Burned

by Edward Humes

  But the trial jurors who heard the evidence for and against Jo Ann Parks in the end believed the state’s case, not the defense’s. Whatever doubts the defense mustered about televisions and closet doors, they hadn’t been enough. Cohen scratched out notes as she read through the brief, knowing she’d have to find something more, something bigger.

  Certainly there were questions about the choices made by the defense lawyer at trial. In his very first question to Ronald Parks, the lawyer accused him of starting the fire and trying to pin it on his wife. Cohen thought, How melodramatic! And possibly a mistake. If the defense wanted to sell the jury on the fire starting accidentally with an old TV, why undercut that theory by suggesting the fire had been sparked deliberately by someone else? The husband had a solid alibi, with no way of setting the fire without his wife knowing or helping. The defense fire investigator who first contacted the innocence project about the Parks case had been particularly incensed by this move by the original attorney. The former fire captain turned expert witness felt certain this insinuating question had confused the jury by undermining his own testimony about the fire being caused by a dusty, old, fire-prone television. Cohen was not so sure; the trial lawyer, worried not just about a guilty verdict but also about a possible death sentence, undoubtedly felt compelled to raise reasonable doubt about the charges in any and every way he could.

  In a trial, when a defendant is presumed innocent, doubt is all that’s needed to win. After a conviction, however, the burden of proof shifts. To reopen the case, Cohen would have to do far more than raise doubt. She would have to find clear proof of an unfair trial, false evidence that had been instrumental in the verdict, or newly discovered evidence that was both unavailable at the original trial and pointed strongly to Parks’s innocence. The time had passed for “reasonable doubt,” the courtroom equivalent of a ground ball single. Cohen needed a home run now. So as interesting as it might be to second-guess judgment calls and lawyerly trial tactics from a quarter century ago, such issues would never get a habeas corpus hearing for Parks, much less a new trial or actual exoneration. The husband was a dead end for Cohen’s purposes, as was the way the trial attorney questioned him. Cohen moved on in the file.

  Next she turned to the potential gold mine: the analysis of the case written in 2012 by John Lentini and the Arson Review Committee. The group’s report noted that the sheriff’s arson investigator in charge of the case, Ron Ablott, had insisted the fire had been brought under control before flashover occurred in the house. To Lentini, that provided the key to reopening the case and to overturning Parks’s conviction. He opined that photographs from the fire scene clearly showed the original investigator got it wrong: Flashover had occurred. Failure to take that into account undermined the entire scientific case against Parks, in Lentini’s opinion. The science of fire had advanced since 1989, he wrote, arguing that it was now clear that many of the old ideas about fire behavior and traditional indicators of arson don’t work once flashover enters the picture—particularly when an arson investigator fails to acknowledge that flashover occurred. This was the lesson of Lime Street and the Oakland wildfires and of many other inquiries since then, Lentini wrote.

  Now Cohen was hooked, unable to stop reading.

  “Simply stated, the rules for interpreting fire damage change once flashover occurs and a compartment becomes fully involved,” Lentini wrote. “None of the evidence presented by the state against Mrs. Parks is valid. Mrs. Parks’s conviction was the result of the miserable state of the art in fire investigation at that time. By today’s standards, none of the allegedly inculpatory evidence would withstand scrutiny. The investigators and ultimately the jury were misled by bad science, or no science at all.”

  Fresh to the case and the subject of arson, Cohen wasn’t quite sure what flashover was. Not yet. But if Lentini was correct, a pivotal piece of false information lay at the heart of the case against Jo Ann Parks—falsehood that could win a new trial for her.

  Cohen closed the report. What had really happened in this case? How could flashover have been discounted by the original investigation when other experts deemed it both obvious and vital to understanding what happened inside that wretched two-car garage turned three-bedroom apartment? Was this a case of a murder conviction where no murder existed? Could it be that simple? That terrible?

