… IT IS MORE THAN five years after Franklin J. Bradshaw’s death. At long last the murderer has been found, tried, and convicted.
“No clues,” the cops had said the day it happened. There were clues, but not the kind police usually look for. The clues were hidden within the dead man’s family. To a degree they had been covered up by the family. Franklin Bradshaw’s family—as utterly, achingly ordinary a family as one can imagine—would appear to have nurtured at least one, and possibly two, or maybe even three criminal psychopaths: a mother and her two sons.
The mother’s trial is to begin today, Tuesday, September 6, 1983. The sons already have been sent to prison, one of them for murder, one for attempted murder. Having convicted one son of the crime, the State now contends it can prove that it was his mother who forced him do it. Her motive was money. She feared her father was about to cut her out of his will.
The defense will challenge the State to prove its appalling contention. It will assert that this mother, far from being her son’s accomplice, is the innocent victim of a monstrous family frameup. It will portray her son as a kid vicious enough to shoot his grandfather in the back, then rifle his pockets; a boy so evil that when finally cornered, he would attempt to lessen his punishment by blaming his own mother.
The proceedings will finally get under way at nine o’clock, the morning after Labor Day. It is the first day of school, and eastern visitors out walking down Main Street early on this bright morning, away from the Mormon Temple and toward the Hall of Justice, are struck by the extraordinary numbers of children on the streets. Shoals of children, mostly blond, flow along the avenues, the smaller ones in arms, in strollers, or toddling behind very young, handholding parents. Brigham Young had begun laying out his city of Zion on the very day of his arrival here, and the major thoroughfares are eight lanes wide, that being the space required for an oxcart to make a U-turn. Oxen, unlike horses, cannot be taught to back up.
Salt Lake City is acutely aware of its origins, and breathtaking in its setting—a long, green ribbon of valley between barren deserts at the foot of mighty mountains beside the Great Salt Lake. Numerous monuments decorate the broad intersections on the promenade between the temple and the courthouse. One bronze tableau depicts an entire Mormon family pushing a handcart across the plains. There are huge statues of honeybees, and sea gulls, creatures which became part of Mormon iconography by helping the first families of settlers to survive in the wilderness. Most memorable are the many idealized sculptures of boys and girls in stone and stucco and marble and bronze; so many children abound that the visitor half expects to come upon the Pied Piper somewhere up ahead. But at the end of the line of statuary, at the foot of the courthouse steps, there is only a grim reminder erected by the Elks Club, the one unsentimental monument in view: a polished granite scroll with the Ten Commandments deeply incised in black stone.
The Criminal Courts Building is a standard postwar municipal structure of landscaped glass and concrete, cozy as an airport. The third-floor courtroom is small, round, windowless, bright blue, and air-conditioned to bone-chilling temperatures.
The most interesting-looking man in the room is Mike Rosen, chief defense attorney. He has a deep tan, pale hair, perfect teeth, gorgeous profile, stocky body, cocky air, and a strong Brooklyn accent. He is from the New York law firm of Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, headed by the brutally powerful Roy Cohn. Cohn himself will not appear. He never does. He always works behind the scenes. How or whether he will manage this in Utah is unknown. So far, the Cohn office has unspooled a creative series of delaying tactics which has stalled the proceedings against its client for over a year, not an inconsequential achievement in a case wherein the victim, his wife, his cronies, friends, and enemies had all attained the biblical age of three-score years and ten.
As the trial begins, no one really knows how strong a case the prosecution has. The prosecutor himself is not sure. His two key witnesses have been granted full immunity in return for their testimony, a circumstance which will allow the defense to make much of the issue of “reasonable doubt.”
The strongest corroborating witness against Frances Schreuder could be one of her sons—both their names are listed among the more than fifty potential prosecution witnesses—unless it can be shown that the son is also an accomplice. The law does not permit one accomplice to corroborate another.
The slim old lady sitting alone over there, smartly dressed in navy blue dotted swiss, hiding her face behind big blue sunglasses—surely she must be the defendant’s mother. Berenice Bradshaw is a Mom cut from the lid of a Mother’s Day candy box. She is eighty years old, and when she first stands up she lists slightly, and shuffles more than she walks. She is a bit deaf too. But behind her spectacles is a heart-shaped Claudette Colbert face, tanned and well preserved, framed by thick and curly gray hair.
On campus at the University of Utah, where Frank Bradshaw first noticed her, Berenice Jewett was considered a good-looker, and she is still astonishingly pretty for a woman of her years. How extraordinary that this otherwise average old lady, looking like a paper cutout of Mrs. Middle America, should find herself in such a wild predicament—waiting for the curtain to go up on a murder trial where she is at once the widow of the deceased, the mother of the defendant, the grandmother of the perpetrator, and the bankroller of the entire legal carnival.
On the eve of trial, Berenice Bradshaw has toted up her legal accounts and found she now has more than thirty lawyers on her payroll. The fee for the trial about to begin is a cool million dollars, payable in advance. It has been paid.
