But this time and this case were different. Lisa Trammel had never wavered in her claim to innocence. She had never once waffled in her response to the evidence against her. And she had never once been remotely interested in any sort of deal. Given this, and the developments regarding the Herb Dahl-Louis Opparizio connection, I was viewing her differently than I had at the start of the trial. She had insisted on having a chance to tell the jury she was innocent and it occurred to me the night before that she should be given the opportunity the very moment it became available. She would be the first witness.
The defendant took the oath with a slight smile on her face. It may have seemed out of place to some. After she was seated and her name was in the record, I jumped right on it.
“Lisa, I just saw you smiling a little bit when you were taking the oath to tell the truth. Why were you smiling?”
“Oh, you know, nervousness. And relief.”
“Relief?”
“Yes, relief. I finally get the chance to tell my side. To tell the truth.”
It started out well. From there I quickly took her through the standard list of basic questions about who she was, what she did for a living and the state of her marriage, as well as touching on the state of her home ownership.
“Did you know the victim of this terrible crime, Mitchell Bondurant?”
“Know him, no. Know of him, yes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, over the past year or so, when I started to get in trouble with the mortgage, I had seen him. I went to the bank a couple times to plead my case to him. They never let me talk to him, but I saw him back there in his office. The wall of his office was completely made of glass, which was a joke. Like you could see him but not talk to him.”
I checked the jury. I didn’t see any outright head nods, but I thought the answer and the image my client had conjured were perfect. The banker hiding behind a wall of glass while the downtrodden and disadvantaged are kept away.
“Did you ever see him anywhere else?”
“On the morning of the murder. I saw him at the coffee shop I stop at. He was two people behind me in line. That’s why I was confused when I was talking to the detectives. They were asking about Mr. Bondurant and I had just seen him that morning. I didn’t know he was dead. I didn’t realize they were investigating me for a murder I didn’t know had even been committed.”
So far, so good. She was playing it as we had discussed and rehearsed, right down to always referring to the victim with complete respect if not sympathy.
“Did you talk to Mr. Bondurant that morning?”
“No, I didn’t. I was afraid he might think I was stalking him or something and take me to court. Also, I had been warned by you to avoid any encounter or confrontation with people from the bank. So I quickly got my coffee and left.”
“Lisa, did you kill Mr. Bondurant?”
“No! Of course not!”
“Did you sneak up behind him with a hammer from your garage and hit him on the head so hard that he was dead before he hit the ground?”
“No, I did not!”
“Did you hit him two more times when he was on the ground?”
“No!”
I paused as if to study my notes. I wanted her denials to echo in the courtroom and in each juror’s mind.
“Lisa, you made quite a name for yourself fighting the foreclosure of your home, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to keep my home for myself and my son. I did what I thought was right. It ended up getting a lot of attention.”
“It wasn’t good attention for the bank, was it?”
Freeman objected, arguing that I was asking Trammel a question she would not have the knowledge to answer. The judge agreed and told me to ask something else.
“There came a time when the bank sought to stop your protests and other activities, correct?”
“Yes, they took me to court and got a restraining order against me. I couldn’t have any more protests at the bank. So I had them at the courthouse.”
“And did people join your cause?”
“Yes, I started a website and hundreds of people-a lot of them like me, losing their homes-joined in.”
“You became quite visible as the leader of this group, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. But it was never about getting attention for myself. It was about what they were doing, the frauds they were committing when they took away people’s houses and condos and everything.”
“How many times do you think you were on the television news or in the newspaper?”
“I didn’t keep count but a few times I went national. I was on CNN and Fox.”
“By the way, speaking of going national, Lisa, on the morning of the murder, did you walk by WestLand National in Sherman Oaks?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“That wasn’t you on the sidewalk, just a half block away?”
“No, it was not.”
“So the woman who testified she saw you was lying under oath?”
“I don’t want to call anyone a liar but it wasn’t me. Maybe she just made a mistake.”
“Thank you, Lisa.”
I looked down at my notes and shifted direction. By seemingly keeping my own client off guard with changing subjects and questions I was in effect keeping the jury off guard, which is what I wanted to do. I didn’t want them thinking ahead of me. I wanted their undivided attention and I wanted to feed them the story in pieces and in an order of my choosing.
“Do you normally keep your garage door locked?” I asked.
“Yes, always.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, it’s not attached to the house. You have to go outside the house to go into the garage. So I always have the door locked. I have mostly junk in there but some stuff is valuable. My husband always treated the tools like they were precious and I have the helium tank for balloons and parties and I don’t want any of the older kids in the neighborhood to get into that. And, well, I once read about somebody who had a detached garage like mine and she never locked her door. And then one day she went into the garage and a man was in there stealing stuff. He raped her. So I always keep the door locked.”
“Do you have any idea why it was unlocked when the police searched your home on the day of the murder?”
“No, I always kept it locked.”
“When was the last time before this trial that you saw the hammer from your workbench in its place in the garage?”
“I don’t remember ever seeing it. My husband was the one who had all the tools set up in there. I’m not really good with tools.”
“What about gardening tools?”
“Well, I take that back if you mean tools like that. I do the gardening and those are my tools.”
“Do you have any idea how a micro-dot of blood from Mr. Bondurant ended up on one of your gardening shoes?”
Lisa stared forward with a troubled look on her face. Her chin wavered slightly as she spoke.
“I don’t know. There’s no explanation. I hadn’t worn those shoes in a long time and I didn’t kill Mr. Bondurant.”
Her last line was spoken almost as a plea. It carried a sense of desperation and truth. I paused to savor it and hoped the jurors had noted it as well.
After that I spent another half hour with her, working mostly the same themes and denials. I got into more detail about her coffee-shop encounter with Bondurant as well as the foreclosure process and the hopes she had of winning the case.
Her purpose in the defense case was threefold. I needed her denial and explanations on record. I needed her personality to engender sympathy from the jury and put a human face on a case about murder. And finally, I needed to have the jurors start to wonder if this diminutive and seemingly fragile woman could lie in wait and then forcefully swing a hammer at a man’s head. Three times.