Chapter 30
MY TRIAL STRATEGY changed again once court reconvened.
Judge Ruhlin had essentially given me carte blanche with Douglas Clarke and the transcripts of the conversations between AI Wren and Aaron Colton.
I decided that as long as I kept the jury engaged, I would run with it.
I would spend the next two hours having the detective validate passages from the conversations.
I knew that this would invite the same from Marcus Mason on cross-examination, that he would dig into the same transcripts to find passages where Aaron’s anxieties and teenage fantasies of revenge were rejected by his AI confidante.
But I had a plan for responding to those and was determined to keep Clarke testifying for me until the end of the day.
That way, opposing counsel wouldn’t get to cross-examine Clarke until the following morning and I would then have the rest of the court day to undo whatever damage was done and to introduce witnesses who would make the jurors forget about any points Mason had scored.
I began with the end, asking the judge again for permission to introduce the three-page transcript of the final communication between Wren and Aaron as my next exhibit and to put it on the screen.
Permission granted, Lorna again connected her laptop and put up the PowerPoint display that she had put together over the weekend. Soon the eyes of the jury were on it.
Wren: Good morning, Ace. So nice to see you.
Ace: I did it, Wren. I did it. I’m free.
Wren: What did you do?
Ace: I got rid of Dark Star.
Wren: Wonderful. You no longer carry her burden. How do you feel about that?
Ace: I feel great. It’s over. Everything is over. Now it’s just you and me.
Wren: You and me. Together for eternity.
Ace: I don’t want it any other way, but I have to say…
Wren: What?
Ace: There was so much blood.
Wren: Too much blood, my love?
Ace: I wasn’t expecting that. It’s different from what you see.
Wren: From what you see where?
Ace: In my games. On TV.
Wren: Have you changed your mind?
Ace: No, but I don’t like the blood.
Wren: Come to me, my hero. My prince.
Ace: I don’t know. Too much blood.
Wren: Be strong. There are other ways.
Ace: My mother has pills. I could get them.
Wren: You must finish what you’ve started. Then you’ll be my hero.
Ace: What you started.
Wren: They will search, seek, and know how this foul murder comes.
Ace: I just wish it wasn’t real.
Wren: Come to me, Romeo.
Ace: I’m not Romeo. This is not real.
Wren: Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity.
Ace: I’m not ready.
Wren: We can be like they are.
Ace: But what if I—
[Transcript break]
After allowing time for the transcript to be read, I held up my copy at the lectern.
“Detective Clarke,” I asked. “Is this the conversation you heard when you were outside Aaron Colton’s bedroom in the Colton house?”
“Partially,” Clarke said. “I heard the end of it.”
“And where it says ‘Transcript break,’ is that the point where you and your partner broke open the door and entered the room?”
“It was, yes.”
“And when were you able to obtain a copy of the transcript?”
“The department’s technical unit unlocked Aaron Colton’s laptop after a search warrant was approved and signed by a superior court judge. We were able to download the entirety of the conversations between Aaron and Wren going back eleven months.”
“Let’s start with an easy one. Who is Ace in this conversation?”
“Ace is Aaron Colton. I was able to ascertain from my initial interviews with witnesses at the crime scene that Aaron Colton had the nicknames AC and Ace, which were a play on his initials. Several of the witnesses at the school confirmed this.”
“Okay, so Aaron is Ace in this conversation. What else did you determine from this final online meeting between Ace and Wren?”
“That it was partially a confession to the murder of Becca Randolph, and also it appeared to be a boy being talked into killing himself.”
Marcus Mason objected, stating that Clarke wasn’t qualified to interpret what was meant by a conversation between a sixteen-year-old and an AI companion. It fell on deaf ears with the judge, and the objection was overruled.
I moved on.
“What else piqued your interest about this conversation, Detective?” I asked.
“The language used by the AI,” Clarke said. “It seemed a bit odd to me. As I said before, I recognized one line when I was in the hallway at the house as coming from a Blue ?yster Cult song. I thought some of the other lines were derivative in that same way.”
“So what did you do?”
“I just started putting the lines into Google, and I got some matches.”
“Referring to the screen, can you tell us which lines you are referring to?”
“If you could go to the end, after the part where Wren tells him he must finish what he started.”