  For the third time across three decades, her muttered reaction to her friend and office-mate mirrored that of others involved in the case, though for very different reasons:

  “Something’s not right here. . . . Something isn’t right.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Cohen next turned to the background material on Jo Ann Parks. The prosecutor had spent considerable effort portraying her as a poor parent, heartless, selfish, untruthful, and, most of all, unmotherly. A big part of the government’s case boiled down to a claim that Parks hadn’t “acted right” during the fire and in its aftermath—as if there is any correct response to fire, trauma, death, and loss. The allegations varied: She wasn’t emotional enough. Or her emotions were an act. She didn’t try very hard to run back into the house and allowed herself to be restrained too easily.

  This sort of attack is uniquely deployed against women in criminal trials, Cohen thought with disgust. In her opinion, it suggested a case that relied on innuendo and personal smear tactics rather than hard evidence. She had seen it before. Such subjective and ambiguous testimony can be devastatingly effective with juries. Prosecutors can’t come out and say: An innocent mother would have died trying to save her kids. But they can certainly get jurors to start thinking in those terms. After the trial, the jurors admitted as much.

  Cohen wasn’t too worried about this “bad mother” evidence, however. It might have had a potent effect on jurors, but such issues simply wouldn’t matter for the purpose of the habeas corpus petition she envisioned for Parks. A judge, not a jury, would handle that, and he would not care about subjective opinions on whether she was sad enough or cried enough or seemed self-sacrificing enough. Cohen’s case would depend on the science. On the experts. On hard evidence. Judges love a good narrative as much as anyone—engaging his or her interest with a good story line embedded in the legal briefs was an innocence project specialty. But Jo Ann Parks’s tears quota would be irrelevant to whether the original fire investigator did a stellar job or screwed up. That was the tale Cohen wanted to spin, and one she needed the judge to focus upon.

  Still, she kept reading. Cohen needed to know her new client. She needed to establish a rapport. She needed to persuade her closed-off, shy, traumatized new client to open up—the client who, for their first tense, difficult interview, could not talk about her kids or the fire or anything more emotionally challenging than her work as a clerk and bookkeeper for the prison.

  Cohen needed to know, most of all: Who, really, was Jo Ann Parks?

  9

  Growing Up Jo Ann

  I was born in Springfield, Illinois. My mom brought me to California when I was four years old. She divorced my dad. She had a daughter a year older and a year younger than me that she said passed away of crib death. She picked my stepfather up off the street. He was nothing but a bum. He was a drunk. We lived in Silver Lake in a back house.

  My mom had a baby boy when I was six years old. My brother got everyone’s attention but me. He would cry all the time. I used to wake him up and pick on him, break his toys.

  I started to go to church with the family that lived in front of us. They were Mormons. My stepfather worked at a bar across from the Greyhound bus station in downtown LA. He was mugged coming home one night. He came in all bloody, had to have stitches and a cast on his arm. My mom started getting curious of why I was going to church. Next thing I knew we were all becoming Mormons.

  * * *

  • • •

  Jo Ann Parks was born February 26, 1966, to an Illinois family strained by lack of money, lack
of parenting skills, the death of Jo Ann’s two infant siblings, and too much alcohol.

  Her young mother, Lorraine, left her father when Jo Ann was still a toddler. They headed west with Lorraine’s best friend, another single mom with child in tow looking for a fresh start. Once in California, Lorraine started a new family with a man she barely knew, and Jo Ann soon had a little brother and two sisters vying for attention from two parents ill-equipped for the job.

  Strict, self-absorbed, and dominating as a parent, even Lorraine conceded she did not always put her kids first in those years. During the birth of one of her younger children, when both she and her baby were in distress, Lorraine heard her husband call out to the medical staff, “Save the baby!”

  She immediately shouted a countermanding order: “Save me!”

  This was a story Lorraine told about herself.

  Jo Ann’s biological father provided even less attention: He had no contact at all with her after the move, something Lorraine refused to explain. He eventually signed away parental rights so Jo Ann’s new stepdad could adopt her.

