Redemption (21 page)

“Now let us follow the trail of evidence. The gun that killed Mr. Hopper was sitting right there on the piece of fax paper. It was registered to Professor Isaac Goldman. The killer may have had an IQ of about thirty; in any case, he made no attempt to test the intelligence of the detectives. He left the gun there, so that the cops could go directly to the residence of Professor Goldman. Elizabeth Hopper is the professor's fiancée. They were to be married the week after she was arrested. Professor Goldman had kept the gun in a drawer in his bedroom for many years. When the police went to look for it, it was missing, perhaps stolen. The detectives refused to believe that a stolen gun is sold and resold, though Detective Hull, in charge of the case, testified that a stolen gun travels from hand to hand. They also cast no suspicion on Professor Goldman. By then, three days after the crime, they had convinced themselves that the killer was a woman—and who better than Mrs. Hopper, who was then living with Professor Goldman? They buttressed this by finding, in her purse and in her bedroom, two lipsticks, both Devlon's Autumn. Meanwhile, the forensic lab at Manhattan South had determined that the note on the fax paper had also been written with Autumn lipstick.

“Professor Goldman testified that he had gone to bed the night of the murder at nine P.M., and that Mrs. Hopper had crawled into bed with him at nine-thirty that same evening. Jerome Brown, my investigator, testified that he had left Professor Goldman's apartment at nine, traveled down to the Omnibus Building and back, and would have been unable to perform the act of which Mrs. Hopper is accused within the time specified by the police. Countering this sworn statement, the District Attorney as much as accused Professor Goldman of perjury—for which Judge Kilpatrick reprimanded him. But according to the police, that is exactly what Mrs. Hopper did.

“Why did she leave the gun? Why did she use the same lipstick she had in her purse? Why was she so intent on incriminating herself and the professor? Why didn't she throw the gun into the river, so nearby, or down a sewer? Why didn't she write Sedge instead of Billy? Why, why, why? Even if, for some reason unknown to us, she intended to incriminate Professor Goldman, she was also incriminating herself.

“We hired a chemist, chief chemist at Household Research Laboratories, who testified that the note might have been written with any one of three lipsticks he produced as evidence—brands other than Devlon's Autumn. But the police were apparently not interested in alternatives. Three hundred and eighty women work in the Omnibus Building. Did the police question more than four of them before the arrest? No, they did not. Mr. William Sedgwick Hopper had a wide reputation in Boston as a womanizer. Garson, Weeds and Anderson, the firm Hopper worked for, has a Boston office. Three very attractive women travel back and forth. Did the police question them? No, they did not. The papers have been full of assertions by the firm of Garson, Weeds and Anderson that Mr. Hopper had illegally appropriated fifteen million dollars that belonged to company clients. They were waiting for their accountants to complete their audit before bringing criminal charges against Mr. Hopper. Fifteen million dollars is a lot of motive; did the police even consider that? No, they did not.

“You have listened to Elizabeth Hopper's account of the brutalities visited upon her by this cruel, sadistic monster she had married, of the hold he had over her. You heard her description of the duck blind, where she had ample opportunity to kill him. It is almost impossible to prove intent in a hunting accident. She had access to two loaded pistols in a house where many guns were kept. She could have killed him when he returned from one of his nights on the town, saying in her defense that she thought he was an intruder. Or she could have claimed self-defense during one of his drunken rages.

“Eight years of a terrible marriage proved that she is not capable of such a deed. She is a gentle, compassionate woman, a pious Catholic who never misses a Sunday at church. The police have no fingerprints, no blood samples, no DNA, no witness who saw her near the Omnibus Building—coming or going—no witness who saw her leave her apartment or reenter it. Oh, yes, they have motive, but I would guess that anyone who ever had dealings—sexual, financial, or otherwise—with William Sedgwick Hopper, has motive.

“Then what do the police have? We have proved that the lipstick as evidence is worthless. The explanation for the gun has been given by Detective Hull, and I think that we have proved to your satisfaction that revenge was not Mrs. Hopper's motive and could not be.

