COLUMN ONE : A Fine Line: To Tell or Not to Tell : The man said he had killed and hinted he might kill again. The confession thrust a Tennessee lawyer into a nightmarish battle with his conscience and a test of wills with his rival, a local prosecutor.

Until his home phone unexpectedly rang one Sunday in late May, the rules for being a criminal defense attorney had always been clear to Leroy Phillips Jr.

You fought fiercely for your client’s constitutional rights, no matter how heinous his crime. You never shared your client’s confidences with anyone, particularly not the authorities. You never gave an inch to the prosecutor. You were a ferocious adversary of the state, a fierce advocate of the defendant.

Those rules had served Phillips well through a celebrated 32-year career, including some 40 murder trials. Prosecutors eyed him warily and defendants clamored for his help here in southeast Tennessee. “Any case of importance in Chattanooga goes to me or a couple of other lawyers,” Phillips proudly advised all who asked.

Then came that phone call in May. If the case it brought to Phillips, 59, did not entirely change the rules of his game, it surely called them into question.

Within minutes of answering his phone, he found himself standing in a gas station parking lot, listening to a meek, awkward man in gray work clothes confess to an unsolved homicide--and, by implication, suggest he might kill again.

“I did it,” Phil Payne told the attorney, smiling shyly. “I killed that store clerk last night. I thought she was my ex-girlfriend.”

From news accounts, Phillips already knew about the shooting of Michelle Murr, 28, a single mother of two young children, at the Golden Gallon on Highway 153. Itinerants on drugs usually committed this type of crime; only they would try to steal the few bucks not kept in a safe at a convenience store.

This guy Payne didn’t look like an itinerant on drugs, though. With his unnerving smile and sideburns cut up above his ears, he looked to Phillips like a mental case--a mental case who had not yet managed to wipe out his ex-girlfriend.

Oh Jeez, the attorney thought. What have I got here?

What Phillips had, it would eventually become clear, was a wrenching legal and moral dilemma.

The ethics of his profession, after all, require Phillips to keep his clients’ confessions confidential; in fact, to divulge them in Tennessee is a felony that carries a possible five-year prison term. The law does oblige Phillips to inform authorities if a client directly threatens to kill someone--but Phil Payne never went that far.

So for two months after accepting Payne’s case, Phillips walked a fine, frightening line. For two months, unable to turn Payne in or let him confess, he begged Hamilton County chief assistant district attorney Stan Lanzo to pick up his client for psychological examination. For two months, Lanzo resisted, distrusting Phillips’ legal ploys, insisting he needed details and a confession to make an arrest. For two months, the defense attorney and prosecutor--old pals and longtime adversaries--waited to see who would blink first. For two months, they--and a psychological examiner brought in by Phillips--clung to their professional codes, knowing all the while an unstable killer was walking the streets of Chattanooga.

What happened here this past summer is now grist, in legal journals and law school classrooms, for a heated national debate about moral obligations, the confidentiality privilege and the adversary system of justice. For those who lived through those anxious months, the random slaying of a young woman has yielded something less abstract. For them, Phil Payne’s case is a matter to contemplate not in a textbook but in a mirror. Payne’s case has brought them--and their community--face to face with the unsettling consequences of how they play their game.

“I have to tell you, there were many sleepless nights,” Phillips said when it was over. “I was scared to death of what might happen.”

‘The Damnedest Story’

He was 43, Phil Payne said, sitting in Leroy Phillips’ office on the morning after they’d first met. He’d been under psychological treatment ever since he was 15.

So began what the defense attorney later called “the damnedest story I’ve ever heard in my life.” (It is a story recounted here through interviews with Phillips, prosecutor Stan Lanzo and psychological examiner George Bercaw; Payne, confined to a mental institution, was not available.)

