Gang Mom Page 14

  After she accepted him into the gang, Mary gave him the blue rag. “She told me to treat it like my best friend, like it’s part of me, and to never let anyone disrespect it.”

  Mary went on to “freak out” over Beau’s arrest and truly believed that Aaron was lying about Beau’s involvement in the knife fight. Hudson said that while gang members hung out at Mary’s house, where they drank and took drugs, Mary told them that they should “… take care of business. At first it was like, we thought she meant beating Aaron up but after some of the gang got a stolen thirty-eight,” what she really wanted was Aaron killed.

  “At first, Mary chose me and another guy to do it. She would come to me and say, ‘We have to take care of business, court’s coming up. He can’t testify.’” Soon after that, Hudson maintained, he started to leave the gang’s sphere of influence. “I didn’t want to be around it [the gang] because it was getting out of control. I knew something was going to happen,” a fact he was assured of when, a few days before the murder, he heard his best friend, Jim Elstad, and Crazy Joe Brown say that they “… were going to be the ones taking care of business.”

  The tape of Mary’s statement to Rainey and Raynor was played for the jury, followed by Mary’s conversation the same day with Angel Elstad in which Angel told Mary, “You said it needed to get done and it needed to get done soon.”

  With the afternoon moving on toward evening, the judge recessed court till morning.

  JUNE 19

  Hudson once again took the witness stand, and Skelton continued his direct examination.

  Hudson testified that he’d lied to detectives when he was originally interviewed. At that time, he had told them that Mary had tried to persuade the gang members to forget about murdering Aaron. He also stated that he lied when he said that Mary had had no role in the murder. At the time of his interview, he was in juvenile jail and didn’t want to be labeled a “snitch.”

  Under Chez’s skillful cross-examination Hudson admitted, “She never said ‘Kill him.’ It was kind of like beating around the bush. It was pretty obvious what she meant.” Still, aggravated murder required intent and if the state could not prove that, Chez knew the jury would have no choice but to acquit.

  Hudson went on to say that he didn’t learn that Thompson had implicated Brown and Elstad until January 1995, because at that time, he was in the Skipworth Juvenile Detention Center, where news of the outside world was sometimes received a little late. Chez, challenging Hudson’s reasons for testifying against Mary, asked him if the news had made him angry.

  “Yes,” he said. “In my opinion, a lot of what happened was her fault … and she goes around and gets everybody else in trouble.” He wanted revenge against Mary. And, if the jury bought that, they would have to disregard his testimony.

  After Hudson finished, Skelton scanned his witness list and decided to throw in a curve ball. There were more gang members who’d testify, but he thought it might be interesting to hear first from someone else who knew Mary.

  “The state calls Kristine Clooney to the stand.”

  He was determined to show the jury that Mary Thompson’s predilection toward murder was not just one isolated instance and to do that, he needed Clooney’s testimony.

  “Raise your right hand and repeat after me. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” intoned the court clerk.

  “I do,” Clooney answered, and took her seat in the witness box.

  As large and tough-looking a woman as Mary, Clooney had been “Gang Mom” ’s bunk mate in Lane County Jail from December 1995 to May 1996. While Mary occupied bunk number 14, Clooney was only a few beds away.

  “She [Mary] said if she were convicted, she’d make sure Aaron’s mother [Janyce] was dead too,” Clooney stated. “She wrote a rap song about the murder itself and how she was like O.J. and would be acquitted.”

  Clooney claimed that some of the jail’s deputies coddled Mary, perhaps because of her status as a celebrity defendant or her past work as an anti-gang activist. Because of this, Mary’s subsequent behavior was tolerated.

  “One minute she’d be crying, the next she’d be throwing things around. Her mood swings were to the extreme. She also got herself assigned the easy laundry duty and always chose blankets, sheets and pillow cases for herself in blue, her gang’s rag color.”

