The Lost Pilots Page 20

  Tancrel’s testimony also provided the courtroom with some much-needed comic relief after Carson inquired whether Tancrel was a member of the Wallpaper Hangers’ Union.

  “I am not,” Tancrel replied.

  “Did you make some mention of the wallpaper in the lobby of the El Paso Hotel and show Lancaster a copy of what you claimed to be a card from the paper hangers’ union?”

  “No. If I had such a card it would be in my briefcase. I would like to have the briefcase here.”

  “You would need it to answer the question about you being a member of the paper hangers’ union?” Carson mocked. “Now, didn’t you tell Lancaster in El Paso that you had hung thousands of square miles of wallpaper?”

  “Yes, I have,” Tancrel replied. “In my home I have hung thousands of miles of wallpaper.”

  “Then you are a paper hanger?”

  “No, I’m not a member of the paper hangers’ union.”

  “Yet you’ve hung thousands of miles of wallpaper?” Carson asked.

  “Oh, not that many. No paper hanger in his lifetime could hang that much wallpaper.”

  Spectators and jurors alike were clearly enjoying watching Carson toy with Tancrel, who was coming across as a ridiculous figure, but Judge Atkinson put an end to the display by declaring the questioning irrelevant.

  After Tancrel stepped down, Hawthorne moved to the issue of the pistol used in Clarke’s shooting. He and Carson offered, via their questioning of a series of witnesses, competing theories as to why no blood or fingerprints had been on the pistol when it was handed over to the Miami Police Department’s identification bureau. After these witnesses, Hawthorne called the embalmer for the W. H. Combs Funeral Home, who testified that he’d found no powder burns on the side of Clarke’s head. This contradicted the defense’s claim. Carson used his cross-examination to cast doubt on the embalmer’s credentials.

  The final witness that Saturday was the policeman Earl Hudson, making a return appearance. He verified that Lancaster, Jessie, and possibly Ernest Huston had all been in the room when he found the gun. When Hawthorne asked whether any blood had been on the pistol, Hudson said yes.

  “How did you take the gun from the bed?” Hawthorne asked.

  “I dropped my handkerchief over it and slipped the pistol into its box, which I found on the table at the foot of Clarke’s bed. Later I gave the gun to [the] fingerprint man at police headquarters.”

  Carson wanted to prove that Hudson was both an incompetent police officer and a highly compromised witness. He began his cross-examination by emphasizing that Hudson’s sister-in-law, Peggy Brown, had been Clarke’s girlfriend. He also hinted that Hudson himself had provided the illegal alcohol at Jessie and Clarke’s parties by using stocks the police had confiscated during police raids, which Hudson vehemently denied.

  Next Carson directed Hudson’s attention to the pistol used in the shooting. “You say you didn’t put that gun in your pocket?”

  “Yes, I did, after placing it in its box,” Hudson replied.

  “Then you shoved the box in your pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  The box sat on display before the jury. Its hefty size, much too large to fit in someone’s pocket, showed Hudson’s claim to be laughably false. Carson didn’t bother pointing this out; it was obvious to the jury. Hudson was dismissed, and the courtroom adjourned until Monday morning.

  On Sunday, the newspapers delivered a surprise: Jessie was to be recalled by Hawthorne the following morning. As usual, the papers referred to her size, calling her the “diminutive aviator” and emphasizing that she weighed less than a hundred pounds, but a condescending admiration shone through. “Although her intimate life has been shorn of its glamour and held up to the world as a sordid love triangle,” The Miami Herald breathlessly wrote, and “although moments of ardent love-making . . . have been exposed to the cold and critical light of a courtroom trial to become the sensation of suburban housewives the world over,” with her home becoming a “love nest” and a “death house,” Jessie was “showing the fortitude she displayed during her aviation career.”

