Last Dance, Last Chance Read online

  Until his discharge from the Army seven years before these felonies, Denny Lee Tuohmy had spent periodic sojourns in service hospitals. But opinions regarding the cause of his problems differed from one Army psychiatrist to another. One diagnosed his actions as schizophrenic and found him mentally ill.

  Yet, there were other excerpts from Army records with different viewpoints on Tuohmy’s personality problems. One mental evaluation declared him to be “extremely immature, impulsive, with no insight into his own problems.”

  Two years after that conclusion, a report read: “No delusions or hallucinations. Inability to postpone gratification. This man cannot profit from punishment or experience. Hopeless to treat. Probably will be life-long.”

  That psychiatrist may have been right on the mark.

  Dishonorably discharged from the service, Denny Lee Tuohmy had spent his next seven years working sporadically and getting into minor skirmishes with the law that landed him behind bars from time to time.

  The winter rains were long gone on May 28 when Tuohmy talked with Dr. Richard B. Jarvis, a Seattle psychiatrist who testified frequently in criminal cases. Jarvis made a startlingly accurate prediction in his summary of that interview.

  “It is quite possible that during the course of the trial, Mr. Tuohmy may become angry and lose his temper. This is not evidence of mental disease but of his inability to hold his temper.”

  Days later, Denny Tuohmy appeared in King County Superior Court Judge Eugene Wright’s courtroom for a preliminary hearing. Although he had an attorney to represent him, Tuohmy rose and asked to address the court. He insisted upon a change of venue, demanded that witnesses be kept in the hallway before testimony, and refused the judge’s request that he sit down and remain quiet.

  All witnesses were routinely required to stay outside the courtroom until they had testified, and there hadn’t been enough publicity to warrant a change of venue. Tuohmy seemed to enjoy hearing himself talk.

  When admonished by the judge again, he shouted that he would not sit still for what he considered a “travesty of justice” and announced that he was going back to jail. And then, the slight, wiry Tuohmy launched an attack that has not been forgotten by either those present in that courtroom or by King County sheriff’s deputies. Screaming like an animal, Denny Tuohmy picked up the heavy tables in front of the bar and threw them across the room at the judge as if they were toothpicks.

  Deputies—many weighing over 200 pounds—rushed to subdue him. In the words of a witness, “He bounced them off the wall. Blood was drawn, but it wasn’t Tuohmy’s.”

  While women spectators screamed and raced for the comparative safety of the hallway, more and more deputies ran into the courtroom. They threw shoulder blocks on Tuohmy, trying to stop him without hurting him, but he continued his rampage. The court reporter, hunched over his machine in an attempt to avoid the flying debris, recorded the incredible melee.

  Eventually, it took eleven deputies to pin down Denny Lee Tuohmy.

  As a result of his display in Judge Wright’s court, Tuohmy was found incompetent to stand trial and was committed to the Eastern Washington State Hospital.

  Throughout his stay at the facility, located in Medical Lake, Tuohmy continued to perplex psychiatric personnel. Some found him to be a psychopathic personality, sane but without the normal restraints of conscience of the average person. Some speculated that he was indeed schizophrenic. Twice, he walked away from the grounds but returned without incident. Whatever his state of mind, patients and attendants alike feared him.

  On two occasions, Tuohmy repeated his familiar pattern of violence and held off a score of hospital attendants with weapons fashioned from a floor mop and his own dismantled steel bed. He attempted to strangle fellow patients and threatened them with homosexual attacks.

  Eventually, the day came when psychiatrists in the state mental hospital declared that Denny Tuohmy was no longer insane—if he ever had been insane—and was competent to stand trial. Almost eight years had gone by, and it wasn’t at all difficult to pick a jury. Nobody in Seattle remembered him—except, perhaps, for Cherie Mullins, Fritz Donohue’s relatives and friends, and, of course, Pat Jacque, who would never forget him.

  King County deputies who had worked courtroom security remembered him, too. They double-staffed the trial in Superior Court Judge George Stuntz’s courtroom.

