|
The prosecution in '95: what were they thinking?
Appended to Quick's report are the transcripts of interviews conducted in August, 2007, one with Jolene Blair (Exhibit B) and the other with Terry Gilmore (Exhibit C). Sadly, reading them does not lead to an understanding of how the Special Prosecutors reached their conclusions. Based on the same material, other conclusions are possible.
Here's what the team came up with. According to the Special Prosecutor's Report, "The requisite evidence or facts establishing a link of Dr. Hammond to the Hettrick murder that would designate him as an alternate suspect under the law did not and do not exist." The operative phrase here is "under the law." The reason he's not a suspect is because nobody labeled him as such - but they did treat him as such, if only in a very limited way and for a very short time. "There is no evidence of an act directly connecting Dr. Hammond to the stabbing death of Peggy Hettrick," the report goes on to say.
So, let's talk about evidence and facts and acts.
They say "There is no blood or blood spatter evidence connecting Hammond in any way to Peggy's death." and "There is no fingerprint, hairs, fiber or other trace evidence connecting Hammond in any way to Peggy's death." Well of course there isn't, because nobody ever looked for it. If Hammond's car, garage, basement, office, and clothing had been inspected on the day when Peggy's body was found, who knows what might have turned up? But at the time of the murder, he was totally off their radar. He was just that nice doctor across the street from the body dump site, who was in bed with his wife all night.
There were, incidentally, none of these kinds of evidence to connect Tim, either.
They say, "There is no DNA evidence connecting Hammond in any way to Peggy's death." At the time when the Special Prosecutor's Report was written, nobody seems to have been in possession of an indisputable Hammond DNA sample. What they had was a highly questionable envelope the doctor supposedly licked. How could any lab make a match with anything?
There was no DNA evidence to connect Tim, either.
They say, "No person has ever come forward to claim that Hammond admitted any relation to or involvement in Peggy's death." Oh, this is how we solve crimes? We sit around and wait for a snitch put the finger on someone? Because nobody blew him in, he didn't do it? This is so lame. Especially when the one person who could have most effectively snitched him out was given instant immunity. You heard right. Becky Hammond got a lawyer, not the same one her husband had, and, quoting Terry Gilmore, this lawyer "would not allow the police to talk with her unless she was granted some kind of immunity from prosecution." Gilmore says he talked to his superiors and "then if we all agreed that that was appropriate, okayed it."
Wow, it's that easy to avoid prosecution? Who knew? How come everybody's not doing it? The police, by the way, gained nothing from the Hammond Immunity (doesn't that sound like a Robert Ludlum thriller?). If you look up "stonewall" in the dictionary, Becky's picture is there.
Nobody ever claimed that Tim admitted involvement in Peggy's death, either. Except for the police and Dr. Meloy and the DA's office, that is. When it comes to evidence in the form of possessions or productions, Hammond had at least as much, and would have had way more, if it hadn't been destroyed. The effort put forth was very unequal. The police watched every movie that Tim possessed - Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween II, stuff like that - looking for clues. Of the pornographic films Dr. Hammond actually made, they watched a few and burned the rest.
Hammond had a clean record, they say. So what? Everybody starts out with one of those. Hammond's record was clean - until it wasn't. In 1987, the murder year, his record was no cleaner than Tim's. And later, at the time of Tim's trial, it's only in the most technical sense that Hammond had a clean record. True, he escaped having an official record, because he took himself out before they had a chance to charge and convict him. This is not a very impressive argument.
They say, "In sum, there is no act directly connecting Richard Hammond to the stabbing death of Peggy Hettrick." Well, guess what. There was no act directly connecting Tim Masters to it either - yet he served nine and a half years in prison.
