Madman Walking E-Book

L. F. Robertson

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

"John Grisham had better look to his laurels—there's a new writer of legal thrillers in town." Richard A. Lupoff, author of The Classic Car KillerHoward Henley is not a killer. That seems obvious to lawyer Janet Moodie when she's called in to work his appeal. Her new client was convicted of arranging the shooting of a drug dealer, but the man who pulled the trigger has always said Henley had nothing to do with it. So why is Henley the one on death row?Janet's new case takes her from the desperate world of prison gangs, where men are murdered as an initiation rite, to the courtroom, where a mental illness might mean the difference between life and death. Can she convince a judge of her client's innocence before it's too late?

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

Coming Soon from Titan Books

MADMANWALKING

Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

Two Lost Boys

MADMANWALKING

L.F. ROBERTSON

TITAN BOOKS

Madman Walking

Print edition ISBN: 9781785652837

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652844

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2018

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

“Futility” by Wilfred Owen is from Wilfred Owen: The War Poems

(Chatto & Windus, 1994), ed. Jon Stallworthy

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2018 by L.F. Robertson. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Richard Robertson

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Truth really is stranger than fiction. The story that follows is inspired by something that happened, in California, late in the twentieth century. The characters and a lot of the details of the story are invented, but the basic premise—that a man with serious mental illness was charged with murder, allowed to represent himself at his trial, and ended up on death row, even though everyone involved knew that the actual killer had confessed to the crime and exonerated him—is fact.

For a DREAM is a good thing from GOD.

For there is a dream from the adversary which is terror.

For the phenomenon of dreaming is not of one solution, but many.

For Eternity is like a grain of mustard as a growing body and improving spirit.

For the malignancy of fire is oweing to the Devil’s hiding of light, till it became visible darkness.

For the Circle may be SQUARED by swelling and flattening.

For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul.

For there was no rain in Paradise because of the delicate construction of the spiritual herbs and flowers.

For the Planet Mercury is the WORD DISCERNMENT.

For the Scotchman seeks for truth at the bottom of a well, the Englishman in the Heaven of Heavens.

CHRISTOPHER SMART (1722–71), Jubilate Agno

(WRITTEN IN ST. LUKE’S HOSPITAL FOR LUNATICS, BETHNAL GREEN, LONDON)

Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys,

Bedlam boys are bonnie

For they all go bare and they live by the air,

And they want no drink nor money.

TOM OF BEDLAM (ENGLISH FOLK SONG)

1

“You have to help me.”

The man’s voice on the phone both pleaded and commanded. “You have to help me, Ms. Moodie, as an officer of the court. A terrible fraud has been committed against me by the court and the police. I’m the victim of an unconstitutional conspiracy by the district attorney of Taft County and the court and the County of Ventura. Sandra Blaine and Judge Redd must be exposed. God will judge them, the betrayers, he will judge them on the final day—” The voice was rising now, the tone more urgent, the words clattering out in a jumble of legal language and fragments of biblical-sounding passages.

“Dammit, Ms. Moodie, they framed me because they knew they cheated me in my legal settlement,” he went on. “They knew I was in jail when the man was killed. I have the proof, all the paperwork. You have to write to the director of the FBI. No, you have to go see him in his office, tell him to come talk to me, they have trampled on my constitutional rights, Ms. Moodie, they have my blood on their hands. And every day you let this happen, you are as guilty as they are. Call my lawyer, Brian Morris, tell him to come see me right away, tell him he needs to petition the Supreme Court to hear my case now—”

He continued talking, stopping only for breath, for the entire fifteen minutes before the prison phone system automatically cuts off inmate calls. Once in a while I managed to utter a syllable or two when it seemed I should respond to something, but I don’t think I’d managed ten words by the time the phone went dead in the middle of one of his sentences.

I shook my head a couple of times to clear the clattering from my ears and looked up Brian Morris’s phone number on the State Bar’s website. He answered on the second ring.

“Mr. Morris,” I said, “this is Janet Moodie from the state defender. I just had a call from a client of yours, Howard Henley?”

“Oh, yes, Howard.” I could hear a sigh in his voice.

