Final Vows

by Karen Kingsbury

  Gene wrote the address down on a piece of paper. “I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

  The next day, Gene, Chuck, and attorney Lorn Aiken arrived at the county jail in San Bernardino at 9 A.M. In light of Suzan’s request to meet, Chuck and Lorn had immediately regained interest in the case. Suzan Brown had already been ushered into a conference room where the men joined her.

  “See, I know Dan didn’t do it,” Suzan began, staring vacantly in front of her and speaking in a monotone. “I’ve got a conscience, and I’m tired of living with it.”

  Gene had been appointed to carry on the conversation with Suzan since he was the one she felt comfortable with. “Tell us about it, Suzan,” he said.

  “It wasn’t planned out or nothing. Just a last-minute kind of deal. Me and the guys was sitting around the house, you know?”

  Gene nodded. “We’re listening.”

  “Well, we’d been doing a little speed, you know. Speed balls, that kind of thing. And, well, we ran out of drugs. No one had any money for more, you know.”

  Suzan took a deep breath and began coughing. The men waited patiently in silence.

  “Well, what happened was I thought Carol and Dan had left for their vacation the day before. So we decided to raid their house and get a TV or something. Something we could sell and get some drugs with.”

  Gene realized that if this story were true, Suzan’s entire testimony had been a lie. He said nothing, though, and Suzan continued. “Well, you know, we didn’t want no attention or nothing like that. So me and one of the guys stayed out fronta my house arguing, like, you know. Trying to make a distraction for them. ’Bout the same time, the other two was sneaking into Carol and Dan’s house.”

  Gene remembered that one of the neighbors had testified about hearing loud arguing just before the shots were fired. “You weren’t in their house?” Gene didn’t believe her.

  “Nah. Never went inside,” she snapped. “Anyways, next thing I know I sees Carol and Dan walk around the corner towards home. That’s when I figured out that they was only on a walk and hadn’t gone to Hawaii yet. Well, you know, me and the other guy who was arguing, we went back inside my house.”

  Suzan coughed again. “We went into my den and that’s when we heard the gunshots. Two gunshots. And I turned to the guy with me and said, ‘We’re in damned trouble now.’ That was about the time we heard this strange, muffled sound. Found out later it was the third gunshot.”

  Gene leaned forward. “Then what?”

  “Well, you know, we were just waiting there to see what would happen and one of the other two guys came back to the house. He said, ‘Damn. I got blood on my hands.’ Then I think he went out back into the garage to wash his hands.”

  “Did you ask him what happened?”

  Suzan nodded slowly. “Yeah, sure did. He told me Carol surprised him in the hallway and he shot her. You know, he told me it was an accident.”

  A strange laugh escaped from deep inside her throat. “Course, it wasn’t no accident. You know, I sold him the gun just a few months before. A thirty-eight caliber.”

  “We need his name, Suzan,” Gene said quietly.

  “Okay. Ron Hardy. He never seemed to get in too much trouble before. Saw a different side of him that night, though.” Next, Suzan told them about a second man who had been in the house and shot Dan with a .25.

  For a few moments there was only silence as Chuck, Gene, and Lorn Aiken tried to digest this new version of what had happened to Carol Montecalvo. Gene broke the silence. “Why didn’t you say anything before this?”

  Suzan had prepared an answer for that question. “’Fraid he’d kill me, too.” She shrugged. “That’s what Ron told me. Said if any of us talked to the police he’d take care of us.”

  “What about the other gun? The one Dan was shot with.”

  “Belonged to a friend of mine. Had it at the house.”

  “What happened to the guns?”

  “Sold ’em. Right away. Sold ’em to Cathy, frienda mine.”

  Gene scribbled the name on a pad of paper. “The biggest question is, why tell us the truth now?” Gene knew there was no reason for her to come forward since Dan had already been convicted and sentenced. If Suzan’s story was true, the men involved could have gotten away with murder.

