Mother's Day Read online

  Two weeks passed.

  “On July 4, I went fishing up at Lake Barryessa and Clifford was supposed to go with me,” recalled Tom Sanders. “I wish he had.”

  Clifford stayed home that holiday weekend. On Sunday, July 5, he celebrated his twenty-third birthday, but it was far from a happy one. Things had continued to deteriorate between him and Theresa. Theresa accused him of whoring around. Clifford ratcheted up the tension between them another notch when he questioned again whether the baby she was carrying was even his. He silently made the fateful decision to move out of the house at 586 Elm Avenue once and for all.

  The next morning, Monday, July 6, he packed his bags. But he never got past the front door.

  Clifford had beaten Theresa before, and he told her he was going to beat her again. Then he was going to take what money they had and leave her. He had already packed a brown suitcase and a cardboard box when she went to the bedroom, got the Winchester lever-action deer rifle, and returned to the living room. Just as Clifford was about to leave she aimed the gun and held her finger against the trigger.

  “I grabbed the gun to make him keep from hitting me and it went off,” she later told authorities. That was all she said she could remember.

  A single .30-.30 cartridge penetrated his heart. The coroner said that Clifford apparently held up his left hand to fend off the bullet because it shattered his wrist before striking him in the chest. He took several staggering steps toward the back door before he tripped and fell, landing flat on his back, staring straight up at the ceiling.

  Shocked at what she had done, Theresa set the rifle up against the door frame next to the mop, gathered up her purse and baby Howard, and raced outside to the car. She drove no more than a hundred feet down Elm Avenue before stopping in front of Fred and Ysabel May’s house, at 603 Elm.

  It was 9:20 A.M. when the Mays’ eleven-year-old son answered the door and confronted a hysterical Mrs. Sanders, holding her baby in her arms. She sobbed over and over that she had shot Clifford in the arm and needed help. The boy roused Ysabel and Fred out of bed, and Ysabel called for an ambulance while Fred sat the girl and her baby down in a rocker in the front room.

  While Fred May was across the street investigating, Ysabel tried to comfort Theresa.

  Where was her father? she asked.

  His ’54 Chevy was still in the driveway, but he had gone to the post office and hadn’t seen any of what had happened, Theresa replied.

  “‘I did not think it would do that much damage,’” Ysabel remembered Theresa babbling. “‘I didn’t think it would hurt him that bad. I didn’t think that old gun would hurt him that bad.’

  “She kept saying she hadn’t meant to shoot him. She said it over and over. She was such a pretty little thing,” Ysabel remembered.

  But Ysabel also remembered Theresa coming to the house two weeks earlier, to complain to her husband, the town’s deputy sheriff, about Clifford’s abuse. She remembered Theresa telling Fred that Clifford slapped her around and then left her to take care of the baby and her invalid father all by herself. It was Fred May who first saw the bruises inflicted by Clifford’s heavy hands, and it was Fred who recommended that Theresa go to the Galt police to file the assault charges that she never followed through on.

  Theresa dropped the charges because she thought he’d learned his lesson. But Clifford had not stopped abusing her. He was trying to hurt her again when she went to get the rifle, she said, rocking hypnotically back and forth with baby Howard in her lap.

  When a grim-faced Fred May returned from the Sanderses’ home, he went in the other room to call the police. Then he asked Ysabel to come back to the house with him.

  “I went and saw the body,” Ysabel recalls. “It almost sounds like a TV movie now: blood splattered all over the wall and little bits of skin. I probably would’ve just noticed the blood, but my husband, he points out the little pieces of skin stuck to the wall and ceiling.”

  A trail of Type-A blood ran through the tiny house, from the front porch to the back, where Clifford’s dead foot propped open the screen door. Inside, the house was sparsely furnished, but clean and orderly in the front room, except for a shattered plaster-of-paris horse atop the TV set that had apparently been hit by the same bullet that killed Clifford.

