WHAT'S THEIR MOTIVE?

When this happened, the first thing that came to me is WHY?  Why are these men doing this?  There must be a mistake.  I worked years for them, respected confidentiality, worked through nights and weekends if that is what it took to get a project done.  Took phone calls in the middle of the night when they worried about their investments and the financial markets.  I was there when they weren't sure if they could trust the banks and wondered if they should bury their money in the backyard to keep it safe.  These men were so focused on their money and watching every little penny even their ex-wives had to fight for years to get divorce settlements out of them.  These men defined MICRO-management when it came to their money and anything they invested in over the years.  So why were they doing this?  I was in the process of leaving them and placing all my energy on The NOAH Project and its growth...the three of us knew that was coming.  There was an on-going joke over the years...."If you ever decide to leave us, you know so much, we'll have to kill you."  It seemed funny at the time but now it wasn't funny at all....were they serious?  Were they doing this in the form of assassinating my character?

In December 2003 I had several phone conversations with Detective Zuczek (pronounced: Zoo-check) from DPD.  I could tell by his responses to my questions and requests that he didn't know much about white collar business or the other possibility is he had already decided I was guilty so anything I had to say was of no use. Then everything went silent. The next I heard from him was on April 5, 2004 when the Detective called and said there was a warrant out for my arrest, the Grand Jury had indicted me.  Forty eight hours later I was arrested and spent 7 days incarcerated while a bond was put in place.  During those 48 hours I had engaged an attorney to take my case.  As it turned out he also did not know much about white collar issues and had a fraud investigator in all our meetings to translate my business-speak.  A few weeks into this I found out he would have to hire somebody else to conduct the trial as he had failed to mention to me that he was not a trial attorney.  I knew I was not getting proper representation from this man who was negotiating a plea on the side (according to his assistant) even though I told him we had to go to trial, I would never plea to something I did not do.

I visited with a friend and his wife one evening to go over all that had happened.  He was a retired Air Force intelligence officer and had stayed connected to the intelligence community.  He immediately checked into other attorneys and found that one of Dallas's best white collar defense attorneys was Mark Perez. On my friend's recommendation and a meeting with Mr. Perez I moved my case to him.  My friend, on the other hand, started an open Internet chat for me.  He would sometimes ask me specific questions and other times he would tell me to just type in the chat everything that came to my mind that happened over the 20 years I worked for these men.  He said to focus on anything that would give rise to the reasons they would set me up.  In other words, anything I knew that they would not want others to know.  Also, anything that I remembered that was odd, or out of place....anything that just stood out.  He also questioned me extensively on all the details of my case.  I printed out all of these chats and organized them chronologically in notebooks.  The Internet chat dialogues sit about a foot high.  I have always had a photographic memory of events which certainly revealed itself in the dialogues.  I charted things when asked and flow-charted organization structures so the details were clear and easier to understand for all those reviewing this information.  I was under the impression that my friend had included others in the questioning of me and processing the volumes of information I provided.  The chats were done over a period of about a year.

During this time I had to change attorneys once again.  Mr. Perez was asking for an additional $50,000 to go to trial.  My family and I could not come up with that.  In fact, as you saw in a previous blog, for a time I had to move to a homeless (transitional living) shelter because we were all out of money.  The court recognized me as indigent (unable to pay legal fees) and appointed an attorney for me.  From the start Mr. Birdsall did not want to listen to the details of my case, was argumentative and said he did not know how to present my case to a jury.  He tried to withdraw from my case and I asked he be taken off my case but both requests were denied by the court.  Since he repeatedly told me he did not know how to defend me I gave him a copy of all the Internet chats I had accumulated on my case, highlighted with the most pertinent points.  Because he wasn't willing to listen to me I thought he might be willing to read.   He kept it but refused to read it and gave it back to me shortly before the trial.  Within those chats were the detail time lines of all that happened in the events of my case, questionable actions over the years of my clients' (false accusers) and an outline of how to proceed with my defense.  I would tell him this every time he told me he didn't know how to defend me but still he would not read it or give me the time to go over all the details with him.  In fact his argument when he tried to withdraw from the case was that he did not have time for the case and we had a conflict of strategy.  Several times my husband and I asked him what his strategy was but he would not answer. 

I had almost four years of continuances and pre-trial hearings.  During that time all that I needed for my defense was either thrown out as "irrelevant" or "privileged".  The men who falsely accused me were allowed to choose what I could use in my defense which was nothing of any value and they knew it.  Their civil attorneys ran the show in the pre-trial hearings, the prosecutor was just a mouth piece for them.  Further, the man who knew my case inside and out, my friend who conducted the Internet chats, was never even called to testify on my behalf.  When I asked my attorney about him the day before the trial was to start...he just responded, "He doesn't know anything." He never even talked to him, much less subpoenaed him as a witness in my trial, as I had requested.

I will explain more in the next blog about depositions from the civil case that ran parallel to my criminal case.  Also coming...what happened to the computer?!  Until next time....