  Lorraine saw her husband as her sweeter, gentler counterpoint, certain that he treated his adopted daughter no differently than the other children. Jo Ann, however, did not see it that way. She recalls an abusive bully of a stepfather, who would pull her pants down and beat her with a belt well into adolescence. Her younger brother later told an investigator that while none of the kids had a good childhood, “Jo Ann received the worst of it because she was not his real child.” The stepfather was careful, however, to hide his behavior from Lorraine, as Jo Ann recalls, and warned her never to tell what he did to her.

  “If you do tell, no one would believe you,” she recalls him whispering to her one day. “Because nobody in this family loves you. No one ever has.”

  Nothing else he said could have been more cruelly effective. Young Jo Ann’s deepest fear was that she really was the unloved and unlovable family outcast, the only one with a different father who never wanted to see her. She started to avoid her stepfather whenever possible, spending time roaming the streets rather than coming home when expected. She would tell herself constantly that when she grew up and got married, she’d find a husband who was the complete opposite of her stepdad, a good partner and a great father.

  Jo Ann ended up turning to other adults for help in her early teen years when she felt she couldn’t confide in her own mother. Carey Corrigan, a schoolteacher and member of the Mormon church Jo Ann’s family attended, became something of a surrogate mom to the teenager. Whenever Jo Ann was down or in trouble or feeling lonely, she would call and ask to talk. Corrigan would pick her up, then drive her to the neighborhood Thrifty Drug Store for ice cream cones. Then they’d sit in the parking lot and chat about Jo Ann’s life and fears, sometimes for hours, with Corrigan providing a sympathetic ear and some occasional kindly advice. Jo Ann imposed one condition on these conversations: Corrigan had to swear never to divulge anything to Lorraine.

  This initially made Corrigan uneasy, but she soon found this was not a very difficult vow of silence to maintain. Corrigan recalls Jo Ann offered no major revelations during these conversations, no intimations of abuse, no alarming thoughts, and no behavior the young teacher would feel compelled to report in order to protect Jo Ann or anyone else. “Just normal teenager angst and self-esteem issues,” Corrigan recalls. “She was sweet and insecure. Like many young women her age.”

  She and her husband, David Corrigan, then a police officer in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park, lost touch with Jo Ann after she married Ron. When the news broke of the fire and her subsequent arrest, they were shocked. Neither of them believed she had killed her children, as they had seen no propensity for violence or rage in the girl they knew. They perceived her as a basically sweet girl who seemed a little lost at times, extremely dependent, and fearful of being alone, with a tendency to attach herself to kindly friends and neighbors, and even acquaintances. This attachment and dependence sometimes reached the point of imposition. To others, the Corrigans included, this seemed obvious. But Jo Ann seemed oblivious.

  This tendency continued into adulthood. Years later, just a day after moving into the Sherman Way apartment that was destined to burn down within the week, Jo Ann had asked Shirley Robison to babysit her three children for her while she and her husband ran some errands. They had only just met the Robisons, had only a single, brief conversation, yet Jo Ann seemed perplexed when Robison expressed discomfort and demurred. Hadn’t Robison said if there was anything she or her husband could do to make the move easier, to just let them know? That polite welcome, as the Robisons saw it, meant letting them use their phone or answering questions about the property or the neighborhood. It certainly did not include taking charge of three little kids they didn’t know. Yet Jo Ann seemed surprised and disappointed by the rebuff.

  While still in elementary school, Jo Ann—once she was tall enough to operate the stove—was ordered to handle the care and feeding of her siblings. This did not always go well. Jealous at the attention lavished on her colicky little brother, she would pinch and pull his hair at times, take or break his toys, and generally be the prototypically rotten older sister. Eventually, though, they bonded. Decades later, long after her family had written her off and cut her off, Jo Ann still fondly recalls how he tried to cover for her when her stepdad berated or threatened to punish her. “My brother,” she says, “was a savior in a lot of ways.”

  Jo Ann’s home life improved after the whole family followed her lead and joined a nearby Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation she had started attending with a friend. Jo Ann recalls that after converting to Mormonism, her stepfather’s drinking slowed, then stopped. He got a better job. Lorraine returned to school in order to improve her own work prospects. Soon the family was able to purchase a nicer house in the LA neighborhood of Highland Park.

