by Edward Humes
“I’ll put together a proposal and I’ll call you Thursday or Friday to set up a time to go over it.”
“Great,” Sandy replied.
It would be the last time Kevin Knutson would see Sandy alive.10
After Knutson left, Pat cooked two thick steaks on the barbecue. Sandy fried some rice. She seemed quiet and even a bit depressed, perhaps by Knutson’s video and its discussion of Alzheimer’s, Pat would later say. She went to bed early in the evening, as usual, with Pat following an hour later. By ten that night, she was gone. She had left their bed hours before her habitual walking time and never returned. Something happened to her, Pat Dunn told the authorities. I’m sure of it.
The authorities thought so, too. And they had some very firm beliefs about where to start looking for answers.
6
THIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE ALEXANDRA PAOLA DUNN disappeared and Pat Dunn became a target for prosecution, a combination of events both spontaneous and conspired catapulted into power and prominence a little-known, baby-faced prosecutor with a hunger for authority and a belief that the nation’s justice system had drifted dangerously leftward in favor of criminals. As the new district attorney for Kern County, Edward R. Jagels would transform Bakersfield from an ordinary farm community and oil town into the toughest town on crime in America—in the process, sealing the fate of his ardent supporter Pat Dunn, along with many others like him.
The pivotal moment in this region’s modern war on crime came on April 12, 1979, a time when Sandy still lived with Pat Paola, and Pat Dunn still lived with his first wife and worked as an elementary school principal. It was the day they and the rest of Bakersfield came to know, all too briefly, a girl named Dana Butler.
It was not so much Dana Butler’s murder itself, or even the identity of the prime suspect, who turned out to be a man of power and prominence. It was not even the fact that this case, more than any other, marked the day that Bakersfield’s small-town complacency finally died and just about everyone seemed to realize that nothing—not distance, not time, not even the mighty Grapevine—could keep the twentieth century’s most fearsome scourge, random violence, from taking root. In the end, what really made this case so important to Kern County’s future came down to what the authorities did about it. Or, rather, didn’t do.
Dana Butler was a fourteen-year-old honors student who vanished on her way home from her church one afternoon. Three days after her mother reported her missing, her corpse appeared on a highway shoulder just outside the Bakersfield city limits. She’d been stabbed forty times, perhaps tortured. There were no witnesses. The murderer had bathed and dressed the body before dumping it by the side of the road. When the police arrived, Dana was still damp, cleansed—or so the killer thought—of trace evidence, the tiny hairs, fibers and fluids so crucial in such cases. Detectives learned in short order from Dana’s friends that she had been one of a number of high school students who had been the underage houseguests of a fifty-six-year-old retiree named Glenn Fitts. Fitts had been throwing parties at his home, where he’d ply teenagers with drugs and booze, then ask some for sex in return. Dana had been to his house shortly before her disappearance, her friends said, and had spoken of plans to party there the very day she died.
With this information in hand shortly after Dana’s body was found, Fitts became an obvious suspect in the murder. Yet the Kern County Sheriff’s Department was reluctant to pursue him, for an equally obvious reason: Until his retirement a year earlier due to a heart ailment, Glenn Fitts had been chairman of the law-enforcement program at Bakersfield Community College, director of the Kern County Police Academy, and a member of the Bakersfield Police Commission. He had personally instructed most of the cops and sheriff’s deputies in Kern County. Then, as a city police commissioner, he oversaw many of them.
Given his exalted status among many Kern County cops, the investigation of Fitts seemed halting at best. Weeks passed before detectives mustered the nerve to request a search warrant for their mentor’s home, something that would have been done long before in virtually any other murder case. Even with that delay, and the opportunity it offered for evidence to be destroyed, a powerful case against the former police commissioner emerged once the search finally was performed. Traces of blood matching Dana’s rare blood type were found in Fitts’ house on carpeting that had been steam cleaned just after the murder—but not cleaned quite thoroughly enough to eliminate all trace evidence. Fitts told police the blood was his, but testing proved that to be a lie. Further testing linked carpet fibers and human hairs found on Dana’s body to his house and car. Pubic hairs consistent with those of Fitts were found clinging to Dana’s head. This was the sort of cold, hard, clinical evidence detectives dream of finding when they must build a circumstantial case in the absence of eyewitnesses to the crime. In many respects, such evidence can be more convincing and reliable than eyewitnesses. Any hesitation detectives felt about going after the ex-commissioner faded in the face of the physical evidence against him.