“I ask only that you take into account what you have seen and heard during this trial. A woman has been accused of a crime that she did not and could not commit. You. are being asked the question basic to our criminal law: Can you say that Elizabeth Hopper's guilt exists beyond reasonable doubt? That's the key to all that has happened in this courtroom during this trial—reasonable doubt. If you have such reasonable doubt, you must find her innocent. That is the law. Now I thank you with all my heart for listening, to me, and I know you will do what is right.”

There was a small ripple of applause from the audience, which the judge quickly put an end to with his gavel and a very stern look. Sarah walked back to the table, and I leaned forward from my front-row seat and said, “Well done. Bless you.” Sarah turned to look at me, suddenly old and devoid of spirit. I had never seen her quite like this before.

“I gave it my best shot.”

Liz leaned over to put an arm around Sarah and kiss her. “Thank you,” Liz said.

“If you're not ready, Mr. Rudge,” Kilpatrick said, “we can have a short recess.”

“The people are ready,” Rudge replied. “Ms. Helen Slater will give the summation for the people.”

That came as a small bolt out of the blue. Through the entire trial, Ms. Slater had not spoken a word, and now, suddenly, Rudge had given her the summation. From all I had heard, it was entirely unlike him. He was a dogged man who dug into each fact as if it were a piece of meat. Why then had he given the summation to Helen Slater? The only thing I could think of was that he desperately wanted to wipe out what Sarah had said and that he felt he needed a woman to face a woman. So, as they say, what goes around comes around, and here was a student of mine, ready to make a passionate plea against a woman I loved. Some of the press scurried out to make a deadline, and Kilpatrick tapped his gavel to quiet the whispering. I wondered how wise this was on the part of Rudge, and after a moment's thought decided that it was the best foot he could put forward. Men had not come off very well in Liz's testimony the day before.

I tried to recall Helen Slater the student. Certainly, I had no memory of her as she appeared now, her dark hair cut close and boyishly, a pretty face and a firm mouth. She wore a gray suit, the jacket of which hung over the back of her chair, since the air-conditioning in the court was less than perfect. Did I really remember her? Perhaps, but time had changed her. She took her place at one end of the jury box and introduced herself as Rudge's junior.

Then I remembered, but she looked so different. She had been to my home once to discuss a particular detail of contract law, and had met my son, then unmarried. He had one date with her, and when I asked him about it, he just shook his head. I recall him saying something about a woman being this hard and bitter.

Her voice was low and strong. She began by spelling out the details of the police case, and for perhaps half an hour she held forth on the people's case, and then she went into the history of the forensic laboratory of Manhattan South, of their state-of-the-art instrumentation and the detailed experience of the laboratory. A man, she claimed, would have had to wear surgical gloves to manipulate the small twenty-two pistol. A woman could do it with delicate kid gloves, and the absence of fingerprints was meaningless.

“The defense,” she said, “has seen fit to throw scorn and charges of inefficiency on what is perhaps the best detective and forensic organization in the world. I don't have to defend the New York City police and I don't have to remind you of the thorough and experienced manner in which New York deals with crime. In this case, the detectives followed a narrow but obvious trail. They decided that a woman had committed the crime, not out of intuition of the single female police officer on the scene but because that is where the trail led them. Mr. Rudge put into evidence a sheet of folded computer paper that was wedged into the basement door, so that the perpetrator might return to her apartment. This is a circumstantial case, but the evidence is very clear and decisive.

“Now let me deal with Mrs. Hopper's eight years of married life. We have only her word for the scene in the duck blind. I am a woman, and I can say that if I had been subjected to the years of brutality and despair and humiliation that Mrs. Hopper received at the hands of her husband, I might well have seized a gun and put an end to it. But she did not. She waited until her emotional state had stabilized, and then she committed as cold and premeditated a crime as I have ever seen. She was no longer the woman who had sat passively in the duck blind. She was someone else. She made an appointment with her ex-husband, and he agreed to write a check made out to cash for the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. Probably, she stood behind him with the pistol at his head while he wrote the check. We offered the check in evidence. You saw the check, the quivering handwriting—everything but the signature. And then, before he could sign it or endorse it, she shot him.

