Murder in Little Egypt (43 page)

“What made you make that decision, Doctor?” Art Margulis asked him.

“It was—I’m sure that a lot of it was selfish,” Dale said, “because if I didn’t do that, as I saw it, I would have to go through this business, through the process of telling his mother even the final statement. She would have to go through the same kind of guilt that I was feeling. And the other way—it’s almost as if it would go away. I guess it was a selfish form of denial, you know—if he was killed by somebody and you don’t know who it is, at least it is gone. It is vanished.”

He then wiped off Sean’s hands, Dale said, took his wallet and things and headed for southern Illinois. He did not know why he had hidden the gun and the belongings. He had not been thinking clearly. He had been in shock.

When his chance came to cross-examine, Steve Goldman pounced.

“You just finished testifying a minute ago,” Goldman said, his voice edged with sarcasm, “that this shooting of your son was partially self-serving for you. Do I understand that you are telling the jury that you shot Sean in the head again to make yourself feel better?”

Dale tried to take refuge in a professional analysis, speaking of himself in the third person, as if he had been present at the scene only as a kind of agent of fate, a victim of circumstance and psychologically determined reaction. No, he had not shot Sean in the head again to make himself feel better. The sequence of events had to be understood in another way.

“The human mind,” Dale said, as if lecturing a medical student, “insulates itself in bizarre ways under stress. What I’m saying is that a denial is in some way an escape that would deny the fact that the thing ever happened. In that sense it would be self-serving.”

“You knew that you were shooting your son in the head again, didn’t you?”

“Well, obviously, you know that, but that’s not the point.”

Goldman believed that he could catch Dale in at least a dozen inconsistencies that would show the jury the doctor was lying. He went after them one by one, casting each accusation in the procedurally proper interrogative form. Dale maintained that Tina Crowley had requested Sean’s ashes; she denied this under oath. He presented himself as not knowing what he was doing when he fired the second shot; his behavior indicated that he was thinking clearly in hiding the gun and his son’s belongings and acting publicly as if nothing had happened during the following thirty-six hours.

Coming up to St. Louis on that Wednesday evening, Goldman said, Dale had not notified either Tina or Kevin of his arrival, although his purpose was supposedly to locate Sean; nor had he told anyone in southern Illinois, not even his live-in girlfriend, about his trip. What other reason would he have had for being secretive other than to carry out a premeditated, murderous mission?

He had been aware of Sean’s drinking problem, yet he had encouraged Sean to drink—for what other reason than to render the poor young man insensible, so as to make him easier to kill, a lamb to the slaughter? His denial that much alcohol had been consumed that night was absurd, given Sean’s 0.26 blood-alcohol level.

Dale had said that the west-county countryside looked like southern Illinois, yet he had turned off the interstate at a dioxin-contaminated site, a place that not only did not particularly resemble southern Illinois—unless grass and trees constituted a resemblance—but one that was bound to be deserted, because the area around it was sealed off. That Dale would choose this specific exit could hardly have been a coincidence; his action bore the marks of careful geographical research. And he was asking the jury to believe that he had handed his son a gun with a light trigger pull after a night of drinking. The jury could decide on the likelihood of this scenario.

Goldman, chilled by the impersonal way in which Dale had described the shooting, asked him to stand up and demonstrate the action to the jury, assuming that he would show matter-of-factly how he had made his “lucky” shot; but on the advice of counsel, Dale wisely declined to do so—a refusal eloquent in itself, Goldman believed.

He concluded his cross-examination by asking Dale whether he had thrown Sean and hit his head against a trailer wall in southern Illinois.

“Sean loves to be abused by me to his mother, and by his mother to me,” Dale said dismissively, as if his dead son’s feelings had been worthless all along. Since no one had accused Marian of violence, the statement was unresponsive, not to say enigmatic.

“Is that yes or no?” Goldman asked sharply.

“No.”

Margulis called as his two final witnesses for the defense, a C.P.A. and a ballistics expert, realizing that the key points in the prosecution’s evidence were Dale’s financial condition and Dr. Turgeon’s forensic analysis. The accountant, James T. Johnson of St. Louis, testified that the doctor had outside income which had been overlooked, including thirty thousand dollars a year in oil royalties from wells on the Galatia farm. He also stated that agreement had been reached in 1983 to sell Hickory Handle for over half a million dollars and that the doctor had outstanding accounts receivable from his medical practice of approximately a hundred thousand dollars. Johnson estimated the doctor’s net worth at approximately a million one hundred thousand dollars.

