Worth More Dead

fearful that they might kill him too and leave him in the woods.
    The men who had abducted Durall eventually returned him to his Nissan Pathfinder and warned him that he must not tell anyone about what he had seen. They ordered him to clean the bedroom of his home and remove all signs of blood in his house. If he told anyone, they threatened to harm his children, telling him that they would make him watch while they killed his children “one by one.”
    And so he had obeyed them, he said in a flat voice devoid of any trace of feeling. He had cleaned up the blood, and never told anyone what had really happened—not until now.
    Unwittingly perhaps, he had invoked the most familiar of all phantom suspects—“The Bushy-Haired Stranger”—so familiar that cops and prosecutors usually just say “The BHS,” for the little man who wasn’t there, and never shows up at all.
    After Bob Durall testified for most of two days, Jeff Baird approached him for cross-examination.
    Just as his computer betrayed him by spitting out the websites he’d checked and his search for romance at Match.com, his emails came back to haunt Durall.
    In one, he had written about hiring “an attorney and a private investigator” to find his missing wife. This was within days after he claimed that he had been warned not to talk to police or tell anyone.
    Baird asked him if the “bushy-haired man who had a good tan” or the “taller man with the gun” had said, “No police, but go ahead and hire a private investigator?”
    “No, those were not their words,” Durall answered stiffly.
    Hadn’t he been suspicious that his wife had been killed in their bedroom? “When you removed the carpet,” Baird asked, “did you associate the big bloodstain with the murder of your wife? There was a lot of blood there. You cleaned up the blood, knowing or assuming it was evidence of a murder?”
    “I thought there was a good chance my wife was killed there but did not know for sure.” He added that he didn’t know the “definition of murder.”
    It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Durall’s story of the deadly strangers would have been unbelievable even in a soap-opera script.
    When he was asked about his list of “bat, bag, pole, hill, gloves, pillow, place, tire, tracks, footprints and disposal,” he said none of these words referred to what had happened to Carolyn; instead, he had written them down to remind himself of baseball, his property in the foothills, and a trip out of town.
    His affect was so flat that it was easy to see why an acquaintance had said, “He’s a cocky guy, but I wondered ‘Is anybody in there?’ ”
    At a time when even a trace of emotion would have helped him get through to the jurors, he spoke of ultimate horror as if he were an automaton.
    Would any of these jurors believe the tale of the killers who had just waltzed out of left field to confuse a flabbergasted gallery?
    Jeff Baird called Durall’s testimony absurd and termed it “the desperate act of a desperate man.”
    After the two hundred exhibits that were entered into the record, the DNA evidence, the scouring of the internet by the experts, and the sophisticated forensic science that connected the defendant to the crime, after dozens of witnesses, things looked bleak for Bob Durall.
    Don Minor did his best, insisting there was no direct evidence. “What you have been presented with is circumstantial evidence,” he told the jury. “You should understand that circumstances can be misleading.”
    Minor wisely did not put Durall’s assertion that he had been abducted by the real killers and then released into the main thrust of his final argument. It’s quite possible that even he didn’t know about that tale until he heard Durall’s testimony along with the rest of the bewildered courtroom. He tried to make the State’s case look as if it were made of smoke and mirrors and assumptions not based in fact.
    “Things that were innocent in nature have been given a sinister meaning,” Minor argued. “Mr. Durall has a need for attention but not a need to kill his wife.”
    Perhaps not. But Bob Durall had told some of his other women that Carolyn would be “better off dead” and that his life would “be easier if she were dead.” He had sighed that he couldn’t bear the thought of her raising their children even part of the time.
     
    The jury stayed out only two hours. When they returned, they announced that they had found Bob Durall guilty