Smooth Talker: Trail of Death, page 13
When the subject came back around to the murder in Napa, Melanson was again adamant that he wasn’t involved. “On my dead mother’s grave, I had nothing to do with anything that you have discussed. And I mean that. I’m getting so old, I’ll die anytime now. You know, I’ve lived a full life, not a good life, but from what you say, I’m not capable of that. And nor was I capable of it even back then. … Mom and Daddy raised me different. On a lot of things I just didn’t do right, but they raised me right.”
Melanson again brought up the topic of lawsuits and said he was going to file a civil rights suit because there’d been no cause of death established in the Michele Wallace case. Then he asked if there was a cause of death established for the case in Napa.
“There’s a cause of death, and your DNA is all over that cause of death. Your DNA is there.”
Melanson shook his head. “It ain’t mine,” he said. “I don’t care what you got. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there. And I don’t guess there’s anything in this world that’s foolproof.”
“Well, DNA is pretty foolproof,” Winegar countered. He said he was giving Melanson one more chance to explain why the evidence pointed to him.
Melanson asked if he was “wanted” in Napa for the murder. But Winegar didn’t answer. He just hit him with a series of questions. Did he take things from the bar? Did he take the car? All of which the inmate denied.
The detective took off the gloves. “Here’s what I want you to know. I didn’t just pick you out from random. I had never heard of you in my life. I’m a cold case investigator, homicide investigator. Your DNA came up as being there. Okay? I didn’t just pick you at random. That’s not the way the system works. I came here to talk to Roy Melanson. And all the sciences, all the everything, points at you, and so I need you to explain it in a better way than, ‘It wasn’t me.’”
Melanson, who throughout the questioning had maintained a polite, good ol’ boy demeanor, was finally pushed to the edge. “Then I’ll explain it with an attorney. If I’m gonna be accused of something like that when I wasn’t even there and can prove I wasn’t there, then I’m gonna get an attorney, because I am tired of this.”
The interview was officially over.
XXII
April 2010
Roy Melanson might have been trying to forget “all that shit” he’d done, but never taken any responsibility for, and wishing to be left alone for a few years. But his past wasn’t going to let him.
Even as Don Winegar and Paul Gero, with the help of Napa County DA investigator Leslie Severe, were putting together their case, the CODIS databank came up with another hit on Melanson. In the spring 2010, the state police in Louisiana were entering DNA data from old cold cases when CODIS notified them there was a suspect match to a case from 1988 in Livingston Parish.
The DNA samples had been taken from the body of Charlotte Sauerwin. They’d been matched to the DNA samples that Melanson had been forced to give when he entered the Colorado prison system.
Notified of the suspect profile match, Stanley Carpenter, who’d been the chief of detectives for the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office since 2007, recalled the case immediately. He’d been a narcotics detective when the murder occurred but it was a big case in a small jurisdiction like Livingston Parish.
One of Carpenter’s first tasks after receiving the DNA report was to contact the people who knew and loved Charlotte the best. Her parents had died not knowing who killed their daughter, even though they’d suspected her fiancé. But he was able to reach out to the victim’s sister, Charlene, and Vince LeJeune.
Life had been hard on LeJeune. He’d dealt with Charlotte’s death by not dealing with it. First with hard drugs until after his daughter was born in 1990. While he’d never gone back to that lifestyle, he did get a prescription for the anti-depressant Xanax and ate it like candy.
Even though he remained gainfully employed, the next twenty-two years saw him go through a series of failed marriages and relationships. He didn’t blame the women; he knew he was hard to live with. But how much of that had to do with Charlotte’s death and the cloud of suspicion that had followed him ever since, he didn’t know. He was only 24 years old when she was murdered and he was suspected. There’d never been a chance to find out what life would have been like—what he would have been like--otherwise.
Part of that was due to the old chief of detectives, Kernie Foster. The man had never outright accused him of being the killer to his face. But Vince had heard from other people that Foster flat out told them: “That boy killed that girl and I’m gonna catch him.”
In some ways, it didn’t matter that Foster never was able to bring charges against him. An entire town full of people, some of them friends, had judged him guilty and turned their backs on him. There might not have been any walls or bars holding him in, but he was in a prison of sorts.
As time passed, it got a little easier to be anonymous in Walker. The town’s population doubled. It got a Wal-Mart, a Winn Dixie, a McDonalds, and four strip malls. But for long-time residents, and people who met them, he was the mad dog who brutally killed his fiancé.
At times it had made him angry. One girlfriend told him that a man in town warned her to get away from him because he was a killer. “I’m not,” he told her, “but you tell him that if I hear of that coming out of his mouth again, I will be.”
Coupled with the anger was a deep sense of guilt. After Charlotte died, he used to visit her grave three or four times a year to talk to her. He felt like he’d failed her. He’d promised to keep her safe, but she’d been murdered. That was sometimes tougher to live with than the whispers and accusations in people’s eyes.
There were times when he probably owed his life to the same handful of friends, and his family, who had stuck with him from the beginning. That family included his two daughters; the one born in 1990, after he gained custody of her four years later; and another born eight years later.
