The Fall (16 page)

Word had gotten out that the trial proper was going to get under way, so the gallery was packed again, and not just with Goodman and his hand-picked team of rabble-rousers but with Sharla Paulson and, Hardy presumed, some of the girls who’d lived in the home with Anlya. Also on the prosecution side, Wes Farrell had come down and now sat in the front row, accompanied by several of his acolytes. He and Hardy exchanged an infinitesimal nod but otherwise pretended they didn’t know each other.

Greg Treadway had his own supporters and believers sitting behind his table. His mother and father sat in the first row; they introduced Hardy and Rebecca to two of Greg’s brothers and a sister, as well as one of his uncles. Additionally, several of Greg’s teaching colleagues from Everett sat with a small posse of younger people he evidently knew from
Teach for America or when he’d been in school at Berkeley and Stanford.

As the wall clock clicked the hour, Phil Braden stood up at his table and walked to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “Good afternoon. Before I begin my opening statement, I’d like to thank you for your patience during the jury selection process. Now I’d like to take just a few more minutes of your time before I begin calling the witnesses who will testify in this case and who together will prove the charges that have been brought against the defendant. But before I begin that process, I want to give you an outline of what that evidence will show. Hopefully, this will give you some insight and understanding into the questions that you’ll be hearing and help you to organize the information that we’ll be presenting to you.

“On the night of Wednesday, May seventh, the defendant, who is twenty-seven years old, picked up a seventeen-year-old young woman named Anlya Paulson for what he called their date night.” In his first sentence, Braden served a bit of strategic notice: He wasn’t going to give Gregory Treadway the dignity of a name. Throughout the trial, at every mention, Braden would call him simply “the defendant,” while in contrast The Beck would try to humanize him to the jury as much as possible, and hopefully by the end make him “Greg” in their eyes, a person.

Braden continued, “At this time, the defendant was working as a court-appointed special advocate, or CASA, helping to represent children in foster care in their administrative dealings with the courts. In this role, he was assigned to Anlya’s twin brother, Max. This is how he met Anlya, as the advocate for her brother; in other words, he was in a position of trust. The evidence will show that he betrayed that trust in the most vile manner possible.

“The defendant met her for their date night at a bus stop that he called their ‘secret spot,’ around the corner from where Anlya lived at a young women’s group home administered under California’s foster care program. If this sounds like a sexual liaison to you, it was. DNA later confirmed that sperm from this twenty-seven-year-old adult was present on the underpants of his seventeen-year-old victim.”

Early on in the jury selection process, Hardy had moved Greg from the center of their defense table to the end seat closest to the jury, with
Rebecca in the middle and himself at the far end. Immediately, he was glad he’d done that, though it had been more instinctive than anything else. He had felt that it would be better if he were near enough to touch her, to silently signal her at various times. Such as this one. At Braden’s characterization of the relationship of trust between Greg and the Paulson children, he felt his daughter tense up next to him, as though to push her chair back and stand up with an objection.

This would have been not a disaster, only a little mistake. But in a murder trial, every mistake counted, even the small ones. An unwritten rule of the courtroom was that you didn’t object to opening statements unless your counterpart went egregiously outside the lines prohibiting argument, conjecture, or hearsay. The Beck could object, but Braden had artfully walked the line between a permissible recitation of fact and impermissible argument. The judge would overrule The Beck’s objection, and she would succeed only in annoying the jury members, at this point concentrating on getting the basic story of the case, not appreciating too many picayune interruptions.

Keeping his face blank, Hardy moved his left hand over a couple of inches and pushed down on Rebecca’s wrist, delivering the message: Stay cool, there will be time.

Braden was going on. “The defendant took Anlya to a Chinatown restaurant called the Imperial Palace, where they sat at their own table and ordered dinner. Sometime during that meal, a man named Fred Liu, the manager there, had noticed that the defendant and Anlya went from holding hands at their table to arguing. Suddenly, the argument became heated enough that, with a cry, Anlya jumped up, knocking over her chair and rushing out of the restaurant, while the defendant stayed behind and paid the check.

