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The conviction:
'It was just a fairy-tale scenario'
BY GERALD M. CARBONE and CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY
Journal staff writers
Scott Hornoff hit the streets in search of a job.
He was candid with his prospective employers: he told them he was a suspended
Warwick police detective under indictment for the murder of Victoria Cushman.
Scott applied for work at about 75 places before
landing a job in the deli department of the Cowesett Stop & Shop in 1995.
The job lasted a couple of nights. It didn't feel right; too many shoppers
recognized him.
Mayor Lincoln D. Chafee hired a special investigator
to study the Police Department's actions in the 1989 Cushman murder. The
investigator, lawyer Kevin Bristow, publicly blasted the department's
top officers. He laid out the findings of his probe: missing police records,
a flawed polygraph test, top officers directing subordinates to back off
from questioning the prime suspect -- a Warwick police officer.
To many, the report confirmed the belief that the
police had intentionally botched the investigation to protect a brother
officer.
Bristow stressed that his report did not weigh the
evidence against Scott Hornoff; it was a critique of the investigation.
In theory, Scott was entitled to the presumption of innocence; in reality,
many had already found him guilty.
Vickie's mother, Patricia Cushman, told a reporter:
"It's the intentional bungling that really upsets me. What's the phrase?
They take care of their own."
"It sounds like something you would see in a spy
movie," said City Councilman Alfred A. Gemma. "But in this case, it was
real life."
Gemma called for criminal charges against former
police Capt. Ronald D. Carter and Joseph A. Duquette, now a major. "On
Carter and Duquette's part, it looks like a massive cover-up," Gemma said.
"They should be punished."
BY 1995, the Vickie Cushman murder probe was a distant
memory for Ron Carter. He had retired from Warwick six years earlier,
soon after Vickie's murder. He had left Warwick to take the Richmond police
chief's job, and then had quit Richmond to work with the Mashantucket
Pequot Indian tribe's police force for twice the pay.
The state police took over the Cushman case in 1992,
and from the start Carter felt like a suspect, complicit in the murder.
He remembers state police Lt. Richard H. Hurst telling him: "We think
this is the biggest cover-up." Carter thought that was crazy; he barely
knew Scott Hornoff.
State police detectives came down to the tribal
police office behind the Foxwoods Resort Casino; Carter says they gave
his boss reports about the Cushman murder, telling him to "read between
the lines," and he would see that Carter had covered up a murder. The
tribe then suspended Carter without pay. Like Scott, he had no job, no
income.
His wife, Allison Carter, left her job as a church
secretary. The Carters changed churches because they felt they were being
snubbed; some in the church community believed he was protecting a murderer.
A rumor spread that a dozen Warwick policemen stood
on the cusp of being indicted for a cover-up; Carter believed it. The
prosecutor, Randall White, called him before the first grand jury that
heard the evidence against Scott, and the two men had "a shouting match."
White, Carter says, challenged him when he told grand jurors there were
lots of men who could have killed Vickie Cushman, because she had lived
a "dangerous lifestyle."
The first grand jury's term expired before it voted,
so White called Carter before a second grand jury.
"They wanted me to hurt [Scott] a little bit," Carter
recalls.
Carter was angry when White called his two teenage
daughters to testify before the grand jury.
"I was so hurt. Devastated," Carter recalls. He
gathered up trophies he had won in the police golf league, and threw them
in the trash. From his closet he pulled the blue dress uniform he'd worn
at his retirement; in his backyard he doused the uniform in gasoline,
set it on fire and watched it burn.
IN THAT summer of 1995, the old Rocky Point Amusement
Park hired Scott as a security officer to make sure the employees weren't
stealing. Word spread among the workers about who he was. Some talked
behind his back, but one worker didn't judge him: Tina Dauphinais, a gate
guard and money counter.
Tina had a nice smile and dark, unruly curls. Her
coworkers told her to watch out: he was the cop charged with killing his
mistress and that his name wasn't really Scott.
Tina had long trusted her instincts over other people's
opinions. She wanted to hear Scott's story from Scott himself.
After work on a summer's evening, Scott bought some
clam cakes and Mountain Dew and walked with Tina down by the docks. He
told her he was under indictment for murder; she didn't let on that she
had heard that. She let him finish his story, then asked him straight
out: "Well, did you do it?"
