She agreed to all of it.
“Ms. Bundick, if you’ll please stand,” he instructed, and she did. “On your pleas and on the evidence I’ve heard in the courtroom in the last two days, the court finds you guilty as charged.”
Judge Tyler told the bailiff that he wanted to bring the jury back in to explain to them what had happened, but that Tonya didn’t have to be in the room for that. The jury filed back in, looking confused as Tyler explained: Their services would no longer be needed, which he expected they would receive with “mixed emotions.” It was a little unusual, he conceded in his teacherly way, but not so unusual as to be cause for alarm, and the jury should certainly feel confident that the legal system had unspooled in a proper manner. He asked if any of the jurors had any questions.
“Why did she change her plea?” one wanted to know. Tyler responded that it wasn’t for him to say.
“What sentence will she get?” asked another juror, and Tyler said that, while he would eventually be the one to make that decision, he wouldn’t be making it for some time.
“And how will we know what happens?” the same juror followed up.
“You will probably read about it in the newspaper,” Tyler told her. “I’m almost certain you will.”
CHAPTER 26
“MORAL TURPITUDE”
THE SECOND TRIAL, SPECTATORS BELIEVED, would be a bellwether for all of the other trials. The first one had been the Commonwealth’s strongest case against Tonya: They had Charlie’s testimony and the phone records, but most importantly, they had eyewitnesses watching Tonya drop off and pick up the confessed arsonist. The count at the second trial, “count fifty-two” as it came to be known, was more nebulous. Count fifty-two, at an abandoned migrant camp, had happened several weeks before Charlie and Tonya were caught, so there were no eyewitness accounts of her presence. If Tonya was found not guilty here, she would likely press on and keep trying her luck with the jury. If she was found guilty, on the other hand, then she might think about pleading out to the other charges. Gary Agar and Allan Zaleski were in a game of legal chicken.
The second trial looked much the same as the first. More cell phone experts, testifying that there had been calls placed between the two phones at the time of the fire. More Charlie, looking melancholy on the stand. More Accomack sheriff’s deputies, hanging out in the hallway, complaining about Virginia Beach traffic.
Tonya’s defense produced a new witness, a man named William Ashbrook, who had been Charlie’s cell mate in jail. Ashbrook testified that Charlie’d told him about setting the fires, all by himself and without Tonya’s help, by riding to and from the sites on his stepson’s bicycle. Gary Agar responded by putting a giant county map on an easel and pointing out that the fire in question, set at an old labor camp, was seventeen miles from Charlie and Tonya’s house. Charlie, he scoffed, had pedaled there and back, thirty-four miles total, at night, down unlit roads, on a child’s bicycle?
Tonya was inscrutable, again. It was tedious, again.
It was notable only for the following reason: in addition to William Ashbrook, Tonya’s defense called one additional witness who had not been at the first trial.
His name was Frank Dickerson. Allan Zaleski asked him to the stand as a character witness, for Tonya. He was identified as a minister. Dickerson was in his early fifties with a sandy goatee and a peacefulness to him associated with a man of the cloth, although Dickerson today was wearing a denim shirt. He had been ordained by the United Christian Church of America out of Tennessee, he testified. He’d lived on the Eastern Shore for twenty-nine years, and he knew a number of people who lived there including Tonya Bundick. The defense did not ask how he knew her; people in the gallery assumed she must have been a member of his congregation. Dickerson told the jury that Tonya’s reputation in the community was that she “was brutally honest.” As for whether she was the kind of person who could commit arson: “She’s not that kind of person. [It’s] not in her nature,” he said.
Gary Agar said that he had only a few questions for this witness. First, he wondered, was it possible that Frank Dickerson had ever gone by “Frasure Francis Dickerson Jr.”? It was, Dickerson acknowledged, although it was rare for anyone to call him Frasure these days. Next, Agar wondered whether Dickerson had ever been convicted of a crime “of moral turpitude? Of lying, cheating, or stealing?” Dickerson said he had not, but Agar pressed him. What about a time in 1998 that a Frasure Francis Dickerson had been convicted of a misdemeanor larceny?
“I thought that was changed to something else,” Dickerson responded. “Thrown out.” He went on to explain: “Before I was a minister, I had a bad drug problem and I had a charge against me for taking a clock off of the wall in our home where my wife and I lived and selling it to an antique dealer.” That was more than a decade ago, though. He didn’t think it would still be on his record.
“How often do you visit [Tonya] in jail?” Agar asked.
“Almost every week.”
“Almost every week,” Agar repeated. “Do you call her?”
“We talk on the phone.”
“How many times a week do you talk to her on the phone?”
“Three or four times a week.”
“You pay for the calls that she makes to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And have you given presents to her children?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re basically her—like her boyfriend then, aren’t you?”
The spectators in the courtroom rustled in their seats at the phrase, but if Dickerson was thrown off by the question, he didn’t show it. “Yes, sir,” he said. He was basically like her boyfriend, as a matter-of-fact.
“And you’ve come here today as her character witness?” Agar asked theatrically. “But you didn’t tell the jury you were her boyfriend when you came here to tell them what the community thought of her, did you?”
“Nobody asked me until now,” Dickerson said.
The cross-examination of the Reverend didn’t last much longer than that. It had accomplished two things. It had stipulated that the character witness had previously undisclosed emotional involvement. It didn’t look good for Tonya that of all the people in the county, the only one they’d brought in to testify that she was a good person was one who was in love with her. The other thing it accomplished, of course, was publicly ending the love story between Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick.
“Bundick Has a New Boyfriend,” read the headline the next morning on the news site Delmarvanow.com. “Bundick Trial Begins, Has New Relationship,” read another headline.
Charlie and Tonya wouldn’t be getting married in a “November Rain”-themed ceremony, the reception at Shuckers with a guest list in the hundreds and hired security to keep out the riffraff. They wouldn’t be getting married in a jailhouse, using rings procured by Charlie’s sister, vowing to never testify against each other. Tonya was in love with somebody else.