Children wanted to please. It was very easy to get a child to say what an adult wanted to hear. Then in repeating what the adult wanted to hear, it became part of the child’s memory, and then, to the child, it became the truth. Jamison searched his mind for the word—confabulation. Was that what he was looking at? Surely the conviction of Richard Harker didn’t rest on the accusation of a three-year-old? There had to be more.
Jamison had tried death penalty cases. There had to be a lot more. Now he needed to find out what more there was.
Chapter 5
Late in the morning, there was a knock on the door casing leading into Jamison’s office. One of the office assistants had a two-wheeled dolly stacked with three boxes of files. It was obvious from looking at the cardboard containers that they had been so tightly packed the corners were strained. Moisture and time had softened the cardboard and the box on the bottom of the pile was sagging under the weight.
Jamison’s only thought was that three boxes were going to take a lot of time to go through, but it wasn’t as bad as he feared. Then the assistant told him that there were four more in the outer office that he still had to bring in. The assistant could tell from Jamison’s reaction that the thought of additional boxes wasn’t good news. He grinned. “I guess you’ll have some light reading for the next few days.” He laughed. “Oh, and I cleaned them off for you.” Veronica had passed on his message.
Jamison stared at the two piles of stacked boxes. The DA file number and the name People v Richard Harker was written in black flow pen on the front and side of each box. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to read the entire trial transcript. That was probably over twenty thousand pages. He knew that files like this were often disorganized. After a trial, paper got stuffed into storage boxes. There wasn’t a lot of concern about preserving order and cataloging files for history or for somebody else to wade through.
As Jamison knew from his colleagues and his own experience, trial lawyers were like gunfighters; they shot and when their work was done they walked away from the mess left behind. So, cleanup was not going to be meticulous. Besides, most prosecutors went from one case immediately to the next and left the rest of it to appellate lawyers, only occasionally revisiting their old cases. Multiple hands rummaged through cases, making them even more disorganized. In big cases that came back on appeal or writs, it was not uncommon that the prosecutor who tried a case would have left the office for the bigger money of private practice or maybe even retired. Harker’s trial file was twentyfive years old and the murder itself was over twenty-six years ago. Jamison was surprised the cardboard boxes hadn’t split apart under the weight of more boxes that would have been piled atop them, like the slowly building accretion of a river bank or the colored striations of a canyon that created many layers with the passage of time.
He waited as long as the few seconds of passive resistance would allow and walked over to the stack. First, he needed to find the beginning. He knew that was going to be a problem the minute he opened the box on top. Manila file folders were labeled with witness names and reference designations like “blood evidence,” and were filed in an order that probably made sense to Gage when he tried the case but would be a maze to anybody else. Plus, the tracking slip on the box at the top told him that the writ attorney, Franklin Bailey, as well as a few other names of deputy district attorneys from the past, had rummaged through the case, adding to the confusion. Jamison sighed and began pulling paper out, flipping open folders and closing them as he tried to put the Harker case back together.
Jamison stretched his arms. He had been at it for hours. He was tired of organizing files when he didn’t know the basic story. He was still separating paper and he wasn’t there yet. That would start with what the officers on the scene had found. Everything built from there, and that was where Jamison would start. But he had to find it. He knew that the investigation of criminal cases, particularly major cases, was built in layers. First there was the initial responding officer and his or her perceptions. Then there were the detectives’ reports and so on until the case built itself sufficiently for there to be an arrest. And then the district attorney would take over with his or her investigator, sending out more investigation requests and breaking the case down into pieces that could be put in front of the jury.
It was like figuring out what the story was and then figuring out the best way to tell the story. At the end of telling the story the jury would write the closing line. All of that was in these boxes. Or, Jamison thought, hopefully all of that is in the boxes. Matt Jamison had been around enough of these cases to know that sometimes little pieces of files didn’t get put back into the box and you had to figure out what wasn’t there and then where to find it.
Four hours of burrowing through paper and Jamison finally found the initial crime scene investigation reports. He decided to quit organizing for a while and sit down and read. The aged paper bent limply in his hands but almost three decades had not softened the impact of the words.
Sheriff’s reports never changed in format and the Harker case was no different. There were printed boxes on the face page for every category to ensure that vital information was cataloged. In the upper left corner there was a name, Lisa Farrow. To the right of her name was the word “victim.”
There were numbers for every crime based on the penal code. Next to Lisa Farrow’s name the category of crime was PC 187, murder. The reports were impersonal. There was no emotion in them. All the emotion comes from the narrative of the officer’s observations and the visualization that comes with people reading, it having seen similar crimes before. If you had seen it before, you could smell it and you could feel it. But even though Matt Jamison had been to more than his share of homicide scenes, he wasn’t prepared for this.
According to his report, Deputy John Kinster arrived at 9:12 a.m., responding to a dispatch call regarding a body in a house at 224 East Flower Street. Jamison knew the area. It was a poor neighborhood of slowly disintegrating wooden homes. Its pitted asphalt streets were continually put at the bottom of street crew projects so that they never reached the top. He had been there more than once on homicide investigations that some areas of town generated like weeds in the sidewalks. The thought flicked through his mind at the irony of calling it Flower Street. He doubted that any flowers were planted along the front yards of homes that sheltered people holding on to bare subsistence.
