CHAPTER 20, MURDER MOST ELITE

Now, dear readers, I present Chapter 20 of  MURDER MOST ELITE.  But first, our book selections:

THE HIDDEN MILLIONAIRE: Twelve Principles to Uncovering the Entrepreneur in You by Anthony Morrison.  Morrison Publishing, Inc.  $24.95.  This is the first of the two must-read books about how to become a millionaire and live happily ever after.
ADVERTISING PROFITS FROM HOME.  This second book tells how to attain the skills necessary to make that first million dollars, and more.  Giving specific steps for the novice to become an expert in all things technical in the Internet World, Morrison stands at the ready to teach, day by day, million dollars by million dollars.  For all ambitious people willing to put forth the energy, these are two upfront roads to success in the new world order of cyberspace.  Actually a great dollar value considering the lengths Morrison is willing to go to render assistance to his students.

BROKE!  by Glenn Beck. Simon & Schuster. $29.99.  With humor and accuracy, Beck shows the readers the pitfalls of the U.S. monetary policy from the time of the founding fathers.  More of a cautionary tale than most voters might realize, Beck's contribution to the prosperous hoped-for culture deserves careful study and full support in favor of solvency.  The result of not doing so he sees as loss of sovereignty.  AKA the Disunited States.

And now the next installment of Joan Bretz's MURDER MOST ELITE:

                                                      CHAPTER 20  

Judge Plummer's decision to send Steve Gilreath to The Psychiatric Institute in Washington, D. C. or PI as he called it, instead of a jail term, prospered Steve enormously.  Dr. Ralph Wadeson, his psychiatrist, diagnosed Steve as a schizophrenic, latent type.  With Wadeson's expert  assistance, for the first time in his life, Steve began to relate positively to other people and to openly discuss his inner turmoil.   And then a most wonderful thing happened: he fell in love with a beautiful girl, Martha.  After so many years, our A Team found that no one could remember her last name, whether it was Randelle or Randall, so we opted for clarity's sake to merely refer to her as Martha.

Fairfax County lead detective James Riddel and his partner  Guy Cecil Boggess interviewed Steve at his apartment in the District, then at the local police station, all the while claiming he was involved in the murder of Tasha Semler.  They ordered him to the Fairfax County jail for further investigation the next day.  By then Steve was in a state of utter anxiety, and in his panic before leaving for the interview, he overdosed on stelazine, but did not take the necessary antidote, cogentin.

After twenty-three hours of interrogation, he became so groggy that he finally caved in, and agreed that he was guilty.  The police then took him to the Madeira School around midnight to re-enact  what he had supposedly done, though he knew he was not guilty.  His wrists cuffed to two police guards, the three men  saw detective Riddel hold up a rag in his hand, as he hollered for them to come where he was.  He asked if this was what Steve had used to bind the victim.  Vulnerable, dizzy and hungry, and true to his habitual reaction to accusations, Steve mumbled that "it must be so, if you say so."  The rag was entered as evidence at the trial as Exhibit 17.

Later at the jail as Steve was reading over the typed confession, police chief William Durrer said, "Sign that thing, son, because you're either going out of here with a number on your back or a tag on your toe."

Steve, now terrified of dying at the hands of the police, signed.  Shortly after this news hit the local media, Martha left PI and never attempted to say good-bye to Steve.  He never talked about her again.  It hurt too much.

The next day he recanted the confession.

In March of 1974, Dr. Wadeson visited Steve in prison, dismayed to find him psychotic.  During the trial Steve remained groggy and listless, barely able to function.  His psychiatrist never knew that he had received non-prescribed drugs daily and hypodermic needle shots of unknown drugs.  He did not begin to recover until several months after his conviction, when he refused further drug treatment.

Now the A Group tackled the huge task of analyzing the Semler trial  which took place at Virginia Beach.  The transcript alone was six inches high.  One full storage box stood on the dining room table with Milly's media collection next to a  box of  David's research of Steve's history in prison and personal experiences about the trials and therapy at PI.

I first looked at the confession as read to the jury by prosecutor Horan.  I read it once.  Then again.  At that point, I knew that Steve Gilreath was not guilty of the death of Natalia Parker Semler.  The confession was invalid.

This narrative began with the subject leaving his Washington  D. C. apartment at about 10:30 a.m.  He drove to the C&O Canal in Maryland, where he swam for 1 1/2 hours, or until "noon."  However, this timeline cannot be correct because it fails to factor in the driving time from the apartment to the canal.  The subject could not possibly have arrived there until 11:00 a.m. at the earliest, and given the rain that day the time would more accurately be at minimum 11:30 a.m. or 11:45 a.m.  After the swim the correct time would be  around 12:30 p.m., the exact time Madeira student Christine Nolan swore she last saw Tasha Semler on her way to her drama class that began at 12:45.  Tasha Semler never attended that class because she was abducted between 12:30 and 12:45 p.m.