“He seemed pretty agitated,” I said. “He wanted me to call you.” I left out the part about petitioning the Supreme Court.

“Did he want you to call the heads of the FBI and the CIA and both senators and representatives from his district, and—oh, God, I can’t remember all the people he’s told me to contact,” Morris said, with weary humor.

“Most of them. He wants you to come see him, too,” I said. “He seemed pretty delusional, but really desperate. Is he all right?”

“It depends on what you mean by all right,” Morris said. “He’s always delusional and desperate; that never changes. I’ve had his case for two years, and I don’t know how many lawyers he’s called, not to mention judges, the governor’s office—anyone who happens to take his calls. Did he talk about the colonies on Mars?”

“No, not that.”

“Poor guy, he’s his own worst enemy.”

“I can see that,” I said.

“Yeah. Thanks for letting me know he called. You may hear from him again, now that he has your phone number.”

“Lucky me.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

That was the first Howard call, something over ten years ago. He did call again; in fact he called me a half-dozen times before apparently giving up and moving on to someone else. By the last call, I flinched when the receptionist said his name. But for some reason I couldn’t refuse him. It seemed important, somehow, to hear him out and let him run headlong through his pleas, his patchwork of Old Testament fulminations, and his speculations on outer space.

After me, Howard called almost all the other attorneys in the office. Eventually his name became a rueful joke, a trigger for rolled eyes and guilty laughter among those of us who had been treated to his breathless monologues. And when one of us complained about a difficult client, someone would inevitably say, “Hey, at least you don’t have Howard Henley.”

* * *

And then one late-winter morning a few years later, my husband drove to a lonely park road in the Oakland hills and shot himself.

Terry’s death shattered my little family, sending me and our son, Gavin, reeling apart like fragments from an explosion. But it wasn’t just a private family tragedy. Terry Moran was famous in the small community of attorneys who defend capital cases—a trial lawyer with a string of miraculous wins; an expert at identifying and litigating the legal and factual issues that can save a client from the death penalty; a speaker at criminal law conferences all over the United States. I was also in that community, but much lower in the pecking order. Along with the genuine sympathy I received from people who stayed close to me in the dark, numb months after Terry died, I learned some uncomfortable lessons about who had befriended me only because of him. And I felt, from some colleagues, particularly those who had been close to Terry, but not me, a hurtful undercurrent of judgment, a conviction that I was somehow negligent in not preventing Terry’s death, that I Should Have Seen It Coming.

The next year, I left the state defender’s office, everyone I knew, and all of it—the damned sympathy, unspoken blame, and unanswered questions—and moved with my shock, anger, and miscellaneous emotional baggage to an old cabin up the California coast, in a scatter of old farmhouses and vacation cabins called Corbin’s Landing. I made a cottage industry of doing what I knew and worked on court-appointed appeals out of my spare bedroom. For a long time I stopped having anything to do with death-penalty cases, except to take phone calls from, and write holiday and birthday cards to, former clients in San Quentin, some of whom had become like extended family over the years in which I’d worked on their cases. I didn’t hear from Howard Henley, and I almost forgot about him.

Once, when I was at San Quentin paying a birthday visit to a former client, I heard Howard Henley’s voice again, raised in a harangue hardly different from the one he had repeated in each of his phone calls to me. From my spot in one of the facing rows of attorney visiting-cages, I looked around for the source of the voice. It was projecting from one of the cages directly across the passageway. Howard, in his prison blues, was leaning forward, almost rising from his chair, his hands clutching the edges of the small table, his body trembling with tension. He was thin, almost ascetic, with a high forehead, eyes set deep in their sockets, and uncombed salt-and-pepper hair. Across from him, his visitor was sitting back in his chair as if pushed there by the force of Howard’s tirade, his eyes on the notepad in front of him and his shoulders hunched as if trying to ward off blows. I felt sorry for him.

