Wilson on how precisely the age of sperm can be pinpointed. Wilson replied that it could be done within certain limitations, but he was adamant that viable sperm
can
be present in the vagina from thirty-six to forty-eight hours after intercourse.
In an attempt to suggest to the jurors that Carole had intercourse with someone else before she went to the library the December evening she died, Marshall asked, "Then how can you say whether these sperm found in the Erickson girl were there just before or just after death?"
"If they had been there sometime before death they would have migrated further up the vagina," Wilson said flatly.
"How many did you find?"
"Five or six… on the labia at entrance [to the vagina]."
"Could they not have been deposited up to twenty-four hours earlier?"
"No. They would have been further up."
"Then how could you classify this as rape with so few sperm deposited?"
"Imperfect penetration," Wilson answered succinctly.
It seemed a fine point— and it was— but Nick Marshall was trying to save his client from the death penalty; murder committed because the killer had rape in mind tended to influence a jury far more than murder with other motivation.
Again, Marshall took particular issue with Dr. Wilson's statement in direct testimony that Joann Zulauf had succumbed to "asphyxia and attempted rape." He asked for a mistrial because Wilson had included the
rape attempt as a cause of death. Judge Soukup denied the mistrial, but during cross-examination Dr. Wilson qualified his statement by saying that the attempted rape was a "condition associated with death."
The most dramatic aspect of Gary Grant's trial was the admission of lengthy taped interviews between Jim Phelan, George Helland, and the suspect. Grant had been informed that his statement was being recorded, but during pretrial hearings, Marshall and Anderson had fought to have these tapes excluded. In a surprising reversal, the defense attorneys themselves introduced the tapes. It was a calculated risk on their part; they wanted to present the defendant as emotionally disturbed but still, Marshall told the jury, "a human being."
The courtroom was hushed as the tapes played for over three hours. Most people never actually hear what goes on during a police interrogation and certainly this jury never had. Hearing the recorded voices of the detectives and the defendant somehow had more power and immediacy for the jury than what was actually going on in front of them in the courtroom.
Wally Hume told the jury that he and Jim Phelan had waited while polygraphist Dewey Gillespie talked with Grant, preparing him for the polygraph. But Gillespie told them that Grant had pulled back and blurted that he didn't want to take the test at all. He would rather tell them what had really happened than be hooked up to all the leads and wires.
"Detective Gillespie walked to the door," Hume recalled. "He said, 'I think this is your man.' "
In his expanded statement on the tape, Grant began his story of the events of April 20 exactly as he originally had told Gillespie. This time, however, he added more to his story.
Gary Grant's voice on the tape explained that after he shopped for shoes, he had somehow found himself on a wooded trail. He began following two small boys, five or six years old. Because he ducked behind trees and foliage, the children were totally unaware that he was behind them. When they came to a "level area," Grant recalled that one of the boys stopped to examine something on the ground while the other walked on ahead. Grant stepped out from the tall brush and told the boy to take off his clothes. The child started to cry and refused. At that point, Grant said he pulled out his knife and the little boy obeyed him, removing his clothes down to his undershorts.
Then Grant said, "I thrusted [
sic
] my knife into him."
The other boy, who had gone on ahead, doubled back on the trail and saw his friend lying on the ground. Grant said he pulled a cord out of his pocket and wrapped it around the second boy's throat until he was dead. Grant's voice shook as he admitted that he had stripped the boy's clothes from his body. He also recalled hitting "the lighter-haired boy in the face."
He then told of throwing the knife away, walking along the river, falling in, and calling home for a ride. Everything was the same, except that, when he was first questioned, he had completely left out his deadly encounter with Scott and Brad. He insisted that he had no memory of interfering with either youngster sexually. And his recall of the actual killings was somewhat dreamlike. He insisted that, after the murders, he didn't remember killing them. "I asked my daddy if I could go and look for them while they were lost," he said, "but he wouldn't let me."
