Empty Promises

was adamant that viable sperm can be present in the vagina from thirty-six to forty-eight hours after intercourse.
    In an attempt to suggest to the jurors that Carole had intercourse with someone else before she went to the library the December evening she died, Marshall asked, “Then how can you say whether these sperm found in the Erickson girl were there just before or just after death?”
    “If they had been there sometime before death they would have migrated further up the vagina,” Wilson said flatly.
    “How many did you find?”
    “Five or six … on the labia at entrance [to the vagina].”
    “Could they not have been deposited up to twenty-four hours earlier?”
    “No. They would have been further up.”
    “Then how could you classify this as rape with so few sperm deposited?”
    “Imperfect penetration,” Wilson answered succinctly.
    It seemed a fine point—and it was—but Nick Marshall was trying to save his client from the death penalty; murder committed because the killer had rape in mind tended to influence a jury far more than murder with other motivation.
    Again, Marshall took particular issue with Dr. Wilson’s statement in direct testimony that Joann Zulauf had succumbed to “asphyxia and attempted rape.” He asked for a mistrial because Wilson had included the rape attempt as a cause of death. Judge Soukup denied the mistrial, but during cross-examination Dr. Wilson qualified his statement by saying that the attempted rape was a “condition associated with death.”
    The most dramatic aspect of Gary Grant’s trial was the admission of lengthy taped interviews between Jim Phelan, George Helland, and the suspect. Grant had been informed that his statement was being recorded, but during pretrial hearings, Marshall and Anderson had fought to have these tapes excluded. In a surprising reversal, the defense attorneys themselves introduced the tapes. It was a calculated risk on their part; they wanted to present the defendant as emotionally disturbed but still, Marshall told the jury, “a human being.”
    The courtroom was hushed as the tapes played for over three hours. Most people never actually hear what goes on during a police interrogation and certainly this jury never had. Hearing the recorded voices of the detectives and the defendant somehow had more power and immediacy for the jury than what was actually going on in front of them in the courtroom.
    Wally Hume told the jury that he and Jim Phelan had waited while polygraphist Dewey Gillespie talked with Grant, preparing him for the polygraph. But Gillespie told them that Grant had pulled back and blurted that he didn’t want to take the test at all. He would rather tell them what had really happened than be hooked up to all the leads and wires.
    “Detective Gillespie walked to the door,” Hume recalled. “He said, ‘I think this is your man.’ ”
    In his expanded statement on the tape, Grant began his story of the events of April 20 exactly as he originally had told Gillespie. This time, however, he added more to his story.
    Gary Grant’s voice on the tape explained that after he shopped for shoes, he had somehow found himself on a wooded trail. He began following two small boys, five or six years old. Because he ducked behind trees and foliage, the children were totally unaware that he was behind them. When they came to a “level area,” Grant recalled that one of the boys stopped to examine something on the ground while the other walked on ahead. Grant stepped out from the tall brush and told the boy to take off his clothes. The child started to cry and refused. At that point, Grant said he pulled out his knife and the little boy obeyed him, removing his clothes down to his undershorts.
    Then Grant said, “I thrusted [ sic ] my knife into him.”
    The other boy, who had gone on ahead, doubled back on the trail and saw his friend lying on the ground. Grant said he pulled a cord out of his pocket and wrapped it around the second boy’s throat until he was dead. Grant’s voice shook as he admitted that he had stripped the boy’s clothes from his body. He also recalled hitting “the lighter-haired boy in the face.”
    He then told of throwing the knife away, walking along the river, falling in, and calling home for a ride. Everything was the same, except that, when he was first questioned, he had completely left out his deadly encounter with Scott and Brad. He insisted that he had no memory of interfering with