Murder in Little Egypt (39 page)

Not a single letter appeared suggesting that the doctor might possibly be guilty or that citizens ought to wait to see what a jury decided. As more evidence piled up, the letters grew more strident. The police had planted the gun in the doctor’s garage. Sean’s St. Louis neighbors were part of the frame-up. Someone had lured the doctor to St. Louis that night and told the neighbors to watch for him. Reviving talk of Mark Cavaness’s death after all these years was nothing but St. Louis “hype and vilification.” The doctor had been framed in 1971, one letter said, when witnesses changed their stories and lied, to get him convicted of reckless homicide. Now he was being made a scapegoat for the rottenness of big-city life. The people of St. Louis wanted a hanging: “If Dr. Cavaness were the worse [
sic
] criminal you had in St. Louis, your fair city would be well off beyond imagination.”

A story in the Evansville, Indiana,
Sunday Courier and Press
ran on February 3, 1985, under the headline HOMICIDE STIRS ILLINOIS TOWN’S EMOTIONS. Eldorado residents were “deeply suspicious of authorities in St. Louis who are trying to convict one of their own of murder.”

Articles telling of the defense fund and the support for Dr. Cavaness soon appeared in papers all over Illinois, in the
Chicago Tribune
and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. Television news broadcasts featured the controversy. The popular theory in Eldorado was that Sean had been killed by drug dealers for gambling debts; the criminals had ties to St. Louis bigwigs, who were framing Dr. Cavaness to protect themselves. Detective Barron took most of the heat and publicly replied with as much diplomacy as he could muster: “I admire people who stick up for him but I think they’re putting blinders on. They see one side. They do not know what I know about this case.”

The story quickly became national news. A reporter in the Chicago bureau of
People
magazine, Giovanna Breu, realized that the Dr. Cavaness imbroglio was of more than local interest, especially because of the vehemence and seeming unanimity of the doctor’s hometown support. She did a thorough job of research, interviewing Bertis Herrmann and others in Eldorado and the authorities in St. Louis, and obtaining a taped interview with Dr. Cavaness in his cell at the county jail.

Steve Goldman, learning of the interview and assuming that the doctor would tell the
People
reporter his latest version of Sean’s death, the suicide story with the doc’s firing a second shot to make it look like a murder-robbery, leaked that material to the Evansville
Courier
before the
People
story could come out. When he subpoenaed Giovanna Breu, she refused to produce the tapes of her interview.

The
People
story, accompanied by a chilling photograph of Dale Cavaness sitting in a chair in shackles and another, poignant photograph of Sean, Kevin and Patrick in 1980, was meticulously accurate and fair. Breu did include the doctor’s version, but she also quoted Kevin as saying that the people who supported his father were those who knew him least. “I was reared in his shadow and I know,” Kevin said.

The
People
story brought the first wave of writers and movie and television producers from Hollywood and New York. Kevin and Charli hoped that their side of the story would come out at the trial. Their emotions were too frayed for them to think about sharing their thoughts with strangers who, as Goldman advised, should not be trusted with evidence before it was presented to a jury.

Kevin, Charli and Marian were offended by all the support Dale received. (As for Patrick, Marian did her best to shield him from the publicity and, except for the
People
story, was mostly able to do so, since the Cavaness case did not get much play in Wausau.) Rumors reached them that a relative of Martha’s, a woman who was a lawyer in Oklahoma City, planned to write a book about Dale from his point of view. Supposedly he was filling his hours in jail writing letters about his life and talking into a tape recorder about the wrongs he had suffered. Vicious remarks about the doctor’s ex-wife and elder surviving son surfaced in southern Illinois, characterizing them as disloyal and out to crucify a decent man.

What about Sean and Mark? Kevin wondered. Didn’t anyone care about them? About Marian and what she had gone through, was going through? Did the credulous citizens of Eldorado and Harrisburg not believe that Marian had had good reasons for leaving Dale years before? In Little Egypt the double standard reigned. A man like Dale could do just about anything he pleased—apparently including getting away with murder—and his wife was supposed to keep her mouth shut and-stick by him. It was all in the Bible, people said. The only public sympathy for the family came in the form of an announcement that appeared anonymously one day in the
Daily Journal
. Framed in black it read simply “In Memory of Mark Dale Cavaness and Sean Dale Cavaness” with their dates of birth and death. Kevin learned that the tribute had been placed by two young women, friends of his and Charli’s from Eldorado. He was grateful for the gesture, which he hoped might prick a few consciences.

