By coincidence, my coauthor, Bruce B. Henderson, crossed paths on June 26, 1988, with the foreman of Jennifer’s jury, the retired chicken farmer Ernest Nelson. They were both in Santa Rosa, California, to see the play Inherit the Wind, based on one of Clarence Darrow’s most famous cases, the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. During intermission, Nelson and Henderson discussed the Jennifer Jenkins trial. “You know, she got away with murder,” Nelson said casually. He explained that he’d finally voted “not guilty” only because of the reasonable doubt I’d raised in my summation. “That Eyetalian fellow, Bugliosi, was very clever,” he said.
Despite the jury foreman’s blunt remark, I’m confident that the jury system returned proper verdicts (for Jennifer Jenkins and Buck Walker) in the Palmyra murder case, unquestionably one of the most fascinating and enigmatic true murder mysteries of our time.
In May 1988, at Honolulu’s Keehi Marine Center, a sleek new racing yacht with two tanned young men aboard pulled into a slip on a windswept morning. As they went about securing the bow and stern lines to the pier, the men couldn’t help but notice the old wooden ketch in the adjacent slip.
The weary old vessel in slip F-3 had once been Mac Graham’s pride and joy. It now smelled musty, like rotting wood. Blisters in the wooden finish had been crudely covered with tape that was peeling. Hanging on the side of the cabin was a “For Sale” sign with the name “Alan” and a Honolulu phone number. (In January 1978, Kit Muncey had sold the Sea Wind to Ray Millard of Oahu for twenty thousand dollars. Millard, who said it had been his life’s dream to own a stately wooden-hulled sailboat, intended to do a major overhaul and refurbishing of the well-traveled Sea Wind, but he never got around to it. For years, the boat remained anchored off Millard’s seaside home at Pohakea Point in Kaneohe Bay, not being sailed and gradually falling into a state of disrepair. In March 1988, Millard gave Mac’s old ketch to Alan Horoschak, a friend from Honolulu. “With the condition she was in, I couldn’t have got much for her anyway,” Millard explained, “and only from people who wanted to break her up for parts. Alan promised he’d fix her up. He towed her over to Honolulu, hauled her out at a boatyard, replaced some planks, and did a few other things. At least she stayed in one piece.”)
Apparently in an attempt to facilitate the sale of the boat, new paint had recently been slapped on—pea green with brown trim. The quick-fix cosmetics wouldn’t fool anybody. The rotten smell told the story. All the galvanized rigging and chain plates were rusted and needed replacing. The wooden hull, which had once cut through the water so majestically, was now laced with long, deep cracks. There was little doubt that this cripple would leak like a sieve at sea.
“Will you look at that garbage scow,” said the man who had been at the helm of the racer.
His crewmate stopped what he was doing and stood, arms akimbo, studying a vessel that was considerably older than he, as if trying to peer beyond the obvious. “I don’t know,” he finally offered. “She has a salty rake to her masts. Looks like an ancient mariner, all right, but in her day, I’ll bet she was—something.”
AS FOR Palmyra Island, the remote atoll continues to serve up grist for the perpetuation of the belief in the Palmyra Curse for those who are so inclined.
While attempting a trip from San Diego to Hawaii in early June of 1989, a forty-foot sloop hit bad weather and its crew became seasick. Struggling with auxiliary-engine problems while trying to find their way by celestial navigation (most modern oceangoing boats are equipped these days with navigational gear that picks up positional signals from orbiting satellites), the inexperienced crew missed Hawaii and found themselves pushed far to the south…ending up at Palmyra Island.
After a brief stay on the atoll, the sloop reportedly departed Palmyra on July 27, 1989, headed for Hawaii. The boat was never seen again, nor were the four people aboard her. Some facts are coincidental enough with the Sea Wind mystery for pulp fiction. The missing boat’s name: Sea Dreamer. Home port: San Diego. Owner: Graham Hughes.
