Gang Mom (12 page)

“Would you give for the court record your name, please?” asked Marion Johnston, the court reporter.

“Janyce Iturra. I’d like to step around so Joe can at least look me in the face.” Janyce stepped from behind the lectern she had been placed at off to the side, to a space directly in front of Joe Brown. He looked up briefly, then back down at his hands in his lap. Judge Kip Leonard leaned forward from the bench, anxious to hear what Janyce had to say.

“First of all, I want you to hear my pain and to let you know what you’ve taken away from us. I’d like to know what made you think you had the right to play God and to determine whether somebody lived or died.”

She waited before continuing. Joe Brown did not answer.

“Aaron was your friend and you didn’t stop it. As far as I’m concerned, you might as well have pulled the trigger yourself because you didn’t take the chance you had to stop it.”

It was her turn to open up with both barrels, with words instead of bullets, words that would place the condemned boy’s crime in proper context.

“The losses that we have felt since this has happened is that two of my children here didn’t feel like coming because they didn’t think it would make a difference. See, you took their big brother away. You took their protector. You took my first-born child away. He was the man of our house and he’s been there since the age of nine filling that role. I have never felt fear in this town until you took my son away while he was sleeping in the security of my home.
You understand that
? It’s a very cold, violent way to take somebody’s life.”

Janyce paused, looking down at her notes, then up again, struggling with her emotions.

“You get to live ten years in the state pen with three meals a day and television and a good time. We live a life of nothing now. We have memories and I have worn his coat since the day I got it back. This is all I have to hold on to and I want you to know that. This is all I have to hold on to. On Thanksgiving, we had to visit a grave. Do you understand that?”

Suddenly, Joe looked up and replied, “Yes, I do.”

“You have all the rights. You are protected and we’re not. I have all the financial burden and you do not. I have four kids to take care of at home. You don’t. You don’t know what it’s like to hear the kids cry in the middle of the night and tell me how cheated they are and how unfair this thing is …”

Her voice trailed off. Joe Brown looked up again and Janyce fixed him with a stare that pinned him frozen.

“Who gave you the right to kill him?”

You could have heard a pin drop in the courtroom.

“Who gave you the right to kill him? If I were the judge sitting there I would make sure that you were sentenced to death. I feel that the only justice is that you don’t breathe again. But the law does not allow you to face the death chamber. The judge will give you time, but I sentence you to something else.”

She stood straighter and intoned the words like she was his judge and jury.

“Joe Brown, I sentence you to have to think of Aaron Iturra’s face while he lay sleeping before you let him be shot. I sentence you to take long, slow breaths, breaths you stole from him. I sentence you to remember those words, because that’s what you deserve.

“So my idea of you, Joe Brown, is that you are nothing. You are absolutely nothing, and the sad thing is that you are alive here today and he’s not. You had seven minutes to walk down to my house at one thirty in the morning and you could have done something. I hope you have a life of hell because that’s what you have put us through.”

Janyce looked up at the court, muttered a perfunctory “Thank you,” and sat down. The judge then sentenced Brown to ten years in prison.

That night, Janyce’s appearance at Brown’s sentencing was all over the local news. A few people called to give support, because while she had been calm and collected in court, she had been upset afterwards, reacting to the delayed stress of talking in detail about Aaron’s death. Janyce was in the middle of preparing dinner when there was a knock at the door.

“Oh, my God, Mary!”

It was Mary Thompson all right, with a big smile on her face. She busted right in like “Ed Norton” visiting “Ralph Kramden.” Janyce was shocked speechless for a second until her tongue untied.

“Mary, you have your nerve—”

Mary wouldn’t let her finish.

“Oh, Janyce, I’m
so
sorry for what happened to Aaron.”

“Mary, I tried you so many times and you never called back.”

“Oh, I was having problems with, you know, my beeper and my phone and then my dog Lars died.”

“Look, Mary, I …”

“Oh, I’m so sorry for Aaron being killed. And you know, I was still angry for Aaron having betrayed me.”

“
Betrayed you
, Mary …” Janyce began in indignation, only to be cut off again.