2

When Mike Barry called me, I was temporarily incommunicado—out in my yard on a not-too-cold February day, cleft-grafting a dozen apple, pear, and plum saplings at my picnic table. Grafting involves whittling twigs with a very sharp knife, and I’m no expert at it, so I was doing my best to work in undisturbed concentration. I was oh-so-carefully slicing into a rootstock when the knife slipped and sliced into the base of my thumb instead. Blood welled up from the cut, dripping onto the table and the pot with the baby apple tree. Cursing, I joined the twigs together and wrapped up the graft, leaving red smears on the tape, and stormed into the bathroom, holding a paper towel around my thumb to keep from dripping more blood onto my shirt and the floor. The phone in my office rang, and I threw a tube of toothpaste in its general direction as I rummaged through the medicine cabinet in search of bandages.

I was still cursing as, my hand swathed in gauze, I stomped across the room and punched the button to listen to the voicemail. “This is Mike Barry calling for Janet Moodie. Would you please give me a call at—” and a number—not that of the state defender, where he and I had worked together. I called him back, furiously punching keys on his answering-machine menu, until his line rang.

“Michael Barry,” Mike’s voice said on the other end of the line.

“Walt Klum,” I said.

“Janny! Thanks for calling back so fast. No, Walt’s fine.”

In the state defender’s office, Mike and I had been Walter Klum’s attorneys for his appeal. Walt had shot his ex-wife, her sister, and her parents, and then tried to kill himself, but the bullet circled inside his skull around his brain, and he had survived, only to be tried for three murders (his wife’s sister had survived to testify against him) and sentenced to death. Mike and I had then spent five years putting together what we thought was a compelling case, in a four-hundred-page appellate brief, that Walt wasn’t competent to stand trial or fully responsible for his actions at the time of the crimes. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury caused by a truck accident two years before the murders. Medical records presented at Walt’s trial showed that he had been in a coma for two months after the accident and that about an eighth of his brain was simply missing, atrophied as the result of trauma and loss of blood supply. His family and friends said his personality had changed after the truck accident. He had gone from being a quiet, easygoing guy to a man who was gloomy, unpredictable, depressed, and prone to sudden attacks of anger and paranoia. In the county jail, tormented by hallucinations and flashbacks and remorse at what he had done, he tried again to commit suicide; and he spent his trial half-asleep from sedatives and psychotropic medications.

The state Supreme Court had given short shrift to our arguments, affirming Walt’s conviction and death sentence in a unanimous opinion.

About a year later, the court had appointed Walt a new lawyer to investigate and file a habeas corpus petition, a separate proceeding to present additional evidence that hadn’t come out, for whatever reason, in Walt’s trial. Mike and I did what we could to help Walt’s new attorney, but by the time the habeas petition was filed I’d left the office. Unlike some of my former clients, Walt wasn’t inclined to write or call anyone; except for the brief thank-you notes he sometimes sent in response to the Christmas and birthday cards I sent him, I hadn’t heard about him in years.

Walt really didn’t care much if he lived or died, and he suffered from bouts of black depression and terror, becoming convinced from time to time that his food was being poisoned or that guards were planning to plant some contraband item in his cell as an excuse to search it and then kill him. No regimen of medications tried by the prison doctors seemed to keep him stable for very long. That’s why my first thought on hearing Mike’s voice after such a long time was that something terrible had finally happened to Walt.

“No, Walt’s as well as he ever was, as far as I know. How are you these days?”

It occurred to me that how I was at the moment would probably not interest most of the people I knew from my previous lives, Mike included. So I refrained from mentioning that I was no longer bleeding out from a grafting wound, and said, “Pretty good. How are you?”

“Okay. Enjoying private practice. And you?”

“Same, I guess. How long have you been out of the state defender?”

“Four years—a little less than you. Sue retired from the school district, and we moved north to Sonoma County. We have two grandkids nearby we get to spend more time with; Hannah just had her second. And Adam graduates from law school this year. And my commute is now fifteen minutes, instead of an hour.”

“God, how time flies,” I said. “You’re ahead of me. No grandkids yet. Gavin’s in Australia doing a post-doc, and he has a girlfriend, but he isn’t married yet. Got you beat about the commute, though. Mine is about thirty seconds.”

After a little more small talk, Mike got down to business. “Are you busy at the moment?” he asked.

“I’m just finishing up a habeas petition, but I’ll be free in a few weeks.”

“Are you interested in another capital case?”

Oh, shit, I thought, but then my curiosity got ahead of my better judgment. “Maybe,” I said, doubtfully. “Tell me about it.”

