Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  Pat also worked on the side with the city and county fire departments, clearing overgrown lots that had become fire hazards. Altogether, this sort of slapdash work on houses and empty lots proved to be quite a lucrative business, and Pat began making more money than he had ever before known. The Bakersfield Californian even profiled him in an article that depicted him and his foreclosure work admiringly, even quoting his philosophical musings on why so many homeowners ran afoul of their mortgages: “Demon rum and failed marriages,” he said sagely.

  His observations, however facile, were bitterly applicable to his own life.

  Pat’s marriage to Nancy had deteriorated over the years as his drinking increased. His decline had started during his flap with the school board, a career change that he claimed to take in stride, never admitting even to himself that his abrupt departure from education left him disappointed and depressed. As his foreclosure business expanded, Pat let his crews do the field work while he conducted most of his business from home—making it easier to start drinking earlier and earlier in the day. His consumption became prodigious; he could gulp down a six-pack in one sitting with little effort. This reliance on booze only intensified when two of his three children began having problems of their own.

  His oldest, Patrick Jr., had always been an easy kid, a quiet and respectful young man who effortlessly earned A’s in school and gained admission to Stanford University. Jennifer and Danny, however, were quite the opposite, providing continual sources of heartbreak for the family. Jennifer not only became an unwed teenaged mother, but she lost her infant son, Jordan, to crib death. Despite his anger at Jennifer over the pregnancy, Pat had loved his little grandson dearly, and the baby’s death marked the only occasion Jennifer ever saw her father cry—until Sandy disappeared.

  Danny, the middle child, was another matter. As a teenager and young adult, he had constant scrapes with the law—drug problems, thievery—and he had a quick temper. Fed up, Pat finally ordered Danny out of the house, and they had a fistfight that night—the only time that Nancy and the two other children say they can remember him striking anyone, no matter how much he had to drink. Pat and Danny never spoke again after that night. “I have only one son now,” he would later tell Jennifer. Danny, it seemed, remained furious at his father, accusing him of all sorts of abusive behavior.

  By the mid-eighties, whenever Pat Dunn was at home, he had a can of Coors glued to his right hand, or a tall whiskey and soda in front of him. In the Dunn household, there was a standing, if unspoken, rule that no one got in the car with Dad after three o’clock in the afternoon. Pat, however, stubbornly refused to acknowledge any problem and would grow irate at the mere suggestion that he drank too much, vociferously arguing that he never missed work or failed to provide for his family—all true, if beside the point. Pat’s model of manly virtue was drawn strictly from the Hollywood idols of his youth—the silent stoicism of Wayne, Cooper, Bogart. A man who provides for his family, who makes a home, who puts meals on the table, who builds a better life for his kids than the one he enjoyed by definition shows he loves his family. You didn’t actually have to say it aloud—your daily life said it all, Pat believed. By those standards, Pat thought his drinking irrelevant, and he couldn’t see that, to his family, he checked out every time he emptied a bottle. He really did love his family, deeply, but he didn’t see the need—and, in any case, couldn’t find it in himself—to actually utter those three words, I love you, unaware of just how much they would have meant to his wife and children. Speaking of such things was far more difficult for Pat than taking a heavy sledgehammer to a ruined house—or, for that matter, showing kindness to an evicted stranger.

  Pat could be a warm and witty companion, and his family and friends knew him to be a well-meaning man, but he also seemed arrogant at times, particularly when he “had a few,” the family’s term for heavy drinking. Then he became something of a know-it-all, sitting back in his chair and dispensing lofty opinions and advice, usually preceded by the words, “When I was a principal . . .” The way he said it at times, he might as well have been a member of the Cabinet, and it became clear, then, just how much he missed his former career. In time, Pat’s drinking left him with few close friends and a world that extended beyond his armchair with increasing rarity. Always a big man, he grew overweight and sedentary, his beer belly hanging low over his waistline, the slightest exertion leaving him breathless.