Phelan and Hume had asked Gillespie to question
Grant about the death of Carole Adele Erickson. They gave him pertinent details of that homicide and Gillespie said to the suspect: "Can you recall any like incidents? I will only mention three items— a girl, a riverbank, and a shoestring."
Grant responded with three questions: "Was she stabbed in the back? Was it at night? Did she have long, dark hair?"
And then he began to cry. When he was calmer, Jim Phelan took over the questioning, and it led to Grant's finally giving a statement on the Erickson case. His queries and Grant's answers echoed in the courtroom, the tape amplified by microphones.
"Do you recall a girl walking along a riverbank somewhere around Christmas?"
"I was walking behind her. I saw her walking along the river. She had on blue jeans, a green jacket, some sort of leather tie-on shoes. I followed her for ten or twelve feet. Then I walked up behind her and thrusted [sic] the knife into her back. I untied the shoelaces and put them around her neck. I dragged her on her back and pulled her by her hands into the bushes— the stickers. Then I heard a couple on the bridge and I was afraid they'd see me, so I ran."
When Jim Phelan asked him if he had tried to rape the dying girl, Grant began to cry and answered over and over: "I don't know… I don't know… God, I wish I did."
"Was she a pretty girl?"
"Yes."
"Did you remove her coat… her sweater?"
"I'm not sure."
"Do you remember her pants? Did you do anything to her?"
"I don't know. I can see her. She's lying on her back. Her shoes are off and one [sleeve] of her coat is off."
"Gary, did you do anything to her sexually?"
"I didn't."
"Did you want to?"
"I suppose I wanted to, but I don't remember doing anything sexual or touching her clothes in any way."
After his confession to yet a third murder, Gillespie spoke with Gary once more. As they talked, suddenly the gaunt teenager put his head in his hands and murmured in horror,
"My God! There's another one!"
The jurors and spectators flinched— as if they were hearing the confession firsthand and not on a tape that was months old.
It was as if Gary Grant had buried the murders so deep in his subconscious that he really did not remember them until the investigators asked him to focus on them. And they, of course, had no idea that he was connected to either the Erickson or Zulauf cases when they began to question him about the two little boys.
In truth, they were as shocked as Grant seemed to be when he moved on to describe what had happened to Joann Zulauf. At that point, Wally Hume had put in a call to Detective George Helland, who joined them outside the polygrapher's office.
The interview that followed was also taped, with Grant's permission, and lasted nearly two hours. Grant had difficulty remembering just when the Zulauf killing occurred. He said he didn't know if it had happened two months or two years before.
Once again the defendant's voice bounced off the courtroom walls as he responded to George Helland's questions.
"It was in a green time of year because there were
leaves on the trees and foliage," Grant said, trying to come up with the month he killed Joann Zulauf. "I came down into a woods and I saw her ahead of me. She didn't see me.… I had a rock or whatever, and I hit her in the back of the head. She fell down. She started to say something and I choked her until she was dead."
"Gary," Helland said, "if we are going to believe you, we'll have to have more particulars— more details."
"I want it to come out," Grant said, his voice choked with sobs. "I did something wrong, I want it to come out. I can't hold it inside me anymore."
"Did you remove her clothing?"
"I don't know— I don't know whether I did or not." Here an incredulous tone came into the defendant's voice on the tape. "Up until I saw her in front of me on the path, I don't remember anything else. I just remember being on the trail and the sun seemed to be out— sort of cloudish, maybe somewhere around three or four in the afternoon."
Grant responded to Helland's questions, recalling that the girl was small, with shoulder-length curly reddish brown hair. He said she was wearing an army jacket and blue jeans. His voice became breathier and more tearful as he described the scene. "When she hit the ground and I grabbed her, she swung around on me. She saw me then. I just used my hand on her throat. She was on her knees. Her back arched and she beat me with her hands and arms, but I kept choking her until she was quiet."