49 Badly Damaged

Cody’s major goal in putting Randy on the stand was to show that Randy was a far different person than the way he had been depicted by the state and its witnesses. It was the only reasonable defense under the circumstances, but it was severely handicapped by Randy’s own innate personality.

Ideally, the best impression Randy could have made on the jury would have been to burst early and easily into tears about the awful events that had happened.

If Randy had been able to cry and portray himself as a man caught up in a maelstrom of tragedy that was beyond his control, he might have been able to create reasonable doubt in the face of all the circumstantial evidence accumulated by the state.

Better yet, such demeanor would have cast the state in the role of the heavy, the persecutor of a man widowed twice by tragic and unforeseeable circumstances; thereby, in his closing argument, Cody could have effectively appealed to the jury to put themselves in Randy’s place: There but for fortune might you have gone instead of Randy.

But Randy apparently wasn’t capable of filling that role. After all, as Donna Sanchez, Donna Clift and numerous others had remarked, Randy never cried. Probably, in his own mind, for so long, Randy had been the hardbitten hero, the Billy Jack who was tough, who fought back when challenged, and who never showed a moment’s weakness.

Moreover, Randy appeared to have a compulsion to present himself as in control of the situation; it seemed to be so much a part of his adult persona that he could not possibly shed it in a convincing manner. Even in his answers to friendly questioning by Cody, Randy seemed to feel as if he had to appear intellectually sharp and emotionally in command.

His words thus struck most in the audience as formalistic, his demeanor rigid, even slightly condescending. Most pointedly, it left the impression, when Randy was describing what should have been the most emotion-laden moments of his life, that he had practiced his speeches in front of a mirror.

Cody began by having Randy provide some of his vital statistics: his age, his birthplace, his early life in Snohomish County and his work history. Cody quickly took Randy through his marriage to Donna Sanchez, his first acquaintance with Tim Brocato, and meeting Janis at the Parents-Without-Partners dance. Randy described life with Jan as fairly typical of other young marrieds. As for Jan’s Pinto, Randy said he only knew that the car had been stolen; if an insurance claim had been put in on it, it would have been Jan’s doing, he said.

After more questions and answers about life with Jan, Cody asked Randy about the first trip to Beacon Rock—the one that Randy claimed he and Jan had first taken the shortcut while with Jalina and Greg. Randy said he probably held Greg’s hand on the way up the trail; he insisted that they had taken the shortcut.

“Now,” said Cody, “to get to this shortcut, how did you identify [it], other than the party ahead of you [that] took this route?”

“Well, this particular section did have railings on both sides, handrailings on both sides of the trail, so we had to actually go through the railing,” Randy said. “Some of the people went between the two rails and some people went over the top.”

Cody continued, taking Randy rapidly through the other events of his life with Jan, before broaching the subject of the Halloween conversation with Tim Brocato.

“Do you recall the discussion that Mr. Brocato related in which he indicated you talked to him about whether he could under some kind of circumstances kill his wife?”

“I don’t recall that conversation having ever taken place, much less on Halloween,” Randy said.

Brenneman noted to herself that Randy hadn’t actually denied the conversation, only said that he couldn’t recall it.

Cody moved up to the events after Thanksgiving at Beacon Rock. Randy said Jan suggested returning to the rock. They walked up the rock, Randy said, and then took the same shortcut they had on the earlier visit. He went over the rail and Jan went under it, he said. They began climbing up the shortcut.

What happened next? Cody asked.

“She stepped down with her left foot and her traction broke away and she fell almost at a forty-five degree angle. Her tracks fell off to the left-hand side and she fell to the left and to the back, but it was basically away from me.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, she did what I had earlier mentioned, that she had actually looked like a cartwheel because the first contact she had with the ground was almost on her head and shoulders, and at that point she did another roll similar to that, but as she was falling, she was falling away from me and it was downhill, and at that point she rolled on her side and disappeared over the edge.”

“Did she make any sound?”

“She hollered when she went over.”

Brenneman was making notes furiously. “Her tracks fell off,” she scribbled. Brenneman thought Randy sounded as if he were describing Jan as some sort of piece of machinery, a malfunctioning tracked vehicle rather than a human being, let alone a wife.

Randy went on to describe his efforts to find a way down to where he thought Jan had fallen. He remembered meeting the Andersons.

“All I can remember saying was, ‘Will somebody come up and help me find my wife? She fell,’” Randy said, adding words the Andersons were positive he never said.

After more questions and answers about the rescue effort, Cody raised the subject of Randy’s role in identifying Jan’s body.

“Well, I can remember not really accepting that she couldn’t be helped, that she was dead yet,” Randy said as Brenneman continued her notetaking. “So I asked that I be allowed to have access to her to actually see her to be with her.”

“And were you allowed to take a look at her?”

“Yes. I don’t recall if Sheriff Blaisdale escorted me all the way to the aid truck or whether there was one of the drivers or the paramedics that was with me when I saw her.”

“And what did you see?”

“She didn’t look as badly damaged as one of the individuals had communciated to me. Her hair was matted down on the side from being bloody, but other than that her face wasn’t damaged.”

First, tracks falling off, now “badly damaged,” Brenneman thought. Randy was talking about Jan as if she had been a machine. Brenneman was surprised he hadn’t used the word “unit” to describe Jan; as in, “the tracked unit was not as badly damaged.” So cold, Brenneman thought.