“Do you remember Howard Henley?”

“Oh no,” I said. “Not Henley. No way.”

“Really?” Mike sounded a little downcast. “I took his case, and I could use someone to work with me on it.”

“Henley? Really? What were you thinking?”

“Oh, God,” Mike sighed. “I let myself be sweet-talked into it by Evelyn Turner at the court.”

I chuckled. Evelyn Turner, the state Supreme Court’s appointments attorney, had a reputation for being, one might say, persuasive. Her magic was mysterious, but faced with her blandishments, otherwise rational attorneys accepted impossible cases at the court’s miserly pay rate, and ended up thanking her for thinking of them.

“You pushover,” I said.

Mike laughed. “Yeah. But seriously—would you work with me?”

“Why me?”

“I thought of you because of Walt Klum, actually. And another case or three—you were kind of known in the state defender for your crazy clients.”

That was actually news to me; I’d never felt particularly known there for anything except being a constant minor irritant to the little clique of bureaucrats who ran the office.

“Maybe,” I said. “Just because it’s you and you’re flattering me. But… Howard? Is he any better than he was?”

“Not better, no. But he’s calmed down some. He’s been on medication for a while. He’s still crazy, but actually bearable.”

“Lovely. So tell me about the case.”

“Howard has a habeas corpus petition pending. His lawyer on it was Gordon Marshall.”

“Wow.”

Gordon Marshall had ascended into the ranks of the elite among death-penalty lawyers by winning a couple of high-profile appeals early in his career. Terry, my late husband, had also occupied that rarified professional space, but he didn’t think much of Marshall; in Terry’s opinion he was too much about publicity and personal fame, and lazy about working on his cases. Marshall claimed to be a distant descendant of John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Judges loved him.

“How did you get Howard’s case from Marshall?” I asked.

“You didn’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Marshall had to retire a while ago—had a stroke, apparently. All his court-appointed cases had to be reassigned.”

“I’m sorry to hear about Gordon,” I said. Whatever I thought about him, the news was sobering. “Jeez, we’re all getting old.”

“I don’t like to think about it,” Mike said. “All the old guard are retiring or dying. I don’t know half the people at seminars anymore.”

“But here we still are until it’s our turn.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford to retire. But back to Howard—all the briefs were filed, and I thought I’d just be babysitting the case until the petition was denied. I’d had it for about three months when the court issued an order to show cause.”

“That’s unusual—good news for Howard, though.” I couldn’t help thinking that having Marshall as his lawyer had a lot to do with an ordinarily merciless court granting Howard a hearing. Marshall had a gift for getting good results for his clients. “What issues is the court interested in?”

“The questions are about innocence: what evidence there was at the time of the trial and what new evidence there might be that Howard wasn’t involved in the murder.”

“Even better news.”

“Yeah. After I read it, I called Evelyn and whined until she agreed to ask the court to pay for a second attorney. I just got the court’s okay yesterday.”

Call it diminished capacity. Or maybe I was addled by shock and blood loss. But somehow, I found myself agreeing to at least consider working with Mike on Howard’s case. “Terrific. I’ll send you some of the briefs and the habeas petition, for a little background, and then we can set up a day to meet.”

Damn, I thought, as I headed back into the bathroom to replace the blood-soaked bandage on my cut finger, I shouldcall him back and say no way. But I didn’t. Instead, I printed out the state Supreme Court’s opinion affirming Howard’s conviction in his appeal and began reading.

3

Confucius supposedly said, “Virtue is never left to stand alone.” Like a lot of philosophers, he had no experience with the criminal justice system.

According to the court’s opinion, Henley had been charged with capital murder for allegedly hiring another man, Steve Scanlon, to kill a competitor, one Jared Lindahl, in a dispute between small-time drug dealers.

Before Henley’s trial his lawyer told the judge he was concerned that Henley wasn’t mentally competent to stand trial. The judge appointed two psychologists to evaluate Henley and write reports for the court.

