The Insanity Plea (28 page)

While the others were dealing with
the issues about the door during the break, Walter Robinson rode the elevator
down to the first floor and walked outside to an empty park bench where he
punched a number in his cell phone. He could do nothing about the key. It was
out of his control, but the expert testimony was not. When Frederick Parke
answered, he gave the psychiatrist an update on the status of the trial. Robinson
knew that the prosecution’s case was going well. Sure, the defense had raised a
couple of points that would serve to distract the jury momentarily. Even if the
key unlocked Debbie’s door, he did not believe it would overcome the
overwhelming evidence that Dan Little murdered Debbie. He had been in enough
civil trials to know that any lawyer could land a few pretty good punches. Criminal
trials were no different.

Robinson had concluded when he agreed
to pay Dr. Parke this scenario was likely. That is, the state would prove guilt
and the case would come down to a battle of the psychiatric experts. Robinson
was now glad that he had agreed to pay two hundred grand to Parke. He was the
best and he would have the last word.

“Dr. Parke, the state is probably
going to rest today,” Robinson spoke quietly into the telephone, unsure who
might be walking by and knowing that the media lurked about. “I think it would
be worth your time to fly down here tonight. You probably ought to be here when
the defense psychiatrists testify. I’ll pick you up at Hobby and get you a
reservation at The Tremont House since it’s within walking distance of the
courthouse.”

“I think I can make that work. I was
on my way out the door for an appointment at the medical school in Denver. I’ll
book the first available flight after my meeting.”

Parke negotiated another twenty grand
in fees for two more days of his time and then put Robinson on hold while he
made a reservation. When he got back on the phone, he told Robinson that he
would arrive at seven that evening. Robinson concluded the call and walked back
toward the courthouse.

Parke walked down the white tiled
hallway and paused to talk to a couple of his students before getting to the
office of Professor Alexander Straus, a colleague and his personal
psychiatrist. He knocked lightly on the door and entered before he was invited
to do so. The office was much more organized than most. Textbooks and bound
journals were all placed on shelves. Licenses, plaques and awards filled one
wall. The desk was of medium size, brown mahogany, empty except for one green
shaded light, the only illumination in a room made dark by drapes pulled to
hide the sun. There was a sitting area, two easy chairs and a coffee table in
front of a fireplace with gas logs. The logs emitted a low flame although the
outside temperature was near seventy.
 
Straus was a tall, lean man with a prominent
Adams apple. His long, gray hair was pulled back from a widow’s peak and tied
in a ponytail. He was on the phone and motioned for Parke to take one of the
fireplace seats. Parke knew which was his and settled into it to await the end
of the conversation.

Straus clicked off the phone and
circled the desk to greet his friend and patient.

“Rick, it’s been a while. I checked
your chart. Four months. You’ve been a bad boy.” Straus smiled as he shook
Parke’s hand and sat in the chair opposite him. “Coffee, water, Coke?”

“Water would be great.”

Straus went to a small refrigerator
behind his desk and retrieved two bottles. They both sipped before Straus
continued. “How have you been doing, Rick? I hear the usual great things about
you from the faculty and students this semester, just like always.”

“Academic life is fine. I’ve got six
medical students in my rotation, about the same as usual. And I’ve got two
bright young residents assigned to me. They haven’t quite figured out what drew
them to psychiatry.”

Straus laughed. “I could tell them. We
all get into this discipline because we’re trying to figure out what is going
on inside our own heads. I’m sure they’re no different. I’ve been my own best
subject for twenty-five years now and I’m still a work in progress. How about
you?”

Parke drank from his water and idly
scratched the back of his head, wondering if there was a small bald spot
beginning there. He’d have to check it out. “I’m about as far along that
self-analysis road as you. My path may be a little more twisted because of what
I chose to do.”

Straus stroked his chin, realizing
that Parke had something particular he wanted to discuss, but knew he could not
approach it head on. “You’ve been studying serial killers for about as long as
I’ve been practicing. I think we’ve talked about this in the past. I can
usually lock my office at the end of the day, go home and have a glass of wine
with my wife and leave my patients’ issues here in the office. I suspect it’s a
little more difficult for you.”

