Authors: M. William Phelps
As the jury passed the letter around, there was no hiding the fact that Clein was coming across as a sex-crazed lunatic, admittedly high on cocaine, writing to Beth Ann about sexual fantasies many of the jurors possibly had thought only existed on the fictional pages of a porno magazine.
“Were you out of control?” Keefe asked, referring to the period in the letter.
“I must have been, as far as Beth was concerned. But I didn’t think I was generally out of control, no.”
“You wanted to remove any source of discomfort in her life, though, right?”
“Sure,” Clein answered.
It was a fair question and an honest answer. If Keefe could convince the jury that Clein had become so obsessed with Beth Ann that he wanted her to defecate on him, as he had written in one letter, he might have done anything to make her happy. The jury needed to understand it was
possible
that Clein had taken it upon himself to have Buzz murdered when he saw how much Beth Ann was suffering over the custody battle.
Martha Jenssen, a lawyer, had been a court officer at the New London Superior Court for the past two years. With her long, dark hair, attractive figure and professional manner, Jenssen was respected by her peers and loved her job. As a court officer, she acted, as most officers do, as the judge’s shadow. Her duties, among many others, included processing files, motions, orders and judgments in civil and criminal cases. In court, Jenssen sat directly next to the judge; among other responsibilities, she made sure exhibits were marked correctly and ready for court. Part of Jenssen’s job also was to keep an eye on the jury to make sure it maintained a sense of integrity. If an officer overheard anything out of order from a juror, it was her job to report it.
As Jenssen was sitting, waiting for Keefe to continue with his cross-examination, she overheard a juror remark that the letter “has to be pretty bad if his assistant [Tara Knight] called him over.”
When Keefe was finished with his questioning for the day, Judge Devlin made mention of the comment to the jury, reminding them that they shouldn’t be discussing the case until deliberations. Still, it was an indication that the jury was itching to get this case into its hands and begin going through it. Obviously, the letter, like a lot of the evidence Keefe had presented already, was going to be crucial to Clein’s credibility. And if there was one thing in Beth Ann Carpenter’s corner as the trial drew to a close, it was how Haiman Clein appeared now that the jury had a complete portrait of who he truly was.
For three days, Hugh Keefe questioned Haiman Clein like Clein was a prisoner of war. Just about all of Clein’s previous statements had been put under a microscope and dissected word for word.
To his credit, many later said, Keefe had done a good job of attacking Clein’s credibility. The true test would come later, of course. But for now, people were saying, Keefe had scored big time.
By March 13, the jury already had heard an earful of testimony surrounding DCYS’s involvement in the custody battle between Buzz and Kim and the Carpenters. Keefe didn’t want to bore them with more. But he still needed them to hear Beth Ann’s side of an issue that the state had made into a major concern during Clein’s direct examination.
Near the end of his cross-examination, Keefe somehow got Clein to admit—“I’m not sure if I saw her”—that he wasn’t all that sure if Beth Ann had actually seen Mark Despres in the office on the day Clein had supposedly given Despres a photo of Buzz. Both Despres and Clein had earlier, in statements to the state police that would be available to the jury once they began deliberations, stated that Beth Ann was in the room. But now Clein wasn’t so sure. He was doubting himself and his memory—which was exactly what Keefe and Knight wanted.
To tie up some loose ends, Kane recalled Chris Despres and Dee Clinton to the stand on March 19, along with Jeremiah Donovan, a local lawyer Clein had gone to in hope of retaining him for Despres, after Mark had killed Buzz. Donovan, who had been friends with Clein at one time, declined to represent Despres when he found out Clein had himself been involved in the murder. In some respects, Donovan gave the jury a bit of an outsider’s point of view as to who had actually called for the murder. Kane got Donovan to admit that Clein had told him that he’d hired Despres at Beth Ann’s request: “She (Beth Ann) kept after me and after me,” Clein told Donovan one day. “And I finally hired Mark Despres….”
