the Onion Field (1973) (60 page)

This particular railbird was interested in Gregory Powell and came almost every day to see him. The railbird never spoke, he only grinned, and after a few weeks of this, Greg's head would spin on its swivel a dozen times each morning, glaring at the old man in the back of the courtroom. The railbird grinned like Death.

Greg began to complain about the spectator but was told that the railbird was harmless and had a right to be here. Finally the old man began following Greg when the guards took him in chains from the courtroom to the jail elevators at day's end, and Greg started to listen for the shuffling footsteps behind him, and his head would swivel and he would peek between the deputies. The old man would be there. Grinning at him. Like Time. Like Death.

One very hot summer day, deputies made a written report that prisoner Gregory U. Powell went berserk at the elevator landing and tried to attack a seventy year old male Caucasian for no apparent reason. The prisoner was restrained, but continued screaming and spitting at the man. The prisoner was led away, beside himself with rage the rest of the night. The next day the old man was in the courtroom. Grinning.

"All of the confessions were inadmissible," Prosecutor Sheldon Brown said. "It was truly forgotten by now, even by counsel, what these defendants had once said in their confessions. Hettinger was a broken man, anyone could see that. Campbell was so forgotten he may as well never have lived."

Sheldon Brown had been mildly amused at how Greg had played to the three blacks on the jury, telling in part how he had taught a black man to write. When the jury for Gregory Powell returned with a verdict of death in only six hours, one of the blacks told Brown that they only stayed out that long to make it look respectable.

Still another escape attempt was planned. It was to take place in the day room of the new county jail. Several court prisoners were thought to be involved including another police killer, and ironically, an ex-Los Angeles policeman turned saloon owner, on trial for the insurance murder of his wife.

Jimmy Smith was inexplicably transferred to the old county jail before the plotters were caught and the tools confiscated. They had been informed on. Jimmy was furious because his transfer made it look like he was the snitch. Jimmy decided it was an elderly inmate who went to the attorney room that night.

It seemed that somebody always snitched him off. But it couldn't have been the old man. The bulls knew too much. No, it had to have been somebody close to him. Jimmy was put in the old Sirhan cell and forever separated from his partner. At least I won't be with Powell anymore, he thought. At least he'd be spared that. Something good had come of it after all.

When Jimmy Smith had acquired a typewriter, Gregory Powell got a better one. In that Powell had testified under sodium amytal, Jimmy Smith also had to do it.

The interview was not taped however, and was unspectacular, at times incoherent. There was one interesting moment. Jimmy's testimony was disjointed and self-contradictory, but during the crucial moment of describing the shooting, he said:

"The body was jerkin and his right hand was jerkin. ... I'll never forget... I don't see the picture of Powell doin this. I don't see the picture of anybody doin this."

Jimmy Smith during his interminable wait for a second trial kept a diary to allay his frayed nerves and ulcerated stomach. At times he wrote outraged declarations:

Hundreds of days in court with more to come! Ten different judges have tried to stick their hooks in me, but I have managed to last. And for what, I don't know. But I will never cower before any master! Nor bend to any threat!

At other times the defendant waxed poetic:

Poor fool that I am. Never again will friendly eyes caress my eyes . . . nor love sweet lips kiss me. No hand grip mine in a display of mutual love. I, the grave, have claimed you Jimmy as my love. Farewell, Jimmy! I'm your everything!

In the high power tank Jimmy Smith always got the gossip from the row. It was the same of course: the appeals, how the truly skillful jailhouse lawyers were doing with their own retrials, the sexual tidbits -who was doing it to whom-the new dudes who had arrived, the bad dudes to watch out for.

