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Soon after Bailey entered the Hearst case, he settled on his line of defense, and the girl who had listed her employment as "urban guerrilla" when she was arrested began to acquire a new look. Gone was the braless, T-shirted image; Patty took to appearing in court wearing a pantsuit and turtleneck, or a blouse with a flowing bow at the neck.
Bailey investigators went to work retracing Patty's 591-day trail from kidnap to capture. Says Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who is helping with the Hearst legal strategy: "Bailey is virtually the only criminal lawyer I've met who has mastered the art of pretrial investigation." Once an investigator himself, Bailey has his team visit witnesses, get photographs, collect documents, visit locales of key events—all so they can "stuff my head with enough facts for when the action starts."
Also fond—some say overfond—of technical tools, Bailey asked experts to analyze the various tapes made by Patty as Tania for signs of stress. They produced nothing he could use.
Other experts have analyzed the bank robbery film for him—to determine, among other things, whether she was showing fear.
Finally, he has had specialists give Patty a polygraph test (a favorite Bailey device); the results, he says, support the claim that she believed herself always under threat. He will fight to have those results admitted at the trial.
On his feet in the courtroom, Bailey "is absolutely without peer," says Boston Lawyer Gerald Alch, a former Bailey associate. Says San Francisco Attorney James Brosnahan, who has faced Bailey in court: "He is quick, forceful, smart and knows where he is going and how to get there. He has the quality you find in brain surgeons. He concentrates completely on technique and doesn't get tied up in emotionalism." Adds Wall Street Lawyer Joseph McLaughlin: "He has a fantastic ability to adapt to his audience, whether it's a jury, a witness or the press."
Of all the trial arts, Bailey's greatest strength is crossexamination. Says Alch: "I can watch him cross-examine a witness, and he'll lose me. If I don't know where he is going, you can bet your life the witness doesn't." One typical example came in a 1968 trial in Boston in which an eyewitness identification was important to the prosecution's case. Defense Lawyer Bailey got the prosecution witness to mistakenly name a man in the courtroom as an investigator who had interviewed him. With the witness reeling but stubborn, Bailey then brought in another man and asked if he were the investigator.
Witness: No.
Bailey: That's not the man, is it?
Witness: No.
Bailey: And you are as certain of that as you are about the rest of your testimony?
Witness: Yes.
Bailey: I have just taken his identification card from his pocket and I invite you to read it and weep.
Bailey's team—longtime friend and associate J. Albert Johnson, 42, two associate lawyers and three or four private investigators—amassed large loose-leaf notebooks for the Hearst trial that total more than 500 pages. They are indexed by witness and cross-indexed by subject. The night before a witness is to appear, Bailey memorizes that section, then almost never uses notes.