“Jennifer, you’ve heard testimony at this trial that Buck did, in fact, have a gun on Palmyra?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you go along with this?”
“Buck insisted that anyone who was going to sail in the open seas had to have some means of protection, and so I went along with that.”
I returned to examples of Jennifer’s standing up to Buck. “Did you tell me once about an incident involving spaghetti?”
She told how Buck had slung the pot of spaghetti against the cabin wall at Mountain View, splattering pasta and tomato sauce everywhere. “I just left it there. The next day, he asked when I was going to clean it up. I told him I didn’t do it. ‘You did. You clean it up.’”
“Did he, in fact, clean it up?”
“Uh-huh.”
There would be more examples of Jennifer’s standing up to Buck later in her testimony.
Getting before the jury Walker’s hard-core criminal history was an essential part of my continuing strategy to prosecute him. I anticipated an objection from Enoki whichever way I attempted to do it, but particularly if he first had the opportunity to argue the matter, orally or in a brief, to the judge. I decided that questions to Jennifer would be the best way, forcing Enoki to show the jury, if he objected, that he did not want them to hear this very relevant information. There was no ethical problem, since there was no question in my mind that the information, being part of the basis for Jennifer’s state of mind with respect to Buck (a key issue in the case), was legally admissible. However, because of improper rulings by courts, not all legally admissible evidence gets into the trial record.
I asked Jennifer when she had become aware of Buck’s “background.” Enoki did not object. She replied that he informed her soon after they started living together that he had been convicted of armed robbery, but explained that he was only nineteen at the time and that the gun had not been loaded.
The cat was out of the bag. For the first time in the trial, the jury now knew that apart from Buck Walker’s having been convicted of Muff Graham’s murder, Jennifer’s lover was a convicted felon.*
“Did you learn when you were living with him in Mountain View that he’d been convicted of a second armed robbery here in California, and that he’d also been convicted of a burglary in the past?” I continued on.
Again, Enoki did not object.
“Not at that point. I found out about that since.”
“Did you learn at that time that in 1966 and 1967 he was committed to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane in California?”
Again, there was no objection.
“He told me about that,” Jennifer answered. “He said he was just feigning insanity so he wouldn’t have to go back to San Quentin.”
“Even though you only knew at the beginning about the one robbery conviction, were you disturbed about the fact you were living with someone who had that type of a background?”
“Yes, but I had found out about this after we had started living together…and we were already in love.” I hoped the jury might begin to see that this four-letter word meant more to Jennifer than to more practical-minded people.
“Would you tell the jury and the judge what it was about Buck Walker that attracted you to him?”
“Well, Buck was bright and articulate and personable,” she answered. “I knew he had a bad background, but I felt he had a lot of potential and—”
She stopped abruptly. “I—I thought I could help him.” She took several deep breaths, trying to calm herself.
In the stilted decorum of a courtroom it would have been difficult for Jennifer to testify to her erotic attraction for Buck, but she would admit privately that in his arms, she’d experienced the most gratifying sex of her life. I planned to allude to this physical attraction whenever possible.
“Was there anything else about Buck that attracted you to him?” I asked, hoping that at least the women on the jury might empathize with Jennifer’s powerful feelings for a man others found so frightening and repugnant.
“I found Buck attractive. He was a big, strong man. He made me feel—safe and protected.”
I next had Jennifer summarize what led up to Buck’s arrest on the Big Island for illegal drug sales. She said it all started when “a friend from the mainland brought some pills” to Hawaii and asked Buck if he knew a buyer. Buck put him in touch with someone, and that person, who turned out to be an undercover agent, later came back twice to Buck promising him a lot of money “if Buck could get some more pills.” When Buck did, he was arrested.
“What was your state of mind with respect to what happened to Buck?” I asked.
“He was entrapped,” she said boldly. “He wasn’t selling drugs before the undercover officer started enticing him. I thought it was unfair.” She recalled Buck’s concern that the drug bust would send him back to San Quentin. “He was terrified of that place. He told me terrible stories about San Quentin.”
“Did he make any vow with respect to not going back to San Quentin?” I asked.
“He said he would never go back to San Quentin.”
“How did you feel about Buck’s decision to jump bail because of his fear of San Quentin?”
“Well, at first I didn’t think running was the right thing to do. But—I loved Buck too much to see him return to San Quentin.”
Jennifer related her family’s unsuccessful efforts to dissuade her from running away with Buck. “It was very hard to go against their wishes, but I felt Buck needed me.”
During this testimony, Sunny and Ted, though after all these years still plagued by their failure to keep her from sailing off into harm’s way, remained expressionless in their front-row seats.
Moving on, I elicited from Jennifer that Buck had acquired a passport under the alias Roy Allen before they left for Palmyra, but that she had used her real name on hers.
Jennifer next explained, in response to my question, that she soon realized that flour, sugar, oil, and other supplies were dwindling more rapidly than she had estimated, fully one-third having been consumed on the trip down.
