Maybe it was the approach of my 40th birthday in 1981 that got me thinking about long-term personal goals. I`d laid no groundwork for permanent financial security, and I was worred about the future. What I did was to resurrect one of my oldest ambitions: to become a lawyer. I wanted to stay active in NOW, of course, but not as an officer.
My friends, however, urged that I run for the state presidency. I argued that I had neither the time nor the money to take on the state presidency as a full-time job. So it was that in 1981 California NOW changed its by-laws to permit a salaried leader, and I was elected to a two-year term as the organization`s first paid president. Law school would have to wait.
(Then on Jan. 11, 1983, Jack Sidote came back into her life.)
It was a Tuesday morning, and I was rushing to get Kay Tsenin, a NOW colleague, to a plane at Burbank airport. As we arrived at the airport, I nudged Kay and pointed to the right, toward the Pacific Southwest Airlines terminal. The steps leading up to it were lined with uniformed police officers carrying rifles and wearing what looked like riot gear.
”What do you think`s going on?” I asked Kay. ”It looks like they`re waiting to arrest some terrorist or something. Maybe some big-time criminal is coming into the airport.”
”I don`t know,” Kay said. ”Whatever it is, it must be really big.”
I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw that there was a line of police cars behind me. Suddenly, the one directly in back of me started flashing its red light. I pulled to the curb and stopped.
Some men in street clothes walked toward the car. One of them looked familiar, but I couldn`t quite place him. Then I remembered. Warren Eggar. Warren Eggar of the Fugitive Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, whom I`d met in 1977 when he walked into my home and arrested me for murder. So then I knew.
When Eggar got to the car and told me to get out I obeyed woodenly, saying nothing, asking nothing. We stood together beside the car. It was then that I noticed for the first time the cameras clicking all around me, the television crews that had materialized from nowhere.
”This can`t be happening again,” I informed him quietly. ”This has all been taken care of.”
He said something like, ”Oh, no, it hasn`t.”
Then Kay was out of the car, shouting at the police, saying that she was my attorney and they couldn`t do this, it was all a mistake. Nobody was listening. I held out my wrists for the handcuffs.
I spent 101 days in jail in Los Angeles while my attorneys finished their preliminary work. Then I agreed to be extradited to Louisiana to stand trial on charges I helped Jack Sidote murder a South American businessman, Moises Chayo.
When Jack entered the Louisiana courtroom all the old swagger seemed to be intact. There was the same cocky tilt of the head, the same jaunty swing of the shoulders.
I watched him settle into the chair and begin to talk. He went on with his now-familiar story of my getting ”dressed up” and our going to Bourbon Street, of my locating a victim and Jack hiding in the trunk of the car, of the trunk jarring closed, of his subsequent ”fear and exhaustion and panic” because he was running out of air. Finally he came to the murder itself.
”And we struggled,” Jack said. ”I heard like a scream, `He knows who I am. He knows who I am. You`ve got to kill him.` And I . . . I panicked . . . and I said, `You`ve got to help me, then do something. Do something.`
. . . And there was a blur, it came from the side . . . from, like, over my right shoulder (the pathologist had testified that the blows had come from the front, not the side). And then . . . then I struck the man . . . I struck the man also.
”The man fell to the ground and I fell on the ground, too. And the next thing I knew my shoulder was . . . my jacket was being pulled and Virginia was there and she said, `Over here, over here.` And I looked and there was . . . I went over to where she was going to and there was a ditch there . . . and
(she) stated that, `We`ve got to put the man in here.` And we went back and started dragging the man to that area. And we were falling down–kept falling down and she helped me and we dragged the man into this ditch and we placed him in the ditch.”
In the confession he signed and swore to in 1977, Jack said that I, and I alone, hit the victim. He said that we left the body where it fell, grabbed the man`s wallet and fled. There was no mention of a ditch or of moving the body.
There was a short recess and then one of my attorneys (Bob Glass) began his cross-examination. Bob asked Jack about his immunity agreement. Didn`t it require him to testify consistently with all previous statements he`d made about the crime or be prosecuted himself? Jack agreed that it did.
”Well,” Bob drawled, ”do you think now that you`re going to be prosecuted because you stated inconsistent things with those statements?”
With that, Bob went on for the next two hours or more to point out the inconsistencies, the differences between Jack`s current story and his past ones, his story and the physical evidence.
What about the time? In 1977 Jack had said he first crawled into the trunk of the car about 11 p.m. Now he was saying that we picked up the victim, killed him and robbed him, and returned home by 9:30. Jack said he must have made a mistake in 1977.
What about the murder site? In 1977 there was a warehouse. Was there any warehouse in the pictures he identified? No. In 1977 he had described the area as rough, stony and flat. Why did the pictures he identified show it to be grassy, with no stones or rocks? Where was the road in 1977? Where was the ditch? Jack answered that his various statements might ”all differ a little to a degree.”
Bob questioned him for more than an hour on his immunity agreement, slowly erasing the prosecution`s picture of a man testifying out of civic duty and desire for atonement. It was established that Jack got even more than immunity and a promise that Louisiana would try to help him with the Nevada Parole Board. It was also reported that he got a commitment from the prosecutors to try to have his parole transferred from Nevada to Louisiana, where he`d be free again, where he may have had prospects for a job connected with offshore oil rigs. Then Bob switched directions.
”Over the five years that you were together with Ginny Foat, you beat her, didn`t you?” he asked. Gordon Konrad, the prosecutor, objected that the question was too vague, so Bob got specific.
