It was one thing for a defense attorney to argue that the case wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Lawyers argued that all the time. But all of them, Jamison included, knew that actual innocence was a different thing. Defendants began with a presumption of innocence and the prosecutor’s job was to overcome that presumption by showing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But reasonable doubt was not the same as factual innocence. The law’s presumption of innocence was not so naive that it did not understand that not guilty and actually factually innocent were two very distinct things. It was a distinction that non-lawyers had difficulty with—innocent because guilt hadn’t been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and actually innocent, as in he didn’t do it. The jails and prisons were full of guys who claimed they were not guilty because the DA or “The Man” or some other vague authority figure didn’t prove their guilt. Privately most of them would slyly acknowledge that they weren’t innocent. Even criminals maintained a degree of realism about themselves.
When lawyers, especially criminal lawyers, got together they would all in confidence admit that their biggest fear in defending a case wasn’t losing it. Their job was to make the prosecutor prove the charge and they accepted that most of the time they would lose. Some would even admit that they should lose. Defense lawyers weren’t any different than anybody else. They knew that some of their clients shouldn’t be out on the streets. And even they would secretly admit to a sigh of relief when a particularly bad defendant was convicted. They looked at it as a constitutional obligation to make the prosecutor meet the burden of proof and they justified the result by making the prosecutor work hard to do it. But their biggest fear was when they believed their client was actually innocent. Nobody wanted to feel responsibility for a man being convicted who was actually innocent.
A judge would be evaluating all of the defense arguments, but there was one argument that Jamison knew he would have to win or there was no question that he would lose in the end. He would have to show that there was no question that Richard Harker murdered Lisa Farrow. No judge was going to deny a new trial if he thought that there was a serious possibility that Harker was actually innocent. With what Jamison knew was coming if the case went to a full hearing, he was going to have to open doors that nobody had looked behind for a quarter century.
Chapter 6
Jamison put the phone down. Before he gave any job to O’Hara or his other investigator, Ernie Garcia, he needed to know more about the case so he could evaluate the issues in the writ of habeas corpus and understand what he needed O’Hara or Garcia to do. He had already taken the first step, sending O’Hara to ensure that all the evidence was located and cataloged. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if evidence had been lost.
He began to stack the file in sequence, deciding that he should approach the case like he would if he’d been the original prosecutor. Normally he would have been to the crime scene. Nothing gave you a sense of what happened like being there, but the photographs would have to do. Then he would read the detectives’ reports sequentially, building the case in his mind. After reading the initial response by the first officer on scene, the detectives would be called in. Their reports would give him more detail. Already he knew that they had called in the arson investigators. The responding detective in charge was Mike Jensen, now retired. Jamison had met him several times at various law enforcement functions that the old boys showed up at to relive past glory. Jensen had been gone from the sheriff’s department for a number of years, but Jamison had heard he still kept his hand in doing private investigation work.
According to Jensen’s report, when he arrived at the crime scene the child, Christine Farrow, was still there. She was completely covered with soot and squeezing a stuffed rabbit that was also visibly begrimed. Jensen called in a female officer to sit with her while efforts were made to locate relatives. The two neighbor women had wiped off the child’s face but had not done anything else to clean her up. As distasteful as it was, Jensen had forensic examiners photograph the child, and then the neighbors supplied clean clothing while the investigators bagged and tagged what she’d been wearing.
Jensen’s experience showed in his report. He observed that the child was visibly traumatized by what had happened even though she was too young to completely understand it. She kept asking for her mother. He allowed the neighbor women to stay with her as well as the female officer with specific instructions that nobody was to ask her any questions until he was present.
The neighbor, Nancy Slaven, repeated to Jensen that Christine had said several times, “Rick put fire on Mommy.” Slaven said that she was worried the child was in shock because she wouldn’t talk except to keep repeating the same thing over and over and then asking for her mother.
Jensen walked his report through the crime scene, carefully detailing his observations. Nobody moved the body while they waited for the coroner to come in and determine officially that the victim was dead and identify her if possible. While it was obvious that Lisa Farrow was dead, the law had requirements and the coroner being the one to make death official—a legally redundant verification of the obvious—was one of them.
It was evident that the victim had been beaten and the lack of clothing was a recognizable indication of sexual assault. Jensen’s description of the condition of the body and the graphic photographs that were spread on Jamison’s desk made it clear that the killer had intended to destroy as much physical evidence as possible.
The reality was that this case was over twenty-six years old and forensic investigation, including DNA preservation and analysis, had by now jumped light-years in terms of use. Jamison ruefully recognized that there would have been little effort to avoid contaminating the crime scene with DNA from investigating personnel because most of them would not have known that DNA was anything more than letters in the alphabet. And how evidence was preserved now was much different than how evidence was preserved then. Jamison made a note to himself to have forensics go over the physical evidence, including the clothing and anything else removed from the scene, on the possibility that something new might be recovered.