  The bedroom and the kitchen were a mess. The Sanderses’ double bed was unmade with unironed laundry at its foot, income tax forms and other documents piled on one end of the mattress, and toys and a blue diaper bag strewn across Howard’s crib. In the kitchen, dirty dishes, empty soft-drink bottles, and watermelon rinds littered the dining table. A clock radio played low.

  Clifford was dressed in khaki trousers, black shoes, and a white T-shirt. A tattoo on his upper right arm identified him: CLIFF. He had $1.70 in one pocket and two money orders in his wallet, totaling $62.14.

  Theresa still didn’t know the awful truth when an ambulance pulled up outside her house across the street. She kept rocking in the Mays’ front room, asking if Clifford was going to be all right and whether she had just grazed his hand. The Mays kept her questions at bay until a squad car showed up in front of their house for Theresa.

  After Galt Police Chief Walter Froelich helped her into the backseat and started off toward the police station, he finally broke the news to Theresa. Ysabel still remembers her scream.

  “It was bloodcurdling,” she said. “I’ll never forget it. Chilling. A chilling scream.”

  Ysabel May heard the screams all the way down Oak Street, until the squad car turned the corner and headed in the direction of the county jail.

  1 Not her real name.

  II

  Chief Froelich could not calm his suspect or her child and detoured to a local doctor before booking her. Once she had been given a sedative, the next order of business was what to do with baby Howard. Theresa gave him an address in Rio Linda and instructions to take the baby there.

  Then she went to jail in Sacramento, not Galt.

  The snobs from Sacramento liked to compare Galt to Mayberry R.F.D., saying Chief Froelich was a regular Sheriff Andy Taylor and his right-hand man, Captain Clyde Lee, had to be another Deputy Barney Fife. Chief Froelich worked the day shift and Lee worked nights in their two-man police department. They had volunteers who worked as police reservists, but Froelich and Lee were the only ones on the city payroll. While the two lawmen handled everything from barking dogs to corralling the town drunks in Galt, neither the captain nor the chief could remember the last time a woman had shot her husband to death.

  They were quite proud of the fact that they ran a decent town, and they resented imported violence, even the domestic variety. It was some small relief to Captain Lee in particular that Cliff Sanders was an out-of-towner who had only recently settled down in Galt with his wife and child. In later years he would be quick to point out that these were not Galt folk shooting each other.

  Theresa’s attorney asked permission for her to attend her late husband’s funeral three days after her arrest. Judge Raymond Coughlin ordered the sheriff’s department to escort her to and from the three P.M. burial at East Lawn Sierra Hills Cemetery. According to Clifford’s brother, Tom Sanders, Theresa paid for the funeral out of the life insurance money she collected from the Carpenters’ Union policy that Clifford had taken out on himself just a few weeks earlier.

  The obituary in the classifieds of both the Union and the Bee told of the death: In Galt, July 6, 1964, Clifford Clyde Sanders, beloved husband of Theresa Sanders, loving father of Howard Clyde Sanders.…

  The case attracted the press immediately. Petite, pretty, pregnant, and penitent, Theresa was as sympathetic a defendant as ever stepped into a Sacramento courtroom. She also attracted first-rate legal talent as her lawyer.

  “They used to describe Bob Zarick as Sacramento’s answer to Jake Erlich,” said Donald Dorfman, the deputy district attorney assigned to prosecute the Sanders case.

  Robert A. Zarick was a Yugoslavian with a cynical sense of humor about
everything legal.

  “He was charming, almost courtly, with a very well-deserved reputation as a sharp lawyer,” said Dorfman. “He used to give a grin and a wink while he was filing his probate cases and say in his booming voice, ‘The wills you do as a young lawyer come back to support you in your old age as probate.’”

  Zarick’s biggest problem was with the bottle.

  “When I met him, he was at the tail end of his career as an active trial lawyer,” Dorfman continued. “He was an alcoholic. I used to pick him up at his house and take him to court in the mornings, and when I showed up, he’d be down in the basement drinking right out of a bottle. Heavy liquor. He’d offer it to me, and when I’d say no, he’d say, ‘What’sa matter? Can’t you handle it?’

