Framed

The Absence of Motive#3

Six months after the murder, the trial began in the Bosque County Courthouse in the town of Meridian, the county seat and even smaller than Clifton.

Joe’s lawyers had made the crucial decision not to request a change of venue.

They reasoned that their client was well known and respected in his community, an accused man who deserved to be judged by his peers.

The decision proved to be prudent when most of the prospective jurors raised their hands when asked if they either knew or had heard of Joe Bryan.

To his family and friends, he was a startling sight sitting at the defense table between his two lawyers.

At times he appeared sad and confused, and at other times he appeared almost belligerent and combative because everyone knew the trial was a sham, he was innocent, and he just wanted to hurry things along and get the trial over with.

Since the day of his arrest, it had never for a single moment occurred to Joe that he would be found guilty of murdering Mickey.

At times he feared it might happen, trials being so unpredictable, but he knew the truth and was certain it would absolve him.

He didn’t belong in the courtroom, dammit, someone else did.

The case was prosecuted by Andy McMullen, the elected district attorney, who had little experience in murder.

The evidence handed to him by Joe Wilie and his team was so lame, circumstantial, and riddled with gaping holes that a guilty verdict looked doubtful.

McMullen, though, was not about to stand in the way of a Texas Ranger who claimed to have solved a high-profile murder.

McMullen’s task was an uphill slog from the opening gavel.

He had no direct proof, only circumstantial at best.

There were no witnesses; no one saw or heard anything unusual the night Mickey was killed.

To convict Joe of the murder, the State would have to convince the jurors to believe an incredible theory:

(1) On the night of October 14, Joe and Mickey talked by phone around 9:15 and said good night;

(2) Joe then sneaked out of his hotel room in Austin, 120 miles away, and drove two hours to his home in Clifton;

(3) Joe made the drive in spite of a heavy thunderstorm, and in spite of a vision problem called corneal erosion, a condition that made it difficult for him to see at night;

(4) Joe arrived home around midnight, parked his car in his driveway, then unlocked the door with his key and entered the kitchen;

(5) Joe moved through the dark house while Mickey was asleep, found his .357 Magnum pistol, loaded it with buckshot, found the flashlight, then eased into their dark bedroom where he shot his wife four times;

(6) while firing away, he was holding the flashlight in such a manner that Mickey’s type O blood spattered, or backsplashed, onto Joe, the walls, the ceiling, and the flashlight itself;

(7) Joe, covered in blood, bathed, changed into clean clothes and shoes, threw away the bloody ones, and left his home;

(8) while making his getaway, he took the pistol, which was never found, and the flashlight, which he placed in the trunk of his car, evidently unaware that the back-spatter had also landed on it;

(9) Joe also “stole”the wedding band he’d given to his wife, along with her watch and diamond ring;

(10) having killed his wife, Joe drove back to Austin in the early morning of October 15, sneaked into his room without being seen, slept a few hours, then arrived promptly at 8:30 for a breakfast session with friends as if nothing had happened.

With great effort, much of this outlandish scenario could almost be explained.

For example: Joe chose October 14 because he would be out of town and his alibi would be well documented;

he made the four-hour round-trip drive with his vision greatly impaired but was determined to do so anyway;

he knew the town would be fast asleep after midnight on a Tuesday so there was no need to hide his car; he entered his own home quietly because he had a key;

perhaps he had pre-loaded his pistol and had it ready; instead of turning on the light in his bedroom and giving Mickey a chance to wake up and resist, he attacked in the dark so she would have no defense and never know who killed her;

he knew the scene would be bloody so he had a change of clothes and shoes ready for his getaway.

And so on.

Each detail could be debated back and forth.

However, in a criminal trial a conviction must be reached beyond a reasonable doubt and cannot be based on what might have or could have happened.

Solid proof is required, and in State v.

Bryan the State had almost none of it to offer.

Missing also was a motive.

During the trial, the State would be unable to produce even the slightest scintilla of evidence that Joe and Mickey were having marital problems.

The opposite was true.

After months of questioning their friends and families, the investigators had not dug up a single hint of conflict or a word of discontent.

As for the homosexual angle, it, too, had fizzled.

Regardless of the innuendos, rumors, and loaded questions they had floated around the county, the investigators had found zero proof of bad behavior by Joe, either with men or women.