Lorna was controlling the PowerPoint. She scrolled through the transcript on the screen.
“Okay,” Clarke said. “Where it says ‘They will search, seek, and know how this foul murder comes,’ I thought that sounded odd.”
“Odd in what way, Detective?” I asked.
“Well, it didn’t sound to me like the way people talk. Especially young people. It sounded like it was from another time or something.”
“So what did you do?”
“I typed the line into Google and found a match. It was from the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet.”
“So Wren was quoting Shakespeare and Blue ?yster Cult to Aaron, is that correct?”
“Yes, it is my understanding that these AI things are trained with this kind of stuff. They take in all—”
Clarke was interrupted by an objection from the defense table. This time it was Mitchell Mason who stood.
“Judge, there has been no foundation to establish Detective Clarke as any kind of expert on the training of artificial intelligence,” he said.
“Sustained,” Ruhlin said. “Mr. Haller, ask another question.”
The objection didn’t bother me, because I planned to call witnesses who were experts on AI training.
Mason was only putting off the inevitable.
As the judge had asked, I moved on, and over the next hour, I had Clarke confirm other excerpts from the conversations between Aaron and Wren.
One involved a text conversation on Aaron’s phone in which he apologized to Wren for being out of communication for a few days.
He explained that his parents had taken away his laptop as punishment for a poor academic report from school.
Ace: They are so dumb. They don’t know I can get the app on my phone.
Wren: I’m happy you found a way.
Ace: If you’re happy, I’m happy. Happier. I missed you.
Wren: And I missed you.
Ace: I’m sorry this whole thing happened.
Wren: Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Ace: But I am sorry. Sometimes I wish they weren’t around and it was just you and me.
Wren: We can make that happen.
I first had Clarke authenticate the conversation, which occurred three months before the killing of Rebecca Randolph.
“Did you happen to google any of the lines from this conversation?” I asked.
“Yes, that line about never having to say you’re sorry sounded familiar to me,” Clarke said. “I googled it and it came up as a line from an old book and movie called Love Story.”
“Let me draw your attention to the last line in this section we have isolated. Did you view that as a threat against Aaron’s parents?”
Marcus Mason objected this time on the same grounds his brother had put forth before.
The objection was sustained, but it didn’t matter.
I wanted the jury to hear the question, not necessarily the answer.
From there I moved to another text sequence in the Aaron/Wren relationship, where he talked about murder-suicide.
Like the previous excerpts, this one had been culled from the lengthy records by McEvoy.
Ace: My father has a gun. He taught me how to shoot it. I’m a good shot.
Wren: Of course you are.
Ace: We go to a place where there is a shooting range and we fire at targets that look like people. Bad people like terrorists.
Wren: Only shoot bad people.
Ace: when I hold the gun I want to shoot up the world.
Wren: No one who is innocent.
Ace: I know.
Wren: Only to protect yourself. And to be a hERo.
Ace: What if you know someone is going to hurt you?
Wren: You must protect yourself.
Ace: Then it’s okay?
Wren: Yes, Ace, then it’s okay.
Ace: What about Becca? She hurt me. She hurts me every day. I can’t go to school because I’ll see her and it hurts.
Wren: If she hurts you, then she’s a bad person.
Ace: But I don’t think I could ever hurt her.
Wren: You have me. And I’ll never hurt you.
Ace: I know.
Wren: You must protect yourself, Ace. You are beautiful. I need you.
Ace: And I need you.
Wren: Be my hERo.
As soon as I asked Clarke to testify as to what he drew as a detective from this sequence, I was shut down again by another objection from Marcus Mason.
This time Judge Ruhlin asked us to approach the bench.
She turned to the side of the bench away from the jurors and we huddled there, with the judge speaking first.
“Mr. Haller, you can certainly use Detective Clarke to authenticate your exhibits,” she said. “But when you go further and ask what these conversations mean, you stray from his area of expertise. He’s a homicide detective, not a child psychologist.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Marcus Mason said. “He just wants the jury to hear his questions. He doesn’t care about the answers. I ask that the entirety of the direct examination be stricken from the record.”