"Tina," Scott said, "I swear to you that I didn't
do it."
She said she believed him, that she could feel his
spirit and she didn't believe he was capable of murder.
For a man who had been publicly pilloried through
media accounts of the Bristow Report, finding someone who believed him
was a tremendous relief.
"Just the fact that she didn't judge me, we became
good friends," Scott recalls.
As that night grew dark over Narragansett Bay, the
two discussed their plans and dreams. Tina wanted one day to own a business,
to be her own boss; Scott dreamed of moving with his wife, Rhonda, and
their two boys to a rural place: the Colorado mountains, or perhaps to
Camden, Maine.
They didn't know then that their dreams would entwine.
"STATE OF Rhode Island v. Jeffrey Scott Hornoff"
began in Superior Court on May 13, 1996, nearly seven years after the
murder. The high-profile case brought out an all-star cast, some of the
best Rhode Island's legal community could muster.
The judge, Robert D. Krause, a former federal prosecutor,
was known for tough prison sentences -- occasionally lengthier than even
the prosecutors requested. Krause, then 50, was an authoritative figure
at 6 feet 5 inches with white hair and deep wrinkles across his brow.
The attorney general's office is a political position,
and prosecutors often come and go on the whims of the politician who holds
the office. The chief prosecutor in this case, Randall White, was so well
respected for his trial work that he had survived under four different
attorneys general.
White, whose long, white hair spilled over his shirt
collar, had a dozen years' experience prosecuting cases. Flanking him
at the prosecutor's table was an assistant prosecutor; behind them sat
state police Detectives Lt. Richard H. Hurst and Thomas A. Denniston,
now a sergeant, two of the best investigators the state police had to
offer.
Only one man besides Scott sat at the defense table,
his lawyer and friend, Joel S. Chase. At Scott and Rhonda's wedding nine
years earlier, Chase became the target of a practical joke. He walked
into the reception; the groomsmen and bridesmaids ducked under their table,
then popped up wearing thick black glasses and mustaches that mimicked
Chase's Groucho Marx look. Chase, a man who wears shirts with monogrammed
cuffs, soon shaved the mustache and updated his eyewear.
Chase was no novice. In his 17-year career, he had
been both a chief prosecutor and a defense lawyer. He knew his way around
a courtroom.
As the trial began, Chase and Scott were cocky.
"We were overconfident because the evidence wasn't
there," Chase says. "It didn't add up to proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt
that this man had killed Vickie Cushman."
Chase thought, "It's going to take smoke and mirrors
to convict him."
TO HELP Scott endure the stress of the trial, a
psychiatrist prescribed a daily dosage of 300 milligrams of Elavil, twice
the recommended amount. As he listened to White's opening statement, Scott
felt a range of emotions stirring through his drug-induced fog -- incredulity,
confusion, anger.
"So," White said, "this case is about Victoria Cushman,
and this case is about the defendant, and the case is, ultimately, about
their affair."
Scott hated the word "affair." To him, the relationship
had been inconsequential, a two-time fling.
"You'll learn that he had the motive," White said.
"He had the opportunity."
From White's perspective, Scott's motive was to
"silence" Vickie, to keep her from telling his wife about their affair.
White introduced the love letter that Vickie had written to Scott but
had never sent; detectives had found it in her apartment, just feet away
from where her body lay, her skull crushed by a 17-pound fire extinguisher.
White read the letter aloud: "I wanted to be the
kind of person who was strong enough to say your best interests come first.
I will let you go easily. But I couldn't, and I can't."
Vickie, White said, wanted to pursue their relationship
even after he broke it off. So Scott went to her apartment to silence
her.
Pretending to be Scott talking to Vickie, White
said, "I'm done. Don't call me. Don't try to have me call you. It's over."
"And it's over with her death."
After he killed Vickie Cushman, White argued, Scott
had slipped her dishwashing gloves over his hands, then opened the window
from the inside to make it look as if a burglar had come in.
Scott could not believe what he was hearing. "It
was just a fairy-tale scenario that never happened," he recalls. "I wanted
to tell the world -- but couldn't."