The Coast Guard instituted an extensive search between Palmyra and Hawaii, followed by harbor searches in Hawaii and on the West Coast of the United States for the Sea Dreamer, Graham Hughes, his wife, Sheri, and their two sons, Alex, twenty-one, and Ryan, sixteen. Authorities discovered that Alex had—prior to the voyage—registered at San Diego State University. He never showed up for classes. Friends of the San Diego family have not heard from them.
To this day, the Sea Dreamer and the Hughes family, last seen on an uninhabited island they didn’t even intend to visit, remain unaccounted-for.
WE do know the fate of another sailor.
Just before dusk on July 26, 1987, a U.S. Coast Guard C-130 search plane, acting on a tip from a foreign fishing boat, reported spotting a sailboat drifting in dead-calm waters “just southeast of Palmyra.”
The plane circled in the darkening skies, its crewmen looking at the boat through binoculars. They could see no signs of life. The sloop’s mast was broken off, and the sails were torn. An attempt to contact the boat by radio raised only silence. Visible on the stern of the boat was the name, the Marara.
The forty-one-foot sloop and its owner, Manning Eldridge, a forty-three-year-old Garden Grove, California, attorney, had been missing since mid-February 1987, while on the last leg (Tahiti to Hawaii) of a three-year South Pacific cruise.
On August 2, a week after the aerial sighting, a 190-foot cutter intercepted the drifting sailboat, and armed Coast Guardsmen cautiously boarded the Marara. Below, in the cabin, they found human skeletal remains.
The Honolulu coroner subsequently identified the deceased as the missing attorney. Owing to the condition of the remains, the cause of death was listed as unknown.
Earlier, when Eldridge had not shown up on schedule in Hawaii, some friends wanted to believe that he had succumbed to the temptations of the tropics and swapped his law practice for life on a deserted island. For him, the solo cruise had been the fulfillment of a long-held dream to sail through the South Pacific, far from his job and the inexorable grind of urban living. But other friends were very worried, and they soon contacted the authorities.
“Right away, we told the Coast Guard to look in the vicinity of one small island south of Hawaii,” explained his friend and former secretary Wendi Rothman. “Before leaving for the South Pacific, Manning talked all the time about wanting to visit a place called Palmyra Island.”
APPENDIX
p. 234: Did Mac kill Muff?
Surprisingly, more than a few have speculated that Mac may have murdered his own wife. They point out that if Mac did it, he would have wanted to place suspicion on others, in this case, Buck and Jennifer. Therefore, he would have had to do it while Buck and Jennifer were still on Palmyra. Is it just a coincidence, they argue, that Mac and Muff’s disappearance was on the very last day before Buck and Jennifer were to leave Palmyra? Also, they argue, Mac was much more adventuresome than Muff, and he liked a life on the sea, whereas she was a homebody and didn’t even want to go to Palmyra. Did hostility develop between them? And of course, since Mac’s body has never been found, how can we be sure he’s even dead? Is he living in Tahiti today with a new love, or sailing the seven seas on another boat?
