A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

  They found Sam Berber, twenty-eight, in Pasco. He worked for Standard Oil and said he rarely had occasion to travel to Yakima, which was eighty miles away. However, on November 21, he had volunteered to drive a friend, Sally Nash, to Yakima to see her brother who was in the Yakima County Jail. Sam, Sally, and her girlfriend, Melodie Isaacs, arrived in Yakima about 8:15 that night, only to find they were too late for visiting hours at the jail. They left some money for Sally’s brother at the booking desk and then ventured out on the town.

  When Sullivan and Henderson asked Berber about Tuffy Pleasant, Sam said he did know the man, but not well; they had met way back in November. In fact, Sam could name the date easily. It was November 21, 1975.

  Berber explained that he and his two female passengers had been left with time on their hands after they missed visiting hours in the jail. They had looked for someplace in Yakima to have a few drinks and maybe dance. They went first to the Cosmopolitan Chinook Hotel and the Red Lion cocktail lounge there.

  Berber said he and the ladies with him were interested in finding clubs that catered to blacks where they might find some music other than the standard hotel lounge canned music. They had noticed a young black man sitting at a table with another man.

  “I approached him and asked him if there were some places we might be able to go … and he offered to show us around,” Berber recalled. “He had asked if the lady with us was with someone, and I told him she wasn’t and then he asked if he could come over and sit at the table with us.”

  Berber had then invited the man, who introduced himself as Angelo Pleasant, to join their party. The man who had been sitting with Pleasant left. They had sat there in the Red Lion until Pleasant told them to follow him; he would lead them to a place that might be livelier. It wasn’t. “We just stayed long enough to have a drink and leave,” Berber said, “because it was just as dead as the place we had just left.” Henderson nodded. That would have been the Holiday Inn, according to what Tuffy had said in his confession.

  Their new friend had then suggested that they go to the Thunderbird. They had stayed there until almost closing time, and Pleasant had asked if they were anxious to leave for Pasco, or if they would be interested in some after-hours parties.

  “He took us past a couple of places,” Berber said, “and there was nothing going on, so we just took him back to his car.”

  “Where was his car parked?” Brimmer asked.

  “At the Chinook.”

  “And about what time did you get back to the Chinook?”

  “I imagine it had to be just right around two A.M. Because people were leaving … from the bar. That was about it. We invited him to Pasco and told him if he ever came around to give us a call or try to get in touch with us and we would try to return the evening.”

  Sam Berber wasn’t sure if he could positively identify the man. But he had introduced himself as Angelo Pleasant and told them that he used to live in Pasco while he was attending Columbia-Basin College.

  Berber hadn’t looked at the clocks in the bars they visited. He based his recall of when they dropped Pleasant off on his date’s comment. “My young lady was in the front seat and she had fallen asleep and she had to get up and lean forward to let him out. We were right under a light, and she looked at her watch and said, ‘It’s two o’clock— we better head on back home.’ “

  Melodie Isaacs, who had been Tuffy Pleasant’s date for the evening, remembered meeting him, a good-looking man in a black leather jacket. They had had three or four drinks and some dances between nine P.M. and a little before two and then they had let him out of the car at two A.M. She had given him her phone number in case he ever came to Pasco, but he hadn’t called her.

  Sullivan and Henderson knew that the Chinook was only a few blocks, a few minutes, from Morris Blankenbaker’s house. Neither of them said what they were surely thinking. If the quartet had found an after-hours place open that night, would Tuffy have decided not to carry out Gabby’s instructions? If it hadn’t been that night, would it have been another night? Or would both Morris and Gabby still be alive?

  While the Pasco witnesses had placed Tuffy only a few blocks from Morris’s house a few minutes before Morris was killed, the investigators had to find witnesses who could either involve, or eliminate Anthony from the shooting. One witness they found was ideal; the others they located were less desirable but made up in sheer number for their inherent lack of credibility. Eventually, they would find a plethora of witnesses who placed Tuffy’s younger brother, Anthony, far away from the shooting scene and, moreover, in no condition to walk, much less commit murder.

