Practice to Deceive

Douglas’s mother, Gail O’Neal, stepfather, Bob, sister, Holly Hunziker, and her husband, Victor, were there. His father, Jim Douglas, was on Skype from Alaska. It was over, at least until Huden’s formal sentencing, and as that sunk in, the Douglas family began to cry softly.
    Jim Huden would remain in the Island County Jail until the sentencing date Judge Churchill chose. It would take almost exactly a month. Sentencing was set for the afternoon of August 24.
    Prosecutor Greg Banks commented that he planned to ask for an “exceptional sentence” for Jim Huden because the murder had been so coldly premeditated. That might mean as much as a thirty-one-year prison sentence—until Huden was ninety years old.
    “And even that does not come close to accounting for the malevolence of this crime,” Banks added.
    * * *
    S HIRLEY HICKMAN, MY COURTROOM assistant for this book, is married to Lloyd Jackson, and knows many of his and Jim’s longtime friends.
    “I feel so sorry for Jim’s friends: Lloyd, Dick Deposit, Jeff Gaylord, Ron Young, who have known him for so long and can’t believe he’s capable of such a terrible crime,” Shirley told me. “They are all suffering through this ordeal. It’s almost as if their youth was a lie, and now someone they trusted and loved is not who they thought he was. Or maybe he was, but something or someone influenced him in this tragedy.”
    * * *
    J IM HUDEN’S SENTENCING WAS moved ahead a few days, and he was back in court on August 21 at 9 A.M .
    Greg Banks categorized Russel Douglas’s murder as “the most egregious, atrocious, premeditated crime,” and said that Huden deserved no leniency.
    Several offers of leniency had been offered to Jim Huden if he would cooperate and help the prosecutor and investigating detectives understand why Douglas was murdered. They all believed that he had been heavily manipulated by the woman he was passionately in love with at the end of 2003: Peggy Sue.
    But Jim had never said anything that might damage her or help to convict her.
    His only counteroffer was not one they could even consider. He didn’t hint at what he might tell them, but he had offered to cooperate if his prison sentence would be set at only ten years.
    Greg Banks pointed out that Russ Douglas’s murder was cold-blooded, calculated, and planned well in advance.
    “He had many opportunities to change his mind,” Banks said, “but he carried through with the planned assassination of someone he didn’t even know !”
    Banks’s suggestion for sentencing was eighty years, considering that Russ’s two children each faced forty years without a father. He also recommended financial restitution that Jim Huden was responsible for: approximately thirteen thousand dollars for the prosecution costs, thirty-six thousand dollars for Dr. Jon Nordby, and reimbursement to Russel’s father, Jim Douglas, for burial expenses.
    Jim Douglas and Russ’s brother, Matthew, gave their victims’ statements through Skype. His stepfather, Bob O’Neal, his mother, Gail, and sister, Holly, made eye contact with Huden as they spoke of the terrible loss they had suffered because of the coldly motiveless murder.
    “I gave him his first hug,” Gail O’Neal said, “but I wasn’t there to give him his last hug . . . In one split second, you pulled the trigger and you killed Russ. And you changed our lives and futures forever.”
    Unlike Jim’s mien throughout his trial, he did meet their eyes, but he never changed expression.
    They all had the same question: “Why? You didn’t even know him!”
    “He was a good father to his children,” Gail O’Neal said. “He was in no way an abuser. You must have listened to someone else and someone needs to own up; someone needs to tell the truth so that this family can put it behind us.”
    But Jim Huden had no statement to make. Was he protecting someone—or was he hoping to file an appeal for a new trial? His attorney said later that that was why Jim didn’t say a word.
    Judge Vickie Churchill sentenced him to eighty years, while telling him that everyone needed to know why. “There is something more to this case, and we all know it. Anything else is just crazy.”
    And of course it was.
    After Jim Huden was handcuffed and led from the courtroom, the judge offered her sympathy to Russel Douglas’s family, and urged them to move on with their lives in a positive manner, in the hope that would help them in the healing process.
    Once