Joy Aylor Part Two


December 1994 Part two of a two-part story

An inside look at courtroom strategies as Joy Aylor is brought to justice

This is the second in a series of two stories about the complicated case centering on the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas. In the first section, we delved into the background of the case and detailed the trial of the man accused of being the hit man. In this installment, we tell the story of the trial of Joy Aylor, the woman accused of planning Rozanne's murder.
Some trials lumber into existence, creaking and groaning and ponderously plodding from one boring event to the next. Joy Aylor's trial was not like that. It opened with a bombshell hurled by the defense even before the jury could be sworn, leaped from crisis to crisis, and kept a national tv audience mesmerized with a fascinating cast of characters ranging from back-stabbing lovers to obsessed prosecutors primed for a showdown that had been years in the making. Doug Mulder, the flamboyant former star prosecutor turned defender of the rich and famous, sprang to the offense before Judge Pat McDowell could settle comfortably behind his blond oak bench, tossing out a flurry of motions attacking the heart of the prosecution's case. His target was former police captain Morris "Mo" McGowan, the man who directed the investigation not only against Joy but against four persons still to be tried and three that have already been convicted of crimes directly connected to the brutal murder of Rozanne Gailiunas in October, 1983. Operating on information received less than a week before walking into Courtroom Number 5 in Dallas's high-rise Lew Sterret judicial complex, Mulder went straight for the gray haired, laconic, previously unflappable witness who formed the bedrock for the series of cases meticulously crafted by Assistant District Attorneys Kevin Chapman and Dan Hagood. "We're in the position where the prosecution's chief investigator has a financial interest in the defendant being found guilty," Mulder dramatically proclaimed even before the nine-woman three-man jury could be summoned to take their oath. He was referring specifically to a newly disclosed contract between McGowan and a Texas-based writer, Carlton Stowers, that so far has netted the now-retired cop $109,000. (see Sidebar #1) Because the agreement between detective and author "fatally flawed and tainted" the case, Mulder said, McDowell should declare a mistrial. Failing that, Mulder contended, McDowell should toss out the charges against Joy. "The burden is on the state to show that their evidence is not tainted," Mulder argued, "and the remedy due to prosecutorial acts is to dismiss the indictment." At the very least, Mulder attested, McDowell should order a continuance to give the defense time to investigate the ramifications of McGowan's actions.

Not surprisingly, McDowell denied all of the motions. To arbitrarily destroy a case that has been on his calendar in one form or another since soon after Joy was charged in 1988 apparently was beyond the judge's capability. Over the years he has presided at proceedings against most of the principals, including the trial of the hit man, a former ministerial student named George Anderson "Andy" Hopper, and his involvement ran as deep as that of Chapman and Hagood.

Plus, there was something else that may have influenced McDowell's decision. At Hopper's trial in 1992 the judge made a number of rulings favoring the prosecution. That tendency became more pronounced during Joy's trial. The adage goes, The law is what the judge says it is, but in this situation it seemed to be modified to, The law is what the prosecution tells the judge it is.

Although McDowell's rulings were almost invariably with the prosecutors, he lacked the singlemindedness that seemed to drive the two ADAs. For Hagood, a lieutenant colonel in the Marines with a proclivity for bellowing annoyingly frequent objections at parade ground volume, and Chapman, whose soft, thin voice belied his fixation with the case, the conviction of Joy Aylor appeared to have become more of a crusade than a job. In their favor was the fact that a conviction was a virtual certainty since the evidence against Joy was considerable and impressive. Although Mulder has a reputation as a courtroom magician, it would take every bit of his skill to save his client from being sent away for capital murder. To his credit, he came close to having a shot at succeeding in the impossible. Given a ruling or two in his favor when the call could have gone either way, the clever defender may have been able to engineer a different outcome.

Jurors got a glimpse of just how strong the evidence against Joy would prove to be when Chapman led them through a slide show-cum-opening statement during which he flashed huge pictures of the multitude of characters involved in the complicated plot on the white wall over McDowell's right shoulder. When he got to the picture of the defendant, jurors did a double take. The giant-sized color reproduction showed a younger, blonde Joy Aylor, a woman who only faintly resembled the brown-haired female squeezed next to Mulder at the defense table. Although the Joy of August 1994 looked much better than the skinny waif with closely cropped hair who climbed off the plane from Paris last November, it was obvious from her strained look and blank stare that this was not the same woman who once mingled with the elite and wealthy.