They had tried to smear Joe’s reputation, but the courtroom was packed with his friends and supporters, clear proof that he was admired, even beloved.

About forty of his closest friends planned to testify on his behalf.

McMullen’s opening statement to the jury was so lacking in conviction and ineffectual that it was almost a surrender, an admission that the State didn’t have much of a case.

Generally speaking, when prosecutors lack strong evidence they tend to grab the high moral ground, yell a lot, even quote Holy Scripture and Shakespeare, and divert the jury’s attention from their weak case.

McMullen did not do that.

He did not present a theory of the case.

He rambled on a bit, offered some platitudes, and thanked the jurors for their service.

The fireworks came next, from another prosecutor, an out-of-town lawyer named Garry Lewellen.

When Charlie Blue became frustrated with the slow pace of the investigation, he brought in his own investigator.

He was equally unimpressed with McMullen, so he hired his own prosecutor—Garry Lewellen.

Texas law permitted the victim’s family to hire a special prosecutor, but only as long as the district attorney kept control of the case.

Lewellen was rowdier and feistier than McMullen and barked enough to get the jury’s attention.

The State’s case, though, soon lost whatever momentum he had given it.

The jury was shown graphic photos of the crime scene, and diagrams of the bedroom and the house, all of which proved little.

Two human hairs found in a cardboard box in the trunk of Joe’s Mercury did not match his or Mickey’s.

Some fingerprints from the bedroom were Joe’s, but then it was his bedroom.

Some more were found on his flashlight.

He had never denied owning it. An unidentified palm print taken from the bedroom was not Joe’s and it could not be linked to Mickey because the comparison tests got screwed up. A chemist from the state crime lab testified that she’d examined photographs of the flashlight under her microscope and seen a fragment she believed could have been from the plastic shell casings found at the crime scene.

Remarkably, the flashlight was not present in the courtroom.

It’s not clear where it was kept at the time, but the record is clear that the State did not produce it for the jury to see.

All the analysis of the lens of the flashlight was performed by examining photographs of the flashlight, and not the flashlight itself.

The first days of the trial dragged on with no damning evidence presented against Joe.

The most important piece of evidence also had the most potential to damage the State’s case: the cigarette butt found on the kitchen floor.

Since neither Joe nor Mickey smoked, it stood to reason that the killer had calmly had a smoke after, or even perhaps before, he committed his crime.

Regardless, the cigarette butt was a major problem for the prosecution.

Someone left it there, and that someone was the killer.

But Joe Wilie was not deterred.

He had a new story.

He patiently explained to the jury that he himself had stepped on the cigarette butt when he was outside the house and had inadvertently tracked it into the kitchen, where it fell off the sole of his cowboy boot.

How the Ranger knew he had stepped on it was not made clear.

How he knew he had somehow deposited it moments later on the kitchen floor was never explained.

So, the problem was solved.

And Wilie even had a witness. A Clifton policeman named Kenneth Fields testified that he had actually seen the cigarette butt fall from Wilie’s boot onto the kitchen floor. Of course, Fields did not mention this to anyone at the time, nor did he include it in his written report. Wilie’s own twenty-five-page report makes no mention of the sticky cigarette butt.

On the fourth day of the trial, the State called Charlie Blue to the stand.

He and Lewellen, the prosecutor he was paying, went through a well-rehearsed back-and-forth to establish that Blue was the concerned older brother who just wanted to find justice for his sister.

He told the jury his story about meeting Saunders, his private investigator, and driving around the county in Joe’s Mercury, until they stopped beside the road to relieve themselves.

When they opened the trunk, Blue saw the flashlight, noticed the red specks on the lens, and immediately said, “That looks like blood.”

Not surprisingly, Saunders agreed.

Again, the jurors did not have the benefit of looking at the flashlight.

Instead, they were handed color photographs that barely showed some specks that were practically indistinguishable.

—

The State’s case plodded on with little drama and no clear evidence of Joe’s guilt.

The most crucial testimony came from Joe Wilie as he was being cross-examined by Joe’s lawyers about the absence of motive.

He was asked, “You haven’t come up with one motive at all, have you, for this man to kill this woman?”

Wilie replied, “She’s worth three hundred thousand dollars to him dead, if you want to surmise a motive.”

