And the Sea Will Tell (51 page)

I now looked up from the transcript. “Did I read the questions and answers correctly, sir?”

“It sounds…yes.”

“Mr. Shoemaker, I’ve counted seven, seven references in the transcript I just read to the fact that this was the last contact you ever had with Mac Graham. So there was no confusion as to which conversation this was. You’ve testified earlier how this cake-truce incident stood out in your mind above everything else. Something you would never forget as long as you live. If it actually happened, as you claim it did, can you tell this jury and Judge King
why
, when you were specifically asked to relate what was said and what took place during this very last contact that you ever had with Mac Graham, that you never felt the cake-truce incident was memorable enough or important enough to mention?”

“Mention to who?”

The whole room felt a gear disengage, I thought.

“To the lawyer who asked you to relate what took place during that conversation.”

“What lawyer?”

“The person that was asking you the questions, sir, that I just read to you.”

Shoemaker paled. “Well,” he stammered, his lips visibly quivering. “I was only…answering the questions that were asked.”

I had no further questions.

On re-direct, Schroeder tried his best to repair the obvious damage. “Do you recall whether you mentioned the cake-truce incident to FBI Agent Hal Marshall?”

“Yes, at my home,” Shoemaker said quickly, grabbing for the life preserver. “That was last year. I discussed it with him then.”

“And you specifically mentioned that incident at that time?”

“Yes.”

But this was some eleven years
after
it supposedly occurred. Shoemaker’s involvement in the notorious Palmyra Island murder case had undoubtedly been a dramatic peak in his life. He could be likened, I thought, to the fisherman who lets a big one get away, and the fish keeps getting bigger and bigger with each retelling. Nonetheless, although Shoemaker had fared badly on cross-examination, he didn’t come across at all like the devious, lying type; he looked more like the sort of guy who goes on stage when the magician asks for volunteers. In terms of believability with the jury, that was a plus for him.

R
OBERT
M
EHAFFY
, the Sacramento college teacher, testified to the
Sea Wind
’s entering Kauai’s Nawiliwili Harbor on the evening of October 12, 1974, and setting anchor next to his boat. The next day, “it was just after dinner when we heard a knock on our hull. We opened the hatch, and this couple was next to us in a dinghy. They had a bottle of wine. They introduced themselves as Roy Allen and Jennifer Jenkins. We invited them aboard, and they stayed about three hours.”

Jennifer did most of the talking, though her boyfriend did talk some, Mehaffy said. The couple mentioned a recent trip to Palmyra, but gave no details. The woman told a story about being shadowed by a large swordfish while they were becalmed at one point during their return to Hawaii. “She said this fish kept circling the boat. They heard a thump, but didn’t think anything about it until later, when they went below and found the boat taking on water. They pumped out the water, and she said they found the bill of the swordfish sticking through the hull into the bilge area. They said they put an outside patch on the hole.”

“Now, from your experience as a sailboat skipper,” Schroeder asked, almost purring, “did you find the story to be plausible or credible?”

“Well, I told Roy at the time that it seemed to me kind of unlikely that a swordfish would have a bill strong enough to go through the oak hull of their boat.”

“Did you ever ask Jennifer or Roy to show you the evidence of this swordfish attack?”

“When we were talking about it, I just simply said, ‘I would like to see that. I’d like to see a hole a fish could put through a boat.’”

“Did Jennifer or Roy ever offer to show you this…swordfish hole?”

“No. They mentioned they had to leave the next day because the boat was still taking water, and they wanted to go someplace where they could haul it out to effect more permanent repairs.”

Prior to trial, I had asked Enoki to stipulate to the following entry in an
Encyclopedia Americana
article: “The excellence of the swordfish’s bill as a weapon and the power of its attack is attested by their frequent piercing of boats and even of large wooden ships, through which the sword has been deeply thrust before breaking off.” Enoki had refused, telling me I’d have to call my own expert witness on this point. I surmised that the Government intended to argue that the hole was probably caused by a bullet. Why else would they be resisting the swordfish-hole theory?