Kinster’s report stated that outside the residence there were two women waiting, Maria Castillo and Nancy Slaven. Next to them was a little girl, later identified as Christine Farrow. Jamison read slowly, trying to visualize the scene.
Slaven said that she and Castillo were neighbors of a woman named Lisa Farrow. They had gone over to visit. When they walked up on the wooden porch steps they could see that there was damage to the curtains. It looked like they had been partially burned or blackened. Castillo knocked. When there was no answer they decided to open the door, which was unlocked. The first thing that hit them was the smell. Then they saw Lisa Farrow’s body on the floor in the kitchen. The women were unable to further describe what they had seen. Both women were crying and extremely emotional.
Slaven did get out that Christine, the little girl with them, was Lisa’s daughter. They had found her sitting on a chair in the kitchen area. She was covered with soot. When Castillo tried to get Christine to come outside with them she wouldn’t leave. All she said was, “Rick did it.” After that she wouldn’t talk at all. Slaven had finally picked her up and carried her outside while Castillo called the sheriff. Neither woman had gone back inside.
Jamison looked at the age listed on the report for Christine. She was three.
Deputy Kinster entered the house and observed the victim lying faceup with her arms and legs stretched out. She was wearing no clothing on the lower part of her body. A red T-shirt was pulled up, exposing her breasts. Kinster could visually observe that the victim was deceased. To Jamison that meant that Kinster hadn’t disturbed the crime sce
ne by checking the victim to see if she was still alive. Anything or anybody that touched the body became more evidence to sift through and more fodder for defense attorneys to claim the crime scene was contaminated. The other thing Kinster observed was the faint odor of a flammable liquid like gasoline or lighter fluid.
He read carefully through Kinster’s description of the injuries. Jamison knew that detailed descriptions would be in later reports, but the initial description by the first responding officer was important to establish the position and condition of the body. How wounds were inflicted was often critical to the process of establishing what happened.
There were lacerations on Lisa Farrow’s arms that were consistent with defensive wounds suffered when she had tried to shield her face. There was a gaping wound to her neck where she had been slashed.
It was evident to Jamison that Kinster also had difficulty describing the crime scene because he said only that he quickly determined the scene needed to be secured and left out the normal details. Jamison pulled out photographs of the crime scene to look at while he read Kinster’s report. When he looked at the photographs, Jamison understood Kinster’s inability to convey what he saw.
Even after looking at pictures of numerous homicide scenes as well as actually being at a substantial number of murder sites, Jamison had difficulty staring at the pictures. The lower portion of Farrow’s body was charred. Something flammable had been poured over the bottom area of her body and set on fire. From the appearance of the photographs, the fire had spread to a rug that Farrow was lying on and that had added to the flames until they burned off whatever accelerant that had been used and died down to a smolder. Jamison imagined that the soot that covered the child was from the smoldering rug. He shuddered at the thought that it could be from anything else.
Jamison shuffled through the pile of photographs taken by the forensic team. There were beer cans on the kitchen table and on the counter. There were several charred beer cans between the victim’s legs. A full ash tray was on the table and there was a broken knife on the floor.
Carefully he laid the photographs out on his desk. Then he rummaged through the same box until he found reports labeled “Autopsy.”
The pathologist’s report concluded Lisa Farrow’s throat had been cut in one powerful slashing motion. She would have gone almost immediately into shock and been dead in no more than a minute or two. The throat wound severed the trachea, the carotid artery on the right side, and most of the supporting muscles of the neck. The wounds on her forearms were consistent with her trying to protect herself against her attacker as the knife was swung. Her face showed bruising to her jaw and lips. She had been struck, probably at least once by a fist and likely several more times. Her left eye was swollen shut. The pathologist found evidence of burning from the knees to the waistline and determined the fire had been concentrated in the genital region. The entire vaginal area and much of the musculature of the thighs had been consumed by fire.
Pulling the reports of the first detectives on scene, Jamison concluded that apparently arson investigators had been called in by the detectives. They had moved around the crime scene but made a quick determination the fire had been intentionally set. Based on the pictures, Jamison knew that conclusion was no surprise.
There had been a smoke alarm in the kitchen, but the cover was slightly ajar. It was an old house and the smoke alarm was apparently battery driven instead of wired in. There was no battery. Jamison speculated to himself that the alarm had probably started to beep when the battery was getting low and to stop the beeping someone had pulled it out and never replaced it. Or, maybe the killer pulled it out before he set the fire, just to make sure the fire obliterated the evidence before anyone came in and discovered the body. The only problem with that plan was that he had used magazines placed under the body as fuel for the fire. Magazines were dense and they didn’t burn as easily as people thought. They had probably flashed with the accelerant and then died down to smolder with the rug. That was the only thing that saved the house and the body from going up in flames. That was probably what saved the little girl.