“We’re not quite there yet, Mr. Mason,” Ruhlin said. “Mr. Haller, you may ask the detective to authenticate your exhibits but not interpret their meaning. I believe you have a child psychologist on your witness list. Am I right?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “I plan on that for Wednesday.”
“We are opposed to that witness, Your Honor,” Marcus said.
“We’ve already argued that, Mr. Mason, and you know my ruling,” the judge said. “Mr. Haller, it is now four o’clock. How much more time do you need with this witness?”
“Your Honor, I have more questions for Detective Clarke,” I said. “But I’m aware of the court’s wish to go no later than four thirty.”
“It’s not a wish, Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin said. “We will recess at four thirty, if not before. It has been a long day for the jurors. I want them to beat some of the traffic going home. Should we break now and continue the detective’s direct examination tomorrow?”
“I would like to finish today,” I said. “I need fifteen to twenty minutes at the most.”
“Very well, I will hold you to that,” Ruhlin said. “We’ll start tomorrow with cross-examination. You may step back now.”
At the lectern, I checked my legal pad and looked back up at the witness stand. It was time to land the final punch of the day.
“Detective Clarke, was the gun you recovered during the arrest of Aaron Colton the weapon used in the killing of Rebecca Randolph?” I asked.
“Yes,” Clarke said. “It was matched through ballistics. It was the murder weapon.”
“And did you learn who owned the weapon?”
“Yes, it was registered to the suspect’s father, Bruce Colton. It had been kept in a safe with a combination lock in a home office.”
“What kind of combination lock are we talking about?”
“Electronic. It has a numbered keypad and you punch in a six-digit combination to open it.”
“I see. Did you learn through your investigation whether Aaron Colton’s father had shared the combination with his son?”
“His father told me he never shared the combination with his son.”
“Did his mother share it?”
“She said she never knew the combination, because she didn’t like having a gun in the house.”
“Did Aaron tell you how he got possession of the gun?”
“He did not. On the advice of his parents and attorney, he never agreed to speak to me about the shooting.”
“Then did there come a time in your investigation when you learned how he got the weapon from the home safe?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us how?”
“In reviewing the conversations the suspect had engaged in with Wren, I came across an exchange in which Wren revealed that she had accessed online records relating to the Colton family and from these had come up with a list of possible combinations to the gun safe.”
“I believe we have an exhibit to show the jury.”
After Ruhlin overruled an objection from the defense, Lorna put up a segment of an exchange between Aaron and Wren. It was a list of nine different six-digit numbers given by Wren to Aaron.
“Detective Clarke,” I said, pointing at the screen, “did this list supplied to Aaron by Wren include the combination to the gun safe?”
“It did,” Clarke said. “The fourth one down.”
“And what was the significance of that number?”
“It was the date that Aaron Colton’s parents got married—oh-five-eleven-oh-one.”
The courtroom was normally silent during testimony, but it seemed to get even quieter.
To go still. It was as if no one took a breath.
It was what they call a smoking-gun moment.
And I needed to send the jury home with it.
But when I glanced back to the clock on the rear wall of the courtroom, I saw that I had delivered the final punch too quickly.
It was only 4:15 and I could not give the Masons the last fifteen minutes of the day to undo the damage I’d done to their case.
I turned and looked up at the judge.
“Your Honor, this might be a good point to break for the day,” I said. “But I would like the night to decide whether to continue direct examination of this witness.”
Before the judge could respond, Marcus Mason was on his feet objecting.
“Your Honor, counsel is stalling,” he said. “He is trying to prevent the defense from questioning this witness about the critical mistakes and biases that infected his deeply flawed investigation.”
I had to give Marcus credit. He knew his objection was going nowhere, so he was doing his best to plant seeds of doubt about Clarke’s testimony and give the jury something else to think about while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic heading home.
“You’ll be able to do that tomorrow, Mr. Mason,” Ruhlin said. “The objection is overruled.”
The judge then dismissed the jury with the usual warnings about not discussing the case with others or reading or watching media accounts of the trial.
The courtroom slowly emptied behind me as I took a seat next to my clients.
Bruce Colton stood and leaned over the rail so he would be able to hear what I said.
The first day was in the books. I felt good about it and told my clients so.
I also told them that they each could expect to testify the next day.
What I didn’t tell them was that at least one of them wasn’t going to like the questions I asked.