The Trial: Part Six
The five-week trial slowly began to wind down. Eleanor Perkins, Emmett's legal wife, testified that her husband was with her the night of the murder. Thelma Sustrick, Emmett's sister, said that her brother was at her home in Alhambra, 40 miles from the murder scene, helping her husband John Sustrick, plant a nectarine tree in their yard until late in the afternoon, when he allegedly was with Santo and the others planning the Monohan robbery. A neighbor of the sister, Gladys Jones, remembered seeing the men plant the tree. Margaret Vertrees, a dental nurse for Dr. W. N. Winemann, produced an appointment book showing that Perkins had some work done at 9:30 the next day, which was the morning after the murder, and that his appearance and behavior were normal.
Only one witness testified for Jack Santo. She was Harriet Henson, who had lived in a common-law arrangement with Santo for five years in northern California. She admitted to knowing Emmett Perkins for about four of those years. Her testimony was designed to indirectly help all three defendants: she stated that Jack Santo and John True were at her house the night of the murder and until early in the morning on March 10, making it impossible for True himself to have been in the Monohan home, therefore nullifying his entire testimony.
On cross-examination, however, it was revealed that Harriet had told a man named James Ferneaux that Santo had dropped his car off in Modesto early in the morning after driving all night from southern California. Turned out that Ferneaux was an undercover agent for the California Department of Justice and had recorded the conversation. Not only had Harriet now just committed perjury, but also as she walked out of the courtroom, northern California authorities arrested her as the getaway car driver for a robbery that Santo and Perkins had committed in that part of the state.
When both sides rested their cases in the tedious trial, Jack Hardy did his level best in closing arguments to save Barbara's life. He heaped scorn on star witness John True and begged jurors not to give credence to a story told by a man saving his own life in exchange for giving the state three others. Undercover policewoman Shirley Parker and conspirator Donna Prow were depicted as "utterly ruthless" in their entrapment of Barbara. Lastly, he pleaded with them to understand Barbara's panic in trying to rig an alibi with Sam Sirianni.
Lawyers for Perkins and Santo likewise denounced and attempted to totally discredit John True's testimony. They suggested that the real pistol-whipping assailant of Mabel Monohan was True himself, not Barbara Graham. Every step of the way, they pointed the finger of blame at True; with Perkins and Santo for clients, that was all they could do.
J. Miller Leavy's summation was emotionally charged. Pointing a finger at the three outwardly impassive defendants, he stormed, "These people steal to live, and this time they killed to steal!" They did not, he believed, intend to leave any living witness even before they went into the house. And, he candidly told the jurors, he wished John True were sitting beside them where he should be.
"But we have to be practical, ladies and gentlemen," he reasoned. "Baxter Shorter is gone for good; we all know that. Should we permit all four of these vermin to escape, rather than let one go and get three' Isn't the answer common sense'"
There was not, he attested, a single mitigating circumstance for any one of the defendants. And the jury's verdict, he declared, must forfeit the lives of Perkins, Santo, and Graham.
The jury unanimously agreed. Jurors deliberated less than five hours before finding all three defendants guilty of murder in the first degree.
Barbara, who had been reading a bible at the defense table, broke down and sobbed violently. As two matrons -- also weeping, incidentally -- led her out of the packed courtroom, she became hysterical and screamed, "I'd rather get the gas chamber than rot away in prison for the rest of my life!"
No comments:
Post a Comment