Stony River (47 page)

FEBRUARY 23, 1960
. Linda prayed that God wouldn't let her stumble on her way to the witness stand or stammer once she was sworn in. The man on trial today for assaulting her had been found not guilty of the attempted kidnapping of two other girls last month and the police were relying on Linda to put him away.

Her head was choking with advice from Mr. Krueger, the prosecuting attorney. Look at the jury when swearing on the Bible. Look at the attorney when he asks you a question but the jury when you answer. Speak so the juror farthest away can hear. Don't make jokes, lose your temper, slouch or chew gum. Keep your hands in your lap. Say yes sir, no sir and Your Honor. Stay alert. Listen carefully. Answer only the question asked. Don't say “I think” or “In my opinion”; just the facts, ma'am, as Joe Friday would say. Always tell the truth. Relax, you'll do fine.

Daddy drove to the courthouse in Elizabeth, Mom beside him. Linda sat in the back seat wearing a white-collared black dress Mom had constructed to be “slimming and serious” under a tentlike coat from Montgomery Ward. She'd lost sixty pounds since her mother began the Linda Project, but she was still fodder for blimp jokes. Climbing the steps of the imposing courthouse, she couldn't recall how they'd gotten there. Mom and Daddy went into the courtroom while she sat in a small, airless room with a police officer, feeling like an egg waiting to be cracked.

The officer accompanied her to the courtroom, opened the door and escorted her, as a bride's father might, down the short aisle and through the gated fence separating the audience, like parishioners, from those taking part in the ceremony. He delivered her to a man with a Bible.

Her voice in the hushed room sounded as if it had traveled a great distance.

As she sat in the witness chair, the edges of the room began to blur and she didn't feel fully present in her body. Tall and lean with a high forehead and pale eyebrows, Mr. Krueger had a disapproving set to his mouth. With her parents present because she was not yet eighteen, he'd rehearsed Linda on the questions he would ask. Linda's mother had cried at what she heard and her father had hung his head. They were hurt she hadn't told them before, but when had the three little Wises ever told each other anything that mattered?

Look at the jury
.
Keep your hands in your lap
.

The answers spilled out easily, and although she'd related the events of July 8, 1958, many times in Mr. Krueger's courthouse office, tears still broke and ran down her cheeks as fast as she could wipe them away with the hanky, smelling of roses and lavender, that Mom had taken from her sachet drawer and given her for the day.

Linda took a deep breath before identifying the man who'd attacked her. The audience laughed when she said Georgie Porgie. The judge banged his gavel. The defendant's name was Eldon Jukes, not Georgie. He looked different in his navy blue suit, white shirt and striped tie. When she pointed him out in the courtroom, he gave her that same sweet smile.

The courtroom
did
remind her of church: women in hats and gloves and men in suits on pew-like benches, she at the front bearing witness, an inspirational half-sun window over the double doors that revealed a chandelier throwing off light sparkles brilliant enough to have come from God's fingers. Everything else—walls, floor, tables,
chairs, the judge's bench, the railing—was as brown and uninspiring as dirt.

The defense attorney, a Mr. Sawicki, had fat cheeks and a gummy smile. He looked at her sympathetically, said that what had happened to her was terrible, just terrible, the only thing worse would have been if there had been penetration and was he correct in his understanding that there hadn't been penetration? Yes, he was correct. She liked him right away.

Mr. Krueger had said the defense attorney might get nasty and ask her intrusive questions about her sexual history. That wouldn't take long, she'd joked. As it turned out, Mr. Sawicki had only a few questions, his eyes half-closed when he asked them, as though he were thinking of something far away and pleasant. She wanted to close her eyes and bob like a cork in his sea of hypnotic words. She hadn't slept the night before and the room was warm.

Stay alert
.

Mr. Sawicki asked whom she sought out after the assault for comfort or medical treatment: her parents, a friend, a doctor? No one, she said, she was too upset and ashamed. Of what would she have had to be ashamed? Getting into a stranger's car. Did she save any ejaculate on a tissue or cloth for later examination? No. Her statement said her assailant picked her up when it was starting to get dark. Exactly what time was that? She didn't know; she hadn't worn a watch that day because she didn't want to lose it at the beach. Was it before dinnertime or after? Oh, after. She and her friends had eaten at the shore before they headed back to Stony River. How long did the attack take, from the time her assailant picked her up to when he dropped her off a few blocks from her home? An hour at least; it had felt longer. Did she look at a clock when she entered her house after the attack? No, but Tony's Garage was closed so it had to have been after seven. Right after seven or much later? She didn't know. Did anyone see her getting in the
assailant's car or leaving it? Not that she knew of. Did she have a boyfriend? No.

No further questions.

The judge said she was free to leave the stand and sit in the audience. She felt dismissed, as though she, not Eldon Jukes, had done something wrong. She stood and passed through the gate. She wanted to keep walking out of the courtroom, down the elevator and onto the street, but her father's arm was around her shoulders guiding her to a seat between him and her mother. “You did fine,” Daddy whispered. “Just fine.” Mom patted Linda's hand.

To show a behavior pattern, Mr. Krueger brought up the recent attempted kidnapping charge against Eldon Jukes and noted that Eldon Jukes had been identified as giving the missing Evelyn Shore a ride. Mr. Sawicki objected on the basis that Eldon Jukes wasn't on trial for those cases. The judge told the jury to ignore Mr. Krueger's comments.

