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But, said Cody, he had had no intention of killing Barbara Finch. When Cody failed to act, the prosecution contended. Finch and Carole decided to do the job themselves. They assembled the "murder kit" in an attaché case: rope, carving knife, drugs, surgical gloves, .38-cal. shells, hypodermic syringes and needles. The plan, declared Prosecutor Whichello: ambush Barbara, knock her out with Seconal, inject a fatal air bubble into her bloodstream, and then put her behind the wheel of her car and push it off the cliff. Late one night last July, testified the housemaid, she heard screams near the Finch garage. She rushed out, saw Barbara lying on the garage floor. "Then Dr. Finch came rushing up to me. He grabbed my head and pushed it against the wall several times, as hard as he could." At gunpoint, Marie Lidholm was forced into the back seat of Barbara Finch's car; the doctor eased his wife into the front. Before Finch could start the car, Barbara leaped out, and Finch ran after her. Marie hurried into the house to telephone the police, and as she ran, she heard a shot. Barbara Finch was dead. The murder weapon, a .38-cal. revolver, was never found. Finch and Carole were discovered next day in Carole's Las Vegas apartment.
Second Finch. That was the prosecution's picture of Bernie Finch. The other, carefully characterized by the doctor himself with the help of brilliant Criminal Lawyer Grant Cooper, was a frustrated loving husband. He happily shared a king-sized 7 ft. by 7 ft. double bed with his wife, he said, until he was driven into the arms of another woman by his wife's frigidity after the birth of their son in 1953. He testified volubly about his love affair with Carole, a onetime photographer's model, and the trysting apartments he rented under an assumed name. He lied to his wife about his affair to spare her pride, he said. But he and Barbara had their own "armistice agreement," permitting them to date on the side. To protect his credit rating while he was dickering on the "deal" to build his hospital, they decided to postpone a divorce and to present a public facade of married bliss. To seal the bargain, he gave her a new Cadillac. In September, Carole left her husband, a muscleman named Jimmy Pappa, who proceeded to give Barbara Finch an earful about Bernie's other life. Barbara then decided to start divorce proceedings herself. As a counterattack, Finch explained, he hired an "unscrupulous gigolo." John Cody was engaged, he said, to "get something" on Barbara "if he had to sleep with her himself."