Burned

by Edward Humes

  Cohen rose stiffly from her chair, easing the pressure on her back, raising the cantilevered desk surface upward with her so she could stand while working. Photos, mementos of cases, clippings, and mottos on typed bits of paper surrounded her tiny workspace like a colorful, comforting reef. A framed picture of her daughter, Mia, at age one, held by a smiling Cohen, bears the label, XONR8N MAMA, a play on the California Innocence Project’s phonetic abbreviation for exonerate, XONR8. Another photo portrays a broadly grinning Jason Rivera, flanked by Cohen and Bjerkhoel, on the day of his parole. There’s a courtroom shot on the day another of the duo’s clients, Kimberly Long, won a new trial in her murder case, with a tiny quote from Ecclesiastes taped below, THE END OF A MATTER IS BETTER THAN ITS BEGINNING. Nearby, handwritten cards bear these:

  Strong people stand up for themselves but . . . stronger people stand up for others.

  There is no force more powerful than a woman determined to rise.

  They told me I couldn’t.

  Cohen gazed at the mottos without really seeing them. The government spin in the Parks case had suddenly grasped her full attention, not as a source of outrage, but insight. It wasn’t just that this bending of the facts was a stretch. It seemed over the top to Cohen, more than the usual gamesmanship. Maybe the spinning went deeper, she thought. More importantly, it seemed that it came far earlier in the case than the trial, perhaps to the point where it influenced and even biased the investigation itself. Had the arson investigators marched through the burned-down house amped by a tale of cough medicine and murder, anticipating evidence of a monstrous crime and then seeing exactly what they expected to see? Had theory preceded evidence instead of vice versa? Would there even be a case if Kathy Dodge had never made that fateful call, then mysteriously disappeared from the case? Did that call lead the investigators to simply look harder for the telltale signs of arson, as they would surely argue? Or did that call lead them to see what they wanted to see, rather than what was there?

  Cohen wondered if this spin, this possible bias, might provide a new and possibly powerful line of attack beyond the more obvious claim of fire science gone wrong. Might this be a case of an investigation so blinded at the outset that detectives had detected a crime that never actually happened?

  Now that would make a great story to tell the judge, Cohen thought. If she could only prove it.

  11

  It’s All Gonna Come Out in the End

  It made her think of old episodes of Father Knows Best.

  From the start, Ron insisted he wanted to be the family’s provider, which was what Jo Ann craved—to be cared for, looked after, protected. She loved that he said he wanted her to be a stay-at-home mom.

  But his commitment to this vision wavered and then collapsed. Life with Ron Parks devolved into an endless series of moves, evictions, jobs found, jobs lost, and cars repossessed.

  The problem was not a lack of marketable work skills—Ron Parks had been trained by the US Army as an electrician while serving in the Vietnam War, where he strung power and communications lines in the combat zone. Yet he habitually left or lost the skilled factory jobs that capably supported his family, instead nurturing his ambition to start his own business while also fantasizing about becoming a professional singer. The closest he came to reaching his entrepreneurial goal was selling used household goods at swap meets, an enterprise that consistently failed to cover the bills even as it sucked up his time with strike-it-rich deals that never came through. And his hopes of singing for a living didn’t even come that close.

  Eventually, Ron shifted from his sole-provider stance to demanding Jo Ann abandon plans to resume her own education in favor of working a series of part-time jobs, mostly waitressing, to keep the family afloat. She would have to take on shifts that did not overlap with his, allowing the two of them to juggle childcare. Their time together became scant. When they were at home at the same time, she would needle him about his work habits or his failure to do his share of the housework. She would do this in front of friends or neighbors while he seethed and replied with a simple, “Yes, dear.”

  It would be his turn to shout and strike out later, once they were alone, although Jo Ann recalls he always took pains to hit her only when the children were out of the room.

  A pattern soon emerged: Each time Ron’s pursuit of his career dreams forced Jo Ann out of the home to work, they would accuse each other of neglecting home and children. Ron especially railed against his wife for spending too much money on clothes and toys for the kids. Even Jo Ann conceded that she had packed their home with the “Magic Kingdom” toys and dolls she had envied when she was a child.

  “You’re obsessed with Disney,” Ron complained one day. “You love Disney more than you love me!”

  This taunt spiraled into accusations that she was sleeping with coworkers or customers at her restaurant jobs.

  “At least I have a job,” she lashed back. Next, as Jo Ann alleges, Ron beat her with car keys in his fist till she bled. Then he ordered her to quit her job.

  A week later, as money dwindled and his swap-meet sales faltered, the cycle began anew and she had to find a new place to work.

