Nancy Grace: The Eleventh Victim

“It’s not just what he did that day that’s so painful for me to face,” Sheila said slowly. “It’s what he was like before that. I thought he loved me, Hailey. He had me fooled. I thought he was perfect. Sweet, charming, he could dance, he brought home a paycheck…everything.”

“ Classic psychopath ,” Hailey thought.

Sheila was her only hope. Here was her chance.

“Sheila, this isn’t just about what he did to you. It’s about the eleven women he murdered after you broke up with him. But really, Sheila, it’s about your little girl. Until he’s behind bars, she’s not safe. Didn’t you say she was the only thing you cared about? That’s what you told me on the phone. What about her? It’s not just about you, Sheila. You’re a mother now. It’s not all about you anymore.”

Coming down on her was a risk. It could make her furious and land Hailey back out on the sidewalk where she came from, empty-handed.

It started with one tear, and quickly Hailey was searching for Kleenex. Sheila broke down. The woman really had been through so much and here was Hailey, badgering her.

From the moment Hailey first laid eyes on Sheila, she had the nagging sensation that she knew her, that they must have met somewhere in the past. But Sheila said no, and she didn’t have a record. She was a nurse at Northside Hospital pediatric NICU without a single blemish on her record, not even a speeding ticket.

But there on the sofa, watching her movements, listening to her speech patterns as she talked, the way she dabbed at her eyes with the Kleenex…there was something familiar…

Hailey came up dry. She couldn’t place her. The woman must be telling the truth. She had never been in the courthouse as a defendant, suspect, or witness. Nevertheless, Hailey instinctively continued to look her up and down, staring intently whenever she looked away.

There was something about her…

“Want some coffee? It’ll only take a minute to brew.”

“I’d love some, thank you, Sheila.”

Hailey stood up, too, and followed Sheila into the kitchen. Her baby girl was there, playing on the kitchen floor. Hailey sat down at the kitchen table and started playing with her.

“What do you take in it? Milk?”

Hailey looked up to answer and, glancing over to Sheila’s profile, there at the kitchen sink, it hit like a ton of bricks.

Hailey realized where she had seen Sheila before. In autopsy photos. Ten of them, anyway.

All Cruise’s victims-with the exception of LaSondra, the very last-looked just like Sheila, front and side. All had the same slight, ghostly pale features, with hair cascading down over one shoulder. Sheila had dark brown eyes, they had dark brown eyes. Even their height and weight…Sheila was five foot one, ninety-five pounds. Cruise’s victims were all between four foot nine and five foot two, not one weighing in over one hundred and five.

How had Hailey overlooked that?

She couldn’t take her eyes off the girl. It was as if the victims had come to life again, through her.

Here was motive, handed to her on a silver platter. The State didn’t have to prove it, but juries without exception expected to hear a motive, especially in a murder case.

Over and over, with each woman he attacked and strangled, he relived Sheila’s rejection, acting out the same rage over and over. With each murder, he got her back.

“Please, Sheila,” Hailey begged. “Please say you’ll testify. I know you can do it. For their sakes.”

She laid out the eleven folders on the kitchen table, setting them carefully one by one and opening their covers to reveal eleven photographs of eleven dead women.

Sheila stared at them for a long time.

“And to protect her.” Without turning away from Sheila, Hailey gestured toward the baby girl sitting on the kitchen floor.

Sheila looked over at the baby, then back up at Hailey. Her eyes filled with tears.

“All right,” she said at last. “I’ll do it. I’ll testify.”

Walking back out to her car, Hailey glanced back to see Sheila standing at the window, baby on hip, looking out after her.

“Maybe now I can pull this thing off…maybe…”

Atlanta, Georgia

IN HER OFFICE AFTER HOURS, HAILEY POURED OVER A MOUNTAIN OF evidence against Clint Burrell Cruise in the murders of eleven women.

Evidence that was now under attack and in jeopardy of being suppressed by a defense team led by Matt Leonard.

Leonard knew every trick in the book and was pulling out all the stops on this one. First, he papered her with motions, knowing she was trying the case solo. She wrote and argued every response herself. He knew that.

Already, he had taken the use of DNA evidence up to the Georgia Supreme Court, arguing that between junk science, possible police corruption, and contamination both at the scene and at the crime lab, it was not reliable enough to use in cases so serious as to warrant the death penalty, cases like this one. Leonard argued that, unlike a sentence of years behind bars, once the death penalty was imposed, there was no possible “reversal,” as far as his client was concerned.

Luckily, she had insisted on a warrant for backup DNA testing at the crime lab, so the Court felt secure that not one but two DNA tests pointed to Cruise as the strangler in ten out of eleven cases. With the startling similarities in MO in all eleven murders, she was determined to prove the last victim, Victim Eleven, Leola’s daughter LaSondra, was Cruise’s as well.

The circus Leonard created was designed to throw her off her game and distract her from trying the case.

The next morning, a mortal blow was delivered to the State. The judge ruled the strangling incident with Sheila would not come into evidence at trial in his courtroom. He bought into the defense theory that to introduce evidence of another bad act-not the ones on trial-was more prejudicial than probative…that it wasn’t evidence proving the murders and just served to taint Cruise’s reputation before the jury.

But Sheila alone showed motive. The judge couldn’t care less. Sickened by the decision, Hailey stood alone in the courtroom as it emptied.

She held her left fist to her mouth, the right twisting the silver pen. What to do…what to do? The jury would never hear motive and if they didn’t accept the DNA or disbelieved any of the cops, Cruise would walk. Look what had happened in O. J. Simpson’s double murder trial…one bad cop and it was all over.

The case was sacked, with Leonard winning round one of pre-trial motions.

Hailey heard the rush of air when the courtroom door behind her was pushed open and she turned.

It was Leonard.

He stopped short when their gazes locked, but he continued to eye her from across the State’s counsel table.

“Ready to bite the bullet and drop the case?”

She laughed. “When hell freezes over, Leonard. Not a day before.”

“If I get the blood warrant thrown out on legal grounds, it’s over. But I can make it easy on you. I won’t tell the press, and you dead-docket the case. Nobody’ll know. You can tell everybody there just wasn’t enough proof.”

“Well, you’ve finally lost your mind, Leonard. I’ve seen it coming, though, no surprise here. Too much pressure?”

“Face it, Hailey, you can’t win them all, as much as I know that disappoints you.” His tone was cruel and sarcastic, belying the half-smile playing on his lips.

Hailey looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time after having handled countless guilty pleas and various other negotiations and motions with him over the years.

To her he was just another defense attorney, one out of hundreds she dealt with in the course of handling the State’s business. She had never really noticed the thin curve of his upper lip, the twist at the corner of his mouth, the cold glint in his gray eyes, his bulky frame. His face was pale but his skin was blotchy, as if he’d had severe acne as a teenager.