Hillside Stranglers (39 page)

Now it was the defense’s turn. Boren and Nash wondered whether Chaleff and Mader would try to argue that Bianchi had acted alone or that he had had an accomplice other than Angelo. Angelo himself was privately feuding with his attorneys. He did not want to put on any defense at all and threatened to fire Chaleff and Mader. To Angelo it made no sense to try to counter the prosecution’s arguments beyond what had already been done on cross-examination. Angelo was afraid that more damaging evidence might come out the longer the case went on, and he did not want to see his lawyers recall witnesses who had already given the jury a damning portrait of his life and character. He wanted to gamble that Boren and Nash had not yet proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and leave it at that. One morning he refused to leave the holding cell in the courthouse. He had had enough, he said. Judge George had him brought into the courtroom without the jury present and talked to him, explaining that by law he had to attend and that
if he insisted on staying in his cell, he would have to hear everything through a loudspeaker that would be rigged up in there.

“I ain’t comfortable in court,” Angelo said. “I heard enough.”

“But Mr. Buono,” the judge said in a voice that was at once soothing and condescending, “that big chair you sit in here in court, it’s much more comfortable than the hard bench in the holding cell, now isn’t it?”

Angelo relented. Chaleff and Mader opened their case by recalling Markust Camden.

Camden had been hitchhiking around the country—through Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Arizona—looking for a girlfriend he had lost. His life was one long improvisation without melody. In February he had started telephoning Mader and Chaleff regularly from pay phones at truck stops, hinting that if the defense would help him locate his girlfriend, he might just change his story. He might testify that he was unsure of his identification of Angelo Buono as the abductor of Judy Miller. He wanted one more chance with his girlfriend, he said, and he would do anything if Mader and Chaleff and their staff could help him get her back. When Mader, who was taping some of the calls, refused to make a deal, the conversations ended. But at the end of March, Mader located him back home in Indiana and told him that she wanted him to come out to testify again anyway, with no deals between them. Camden replied that he would shoot to death anyone who tried to approach him, or he would escape to Alaska. Mader told him that he would be found anywhere he went.

“What would happen if I didn’t come?” Camden asked.

“We’d harass you. . . . We’d harass you forever.”

“Oh, really?”

“What do you think I’d do, Markust? I’ve got a client who’s facing the gas chamber and a lot of it is based on what you’re now saying is wrong information. You think I’m just going to give up? It’s not going to go away.”

Camden returned to California. Chaleff called him to the stand, this time in order to try to expose his mental problems to the jury, who knew nothing of them as yet.

Chaleff did a relentless, clever job on Camden, getting him to admit nervous breakdowns and brushes with the law. But Camden stuck to his original story and identification of Buono. Under Chaleff’s pressure, Camden became very angry on the stand. He felt persecuted. He felt used, abused, ridiculed. Chaleff asked why, if he had been worried about becoming a suspect back in 1977 and did not want to get involved, had he not simply kept quiet? The implication was that Salerno had somehow tricked or forced him into his story. But Camden said that he had talked then “because I didn’t figure you people would take and have that much disrespect for people’s private lives that you have to tear them down, Chaleff.”

“But you didn’t want to be involved, right?”

“I didn’t think you was going to drag me through the mill. I’m talking about any of you. State of California. Roger, Salerno, the whole damn bunch of you. Includes this man right here,” he said, pointing to the judge. Everyone laughed.

“So that we don’t have any ambiguity or unfairness,” Judge George said, “the record will reflect that I have been pointed out.”

“The whole State of California,” Camden added. “You all been driving me crazy.”

“Was it a long drive to get there for you?” Chaleff asked.

“I’m really getting off on that. Of course I understand you have to ask questions . . . but you just, you know, just ride, ride and ride and ride. Why don’t you just let it go when somebody says, ‘Yeah, I seen this person’? . . . You trying to make an ass out of me up here. You trying to make me look like I’m a damned nut or something because I had a nervous breakdown.” And then with a colorful idiom that summed up his defense of his story in spite of his mental problems, Camden concluded: “My dog had a cold, by God, but she had pups! Apparently something wasn’t interrupting her.”