Special treatment equals special relationship
The report contains quite a lot of discussion about Hammond, and finds, of course, no evidence of any non-disclosure problem, or of any special relationships. The party line is, Hammond had nothing to do with any of this, and therefore, nobody could have possibly done anything improper on account of him. Terry Gilmore first said he had never been at the Hammonds' house, then after consulting with his wife, said that he had been. His wife knew Becky Hammond from church. But it really doesn't matter if the Gilmores and the Hammonds, or the Blairs and the Hammonds, were bosom buddies, golfing partners, or barely knew each other. All three families were from the upper stratum of society. Admit it or not, we have a class system in America, and the members of the ruling class protect each other.
Gilmore was the screening deputy when Dr. Hammond was arrested and immediately sent off to a hospital for evaluation of his mental health. Charges hadn't even been filed yet, the police didn't even know what they had, at that point. For all they knew, Hammond's oeuvre might have included snuff movies. Concerning his criminal history, Gilmore told the Special Prosecutors, "I don't recall reading any reports prior to signing or okaying the bond." He was let go, because as Gilmore said, "…the concern everybody had was his mental stability." Isn't that all warm and fuzzy! What about his actions? This guy was caught doing some serious pervert stuff, with victims numbering in the hundreds, and the scope of his activities was as yet unknown. But there was no special relationship, no sirree.
Before killing himself, Hammond wrote a nice bread-and-butter letter to Gilmore thanking him for the leniency and expressing how, as Gilmore says, "He was upset about all the publicity and was angry at the police department…." Awwww. "I berated myself for letting him out on bond," Gilmore says, "because maybe he'd of still been alive." Yeah, and maybe he'd have been held accountable for his wrongdoings, but nobody gives much of a shit about that. And Gilmore's vagueness about the whys and wherefores of Becky Hammond's immunity amounts to willful ignorance.
Here's a question: Why didn't the suicide of Richard Hammond suggest, to at least some law-enforcement minds, that he needed to avoid the consequences of something even more sordid than potty pictures, something much worse, that the police might have been on the verge of learning? After all, everyone used plenty of imagination when conjuring up guilt scenarios for Tim Masters. Why not apply a bit of that creativity to Hammond's situation? What was so desperate to avoid, that he killed himself to escape it?
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain
A mountain of evidence, is what the police had on their hands after Hammond's death. Over 300 self-produced videotapes and a couple of storage sheds full of assorted porn, which flames took over eight hours to consume. Why was it burned? As Gilmore said, "You got a police department that's in possession of all this stuff that they obviously don't want to make public or have disseminated…." Well, if the police can't keep something locked up and undisseminated, who the hell can? That's why they have secure evidence storage facilities. Are we to infer that even if the police locked it up, they couldn't be trusted? Was there a danger that some cops would be selling the dirty movies, or what?
Meanwhile, the case had been "specialed out" - turned over to another jurisdiction. Why? The Jolene Blair interview says, "…people that were on the video tapes might have some relationship to employees of the district attorney's office. I don't know who…." The Terry Gilmore interview says, "I don't think I ever was aware of who they were…." Then who the hell does know? Surely, some living person must still work there now, who worked there then. Why is there a deep, dark mystery about the reason for the removal of the local DA's office from that situation? Aren't these things supposed to be documented? This is the government, right? Gilmore says, "I don't know that I've ever seen that motion." How could he not have seen the paperwork that took away his authority over the case? What was the connection between Dr. Hammond and the DA's office, to cause that office's withdrawal from the case? Why don't we know?
So. The local authorities no longer were officially in charge of Hammond's evidenciary legacy. Yet someone here ordered its destruction. Who? Blair says, "…the City Attorney requested that the District Attorney file a motion for the destruction of those tapes…and I think our office did file a motion to destroy the evidence…" Gilmore says he doesn't remember participating in the decision or signing the request, although he read in the newspaper that he did both. And he acknowledges that involvement by the city attorney's office "wouldn't have happened on a normal basis."
So Quick's report says, in regard to the Hettrick murder, "The defense cannot prove that Richard Hammond 'committed some act directly connecting' him with the crime charged. In fact the weight of the evidence concludes otherwise." The weight of what evidence? Those people destroyed all the evidence. This is, like, so Catch-22. Destruction of evidence in a murder case - isn't that obstruction of justice? Isn't that, like, a crime? What they did here was destroy stuff that should have been evidence in a murder case.