Eliciting Jennifer’s admission about these food problems was consistent with the pattern I would pursue throughout my examination. With two calculated exceptions, I intended to raise every negative circumstance, every inconsistency, discrepancy, and incriminating thing she had said or done. I wanted to cross-examine Jennifer myself, on my terms, leaving nothing more than a plate of leftovers for the prosecutor; in other words, I wanted to conduct Enoki’s cross-examination for him. If he reprised the points I covered, he’d be going over old ground with the jury, with the impact almost surely being diminished.*
“As you know, Jennifer, there has been testimony at this trial that you and Buck were in relatively poor shape as far as food was concerned during your stay on Palmyra. Did you consider the situation desperate?”
“No. It wasn’t great, but it definitely wasn’t desperate.”
“Was it your state of mind, when you arrived on Palmyra, to live solely off the provisions you had brought with you?”
“No. We planned to supplement our provisions by living off the land, off foods available on Palmyra.”
“On a given day, if your diet, as indicated by your diary, consisted of fish from the lagoon and coconuts from the island, would this mean that your food provisions on board the Iola had been completely depleted?”
“Absolutely not,” Jennifer said. “It just meant exactly what I said. We were supplementing and using those foods available to us on Palmyra in conjunction with our stores.”
“You were trying to stretch out the stores you had as much as possible?”
“Right.”
She went on to explain that they quickly learned which fish from the lagoon could be safely eaten. She noted the many uses she’d discovered for the wealth of coconuts on the island. “We made milk shakes, ice cream, cookies, sour cream, butter. Coconuts are a very nutritious food.”
After es
tablishing that Jennifer would frequently need her “diary” to refresh her memory about events that occurred on Palmyra, I handed her a photostatic copy of the Iola’s log. It had, she explained, become more of a daily journal or diary during her sojourn on the island.
“What other foods did you find on Palmyra?”
“There were lots of crabs.”
“Would you read your July 17th diary entry to the jury?”
“‘I never saw so many land crabs in my life,’” she recited, “‘and they tasted delicious.’”
“Did you attempt to grow a vegetable garden?”
“Yes. I had brought all kinds of seeds down, vegetables and fruit seeds, and we attempted to grow a vegetable garden.”
“Were you successful at all in growing vegetables in the garden?” (A far better question than a prosecutor’s “Isn’t it true, Miss Jenkins, that your effort to grow food on Palmyra to help sustain you was completely unsuccessful?”)
“No,” Jennifer answered. “The hermit crabs used to climb up everywhere and raid them.”
“I take it, Jennifer, you would have preferred, during this period of time that you were on Palmyra, to have had a more diverse diet—more meat, fruit, and vegetables. Is that correct?”
She smiled at the understatement.
“Yes.”
By late August 1974, their food supplies had fallen to about seven days’ worth of food, Jennifer said. Pointing out the apparent discrepancy that an earlier, August 15 diary entry estimated only about “ten meals” left, I asked Jennifer how they could still have had seven full days of provisions remaining by late August.
“Well, more and more at the end, we relied heavily on those foods that were available to us on the island. I was conserving our stores because I never wanted to fall below a week’s supply.”
Did a period of a week have any particular significance? I asked.
“Yes. We were planning to go to Fanning Island to get supplies. I wasn’t sure exactly how long it would take, but I knew that a week was the absolute outside. So, I didn’t want to go below a week’s supply.”
Although her two previous answers satisfied my next question, the subject was so critical I couldn’t leave the matter open for the jury to interpret. I had her turn to her August 23 entry, just seven days before the key day of August 30, and said: “It reads: ‘No dinner save a coconut milk shake.’ I asked: “Did that entry mean that you did not have any food left whatsoever at that point other than the coconut milk shake?”
“No, it didn’t mean that at all,” Jennifer insisted. “It just meant that all I had to eat that day was a coconut milk shake. By choice.”
I asked Jennifer if she considered herself a big eater.
“No, I’m not a big eater.”
“How many meals do you usually eat a day?”
“I usually eat one meal a day.”
“Do you sometimes go a day without eating?”
“Yes.”
“Jennifer, in late August of that year, did you have any sense of malnutrition at all?”
“No, not at all.”
“To your knowledge, how was Buck doing?”
“He looked fine.”
“Had either of you lost any weight on Palmyra?”
“No.”
I next asked her to describe briefly the couple’s relationships with the various visitors to Palmyra that summer. She told how Jack Wheeler and his son had helped free the Iola from the reef and how, in succeeding days, Jack had given them advice about how to live and eat on Palmyra.
Jennifer said Bernard and Evelyn Leonard “seemed cordial enough.” She described her efforts to barter with them for food. “Evelyn said she’d trade for some things, but when I went over to her boat to do so one day, she said she wasn’t feeling well. She said she had a tooth inlay problem,” and Jennifer didn’t go aboard.
“So you didn’t get the impression that she didn’t want you on the boat. She simply didn’t feel good that day.”
“Yes. She was always very friendly to me.”
“Would you look at your July 13th entry and see if there is any reference to this tooth inlay problem and your not going on the boat?”
“Yes. It says, ‘Evelyn wasn’t feeling well. A reoccurrence of tooth inlay.’”