Jensen’s report indicated that a broken knife was found near the body. The photographs clearly depicted that the victim’s throat had been slashed. While the knife in the photograph was a kitchen knife, whether it was also the murder weapon was unclear to Jensen because it was lying in pooled blood. Jensen had the knife separately preserved after multiple photographs had been taken to establish the precise location of the knife in relation to the body.
Jamison had been to enough homicide scenes that he knew the chaos of shuffling feet around a crime scene. According to Deputy Kinster, the initial responding officer, he had avoided walking around the body because it was evident from visual inspection that the victim was dead. There were partial footprints in blood that Jensen had directed forensics to photograph. A ruler was laid out next to each shoe print and apparently Jensen had directed that the tiles on the linoleum floor be carefully pried up to preserve the blood-etched imprints. Jamison made another note to himself to see where those tiles were and their condition.
Holding the photograph of Christine Farrow in his hands, Jamison narrowed his focus, looking at her eyes. What he saw wasn’t the face of a child, at least not the face of children that people usually saw. He suddenly realized what it was that he hadn’t picked up on initially. It was the face of someone who didn’t have a child’s trust in her eyes.
He had seen this only a few times but he had seen it. A child who realizes that not all adults were protectors—some were predators. Christine Farrow had seen a predator and no adult would ever again have the benefit of the doubt from her—or her trust.
Jensen apparently had made it clear that he wanted to talk to Christine before anyone else took a statement because there were no other initial reports that Jamison could find. That was the right thing to do. Too many people questioning a small child in a case like this and you couldn’t depend on anything
she said. Jamison sympathized with the situation. At that point, the only witness was a three-year-old child who was traumatized. Jensen made the decision to talk to her at the neighbor’s home while they determined who the relatives were and contacted them.
According to Jensen’s report, he allowed the neighbors, Slaven and Castillo, to be present when he talked to Christine in order to keep her calm. Jamison kept looking at the crime scene photographs of a little girl with a soot-covered T-shirt, tightly holding a stuffed rabbit, her face smeared with the remnants of ash. The child’s huge blue eyes filled the photograph.
As he held the photograph in his hands, Jamison’s anger stirred. Dealing with numerous victims had taught him of the emotional wreckage left by crimes of violence. He knew that the public had no concept of the graphic reality of crime, the cascade of visual bludgeoning that crime scenes revealed and the slow desensitizing of crime scene investigators who walked where the average person could not imagine. But most of all, the years had taught him that victims of violent crime did not emotionally heal quickly, and sometimes not ever.
He had a sense of vague uneasiness that Christine Farrow was one of those victims of violence for whom the crime overwhelmed their life. It happened more than people realized, particularly in cases like the Harker case. For the victim, it was the endless judicial proceedings and the constant reminders of the crime as the case slithered like a lethargic snake through the maze of the criminal justice system, while the defendant fought the very personal—to him—consequences of his crime. Meanwhile the victim was forced to live with the consequences caused by the defendant. In the end, Jamison often wondered, Who suffered more?
Even Jamison had lost the edges of memory of individual homicides he had worked on. There were so many that the Saturday night shootings and the robberies gone wrong all merged together in jaded investigators’ minds into jumbled memory snapshots of violence. But there were a few that always managed to stay with him sharply etched. Jamison was sure that the image of little Christine Farrow would remain vivid in Detective Mike Jensen’s mind until the day he died. He made another note to have Jensen come in and help place all the reports in perspective.
Detectives weren’t always the most sensitive people. They had to be tough to do their job and sometimes the endless lying to them and the constant confrontation with the sludge of society made it difficult to allow themselves to see the sides of life that other people, normal people, lived in. It was one of the reasons that so many cop marriages broke up. There was a gulf that separated the lives of cops from the lives of everyone else, including their families. Some detectives and cops were successful in bridging that gulf, but many were not. Jamison imagined the difficulty for Jensen as he tried to do his job and at the same time remember that Christine was three and not thirty.
From the report narrative, when Jensen asked if Christine knew who had hurt her mommy, Christine said, “Rick did it.” Christine said that Rick started the fire “because him was mad at my mommy.” She told Jensen that Rick and her mother had a fight and then Rick “put fire on Mommy.” According to the report, Christine repeated that same thing several times and refused to say anything else except that she wanted her mother. Jensen’s report indicated that he decided to have the child taken to the hospital to make sure she was okay and not suffering from smoke inhalation.
Both neighbors said they weren’t sure who “Rick” was. They knew that Lisa had been involved at one time with somebody named Rick and they had seen a white man and an African-American man go to Lisa’s house the day before. Neither knew who the white man was, but they identified the black man as Clarence Foster, who had lived in the neighborhood off and on.
