Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman James Sackett

Chapter 4

223 4 T he passage of time is both an enemy and an ally,” Jeff Paulsen said for neither the first nor the final time, speaking to reporters outside Courtroom 840 following the Clark verdict. “It’s true that people die and memories fade, but it’s also true that attitudes change and a case that could not have been successfully prosecuted in 1970 was successfully prosecuted now because people were willing, finally, to come forward and tell what they knew. “The message from both verdicts, from both the convictions of Ronald Reed and Larry Clark, is that it’s never too late to do justice.” Much later, Paulsen acknowledged that the “centerpiece” of the state’s case in both trials actually had nothing to do with memory and had proved impervious to the passing of time. He was speaking about the carefully preserved recording of Connie Trimble’s phone call, which had survived its own aging, a series of investigations and grand jury hearings, and a long-ago trial. “There was no question that was Trimble’s voice on the tape,” Paulsen said, “and once you have her making that call, and once it’s established that she was Reed’s girlfriend at the time, and once you have all those witnesses coming in and saying Ronnie and Larry hated cops and were trying to get a Black Panther charter and wanted to make a statement— then it all came together. But it was centered on that tape, that core piece of evidence, which was not dependent on anybody’s memory “ 224 Black White Blue or motivation.” The recording was, to Paulsen’s mind, the equivalent of a smoking gun. “Trimble made the call, and Reed was with her when she made the call, and they went to Clark’s house about three minutes before the shooting and the victim fell a hundred yards away. She can shade it all she wants at that point. She can say she doesn’t think they ever left the house. But she made the call and that’s what brought the officer to the scene and the officer was killed. Even if Reed didn’t leave the house, even if he’s not out there pulling the trigger, he’s in on the conspiracy, and he’s guilty of both aiding and abetting and conspiracy. “Then there were the notes that were in Reed’s pocket when he was arrested [in November 1970],” Paulsen went on, with the certitude of a man who has proven his case. “To me, those notes were a second smoking gun. Our whole theory of the case was laid out in those notes, in Ronnie’s handwriting. I’m going to hijack a plane. I’m going to kill people unless I get what I want. What do I want? I want Connie Trimble, Larry Clark, and Gary Hogan released from jail. I want free airtime for the Panthers’ platform. I want $50,000 in gold. You couldn’t write a more incriminating script or one more in line with the government’s theory. He didn’t say anything about killing a cop, but if you take those notes together with Trimble’s phone call and the other testimony, it all adds up.” Tom Dunaski, who had invested even more time in the case than the prosecutors, summed up the investigators’ feelings in his inimitable fashion. “With Larry,” he said, “I thought it could go either way. We weren’t putting the gun in his hands. Plus, you never know what a jury’s going to do. So it was pretty much I’d take the one and the other would be a bonus. With Ronnie, I’d been pretty confident. Larry was more touch-and-go. I was relieved we got both convictions.” “It was like winning the lottery to have the case not just solved but resolved in a courtroom,” Neil Nelson said. “The chances of having another cold-case cop murder solved liked that, with no DNA or whatever—it will never happen again.” The older, retired cops such as Ed Steenberg and Joe Corcoran seemed confident the jury would judge history the way they believed they had lived it. “I had no doubt about the verdicts,” Steenberg said. “It was the two of them and Connie. I think there were other people The Burden of Proof 225 who were aware of...