Keefe had expected a much larger case from the state’s attorney’s office, he later said. More witnesses, more evidence, more proof that Beth Ann had been the murder-for-hire mastermind. But when the state’s attorney’s office wrapped its case up on March 19, over a period of sixteen days in the courtroom, it had called a total of twenty-two witnesses, two of whom were later recalled. Apparently, Kane and McShane were confident the jury was going to believe Clein. Because if it didn’t, all those other witnesses really didn’t matter much.
As Keefe and Knight’s defense got under way on March 22, they called Thomas Cloutier, Cynthia Carpenter’s attorney during the child custody fight, another lawyer (who was now a judge) who had been involved in the child custody matter. They also called Detective Marty Graham and Mary Sneed, a local tailor who had known Beth Ann for some time.
For the most part, they wanted to establish that the child custody issue the state’s attorney’s office had made such a big stink over during its portion of the case was nothing more than a family situation in which the Carpenters were truly concerned about Rebecca’s welfare. They wanted to show the jury that Beth Ann hadn’t been as preoccupied with the situation as nearly half of the state’s attorney’s office’s witnesses had implied. Moreover, Mary Sneed, who was “not permitted to testify about it,” someone close to Beth Ann’s camp later said, would have told the jury that Beth Ann had “long been thinking of going” overseas when she couldn’t find a job in town after leaving Clein’s law firm. More important, she even had asked Mary what she thought about London. In fact, during that same conversation, she also had told Mary that everything was “going smoothly” with regard to Rebecca. “There were no pressing problems.”
Dr. Vittorio Ferrero drew the spotlight on March 22. Ferrero, Clein’s former psychiatrist, had heard directly from Clein just how obsessed he had become with Beth Ann, and Keefe wanted the jury to understand it clearly.
Before the day ended, Keefe had Ferrero explain the effects of cocaine on a person’s psyche. Clein had admitted to using cocaine during the time in question, and Keefe wanted to keep the focus on why a cocaine user and alcoholic shouldn’t be all that useful in testifying about his actions nearly a decade ago.
After telling the jury how cocaine makes a person feel “euphoric” and “very powerful,” Ferrero detailed how certain people can become “aggressive” on the drug because “they begin to believe there are plots against them….” What’s more, Ferrero insisted, “another complication…is that because of what it does to the brain, it can cause permanent damage to areas…that are also related to memory functions and impulse control.”
“You mentioned something about feeling powerful as a side effect of cocaine use?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean powerful in an unrealistic and inappropriate way—that is, the person can feel there is nothing that’s beyond me, there is nothing that I cannot do. I can do whatever I want and get away with it.”
“Now, taking…Prozac and cocaine [together], and throwing in a little booze to boot, are there effects, sir, from that mix?”
“Yes.”
Keefe asked Ferrero to explain.
“I would say…there is certainly an increased risk for damage related to memory functions.”
It was possible that Clein, because he was doing many different drugs at the same time, wasn’t in a position to remember accurately what had happened. Ferrero outlined rather fluently, in lay terms, that the drugs and alcohol Clein had been on had a major impact on his behavior and memory.
When Ferrero returned to the stand on March 26, Keefe quickly got him to discuss Clein’s actual psychotherapy treatment: when, where, what they talked about, and how often Clein had come in for treatment.
Near the end of Keefe’s direct examination, the subject of Clein’s sordid sexual behavior became an issue the judge wanted discussed without the jury.
“What is it that you were going to say about Mr. Clein’s sexual behavior, Doctor?” the judge asked Ferrero after the jury stepped out.
“Mr. Clein was having wild parties in his home in Old Saybrook before he lost [his home] due to financial problems. There was couple swapping at times. He had his wife have sex with friends”—reporters, well-wishers and most of the gallery nearly gasped all at once when the doctor alluded to this; in fact, the sexually explicit letters Clein had written now seemed G-rated—“sometimes several different friends. And watched it. Any part of his rationalization as to why he was doing that was [that] these people were business partners and that he needed their financial support in order to get out of financial difficulties…. He was showing them a goodtime.”
