Steve Martini - Double Tap

He falls silent for a moment, then plunges his hand back into his pocket, turns, and takes a few steps, this time away from the bench toward the audience while he allows the jury to consider this.

Twelve sets of eyes now focus on Ruiz, studying his face, his response to the charge, whether his expression at this moment is that of a cold-blooded killer.

Templeton may have just answered one of the more nettle-some questions that has plagued us for months. “Lying in wait” is the single special circumstance charged by the state in their criminal complaint that allows them to seek the death penalty against Ruiz. They are apparently prepared to argue that he entered Chapman’s house and either stalked her from room to room, seeking to kill her, or waited for her to come home from work and simply shot her as she came into the entry hall.

Harry and I have wondered for weeks whether Templeton would try to amend the state’s complaint to add the charges of murder for financial gain or murder during the course of robbery or burglary, either of which would carry additional special circumstances to justify the death penalty. The key in all of this, of course, is the Orb at the Edge , the half-million-dollar piece of art glass that went missing from Chapman’s house after the murder. It would appear that Templeton and the cops have no more idea what has happened to this piece of art than we do. If they had the Orb or knew where it was, and if they could connect it to Ruiz, there is now no question but that they would have brought the additional charges.

I glance over at Harry, who is making a note. This fact has not gone unnoticed by my partner.

“Yes, it is an awesome responsibility,” says Templeton, “and one that an ordered and just society must place upon the shoulders of ordinary citizens, because an ordered and just society has no emperors, it has no kings, it has no spokesmen who speak to the gods. It has only ordinary citizens, whose judgment and reason it respects and whose decisions by long history and proud tradition are the legal fabric holding that society together.”

He veers into the evidence, nibbling first at the edges. He may not know what happened to the glass artwork, but for every deficiency Templeton highlights five or six points so that his case overflows like a horn of plenty. Most prosecutors might shy away from issues involving Chapman’s wealth for fear that we would seize it and turn it against them in an orgy of class warfare. But not Templeton. The state’s computer technician flashes images on the large screen on the wall of the courtroom across from the jury box, pictures of Chapman’s home on the beach, her corporate jets, and the expensive Ferrari parked in her garage.

Templeton turns and walks slowly toward the other end of the scaffold once again, all the while talking as if he’s conversing casually in a room filled with friends. At one point he nods toward the computer tech at his table, and suddenly a full head-and-shoulder shot of Madelyn Chapman, her face beaming with a smile, flashes up on the large screen. In the photograph Chapman appears youthful, vital, full of life, a measure of what was taken from her when she was killed.

He talks about Ruiz and his time in the military, the fact that he is a divorced father of two who took a job working for a security firm, and that the Fates placed the defendant, a retired Army sergeant with nothing more than a high school education and a few units of community college, in close contact with one of the wealthiest women in the world.

Templeton starts to catch a rhythm, stopping at places along the top of the boards to face the jury straight on, bending at the waist using his tiny hands, fingers extended, palms out, to emphasize important elements. At one point he strikes a pose like a magician about to throw flash powder into a fire.

“You will hear testimony that, during his employment providing security for Madelyn Chapman, Mr. Ruiz was able to indulge in travel in the form of luxurious international flights on board corporate jets to exotic locations. There he was able to observe at first hand and up close the good life which he had never experienced before, certainly not in the military and certainly not before that time.”

He has taken the sword of Chapman’s wealth from our hands and blunted it, and now proceeds to club us about the head and shoulders with it. He goes on.

For a moment Templeton dabbles at the edge of the ice. He would like to argue overtly that Ruiz could not bear to pass up this opportunity of a lifetime to gold-dig his way to wealth and comfort. This is the state’s theory of the motive for murder. But Templeton saves himself, avoiding an objection to a conclusion that his evidence would never be able to prove. Almost leaning off the edge of the boards into the jury box, he pulls himself back and instead stays with the facts.

“You will hear testimony from witnesses,” he says, “that there was a sexual relationship between the defendant and Madelyn Chapman and that, following her decision to end the security detail, Mr. Ruiz was removed from the assignment and instructed by his employer to have no further contact with the victim. You will also hear testimony that he failed to comply with those instructions and that Emiliano Ruiz proceeded to stalk the victim and was observed on more than one occasion following Madelyn Chapman as she was engaged in private activities.”

Damaging evidence of this has been withheld from us until the last possible moment under the rubric of confidential personnel matters. It was the excuse Max Rufus used the day I spoke to him in his office.

Templeton looks to our table and smiles as he realizes the impact that all of this is having on the jury.

It is deadly. I can read it in their eyes, and Templeton hasn’t even arrived at the meat of his case: the weapon and the wounds.

“Finally you will see documents and hear evidence from medical and ballistics experts and qualified crime-scene technicians that the two shots that killed Madelyn Chapman, the bullets that fractured her skull and destroyed her brain”-Templeton motions toward the smiling photograph on the screen behind him-“were fired from a pistol that had once been in the possession of the defendant, issued to Emiliano Ruiz while he was in the military and which the defendant failed to surrender to military officials as was the proper procedure when he left the Army. We will prove not only that this handgun was used to murder Madelyn Chapman but that the two shots that killed her required expert marksmanship, and that the defendant Emiliano Ruiz was once considered one of the top pistol marksmen in the United States Army.”

The links may all be circumstantial, but as Templeton lays them out for the jury, each one snaps in place with the sound of case-hardened steel. I can feel Emiliano flinch in the chair next to mine, overwhelmed by the desire to stand and tell the court everything, to vomit what he knows over the courtroom floor, to burst the bubble of inferences linking him to the murder, to place it all in the light of truth: that the gun was there because she had asked him to bring it, that she had fired it herself, that the only reason he was following her was because Chapman had asked him to, because she was scared, frightened of someone else. I can see his fists as they clench on the counsel table, and I place a hand on his forearm. He looks at me with a stark expression.

“Relax. It’s their opening shot.”

Templeton is now on a roll, hitting his pitch. While I try to quell the rising panic in Ruiz, in my own mind I can feel and fully understand the reason for it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the state will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Emiliano Ruiz murdered Madelyn Chapman: that he did so in cold blood with malice aforethought and clear premeditation. We will prove that Emiliano Ruiz lay in wait for Madelyn Chapman inside her home, and that when she arrived he executed her with two closely grouped shots to the head fired from a distance of nearly thirty feet. We will prove that the shots that killed Madelyn Chapman required expertise in marksmanship of a kind possessed by very few people, a small and select number of shooters, and that Emiliano Ruiz was one of them. We will show by proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the application of the two closely grouped shots that killed Madelyn Chapman was a well-practiced routine in select circles of military marksmanship-a practiced routine that had only one purpose: to terminate a target with lethal and certain force; to put an enemy down and to make sure that they were dead. We will prove that Emiliano Ruiz was one of the foremost experts in the world in the use of this technique: a targeting routine known as the double tap.”