Randy testified for the rest of the day under Cody’s open-ended questioning, covering the events at the pizza parlor, how Jalina was told about Jan’s fall, the insurance discussions—here Randy likened calling the agent to reporting a car accident—and finally, his conversations with Louise Mitchell about notifying Jan’s family.

The rest of Randy’s recollection of the events immediately after Jan’s death was hazy, with Randy frequently saying he could not recall exactly what had happened. Randy said he didn’t recall taking any envelope from Jalina. He didn’t recall telling Tim Brocato not to ask any more questions, or saying that he didn’t want to have to lie to him. He denied offering to buy the Brocatos’ mobile home and denied helping Tim burgle his own house for insurance proceeds.

Randy’s first day of testimony created a major media stir. Randy refused to be photographed in the courtroom, and Sullivan upheld his request.

Randy’s testimony, Sullivan said, would probably be “the most important hours of his life.” If Randy got nervous or distracted because of the camera, he might have been denied a fair trial, Sullivan added. A lawyer for a television station argued against the ban to no avail, and a photographer for a newspaper who somehow failed to get the word snapped a shot of Randy in front of the now-infamous raft, leading Sullivan to threaten the paper with contempt if it published the photo.

But Randy’s choice of words in describing Jan’s death had caught more than the attention of just Brenneman. One newspaper reported Randy’s remarks about Jan’s cartwheeling and hollering, and quoted his observation that she had not looked “badly damaged.” Both remarks added to the public impression of Randy as a cold, almost robotic personality.

The same paper hunted up Lizabeth, who said that Randy had been raised by his father not to show emotion. “The prosecutors are presenting him as cold-hearted and cruel, but he’s not,” Lizabeth said.

The following day, a Friday, Cody resumed his questioning of Randy. Randy described his marriage to Donna Clift and the incident over Jan’s ashes.

“She didn’t understand why I would have continued to keep it all the years and not have done something with it, with the box, and she didn’t feel that it was proper that I would continue to keep it now that I was remarried,” Randy said. “She didn’t seem to understand that I was unwilling or unable to deal with finding a proper way to dispose of it, as she referred to it.”

Randy said he put the box with Jan’s ashes in the attic and told Donna a fib about what he had done with them.

Later, Randy testified that the problem with the ashes was one reason his marriage with Donna Clift had broken up.

“There always seemed to be some sort of a gray cloud hanging over us about the remains that she had discovered of Janis,” Randy said. “She had strong feelings about that, and I believed that she had carried them over. I was still in an emotional state that I really couldn’t explain or understand at that point on how I was going to deal with it and the fact that I wasn’t allowed to be able to explain why I couldn’t part with those, and she had demanded that I not have them in the house, so I think that probably stayed with the both of us the entire time.”

Also, Randy said, he once saw Donna socializing with some people he didn’t know. He later discovered that the people were planning a marijuana party that Donna intended to go to. Randy said he confronted Donna about this, and Donna acted “a little different.”

“When I say different, she was acting different than I had normally seen her acting while we were together. I asked her who the people were that she was down there with, and she informed me that I didn’t need to control every aspect of her life and there was some socializing that I shouldn’t be restricting her from, and as long as it didn’t bother our home life, I should let her do what she was doing because it wasn’t hurting me.”

Randy gave his, version of the raft trip with Donna, Harvey and Judy, saying that Donna had become hysterical for no reason.

Later in the afternoon, Cody began an interminable discussion with Randy over the tools he owned.

While Cody wanted to establish that Randy owned a large set of tools which he often used at home—in order to undercut the insurance fraud count relating to the faked burglary—one effect of the tool discussion was that for the first time Randy seemed animated during his testimony. For many in the courtroom, it appeared that Randy was far more in love with his tools than any of his wives; he spoke lovingly of screwdrivers, socket wrenches, pliers, chainsaws and other tools.

As for the burglary, in lengthy testimony Randy asserted that the burglary was real, and that his dog Jackson had in fact been drugged the night it took place.

Next, Cody turned to the subject of Mary Jo Phillips. Randy described meeting Mary Jo at the grocery store and later dating her. Soon Cody had him discussing Mary Jo’s decision to move in with Randy and Greg.

“It was at a point when I arrived at her house with my truck and trailer to move her stuff that I discovered she had three more children,” Randy said. “She had two girls and another son from another father, and she also had a very large bird collection. She had, I don’t remember how many cages, but there was over one hundred birds, finches and canaries.”

“And you moved all of that over to your house?”

“I was apprehensive at that point because this was something—it took me kind of by shock at this point, but we were extremely compatible so I decided that I would be able to make a compromise and somehow find a way to make it work.” Randy seemed to be trying to imply that Mary Jo was a bit flakey.

Later, Randy returned to the subject of Jan’s ashes once more, this time asserting that Mary Jo too had found the box in a closet. But Mary Jo had thrown them out with some trash, Randy said. “I was very upset about that,” he added.

Near the end of the day, Cody had Randy describe his Little League activities in an effort to portray Randy as a community-minded person and a devoted father.

But the testimony dragged on and on, and in the end, Randy’s stiff responses to Cody’s questions robbed the whole subject of any mitigating value. In short, Randy seemed more like a self-important bore than a helpful molder of growing children. On that note, Sullivan recessed the trial for the weekend. Randy would return to the stand the following Monday to discuss the most important question: just how his fourth wife, the woman insured for $385,000, had come to drown in Lake Sammamish.