  Vern Henderson thumbed through the November 21-22 FIRs (Field Investigation Reports filled out by patrolmen for every incident on every shift). He was elated to find an officer who had had occasion to contact Anthony Pleasant that night. Patrol Officer Allen D. Bischoff of the Yakima Police Department was working C-Squad that Friday night from eight P.M. to four A.M. He told Brimmer that he had responded to an incident on La Salle Street—a “possible disturbance” shortly after ten P.M.

  Bischoff and his partner found several young black men, a young white woman, and an older white female. The men were arguing. Bischoff said they had been a little wary about going to the call; there had been some threats against the lives of police officers, particularly in this area. Since it came in with an “anonymous” citizen reporting, they had wondered if it might be a setup, and Bischoff was actually rather relieved to find that he knew one of the young men. It was Anthony Pleasant, whom he did not consider a threat. Bischoff talked to Anthony, shined his flashlight in his face to check his eyes for signs of drinking (police officers know that there is an involuntary shifting of the pupils in the eyes of someone under the influence), and concluded that Anthony had, indeed, been drinking. The fight seemed to be over after Bischoff talked to Anthony and his partner talked to the other combatant.

  “I told him to leave … and go directly home,” Bischoff told Brimmer.

  Anthony had gotten into a Chevrolet sedan and left the scene. As Bischoff went on the air to clear the complaint, it was approximately ten minutes to eleven. He assumed that Anthony had gone home as he directed, but he could not be certain of it.

  However, Anthony did not go home, as Henderson found when he located a number of teenagers who told him about almost-weekly “floating” parties where the guest list was whoever showed up. The refreshments were beer and marijuana. Henderson might have wished to have witnesses whose memories were a bit more crystalline than those he found, but eventually, he did discover some party-goers who remembered the night of November 21, very well.

  More importantly, they remembered exactly where Anthony Pleasant had been that night between the fight in the street and dawn. Most particularly, they remembered where he had been around two A.M.—the time when his big brother claimed Anthony had been shooting Morris Blankenbaker.

  Although the party on the night of the murder had been full of drop-ins and drop-outs, there were a few people who remained in the home of the young woman who was the hostess that night. Everyone agreed that one couple had disappeared into a bedroom and stayed there. There was a girl who had had an argument with Anthony Pleasant, and there were several other people who had laughed to see Anthony passed out cold on a couch.

  One of the best sources Henderson found was an eighteen-year old girl named Casey Lynn Anderson: She was a recent graduate of Davis High School and was working as a cook and waitress at the Cosmopolitan Chinook Hotel. Casey and her sister, who also worked at the Chinook, went to the party-of-the-week on November 21. Casey said she had “babied a beer” all night, and she had had no marijuana at all.

  She was upset with Anthony Pleasant because he had been in a fight with a friend of hers over a girl. (This was the “incident” that Bischoff had just investigated.) Anthony had returned to the party, and Casey said she had given him a good lecture about fighting. “I was trying to tell him that he was stupid,” she recalled ??
?And then he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about—that he had his reasons and he was man enough to take care of himself.”

  Casey said she found Anthony’s arguments almost unintelligible because he was very, very drunk. “He was standing up—he was trying to stand up against the wall—and I remember telling him, ‘Sit down before you fall down,’ and he told me to shut up.”

  As far as Casey was concerned, her longtime friend Anthony was in no condition to remember anything about their argument that night. “He looked like he was ready to just say ‘good night’ to the world.”

  A number of people at the party confirmed that Anthony had fallen asleep on a large couch in the living room. A girl had vomited on the couch sometime earlier, but Anthony had been so out of it that he hadn’t noticed. People watching had thought this was hilarious.

  “What time?” Henderson asked again and again of those who had been at the Friday night party. “What time did you see Anthony Pleasant passed out on the couch?”

