“No!” she exclaims.
“I loved Art. He was the smartest man I’ve ever known. And he made me feel like a person and a woman for the first time in my life.”
I steal a glance at the jury but can’t read anything. A new Art is emerging from Leigh’s lips. Gone is the terrible deceiver who seduced her away from Christianity.
She is free-lancing with this version, but intuitively she must know that if she gives the impression that she had begun to hate him, the jury will assume she had a reason to kill him. Cautiously, I go with this new, improved model.
“You loved him despite the fact,” I ask, giving her a chance to explain, “that he was a thief?”
Leigh responds earnestly, “He took the money from pornographers. I was worried about our safety, but I wasn’t upset at what he did.”
“Did you feel threatened?” I ask, watching Leigh carefully. She is fighting for her life now, but she is on thin ice.
“Of course,” she says, “but we couldn’t very well go to the police.”
I have no choice but to ask her about the video. It is a double-edged sword, equally a problem for her as well as her father.
“Why did you let your husband film you naked?” I ask, wondering how closely she will stick to the script. Whatever I argue to the jury in my closing statement about Hector and Shane, the jury will be asking itself if Leigh suddenly blew up.
Her face colors, and her voice drops into a lower register.
“I was always taught that the husband is the head of the household,” she says softly.
“Sex generally was a taboo in our house. I suppose you could say Art was trying to teach me that the body didn’t have to be dirty.”
I am impressed at how manipulative my client has become. If Leigh had a self-destruct button, it is no longer apparent. After a few more questions, to which she reiterates her innocence, I sit down and watch Jill’s assault.
Jill begins by forcing Leigh to admit the name of each person she deceived. Beginning with her father and the women in the church down through the police, it makes an impressive list.
“Isn’t it a fact,” Jill asks harshly, “that in this case you’ve lied whenever it was convenient for you to do so?”
Leigh pauses and finally admits, “Yes.”
Jill covers much of the ground I have already been over in an effort to reinforce how guilty Leigh must have felt during the last two years. Jill’s contempt for Leigh is palpable. Though surely it is part of the prosecutor’s bag of tricks, Jill truly does not like Leigh. I wonder how much of it is rooted in disdain for her apparent hypocrisy. Jill pushes Leigh on her decision to dance naked for Art.
“Were you embarrassed when he turned on the camera?”
Leigh ponders the question. To be consistent, she must answer yes. Instead, she answers, “It was in the privacy of our home.”
Dan nudges me.
“She’s trying to be cute. The jury has got to believe her. Jill will crucify her on closing if she doesn’t cut this out.”
“So your testimony is that,” Jill badgers her, “you weren’t embarrassed when you danced naked for your husband?”
In preparation for her testimony I have begged Leigh not to try to outsmart Jill, but even the most astute clients make that mistake. Jill will make her look as though she is incapable of presenting a consistent image to the jury.
“Art said it would never leave the house.”
Jill bores in on her.
“Isn’t it a fact that just the night before you and your husband had had a fight in which you told Art to quit ‘bad-mouthing’ your father?”
“It wasn’t a fight,” Leigh says defensively.
“And isn’t it a fact that the next morning an hour before your husband’s death,” Jill asks, “you were upset with him because of an angry conversation he’d just had with your father?”
“Just because I was upset,” Leigh says, “doesn’t mean I killed him.”
“Are you saying,” Jill asks bluntly, “your father shot your husband?”
Leigh shakes her head.
“I don’t know who shot my husband.”
Jill asks grimly, “What about you, mrs. Wallace?
You’re capable of telling repeated lies. But are you just too sweet and pretty to kill anybody?” Before Leigh can answer, Jill turns her back on her and goes to her seat.
I remain where I am. I don’t want to hear the answer.
After Grider instructs the jury on the law of the various degrees of murder, Jill begins her closing argument by summarizing the testimony of each witness and its significance, then goes to work on the crucial hour and a half between Shane’s phone call and the discovery of the body.
“What happened, ladies and gentlemen,” she asks rhetorically, standing in front of the jury rail, “after Art Wallace put down the telephone after speaking to the defendant’s father?” Jill looks back over at Leigh for an instant and then says conspiratorially, “You know as well as I do what happened. The defendant was feeling a crushing sense of guilt. Her entire life had been centered around her father. From the time she was born until this very moment, her father adored her, and she adored him. No relationship was more important in some ways to either of them. She made trip after trip with her father to foreign lands; after graduation from college she worked for him in the church. It is not too much to say that Leigh was as much inspiration to this tireless minister of the Gospel as he was to her. And why not? She was willing to try to convert the Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla group terrorizing the country of Peru. And the defendant reveled in her father’s love.
What daughter would not? Inevitably, this beautiful woman was bound to attract the attention of other men, and perhaps, understandably, she probably thought they were all as wonderful as her father.”
Jill pauses here and then says dryly, “Well, Art Wallace was not. With a persistence that bordered on the fanatical, he began to chip away at the defendant’s relationship with her father and her church until one devastating morning Leigh Wallace found herself lying to her father, lying to her friends, and dancing naked in front of a camera. Of course, we know what happened next! The police have told us there was no forced entry, no evidence of another soul coming into that house until the defendant brought mrs. Sims back with her to discover her husband’s body.”
Jill raises her voice slightly as she taps her right hand above her left breast.
“Guilt and anger, ladies and gentlemen guilt and anger are a deadly combination of emotions, and Leigh was experiencing them both when she frantically began to get ready to drive to the church so she could pretend she had been there all along. She felt guilt because of everyone she had betrayed, and she felt anger at herself and the man who had debased her.
Her husband, we know, got dressed and went into his office and sat down behind the desk and turned on his computer. What happened, ladies and gentlemen, was that Leigh took a twenty-two-caliber pistol and walked into her husband’s office and shot him through the heart and killed him. She then drove to the church, pretended she had been there all morning, and invited a friend to lunch so she could happen upon her husband’s body.
There is no evidence in this case that supports any other explanation..
18
Leigh’s body is practically rigid beside me as she listens with her left hand placed firmly over her mouth. It is as if she is stifling a scream. Jill’s explanation is so reasonable, so obvious, that it is impossible to resist a wave of depression. As I stand to make my closing, Leigh begins to weep, hardly an encouraging send-off.
I walk quickly to the jury rail to draw attention away from her. What are her tears if not an admission of guilt?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin hoarsely, and stop to clear my throat. I know I sound nervous and try desperately to relax. If I had not begun to feel Leigh was guilty, this would be easier. Starting again, my voice still scratchy, I say too loudly, “What the prosecutor wants so badly is to have you ignore the obvious conclusion that there is no evidence in this case at all there is no evidence whatever that Leigh Wallace shot her husband. There is no murder weapon, no eyewitness, no physical evidence at all. She has offered no motive except emotions that those of you on this jury feel every day. If there was a murder every time some one felt guilt and anger, there wouldn’t be a person in this courtroom.” I slap the rail in front of me and pretend to scoff, “Talk about making a virtue of necessity, and necessity being the mother of invention! The prosecutor has invented her theory because she has no facts.” I turn to Jill and point at her.