After six years of hearings, motions, experts, multiple personalities, and delays, the trial of accused serial killer Thomas Dee "Zoo Man" Huskey edges closer.
by Betty Bean
Knoxville's Trial of the Century is approaching, and the defense is calibrating its arsenal. On this day, a motion to throw out one of Tom Huskey's previous rape convictions occasions a discussion about compelling a prosecutor to testify for the defense.
There's a motion demanding that the judge recuse himself and a motion demanding that the judge recuse himself from hearing motions. Pending motions to throw out the prosecutors aren't on the day's docket.
Neither the defense nor the prosecution has a handle on the number of motions and pleadings that have been filed in this case, but everyone agrees it exceeds 1,000.
For the first couple of hours, Judge Richard Baumgartner is patient, forbearing; a lot like his TV commercial in the recent election (which he won, despite his opponent's criticism of the way he's handling this case).
The defendant, Thomas Dee "Zoo Man" Huskey, 38, sits passively as defense attorney Herb Moncier starts talking about taking the stand himself. But Baumgartner has had enough:
"I have heard this time and time again, Mr. Moncier. It is not appropriate for you to be a witness for Mr. Huskey."
Moncier: "If I call myself as a witness, will I be disqualified from representing Mr. Huskey?"
Baumgartner: "I'm warning you..."
Moncier: "I call myself as a witness."
District Attorney General Randy Nichols: "This is gibberish, Your Honor." Mercifully, lunch hour intervenes.
After the break, Moncier lays out the reasons Tom Huskey's 1995 rape conviction should be overturned. Later, co-counsel for the defense Greg Isaacs will talk for two hours about why Baumgartner shouldn't be hearing motions.
And so passes an average pre-trial hearing in the longest-running, most complicated, and, perhaps, most bizarre saga in the annals of local legal history. Bringing accused serial killer Tom Huskey to the bar of justice has transformed the courtroom into a battleground where the defense has launched motions and pleadings and appeals like missiles over Baghdad; where prosecutor and defense attorney pace and glare and rant and accuse; where exotic theories of psychiatry and entomology are expounded by famous experts who are flown in from faraway places at great public expense; where fundamental rights of citizens accused collide with political campaigns and are played out in hateful radio ads; where the defendant's right to a defense runs smack into the public's right to know.
"It's to the point of the surreal," Nichols was heard to say after a recent skirmish with the volatile Moncier. "I expect the clock on the wall to start melting."
It began in a scrubby patch of woods in East Knox County. Most likely there are songbirds there, but nobody could hear them over the roar of the 18-wheelers rolling southwestward toward the Smokies down Interstate 40. And if someone screamed for help, nobody could hear that, either.
As woods go, these are neither lovely, dark nor deep, strung out as they are along the west side of the heavily-traveled highway. The only access to the spot is a rather forlorn little road called Cahaba Lane, which parallels I-40 for a couple of miles between the Strawberry Plains and Midway Road exits before it peters out and dead-ends just past Sunnyview Baptist Church. A billboard marks the end of the line. Faded satanic symbols spray-painted on the pavement beneath the sign are still detectable, and there are remnants of a bonfire. The ground is littered with the beer can and cigarette butt detritus of lovers' lanes. A little distance inside the treeline where the land starts to incline are the skeletal remains of an old mattress—its fabric cover and stuffed innards long since decayed away, coils exposed and rusty.
They found the first one there on Oct. 20, 1992. Her name was Patty Rose Anderson, and she was wearing a green, white, and yellow sweater, blue jean shorts and black high-heeled shoes. A hunter noticed her legs sticking out from under the mattress where she lay face-down on the ground. She was 31, blond, pretty, pregnant, and dead. A former dancer at the Mouse's Ear, she had a long history of arrests for petty crime—mostly prostitution—and was last seen alive on Oct. 13 by a bondsman who said she told him she was trying to make enough money to pay for an abortion.
It took detective Dan Stewart of the Knox County Sheriff's Department about two seconds to recall a man who had been arrested on two counts of rape and one count of robbery at that same location the previous February. He had literally been caught with his pants down by a city police officer who came to investigate after a woman reported being bound, raped, robbed, and tied to a tree just hours earlier. She managed to escape and found her way to a beauty parlor down the road where she called the police. She returned to Cahaba Lane with Detective Tom Pressley of the Knoxville Police Department, who spotted a man about 100 yards into the woods. He drew his gun and caught the suspect forcing a woman to perform oral sex.
The man was arrested and jailed, but was released a couple of months later because the victims, both prostitutes, failed to appear in court. The day he was released, he was arrested again on Magnolia Avenue for soliciting an undercover policewoman for sex. Later, he would tell a defense psychologist that he was looking for the two women he had taken to Cahaba Lane in February. He said he wanted to apologize. (The victims say he told them they'd go "to the graveyard" if he went to jail.)
The officers got a "capias" warrant for Thomas Dee Huskey the day Anderson's body was found, and they went to the home of Frank and Jessie Huskey, near Pigeon Forge, to look for their son, a divorced father of two boys, who lived with them.
There, amid the elephant what-nots and doo-dads that are mementos of Frank Huskey's long and successful career as an elephant trainer at the Knoxville Zoo, Tom Huskey was arrested for failure to appear in court on a misdemeanor charge of soliciting for prostitution. The officers accompanied the bearded, muscular suspect to his bedroom so he could put on his shoes.