Mehaffy testified that two weeks after meeting the couple, his boat was moored at the Hawaii Yacht Club in the Ala Wai harbor when their ketch entered the harbor and anchored a hundred feet or so away. The date was October 28. “As they dropped anchor,” he continued, “there was a man helping me tie up another boat and he looked across the channel and said, ‘That’s the Grahams’ boat.’ I said, ‘No, that’s Roy and Jennifer.’ He said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and hurriedly left.”

“Do you know who that man was?” asked Schroeder.

“Bernard Leonard,” said the witness.

Based upon my pretrial interviews with Mehaffy, I had intended to bring out some things I felt would be very helpful to Jennifer. But Schroeder did my job when he asked if Mehaffy had observed Jennifer and Roy at any time the following morning.

“Yes, when they left the
Sea Wind
in their dinghy to row ashore.”

“Do you recall which one of them was rowing?”

“As I remember, it was Jennifer.”

“Did you see either of them later?”

“Well, just a few minutes later, Jennifer rowed
back
to the boat. She was there for just a very few minutes. She was rowing back toward shore the next time I noticed. It was then that the Coast Guard patrol boat came into the harbor and speedily headed toward her.”

The prosecutor had just unwittingly provided corroboration for Jennifer’s story about returning Joel’s laundry.

Cross-examination is limited to those matters covered by the direct examination, but I asked Judge King to permit me to take Mehaffy as my own witness on direct, which he allowed me to do.

I began by establishing Mehaffy as an expert sailor who had taught sailing classes and written articles about the sport. “Mr. Mehaffy, if a boat doesn’t have an engine, can it sail—by way of what is called tacking—against the wind?”

“You can never sail
directly
into the wind. But by attacking first one side of the wind source and then the other—what we call tacking—it can go towards the direction that the wind is coming from.”

Tacking was never discussed at Buck Walker’s trial
, although the Government urged the proposition that a sailboat without an engine could
not
sail against the wind from Palmyra to Fanning. Knowing nothing about boats and the sea, I had never heard of tacking before, but it made no sense to me that sailboats, plying the Mediterranean in ancient days long before any thought of combustion engines, could proceed at sea only with the wind at their back, or against it with oarsmen. Knowing that Fanning was against the wind, I had asked Jennifer about this and she was the one who first told me about tacking, explaining this was the way Buck and she had intended to sail to the island.

“Can you explain to the jury in a little more detail what’s involved in this technique called tacking?” I asked Mehaffy.

“What you have to do is to get the sail to curve, and then as the wind comes by the sail, instead of pushing the boat, it sucks the boat ahead. When the wind comes around the side of the sail, it creates turbulence in the back that draws the boat ahead.”

“Is this aerodynamic principle roughly analogous to the wind on top of an airplane wing forming a suction which holds the airplane up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So by tacking, then, even though the wind is against you, you can actually advance and proceed forward.”

“That’s correct.”

“Does the bow of the boat, when you’re tacking, have to be slanted in excess of any angle from the wind line?” I asked.

“Yes, about forty-five degrees from the wind source.”

“If the angle is less than forty-five degrees, you can’t tack forward.”

“Yes, you’re not going to go forward.”

“Let’s assume that not only the wind is against you, but also the current. If the wind velocity is greater than that of the current, can one tack forward against the wind
and
the current?”

“Yes.”

When Schroeder took my place at the podium, he was obviously concerned over the testimony just elicited. “Mr. Mehaffy, would it be safe to say that you cannot tack everywhere? That there are conditions when you would, for example, be proceeding directly into the wind and the current where it would be extremely difficult to tack?”

“Well, in really light winds, say less than five miles an hour, and you’re trying to tack into that with the current against you, you’re not going to go very far, very fast.”

