(3 of 3)
When Finch suspected that Cody was bilking him, he and Carole decided to face Barbara and talk about the divorce. They had with them the "kit," but it was really an emergency pack, testified Finch, that he carried for emergency calls; the carving knife was a gift for Carole's apartment, and the rope was just a line for his new boat. When Barbara got out of her car in the garage and saw Finch and Carole waiting for her, she grabbed Finch's gun, which was in her car. Carole ran off in fright and hid in a nearby clump of bougainvillaea while Finch wrestled with his 110-lb. wife. She kneed him in the groin, stomped on his toes, bit him on the arm. She began crying for help, so he slugged her with the gun. ("I couldn't get her to cooperate with me.") When the aroused housemaid came running, he banged her head against the wall ("Everything was bang, bang, bang") because he thought she might have a gun. He "helped" Barbara into the car, began to search for the keys. She recovered consciousness, slid out of the other side, grabbed the gun and began running away. Descending from his witness chair to demonstrate to the bug eyed courtroom, Finch showed how he caught his wife, knocked the gun from her hand. As she turned, Finch said he picked up the gun to throw it away: "I didn't want either one of us to get shot." As he raised it, "it went off."
Q. What happened to the gun?
A. I don't know what happened to the gun after it went off ... I went over to the edge of the hill [to look for Carole]. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Barbara . . . running down the steps.
"I'm Sorry . . ." Then, testified Finch, he saw her fall. "I went over and knelt down by her and said, 'What happened, Barb . . .?' She said: 'Shot in chest.' I was amazed." Finch started off to call an ambulance, but Barbara called, "Wait."
"I came back and knelt down by her head. She moved her arm ... I took her hand and she sort of opened her mouth, and then she spoke, and her voice was very, very soft. She said: 'I'm sorry . . . I should have listened . .. Don't leave me . . . Take—care—of—the—kids.' She was dead. I said, 'Barb! Barb!' She couldn't answer me." In his distress, says Finch, he stole a car, abandoned it, stole another and drove through the night to Las Vegas.
In the courtroom, as Bernie Finch concluded his testimony, Carole Tregoff wept. A woman juror removed her glasses and sniffled into her hanky, and a spectator released an anguished sob. There were two Bernie Finches all right: the prosecution's was a calculating, cold-hearted wife murderer; the defense's, a genial, fate-tricked playboy who only wanted to protect himself against his wife's divorce proceedings. But in reality there was only one Bernie Finch, and the jury of six men and six women would have to decide who he was.