Who Named the Knife Read online

  A BOOK OF MURDER AND MEMORY

  Copyright © 2006 by Linda Spalding

  Hardcover edition published 2006

  Trade paperback edition published 2007

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Spalding, Linda

  Who named the knife / Linda Spalding.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-727-8

  1. Acker, Maryann. 2. Spalding, Linda. 3. Murder–Hawaii. 4. Murderers–Hawaii–Biography. 5. Authors, Canadian (English)–20th century–Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Who named the knife: A book of murder and memory.

  HV6533.H39S62 2005 364.152′3′09969 C2005-903392-4

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For Michael

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Honolulu

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Toronto

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Topeka

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Honolulu

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgements

  “Justice had been done, and I belonged to the nation of criminals …”

  – Peter Handke, Across (1986)

  The first time I visited Hawaii it was still a territory, not yet the fiftieth American state, and to my vivid fourteen-year-old Kansas imagination, it was another world. I was visiting my brother and his wife in the summer of 1958. He’d been born ten years before me and by the time I could measure anything, he’d left home. He would not be a lawyer like our father. He would not wear a suit or drink highballs or join the navy. He saw that I was unhappy (we both knew the brooding temper in the Kansas house) and he took me out to Hanauma Bay, where he taught me courage by telling me to relax, to breathe, to go with the waves. Once, we were swimming over the coral looking down through our masks when I saw something in a crevasse where the water was not even very deep. It was a moray eel with a cold, blank look over an open throat and murderous teeth.

  When I married, I moved with my husband to Hawaii. To the way, as my mother put it, I thought life should be. Of course it was changed. The landscape was different. There was no room for taro, the mainstay of the Hawaiian diet, or for the stone heiau dedicated to Hawaiian gods. The past had disappeared, as it always does, but there were temple stones scattered in the grass. I tried to belong.

  When my husband and I divorced, I stayed in Hawaii and raised our two girls. Then there was a murder and a trial. The yellow notebook I kept.

  Years later, to find that yellow book containing my notes, the mistake I had made. I had changed countries, changed lives. And I had left the past unfinished.

  1

  Murder. In such a place.

  From above, from the highway, it looks like a planet must have fallen into it, the round bowl edges of this bay are so perfect. Below the surface of the water, amazing fish can be seen living their lives in the coral. This is a place where children play in the waves, where parents sit on the sand, where people float, looking down. A swimmer can pause, roll over, blink a few times, and look up at the hills that surround this blue water. The hills feel protective, a barrier between the world of invention and this place.

  So it must have looked to Larry Hasker in the last minutes of his life. He had been casual with his captors. “So this is a robbery? I can’t believe it.” He got out of the car with his shirt unbuttoned, his rubber slippers moving over the rocks. Up at the cusp, above the parking lot, the terrain is rough. Even through the slippers, he must have felt the jolts of stone and brush and dirt. He had smoked a joint in the car. He was young, twenty years old, and almost relaxed. On a ridge within sight of the highway, he turned and looked down. It was past midnight in the month of June, 1978. The moon was high. It threw its reflected light on the ocean so that the water looked like metal heated over flame. Molten. He breathed in and reached down for himself, opened his fly. Looking at water and night. The stars were there too. And his captors.

  There is no shame in dying with a shirt open or pants, dying in the act of emptying oneself. In such a place.

  The girl who discovered the body was taking a walk before work, noticing the dusty smell of kiawe above the bay, the pungent smell of seaweed, the smell of a place where ocean and land meet. It was early in the morning, but when she saw a slipper lying in the brush, she was not surprised. Near any beach, such a forgotten slipper is not unusual, although this one wasn’t broken; its thong was intact. She saw the slipper and then she saw a human foot covered in flies. It was a Monday morning and nobody was there to hear, but she screamed.

  So it begins with a body on the side of the road that leads from Hanauma Bay to the Kalanianaole Highway on the windward side of O’ahu – this story of murder, on the island where I lived. The body was lying twenty-five feet from that highway among rocks, thorns, and brush. The shirt was untorn. There were no scratches, no bruises, no cuts on the flesh. There were just two wounds: one on the right side of his head and one on the outside surface of a leg.

  What happens in such a place, on such a beach, is quickly forgotten in any season. What happens can so easily wash away. Even above the tide line, far above it, a third bullet can get lodged in the sand, can be plucked at by birds, can be sent down the slope by a vagrant wind. A body can be ignored until it is past recognition, until its bones and teeth must be studied; it can be eaten; it can merge with the elements; it can be nosed at by wandering dogs. But this is a beach for children and families, a place to be walked along and sat upon. And what is there left of Larry Hasker here? Blood. Piss. A fragment of rubber slipper. He’d stood in the brush above the sea with
its luminous sheen. One of his slippers had fallen off. He’d turned, unzipped and zipped. Then he’d been shot.