Boren and Nash were pleased with Camden’s performance. He had shown more mental toughness than they could have hoped for in standing up to Chaleff’s attacks.

Chaleff also tried to impugn Catherine Lorre’s testimony by suggesting that she had lied earlier by saying that she had been returning home from a class at the USC medical school when Buono and Bianchi had stopped her. The idea was that if she had lied about being a medical student, which apparently she had, then she was lying or could easily be lying about meeting Buono and Bianchi. But since her story fit perfectly with Bianchi’s version of the incident, Boren and Nash did not feel that Chaleff had inflicted any serious damage on her credibility.

In a year and a half, many bizarre and shocking things had occurred in the courtroom. Much of the evidence was of an almost unendurable gruesomeness, especially the color photographs of the victim’s bodies. A set of these had been glued onto a piece of plasterboard the size of a double bed which was kept, along with the model of Angelo’s house, in the judge’s chambers because of its size and brought out when needed. The judge turned the photographs to the wall most of the time, but often, as when a reporter would interview him and question whether the length and expense of the trial were really worthwhile, he would turn the board around and, perhaps pointing to Jane King’s maggot-eaten face or the bums on Lauren Wagner’s hands, let the evidence speak eloquently for itself. It was disquieting to hear the most violent and obscene words in the language bandied about in the decorous setting of the courtroom by witnesses and lawyers alike: Angelo’s fondness for the word “cunt,” for instance, was much emphasized. But nothing quite equaled in its combination of repulsiveness and absurdity what Michael Nash would come to call Chaleff’s Great Ant Experiment. That the· defense planned to show that the sticky substance found on Lauren Wagner’s breast with ants crawling through it could not have been left there by the ants or by either Angelo Buono or Kenneth Bianchi. A third-man theory was in the works.

Boren, Nash, and Tulleners spent the next few evenings
studying what the laboratory had discovered about the sticky substance, and they read up furiously on ants. They also discussed ant behavior with an ant expert from the County Museum of Natural History. They guessed that the defense would try to show that the sticky substance was saliva and that it had come from a blood type B secretor. Both Angelo and Kenny were type AB nonsecretors. The conclusion would be drawn that Bianchi had acted with a third, unidentified man, not with Angelo.

But the prosecution team could not see how the defense could prove that the sticky substance was in fact saliva, the premise of their probable argument. It had not been proved to be saliva, and moreover, saliva was not sticky when it dried. Was it possible that the substance had been deposited by the ants or that the ants, feeding on the breast, manufactured or synthesized the substance in the process of, say, digestion? How and what did ants eat, and were they fastidious or sloppy in their dining habits? These and other aspects of ant lore Boren, Nash, and Tulleners found themselves spending hours researching, wondering whether the case had finally driven everyone into madness.

On July 7, Chaleff began elucidating his Great Ant Experiment, equipping himself with an elaborate chart and enlarged photographs of Lauren Wagner’s breast with the ants marching over it. He summoned the Berkeley insect professor to the stand, eliciting credentials: Ph.D., chairman of the department, associate dean of the Graduate Division, published ninety papers of which two were about ants, expert on the carpenter ant, had testified before the Structural Pest Control Board of the State of California at least fifteen times. The professor testified that last May, at the request of the defense, he had gone to the Lauren Wagner body site on Cliff Drive and had dug up ants. (Judge George interrupted at this point to clarify that the digging had taken place only two months earlier, five and a half years after the murder.) The species was the Argentine invader ant, the professor said. No other kinds of ants were found at the spot. He and his graduate assistant had transported the ants back to Berkeley in a container, feeding them honey to keep
them alive. At
the university they took a hundred of the ants, separated their abdomens, put the heads and thoraxes in one maceration tube and the abdomens in another tube, and ground them up with a macerator.

The sticky substance on Lauren Wagner’s breast had been found to contain amylase, an enzyme secreted with saliva and other substances, that indicated a blood type B secretor. The macerated Argentine invader ants had contained no amylase, the professor testified. Therefore, Chaleff concluded, the ants on Lauren Wagner’s breast had not deposited the amylase, and the sticky substance, presumably saliva, had been left there by someone other than Buono or Bianchi who had a different blood type.

