On death row
The word of one witness put Michael Mordenti ON DEATH ROW.
What the jurors didn't know could kill him. By
CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer
Published March 14,
2004
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TAMPA - Homicide detectives surprised Gail Mordenti at her Largo
home early that morning, hoping to catch her bleary and
off-balance.
They had an unsolved murder on their hands, an especially cruel
one. Thelma Royston, a 54-year-old woman who raised paint horses,
had been found riddled with bullets and stab wounds in the dirt of
her Odessa horse barn.
Now, nine months later, the investigation pointed to Gail
Mordenti, a cash-strapped, twice-divorced, 40-year-old car dealer
whose blue eyes lingered in men's minds. And on March 8, 1990, as
detectives drove her to Tampa for questioning, she looked ashen,
petrified.
"What would happen to me," she said nervously, "if I tell you
what happened?"
A prosecutor cut the deal: If she named names, she would get a
pass.
So she admitted that she had set up the murder, at the insistence
of the victim's husband. She said she had personally ferried $17,000
from the husband to the hit man, who kicked back some cash to
her.
And she told detectives the hit man's name.
It was Michael, she said. My ex-husband.
No other evidence linked Michael Mordenti, a St. Petersburg used
car dealer, to the crime. Detectives had no eyewitnesses, no
fingerprints, no DNA samples, no hair fibers implicating him. Before
Gail Mordenti gave her statement, a detective would say, her
ex-husband had not even been a suspect.
In the end, she would walk away, free and clear, from the murder
she orchestrated. And her word would send Michael Mordenti to
Florida's death row.
In the 13 years that Mordenti has awaited execution, however, his
case has left a troubling legacy. There is the former superstar
prosecutor who misrepresented or concealed crucial evidence and has
been excoriated for misconduct in other cases. There is the novice
defense attorney who has admitted to critical blunders in Mordenti's
trial and has since left the practice of law. And there is the star
witness' datebook, never shown to jurors, which casts doubt on the
state's official version of events.
The Florida Supreme Court is now deciding whether Mordenti
deserves a new trial. At a hearing March 5, at least two justices
expressed grave doubts about a case that hinges entirely on the word
of an unpunished accomplice to murder. There's no telling when the
court will rule.
"Don't we have a substantial problem?" Chief Justice Harry Lee
Anstead asked the state's attorneys.
If Mordenti, now 62, is an innocent man on death row, a startling
confluence of bad lawyering and bad luck sent him there. If he's
guilty, some of those same legal missteps may soon set a killer
free.
A marriage, a
murder
The marriage of Larry and Thelma Royston lasted 19 years. By
summer 1989, it was long sour. Both wanted out.
They shared a home at High Acres Paint Horse Farm on Gunn
Highway, in northwest Hillsborough County, but they led separate
lives.
Charming and soft-spoken, Larry Royston was a serial adulterer
who disappeared on frequent ski trips. To his lovers, he wove a
well-rehearsed tale designed to elicit pity: His wife was a lesbian
who would "take him to the cleaners" in a divorce.
Over the years, Thelma Royston had forgiven her husband his
infidelities. But in mid 1989, she broke down in tears and told a
friend that she didn't love him anymore, that she wouldn't let him
touch her for fear of AIDS.
Still, she was scared to start over at 54. Her life revolved
around horses. People spoke of how she doted on them. She went to
shows with her paint horse, Pretty Dee Bar, or her husband's
stallion, High Inflation. She immersed herself in the daily routine
of the 10-acre ranch, waking before dawn to feed the horses.
Nights, before heading to bed, she checked to make sure the light
was on in the horse barn.
Late on June 7, 1989, the light went off.
When Larry Royston brought this to his wife's attention, she and
her 74-year-old mother, Isabel Regar, walked out into the mist to
investigate.
A man's voice came from the darkness. "Is anyone home?"
Carrying a flashlight, Thelma Royston walked down the 300-foot
dirt driveway toward the voice. She called back to her mother, "It's
okay, Mom." She explained that a man had come to talk about Bubba, a
horse she had for sale. Regar saw her daughter go into the barn with
the man.