However, when the sheriff’s investigators brought their case to the district attorney’s office, they were told no, there would be no prosecution. The DA himself, a veteran prosecutor named Al Leddy, and his top three deputies made the call, overruling a lower-level trial deputy who had said, sure, of course there’s enough evidence to prosecute Fitts.
To the sheriff and his detectives on the case—as well as to other prosecutors in the Kern County DA’s office—the decision looked extraordinarily timid at best and, at worst, smacked of a cover-up and of favoritism of the worst kind. It enraged cops and deputies throughout Bakersfield, creating an instant divide between normally natural allies, the cops in the street and the prosecutors in the courtrooms. Fitts, it seemed, was untouchable. He blithely put his house up for sale and made plans to leave town for good.
But the sheriff made sure that word leaked out about the evidence against Fitts—and about the DA’s unwillingness to prosecute the suspected killer of Dana Butler. The local press picked up the story, and the protests began. A grassroots organization called Mothers of Bakersfield began picketing the courthouse, Al Leddy’s home and Glenn Fitts’ house, demanding justice in the Butler case—an extraordinary sight in a conservative community where protesters generally were reviled. The group begged the California Attorney General to investigate, a request that was summarily denied. Unwilling to relent, the sheriff, despite Leddy’s and the state’s decision to do nothing, placed Fitts under round-the-clock surveillance. Meanwhile, Dana’s parents filed lawsuits against Fitts, putting his name into the public record. Then, after a long refusal to name him as a suspect despite his involvement in the case being an open secret among reporters, the local news media finally published Fitts’ name in connection with Dana’s murder.
Under this mounting pressure, the DA finally agreed to bring the case before the grand jury. Even then, senior prosecutors withheld key evidence from the panel and ultimately closed the investigation without asking for an indictment. But if this was intended to provide political cover, the tactic failed: District Attorney Leddy finally had to charge Fitts or face a near insurrection in his town. The charge he settled on was not murder, however—it was contributing to the delinquency of minors, for passing out drugs to kids. Even then, prosecutors and a compliant judge tried to shield Fitts by sealing files that normally were open to the public, but the howls of protest that resulted led to the unsealing of the records a day later. The police commissioner’s dalliances with children became instant fodder for public court files and television news shows. In the midst of the ensuing uproar, Fitts was found in his yard shot in the head, a death officially ruled a suicide, though a neighbor reported hearing two shots, and the gun found next to Fitts had been fired only once.
The case, abruptly ended with so many questions unanswered, had a profound and lasting effect on Kern County. District Attorney Al Leddy decided not to run for reelection, and his top prosecutors, who had harbored ambitions to succeed him, also bowed
out. Winning the DA’s election in Kern County without support from the cops irate over the Fitts case would have been tough. The police had in the past taken to the streets and banged on doors for candidates with great success. They literally got DAs elected—or defeated. Prosecutors involved with the Dana Butler-Glen Fitts fiasco would have faced long odds indeed if they had run. The race, then, was open to a new candidate, one who could garner support from law enforcement as well as the grassroots Mothers of Bakersfield organization that had risen to prominence in the wake of Dana Butler’s murder.
