Ajury from Erie County did not decide whether Marjorie Diehl was guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Bob Thomas. The case had received so much publicity in Erie, the only place that Diehl had ever lived, that Erie County Judge Roger M. Fischer granted the defense’s request for change of venire. Instead of moving the entire trial to another county—a change of venue—Fischer got permission from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to pick a jury from Butler County, about one hour and forty-five minutes south of Erie. The jurors traveled to the Erie County Courthouse for the trial, which started with testimony on May 19, 1988, and ended with a verdict on June 1. The Butler County jurors, according to the defense’s rationale, would judge Diehl only on the evidence in her case as the jury heard it, rather than rely, consciously or not, on some stray fact or misconception that they had picked up by reading Erie’s newspapers or by watching local newscasts about the many facets of Diehl’s case—the homicide, the food-filled house, the bond revocation, the claims of mental illness. All of those strange events had made Diehl’s case more newsworthy than most. Adding to the interest was one of the case’s most compelling details—that Marjorie Diehl was unique because not only was she a woman accused of killing a man but also a woman accused of killing a man because she said the man beat her.
Diehl went to trial just as the American public was becoming more aware of the prevalence of domestic violence. Battered woman syndrome had emerged as a legal foundation for self-defense around the time of Thomas’s death, and the fourth edition, text revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2000) would go on to identify battered woman syndrome as a subcategory of posttraumatic stress disorder.1 Diehl’s lawyers intended to present evidence that she suffered from the syndrome and acted in self-defense because of it. The Erie County District Attorney’s Office blocked that strategy, arguing that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had ruled in a 1986 case that battered woman syndrome “has not been recognized in this Commonwealth as a viable defense in the case of homicide.”2 Three years later, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled, in another case, that battered woman syndrome was a viable defense in homicide cases. The justices, citing the latest scholarship on domestic violence, also said the defense had a duty to argue battered woman syndrome if the evidence supported that theory: “Because of the unique psychological condition of the battered woman and because of the myths commonly held about battered women, it is clear that where a pattern of battering has been shown, the battered woman syndrome must be presented to the jury through the introduction of relevant evidence.”3
Diehl’s lawyers had no such precedent on their side in 1988. But they were able to present plenty of evidence of what Diehl claimed was her abuse at the hands of Thomas, who was unstable with posttraumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia with paranoia. The lawyers were legally restricted from arguing a specific defense of battered woman syndrome, but Diehl in her testimony all but said she acted in a way that would have been consistent with an abused woman defending herself. She said she acted out of fear and was in a state of mind knocked out of balance by years of abuse and mental illness. Just as Diehl’s lawyers never argued that she was not guilty by reason of insanity, they also never argued she was not guilty because she suffered from battered woman’s syndrome. Yet the lawyers still presented evidence that, in colloquial terms, suggested that Diehl killed Thomas because she was crazy, a condition linked both to her own mental illness and the abuse she said she suffered, again and again, from Thomas. The prosecution countered with credible evidence that Diehl was indeed crazy, but crazy with a purpose and a plan, and that she plotted to kill Thomas and tried to cover up his death.
For the prosecution, Diehl was a manipulative, cold-blooded killer. For the defense she was, as her lead lawyer, Leonard G. Ambrose III, told the jury, an abused woman whose bipolar disorder only intensified her fear of Thomas, who was also mentally ill, and made her act irrationally in killing him. Perhaps the most telling detail of the defense’s strategy was that Ambrose put two star witnesses on the stand: Diehl and Robert L. Sadoff, the forensic psychiatrist, who testified after Diehl to explain why she acted as she did. “My opinion,” Sadoff said, concluding his direct testimony, “is within a reasonable medical certainty that at the time that Marjorie shot she was in a state of fear for her life.”4 The prosecutor objected, arguing that Ambrose had asked Sadoff to weigh in on the ultimate question in the case—whether Marjorie Diehl was guilty or not guilty by reason of self-defense—and that Sadoff was usurping the role of the jury. Judge Fischer overruled the objection. Sadoff stated his opinion. And several days later, after deliberating eleven hours, the jury from Butler County delivered its verdict.