A Chattanooga psychologist named Dr. Robert Spalding had treated him for years, Payne said. Then, about a year ago, Payne had watched a TV show where some sort of drug counselor said drugs do bad things to you. Payne, who had been taking Prozac and lithium for years, called this guy. They’d talked on the phone 20 times but had never met. The guy had counseled him off drugs. So Payne had stopped taking his Prozac and lithium. He’d also stopped going to Spalding. He hated Spalding now.

Two weeks ago, Payne said, he’d tried to visit a former girlfriend whom he’d briefly gone with nine years before. But she ran him off.

So last Friday night, Payne said, after drinking beer all evening at a tavern, he went to her place to kill her. He knocked on her door, but she wouldn’t answer.

He started driving around. He didn’t know where he was, how long he’d been driving. Eventually, he stopped at the Golden Gallon on Highway 153 for cigarettes.

The clerk was in the middle of the store, making coffee. Payne thought of his ex-girlfriend, who used to make him coffee. He saw his girlfriend. He pulled out a gun and shot the clerk. He walked closer and shot her four more times. He stole nothing.

He drove back to his mother’s home, where he lived. He couldn’t sleep. Lying in bed awake, he kept hoping he’d had a nightmare. But he knew it was too real.

When he finished his story, Payne smiled.

Is he telling the truth, or spinning an utterly loony tale, Phillips wondered.

It was not Payne who’d called Phillips the day before but an in-law whom the defense attorney had once represented. Phillips had not wanted these guys at his home--you don’t bring clients to the house, not when you’re a criminal defense attorney. He also had not wanted to meet them alone in an empty office on a Sunday. Only after sizing him up in the parking lot had Phillips invited Payne to his office the next morning.

Convenience store killers usually end up with public defenders, but this one, it turned out, had a family able to pay for a high-priced lawyer.

“Look,” Phillips now said, “what do you want me to do?”

“I want help,” Payne said. “I did a terrible thing. I want help. I want to be punished. I don’t want to harm anyone.” Again, Payne smiled.

“It sounds to me like you’re ill, very ill,” Phillips said.

Phillips considered. If he just turned Payne over to the police, if Payne simply confessed, they’d put him in jail. He was not sure Payne understood his rights. Payne was saying he wanted to be punished, but he was also saying he wanted help.

Now that they’d slipped into an attorney-client relationship, Phillips felt ethically and legally obliged to explain to Payne his rights and the consequences if he simply turned himself in.

“I don’t want you to harm anyone either,” he told Payne, choosing his words carefully. “But let me explain. If you just go to the police, they might put you in a jail cell for the rest of your life. If you go through me, they might put you in a hospital. If you are mentally ill, you have a right to be treated. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” Payne said. “Yes I do.”

Phillips studied his new client. It would have been so easy, he thought wistfully, just to tell Payne, “You’re right, you should be turned in, we’ll take you down to the police right now.” Payne would have readily agreed.

But Phillips could not have done that. For better or worse, he now was Payne’s advocate.

Adversaries Face Off

Phillips and assistant district attorney Stan Lanzo, once good friends, no longer down beers and travel to Atlanta together. In fact, now that Phillips is remarried, with a young daughter, and Lanzo is single, with a girlfriend in Atlanta and a vacation home in Florida, they rarely socialize.

In the courtroom, though, they are the adversaries they’ve always been. Lanzo, 51, came to the Chattanooga prosecutor’s office from Boston 23 years ago, and Phillips has been pitted against him since Day One. They trust and understand each other but always hold their guards high.

Which is what Lanzo was doing when Phillips came to see him hours after the defense attorney took on Payne’s case. Sitting in with them was Lanzo’s boss, Hamilton County Dist. Atty. Gen. Gary Gerbitz.

“Gentlemen, the murder at the Golden Gallon?” Phillips began. “I believe I represent the guy who did it. I believe he is totally insane. But maybe he’s a kook, trying to confess. To find out, I want to give you some details.”

Lanzo checked with his detectives. They were empty on the case--no leads, no motives. But Phillips’ details--the number of bullets, the coffee, nothing stolen--matched what little they had.

