“He just said it was busy. He was in charge of home loans and it was a bad time. A lot of foreclosures and all of that sort of stuff. He didn’t really get into it.”
“Did he talk about his own real estate holdings and what was happening with them?”
Freeman objected on relevance. I asked for a sidebar and it was granted. At the bench I argued that I had already put the jury on notice that I would not only be debunking the state’s case but putting forward a defense case that included evidence of an alternate theory of the crime.
“This is that alternate theory, Judge. That Bondurant was in trouble financially and his efforts to get out of the hole brought about his demise. I should be given the latitude to pursue this with any witness the prosecution puts before the jury.”
“Judge,” Freeman countered, “just because counsel says something is relevant doesn’t mean it is. The victim’s brother has no direct knowledge of Mitchell Bondurant’s financial or investment situation.”
“If that’s the case, Judge, Nathan Bondurant can say so and I’ll move on.”
“Very well, overruled. Ask your question, Mr. Haller.”
Back at the lectern I asked the witness the question again.
“He spoke very briefly and without going into detail about it,” the witness replied.
“What exactly did he say?”
“He just said that he was upside-down on his investment properties. He didn’t say how many that was or how much was involved. That was all he said.”
“What did that mean to you when he said he was upside-down?”
“That he owed more on his properties than they were worth.”
“Did he say he was trying to sell them?”
“He said he couldn’t sell them without taking a bath.”
“Thank you, Mr. Bondurant. I have no further questions.”
Freeman completed her tour of minor players by calling a witness named Gladys Pickett, who identified herself on the stand as the head teller at WestLand National’s main branch in Sherman Oaks. After eliciting from Pickett what her duties were at the bank Freeman got right down to the salient testimony.
“As the person in charge of the tellers at the bank, you have how many people reporting to you, Mrs. Pickett?”
“About forty altogether.”
“Is one of those people a teller named Margo Schafer?”
“Yes, Margo is one of my tellers.”
“I would like to draw your attention back to the morning of Mitchell Bondurant’s murder. Did Margo Schafer come to you with a particular concern?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Can you please tell the jury what Ms. Schafer was concerned about?”
“She came to me and reported that she had seen Lisa Trammel just a half block from the bank, walking down the sidewalk and moving in a direction away from the bank.”
“Why was this a concern?”
“Well, we have Lisa Trammel’s photograph up in the employees’ lounge and inside our vault and we have been instructed to report any sighting of Lisa Trammel to our supervisors.”
“Do you know why this instruction was put in place?”
“Yes, the bank has a restraining order keeping her away from the property.”
“Can you tell the jury what time it was when Margo Schafer told you about seeing Ms. Trammel near the bank?”
“Yes, it was as soon as she came into work that day. It was the first thing she did.”
“Now do you keep a record of when tellers arrive at work?”
“I keep a checkout list in the vault on which the time is posted.”
“This is when tellers come into the vault and get their money boxes to take to their stations?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“On the day in question, at what time do you show Margo Schafer’s name being checked off?”
“It was nine oh-nine. She was the last one checked in. She was late.”
“And would that have been when she told you about seeing Lisa Trammel?”
“Yes, precisely.”
“Now, at that time, did you know that Mitchell Bondurant had been murdered in the bank’s garage?”
“No, no one knew that yet because Riki Sanchez had stayed in the garage until the police came and then they kept her there for questioning. We didn’t know what was going on.”
“So the idea that Margo Schafer would have concocted the story about seeing Lisa Trammel after hearing about Mr. Bondurant’s murder is not possible, correct?”
“Correct. She told me about seeing her before she or I or anybody in the bank knew about Mr. Bondurant.”
“So at what point did you learn of Mr. Bondurant’s murder in the garage and offer the information you had received from Margo Schafer?”
“That was about a half hour later. That’s when we heard and I obviously thought the police needed to know that this woman had been seen nearby.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pickett. I have no further questions.”
It was Freeman’s biggest hit so far. Pickett had successfully undone much of what I had been able to accomplish with Schafer on the stand. Now I had to decide whether to leave it alone or risk making things worse.
I decided to cut my losses and move on. They say never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. The rule applied here. Pickett had refused to talk to my investigator. Freeman could be setting a trap, leaving her up there with one more piece of information I might stumble into with an ill-advised question.
“I have no questions for this witness,” I said from my place at the defense table.
Judge Perry excused Pickett and called for the afternoon break of fifteen minutes. As people stood to leave the courtroom, my client leaned into me at the table.
“Why didn’t you go after her?” she whispered.
“Who? Pickett? I didn’t want to make it worse by asking the wrong thing.”
“Are you kidding me? You needed to destroy her like you did Schafer.”
“The difference was I had something to work with on Schafer. I didn’t have it on Pickett and going after somebody with nothing to go after her with is potential disaster. I left it alone.”
