Excerpts

1 LOS ANGELES All right. call the matter," said Judge Andrew Hauk to the court clerk, seated below and in front of him. "Seventy-two-dash-three-zero-four-four, Dennis G. Martin versus the United States," announced the clerk. It was a Thursday morning, the ninth of January, 1975, when the trial concerning the death of Harry Walker, known by then as Martin v. United States, convened in United States District Court in downtown Los Angeles. The courtroom was an impressively large chamber with fluted mahogany pilasters at intervals along its hardwood-paneled walls, their capitals touching a high ceiling of acoustical tile and fluorescent lights. A small audience was scattered in three blocks of hardwood pews, separated by a low fence from the judge, lawyers, court clerk, court reporter, and bailiff. A tall lawyer in a fine suit with an unruly head of curly, salt-and-pepper hair stood up from his chair at the leftmost of the two attorney's tables at the front of the room. "Stephen Zetterberg for the plaintiffs, Your Honor," he said. "William Spivak, Your Honor," said the assistant US attorney, rising from his seat at the defense table to the right. He was an owlish, balding man in his thirties with glasses. "For the record, I would like to renew my objections to the venue," he added. Spivak was referring to a highly irregular maneuver by which Zetterberg had gotten a case about an Alabaman who died in Wyoming adjudicated in a Los Angeles court that normally would have had no jurisdiction in the matter. Federal district courts are spotted all over the United States, and a given case will be heard in a particular court when one or more of the parties lives in that district, when the disputed matter took place there, or because assets in the case are located there. None of these things had been true of the Walker case when Stephen Zetterberg took it on, and what he then did was an expression of the creativity he brought to lawyering. In court, Stephen Zetterberg affected a restrained, dignified manner. Uncoiling his lanky frame to announce his readiness to proceed that morning, he reminded one witness of Abraham Lincoln. But underneath his solemnity he was a passionate man. He had grown up, and still lived and worked, in Claremont, a pleasant university town east of Los Angeles, with tree-lined streets laid out on a gentle slope of alluvium at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. He graduated from Pomona College and Yale Law School, and during World War II he served on a Coast Guard ship patrolling for submarines out of Pearl Harbor. After the war, Zetterberg returned to the law in greater Los Angeles. By the 1960s his practice was thriving, he was active in politics, and California's governor offered him a series of judgeships. Zetterberg turned them down. He later explained that judges had to take whatever cases came before them, and in private practice he could take the ones that really interested him. Zetterberg saw the courts as a democratic institution through which the little people could confront powerful adversaries, such as government and corporations. He was attracted to cases involving an underdog. His son, Charles, who became his partner at Zetterberg & Zetterberg after law school, complained affectionately that at any given time his father always had some hopeless matter that could be counted on to bleed the practice of billable hours while the younger associates tried to keep the lights on and make a living. The Walker case was that one in the 1970s. The case of Harry Walker had three things going for it. First among these were Harry's survivors, the Walkers themselves. To Zetterberg, they were the salt of the earth, American Gothic without the dour expressions. Second, they genuinely needed his help. Deprived of their son's labor on their farm, they were in danger of going out of business. Third, there was a great expert witness on their side, a famous biologist who would testify that something had gone terribly wrong with the Park Service's management of nature at Yellowstone. And there was Yellowstone itself. Zetterberg had no personal enmity toward national parks. On the contrary, he loved them. He and his wife were avid hikers, and the fact that the case would involve visits to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Yosemite for research and depositions was a major attraction for him. Finally, Zetterberg had already handled two other lawsuits against the Park Service; he knew the case law. Martin v. United States had acquired its name from Dennis Martin, a young associate lawyer who sat next to Zetterberg at the plaintiff's table. A Yale Law classmate of Hillary Clinton's, Martin had been recruited to the firm in the spring of 1972, in one of Zetterberg's periodic trips back to New Haven to scout promising members of his alma mater's graduating class. Martin was clerking for Zetterberg and hadn't even passed the California bar when he became involved in Zetterberg's scheme to extract the Walker case from its natural venues and bring it to California just so Zetterberg could represent the Walkers. When the Walker family contacted him about Harry's death, Zetterberg sent Martin to a state court with a motion requesting that Martin be named administrator of Harry's estate. In order for that to happen, at least some of Harry's assets would have to be located in California, however Harry's estate--consisting of little more than a few clothes, a secondhand car, some fishing rods, hunting rifles, a shotgun, and a pool cue--was at his parents' home in Alabama. Zetterberg's pleadings were a circular arrangement of interdependent ifs. Administrators of estates are empowered to take various actions, and Martin told the judge that if he were to be so appointed, he planned to sue the federal government for