“I was in the apartment. It was still early. I was, I had gotten up and, um, I just laid my clothes out. I had plenty of time. I was just getting ready. . . .”
“Just getting started. Did you work at that time?” “Yes,” Aguilar answered.
“Where did you work at?”
“I worked at, uh, a place called Tight Air.” “What did you do for them?”
“I was a receptionist.”
“Now, you indicated that the first, sort of, indication or clue you, that something unusual was going on, was you heard a scream. Is that right?” Kaplovitz wondered.
“Yes.”
“That was from outside?”
“I assume it was from outside.”
“You assumed it was Lori Lister screaming, right?” “Well, I didn’t assume it was her at the time, ’cause I
didn’t, you know, I just heard a scream, I didn’t think anything of it.”
“In reflection now, you were assuming that it was her screaming when she was attacked, isn’t that correct? Now?”
“Well, now, yes.”
“Right, and I understand at the time you didn’t know what was going on,” Kaplovitz suggested.
“Right, right.”
“You heard a scream from someplace coming out . . .” “. . . Right.”
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“. . . somebody screamed outside the apartment and you were able to hear it, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay, thank you. I have no further questions.”
The “ Texas Trio” was followed by Houston police officer Doug Bostock, who described what Watts was wearing at the time of his arrest and that Watts was driving his brown 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix.
Bostock was followed by Houston detective Tom Ladd, who read over Watts’s confessions and described the crime scenes for the court. Ladd had a rather distract-ing habit of placing his eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose as he read from his notes and then removing the eyeglasses when he looked up at the attorneys to hear their questions.
One of the more interesting exchanges took place between Ladd and Donna Pendergast.
“What did Mr. Watts tell you he did relating to Carrie Jefferson?” Assistant Attorney General Pendergast asked the retired detective.
“He said he was driving around in his, his Pontiac. He saw Mrs. Jefferson driving, uh, a small blue car,” Ladd stated as he placed his glasses on his nose. “He, again, got in behind her,” he said as he removed his glasses. “He followed her to a residential neighborhood. It was a fairly long drive outside the, you know, downtown area of the city of Houston.” The detective again placed his glasses on his nose. He looked down at his notes and just as quickly removed his reading glasses. “He said he saw her pull up to a curb in front of her house and there were other vehicles in the driveway, so it appeared that she probably had to park on the curb. He parked. He
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stopped. He saw her get out of the car. He grabbed her as she was walking to the front door of her house. Choked her down and then he put her in the trunk of her own car,” he stated while holding his glasses in his hand and waving them back and forth.
“He said he would never put a complainant in his vehicle because of ‘evil spirits.’
“So, he had her in the trunk of the car,” Ladd continued, “he returned to his vehicle, which was parked a short distance away, retrieved his shovel. Went back, put the shovel in Carrie Jefferson’s car with Carrie in the trunk, and then drove her to the location of sixteen-hundred block of White Oak Bayou, where he opened the trunk. She was still alive and fighting; he then fought with her, choked her, killed her, and then buried her.”
Pendergast asked, “Did he indicate whether or not he stabbed her?”
“Yes, he stabbed her twice. One on each side of the neck,” the no-nonsense detective assured her.
“Did he indicate whether or not he took any personal items with him?”
“Yes, he took a pair of burgundy pants,” Ladd recalled while looking down at his yellow legal pad. “He burned them.”
“Did he tell you why he buried Carrie Jefferson?” “He said that [to] kill her spirit. He said that she was
evil. He said that she had fought him so hard that he had buried her deep to prevent her spirit from getting out.” Ladd also spoke of the murder of Suzanne Searles.
He stated that Watts confessed that he had choked Sue Searles and pushed her face first into a flowerpot filled with water and drowned her. He also stated that Searles was listed as five feet two inches, 120 pounds, on her miss-
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ing persons report. When police unearthed her body, her decomposed corpse weighed only sixty-seven pounds.
Detective Ladd eventually was cross-examined by Ron Kaplovitz. The defense attorney honed in on Ladd’s contention that Watts confessed that he attacked the women because of their “evil eyes.”
Kaplovitz stood behind the wooden lectern and asked the detective, “Now, he also indicated that he selected his victims based upon their ‘evil eyes’?”