Parke nodded but said nothing.

Straus prodded gently. “Are you
dealing with a particularly horrific killer now?”

Parke rubbed his hands together while
he collected his thoughts. “Not really. I’m on my way to Houston to testify
that a schizophrenic defendant was legally sane at the time he murdered his
victim.”

Silence.

“Do you find those kinds of projects
emotionally difficult? I mean, you literally have the life of someone in your
hands. I’ve never been involved in that kind of situation. For that matter,
most of our colleagues never have to make those decisions. We are almost always
just trying to unlock problems that are twisting our clients’ minds, or we’re
searching for the right medications to make their lives better. I could
mistakenly make a bad choice, but it rarely involves life and death. After all
of these years, what you do must have taken its toll.”

Parke took his water from the table,
held it while he thought, and put it back down. Of course, he didn’t tell Straus
that he really didn’t give a damn about the life of the defendant. He was a gun
for hire and he knew it. He decided to tiptoe to the shallow end of the lake of
horrors that overflowed his mind, kept him awake at night and left him now
wondering about his own sanity.

“Alex, you remember some years ago
our discussion about my dreams of my father and mother?”

Straus leaned forward, placing his
elbows on his knees and searched the face of his friend. “Of course. As I
recall, you have no recollection, probably because you were so young, but you
described dreams with your father hitting your mother and dragging her in to
their bedroom. Behind the door you heard her screaming and begging him to stop.
You would go out to the front porch and sit until the screaming ended. Are you
having those dreams again?”

Silence.

“No. I’m having different ones now,
just in the past year or so.” Parke paused. “I’ve studied dreams about as much
as any of us since Freud wrote his classic,
The
Interpretation of Dreams.
I find myself in different cities, usually in
hotels where I have stayed at one time. I’m stalking victims, usually young
women. When I catch them, I kill them with a knife.”

Straus templed his hands under his
chin while he thought. “As I said, Rick, I’m not surprised. You’ve been
suppressing the emotional impact of your studies for too long. Now they’re
manifesting themselves.”

Parke hesitated before touching on
what was really bothering him. He plunged ahead. “There’s one more thing. At
first, I was satisfied that my dreams were manifestations of my research. I was
an objective observer, almost as if I were high up in a tree, watching the
murders. Lately, though, I find that I am on the ground, killing the victim. And,
Alex, I’m enjoying the act of killing. I look forward to it. In fact, I wake up
from the dream aroused. Frankly, I’m beginning to question my own sanity.” He
sighed. “That’s why I’m here.”

Straus leaned back in his chair and
crossed his right leg over his left, intending to convey a posture of complete
relaxation. “Rick, you’re not insane or anywhere close to it. In fact, I’m a
little surprised that you would even suggest that dreams are symptoms of
insanity. You know we can’t control our dreams. If you told me you had killed
some young woman, that would be a different story.”

Parke shook his head. “No, nothing
like that. And it’s not the dreams of murder that are bothering me. It’s my
reaction, my pleasure in response.”

“Again, taken in the context of what
you do for a living, I can assure you that it’s nothing more than a long
repressed manifestation. Still, since you’re bothered by the dreams, let’s meet
a little more often for a while.”

The last witness for the prosecution’s
case in chief was “the suit” as Wayne had called him. Detective Arthur Jackson
had spent twenty years on the Houston Police Force and took an early
retirement. Fishing was his passion; so he moved to Galveston, joined the
Galveston Police Department and soon was considered the best interrogator on
the island. If there was a way to obtain a confession, he knew what it was. Before
he testified he told Klein that he had some strong reservations about the
defendant’s sanity at the time of the confession. Klein told him that was not
his concern. All he had to do was prove up the video, confirm the Miranda
rights and that Little had confessed to the murder of Debbie Robinson. Specifically,
he directed Jackson to stay away from issues of competency and insanity.

Jackson stood close to six feet with
a middle-age paunch showing under his brown suit. He wore old-fashioned horn
rim glasses and spoke in the calm voice of a high school English teacher. Nothing
about his appearance on the stand was intimidating or threatening. Certainly,
he would not be the personality to coerce a defendant into admitting to a crime
he didn’t do.