Diehl’s outbursts had become familiar to the judge and the lawyers in the days and months leading up to the trial—how she would criticize her lawyers during the pretrial hearings and express all kinds of other opinions. Before the jury, she was controlled and even-tempered, despite David B. Paul’s fear that her bipolar disorder would cause her to spout nonsense about voodoo and astrology on the witness stand, and that she would come off as a kind of dangerous freak that deserved no sympathy. That was not the Marjorie Diehl the jurors encountered. They saw more of regular Diehl, dressed in a skirt and blouse, her hair trimmed short and curled, a thirty-nine-year-old woman who, on the day testimony started, had a crown replaced on one of her beloved teeth.5 This was the Marjorie Diehl who told the jury, point by point, and with a calm demeanor, why she opened fire on Thomas as he was on the couch the morning of July 30, 1984.
“I was scared to death at that point,” she testified.6
That was Diehl’s version. Bob Thomas was not alive to tell the jury what happened. To try to prove Diehl’s premeditation, the critical element of first-degree murder, the prosecutors focused not only on the shooting, but also on the events that preceded and followed it—events where other people witnessed Diehl’s behavior and heard her talk. As the defense lawyers and medical professionals had long known, Diehl liked to talk and talk.
She spoke freely when she bought the gun she used to kill Thomas, the .38-caliber snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver, a weapon larger than the .25-caliber Browning automatic handgun she had bought about nine years earlier and still had at the house on Sunset Boulevard. Diehl purchased the .38-caliber revolver, a box of bullets, a gun case, and a gun-cleaning mitt at an Erie sports store on July 25, 1984, five days before she shot Thomas.
“Would this gun kill someone?” Diehl, by her own admission, asked the clerk, according to testimony.7
Diehl also did not dispute what she told the clerk about why she wanted the gun.
“I told her it was for prowlers,” Diehl testified.8
She also raised no challenge to another piece of indisputable evidence—that, when she filled out the form for buying the .38-caliber revolver, she stated that she had no mental illness, though she had been on Social Security disability benefits for bipolar disorder—a designation she had fought to obtain—since January 31, 1984, about five months before she purchased the gun. Diehl at the time was also on Tofranil, the antidepressant first prescribed to her in the mid-1970s. Had Diehl stated she had a mental illness on the forms at the sports store, she would have been prohibited from buying the gun.
John Bozza, one of the prosecutors, asked Diehl if she had answered the question on the form about whether she had a mental illness.
“Yes, sir,” Diehl testified.
“And did you say no?” Bozza said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You lied, didn’t you?” Bozza said.
“No, sir,” Diehl said. “As far as that question is concerned, I don’t consider it a lie because I was never adjudicated to be mentally incompetent,” Diehl said. “As far as I am concerned, that kind of question means do you go before a judge for a mental competency hearing, are you appointed a guardian, like you go to a state mental hospital. I had never been to a mental hospital [in 1984]. I had been to an outpatient mental hospital, but to my knowledge I was declared by the Social Security for work purposes only. I have never been told by the doctor that I am unfit mentally in other ways as far as needing a guardian to that point.”
“I understand,” Bozza said. “So you remember the question, then, that was asked in the questionnaire?”
“I answered you now,” Diehl said.
“And you answered ‘no’ to that question?” Bozza said.