Who was thinking what in '99?
In the four years between March 1995 (Hammond's week of infamy) and March 1999 (Tim's trial), what went on in the minds of the police? In late 1996, the Hettrick case was retrieved from cold storage and reopened in a big way, but still with only one name on the suspect list. Most of the department was deeply engaged in trying, yet again, to build a case against Masters. He was arrested in August of 1998.
After Tim's arrest, Krenning, Mickelson, Sanchez, and Martinez, whatever opinions they might have held, didn't talk to the defense attorneys. Dave Mickelson says he attempted to break the code of silence once, with a passing remark to the Public Defender, tipping him off to look at Hammond. But because Tim wasn't being represented by the Public Defender, the hint fell on sterile ground.
At the recent hearings, Troy Krenning testified that he assumed the defense attorneys knew about Hammond, and knew about Krenning's thoughts about Hammond, and he assumed that they would call if they wanted his take on it.
At the trial, Linda Wheeler-Holloway was a prosecution witness. Only a recognized expert is allowed to give an opinion, but she anticipated that Tim's lawyer might ask her for one anyway, and told the prosecutor "if the defense asked me for my opinion about Master's guilt, that I would tell the truth, which was that I had serious doubts that they were trying the right person. I told Blair that if I was asked the question, that she had better be ready to object to me being asked for an opinion, because I would tell the truth." Although she hadn't yet made the connection between Hammond and Hettrick, frustration with the inadequate investigation of the whole Hammond matter still rankled. There had been more to it than ever got into the papers, and with a little digging, who knows what might have been unearthed?
The point here is: we now know that at least four officers made the connection as far back as 1995. That means the Hammond information should have been part of the discovery material when the trial took place. It's difficult to see how this could be disputed.
Jim Broderick, of course, was still monomaniacally focused on Tim Masters. The report describes him as "meticulous and detailed in his work. He wrote voluminously…" They got that shit right. He wrote so voluminously because he was doing the work we paid Meloy tens of thousands of dollars to supposedly do. One of the documents newly excavated during the hearings is Broderick's chore list from the summer of 1998. The category "For Gilmore - exculpatory covered?" included the item "Take out Meloy ref to doc extractions." This is interpretable as a clear intention to deliberately withhold mention of the Meloy Extractions - one of the four items the Special Prosecutor's office has named in its stipulation list.
Although Lt. Jim Broderick was obviously thinking about how to conceal things, this report emphasizes that there is no evidence of non-disclosure by him, and we are not for a moment to believe that the officer intentionally hid anything, from either the prosecutors or the defense attorneys at trial time. "Our stipulation makes no such finding of intentional hiding," it says. Oh, puh-leeze! (See previous paragraph.) Even if we suspend our disbelief far enough to grant that the trial prosecutors, Gilmore and Blair, were pure as the driven snow, somebody hid and held back stuff. If it was not hid and held back, then where was it, all that time? The Special Prosecutors say, "We found evidence that certain reports and statements were not provided to the trial prosecutors or to the trial defense attorneys…." Well then, who exactly was it that did the "not providing"? If not Broderick, then who? And one issue that no one has even addressed yet is the astonishing number of physical evidence items that have gone missing over the years. That should be a whole separate investigation - which would make, what? Five?
The Special Prosecutors did many things, "including reviewing all of the documents." This is disingenuous. For some time, they were not able to review all the documents, because some documents were kept from them - yes, kept from the Special Prosecutors - until late 2007, when the hearings had already been in progress for weeks. Ever the cowboy, Broderick held on to a plethora of material right up until the very last second and beyond. Not even a subpoena pried the stuff loose until he was darned good and ready to give it up. Even so, we can't know how much relevant paperwork will never see the light of day. He had a lot of years in which to bury it.
Page Previous 1 2 3 4 Next
|