  We first got married by a preacher under my wrong name . . . then got married legally in Las Vegas with my mother’s permission. My mother never liked Ron because he was her age. Plus, he tried to pick up on my mom, or at least that’s what she said. That’s the last time I saw my mom until after Ronnie Jr. and RoAnn were born. . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  Friends, family, and neighbors had mixed opinions about the dynamics of the Parkses’ marriage, with some concluding the older husband totally dominated his young wife, while others thought the reverse—in part because Jo Ann’s many complaints about him were the most public part of their relationship. Their Christian Science practitioner, Paul Garman, who knew Ron before he married Jo Ann and was close friends with him, felt Ron’s religious devotion helped him change from an angry, depressed veteran whose first marriage had crumbled into a much happier, better partner for his second wife. He believed Ron frequently felt “henpecked” by a more dominant wife.

  According to Jo Ann, Ron left that impression with many people because he would always bide his time when she yelled at him, appearing to placate her. Then he would lash out in private. He also kept her away from her mother and sisters if he could, limiting their exposure to his temper and treatment of Jo Ann. He would berate her when she visited her mother without his permission.

  “Family always causes trouble,” he told her. He justified this sentiment by recalling how Jo Ann’s mother had banned him from her house, supposedly because of his behavior during his first visit. She claimed he tried to stick his tongue in her mouth during a hello kiss.

  “She’s wrong, I was just trying to be friendly,” Ron protested when Jo Ann had questioned him about it.

  Later Jo Ann would learn that she was not the first person in Ron’s life whom he told “family causes trouble.” There had been a previous Mrs. Parks in Texas, and Ron had griped about his in-laws causing trouble then, too. They also accused him of acting inappropriately when kissing and touching other family members.

  His marriage to Norma Parks had other parallels to his relationship with Jo Ann. Norma was five years younger than Ron when they married in a whirlwind courtship—which put her at exactly the same age as Jo Ann claimed to be when she married Ron. They barely knew each other when they exchanged vows. They had a son—also named Ron Parks—in 1972, then the couple separated a year later. Norma accused Ron of beating her, of beating their little boy for not succeeding in his potty training quickly enough, and of shooting at both of them while driving by the house in a pickup truck. When Ron and Norma split up, he took Ron Jr. with him against her wishes, Norma claimed. A few weeks later, he agreed to return the little boy in exchange for getting custody of their pickup truck.

 
Norma also claimed that several mysterious fires occurred around Ron during their marriage, including a grease fire in their kitchen that caused serious damage but did not consume the house or injure anyone.

  There was one more parallel between the two marriages: According to Norma, Ron liked to give cough medicine or other drowsiness-inducing drugs to his son to make sure he slept through the night.

  * * *

  • • •

  As a result of the constant churn in jobs and income, Ron and Jo Ann frequently could not pay their bills on time, when they could pay them at all. They lived a rootless existence of constant moves all over Southern California, as well as several migrations to Las Vegas, where they stayed with Ron’s uncle and worked in casinos. By the time they returned from Nevada to California in the summer of 1987, their marriage had congealed into a pattern of fighting, abuse, flight, and reunification. Twice Jo Ann moved in with her mother but eventually had to leave each time, giving in to Ron’s pleas, threats, and physical force.

  In early 1988, a few months after Jessica’s birth, their financial and living situation took a sudden turn for the better. Ron landed a job at the Darigold ice cream packing plant. This time, Jo Ann saw, he seemed to want to stick with it. He liked the overnight work shift and being home during the daytime.

  With a steady salary and their monthly bills under control, the Parks family moved into a small, one-bedroom wood-frame house in the south Los Angeles community of Lynwood. The house was run-down—the six-hundred-dollar rent was derided years later by the Parkses’ attorney as “standard slumlord rate”—and the kids had to use the living room as their cluttered bedroom.

  A few weeks after moving in, the main shortcoming of the Lynwood house became apparent: The electrical system, with its old wiring and venerable fuse box, proved to be inadequate and decrepit. Whenever someone turned on more than one electrical appliance at once—the microwave, the coffeemaker, the blender, the air conditioner, or some other appliance—the electricity in the entire house would shut off. According to the Parkses, if they turned everything off and waited for five to ten minutes, the electricity would resume working but go out again if multiple appliances were switched on.

  For nearly two months, they repeatedly called the landlord about the problem, receiving many promises but no repairs. Finally Ron offered to hire a friend who could do the work inexpensively and then bill the owner. The landlord said no, that his own workers would take care of any issues. No workers came. Visitors to the Lynwood house, including Paul Garman, later confirmed seeing the electrical-system issues firsthand. The Parks family just got by with the constant power outages, periodically calling, with nothing to show for their efforts.

  Then, on April 26, 1988, Jo Ann later claimed, she screamed and cowered when an enormous electrical spark flashed in the kitchen like a lightning strike, filling the room with the distinctive blue light of arcing current. Then she smelled the sharply acrid odor of burned plastic insulation drifting out of the kitchen.

  She called Ron at work to ask him what she should do. He suggested she contact the Lynwood fire department. Firefighters came out that afternoon to inspect the home, and they reported finding faulty wiring leading into the house, as well as a deteriorated outlet and wiring behind the kitchen stove.