  Denny Tuohmy seemed calm enough. The short, almost frail-looking defendant smiled benignly at the jury.

  On that sunny, crisp morning of January 11, court habitués who had heard this might be an interesting trial filed in. Some of the old-timers who lived in drab hotels around the courthouse had attended so many trials that prosecutors and defense attorneys alike valued their perspective and occasionally asked, “How do you think it’s going?” in one trial or another. The “expert” legal advisers in the gallery had learned to bring cushions, since the wooden benches became hard as rock by the afternoon sessions.

  * * *

  Judge George Stuntz had a reputation for being peppery and taking no nonsense, so his trials always drew extra court-watchers. They would not be disappointed. Stuntz ran a tight ship. Still, tempers flared and old hatreds among witnesses revived as special prosecutors Paul M. Acheson and Darrell E. Lee and defense attorney Anthony Savage, Jr., elicited testimony.

  The opposing attorneys had the most astute minds in criminal law in the county. Paul Acheson, who had resigned his position as assistant chief criminal deputy on January 1 to form a law partnership with two other winning ex-prosecutors, William Kinzel and C. N. (Nick) Marshall, had prosecuted over 200 felony cases during his tenure in the prosecutor’s office. He and Darrell Lee, another former assistant prosecutor, had been rehired to prosecute this case, which they had spent so many years preparing.

  Tony Savage, arguably the top criminal defense attorney in Seattle, had been appointed to defend Denny Tuohmy, who was now 36, by the office of the public defender. Savage was a most worthy opponent. He too had once been assistant chief criminal deputy in the prosecuting attorney’s office.

  Tony Savage was totally against the death penalty. He always would be. Some thirty years later, an older—and grayer—Savage would be appointed to defend Gary Ridgway, the man accused of being the infamous Green River Killer. Savage would be just as adamantly against the death penalty as he was when he was a young attorney.

  In his opening statement, special prosecutor Acheson recalled the grim events of December 19 and 20, for the jury. He said the defendant had confessed to King County detectives that he had strangled Mrs. Gladys Bodine, 58, in her Kent home because he believed she had broken up his romance with her daughter.

  The next day, Tuohmy had driven to a desolate road outside Kent and “accidentally” shot his best friend in the head. Fred Garfield “Fritz” Donohue, a hospital orderly, had been found with his skull literally “blasted to small fragments.” Tuohmy’s initial confessions had been enhanced, however, Acheson said, when he told a detective he had committed both murders “on purpose.”

  After shooting Donohue, Tuohmy had admitted that he ran through the densely wooded Kent area with his rifle and forced his way into the home of Mrs. Patricia Jacque. He had threatened her with the powerful gun and forced her to drive him from her house, leaving her three young children behind.

  With the rifle aimed at her head, Mrs. Jacque had been forced to drive a meandering route through the back roads of South King County until she was rescued uninjured by several sheriff’s deputies, who forced her automobile off the road and disarmed Tuohmy.

  Defense attorney Tony Savage, who had entered a plea for his client of innocent by reason of insanity at the time of his crimes, told the jurors that his client was mentally ill and that there would be no evidence from the state to show premeditation—an essential factor in proving first-degree murder.

  “From the day Denny Tuohmy was born, he lived anything but a happy life,” Savage told the jury, and the eloquent attorney promised that
he would produce lengthy records supporting his contention that Denny Tuohmy was, and had been, a schizophrenic for many years. With voluminous medical and Army records, and with testimony from the defendant’s family, he would attempt to show that Tuohmy had acted as a man medically and legally insane. The diminutive defendant viewed the proceedings with equanimity as Tony Savage rose to present the case for the defense.

  The most difficult questions facing the jury were whether Denny Lee Tuohmy had been legally insane in December seven years before. Was he unable to distinguish right from wrong at the time he killed Gladys Bodine and Fritz Donohue?

  There is no machine, no recording device, no computer that can accurately evaluate the condition of the human mind at a specific time in the past. The jurors who would decide Tuohmy’s fate would have to rely on testimony from friends and relatives who knew the defendant before and after his crimes, testimony from strangers who dealt with him during that period, and testimony of expert witnesses in the field of psychiatry.

