Murder in Little Egypt (41 page)

“Sure,” Goldman said. “Tell him he’s going to get a second shot. He’ll appreciate that.”

Margulis replied that he would put the matter in less colorful terms.

On Sunday Judge Nolan ruled in favor of a mistrial and, on Margulis’s urging, set the date for the new trial in November.

Polled by the press after they were dismissed, all twelve jurors said that they had been prepared to vote guilty and were sorry to have been deprived of the chance to convict Dr. Cavaness.

The doctor’s supporters were undaunted. They would raise more money, Bertis Herrmann said, and the Reverend Staley R. Langham declared that he had new evidence to present to Dr. Dale’s attorney which would assure an acquittal.

Margulis moved for a bail hearing, a normal procedure after a mistrial. Steve Goldman told Kevin that he would have to stand before the judge and in the presence of the defendant state his reasons for believing that Dale Cavaness should be denied bail. Kevin found this the most difficult moment so far in the legal proceedings, but he went through with it, saying that he feared for his life and those of other family members if the defendant was released on bail. The judge agreed, ruling that Dr. Cavaness would have to remain in jail while awaiting the new trial.

“My dad wanted to kill me right there,” Kevin told Goldman afterward. “I could see it in his eyes. Did you see the look he gave me?”

Dale resumed his letter-writing campaign. He was hurt, he wrote to a woman in Eldorado, that Kevin, Marian and Charli had turned against him and were telling such lies about him. Sure, he had not been a perfect father, but he had always provided for them and had never been the stingy sort of person that they had made him out to be. How could Marian say that he had no use for his family, when, among many other acts of selfless generosity, he had paid in full for a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house for her, after she had divorced him, so that she could live in Chesterfield with the boys in the style she preferred? It was sad, how ungrateful people could be.

The declaration of the mistrial was devastating to Kevin, Charli and Marian—as well as to Les Green, who had not planned on having his second marriage start off with a murder trial and revelations about Marian’s life with Dale that were almost beyond belief. He did the best he could to help Marian and admired her strength. He tried not to think about what might happen if Dale got off, fearing that Marian would crack and amazed that she had not broken down already. She was putting up a brave front, but she was not sleeping well. Her nightmare about a baby with Sean’s mature head kept recurring, sending her wandering through the house in the dark.

Kevin and Charli worried about the effect on Charli’s pregnancy of the anxiety of waiting and dragging through the entire wretched business again in the coming weeks. Fortunately the baby was due in September, before the new trial would begin.

Charli was at full term when, on September 27, she gave birth to a stillborn girl. Losing the child, whom they named Kelly Ann and buried formally in a St. Louis cemetery, hurt more than anything else in the string of tragedies that beset them. The baby had become their symbol of hope and renewal, to Kevin a way of defying and overcoming everything that Dale had tried to do to them. Now, only ten months after Sean’s death, the baby was dead. The two deaths seemed linked.

In Charli’s second month of pregnancy they had taken Sean’s ashes, finally recovered from the funeral home when the Cavaness defense fund paid the outstanding expenses, and driven them to southern Illinois, as they believed Sean would have wished. For all that he had suffered there, Sean had always been drawn back to the land between the rivers. Under the circumstances they did not think they ought to risk driving onto the Hickory Handle farm to scatter Sean’s ashes with Mark’s. The farmhands, loyal to Dale, might make trouble.

In a snowstorm they slowly made their way along Route 34 past Herod, up into the Shawnee hills to a spot called the Garden of the Gods, a scenic lookout point in good weather, enshrouded that day by the blizzard.

They walked to an obscure, rugged place on the edge of a bluff. Kevin poured the ashes out of the urn in a thin stream, letting the cold, wet wind take them; and Charli said quietly, “God bless him and keep him.”

On the road home to St. Louis they talked of Sean and of their baby, hoping that Dale’s trial and conviction would be past before it was born.

Now she too was gone, and Dale still defiant, still, it seemed, bringing death. Charli could not help but think that the agony of the trial and its failure to reach a resolution had drained the life from Kelly Ann. Kevin in despair wondered whether they were forever cursed. Did his father somehow have the power to ruin their every hope?