  In cross-examining Clooney, Chez got her to admit that she was in jail on theft and forgery charges, and that she had a long criminal history, including armed robbery. Then, Chez wondered, did the state offer her any sort of deal in return for her testimony?

  “No, I haven’t been offered leniency for anything,” Clooney answered. “Look, my life isn’t a pretty picture. But I take responsibility for what I’ve done. I’m real tired and I’m trying to turn my life around.”

  Still, Clooney wasn’t the best of witnesses. She admitted under cross-examination that she never trusted Mary, that they never got along, and that she neither liked nor trusted other women. “I have a high animosity toward any woman,” she said. It would be left to a therapist on a distant day in the future to figure out exactly what that was all about.

  Mary had boasted about her gang to Clooney and another woman, jail deputy Jean Petersen, who testified the same day. “Mary carried on about how Crips were better people” than police officers and how “her son is a Crip and he’s the best Crip there is,” Petersen testified. “She said, ‘All I have to do is make one little phone call and this community could be hurt real bad.’”

  JUNE 20

  “They’ll never be able to hang me because my homies won’t talk,” Sam Warthan testified that Mary Thompson had said during a conversation with him and Beau in January 1995. He said that he, Thompson and Flynn were in a car when he and Flynn began horsing around. When he jokingly bragged about beating up Flynn, Thompson told him not to mess “with us because look what happened to Aaron.” Then he recounted a later conversation during which, “Me, Beau and Mark were jockey-boxing [breaking into cars and stealing stereos] a few days before Beau got caught when we spotted a Chevy Suburban with the keys inside.”

  They stole the car and then drove around Eugene until they found a matching vehicle so they could switch license plates and thus fool the police into believing the car wasn’t stolen.

  Skelton then played the tapes of Beau’s conversations on January 17 with Lisa Fentress regarding picking up the .22 at South Eugene High School, and then the tapes of Mary’s conversations with Mark Darling recounting the subsequent car chase and capture. The jury did not seem visibly moved by Mary’s crying as recorded on the tapes.

  JUNE 21

  Skelton’s strategy seemed to be paying off. The jury had listened attentively as the gang members testified. Now it was time to have Mary Thompson convict herself with her own words. With the court’s permission, Skelton was allowed to play some of the wiretaps recorded subsequent to Beau’s capture.

  On some of the tapes in which Mary spoke to gang members, she expressed ignorance about Beau’s activities when he was caught. “All he [Beau] was doing was getting a ride to school,” she told Lisa Fentress during one conversation, a lie repeated in a number of subsequent conversations. Other wiretaps showed that she was deliberately lying to gang members in order to manipulate them, that she knew the Suburban was stolen, that the plates had been changed and that Beau was heading to meet Lisa for the gun exchange.

  At one point while Beau was speaking with Lisa, you could hear Mary get on the line, urging Lisa to give him the gun. During another conversation, Mary admitted alibiing Beau, telling cops that Beau was asleep in her house at the time of the chase.

  Mary worried about Beau being sent back to MacLaren, and about her own future too, because of the pressure police were putting on gang members to testify against her. On the tapes, she sounded paranoid and scared, though sometimes she did a 180-degree turn and just seemed to laugh everything off, as if nothing had happened and nothing mattered.r />
  “If I were going to get hooked up for murder, they’d have come and got me already,” she said in one call. In another, she was recorded as follows:

  MACHINE: Hi. You have reached 555-9039. Sorry we’re unable to take your call, but please don’t hang up. Leave your name, number and a short message and we’ll get back to you.

  THOMPSON: Yo. It’s the murderous brainwashing bitch here and it’s Saturday and if you get a chance, give me a call. Bye.

  JUNE 25

  The first witness of the morning was one of Mary’s foremost allies: Angel Elstad, the older sister of the “shooter,” Jim Elstad.

  By the time Angel took the stand, she was twenty years old, and trying to turn her life around by attending Lane Community College, where she was a sophomore. Since her first child was born, on the night Aaron died, she had given birth to another who was now five months old.