  Predictably, Pat’s drinking gradually tore the family apart.4 As the kids neared and reached adulthood, Nancy professed a desire to go back to college, to take up hobbies, to widen her horizons. Pat, meanwhile, wanted to sit home and drink, maybe shoot the occasional game of pool. He never wanted to go out; the last movie he left the house for was The Guns of Navarone. Twenty-five years together and Nancy, who had always been the glue of the family, the one who planned the events and forged the friendships, increasingly felt like a stranger to her husband. It’s not that she stopped loving him—there was just something about Pat, she would insist, that shone through even in his darkest moments, something kind and good—but it was no longer enough. In a decision that was a long time coming, but which still seemed to take Pat by surprise, Nancy filed for divorce in 1985. She moved out of the house, taking with her Jennifer, the only one of the couple’s children still living at home.

  Without really thinking about it, Pat gave everything but his business to Nancy and wished her well. He harbored no ill will toward her, no bitterness, though he was bewildered and hurt and wished she would change her mind. Yet he couldn’t find the words to ask her to stay. He thought them, heard them in his head, but just couldn’t make them come out. He didn’t know how. He rented an apartment and lived alone.

  A year or so later, his foreclosure business still thriving (even as the California real estate market was crashing), the fire department called and told him about some acreage in East Bakersfield choked with weeds and trash. The landowner being cited for the violation was a difficult middle-aged widow who had been totally uncooperative, distrustful of all the contractors the fire department suggested, yet unwilling to do the work herself. “How about you give her a try?” Pat was asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “What’s the lady’s name?”

  “Paola,” the fire official told him. “Alexandra Paola.”

  3

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON, PAT WENT TO THE PAOLA Development Company office at the College Center mall in East Bakersfield. The sixties-era strip mall had begun to look a bit ragged by then, he noticed, with several vacant storefronts and an air more gritty than prosperous. Pat Paola’s big dreams hadn’t quite panned out: Decades earlier, he had snapped up property all over East Bakersfield, betting heavily that development in the city would move in his direction and make his land worth far more than what he paid for it. Instead, most of the upscale shopping and higher-end neighborhoods went the opposite way, to the northwest, and many of the Paola properties remained vacant after twenty years, his visions for that part of town unrealized and now in the hands of his widow.

  The College Center had aged poorly in the process. The proprietor’s office was dingy and dark, with battered metal desks and stained carpeting on the floor. The surroundings shocked Pat. An older man sat playing solitaire at a scarred table stacked high with old papers. He ignored Pat, flicking cards and frowning at his hand, not bothering to respond to Pat’s greeting. And then Alexandra Paola stood up from behind another desk. She looked radiant in a blue sundress with lace around the collar, her short hair silver now. Pat hadn’t seen her in twenty-five years, but he thought she looked more lovely than he remembered, the only note of brightness in that shabby little office. Whenever he told the story of their meeting that day, he would always remember thinking Sandy didn’t look like she belonged there. The place and the woman simply did not fit. The dismal office’s gray pallor could not touch her.

  Alexandra immediately remembered Pat from those long-ago rides home from the dress shop, and they spent nearly an
hour catching up, first in the office while the old man continued playing solitaire with a sour look on his face, then while driving out to see the acreage that the fire department wanted cleared. Pat Paola, Sandy explained quietly, had been sick since 1975, first with heart disease, then cancer, and finally senility. Sandy had taken care of him throughout, finally having to dress and feed the man who had once done everything for her. At the end of his life, he would either sit in his easy chair, recognizing no one, or he would be seized by sudden bursts of energy that saw him stripping his clothes off and running outside, cackling madly, then telling neighbors his wife had locked him outside with no clothes. To Pat’s surprise, Sandy described these incidents with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “You must miss him a lot,” Pat said, and Sandy nodded silently.