For a criminal defendant to be mentally competent to stand trial, the law requires two things of him. First he has to show he understands the legal proceedings, meaning he has to know basically what he’s been charged with, what could happen to him, and which people in the courtroom are the judge, the prosecutor and his own attorney. Second, he has to be able to assist his attorney “in a rational manner.” A defendant can be mentally ill, even psychotic, but if he can manage both those things, he’s fit to be tried for his alleged crimes.

Both psychologists decided that Henley was competent. They agreed he understood why he was being prosecuted, but wasn’t getting along with his lawyer. One doctor said it wasn’t clear whether he was mentally ill or just an eccentric with some strange beliefs. The other concluded that Henley could cooperate with his lawyer, but was choosing not to.

Henley was entitled to a hearing on the question of his competence, but after seeing the reports, his lawyer, perhaps seeing where things were going and trying to salvage what might be left of his relationship with Henley, decided not to pursue the issue. The judge ruled that Henley was mentally competent. Henley promptly fired his lawyer and represented himself from then on.

At his murder trial, Henley didn’t cross-examine any of the prosecution witnesses, but he tried to call witnesses of his own: his father, who testified that he had had to give Henley money for his rent the month Lindahl was killed, and two men who had told the police Scanlon confessed the murder to them. Both men said Scanlon had told them more or less the same thing: that Lindahl was killed on orders from the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang and that the guy the police had arrested had had nothing to do with the crime. The district attorney objected, arguing that the two witnesses could testify that Scanlon told them he’d killed Lindahl, but that everything else in their statements was inadmissible hearsay. The judge agreed and excluded the testimony.

The judge’s ruling left the prosecutor free to argue to the jury, “You have not heard any evidence—anything—that contradicted our evidence that Howard Henley hired Steve Scanlon to kill Jared Lindahl.”

The jury convicted Henley of conspiracy to commit murder and murder for financial gain, a death-penalty offense.

The shock of getting convicted must have jolted Henley briefly into lucidity, because he asked the judge to appoint him an attorney for his penalty phase, saying he thought he was in over his head. The judge refused, and Henley continued to act as his own lawyer. The district attorney presented evidence of a long string of prior convictions and uncharged, mostly minor, crimes—assaults, drug possession, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, and brandishing a kitchen knife during a confrontation with a police officer.

Henley didn’t present any evidence on his own behalf and gave a closing argument which even the state Supreme Court described as “rambling and incoherent.” But it affirmed his death sentence nonetheless. The court noted that both the psychologists appointed by the court had said that Henley was competent, and that because Henley was mentally fit to stand trial, he was fit to make the decision to represent himself. He wasn’t entitled to a lawyer for his penalty trial because he’d waited too long to ask for one. The court also held that the trial judge had been right when he ruled that the men to whom Scanlon confessed could testify that Scanlon told them he committed the murder but not that Henley wasn’t involved. And because that ruling was correct there was nothing wrong with the district attorney arguing to the jury that Henley hadn’t produced any evidence that he wasn’t guilty. The prosecutor was simply stating the truth, even though she knew of the evidence and had been responsible for keeping it from the jury.

4

Mike emailed me the briefs in Howard’s appeal, along with the habeas corpus petition filed after his conviction was affirmed and a packet of police reports about the crime. The facts related in those papers told a story a bit different from the state Supreme Court’s opinion.

Jared Lindahl had been killed in Wheaton, a small city in the Central Valley. His body had been found behind the seedy trailer park where Howard was living. When the police asked people in the park if they’d seen anything, two or three said Lindahl had recently started living in a cabin behind the park. Lindahl had recently been released from prison, and he was trouble, stealing from denizens of the trailer park and strong-arming them for the meager amounts of money and valuables they owned. Howard had been selling small quantities of marijuana and pills, they said, and Lindahl had gone to his trailer one night, beaten him up, and taken his money and stash.

Howard had spent the days after the beating in a rage and had asked a couple of acquaintances in the park if he could borrow a gun to kill Lindahl. The police had arrested Howard for Lindahl’s murder, but had been forced to release him when they learned he was in jail on the day Jared Lindahl was shot, serving a weekend for failing to pay a fine for a speeding ticket.