Sacrificing his wife:
He was showing them a good time.
Was there anything more to say about Clein’s lack of credibility? He had sold his own wife’s body and soul to friends—but not for money, for work.
Keefe’s job, however, was to get this information into the hands of the jury.
Kane didn’t view the situation the same way. He objected on the grounds that it had
nothing
to do with Clein’s credibility. Kane suggested that Keefe just wanted to “get this in.”
“His sexual practices and his sexual behavior have nothing to do with his credibility,” Kane contended.
Keefe argued the “components of deceitfulness,” which the court obviously had reason to question. Kane continued to say that, although most could agree it was disgusting behavior, it had nothing to do with Clein’s version of the events in question.
Psychiatric information gleaned during therapy was a slippery slope. Much of it is not admissible in a court of law—hence the concern of patient-client privilege always attached to these types of arguments. But Keefe continued to beat the drum about Clein’s credibility: Clein had put his own head on the chopping block by accusing Beth Ann of masterminding a murder. Anything should be fair game. Address this situation now, or have it come back on appeal.
Next there were discussions regarding Ferrero’s diagnosis of Clein’s antisocial disorder.
“Your Honor,” Keefe said at one point after Ferrero had been asked to leave the room, “let me just say this. You have to live with what witnesses you get. I sympathize with Mr. Kane. He’s got Haiman Clein….”
Kane, sitting, listening without much reaction, shook his head. Keefe was jabbing him, trying to make Clein out to be someone who shouldn’t be trusted to take the garbage out, better yet make statements that could put Beth Ann in prison for life.
After a long discussion, it was agreed they would “move beyond” the topic.
No sooner did one matter get cleared up and the jury was back, did another arise after Keefe asked what turned out to be a fair and important question.
“These psychotherapy sessions that you had [with Clein]—were you able to form an opinion with respect to whether Mr. Clein was a truthful or an untruthful person?”
“Yes, I was.”
“What was your opinion?”
“That he was
not
truthful.”
The judge indicated to the jury that what Ferrero had just said was an “opinion,” and it should be taken as such.
Opinion or not, it was coming from a reputable source.
By midafternoon, Keefe had finished his direct examination of Ferrero and Kane his cross-examination. It was up to the jury to separate truth from fact from fiction from opinion.
As March drew to a close, Keefe and Knight called several more witnesses who could throw water on the fire of the state’s attorney’s office’s assumption that Clein had set the entire murder up under the direction of Beth Ann. No one held on to a smoking gun, but it was a way for Beth Ann’s defense to offer the jury a second scenario.
Dr. Matthew Elgart, the local optometrist and one of Clein’s closest friends near the time of Buzz’s murder, testified how he’d snorted cocaine with Clein, offering more evidence that Haiman Clein was out of control.
One of the defense’s most important witnesses to substantiate its claim that Clein had acted alone was Paul Francis, Clein’s old cellmate—a guy who had written to Keefe and told him that Clein had made up the entire murder-for-hire plot theory against Beth Ann to get back at her for turning him in. The only problem with Francis’s testimony, however, was that if the jury was to believe a guy with a record as horrifying as Francis’s, that same jury would have to view Clein as a monk. Lest anyone forget, Paul Francis was serving a ninety-year sentence for murdering an elderly woman.
When Francis took the stand, he testified about the letters he’d written to Keefe—but that was it, Keefe took it no further.
Kane, when he got his chance, tore right into Francis’s background, having him explain how he’d been charged with burglaries, assaults, larcenies and several weapons violations, all before graduating to murder.
Francis, Kane implied, had given Keefe the goods because he wanted Keefe’s law firm to represent him in an upcoming habeas corpus hearing.
In the end, though, it was up to the jury to decide.