I could see anger darkening her eyes.
“Well, you should’ve gotten something on her.”
It came out as a hiss through what I believed were clenched teeth.
“Look, Lisa, I’m your attorney and I decide—”
“Never mind. I have to go.”
She stood up and hurried through the gate and toward the courtroom exit. I glanced over to Freeman to see if she had caught the display of attorney-client disagreement. She gave me a knowing smile, indicating she had.
I decided to go out into the hall to see why my client had so abruptly needed to leave. I stepped out and was immediately drawn by the cameras to one of the benches that ran along the hallway between courtroom doors. The focus was on Lisa, who was sitting on the bench hugging her son, Tyler. The boy looked extremely uncomfortable in the camera lights.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
I saw Lisa’s sister standing on the periphery of the group and walked over.
“What is this, Jodie? She knows the judge ruled she can’t have the kid in court.”
“I know. He’s not going into the courtroom. He had a half day at school and she wanted me to bring him by. She thought if the media saw her with Ty that it might help things, I guess.”
“Yeah, well, the media’s got nothing to do with this. Don’t bring him back. I don’t care what she says, don’t bring him back.”
I looked around for Herb Dahl. This had to be his move and I wanted to deliver the same message to him. But there was no sign of the erstwhile Hollywood player. He had probably been smart enough to stay clear of me.
I headed back into the courtroom. I still had ten minutes of the break left and planned to use it brooding about working for a client I didn’t like and was beginning to despise.
Twenty-five
After the break Freeman moved on to what I call the hunter-gatherer stage of the prosecution’s case. The crime scene technicians. Their testimony would be the platform on which she would present Detective Howard Kurlen, the lead investigator.
The first hunter-gatherer was a coroner’s investigator named William Abbott who had responded to the crime scene and was charged with the body’s documentation and transport to the medical examiner’s office, where the autopsy would be conducted.
His testimony covered his observations of the crime scene, the head wounds sustained by the victim and the personal property found on the body. This included Bondurant’s wallet, watch, loose change and a money clip containing $183 in currency. There was also the receipt from the Joe’s Joe franchise that had helped investigators set the time of death.
Abbott, like Covington before him, was very matter-of-fact in his testimony. Being at the scene of a violent crime was routine for him. When it was my turn to ask the questions, I zeroed in on this.
“Mr. Abbott, how long have you been a coroner’s investigator?”
“I’m going on twenty-nine years now.”
“All with L.A. County?”
“That’s right.”
“How many murder scenes do you estimate you have been to in that time?”
“Oh, gee, probably a couple thousand. A lot.”
“I bet. And I assume many were scenes where great violence was involved.”
“That’s the nature of the beast.”
“What about this scene? You examined and photographed the wounds on the victim, correct?”
“Yes, I did. That is part of the protocol we follow before transporting the body.”
“You have a crime scene report in front of you that was admitted into evidence by pretrial agreement. Could you read the second paragraph of the summary to the jury?”
Abbott turned the page on his report and found the paragraph.
“ ‘There are three distinct impact wounds on the crown of the head noted for their violence and damage. Positioning of the body indicates immediate loss of consciousness before impact on the ground.’ Then in parentheses I have the word ‘overkill.’ ”
“Yes, I’m curious about that. What did you mean by putting ‘overkill’ in the summary?”
“Just that it looked to me like any one of these impacts would’ve done the job. The victim was unconscious and possibly even dead before he hit the ground. The first blow did that. This would indicate that two of the impacts came after he was facedown on the ground. It was overkill. Somebody was very angry at him is the way I was looking at it.”
Abbott probably thought he was smartly giving me the answer I most didn’t want to hear. Freeman, too. But they were wrong.
“So you are indicating in your summary that you detected there was some sort of emotional involvement in this murder, correct?”
“Yes, that is what I was thinking.”
“What kind of training do you have in terms of homicide investigation?”
“Well, I trained for six months before starting the job way back thirty years ago. And we have ongoing in-service training a couple of times a year. We’re taught the latest investigative techniques and so forth.”
“Is this specific to homicide investigation?”
“Not all of it but a lot of it is.”
“Isn’t it a basic tenet of homicide that a crime of overkill usually indicates that the victim knew his or her killer? That there was a personal relationship?”
“Uh…”
Freeman finally got it. She stood and objected, saying that Abbott was not a homicide investigator and the question called for expertise he did not have. I didn’t have to argue. The judge held his hand up to stop me from speaking and told Freeman that I had just walked Abbott down the path without objection from the state. The investigator had testified to his experience and training in the area of homicide without a peep from Freeman.
“You gambled, Ms. Freeman. You thought it was going to cut your way. You can’t back out now. The witness will answer the question.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Abbott,” I said.
