April 8
Glorious morning. Air is soft and warm. We walk to the Court House to hear the judge read the instructions to the jury. He finishes at 10:30, and the jury files out to start deliberating. We return to the hotel and join the clan in the restaurant. This is our first quiet moment. Everyone is surprisingly relaxed, but then they've been facing one trial or another since 1986, when three of Susan's brothers got tangled up in the collapse of Jim McDougal's financial empire. The stress breaks through only once when Susan bursts into tears while describing the physical and mental abuse of a fellow inmate in a Little Rock jail. To Ken Starr, the Henleys are the political equivalent of Rumpole's larcenous Timson family, but Mark and I are awed by their mutual love and loyalty, tempered by years of legal persecution. We ask what they'll do if Susan wins. Bill answers, "I don't really know. It would be the first morning in five years that I got up and did not face a trial."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Doing the "perp walk": Susan McDougal outside the courthouse in Little Rock with her Seattle pals Walt Crowley and Marie McCaffrey.
Related Content
More About
We hope they can survive acquittal.
April 9
Something's up at the Court House, and it doesn't sound good. We all rush down in the morning. Seems a juror brought a law book with him to the jury room. He turns out to be Michael Nance, someone that Mark believes is likely to take Susan's side. The prosecution is outraged and wants him yanked, leaving 11 jurors to decide the case. Mark threatens to ask for a mistrial, but this is really the last thing Susan wants.
We wait in our seats while the lawyers and judge wangle in chambers. Mark appears every once in a while to update us. He's not optimistic.
The plot thickens around noon: The offending law book (devoted to Arkansas state rules and thus irrelevant in a federal trial) belongs to former State Supreme Court Justice John Purtle. He is an outspoken critic of Starr, and the OIC smells a conspiracy to suborn the jury. Judge Howard sends federal marshals to track down Purtle. They find him fishing in Toad Suck, Arkansas. Toad Suck?! "Y'all never heard of Toad Suck?" the court ladies ask. "They call it that 'cause they just sit around drinking beer till they swell up like toads. Don't know why they're sending investigators there. The only case they're gonna find in Toad Suck is a case of beer." (I swear I'm not making this up.)
Later, Judge Purtle is retrieved, and he explains that he had sold his house to Nance three years earlier. He must have left some books behind, and Nance found them. Judge Howard is satisfied and lets Nance stay on the jury, with the admonishment that he is not to do any more freelance legal research. Deliberations are postponed until Monday, which means we'll miss the verdict. We have to return to Seattle via a weekend visit to my parents in Arizona.
Susan and Pat decide to fly to Los Angeles with Mark, where the local bar is to honor him as "Trial Lawyer of the Year." Hugs and kisses at the hotel. We plan an elegant meal in the hotel restaurant for our last night, but instead we fall in with Bill, Jill, CNN correspondent Bob Franken, and assorted ne'er-do-wells. We form a movable conspiracy in search of a restaurant open after 10pm, but this takes a court order. We settle for pizza.
April 13
Back in Seattle early Monday afternoon the 12th. The phone is ringing. It's Donna Gogerty (a McDougal supporter with husband Bob): "Have you heard the news? They acquitted her on obstruction and hung on the rest." It turns out that seven of the 12 held out for acquittal on contempt, making a retrial very unlikely. Could the whole fiasco finally, at long last, be over?
An hour later, Susan Weber Wright, the judge who presided over the Whitewater grand jury and sent Susan to jail, cites President Clinton for "civil contempt."