But Roger Boren, who cross-examined the professor, already knew that the ant experiment was as scientifically flawed as it was ludicrous. To begin with, the professor had gotten
the wrong ants!
The ants on the breast in the photograph had been positively identified as fire ants, not Argentine invader ants, by the expert at the county museum. Evidently the Argentine invaders, more successful than their human cousins had been against the British in the Malvinas/Falklands campaign, had driven out the fire ants since 1977. Furthermore, all ants secreted amylase, whether the Berkeley professor had found any or not. It was likely that the fire ants had been feeding on the nipple of the breast and had drooled amylase. The sticky substance itself could just as likely have been brought there from somewhere else by the ants, who might have enjoyed an earlier meal that day.

Roger Boren asked the professor whether the ants on the breast had been coming or going. The professor replied:

“Sometimes it’s very difficult to tell whether they’re coming or going because they are coming and going all along the trail.” There was also, he said, the problem of “deviate” ants, who may be just wandering around aimlessly. But on the whole, ants are “coming and going and there is some going and they are bumping into each other.”

It wasn’t easy for Boren to keep a straight face at this. He asked the professor whether ants ate human flesh. The professor
said that he had “never seen anything in the literature to indicate that they eat human flesh.” Carpenter ants, he said, alluding to his specialty, fed off the anuses of aphids.

As any homicide detective knew, ants certainly did feed off human flesh: they did not crawl over corpses out of mere morbid curiosity. Boren now brought in his own expert, the entomologist from the County Museum, who established that the ants experimented with were the wrong ants, that ants do eat human flesh, that they secrete amylase, and that they drool.

“When ants with salivary glands eat something, let’s say a fatty substance, for example, do they eat that just as other animals . . . might eat? They chew?”

“Yes. They have mandibles and they chew just like we do.”

“Would their saliva be left in the same way, say, as a cat or a human might eat?”

“Yes. In proportion to their size, they probably drool at least as much as we do.”

Boren was satisfied that he had demolished the ant experiment. It had been amusing in its way, but it had been useless and, as Boren pointed out to the jury, it had cost at least ten thousand dollars in experts’ fees and wasted a great deal of court time.

Grogan, although he had laughed as much as anyone at the testimony and had offered facetiously to swear that he had drooled on the body himself, since he was a type B and could be the third man, resented the entire interlude for another reason. It was a grotesque example of how the victim in a murder trial became dehumanized, an object to be dissected and impersonally discussed. He was glad the Wagners had not been there to see their daughter’s breast gone over with heartless objectivity: the press reported nothing of this phase of testimony. Grogan asked Boren and Nash to be sure, when they came to their closing arguments, to remind the jury that these had been young women and girls whose lives had been taken from them. Boren and Nash said that they certainly were planning to do just that.

It may be that the failure of the ant experiment discouraged Gerald Chaleff. It was not that his effectiveness was in any way diminished nor that Angelo’s defense became to any degree less competent, but to court observers, including Boren and Nash, Chaleff did not seem quite his old hurrying, vigorous self during the last phase of the defense’s presentation. Perhaps he was, understandably, running short of ideas. For whatever reason, when the defense called as one of the final witnesses Veronica Compton, Chaleff remained aloof, quiet, referring to the bloody-minded playwright as “her” [Mader’s] witness and participating very little in the examination. What Mader planned to get from Veronica Compton the prosecutors could not imagine. Veronica had already offered to testify for the prosecution, but Boren and Nash had refused to talk to her, not wanting anything to do with her, disbelieving that she could do anything but harm to whoever used her as a witness.

Veronica, however, was anxious to get back onstage at any price, even against the advice of her lawyer, who told her that her chances for parole would be diminished by another court appearance reviving the ghoulish events for which she had been convicted. She took the stand looking ravishing and manic and, under Mader’s guidance, unfolded a tale of an improbable conspiracy between Bianchi and herself to frame Angelo Buono—at the same time admitting in an aside that Kenny had always told her that Angelo was guilty. The logic and sequence of this conspiracy were impossible to follow, and her manner, that of a starlet courting recognition on a television talk show—coquettish, then dramatic, tearful, giggly, self-caressing—was far more arresting than her conspiracy story, though just as unconvincing.