  Three questions had to be answered by the statements of witnesses: (1) Was Denny Lee Tuohmy legally insane at the time of the murders, insane during his stay at Eastern State Hospital, and still insane at the time of his trial, or had he recovered to a point where he could move freely within society? (2) Was Denny Lee Tuohmy legally sane at the time of the crimes, and had he only succumbed to mental illness in the aftermath? (3) Was Denny Lee Tuohmy legally sane at the time of his crimes, and had he, as some experts speculated, faked a schizophrenic reaction to avoid being tried?

  Special prosecutor Darrell Lee called Cherie Mullins, the dead woman’s daughter, to the stand. Answering his questions, she related the ups and downs of her affair with Tuohmy.

  “Did you hear from him on December 19?” Lee asked.

  “At about six that evening—he called me, and wanted to borrow my car. I told him to leave me alone.”

  “Did you ever see your mother alive or talk to your mother after that phone call?”

  “No.”

  Cherie described the phone call she had received from the defendant the next morning at the nursing home where she worked.

  “Did you see Denny Tuohmy after your mother’s death?”

  She explained her visit to him in jail on Christmas Eve, when she hoped to get some answers.

  “When you found her, did you see marks on your mother’s body?”

  “No, not then,” she answered softly. “Later, at the morgue, I saw that she had black and blue marks on the backs of her hands and on her throat, and her throat was all swollen.”

  Cherie identified the contents of a suitcase that Denny Tuohmy had taken with him the day after her mother’s death. Virtually all of his clothes and possessions had been packed as if he planned an extended trip. She then identified more than a score of letters he had written to her after his arrest. They were not the ravings of a maniac.

  The gallery buzzed when Patricia Jacque was called to the stand to tell the jury the chilling story of the hours she had spent with Denny Tuohmy.

  Dark-eyed and delicately pretty, Pat had such a soft voice that it needed to be amplified by a microphone. Yet, despite her seeming fragility, Pat Jacque had displayed a backbone of steel when confronted by the gun-wielding stranger. Her children were in danger, and her instincts to protect them were stronger than her own terror.

  “When did you first see the defendant, Denny Tuohmy?” Paul Acheson asked.

  “I answered the knock at the door,” she said, and then related the terrifying hours that began for her, her children, and her husband.

  “At any time that the defendant was with you,”Acheson queried, “did you notice any odor of intoxicants or drugs?”

  “None…Never.”

  “Was his conversation rational? Was he purposeful in his actions?”

  “Yes. He had a reason for everything he told me to do.”

  Pat darted a look at the defendant, where he sat beside his attorney. He smiled at her as if she were an old friend.

  It was clear to everyone in the courtroom that Pat Jacque had believed that she wasn’t going to survive. She still seemed thankful that she was alive.

  Tony Savage bore down heavily on Detective Lieutenant Givens as he asked about Tuohmy’s state of mind during his first contact with the detectives, shortly after he was arrested. Givens recalled that they had talked casually at first about the weather and sports events and that Tuohmy had appeared perfectly competent.

  “And when you questioned him about Fritz Donohue?” asked the defense attorney.

  Givens answered that Tuohmy made complete sense and that he had given excellent instructions about the route they should take to find Fritz, even though he didn’t come right out and admit that he had shot Donohue.

  The final days of the lengthy trial might be called the “war of the psychiatrists.

  Dr. Nicholas Godfroy, called by Savage for the defense, stated unequivocally that Denny Tuohmy had been legally insane at the time of his crimes and was a “schizophrenic, undifferentiated type.” Godfroy, who had not interviewed Tuohmy until five months after the murders, insisted nevertheless that he could be positive that Tuohmy had been insane the previous December.

  Throughout four hours of cross-examination by prosecutor Acheson, Godfroy remained steadfast in his original diagnosis.