  The trial was already being trumpeted by the Herald as “the most sensational triangle ever aired in Florida courts,” and the previous week’s media coverage had only increased the public’s already-intense fascination. Now the news that Jessie would face off again with Hawthorne brought unprecedented numbers of voyeuristic onlookers to the courthouse on Monday morning. By 6 a.m. a vast crowd had started to gather in the sixth-floor hallway, eager to witness the proceedings. Though the courtroom was bursting with people by the time Judge Atkinson entered, hundreds more were left standing outside, unable to gain a coveted seat.

  Hawthorne had planned carefully for his second pass at Jessie, intending to expose her as a hypocrite who would do and say anything to save Lancaster’s skin. He began by taking Jessie again through the story of the night of Clarke’s shooting. Jessie repeated how she had been reading a detective story in bed when she heard Clarke go to the bathroom and laugh. (Clarke had been laughing at Lancaster’s story of Tancrel’s wallpaper hanging exploits.)

  “What was your belief when you were shown the alleged suicide notes?” Hawthorne asked.

  “I had no belief.”

  “Didn’t you tell me in my office that you were positive that Bill didn’t write them?”

  Jessie was unruffled: “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “Didn’t I say to you in my office, ‘Are you as sure about the notes as you are that Lancaster didn’t kill Haden Clarke?’ ”

  “You didn’t ask me that,” Jessie protested.

  “Then you knew Lancaster wrote the notes?”

  “No.”

  “Were you shown fourteen discrepancies existing in the notes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you not say that Lancaster didn’t and couldn’t have written them?” Hawthorne’s pace was unrelenting. “Did you say the language made you know Lancaster didn’t type those notes?”

  “Yes,” Jessie answered.

  “Didn’t you assert that Lancaster’s code of honor wouldn’t have permitted him to write those notes?”

  “I did state that.”

  “Then the first time you knew of the forgery was when you asked Captain Lancaster directly at the house after your release [from jail]?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you had asked him if he had killed Haden Clarke and had received the answer yes, would that have surprised you more than the admission of forgery?”

  “Most decidedly,” Jessie replied.

  Hawthorne had reached the culmination of this line of pursuit: “Although you had stated to me previously that you were as positive that Lancaster had not written the notes as you were that he had not killed Haden Clarke?” Confident that he’d made his point to the jury, Hawthorne assumed a gentler tone.

  “Do you still love Haden Clarke?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you love Lancaster?”

  “No.”

  “When did your affection die for Lancaster?”

  “About two years ago.”

  “Did it die a natural death?”

  “Yes. I am still intensely fond of him.”

  “Was there anything Lancaster did to cause a natural death of your love for him?”

  “No.”

  Abruptly Hawthorne’s tone changed to one of indignant accusation: “Then why did you deliberately betray him in every letter, telegram, and telephone message to him? Weren’t you a traitor to him during all that time when he was sending you even single-dollar bills in his letters?”

  “Objection!” Carson shouted.

  Hawthorne tried again: “Weren’t you a deliberate traitor to Lancaster in all those letters, in all those telegrams, all those times you said ‘all my love to you’?”

  Jessie’s response was steely but seemingly heartfelt. “Mr. Hawthorne, you don’t understand the feeling that exists between Captain Lancaster and myself,” she s
aid. “We have been through hardship and misfortunes. We were pals, not ordinary friends. We trusted each other.”

  Hawthorne moved on. “So you no longer love the memory of Haden Clarke?” he asked.

  “No,” Jessie said firmly. “I have been completely disillusioned.”

  “By what?”

  “Proofs.”

  “Are you referring to his illness?”

  “Among other things.”

  When Hawthorne pressed her to explain, Jessie said, “I believed in, trusted, Haden Clarke, and he lied to me.”

  “Did he lie about his love for you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. . . . He lied to me about his age, his university degree, he told me he had never had that malady before, he lied about things he had done.”

  “Then the principal thing that killed your love for Haden Clarke was because he was a liar?”

  Jessie said it was.

  Now Hawthorne was positioned to make his larger point: that Lancaster was no more truthful than Clarke. “Do you know [Lancaster] pleaded guilty of a crime for which he was not guilty to save you?” he asked.