At 12:30 p.m., the subject of this confession would have been in the state of Maryland.  Not Virginia.

Therefore, he could not have met the victim at the school in Virginia.

One unalterable rule must be in place: The confession must be accepted exactly as stated, and cannot be altered in any way, i.e., no one can interpolate what the subject might have done, or could have done.  This sworn statement  cannot be amended or edited by any outside source.

The accused was therefore not guilty according to the storyline in the confession, and therefore the confession must be thrown out as evidence.

My A Group pals were speechless at what I had found.  Thrilled because the confession was the only piece of material evidence against Steve, though Donna reported to us later that the Gilreath family  was furious that Tom Dyson, the court-appointed attorney, had not analyzed the confession correctly, a major legal faux pas, to put it lightly. 

Why did this discovery of mine come as no surprise?

The Newbold case had caused me to be suspicious of a set up, regardless of how cleverly planned and implemented.  And now this confession fit so well into the correctly exposed Get Gilreath edict in Fairfax County.

Our attention now turned to the media reports.  Most news sources about Tasha Semler's death began at 6:00 p.m., Monday, October 29,  when she had not met her older sister Tatiana, at the bus stop for their ride home to Arlington.  Police organized a search party of thirty Arlington County fire and police departments,  rescue squadsmen, Tasha's father Peter Semler, and the family golden retriever.  Fairfax County police issued a signal 36 lookout alarm throughout the Washington area.  The only evidence they found at the school was two  bikes missing from the bike pool that could not be identified as having been used by Tasha Semler.

Police called off the search at around 2:00 a.m.  At first light, Peter Semler appeared at the school and informed police chief Durrer that he had found his daughter dead in the woods, but he refused to reveal the location until he had spoken with Tasha's grandparents and his lawyer.  Durrer agreed, pledging not to discuss the details with the media if Semler would lead the police to the crime scene.  Later that morning, Semler escorted them to where Tasha lay, about 100 yards from the chapel auditorium.

Personally I thought this scene looked orchestrated.  It raised more questions than it answered.

At this point police ordered a total press blackout.  Everyone at the school was forbidden to talk about the murder, as well as all law enforcement personnel.  Yet only hours before, every detail had been immediately relayed to the media.  By 11:00 a.m. Tasha's body had been delivered to the medical examiners at Fairfax Hospital.

Robert F. Horan Jr. was the first person to break the media blackout, achieving celebrity status as the sole authority for all information.  According to him in his widely publicized statement, Tasha's death was a "particularly brutal murder."  Claiming she had bled profusely, though she was not raped, she put up a "furious struggle." He quickly defined the case as sexual, involving "sex, however weird."

Shortly after midnight on November 1, Horan called a press conference to dramatically announce that John Stephen Gilreath had been arrested for the murder of Tasha Semler.  He had been a suspect ten minutes after the police had located the body.

I took a look at the  newspaper reports, and while some were jarring, I noted that e.g., The Star News wrote that "In an interview with WRC-TV yesterday, Madeira School Headmistress Barbara Keyser said Gilreath's unauthorized release from the [psychiatric] hospital had driven the girl he had assaulted two years ago to the brink of hysteria.  'I think she's very near the breaking point....  This is a child who has lived in mortal fear for two years.  We thought it was an irrational terror because we thought the man [Gilreath] was locked up, and then we discovered he isn't.'"

Keyser charged that the police knew of his reappearance at the school wearing only a loincloth, but failed to notify the school administration.  The article stated that when Steve was tried in the Newbold case, he went berserk in the courtroom and half a dozen bailiffs had to subdue him.

None of those stories was true.

The Gilreath family's anxiety was heightened when The Star News quoted Lieutenant James Horvath of the Fairfax County Sheriff's office saying that Steve was medicated with tranquilizers and antidepressant drugs because of hypertension.  And that Steve had tried several times to commit suicide in jail two years ago.  Again, untrue.

Jimmy Gilreath's response was emphatic: "If that guy, Horvath, is the one I'm thinking of, he wanted to send me to jail for ten years for running a red light."  

Milly sent me a long email, saying "Hey, Nena, here's some real good new info.  Guess who has a special interest in the Madeira School?  It puts a singularly new and important perspective on the two cases, especially the death of Tasha Semler.  Dig this, amiga: Eugene Meyer, the father of of the most powerful woman in the United States, CEO of The Washington Post, Katharine Graham, had donated the land for the school.  Graham had graduated  from there."