“Yes, I did.”9
Whatever her reason for filling out the questionnaire the way she did, Diehl was clear at trial as to why she bought the revolver. She said it was a belated birthday present for Thomas, who had turned forty-three years old on July 14, 1984. Diehl purchased the gun eleven days later. She testified that Thomas could not own a gun of his own because he was on probation for carrying a loaded .38-caliber handgun without a license in May 1983.10 Diehl said Thomas had also told her, in 1971, when they first met, that his then wife had filed an assault charge against him, claiming he beat her.11 About a month before his forty-third birthday, Diehl said, Thomas started hinting that he wanted a gun: “My birthday’s coming up, you know,” Diehl testified about what Thomas told her, “you can get me something.”12 She said Thomas insisted that she get him only one kind of gun—a snub-nosed .38—because “that was like the one they took from him” when he was charged with carrying a handgun without a license.13 Diehl said Thomas identified the kind of gun he wanted by showing her a picture in The Shooter’s Bible, one of the books police found inside the house on Sunset Boulevard.14
“It got to be daily he got to talk to me about it,” Diehl testified about Thomas’s request for the unusual birthday present. “For a while there it really got to be daily right down there before I did it . . . went and bought it.”15
In the hours after the shooting, when she talked to the Erie police, Diehl never mentioned that she had bought the gun as a birthday present for Thomas. Her remarks, as the police wrote them down, suggested that she had bought the gun as a safeguard against Thomas, who she said had been beating her. “I told him last week that I was getting a gun and I got it,” Diehl said in her statement. “I told him I had the gun when he came after me, and I freaked out.”16
At trial, the defense built its case using Diehl’s explanation that the revolver was in the house only because it had been a gift for Thomas. Diehl testified she told the store clerk that the gun was for prowlers, and not a birthday present for someone else, “because you are not allowed to buy a gun for any other person, especially if the person is already on parole [it was actually probation, and it had expired] for a charge, carrying a loaded gun. You are not allowed to do that. I didn’t want to get into trouble.”17
Diehl also explained why, if the gun was supposed to have been a birthday present, she bought it eleven days after Thomas’s birthday. She spoke about how Thomas had been abusing her around that time, how he beat her when they stood on line waiting for government butter and cheese. She testified she wondered whether Thomas would be dangerous with the gun, but she said she was also worried that Thomas might lash out at her if she failed to get him the gun. Buying Thomas the gun, she hoped, would “appease him.”18
“The reason I didn’t get it for him on his birthday was because I had reservations,” Diehl testified. “I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. I had something telling me, you know, it’s not smart. But, on the other hand, he kept on pounding to me about it. I kept thinking, Well, maybe I could handle it. It will be all right.”19
Her lead lawyer, Ambrose, followed up.
“Did you think that buying the handgun for Bob would help the relationship?” Ambrose said.
“Yes,” Diehl said.
“When you went there that Wednesday to the sports store, did you ever go to that store with the intention of buying this weapon for the purpose of killing Bob?”
“Never.”20
Diehl said she put the gun and the bullets in a spare bedroom when she got home that day, a Wednesday. She said she intended to give Thomas the gun that Sunday night, July 29, 1984, because he was to go to the hospital for treatment of his many ailments on Monday, July 30, the day she shot him. Diehl said she had a party planned for her and Thomas on Sunday night. She said she made Thomas his favorite meal—chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes, salad, chocolate cake, coffee, milk—and gave him the .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver as well as the box of bullets and the gun-cleaning mitt. She said Thomas was thrilled to finally have a .38 again.
“He looked happier than I had seen him in a long time,” Diehl testified. “It was almost to him like . . . losing that gun had been like an extension of himself and finally, finally, he was happy again.”21
She said Thomas promised to train her on how to use the gun, and he gave her advice right away: Never shoot a gun with no ammunition because it ruins the firing pin. Thomas, she said, opened the box of bullets, called them “well-oiled,” and loaded the revolver.22 She said he placed the gun on the coffee table, in front of the couch. It would stay there, Diehl said, until she grabbed it the next morning.
Diehl said she had no idea that watching a movie would have made Thomas so upset. After giving Thomas his birthday present, Diehl said, she suggested they watch a movie on cable television, An Officer and a Gentleman, the 1982 hit in which Richard Gere plays a young man training to be an officer in Navy flight school. Diehl said Thomas watched the movie begrudgingly and, as a disgruntled Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, engaged in a running commentary about how much the Navy had mistreated him and caused his mental problems.23 Diehl said Thomas became enraged at the women in the movie and started hitting Diehl. She said Thomas got upset with her because he thought she was interested in the movie’s star.
