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In Miami, where he represented Melvin Powers and called signals for a team of defense lawyers, Foreman confronted wholly circumstantial evidence—and the relatively easy job of raising a reasonable doubt in the jurors' minds. According to Prosecutor Richard Gerstein, who had won 24 previous capital cases, Aunt Candy and Nephew Mel had lived and loved together on Financier Mossler's money. Aggrieved over their lurid affair, Mossler allegedly planned a divorce that would have cut off their income and her potential inheritance. To avoid that disaster, argued Gerstein, Mel jetted over from Houston to Miami one June day in 1964, jumped into a white car provided by Candy, drove to a bar near Mossler's Key Biscayne home and picked up a king-sized Coke bottle. At the odd hour of 1 a.m., Candy took her children out for a drive to mail some letters, suffered a migraine headache and went to a hospital, where she received several phone calls from an unidentified man. Meanwhile, Mossler's neighbors heard him scream, "Don't! Don't do this to me!" and saw a man hurtle away in a white car. When Candy got home, her "dear husband" was dead of a crushed skull and 39 knife wounds.
In his opening statement, Lawyer Foreman depicted Mossler as such a "pirate" tycoon and depraved homosexual that "many times" more than 39 enemies would have been glad to take turns with the knife. But he did little to support the allegations. He had no need to. Arrested in Houston, Powers had been held incommunicado for several days by Texas Rangers. As a result, his only statement, which might have helped to incriminate him, was inadmissible at the Miami trial; the prosecution had to rely on indirect evidence. Witnesses placed Powers aboard a Miami-bound jet the afternoon of the murder and at the bar. But the Coke bottle never turned up, a palm print of Powers found in Mossler's kitchen could have been days old, and a bloody handprint on Mossler's body was unidentifiable. The white car, found at the airport, was bloodless; neighbors could testify only that it looked "similar" to the getaway car.
Tawdry Witnesses. By introducing no witnesses for Powers, Foreman limited the state's opportunities to cross-examine, while he himself went to work to tear down the state's witnesses and make the most of Candy's. Under Florida procedure, Foreman's no-witness tactic also entitled him to the opening and closing arguments.
A master cross-examiner, Foreman made hash of the state's witnesses—a clutch of convicts and others who told in gutter argot of assorted sexual stunts that they said Mel boasted of performing with Candy. Sex, the defense scoffed, does not prove murder. After one Texas thief and drug addict testified that Candy gave him $7,000 to kill Mossler, and an ex-con carnival worker said that Mel offered $10,000 for the same job, the defense produced both men's wives to testify that their husbands were liars. Another con, who claimed that Mel had asked him to kidnap Mossler, was so deflated by Foreman that part of his confused and contradictory testimony was stricken.