Burned

by Edward Humes

  Raquel Cohen, on the other hand, has come to see cognitive bias not as a niche idea, but as something that is deeply rooted in the justice system, in politics, in all our institutions. It animates many of the conflicts, hate, and intolerance tearing the country apart: “People see what they expect to see,” she says. “And they are blind to it.”

  Every prosecution expert in the Parks habeas case, she believes, has been influenced by unconscious cognitive bias. She argues that this has led them to select only the facts from the old trial record that confirm their views while ignoring contrary information, including reliance on police and firefighter testimony that even the original prosecutor on the case deemed not credible. “Once you start looking for it, you start to see cognitive bias everywhere,” Cohen says. “It is pervasive.”

  Paul Bieber’s solution is to keep forensic examiners in the blind. Let them focus on the science and stay ignorant of the criminal case information, avoiding exposure to potentially biasing information, such as allegations of poor parenting, drugging, and profit motives against Jo Ann Parks. Did this in fact bias the Parks fire scene investigation? It’s impossible to say with certainty. It’s just as impossible to rule out, says Bieber. Yet making forensic analysis independent of law enforcement, to avoid the cognitive bias that linkage can cause, is not even on the table for discussion.

  In fact, there isn’t even a table anymore. Spurred on by a National Academy of Sciences report on problems with forensics, a presidential commission convened during the Obama administration to find solutions to forensic failures and how to make the various forensic science disciplines stronger. The initiative was canceled by the Trump administration. Forensic reform—or, at least, exposure of forensic failures—is now back to a case-by-case basis. Jo Ann Parks is just the latest in line. More will follow.

  * * *

  • • •

  Should the judge rule in her favor, Jo Ann Parks has modest plans for the future. She will stay with the family of her old fire expert. Mary Ross has become her confidante and supporter, and there is a room waiting for her at the Ross family’s home in San Juan Capistrano, California. There she can readjust to the outside, to a world she left when no one had smartphones or browsed the Web, before DVDs or Netflix or Amazon, when the Disney cartoon Aladdin was the most popular film in the United States and O. J. Simpson was known only as a football star, actor, and pitchman for Hertz rental cars. In time, she may move to Hawaii to be with her paroled girlfriend. Beyond that, it is hard for her to plan. Painful, really, she says. “Because who knows if any of it will come true?”

  Her mother is dead, her ex-husband is dead, her children are dead, her siblings have nothing to do with her. She has no money, no resources; she is no one’s constituency. She has been the outcast since her rape and the birth, foster placement, and death of her first child, David, was “handled” by the Mormon church. Her own mother sent her off to foster care, and then fate brought her to that Laundromat and Ron Parks. She has no idea, she says, how normal people live. Prison is now her norm.

  She says she is filled with regrets about things she wished she had done differently, choices she made or didn’t make. She wishes she had been strong enough to leave Ron. She wishes sometimes that she had died in that fire, trying to save her babies. She is still haunted by the words her husband uttered in court, that their kids were like spilt milk to him. She is haunted by the thought that the police looked at her and her life and were disgusted by what they saw, disgusted by the monster they perceived in her skin. “Do you know,” she once asked, “what it’s like to be called a monster?”

  The question that always comes up about Jo Ann Parks is the most obvious: Do you believe she is innocent? That question won’t be answered in these pages. Or anywhere else. It is not answerable. There is no DNA test or alibi witness or scientific method that can deliver that answer, that certainty.

  The more answerable yet ambiguous questions, the ones that have legal weight, are whether there was ever sufficient evidence to convict her, and whether there is sufficient evidence left standing to justify keeping Jo Ann Parks in prison until she dies.

  There is that tangle of wires with a few small cuts in the insulation and some charred material from old drapes that could have been wrapped by an arsonist—or by a child, or through sheer messiness, or by accident. There is a closet door no one can be certain was open or closed, or whether the child inside was hiding on his own or barricaded by his mom. There is a hamper that is supposed to have burned against a door without leaving evidence of burning against a door. There is a child who played with matches and who was known to rise late at night to turn on the old TV. There is a mother who saved herself instead of trying to save her kids, then lied about it. There is a mother who didn’t grieve or cry the way some people thought she should. Is all this enough to imprison a woman for life? Is there even enough evidence to say with any degree of certainty that a crime was committed at all?

  Before her trial, Parks could have sought a deal to testify against her husband in return for her freedom or a reduced sentence, but she didn’t. When facing death, she again could have accused her husband to save her own skin, but she didn’t. She could have blamed her son for setting the fire, but she didn’t, except for that one blurted comment to her neighbor while the apartment blazed. She could have bought insurance before the fire, but she didn’t. She could have died trying to save her kids, but she didn’t.

  Is all of this evidence of guilt or innocence or cowardice or simply human fallibility?

  She sits behind bars now, waiting. She waits not for proof of innocence or surety of guilt, but for the realization that ambiguity is not evidence. She waits for a judge who must decide what to do about that. There will be a ruling. There will be appeals. There will be slow and gradual reforms to forensics and fire science, most likely because courts will force these reforms, though they likely will not go as far as some might wish.