And so, an obscure but extremely aggressive young prosecutor named Ed Jagels, with an infusion of family money and the law enforcement support denied his predecessor, stepped into the vacuum left by the Butler case. At the time, he was known chiefly around the courthouse for a combative attitude toward judges, most of whom he openly despised, and for the extreme, almost vicious approach he took to trying cases—he attacked defendants, witnesses and defense attorneys with gleeful vigor, always seeking to take control of the courtroom and the case. He had a habit of accusing anyone who disagreed with his ultraconservative views of being in league with criminals and of “perverting” the law—particularly if the disagreement emanated from a trial judge or appeals court. The local bench suspected that Jagels was the source for some extremely unflattering articles about Kern County judges that appeared in a statewide legal publication, in which one supposedly cowardly judge’s courtroom was derogatorily labeled “Foster Farms,” the name of a popular purvey-or of chicken parts. (Jagels denied being the anonymous source but did not disavow the sentiments expressed.)11 Later in his career, after he became DA, Jagels’ public tirade over the California Supreme Court’s exclusion of a coerced confession in a murder case left his critics sputtering and even some of his supporters uneasy.
“If a couple of victims of these homicides wore black robes, appellate black robes, instead of being gas station attendants and ranchers and jewelry store clerks, we’d start getting a little bit different decisions,” District Attorney Jagels told reporters in one of his most notorious press conferences. “I guarantee that.”12
When Jagels announced his candidacy for district attorney, he surprised most everyone but the cadre of similarly minded young prosecutors he led, a new generation of prosecuting attorneys who were less interested in the cushy private practices sought by their predecessors, and more concerned with remaking the justice system in their own image. As DA, Jagels promised to crack down on child abusers like no one else before him. Never again would a criminal like Glenn Fitts be allowed to roam free. His would be the most aggressive DA’s office in the state, Jagels promised, an office that would push the envelope on the streets and in the courtrooms, doing whatever it took to put crooks away. He would draw the line against elevating “criminals” ’ rights over victims’ rights, he vowed. His campaign slogan: “Ask a cop.” His most ardent supporters: the Mothers of Bakersfield and their leader, a self-styled child-abuse expert named Jill Haddad, who later would play a pivotal role in the DA’s office and the then-nascent Witch Hunt cases.
Together, they wanted to transform the justice system of Kern County into the nation’s toughest, a virtual criminal-conviction machine.
All they had to do was win.
• • •
Ed Jagels stood perfectly still, watching the moment—his moment—play out in the crowded debate hall. For many of those present, it seemed the 1982 election was being decided right in front of them, just weeks before the vote. And the best part was, all Jagels had to do was sit back and enjoy it as his opponent, one of the hated judges, crashed and burned right next to him. It was almost like prosecuting some scumbag defendant and watching him self-destruct on the witness stand, the lies unraveling like cheap socks.
“I can’t really respond to that,” the judge sputtered to the implacable woman in the audience, the one with the tightly curled hair and the file of legal papers held overhead like a bludgeon. “I don’t really recall the case you’re referring to.”
But the woman kept waving those papers, legal files from an awful case of abusive parents and a murdered child, a bad ruling pulled out of the judge’s past, one that demanded an explanation not even Learned Hand could have conjured.
Jagels supporters in the audience thrilled at the unexpected confrontation. There was one of Kern County’s best-known and most powerful jurists, Judge Marvin Ferguson, the cigar-chomping courthouse insider, double chin quivering, vainly searching the faces in front of him for some clue as to what to say to this woman who would not sit down. Until this moment, Ferguson had been the easy favorite to win the district attorney’s race, the candidate with all the support from the legal community, the one with the political connections and the campaign war chest. He had dismissed the upstart Jagels with a wave of his stubby hand, refusing to call him by name, referring to him instead simply as “that young guy.” He mocked Jagels for his inexperience, saying the young guy had tried a mere eight cases before a jury in his brief career—and had been harshly criticized by an appeals court in one of them. Ferguson considered Jagels impertinent and dangerous, and he had vowed to crush him. And for a long time, it had looked like he would do just that. Now everything was about to change. The room seemed filled with crossed arms and stony stares, all of them directed at Judge Ferguson—and all because a community activist named Jill Haddad had a question.