  Once in an ankle. Once in the head.

  Someone, it must have been, with lousy aim.

  2

  In 1978 I was a white, Midwestern American living on the windward side of O’ahu with my two daughters. I was a single mother then, running a child-care agency for low-income families, and I must have read about the murder of Larry Hasker in the morning paper. Another syndicate killing, I must have thought.

  In those days, the morning paper was stuffed in my mailbox before I got up. I had to walk across the front yard in whatever I had worn to bed and step on the sleeping grass, which stung my feet. I’d have made myself a pot of coffee and given myself until ten o’clock to get to work because it was summer and I was my own boss. I’d have sat outside under the tin roof of the first house I’d ever owned – a house hard won and loved by me as no other. I’d have sat on one of the two basket chairs and read about the murder and I’d have thought about my father because it was a reflex. He had been dead for six years at the time of the murder, but I’d have thought about him and about my brother, who had taken me out to Hanauma Bay. Neither of us had ever seen our father in court, but all my life I had imagined him there.

  3

  Four years later, when I was summoned for jury duty, I had forgotten about the body lying under kiawe trees in the thorny brush above Hanauma Bay. It was 1982 and I was one of a pool of people who would be questioned by lawyers – both prosecution and defence – for any one of several trials. I was working for public television by then, across the mountains in Honolulu, and I was glad to be called. It would mean double pay for one thing, but there were other reasons that were more personal. I was about to move to Canada with my daughters. I had met someone and I was ready to give up the house, the job, the dog, everything. But this would be a last chance to leave a little mark of myself on the island where I had lived for fourteen years. And it was a chance to test myself on my father’s ground.

  For two days, I sat with seventy potential jurors, all of us being questioned about our backgrounds and habits and beliefs in a process known as voir dire, which means to tell the truth. Lawyers on both sides tried to weed out jurors who were likely to vote against them. Each of us was carefully studied.

  During those two days, I was challenged by the prosecutors of two separate trials and sent back to the jury pool. An elderly friend said that in his opinion smart people didn’t belong on juries. And a middle-aged man in the jury pool seemed to agree. He told me that what the court wanted were uneducated people, “the ones who maybe don’t have the knowledge of right and wrong.”

  On the third day the remnants of the pool – those who had not yet been selected – were called into a murder trial. “Will you convict based upon the testimony of a single witness?” the prosecutor asked. The question was put to each of us individually while the defendant was sitting in front of us. She was young and stunningly pretty. Her pale blond hair framed an intelligent face behind large horn-rimmed glasses. WANTED SEX AFTER KILLING, one headline had read in the morning paper.

  “The fact that the defendant is a woman, would you hold that against her?”

  “The fact that the defendant is haole …” The word means white.

  At the side of the old stone Judiciary Building, there is a porch where we used to stand during breaks in the long process of questioning. Like the building itself, this porch is solid, with a feeling of dark in its corners, and I was standing out there looking at the grass that stretched away to the sidewalk when I saw a friend walk by. She was a former prosecutor and friend of my former in-laws. She was a piece of my past, part of what I was leaving. “Oh,” she said when she saw me, “there you are. I heard you were in the jury pool. I hear you keep getting dismissed.” She’d been up in the DA’s office, visiting her former colleagues.

  I shrugged. She knew I was not supposed to discuss what happened in the courtroom.

  “Actually, I know the reason you haven’t been chosen,” she went on recklessly. “Everyone in the office noticed it. You stare. At the defendants. You make too much eye contact.”

  I said, “Well I’m on my third try.”

  “Which case?”

  She knew the rules. I mumbled, “It’s a murder trial.”

  “Mon dieu. The Acker case? She’s vicious, that one! She’s in prison on the mainland for the same thing!” She held up two fingers. “Two murders at the tender age of eighteen. Her husband’s involved too.”

  “But they don’t know she did it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” my friend said. “They’ll put her away.”

  Back inside, I felt queasy. Suppose they asked, during voir dire, if there was any reason I could not be a fair and impartial juror? Doesn’t matter. They’ll put her away. But when my turn came for questioning, the prosecutor had run out of allowable challenges. And that afternoon, with fourteen other people, I stood up shyly, as if I’d been invited out on the floor to dance. I was the second alternate out of three.