  “I had trials with him where he was actually drunk in the court, and he’d nod off and wake up and do something brilliant in between, in his moments of lucidity. That’s the way he was. Heavy drinker. But he didn’t kill anybody, and he lived to be eighty years old.”

  Drunk or sober, Zarick had his hands full with Theresa Sanders. Even if she had been the most sympathetic client in the world, the fact remained that she had shot her husband to death in an era when terms like “diminished capacity,” “temporary insanity,” and “battered-wife syndrome” were unknown or would have been utterly meaningless in a court of law. Any hope he or Theresa had that she might be set free on a simple claim of self-defense vanished two weeks after her arrest, on the evening of July 21.

  Beginning at 7:30 P.M., the Sacramento County Grand Jury heard testimony in the matter of Theresa Jimmie Francine Sanders. The first witness called was Dr. Arthur Wallace, who had performed the autopsy on Clifford Sanders.

  There were no powder burns on the body, Wallace testified. Whoever shot Clifford Sanders did it from several feet away. What is more, he had died sober. Blood alcohol tests turned up negative.

  In fact, Clifford Sanders was the very picture of health. The only thing physically wrong with the dead white male lying on Dr. Wallace’s examining table was a bullet lodged in his heart and a shattered wrist that appeared to have been raised to fend off the bullet.

  “Both bones were shattered and the wrist was almost amputated,” Wallace told the grand jurors. “It was hanging by a few shreds of muscle.”

  And there was a chest wound, one inch left of the sternum at the level of the eighth rib.

  “It was my assumption, and I believe this is very correct, that the deceased apparently had his hand in some position in front of his chest,” said Wallace.

  “Maybe like this, or like this,” he continued, demonstrating for the jury how Sanders might have held up his hand to protect himself from the bullet. Regardless of how he held his hand, it slowed the bullet down, but not enough to save his life. Normally, a .30-.30 slug would have gone right through Sanders and lodged in the wall behind him, said Wallace.

  “The fact that it lodged within the soft tissues of the heart shows that its momentum was considerably slowed when it struck the chest.”

  Wallace finished his description of Clifford Sanders’s death in less than ten minutes. He was followed by the deputy coroner who hauled Clifford to the morgue, and by a state-certified criminalist who tested the rifle. Both men spent even less time on the stand, corroborating Wallace’s testimony.

  Then Buster May was sworn in.

  “Directing your attention to the sixth of July of this year, sometime around nine A.M., where were you at that time?” asked Deputy District Attorney Dorfman.

  “I was sleeping,” said May.

  “Did something unusual occur at that time?”

  “Yes. My little boy, eleven-year-old, he came in the bedroom and shook me and he says, ‘Daddy, get up! There is a woman out here crying. Says she shot her husband.’”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I jumped out of bed, put on my uniform that was right side of my bed, went out, and the woman was in the living room. She had a little baby. She says, ‘Hurry, hurry.’ She says, ‘Stop the bleeding. His arm is bleeding.’ And I asked her where he was at. She says, ‘He is lying by the back door, inside the back door.’ So I asked her, ‘Where is the rifle?’ She told me she had shot him with a rifle. I says, ‘Where is the gun?’ She says, ‘I threw it.’ She says, ‘Maybe it is in the car.’ Well, I went over to their house and I seen the rifle, sitting right side of the door on the right side.”

  Ysabel May followed her husband to the stand and backed up everything he said. Yes, the young woman came to the house, baby in her arms, hysterical that she might have hurt her husband’s hand. Yes, she had been to the house two weeks earlier, complaining that her husband had beaten her. Yes, she had left the rifle with which she shot him propped up against the wall, next to the back door at 586 Elm. Ysabel could have gone on, but Dorfman thanked her and told her that what she had told the grand jury was plenty.

  By 8:10 P.M., the grand jury had heard enough. After Mrs. May, testimony in the Mrs. Theresa Jimmie Sanders matter came to an end. Deliberation began.