“You really go for that Richard Gere guy,” Diehl testified Thomas told her.24
Diehl had hoped, she said, that the night would not end with a fight. Her beatings were obvious proof that she and Thomas had a violent relationship, though Diehl said Thomas could cool off as quickly as he could lose his temper. The night before, on Saturday, Diehl and Thomas had quarreled, she said, when she made him spaghetti, another of his favorite meals. Diehl said she had become exasperated when Thomas said he wanted Parmesan cheese. Diehl did not have that kind of cheese at home. But she had American cheese—thousands of pounds of which were stockpiled inside the place.
“We had tons of food in our house and God knows how many pounds of cheese, right?” Diehl testified. “And he said to me, ‘I want you to go out and get Parmesan cheese. I don’t want American cheese.’”25
Diehl said Thomas had beaten her before when his food was not quite right, so she said she went to the supermarket and bought him Parmesan cheese. She said Thomas was no longer upset.
“He was well pleased with me,” she testified.26
On Sunday night, Diehl said, Thomas was unhappy. An Officer and a Gentleman ended about eleven o’clock. Diehl said Thomas wanted to have sex. She said he pulled off her silk nightgown in the bedroom and forced her to perform oral sex on him. She said he pulled her hair, slapped her, and punched her, and called her a bitch and a whore who was unable to satisfy him after more than two hours of performing fellatio against her will.
“If it was Richard Gere,” Diehl said Thomas told her, “you could get him off, couldn’t you?”27
Thomas went into the kitchen. Diehl stayed in the bedroom. Diehl said he called for her. Now wearing the silk nightgown, she walked into the kitchen, she said, where Thomas, wearing pants but no shirt, again berated her about the oral sex. She said he picked up a knife and cut her on the arm, and that they struggled and she cut him on the chest. She said the knife broke, and Thomas backed off after she pleaded with him: “Oh, God, please, please. I’m bleeding.”28
Diehl said she went back to bed. Thomas, she said, was elsewhere in the house. She said she never called the police. She was concerned, she said, that Thomas would get angrier if she reported him, and she said she worried about the impression she would make on the police.
“I had never called the police when he beat me because . . . I was scared of him,” she testified, “but also if I was to call the police in the middle of the night like that, I can’t know what they would think of me. They might think I was some kind of nut or something.”29
That morning, Diehl said, she found Thomas sitting on the couch in the living room. The loaded .38 was still on the coffee table. Diehl was wearing her nightgown. Thomas, Diehl said, told her to come and sit down. Diehl sat in a chair. She said she listened to Thomas complain about the oral sex and Richard Gere and how she did not love Thomas. Diehl said Thomas raised his hands.
“These hands are lethal weapons, do you know that?” Diehl testified he said. “They can kill you.”
“You are no good,” she said Thomas told her. “I should kill you.”30
Diehl said Thomas reached for the .38 on the coffee table. Diehl said she jumped up and grabbed it first.
“Bob,” she said, “I have the gun.”
She said he laughed and threatened to take the gun from her.
“I believed if he got the gun from me right then and there, he was either going to kill me or beat me within an inch of my life,” Diehl testified.31
She said Thomas again reached for the gun.
Diehl pulled the trigger again and again.
She was scared to death, she testified.
“I had no other choice,” she said. “It was him or it was me, and I couldn’t think. I didn’t have time to think. I just fired the gun.”32
Diehl said she felt numb. She had no idea what she was doing. She changed out of her nightgown, grabbed the cash, filled the two shopping bags with the gun, the telephone, and all the other items, and got into her Gremlin. She drove away.
About six hours later, Diehl arrived at Donna Mikolajczyk’s house with a question: Would she take $25,000 to help get rid of her boyfriend’s body?
The defense also presented what it considered more objective evidence. The defense called two witnesses who said they saw Thomas beat Diehl on food lines four separate times.33 Another defense witness, a paralegal in the county public defender’s office, said she took photographs of Diehl on August 2, 1984, that showed Diehl had bruises or cuts on her body.34 The defense said the autopsy report of Thomas and other forensic evidence proved that Thomas was the aggressor and that he was not asleep or even lying down when Diehl shot him.