About 20 minutes passed before the Doberman, Dixie, began
barking.
Regar went outside to check. She found her daughter dead on the
barn floor. There were four bullet wounds and five stab wounds to
her head and upper torso. "An overkill situation," a Hillsborough
sheriff's deputy would call it.
An immediate
suspect
Detectives would find no signs of rape, robbery or burglary,
pointing to some other motive. Larry Royston vaulted to the top of
the suspect list.
His reaction to the murder seemed strangely cold, his responses
to simple questions cagey. He had insurance on his wife. The killing
pointed to inside knowledge. Who would have known to extinguish the
barn light to lure her outside?
The morning after the murder, Royston asked a question that
chilled Sherri Loeffelholz, his wife's daughter from a prior
relationship: Did anybody know about our trouble as a couple?
No, Loeffelholz said.
I think it's best to keep it quiet, he said.
Detectives soon learned that the Roystons had skimmed $300,000 in
profits from their Clearwater air-conditioning business and hidden
the money from the IRS. Thelma Royston had made copies of the
invoices, planning to use them against her husband in a divorce.
Investigators also heard about Larry Royston's numerous affairs,
and about what they called his "obsession" with murdering his
wife.
He broached the subject of having her killed, it seemed, with
anyone he trusted enough to help. He appealed to one of his
mistresses, who was once a manager at his farm. He offered to pay
off her truck if she helped. She balked but did not contact
police.
Royston himself had an alibi: His mother-in-law could attest that
he had been in the house, watching TV, when the attacker
arrived.
For detectives, the question became: Whom did Larry Royston send
to the barn that night to act out his will?
An ex-wife's
account
On the early morning of March 8, 1990, Hillsborough sheriff's
deputies, alerted by tipsters, converged on Gail Mordenti's home in
Largo.
They found her alone, in her nightgown. She was scared. They
waited for her to dress and took her to the state attorney's office
in Tampa.
In a previous interview, she had denied knowledge of the killing.
Now she suggested that she knew more than she had let on. But she
wanted immunity.
Prosecutor Lee Atkinson granted it. As long as she told the
truth, he said, her statements could not be used against her.
As Mordenti told it, she had met Larry Royston two summers
before, when he came to install central air in her house. The two
bonded over cars: She sold them, he collected them. He kept classic
Chevys and a Mercedes. He owned thoroughbreds. He struck her as
rich.
Early in 1989, she said, she invited Royston to her house for
lunch. She was broke, stung by recent setbacks in the car business.
She wanted him as a partner in a new venture: With her know-how and
his cash, they could move a lot of autos.
He seemed interested, but he had a problem. His wife was bleeding
him dry in a divorce. She was a lesbian, he said. She was putting
him through hell.
"I need to have her done away with," he told her. Did she know
anyone?
Mordenti told detectives she didn't think beyond "trying to get
my own life straightened out" and "getting myself set up" in
business.
She set about finding someone to commit the murder.
She approached a "big Italian guy" who sold cars on 49th Street,
whose name, it so happened, she didn't remember. She called a Jewish
car dealer in Clearwater, but she didn't remember his name, either.
She said she also broached the subject with a former business
partner.
When those overtures went nowhere, she said, she contacted her
ex-husband, Michael Mordenti. He agreed to do it.
By appearances, it wasn't tough to imagine that Michael Mordenti
might fit the bill, might even serve as a Hollywood casting agent's
image of a contract killer. People remembered his unnervingly dark,
penetrating eyes.
He carried a gun in his briefcase, and a sheathed knife. He liked
the camaraderie of other car lot veterans, who gathered in the
mornings at his home office for coffee. His language was rough and
salty, flavored by his native Massachusetts. He smoked big, reeking
cigars, favored dark clothes and bolted his wallet to his jeans with
a chain.
Gail and Michael Mordenti had divorced in 1987 but stayed on
speaking terms.
"Did Michael ever tell you that he is the one who did it?" a
detective asked Gail Mordenti of the murder.
She sighed. "Yeah," she said.
"Stay cool"
The same day, Gail Mordenti agreed to place a call to her
ex-husband while detectives listened.