“I think we’ve got something,” Lanzo told Phillips at their second meeting that week.

Phillips began his pitch: “My guy’s been under psychological care since he was a teen-ager. He’s delusional. He thought he was killing a girlfriend he hadn’t seen in nine years. The girlfriend is still out there. I’m worried. But he hasn’t said he plans to kill her. So I’m not able to turn him in.”

Phillips offered his proposal: “Let’s file a petition, put him in a hospital and examine him.”

It was, Phillips thought, a perfect strategy. By committing Payne to a hospital, he’d be getting his client off the street while protecting his rights. As long as the state asked for the exam, whatever Payne said to a doctor in the hospital was usable only on the issue of sanity, not guilt or innocence.

Lanzo, however, was not buying.

He wasn’t going to just pick up this guy and commit him based on Leroy’s hearsay. He didn’t know who the guy was. He didn’t have probable cause even to hold him. If they went to trial, what was his case? He didn’t have one. Leroy was a great lawyer, but how did he know this guy was crazy?

Lanzo understood that Phillips was trying to give him enough to commit his client to a hospital but not enough to put him in prison. His own job, though, was to build the best possible prosecutable case. To do so, he’d have to exploit Phillips’ desire to get his client off the streets.

Lanzo rolled a pencil across his desk and looked out his window.

“We believe there’s a public safety exception to the confidentiality privilege,” he said. “If there’s a threat to public safety, you can violate confidentiality. You can share this.”

“Bull,” Phillips said. “Where’d you pull that out of?”

To those standing at a distance from the workings of the legal system, Lanzo and Phillips knew their tug of war would look exasperatingly foolish. But to the lawyers, their standoff involved the critical heart of their profession. The confidentiality privilege is a sacrosanct basis for how lawyers and psychologists work. People must know they can tell their lawyer or therapist anything and it won’t be divulged. An impasse that looked senseless to others looked unavoidable to Lanzo and Phillips.

Later that afternoon, the two adversaries decided to call the Tennessee Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility for guidance. On a speaker phone, talking to an associate counsel in Nashville, they laid out their hypotheticals, then asked: Is there a public safety exception?

“I don’t believe there is,” the court officer said. “No. Only if the guy tells you he’s going to kill again. There’s another thing to consider. This guy might not be competent to waive his rights.”

Phillips looked at Lanzo after they’d hung up. “Well?” he asked.

Lanzo shrugged. “Well, let’s think some more.”

Search for Psychologist

When Phillips came to him with news of his former patient’s activities, psychologist Robert Spalding said he was not surprised.

Payne had always feared he was going to do something wrong, Spalding told Phillips. He’d lived in anguish. Social Security had declared him totally disabled. He’d never had a job.

“Leroy,” Spalding said, “it was only the medication that kept him in bounds.”

Spalding couldn’t resume seeing Payne as a patient, because Payne didn’t trust him anymore. So instead, he recommended four other psychologists.

One by one, all four turned Phillips down. Most didn’t bother to hide their reasons: legal liability, uncertain territory, too much time in court, bad publicity. This case just was not a way to bring in more patients.

Next, Phillips sent his client to a state-approved forensic psychologist but quickly withdrew him when the therapist, after a single session, sounded as if he thought too much beer, not insanity, drove Payne to kill. In Phillips’ experience, psychologists’ opinions could go every which way; this one was not the way he wanted.

As the days went by with Payne still at large, Phillips felt increasing anguish about the ex-girlfriend. If he didn’t warn her, she could be harmed. But if he did share Payne’s secrets with her, he could be sued, or reprimanded by the bar, or worse. What’s more, she might then go to the police and turn Payne in.

“We were getting more and more nervous,” Phillips recalled. “I had mama and two aunts watching Phil day and night. It would be too much to give in to the state, but we were agonizing.”