  The consensus was that it was well before two A.M. Since two A.M. was the magic hour to buy beer and they were running low, a group left to buy more. When they left, Anthony had already been almost comatose and the subject of many giggles and guffaws.

  One girl said that she had been there both when the beer buyers left, and when they came back— without finding any stores open. She had stayed awake until three-thirty or four. When she and her friend finally did get tired enough to sleep, they had a problem.

  “Okay,” she explained, “we were laughing at him [Anthony] because he was on the couch and he was passed out. Me and a girlfriend were getting tired and we wanted to go to sleep, but he was on the double couch … and so we rolled him off the couch and he just fell right on the floor, and he was just blah. And we sat up for a while longer and kind of laughed at him, and then he crawled over to the chair and sat in that and fell asleep.”

  Under ordinary circumstances, Anthony Pleasant, nineteen, might have been chagrined that he had made such a fool of himself by getting passed-out drunk, and becoming “the main part of the night, because we were all laughing at him” However, the number of witnesses who recalled absolutely that he had not left the party between eleven and dawn would eventually save him from murder charges.

  Vern Henderson reported to Jeff Sullivan that he now knew where Anthony had been at two A.M. on November 21, and where Tuffy had been.

  They knew where Tuffy had been on Christmas Eve, but they still had to check on where Kenny Marino had been. Once more, it was the memory of teenaged girls that provided alibis. Kenny Marino had invited three girls to come to his parents’ home that night for Tequila Sunrises, a curious Christmas libation. One of the girls told the detectives that she had to plead with her mother to go out, and only got permission when she promised to be home by midnight.

  At midnight, while the others were raptly watching a horror film on television, the witness realized she wasn’t going to make her deadline. In fact, it was 12:30 before she could convince Kenny Marino to drive her home. It was close to one when she got home, and her mother was waiting up for her. Kenny Marino and the other two girls returned to his house.

  Over on Eighteenth Street, miles away, someone had just shot Gabby Moore. Figuring the times and the distances and the witnesses, there was no way Kenny Marino could have been the shooter.

  Although Tuffy Pleasant would go into his trial still claiming to have been only an observer at the murders of Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore, Jeff Sullivan had his witnesses in place, ready to show that Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino could not have been the killers.

  Tuffy agreed to waive his right to a speedy trial (within sixty days of his arrest) and was given a new trial date in early June. Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino had their trials joined at the request of Marino’s attorney. Their new trial date was now May 24.

  With less than two weeks to go before their trial, Judge Howard Hettinger ordered that the Anthony Pleasant/Kenny Marino pretrial hearing be held in secret. No one in Yakima knew what was going on. Hettinger said that he would release a statement on the closed-door hearing as soon as a jury was sequestered. After defense attorneys argued that any reporting of the pretrial motions would “seriously jeopardize” their clients’ right to a fair trial by an impartial jury, Hettinger issued an order excluding the press and public from the pretrial hearings.

  Tuffy Pleasant’s hearing, presided over by Judge Loy, had been open to the press although they agreed not to report on it— beyond change-of-venue arguments— until a jury was sequestered.

  Interest in the trials was at fever pitch among Yakimans. Court Administrator Charlotte Phillips said that the trials themselves would be open to the public and that the press could expect special seating arrangements in the largest courtroom in the courthouse. The trials would run continuously, including weekends, partly because jurors would be sequestered.

  Newspapers announced that security would be tight in the courtrooms. No one knew exactly why. No one beyond the principals involved and the police, attorneys, and prosecuting team knew the whole story, but everyone in town was curious.

  And then, four days before Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino were to go on trial, Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan moved for dismissal of the charges against them. The defendants’ jaws dropped; they hadn’t been expecting this. Sullivan would have preferred to postpone their trial, rather than have it dropped, but, in the interests of justice, he said he did not have sufficient evidence to bring them to trial. (Sullivan said later that the dismissal of charges against Tuffy Pleasant’s younger brother and his best friend did not affect the case against Tuffy at all.)