Making that argument was a challenge. A firearms specialist had testified for the prosecution that Diehl was standing between seven and two feet away from Thomas when she shot him. The coroner’s report said police had found Thomas lying on the right side of the couch with his feet on the floor, his head lying on an armrest, and a plaid throw blanket covering the lower part of his body. The scene suggested that Thomas, before he was shot, was lying down with the blanket on him, and that he had sat up or otherwise been roused before Diehl opened fire. A pathologist testified for the prosecution that, based on the autopsy, all six bullets entered Thomas in a downward trajectory, including the bullet that severed Thomas’s aorta and killed him.35 The testimony indicated that Diehl had fired at Thomas as she stood above him, and maybe over him.
The defense said the evidence suggested otherwise. In what some spectators considered a turning point in the trial, Ambrose and his cocounsel, Michelle Hawk, presented forensic evidence that they said showed Thomas could not have been lying on the couch when he was shot, and that he was most likely lunging at Diehl when she killed him.36 Ambrose and Hawk had the couch, designed in a flower print, brought into the courtroom. They had a college student play the part of Thomas. A criminologist for the defense placed black stickers on the student’s body to show where Thomas had been shot, and the criminologist placed dowels in the bullet holes in the couch. The criminologist said that, based on the location of the bullet holes, Thomas, when he was shot, was not in the position that the police found him—lying down, with his head on the armrest. The defense said the evidence proved that Thomas was going after Diehl.37 The jurors got a close look at the evidence. Judge Fischer allowed them to walk around the couch and inspect the criminologist’s work.38
The college student gave life, in a way, to Bob Thomas, by standing in for him, and portraying to the jury how the defense believed he was positioned when he was shot. The jury also got to know Thomas more intimately. Sadoff, who had never met Thomas, used Thomas’s psychiatric records to tell the jury about his mental state. Thomas did not come off well. Sadoff detailed how he suffered from the “triple threat” of schizophrenia, paranoia, and posttraumatic stress disorder, and he read from documents that presented Thomas as unpredictable, angry, sarcastic, and manipulative. “Patient presented to be a very withdrawn, apathetic-looking individual who was poorly dressed and groomed,” Sadoff read from a report from March 1983. “He was wearing dirty jeans, dirty shirt and red-colored leather coat which was equally dirty. His hair was disheveled. He was wearing a beard and mustache. He had a blank look in his face.”39
In February 1984, five months before Diehl shot him, Thomas showed up at a hospital emergency room with cuts to his right wrist. As the medical records stated, Thomas had put his hand through a window “in a fit of anger.”40 Thomas complained of flashbacks and nightmares of Vietnam, and he asked for a mental health evaluation. The diagnosis: “Axis I: straight traumatic stress syndrome.”41 A ringing alarm clock would startle Thomas into believing he was in Vietnam, according to medical records, and so would certain kinds of music.42 Once, Diehl testified, she and Thomas were watching fireworks on July 4, and Thomas became unhinged. She said he started talking about the Vietcong and the Vietnamese, and said: “Get down. Get down. We are being fired on.”43
Yet Diehl stayed with Thomas, despite the beatings, despite his post-traumatic stress disorder, despite jealousy and suspicion so extreme that, she said, he once accused her of cheating on him when she was only at a Burger King.44 She stayed with him despite his demand that she get him a gun that the law prohibited him from having. Diehl said she stayed with Thomas for a simple reason: “I loved him.”45 Diehl said Thomas, after the beatings and sexual abuse, was nice to her and promised to stop the beatings. She said he would pick flowers for her, and telephone her, and write letters to her, which she said she particularly liked. “I’m crazy,” she said one letter read. “I know I don’t love you in the normal way, but I love you in my own way.”46 Diehl thrived on the attention.
“I am a romantic person,” she told the jury. “I liked it. I loved it.”47
“We had our good times,” she said. “I cared about Bob and I wanted to believe that he cared about me. We talked about getting married. He wanted a daughter. I wanted to believe the relationship would work out.”48
Diehl’s lawyers had made many points without arguing a battered woman defense. Through Diehl’s testimony, the defense had all but presented her as a victim of that syndrome—a woman who, against her better judgment, kept returning to the man who abused her because she believed his promises to change, to get better, to stop the abuse. At her height (five feet, eight inches) and weight (the police listed it as 145 pounds when she was arrested), Diehl appeared as a sturdy and solid woman, and anyone around her long enough likely felt the force of her incessant talking and her endless verbal demands. But on the witness stand, on center stage in the biggest court case in Erie County in years, Diehl continued to present herself as demure, gullible, and so dependent on men for her sense of well-being that she stayed with a man she said she thought would kill her.