Eventually, Phillips contacted George Bercaw, a psychological examiner with a master’s degree in clinical psychology who’d helped him before. Unlike his more highly credentialed colleagues, Bercaw said he would have no qualms about evaluating an at-large killer. The therapists’ code of confidentiality with patients was as important to him as the lawyers’ one was to Phillips, he explained.

Besides, he welcomed the challenge. Most of his work involved routine disability exams for the Social Security Administration. To his small, drab storefront office in a suburban strip mall came an endless flow of the indigent, the homeless, the alcoholic, most panicked or depressed. Any time he had a chance do something different, he was game.

Payne’s mother brought her son to the first appointment with Bercaw. He walked in with his arms held straight down, stiff and immobile at his sides--the mannerism of a schizophrenic, Bercaw thought.

He was upset, just flabbergasted that he’d committed such a crime, Payne told him. It was like when you looked at a story in the paper about a pillar of the community doing a bad thing--that’s how he felt. He couldn’t believe he’d done this. He didn’t know why he’d done it. He thought a lot about his victim’s children not having a mother. That bothered him greatly. “I should be punished,” he said over and over. “I should be helped.”

In subsequent meetings, Payne revealed more. He’d had a sexual relationship with his ex-girlfriend’s mother, who died at age 56. He often visited her graveyard and talked to her. She talked back. He’d started seeing the daughter only after the mom died, but the younger woman had soon backed off. He visualized the daughter as the mother.

Bercaw gave Payne a battery of psychological tests. In them, the results were clear, strong, consistent: Payne was paranoid and schizotypal, which meant he had a personality disorder with eccentric traits that fell short of being fully schizophrenic. He also, though, had excursions into full-blown schizophrenia. He heard and interacted with voices. He was socially inept and agoraphobic--fearful of open or public places. He had a rich fantasy life.

This, Bercaw thought, is the kind of mild-mannered type who goes home, kills his wife, puts her in the blender, feeds her to the dog, gets up and goes to work in the morning. Only the lithium and Prozac, it was clear to Bercaw, had kept Payne from blowing.

All the same, Bercaw liked Phil Payne, liked him a lot. He was sensitive, caring, devoted to his mother. He struggled with and felt much anguish over his illness. When he stopped at bars, he’d watch everyone having a good time and fantasize about being part of that. He was painfully aware he was alone.

Whether he was immediately dangerous, Bercaw could not precisely say, at least not at the start of his sessions with Payne. Only after his judgment had evolved over a matter of weeks did Bercaw begin urging Phillips to resolve this matter with the prosecutors. But even then, Bercaw wasn’t overly worried.

“I had a pretty good rapport with Payne,” he explained. “When he was uptight, he’d call me. I had a sense he’d let me know if he was blowing. Also, his mom and aunt were watching him 24 hours a day. His car was blocked in by theirs. He stayed at home behind drawn drapes . . . There was a sense of danger, but I thought it was under control.”

There matters hung in limbo through much of June and July, as the defense attorney and prosecutor warily circled each other.

“What’s going on?” Lanzo would ask Phillips from time to time. “I thought your guy was dangerous.”

“We’ve got him under control,” Phillips would respond.

There is no telling how long their dance might have continued but for a phone call Bercaw received just as the sun was rising on Thursday morning, July 22. It was Phil Payne’s mother, sounding distraught.

“Phil is gone,” she said. “He managed to get his car out, and he disappeared last night. He hasn’t come back. I don’t know where he is.”

A Need to Act

Phillips’ first thought, when he heard Payne had disappeared, was that he had to contact the ex-girlfriend. His second thought was, how could he?

He’d be violating his trust with his client. That prospect still seemed unimaginable. So did leaving the ex-girlfriend in harm’s way.

“I’ve got to decide some things,” he told Payne’s mother. “Please let me know if you hear from him.”

The lawyer’s phone rang an hour later, before he’d acted. It was Payne. After eight hours alone on the streets, he was home.

