Last Dance, Last Chance

Denny Lee Tuohmy legally sane at the time of the crimes, and had he only succumbed to mental illness in the aftermath? (3) Was Denny Lee Tuohmy legally sane at the time of his crimes, and had he, as some experts speculated, faked a schizophrenic reaction to avoid being tried?
    Special prosecutor Darrell Lee called Cherie Mullins, the dead woman’s daughter, to the stand. Answering his questions, she related the ups and downs of her affair with Tuohmy.
    “Did you hear from him on December 19?” Lee asked.
    “At about six that evening—he called me, and wanted to borrow my car. I told him to leave me alone.”
    “Did you ever see your mother alive or talk to your mother after that phone call?”
    “No.”
    Cherie described the phone call she had received from the defendant the next morning at the nursing home where she worked.
    “Did you see Denny Tuohmy after your mother’s death?”
    She explained her visit to him in jail on Christmas Eve, when she hoped to get some answers.
    “When you found her, did you see marks on your mother’s body?”
    “No, not then,” she answered softly. “Later, at the morgue, I saw that she had black and blue marks on the backs of her hands and on her throat, and her throat was all swollen.”
    Cherie identified the contents of a suitcase that Denny Tuohmy had taken with him the day after her mother’s death. Virtually all of his clothes and possessions had been packed as if he planned an extended trip. She then identified more than a score of letters he had written to her after his arrest. They were not the ravings of a maniac.
     
    The gallery buzzed when Patricia Jacque was called to the stand to tell the jury the chilling story of the hours she had spent with Denny Tuohmy.
    Dark-eyed and delicately pretty, Pat had such a soft voice that it needed to be amplified by a microphone. Yet, despite her seeming fragility, Pat Jacque had displayed a backbone of steel when confronted by the gun-wielding stranger. Her children were in danger, and her instincts to protect them were stronger than her own terror.
    “When did you first see the defendant, Denny Tuohmy?” Paul Acheson asked.
    “I answered the knock at the door,” she said, and then related the terrifying hours that began for her, her children, and her husband.
    “At any time that the defendant was with you,”Acheson queried, “did you notice any odor of intoxicants or drugs?”
    “None…Never.”
    “Was his conversation rational? Was he purposeful in his actions?”
    “Yes. He had a reason for everything he told me to do.”
    Pat darted a look at the defendant, where he sat beside his attorney. He smiled at her as if she were an old friend.
    It was clear to everyone in the courtroom that Pat Jacque had believed that she wasn’t going to survive. She still seemed thankful that she was alive.
     
    Tony Savage bore down heavily on Detective Lieutenant Givens as he asked about Tuohmy’s state of mind during his first contact with the detectives, shortly after he was arrested. Givens recalled that they had talked casually at first about the weather and sports events and that Tuohmy had appeared perfectly competent.
    “And when you questioned him about Fritz Donohue?” asked the defense attorney.
    Givens answered that Tuohmy made complete sense and that he had given excellent instructions about the route they should take to find Fritz, even though he didn’t come right out and admit that he had shot Donohue.
     
    The final days of the lengthy trial might be called the “war of the psychiatrists.
    Dr. Nicholas Godfroy, called by Savage for the defense, stated unequivocally that Denny Tuohmy had been legally insane at the time of his crimes and was a “schizophrenic, undifferentiated type.” Godfroy, who had not interviewed Tuohmy until five months after the murders, insisted nevertheless that he could be positive that Tuohmy had been insane the previous December.
    Throughout four hours of cross-examination by prosecutor Acheson, Godfroy remained steadfast in his original diagnosis.
    The second defense psychiatrist, S. Harvard Kaufman, had interviewed Tuohmy six years after his crimes. Kaufman, too, said he found the defendant to be a chronic schizophrenic. In cross-examination, prosecutor Darrell Lee asked him, “If you saw a patient five months after a crime, could you state what his condition was at the time of the incident?”
    Kaufman replied, “No, there would be no way of knowing.”
    The first