Murder in Little Egypt (42 page)

The second trial began at the County Courthouse on Wednesday, November 14, with the scene in the courtroom the same as before: thirty or forty southern Illinois supporters, including the Reverend Staley R. Langham, who arrived equipped with slides and projector, hoping for his moment on the witness stand; the press; the detectives, among them Jack Nolen and his wife; members of the public who could find a seat.

One interested spectator was the former Mrs. Dorothy McLaskey, now Mrs. Zignetti of St. Louis, who had offered to testify against Dr. Cavaness but whom Art Margulis succeeded in excluding, although he did fail in his attempt to suppress any mention of the reckless-homicide convictions in 1972.

Margulis made a number of preliminary motions to bar certain evidence. He succeeded in having Charli’s story of the gas burners turned on in the trailer suppressed as prejudicial and irrelevant, along with any references to Mark’s death, to alleged arson and drug abuse by the doctor, and to specifically physical abuse of Marian. His motion to quash the search warrants obtained by Dave Barron—the ones resulting in the finding of the murder weapon and Sean’s belongings—failed. Barron had made an error in indicating to the Saline County judge who issued the warrants that Dr. Cavaness had actually confessed to murder, when he had confessed only to shooting his son in the head. Judge Luten did not consider the error on Barron’s part sufficiently grave to invalidate the warrants. Had the judge ruled otherwise, the murder weapon and Sean’s clothing and wallet would have been inadmissible evidence because illegally obtained.

Barron’s was the sort of trivial error—it was hardly surprising that someone would equate shooting one’s son in the head with murder—that, with another judge in another state, could put a murder trial in jeopardy and result in higher-court reversals. But neither Judge Luten nor the Missouri Supreme Court had a history of upsetting a trial or a verdict on trivial grounds, believing rather that common sense ought to prevail in matters of justice. In this instance the key point was that the Saline County judge, based on the evidence then at hand, ought to have issued the warrants whether Dr. Cavaness had actually confessed to murder or not.

In a lengthy opening statement Steve Goldman described what the State’s evidence would show, that John Dale Cavaness had murdered his son by coming up behind him, shooting him in the head once while he was standing and again after he had fallen to the ground. Goldman described how the doctor had taken the gun and Sean’s belongings with him back to southern Illinois and hidden them. He said that the State would prove that the doctor was a man in desperate financial condition, who had for years been abusive and irresponsible toward his family, and who had murdered his son to collect a hundred and forty thousand dollars’ worth of life insurance.

Margulis objected frequently during Goldman’s presentation and lodged what were called continuing objections to the inclusion of such evidence as Marian’s description of how Dale had told her in 1966 that he did not love her any longer. These objections would remain in the record as grounds for reversal on appeal, were Dale to be convicted; but during the trial Judge Luten overruled most of them. Margulis, as any experienced legal observer could see, was not overlooking anything that might help his client, was doing what any skilled defense attorney would do. But if Goldman could indeed prove to the jury’s satisfaction all or most of what he outlined in his opening statement, Margulis was going to have to come up with new evidence to avoid a conviction.

Charli took the stand on the second day of the trial and described how Dale thought Sean was a hindrance to him and an embarrassment, how he had not wanted to pay for Sean’s funeral, how he had denied having insurance on Sean and had suggested that the ashes go to a nonfamily member. She insisted that Sean had been looking forward to Christmas and had not seemed at all to have been in a suicidal frame of mind the last time that she had seen him.

Margulis did his best to rattle Charli but could not. He pressed her on the matter of the argument over the ashes. What was wrong with the doctor’s suggestion that the ashes go to Tina Crowley? Margulis wanted to know. Didn’t Tina love Sean?

“I think it is a very strange, unusual, weird request,” Charli said sternly, not at all intimidated. “Tina had only known Sean four months. If you want to know my opinion, I am not going to give my brother-in-law’s or any of my family’s ashes to anyone.”

“You were only a sister-in-law yourself?” Margulis asked.

“Exactly. But Dale asked my opinion and I told him. Would you give your loved one’s ashes to someone?”