Shortly after her capture on the Cote d'Azure the French tabloid press dubbed her la femme diabolique de Dallas, the devil woman from Dallas. While Chapman lacked the French media's poetic flair the profile of Joy that he laid out for the jury was no more flattering. According to Chapman, Joy orchestrated Rozanne's murder not because she was jealous and consumed with anger about losing her husband to another woman, but because she was afraid that if her estranged husband went through with his plans to marry Rozanne it would leave her penniless. "This killing was about money," Chapman contended. "She felt she needed (her husband) for monetary purposes."

Working methodically through a drum containing 21 slides, pictures that ran the gamut from mug shots of the principals in the case to a closeup of the small caliber pistol used to shoot Rozanne, Chapman paused when he got to number 17. It was a picture of the villa near St. Paul de Vence that Joy and her lover of the moment, Dallas businessman Jodie Packer, rented under assumed names. Pausing to give the jury a long look at the red-roofed residence nestled comfortably in the wooded hills of southern France, complete with colorful garden and bright blue swimming pool, Chapman, letting his frustration bubble to the surface, commented drily: "That beats death row by quite a bit, people."

When Joy fled Dallas in May 1990 on the eve of her scheduled trial before McDowell, she was accompanied by another lover, prosecutor-turned-defense lawyer Mike Wilson. A man running from his own demons, Wilson had an alcohol and drug dependency problem stretching back to the late Seventies. Just how deep this dependency ran is documented by an incident that occurred shortly before he ran away with Joy. In March, two months before his fateful dash to Canada, Wilson was snagged in a DEA bust and charged with possessing and intending to distribute 21 kilos of cocaine, dope that he had taken in payment for defending a drug dealer. At the time, the street value of the narcotic was in excess of $300,000.

Wilson, ducking his own trial, and Joy bolted to Vancouver. Tucked carefully away in one of Joy's traveling bags was more than a quarter of a million dollars in cash, money that she had gotten from the sale of her house and from her mother, supposedly to pay for her defense. After a few days in Canada, the paranoid Joy, fearing authorities were hot on their trail, abandoned Wilson, leaving him to ponder whether he should follow her or return to Dallas to face the charges against him. Before he could make up his mind, he was arrested by Canadian Royal Mounted Police and spirited back to Texas.

Safe in Mexico, Joy contacted her former lover, Jodie Packer, and asked him if he wanted to join her. He jumped at the chance; together they embarked for the Riviera. Several months later Joy was captured almost by accident. French police became suspicious when an American woman fled the scene of a minor automobile accident. An investigation showed that the woman had been hiding under an assumed name and was, in fact, someone being sought for murder in Texas: Joy Aylor.

Although Packer had not been with her when she was arrested, he was picked up two weeks later in Texas. Soon afterwards, free on bond on federal charges of passport fraud, Packer began his own odyssey as a fugitive. He disappeared into Mexico and did not surface again until May 1994, when he was arrested trying to cross the border near McAllen, Texas.

In the meantime, Joy had been extradited from France on the condition that Texas would never execute her, a promise that did not stop the district attorney's office from trying her for capital murder without asking the death sentence.

Packer's arrest virtually on the eve of her trial was an incredible break for Chapman and Hagood. Wilson had already agreed to testify against Joy and it took the prosecutors little time to work out a plea agreement with Packer that brought him into their camp as well.

In the end, it was Joy's former lovers who did her in, testifying under controversial rulings from McDowell which probably will be challenged on appeal. The decisions to allow Packer and Wilson to relate their emotional and damning stories against Joy were two of the three close calls made by McDowell that most damaged Joy's defense. The third was McDowell's ready consent to a prosecution request to let the jury view the videotaped statement by Andy Hopper in which he admitted killing Rozanne for a trifling $1,500. The prosecution wanted the jury to see the confession because of its powerful emotional impact; the defense wanted to keep it out, arguing that it had nothing to do with Joy's case. Hopper never saw or had any dealings with Joy Aylor; in fact, it is likely he never knew of her existence until the case made the headlines.

While the deck seemed heavily stacked in the prosecution's favor, the defense had several cards of its own to play. The first was the McGowan incident. Although his attempt to halt the trial because of the detective's deal collapsed, Mulder hammered at the former cop during cross-examination in an effort to discredit his testimony. The problem there proved to be that McGowan was not a major witness, certainly not to the extent that he had been in Hopper's trial, and even if he was discredited it probably would have little effect on the jury's decision. Those whose testimony most severely damaged Joy were Packer and Wilson. And Mulder came within a hair of keeping both off the stand.

