A day after a Pasadena jury convicted Michael Goodwin of murder in the deaths of racing legend Mickey Thompson and his wife, jurors said they had no problem reaching guilty verdicts, despite a lack of physical evidence tying the defendant to the murder scene.
"There was never anybody that said, 'No way, there's no way,' " said Mark Matthews, 52, the jury foreman. "We never had to convince anybody that he was guilty. We only had to make sure we were following the law correctly."
The Thompsons were gunned down in the driveway of their home in the eastern Los Angeles County community of Bradbury on March 16, 1988, by two hooded gunmen who escaped on bicycles. The killers were never identified; Goodwin was charged with planning the murders.
With many mysteries still surrounding the case, observers had wondered if the jury would be able to reach unanimous verdicts so long after the crime.
"I could not have ever believed that 12 people would consider this proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and I continue to be stunned," Deputy Public Defender Elena M. Saris said.
But jurors said the judge's instructions clarified how they viewed evidence during six days of deliberation. For example, jurors said that before joining the trial many of them did not know that circumstantial and direct evidence could be weighed equally in making their decision.
"All our understanding of the legal system [was] based on television shows," Matthews said. "People think that every single fact has to be proven and DNA-ed and stamped, that it has to be an open-and-shut, gun-in-hand and blood-on-the-T-shirt kind of case, which this obviously wasn't."
Only one previous ballot was taken the day before Goodwin's conviction, and that resulted in a single not-guilty vote and two undecided votes. However, after rereading the jury instructions and discussing the evidence, jurors said, the three voted with the majority.
The murders of Mickey and Trudy Thompson fascinated the media and were the subject of "America's Most Wanted" and other television shows. Saris argued that the time between the crime and the trial, along with the "Hollywood treatment" of the case, had hopelessly tainted the memories of witnesses, some of whom did not come forward for years. "They have no killers, no plan, no meeting, no weapon, no phone calls, no payout, no nothing," she said.