She told him she was scared, that she had received a subpoena
from prosecutors in connection with the Royston murder.
"You don't know nothing about it," Michael Mordenti replied.
"You're not involved. So don't worry about it."
"Well, what should I say?"
"Nothing. You tell them what you know. That's all. . . . Stay
cool. There's nothing to worry about. You didn't do anything."
He asked if she had slept with Larry Royston. She denied it.
"Well, what if they - if they want to give me a lie detector
test?" she said.
"You don't have to take nothing. No way. . . . I don't take a lie
detector for nobody."
He added, "I don't want to say too much either" and told her,
"Don't talk nothing on the phone." He said he'd rather talk in
person, that they should meet at a car auction that night.
"I'm just really scared, you know?" she said.
"Play cool," he said, and added: "They have nothing. . . .
They're on a fishing expedition, as usual."
Detectives arrested Michael Mordenti and Larry Royston later that
day.
The alibi
Michael Mordenti turned to one of Tampa's premier defense
lawyers, Barry Cohen. Cohen's investigators got to work establishing
an alibi.
They found an ex-girlfriend who swore that she attended the Lee
County Auto Auction with Mordenti, 90 miles from the murder, on the
night it happened. She remembered that Mordenti wore a western plaid
shirt with pearl snaps and smoked one of his "large, nasty cigars,"
that he ate spaghetti afterward at a Shoney's Restaurant, that they
had sex in his car beneath a freeway underpass.
A server would recall serving them that night, though she had not
punched her time card to prove that she had worked. A car dealer
would corroborate Mordenti's presence at the auction, saying that
Mordenti helped to get the bid started on a Datsun 280ZX. A second
dealer also remembered Mordenti being there, puffing one of his
cigars.
Mordenti soon lost his star attorney. Cohen said Mordenti refused
to pay the fees he quoted and seemed "cavalier" about the need for a
robust defense.
Instead of turning to the public defender's office, with its
decades of collective experience in murder trials, Mordenti wanted
his own lawyer and hired one on the cheap.
His St. Petersburg bail bondsman knew someone: an attorney in the
office next door. Thus Mordenti found John L. Atti.
Atti had been practicing law just three years. He had never
handled a murder trial, much less a death penalty case. He agreed to
represent Mordenti for $50,000, paid for with the transfer of
Mordenti's property.
Atti would later admit that he did not realize how much it would
cost to take witness depositions in the case. He would say that he
didn't think Mordenti would even go to trial, so weak was the
evidence against him. He would say that Mordenti, insisting on his
innocence, rejected the state's offer of a five- to seven-year
sentence in exchange for a guilty plea.
Atti hoped the state would tip its strategic hand when it
prosecuted Larry Royston, who was scheduled for trial before
Mordenti. But in March 1991, the night before his murder trial was
to begin, Royston, 51, took an overdose of antidepressants. He died
alone in his widower's condo.
With Royston dead and Gail Mordenti under immunity as the star
witness, the state had only Michael Mordenti left to answer for the
slaying.
"It was my opportunity to get in the big leagues, if you will,
and take on a murder case," Atti would later say of representing
Mordenti.
It was a league in which he was hopelessly outplayed.
His courtroom opponent was Karen Cox, who had graduated from
Georgetown's law school at age 20 and become a prosecutor at 21.
By the time she got the Mordenti case, still in her late 20s, she
was already amassing a record of high-profile convictions at the
Hillsborough State Attorney's Office that would build her reputation
as the county's top homicide prosecutor. She left to become an
assistant U.S. attorney in 1997.
Defense attorneys would later say there was a problem with the
way she won: She cheated.
The trial
At Mordenti's trial in July 1991, Cox eviscerated his alibi
defense. She ridiculed the "amazing memory" of Mordenti's
ex-girlfriend and characterized her as "the conductor" of witnesses
who conspired to protect him.
The prosecutor pointed out that the recollections of the car
dealers who backed up Mordenti's story were initially hazy on
details about the night of the murder but inexplicably improved over
time.
