Читать книгу Hands Through Stone - James A. Ardaiz - Страница 17

7

You Don’t Break a Horse in One Ride

December 17, 1976

Alderson Women’s Prison

Alderson, West Virginia

A murder case takes on a life of its own. People may think that they understand the process, but they really don’t. They think that because they’ve seen some television detective wrap up a murder investigation in an hour, they know how it’s done. But life isn’t like television. Most of the success in solving a murder or in catching a murderer comes as a result of plain sweat and hard work. You know that murder always has a pattern—you just have to find it.

Assuming you have a suspicion, and even some evidence about who the murderer might be, it doesn’t mean that you can prove it. Every detective knows that you can bring a stack of paper to the district attorney and tell him or her that you have a case, but that doesn’t mean you have a case; all it means is you have a big stack of paper. All a detective needs in order to make an arrest is a strong suspicion and an arrest warrant. But a conviction of murder requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And that means evidence, lots of evidence.

Barbara Carrasco was right about her information; it was hearsay and couldn’t be used in court against Allen unless the person testifying had actually heard him say it—and without more, it wasn’t enough to prove murder. First, there was no body. Without a body, it’s very hard to prove a murder has been committed. In most murder cases, the body is the best evidence. Without a body, a pathologist can’t determine, and certainly can’t prove, cause of death. Without a body, you need an eyewitness to prove there ever was a body. Without a body, you can’t find physical evidence at the crime scene because you don’t have a crime scene. So, without a body, only in the rarest of instances can you prove murder.

Blade and Lean knew that without a body, whatever Barbara Carrasco said wouldn’t mean much. They had to have more. In the arcane world of evidence, it also meant that only what Eugene Furrow said about himself could be used against Eugene Furrow and only what Clarence Allen said about himself could be used against him. All Furrow or Allen had to say was that Barbara Carrasco was lying when she testified about what either of them supposedly told her, and then what? After all, who were you going to believe? Certainly, Carrasco had a motive to lie. She hated Clarence Ray Allen for what she believed he had done to her son. And Barbara Carrasco was a proven liar; she admitted that she made her living by lying. She was a proven and admitted criminal, accusing other people of being criminals. She had a slew of felony convictions which would be paraded in front of a jury, whose members would then be asked to accept her word over that of Allen and Furrow. While it wasn’t always true that if you had no body you had no case, there was a reason why after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared without a trace, nobody has ever been successfully charged.

The next day, Blade called Tabler to ask him to check with counties near Fresno to see if they had found any unidentified bodies that might fit the description. Blade didn’t want to talk further over the phone, and he told Tabler that Carrasco had come through and he would explain when he got back.

It was a long plane ride back to California, but the detectives didn’t talk much about the crime. Carrasco had said that the motive had been to remove a woman who talked too much about floating forged money orders. What she didn’t know was where the money orders had come from. If the motive for killing Mary Sue Kitts was to cover up a burglary, there had to be proof that there was a burglary and that it involved stolen money orders. Blade and Lean didn’t even know when or where such a burglary might have taken place. It was simple: no burglary, no apparent motive. Without a motive attributable to him or some physical evidence, all Allen had to say was “Why would I do that?” There wouldn’t be any good answer other than you thought he “had done that.”

Assuming they could prove a burglary, they had another problem. They couldn’t prove Mary Sue Kitts was even dead or that she had ever been involved with Allen. The most obvious thing they knew was that Clarence Allen wasn’t going to help them prove anything. They didn’t even know the names of the people who had been involved with Allen, with the exception of Eugene Furrow. Somebody was going to have to talk—somebody who had been there. Blade and Lean had been partners long enough that by the time they got off the plane, each of them knew what the other was thinking. What they knew was that no district attorney would waste their time writing NCF, no charges filed, across their request for a complaint; he would just use a stamp instead of wasting the ink in his pen.

First things first. They had to be able to convince their captain, Bud Lauter, and, more importantly, their sergeant, Art Tabler, that there was something here that would take them somewhere at the end. Even serious cases have to be prioritized. You can give cases so much time and then you have to move on, because there is always another body, there is always another case.

Both detectives wanted this case. They wanted to close the book hard on Clarence Ray Allen, but from the beginning they knew they had to approach every step carefully and build their case slowly. They had to put a case together before they started to make arrests and interrogate suspects.

When you sit down to interrogate a person for any crime, but especially for murder, there are unwritten rules as to what can be a very intricate dance. Very seldom do people crack just because they are sitting in front of you. You have to measure them and you have to bring them in slowly. To do that, you have to know the facts, because when suspects lie—and they almost always lie—you have to know it. A good interrogator gets into the head of the person in front of him. It’s a matter of knowing when to push forward and when to pull back. Unfortunately, right now, Blade and Lean had nothing that would shake anybody.

After sifting through their options, Lean asked his more seasoned partner, “So, Blade, what do we tell Tabler? We both know that this case is going to take hundreds of hours and we may end up nowhere.”