Diehl, under cross-examination, offered another reason she stayed with Thomas and sought no help from the police or a women’s shelter. She blamed what she described as her mental disability. She said her mental illness, combined with the beatings from Thomas, removed sense from her thinking and plunged her into a cycle of abuse that she ended herself with six bullets to Thomas’s chest. “You really get to the point where you are burned out,” Diehl said. “You didn’t stop and think. If you stopped and thought, you wouldn’t be getting beatings and you wouldn’t have four thousand pounds of rotten food in your house and standing in the food line if you had your mind together.”49
For Diehl to make such statements was one matter. For an esteemed forensic psychiatrist to support Diehl’s position was another. Robert Sadoff gave the defense’s theory the imprimatur of medical science. Sadoff, who said he had worked on a thousand homicide cases, testified that Diehl’s mental illness and abuse had made her irrational and impaired her judgment. And when Diehl’s mental state was considered with Thomas’s, Sadoff said, the propensity for irrational behavior multiplied, as two paranoid people tried to live with each other. How else to explain a house filled with rancid food? How else to explain the reluctance to escape an abusive relationship? How else to explain why a highly educated woman would buy a gun and bullets as a birthday present for a man she said she feared?
“It’s the very weapon that could be used against her when he became violent,” Sadoff testified. “So her judgment there in my opinion was also impaired.”50
Ambrose directed Sadoff to answer what the prosecution said was the ultimate question in the case—whether Diehl acted out of fear and in self-defense. “Considering the illness as you have described, the triple threat, her illnesses, all the circumstances, dynamics of the relationship,” Ambrose said, “do you have an opinion, doctor, within a reasonable degree of medical certainty as to what her state of mind was at the time she shot Robert Thomas?” Sadoff gave his response. He said Diehl was afraid Thomas would kill her.51
Ambrose spent ninety minutes on his closing argument. He focused—as United States District Judge Sean J. McLaughlin would more than two decades later, in the Pizza Bomber case—on what had happened to Marjorie Diehl, how her life had derailed. Ambrose held up photographs of her in college, a svelte, smiling young woman who appeared to have a sunny attitude toward life. “What causes a person to go from a person who looks like this to someone who lives like she did?” Ambrose said. “I’ll tell you what does. Mental illness.”52 Given her mental illness, and her impaired judgment, Diehl had no choice but to kill Bob Thomas, Ambrose said. His argument suggested that Thomas was such a threat that Diehl would have been justified in killing him even if she were not bipolar.
“If she hadn’t shot him,” Ambrose told the jury, “this would not be the Commonwealth vs. Marjorie Diehl. It would be the Commonwealth vs. Robert Thomas.”53
John Bozza, the lead prosecutor, spoke for two hours in his closing argument. His remarks echoed his cross-examination of Sadoff, in which Bozza had questioned whether psychiatry was objective or could be considered scientifically reliable: Bozza had suggested then, with Sadoff’s agreement, that psychiatry “is somewhat less scientific than some of the other branches of medicine.” Bozza’s closing argument also touched on his cross-examination of Diehl, in which he had zeroed in on her failure to state that she was mentally ill on the forms for buying the gun. Bozza in those instances implied that Diehl was faking mental illness and that, because of the limits of psychiatry, the diagnoses of mental illness might have been misguided anyway, influenced by Diehl’s constant pressure on the doctors and the social-services system to be declared mentally disabled so she could get Social Security benefits. Diehl, for the prosecution, would have readily committed such a fraud—after all, she had thousands of dollars in cash that, as far as anyone knew, she had never reported to the Social Security Administration.