  Suzan sighed and stared blankly into space. After a few moments she hung her head and lit a cigarette. “I’ve been running for two years now. Left my house, stayed in the hospital. Moved from one apartment to the next, every few months. Even tried to kill myself. All that running gets a little tiring after a while.” She waved an arm at Gene and Chuck. “And you guys wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “That’s why you’re talking?” Gene sounded doubtful.

  “See, I know Dan didn’t do it. And well, you know, the fact that an innocent man was convicted of something he didn’t do is totally outrageous to me. My conscience couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Gene waited. “Is that your story, then?”

  Suzan raised her head up and took another drag from her cigarette. “I’m telling you guys what happened. I don’t think too many people in their right mind would sit here and tell you guys that they were involved in a murder.” Suzan paused and Chuck raised an eyebrow in Gene’s direction. The partners were well aware that the woman they thought capable of murder was indeed mentally disturbed. It was a factor that would seriously hurt the credibility of her confession.

  Suzan continued. “No reason to tell you now. Not after someone else has already taken the fall for it. We coulda gotten off scot-free.”

  Gene kept silent and after a few moments she continued. “Maybe I ought to get my head examined. But I guess it’s better to tell you what happened and get this thing behind me.”

  For another two hours, Suzan rehashed this version of what she believed had happened to Carol Montecalvo. The story was both riveting and believable, even if it was being told by a mentally ill drug addict. There were parts where the detectives felt Suzan wasn’t being completely honest. For instance, Gene’s uncanny hunches told him that Suzan was probably inside the Montecalvo house that night. But for the most part her story was the solution to their investigation.

  They returned to the office just after one o’clock that afternoon and immediately Lorn Aiken put in telephone calls to the district attorney’s office and the Burbank Police. The message was the same at both places. “We have information that will prove Dan Montecalvo did not kill his wife.”

  For the next several days, Chuck, Gene, and Lorn waited for Ben Bernard and Brian Arnspiger to contact them. They were concerned not only that Suzan might forget her story or change it, but also that she was about to be released from jail. She would then be free to go where she wished. They needed to tell the story to the authorities before that happened.

  On the afternoon of Suzan’s release from county jail, they still hadn’t heard from Bernard or Arnspiger. Lorn Aiken convinced Chuck and Gene that it was time to demand the authorities’ attention. He knew of one surefire way: to go public with the story.

  Lorn picked up the telephone and dialed the Los Angeles Times. In five minutes he had set up an interview for that evening. At 5 P.M. Lorn and the private investigators would meet the Times reporter and photographer in Lorn Aiken’s Los Angeles office.

  The next morning, the story and a large photograph of Suzan Brown made the front page of the paper’s Metro section along with this headline: “Tardy Confession: Woman Says Convicted Man Didn’t Kill His Wife.”

  Chapter 45

  Prosecutor Ben Bernard had spoken with Lorn Aiken and knew what to expect when he opened the newspaper and saw Suzan Brown’s story. What he didn’t expect was the reaction the story would have on the public, and, in particular, on one of the jurors in the Montecalvo case.

  Juror Martha Faylor, a retired Pasadena woman whose guilty verdict had been among those that convicted Dan, read the article in the Los Angeles Times with
great interest. Since the trial, Martha had decided that perhaps she had made a mistake. She kept thinking back to the final day of deliberation and how several jurors had berated her for taking too long to decide Dan’s guilt. One of them had even told her that if they didn’t reach an agreement the judge would keep them locked up until after Christmas. Martha didn’t actually believe that, but she was confused by the threat and felt pressured to agree with the others.

  When Martha finally decided to cast a guilty vote against the defendant, her decision had little to do with the evidence presented. Instead, it was because of Maree Flores. When Maree had testified that she and Dan were in love, the thought occurred to Martha that if Dan wasn’t put away, sweet Maree might be his next victim. Martha couldn’t let that happen. So on the chance that Dan was responsible for Carol’s murder, she agreed to hand down a guilty verdict. Anything to save Maree from such a terrible fate.