On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, Linda Yuhas, a family relations counselor, Diana Hendelman, a former friend of Beth Ann’s, and Diane Contino, a real estate agent from Ledyard who knew Haiman Clein, took the stand and exposed further the fact that, according to Keefe and Knight, Beth Ann didn’t have as much to do with the custody case as the state’s attorney’s office had been implying for the past month or so.
By midday, rumor was in the air around the courthouse like high-school gossip that Beth Ann had made a decision to take the stand in her own defense.
“No way,” someone said. “She’ll bury herself.”
“It’s her only chance,” someone else commented.
Either way, it was time for her to make a decision. Soon the trial would be in the books.
If Keefe put his client on the stand, there were certain issues he was going to have to address, and from Beth Ann’s point of view, she would have to try her best to clear these up. For one, how did Clein get hold of a photograph of Buzz if Beth Ann hadn’t given it to him? Second, how could she imply that witness after witness were liars? There wasn’t one or two people saying damaging things about her; there was a small chorus. And how, by God, would she explain away the notion of having taken off to England as soon as word hit the street that Despres and Fremut were going to be arrested in connection with Buzz’s death?
All the rumors had been squelched by midmorning when the gallery looked on as Beth Ann Carpenter got up from her chair at the defense table and made her way to the witness stand. Surprisingly, she looked calm and in control. Many thought she would never do it. Yet, obviously, she had convinced Keefe and Knight that she could carry the load, and she felt confident the jury would believe what she was going to say. After all, she was a lawyer. The courtroom was not some foreign place she had only seen in movies and on television. She had experience. She knew what to say, and when to say it. Many said she was articulate, intelligent, well-liked and misunderstood.
Many others, however, swore she was manipulative, devious, cold; she had mastered the art of lying.
As every eye in the courtroom looked on, Keefe began by asking his client if she understood the charges against her. Then he wanted to know if she was involved in Buzz’s murder in
any
way.
“Absolutely not,” Beth Ann answered both times.
“Have you ever asked anyone in your life to murder anybody?”
“No, I have not.”
“Are you a violent person?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Objection,” Kane said.
“Sustained.”
Spending a bit of time talking about her family, Beth Ann showed impeccable memory skills regarding dates, places and details about her education—some of which took place two decades ago—and upbringing. Then Keefe had her move into her desire to practice law and her early search for a job.
“Did you ultimately apply to the law firm of Haiman Clein?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what year was that?”
Without missing a beat: “August 1992.”
She said she was ultimately hired by Clein himself, then began talking about Kim and Rebecca, implying that Kim’s PKU disease “leads to mental retardation” if left untreated, as well as “sexual promiscuity.”
Then it was on to Kim’s first husband, and several of Kim’s other boyfriends, whom, she suggested, Kim had always had problems with. And because of those problems, she insisted, her parents “essentially” had to raise Kim’s kids—including
Rebecca
—themselves.
After discussing briefly how the litigation process surrounding the custody of Rebecca had been initiated, she talked about Rebecca’s living conditions and the visitation dispute that had erupted between Buzz and Kim and the Carpenters—plus, being a lawyer, she began helping out her parents.
“Did you want custody of Rebecca?”
“No, no.”
“Have you ever wanted custody of Rebecca?”
“No, no.”
“And after you moved [out of your parents’ house]…how frequently did you see Rebecca during the years after you moved?”
“After I moved, I really—I couldn’t put a number on it. I would—my mom would have fights with me because I think it was in 1993 when I missed [Rebecca’s] birthday party, and I was supposed to bring the cake and I was late and I missed the birthday party. So I know I would not see her frequently because there were often arguments, and my mom would say, ‘Why aren’t you here? Why aren’t you doing this?’ I was going out. I was young. I was trying to start off doing my own thing.
“I couldn’t put a number on how many times I saw her—not very frequently.”
