I have watched all of the video available on wral.com of Brad's long, long deposition given for the child custody case. The deposition was given on October 2, 2008--less than 3 months after Nancy's death, after Brad has lost custody of his children, and before he was arrested. It lasted all day and was conducted by the attorney Nancy had seen about a legal separation agreement.
Such difficult circumstances. Brad was serious, mostly calm (I'm sure some watchers will feel he was too calm), polite but cool. His facial expressions were limited. His voice was steady. He talked about his affair, his concern for his marriage, his concerns about money. He was understated in talking about Nancy but when asked acknowledged that she cursed at him, that both of them raised voices when they argued. He said that he tried to make her happy by buying her things she wanted but had to draw lines based on his income. He described how he cared for the girls.
The one time that his composure slipped was late-ish in the deposition, when everyone involved must have been tired, when he was talking about the girls. He came near tears and his voice cracked. He fought down the emotion, though. I thought of the people who said that he didn't show what they considered to be proper emotion when Nancy died. It is possible that he has greater ability than most of us to suppress strong emotion.
I was struck by a lot of the questions asked. They seemed much less relevent to a custody case than to a murder case. The attorney present with Brad made frequent and regular objections on that basis but it seems a judge had approved the questions. At one point, they had to get the judge on the phone to instruct him to answer a question.
What I don't know is whether or not the deposition was available to the Cary police, and if so, when. I can't help but wonder if the attorney for Nancy's family was asking questions on behalf of the Cary police. The questions often dovetail with the witnesses we've heard from and with the prosecution's theory of the crime.
Brad said things in the deposition that are at odds with testimony the jury has heard. Nancy's father said that the acquisition of a certain painting was a joint purchase made by Nancy and Brad. Her father also explained how he and his wife had commissioned a piece of art as a gift to Brad, because Brad had admired a similar one. Brad was dismissive of the importance of that second piece, and said that the first painting was something Nancy bought over his objections. I can wonder if the grieving father really knew what discussions had taken place about the purchase and Brad's version is consistent with his full account of Nancy's spending. Brad not acknowledging the importance of the gift to him is curious to me. It is a specific example of an overall impression I got from watching the deposition: Brad may be a person who has little recognition of how others perceive him; further, he may not care or know why he should care.
It is not surprising Nancy's friends and family would present different sides of her than Brad did, and consciously or not, spin their memories and feelings in different directions. Brad had trouble recalling people's names, even when he had worked closely with them. It could have been the stress of the day. Early on, he blanked on the name of his brother's son but remembered it later. We've all done such things in stressful situations, but the failure to recollect names seemed to me to go beyond that. I wondered if he simply didn't care enough to make those people and their names part of the fabric of his life.
And then there is this failure of memory, or lie: several people have told about an incident at the girls' preschool. Brad and Nancy had a fight in parking lot, the the girls present and crying, Nancy crying, and loud voices. He said in the deposition that it didn't happen. He must have realized that the attorney (and the police) already knew that it did happen. Why would he lie about something easily verifiable by people not involved?
The jury is hearing the deposition and they will note all of the contradictions, large and small. They will individually value them. There is still no smoking gun. Is there a smoking deposition?
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