In plain view on the bedroom floor was a length of rope resembling that which had been used to bind Anderson's hands. On the dresser was a fake pearl earring snagged on a wisp of blond hair.
On Oct. 26, investigators found Patricia Johnson's body about 50 yards from the spot where Anderson died. Just minutes later, they found Darlene Smith's decomposed corpse deeper in the woods. Both were African American. Johnson, who lived in a homeless shelter, was identified as a prostitute. Smith was not.
One of the best ways of determining how long someone or something has been dead is to examine the insect life that has taken up residence in the soft tissue, so the prosecution called in noted Purdue University entomologist Neal Haskell, a gregarious, talkative professor who calls himself "Maggot Man." Haskell gave interviews opining that Johnson had been dead two days.
This is one thing the prosecution dearly wishes it could have back, since Huskey had been jailed for six days. The defense lawyers seized on Haskell's ill-considered comments, although his subsequent research pinpointed an earlier time of death.
On Oct. 27, searchers came upon the skeletal remains of Susan East Stone, another woman with a record of arrests for prostitution, lying in a creek bed. Stone, who was white, had been dead since late September. On Oct. 30, KCSD detectives Larry Johnson and Mike Upchurch, along with David Davenport of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, were questioning Huskey when something curious happened. Johnson has described it in court like this:
"I stepped out of the room to get a cup of coffee, and when I came back, Upchurch was just kind of grinning. He motioned to Huskey and said 'Larry, I want you to meet Kyle.'...
"So I said 'Kyle, let me read you your rights.'"
On Nov. 9, investigators took three statements from a hostile, threatening "Kyle," and two days later, one from English gentleman "Phillip Daxx." Clinical and forensic psychologist Diana McCoy, who spent 55 hours interviewing and testing Huskey, summarized his condition in a report filed in court:
"Early in the evaluation process the examiner became aware that Mr. Huskey suffers from disassociative identity disorder, with police detectives being the first to be aware of this in their interrogation process after a personality named 'Kyle' took credit for the killings. Kyle is very different from Mr. Huskey in his physical, personal and verbal mannerisms in that he is belligerent and threatening. Kyle frequently uses profanity, in striking contrast to the mild-mannered, polite Tom Huskey."
McCoy said she met other personalities, as well: Larry, who was "almost automaton-like" in his voice inflection, Timothy Sutton, "the homosexual (who) speaks with effeminate bubbliness and is warm and outgoing. Jericho speaks with a British accent."
McCoy says Huskey's condition may stem from his alleged involvement "with a prostitution ring beginning at the age of 15 and the subsequent acts of sado-masochism in which he purportedly engaged. Having been gang-raped by a group of men led by a police officer, 'Sergeant Blackie,' seems to figure prominently in the development of homosexual inclinations as well as Mr. Huskey's resulting fear of police officers..."
Kyle told McCoy he was "born" in 1988, and that the murders were "my last resort to take over and get rid of Tom for good."
Prosecutors scoff at these theories, although McCoy and no less an expert than psychiatrist Robert L. Sadoff, a nationally recognized specialist in disassociative identity disorder (DID) research from Philadelphia, say Huskey shows a large number of observable physical and emotional symptoms associated with DID.
Sadoff and McCoy say Huskey told them he has heard laughter "coming from inside his head," and that he escapes by "crossing over" into the realm of "The Forever People," a world inhabited by heroes, historical and imaginary, pixies and fantastical creatures.
The prosecution, however, is likely to insist that Huskey is evil rather than mentally ill; that he is a sexual sadist whose escalating lust drove him to commit increasingly reckless acts of violence. When (and if) the case comes to trial, Nichols will seek to debunk the whole notion of multiple personalities, since not all experts agree that such a condition exists.
There has also been talk on the prosecution side that Huskey's personalities resemble a 1992 story line from Days of Our Lives.
Moncier and Isaacs want the confessions thrown out because Huskey was not competent. They will stand on expert testimony, which is compelling. They must reconcile their contradictory two-pronged theory, which contends both that he is not guilty, and that he is not guilty by reason of insanity.
Here are some of the motions and pleadings they have filed:
A motion challenging the state's death penalty statute; a motion calling for separate lawyers for Kyle, Timmy, Phillip Daxx, Jericho, et al; a motion requiring FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court; a motion extending the gag order to Baumgartner's GOP opponent, Gail Jarvis, who was using the Huskey case as a campaign issue; a subpoena to a WNOX advertising representative to deliver a tape recording of the offending commercials to court; a motion for a speedy trial.
Moncier and Isaacs will also attempt to plant seeds of reasonable doubt by pointing to Haskell's and forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass's assertions that Patricia Johnson was killed while Huskey was jailed. They may also seek to implicate the boyfriend of Susan East Stone, using a tape recording and an anonymous letter in their possession. A third man, they say, has confessed to committing four murders on John Sevier Highway during the period of time in question.
In late August, Baumgartner ruled that the scheduled Sept. 12 trial date is an impossibility, mostly because the state has run out of money to pay for the experts who must testify. He has reset it for Jan. 11 and has scheduled more hearings this fall.
In the meantime, employees in the criminal court clerk's office will continue to shove other files out of the way to make room for the Huskey case, which is growing like kudzu. And four floors below, Tom Huskey remains in solitary confinement, passing time, drawing pictures of unicorns for his mother.
 |