“That’s what he said,” Ladd responded. “That was his response to the question I asked him, why he would pick one victim, you know, after he drives around all day, he sees many, many women, but yet he picks a certain woman, and so we always asked him, ‘Why did you pick this particular individual?’ and he’d come back and say, ‘Because they had evil in their eyes.’”
“So he, he, he, saw evil in their eyes?” “That’s what he said.”
“That’s what he told you, right?”
“That’s what he told me, yes,” Ladd answered.
“So it was ‘evil eyes.’ Because [of] their evil eyes, right?” Kaplovitz ascertained.
“Evil in their eyes.”
After calling several more officers to the stand, including Felix Bergara, Jim Ladd, Gary Fleming, and Daniel Jensen, the prosecution rested its case.
The defense only called one witness, Sergeant Tim Brown, of the Michigan State Police Department. Kaplovitz questioned Brown about the possibility that Joseph Foy could make an accurate description of his client, Coral Watts, from eighty-four feet away. Kaplovitz then had the jury step into the hallway so as to conduct a
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distance test. Kaplovitz wanted the jury to know what it felt like to see something from that particular distance.
After the demonstration the defense rested its case.
After the day’s testimony, Andy Kahan marveled at the strength of the Texas Trio. “God, it’s never left them,” he said of Julie Sanchez, Lori Lister Baugh, and Melinda Aguilar. “They never thought they would have to go through this again.”
Kahan discussed how the women had not wanted to fly to Michigan to face their brutalizer. He stated, however, that they knew they must.
“They don’t want anyone else to suffer as they have.” Kahan singled out Aguilar for additional praise. “She’s the most heroic lady I’ve ever met. If she hadn’t jumped, they were numbers fourteen and fifteen. He was on a major roll. Who knows when it would have stopped?
There are people alive today because of her actions.”
Judge Kuhn’s courtroom was overflowing with specta-tors. Surviving family members of Coral Watts’s victims, such as Harriett Semander and Jane Montgomery, sat in the audience, joined by many of Watts’s surviving victims, such as Julie Sanchez and Sandra Dalpe Carlsen, to ac-tivists Andy Kahan and Dianne Clements. They were all there to witness the closing arguments of the case.
First up for the state was Donna Pendergast. The elegant assistant attorney general dressed sharp in her blue business dress, white blouse, and strand of pearls necklace. She displayed her eloquence right off the bat as she walked past the pushed-aside lectern and addressed the remaining thirteen jurors. She used no notes and stood upright and confident, but not cocky, as she spoke.
“It’s been twenty-five years since the final chapter in Helen Dutcher’s life was written on the blade of a knife. And yet the final chapter to this story has been written in this courtroom in a very few days. It awaits only an ending which will be written by you, the jury. After twenty-five long years, I beg of you, make sure it’s the right one.
“For twenty-five years Helen’s screams have been
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silenced. No closure for the family, no justice. But she speaks to you now through the evidence. The evidence that points in one direction and one direction only,” she declared as she turned her back to the jury box and pointed at the defendant Coral Watts. “Directly at a stalking predator with a diabolical pattern and scheme of willfully and purposefully killing women for the sheer thrill of it.” Watts appeared nonplussed at the accusations being tossed his way. He simply placed his chin in his left hand and stared at a yellow legal pad on the defense table.
“And now it’s time. Time to say, ‘We, the jury, understand that a terrible crime was committed here. We don’t understand how you could do what you did, but we know that you did it.’ And the truth is, there is no understanding of the whys of Helen Dutcher’s death. Only the hows. Alone, terrified, on a cold driveway, and in an agonizing manner. But, unfortunately, not quickly enough to spare her of the horrifying certainty that she was about to die.
“There is no understanding of the whys of Helen Dutcher’s death because it is pure evil. And there is no understanding of pure evil, just recognition of what it is,” Pendergast declared as Watts looked over for the first time, albeit briefly.
“You know, no one ever knows when the end of their life is going to come. I am sure that when Helen Dutcher woke up on December 1, 1979, she never dreamed that that was the last day of her life. If she went about her activities during the daytime hours, doing what she normally does, undoubtedly she never dreamed that those were the last hours of her life.
“As she left Alfie’s Restaurant, walking toward the area where she would soon die, I’m sure she never dreamed those were the final minutes of her life.
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“Surely,” Pendergast said with a sigh, “when you’re thirty-six years old, your world doesn’t end like this: on a cold December night, isolated from everybody but a man with a knife. And then, in the struggle of your life, a struggle for your life, a struggle that ends only after you crumple to the ground”—she paused—“staring blankly at death in the face as the life drains from your body.
