Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [114]
Gabe sat impassively as his dead father’s voice filled the courtroom. “The children were raped on stage, raped in every form imaginable,” Felix told conference participants. Meanwhile jurors were transfixed by the audio-taped lecture in which Felix claimed that his eldest son, Adam, had witnessed a baby being stuffed into a plastic bag and “hammered to death,” and that cult members ate flesh, vomit, and blood in front of his son and other children.
“My rage is omnipresent…my fantasy, of course, is to kill them,” Felix’s recorded voice resounded over speakers in the courtroom. “And I’m a rather moral person. I want to kill them.”
“Did you recognize your father’s voice?” Susan asked Gabe when the tape ended.
Gabriel responded affirmatively.
Afterward, Susan asked about allegations that he, too, had been sexually abused while in day care and that both his parents had gone to police to file a complaint. Still, he insisted that he and Adam had no recollection of being molested while in day care. He maintained that Susan was the one who had created the whole scenario and ultimately convinced Felix that it was real.
“Did it ever occur to you that he might be making it all up?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know,” Gabe replied.
While the questions were exhaustive, Susan never really probed Gabe’s recollection of the night he found his father’s body in the guesthouse. After three days of cross-examination, she asked the teen, “On the night you found your father’s body, were you scared?”
“I wasn’t scared, I was completely devastated,” Gabe replied. “But I wasn’t scared.”
Questions like this made it clear that Susan’s examination was going nowhere. She asked her son if he was “completely truthful” with police during his interrogation, and if he recalled how many times he told officers that his mother “had never been violent” with his dad. But she failed to delve further into the events of that day.
Instead, she pushed Gabe to portray his father in a negative light.
“You don’t recall your father poisoning Tuffy, the family dog?” she asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you aware that your father woke up every day thinking about killing people?”
At times, Susan seemed determined to engage her son in a dialogue, invoking Judge Brady to issue a warning that cross-examination “is not a conversation.”
Even the prosecutor expressed frustration after it became clear that Susan intended to question his star witness until she was content with his responses—no matter the relevance to the case.
There was a break in the case during the second day of testimony when Susan arrived for court and told the judge that she had a bad sore throat, vowed that she “wasn’t making it up” and asked for a postponement. The judge acquiesced and instructed everyone to return to court the following Monday, March 13.
Still, Susan felt well enough to object to Marjorie Briner’s presence in the courtroom before the adjournment. She argued that Briner, her son’s guardian, was influencing Gabe’s testimony. She also insisted that Briner stood to profit from the outcome of the trial because she was entitled to Social Security benefits as his guardian.
In a telephone conversation early in the trial, Marjorie Briner expressed Gabriel’s concern over how he was being portrayed in the media. Some members of the press had been speculating over statements the teen had made during a telephone conversation with his brother Adam while at police headquarters that were being aired on Court TV. Briner explained that Gabe was anxious to clarify one remark in which he appeared to say “Dad left us a pile of ‘money,’ when in fact, Gabe claims that he told Adam, ‘Dad left us a pile of debt.’
“This young man is under a great deal of stress, and it’s not unreasonable