  As she says, Jo Ann Parks is good at waiting.

  A resolution of sorts arrived late Friday, November 2, 2018: Judge William Ryan denied the petition for a new trial. In a ruling that read more like a punt than a firm rejection, the judge decided little had changed in thirty years. Then, as now, he said, it all boiled down to a muddle of dueling experts, and he was not about to pick one scientist over another. Yes, there was false evidence about flashover at the original trial, but he found this insufficient to free Jo Ann Parks.

  “The world of fire science and fire investigation is a complex area,” he wrote, “rife with differing opinions and contentious debates that continue to this day.”

  Raquel Cohen told her devasted client to take heart; that years of appeals and waiting were inevitable no matter how Ryan ruled. Instead of reserving it for a new trial, she said the re-creation of the fire would become the centerpiece of her appeal—if she could raise the $100,000 needed to stage a re-creation. The case is not about dueling experts, Cohen insists, but about experts who claim scientific certainty where none exists.

  “That isn’t an opinion,” she says. “It’s a lie. And I’m going to prove it.”

  Sources

  Note: Copies of original reports, interviews, and other key documents referenced in Burned may be found at www.EdwardHumes.com/burned.

  Chapter 1: April 9, 1989

  From the testimony of Bill and Shirley Robison in the preliminary hearing (April 15 and April 20, 1992) and the jury trial (August 6, 1992–February 26, 1993) in the People of the State of California v. Jo Ann Parks, Los Angeles County Superior Court Case No. VA009503; from the author’s interview with Shirley Robison; and from the report dated April 9, 1989, by Bell Police Department officer Frank Espejo.

  Chapter 2: 1,100 Degrees

  The explanation of the stages of a house fire leading to flashover is based on publications and videos from the US Fire Administration, the National Fire Protection Association, the Bureau of Alc
ohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, fire expert Greg Gorbett, and testimony in the Parks trial and habeas hearing. The times noted in this description are hypothetical and can vary; in some situations, flashover can occur more quickly or take longer.

  Information regarding the Parkses’ landlords is drawn from court records and from the article “Slum Citations Mount in 4 Cities Against Landlords; Tenants Say Owners Refuse to Repair Shoddy Living Conditions,” by James M. Gomez, Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1989.

  Chapter 3: Firefighting

  From the testimony of David Haney (misidentified as David Laney) in the Parks preliminary hearing, as well as preliminary hearing and trial testimony from Bob and Shirley Robison, Bell police officer Pete Cacheiro, Bell reserve officer Timothy McGee, and Los Angeles County firefighter Dirk Wegner.

  Additional information came from the April 9, 1989, Bell Police Department incident report by Officer Jeff Bruce; the author’s interview with Bruce; and defense fire expert Robert Lowe’s notes on and analysis of Bruce’s actions and his own conversation with and testimony about Bruce.

  Lowe’s report dated March 8, 2006, on his investigation of the Parks case, provided a detailed timeline of events before, during, and after the fire.

  The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department supplementary report dated September 11, 1992, by homicide detectives Jacqueline Franco and Patrick Robinson detailing their interview with Parks’s neighbor Lloyd Richard Powell; and the February 6, 1992, sheriff’s report filed by Franco and Detective Frank Salerno on their interview with David Haney (Tuxedo Man) provided details about the fire and the timing and sequence of events, much of which was overlooked later in the case.

  Note: The role of Officer Bruce has been a point of controversy and debate from the beginning of the investigation of the Parks fire. Bruce exaggerated his heroics that day in describing his entry into the girls’ bedroom prior to the room flashing over. He later admitted as much but maintained the rest of his official report was accurate. Notably that report was written immediately after the fire.

  Bruce’s version of events—the timing of the window breaking and the fact that there was little or no fire in the room until after he broke the window—is more favorable to Jo Ann Parks’s defense than to the prosecution.

  Officer McGee’s version of events—that the back windows were all intact until they all blew out at once—fits the prosecution’s theory of the case better. McGee, a reserve officer, wrote no report and did not provide a detailed description of events until two years after the fire. McGee was incorrect in several of his other recollections about the fire, which is normal for anyone asked to recall events years after the fact.

  At Parks’s trial and ever since, police and prosecutors have asserted that McGee’s account is the accurate one and that nothing Bruce reported is credible. But they ignore a police interview with the Parkses’ neighbor Lloyd Powell, who recalled watching an officer banging on a window with what appeared to be a baton, and finally breaking the window. Smoke and flames then shot out.

  Chapters 4–5: Statements–Victims

  The events occurring at the police station were described in the April 9, 1989, report by Bell Police Department officer Frank Espejo detailing his interview with Jo Ann Parks; the preliminary hearing and trial testimony of Espejo and Shirley Robison; author’s interview with Paul Garman; Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department supplementary report dated November 29, 1991, by Detectives Franco and Salerno, on their March 29, 1991, interview with Paul Garman; the testimony of Ronald Parks; a handwritten statement by Ronald Parks entitled “Statement: Night of Fire”; and a handwritten statement by Jo Ann Parks.