  Jeff Sullivan was between a rock and a hard place. He was not entirely convinced that Marino and Anthony didn’t have some guilty knowledge, before or after the shootings, but he could not produce evidence linking them to the crimes. They each had witnesses who could prove that they were nowhere near the murder scenes at the time the shootings occurred. Although he did not want to reveal that information in this venue, Sullivan had asked for “dismissal without prejudice,” meaning that he could re-file the charges should the investigation come up with new evidence. Defense attorneys did not object.

  Thirty minutes later, smiling broadly, Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino walked out into the sunlight. Anthony had been in jail for sixty-two days, and Kenny Marino for forty.

  “What’s it like to be in jail?” a reporter called out.

  “God, I can’t say,” Marino said. “You’d have to go through it. I had nightmares and nightmares … every night.”

  For them, at least, it was over. For Tuffy Pleasant, a trial lay just ahead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Despite everything, there was still a grudging respect between Tuffy Pleasant, and Vern Henderson. Vern didn’t exactly feel sorry for Tuffy. How could he when Vern knew that Tuffy had shot his best friend and, for that matter, Tuffy’s best friend. But Vern sensed the waste, the tragedy, the loss for so many people, all because Gabby Moore had been ready to sacrifice anything and anyone so that he could regain what he had lost: Jerilee.

  When Tuffy’s girlfriend, Rene, gave birth to her second daughter— to Tuffy’s second daughter too— it was Vern who took Tuffy from the Yakima jail up to the hospital so that he could hold his new baby. It was a bittersweet moment. Although Tuffy’s murder trial had been continued for a second time, until July 19, it loomed ahead like a dark tunnel. If he should be convicted, Tuffy might not be around to see either of his children grow up.

  When Tuffy Pleasant had waived his right to a speedy trial, he had allowed Jeff Sullivan the time he needed to bring the fragments of this peculiar case into some kind of order. Sullivan remarked that each “fact uncovered led to another.” He wanted to be very sure that the person (or persons) who had shot Morris and Gabby was the one on trial. There were more witnesses to locate. It was becoming clear, however, that the state could never try the person who had instigated the shootings e
ven though statute made that person just as guilty as the one whose finger, pulled the trigger.

  That person—Gabby Moore—was dead.

  The public didn’t know that, of course. Every facet of the case had been shrouded in secrecy. Adam Moore, Tuffy’s attorney, had agreed to the continuance, saying inscrutably, “When the truth is finally known, a lot of questions will be answered. ”

  Loretta Scott was a vital witness for the prosecution. Sullivan needed her testimony to show the transfers of the murder weapon from herself to Tuffy and back again. She would be granted immunity from prosecution on the weapons charges. It was possible that Kenny Marino and Anthony Pleasant, once suspects themselves, would end up being state witnesses too.

  In late June, without fanfare, Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Sullivan and Defense Attorney Adam Moore flew to Germany. “We left Sunday morning,” Sullivan recalled, “and although we went to Worms, Frankfort, and Heidelberg, we were back on Wednesday.”

  Although they were on opposite sides in this case, both attorneys had questions about the Colt .22 and about unconfirmed rumors that they needed answers for. Working on minimal sleep, Moore and Sullivan took depositions from David Pleasant, Loretta Scott’s brother, who was serving in the army in Germany, and from Anthony Pleasant’s girlfriend at the time of Morris Blankenbaker’s murder. Her stepfather was also in the army in Germany. One of the most rampant rumors around Yakima was that she had been told the “real” truth about the double murder, and David was supposed to know where the gun had come from. As it turned out, Anthony’s girlfriend knew nothing about the killings.

  In his deposition given in Frankfort, Germany, on June 22, David Pleasant verified that he had once owned the .22, and that he had given it to his sister, Loretta, when he went into the army. He had gotten it from a friend who had gotten it from a friend. The gun had come from Vietnam, and it was virtually untraceable.