  The second defense psychiatrist, S. Harvard Kaufman, had interviewed Tuohmy six years after his crimes. Kaufman, too, said he found the defendant to be a chronic schizophrenic. In cross-examination, prosecutor Darrell Lee asked him, “If you saw a patient five months after a crime, could you state what his condition was at the time of the incident?”

  Kaufman replied, “No, there would be no way of knowing.”

  The first psychiatric witness for the prosecution, Dr. Jack Klein, was questioned by prosecutor Lee. Klein, who had talked to Tuohmy on December 26, six days after the two murders and the kidnapping, found no overt evidence of abnormal mechanisms in the mind.

  “I would not have recommended that he be committed.”

  During rebuttal, Dr. Jarvis, the final witness for the prosecution, said that he had also talked to Denny Tuohmy on December 26. In subsequent years, he had talked to him five more times. Jarvis’s basic assumption was that the defendant was a psychopath—or, in current terminology, an antisocial personality.

  “If Tuohmy was as disturbed as he claims to have been, close associates would have noticed it. Even strangers would have noticed,” Jarvis said flatly. “Nobody saw it.”

  The day after Christmas, Tuohmy had admitted his crimes to Jarvis, saying he wanted to talk about them. In discussing his capture by sheriff’s deputies, he had remarked, “If I’d really wanted to hurt somebody, I could have kicked out the back window and shot the patrol car. I’m not insane, but I will be if things keep going like they have.”

  One aspect in the marathon courtroom debate on mental illness was brought out by the prosecution. All the psychiatrists agreed that the mere fact that an individual suffered from schizophrenia did not mean that he was unable to differentiate between right and wrong.

  Asked if they had ever been “fooled” by a patient mimicking mental illness, each doctor in turn admitted that he was sure he had been.

  The time had come for final arguments. Darrell Lee walked to the bar to speak for the prosecution.

  “In making your decision on this case, you must operate on a premise of reasonable doubt. A reasonable doubt can be written down: The defendant had a girlfriend; her mother was trying to drive them apart. He went to the woman’s house to get the right answers. He knocked her down. He fought her. He choked her. And then he heard her gurgling. He went to her and placed his full weight with his knees on her chest, and as Dr. Wilson says, he choked her for two minutes. He knew Cherie Mullins was not living with her mother, because he called her the minute she arrived at work the next morning. He packed all his clothes. He bought shells for his gun. He called Cherie’s place of employment and found she’d al
ready left. He called Fritz Donohue and wanted to go to Kent. He led him up a lonely road—Denny Lee Tuohmy wasn’t lost; he knew all those roads, but he wanted a car. He couldn’t steal a car. Stolen cars are reported, but not if you kill your best friend and take his car.

  “Then the car wouldn’t start, so he took his gun and his shells and he ran. Why was the rifle loaded? He picked up that rifle and lifted it to his shoulder. He says that gun fired when he slipped, but the bolt action of that rifle takes many steps. Fritz was 5’7" and that gun was held five feet above the ground. Tuohmy shot him right through the head at a range of four or five feet.

  “The defendant once told Cherie Mullins that he had faked insanity in the Army because the hospital was more comfortable than the stockade. Why not then fake insanity again and wait in the hospital in comfort for seven years for witnesses against him to die and disperse?

  “You, as jurors, represent King County; you are six women and six men, a cross-section of our community. Capital punishment is an individual question for an individual case. When you think of Denny Lee Tuohmy, consider the safety of state employees, of fellow prisoners, of you and me. Consider what will happen when he escapes…because he has a history of escape. Think what it will mean to our fellow citizens if he should make another rampage throughout the county.”

  Tony Savage was a large, sardonic man with a wry sense of humor, and he lumbered like a bear when he walked. Now, he rose to address the jury for the final time on behalf of his client.

  Once again, he recounted the defendant’s history of mental aberration.

  “It borders on the ridiculous to say these killings were premeditated acts. He strangles the mother so he can resume the relationship with the daughter. That is supposed to be the act of a sane, rational, man? He wants to ‘escape’ to Tacoma so he can get a divorce from his wife and come back and marry his girlfriend.”