  “He always tried to save me, to help me.” To Jessie, this was a sign of Lancaster’s honor, not of dishonesty.

  “You don’t love him even though you have said you would die for him?”

  “No.”

  “You’d lie for him?”

  Hawthorne intended, with his question, to put Jessie on the defensive, but this time she was ahead of him. “No,” she countered, “because you would know.”

  At Jessie’s answer, the courtroom erupted in noise, the spectators buzzing about her verbal parry. Judge Atkinson pounded his gavel to silence the crowd. Hawthorne, undeterred, plunged forward.

  “One of the principal things you admire in Lancaster is his code of honor?” he asked.

  “Yes. He is one of the finest men I ever knew.”

  “He’d steal for you, wouldn’t he?”

  Hawthorne’s approach was crafty, but it was met by Jessie’s ire: “He doesn’t steal,” she icily replied.

  “Didn’t he steal a chicken for you?”

  Abruptly the interrogation veered into comedy: “No,” Jessie said. “It was a duck.”

  At this the courtroom convulsed with laughter, which, despite the bailiffs’ concerted efforts, continued uproariously for several moments. His momentum lost, Hawthorne approached Jessie from another angle.

  “Do you know Lancaster has a wife?” he asked. Before Jessie could answer, Hawthorne continued: “From whom he is not divorced?”

  “Yes, but—” Jessie managed, before Hawthorne interrupted: “And two little girls?”

  “Yes,” Jessie admitted.

  Carson shouted his objection. But Hawthorne’s point had been made: Lancaster was a man who had abandoned his helpless family, a far cry from the upstanding individual that Jessie had made him out to be.

  Hawthorne wasn’t finished. Referring to an earlier incident in Miami, he said, “If Lancaster committed perjury to save you from the penalties of a fine for driving after you’d been drinking, did that increase your admiration for him?”

  “Objection!” Carson said.

  “You said earlier that you intended to marry Lancaster, that you believed it was inevitable?” Hawthorne asked.

  “Yes, I always felt that when Bill was free from his wife in England I would marry him.”

  “But you weren’t in love with him?” Hawthorne pressed.

  “Being in love and just loving a person are two different things,” Jessie answered, returning to her earlier point. “I was not thrilled or infatuated with Lancaster, just terribly fond of him.”

  “Were you infatuated with Clarke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now you do not even love his memory?”

  Jessie, who had been fighting all morning to keep her emotions in check, finally lost her composure. “No,” she said, starting to cry. “Unfortunately, no.” Turning away, Hawthorne pronounced his questioning complete. As Jessie left the stand her tears turned into sobs, and she bawled to a friend at the door that she was being “crucified.” She was taken into a nearby room until her weeping subsided.

  The other significant moment that afternoon came when Carson recalled the attorney Ernest Huston to the stand. Seeking to prove that Lancaster hadn’t wiped any fingerprints from the pistol, Carson had Huston describe how he’d watched Earl Hudson, the policeman, wrap the gun in a handkerchief and slip it into his pocket. Contrary to the policeman’s testimony, Huston said Hudson had not put the pistol into its box.

  “Was there blood on the gun?” Carson asked.

  “It was running with blood,” Huston replied.

  At 2:50 p.m. Hawthorne rested the state’s case. He had been unable to locate his intended final witness, Fitzhugh Lee, the driver of the police emergency vehicle that had responded to the emergency call from 2321 S.W. 21st Terrace on the morning of the shooting.

  After the jury was excused from the courtroom, Carson moved that all exhibits except the pistol, the bullets, and the photographs of Clarke be withdrawn, and that all testimony except that of Dr. Carleton Deederer and the undertaker be stricken from the record. He argued that all of the evidence advanced by the state except in “isolated instances” was circumstantial. Carson did not, however, move for a directed verdict in favor of his client.

  “The fact that the defendant made a statement that he would ‘get rid’ of the deceased is certainly not circumstantial,” Hawthorne countered, before listing other examples of non-circumstantial testimony. Judge Atkinson quickly rejected Carson’s motion, and the jury returned to the courtroom.