”You beat her in Florida and Louisiana?”
”No sir.”
”You beat her when you got to Hermosa Beach . . . ?”
”I never beat Virginia Foat,” Jack said. ”I struck her, but I never beat her.”
His fine distinction drew laughter from the courtroom, along with some outright jeers.
”And in 1970, when she left you after that fight, you almost killed her, didn`t you?”
”Yes, at that time.”
”You threatened to say that the killings you had committed, you`d put on her if you she left you?”
”I don`t recall that, sir.”
Bob began to probe Jack`s feelings about me.
”John Sidote,” he said, ”you look at Virginia Foat. You look at Ginny Foat and tell her that she did what you say she did.”
The courtroom was hushed. The jurors were leaning forward in their seats. Jack was looking down at his lap. Finally he raised his eyes and looked not at me, but at Bob.
”Mr. Glass, I don`t want to be here to testify to begin with,” he said. ”I feel badly enough that I have to do this. I`m not following your instructions to look at Virginia Foat and tell her that this is the way it has to be. It`s not that way . . . .”
”You can`t do it, can you?” Bob said. And he was right. Jack could not look at me. When court adjourned for the day, a deputy led him out of the courtroom, and he went without looking at me. In two days he had never looked at me once.
Bob`s cross-examination had all but destroyed whatever credibility he may have had, and I had no doubt the prosecution would try to rehabilitate its star witness. But at 9:03 Monday morning, Gordon Konrad dropped a bombshell.
”Your honor,” he said to Judge Robert Burns, ”the state is not going to put Mr. Sidote back on the stand for any redirect, and the state will rest its case at this time.”
An excited babble broke out in the courtroom. I could hear people whispering to each other somewhere behind me: ”Is that it?” ”Are they serious?” ”Is that all they`ve got?”
Now it was my turn to take the stand. From John Reed, my other attorney, questions were taking me back to when the nightmare began, and I found myself lowering my eyes and I couldn`t seem to raise them again.
”Ginny,” he said, ”what were the years 1965 to 1970 like, in a word?” ”Horrible. Shameful. Terrifying.”
”Have you ever told anyone publicly about those years?”
”No. I have never told anyone privately about those years.”
”Can you tell the jury about those years?”
”I don`t know,” I said. ”I`m so ashamed.”
Of what? John asked.
”I`m ashamed of having loved Jack. I`m ashamed of having stayed, ashamed of my own stupidity.”
I`d promised myself that I wouldn`t cry, but I was crying and I couldn`t stop. I was trying to tell about the first beating, the one in Florida, but I was crying too hard and a recess was called. Then I tried again, and I got through it. I told about the beating and the story of murder that went with it, and afterward I pulled myself together a little bit and went on. But then I came to the beating in New Orleans, and by now the crying had turned into heaving, wracking sobs, and I looked up at John and whimpered, ”Oh, John, I can`t . . . .” And he said, ”You`ve got to tell the jury, Ginny.”
So I told the jury. For more than two hours that day and then on into the next day I told what the years 1965 to 1970 had been like. I went through beating after beating after beating, the psychological torture, the sexual torture, dredging up every detail.
John was finished, but I was to spend almost three more hours on the stand. At 1:30 p.m. that Tuesday, Konrad began his cross-examination. His main interest seemed to be in my love life. Didn`t I know that I was breaking up Jack`s marriage when I started dating him? Wouldn`t I have gone with anybody willing to take me? Didn`t Jack`s drinking problem begin after he met me? What about Ray Foat?
The questions confounded me. Even assuming that everything Konrad was trying to imply was true, was I being tried for adultery? For home-wrecking?
For perpetrating multiple marriage? But I was even more surprised by the questions he didn`t ask. He never asked, for instance, whether I killed Moises Chayo.
John asked me a few more questions on redirection and then, at 4:05 p.m., he turned to Judge Burns. ”The defense rests, your honor,” he said.
On Wednesday morning, the ninth day of the trial, the closing arguments were presented.
The last argument, the rebuttal, belonged to the prosecution, and it was Gordon Konrad who rose to make it. Jack Sidote, he said, ”became an alcoholic because of what he did with this woman. . . . Now, I don`t know whose cage who was in, but all I can tell you is that Jack had lots of things going in 1965, and when he left New York with Ginny Foat the nightmare of his life started;
and from 1965 until now, that nightmare has continued.”
The suggestion that I`d ruined Jack`s life caused so much laughter in the courtroom that Konrad could only stand there flushing and wait for it to subside. I saw that one of the jurors, a young black woman in the front row, was glaring at Konrad with what looked like pure loathing.
I`d heard that jurors who have voted to acquit always look at the defendant when they come back into the courtroom. They look happy. They smile. But as I stood and watched my jurors file back in, not one of them looked at me. Not one was smiling. Judge Burns addressed the foreperson of the jury:
”Have you arrived at a verdict, sir?” he asked.
”Yes, sir, we have.”
”Will you hand it to the clerk, please?”
The court clerk took a slip of paper from the juror and delivered it to the judge. Burns looked down at me and then read from the paper: ”We, the jury, find the defendant, Virginia Foat, not guilty.”
I slumped back into my chair, hardly hearing the bedlam that had erupted all around me.
And I was crying, too, with the joy of finally leaving all the cages behind me. The jury had made its judgment in one hour and fifty minutes, and I, after an agony of years, had made mine: Ginny Foat is not guilty.