“The last thing that Helen Dutcher saw was the defendant. She looked at evil up close. She saw that the human face of Coral Eugene Watts is nothing more than a mask for evil so dark that your worst nightmare pales in comparison.”
As Pendergast addressed the jury, she also projected images of the case on the overhead screen directly above and to the right of Watts. It was on the left of Watts from the jurors’ perspective. At the same time she described “evil up close,” she flashed an image of Coral Eugene Watts’s eyes in a larger-than-life manner.
“You know, we see violence every day, at the show, on television. We’ve become so used to seeing violence for its entertainment value that we lose sight of what true violence really is. But this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is not TV violence,” she declared as she clicked the pro-jector to display two photos of Helen Dutcher’s corpse as it lay on the morgue slab. Watts tilted his head back to get a good look at the body of Helen Dutcher.
“Unfortunately, it’s not. There’s nothing fictional about the plot of ground that Helen Dutcher lies in. And while we engage in our pursuits of some sort of justice, we can do it under a horrific set of circumstances, Helen Dutcher remains very dead. Robbed of her life by a man who has no conception of the value of human life. A man who kills for no reason other than the pleasure of killing. A man with his own diabolical plan and scheme. Really,
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a plan and scheme that almost defies comprehension. A man who sits in this courtroom today hoping for your mercy when none was shown to Helen Dutcher.
“You know, as human beings we have a tendency to want to try and understand. We relate a lot easier to things that don’t threaten our views of why and how things happen. It would be a lot easier and a lot less dis-concerting to think, as Mr. Kaplovitz insinuated, of this as a purse robbery gone bad. Because even though that certainly is a horrific thing, it’s easier to understand. But every shred of evidence in this courtroom shows that things far more monstrous than a purse robbery gone bad to the point of murder do happen, can happen, do happen, and, in this case, did happen.
“So how do we know that the defendant is guilty?” Pendergast asked as she slowly walked back and forth in front of the jury. “Well, I’m confident that you had the opportunity to size up, listen to, hear from, and watch Mr. Joseph Foy. To size him up for what he is, a good citizen who saw a very bad thing.
“You know, it’s interesting, because in this case it’s no coincidence that he just happens to be the person who lives at that first house off the alley. We’re not talking about somebody who comes into this courtroom and says, ‘I was walking down the street and I saw a murder.’ You’re talking about the man who lives right there, the first house, the closest house to where the murder occurred. “We know that Mr. Foy was home that night because we know that from his testimony as well as Paula Otto’s testimony. And we know that he saw something, because he reported it to the police through his wife, as well as pointed Officer Eberhardt to the body as soon as he arrived.” Pendergast paused and pointed with her index finger for emphasis. “We know that he talked to a sketch
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artist the very next day, and not only was able to give sufficient information for that sketch artist to compile a sketch, but also to convince her, a professional, that he would be able to make an identification again if he saw the individual. A belief that was so profound that she put it in her report. The same report where she indicated that she was of the belief that Joseph Foy had registered and recorded specific images. Her belief, a professional, he would be able to pick him out again.
“You saw that composite sketch,” she reminded the jury as she displayed Barbara Martin’s sketch on the overhead screen. “Put a little more hair on it and it’s the defendant. Or, as good as you’re gonna get with a composite sketch. “Clearly, this is not a situation where Joseph Foy thinks all black men look alike. He got a number of features down remarkably well. The puffiness, the top of the cheeks, the eyes, the position of the ears, you heard from Mrs. Martin, the mouth. That’s pretty remarkable considering when Mrs. Martin told you of the purpose of the composite sketch is to basically rule out a number of people, not to include a number of people. And Mrs. Martin told you a composite sketch is not exact. It’s as best we can do under the circumstances and it rules out a number of people. But, in light of the fact that Mr. Foy got that many features down pretty well, under the circumstances, it’s pretty clear that he saw the defendant. “What else? Well, I know that Mr. Kaplovitz is going to come in here and say, ‘Well, we have a picture taken six weeks before and Mr. Watts didn’t have any facial hair.’ And that’s true. I stipulated to the admission of that picture. Actually, I think if you look at the exhibit, there is a little tuft, like he’s beginning to grow a beard, but the point is, number one, Mrs. Martin never said that the composite was exact, and number two, if you look at Mr. Watts’s various