But under Goldman’s cross-examination, the accountant was made to waffle. He had not been aware of the latest foreclosure actions against the doctor by the F.H.A. and admitted that Dr. Cavaness had “a serious cash-flow problem.” The sale of Hickory Handle had fallen through, Johnson agreed, except for a fifty-thousand-dollar down payment. Johnson admitted that he was not an expert on valuing land. He also agreed, under Goldman’s questioning, that taking out large insurance policies as tax write-offs made no sense for a man in Dr. Cavaness’s financial position.

Art Margulis called as the defense’s ballistics expert a man in his mid-fifties named James Holt, who identified himself as a former member of the St. Louis County Police Department, at present a U.S. Army Intelligence officer. Holt had also testified at the first trial, and at the time Goldman had been pleased that Margulis had, apparently, been unable to find someone better qualified than Holt, who admitted on the stand to having had only limited experience with gunshot-wound analysis. Goldman’s supposition was that Margulis must have tried to find someone with greater expertise to back up Dr. Cavaness’s story of Sean’s suicide but had been unable to get any widely respected and highly qualified pathologist to testify for the defense. The ballistics evidence was too strong; photographs and X rays of the wounds and blood-spatter patterns showed too clearly that Sean could not have shot himself. No respectable pathologist would be likely to reach the defense’s conclusions.

Jack Nolen had also been curious about the weakness of the defense’s ballistics testimony. On his own between trials Nolen did some checking. A source in Goldman’s office revealed that Margulis and his assistants had indeed been dutiful in trying to find a highly regarded pathologist for their case and had been unable to do so. Nolen’s information was that Margulis had contacted several well-known pathologists around the country; all had said that the prosecution’s interpretation of the evidence was irrefutable. One pathologist, the chief medical examiner in a large southern city, had examined the photographs for about five minutes and had proclaimed simply, “He did it.” Margulis was stuck with Holt.

In examining James Holt, Margulis cited
Gunshot Wounds
, a book by a Dr. Vincent DiMaio, which was regarded as a definitive text and which showed that, in suicides, two shots were often fired to the head when the first was not fatal. DiMaio also demonstrated that pulling the trigger with the thumb rather than with the index finger was not uncommon among suicides—a key point, since Sean would almost certainly have had to use his right thumb to pull the trigger had he inflicted either of the head wounds on himself.

Holt did his best to substantiate the defense’s case, but under Goldman’s cross-examination he wavered on several important points, notably as to the distance from which the shot to the back of the head had been fired: The amount of soot, searing and stippling indicated an extremely close shot, one nearly impossible for a person to inflict upon himself, even when firing with his thumb. Goldman, over Margulis’s objections, also got Holt to admit that he had been transferred out of the ballistics section of the St. Louis County Police Department after he had testified at a trial that a semiautomatic weapon could not be fired with a clip out (it could, with a bullet still in the chamber); he could not recall another case, in which he had inaccurately testified that a bullet did not match a murder weapon.

Holt admitted that his training in the effects of bullets on bodies consisted in its entirety of one short course in forensic pathology at St. Louis University.

“And who taught it?” Goldman asked.

“Dr. George Gantner.”

“Is he a pretty well-known pathologist, not only in this area but in the country?”

“Very well.”

“Is his opinion very well respected by you?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you think that he would know a little bit more about the pathology of that gunshot wound than you would?”

“He would know a tremendous amount more than I would.”

In rebuttal, Steve Goldman called Dr. George Gantner to the stand.

25

DR. GEORGE GANTNER TOOK THE STAND ON TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, the fifth and final day of the trial. He was in his late fifties and identified himself in a resonant, self-confident voice as the chief medical examiner for both the county and the city of St. Louis, positions he had held since 1969 and 1977 respectively. He was, he said, the immediate past president of the American Academy of Forensic Science, an international organization; he was also professor of forensic and environmental pathology at St. Louis University, where he taught medical students, doctors in training as residents, and medical-legal investigators. He had written more than seventy articles published in medical journals and several books dealing with the medical-legal aspects of his profession.

