Linda Fairstein: Killer Heat

The ninth length of rope was missing its knot.

"What is it?"

"Guess you never saw a cat-o'-nine-tails before."

Mike picked up the whip by its handle, shook off the water, then raised his arm and cracked it against the asphalt walk. The sharp sound split the still night air like a gunshot.

"Bound. Tortured. Killed. It's not a pretty way to die.

Ms. Cooper, are you withdrawing your offer?"

Alton Lamont had taken the bench minutes earlier, just after court officers had uncuffed the prisoner and seated him next to his lawyer.

Although the odors of the waterfront and the grisly scene of the previous evening lingered in my mind's eye and brain, I tried to concentrate on the pretrial proceedings under way in Lamont's courtroom

That's not a real plea bargain she suggested, Your Honor," Gene Grassley said, pointing his stubby forefinger in my direction. "It's Ms. Cooper's version of a death sentence. "Mr. Grassley knows we're going forward." We had spent most of the day selecting a jury and were finishing up the afternoon with some last-minute housekeeping before setting a timetable for opening statements. "My victim boarded her flight in Seattle at dawn-the offer's off the table. Floyd Warren was studying his copy of the indictment as his lawyer talked about him. "My client turned sixty-one last week. He can't serve out thirty years in state prison. "He's looking at fifty if this jury convicts him," Lamont said, smiling at Grassley. "I expect he'll try to do the best he can."

Warren looked up at Lamont, scowled, and licked his front teeth.

"I don't mean any disrespect by this. I know you've been a judge longer than I've been practicing law." Grassley had started his career with the Legal Aid Society a few years before I became an assistant district attorney. "But sixty-one-year-old men simply do not, can not- well, they're not your typical rapists."

"May I be heard, Your Honor?"

"Let me finish, Alex." Grassley was a head shorter than I. He liked to keep me in my seat once jurors were in the courtroom, as though he feared they would be swayed by my arguments because of my greater height. "I know what she's going to say, Judge. There's no such thing as a typical rapist. I've heard her spiel before."

"May I-?"

"Okay, so older guys are still capable of molesting children or beating their wives," Grassley said, as though those were insignificant criminal acts. "I'm not saying such things are impossible. But Mr. Warren is charged with climbing up three stories on a fire escape, squeezing through a small window, struggling with a healthy young woman to rape and sodomize her. Suppose for a minute he even did those things- when was this? Thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five years ago . He's not capable of doing them now. He's not possibly a danger to anyone. There's a legal doctrine Alexandra Cooper has no respect for. You need to help her with it."

"And what is that, Mr. Grassley?" Judge Lamont took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

" Rachmones , Judge."

"Rock what?"

Alton Lamont was an African-American, a former defense attorney who had been elected to the Supreme Court-New York State's highest trial court-more than twenty years earlier. He cupped one hand to his ear and shook his head.

"Compassion. It's the Yiddish word for compassion."

The heavy door creaked behind me and I turned to look over my shoulder. A young man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans walked down the short aisle of the small courtroom and sat in one of the empty rows of benches.

"A few months back, Mr. Grassley, when you were here with Ms. Cooper on another matter, you were complaining she was too soft, a bleeding heart, if I'm not mistaken."

"Yeah, you're right. But she only bleeds for her victims. Try to talk logic to her about an alleged offender and you can't even get ice water from the tap. She's got blinders on."

I was saving my arguments for the serious legal issues ahead. Judge Lamont could handle this.

"And what's your logic this time? Seems to me Mr. Warren could have had this all behind him if he'd stayed in town after the first trial." Lamont was studying the court file. "Looks like the jury almost let him walk."

Floyd Warren put his elbows on the table and rested his forehead in his hands.

Grassley passed behind me and leaned against the rail of the jury box. "They were hung nine to three for an acquittal."

"Doesn't make sense that your man skipped," Lamont said. "The prosecution case never gets better the second time around."

"There was another rape charge filed before a date for the retrial was set, Judge. Kings County," I said from my seat. The defendant had been identified by a woman in Brooklyn who saw his photograph in the newspaper.

"And even then my client was still free on bail. Couldn't have been such a big deal."

Lamont rested his head against the back of his tall leather chair. "Those were different times, Mr. Grassley. 1973, I'd venture to say there weren't a dozen rape prosecutions successfully brought in this entire city that year. Archaic laws, no Special Victims Units, and DNA hadn't been heard of yet. There wasn't a lawyer on either side who could have dreamed that science would give new life to these old cases."

"Alex and I were still in diapers, Judge. Ancient history."

Warren glanced at me and sneered again.

"What are you looking for here, Mr. Grassley?"

"Give him a couple years, maybe three, and membership in AARP," Grassley said, laughing nervously. "He'll go back to his wife and his little suburban house outside Birmingham. Whatever you think he may have done, Judge, he's retired now. Out of the business. For the last ten years he's lived quietly, supported himself as a landscape gardener. Where's your rachmones ?"

Lamont looked over my head as the door opened again. Another young man walked in, dressed like the first, and took a seat behind him. I assumed there were cases on the calendar late in the day that the judge would hear after he finished our arguments.

"You're putting on a good show for your client, Gene," the judge said, waving at the court reporter to tell her that he was going off the record, "but your bullshit-sorry I don't have a legal term for it, it's just plain bullshit. And it's so far over the line that it's insulting to me and to the-how many victims, Alex?"

"Forty-two and counting."

"Alleged victims," interjected Grassley. "My client hasn't been charged in any of those cases yet."

"In 1974, Mr. Warren jumped bail before his retrial here-almost certain to be acquitted-and began a rampage more devastating than the worst hurricane on record. He left New York and-Alex, refresh my recollection, will you?"

"He moved south and became the Philadelphia 'Strip Mall' rapist- about a dozen cases reported there over the next eighteen months. Then he continued on to the DC area, where DNA has recently confirmed that he was the Chevy Chase 'Carjack' rapist-head count still growing from police there and up the road in Silver Spring-before going on to terrorize the academic community in North Carolina as the 'Chapel Hill Campus' rapist. Patterns all along the East Coast throughout the next twenty years."

"And if you and your cops are so damn smart, how come nobody identified him in all that time?"

I was standing now, and my slim five feet ten inches of indignation towered over Grassley's short, pudgy frame.

"In the seventies and eighties, Floyd Warren had moved around the Southeast like a chameleon, changing his name in every location. When SVU detective Mercer Wallace backtracked to collect the evidence from three decades of closed cases, he found local records that matched a transient calling himself Warren Floyd, who later became Floyd X and a variety of aliases before settling in Alabama and adopting the name of the late judge before whom his case had been tried-Howard Rovers. "