Why was it, Haddad wanted to know, that five years ago, Judge Ferguson had sent a four-year-old girl named Mary Ann Azevedo home to abusive parents after county welfare workers asked the judge to put the child into protective custody? “I think that shows a pretty cavalier attitude,” Haddad suggested, “with overwhelming evidence of child abuse.”
The judge looked blankly at the small, intense woman with the thick sheaf of paper. He vaguely recognized her as someone the newspaper occasionally wrote about, identifying her most often with the ambiguous title of “child-abuse crusader.” He didn’t know what she was getting at now, but he sensed that whatever was in that folder wasn’t going to be pretty. “I resent the implication that I’m soft on child abuse,” he finally huffed. His inquisitor continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
When the case came to you, Haddad said, Mary Ann had been beaten by her stepfather. The girl was left with a broken collarbone, a burned hand and a possible concussion and skull fracture. Mary Ann’s mother did nothing, waiting all day to bring the girl to the hospital, then refusing to report the beating to police. The emergency room had to do that. “Yet you sent Mary Ann back home with her.”
Haddad paused as the audience listened raptly. Everyone knew what was coming, yet dreaded it, too. Ed Jagels still just stood there and nodded slightly, lean, silver-haired, a grim smile on his face—a cool and calm contrast to the flustered judge next to him. For Jagels, it didn’t get any better than this: First the old DA had been pushed out of the way after mishandling Dana Butler and Glenn Fitts, and now he had Ferguson on the ropes. Haddad reached the inevitable end of her story: As soon as the stepfather got out of jail a few months later, he and the mother moved with Mary Ann to Mississippi, where he promptly beat the girl to death. “Thanks to your order,” Haddad concluded.
Ferguson stood stammering at the front of the room. Somehow, Haddad had gotten hold of confidential child-welfare files that were never supposed to see the light of day. They came to her anonymously in the mail, she would later say. The files revealed one of the most unfortunate rulings of Ferguson’s career. He knew, as every judge knew, that one bad decision could erase a thousand good rulings so far as the public was concerned. Unable to recall any details of the case—the blur of plaintiffs and defendants make it impossible for any busy judge to remember cases by name—he finally offered a threadbare response: “Since it is against the law to divulge juvenile matters, it’s difficult to defend myself.”
The audience seemed almost as shocked by the judge’s reliance on rules of secrecy as it was by the awful story itself. Thanks to Dan
a Butler, violence against children had become a hot-button issue in Bakersfield even as a national movement was taking root as well to end what had been a tendency to treat child abuse as a mere “family problem.” Ferguson, thanks to Haddad, was being cast as part of the old guard, and Ed Jagels, recognizing a devastating blow when he saw one, knew how to finish it off—just as he would finish up a summation in the courtroom.
“We have some very good judges in Kern County, and I’m happy with them,” Jagels told the audience. Then he turned to look at Ferguson, voice heavy with trademark sarcasm. “We also have some very bad judges who worry too much about being reversed.”
There was only one thing to do about it, Jagels continued: They had to put the bad judges out of office, the ones who were more concerned with protecting criminals than the rights of crime victims. Jagels promised, as he had throughout his campaign, to make the task of removing bad judges part of his job description as DA. He’d start with the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, the wildly unpopular Rose Bird, and work his way down, he vowed.
The one hundred fifty members of the audience applauded loudly. Suddenly the race for DA was not about experience or standing in the community or courtroom smarts, the issues Ferguson wanted to argue. It was about vigor and youth and new ideas versus the old, corrupt system that got us where we are now. It was about Ed Jagels versus the baby-killing judge.
This contrast in images became an enduring theme for the rest of the campaign. Ferguson never recovered from Jill Haddad’s seemingly spontaneous surprise, and Jagels never looked back. The death of one child, Dana Butler, had made it possible for Jagels to run for district attorney. And the death of another, Mary Ann Azevedo, made it possible for Jagels to win.