Diehl, Bozza told the jury, is “a manipulative, calculating woman . . . who is more than willing to lie when it suits her purpose.”54
Bozza all but asked the jurors not to let Diehl dupe them. He said her claim of self-defense failed to match the facts, which he said showed that she bought the .38-caliber revolver and bullets well after Thomas’s birthday; that she asked the clerk whether the gun would kill someone; and that she then used the gun on the morning of July 30, 1984, to “pump six bullets” into Thomas’s body as he was on the living-room couch.55 Thomas, he said, was far from the aggressor. He said the coffee table on which Diehl said the gun had rested was undisturbed when police arrived, and that the police saw the bottom of Thomas’s body covered with the plaid blanket. Bozza said the scene of the crime revealed no evidence of a struggle.56 This was a victim who, before he was shot, was most likely, in the view of the prosecution, in a state of repose.
Diehl’s actions after the shooting drew Bozza’s attention, particularly the $25,000 offer to Donna Mikolajczyk. Diehl was rational when she shot Thomas, and she was rational when she tried to get rid of his body, Bozza said.
“She methodically tried to cover up her deed,” he said.57
The jury of seven women and five men deliberated about five hours on May 31, 1984, and another six on June 1, 1984. Diehl burst into tears in Judge Fischer’s courtroom when she heard the verdict at about 4:45 p.m. June 1: not guilty of homicide and possessing an instrument of crime and guilty of only carrying a firearm without a license. Several spectators in the courtroom gasped.58 Even the defense was surprised. Ambrose told reporters he had anticipated “a compromise verdict,” such as third-degree murder, which is an unpremeditated killing with malice; or manslaughter, but not an acquittal on the homicide count. “A tremendous win,” he said.59 He later said the trial, and Diehl’s endless talking, exhausted him.
“It was literally, in my mind, the case from hell,” Ambrose recalled. “With medication, it would kind of cut off these talks, so you could kind of have some window so you could communicate with her. It would take off the high, what I would call the nonstop verbiage.”60
After her tears stopped following the verdict, Diehl became composed. She spoke briefly to reporters.
“I thank God and I thank the jury and everybody that’s always believed in helping me get through this,” she said. She was asked what she planned to do now. “Talk to God,” she said.61
Diehl had not made such provocative statements on the witness stand, and her calm demeanor might have been her greatest asset. At a trial in which her lawyers sought to portray her as irrational at every turn, Diehl appeared rational in court. The jury foreman said Diehl’s testimony, and how she presented it, “swayed us that she was trying to defend herself.”62 He said the jurors believed Diehl fired six times out of panic, and that Diehl would have only wounded Thomas (by shooting him in the kneecap, for example) had she been able to better handle a weapon and was not in fear for her life.63 The foreman said Diehl showed remorse, and “must have been under an awful strain,” which he said might have contributed to Diehl shooting Thomas six times rather than once.64
“If you’re scared,” the foreman said, “so many things can go through your mind.”65
A little more than a month later, Diehl was back in court for her sentencing on the firearms charge. She was upset. Judge Fischer had let her out of prison following a verdict that stunned even her own lawyers, but here she was, on July 7, 1988, complaining to Fischer that she should have never been held in prison for nearly four years while she had been awaiting trial. She told reporters that she had learned her lesson and was no longer going to get into trouble. In court, where Fischer sentenced Diehl to fifteen months of probation, she said she was not dangerous but had psychological problems and knew herself best, including realizing when she needed medication. Diehl spoke with contempt—at the legal process, at the judge, at anyone who questioned whether she would be a danger now that she was no longer locked up.
“I do believe the only person who can control myself, is myself,” she said. “I know when I need medication or I need a psychiatrist. I am not a dangerous person and I know myself. I am familiar with monitoring my own situation.”66
Fischer told Diehl that he would not order her to take medication while she was on probation; he said only medical professionals could make the determination. Diehl started to sob. She had misunderstood, and thought Fischer was going to order her to take medication.
“It makes me sick,” she said. “I almost died from it.”67
She then declared, “Everybody’s picking on me.”68
Diehl would repeat that sentiment—that she was misunderstood, and persecuted, and the victim of others’ manipulations—in the years ahead. She would make the comments when, still suffering from a bipolar disorder, she would plead guilty but mentally ill to murdering one man and be convicted of conspiring in the murder of another.