Mr. Krueger entered into evidence Eldon Jukes's A&P timesheet for July 8th, showing he had finished his shift at 4:30
PM
. He called in a meteorologist who said sunset on July 8th began at 7:30
PM
, when you could reasonably say, as Linda had, that it was “beginning to get dark” and lasted until what was termed “civil twilight” at 8:03. Mr. Jukes would have had sufficient time after work to be where Linda said he picked her up. Mr. Krueger had wanted to subpoena Lonnie, Arlene, Dee and the girls' dates to testify when and where they'd dropped her off, but Linda didn't want them snickering about it at school. She wished now she'd said okay because she couldn't have felt any more humiliated than she did right then.

Mr. Krueger brought in a forensics expert, a detective from the state police examiner's office, to corroborate Linda's testimony about the missing handle on the passenger door of Eldon Jukes's car. The detective said the handle was loose when they examined the car and could easily have been taken off and put back on. Mr. Sawicki asked
the detective if Linda's fingerprints had been found in Mr. Jukes's car; the detective said they had not.

Mr. Krueger called up Detective Roesch to tell the jury he'd taken Linda to the pine grove where Barbara Pickens's dead body had been found and Linda had identified it as the same area to which her assailant had taken her. Mr. Sawicki objected and the judge told the jury to ignore Detective Roesch's testimony.

Mr. Sawicki entered into evidence the police report that said Linda Wise was not able to identify the knife allegedly used against her among the knives seized from Mr. Jukes's home. A police detective had spent hours with Linda last November prodding her to describe the knife in detail. She remembered only a black handle. The knives from Eldon's house had brown handles.

Mr. Sawicki called a witness named Ladonna Jukes. As the witness entered the courtroom, Linda clapped her mouth. She wanted to jump up and call out. She'd long ago accepted that Daddy wouldn't have done anything dirty with Tereza. And she realized how scared Tereza must have been to run away. Why had Mr. Sawicki called her Ladonna?

As Tereza settled into the witness chair, Linda smiled and gave her a little wave but Tereza didn't react. She'd gotten softer and grown-up looking. She wore a black-and-white tweed suit and was still tiny. For the first time, Linda felt ashamed about her weight.

Tereza testified that she was married to the defendant, Eldon Joseph Jukes. Linda was more than alert now. Mr. Sawicki asked Tereza to describe her relationship with her husband. After she'd run away from her stepfather's brutality, she said, Eldon Jukes had saved her from a life on the streets when he took her to the house he shared with his grandmother. She'd found a safe, loving home for the first time in her life. Eldon Jukes had been nothing but a gentleman, watching over her, never uttering a cross word, never raising a hand. They'd been married almost three years and had a seven-week-old baby daughter.
Eldon hadn't left her side through thirty-six hours of labor and was so upset to see her in pain he'd nearly fainted. He was a hard-working A&P management trainee, a good husband and father. Tereza sounded like she was reading a script, but even so, she pronounced words a lot better than Linda remembered her ever doing.

Tereza said Eldon had been with her all evening July 8, 1958. That couldn't have been!

Daddy hurriedly wrote a note and reached across the railing to Mr. Krueger, who read it and asked for a ten-minute recess. He took Linda and her parents to a conference room. They told him everything they could about Tereza in the short time they had.

When it was his turn to question Ladonna Jukes, Mr. Krueger asked if she'd ever gone by the name of Tereza Dobra. She looked down at her hands and said yes. Lived on Grove Street in Stony River? Yes. Been friends with Linda Wise? She'd known her, yes. Had her husband, to her knowledge, ever been near Grove Street? He'd driven her there once. So he would have been familiar with Linda Wise's neighborhood, thank you, no further questions.

Linda watched Tereza leave the stand and sit next to a pink-haired lady holding a baby in a yellow blanket. Tereza took the baby and clasped it to her chest. Who would have imagined her capable of such tenderness? Linda was mystified: the tweed-suited wife and mother Tereza had become didn't fit Linda's concept of justice. Tereza hadn't applied herself in school, had hung out with hoods, done vulgar things in cars with men and run away from home.

Mr. Krueger gave the first summation, noting that it took great courage for Linda Wise to come forward as she had with no other motive than to prevent other young women from falling prey to the dangerous Eldon Jukes. He pointed out Linda's positive identification of the defendant in a lineup, her accurate description of his car and the fact that the only person who had testified to Mr. Jukes's whereabouts that night was an understandably biased relative.

In his summary, the defense attorney speculated that Linda Wise had seen the newspaper account and made up a story so that others would think she was desirable, given her weight and the pressure on girls her age to have boyfriends. He said it was hard to imagine such a heavyset girl going through the gyrations she'd described in the front seat of a car. No hard evidence placed Miss Wise in the defendant's car on July 8, 1958, or any other day, for that matter. She was decidedly unclear as to the time of the assault. There were no witnesses to the assault or its aftermath. The make and model of the defendant's car was described in a newspaper article before Miss Wise contacted the police and a loose door handle was not surprising in a now-sevenyear-old automobile. He said you'd think someone who'd used his car for a crime would have disguised that car afterward or sold it. Mr. Jukes had done neither. Finally, Mr. Jukes was not in possession of any knife Miss Wise recognized as having been used against her.

The jury deliberated for two hours. It had never occurred to Linda they wouldn't believe her.

Mr. Krueger said they'd appeal. He'd investigate Ladonna Jukes and insist that Linda's parents and her doctor testify that Linda's most dramatic weight gain had occurred after the assault. He'd wanted to do that today but Linda had objected. What did weight have to do with integrity? Tereza had lied and they'd believed her. Linda had told the truth and they hadn't.

Daddy put his arm around Linda and hustled her out. Driving home, he said the prosecution had done a piss-poor job, and “If they think they're going to put you through that again, they have another think coming.”

Linda could only say, “They didn't believe me, they didn't believe me.”

“I know how that feels,” Mom said.

TWENTY - NINE