“Certainly, if she had in mind only to get the money, which she well deserved, she would have taken a signed and endorsed check and left. But she had to have the cream of the jest, and she carried out his death sentence before he could sign it.

“Now, let me take up a very important psychological matter, which the defense leaned on heavily, namely the gentle, almost apologetic manner in which the defendant accepted her beating by her abusive husband, and thus forswore the several opportunities she had to kill him. You may argue among yourselves that she was incapable of murder, and possibly that was so. But was that woman the same woman you saw take the stand here? Was that a beaten, sick woman, incapable of striking back?

“This Elizabeth Hopper is another woman indeed. The months of love and care with which Professor Goldman cherished her have had their effect. Facing a possible life sentence in prison, she is firm and self-reliant. She is clear about what was done to her, and she is fully capable of taking her revenge; and that is precisely what she has done. She shot the man who abused her, a crime she worked out in advance, with precision and with expert facility. No clinging vine now. No poor, beaten woman. A thousand gypsy cabs roam the streets of New York. They cannot be traced. For a hundred dollars, they will go anywhere, anytime. What is the testimony of Investigator Brown worth? What is the testimony of when she appeared back in bed worth? At best, the time of death is never exact, but only estimated. One hundred fifteenth Street to Wall Street is between seven and eight miles. At that hour, the hour when the murder was committed, a practiced gypsy cab could be at Wall Street in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes there, fifteen minutes back. Time for the good professor to yawn and turn on his side.

“She played the role of a vigilante, judge, jury, and executioner, but in our society no one has the right to play those roles. Otherwise, we would live in chaos. No policeman has that right; no citizen has that right. We are a society of law, not a gunfighter's frontier town.

“You must not decide this case on the basis of sympathy for a battered wife who killed a sadistic man. You must look at the evidence and only at the evidence. This is not a case of emotional revenge or self-defense. This is a carefully plotted and premeditated murder. There is only one question to be decided: Is Elizabeth Hopper guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

“I know you will consider the evidence carefully, and I thank you for your patience during this trial.”

It was half past one when Helen Slater finished her summation. Kilpatrick said that we would break for lunch and that court would convene in an hour, when he would charge the jury. Liz and I, and Sarah and J. J. made a gloomy foursome as we pushed through the media and down the classic steps of the Foley Square courthouse. None of us had anything to say to anyone. Jerry Brown was waiting for us, and he whisked us a few blocks uptown to Klapper's Jewish Dairy Restaurant, a place where we would be free from any reporters. There were no parking spots around, so Brown remained in the car to get us back in time. None of us was in any mood to eat, so I ordered Klapper's famous onion and potato soup for all of us, and they could taste it if they wished—although I never knew anyone to taste it and not go on with it to the end.

It was not until we had given our order that anyone spoke about the trial, and then I broke the silence by asking Sarah what she thought.

“It doesn't matter now what I think. It's up to the jury. But I must give Rudge credit for letting Slater do the closing. Knowing Rudge and his ego, I think it was an act of pure desperation. He had to have a woman speak, and I suppose he was up half the night working on it with her. What do I think of her closing? It was good, but not inspired. I don't think it changed anything.”

“We have seven women on the jury,” I said.

Sarah sighed. “
La donna e mobile
.”

“I thought you were a feminist.”

“Sometimes, Ike, sometimes. We won't get a guilty verdict—I feel sure of that, but we may get a hung jury.”

“And that means a retrial?” Liz asked woefully.

“Maybe—maybe not.”

“God help me, I can't go through this again.” Tears filled Liz's eyes. “What am I doing to you, Ike? This has cost thousands and thousands of dollars already. Why didn't you leave me alone there on the bridge? Why didn't you let me die? I brought you nothing but misery. Sarah, if they find me guilty, what will it be? We have the death penalty now. Will it be the electric chair?”