There was a game he used to play when he was alone with a .357 magnum revolver. He’d put one bullet in the cylinder and spin it, then cock the hammer back and look to see where the bullet ended up. But he had people who loved him and counted on him, so as often as that bullet might have come up in that .357, he never pulled the trigger.
Vince LeJeune lived for 22 years under the cloud of suspicion, falsely believed to have murdered his fiancé. Photo courtesy of Vince LeJeune.
Vince tried to be the best father he could and that included being completely honest with his girls. He might have been stricter than some fathers; then again, he knew more about the evil in the world than most. But they always knew that if he was a little hard on them, and their boyfriends, it was because he loved them and wanted to keep them safe.
He never hid anything from his daughters. Not the drugs. Not the drinking. Not what had happened to Charlotte. When they got old enough to ask about her, he showed them pictures of the two of them and told them. He figured they’d hear about it at school or on the streets eventually; though if they were ever given a hard time about it, they never told him.
LeJeune had given up on the police ever catching Charlotte’s killer. But that all changed one evening in April 2010. He was at his best friend’s house drinking a few beers with his buddies when his dad called. Someone named Stan Carpenter with the sheriff’s department was looking for him.
“He say what for?” he asked suspiciously. Even though Kernie Foster had retired, he wouldn’t have been surprised if someone wanted to ask him more questions.
“All he’d tell me was it has something to do with Charlotte’s death.”
“Here we go again,” LeJeune told his friends as he hung up and then called Carpenter.
“This is Vince LeJeune,” he said when the detective answered. “I hear you’re looking for me.”
“I’d like you to come down to the sheriff’s office tomorrow, there’s been a break in the Charlotte Sauerwin case,” Carpenter said.
LeJeune rolled his eyes at his friends. There’d been other false alarms and he thought it could even be a trick to get him to the police station so they could interrogate him some more. But then the detective told him that a prisoner in Colorado was a match for DNA found on Charlotte.
It wasn’t what he was expecting to hear. He started crying and then to his buddies’ alarm fell completely apart.
After he pulled himself together, they all talked about it for awhile. Then he just wanted to go home and be alone. As he drove back to his place, he got to thinking about the times the police lied to him or tried to trick him into saying something. He wondered if the meeting with Carpenter the next day would be more of the same.
However, when he arrived he was ushered into Carpenter’s office and was surprised to see Charlene there. Her family had treated him like a pariah since the murder and the tension between the two of them as they sat several chairs apart from each other was palpable.
Then Carpenter told them what had transpired with the DNA test. After all those years, it turned out that a serial rapist and murderer now serving time in Colorado was the man Charlotte met at the Laundromat. He’d preyed on her hopes of getting the land cleared so that she and Vince could build their dream house. Then he’d raped, beat and strangled her before slitting her throat.
It also turned out that he’d been caught with Charlotte’s little .380 Beretta. Apparently he’d tried to file the serial number off but the police had been able to recover all but one of them. Unfortunately, that had not been enough to trace the gun back to Louisiana though it would now matter if his case went to trial.
Sitting in his chair, Vince couldn’t believe it. The long wait was over. He got up and hugged Charlene and they cried together. He wasn’t ready to forgive her or her family or the town that had judged him guilty without a trial, but at that moment it felt good to share the tears.
On April 10, Stan Carpenter and detective Ben Bourgeois of Livingston Parish flew to Colorado. Like the team from Napa, they wanted to get fresh DNA samples from Melanson and see if he would talk to them.
At first Melanson joked with them about being a Cajun, like Bourgeois, not knowing that would tie into what another witness had told the investigators back in 1988. But when they brought up the subject of DNA and Charlotte Sauerwin, he said he was through talking.
Melanson smiled at them and said that if they could find his DNA on their victim, “you go ahead and charge me.”
The detectives smiled back. “We will.”
XXIII
September 2011
The two men sat in their wheelchairs facing each other across the Napa County courtroom. One, Roy Melanson, obese and wearing thick, black-framed glasses on his round, bald head, dressed in a button-down shirt, a tie and slacks, showed little emotion next to the defense table. The other, David Luce, dying of cancer at age 67, oxygen tubes in his nose and attached to a portable tank, was happy to be on the witness stand doing this one last good thing before he passed.
It was the second day of the trial for the 74-year-old Melanson, who’d been charged with first-degree murder. And it had been thirty-seven years since they’d last looked upon each other’s face.
In his opening statements on the first day, Gero told the eight men and four women on the jury that the case was about “a brutal murder and the progress of forensic science.” Police investigators had initially done all they could to solve the crime, he said, but the case had gone cold for thirty years until DNA from the crime scene led to Roy Melanson.
Gero touched on Winegar’s interview with Melanson and how the convicted killer said he’d never been in Napa, or Fagiani’s, or met Andrews. “He denied everything,” Gero said. “He even swore on his mother’s grave.”
The prosecutor told the jurors they would be hearing about other crimes Melanson had committed, including rape and murder. “I’ll ask you to find the defendant, Roy Melanson, guilty of the murder of Anita Andrews,” he’d concluded.