As Kevin maintained, Dale’s vocal supporters were people who knew him least. The Sullivans and the Becks were publicly silent; others, like the Leonards and the Davenports, had moved from southern Illinois. Kevin wished that dissenters in Eldorado and Harrisburg would speak out, but he understood why they did not. They had to live and work down there.

One of the most bewildering of Dale’s supporters was a Baptist minister, the Reverend Staley R. Langham, who appointed himself Dale’s spiritual counselor and principal personal spokesman. A letter from Reverend Langham, pastor of the College Heights Baptist Church in Eldorado, appeared in the
Daily Journal
, stating that he had visited Dr. Dale Cavaness in jail and that the doctor was well and in a good state of mind. Dr. Dale wished to thank everyone for their letters and support, which proved what a kind and loving place Eldorado was. He was looking forward to returning to his practice and was certain that he would be cleared of the charges against him.

Reverend Langham went on to report that Dr. Dale had revealed what had really happened to Sean. Even his attorney did not know the true story at first; now the attorney wanted it kept quiet, so Reverend Langham was required to maintain the secret. Everyone could rest assured that the doctor was innocent and would be cleared.

This letter was only the first of many public statements by Reverend Langham, who said that he had gone to see the doctor as a Christian act of mercy and had discovered an innocent, persecuted man. The minister would not abandon Dr. Dale until he was freed.

Kevin had never heard of Staley Langham, and he was sure that Dale had never had anything to do with him until now. The idea of Dale’s so much as giving a minister or a priest the time of day was ironic; he had not set foot in a church for years except for funerals and for Kevin’s wedding. But Dale was clever, Kevin knew, and would be prepared to try anything to save his own neck. Talking to a minister who then blabbed to the public was a good strategy; it had worked for other criminals.

The Sullivans, like most of Dale’s longtime friends, were so shocked and depressed by what had happened that they could hardly speak about it between themselves, aside from the wisdom of keeping a public silence. Once the evidence began to come out, especially Dale’s tale of a suicide and a second shot, they assumed that their old friend had finally gone crazy. They were sorry to conclude that they had so misjudged a man whom they had considered difficult, eccentric and irresponsible toward his family but hardly a murderer.

Lou and Pann Beck could not talk about Dale and his sons without crying. Over in the Missouri Ozarks, where Marilyn and Chuck Leonard had retired to a cottage beside a lake, Marilyn had been sure that Dale was guilty the minute that she saw the news of his arrest on television; and she telephoned Marian often to comfort her. Dale’s guilt was more difficult for Chuck to accept; he became silent and depressed, finding it difficult to reconcile all the good times he and Dale had spent together with Dale’s being a father who had murdered his son. Marilyn was more inclined to see what had happened as the logical extension of the megalomaniac behavior she had endured working for Dale.

Marilyn’s successor, Eddie Miller, never for a moment doubted Dr. Cavaness’s guilt; but he kept silent for his own health and safety, in case the doctor managed to wriggle free. Eddie had heard the rumors about the widow in McLeansboro and believed that the doctor had also killed her. Back in 1977 Eddie Miller was one of the few who assumed that Dr. Cavaness had committed the perfect crime in killing Mark. Eddie thanked God that he had taken Dr. Cavaness’s threats against him seriously and had quit his job before being killed or driven insane. He was surprised that the doctor had not killed his wife when she dared to leave him. He admired Marian and hoped that she would be able to survive.

Privately Eddie Miller thought it amusing that Bertis Herrmann was so prominent among Dr. Cavaness’s supporters. Eddie remembered when the doctor had ordered him to fire Herrmann, who Dr. Cavaness had said was incompetent and incapable of repairing the office air-conditioning. Herrmann had blamed Eddie, of course, who took responsibility for the dismissal, preserving the myth of Dr. Cavaness’s good-fellowship.