Claiming that Joy and the Dallas businessman were common-law husband and wife, Mulder asked McDowell to prohibit Packer from testifying under a Texas law which forbids a spouse from giving witness without permission from the other.

The Appeal
Lawrence Mitchell, one of the two court-appointed attorneys representing George Anderson "Andy" Hopper, argued his client's case before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in March 1994, stressing Judge Patrick McDowell's refusal to instruct Hopper's jury about the possible involuntariness of Hopper's confession. During Hopper's trial two years previously testimony confirmed this situation: The former ministerial student was arrested by Richardson police on December 20, 1988, in connection with the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas. At first, Hopper denied that he had been the trigger man, insisting that he had passed on the money to commit the murder to a shadowy figure he identified only as "Chip," a tale that came to become known as "the Chip statement." Soon after his arrest, Hopper was transferred to the Dallas County jail while Richardson police continued the investigation. On February 27, 1989, Richardson investigators asked Hopper's initial court-appointed attorney, Jan Hemphill, for permission to bring Hopper from Dallas to Richardson to be polygraphed in an attempt to affirm the veracity of the Chip statement. When the polygraph examiner told the chief investigator, Morris "Mo" McGowan, that Hopper's test indicated deceptiveness on questions about Rozanne's murder, McGowan took Hopper into an interrogation room to grill him further, an act that Mitchell and his co-counsel, Peter Lesser, claimed went beyond what Hemphill had agreed to on behalf of her client. Under Lesser's cross-examination, McGowan admitted that Hopper had asked to be returned to his cell so he could have time to "think about" the investigator's renewed line of questioning concerning the murder. Instead, McGowan insisted that Hopper tell him about the incident. "I want the truth," he said, "and I want it now." Soon afterwards, Hopper confessed. When the prosecution tried to introduce the videotaped confession during Hopper's trial, Lesser and Mitchell objected. By asking to be returned to his cell, Hopper had tried, his lawyers argued, to invoke his Miranda rights. The fact that McGowan did not accede to the request, Mitchell and Lesser contended, made the confession involuntary. At that stage, Judge McDowell recessed the trial for a hearing out of the presence of the jury to give lawyers the opportunity to argue admissibility, the Texas equivalent of a Jackson v. Denno proceeding. The defense's main witness was Hemphill, who had given up her role as Hopper's defender long before he came to trial because she was appointed a district court judge. Under questioning from Lesser, Hemphill admitted she had made two mistakes during the series of events that culminated in her client's confession: First, she had allowed Hopper to be polygraphed before she had administered her own test and, second, she did not accompany him to Richardson. "I didn't expect the man to make a confession," she said. In light of Hemphill's testimony, Lesser asked McDowell to either rule the confession inadmissible or allow Hemphill to testify before the jury about how the confession had been obtained. When the prosecution got it's turn, Kevin Chapman contended that if Hopper had been trying to invoke Miranda he would have been more specific in his request to McGowan rather than simply saying he wanted to "think about it." Besides, Chapman said, McGowan had never actually refused to stop the interview. All he had told Hopper was that he wanted the truth "and I want it now." After hearing arguments from both sides, McDowell rejected both of Lesser's requests. His decision to allow the jury to watch the videotape was probably the most damaging blow to the defense suffered during the trial. McDowell also ruled that Hopper's words "I want to think about it" did not, of themselves, raise the issue of voluntariness. The fact that he was not given time to think about it did not mean the confession was coerced or was given involuntarily. In addition, McDowell said, the fact that McGowan had not told Hopper "no" when he asked to be returned to his cell was significant. Since the investigator had not specifically refused, McGowan had not violated Hopper's Miranda rights by going ahead. Mitchell jumped to his feet. "We believe this (voluntariness) is a question of fact not of law," he said angrily, arguing that it was an issue that was not open to judicial discretion, that McDowell's opinion was not important because it was not something that was within his purview to judge. The defense wanted McDowell to instruct the jury to consider if Hopper's confession was obtained in violation of his constitutional rights and, if they decided that it was, then they should disregard it. McDowell glared at the lawyer. "I've determined that the confession is admissible," he said, "and I don't think the jury is the proper forum to review my decision." Seventeen days after Joy's trial began it went to the jury: an eclectic group composed nine women and three men. There was one black on the panel and one Asian-American. Surprisingly, considering Dallas's heavy Hispanic population, there were no Hispanics in the group. Most of the jurors were in their 30s and 40s, with the youngest being a 26-year-old man and the oldest a 62-year-old woman. It took the jury only two and a half hours to find Joy guilty of capital murder/ Since the state was prohibited from asking the death sentence, Joy will be sentenced to life in prison. Under the law in effect at the time Rozanne was murdered, that means she will have to serve at least 20 years before becoming eligible for parole. By that time, if she is still alive, she will be 65.