When his mother brought him to Bercaw’s office late that Thursday, Payne sounded shaken but also pleased that he’d pulled off his escape.

He’d driven around all night, he explained to Bercaw. Yes, he’d passed his ex-girlfriend’s house a couple of times. Then he’d gone to the cemetery to talk to her mother. She’d talked back to him. He’d spent the night there, at her graveside.

The voices and impulses all fit with Payne’s past patterns. Bercaw realized his sense of control over this man was ephemeral. Payne was not going to contact him before he blew.

“He’s dangerous, he’s going to kill someone or commit suicide,” Bercaw told Phillips when they talked the next day.

Bercaw appreciated Phillips’ allegiance to the confidentiality privilege but no longer shared it entirely. Where the lawyers hesitated to tread, he would. His moral obligations took precedence, he decided, even if it meant losing his license. Either you’re a moral person or you’re not.

“Leroy, I know you have an obligation as a lawyer,” Bercaw said. “But I believe the law permits me to do more. The law says if I feel he’s dangerous to himself or others, I can report him.”

“You’d be out on a limb,” Phillips said. “You’re an examiner, not a psychologist.”

“I want to get in touch with the authorities,” Bercaw said.

Phillips considered. Perhaps Bercaw could argue that he, in his professional capacity, had judged Payne to be dangerous. Phillips wasn’t sure Bercaw had strong enough qualifications, though. Nor was he sure that a prediction of future danger allowed Bercaw to reveal Payne’s confession.

He’d feel better if they had Payne’s clear waiver of confidentiality, but what would that be worth? Phillips knew he could have asked Payne for a waiver the first day and he’d have given it. In fact, he could have told Payne to go jump off the nearest bridge and he’d probably have done that too.

“I don’t know,” Phillips told Bercaw. “Let me talk to Payne. I want to get his permission for us to tell authorities that he killed a woman. I intend to protect this man’s rights. I must tell you, even though I seek his permission, I’m not sure he’s capable of giving it.”

However appropriate professionally, Phillips’ reluctance looked just plain untenable by the time Payne’s mother brought her son to Bercaw’s office on Monday morning. Over the weekend, it turned out, Payne had flown into a rage and torn up his mother’s home.

“What are you trying to do, Phil?” Bercaw asked. “Get your mother to turn you in?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Phil, you think you’re starting to lose it?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Phil, why did you drive by your girlfriend’s home and the cemetery? Were you saying goodby?”

“Well, maybe.”

“Phil, what’s next? Will you kill yourself? Will you kill your girlfriend?”

“I guess maybe I’m thinking of both.”

“I’m very concerned about you,” Bercaw told Payne. “The only course I can think of is to turn you in for the murder. How do you feel about that? Are you willing to let me call the prosecutor?”

“Yes.”

Like Phillips, Bercaw questioned whether Payne was capable of waiving his rights. But by then, he would have turned him in anyway, even without a waiver. “I would not have let him out of my office that day,” he said later.

Bercaw phoned Phillips, who asked to speak to his client.

“Mr. Bercaw thinks you’re very ill, need help and should be turned in,” the defense lawyer told Payne. “They will put you in jail. Eventually you will be examined to see if you should be put in a hospital, but you will be in jail for some time.”

“Fine,” Payne said.

It doesn’t affect him one iota, Phillips thought. It only bothers me. It’s up to me--he’s not capable of waiving his rights.

Turning Payne in clashed with what his whole life had been about. He had to do something, though. Life was full of balancing acts.

“Bercaw is going to turn you in,” Phillips told Payne. “But I don’t want you talking to the police. Talk to the doctors, not the police. It may be the difference whether you go to prison or a mental institution.”

He was still trying to protect his client, he told himself. But in truth, he knew he was going one step over a line he had not wanted to cross.

Lanzo had won. He had blinked.

Playing an Ace

Only after the detectives had Payne downtown, in their office, did they realize he wasn’t going to talk formally, on the record. Late that Monday afternoon, Lanzo called Phillips.

