opened this door, Mr. Merton, with your direct examination of Chief Jeffries. Continue, Mr. Wylie.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.” To the witness he said, “Ms. Jansen, you were about to tell us where the investigation was prior to the murders of Vanessa Brock and Pedro Diaz?”
“Yes. Those two people were the ninth and tenth individuals murdered. The eighth was Alice Jeffries, Sam Jeffries’s wife.
“One of the other people murdered was a young woman named Stacey Kincaid. The killer had tried to kill Stacey earlier, but she had managed to escape and she identified a bowie knife with a gargoyle handle as the weapon the assailant tried to kill her with. Because of her identification, we were focused on that bowie knife.”
The jury was listening intently. She was so much more compelling in her testimony this time.
“I was convinced that Thomas Felton was the murderer. I didn’t have any real evidence other than the fact that there was a serial killer at the University of Utah when Felton was a student there and the fact that he had an unusual knife in his house, although it looked nothing like a bowie knife. However, with the number of people dead, I felt we needed to move on this flimsy evidence. I went to Sam Jeffries, the head of the task force, and asked him to get me a search warrant. He refused to support the request because he did not believe we had probable cause. I then went to Janet Pelicano, the state attorney at the time, and asked her for a search warrant. She refused me for the same reason.
“I must tell you also that the killer had threatened my daughter so I had a personal stake as well.”
“Why are you telling us all this?” Tom asked. He really didn’t know where she was going.
“Number one, I want the jury to know the pressure that was on us. People in our community were dying and it was our responsibility. And second, for Sam and me it was personal, although his loss was so much greater than mine.”
“So what happened the night of the Brock/Diaz murders?”
“The night Vanessa Brock and Pedro Diaz were killed, I got a call from my partner to come to the scene. However, I didn’t go to the scene right away. I went to Thomas Felton’s apartment.”
The gallery started to murmur at that revelation but Judge Holbrook merely had to raise his head and look out into the crowd for the murmuring to stop. Danni continued.
“Felton wasn’t there, so I picked the lock and went in. I found the bowie knife that Stacey Kincaid had identified. It was located in a dresser drawer in a second or spare bedroom in the apartment. Felton had denied us access to that bedroom when we were there during the investigation. That was my main reason for requesting the search warrant.
“At that point, I knew in my own mind that Felton was the killer. I was so excited that I didn’t put anything together as I should have. What I mean is that I should have realized that since Felton wasn’t home, he must have used a different weapon in the Brock/Diaz murders. I just wasn’t thinking straight.
“I also knew that I couldn’t use the bowie knife as evidence because it was illegally obtained. I couldn’t just close the door and walk away. I couldn’t let another murder happen knowing what I knew. So I went to the Brock/Diaz murder scene and I planted the bowie knife in the woods where I knew it would be found.”
There it was. What Jack had suspected and what he had argued to the Florida Supreme Court was, in fact, true. The bowie knife had been planted. Jack just didn’t know that it was planted by Danni.
“Did you ever tell anybody what you had done before your testimony here today?”
“No.”
“The state attorney, the coroner, Chief Jeffries—none of them knew?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t tell them. They all knew. These were experienced people but by the time the case came to trial, the murders had stopped. They were faced with essentially the same dilemma as I was—they had bad evidence, but the killing had stopped. They weren’t going to release Felton. So they fudged it.”
Merton’s case was bleeding heavily at this point. He had to at least try to stop the flow. “Objection, Your Honor. Move to strike the last answer as unresponsive to the question and speculative.”
“Overruled. You’ll have your opportunity on cross-examination, Mr.