  For the first time in the trial, Lancaster, his voice sore and, in the words of the press, “heavily British-accented,” was called to the stand.

  18

  A TISSUE OF LIES

  The months Lancaster had spent in jail awaiting trial were evident in the pronounced pallor of his skin, highlighted by the midafternoon light, as he took the witness stand. His eyes were bright and clear against the paleness of his flesh, and they darted over the room as he responded to Carson’s questions. Lancaster answered Carson slowly, invariably hesitating before he spoke, but his manner was clear and direct. Frequently he paused to wipe the sweat from his chin; the August heat was suffocating for witnesses and spectators alike.

  Carson’s interrogation kicked off at a leisurely pace as he focused on giving the jury a complete picture of Lancaster the man, not Lancaster the disgraced aviator. Carson began with Lancaster’s birth in 1898 and proceeded through his family life as a child; his schoolboy days; his service with the Royal Air Force before and after the war; his relationship with his wife, Kiki; his first encounter with Jessie at a London party; and their meeting the following day at the Authors’ Club in Whitehall. The story quickened as Lancaster described his and Jessie’s record-setting flight to Australia and their sudden celebrity. Carson made sure Lancaster emphasized that he and Jessie had shared one-third of their profits with Kiki. This information, Carson hoped, would make Lancaster’s abandonment of his family seem less harsh.

  Nods of recognition began to appear in the courtroom as Lancaster told of his arrival in America with the crew of the Southern Cross and his subsequent travails, including his crash in Trinidad. These events had been covered in the newspapers and were familiar to many in the room; they brought back the days when Lancaster’s reputation, unsullied, had been that of a heroic aviator.

  At 5 p.m. Judge Atkinson recessed the court. Lancaster had been on the stand for two hours, narrating his life up to the point of his initial association with Latin-American Airways and his departure with Russell and Tancrel for Arizona.

  Media reports that evening were critical of Carson for proceeding so painstakingly through Lancaster’s life, and for building such a complete portrait of events unrelated to Clarke’s shooting. Carson’s goal had been to humanize Lancaster, to present him as a sympathetic, fully rounded individual, and indeed,
many in the courtroom appeared to find Lancaster an appealing figure on the stand. But to jaded newsmen—not to mention Hawthorne—Carson’s presentation had been ponderous and unnecessary.

  The next day, August 9, four hundred people crowded into the courtroom in the morning, while two hundred others lined up in the corridor in hopes of gaining entry. Perhaps stung by the media’s criticism of his performance, Carson began his questioning by addressing the crucial issue: “Captain Lancaster,” he asked, “did you kill Haden Clarke?”

  “No, I did not,” Lancaster answered calmly, without obvious emotion. His unruffled manner had the effect, perhaps counterintuitively, of making his answer seem more believable.

  A satisfied Carson, in his trademark white suit, resumed his exploration of Lancaster’s history. “When did you first find yourself in love with Mrs. Keith-Miller?”

  “Mrs. Keith-Miller and I suffered many dangerous trials on the trip to Australia,” Lancaster said. “I grew to admire her character. We suffered many things together. I am sure I was intensely in love with her on our arrival.” The previous day Lancaster had spoken of how Jessie’s courage and cheerfulness in the face of adversity had endeared her to him. He admitted that by the time they reached Persia their level of intimacy had exceeded friendship.

  “Was it physical passion or unselfish love?” Carson asked.

  “Both.”

  “In Australia, on how many occasions did you have intimate relations with Mrs. Keith-Miller?”

  “I can’t remember, although I am sure it was not many.” Given their newfound celebrity, Lancaster explained, he and Jessie had found few opportunities to be alone.

  “And your love for Mrs. Keith-Miller increased or decreased during the years?”

  “Increased.”

  “When did you first meet Haden Clarke?”

  Lancaster consulted his diary, which he had brought to the stand. “February 9, 1932,” he replied. “We had met in New York before, he told me, but I didn’t remember him.”