The statement was not only inflammatory and highly prejudicial, it was also untrue.

The policy on Mickey’s life paid roughly $150,000.

When she died, she and Joe had about $35,000 in the bank and a modest home with a mortgage.

To testify, under oath, that Joe’s motive, indeed the only possible motive, was financial, was objectionable.

To mention the life insurance should have been grounds for a mistrial.

Joe’s lawyers jumped to their feet and objected loudly.

The prosecutors yelled back.

When things settled down, the judge allowed the testimony anyway.

After four days the State had produced nothing but weak evidence that was not only circumstantial but, for the most part, equivocal.

The course of the trial changed dramatically on the fifth day, when Robert Thorman took the stand.

As a newly certified expert in the field of bloodstain analysis, he would bring scientific certainty to an otherwise murky case.

As most expert witnesses do, Thorman began with a blustery narrative about his credentials and qualifications: his long career in law enforcement, even the military police, and his training in bloodstain analysis.

The jury did not know that he had no scientific training in such analysis and that his sole training consisted of one forty-hour course in a Beaumont hotel four months earlier.

He then laid the groundwork for his expertise by describing the crime scene when he arrived on the evening of October 15.

The jury had already seen plenty of the gory photographs and needed to see no more.

Thorman said there was a “vast amount”

of splattering and there would have been a “vast amount”

of blood on the killer, whoever he was.

The flashlight was the crucial piece of evidence, and Thorman soon got around to it.

Since it was not available, and no one could ever explain where the damned thing was, Thorman relied on some of the same photographs the jury had already seen.

They did not reveal any recognizable blood; rather they showed a series of tiny specks, which, to the average eye would mean nothing.

But to a highly trained expert like Thorman, there was an enormous amount of evidence in those specks.

They were caused by blowback, or backsplash, or “back-spatter,”

as he preferred to call it, and, at least to him, they were proof that the victim’s blood had reversed course from the angle of the wounds and traveled backward at a high rate of speed.

Since some of the blood landed on the flashlight, it therefore stood to reason that the flashlight was at the crime scene.

Thorman went on to say that the absence of spatter on the handle of the flashlight indicated that someone was holding it at the time of the shooting.

This fit neatly into the State’s scenario that Joe sneaked into his own home, did not turn on the lights for fear of waking the person he was about to murder, then entered his bedroom with the flashlight in one hand while firing his pistol with the other.

Using some of the scientific words he had just learned, and also throwing in the usual jargon, Thorman was certain the flashlight was a crucial part of the murder.

After the shooting, Joe had hidden it in the trunk of his car, but only after neglecting to wipe off the blood.

Since Mickey’s blood was O-positive (like that of billions of others), then it was clear, at least to Thorman and the investigators, that Joe had killed his wife.

On cross-examination, Joe’s lawyer asked Thorman how, in spite of the “vast amount”

of blood that had back-spattered onto the killer, Joe’s car, the Mercury, could have been so spotlessly clean when it was examined by the investigators.

There was not a trace of blood anywhere.

And, also, how did the killer manage to leave the crime scene without tracking or leaving a trace of Mickey’s blood? The crime scene team found no bloody fingerprints, nor boot or shoe prints.

Here, Thorman began to improvise.

He speculated that Joe bathed and changed clothes and shoes, and also found the time to thoroughly wipe down his car.

Thorman’s alleged expertise was with bloodstain analysis, the parameters of which were set by the crime scene itself.

He had a certificate to prove it.

From where, then, did he gain the knowledge to predict what a killer might do after he left the crime scene? How could he possibly know, for a fact, that the killer bathed, changed clothes and shoes, and scrubbed his car to get rid of bloodstains?

It was all speculation.

Thorman was reaching far beyond the scope of his field.

That portion of his testimony was prejudicial and inadmissible, and should have been stricken from the record, with an admonishment to the jury to disregard it.

Joe’s lawyers objected loudly but the judge admitted the shaky testimony anyway.

Robert Thorman saved the State’s case by grounding it in scientific certainty.

Until he testified, the prosecution had floundered through a mishmash of hearsay, speculation, half-truths, and innuendo.

At the last minute, though, a certified expert had placed the flashlight taken from the trunk of Joe’s car and made it a vital part of Mickey’s murder.

Thorman had turned the tide dramatically.