And the Sea Will Tell (36 page)

Findlay next called an expert in the operation of Zodiac dinghies and asked whether or not a strong wind could flip or overturn a motorized Zodiac. The witness said it was possible if winds exceeded twenty knots (twenty-three miles an hour).

The defense theory that the Grahams drowned when their boat capsized required that the jury accept quite a string of
ifs: if
there were squalls on Palmyra on August 30;
if
the lagoon, normally placid even during tempestuous seas outside, was uncharacteristically turbulent;
if
Mac and Muff just happened to be in the lagoon during the several minutes of a squall;
if
the Zodiac was not, as Government witnesses had testified, almost impossible to capsize; and
if
Mac and Muff, thrown in the water, had been unable to get back to their dinghy or to shore.

But Partington and Findlay were doing their best to convince the jury that these ifs added up to a reasonable doubt of Buck Walker’s guilt.

University of Hawaii marine biologist Richard Grigg, still lithe and rangy like the big-time competitive surfer he had once been, next testified about a trip he made to Palmyra in August 1984 on behalf of the Walker defense.
^*

The biologist explained that one objective of the excursion had been to search for the missing second container from the rescue boat. They did not find it after numerous scuba and snorkel dives that totaled sixteen hours underwater. The divers had seen plenty of blacktip sharks, though. Were they afraid? “Not really,” Grigg shrugged. “With sharks, you are safer staying right against the bottom than swimming on the surface. Most accidents with sharks occur at the surface, the sharks being attracted by splashing or some sort of agitation in the water.” The jury was also told that sharks have “very, very poor vision” and compound it by closing their eyes when they attack. A gray reef shark, however, with one bite “could take a pound of flesh with no problem.” Grigg said he saw many gray reef sharks (“They are only about six feet long, but they are perhaps the most aggressive shark in the Pacific”) outside the lagoon, but only one inside. He said that although the lagoon’s blacktip sharks were also aggressive, they “wouldn’t take a very large bite” of a human, since most were smaller. Grigg’s laconic testimony had not been overly helpful to Partington, who peppered him with questions suggesting the Grahams could have been killed by sharks.

To rebut the Government’s position that the metal container had surfaced after Buck dumped it in the lagoon, Partington next inquired about the stability at the bottom of the lagoon. Grigg described the bottom sediments as “very fine,” and metallic pieces of debris scattered around the lagoon bed as “coated,” as if they had been undisturbed for years. “The bottom [he found the deepest point to be around 150 feet] is very stable. There is no indication that a box, such as the metal container, could be moved on its own. There is just not enough wave or current energy along the bottom to move
anything
once it was lodged on the bottom.”

Grigg and his associates conducted a survey along the entire length of the beach connecting Strawn and Cooper islands in which they counted the number of items of flotsam—floating material that had washed up on the beach—every fifty feet.

“What was the purpose of that survey?”

“To determine to what extent the site where the box and bones were found was a cul-de-sac.”

“Did you find any area that collected more debris than any other?” Partington asked.

“Yes, the box and bones site.”

“Do you know why that is?”

“It is a place of confluence, meaning concentrated current where more objects than normal collect.”

In other words, the defense was suggesting, the finding of the bones near the container didn’t necessarily mean they had once been inside
.

Partington had done a good job with Grigg, a credible witness. Enoki, obviously sensing that the man would only strengthen under fire, merely asked a few benign questions and sat down.

Although his
Toloa
shipmate, Thomas Wolfe, had appeared as a prosecution witness, Norman Sanders came to the stand on the other side. In 1981, he had read Australian press accounts of the discovery of Muff Graham’s body in “a steel box on Palmyra Island” and had written to the authorities in Honolulu offering to be of assistance to the prosecution, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office eventually decided not to use him. Partington put on his traveling shoes in late 1983 for a trip to Australia to recruit the former college geology instructor as a defense witness. Sanders, now an Australian citizen and the first American-born politician ever to be elected to the senate of the Australian Federal Parliament, had subsequently been hired by the defense, all expenses paid, to conduct geological experiments on Palmyra during the August 1984 trip. The bearded Sanders, his head lifted high, had a puffed-up demeanor on the witness stand that sometimes made him seem fatuously self-confident.