  Not until after she was back home and following her regular routine did Martha realize that her decision was not very sound. After all, the defense had raised a good point. What had happened to the three footprints lifted from the Montecalvo kitchen floor? She had seen the document showing that they had been admitted as evidence after the murder. Yet none of the police or sheriff’s personnel remembered having seen them or having collected them. Still, not until she read the article in the Times about Suzan Brown’s confession was she absolutely certain of her mistake. Before wasting another moment, Martha sat down at her kitchen table, pulled out a piece of stationery, and began to write.

  I, Martha Faylor, served as a juror in the Montecalvo trial during October and November, 1990, in the Superior Court in Pasadena, California. After thoughtfully considering the evidence presented in the court proceedings and after lengthy discussion with other members of the jury, it was—and continues to be—my opinion that the prosecution failed to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mr. Montecalvo is guilty as charged of the murder of his wife. I argued for acquittal for several days but failed to convince the other jurors of my opinion.

  In, the course of deliberations, the jury foreman and the other jurors became abusive and insisted that the judge would not tolerate a hung jury and would keep us there until Christmas if I refused to go along with the majority. Having had no previous experience with jury duty, I believed them and agreed, under duress, to vote with the other jury members. My position for acquittal was, and is, based on my belief that Mr. Montecalvo was treated unfairly by the court to the extent that I believe his constitutional rights were violated. The evidence presented was circumstantial and incomplete. Further I had the feeling that much important information was withheld and critical evidence seemed to have mysteriously disappeared. Sincerely, Martha Faylor.

  Martha did not mention the fact that she had seen the newspaper article regarding Suzan Brown’s confession. After all, she knew that her change of heart had arisen from her own doubts. The article had simply encouraged her to take action. She addressed the letter to Prosecutor Ben Bernard and once she had dropped the letter in the mail, Martha felt much better. She did not know what might be accomplished by writing such a letter, but she did not know how else to tell the authorities how she really felt about the case.

  If Ben Bernard thought the Montecalvo case had taken a strange twist in light of Suzan Brown’s confession, he was completely baffled after receiving Martha Faylor’s letter. There was nothing he could do. Later in the week, when Martha contacted him, he told her as much.

  “You were advised of the rules ahead of time and you made that decision,” Ben Bernard explained to the angry and frustrated woman. “The system does not allow jurors to change their minds.”

  Not long after that discussion, Ben telephoned Brian Arnspiger. The two had shared several conversations since learning about Suzan Brown’s story. In general, they agreed that Dan was still as guilty as he had been the night of Carol’s murder. They also agreed that Suzan had confessed in order to gain publicity. In private moments, they both suspected the woman was not dealing with a full deck.

  In addition, Ben Bernard and Brian Arnspiger believed that despite the local and national attention the story was getting since its latest development, the publicity would eventually die down and Dan would remain in prison. If one of the men might possibly have felt stronger about Dan’s guilt, it was Brian Arnspiger. He would have bet his house that Dan had killed his wife. He had not spent more than a year investigating that murder only to have some lunatic off the street walk in and confess to details provided by the press.

  While Bernard agreed with this assessment, there were still nights when he would lie awake wondering whether—by some monumental, terrible quirk of fate—Dan might actually have been innocent. But whenever those feelings would overcome him, he would mull over the basic evidence against Dan and in moments he would be sleeping like a baby.

  In the following days and weeks Suzan Brown’s confession did not easily disappear from public attention. Reporters found irresistible the story of a potentially innocent man sitting in prison while a crazy killer walked the streets. It ran in all the local newspapers and was picked up by the Associated Press wire service. A nationally televised news show did an entire segment on the story.

  By then, of course, Ben Bernard had long since known what he must do to quiet the public uproar—and to pacify Martha Faylor. He called a meeting with two of the top investigators from the district attorney’s office and explained the situation to them. Although the case had already been tried, a conviction decided upon, and a sentence handed down, he told them to spend as much time as necessary determining if there was any truth to Suzan Brown’s confession.