The prosecutor put on her star witness, Gail Mordenti, who stuck
to her story. She said that Michael Mordenti had told her of
committing the murder and had described the victim as having "a lot
of really expensive jewelry on - rings and things" that he regretted
he couldn't steal.
Crime scene photographs showed there were no rings on Thelma
Royston's fingers. Atti failed to point out the discrepancy to
jurors.
Though it was not the murder weapon, Cox introduced into evidence
the .22-caliber revolver Gail Mordenti claimed her ex-husband gave
her. An FBI metallurgist testified that bullets taken from Royston's
body came from the same box as bullets found in the revolver.
The gun was the single piece of physical evidence prosecutors
produced to link Michael Mordenti to the murder.
Appellate attorneys would later call the metallurgist's testimony
junk science, but Atti did not cross-examine him.
Gail Mordenti told jurors that her ex-husband gave her the
revolver after the murder. This conflicted with her earlier sworn
statement to authorities, in which she said he gave it to her months
before the murder.
Atti would later call it "one of the most important issues in
this case." Yet in his closing argument, when he tried to tell
jurors about the discrepancy, the prosecutor objected: Atti had not
introduced Gail Mordenti's previous statement into evidence. Circuit
Judge Susan Bucklew agreed with the state. Atti couldn't discuss it
now.
Jurors would hear that Michael Mordenti had been involved, in
some unspecified way, in a bank robbery investigation. It sounded
bad. They did not hear the rest of the story: Mordenti had helped
the FBI catch a man who robbed a bank using one of his cars.
Most devastatingly, jurors heard the taped exchange between
Mordenti and his ex-wife. When Larry Royston's name came up, Michael
Mordenti's remarks clearly showed that he knew who Royston was.
In her closing argument to jurors, the prosecutor painted Michael
Mordenti as a liar. She stressed that he had repeatedly denied to
authorities "ever knowing or even hearing of Larry Royston," despite
the familiarity the tape showed.
But Mordenti had acknowledged his familiarity with Royston, in a
February 1990 interview with a sheriff's detective. According to the
detective's report, which the prosecutor had in her possession, "He
never has met Larry Royston but has heard of him via Gail."
It was another discrepancy Atti failed to point out to
jurors.
"I just failed to catch it," he later explained.
Jurors found Mordenti guilty and recommended death by an 11-1
vote.
The datebook
There was one other vital piece of evidence jurors never saw: a
datebook belonging to the star witness. Gail Mordenti said she
turned it over to prosector Cox before the trial. But Atti, the
defense attorney, said the prosecutor never shared it with him.
In the book, Gail Mordenti marked down April 11, 1989, as the day
Larry Royston met her for lunch and raised the subject of murder.
This contradicted her trial testimony that the meeting was in late
February or early March 1989.
Why was the April 11 lunch date important? To Michael Mordenti's
appellate attorneys, it undermined his ex-wife's account of how the
murder plot unfolded.
One night during the murder planning, she said, Michael Mordenti
paid her a surprise visit at home, rousing her from bed. "Get up,"
he said, wanting to stake out the Royston farm.
Gail Mordenti would place this late-night visit sometime at the
end of March or the beginning of April 1989; she knew, she said,
because it was just before boyfriend Michael Milligan, who would
later become her husband, moved in with her.
To Michael Mordenti's attorneys, the April 11 date suggests that
the murder planning took place after Milligan moved in with her. How
plausible is it, they ask, that an ex-husband would barge into the
house and rouse her from bed while another man lay beside her?
Isn't it more plausible, defense attorneys ask, that Gail
Mordenti fingered the wrong Michael as the triggerman, in an effort
to protect Milligan?
Messages left for the Milligans with Gail's daughter were not
returned.
The aftermath
John Atti did not last long in the law.
In 1993, two years after he lost the Mordenti case, he resigned
his law license amid allegations that he misappropriated client
funds and failed to provide competent counsel in other cases. At a
November 2001 hearing in a Hillsborough court, Atti, who by then was
working for Sears Home Improvement, acknowledged that he made
oversights in Mordenti's case.
Karen Cox, the superstar prosecutor, is no longer putting people
behind bars.