“Name’s Arthur Jackson. I’m a
detective with the Galveston Police Department.”

Harry Klein sat back in his chair,
giving the appearance that he and Jackson were two old friends just carrying on
a conversation. From time to time he placed his pen in his mouth and chewed the
end.

“Were you the first officer to
interview the defendant, Mr. Little, here?”

Jackson nodded. “As far as anything
other than minor conversation, yes, sir. The job of the other officers was to
bring him to the station. They knew I would read him his rights and ask about
the crime.”

“Detective Jackson, what was his
condition when you first saw him?”

“Physically, Mr. Klein, he was a
mess. Like a lot of street people he had old, worn out clothes. He hadn’t
bathed in weeks.” Jackson shook his head as he thought back. “The stench in the
interrogation room was overwhelming.”

“You read him his Miranda rights,
like these I’ve just put up on the overhead?”

“I did, sir. He wanted to recite them
himself. He apparently had them memorized, but I made him listen while I gave
him his warning.”

“Did Mr. Little here confess to the
murder of Debbie Robinson?”

“Yes, sir. He did. I didn’t have to
spend more than about fifteen minutes with him before he confessed. I videoed
the entire interview.”

Klein rose as he addressed the judge.
“At this time, Your Honor, we’d like to play a short excerpt from the
interview.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Duke said as
he got to his feet. “Rule of optional completeness. If they’re going to play a
part of the interview, then we demand that the jury see the whole thing.”

The judge looked over to Klein. “He’s
right, Mr. Klein. It’s all or nothing.”

“Then, we’ll play it all, Judge.”

Duke nodded his agreement and
returned to his seat as Kate started the video. Wayne and Duke watched the
jury, not the video. They wanted to evaluate the reactions of the jurors. What
they saw were looks of astonishment, amazement, horror and revulsion on the faces
of about half the jurors, particularly when they saw Dan leap from his chair
and back against the wall, trembling. The others watched impassively until the
video concluded and Harry Klein announced he would pass the witness.

Duke attacked from a direction that
the prosecution didn’t see coming. Knowing that Dr. Parke’s interview had a
lengthy gap, he chose to impeach Parke with testimony from Detective Jackson.

Duke walked over to the video player
and pushed the eject button. He then walked to the witness stand and placed the
disc on the stand in front of Jackson.

“You record every word you and Mr. Little
here said in that room?”

Jackson’s eyes darted to Klein and back
to Duke. “Yes. Of course.”

“When you say ‘of course,’ what
you’re saying is that it is standard operating procedure, SOP, for anyone
interviewing a prisoner to record it all, every last word, right, Detective?”

“Absolutely, counselor.”

“You wouldn’t think very much of
someone interviewing a prisoner, either at the intake interview or even to
judge insanity if that person turned off the video for thirty minutes or so,
would you? No telling what might have happened during that time?”

Harry squirmed in his seat and
whispered to Kate, asking what this was all about. He had relied on Kate since
he had come into the case late; in fact, he’d never seen either of the
interviews before trial. When Kate whispered back that a section of Parke’s
interview was gone, a frown clouded his face.

Jackson thought about his answer, not
even sure where this was going and replied, “I suppose that’s right, Mr. Romack.”

“Last question on this subject,
Detective. Certainly, you would give less credibility to an interview where the
recording was stopped for nearly thirty minutes and then started again, right,
Mr. Jackson?”

“I’d agree with that, counselor.”

Duke returned to his seat as if he
was finished. “Oh, one more thing, Detective, I didn’t hear you mention
anything on direct exam about Mr. Little’s competency for your interview. That’s
something you have to assess, isn’t it?”

Detective Jackson looked hard at Harry
Klein. “Now don’t be looking at the D. A. for an answer,” Duke admonished him. “You’re
the one up there. You can’t be interviewing someone who’s incompetent for
whatever reason, might be intoxication, maybe overdosed on drugs, could be the
person is just flat crazy and doesn’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Jackson didn’t like this line of
questioning. Still, he did his duty. “Sir, I recorded it all. I understood
others would be evaluating his competency.”