Among those who had known Dale Cavaness well, one of the most shocked was Greg Sullivan, Pat and Betty Ray’s son, who had always been one of Dale’s favorites. Greg had heard his parents say that, if Dale had paid as much attention to his own sons as he did to Greg, Mark and Sean would have turned out happier and better-adjusted kids. His father had often urged Dale to be a more responsible parent.

Greg was now the manager of the Marion Holiday Inn, the largest and best-run hotel and entertainment complex in Egypt, a hugely profitable operation; he was also a successful racing-car driver and the pilot of his own plane. He rightly considered himself more sophisticated than the typical admirer of Dr. Cavaness, yet he realized he too had been fooled, dramatically so.

Greg had attended Peggy Ozment’s Christmas party and with his wife had spent almost the entire evening, well over two hours, at a table with Dale and Martha, laughing and drinking and reminiscing about old times—hunting trips, parties, excursions. To Greg, the fact that Dale had only that morning either murdered Sean or watched him commit suicide and then shot his own son in the head was astounding.

Greg knew Dale as crafty, someone who showed you only as much of himself as he wanted you to see; he had also known him as a warm, funny guy, who could encounter you in the street and sit down with you on a corner to chat for half an hour just for the hell of it. He had seen Dale explode on many occasions over the years; he had also heard him give wise, confidential advice. When Greg had been experiencing some troubles with a girlfriend several years back, it was Dale who had gone out of his way to help him.

Greg had believed Mark’s death to have been an accident until the papers began quoting Jack Nolen as saying that the case was an open homicide seven years later. As for Sean, Greg’s theory was that Dale might well have bitched and taunted him into suicide. He could hear Dale’s voice, vicious and loud, telling Sean that he was no good and that he ought to do everyone a favor by killing himself. But what was beyond imagining, almost, was what had certainly happened: that Dale had casually conversed and laughed for hours at Peggy Ozment’s party.

Wherever they were, whatever they were doing with their lives, people at all close to Dr. John Dale Cavaness and his family were puzzling over what had happened. In south Florida, where he had retired, Marian’s uncle Eddie Bell thought he understood why Dale had murdered both Mark and Sean. Eddie was a combat veteran of World War II and a successful businessman. He was not a sentimentalist and was no more surprised by what human beings did than a homicide detective was. He had observed Dale during those Christmases in St. Louis when, usually with Marian out of the room, Dale would attack Kevin and Sean, telling them that he wanted them out of his life. Marian would try to pass off Dale’s behavior as drunk talk, but Eddie had seen the hatred in Dale’s eyes and was glad that his beloved Marian had divorced this tyrant and was not living near him.

To Eddie, Dale Cavaness had a threefold motive for killing his sons. The first was greed: Dale was a business failure and wanted the insurance money. The second was hatred: He had contempt for Mark and Sean and wanted them out of the way, as embarrassments. He also despised that part of himself that was a failure—in business and in his first marriage, as a father and a husband—and he saw Mark and Sean as living proof of his failures. In a twisted way he must have thought that by killing them he was getting rid of that part of himself that he hated.

The third motive was revenge. Eddie knew Dale Cavaness well enough to see that he was the sort of man who never forgave and never forgot. He had married Marian and gone back to Eldorado to spite his first wife, Eddie thought; and when Marian also left him, he had to find a way to get back at her. No matter that Dale had brought the divorce on himself by his behavior: No woman was going to rebuff Dale Cavaness and get away with it. He had hurt Marian by killing the one thing she cared most about in life, her children.

For Eddie, all three motives were intertwined, greed and hatred and revenge. He wished that he could explain them to the jury. He did not think that Dale Cavaness was crazy, just a son of a bitch and a doctor who thought that he could get away with anything.

23

DALE’S TRIAL DATE WAS INITIALLY SET FOR FEBRUARY 11, 1985, but Arthur Margulis needed time to assess the evidence and to interview potential witnesses in St. Louis and in southern Illinois, as well as to prepare his client on the crucial question of what had actually happened on the morning of and the night preceding Sean’s death. Margulis’s various motions postponed the date to July 8. Justice moved swiftly in Missouri. Protracted delays and the lengthy, histrionic trials that characterized the sluggish pace of the courts in such states as California were unknown in Missouri. There were several reasons for this efficiency, perhaps the most important being that the state’s criminal lawyers did not charge by the hour and so had no incentive to drag out a trial.