  “How many times had you been to Mary Thompson’s house with your brother?” Skelton asked.

  “About ten to twenty times with Jim,” Angel answered.

  “To the best of your knowledge, when were the Seventy-four Hoover Crips formed?”

  “About one to one-and-a-half months before Aaron died.”

  “And were you ‘jumped in’ at that time?”

  “No, I was eight months pregnant then.”

  “What did Mary Thompson mean by ‘taking care of’ Aaron Iturra?”

  “That meant that Aaron couldn’t testify against Beau.”

  “And how did she incite the gang against Aaron?”

  “Well, first, she claimed that Aaron snuck over the fence to her house and poisoned her dog Lars. Second, she said Aaron was involved in selling drugs to little kids and third that he was having sex with little kids. But see, she would be, like, talking about all that and then I remember a lady arrived at Mary’s house in the middle of the day and the conversation changed to gang intervention.”

  “It was like she was another person?”

  “It was a complete contrast,” Angel agreed.

  “Did Mary Thompson have a gang background?”

  “Mary said that she’d been a Crip for thirty years and that she kept a can of spent bullets she used in her life under a floorboard in her house.”

  “Did she tell you to wear your gang rags?”

  “All the time. You were supposed to wear your rags all the time. Mary said, ‘Don’t let anyone mess with the rags.’”

  “What about John Thompson, did he know what was happening?”

  “No, he was at work. We had private meetings where kids did drugs like crack. The kids would come back from the back bedroom where Mary was, rubbing their noses.”

  “Was there a burglary Mary masterminded?”

  Angel nodded.

  “At the Pleasant Hill gun shop. Mary told [the gang members] the specific guns to steal. I was driving the getaway car and everyone got cold feet when a police officer drove by.”

  “What about Jim? What kind of relationship did he have with Mary?”

  “We have a difference of opinion. Mary Thompson was his ‘Moms.’ See, Jim changed around August [of 1994]. We used to be involved with rock slides and swimming and just hanging out.” Then he started hanging with Mary and began declining. Eventually, Mary had such a hold on him that “if Mary asked him to do something, there was nothing on God’s green earth that could stop him from doing it.” Angel described her brother and the other teens as being pressured into taking care of Aaron for Mary.

  Throughout Angel’s testimony, Mary scribbled notes to Chez, uttering profanity under her breath. Angel went on to describe how she heard the shot that killed Aaron, how her brother and Joe Brown showed up a few minutes later.

  “What happened then?” Skelton wondered.

  “A zillion things were coming out of their mouths a million miles a minute,” Angel testified. When she asked Jim why he had killed Aaron, “He said from conversations he’d had earlier with Mary that my [unborn] son would have gotten killed if he hadn’t taken care of it.” After that, they all went over to Mary’s.

  Under cross-examination, Chez got Angel to admit that she thought Thompson, her brother and Crazy Joe merely intended to beat Aaron up. But noting that Aaron was a big guy they couldn’t just lean on, she assumed they’d threaten him. “I figured they’d say something and Aaron would put them in their place and they would come home. I didn’t even think he’d get a scratch.” She admitted knowing that Brown had stolen a .38 caliber revolver, but didn’t think he’d use it.

  “And you knew this gun?” Chez asked.

  “Yes, I’d borrowed it a few days before and drove to Mapleton to scare this kid that was threatening my cousin.”

  Angel wasn’t such an angel after all, which was exactly what Chez was trying to establish.

  “Did you ever hear Mary Thompson say she wanted Aaron Iturra murdered?”

  “No,” Angel answered.

  “Shortly after the murder, you had a phone conversation with Mary Thompson in which you said that you knew your brother and Brown were going to ‘cap’ Aaron the night he died, right?”

