Nancy Grace - Murder in the Courthouse

The baby she’d never hold. The daughter she’d never see alive again… all the happy years to come, gone… vanished… disintegrated like dust that slipped through her hands and into the wind. Gone. Forever.

The pain of reliving it in the courtroom had been too much to bear and now… now… Todd Adams and his mother both exchanged smiles. No one near the front of the courtroom could miss it. What did they know? Hailey wondered again.

“Madame Calendar Clerk, does the jury have a verdict?”

“Yes, they do, Your Honor.”

“Sheriffs, bring in the jury.”

Two sheriffs headed to the jury deliberations room as the bailiff called out in a low voice that carried across the courtroom, “All rise for the jury.”

In they came. All eyes locked on the twelve jurors entering the courtroom. From the moment the deliberations door opened, Hailey’s radar went berserk.

They came out in knots of two or three at a time. Two of the middle-aged men actually looked angry. An older man Hailey remembered from voir dire as a veteran was methodically clenching his fists then unclenching them. Hailey had pegged him as a possible foreperson. Two of the lady jurors came out with eyes red and teary. The four alternates were rousted from somewhere deep within the judge’s chambers to file into the jury box along with the twelve.

They sat as if exhausted and, in unison, so did the audience. Hailey noticed they did not all sit together as a group but split into groups of two or three, leaving spaces between them.

There was complete silence; Hailey could have heard a pin drop. She and Fincher sat side by side, their backs ramrod straight, eyes on the jury. The judge turned toward them.

“May I ask the foreman of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

A pale young man of medium height, his dark hair disheveled and sporting a matching goatee, answered from his seat, “Yes, we have.”

“You will stand when you address the judge,” the sheriff growled out, taking several steps toward the jury foreperson.

The pinched white face of the foreman screwed into a scowl, but facing the angry-looking sheriff, whose face never once collapsed into a smile, stood up. Smoothing down his sweatshirt, he looked irritated he was asked to stand.

“Yes, we have reached a verdict.”

“And has it been signed by the foreman?”

“It has.” He practically stuck out his tongue at the judge when he answered, his demeanor so irritated. This was a factor Hailey had worried about since she learned at the get-go that this was the foreperson. Who in their right minds would elect such a brat to lead the jury deliberations and why?

The judge seemed to ignore his bratty manner and calmly addressed the sheriff. “Mr. Bailiff, please hand up the verdict to Madame Calendar Clerk.”

“Yes, Your Honor.” The sheriff did so, taking the indictment which was folded longways in three sections from the foreman and without so much as glancing at it, strode across the courtroom and handed it to the female calendar clerk seated in a low desk below and to the side of the judge’s bench.

“Is the verdict in order, Madame Clerk?”

Without responding, the middle-aged woman who had been Alverson’s calendar clerk since she graduated from high school stared at the document. She stood and handed the indictment up to the judge.

The judge took the indictment and studied it. Removing his glasses, he looked at it again and then turned a cold, questioning stare on the jury. “I understood you to say you have reached a verdict in the matter of The State v. Todd Adams .”

The foreperson, visibly upset that he had to stand again, launched into a diatribe. “We have Your Honor… our verdict is… there is no verdict! You put a bunch of morons out for blood on the jury… what’d you expect? I mean… this is just a vendetta by the state over some cheerleader…”

Sharp screams rose from the Love camp. Dana Love fell back onto the bench and let out a cry of anguish. In stark contrast, clapping and shouts of victory rang out from the other side of the aisle, the Adams camp as well as from the defense table itself.

DelVecchio managed to yell out two words as his fleet of defense minions leaped from their seats around the defense table, surging toward their leader in victory. “Appeal bond!” DelVecchio practically screamed it.

“Oppose bond! We demand a new trial immediately!” A beat behind, the state’s lead attorney stood at his seat and finally found his voice but he was immediately drowned out by the judge.

“Silence! There will be order in this courtroom!”

Luther Alverson was standing at the bench now as sheriffs from all around the courtroom closed in on the defendant and the sources of the outburst. Alverson was looking directly at the lead defense attorney. “And you sir, Mr. DelVecchio, are hereby held in contempt for your outburst in this courtroom. And I will have silence from the foreman!”

“Order in the courtroom! Order in the court!” the chief bailiff shouted out, and suddenly the courtroom quieted. Except for the low moans of Dana Love, not a breath could be heard.

Reporters, TV and print alike, were silently thumbing texts as quickly as their hot little fingers could type on their iPhones’s mini-keyboards while Dana Love’s moans continued. The whole bunch hardly glanced over at her as she and her husband, Malcolm, now audibly crying, huddled together on the front pew.

While the press didn’t bother to notice them sobbing and shaking right in front of them, Hailey couldn’t drag her eyes away. Their suffering coursed through her, bringing back the gut-wrenching pain from Will’s murder and trial. A pain shot through her chest, and she felt like she had swallowed a big lump of charcoal that stuck in her throat. Hot tears leaped to her eyes.

Before anyone could fully take in what was happening, Michael DelVecchio strong-armed his defense minions away from a jubilant group hug despite the bailiff’s demands for order in the court and sprang to the center of the well. “Under threat of jail, I insist, Your Honor! Appeal bond, Your Honor! Appeal bond! This jury has all but exonerated my client…”

“No! We didn’t!” one of the lady jurors who had been crying jumped from her seat, found her voice, and shrieked at DelVecchio. “ We didn’t! He did!” She pointed directly at the surly foreman, still sitting in his juror chair, his arms folded defensively across his chest.

He responded by not budging to turn around to look at the lady juror. Instead, he smiled thinly at the courtroom in general.

“Madame juror! Please be seated.” Luther Alverson had never, in his forty years on the bench, had such a display in his courtroom.

“You have to know… we are sorry, Mrs. Love. It was eleven to one for guilty, but he wouldn’t budge! He did it… Todd Adams murdered Julie! We are just so sorry…” The juror collapsed into her seat and cried unabashedly into a soaked hanky.

DelVecchio took her collapse as his cue to continue the dramatic delivery of his speech. “… and we hereby go on record demanding a bond while we appeal a new trial! It would be unconstitutional to hold him while these legal briefs go up to an appellate court!”

“Bailiff, send out the jury immediately! Order! There will be order or every single spectator in this courtroom will be held in contempt!”

Outside, the silhouettes of tall trees were now pitching wildly against the courthouse in the dark as rain dashed the courtroom windows and lightning pierced the night sky. The wind could now be clearly heard whistling and howling outside as a hush fell across the courtroom.

With the jury out of the room, some shred of quiet was restored but electricity charged just beneath the surface. “Your Honor, please do not grant him bond. The state is prepared to re-try him immediately.” The state stood at their massive oak table before the judge.