“What happened next?

“The defendant gave a version of events to police. He told a story about the dinner with Anlya, conveniently leaving out the argument. He told officers that they had parted amicably so that he could drive home alone and she could go shopping in Chinatown. He denied ever having a sexual relationship with the young woman. It was a lie. Every bit of it was a lie.

“Instead, DNA evidence proves sexual activity after their dinner.

“Finally, at
around eleven
P.M
., five witnesses heard the sounds of argument and struggle between a man and a woman on Bush Street where it crosses over the Stockton tunnel. They heard Anlya scream. The defendant threw her over the low parapet and into the oncoming traffic coming by below. She suffered five broken ribs and three separate skull fractures. Both her arms were broken. Her left leg was broken. She died horribly on the street.

“How do we know that it was the defendant and not some other random person who threw Anlya Paulson to her death? No sooner had he let her go than he wanted to make sure that his attempt at a gruesome killing had been successful. There are steps leading inside the tunnel from Bush Street down to Stockton, which was where Anlya’s body had fallen and been thrown nearly a hundred feet by an approaching car. Fortunately, this staircase is under constant surveillance by video camera, and this camera unmistakably shows the defendant coming down the stairs within seconds of Anlya’s death.

“How do we know that the figure we see is the defendant?

“First, the body build, size, and hairstyle matched the defendant’s. But much better, an eyewitness happened to be in the stairway to the tunnel at this very same time and positively identified the defendant. In the tunnel. Within minutes if not seconds of Anlya’s death.”

Braden, apparently overwhelmed with the drama and poignancy of his recital, went silent, making eye contact with as many jurors as he could. Finally, after half-turning to cast a scornful and judgmental eye on the reviled Mr. Treadway, he took a deep breath and found that he was able to go on.

“Why?” he asked. “Why would the defendant resort to this ultimate and violent end for a young woman with whom he shared an intimate relationship? We may never know for sure, but we do know that the revelation of an intimate relationship, and of the bare fact of statutory rape between the defendant and Anlya, would certainly result in the defendant’s dismissal from his job as a schoolteacher, as well as his position as a court-appointed special advocate. Additionally, Anlya Paulson kept a personal diary that sheds a glaring bright light on this question. I am not here today to share with you all of the evidence you’ll be hearing in the coming days. If I did that, it would take as long as the trial itself.

“But
I am here to tell you that the evidence clearly proves on May seventh, the defendant and his victim quarreled, made up, then quarreled again. At some point that night, the defendant realized that Anlya threatened his livelihood and his future and that he could not control her actions. So he decided to kill her.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. This was not a thoughtless, spur-of-the-moment decision. The defendant may not have conceived of this murder in the weeks, days, or hours leading up to it. But when he did decide, he led Anlya to Bush Street above the Stockton tunnel. Then, with cars passing by underneath, he made the conscious decision to end her life. And he acted on this decision. These are circumstances that the law defines as murder. After you’ve heard the court’s instructions and evaluated all the evidence, that is the verdict I will ask for and the verdict your oaths will compel you to return. Thank you.”

•  •  •

I
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ALIFORNIA, DEFENSE
attorneys have an option regarding their opening statement. They are allowed to deliver their opening immediately after the prosecution’s, or they may elect to wait until they are ready to present their defense case in chief, after all of the prosecution’s witnesses have testified.

Rebecca had agonized over this decision almost from the moment she knew that Greg Treadway was going to trial. Her father, who very much believed in an instinct-based, freewheeling approach to trial strategy, had counseled her to wait until she’d heard what Braden had to say before she made up her mind. Now she’d heard it, and the answer still wasn’t clear.

True, Braden had hewed to a consistent line that, if he could prove any of it, might cast Greg in a bad light. But the issue of proof, especially proof that relied on physical evidence, was questionable, to say the least. Did Rebecca want to point that out right away, or might she be wiser to let Braden present all of his so-called evidence and then—much closer to the time when the jury would begin deliberating—pick it apart piece by piece?

Next to her, Hardy ventured no opinion. And in the end, she played it as he would have, with her gut.