  “Well, I can’t remember any of that. I was heavily medicated after my delivery. The details about the day of the murder and the days afterward are all just a blur. Maybe I was trying to impress the detective at that time. I couldn’t tell you. My attitude was just very childish and just stupid, plain stupid.”

  “Did you believe that Mary Thompson would kill your brother James if he tried to leave the Seventy-four Hoover Crips?”

  “You bet!” she practically shouted. “I overheard Jim say that he would be killed in a conversation before the murder with our mom. She was urging him to stop his gang stuff.”

  Chez had apparently made the one mistake lawyers are never supposed to: he had asked a question without knowing what the answer would be in advance.

  “Did you really believe she had a can of bullets under the floor boards?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you participate in conversations against Aaron Iturra?”

  “Perhaps. I think I stood up for Aaron.” Angel concluded, “It was all centered around her. Our family was nothing.”

  THIRTEEN

  Next up to the stand was gang member Cameron Slade.

  Quickly, Skelton established in his early questioning that Cameron was eighteen years old, living in nearby Klamath County with his girlfriend, that the last grade he attended was the tenth and that he was unemployed.

  “What kind of relationship did you have with Mary Thompson?” Skelton continued.

  “I considered her to be ‘Moms,’” the teenager answered.

  He said that Elstad hung around Mary constantly, that he snorted drugs in the back room with the other teens. Skelton was curious as to why Elstad carried out Thompson’s bidding.

  “Jim would get respect if he killed Aaron Iturra,” he answered simply.

  “Did you know what was going to happen that night?”

  “Yes, I knew it would happen.” Afterwards, “When I saw Jim that night, he had his blue bandanna across his face and one over his head. Both Jim and Joe were very excited when they came back to the house.” Then they all drove over to Mary’s. At first, he watched them go into Mary’s house, but when Angel began having labor pains, he went in to get them. Inside the house, he heard Mary on the phone.

  “She was telling someone, I don’t know who, that ‘It was done,’” Cameron said. As they were leaving to take Angel to the hospital, Mary said to Jim and Joe, “Good job,” and warned him, Cameron, not to talk. “She said not to say anything about this [the murder].”

  Then Steve Chez took over for cross-examination.

  “Were you a member of the gang?”

  “I was asked to join the gang by Mary but I didn’t because I thought gangs were stupid.”

  “Aren’t you concerned over your legal exposure?”

  “No, because I didn’t encourage anything.”

  “When did you first find
out Mary went to the police?”

  “I didn’t know she did do that.”

  “Did you know Beau?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know Joe Brown?”

  “I did not like Joe Brown. Jim Elstad was my friend.”

  On redirect, Cameron admitted that the original idea was to beat Aaron up but once a gun was obtained, killing became the goal.

  “Did you ever see Mary Thompson processing drugs?” Skelton asked.

  “I saw her melt down the drugs in a spoon,” he testified.

  It seemed that Mary had not left her drug-processing past behind her when she moved to Eugene from Josephine County.

  “One more question. Why was the jumping-in ceremony videotaped?”

  “So Mary could mail it to Beau at MacLaren,” Slade concluded.

  Throughout the trial, in addition to local reporters, the courtroom was packed with scribes from Portland and surrounding localities. The Associated Press had their correspondent there; the Iturra case was going out on the wires around the world. The “Gang Mom” trial was big news.

  On the third day of the trial, Skelton stood and intoned, “The state calls Neil Crannell to the stand.” A tall, distinguished-looking man in a gray suit came forward and put his hand on the Bible.

  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” asked the court clerk.

  “I do,” said Crannell, and took his seat in the jury box, while Skelton took his by the lectern. Unlike on television, attorneys are rarely allowed to approach the witness and must do their examining from lecterns across the courtroom.

  “Please state your full name.”

  “Neil Crannell.”

  “And, Mr. Crannell, how and where are you employed?”

  “I am employed in Portland as a policeman for twenty-one years.”

  “Mr. Crannell, do you have any special expertise?”