Yes, one can make these theoretical arguments, but to my knowledge, no one intimately associated with the case has ever given a fleeting thought to the possibility that Mac murdered Muff. I know I haven’t. The reasons are multifold. All of Mac’s and Muff’s friends agree that Mac loved Muff dearly, and his doing anything at all to harm her (much less in the exceptionally brutal way Muff met her end) is unthinkable to them. And if there was anyone or anything he loved even close to Muff it was his beloved Sea Wind, which, under the circumstances of the case, he would have also had to give up. He also would have thereby been stranded on Palmyra (since we know the Iola, the only other boat on the island, was sunk by Buck and Jennifer), with no way to leave except to hitchhike out on a later boat. Not only would this obviously be a highly disagreeable
prospect for Mac, but the mysterious disappearance of the Grahams generated considerable publicity throughout the Pacific region, and whoever gave a Caucasian male of Mac’s approximate age and description a lift off Palmyra would almost assuredly have notified the authorities. Mac also apparently would have decided and been willing to assume a new identity and literally be on the run the rest of his life, since as of the date of this book, seventeen years after his disappearance, he has not been heard from. Moreover, in addition to giving up Muff and the Sea Wind, he also would have to have been willing to give up his sister, Kit, and his then seventy-five-year-old mother. And since there doesn’t appear to be any way that Mac could have profited financially from killing Muff (there being no evidence of any insurance policy on her life), Mac would also have to have been willing to give up every cent of his net worth, all of which, under the terms of his 1973 will, he left (in the event Muff did not survive him) to Kit. His assets were subsequently distributed to her in 1975, and Elliot Enoki reported to me that prior to that, all of Mac’s accounts had remained untouched, with no activity on them. There is also physical evidence pointing to Mac’s own demise and murder: the missing fourth container.
p. 243: Perjury in self-defense is expected and overlooked.
When a defendant who has denied guilt from the witness stand is convicted, the jury obviously believes he committed perjury when he denied his guilt under oath. Yet of the countless defendants convicted of various crimes every year throughout the United States, I personally have never heard of one being prosecuted for perjury following his conviction.
p. 250: The prosecution seeks life imprisonment.
In the Palmyra murder case, the prosecution sought sentences of life imprisonment, not the death penalty. But not by choice. The section of the U.S. Code under which Walker and Jenkins were being prosecuted, Section 1111, provides for the death penalty as an alternative to life imprisonment for a conviction of first-degree murder. However, in the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, the United States Supreme Court struck down death-penalty statutes throughout the land, holding that the death penalty was unconstitutional unless the jury was given guidelines by the trial judge to control their discretion in determining whether or not the penalty of death should be imposed. Thereafter, many states enacted new death-penalty legislation to comply with the mandate of Furman. But on the federal level, as of the date of the Walker and Jenkins trials, Section 1111 had not been amended to meet that standard, and the Office Manual of the U.S. Attorney’s Office instructed federal prosecutors not to seek the death penalty in murder cases because a verdict of death under Section 1111 would be unenforceable.
p. 269: The DeLorean case.
DeLorean was subsequently acquitted. For a defense attorney, the DeLorean case was a “dream entrapment case,” said San Francisco criminal defense specialist John Keker.
p. 271: Circumstantial evidence of innocence.
Cases are legion in which certain acts and statements of an accused are deemed admissible circumstantial evidence to show guilt, while the opposite of such acts or statements are not admissible to show innocence; e.g., although the prosecution can introduce evidence of escape or attempted escape, the defense generally cannot introduce evidence that the defendant had an opportunity to escape but did not. And while a defendant’s incriminating statement comes in under an exception to the hearsay rule, a defendant’s exculpatory statement is inadmissible, since the law virtually presumes a self-serving motivation for the latter. Similarly, a suspect’s silence in response to being accused of committing a crime is admissible as showing a consciousness of guilt. But if he is not silent, and denies the accusation, the denial is not admissible.
p. 276: My motion that the judge order the prosecution to change the charge to premeditated murder.
At the Walker trial, Robert Hollis, a respected veteran reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser, approached me to say that Partington blamed me for the premeditated murder count being added against both defendants in the superseding indictment of January 8, 1985. He said Partington thought my written motion a few weeks earlier on December 12, 1984, had put the idea in the prosecutor’s head. I felt this was ridiculous on its face, since Enoki and Schroeder, two experienced federal prosecutors, obviously didn’t need me to tell them about the availability and viability of a premeditated murder count. When I confronted Partington, he passionately denied telling Hollis this, but I had no reason whatsoever to disbelieve the reporter. In any event, I reminded Partington that I was representing Jennifer, not Buck, and therefore had to do what I felt was good for her, not Buck. Besides, the felony-murder count could hurt only Jennifer, since only Jennifer’s theft conviction had been affirmed on appeal. Walker’s conviction had been reversed by an appellate court, so Jennifer alone had to worry about a felony-murder conviction flowing from her theft conviction. Thereafter, Enoki told both Hollis and me that the premeditated murder count was based on Ingman’s and Williams’s testimony before the grand jury, and that he and Schroeder had contemplated filing it in addition to the felony-murder count long before I even raised the issue of substituting it for the felony-murder count.
p. 276: The inappropriateness of the felony-murder count.
