And the Sea Will Tell (33 page)

Her presence had caught Buck by surprise, because they hadn’t been in contact for years. Although they exchanged greetings by notes passed to Partington, Patricia was careful not to let people know who she was. She was here not to lend Buck support, but rather, as she would later explain, “to see for myself the case against him. I needed to know.” She intended to fill in details of the evidence for Noel—her and Buck’s nineteen-year-old daughter, who was sure her father was being framed.

Patricia had never had such feelings. Buck had been a crook when they met and fell in love in 1961, she insisted, and she was convinced he’d stayed a crook after their 1972 divorce. Of course, there had been a time, at the beginning, when Patricia believed in Buck, too. And when things were good, there was a lot of passion and love between them. When things were bad, it was horrible. Patricia had often feared for her safety, even after the divorce. “I always felt that if Buck killed anybody, it would be me. Our relationship was that volatile.”

Sailing around the world on his own beautiful yacht had long been Buck’s dream, Patricia recalled, and during their early years, he’d sit hunched over the kitchen table for hours drawing elaborate yacht designs. Once he sent away for a kit of sailboat plans, thinking he’d build one himself.

When she first saw a picture in the newspaper of the
Sea Wind
, a chill had gone through her. The Grahams’ ketch looked very much like Buck’s dream boat.

T
RIALS NEVER
proceed swiftly, except in novels or the movies, and during the ensuing days, a long line of additional prosecution witnesses dutifully took the stand.

The defense’s cross-examination of these witnesses was consistently uninspiring, failing, for the most part, to make any dent in the witnesses’ version of events. The mediocre performance of the defense attorneys was hardly enhanced by King’s continuing assault upon their competence in open court. Remarks like “You are wasting a lot of time,” “Stop this nonsense and go on to another question,” and “Now, move on” found their way into his splenetic repertoire.

During a recess, one of the newspaper reporters covering the trial approached Findlay in the hallway.

“He’s a peppery judge,” the reporter said.

“The judge is so bad, it’s unbelievable,” snapped a disgusted Findlay, making no effort to keep his comments off the record. “It’s more than his demeanor. His prejudice against our side goes to substantive issues.”

I knew that King’s conduct would likely influence the jury against Walker, since it would be a small step for a lay person to reason that a judge who treated the prosecutors with collegial respect and the defense with such disdain must not like
the cause the defense attorneys were representing
. But Partington and Findlay stuck with their submissive stance, not unlike steers being led to the slaughterhouse.
^*

It was obvious that King was like a loose cannon on the bench, unmindful of the prejudicial effect to the defendant his outbursts in court would have on the jury.

I hadn’t decided how yet, but I already knew I would have to come up with some way to help insure that King acted much differently during Jennifer’s trial. If I had anything to say about it, I wouldn’t even countenance one such outburst, much less the steady stream of them Walker’s attorneys endured.

F
RANK
M
EHAFFY
, a Sacramento, California, college teacher, bland of demeanor and expression, testified he was aboard his boat at Kauai’s Nawiliwili harbor on October 12, 1974, when a ketch he identified as the
Sea Wind
pulled up to the pier. The next day, he met the couple on the unfamiliar craft—Roy Allen and Jennifer Jenkins.

Mehaffy was the first prosecution witness to mention a mysterious hole in the hull of the
Sea Wind
. According to him, Roy Allen explained that a swordfish had speared his boat just below the waterline on the trip from Palmyra.

Kit, who shook her head in disbelief once or twice during Mehaffy’s story, was convinced that the hole was made by a stray bullet during the brutal murder of her brother and sister-in-law. The prosecutors obviously had the same suspicions and introduced the evidence in order to suggest this scenario to the jurors.

During a recess, a rangy fellow sitting in front of me turned around to strike up a conversation. An outdoors type in his mid-thirties with a neatly trimmed Vandyke, he said he was a building contractor from Los Angeles.

“What brings you up for the trial?” I inquired.

“I’m going to testify.”