  “If Dan Montecalvo didn’t do it, I will be the first one to ask that he go free,” Bernard told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times as the investigation began. “But we have to have competent evidence that someone else did it. And (Suzan Brown) is an admitted perjurer.”

  When the reporter asked whether the investigators might be reluctant to pursue evidence that, if found, would place the district attorney’s office in a bad light, Bernard flatly denied it. Of course, Dan would later complain that the district attorney’s office could not possibly be unbiased during such an investigation. Dan’s claim that he was being framed and treated unfairly went unheeded by Ben Bernard, if not by the press. By law, when a confession by another party is made after a conviction, the resulting investigation is always staged by the district attorney’s office—the very office that would be most harmed if there was any truth to Suzan Brown’s story.

  Chapter 46

  Gene Brisco and Chuck Lefler kept busy in the weeks following Suzan Brown’s confession doing the same undercover work that the district attorney’s office was being paid to do. Like Dan they thought it unfair to have the district attorney’s detectives investigating Suzan’s confession. Therefore while the officials were checking Suzan’s statements, Gene and Chuck spent several afternoons interviewing her. Gradually, she revealed many aspects of the case that she could not have known unless she had been inside the house. She knew what color the Montecalvo cash box was, she knew that eight hundred dollars had been taken from a white envelope, and she knew that several dollars in change had also been stolen. In addition, she knew the exact position of Carol’s body after she was shot and the clothing she’d worn.

  Next, the detectives checked with the newspaper morgues and reread every article written about the case. One month later, Gene and Chuck were satisfied that none of those details had ever been mentioned in the press. Finally, the men were convinced of two things. First, that Suzan Brown had not been telling the entire truth; and second, that she had definitely been involved in Carol’s murder. They came to this conclusion after checking out the names of three men Suzan said were involved. Two of them, Gene and Chuck discovered, did not appear to have been anywhere near South Myers Street the night of Carol’s murder. The third man—Ron Hardy—had no police record, but he had a reputa
tion among his friends for being volatile.

  According to their information, Ron Hardy had never been caught for what his friends said was a rash of home burglaries. Days after Carol’s murder, Ron rented a one-room flat in Los Angeles. He promptly boarded the windows with plywood and began leading a very secluded life. Gene and Chuck wondered if the district attorney’s office had found that information.

  Then they did further research on Suzan Brown, who had by then admitted that the story of hearing people in her backyard was something she’d made up. They contacted her former roommates and asked if they thought she was capable of killing someone. Each thought she was.

  “She’s crazy,” one woman told Gene. “She would do anything to save her own butt. If that meant killing someone, then so what. At least that’s the Suzan I knew.”

  They also agreed that Suzan typically lied about nearly everything. She sometimes believed the lies herself. They thought that if Suzan had placed herself outside the murder scene, it was very likely a lie.

  By the first week of 1991 Gene and Chuck had discovered what they thought to be several problems with Suzan’s confession. They involved the number of people who had taken part in the crime and her location during the time of the murder. Gene and Chuck believed that only two people—including Suzan—had been involved and that Suzan herself had quite possibly shot Carol. That would explain Carol’s last words, “What are you doing here?”

  Another reason they thought that Suzan might have killed Carol was the way she was shot—once in the back of the neck and once on the right jawbone inches away from her spine. Medical examiners had been unable to determine which shot had been fired first. Gene and Chuck could picture Carol going into the house and walking down the hallway past the office before realizing someone was in her house. She would have looked over her shoulder and seen Suzan.

  At that point, she would have said, “What are you doing here?” Carol did not know Suzan’s friends, so it was reasonable to assume that she had said those words to Suzan. Suzan then would have pointed a gun at Carol just as Carol tried to turn away and escape into the kitchen. If that had been the scenario, the first bullet would have entered the jawbone and the second the back of the neck, and Carol would have died at the end of the hallway. Exactly where her body was found.