Abbott stalled by asking for the question to be read to him by the court stenographer. He then had to be prompted again by the judge.
“There is that consideration,” he finally said.
“Consideration?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“When you have a crime of high violence it should be considered that the victim personally knew his attacker. His killer.”
“When you say crime of high violence, do you mean overkill?”
“That could be part of it, yes.”
“Thank you, Mr. Abbott. Now, what about other observations you made at the crime scene? Did you form any opinion in regard to the kind of power it took to make these three brutal strikes on the top of Mr. Bondurant’s head?”
Freeman objected again, stating that Abbott was not a medical examiner and did not have the expertise to answer the question. This time Perry sustained the objection, giving her a small victory.
I decided to take what I had gotten and be happy with it.
“No further questions,” I said.
Next up was Paul Roberts, who was the senior criminalist in the three-member LAPD crime scene unit that processed the scene. His testimony was less eventful than Abbott’s because Freeman kept him on a short leash. He spoke only of procedures and what he collected at the scene and processed later in the SID lab. On cross I was able to use the paucity of physical evidence to my client’s advantage.
“Can you tell the jury the locations of the fingerprints you collected from the scene that were later matched to the defendant?”
“There were none that we found.”
“Can you tell the jury what samples of blood collected at the scene came from the defendant?”
“There was none that we found.”
“Well, then what about hair and fiber evidence? Surely you connected the defendant to the crime scene through hair and fiber evidence, correct?”
“We did not.”
I took a few steps away from the lectern as if walking off my frustration and then came back.
“Mr. Haller,” the judge said. “Let’s skip the playacting.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Freeman said.
“I wasn’t addressing you, Ms. Freeman.”
I looked at the jury for a long moment before asking my next and final question.
“In summary, sir, did you and your team gather a single shred of evidence in that garage that connects Lisa Trammel to the crime scene?”
“In the garage? No, we didn’t.”
“Thank you, then I have nothing further.”
I knew that Freeman could hit back hard on redirect by asking Roberts about the hammer with Bondurant’s blood on it and the shoe with the same blood on it found in my client’s garage. He was part of the crime scene crews that handled both places. But I was guessing she wouldn’t do it. She had choreographed the delivery of her case to the last piece of evidence and to change things now would be to knock the case out of rhythm, threatening her momentum and the ultimate impact when all things came together. She was too good to risk that. She would take her lumps now, knowing that she would eventually deliver the knockout punch later in the trial.
“Ms. Freeman, redirect?” the judge asked, once I had returned to my seat.
“No, Your Honor. No redirect.”
“The witness may step down.”
I had Freeman’s witness list stapled to the inside flap of a case file on the table in front of me. I drew a line through the names Abbott and Roberts and scanned the names that were left. The first day of trial wasn’t even quite over and she had already put a sizable dent into the list. I scanned the remaining names and determined that Detective Kurlen was most likely the next witness up. But this presented a bit of a problem for the prosecutor. I checked my watch. It was 4:25 and court was scheduled to end at 5. If Freeman put Kurlen on th
e stand she would just be getting started when the judge recessed for the day. It was possible she could lead him toward a revelation that would be nice to have the jury considering overnight, but this might entail shuffling the delivery of his testimony and again I didn’t think Freeman would consider it a worthy trade.
I scanned the list again to see if she had a floater, a witness who could be dropped in anywhere in the prosecution’s case. I didn’t see one and looked across the aisle at the prosecutor, unsure what move she would make.
“Ms. Freeman,” the judge prompted. “Call your next witness, please.”
Freeman rose from her seat and addressed Perry.
“Your Honor, it is expected that the witness I planned to call next will be providing lengthy testimony on both direct and cross-examination. I would like to ask for the court’s indulgence and allow me to call the witness first thing in the morning so that the jury will not feel a disruption in testimony.”
The judge looked over Freeman’s head at the clock on the rear wall of the courtroom. He slowly shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No, we’re not going to do that. We have more than a half hour of court time left and we are going to use it. Call your next witness, Ms. Freeman.”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Freeman said. “The People call Gilbert Modesto.”
I had been wrong about the floater. Modesto was head of corporate security at WestLand National and Freeman must have believed his testimony could be dropped into the trial at any point and not be detrimental to momentum and flow.
After being sworn in and taking his seat on the stand, Modesto proceeded to outline his experience in law enforcement and his current duties at WestLand National. Freeman then brought the questioning around to his actions on the morning of Mitchell Bondurant’s slaying.
“When I heard it was Mitch, the first thing I did was pull the threat file to give to the police,” he said.
“What is the threat file?” Freeman asked.
“It’s a file we keep that contains every mailed or e-mailed threat to the bank or bank personnel. It also contains notes on any other kind of threat that comes in through phone or third party or the police. We have a protocol for weighing the severity of the threat and we have names that we flag and so forth.”