“Leroy, this man wants to talk to us and you’re preventing him,” the prosecutor complained.

“You’re right,” Phillips replied. “Now take his ass into custody and let’s get on with this.”

Despite their apparent indignation, both understood well the other’s position. Phillips feared the cops would pull what they wanted from Payne; after 33 years of practicing law, he knew how interrogations went. Lanzo, on the other hand, was listening to a guy who kept saying, “If I talk to you, I go to jail.” It seemed to him that Payne was in control of his verbal facilities, if nothing else. Something funny was going on with Bercaw and Leroy.

So Lanzo, on the phone to Phillips, played his ace card.

“We’re thinking of turning him loose,” he said.

“Are you goddamn people crazier than he is?” Phillips sputtered. “I’ll tell you this: If you turn him loose, the full responsibility is on you.”

Lanzo was not overly concerned. For two months he’d thought Payne was running around planning to kill somebody, but that hadn’t happened. Payne seemed more weird than dangerous.

Besides, who was to say what was dangerous, what was crazy?

The psychologists’ judgments were so subjective. You can find two psychologists coming up with diametrically different opinions on just about any case. Lanzo didn’t have great faith in psychologists. For that matter, he didn’t have much enthusiasm for defense lawyers who played the insanity angles.

About 10 years ago, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, heeding the psychologists, had ordered a directed insanity verdict after Lanzo had won a first-degree murder conviction. Then, four years ago, Leroy Phillips--Leroy, of all people--had parlayed that decision into another reversal of a conviction out of Lanzo’s office. In that case, they’d ended up putting this guy Dennis Dodson in a hospital and giving him lithium, which--surprise--made him better. So now he was free.

It drove Lanzo up a wall. These psychologists decide when the guy gets out, but it was his job to protect the public.

Hamilton County had been holding Phil Payne for three hours by now. Hell, Lanzo thought, we don’t have any more than before we brought him in.

Monday evening, Phillips’ phone rang once more. “They turned me loose,” Payne reported. “I’m at home.”

So what is a mother to do, Phillips muttered angrily as he walked up and down the hallways of his home that night.

Where Lanzo distrusted psychologists to judge insanity, Phillips distrusted prosecutors. Time and again, he’d seen them push through convictions of defendants who were obviously insane.

Dennis Dodson, for instance. Phillips knew the Dodson case agitated Lanzo, but what the hell. Even the state psychologist had said he was mentally ill.

Dodson had gone into a convenience store carrying a Bible and a rifle, then had dragged the clerk to a back room and tried to assault her, even though another customer was watching. Days before, he’d bought a piece of wretched north Georgia riverfront land, put up a birdbath and a statue of a naked woman and started talking of making a million dollars off this “development.” He was out of his mind--but the state and a jury would have put him in jail for life if not for Phillips.

It was time, the defense attorney decided, to do two things. He had to contact the ex-girlfriend. And he had to put this whole smelly story in the public domain. He needed the public’s wrath.

That night, Phillips called a friendly reporter on the Chattanooga Times at his home. “Do you want a good story?” he asked.

The next morning, Phillips’ investigator visited Payne’s girlfriend. To his amazement, she registered not fear but rage at Payne when told of the danger she’d been facing.

The end game had begun.

There is dispute now about just what precipitated the final resolution. As Phillips tells it, the prosecutor’s decision to deal arose at least partly because the local newspaper was on the story. As Lanzo tells it, they dealt because Phillips finally gave them what they wanted.

However it came about, all the players gathered at the prosecutors’ office that Tuesday afternoon, July 27.

“If your man will acknowledge he did it, we’ll arrest him,” Lanzo began.

“Well, no, he’s not going to do that,” Phillips said.

“OK,” Lanzo countered. “If your man, with his lawyer present, will go on record waiving his confidentiality, saying it’s OK for Bercaw to talk, we’ll arrest him.”

