Being a Juror for a High Profile Case

My Mother was often called to Jury Duty.  She was a juror magnet, apparently.  Somehow, she was often chosen from the large pools of candidates.  When the trial of Louise Thoresen began with jury selection no one was surprised when she ended up as one of the twelve.  It was November of 1970 and the timing was terrible.  She was a school secretary.  She had been selected to be a member of the first staff who would open a brand-new school in the fall.  There were still many bugs to be worked out.  Her daughter (me) came down with the hard red measles.  Thankfully, my grandmother was able to take care of me.  Honestly I didn’t create much work, I could barely lift my head up and I didn’t want to eat.  And the jury had been sequestered, so she couldn’t even see me at night, or tend to other business. 

Mrs. Thoresen had written a book about her life with William Thoresen III entitled It Gave Everybody Something To Do.  The Thoresen Family was wealthy and relatively well known.  The notorious off-the-rails antics of Louise and William III often made front page news.  Louise admitted killing William but pleaded self-defense.

The courtroom was filled each day, the media was everywhere trying to get a unique angle on the event.

The trial ended on Thursday, November 19.  On Friday, November 20 at 3 am the jury announced their verdict.  Here is an excerpt from Louise’s book regarding that moment in time:

“It was three o’clock in the morning when even juries and justice might have been thought to sleep.  But I was told they had been out all night and were almost ready to come in and render their verdict.  I was led back to the courtroom. 

“The bailiff looked absurdly cheerful for so weary an hour and so solemn a moment.  Did he know something only the jury was supposed to know at that point?  Look at their faces, someone had said to me.  Find the hint in whether they look grim or happy.

“They didn’t look grim.  That I could be sure of, that they didn’t look grim. 

“I remember those most crucial words, though.  An ending and a beginning.

‘We find the defendant not guilty.’

“I felt nothing.  Only great emptiness.”

Forward to 2024 and I’m finally interested into what happened back then.  I read the book and found it to be remarkable.  Here is the synopsis on Amazon:

“It might have been a Cinderella story. On a hopeful New Year's morning in 1960 the daughter of a working-class Illinois family married a handsome heir -- and ten years later with (in retrospect) almost breathtaking inevitability, Louise Thoresen killed William in the bedroom of their Fresno, California, home, was tried and acquitted. It was an extraordinary meshing of madness, husband and wife reinforcing each other in shoplifting capers on a grand scale, gun buying sprees (a 1967 raid on their San Francisco mansion netted an estimated 500,000 dollars in munitions), the dynamiting of an Arizona radio station. There were hangers-on picked up and discarded, arrests (and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees), sadistic wife-beatings, the Haight-Ashbury scene and debilitating doses of drugs, commitments to mental institutions and escapes.

“This is Mrs. Thoresen's very personal view of how it all went bad, and it raises more questions than it answers: did her husband attempt to murder his parents; arrange his brother's death, then in turn kill the hired killer; and then plot to murder his wife? Did he actually manipulate her into killing him? Horror overlays grotesqueness in a distasteful, involving and deeply disturbing -- the more so for lacking poignancy -- story of a very au courant American tragedy."

My first question for my mother was why they had deliberated until 3 am?  She said it was because there was a large convention in town and there were no available hotel rooms, so they fed them dinner at a restaurant and then brought them back to the courthouse.

Next question was how did the deliberations go?  She said eleven of the jurors found her not guilty immediately.  There was one who couldn’t get past the fact that she had committed murder, regardless of the reason why.  He was a nice, honest man (my mother actually already had known him before the trial) who couldn’t true-up murder being acceptable.  It took several hours of discussion before he could feel comfortable that self defense was a viable defense.

As the trial went on, the Judge and police officers would escort the jurors out of the courtroom.  When she could, my mother would go to the new school at 5 am and work until she had to appear in court.  No one ever asked her about the case until it was over.  The only question was ‘When will the trial be over?’  As a juror, they’re not allowed to read or watch in media coverage.  Because it was high profile there was much media coverage so my father cut out the daily Fresno Bee Newspaper articles for her to read once the verdict was entered.  She still has them. 

She said that Mrs. Thoresen always presented herself as a lady.  This surprised me because the woman had been arrested and thrown in jail multiple times, ran arms back and forth across the country and assisted in the dynamiting of a radio station in Arizona.  I read somewhere that after the trial, she enjoyed a quiet life. I wonder if that’s true.