  When he finally died three years earlier, in 1983, Alexandra had tried to keep his businesses and real estate dealings going. But Paola had maintained a complex web of interlocking companies and transactions, and after so many years of being so sheltered by her husband, Sandy confessed, “I did a pretty poor job of it.” Her woes had escalated recently when she learned that a trusted bookkeeper—a woman who had worked for Paola Enterprises since 1961 and who had seemed like a member of the family—had been embezzling from them for years. Seventy thousand was gone at minimum, perhaps as much as a quarter million, Sandy whispered, shaking her head, nearly trembling at the thought. “Maybe more,” she said. “The police don’t know, the accountants don’t know. I don’t know.”

  The turmoil brought by this betrayal had been compounded by Sandy’s impulsive, almost desperate decision to remarry a year after Paola’s death. As Sandy told it, her new husband, Leon—the older man playing solitaire at the mall—had misrepresented his own wealth and holdings and had run up all sorts of debts against Sandy’s money. She called him a smooth-talking charmer who loved only the Paola fortune. In her loneliness, the woman who always feared that she would be thought of as a gold digger had ended up being preyed upon by one, she told Pat with a bitter smile. They had separated within a year, amid a nasty battle over property he had hauled off and tried to sell through the classifieds. Pat wondered to himself why Leon was still hanging out at the mall, but he bit his tongue, not wanting to pry, letting Sandy tell him what she wanted to tell him. Now, she continued, all sorts of other people were coming out of the woodwork to offer impossibly good investments and real estate deals, if only she would give them a piece of the Paola holdings. Her late husband’s real estate on the east side had finally jumped in value as Bakersfield relentlessly grew from a town into a major city and open space fetched an increasing premium. “I know just enough to say no,” Sandy said ruefully.

  Pat spoke little of himself during the drive, saying only that his own troubles seemed small indeed compared to Sandy’s. But he had an engaging, supportive way of listening, of not seeming to judge, and Sandy would later say he seemed at that moment one of the kindest and most understanding men she had ever met.

  They drove on to the weed-choked property cited by the fire inspector, and Pat said he would take care of it, then call her back. In a few days, he had removed the weeds and trash from the lot, as well as cleared the grounds of a neighboring apartment building that Sandy owned, too. He refused to charge her, and Sandy, who had remained extremely thrifty despite her wealth, seemed particularly delighted by this gesture. When Pat mentioned that he and Nancy were separated, Sandy invited him to her house on Crestmont Drive, where she had lived for a quarter century with Pat Paola—the same house Pat Dunn had helped measure years before. Pat remembered admiring the big ranch-style house, with its pool and cabana and rich tile work.

  Arriving for his visit in 1986, however, he barely recognized the place. Sun and heat had etched and faded the paint. There were cracks in the plaster. Green plastic garbage bags stuffed with old clothes sat on the porch and in the side yard, a rusty old bicycle propped against them.

  When Sandy opened the front door for Pat, a wave of heat washed over him. It was July and quite hot outside, but the interior of the house was well over ninety degrees. The house had air conditioning—a matter of survival in desert summer—but Sandy would not run it. Instead, she would turn on several floor fans in the living room and aim them at whatever chairs were occupied. Pat sat down gingerly, the hot stream of air from the fan washing over him like jet exhaust. He felt like he had climbed into a kiln.

  Like the porch, the interior of the house—living room, dining room, halls—was piled high with debris. Cardboard boxes of all sizes had been stacked one on top of the other like child’s blocks, with pathways through their rows—a shut-in’s maze. Nothing was dirty; the house was just impossibly cluttered, as if Sandy had not thrown anything away in twenty years. Pat later learned this was exactly the case: Sandy never tossed out a newspaper, a magazine or a worn-out article of clothing. Even the plastic bags from the produce section of the supermarket were kept. Sandy had an enormous roll of them in her kitchen cabinet, washed, dried and ready for reuse so she wouldn’t have to spend money on sandwich bags. She had kept in the house all of her late husband’s clothes and possessions, as well as some of her second husband’s things, and everything left behind by her mother, who had recently died after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease—an entire second household of furniture, clothes and bric-a-brac crammed into this one home. Pat imagined he had entered some dark and crowded curio shop, where one table might hold beautiful jade sculpture, clearly valuable, while another was piled high with yellowing copies of Ladies’ Home Journal or chipped jelly-jar glasses. Once again, it struck him that this handsome, gracious woman who welcomed him into a labyrinth of junk did not seem to fit her surroundings. He figured that when her first husband died, Sandy had started bleeding money to embezzlement and an unscrupulous new spouse, and ended up broke, forced to live like a bag lady. No wonder she wouldn’t clear the weeds from those lots, he told himself. He remembers thinking, Here’s someone who really needs me.