And Milly reported the consensus in the Northern Virginia community was that though Ms. Graham was not involved in the daily administration of the school, any and all important issues must have her full support or  they were trashed.  Madeira was her pet, her baby, so to speak.  She owned it.

Milly concluded that it followed that The Post's reportage of the Semler murder must have the complete approval of Ms. Graham.  Her desk was exactly where the buck stopped and nowhere else.  Horan had a magnificent ally in The Post supporting his case  against Gilreath because the word on the street was emphatic that Graham would never permit one negative word about Madeira School to reach the public.  Not from her paper.

 "And remember this, Nena," Milly wrote, "everyone said that Horan absolutely had to win this case because he was up for election in 1975.  He had been appointed to the office of Commonwealth Attorney but relatively speaking, he was not a well known legal figure to the voters.  Ergo, it was vital that he send Gilreath to prison."

I read the complete 1,532 page transcript of the trial, and annotated it.  Then I declared the case an utter disaster for Steve Gilreath, beginning with court-appointed Tom Dyson's defense presentation that 1) Steve was never at the school, never sighted by anyone among the 300-plus people there, and was not guilty.  And 2) that if he was guilty, as described by attorney Blair Howard (also appointed by the court), it was because of mental defect as he referenced from the Newbold case.  Other key points were that the tapes of the interviews of  Steve and the attending officers were destroyed by an electronic eraser.  Also, Steve's testimony was a catastrophe.  He failed to remember basic facts or to correctly pronounce the name of his apartment building.  Amy and Stan's testimonies gave the net effect of something being wrong with him from childhood.  Dr. Wadeson successfuly described Steve as so vulnerable under attacks by the police that he had lost his sense of reality.  This meant that his caving into them had been caused by them, the reflex acting out of an old pattern, which was an example of pure cause and effect.   A second qualified psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Hague, agreed with Dr. Wadeson, noting that Steve had always been timid, recessive and fearful.  Unable to fend for himself under pressure, he was an easy target for the police to elicit a confession from.

Dyson claimed that  officer William L. Johnson had given a pair of riding britches found on a bicycle to officer Riddel.  The A  Group knew it should have been key evidence, but no one knew what had happened to it.  It had disappeared.

Blair Howard argued that if Steve was guilty, it was because of a mental defect Howard claimed was demonstrated in the Newbold case, as well as irresistible impulse; therefore Gilreath must be acquitted.  Pat Furey, the intern for the defense team, made no closing argument.

Clearly, the prosecution intended to convince the jury, the media, and the public that Exhibit 17 which Riddel had uncovered at the re-enactment contained Gilreath's feces.  But the FBI chemical lab's report found no traces of feces on any of the fabrics submitted for chemical examination.

Prosecutor Horan stated that Gilreath had used Exhibit 17 to tie and bind the victim which was smeared with Gilreath's feces.  He waved the exhibit at the jurors, who reacted with horror and disgust as did the members of the audience. Steve Goldberg, reporter for The Virginian-Pilot, wrote that "Horan placed an excrement-covered  piece of blanket on the rail in front of the jurors, and said Gilreath, 23, had told police he wiped himself with the material after defecating in the woods on the day of the slaying."

Whoa!  Now the A Group detectives had something to howl about!  On line 284 of the confession, the questioner asked the suspect, "When you went to the bathroom was this prior to going up to the chapel?"  And the suspect answered "This was prior to going up to Black Pond."  The suspect had earlier stated that he first had a swim at Black Pond, then headed over to the chapel auditorium, where he stood next to the air conditioning unit and ultimately met the victim.

So the confession clearly shows that the piece of blanket used for wiping purposes had been discarded before the subject hiked to Black Pond, and  before he encountered Tasha Semler.  He could not possibly have had that piece of a blanket with him when he first met Tasha Semler.  Therefore Horan's statements were entirely false.

None of the defense team informed the jury that there was no trace of feces on any of the pieces of blanket used on Tasha Semler.

We wanted to know why, why hadn't the defense accurately analyzed the confession, because if they had they could have defeated Horan's arguments.  The jury would have then fully understood why Steve must be acquitted.  That would have been true justice.

What could account for Horan making such a patently untrue claim before the jury?  Was he attempting to protect the privileged Madeira students, considered the jewel in the crown of Northern Virginia?  The  creme de la creme from fine affluent families?  The ultimate in beautiful young womanhood?

How could the prosecutor now rationalize turning Exhibit 17 into defamatory and untrue evidence on which to convict Steve Gilreath?

Whenever we asked that question, those famous words immediately came up that were common knowledge in Northern Virginia: Horan had to win the 1975 election! 

That was the only possible answer.


                      Your obedient servant,
                      Boz