Convinced that Howard must have had something to do with Lindahl’s death, the detectives investigating the case kept hunting for evidence that Howard was somehow behind the killing, and they found Freddy Gomez. Freddy, who lived in the trailer park, told them that after the beating, Howard had asked him where he could buy a gun, and Gomez had given him the name of a guy he knew. Gomez had been in Howard’s cabin buying weed one day soon after that; Steve Scanlon, a guy who sometimes visited the park, was there, too. Freddy claimed he had heard Howard offer to pay Scanlon to kill Lindahl and had seen him give Scanlon a handgun.

Freddy Gomez wasn’t just a good citizen. As he was forced to admit under cross-examination at the preliminary hearing, he was a heroin addict who had just been arrested for trying to kill his girlfriend and possession of heroin for sale. He was desperate to get out of custody, so he wouldn’t have to endure the agony of withdrawal from the drug. So he called a jail guard over to his cell and told him he might have some information about the Lindahl killing.

On the basis of Freddy’s information, the detectives arrested Howard for hiring Scanlon to kill Lindahl. Gomez was released from jail the next day.

Acting on Gomez’s information, the detectives went looking for Scanlon. At first they couldn’t find him, but then they received a tip from a parole officer in El Dorado, near the Nevada border. A client of his had reported that Steve Scanlon had visited him and confessed to a murder in Wheaton. By the time they drove to El Dorado and interviewed Scanlon’s friend, Scanlon was gone. But his friend said Scanlon had told him he’d killed a man in Wheaton on orders from the Aryan Brotherhood, and that the police had arrested another guy who had nothing to do with the hit. Scanlon was picked up a few days later.

Howard’s family hired an attorney for him. The lawyer declared his doubts about his client’s mental competence after a couple of court hearings in which Howard repeatedly interrupted the proceedings with rambling rants accusing the prosecutor of framing him for Lindahl’s murder because he knew the sheriff’s son bought cocaine in the trailer park, and insisting his attorney was working with the prosecution by refusing to present his alibi defense.

After Howard fired his attorney to represent himself, a local defense attorney was appointed to be what they call advisory counsel, someone to be available to help him with legal questions he might have and to do legwork, like legal research and interviewing and subpoenaing witnesses, that a defendant can’t easily do from jail. But Howard called the shots. And he had his own ideas about how to try his case. He exercised his right to a speedy trial and refused to ask for extra time to do any work on the case, so he was picking a jury two months after his motion to represent himself was granted.

Howard’s voir dire of the trial jurors consisted of asking a half-dozen jurors whether they had heard that he was in jail on the day of the murder and whether they accepted the truth of the Book of Revelation. He randomly asked a couple whether they knew about the secret colonies NASA had established on Mars. He ignored their answers and challenged no one.

Freddy Gomez had disappeared after testifying at the preliminary hearing in Howard’s case, and by the time the case was tried, no one could find him. The prosecutor and a deputy were allowed to read his prior testimony to the jury.

In addition to Gomez’s testimony that he had given Howard the name of a gun dealer after the robbery and had later seen Howard give a revolver to Steve Scanlon, the prosecutor presented several witnesses from the trailer park to establish that Howard had been beaten and robbed of drugs and money by Lindahl and that Howard had threatened to kill Lindahl after the robbery. Howard tried to cross-examine the first of them, asking if he knew about a lawsuit Howard had once filed against the County of Ventura and if he was aware that Howard had been in jail on the day of the murder. The prosecutor objected that the evidence wasn’t relevant, and the judge agreed. After that, Howard asked no more questions.

The one rational thing he did, presumably on the advice of his advisory attorney, was to try to call the two men to whom Scanlon had confessed—the friend who had reported him to his parole officer, and another man who had reported that Scanlon had told him essentially the same thing when he was in jail waiting for his own trial. After the judge ruled they couldn’t testify about anything Scanlon told them beyond the fact that he had killed Lindahl, Howard said, in a rare moment of insight, “I have no way to prove my innocence,” and rested.

Howard tried to argue to the jury that he was innocent of the murder. “I had nothing against the man,” he said. In her closing argument, the prosecutor hammered at the lack of any evidence presented that Howard was anything but guilty of a murder for hire. “Did you hear any evidence,” she asked rhetorically, “that anyone—anyone—but Howard Henley had a motive to kill Jared Lindahl?”