  Less than two and one half hours later the fifteen mostly white, professional, well-educated, and upper-middle-class jurors voted an indictment of first-degree murder against the eighteen-year-old widow, mother, and high-school dropout from dirt-poor Rio Linda, for willfully and maliciously shooting her husband to death.

  At 10:40 P.M., the grand jury adjourned.

  When the district attorney’s office proposed moving the trial of Mrs. Theresa Sanders to downtown Sacramento, the Galt police did not object. Chief Froelich felt a certain sympathy for the thin little wisp of a girl and her baby boy. On the other hand, Galt didn’t need all the attendant bad publicity a murder trial would bring.

  “I think [Deputy District Attorney Donald] Dorfman thought he had a clear-cut case against her,” the chief said years later, underscoring his own belief as to why the DA moved the case out of Froelich’s jurisdiction.

  Dorfman had other reasons. Clear-cut or not, neither he nor his boss, Chief Deputy DA Ed Garcia, wanted the case muffed by a small-town police operation notorious for losing evidence, alienating witnesses, and overstepping the lines of its authority.

  “We used our own investigators from the DA’s office and the coroner, and moved the case up to Sacramento because, frankly, we didn’t want them screwing it up down in Galt,” said Dorfman.

  For the young woman standing trial, however, it might have been better if she had been tried in Galt. A move from sympathetic peers in the rural outback to the relatively urbane metropolis of downtown Sacramento did not appear to bode all that well.

  It was a different, and far more conservative time in California. A thirteen-year-old was suspended from school in Escondido for six days for having a Beatle haircut the same week Theresa was arrested, and fathers were forbidden by law from being in the delivery room when their wives gave birth.

  In addition to the socioeconomic differences between country dwellers and city folk in the state’s capital, there was the troublesome fact that women—whether they were accused of a crime or simply seeking a job—were a rarity in the downtown Sacramento court system of the sixties. Women were to be ogled, but not heard.

  The same week Theresa’s trial was to begin, for example, the Sacramento Christian Women’s Club held a luncheon featuring two speakers: San Francisco lawyer George Hardisty and local fashion maven Mrs. Nancy Green. Hardisty’s topic was “An Attorney Views Tragedy and Success.” Mrs. Green spoke on “How to Be Lovely This Fall.”

  Generally the only women employed by the courts at the time were secretaries or court reporters. Spittoons and cigar smoke in the clerks’ offices and courthouse corridors have long since been replaced by floral arrangements and “no smoking” signs. But in 1964, the Sacramento Superior Courthouse, built at the turn of the century at Sixth and I Streets like a medieval fortress, was still very much a haven for the county’s “old boys’ network.” Women—especially women criminal defendants—were not particularly welcome.
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  Mrs. Theresa Sanders, the plucky little housewife who blew away her abusive oaf of a husband, had already become a cause célèbre before she ever set foot in a courtroom. The photo on the front page of the Sacramento Bee depicted a frail, haunted young woman, barely beyond puberty and clad in prison clothing as she was transferred from Galt to the Sacramento County Jail prior to her first court appearance. When a sad but unbowed Theresa was finally arraigned four weeks later, all the local media were there.

  At nine A.M. on August 4, 1964, a county jail matron escorted Mrs. Sanders down a dimly lit corridor on the ground floor of the county courthouse and into Judge Albert Mundt’s courtroom. The atmosphere was perfunctory, even if the interior design was not. The railings that separated the bench from the jury box and the counsel tables from the court watchers were made of carved and polished hardwood. The squeaky seats in the gallery, behind the bar, were as hard as Puritan church pews. The clerk’s voice echoed off the shiny marble floors and walls as he read the charge: murder in the first degree.

  Theresa’s rosebud mouth turned down in a resolute frown. She was neither repentant nor remorseless. With Robert Zarick at her side, she offered a plea of not guilty. It was self-defense, after all.

  Judge Mundt accepted the plea without comment. He assigned her a trial date of September 10 and a freshman judge who had been on the bench for less than a year: Charles W. Johnson, up in Department 11, on the third floor of the courthouse.

  The matron escorted Theresa past reporters and out of the courtroom, back to her cell in the county jail.