Kevin was also strong. He was able to convey in direct, clear language how his father, on the day before Sean’s funeral, had called Sean an embarrassment.

Kevin tried to slip in the story about the gas in the trailer, but Margulis saw it coming and leaped in to object before Kevin could get the words out. When it was Margulis’s turn to question Kevin, he surprised him by asking him whether he had ever been under psychiatric care. That information must have come from Dale, and Kevin answered truthfully that he had been depressed and had gone into a hospital briefly once, but for only a few days, less than a week. Steve Goldman objected to the irrelevance of this line of inquiry, but the judge let it stand. Margulis got Kevin to verify that Dale had given Sean checks for his rent and other small checks over the years, but Kevin countered this with several asides about Dale’s contempt for Sean.

Marian’s appearance this time was brief but damaging, in Goldman’s view, to the defendant. Margulis thought that he could detect for the first time a resentment in Marian’s voice, eyes and manner that bordered on all-out hatred for her ex-husband. Over Margulis’s continuing objection she described Dale’s rejection of her when she had been pregnant with Patrick and Dale’s refusal to build them a new house when the place on Fourth Street burned down.

“He put us in a trailer,” Marian said succinctly.

In St. Louis, she would call him, to try “to maintain communication between the father and the sons,” with limited success. He was physically and verbally abusive to his family. “I don’t know why he hates me,” she quoted Sean as saying after he would talk to his father on the phone.

Sean had talked of suicide only once, Marian testified, when he was drunk, and in the morning he rejected the idea and could not remember having mentioned it.

Anticipating Dale’s story of how he had shot Sean a second time to spare Marian the pain of her son’s suicide, Steve Goldman asked her whether it made any sense to her that she would feel better if Sean had been murdered than if he had taken his own life.

“Heavens, no,” Marian replied. “Who would?”

“I object to any further response,” Margulis broke in.

“Sustained,” said Judge Luten.

“I wish he would quit that,” Marian said, referring to the defense attorney.

Margulis tried to imply, in questioning Marian, that Sean had been more suicidal than she would acknowledge and that Dale had been more generous to his sons than she or Kevin would admit. Had not Dale paid for Sean’s tuition at a junior college in St. Louis?

“He paid for part of it,” Marian said. “I paid for books and I paid for a lot of things.”

Steve Goldman concluded the State’s presentation of evidence on Saturday, November 16. He was satisfied that the prosecution witnesses had established the case against Dr. Cavaness, most tellingly through Dr. Turgeon’s ballistics evidence, which more or less ruled out suicide; through the family’s condemnation of the defendant; and through Detective Barron’s straightforward presentation. Barron outlined the several lies Dale had told the police and said that, in his experienced view, Sean could not have committed suicide and that suicide had never seemed a possible cause of death.

To substantiate the doctor’s peculiar behavior after Sean’s death, Goldman called Peggy Ozment who, although she seemed nervous and a reluctant prosecution witness, said that Dale had appeared normal throughout the party and had been one of the last guests to leave. Had she known that Sean had died that morning and that Dale had seen his son die, she would, she admitted, have thought his behavior at the party odd.

A certified public accountant who had examined the doctor’s financial situation detailed Dr. Cavaness’s loans and notes due totaling nearly half a million dollars from various persons and institutions, including Medical Electronics, Ford Motor Credit, First State Bank, Credit Thrift of America, Illinois Industrial Development Authority, the Harrisburg National Bank, the Galatia Bank, the Farmers Home Administration, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the General Motors Accounting Corporation. The C.P.A. estimated the doctor’s net worth as minus two hundred thousand dollars. The yearly losses from his farming activities offset the income from his medical practice, and the doctor had reported net losses of approximately two hundred thousand dollars a year on his income tax for the past several years and therefore had no reason whatsoever to take out insurance policies on his sons as tax write-offs.

Art Margulis began his presentation of the defendant’s evidence on Monday, November 18, and called Hap Dawson and a former manager of Hickory Handle to testify that Sean had been drinking heavily whenever he was in southern Illinois and that Dr. Cavaness had been worried about him.

