By Jim Nintzel
WHEN HE WAS convicted of conspiring to kill his ex-wife two years ago, Fred Hewitt could scarcely believe he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Now it looks as if he may not have to.
Hewitt, who has always maintained that he was framed, recently agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of attempted murder. Last Monday, March 3, Judge Gilbert Veliz sentenced Hewitt to seven years behind bars, followed by intensive probation.
The 67-year-old former engineer saw the guilty plea as his only chance to get out of state prison, where he's been serving a life sentence since a Tucson jury found him guilty of the conspiracy charge in late 1992 ("Claim To Frame," Tucson Weekly, March 3, 1993).
"I said, 'I'm gonna have to do it,' so I pled guilty to attempted murder," says Hewitt, sitting in his prison scrubs in a small, gray room at the Pima County Jail.
Throughout his trial, Hewitt insisted he was innocent. He claimed to have been led into the murder plot by federal fugitive Ronn Westfall, a pathological liar who was desperate to cut a deal with authorities.
Before his trouble with the law began, Hewitt was just a 65-year-old Irish immigrant scraping by doing engineering work in Cochise County. He was unfortunate enough to be saddled with a stiff monthly alimony payment to his ex-wife, Jutta Hewitt.
When Hewitt quit making the payments to Jutta, a judge put him in the Cochise County Jail, where he first met Westfall, who was serving a sentence for running stolen cars parts across state lines. Westfall had a long list of crooked deeds to his name, including $93,000 worth of fraudulent insurance claims. He was, in short, a scam artist--or, as Tucson police Det. Sharon Allen puts it, "a piece of shit."
Westfall had found a new line behind bars--snitching on fellow inmates. Even then, his stories stank of bullshit. Westfall would befriend inmates, learn all he could about them, and then approach prosecutors with outlandish tales he tried to use to cut deals. His testimony in one case in Cochise County was so outrageous that a jury took only 10 minutes to acquit the defendant.
Despite his track record, Westfall found a sympathetic audience with the Tucson Police Department when he called to tell them that Fred Hewitt had asked him to kill his ex-wife.
Hewitt says he had a deal with Westfall, all right. Westfall's uncle was supposed to be courting Jutta so she would remarry and he'd be off the hook for his alimony payments.
Westfall put on a command performance for the gullible Hewitt, portraying himself as the victim of an unfair legal system and spinning tales of the fortune he would soon inherit. For months he wrote pathetic, misspelled letters to Hewitt, luring him in deeper with tales of how the two of them were going to go into business together building houses with his father's money. He begged Hewitt to lend him money, promising huge returns on his generosity.
At the same time, he was telling Tucson police that Hewitt had contracted him to kill his ex-wife.
Hewitt says Westfall had never said anything about cold-blooded murder until a few days before his arrest. By then, Hewitt maintains, he had realized Westfall was running some kind of scam--and he made fatal mistake.
Hewitt says he played along with Westfall's absurd plot--which involved sabotaging Jutta's car so she would plunge to her death on the Mount Lemmon Highway--because he thought he could recover some of the money he'd lent him.
Unfortunately, while Hewitt was playing along, Westfall was wearing a wire. He taped their conversations and Hewitt was busted making a down payment on the hit in the parking lot of El Con Mall.
After Hewitt's arrest, Westfall returned to Cochise County, where he set about making sure Hewitt would be convicted. He sent an anonymous letter to Hewitt inside the county jail. The letter said Westfall had survived two attempts on his life but he wouldn't survive the third, so the state would have no case against Hewitt.
Prison authorities intercepted the letter and turned it over to the attorney general's office, which used it as justification for keeping Hewitt's bond at a half-million dollars. It wasn't until months later that an investigator for the defense was able to prove Westfall had written the letter.
By then, Westfall had vanished. One of his last acts was to ask a Douglas resident to say he saw two men hit him over the head and drag him across the border.
Based on the tape-recorded conversations between Hewitt and Westfall, a jury convicted Hewitt of conspiring to kill Jutta Hewitt in October 1992. Judge Veliz sentenced him to life behind bars. On Christmas Eve, he was shipped out of Pima County Jail and into the state prison system.
BUT HEWITT NEVER stopped fighting. His current wife, June Hewitt, managed to scrape together enough money to hire Steve Hart, an attorney with the Phoenix law firm Burch & Cracchiolo.
Hart appealed to the court for post-conviction relief, arguing that Hewitt simply didn't get a fair trial.
To begin with, Hewitt was represented by former public defender Deborah Bernini. Now a judge pro tem, Bernini herself took the stand in a hearing in Veliz's courtroom earlier this year and admitted she had been so swamped with cases that she'd been unable to provide a competent defense for Hewitt.
"I don't blame her," says Hewitt, who understands how understaffed the public defender's office is.
Then there was the fact that the jury never heard about Westfall's criminal record or the fraud cases that were pending against him elsewhere in Arizona--charges he hoped to have dropped in exchange for his help in convicting Hewitt.
Rather than pursue the case further, the attorney general's office earlier this year offered Hewitt a deal: Plead guilty to attempted murder.
"That was not based on any feeling that there was any merit to the appeal," says John Davis, who handled the post-conviction relief hearings for the attorney general's office. "It was based on consulting with the victim.... What the defense files is basically unproven allegations. None of those things were ever found to be correct by the judge."
"Two and a half years later, they're offering me a plea," Hewitt says. "If I don't take it, it's going to take four years to get out of here."
Prison life has not been easy on Hewitt. He survived a bout with pneumonia soon after his sentencing and he's now suffering from a hernia, but he's too wary of the prison's hospital staff to have an operation.
He's landed small jobs on the inside--he's delivered books from the prison library and helped teach a class. Most recently, he's put his engineering background to work as a draftsman for the prison staffers, who needed someone who could interpret plans. Although officials didn't want to use anyone from the maximum security unit where Hewitt is held, they ultimately decided he didn't pose much of a threat.
"So in a sense, it's great, because I work eight hours a day, it's work that I enjoy," Hewitt says. "It's like being out in the street, almost, except that I can't see June."
Still, now he can at least hope to one day be free. With the new seven-year sentence, Hewitt could be eligible for parole in another year.
His troubles, of course, will not be over. He's now saddled with a huge legal debt and, upon his release, he still has years of intensive probation to look forward to.
The whereabouts of Ronn Westfall are still unknown.
"There's a warrant still out for him and there's a lot of us who would sure like to have him back in custody," Davis says.
Cutlines:
Fred Hewitt recently plead guilty to attempted murder.
Scam artist Ronn Westfall is still on the lam.
 |
 |
© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth |
|