49. Disguises

In a North Car­oli­na court­room dur­ing 1970, a wit­ness named Lar­ry Price, don­ning a mod­est blue suit and declar­ing him­self a Trail­ways bus dri­ver, took the stand to dis­cuss the night of Chase’s death. Price tes­ti­fied under ques­tion­ing from pros­e­cu­tor Eric that it was fea­si­ble to jour­ney between Greenville and Barkley Cove with­in a sin­gle evening. Specif­i­cal­ly, he drove that route the night Chase died and not­ed none of the pas­sen­gers resem­bled Miss Clark, the defen­dant.

The dis­cus­sion shift­ed towards a par­tic­u­lar pas­sen­ger Price remem­bered: a tall, slen­der indi­vid­ual who could poten­tial­ly be a woman mas­querad­ing as a man. This pas­sen­ger, described as a young white man around five ten, clad in loose-fit­ting clothes and a bulky, blue cap, did not inter­act with oth­ers and kept his head low­ered. When ques­tioned by Eric if this could have been Miss Clark in dis­guise, Price con­curred, believ­ing her long hair could have been con­cealed under the hat. By hav­ing Kya Clark, the defen­dant, stand up, Eric aimed to draw par­al­lels in height and build between her and the mys­te­ri­ous pas­sen­ger, sug­gest­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Clark was indeed the pas­sen­ger on the bus from Greenville to Barkley Cove on the fatal night of Octo­ber 29, the pri­or year.

In cross-exam­i­na­tion, Tom Mil­ton, pre­sum­ably Clark’s defense attor­ney, high­light­ed incon­sis­ten­cies and assump­tions in Price’s tes­ti­mo­ny. He point­ed out that ini­tial­ly, Price did not per­ceive the thin man as a dis­guised woman, and this notion only formed after sug­ges­tion from the sher­iff. Mil­ton also ques­tioned the reli­a­bil­i­ty of Price’s mem­o­ry regard­ing the exact date the thin man was seen on the bus, insin­u­at­ing that no con­crete evi­dence ver­i­fied his pres­ence on the night in ques­tion.

This chap­ter encap­su­lates a crit­i­cal moment in the tri­al, expos­ing the fragili­ty of eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny, espe­cial­ly under sug­ges­tive influ­ence, and the strate­gies employed in court­room bat­tles — the attempt to tie Clark to the scene of the crime on the sig­nif­i­cant date through indi­rect and pos­si­bly flawed wit­ness obser­va­tions.