“They were very tight, very close,” Hap Dawson said. “Sean was always one of D.C.’s favorites.”

Steve Goldman tore into Hap Dawson when he had a chance to cross-examine him. He asked him whether he had been drinking before he came to court or the night before, which Dawson denied. He asked whether he had been involved in shifting mortgaged cattle around from place to place to try to fool the Farmers Home Administration which, as the records showed, was threatening to foreclose on Hickory Handle. Dawson denied everything and said that the F.H.A. was trying to foreclose on every farmer in America. Goldman asked about the doctor’s drinking habits, and Dawson replied in his drawl that Doc C. drank beer sometimes, sometimes vodka, and sometimes coffee, tea and milk. There was never an incident when Sean was thrown against the wall of a trailer.

Margulis called Harry Bramlet, Dale’s insurance agent for the policies on Sean, who said that the policies had not been Dr. Cavaness’s idea. Bramlet had talked the doctor into the policies, as a tax write-off and a sound investment, meeting with him on several occasions in late 1983 and early ’84.

During cross-examination, Steve Goldman attempted to show that Bramlet was lying to protect the doctor, whom he had known since childhood. He got Bramlet to admit that write-offs were of no use to someone who was not paying any income tax, but Bramlet insisted that he had known nothing about the doctor’s financial situation. Goldman asked Bramlet whether he had been a drinking buddy of the doctor’s. How much did they drink together?

“Well,” Bramlet said with a grin in his down-home way, “when we drank, we weren’t just fooling around.”

Whether or not to call a defendant to the stand to testify in his own defense is a dilemma faced by all criminal defense attorneys. Not to call the defendant can place suspicions in a juror’s mind; to call him risks revealing facets of personality and inconsistencies of statement that could become factors swaying a jury toward conviction. In this instance Margulis’s only choice was to let Dale Cavaness testify. The whole case, for better or for worse because of Dale’s statements, rested on whether or not the jury believed his version of events. He was the only living witness to Sean’s death. To keep him off the stand, to have him remain silent, would have been in effect to offer no defense at all, not a realistic alternative given the strength of the prosecution’s case.

Dale looked as he had at the first trial, drawn, rumpled in an ill-fitting suit, anything but the picture of the competent, prosperous physician. He stated his name and accounted for his place of birth and higher education. Until their separation in 1971, he said, he and his wife and four sons had lived a wonderful life.

“It was a beautiful family,” he said. “I mean, we had really everything anybody should need.”

It was on him that the responsibility for disciplining the boys fell, Dale said, describing himself as “the enforcer.” But Marian was an excellent housekeeper and there were no major problems of any kind until after the separation. After that, in St. Louis, Sean showed signs of destructive behavior and developed an alcohol problem by the time he was thirteen. When he quit high school, he had trouble finding and keeping jobs.

Dale admitted that he had always had “a cash-flow problem” but that the future of his farming operations looked very promising. In case anything happened to him, he had a policy on his own life for a hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars, to be left in trust for the benefit of his sons, with Marian as the executor and trustee.

Margulis offered Dale’s will and the policy on his own life in evidence.

Dale described paying Sean’s rent and junior-college tuition. He had seen Sean once during 1984 in St. Louis, four weeks before his death, as he had originally told the police.

Dale described what he said had happened on the evening and morning of Sean’s death, telling essentially the same story Dave Barron had heard on Christmas Eve—arriving at the apartment, spending time there with Sean, taking him out to Laclede’s Landing until closing time, driving around for a while. They had not been drinking heavily, although Sean might have been drinking earlier that evening; Dale had no way of knowing.

He added that eventually they had headed west on what he thought was the highway to Arnold, Missouri, where he wanted to take a gun to be repaired. They pulled off on Lewis Road and onto Allen Road because Sean said he wanted to see the countryside, which looked like southern Illinois. Then Sean asked him to stop beside some hand-carved pillars because they looked like ladies’ faces.

Dale then repeated his version of how he had given Sean the gun and how Sean had shot himself after saying “Tell Mom I’m sorry.” He had then shot Sean again to preserve Marian’s feelings by making it look like a homicide-robbery.