Immediately Jensen had contacted the sheriff’s department to determine if Foster had a record. It didn’t take long to establish that Foster was a longtime loser in the lottery of life. He had a lengthy record of petty crimes and had pissed off enough people with his criminal activity that he had done a short prison stretch. It was harder than people realized to get sent to prison, particularly for low-level criminal offenders, but if a small-time criminal worked at it, eventually some judge would get fed up and drop the hammer.
Before he had started looking for Foster, Jensen made sure that Christine was at the hospital. Her grandmother had been notified and was on her way. From the report, it appeared Jensen concluded that under the circumstances the best use of his time was to shake Clarence Foster and see what rattled.
Jamison decided, since there was no declaration from this Clarence Foster in the petition to the supreme court, that he would see what Foster had told the police. For the time being that was all that mattered. Whether Foster had allegedly decided in prison to recant his accusation of Harker wasn’t as important at the moment as what Foster told detectives at the time about the crime, particularly if he was the only other witness besides a traumatized three-year-old.
Clarence Foster’s file was lying neatly in Jamison’s organized stack. This was the guy who, according to Harker, now said that he had lied to the police about him. Jamison put the gloss of his cynicism on the credibility of Foster’s prison conversation—at least that’s what he apparently told Harker, according to Harker. Jamison flipped open the file. It was thick with reports and a transcript. Jamison thumbed the pages of the transcript—an interrogation. Well, it was at least a beginning.
While the Clarence Foster file was carefully sandwiched in Jamison’s sequential stack, nothing in the file itself was neatly organized. That didn’t surprise Jamison. Once the trial lawyer had gone through the reports, he would normally pull them apart and create his own organization depending on his focus. Looking at the reports, Jamison could almost smell the dust from years of the paper lying within the bulging manila folder. It reminded him of the musty smell of law books preserving cases fifty and a hundred years old, the paper slowly surrendering to time.
The pages were underlined in red pen with notes on the side. Jamison was surprised at the cramped scrawl in the margins, apparently by Gage or the lawyer who was second chair in the trial. He hadn’t given a lot of thought to that, the lawyer who was second chair. Almost every major trial had a younger lawyer who followed the lead lawyer around, carried the boxes of files, and marshalled the witnesses. The purpose was for the younger lawyer, commonly referred to as “second chair,” to learn how a big case was tried and, if he or she was lucky, to get to stick their head into the edges of the public spotlight. In the Harker case, the second chair was Jonathon Cleary. Now Justice Jonathon Cleary of the court of appeal.
Jamison sat back in his chair, thinking about what the Harker case had done for Gage and Cleary. It had made Gage the district attorney of Tenaya County and put him on the path to probably being the next attorney general for California. And maybe, after that, governor. As for Cleary, office legend had it that Cleary pulled a rabbit out of the hat in the Harker trial and after that became the golden boy in the office.
Cleary started drawing big trials on his own, with the blessing of the new district attorney, Bill Gage. After a number of years in the public spotlight, Jonathon Cleary had been appointed to the superior court and then to the court of appeal, where he had distinguished himself on both the state and national stages. Rumor had it that he was about to be nominated by the president of the United States to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeal, the pool where most justices of the United States Supreme Court were drawn. Jamison had watched with fascination when Cleary occasionally deigned to walk into meetings of the Tenaya County Bar Association as members of the bar and local judges hovered around him like moths around a flame.
Jamison allowed himself a smile as he looked at the constricted notes in the margin with lines drawn to encircled sentences. There were so many lines that Jamison thought whoever made the notes would have been better off just drawing a circle around the entire report. It was indicative of a compulsive personality. As he thought about it, Jamison decided the notes probably belonged to Cleary.
He had seen Bill Gage’s notes, and aside from being virtually unintelligible, he wasn’t a detail guy.
As he flipped through the pages Jamison decided he would have to make an appointment with Cleary in order to tap into his memory. Right now he needed to familiarize himself with the reports as much as possible, and that meant reading about Detective Jensen’s drilling down into the mind of Clarence Foster.
Jamison shuffled through the Foster reports and rearranged them by date. Jensen had put out an APB for Foster and it hadn’t taken long to pick him up. According to the time notation on the reports, with the help of the deputy assigned to the area, they soon found Foster drinking in a nearby park with a few other fellow losers.
Jensen’s report indicated that the sector deputy transported Foster to the detective division where Jensen was waiting. He didn’t read Foster his Miranda rights, deciding that he needed to first find out whether Foster was a witness before deciding that he might be a suspect.
Foster claimed he knew nothing about the murder of Lisa Farrow. He said he only had a general idea of who she was and expressed his sorrow that somebody had killed her. When Jensen told him that he had been seen going to Lisa Farrow’s house with a white man and that was why he was being questioned, Foster said whoever said that must have been mistaken. He had been nowhere near her house and claimed that “all black people look alike to white folks” so it was a mistake. Foster was adamant that it wasn’t him and at that point Jensen didn’t have anything else.
Jensen’s report from the next day changed all of that.
Shades of Truth Page 5