To substantiate his claim of a spousal relationship, Mulder called Joy outside the jury's presence. Hampered by ankle chains that were affixed by a female bailiff each day when she entered the courtroom, Joy shuffled forward as deliberately as a crab traversing a wave-washed beach. Easing into the witness box, she settled erectly into the chair, staring straight ahead.

In a calm, quiet voice that occasionally lapsed into a monotone, Joy summed up her reasons for considering Packer her common-law husband. They registered in hotels as man and wife, she said. They posed as man and wife while living in France. They introduced each other as spouses. And, significantly, Packer signed letters to her as "your loving husband."

Called by Chapman to contradict her, the tall, slim Packer, an accomplished amateur tennis player and yachtsman, strode confidently across the courtroom, unhindered by shackles as was Joy. In direct variance to what Joy had said, Packer contended in a resonating bass that when meeting strangers Joy introduced him as "my friend" rather than "my husband." And, in assertions that would prove vital to prosecution claims that the two were not joined in a common-law marriage, Packer claimed they never had joint bank accounts, filed joint income tax returns, or co-signed leases or other legal documents. In actuality, these were things they could scarcely have done considering Joy's fugitive status and the fact that Packer was traveling with an illegal passport.

"Why did you register as husband and wife at hotels?" Mulder asked when he got a chance to cross-examine.

"Just convenience," Packer replied.

"Why did you sign your letters 'your loving husband'?" "Moral support," Packer shot back, obviously well coached.

Zeroing in on what he considered the more important issue, Mulder quizzed Packer sharply about his motives for agreeing to testify against his former lover.

"Do you feel the prosecution has a gun to your head?" he asked.

"No, sir," Packer replied. "Not at all."

"You're pleading to nine five-year counts?" Mulder pointed out, implying that without the plea bargain Packer would be an octogenarian by the time he finished his sentences.

"I'm not sure," Packer replied evasively.

By testifying against Joy, Mulder asserted, Packer could get away with a sentence as low as three or four years. "In fact," he said, turning the statement into a question, "you're hoping, aren't you, to get by with time served? You're hoping, aren't you, to walk out of that courtroom and have the judge drive you home?"

A smile flickered across Packer's thin face. "I'm not sure about him driving me home," he answered, "but I'd love to walk free."

Despite Mulder's claims that testimony supported two of the three conditions set forth in Texas law for establishing a common-law relationship, Judge McDowell denied the defense motion to keep Packer off the stand. "It's discretionary on my part," he admitted, "but I don't believe the defense established as a matter of law that they were married."

Later, re-called in the jury's presence, Packer claimed that Joy confessed her involvement in Rozanne's murder to him several times, including once when both were meeting with Mulder.

Under questioning by Chapman, Packer said Joy told him she was angry because her husband was spending money on gifts for Rozanne that he had never bought her. "She said she told Bill Garland that she wanted Rozanne out of the picture ... she wanted her eliminated ... she said she wanted her killed."

The image Packer created, however, was not altogether a boon for the prosecution. Coming across as an arrogant opportunist, he admitted in condescending tones that risked alienating the jury his various roles as thief, liar, and fugitive.

After calling a number of minor witnesses and one man who could speak knowledgeably about the plot to kill Rozanne but not about Joy's participation -- auto mechanic Brian Kreafle -- Chapman offered tape recordings of two conversations between Joy and her sister, Carol.

In 1988, at Detective McGowan's request, Carol agreed to be wired during a meeting with Joy in an attempt to get Joy to forthrightly admit her role in Rozanne's murder. The meeting took place in a noisy restaurant and the tape was largely unintelligible although Chapman offered a transcript of the prosecution's interpretation of what was said. Disappointed in the results, McGowan asked Carol to arrange a second meeting, which took place in a quiet motel room. That tape, although much clearer, lacked an unequivocal admission by Joy of her participation in a murder scheme.

Soon after presenting the tapes, the state rested. Conspicuous in their absence as witnesses were Bill Garland, the only person capable of testifying with firsthand knowledge that Joy had indeed ordered and paid for Rozanne's murder; Carol Garland, Joy's traitorous sister and former wife of Bill Garland; and Mike Wilson.