Jennifer recalled the Leonards’ bringing books and rice pudding over to the Iola the day they left, her birthday, and Evelyn’s snapping her picture with Puffer. She described how Bernard shouted farewell from the bow of his boat. “He waved and yelled, “Goodbye, Jennifer. Have a happy birthday and a wonderful year.’”
Jennifer explained that she had baked for Don Stevens and Bill Larson, using flour and sugar they supplied, and exchanged books and magazines with them.
And though Tom Wolfe and Norman Sanders “weren’t on the island very long,” Jennifer said she got along well with both of them.
I asked her to relate the incident of Wolfe’s being bitten by one of Buck’s dogs.
“Tom came over to the Refrigerator House, and I guess he somehow startled Popolo, and Popolo lunged at Tom and nipped him.”
“What type of dog is Popolo?”
“He’s a pit bull.”
In response to my question, Jennifer went on to say that even before Palmyra, she and Buck had trouble with Popolo, who would chase cars down the street, barking ferociously.
I wanted to show that the attack did not indicate, as the Government wanted to suggest, that Buck’s dogs were starving. This particular dog, like many others of its breed, had been flat-out mean.
“You heard Mr. Wolfe testify that you didn’t apologize when he was bitten?”
“Right. And I can’t believe that I didn’t apologize to him. Buck was yelling and screaming at Popolo and hitting him, and I wanted him to get Popolo out of there. Tom went running off. I’m sure I apologized to him but perhaps he didn’t hear me in all the confusion.”
When I asked Jennifer about little Puffer, my witness grinned for the first time on the stand. She eagerly told the jury how much Puffer weighed (twenty-five pounds), how intelligent and sensitive she was, and how the two of them liked sleeping in the same bed. “On my last two jobs,” Jennifer added, “she came to work with me and she slept on a little pillow under my desk.”
I was presenting this evidence for the jurors to draw their own conclusions, presumably favorable. I was not about to argue in my summation, however, that someone who loved animals was unlikely to commit murder. Enoki could respond that Hitler also loved animals, once saying that the more he got to know humans, the more he loved animals. While millions were dying in his gas chambers, the Führer showered affection on Blondie, his purebred German shepherd. Charles Manson also said he loved animals more than human beings and would rather kill a person than a bird or even a rattlesnake.
I had saved the Grahams for last. “With respect to Mac and Muff, during your stay on Palmyra, how often would you see them or talk to them?”
“Just about every day we would see one or both of them.”
“And did you feel you got to know them fairly well?”
“Yes.”
“How would you describe Mac Graham?”
“Mac was a wonderful man,” she answered warmly. “He was full of life and very outgoing. He would come by the boat frequently and bring us fish he caught. I think he fished more frequently because he knew we could use it.”
And Muff?
“She was always very nice to me. Muff was much more reserved, kept much more to herself than did Mac. And she wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy to be on Palmyra.”
“Did you have any animosity whatsoever toward either Mac or Muff?”
“No, absolutely not.”
“To your knowledge, were you aware of any animosity or ill feeling that either one of them had toward you?” I asked.
“No.”
“So, if they harbored any bad feelings toward you, you were not aware of them?”
“Right. They were both always friendl
y.”
I asked if she or Buck ever had any kind of an argument with either Mac or Muff on Palmyra. Other than the problems with the two big dogs (which she set forth), she said, no.
“How would you describe the relationship that existed between the Grahams and you and Buck on Palmyra that summer of 1974?”
“It was friendly. Not especially close, I suppose, but definitely friendly.”
“Jennifer, you heard Tom Wolfe’s testimony at this trial that you told him neither you and Buck, nor the Grahams, wanted the others on the island. Do you recall telling him that?”
“I told Tom that both Mac and Muff, and Buck and I, had specifically chosen Palmyra because it was an uninhabited coral atoll. We had all come down there specifically to be alone, and I believed that this desire continued with—with Mac and Muff. But as it turned out, having Mac and Muff there was very good for us. Mac helped us in a number of ways. He brought us fish, and he tried to repair our outboard motor. Once our generator went out and he repaired that. So, having them there was good.”
“Did you ever try to barter with the Grahams for food?”
“No.”
“Inasmuch as you apparently did do this with the people on the other boats, why not with the Grahams?”
“Mac and Muff were down there for a prolonged period of time, so I knew they needed all their stores. I just offered, you know…wanted to barter with those people who were on their way to places where there were stores they could purchase.”
It was getting late. Jennifer had been on the stand for more than two hours, and she looked fatigued. I turned to the judge and suggested this might be a convenient time to recess for the day.
“All right,” said Judge King, taking my cue. “We’ll recess until 9:30 A.M., and it won’t rain hard tomorrow.”
Outside the whole day, cold drizzle had given jewel-like San Francisco the mournful aspect of an Iron Curtain capital in the 1950s.
WEDNESDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 19, 1986
WE ALL arrived in the courtroom with dripping raincoats and folded umbrellas generating small puddles. During the night, the skies had loosed another torrent of rain that showed no sign of easing. Mother Nature was most definitely in contempt of court.