In 1999, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction of
accused contract killer Walter Ruiz, saying Cox and another
Hillsborough prosecutor had engaged in "egregious and inexcusable
prosecutorial misconduct." In that case, Cox told jurors of her
cancer-stricken father's service in the Persian Gulf War. The court
said she improperly equated his sacrifice with the jury's "moral
duty to sentence Ruiz to death."
As a federal prosecutor in 1998, Cox allowed an informer to
testify under a false name in an Internet sex solicitation case. She
resigned from the U.S. Attorney's Office in 2001, after the state
Supreme Court suspended her for a year, describing her as "a
prosecutor who determines on her own when and how to follow the
rules." The court, however, called her conduct "an aberration on an
otherwise unblemished career," and Cox now practices law in
Tampa.
Contacted for this report, Cox referred questions to the state
Attorney General's Office, which is handling the case on appeal.
That office declined to comment.
Why they convicted
Asked why they convicted Michael Mordenti, jurors interviewed by
the Times pointed to one piece of evidence that, for them, clinched
the case: the taped call between Michael and Gail Mordenti.
"I just remember him saying, "They don't know nothing, they're
just fishing,' " said juror Norman Haight. "If you were not guilty,
I just don't think that's something you would have said."
Juror Karen DuBois agreed, saying: "The recording was to me very
damning." Thirteen years later, DuBois still remembers being
unnerved by Michael Mordenti's "dark, dark eyes."
"They were cold, hard," she said. "He'd just stare at the jury,
and I thought, "Not a good move. You're not engendering warm, fuzzy
feelings here.' "
The Florida Supreme
Court
Martin McClain, the court-appointed defense attorney handling
Mordenti's appeal, has helped free two men from Florida's death row
already.
Here, McClain sees a horribly flawed prosecution based on the
word of a woman who had good reason to lie. While prosecutors see
proof of Mordenti's guilt in his "cagey" remarks to his ex-wife
during their taped exchange, the defense attorney hears something
else entirely. He hears Mr. Mordenti trying to calm an ex-wife who,
as he knew, had become a suspect in the Royston murder. All the tape
really shows, McClain said, is that they had in some way discussed
the well-publicized murder before.
"I think she's the one being cagey," McClain said.
In the Mordenti case, he said, so many things didn't jibe. In her
hunt for a hit man in 1989, why would Gail Mordenti make overtures
to her ex-husband, her ex-business partner and two other car dealers
whose names she could not even remember? Why not approach the man
she presumably trusted most: Michael Milligan, then her boyfriend,
soon to be her husband?
And why, the defense attorney asks, did Gail Mordenti marry
Milligan just weeks after her story prompted arrests in the murder?
Perhaps so they could not be forced to testify against each
other?
"How much misconduct will the court accept from the prosecutor
and the state?" McClain asked the Florida Supreme Court on March 5,
launching into the case's flaws. He spoke of the datebook, of how
the state led jurors to believe Michael Mordenti might be a bank
robber.
Robert Landry, the assistant attorney general handling the appeal
for the state, admitted that the prosecution had not turned over the
datebook to the defense, but he could not explain why. The datebook
and how it might have affected the case were what Chief Justice
Anstead called "a substantial problem."
Justice Barbara Pariente also seemed troubled. Without physical
evidence, Pariente said, "How could there be a case where
credibility is more important than in this case?" And in light of
the datebook, she said, didn't Gail Mordenti's account of the
timeline collapse?
"We have one woman's word, and now we have got several different
pieces of evidence, either withheld or misrepresented, that could
change what the jury felt about the credibility of Gail Mordenti,"
Pariente said.
While Gail Mordenti fingered her ex-husband in the murder plot,
Pariente said, "She could just as well have said that she talked to
her boyfriend, Michael Milligan, and he said for 10,000 (dollars),
he'd do it."
The justice added: "She could have said anybody in the
world."
Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com
About this report
Information used in this report was drawn from court transcripts,
depositions, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office reports and
interviews. Times staff writer Dong-Phuong Nguyen and researchers
John Martin and Caryn Baird also contributed. [Last modified March 11, 2004, 15:19:25]
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