Although the prosecutors did not say why they did not call Garland the word around the courthouse was there was a dispute over the interpretation of the plea agreement that Garland had signed. By not calling him, Chapman avoided the risk of having the dispute aired in public and having Garland reveal the terms of his deal with the state.

If prosecutors feared that Garland might be difficult, they were more worried about Carol, a woman with a history of mental problems who reportedly already was irked because she did not receive a reward sponsored by Rozanne's husband for breaking open the case. They apparently were concerned, perhaps justifiably, that if they put her on the stand there was no telling what she might say.

More puzzling was the prosecution's decision not to call Wilson. Although Chapman and Hagood have repeatedly refused to discuss their strategy, it appears that they had decided to hold him for rebuttal. If that was indeed their plan, it came close to backfiring; if it had not been for Judge McDowell's benevolence, the jury may never have heard Wilson and the prosecution's chances of convicting Joy may have been irretrievably damaged.

When the weight shifted to the defense, Mulder had a tough decision to make. He could call a string of witnesses testifying to Joy's character and perhaps Joy herself, or he could rest without calling any witnesses and prevent the state from presenting a rebuttal case, including, he thought, the possibility of summoning Wilson.

With mainly Packer's testimony to contend with -- and all the baggage that went with the unlikable witness -- Mulder reasoned that without Wilson's testimony to combat he had a good chance of convincing the jury to look somewhat favorably upon his client. But what Mulder did not figure on was McDowell's decision to accede to a prosecution request to re-open its case specifically to let Wilson testify.

With his protest overruled by McDowell, Mulder made one more attempt to keep Wilson off the stand. Claiming that conversations between Joy and her former lover were covered by lawyer-client privilege, Mulder argued that Wilson be prohibited from testifying since his former client, Joy, was asking that privilege be respected. McDowell denied the request.

Looking older than his chronological age of 49, Wilson settled comfortably into the witness chair, carefully setting at his right elbow a disposable coffee cup filled with water from which he sipped intermittently during his stint as Joy's chief accuser. Wearing his slightly wavy, gray hair swept back, giving prominence to a high forehead, Wilson alternated between glaring with terminal seriousness through darkly circled, light-colored eyes, to smiling broadly in a grin that exposed two rows of gray teeth.

A country boy from the tiny East Texas town of Winnsboro, Wilson used his heritage to considerable advantage, speaking in a dialect as thick as oil field mud, peppering his conversations with idioms that belied his education at the University of Texas and Southern Methodist University Law School. Listening to him matter-of-factly describe his relationship with Joy or reveal details he knew would impact heavily on the jury, it was not hard to imagine him as the promising Assistant District Attorney he once was, back in the days when, as a contemporary of Mulder, he handled his own share of high profile cases, such the much-publicized prosection of the distributors of the movie "Debbie Does Dallas." At the time, he seemed destined for prosecutorial stardom.

Unlike Packer, who met defense questions with hostility and suspicion, Wilson utilized his upbringing and his training to effortlessly turn defense probes to his own and the prosecution's benefit. I'm just a good ol' boy who made a few mistakes, he implied, and this is my chance to make everything right.

Curtis Glover, Mulder's co-counsel who was handling Wilson's cross, apparently because of a relationship that existed when they both worked for the legendary district attorney Henry Wade and Mulder was Wilson's boss, was unimpressed.

What about those 46 pounds of cocaine you were caught with? Glover wanted to know.

"It was for my own use," Wilson answered smoothly.

"Forty-six pounds?" Glover asked incredulously.

"It would have taken me awhile," Wilson drawled, "but I eventually would've got through 'er. I would've got 'er done."

Trying to show how much he had profited by agreeing to testify against Joy, Glover pointed out for the jury's benefit that Wilson's sentence was reduced from 180 months to 42 months.

"That's a pretty big reduction, isn't it?" Glover asked.

Wilson nodded enthusiastically. "That's a right smart knock," he agreed.

Despite Glover's efforts to discredit the former lawyer, he was unable to overcome the force of Wilson's testimony against Joy.

Earlier, under careful questioning by Chapman, Wilson recounted how he and Joy had gone to a firing range so Wilson could try out a new pistol. Handing the weapon to Joy, he watched in surprise as she quickly and expertly emptied a clip. Turning to him, she said, "I should have used this gun on Rozanne."

Another time, he said, when the subject of Rozanne's murder came up, Joy told him: "I'm comfortable with what I did. I don't regret what I did. I'm at peace with what I did. The only thing I regret is I didn't do it differently."