  He suggested they go out for lunch, and they decided to drive to a place up in the canyons outside Bakersfield called Balanced Rock, where Pat knew of a restaurant famous for its home-style coleslaw—their first date. It was July 4, 1986, a brilliant, sunny day so hot the sky seemed burned clean of color. Within the year, as soon as each of their divorces became final, Pat and Sandy married.

  Exactly six years after that first date, on July 4, 1992, the murder case against Pat Dunn began in earnest.

  4

  IN AUTUMN 1986, AFTER PAT AND SANDY HAD BEEN LIVING together in the old Paola house on Crestmont Drive for two or three months, she got up one morning and said, “Let’s take a ride. I need to see the lawyer.”

  Pat said sure, and, once in the downtown law office, he sat in the waiting area watching the secretaries while Sandy met with her attorney privately. It was a law firm that specialized in family law, real estate matters and other kinds of civil litigation, and Pat assumed that the meeting had to do with Sandy’s imminent divorce from her second husband. But when they left the office an hour later and settled into the car, Sandy tossed a thick brown envelope onto his lap and said, “Here, put this away somewhere.”

  He looked at her and raised an eyebrow, and she said, “It’s my will. I’m leaving you everything.”

  Pat thought she was joking at first, but, sure enough, inside the envelope was a simple four-page will prepared by Sandy’s lawyer just that morning. The will named Pat as Sandy’s sole heir and appointed him estate executor. It left nothing to the Paola family and omitted Sandy’s only sister, Nanette, with whom Sandy had been feuding for years since their mother died and left everything to Sandy. The new will also specifically bequeathed just one dollar to any potential heir who contested the will.

  Touched and surprised, Pat wasn’t sure what to say. Speaking aloud about such emotionally charged subjects still made him uncomfortable. He chuckled to cover the mixture of warmth and embarrassment he felt, then breezily asked, “So, what are you w
orth?”

  He figured Sandy had little left at that point, just whatever the house might bring in, perhaps a bit more. He had seen the way she was living before they began dating, and he had taken it upon himself to clean out the pack-rat clutter, the rooms crammed with boxes and the trash bags on the porch. He had heard her talk of Leon misrepresenting his own wealth, then trying to dive with open arms into the Paola fortune. So he almost veered the car off the road when Sandy nonchalantly answered, “About three million, give or take a couple hundred thousand.”

  Pat shook his head in wonder. Apparently, Sandy had been a lot smarter with her money than she let on—something Pat would come to understand firsthand as he watched her over the years deal confidently, sometimes ruthlessly, with various accountants, brokers and businessmen.

  When they got home from the law office, Pat stuck the will in a desk drawer, where it remained for six years. It was September 16, 1986, the day, prosecutors would later claim, Sandy became worth more to Pat Dunn dead than alive.

  • • •

  Though that last will and testament would one day become a dagger-like piece of evidence against Pat—part of his motive to murder, police and prosecutors would say—there had been no pressure on Sandy to write it that day.5 Pat hadn’t asked for it, and Sandy offered him no explanation as to why she suddenly found it necessary to craft a new will leaving him everything before they had even married. Pat shrugged it off. Perhaps she just wanted to make sure her second husband got nothing should she die before their divorce became final. It did seem that the will and the divorce were linked in Sandy’s mind; she signed papers the very next day at the same law office to put formal marriage dissolution proceedings into motion against Leon.