One new one to watch out for was a skinny youth named Robles who had slashed a sleeping motorist and a hitchhiker in separate assaults to get himself into prison in the first place. Neither died, but while in the Santa Clara County Jail, Robles became involved in a bizarre escape scheme. He convinced his cellmate to pretend to hang himself with a bedsheet. Robles would hold his friend up and when the guard came in to cut him down, they would both overpower the bull. Unfortunately for the cellmate, Robles hanged his friend during the rehearsal. When guards came in to cut the dead man down they found Robles giggling and singing, "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley."

Finally, in yet another prison murder, Robles fatally cut the throat of an inmate with a toothbrush/razor-blade weapon, at last guaranteeing himself a trip to the row.

"Jumpin fuckin Jesus," said Jimmy Smith when he heard the story. "We got a couple here about as bad almost. One sucker jist don't care about nothin but jackin off and fightin the bulls. But that one you was talkin about reminds me of the guy that's down here now as a witness. Jesus," said Jimmy as he thought of the swarthy inmate who had carved lines in his own face beside the eyes and above the lips and rubbed in carbon black to make permanent cat's whiskers. He would occasionally come to jailers and say he was "getting the feeling" again. He warned that he wanted to kill and should be returned to the row. They were all in module 2500, the high power tank.

"Looky here," said Jimmy Smith. "It ain't right, them lettin some crazy fuckin killers run loose like that, man."

"Hell no," the other con agreed. "Ain't nobody gonna be safe. Somebody better get his shit together cause everybody's gonna have to be carrying blades all the time."

"Jesus," said Jimmy Smith, thinking of going back there. No one cared on the row what your crime had been as long as you left the other cons alone and minded your own business. But dudes like this one murdered cons without reason!

They both agreed. It just wasn't fair to the other condemned men. No one on Death Row would be safe as long as they had this killer among them.

Attorney Charles Hollopeter at first characterized his client as paranoid. He seemed to Hollopeter more concerned with jail conditions than with saving his life. He would only talk to his lawyer on the subject of certain motions: for hotter food, for having certain jail lights extinguished, for having other lights left-on.

Jimmy Smith had twice attacked Irving Kanarek, but now for some reason Jimmy seemed equally unhappy with Hollopeter. That made it unanimous. Jimmy thought every lawyer assigned him was incompetent or worse.

Prosecutor Dino Fulgoni was a short, muscular, craggy man. A physical man, very different from the older dapper Pasadena lawyer with his curiously homespun delivery, who had a way of putting himself on trial and coming off sympathetically to juries. Fulgoni believed his opponent, Charles Hollopeter, was as good a trial man as there was in the Los Angeles area.

But Fulgoni was not terribly pleased with his own star witness, who was willing to say only what he saw and remembered and no more. "Hettinger was not," Fulgoni complained, "willing to make those small inferences we all make and must make without seeming equivocal. His testimony was cold, unemotional, too objective."

It was true. The witness showed absolutely no emotion during the 1969 retrials. He was a different man to all of them: the defendants, Pierce Brooks, the dozens of civilians and police witnesses who had heard his demonstrative testimony in 1963. But if the witness seemed emotionless, his wife was not. Helen Hettinger broke out in a serious case of hives for the first time in her life. Her body was covered with itching maddening welts until the trials were over.

One of the days he stood in a courtroom corridor waiting to be called, the witness was approached by a black man who looked very familiar.

"What say, Karl?" said the bony farm worker with the scarred mahogany face. "Remember me? Emmanuel McFadden?"

"Emmanuel? Is it you?"

"It's me." The farm worker grinned. "You look different, Karl. A little skinny."

"Getting old, Emmanuel."

"How they been treatin you, Karl?"

"Okay, Emmanuel. I stopped in Bakersfield once on my way to the lake. I looked for you."

"Yeah, I heard there was a white man lookin for me. I jist figgered it was you. I hear tell you ain't a officer no more." "No."

"You okay, Karl?"

"Sure, Emmanuel. Sure."

Jimmy Smith's attorney believed Hettinger to be honest in what he said, but found him rather contemptible. "A beaten dog," was the term he used out of court.