“I am so sorry for having Aaron killed, and if he hadn’t betrayed me …”

“Mary—”

“I’m so sorry for having to have it happen.”

“You didn’t even show up at the funeral!” Janyce yelled.

“The officers, the officers, they said I shouldn’t go,” she said in a flurry of words.

Janyce didn’t want to hear any of that crap. Mary had deserted her friend and his family on the day of his funeral. What kind of person did that? You could look for hidden meanings but the most obvious was that Mary just didn’t care.

Then suddenly, the whole tone of the conversation switched.

“Well, Jan,” said Mary rationally, “I just really want to be your friend. Why don’t we just do coffee? Call me.”

“I don’t think so right now. No, I don’t want to be your friend right now.”

Mary left. Angry and hurt, Janyce slammed the door behind her. Janyce stood there and fumed. The nerve of that woman, coming here when Aaron …

“Oh, my God!”

Had Mary just said, “I am so sorry for having Aaron killed”? No, wait a sec, that can’t be
.

All night, and into the following morning, Janyce questioned what she had heard. And if she had heard what she thought she had, what should she do? By morning she had decided. She went down to police headquarters to the Violent Crimes Squad.

“Jim,” she began, and told Michaud of her conversation the previous night with Mary.

Michaud was surprised that Mary had slipped up, but in eighteen years as a cop he had seen other con men make crucial mistakes that brought them down. He had recently worked a case of a major jewel thief and con man named
Thomas Moran
, who had operated up and down the 1–5 corridor, who thought he could continue getting away with his crimes, until Michaud got on his trail and, like a bloodhound, wouldn’t get off it till Moran began to make mistakes. Michaud was there all right, ready to pounce.

Maybe that was going on here. Maybe the pressure was finally getting to Mary.

“Are you sure about what Mary said?” Michaud asked.

“I heard what I heard. Yes, I’m sure,” Janyce answered.

“All right, Janyce, look …” Michaud grabbed both her hands and stared into her eyes. “I need to tell you, this woman is more involved than you or I can ever imagine. Now, no more talking to her. Do not put yourself out there for her and definitely do not meet her for coffee. Oh, and one more thing.”

“What?”

“I’m going to get her.”

DECEMBER 19, 1994

Janyce Iturra looked at the space that used to be her son Aaron’s bedroom. When she and the kids moved back in, she’d cleaned up. Gone were the blood-stains and the bloody mattress. When you looked around, it seemed like he’d be home any minute. But of course, that was just a fantasy. She turned, went out into the garage and got into her car.

As she drove, she thought she should be at work. Janyce still worked the early morning shift at the department store. Her employer had been nice enough to give her the time off for the court proceedings she needed to attend.

By the time she reached downtown, her mind had turned to the place it felt most comfortable with lately: revenge. Revenge was on Janyce’s mind when she entered court for Jim Elstad’s sentencing. Sure, revenge wouldn’t put food in her children’s mouths, nor would it bring Aaron back. But it felt
good
.

“Mrs. Iturra, this is your opportunity to make a statement, and if you would like to come up and sit in the chair next to Mr. Skelton, please feel free,” began court reporter Hugh Wheeler.

Steve Skelton looked up from his seat at the prosecutor’s table as Janyce walked around it and sat down next to him. Janyce looked down at her notes, shuffled them in her hand, then looked up.

Janyce made her statement coldly and methodically, reviewing the way the murder of her son had been carried out. Years from now, when the parole board reviewed the file to make a decision about whether or not Jim Elstad got out on parole, she wanted to be sure they knew what a cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch he really was.

“I would like you to look at his senior picture,” Janyce said to Jim Elstad. She extended it to Elstad, and Wheeler, the court reporter, came over and took it. Then he handed it to Elstad, who gazed at it.

“I just got it a couple days after he died. That was
your
friend, and you held his life in your hand just like you’re holding his picture now. You had choices. He was a human being, and in that seven minutes that it took you to go from your house to my home, you committed the most cruelest crime on Aaron, on me and my family,
your friend
.