  But after a period of stability, the stepfather began drinking to excess again and behaving bizarrely, and the marriage deteriorated. After Lorraine awoke one morning and found him trying to tie up and blindfold her in her sleep, she threw him out, asked him to seek counseling, and threatened divorce if he failed to get it.

  Later, when it appeared the couple might reconcile, Jo Ann finally told her mother that she had been physically abused by her stepdad for years. She described to Lorraine one occasion when her stepdad grabbed her from behind while she washed the dishes and roughly shoved her head under the faucet. Then she claimed he told the sputtering, coughing girl that he’d kill her if she told anyone. Another time, she said, he dragged her across the room by her hair.

  “She’s just saying that to stop us from getting back together,” he said when Lorraine asked about it. “It makes me sad.”

  Her husband really did sound more sad than angry to her, and Lorraine did not trust her daughter’s motives. So not only did marital reconciliation remain on the table, but Lorraine insisted Jo Ann have regular visits with her stepfather, too, so they could repair their own relationship.

  Jo Ann dreaded those visits. Her grades began to plummet. The excellent student in elementary school became a poor performer in middle school, then a disaster in high school. She failed to do homework. She dodged tests. She skipped classes, making up stories about going to school even as she missed more than two months of class before Lorraine got wind of what was going on. Then, a week or so after her sixteenth birthday, Jo Ann got pregnant. She would later say she didn’t realize this for months. Neither did her family. She attributed her morning sickness to the flu.

  She says an adult member of their church congregation sexually assaulted her.

  By then, Lorraine’s reconciliation attempts with her husband had collapsed. He began threatening to break into the house and to take their son away to Colorado, Lorraine later recalled. She said she had to change the locks on the front door to fend him off. Divorce proceedings soon followed.


  Jo Ann’s pregnancy, meanwhile, proceeded for nearly eight months without anyone noticing that it was more than a mix of flu, a bad cold, and overeating. She looked somewhat stouter, but she had been struggling with her weight for years. A few extra pounds, along with her penchant to be out of the house more than in, helped preserve the general cluelessness. She even recalls having what she thought were periods throughout that time. The serious downside of this sub-rosa pregnancy was that she had zero prenatal care and became severely ill with toxemia in the final month, when the secret finally was revealed. With medical care for both mother and baby belatedly begun, Jo Ann pulled through, and her son David, named for David Corrigan, arrived on time and in apparent good health on January 7, 1983.

  Prior to his birth Jo Ann seemed adamant about giving up the baby for adoption. But in the end she insisted that she wanted David to come home with her. She recalls that her siblings were told not that she had been pregnant, but that she had been sick and had to be hospitalized for a few days. When David appeared, Lorraine offered a cover story: The family was just babysitting for a church member in need.

  Lorraine, Jo Ann recalls, did not like or want the baby. She refused to hold him or to be responsible for his care. She said she did not consider him her grandson, according to Jo Ann, and perhaps sensing the hostility, David seemed to cry incessantly whenever his reluctant grandmother hovered nearby. Lorraine would not take off from her own studies to help with childcare, nor was she willing to help even when she was home and idle. Jo Ann had to take sole charge, an immature teen essentially left to her own devices with a newborn. Over the next few weeks, Lorraine continually urged her daughter to put David up for adoption as the best choice for all concerned.

  Overwhelmed by motherhood, depressed about hiding it, and feeling bereft of her own mother’s support, Jo Ann relented. She and Lorraine visited a Mormon attorney in Los Angeles—a prominent figure in the church hierarchy then, destined to become a leader in the church’s national organization in the years ahead. He explained that there was a Latter-day Saints children’s services agency that could find a good adoptive home for David with a Mormon family. Jo Ann thought the attorney was extremely kind and understanding, and she signed the papers he had prepared. David went to foster parents in a distant part of Los Angeles County, about sixty miles from Highland Park.