Watching the cast of witnesses called by the state
was like sitting through a sadistic version of This is Your Life. Outside
of the jury's hearing, White told the judge he wanted to present as witnesses:
a woman Scott dated in high school, who would testify that once, in 1983,
he shoved her; a high school chum who would testify that when Scott drank
beer "he gets like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; a woman who was telling people
that in 1986 she saw Scott throw a dive tank at Rhonda. Scott thought
that was preposterous; if he ever threw a dive tank at Rhonda, a champion
javelin thrower, she'd heave it right back.
Judge Krause listened to White's arguments for presenting
these witnesses to Scott's past and then ruled that they could not testify.
That was one of the few rulings that fell in Scott's favor.
"ONE DAY just blurred into the next," Scott recalled
of the five weeks he stood trial. "I just kept hanging on to the belief
that there was no way I was going to be convicted because I was innocent."
On the ninth day of testimony, the state called
the famous investigator Henry Lee, who had recently testified for the
defense in the O.J. Simpson trial. He had also testified in the Palm Beach
rape trial of William Kennedy Smith.
Lee testified that for 18 years he had been chief
"criminalist" for the State of Connecticut. Scott found Lee's testimony
nearly incomprehensible. According to transcripts of the court case, Lee
said the job of criminalist "actually starts from crime scene, unless
the crime scene is world document properly preserved, physical evidence
collected, scene pattern, interpreting correctly, subsequent examination,
sometime meaningless."
Lee testified about the blood spatters shown in
photos of the crime scene. He dripped red ink on white paper to show how
splattering liquids leave telltale signs.
Lee said that he had tested a smear found on the
inside of Vickie's window screen, and the smear tested positive for blood.
This buttressed the prosecution's claim that the killer had lifted the
screen from the inside.
On cross-examination, Chase asked Lee if it were
possible that the killer raised that screen from the outside.
"If this screen was in proper locked position and
down I can rule that out," Lee said.
The blood spatters around Cushman's body indicated
that the crime "is not consistent with a burglary or a rape," Lee testified.
"It's a homicide. Somebody had to plan to kill that person."
SCOTT'S MOTHER and his aunt attended the trial;
at times he found the testimony painfully embarrassing. When his wife,
seven months pregnant, took the stand, White asked her, "What did you
learn about the details of the two sexual incidents with Vickie Cushman."
Rhonda told him what she knew of her husband having
sex with another woman: "She came out half-dressed . . . . She -- they
had sex on the bed."
The prosecutor also pressed Rhonda on her reaction
when Scott told her of his affairs.
She said there was so much going on with him being
a suspect and her trying to hold the family together that she "didn't
get to yell and scream, do my -- whatever I'm going to do."
Q: "When did you get that chance to yell and scream,
do whatever?"
A: "I don't think I really still have."
When Scott's brother Dave took the stand, the judge
scolded him for evading the prosecutor's questions: "The witness will
answer the question without editorializing, please."
Though he loved his brother, Dave didn't help Scott's
case. White asked him why he had told three different stories about the
morning that the police found Vickie's body. He had told the state police
that he called Scott and told him it was Vickie; he had told the grand
jury that when he first talked to Scott he didn't know it was Vickie,
but after their conversation he called the station and found out it was;
and he told jurors that he didn't know it was Vickie until Scott called
him from the station and told him.
Q: Now you are saying a different story from what
you either told the state police or what you told the grand jury, aren't
you?
A: You're correct.
David said he concocted the first story he told
state police because they had asked him to take his best guesses about
what had happened that morning. "I tried to formulate after three-and-a-half
years on my memory. So, yes, some of that I probably made up, what I thought
happened" in an attempt to be helpful.
For parts of two days White and Dave Hornoff went
back and forth in a contentious cross-examination. Almost all of the testimony
on June 6 came from Dave, either in person or through a tape of his grand-jury
testimony. As court wound down that day, Judge Krause asked the jurors,
"Had enough?"
"Yes," a juror said.
The judge replied: "Probably the first direct answer
I have had all day."
THE TRIAL ground on for nearly six weeks. Near the
end, Scott and Dave were pitching horseshoes in a pit behind their mother's
house. Scott had a sinking feeling that things were not going well. He
slipped from his wrist a red metal bracelet that he wore in remembrance
of a Vietnam-era Marine who was shot down and missing in action. He handed
the bracelet to Dave.
"Hang on to this for me?" he said.
"You don't think you're going to be found guilty?"
Dave asked.
"Just hang on to it."