Incredibly, up to a point, the greater the winds against you, the easier to make forward progress in a sailboat
. In hoping to make the trip sound impossible, the Government had already stressed how strong the winds would have been between Fanning and Palmyra.

“Would it be safe to say,” Schroeder went on, “that there are certain directions and points on the globe where it’s commonly known to sailors that sailing from one point to another is extremely difficult or almost impossible?”

“Yes,” Mehaffy answered. “An example being from Honolulu to San Francisco. It’s very difficult without going due north out of Honolulu for eight hundred miles before you turn east.”

“And would not another variable involved in sailing a difficult course, and trying to tack, be the condition of your boat?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

“If your boat was unseaworthy, it would be extremely difficult, would it not?”

“Not so much difficult as dangerous. Because when you’re tacking, that puts more strain on your boat. So if your boat were not seaworthy, it could tear apart.”

Schroeder had done a good job in bringing up the seaworthiness of the
Iola
as a factor. But on defense, we’d strongly made our point that Jennifer had reason to believe that she and Buck
could
have made it to Fanning by tacking.

T
HE NEXT
two prosecution witnesses, James Wollen and his wife, Lorraine, had testified at Jennifer’s theft trial. Originally from Tacoma, Washington, they’d spent 1974 through 1976 living aboard their twenty-seven-foot sailboat, the
Juno
, at Pokai Bay in the town of Waianae on Oahu’s western shore.

James Wollen testified to meeting Jennifer and Roy Allen in mid-October 1974 and visiting them aboard a blue-and-white ketch they claimed was theirs. He had noticed the name
Iola
painted on the back of the boat.
^*
Wollen was certain of this point for a good reason: he’d been born and raised in a small Kansas town named Iola.

Wollen identified a photograph of the
Sea Wind
as “the
Iola
from Pokai Bay.”

Mrs. Wollen once again testified to her picking up the snapshots for Jennifer—the pictures that showed the
Iola
and
Sea Wind
sailing alongside each other in the open sea.

She had visited “the Allens” once aboard their boat, Mrs. Wollen explained. “It was very, very nice. I remember seeing things like china and crystal. It was quite plush.” She repeated Jennifer’s telling her how she and her boyfriend had come into possession of the beautiful yacht—they’d purchased the boat from a man who had had it some fourteen years and had become tired of the maintenance.

“Did she ever mention the names Mac or Muff or the Grahams?” Enoki asked.

“No.”

“Did she ever mention anyone disappearing or having any accidents on an island named Palmyra?”

“No.”

There was but one point I wanted to bring out on cross-examination—that there was a picture of the previous owners on the cabin wall of the boat.

“I don’t remember that, no,” Mrs. Wollen said.

I flipped to a page of Jennifer’s theft-trial transcript and read a brief portion of her testimony in which she recalled noticing a picture on the cabin wall and asking Jennifer if those were the previous owners and being told yes.

“Do you recall testifying to that on a previous occasion?” I now asked.

“Yes, I do. I guess I don’t remember the picture now, and that’s throwing me.”

K
EN
W
HITE
, the Government’s boat expert, testified to his detailed examination of the nine-and-a-half-horsepower Evinrude engine from the
Sea Wind
’s Zodiac not revealing any evidence of salt water inside the motor. White had found no evidence of corrosion, either. “Corrosion from salt water is immense,” he explained.

With his testimony, the Government proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Zodiac had
not
capsized in the Palmyra lagoon.

White went on to describe the complicated procedure for starting an engine after it has been immersed in salt water—taking the spark plugs out, drying them off, using the primer bulb to force gas through the carburetor system while extracting all the water, and finally, using a flywheel puller to clean out the magneto. (Jennifer was going to testify that Buck did none of the above, and yet the engine roared to life after he pulled the cord several times.)

White added that there was no sign that a flywheel puller had been used. “You find some scarring tissue on the side of an engine when a flywheel puller has been used. I didn’t find such scarring on the Evinrude…. It was a very clean engine.”