I also argued that, assuming the Government had furnished us everything we were entitled to receive under discovery, both sides already knew, before the trial, that the prosecution had no evidence the killing took place during the perpetration or attempted perpetration of the robbery, a necessary element for the felony-murder rule to apply. Realistically, this legal argument could only be made if there was a premeditated murder count in addition to a felony-murder count in the indictment. With only a felony-murder count, if the jury (or even a judge) believed beyond a reasonable doubt that Buck and Jennifer had murdered the Grahams, there’s no way in the world they would return a verdict of not guilty and let Buck and Jennifer walk out of court simply because the Government failed to prove that the murder was “connected” to the robbery. They would automatically (and no doubt correctly) conclude that there was a connection.
p. 278: The duty of a public prosecutor to be fair.
It is often said that the purpose of a criminal trial is to ascertain the truth. But this obviously depends upon the perspective. Certainly the prosecutor, judge, and jury want the truth to come out. Not so with the defense attorney. If his client is guilty, which is usually the case, the very last thing in the world he wants to come out (and that which he attempts to suppress) is the truth. And this verity reflects the very disparate roles of the opposing lawyers in a criminal trial.
The duty of the defense attorney is only to his client, the accused. But the prosecutor has a higher and dual role. He represents “the people” (as in People of the State of California v. Jones), and in more than a theoretical sense, one of those people is the defendant. So while he can justifiably seek a conviction in cases he believes in, he has the concomitant duty to help insure that the person he is prosecuting receives a fair trial. Saying it another way, the prosecution is the lawyer for the sovereign (state or federal government), and the government’s only interest is to see that all of its citizens receive impartial justice. Therefore, as opposed to a defense attorney, it is as much a prosecutor’s duty to refrain from improper methods to secure a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate measure to bring about a just one.
In all fairness to the prosecutors in this case, they most likely believed, although erroneously, that they at least had a legal right to do what they were seeking to do.
p. 282: Why I did not believe that the prosecution, at Jennifer’s murder trial, should be allowed to ask her whether she had been convicted of the theft of the Sea Wind.
Under Rule 609(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence, when a defendant testifies, the prosecution may (for the ostensibly limited purpose of impeaching his credibility as a witness) ask him on cross-examination whether he has ever been convicted of a crime if: 1. The crime is a felony, and the probati
ve value of the conviction (that is, the extent to which the fact of the prior conviction tends to indicate guilt in the current case) outweighs the prejudicial effect to the defendant if the jury hears of the conviction. [On the issue of probative value, the thinking goes that an ex-felon is not to be believed in his testimony as much as one who is not an ex-felon. But if a priest or rabbi actually commits a felony, yet pleads not guilty, he is not any more likely to tell the truth on the witness stand than one who has previously been convicted of twenty felonies. If he were going to tell the truth, he would not have pled not guilty.] or 2. Regardless of whether the crime is a felony or a misdemeanor, it involved dishonesty or a false statement.
Among other things, I argued in my brief that the prejudicial effect to Jennifer that would result from the jury’s hearing she had already been convicted of stealing the Sea Wind, “would be singularly devastating and completely outweigh any probative value. The built-in bias the jury would have against Defendant Jenkins may prove to be insurmountable. If, in the jury’s eyes, she has already been judged to be guilty of the theft of the Sea Wind, almost as a necessary corollary they would feel she must also be guilty of Mrs. Graham’s murder.”