“What you robbed my three girls of, and my surviving son of, was an uncle for their children, a best man at their wedding, a companion in old age. You robbed me of grandchildren.”

Then she described how she came to discover his injured body, and holding him in her arms. “There was blood everywhere. Too much. There was brain matter there. I did not know what it was until later. And I still knew my son was going to make it because he was the strongest person I knew.”

She talked about how it took a while to find out that he had been shot in the head and the embarrassment she and her kids went through when, “We were made prisoners in our own home. We were checked for gunpowder residue on our hands. We couldn’t leave.

“Do you know how long I had to wait before I could leave and see my son? Eight thirty. Seven hours after you shot him. I lost seven hours with my son, seven of his last hours on earth, because
you
shot him.
You
! I finally got down there and you know how many hours I had left? Two. He died at ten thirty, Jim. From what I understand, it was at the same time your sister was having her baby. Congratulations on being an uncle,” she said sarcastically.

Janyce paused and took a drink out of a paper cup of water, then continued.

“The first time I got to kiss him was at the funeral. A little late, don’t you think?”

Elstad didn’t answer, just stared at her. What was there to say? No psychological evaluation had been done on him, but from the description of the way he committed the crime and his lack of guilt afterwards, and even as Janyce poured her heart out, it sounded like he was probably a psychopath.

Elstad didn’t feel guilt. He just did what made him feel good. Like shooting a defenseless teenager in the back of his head as he slept.

“It’s going to be ten years, fifteen years before you see your little niece. But it will be a lifetime before my kids ever see their brother. It will be when they’re passing. And the one thing that I’m going to sentence you to is that every night you go to sleep, the last thing you see, is my son sleeping before you shot him. And that every breath you breathe is a breath you took from him. And you remember that for the rest of your miserable life, because I can’t give you any worse sentence than
that
.”

She sat down and the judge sentenced Jim Elstad to fifteen years behind bars. The guards led him away into the bowels of the prison system, away from his family, away from society. Maybe he’d turn his life around in prison. Maybe he’d get an education there. Maybe he’d realize the horror of what he had done and begin to feel.

Like the “bad guys” on “NYPD Blue.”
Not
!

Michaud had been watching from the back of the courtroom.
Good
, he thought.
One less murderer to worry about. And now he’s gone. Two down and one to go. The one who set the whole thing up and continues to walk free
.

Mary Thompson
.

THREE

The Wire

TEN

Mary was born November 23, 1954, in Massillon, Ohio. Her mother, Ethyl Fockler, was a nurse with three children. Her brothers at the time of her birth were twelve and seventeen, while her sister was sixteen. Mary’s, though, wasn’t a planned birth. In fact, Ethyl figured she was too old to have any more kids. She was wrong.

Marriage and family therapists today quickly pinpoint where family dynamics go wrong and a child follows the wrong path. A child brought into the world unplanned may get the message that her birth was a burden to her family and as a consequence, begin to act out. In Mary’s case, it is hard to tell what she learned subliminally. While her father, a steelworker in one of the local mills, loved her dearly, her sister would later recall that as she matured, Mary became a bully, acting out with tantrums and violence.

“Yeah, I was pretty spoiled,” Mary Thompson recalled during an interview in 1996. “Judy [her sister] couldn’t handle that. None of them could. I remember one time the ice cream truck came around and my dad said, ‘What kind do you want?’ and I said, ‘Cherry, raspberry, banana,’ several flavors, and he got them all for me.

“Then my brother Joel said, ‘Can I have a bit of one of those?’ And I went ‘Noooooooooooo!’” Mary continued, sounding like Red Skelton’s greedy character “The Mean Widdle Kid.”

Her other brother Bobby was more into Italian food than ice cream. Sometime in 1967, Bobby was driven by his brother Joel to the pizza place where his wife worked. Bobby walked in, pulled a gun and shot his wife dead. Sentenced to prison, by the summer of 1968 he was serving his time in the Ohio Correctional Facility when inmates started a riot. Watching the riot coverage on TV at home, his father became alarmed. Would his son be safe? The old man worried so much for his son’s safety that he had a heart attack.