If nothing else, this was a complete playing down of her role in Rebecca’s life. Rebecca was born in August 1990. By August 1993, Beth Ann had told several people about the bitter battle brewing between Buzz and her family for child custody, and she made it a daily part of her conversations with people in her inner circle—many of whom had already testified that there wasn’t a moment during that period when she
hadn’t
talked about getting custody of Rebecca. In fact, on August 16, 1993, she had been present at a court hearing in which Buzz acted as Kim’s attorney, and later, after the hearing, she threatened his life.
According to a court employee, she had said to Buzz, “I’ll kill your ass.”
To say that she wasn’t
that
involved in Rebecca’s life at that time and was “off doing [her] own thing” was a ridiculous exaggeration at least, a lie at best.
She admitted next to speaking about the custody issue and court proceedings while working at Clein’s office, but she made it sound as if she had mentioned it briefly in passing. “And if things came up, I would talk about it just like everybody talks about the things that’s going on in their families or household.”
“How many superior court hearings were there concerning Rebecca…?”
Beth Ann didn’t hesitate or even think about her answer, darting off dates with flawless accuracy. “April sixth and August sixteenth.”
“Both in ’93?”
“Yes. One was in Norwich and one was in New London.”
“And did you attend both of them?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Why were you there on April 6, 1993?”
“To support my family.”
“Why were you there on August sixteenth?”
“To support my family.”
“By the way, did you have any skirmish with Buzz or anybody else on either of these occasions?”
“Absolutely not. No!”
There were several witnesses who could testify differently—and they had already been interviewed by police. Some were even officers of the court. Were they liars, too? many were wondering.
When Keefe asked her if she had seen any visible signs of abuse on Rebecca, Beth Ann said, “I never saw any evidence of abuse whatsoever.”
Again, just about every person close to her had disagreed. Not to mention that no fewer than three witnesses had already testified how she had talked about the abuse almost daily. Kane and McShane took notes like reporters as she spoke. Surely, the day’s transcripts would make for some interesting late-night reading.
For Keefe, there was no way of getting around the fact that Clein had said Beth Ann had, point-blank, asked him to have Buzz killed one night. So Keefe decided to address the situation head-on.
“You heard Haiman Clein testify…that you approached him and asked him to kill Buzz. You heard him say that?”
“Yes, I did.”
“He said first you asked him to do it personally. You heard him say that?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you do that?”
“No!”
“He also said he refused to do it, certainly, so you said hire somebody or get someone else to do it, or words to that effect. You heard that?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you do that?”
“Absolutely
not
!”
“Was there any reason that you would want Buzz dead?”
“None whatsoever.”
About an hour before lunch, Keefe asked Beth Ann about Clein’s drug use—she said she didn’t know much about it—and how their relationship progressed from coworkers to lovers over a period of about a year. Then he had her explain away the notion that she knew Mark Despres. She admitted to being at the Christmas party in 1993 when Despres and Clein began plotting Buzz’s murder. And she also said it was possible that she had even seen or met Despres at the party. She insisted, though, on having no “independent recollection” of any such meeting.
Then Keefe moved on to the infamous photograph of Buzz that Clein had said she gave him.
“Did you ever give [Clein] such a photograph?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Now, did you have photographs of Kim and Buzz?”
“I have boxes of family photographs at my house.”
“And they were kept where at your house?”
She explained that all of her family photographs were kept in a closet at her condo, which gave the jury some explanation possibly as to how Clein could have gotten his hands on the photograph without her knowledge.
“Now, you say that Haiman had keys to your apartment?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And did he have them for the months preceding the murder of Buzz?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And you say that Haiman…Did he visit your apartment at will?”
“Yes!”
“Whether you were there or not?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have access to everything in your apartment?”
“Yes.”
With that out of the way, there was one more, little obstacle Keefe had to get around: if Beth Ann hadn’t contracted for the murder, why in the world would she have stayed with Clein and continued an intimate relationship with him
after
he admitted to her that he had Buzz murdered on his own?