They placed a vase on their baby’s grave and brought fresh flowers when they could.

24

THE REVEREND STALEY R. LANGHAM PESTERED ART MARGULIS during the four months between the first and second trials, saying that he had new evidence proving that Dr. Cavaness’s story of Sean’s suicide was true and that the State’s ballistics evidence was as phony as a three-dollar bill. Margulis accepted the minister’s frequent telephone calls and listened to his argument about the first shot’s being the one near the right ear, inflicted by Sean himself, and the second being the shot to the back of the head, inflicted by the doctor, exactly as Dale had said, the reverse of Dr. Turgeon’s testimony; but Margulis could not make sense out of the Langham’s reasoning. Margulis knew about Langham’s public defense of the doctor and took an indulgent attitude toward this man of God who, favoring string ties and cowboy boots with his suits, had stood out among spectators at the first trial.

In addition to his ministry for Christ, Reverend Langham also claimed to be a “photographic lab specialist” and said that he could prove that the evidence used by Dr. Turgeon at the trial had been altered. Langham had a photograph of himself holding a .357 magnum pistol in his right hand with his thumb on the trigger, his arm outstretched and the gun pointing at the side of his head. He would have no trouble shooting himself in the head that way.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Margulis said, “but I’m still not sure what you’re saying.”

“You have to see the picture,” Langham said. “I know Dr. Dale is innocent and I can prove it. I’ve got other pictures.”

“You do?”

“I am so sure because I shot a sheep head that had been killed to butcher.”

“You what?
A sheep’s head?
”

“I shot a sheep head with, a magnum. Yes, I did. And we took and had X rays made of the sheep head, exactly like Sean’s head.”

“You think the sheep’s head is exactly like Sean’s head?”

“We shot it at close range and had X rays made to compare with the X rays of Sean’s head. You see the X rays of the sheep head and the debris and soot found prove that the shot to the back of the head was not a close-range shot. It was the second shot. And the first shot to the side of the head was the one went out the eye, a fragment of it, not like Dr. Turgeon said.”

Reverend Langham had performed other ballistics tests. He had also shot a pork roast and a baloney-roll.

“You shot baloney?” Margulis said.

The baloney-roll experiment, Langham said, had not worked as smoothly as the others. Baloney was full of water and it had exploded when he shot it, and the water had gone all over the place. Margulis would have to examine the photographs fully to appreciate the conclusiveness of this new evidence. It would be just what was needed to shoot the State’s case full of holes.

Margulis, not wishing to offend one of his client’s most vigorous supporters, made an appointment to meet Reverend Langham in Clayton at his law offices, which were just down the street from the courthouse.

Reverend Langham arrived bearing slides and a projector—no animal remains. Margulis let him set up the projector in the office of a junior member of the firm, who watched the show without uttering a sound.

“Now do you get it?” Langham asked when he was through showing photos and X rays depicting a bullet-torn sheep’s head and brain.

“Sort of,” Margulis said. “I’m not sure.”

Langham asked whether Margulis would permit him to testify at the trial. Margulis said he would have to think the matter over. There might be a problem with the jurors’ thinking that the defense was comparing Sean’s head to a sheep’s and to a pork roast or other objects. They just might be offended by that and fail to grasp the subtlety of the argument.

Unfazed, Reverend Langham brought out a tape measure and got down on his hands and knees on the office floor.

“Here, Art,” he said, “take this here tape measure and measure the distance over my head from the right ear to my left eye.”

Margulis did as he was asked, wondering what this experiment was supposed to prove.

“What do you see?” Langham asked. “What’s the measurement?”

“I’d say it’s about a fifteen and a half–thirty-four,” Margulis said. His feelings only slightly ruffled, Reverend Langham gathered up his things. He hoped Margulis would let him testify. It could mean the difference between life and death.

“You’re probably right,” Margulis said.

Dave Barron spent time between the trials comforting Kevin and Charli after their latest loss and assuring them that this time the trial would reach its proper conclusion. If they and Marian could go through their testimony once more, everything would be fine. The doc was stuck with his incredible story. A second panel of jurors would be no more likely to believe it than had the first. The state was planning to call a new forensic expert, Dr. George Gantner, who had examined the autopsy report and the photographs and agreed strongly with Dr. Turgeon’s conclusions. Dr. Gantner was the chief forensic pathologist for both the city and county of St. Louis and one of the most respected men in his field in the world. Barron doubted that Art Margulis would be able to find anyone able to refute Gantner.