When I explained who I was, he told me he was Joel Peters, “Not
the
Joel from Ala Wai harbor?” I said quickly.

“Yeah,” he shrugged.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time, Joel. In fact, four years.”

“You’re kidding.”

I was not. I asked him to step out into the hallway, where I found Len huddled with Ted Jenkins, mulling over some aspect of the trial. I introduced Peters.

“This guy right here, Joel—I never knew his last name before now—is one of the key witnesses for Jennifer’s defense,” I said spiritedly, holding on to the surprised contractor’s arm. “I’ve been looking for him ever since Jennifer told me about him. I asked Enoki about someone named Joel, and he said he’d never heard of him. I called all over looking for him.”

“The FBI called me about a month ago and asked me to testify,” Peters explained. “I guess they’d been looking for me, too. I left Hawaii years ago. Moved to Los Angeles.”

Len and Ted looked bewildered.

“Don’t you remember who Joel is?” I asked. “He’s the guy Jennifer delivered the
laundry
to on the morning of her arrest even though the Coast Guard and FBI were pursuing her. That’s great evidence.”

Len and Ted both nodded vacantly, obviously not sharing my elation.

“Wait until the trial,” I promised them. “You’ll see what Joel is going to do for us.”

Len and Ted both gave me amused if-you-say-so-Vince smiles and resumed their conversation.

On the stand for the prosecution, Peters testified that he first met Jennifer and Buck on the Big Island in the fall of 1973, then ran into them on Maui early the following year when they were preparing the
Iola
for launching. In Ala Wai harbor in October 1974, he saw Buck rowing by and hailed him. “Buck pointed out a boat he said was his,” Peters testified, adding that it didn’t look at all like the same boat he had seen Jennifer and Buck refitting in Maalaea Bay. Shown a photo of the
Sea Wind
, he identified it as the boat.

The next witness, Katherine Ono, clerked at the Hawaii State Harbors Division. Using Harbors Division documents to refresh her memory, Ono testified that on October 18, 1974, a man named Roy Allen, “a very grubby individual wearing shorts,” filed boat registration forms with her for a “homemade sailboat named the
Lokahi
,” claiming he had completed it that year. The craft was “an Angleman wooden ketch, thirty-seven and a half feet long by 11.9 feet wide, by 5.7 feet draft from bridge to port, powered by sail and inboard” (the exact description of the
Sea Wind
), colors “white and violet,” according to Allen’s answers on the form. Ono assigned the boat Hawaii state hull number HA25946C0672.

Taking the stand dressed in a tight-fitting black skirt and scarlet raw-silk blouse, Sharon Jordan, with her Polynesian looks, deep tan, and straight black waist-length hair, was right out of
Mutiny on the Bounty
. In her clipped upper-class accent, she testified with poise to finding skeletal remains beside a metal container on the northern shore of the Palmyra lagoon in January 1981.

Up to now, the horror of what had happened on Palmyra had been deflected by testimony that was relevant to the issue of guilt, but unrelated to the actual acts of atrocity that had taken place. Like a sudden cold sweat, the atmosphere of the trial was changed in an instant by the slow, creaking arrival of a silvery metal box
^*
being wheeled into the courtroom by an FBI agent. There was a sudden silence in the courtroom. The rust-stained container was riddled with holes, some caused by corrosion from the lagoon waters, others by experts conducting evidentiary examinations. The box and lid, Government exhibits 28 and 29, sat squarely before the jury for the first time.

Everyone’s attention was riveted to the box that, in all likelihood, had for seven years been Muff Graham’s coffin at the bottom of the Palmyra lagoon.

During cross-examination, Partington worked a line of questioning designed to open the possibility that the bones and box could have washed ashore separately—implying that Muff Graham’s remains had never been
inside
the container. But Jordan steadfastly and articulately resisted all his attempts to separate the bones from the container, a separation which was vital to Partington if he was to have at least a hint of credibility when he argued to the jury at the conclusion of the case that Muff Graham had not been murdered.