  4

  From the start I kept a notebook, writing something like letters to Maryann Acker as if I thought we might meet someday and talk about her trial. I addressed her directly in my notebook, but sometimes a little angrily. This was because I was sitting in a courtroom in the old stone courthouse in Honolulu, where I had lived for long enough to feel I belonged. I was born and bred in Kansas, but I had married the great-grandchild of missionaries who sailed around the horn, disembarked in Honolulu, and stayed. My mother said I had fallen in love with Philip in order to get myself back to Hawaii.

  March 18, 1982

  When they first read the charges – when they introduced you to us – I could not believe you were a murderer. Your muumuu is light blue and then that white bodice with its little string at the back, its little drooping tie, gives the impression of something worn in a hospital. In front of you there is a pad of paper and you write at your own pace as if you follow your own thoughts and not the words around us. As if you might be writing to your mother, only what could you say?

  Watching Maryann, I kept thinking about my divorce hearing, when Judge Chou, in his black robe, had looked down at me the way Judge Au was looking down at her. I kept remembering the way Philip’s lawyer had tried to trick me into admitting that I had no right to child support – “Has he ever supported you?” – and the way I had thought that any minute all of them – the lawyers and the judge – would suddenly confess that the whole thing was a terrible joke. Did I honestly think he wanted the engagement ring back? I remembered the way I had wanted my father, for once, to defend me. I had to remind myself that this was Maryann’s trial, not mine.

  We had settled ourselves in the jury box, but I kept my eyes on the halo of pale hair around Maryann’s face. When the prosecutor stood up to introduce herself, there was a sudden crash of thunder, as if she had planned it for effect. The courtroom got dark. “Jan Futa,” she said as the shades at the top of the windows clattered. She raised her voice but we could barely hear all the charges. When she said she was going to produce an eyewitness to the crimes, we leaned forward. Futa was small and delicate, like a ballerina. “The state will prove,” she said earnestly, “that, in addition to other crimes, Maryann Acker killed Lawrence Hasker on June 19, 1978.” Her long hair was pulled loosely back and tied with a dangling scarf. She wore a severely tailored suit, dark blue with a stripe, and buttoned the jacket all the way to the top. The only decoration she allowed herself was a thin gold bracelet on the right wrist. Always she carried a gold pen in her right hand. It proved, she said, a belief in something unprovable. She believed that if the pen were not there, between index and middle fingers, she would be lost and so, presumably, would be her case.

  As she explained the multiple charges – kidnapping, burglary, murder in the first degree – I kept looking at Maryann. There were the heavy glasses, round and dark-rimmed, through which she stared at the table in f
ront of her. When it was her lawyer’s turn to address us, the thunder had stopped. “Stephen Hioki,” he said, dipping his head and holding his hands behind his back as if he expected someone to put handcuffs around his wrists. He was tall for an Asian man, with bony arms that stuck out of the sleeves of his jacket. What he would show, he said, was the state’s lack of evidence. “What the defence intends to show is that Maryann was the companion of a murderer.”

  Her husband’s involved too.

  5

  The first witness, on that first day of the trial, was another man who had been kidnapped and taken to Hanauma Bay a few days before Larry Hasker was killed. His name was Joe Leach. He said he’d met Maryann at the Garden Bar in the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki on June 9 and offered to buy her a drink. A margarita, he said it was. He said they’d danced – he didn’t remember how many times – and she’d told him her brother was with her and needed a ride. Could he help her out? Then maybe she and Joe could be alone for a while?

  Jan Futa pointed at someone in the front of the courtroom. “Is this the man she called her brother?”

  Leach said, “That’s him,” and we took a good look at William Acker. He was thirty-two years old, with a pretty face and a wiry build. Sitting still, he seemed slightly magnetic. But Leach went on testifying and we turned our attention back to the witness stand.

  Joe Leach told the court that Maryann had seemed calm as the three of them walked to his car, although he did not know what she was feeling inside. He said William had climbed in back, but Maryann had got in the front. They had used false names. He did not remember what names they had used, but William’s hair had been black that night. He said William had been quiet and then he’d pulled a gun and after that it was all obscenities, as if he wanted to make it clear how serious this was going to be. As if he were making monster faces in the dark of the backseat. Leach said he could feel the gun at his hairline. He was trying to follow the directions he was getting, but it was a Honolulu night – stars, the bright lights of Waikiki, the sound of the tide beating against the traffic – and the girl and the man didn’t always agree. There was the smell of salt in the air and sweaty flesh, the three of them taking the turns, stopping at the crosswalks in front of red lights. What they told him to do was to drive to Hanauma Bay and he took Kalakaua as far as he could through Waikiki, but the man kept yelling, “He’s doing this on purpose, the fuckinshitheel! He’s trying to get us lost.”