As to the witness's stealing, Hollopeter had a less complex and psychological interpretation than Charles Maple had, but came to much the same conclusion. Hollopeter would allude to the old psychiatrist joke: "Your son, madam, takes things because . . ." "Yes, Doctor?" "Because he is a thief, madam."

Hollopeter knew Hettinger was vulnerable to psychological attack but avoided the tactic, not because of any compunction, but because he feared it would engender sympathy for the witness. Hollopeter would say of the witness: "A real tough guy never would've let this happen in the first place. He could've crushed Powell's skull with a jack or a hubcap. If he were a tough guy."

The witness had no friends at the defense table, not at either trial.

Early in the trial, Hollopeter made the following comment at the bench:

"I have one criticism, your Honor, and I welcome the chance to state it. I do object to counsel referring to the witness as 'officer! The man, I am informed, is not an officer."

"Actually that's true," said Fulgoni. 'Til call him Mister Hettinger."

In October, 1969, the witness was asked by Hollopeter:

"When you got back to the shooting scene did you see Mr. Campbell?"

"Yes."

"Where was he?"

"He was lying in a ditch."

"Was he alive at that time?"

"I don't think he was," said the witness, his voice mechanical, his eyes vacant.

"When you rode in the ambulance with Mr. Campbell, did you notice any wounds on his body?"

"I just saw a lot of blood. Just a lot of blood."

"Mr. Hettinger, what is your present occupation?"

"I am in landscaping and maintenance."

"You are no longer a police officer?"

"No."

"When did you terminate your employment as a police officer?"

"In May of 1966."

"How many times have you testified about what occurred on the night of March 9th and the morning of March 10th, 1963?"

"Six or eight times," said the witness. "I can't quite remember."

"When you testify, does it bring back the events to your mind?"

"Sometimes they sort of fade away between trials. And then 1 get my memory refreshed," said the witness haltingly, staring at the wall in the back of the courtroom.

"You told us you looked over your shoulder and you could see flashes that seemed to be gun flashes and then appeared to be teardrop-shaped flashes. Mr. Hettinger, were you very greatly shocked by this event?"

"I would say that my state of mind ... I was in disbelief . . . I couldn't believe that it had happened."

"How old were you at that time?"

"About twenty-eight or so."

"Were you in good physical condition?"

"Yes, I think so."

"When you ran, you intended to escape if you could, didn't you?"

"I wanted to," said the witness bleakly.

"Did you think you'd reach a place of safety?"

"I don't know what I thought."

"Why did you slow down to look around?"

"I think ... I was still in a state of... disbelief. I couldn't believe that this had happened. And call it a . . . curiosity, if you must. I looked back. I couldn't believe it."

When the star witness was finished he approached the district attorney during recess. "This is the last trial, isn't it?" he asked, but Fulgoni was talking with Hollopeter about something that had happened in chambers. "Sir," said the witness, "is this . . . ? Do I have to come . . . ? Is it really going to . . . end now?"

But they didn't hear him. They were arguing about Gregory Powell testifying for Smith, and Fulgoni was angry.

The witness was suddenly too tired to stand there. He left the two lawyers and went to his truck. He drove home, but his wife was at work. He wanted to tell her it was probably over. He didn't think he'd have to testify anymore. Not unless it was reversed again.

He put on his jeans and old shirt. It was too late to go to work, so he just went out to his own yard and knelt in the flowers. There were two brown snails feeding on his newly planted yellow gazaneas. He carried the snails across the yard to the street and released them.

Then he went back to his gazaneas. He found one more fiery than the rest. It was folded and tucked, elliptical. He touched its petal. He wanted to help it open. Then he looked at the little gazanea. It was like a fiery teardrop. He thought he heard a quiet whimpering behind him and spun around, but there was nothing. Then his eyes were clouded and burning and he realized he was crying. It had just happened. There was no warning anymore. That scared him more than anything ever had-that a man could just start crying without warning.