And once, he testified, when he mentioned the fact that Rozanne's young son had been asleep in another room at the time of the murder, Joy had brushed it off. "The little boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time," he quoted her as saying.

It was commanding testimony: Damning and powerful. While Packer, however unattractive he might have appeared to the jury, damaged Joy, it was Wilson who sank her.

Chapman is a grind and he built his case in drudging fashion. Piece after piece of incriminating evidence was thrown out for the jury to consider and evaluate without special effort to underline the more relevant information with courtroom histrionics. Similarly, in his closing argument, Chapman urged jurors to consider each piece of evidence as part of a whole. "The evidence is absolutely overwhelming," he argued. In an attempt to brush over the glaring faults of some of his witnesses, especially Packer, he added, "Collectively it is much stronger than the individual parts."

Wanting to leave that thought with the panel, Chapman deviated only briefly from the line to fire a parting shot at Mulder. Scoffing at the defense implication that Joy had not intended for Rozanne to be killed, Chapman pointed out that Joy, according to his witnesses, had never claimed otherwise."Not once," Chapman said, "did she ever say, 'I didn't want that woman dead.' Does that," he asked rhetorically, "sound like a woman who ordered eggs and got bacon?"

Although he may have had a fair chance of discrediting Packer thoroughly enough to influence the verdict, once Wilson delivered his devastating testimony there was little Mulder could do except try to demolish the state's entire case, a formidable task even for the silver-tongued lawyer. Since he made no opening statement and rested without presenting a case in chief, the closing argument represented the jury's first view of Joy's defender outside his confrontational role as a cross-examiner.

Switching roles from attacker to persuader, Mulder tried to create what he hoped the jury would consider a reasonable explanation for the chain of events leading to Rozanne's murder. As Chapman had predicted, Mulder argued that Joy's motive was to have Rozanne beaten, not killed. But once matters got in the hands of Bill Garland events spiralled out of control. Garland, he reminded jurors, had been described by witnesses as a braggart who claimed to have learned to kill as a Marine in Vietnam. Labelling the former pest exterminator an "homicidal maniac" and a "psychotic," Mulder contended that it was he, not Joy, who determined that Rozanne should die. "This thing got out of hand not because of what Joy Aylor did; it got out of hand because of what Bill Garland did."

During his cross-examination of Kreafle, he reminded the panel, the auto mechanic told how he and Garland had driven by Rozanne's house before the murder, circling the block and cruising down the alley that ran behind the residence. During this expedition, Kreafle testified, Garland outlined how he would commit the crime. "He said," Mulder pointed out, ''I'd use a gun.' And when Kreafle asked him about the noise a gun would make, Garland said he'd use a pillow to muffle the sound." It was strange indeed, Mulder argued, that was precisely the way it happened. "Garland is involved in this killing," Mulder insisted. "Either he's involved or he's clairvoyant."

In an attempt to negate the testimony from Joy's long-term lover, Mulder attacked Packer as an opportunist, a scoundrel, and a thief. He still has tens of thousands of dollars of Joy's money secreted in a bank in Mexico, Mulder said, and through his deal with the prosecution he will have time as a free man to enjoy spending it. "He," Mulder said with contempt, "is a prevaricating liar to whom the truth is inadvertent and coincidental."

But Mulder reserved his real revulsion for Wilson, a man who hoodwinked him so badly he twice hired him as an assistant district attorney. "Wilson is corrupt," Mulder maintained. "He was involved in the biggest dope deal in the history of Dallas County," he added, ridiculing Wilson's claim that he planned to keep the 46 pounds of cocaine he was caught with for his own use. Wilson used the same argument in his federal court trial, Mulder said, and that jury refused to buy it. If Joy's jurors were to believe that part of Wilson's story, he said, they would have to understand that quantity of cocaine would be sufficient to last an addict who needed a gram a day to sustain his habit for more than 56 years.

He agreed to testify against Joy, Mulder said, because it got his sentence reduced by more than three-fourths and because there still was something he wanted from Chapman and Hagood: their support in his battle to get re-licensed to practice law. "He is a lawyer who has worked both sides of the fence," Mulder said. "He knows full well what to do to help his deal. MIke Wilson," he said with disdain, "is cut from the same bolt of cloth as Jodie Packer."To substantiate his claim of a spousal relationship, Mulder called Joy outside the jury's presence. Hampered by ankle chains that were affixed by a female bailiff each day when she entered the courtroom, Joy shuffled forward as deliberately as a crab traversing a wave-washed beach. Easing into the witness box, she settled erectly into the chair, staring straight ahead.