Partington had considered Jordan so important a witness he had traveled to Johannesburg to interview her. But even with this type of preparation for cross-examining her, he was not able to diminish the impact of several key observations. Jordan’s word picture of Muff Graham’s remains spilling out of the upended container onto the beach was too memorably vivid.

Jordan: “I found a wristwatch
^*
and small bone inside the lid of the box. The rest of the bones looked like they had fallen out of the box, and were in a crescent shape in the immediate vicinity of the box. I also found a piece of wire near the box, twisted in the shape of the box, that had obviously been around the box at one time, as if to keep the lid on.”

Partington got into a disagreement with Jordan about what she had told him in South Africa. “Do you recall saying to me that the vegetation was growing in the box in such a way that the box was wedged in and you actually had to hack the vegetation away to get it out?”

Jordan: “I don’t recall saying that.”

Partington glowered at the witness. “Do you recall my saying to you that if there was vegetation already growing in the box and wedging the box in, how could the bones have just recently spilled out, as the Government contends? To which you replied you hadn’t thought of that, and the bones couldn’t have just recently spilled out of the box?”

Jordan: “I don’t recall saying that.”

After Harry Conklin, a former Coast Guardsman, next testified to having observed Buck dive into the water at Ala Wai harbor on the morning of October 29, 1974, and escape, FBI agent Henry Burns, the bull-necked twenty-two-year veteran of the Bureau who had arrested Walker on the Big Island in November 1974, gave details of his interview with the prisoner on the drive to Hilo.

Burns testified to Buck’s telling him about the dinner invitation from the Grahams on August 30, 1974; his and Jennifer’s going to the
Sea Wind
that night and the Grahams’ absence; the discovery of the overturned dinghy on the beach the following morning; his belief they had died an accidental death, etc.

Ken White, the missing boat expert whom the prosecution had finally located in Texas, took the stand to tell the jury he’d found no salt water in the Zodiac engine. This was now the third jury to hear that there was no indication at all that Mac and Muff’s dinghy had overturned in the lagoon, thereby knocking another pillar or two out from under the Walker defense team’s accidental-death argument.

Witness Frank Ballintine, who had sold and serviced Zodiacs for eighteen years, described it as “probably the most stable boat you can find.” He’d heard of only one Zodiac capsizing in the whole of his career, and that had happened in thirty-foot waves forty miles out at sea.

Next, Calvin Shishido, now retired, testified about his 1974 and 1981 trips to Palmyra.

Enoki asked the former chief investigator to identify the contents of a large cardboard carton. The jury was now to see the incomplete remains of Muff Graham for the first time. Six plastic bags contained various bones. Out of the carton last came the skull. Shishido identified the lot as the remains he had recovered from the Jordans and subsequently sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C., for identification and analysis.

Shishido was next shown a wristwatch. “Do you recognize exhibit 27?” Enoki asked.

“Yes. Sharon Jordan gave it to me. It was later identified as a lady’s Westclox watch.”

“That watch has never been positively connected to anybody, has it?” Judge King asked.

Enoki confirmed that it had not.

Shishido also identified Buck’s .22-caliber Ruger Bearcat pistol, which he had found aboard the
Sea Wind
.
^*

The Government next called Joseph Stuart, who testified to meeting Buck Walker (introduced to him then as Roy Allen) at a party at his Honolulu home in October 1974.

Stuart: “He told me he was playing chess with this couple that owned a boat on Palmyra Island…this couple ran out of money and they put up the boat. Whoever won the game would get each other’s boat.”

Enoki: “According to him, what happened?”

“He said he won the game and got their nice boat. They got his old boat.”

“What was the context of this conversation? Was it a joke or what?”

“He told it as a true story, sir.”

B
ESPECTACLED
A
L
Ingman, the next prosecution witness, looked as nervous and ill at ease as a Baptist in a bordello, never once even glancing at his old cellmate, Buck Walker.
^†

On direct by Schroeder, Ingman elaborated on the details of Walker’s alleged prison confession at McNeil Island in the spring of 1979: “He mentioned forcing the man to walk the plank.”