John Grisham - The Confession

She then called Dr. Herzlich, who was a thoracic surgeon at St. Francis and a longtime member of St. Mark’s. She had no plans to inquire into the medical status of Travis Boyette, since such nosiness was far out of bounds and certain to go nowhere. She would let her husband chat with the doctor, with his door shut, and in their veiled and professional voices they might find common ground. The call went straight to voice mail, and Dana left a request for Herzlich to phone her husband.

While she worked the phone, Keith was glued to his computer, lost in the case of Donté Drumm. The Web site was extensive. Click here for a factual summary, 10 pages long. Click here for a complete trial transcript, 1,830 pages long. Click farther down for the appellate briefs, with exhibits and affidavits, another 1,600 or so pages. A case history ran for 340 pages and included the rulings from the appeals courts. There was a tab for the Death Penalty in Texas, and one for Donté’s Photo Gallery, Donté on Death Row, the Donté Drumm Defense Fund, How You Can Help, Press Coverage and Editorials, Wrongful Convictions and False Confessions, and the last one was for Robbie Flak, Attorney-at-Law.

Keith began with the factual summary. It read:

The town of Slone, Texas, population forty thousand, once cheered wildly when Donté Drumm roamed the field as a fearless linebacker, but now it nervously awaits his execution.

Donté Drumm was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1980, the third child of Roberta and Riley Drumm. A fourth child arrived four years later, not long after the family moved to Slone, where Riley found a job with a drainage contractor. The family joined the Bethel African Methodist Church and are still active members. Donté was baptized in the church at the age of eight. He attended the public schools in Slone, and by the age of twelve was being noticed as an athlete. With good size and exceptional speed, Donté became a force on the football field, and at the age of fourteen, as a freshman, was starting linebacker for the varsity at Slone High School. He was named all-conference as a sophomore and junior, and had verbally committed to play for North Texas State before a severe ankle injury ended his career during the first quarter of the first game of his senior year. Surgery was successful, but the damage was done. The scholarship offer was withdrawn. He did not finish high school, because he was incarcerated. His father, Riley, died of heart disease in 2002, while Donté was on death row.

When Donté was fifteen years old, he was arrested and charged with assault. It was alleged that he and two black friends beat another black youth behind the gymnasium at the high school. The case was handled through juvenile court. Donté eventually pleaded guilty and was given probation. When he was sixteen, he was arrested for simple possession of marijuana. By then, he was an all-conference linebacker and well-known in town. The charges were later dismissed.

Donté was nineteen years old when he was convicted in 1999 for the abduction, rape, and murder of a high school cheerleader named Nicole Yarber. Drumm and Yarber were seniors at Slone High School. They were friends and had grown up together in Slone, though Nicole, or “Nikki,” as she was often called, lived in the suburbs while Donté lived in Hazel Park, an older section of town that is primarily black middle-class. Slone is one-third black, and while the schools are integrated, the churches and civic clubs and neighborhoods are not.

Nicole Yarber was born in Slone in 1981, the first and only child of Reeva and Cliff Yarber, who divorced when she was two years old. Reeva remarried, and Nicole was raised by her mother and stepfather, Wallis Pike. Mr. and Mrs. Pike had two additional children. Aside from the divorce, Nicole’s upbringing was typical and unremarkable. She attended public elementary and middle schools and in 1995 enrolled as a freshman at Slone High. (Slone has only one high school. Aside from the usual church schools for kindergartners, the town has no private schools.) Nicole was a B student who seemed to frustrate her teachers with a noted lack of motivation. She should have been an A student, according to several summaries. She was well liked, popular, very social, with no record of bad behavior or trouble with the law. She was an active member of the First Baptist Church of Slone. She enjoyed yoga, water-skiing, and country music. She applied to two colleges: Baylor in Waco and Trinity in San Antonio, Texas.

After the divorce, her father, Cliff Yarber, left Slone and moved to Dallas, where he made a fortune in strip malls. As an absentee father, he apparently tried to compensate through expensive gifts. For her sixteenth birthday, Nicole received a bright red convertible BMW Roadster, undoubtedly the nicest car in the parking lot at Slone High. The gifts were a source of friction between the divorced parents. The stepfather, Wallis Pike, ran a feed store and did well financially, but he couldn’t compete with Cliff Yarber.

In the year or so before her disappearance, Nicole dated a classmate by the name of Joey Gamble, one of the more popular boys in school. Indeed, in the tenth and eleventh grades, Nicole and Joey were voted most popular and posed together for the school yearbook. Joey was one of three captains of the football team. He later played briefly at a junior college. He would become a key witness at the trial of Donté Drumm.

Since her disappearance, and since the subsequent trial, there has been much speculation about the relationship between Nicole Yarber and Donté Drumm. Nothing definite has been learned or confirmed. Donté has always maintained that the two were nothing more than casual acquaintances, just two kids who’d grown up in the same town and were members of a graduating class of over five hundred. He denied at trial, under oath, and he has denied ever since, that he had a sexual relationship with Nicole. Her friends have always believed this too. Skeptics, however, point out that Donté would be foolish to admit an intimate relationship with a woman he was accused of murdering. Several of his friends allegedly said that the two had just begun an affair when she disappeared. Much speculation centers upon the actions of Joey Gamble. Gamble testified at trial that he saw a green Ford van moving slowly and “suspiciously” through the parking lot where Nicole’s BMW was parked at the time she disappeared. Donté Drumm often drove such a van, one owned by his parents. Gamble’s testimony was attacked at trial and should have been discredited. The theory is that Gamble knew of Nicole’s affair with Donté, and as the odd man out he became so enraged that he helped the police frame their story against Donté Drumm.

Three years after the trial, a voice analysis expert hired by defense lawyers determined that the anonymous man who called Detective Kerber with the tip that Donté was the killer was, in fact, Joey Gamble. Gamble vehemently denies this. If it is true, then Gamble played a significant role in the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of Donté Drumm.

A voice jolted him from another world. “Keith, it’s Dr. Herzlich,” Dana said through the phone’s intercom.

Keith said, “Thanks,” and paused for a moment to clear his mind. Then he picked up the phone. He began with the usual pleasantries, but knowing the doctor was a busy man, he quickly got down to business. “Look, Dr. Herzlich, I need a little favor, and if it’s too sticky, just say so. We had a guest during the worship service yesterday, a convict in the process of being paroled, spending a few months at a halfway house, and he’s really a troubled soul. He stopped by this morning, just left actually, and he claims to have some rather severe medical problems. He’s been seen at St. Francis.”

“What’s the favor, Keith?” Dr. Herzlich asked, as if he were staring at his wristwatch.