Having reviewed the autopsy photographs and his associate Dr. Ronald Turgeon’s report, Dr. Gantner stated that he agreed fully with Dr. Turgeon’s conclusions, notably that the shot to the back of the head had been fired from within an inch of the surface of the skin, and that, based on the blood pattern on the left shoulder and arm, the victim had been standing when shot. The second shot, near the right ear, had been inflicted when the victim was lying on the ground. The blood-alcohol count indicated that the victim had consumed a great deal of liquor and had a net level intake of twelve or thirteen drinks in him when he died. Sean’s dexterity would have been seriously impaired, Dr. Gantner said, making it extremely unlikely that he would have been able to inflict a wound to the back of the head upon himself. Such a shot would have been nearly impossible to manage sober.

In cross-examining Dr. Gantner, Art Margulis tried, through the use of technical terms and the introduction of various alternative possible actions at the death scene, to shake the witness from his testimony. He was able to get Dr. Gantner to admit that either shot would have caused the victim to fall to the ground, but Dr. Gantner stood firm on all the points of his analysis. During this cross-examination, Dale, sitting at the defense table, grew obviously restless, scribbling notes and calling Margulis over to give him advice on what questions to ask. Margulis kept his composure, but relations between the defense counsel and the defendant appeared to be getting tense. Dr. Gantner had been on the stand for more than an hour when Margulis asked to approach the bench.

“Judge,” Margulis said, outside the hearing of the jury, “Dr. Cavaness is unhappy and dissatisfied with the way I have asked the questions and, although he has written out questions for me which I have attempted to ask verbatim from his list, he is insisting that I have not asked the questions he wants. His question now is, can he ask the doctor questions?”

Margulis said that he had told his client that perhaps under the rules of the court he was entitled to ask Dr. Gantner questions. But he had advised Dr. Cavaness that this would not be in his best interests.

“His response to that,” Margulis said, “is that I have not served him well, so he may as well go ahead, even if it looks bad. So I am requesting of you, on his demand, that he be allowed to ask Dr. Gantner questions.”

Steve Goldman objected. To let Dr. Cavaness take over the questioning would turn the proceedings into a shain. The judge called a recess.

Margulis tried to talk Dale out of questioning Dr. Gantner, but Dale insisted. He did not care whether Margulis thought that this was a mistake and would look bad. Margulis had no choice but to ask the judge again to let Dale go ahead. At the bench, with the jury still out of the courtroom, Judge Luten listened as Dale explained his request:

“I am not criticizing my lawyer’s presentation particularly,” Dale said, “but I think that it may be possible that I could communicate with Dr. Gantner within the medical field a little better than he can.”

“My position is,” Steve Goldman objected, “that unless he wants to fire Mr. Margulis, which he can’t do at this point anyway, I don’t think that he has any real right to ask questions.”

Judge Luten pressed Dale to clarify his position. Was he not satisfied with the inquiry by Mr. Margulis? Did he feel that his interests would be better served if he conducted some of the inquiry himself?

“Yes, sir,” Dale replied. “I think that Dr. Gantner’s evidence is so damaging, you know, without at least my attempt to—for further inquiry that, very honestly, I think I will be convicted.”

Judge Luten agreed to let Dale cross-examine Dr. Gantner. With Margulis sitting at the defense table, Dale began by trying to explain why the court was permitting him to speak. The judge cut him off, saying that he had to stick to the interrogative form: He was not permitted to make statements and explanations.

From the beginning of his performance as his own counsel, Dale, in the opinion of every courtroom observer except perhaps his southern-Illinois supporters, did nothing but damage to his case. His manner, for one thing, was ice-cold; it was as if this had been a routine medical case, not one involving the death of his son. He handled and discussed the autopsy photographs of Sean’s head and body without showing the slightest emotion, pointing out the wounds, the blood, the powder burns as if they were merely spots and colorings on a map. During a recess a friend of Margulis’s who had been watching the proceedings out of curiosity rushed up to him in a hallway and told him that his client’s performance was disastrous. He would have to get Dr. Cavaness to sit down and shut up. The jury was clearly disgusted with him.