Duke raised his voice as he stood to
his full six feet, ten inches, “Wouldn’t you agree that some people could look
at this video and conclude that Mr. Little was not competent, that he didn’t
understand what was going on, that, in fact, he was insane?”

“That’s possible, Mr. Romack,”
Jackson conceded.

“Nothing further, Your Honor.”

“Detective Jackson,” Harry said. “The
jury has seen Mr. Little’s appearance. Can you describe what they might not
have seen on the video?”

“I can, Mr. Klein. He was wearing
three shirts and two coats along with three pairs of pants. His smell was
impossible to describe. Well, maybe akin to a garbage bag of food left to rot
in the sun. Like most of the street people, he probably slept in those
clothes.”

“Now, Detective, you deal with street
people fairly regularly. Just because they’re different from you and me and
these jurors, maybe a little weird or strange, does that mean they are all
incompetent?”

The detective looked at the jury. “No,
Mr. Klein. That’s the main reason that it takes someone with different skills
from mine to evaluate them. Like Mr. Romack here noted, I did record my entire
interview. I certainly wasn’t going to hide anything.”

Harry walked over to the jury box for
his last question. “And, Detective, do you know if the defense even asked for a
competency hearing?”

Jackson nodded. “It’s my
understanding that they didn’t consider one necessary.”

Klein smiled as he passed the
witness.

Duke ambled slowly to the evidence
table, capturing the attention of every juror with his long legs and slow walk.
At the table, he picked up a garbage bag and, as he approached the witness
stand, he tossed the bag to the witness where it landed in his lap.

“One last question, Detective
Jackson. You know this bag contains all of those clothes that you told the jury
Mr. Little was wearing. Tell the jury how much blood you found on all of those
shirts and britches and jackets.”

Jackson replied so quietly he could
hardly be heard. “None, Mr. Romack. Not one drop.”

Judge Fernandez looked at Klein who
announced he had no more questions. The State rested its case in chief.

Judge Fernandez smiled at the jury. “All
right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to quit a little early today. The
State has concluded its case in chief. I doubt if any of you will object to the
rest of the afternoon off. We’ll reconvene at nine in the morning.”

After trial concluded for the day, Walter
Robinson left the courthouse and found his black Lincoln Continental in the
adjoining garage. When he turned onto Broadway, he stopped at a convenience
store for a cup of ice and returned to his car. He withdrew a silver flask from
the glove compartment and poured a generous portion of Johnny Walker over the
ice. Within an hour he had finished the scotch and was waiting outside of
baggage claim at Hobby Airport when Dr. Parke, dressed in tan slacks and orange
golf shirt, walked out. Robinson flashed his lights and popped the trunk. After
storing his luggage, Parke settled into the passenger seat and shook Robinson’s
hand.

“Flight okay?” Robinson asked.

“Flight was fine.
 
Any new developments since we talked this
morning?”

“The detective who did the interrogation
testified this afternoon. He played the video of that confession. Gotta say
it’s a little troubling.”

Dr. Parke looked at Robinson and even
in the dimly lit interior of the car, Robinson was almost sure he saw the
psychiatrist wink. “Don’t worry, Mr. Robinson. I could spin that confession
either way. Since you’re paying me, the prosecution will be just fine.”

Robinson stared straight ahead as
they turned onto the Gulf Freeway. It was not his first time around the block
in a trial and he knew that experts were paid for their opinions. Still, it
troubled even him just slightly that Parke would be so cavalier about his
testimony, knowing the defendant could be executed.

Parke had been to Galveston many
times, but had never stayed at the Tremont House. It was an old hotel in the
middle of the Strand Historical District, remodeled some forty years before by
a Galveston billionaire determined to restore Galveston to its glory years.
 
A flight of steps led to the lobby, ornate
with antique sitting areas, featuring chandeliers hanging from a multi-storied
atrium. A baby grand piano was in the center of the lobby bar where the pianist
alternated between Sinatra and show tunes.

Parke found his way to his room,
dropped his briefcase and luggage and spent the rest of the evening watching
the video of his interview with the defendant and the initial intake interview,
including the confession. He wanted to make sure he could smoothly hit all of
the points that would support his opinion that Daniel Little was sane at the
time of the commission of the crime and competent at the time of the
confession.