negligence in Harry's death. If the estate were to win such a suit, the award would be paid to the estate in California. Therefore, the judgment's potential value could be construed as a California asset--just as an account receivable is listed as an asset on the balance sheet of a business. If such an asset could be construed to exist, then the estate had California assets, and it could sue in a California court to create the judgment the whole idea was based on. The argument was a Mobius strip, a snake eating its own tail. Zetterberg referred to the maneuver as "bootstrapping," after the tall-tale notion of reaching down to grab your own bootstraps and lift yourself off the ground. The state judge apparently admired Zetterberg's fancy and approved Martin as administrator. Zetterberg and Martin then filed suit against the Park Service in Los Angeles. In a preliminary appearance before Judge Hauk, Assistant US Attorney Spivak objected, but Hauk came down on Zetterberg's side. Now Spivak renewed his objection and Judge Hauk defended his decision. There was no--as he put it--"skullduggery" or "callosity toward the law" in what Zetterberg and Martin had done, and he intended to give a fair trial. The case of Harry Walker's death at Yellowstone National Park would be heard in Los Angeles. "I ruled that way before. I rule that way again," Hauk concluded. "I am going to keep the jurisdiction. I think, therefore, we will proceed." it had taken over two years for Martin v. United States to reach trial, and when it was finally docketed for early January 1975, Stephen Zetterberg's office made arrangements for Harry's father, mother, and youngest sister to travel from their Alabama dairy farm to Los Angeles. It was the first time any of them had ever set foot on an airplane. Harry's mother, Louise, spent the trip to LA in the aisle seat, farthest from the window, gripping the seat arms with a pained expression every time the aircraft lurched over a thermal. Harry's father, Wallace, had grieved no less deeply than his wife over the loss of their only son, but he displayed as much youthful glee at his first view of the earth from above as did his twenty-year-old daughter, Jenny. Hurtling west over Louisiana, the two of them watched, transfixed, out the window as dusk wrapped the earth thirty thousand feet below, even as the aircraft's wings sparkled in the orange sunlight. At Los Angeles International, the Zetterbergs picked them up and installed them in a Claremont resort hotel. On the first morning in court, Wallace sat listening in the pews. Jenny and her mother were out sightseeing with Stephen Zetterberg's wife. Zetterberg stood facing the judge at the podium between the defense and plaintiff's tables, which the lawyers were required to use when presenting their cases or questioning witnesses. "All right," said Zetterberg, "next I would like to offer what amounts to--" Here he paused, glancing over his shoulder. "Would you mind stepping out, Mr. Walker?" Wallace stood up stiffly and made his way to the exit at the back of the room. Zetterberg waited for the door to swing shut, then finished his sentence. "--what amounts to an autopsy report of Harry Walker, consisting of seven pages. Mr. Spivak has a copy in his hand." The document contained the death certificate and pathology report, as well as the typewritten narrative of a strong-stomached Yellowstone National Park wildlife biologist who'd been dispatched to a Livingston, Montana, funeral home to serve as the Park Service's witness to the autopsy. The latter read, in part: The body was examined carefully for tooth marks in an effort to measure spacing between canine tooth punctures. Very few puncture wounds were found, however, and none appeared to have been caused by large canine teeth. Most of the injuries seemed to have been caused by claws. The body cavity and cranium were opened by Dr. Steele; and the brain and body organs not previously removed by the bear were examined. Dr. Steele remarked that other than slight sub-cranial bleeding, which could have been the result of a mild concussion, there was no apparent skull or brain damage. The larynx had been crushed, apparently by a bite to the throat; and Dr. Steele felt at the time of the examination that anoxia from this injury, coupled with shock, seemed to have been the cause of death. "All right," said Judge Hauk from the bench. "The autopsy report of the decedent. Any objections?" he asked Assistant US Attorney Spivak. "I don't know what this adds," replied Spivak. "It's been stipulated that the decedent died in a bear attack." Stephen Zetterberg explained that the cause of death, a crushing injury to the neck from the massive power of the grizzly's jaws, yet without the puncture wounds that would normally have been inflicted by the canine teeth, demonstrated that a particular old, toothless bear was involved. Bears are known for their long memories, part of a general tendency in nature to remember more than it forgets, in layers of stone, in the concentric rings of ancient trees, the migrations of elk, antelope, and trumpeter swans, even in our own recollections of the joys and sorrows of childhood. The autopsy was part of an arrangement of facts with which Zetterberg intended to indict authorities at Yellowstone National Park for believing that nature would forget our past mistakes the minute we tried to remedy them. Zetterberg didn't think nature worked that way, any more than people did. He had watched nature, hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains near his home, and in Yosemite, but he spent much of his working life in court, and courtrooms are full of long-remembered grievances. Excerpted from Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature by Jordan Fisher Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.