Chapter 51
She once again thanked the jurors for their service, a needless gesture that meant nothing. By then they were weary of their service and tired of each other and no amount of false praise could impress them.
She switched gears immediately and got their attention.
“According to FBI statistics, there are twenty thousand murders each year in this country. Almost forty percent are never solved. Those are troubling numbers, but let’s set them aside.
Of the murders that are solved, almost half, fifty percent, involve circumstantial evidence.
No one saw the fateful deed. No one saw the murderer pull the trigger, or cut with the knife, or beat with the club.
There were no eyewitnesses. And, since the murderer did not confess to the crime, the detectives studied the crime scene and found clues.
Every murderer leaves behind evidence. Bullets and shells for ballistics tests.
Blood, semen, saliva, sweat, skin, for DNA testing.
Fingerprints, hair follicles, boot prints, for forensic analysis.
And poison for toxicologists to examine and study. ”
Cora stayed behind the small podium and only occasionally glanced at her notes. She spoke directly to the jurors, looking them in the eye, an orator who was well prepared and knew her stuff.
“Eleanor Barnett was murdered in a very devious manner. She ingested a poison that has for decades been known as the poisoner’s choice.
Thallium has no taste, odor, or appearance.
It’s invisible. It can be ingested in small quantities over several days or weeks without yielding clues, often, as in this case, confounding the doctors, who so rarely confront it.
Neither the doctors nor the nurses had any reason to suspect that this lovely and respectable lady, laid up in the hospital after an awful car wreck, would secretly be fed, in small doses, a poison added to one of her favorite treats, ginger cookies purchased by the defendant and delivered by his longtime and loyal secretary.
“Now, the defense evidently wants you to believe that someone other than the defendant acquired a poison that can be found only on the black market and only by someone with evil intent, and this other person sneaked into Ms. Barnett’s hospital room and laced her cookies with thallium.
How convenient. How original. Someone else did it.
I’m sure you’ve never heard that one before.
“But why would someone else murder Eleanor Barnett? Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a question of motive.
And the motive was greed. Who could profit from her death?
Oh, I suppose the funeral home could make a buck.
But it’s hard to imagine Mr. Douglas Gregg, the mortician you met here on the stand, sneaking into her hospital room and killing her so he could then cremate her.
Are we supposed to believe that? Ludicrous.
About as ludicrous as the other good and innocent people the defense has dragged into this courtroom to smear their names.
The doctors, nurses, orderlies, assistants, even janitors, all those good folks just doing their jobs, trying to save her life, and now the defendant wants you to suspect them all. Pretty outrageous.”
One glance at the jurors and Simon knew better than to glance again. If Raymond thought they had eight friends in the box, Simon would love to know where the first one was sitting.
“Who has the motive? Who wanted Eleanor dead?” Cora’s voice was loud, incredulous, and echoed around the courtroom.
She stepped away from her notes and hit her stride with a tirade of facts that could not be contested.
The secrecy of the preparation and execution of the will.
The obvious belief that there was big money on the table; otherwise, why would the defendant go to such great lengths to set up a trust designed to make donations to 120 charities?
Why would the will leave $100,000 each to Clyde and Jerry Korsak if doing so would leave so little for the trust?
Why would the defendant call his pal Dirk Wheeler, a bona fide tax and estate lawyer, and seek advice for a client with a substantial net worth?
Why would the defendant insert himself as the attorney for the estate and also the attorney for the trust, with no other trustees to provide oversight?
Why would the defendant award himself fees of $500 an hour, an obscene amount for a small-town lawyer with no experience in complicated estate matters?
According to his own secretary, he had never been paid such exorbitant fees.
Cora stopped, looked at the jurors in complete amazement, and asked, “Who in the world is worth five hundred dollars an hour?”
Then she lowered the large white screen opposite the jurors and methodically went through the timeline, carefully listing the important dates and times: Eleanor’s car wreck and hospitalization, the purchase of the first box of ginger cookies from Tan Lu’s, the aggressive actions by the defendant to get his client to execute a power of attorney and living will, from her hospital bed; the purchase of the second box of cookies; the deterioration of her condition; the ventilator; her death; then, of course, the forty-seven-minute gap between her official passing and the defendant’s phone call to the funeral home with the request to “come and get her.”
Cora finished an hour after she began. Her final words to the jury were: “A clear-cut case of first-degree murder.”
Simon tried to sit tall, take meaningless notes, and present a confident look for everyone.
Raymond wasted no time in attacking the prosecution.
He said, “Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, once again the great Commonwealth of Virginia, with its endless resources of lawyers, investigators, experts, doctors, and money, has stumbled its way into a courtroom without bringing enough proof to overcome the presumption of innocence. The prosecution has no proof!” His voice boomed throughout the hushed courtroom.
“What the Commonwealth does have is plenty of speculation.
Tons of it. Lots of suspicion too. Plenty of circumstantial suspicion.
And, it has the dead body of a lovely lady who deserved better.
A lady who trusted the defendant because she had no one else to trust. A lady who had once been wealthy and lost it all and was obviously mentally unbalanced in many ways.
She still lived in a fantasy world in which she and her late husband were quite wealthy.
She was delusional and still dreamed of the lost money. She was lost in the past.
“And how, exactly, was Simon Latch supposed to know it was all a hoax? Maybe he should have dug deeper. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter right now. All that matters today is that someone poisoned Eleanor Barnett and it wasn’t Simon Latch.”
Raymond stopped pacing and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
“Greed? You want to talk about greed? Simon Latch never received a single penny in fees from this woman. Nothing. She didn’t believe in paying her legal bills.
She had plenty of cash, and he knew that, but he never pressed her for payment. ”
Simon kept his eyes on Raymond as he moved back and forth in front of the jury box, and in doing so he caught glimpses of the jurors’ faces. Some watched Raymond and seemed to agree. Most, however, seemed dismissive.
He finished in half an hour and his timing was good. The jury had heard enough. Judge Shyam told them to go home and forget about the case until nine the following morning, Friday.
Landy had been in the courtroom for most of the afternoon and was waiting behind the courthouse near the dumpsters.
They made another getaway and drove for an hour west of town.
She was of the opinion that the jury was split and would hang itself.
Simon was too consumed with fear to say much. He certainly wasn’t hungry.
They stopped at a restaurant in Williamsburg and had drinks on an outdoor terrace as the sun faded. She asked if sex might help and he said no. At the moment, nothing would help but an acquittal.