  The firefighters determined the electrical system in the home was a possible fire hazard. They turned off power to the house entirely at the fuse box and filed a complaint with the city’s code enforcement department for possible action against the landlord. Finally the firefighters advised Jo Ann to leave the power off until repairs had been made. She called the landlord and property manager yet again, and they promised to have workers there early the following morning.

  While next morning slipped toward noon, the Parks family tired of waiting for the repair crew. Eventually Jo Ann went out and bought a pair of smoke detectors for the house, which the landlord had not installed as legally required. Then Ron turned the electricity on again so the refrigerator would stay cool and milk for the baby would not spoil. Jo Ann later told fire investigators that they kept their other appliances switched off, waited for a while, and when everything seemed fine, they decided to go out.

  Ron took Ronnie Jr. and RoAnn to the neighborhood park. Jo Ann recalls that she stayed home with Jessica, later taking the car to get a box of fried chicken from a nearby drive-through. Then she planned to bring the food and baby Jessica to meet the rest of the family at the park so they could picnic together.

  At 3:40 P.M. on April 27, Jerome Samuel, a fire prevention officer with the Lynwood fire department, saw smoke while driving on Imperial Highway. He called his department headquarters so they could dispatch a firefighting engine company, then he drove to the source of the smoke a few blocks off the highway. He found the Parks house fully engulfed in flames. No one was home. A neighbor told Samuel that the family had gone out, but that she was babysitting their youngest child, Jessica. (Later Jo Ann would recall that Jessica was with her at the time of the fire, but she also says her memory for details of traumatic events is not always reliable.)

  A short time later, according to Samuel, the entire Parks family arrived home to find the house in flames. Before the fire could be put out, almost all of the Parkses’ possessions and most of the interior of the house were destroyed as they stood by helplessly and watched.

  Ron Ablott, the same Los Angeles County Sheriff’s arson specialist who would investigate the origin and cause of the fatal fire a year later, arrived long after the Lynwood fire was extinguished. He worked alongside an assistant chief from the fire department to trace the start of the fire. After walking through the rubble and examining the home, Ablott decided this blaze had been accidental, and that it started in the bedroom where Ron and Jo Ann slept.

  The window in that lone bedroom had shattered during the fire. Flames had shot out, scorching and burning the outside of the house near the window. From this, along with a corresponding burn pattern inside, Ablott concluded that the fire started in that bedroom. He decided that these fire patterns pointed to an extension cord that supplied power to a small air conditioner in the bedroom window, and that overheating of that cord caused the fire. The cord had been coiled, and Jo Ann or Ron had dropped clothing on top of it. The high current drawn by the air conditioner, combined with the coiling of the wire, generated enough heat to melt the cord into the carpeting, Ablott theorized. He then presumed this overheating became great enough to ignite the clothing piled on top of the cord, and the fire spread from there—a rare but possible means of starting a house fire. A companion report written by the assistant chief, which was supposed to summarize his and Ablott’s conclusions, blamed a “short circuit” in the air conditioner cord. This was a different mechanism for starting a fire than cited by Ablott, as a short circuit requires the baring of the two metal wires inside an electrical cord, which then must touch each other to create sparks and heat.

  Ablott recalled lecturing Jo Ann about not coiling or covering electrical cords in the future, though he was not sure at the time that she fully understood what he was talking about. Although the fire was classified as accidental, Ablott’s report nevertheless blamed Jo Ann and Ron’s “careless maintenance of appliances in the southeast bedroom.”

  Ablott’s opinion was based primarily on the large V-pattern in the bedroom around the air conditioner, and the fact that the flames that shot out from the bedroom window did the most damage to the outside of the house. This is a standard method of determining the origin of a fire by locating the area of greatest damage. But that standard may lead to deceptive results in fires where flashover has occurred.

  The building was “fully involved” when firefighters arrived—the last and most severe stage of a house fire, which is often preceded by flashover—yet the Lynwood fire reports do not address whether flashover occurred or how it could influence evaluation of fire patterns. Nor is there analysis of the effect of
the bedroom window shattering during the fire, which allowed air to rush in and create an area of greatest damage even if the fire originated elsewhere. Ablott disregarded or didn’t believe Jo Ann’s statement that the air conditioner had been switched off when they left the house. And although he mentioned in his report that Jo Ann claimed the house had electrical problems before the fire, Ablott’s report makes no mention of the fact that the fire department had been there the day before and confirmed Jo Ann’s complaints, declaring the electrical system a possible fire hazard and code violation.

  Ron Parks hired an attorney to sue their landlords. As the case involved minor damages because no one was hurt in the fire and the Parkses’ personal property had relatively little monetary value (the most costly item was a child’s bunk bed worth a few hundred dollars), the legal claim apparently went nowhere.

  But this fire, as well as the manner in which it was investigated—with its focus on wiring, confusion about a short circuit, and disregard for flashover—would loom large a year later in the far more catastrophic fire to come.