  Events at the house were described in detail in the testimony of the first responders, in particular Dirk Wegner; and in LA County fire investigator William Franklin’s testimony and investigation report.

  The phone call from Kathy Dodge was detailed in the Bell Police Department report dated April 12, 1989, by Sergeant William Talbott.

  Chapter 6: Arson Expert

  Kathy Dodge’s allegations are described in detail in the original Talbott report; a transcript of an August 20, 1989, interview conducted by Jacqueline Franco and Michael Lee, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives; a transcript of a June 7, 1991, interview with sheriff’s detectives Franco and Salerno; and transcripts of the Parks trial in which the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney discuss Dodge outside the presence of the jury.

  Fire investigation information is derived from the author’s interviews with retired sheriff’s arson investigator Ron Ablott and sheriff’s arson investigator Ed Nordskog; preliminary hearing and trial testimony of Ablott and William Franklin; the 2006 Lowe report; fire expert reports filed in the habeas proceedings authored by the Arson Review Committee (John Lentini, David Smith, and Michael McKenzie), Brian Hoback, and Thomas May; and the testimony in habeas proceedings of Smith, Hoback, Paul Bieber, and Greg Gorbett.

  Information about the Parkses’ activities between the time of the fire and Jo Ann Parks’s arrest is drawn from the author’s interviews with Jo Ann Parks and Mary Ross; Parks’s autobiographical statement, “Her Story”; and correspondence between Ron Parks and Robert Lowe.

  Chapter 7: Three Days in October 1991

  From the author’s interview with John Lentini; “The Oakland Experience,” by John J. Lentini, David M. Smith, and Dr. Richard W. Henderson, Fire Technology (vol. 28, no. 3) August 1992; “The Lime Street Fire: Another Perspective,” account by John J. Lentini, Fire and Arson Investigator, vol. 43. no. 1, September 1992; and “Badly Burned: Long-Held Beliefs about Arson Science Have Been Debunked After Decades of Misuse and Scores of Wrongful Convictions,” by Mark Hansen, ABA Journal, December 2015.

  Arrest information based on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrest report of Jo Ann Parks, and the author’s interview with Parks.

  Chapter 8: The Pit

  From the author’s interviews of the staff at the California Innocence Project, including Raquel Cohen, Alissa Bjerkhoel, Justin Brooks, Alex Simpson, and Michael Semanchic.

  Details on cases, crimes, and exonerations in this chapter are drawn from individual court pleadings and rulings, and from the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of the University of California, Irvine; Newkirk Center for Science & Society; the University of Michigan Law School; and Michigan State University College of Law.

  Chapter 9: Growing Up Jo Ann

  From author’s interview with Jo Ann Parks; “Her Story,” by Jo Ann Parks; “Life with Ron,” by Jo Ann Parks; author’s interviews with Mary Ross, David Corrigan, and Carey Corrigan; 2006 report by Robert Lowe; and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigative reports and search warrants for records related to the birth, foster care, and death of Jo Ann Parks’s son David.

  Homicide detectives initially sought to link David’s death to foul play by Parks rather than sudden infant death syndrome, under the theory that she was a serial killer with a compulsion to kill her own children. The investigation, however, exonerated her of any involvement with David’s death. He was in a foster home sixty miles away from Parks at the time of his death.

  Chapter 10: They Told Me I Couldn’t

  Much of the information for this chapter is drawn from author interviews with Raquel and Ryan Cohen and Alissa Bjerkhoel, along with California Innocence Project case summaries and court records for Jason Rivera and Luis Vargas.

  Chapter 11: It’s All Gonna Come Out in the End

  Jo Ann Parks is the primary source for information on her and Ron’s background and life together, supplemented by letters and written statements from Ron Parks and interviews from friends and relatives by investigators.

  Information on the 1988 Lynwood fire is from the non-fire incident report of the Lynwood Fire Department dated April 26, 1988 (documenting Jo Ann Parks’s complaints of electrical problems
and the fire department’s verification of faulty wiring at the house and a code violation); Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department fire report dated April 27, 1988, on the fire at the Parkses’ Lynwood rental house (with additional information on the April 26 examination of electrical problems at the house); the supplementary fire investigation report dated June 28, 1988, by Ron Ablott; the deposition of Jo Ann Parks dated August 21, 1990, taken in the lawsuit the Parks family filed against their former landlords in Lynwood, Parks v. Segueira, Los Angeles County Municipal Court Case No. 89C02092; and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide investigation supplementary report dated April 10, 1991, by Detectives Franco and Salerno on their interviews with Lynwood Fire Department fire prevention officer Jerome Samuel and other fire personnel.

  The Parkses asserted that they made nothing from the lawsuit filed in the Lynwood fire. Prosecutors have suggested they made $30,000 through fire-related lawsuits, but this is based on testimony from Ron Parks that they were offered that sum at one point; elsewhere in the testimony, Parks says the lawsuits were dropped. Other than this testimony, prosecutors and police cite no evidence that the Parkses received any sort of monetary settlement in connection with either house fire. They did, however, receive about $30,000 in donations made after news coverage of the fatal fire.