Sanders shared with the jury his melodramatic impressions of the island during his short stay there in 1974. “Palmyra is one of the last uninhabited islands in the Pacific. The island is a very threatening place. It is a hostile place. I wrote in my log: ‘Palmyra, a world removed from time, the place where even vinyl rots.’ I have never seen vinyl rot anywhere else. I said, ‘Palmyra will always belong to itself, never to man.’ It is a very forbidding place.”

Because the presence of blood in the water enhances the probability of a shark attack, Partington elicited testimony from Sanders that he observed Mac slash at small sharks in shallow water with his machete. Sanders identified two photos he had taken of Mac: in one, his left calf bandaged, he posed with a machete; in the other, he stood in ankle-deep water holding the machete up in the air as a small shark approached his feet.

Partington, pursuing the defense’s boat-accident theory, next asked if there were any obstructions in the lagoon that would be hazardous to small boats.

“It’s full of steel spikes that stick up and concrete blocks in various places. There are a lot of underpinnings that you couldn’t see well at high tide and which are a hazard to a small boat. At low tide, you can see them and avoid them.”

To cast doubt on the credibility of all the prosecution witnesses, Partington suddenly changed course, asking about a conference telephone conversation Sanders had with the Government attorneys following the 1984 trip to Palmyra.

“A voice sounding like Mr. Schroeder’s said, ‘Well, these defendants are nasty people. They are killers. Why are you working for the defense?’ Another voice then came on saying, ‘We are just joking around here, Dr. Sanders,’ as if that person felt this was not a proper thing to be saying,” Sanders recalled for the jury. He then flashed a smug smile in the direction of the prosecutors, as if to say,
That’ll teach you
.

If this was the heavy-handed way the prosecutors dealt with one witness, had other witnesses been cowed by the prosecution’s tactics? That was the question Partington wanted the jury to consider.

At the defense’s behest, the court then accepted Sanders as an expert witness in coastal geomorphology. Sanders explained that he had spent a number of hours at the site where the bones were found, studying beach erosion on the lagoon shore. The defense attorney asked his witness for any conclusions he arrived at as a result of his experiments.

Sanders seemed to relish the moment. “There was evidence of a
great
deal of coastal erosion, as well as accretion, which is the opposite of erosion. Accretion occurs where the sand builds up on the lagoon shores. Both these movements are very rapid on Palmyra. This is a sign of extremely rapid beach fluctuations.”

Partington asked if Sanders’s analysis of the sand samples showed them to be abrasive. The witness said yes.

Judge King interjected with a smile: “They use sand for sandpaper, don’t they?”

“Yes, they do,” Sanders said.

Court: “So it would, indeed, be an abrasive?”

“It would, indeed, be an abrasive.”

Partington, ignoring this needling, pressed on. “In view of the sand movement you have testified to, what might happen to a skeleton on that beach over a period of time?”

“It would be buried in the sand,” the witness said. “The sand buildup could cover a skeleton or anything else that was there. It would lie there until some action dug it out.”

A one-man band for the defense, Sanders rendered his judgment that Buck and Jennifer’s boat was seaworthy. In fact, his overzealous attempts to do well for the defense provoked Judge King numerous times: “Just wait for the question.” “Keep it short. We don’t want all your mental processes.” “Could we get to it as fast as possible?” “Briefly, briefly!”

On cross, Schroeder, after a struggle, got Sanders to admit that he had sensed a “great deal of tension between Mac and Muff and Roy and Jennifer” and that, to his knowledge, the two couples did not associate with each other.

All eyes riveted upon the next witness, a stunning brunette in her late twenties who approached the witness stand with the casual poise of a woman unaccustomed to being ignored. With her bright floral prints, stylish sandals, and flashing smile, Galatea Eatinger glided through the courtroom with the freshness of a tropical breeze.