Braden went back to his table, and Bakhtiari turned his gaze on her. “Ms. Hardy?”

Rebecca stood up. “Your Honor, the defense reserves the right to present its statement after the prosecution rests.”

Bakhtiari intoned his thank-you and went back to the prosecutor. “Mr. Braden. Are you ready to call your first witness?”

“I am, Your Honor. The prosecution would like to call San Francisco’s medical examiner, John Strout.”

Closing in on eighty years old, Strout was by a good stretch the oldest man in the courtroom. The doctor probably should have retired years before, possibly could have been forced to, but it wasn’t really anyone’s job to prod him out, and no one particularly wanted to see him go, so he stayed, mostly laying low at the morgue, a widely respected and more or less beloved fixture down at the Hall, plus an experienced witness in the courtroom.

He came to the witness stand today, thin as a pencil, in an all but threadbare blue suit, badly scuffed brown shoes, mismatched black and brown socks, and a narrow yellow tie. He sported a full head of snow-white hair, a prominent Adam’s apple, and sunken blue eyes that, in spite of his immersion in the intricacies of death, seemed to hold a permanent twinkle.

Braden had called Strout as his first witness under the well-trodden theory that if you were trying someone for murder, it was wise to establish that a death had, in fact, taken place.

“Dr. Strout,” Braden began after he’d established Strout’s credentials and entered the autopsy photos and the death certificate as exhibits for the prosecution, “can you please tell the jury what killed Anlya Paulson.”

“She suffered massive trauma and internal injuries to the head and body. Two sets of injuries, actually.”

Although there was little if anything in terms of controversial evidence or prosecutorial value, Braden nevertheless walked Strout through the autopsy photos, outlining the various injuries she’d incurred, not only from the first contact with the windshield of Robyn Owen’s Subaru but then the further injuries from landing on the street after she was thrown in front of that car. Rebecca had objected to all the autopsy photos, arguing that the cause of death wasn’t in dispute; these photos would simply inflame the jury.

Braden, on the other hand, had argued that he required thirty of the
more than one hundred eight-by-ten color photos that substantiated Strout’s testimony. Ultimately, the judge had allowed him to use eight. Distasteful, even gut-wrenching though these photographs might be, prosecutors felt, and appellate courts agreed, that it was important for members of the jury to get a visceral feeling for the violence and finality of death that, unspoken but implicitly, the defendant had caused.

But out of arrogance, laziness, or overconfidence at facing a rookie in Rebecca Hardy, Braden was all but phoning in his questions, and as this largely meaningless testimony was going on, she realized that he was giving her an opportunity. It was going to be her first cross-examination, and she’d try to make it one that, though short, people might remember.

“Dr. Strout,” she said, “you have testified at some length here as to the cause of death of the victim in this case, Anlya Paulson.”

“That’s right.”

“And these photos document your autopsy, do they not?”

“They do.”

“So you performed the autopsy yourself?”

“Yes, I did.”

“All right, then, Doctor.” She moved over to the table that held the exhibits. “What in your autopsy precludes a finding that Anlya killed herself?”

“Well, nothing. Nothing about my examination says how or why she came to go over that parapet.”

“What about an accident? What about your examination precludes the possibility that she fell by accident?”

“Same answer, counsel. Nothing.”

A rippling undertone of comment made its way across the gallery, enough so that Judge Bakhtiari picked up his gavel, although he did not have to use it.

Rebecca went on. “Are you saying, Doctor, that as far as your examination goes, Anlya’s death could have been a suicide?”

“Yes. It could have been. I found nothing inconsistent with suicide.”

“Or an accident.”

“No. Nothing inconsistent with an accident.”

Rebecca stood for a moment, shocked by a sense of exhilaration so strong that she nearly forgot where she was. In all of her time preparing
for this trial, no one had ever talked about the idea that Anlya had committed suicide, and now here it was, front and center, a glaring flaw in Braden’s case almost before they’d begun. Out of nowhere, one of her law school lessons kicked in: When you’ve made your point, sit down and shut up. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said.