However, Melanson’s public defender, Allison Wilensky, assured the jurors it was a “reasonable doubt case.” The DNA evidence, she said, was very weak. And there was “no way of knowing” who the last man to leave the bar was that night.
“I’ll ask you to return a verdict of ‘not guilty,’” she said.
Gero had then begun the People’s case by calling Joe Moore, the first police officer on the scene, who recalled meeting a “shocked but calm,” Muriel Fagiani who showed him the body in the storeroom.
In an attempt to demonstrate to the jurors all the work that had gone into the case, Gero had then called detectives Bailey and Jarecki to the stand to describe their efforts, leading up to detective Jerich and the work he’d done until 2004.
Criminalist Peter Barnett was called to the stand to detail how he found the crime scene on the morning after the murder. Using photographs taken on that morning, he described how the blood-splatter on the walls and throughout the storeroom demonstrated the violence of the crime as Anita Andrews was beat and stabbed with the screwdriver.
Referring to other photographs, he noted how the placement of the stool and the ashtray on the otherwise clean bar, indicated that Andrews had not yet had a chance to finish up where the stranger had been sitting. But she had one of her high heels on when her body was found in the storeroom, which indicated that she wanted to leave.
Watching the proceedings from the first row behind the prosecution table, Don Winegar recalled how happy he’d been when he found out that Joe Moore and Barnett were still alive and able to testify. Besides showing the chain of custody, there was the human aspect.
Then as Luce was wheeled by a bailiff up next to the witness stand, Winegar remembered the day in January 2010 he met the man. It was a little over a month after returning from Colorado and his interview with Melanson, and he’d called Luce first and told him what was going on and asked if they could meet.
The “peacemaker” at Fagiani’s on the night of July 10, 1974 was excited to hear that at long last the case was solved. He said he’d be happy to help in any way possible, but the detective better hurry; he had terminal cancer and was living in a long-term healthcare facility in Chico, California.
On January 6, 2010, Winegar drove the two hours to Chico where Luce met him at the door of his apartment in the healthcare facility. He was smoking a cigarette while hooked up to a portable oxygen tank. But he smiled and invited Winegar in like a long, lost friend, and they spent the first fifteen minutes talking about Napa in the 70s and their lives.
Winegar liked the gregarious Luce. He was a tough guy and had lived a tough life, but he laughed easily and clearly enjoyed talking about old times. Then they turned to the night of July 10, 1974.
Luce said he was married when he moved to Napa in 1969 and worked construction with the two friends, both of whom had since died, he was carousing with that night. They’d already been to several other bars, including The Happy Hour bar where he left his truck. Then they stopped by Fagiani’s for a beer on the way to another bar. He remembered the stranger at the end of the bar schmoozing Anita, and how his friend hadn’t like the way the guy sat with his back to them and tried to hide his face.
The friend had yelled at the man. But as they were getting ready to leave, Luce had played the peacemaker and gone up to the stranger and told him they meant no harm as he shook the man’s hand.
Luce described the man’s face to Winegar as “demure,” by which the detective assumed meant that he wasn’t aggressive-looking. He also said the stranger’s hands were “soft, hot and wimpy.”
“The only other person I ever met who shook hands like that was Richard Nixon,” he said with a laugh, adding that he’d met the former president at a rally.
As Luce reminisced, Winegar was struck by how exactly his story matched the photograph of the bar. The barstools lined up neatly under the counter, except for the stool on the end. The counter itself wiped clean but for an ashtray, a shot glass and a spoon. That sort of corroboration would be important at a trial.
After Luce told his story, Winegar asked if he’d be willing to view a photo lineup he’d brought with him. A great deal of effort had gone into creating the lineup so that all six of the photos were similar—black and white, cropped the same just below the chin, and nothing in the background to giveaway location. He told the old man that the suspect may or may not be in the photograph and to only identify someone if he was sure.
With that admonition, Winegar laid out the sheet with the photographs on it in front of Luce, who carefully scanned each for several seconds though it seemed much longer to Winegar.
Then Luce pointed to one. “That’s him.”
Winegar did his best to hide his excitement. Luce had just identified Roy Melanson as the stranger at the end of the bar. “How do you know?” he asked calmly.
“The eyes,” Luce replied. “I remember the eyes.”
Gero had indicted Melanson for first degree murder in April 2010. The original trial date had been set for April 2011, but when it was pushed back to September, Gero had worried that Luce might not make it. So they’d taken the extraordinary step of videotaping his testimony in an empty courtroom as Gero and Melanson’s public defender Wilensky asked questions. That way they’d be able to use his statement in court if he died.
However, Luce was alive and his voice was strong as he recounted the night he first saw Melanson, who he described as then being in his 40s with a receding hairline and thin lips. He sat on the barstool, “crossing his legs like a girl.”
It was clear to Luce and his friends that Melanson was purposefully shielding his face with his hand as he sat smoking and drinking. His friend had become angry and started shouting insults at the stranger. “How come you’re hiding your face?” Luce yelled in the courtroom, imitating his friend.