Barron also tried to dig up more information on Mark’s murder. The photographs of Mark’s remains were, as Jack Nolen had promised, the worst Barron had ever seen, and he was as convinced as Nolen that Dale had committed both murders. He was intrigued by a meeting he had had with a relative of the Weingartens, who had contacted him and told him that she believed that Johnny Weingarten knew something about Mark’s death: The property on Lake Harrisburg that Dale had deeded to Johnny Weingarten in 1978, supposedly for fifty-five thousand dollars, might have been a payoff to keep Weingarten quiet. The younger Weingarten cousin had told her that Dale had once threatened both Weingartens and Mark late in 1976, when they were climbing out of their boat after doing some night fishing on the lake. Dale had sprung out from behind a tree, held a shotgun to the younger Weingarten’s neck, and said that he could blow his head off and nobody would know anything about it. Dale had been drunk, of course, but he had scared hell out of the boys.

The woman believed that Mark had known about his father’s dealing narcotics to the Weingartens and had wanted no part of it. Dale had killed Mark to shut him up.

Barron, while accepting that there was no proof that Dale had dealt any drugs other than the stuff found on the Weingartens when they were busted years later, and understanding that not even that would stand up in court, nevertheless believed that Johnny Weingarten just might know something about Mark’s murder and Dale’s involvement in it. If he did, that would explain why Dale, as he had told Kevin and Charli, wanted Johnny locked up.

It was only a slender lead, but Barron contacted Jack Nolen and went with him to visit both Weingartens at the state penitentiary at Vienna, about twenty-five miles south of Marion. Neither Weingarten would talk to the detectives, and Johnny refused even to come out of his cell.

Barron, guessing that the Weingartens might not want to talk in the presence of Jack Nolen, whom they surely blamed for their arrest and conviction, returned to Vienna on his own. Johnny again refused to leave his cell; his cousin again said he knew nothing, and Barron believed him. Whatever Johnny knew, if anything, he was not telling. Barron felt frustrated, sensing he was missing something, but he had to give up on that lead.

Because of the enormous amount of publicity surrounding the Dr. Cavaness case in St. Louis—the first trial had been front-page news in the
Post-Dispatch
and the lead story on the television news every evening—the judge assigned to the second trial, the Honorable Drew W. Luten, Jr., of the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, determined that the jurors should come from Kansas City, Missouri, where the case had been reported with less intensity. The judge reasoned that, rather than move the entire trial away from St. Louis, it would be less expensive to bring jurors in from across the state who had not formed an opinion about the defendant’s guilt. Although the crime had occurred in St. Louis County, capital murder was a crime against the State of Missouri, so the case could appropriately be tried by jurors from Jackson County.

The judge’s plan was for himself, Goldman, Margulis and Dr. Cavaness—who by law had to be present during all phases of his trial—to be in Kansas City on Tuesday, November 12, to select a panel. The twelve jurors and three alternates would then be escorted to St. Louis and sequestered at a Clayton hotel for the duration of the trial.

Goldman and Margulis agreed to this plan, which seemed the most sensible means of gaining an impartial panel at reasonable cost to taxpayers. They considered Judge Luten fair, learned and experienced. The judge planned to retire after the Cavaness trial; over the years he had merited respect, having been but rarely reversed by a higher court.

Jury selection took one day. On Wednesday the jurors, whom the judge instructed to be prepared to remain a week or perhaps more in St. Louis, were bused from Kansas City to the Clayton Holiday Inn, where bailiffs would see to it that they did not read about the trial or watch relevant portions of the television news. The jurors and their alternates were ten women and five men and included a second-grade teacher and a high school principal, secretaries, salespeople, a carpet cleaner, a pest-control worker, a housewife, a food porter, a kitchen manager, a liquor sales representative, and a Hallmark Cards handler—about as various and representative a group of Missourians as one could find.