Two points of law are important. The first is the matter of “aiding and abetting.” Like most other states, Utah considers anyone who aids and abets the murderer to commit the crime to be just as guilty as the person who actually pulls the trigger.
Pecuniary interest is also an issue. Utah, like most other states, regards murder for profit as a more heinous crime than murder committed in passion, whether that passion be love or hate. To convict Frances Schreuder of first-degree murder, the prosecutor will have to show that she had a “pecuniary interest” in directly soliciting her father’s death. On the other hand, if the defense can show that Frances lacked pecuniary interest, they can get the charges reduced to second-degree murder, not a death-penalty offense.
Utah is unlike all other states in its attitude to capital punishment. Not just three fourths of the people but ninety percent of the officeholders and public officials in Utah are Mormons, more or less committed—depending on the level of their orthodoxy—to the old Mormon doctrine of blood atonement. This is why Utah retains the firing squad as one method of execution. The majority of Utah’s citizens do not merely approve the death penalty, they demand it, the state religion demands it. The situation has made people in Utah especially touchy about charges of barbarism. In the wake of Utah’s last big murder case, the Gary Gilmore circus, such charges were particularly stinging, and in response the legislature modified the law so as to grant every person charged with a capital crime a two-phase trial. In Phase One, guilt or innocence is determined in the usual manner. If the verdict is guilty, Phase Two determines whether or not the death penalty shall be imposed, or whether life in prison is sufficient punishment. Phase Two is essentially a referendum on the defendant’s moral character.
Utah offers those persons who do receive the death sentence a final choice: lethal injection instead of the firing squad. The state used to offer a third choice, death by hanging, but so few people chose the gallows that some years back this option was dropped from the menu.
It is well to remember that a murder trial is not a window onto reality. It does not show what actually happened. A trial is a carefully constructed play for a carefully selected audience—twelve people. Rather, it is two plays. Neither is “true.” Neither is “complete.” Each is a version of reality, very heavily edited. After the final curtains—the two summings-up by the opposing lawyers—jurors are invited to vote their preference. To put it another way: trials are designed to exclude as much as to include information. The one about to begin will exclude plenty.
The prosecutor gets to his feet and begins speaking quietly. He explains to the jury that the murder in question occurred more than five years ago. His evidence will focus not on the individual who has already been convicted of the crime, but on the person who ordered the execution, his mother. The defendant sits beside her lawyer, her back to the courtroom.
She is a small woman, expensively dressed in silk and camel’s hair, with chopped black hair. As the county attorney describes the events leading up to the death of Franklin Bradshaw and the ultimate arrest and conviction of his grandson, the defendant appears to be gazing steadily at the jury except when she makes notes on a legal pad with a gold-and-ivory pen.
“This is a woman driven by greed,” the prosecutor concludes. “And power. And the desire for money … a woman who would destroy virtually anyone who got in her road, who blocked her access to money. This is a woman who ordered her own son—her own flesh and blood—to kill her own father.”
Mike Rosen walks coolly to the podium. He introduces himself, spells out the name of his law firm, walks back to the table where his client sits and, standing directly behind her, places a protective hand on each shoulder and says, “I represent this human being. I represent no one else…
“Okay, now I am going to try to scare you. But what you are going to do here is probably the most serious thing you have ever done in your lives, outside of your own family … This is a capital case. They are going for the death penalty in this case. But … before they can do that, before they can put Frances’s life on the line, they have got to convince each and every one of you individually that they have met their Constitutional burden, their burden which never shifts—never—and that is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
He points to the empty witness chair. “That’s where it’s coming from!” he snarls, as if the chair were a poisoned well. But “Frances Schreuder as she sits here today is as innocent as you, me, His Honor and Mr. Jones … Her presumption of innocence protects her like a coat. Only if they prove it does her coat come off. Remember her plea: Not Guilty. Those are magic words in this country. Those magic words say: Hey! Those charges—I say no! You prove it! That’s America … That’s what this trial is all about. Will the system work? The system works when you get twelve people, and a judge who gives you the law, and a defense lawyer who is not going to quit until the truth comes out …”
This high-voltage Brooklyn lawyer is very different in style from the drawling Utah prosecutor. How will his intense manner go over with these jurors? Their faces—seven women, five men—are attentive, carefully composed, as unrevealing of their feelings as the statues in their streets.
“The prosecutor told you there was tension in the family. Of course there was tension in the family! Of course there were problems … I am not going to stand up here and insult your intelligence and say that a family, with brothers or with sisters, and with wealth—there are no problems! Would they be a human family if there weren’t problems?”
A silence. He wants the full attention of his audience of twelve. One of them had, himself, expressed the matter best, the lawyer says, during the intensive voir dire questioning which took place last week out of public view.
“Look, Your Honor,” the prospective juror had said, “you can pick your friends. But you sure can’t pick your family!”