In his closing argument, Scott's lawyer asked the
jurors to "look at the quality of the evidence in your search for the
truth." There was no physical evidence that tied Scott to the murder scene:
no fingerprints, none of his blood, no hair.
"The untimely death of Victoria Cushman was a tragedy,"
Chase said. "Don't create another."
Then it was White's turn. White told jurors that
he agreed with Chase -- there was no physical evidence that tied Scott
Hornoff to this murder. But there was enough circumstantial evidence.
"Even I have made spaghetti sauce," White said.
"And, I expect that if you haven't yourself you have at least eaten it.
And, you no doubt have heard the comment when sampling or observing someone
sample a sauce, 'What is in this? What is it? What is this? This is great.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something about this sauce
that really makes it. Is it tomatoes? Is it oregano? Is it paprika? What
is it?' Well, it's none of those things individually. It's how they're
blended together. And that's what this case is about. When you put together
the elements and individual circumstances that are drawn fairly from the
evidence in the case you have a whole that is greater than the sum of
the parts."
One of the ingredients that made up the whole was
the fact that Scott Hornoff was a detective, White said.
"If I'm a detective I carry an evidence print card
just in case I go to a crime scene where there's been a break and I have
to process it, dust it, to see whether or not anybody else has left their
fingerprints," White said. "Somebody who is conditioned that way to carry
around . . . an evidence print card is among the most likely people, I
submit, to think, 'Don't leave prints.' "
Scott looked on, incredulous, as White argued that
the very lack of evidence at the scene was itself strong evidence. "It
was like the Salem witch trials," Scott recalls. "He says he's not a witch,
so he must be a witch."
For parts of three days the dozen jurors digested
the evidence. And then, on June 19, 1996, they declared their verdict:
Guilty.
Scott's mother gasped, and someone in the gallery
wailed, "No, no." But Scott sat stoically. He slipped his wedding band
from his finger and handed it to Rhonda. There was no symbolism to the
gesture. A small diamond studded his wedding band, and in prison they
don't allow rings with stones.
"I love you," he said.
Jurors refused to speak about their deliberations.
Recently, one juror said: "None of the stories jibed. There were so many
lies, lies, lies. After a while, you just thought he must have done it."
Outside the courtroom Robinson Cushman told reporters,
"Seven long years. It's been seven years of hell. . . . I'm just delighted
that the system worked."
Todd J. Barry doesn't recall how he heard that someone
had been convicted of the murder he committed, but he remembers his reaction:
"It struck me like a thunderbolt."
He says he called the Warwick Beacon, a twice-weekly
newspaper. "You guys got to look into this, you know, this death . . .
This thing, this conviction, ain't right. Someone should look into it."
He recalls: "I was just thunderbolted, you know,
thunderbolted. . . . I was so scared."
He almost called the Warwick Police Department.
But he didn't.
Ten days after the verdict, Todd Barry's first child,
a son, was born.
Eleven days after that, Scott Hornoff stood before
Judge Krause for sentencing. Krause invited members of Cushman's family
to speak.
Vickie's father rose. "We will miss her forever,
and have nothing but contempt for this despicable character who so coldly
and brutally murdered her."
Scott, too, rose to speak: "Mr. Cushman, to you
and your family, I offer my belated condolences. No parent should have
to bear the pain of burying one of his children, and I pray that I am
never faced with that task. I would rather endure 100 years of false accusations
than to bury one of my sons.
"Mr. Cushman, I did not kill your daughter, though
I doubt it took very much persuasion from the state police to convince
you that I did. I know I would be eager to believe it, also, so there
could be a closure and the healing process could begin. I also know that
if you look long enough or hard enough at something or someone, you can
convince yourself of most anything.
"Am I guilty of something? Yes, I am: I broke my
sacred wedding vows. And for that, I will never forgive myself. Though,
somehow, my wife has."
Krause kept his remarks brief: "There is no discretion
on the court's part in connection with the sentencing of a man convicted
of first-degree murder. The statute requires that a mandatory life sentence
be imposed, and I hereby impose it.
"The defendant shall be sentenced to life, and shall
be imprisoned at the ACI."
TOMORROW:
The Prisoner
Gerald M. Carbone can be reached at gcarbone@projo.com
and Cathleen F. Crowley can be reached at ccrowley@projo.com.
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