Guilty by Popular Demand by Bill Osinski

Author:Bill Osinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

A Saturday session was called for the next day, January 28. That was a sure sign the judges expected to be able to wrap things up before the weekend was out.

Before going into open court, Stillwell made a startling announcement to the defense attorneys. He told them that about twenty letters containing death threats against the judges had been received during the trial. He offered to let the defense attorneys examine the letters, but at this point Tyack and Suhr were confident that they’d successfully attacked the state’s case and that they would receive an impartial verdict from the three judges. So, they declined Stillwell’s offer—a decision they would later regret.

After a few brief rebuttal witnesses, the prosecution began its final summation of its case. Mong started his closing argument in the same nonargumentative manner he’d displayed throughout the trial. He rehashed the details of the day of the murders, the movements of the victims and the members of the Johnston family.

Then he started to tie together the loose ends of the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses. He expanded on some of McDaniels’s testimony about the phantom stopover at Dr. Mason’s office after the phantom abduction. He even invented a theme for the animated discussion that McDaniels had claimed to have glimpsed, but not heard. The fight that led to the killings, Mong declared, was all about the little orange Skyhawk.

“And so the anger and argument and ultimate issue was to be settled,” Mong stated. “He [Todd] knew he couldn’t do anything through legal means, so it must be settled, and out to Trowbridge Road to settle this argument.” Mong was actually asking the judges to believe that a nineteen-year-old man, who’d been abducted with his fiancée an hour or so earlier, would willingly go with his abductor to his abductor’s home so that he could press his claim for a used car.

Mong next asked the judges to believe that Michelle Johnston, who before being browbeaten by police interrogators had consistently stated that nothing unusual had happened that day, had actually witnessed the murders. “What traumatic event did her eyes behold that would cause psychogenic amnesia?” Mong asked rhetorically.

The judges were also invited by Mong, a former Protestant minister, to imagine the death scene worthy of a Savonarola. Mong invoked the image of Annette cradling the head of her dying lover, who’d just been shot by her maniacally jealous stepfather. “Grabbing his head in a fashion with such intensity the hair on his head stuck under her fingernails,” Mong gushed.

Since there was no evidence of any such bloody crimes found in the Johnston’s trailer, Mong could only support his dramatic account by pointing to the state’s evidence, blankets spotted with a little blood of unknown origins and found twenty-five feet deep in the strip-mine trash pit. He also neglected to mention that those blankets were never connected to Johnston.

The gory mutilations of Todd’s corpse were clear evidence of Johnston’s hatred for Todd, Mong claimed. “The intensity of that dislike [was] so eloquently portrayed in the brutal mutilation of his torso.

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