Jamison looked at the photographs of three-year-old Christine Farrow taken at the scene. She was holding a stuffed rabbit. Except where someone had cleaned her face, she was covered by a layer of black soot, and the stuffed rabbit was also covered with grime, although it was difficult to tell how much of the grime on the rabbit was from soot or from hours of being loved. It took no imagination for Jamison to realize that the child had sat in the kitchen tightly hugging her rabbit while the smoldering rug desecrated her mother’s body. He hoped that the child’s age somehow would spare her the horror of what it would be almost impossible for an adult to get out of their mind.
And now the man who had done this savagery was going to get to come out of his cell at San Quentin and be in the sunlight outside of prison walls once again. Jamison leaned back in his chair. He had seen a lot of brutal murders, but the viciousness of this caused him to draw in his breath.
Most people who commit murder will panic because they killed in anger. When they realize what they’ve done they don’t think clearly and they make clumsy efforts to conceal the crime or they simply run. Jamison could see that the person who killed Lisa Farrow was trying to conceal what he did by burning the evidence, only the evidence was a human being. It was clear to Jamison that Lisa Farrow had either been sexually assaulted or sexual assault had been attempted. Her killer had the presence of mind to try to destroy the evidence of what he had done. It wasn’t the brutality of the of act of murder that shocked Jamison anymore. But in this case, it was that someone could have so little feeling for what they had done. They had set a fire, leaving that little girl in the house. Whether they knew the child was there or cared was not something that had even teased at their conscience.
Jamison pulled out a booking photograph from the stack of pictures. Staring back at him was Richard “Rick” Harker from over twenty-six years ago. Jamison wondered what he looked like now. Soon enough he would know. Jamison looked at the face of a young man backdropped by height designations on the wall behind him. Most men under arrest and being processed had to be ordered to look at the camera as they absorbed the reality of their situation. Harker stared straight into the camera. Jamison immediately noticed Harker’s appearance. Why is it that so many of these people don’t look like killers, or at least what killers are supposed to look like?
Jamison knew from experience that jurors didn’t expect murderers to look like their neighbors, but so very often that was exactly what they looked like. More than one time Jamison had heard a juror say that the defendant looked like such a nice young man and they couldn’t believe what he had done. Harker’s face looked like that of someone you would sit next to on the bus and wouldn’t give a moment’s thought about. Rick Harker looked like anybody. And that was one of the things Jamison knew was most frightening about murderers: you wouldn’t know one if they walked by you on the street or sat next to you on the bus—unless they were the last person you would see at your final moment of life.
He examined the crime scene photographs for a moment longer, trying to commit the images to memory. He knew it wouldn’t be difficult. The sterile images captured by the crime scene photographer would etch themselves in his mind almost as much as if he had stood in the room when the photographs were taken.
Jamison shuffled the photographs back into a bundle and slid them into the manila envelope he had taken them from. He picked up the phone and punched in the three-number extension for Bill O’Hara, his investigator. The phone didn’t finish its first ring before O’Hara picked up, his voice rumbling like wet gravel in a cement mixer. “So, Boss, rumor has it you got stuck with the Harker case. You dusting off old files?”
Jamison caught himself stifling a snorted chuckle. The DA’s office was a constant rumor mill and the investigators were the worst, cruising through the secretarial pool and picking bits and pieces of information from their colleag
ues. O’Hara was a senior investigator and he was also Jamison’s primary investigator, along with Ernie Garcia. In some respects, Jamison was O’Hara’s boss, but O’Hara was one of those people who didn’t seem to have a boss. He worked his cases and he responded to questions, but if he thought for one minute that you were ordering him around you would soon know that O’Hara was his own boss and not you. Jamison accepted that, primarily because he had no choice. He also accepted that O’Hara called him “Boss,” essentially to indicate that he wasn’t. It was a test of wills. O’Hara never lost. At least not so far; and that included the day they first met when Gage sent him to O’Hara’s office and O’Hara had stared at him like a bug at the end of a pin. When he took over the Major Crimes Unit, O’Hara was his first choice, but nobody would call their relationship warm and fuzzy.
He responded after a second’s hesitation. “Yeah, and you’re stuck with it too. I’m still going through the files, but I want you to go over to the sheriff’s office and have them start gathering all the forensic evidence. I need to know what there is and where it is.”
O’Hara didn’t let out his usual caustic comment to remind Jamison that their relationship was equal in his mind. Instead he showed an immediate level of interest and curiosity. “I was a brand-new sheriff’s deputy when that case went down. Don’t tell me after all these years that it might have to be retried?
“Well, that’s what we’re going to have to find out. But right now, I need to know what we have.” Jamison was well aware that even in big cases, evidence got shoved into corners and sometimes misplaced. This wasn’t going to be simple. Basically, the way these cases were attacked by a writ of habeas corpus was to show that the trial lawyer made mistakes, and that if those mistakes had not been made, a different result might have occurred with the jury. Defense attorneys would go over the original defense lawyer’s conduct with a fine-tooth comb, looking for any stone that was unturned or not thrown at the prosecution, and then they would argue that the trial counsel had been negligent. They would frequently find pieces of evidence that had not been brought in for various reasons, and when they smelled blood they were like sharks chewing on another wounded shark.
Shades of Truth Page 4