Under questioning by Findlay, Eatinger testified she had lived in Hawaii for ten years and in June 1980, aboard a small fishing boat called the
Aquaholics
, visited Palmyra. Friends on three other boats—the
Kiave
, the
Luty
and the
Hawaiian Moon—
also made the journey.

“On this occasion in the summer of 1980, did there come a time when you discovered a bone?” Findlay asked.

“Yes.”

A bone? Found on the island seven months
before
Sharon Jordan’s discovery? I had to shake my head at the Erle Stanley Gardner theatrics. Was the beautiful mysterious witness actually going to produce amazing evidence that would turn the trial around?

The courtroom was suddenly so still that I was aware of the soft tapping of the court reporter’s fingers on the keys of her stenographic machine.

Findlay had the witness mark on the chart of Palmyra the exact location where she had found the bone. She put a circle on the lagoon shore about midway between Strawn and Cooper islands—a couple of hundred yards east of Jordan’s find.

She found the bone “washed up, close to the bushes,” as she was “looking on the ground for crabs.” When she picked it up, it was “very clean, with a little bit of green algae growing on it.” She immediately thought of the “case of the missing couple.”

She showed the bone to her friends and kept it for about three weeks before throwing it overboard where the
Aquaholics
was moored at the dolphins.

Findlay entered into evidence a diagram of the bone Eatinger had drawn for the defense several months earlier. Placing several pages from a book of human anatomy in front of the witness, Findlay asked if she could find anything that looked like the bone she had found.

“It was this bone,” she said, pointing to a picture of an adult humerus, the long bone of the upper arm that extends from the shoulder to the elbow.

On cross, Schroeder threw into question the witness’s credibility by getting Eatinger to admit she had at first thought she’d found a thighbone.

He then asked what had caused her to dispose of the bone if she had really thought, as she testified on direct examination, that it might pertain to the Palmyra murder case.

“It was rather grisly and uncomfortable for me to keep, and it kept getting in the way,” she explained lamely. “Every time I reached for something, the bone would be there.” She gave a fetching shudder.

Eatinger went on to say that although she had never told the authorities about her find, she had told a sailing friend, defense witness Richard Grigg, and he had immediately recruited her for the defense team.

N
EXT, SEVERAL
witnesses were called in an effort to discredit the testimony of prison snitch Al Ingman that Buck Walker told him he had killed the Grahams. Two half sisters of his each claimed Ingman introduced them to heroin at a young age, and labeled him “untruthful.”

The testimony began to sound like a broken record, perhaps diluting the defense effort by repetition. Ingman’s twenty-two-year-old niece, Tamee Cyphers, called him a “very untruthful, manipulative person.” When she was sixteen, she said, her uncle had taken her to an Arizona motel room and instructed her to have sex with his friend Terry Conner. She did, and remained with Conner for a year—until his 1981 arrest at the Torch Light Motel—and had his baby. A pathetic story, but not particularly germane.

Ingman’s stepmother was contemptuous. “Al has never been truthful. He has more or less lived in a fantasy world. He seemed to fantasize about what things would be, and lied about what they really were.”

Ruth Thomas, now in her forties, appeared next. Life on the run with lawbreakers followed by a prison stretch had taken a severe toll on the former social worker. Buck Walker’s ex-lover looked drawn, even gaunt. As she passed the defense table, she and Walker exchanged weak smiles. After being sworn in by the clerk, she looked again at the man who had upended her life, this time with sad eyes and no expression.

“Where do you reside, Ms. Thomas?” Partington asked.

“The federal correctional institution at Pleasanton [California],” she answered quietly.

Thomas explained that she had been arrested in 1983 for conspiracy to distribute heroin. She had been convicted the following year after Al Ingman testified against her. “He’s a liar,” she said softly.

Thomas reviewed her live-in relationship with Walker, which had lasted from July 1979 until mid-1981. Several times the judge had to ask her to speak up. The demure Thomas clearly took no pleasure in being the center of attention. She denied that Walker had ever been involved in smuggling drugs or guns.