Phillips saw no choice but to agree.

The skirmishes aren’t nearly over, though. On Dec. 22, after several weeks of examination at the Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute, state psychologists stunned Phillips and Lanzo by finding Payne sane and competent to stand trial. They thought Payne was seriously mentally ill but not psychotic, one state psychologist explained to Phillips. He does have audio hallucinations, they believed, but he wasn’t having them at the time of the killing. Instead, they thought, he was under the influence of 11 beers when he shot the store clerk.

Since both the defense attorney and the prosecutor had been predicting an insanity judgment, this finding only confirmed their sense that psychology is less a hard science than a subjective art form.

Did it change the equation if they’d been letting a mentally ill schizotypal killer, rather than a full-blown psychotic one, meander through Chattanooga for two months? Did it matter if Payne’s intent to kill was triggered by beer or voices? Was it really possible to divine Payne’s inner life on the night he shot the store clerk?

These are among the questions that now occupy Phillips and Lanzo. A court of law may not be the forum best suited to answer them, but that is where they are headed. Phillips, who waived a preliminary hearing in July, expects his client to be indicted on a first-degree murder charge. The trial, he said, will be “a battle of the experts” over sanity, since the defense won’t deny Payne killed the clerk.

In the eyes of the two adversaries, the prospect of an indictment and a trial underscores what they both already feel: Rather than resisting too much, Phillips bent too far.

He was forced to yield by the prosecutor’s refusal to get Payne off the streets, Phillips feels. “I shouldn’t even have crossed the line I did cross.”

“It may turn out that Leroy violated the code of ethics, for letting his client waive his rights after that call we made to the (state bar’s) disciplinary board,” Lanzo agreed.

That’s how the psychological community sees it as well. For turning in Payne when the lawyers would not, George Bercaw has drawn a drumbeat of professional criticism, including a warning letter from the Tennessee Psychological Assn.

What those outside the sealed world of lawyers and therapists make of the events in Chattanooga this past summer is another matter. What concerns many people here are not the vagaries of psychological diagnosis or violations of ethical codes but the notion of an unstable man walking the streets for two months while attorneys and therapists shadowboxed.

How could you wait so long before turning him in? they now demand of Phillips.

How could you wait so long before picking him up? they now demand of Lanzo.

“I think that anyone who would protect (Payne) and take up for him, they need to get right with God . . .” Virginia Graves, the mother of the slain convenience store clerk, told a press conference. “I just don’t understand people that would defend somebody--to use our taxpayers’ money--to protect murderers of innocent people.”

Another day, Virginia Graves called George Bercaw directly. “How could you protect him?” she demanded. “How could you say he was insane? You need to get right with the Lord.”

Bercaw broke down at a press conference when asked about Graves’ comments. Phillips and Lanzo felt shaken as well. If there’d been another killing, “deep down I would have felt responsible,” Lanzo allowed. Mostly, though, the lawyers shrugged if off. Except for the exceedingly higher stakes, after all, this dance had been an old, familiar one for them.

“I’m used to people not understanding the system, not understanding what lawyers do,” Phillips said. “I have no second thoughts about the system because of this case. It’s the best we’ve got. The confidentiality privilege is absolutely sacrosanct. Yes, it creates dilemmas and problems. My anguish over this case is the price we pay for it. But it’s worth the price. It’s essential to the system.”

“This is a case of ‘what ifs,’ ” Lanzo said. “What if he had killed the other woman? Who would be responsible? The whole legal profession would have come under fire. But you always play with dilemmas. You can’t give up the protections because of that. The defense attorney was just doing his job, and so was I. We all jockey around, posture, listen. It worked out all right in this case.”

Phil Payne, for one, agrees with this last thought. After his arrest, after being led off to jail, he called Bercaw. He liked it there with the cops, he reported, because they were giving him all the Cokes and cigarettes he wanted.

“At least now,” he said, “I’m where I should be.”