She wasn’t denying that she knew about the murder after the fact; she was denying that she’d had anything to do with it.
“Do you remember what part of the weekend it was that Clein told you that he had arranged the murder?”
It had been a little over eight years since Buzz’s murder, but Beth Ann didn’t hesitate or think about her answer.
“It was a Sunday.”
Keefe asked her if she remembered what time of day it was.
“It was toward the evening. It was dark, darkish hours. It wasn’t bright out.”
She then explained how it was the first time she had heard that Clein indeed had something to do with Buzz’s murder.
“What was you reaction?”
“I didn’t want to believe it. I said, ‘Please, please, tell me this isn’t true.’ And he was laughing and he was gloating, and he thought…he had done this great thing. And I was just, ‘You have to be crazy. You can’t do this. Can’t be true.’”
“Did he tell you
why
he had murdered Buzz?”
“He said, ‘Don’t you see? You don’t have to worry about anything anymore.’ He said [Buzz] was just a ‘scumbag,’ and that he had done the world a service.”
After lunch recess, Keefe had Beth Ann discuss in a bit more detail the litigation process between the Carpenters and Kim and Buzz regarding Rebecca. When Keefe asked her about Dee Clinton’s having testified that she had called Kim a whore, she denied it. When Keefe began to talk about Joseph Jebran, she wrote the relationship off as a brother-sister type of friendship. She said she had tried to make it more romantic, but the feelings just weren’t there.
“Did you ever ask Joseph Jebran to take you and Rebecca and run away anyplace?”
“Never.”
“Now, Beth, did you develop a friendship with Tricia Gaul?”
“I would call it more of an acquaintance, not a friendship. I mean, we went out once or twice maybe.”
So not only were Haiman Clein and Dee Clinton liars, but, according to Beth Ann, Joseph Jebran and Tricia Gaul also had walked into a court of law, raised their hands, taken an oath and proceeded to lie, too. Moreover, why did she bring Tricia Gaul to Washington, DC, when she had been admitted to the bar, if she was merely an acquaintance?
For a good part of the afternoon, Beth Ann denied just about everything negative anyone had said about her. Where Clein was concerned, there wasn’t anything that she would fess up to besides being obsessed with him. She said time and again that the reason she had stayed with Clein so long after the murder was because she had become codependent. She felt she couldn’t live without him—that is, until she decided to turn him into the FBI while he was on the run when she was in England.
After Beth Ann played down her trip to England and Ireland as a mere working and education experience, Keefe ended his direct examination of her by asking if she had been confined to her parents’ home under house arrest.
“That is correct, yeah.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of Beth Ann’s direct testimony was that there wasn’t one time where she hadn’t remembered a fact or incident. She had displayed to the jury a computerlike memory, even about events that had taken place some twenty years earlier. She answered questions with succinct, direct phrasing: dates, times, places, names. There was nothing, it seemed, Beth Ann had a problem recalling.
That, however, was all about to change.
Kevin Kane was a peaceful man. Scholarly-looking right down to his owlish glasses and Santa Claus–like white eyebrows and mustache, Kane spoke softly, rarely ever raising his voice or showing excitement. Some years ago, he’d prosecuted one of the most prolific serial killers the state of Connecticut had ever put on trial: Michael Ross, a sadistic sexual predator who had raped and murdered several young women and laughed about it afterward. Kane and Peter McShane had been instrumental in bringing Ross up on charges and, during a retrial, sending him to death row.
Beth Ann Carpenter, though, was no Michael Ross. Kane had to be careful. He couldn’t come across as being overbearing and aggressive. The jury might take it the wrong way.
Because Keefe had left off with Beth Ann explaining her “trip” overseas, Kane thought it pertinent to stay on point.
“You were going to come home from Christmas break and then return to London, is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“You told other people you were going to go home for Christmas break?”
“Haiman was a fugitive!”