Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  This prescription has taken hold across the United States: Jagels’ time as district attorney has paralleled a quantum expansion in the powers of prosecutors throughout the nation, as Three Strikes laws and other limitations on judicial discretion have spread. As an eloquent spokesman for his cause and a power to be reckoned with throughout California, Jagels’ influence has ranged far beyond his fiefdom in Kern County.

  The take-no-prisoners, judge-bashing posture Jagels adopted to achieve his goals turned off the veterans in his office, but it made him a natural leader to most of the younger assistant DAs, who also had come to the conclusion that judges were as much the enemy as criminals. Here was a guy who publicly announced that he wanted to recall most of the California Supreme Court, who thought illegally obtained evidence ought to be permissible in trials, and who considered it a badge of honor to be reversed by an appellate judge. He proclaimed the requirement that police should have to take thirty seconds to advise a suspect of his constitutional rights—the famous Miranda warnings created by Bakersfield native Earl Warren—an outrage that should be ignored whenever possible. No wonder the deputies and patrol officers were knocking on doors for Ed Jagels by the dozen. He was their dream DA.

  Once he took office, Jagels quickly reorganized his staff, removing the senior prosecutors who had opposed his candidacy from high-profile and supervisory jobs they once held. In their place, he installed the young, aggressive, like-minded prosecutors who had put their careers on the line to support him. And, almost immediately, the office Jagels had built in his own image began performing just as he promised it would: The Kern County District Attorney’s Office began accumulating the toughest record in California, sending more people to prison per capita than any other county, filing a higher percentage of cases brought to them by police than any other county, and garnering longer sentences than any other county. Jagels boasted that he had the most aggressive, law enforcement-oriented DA’s office in the state, and few argued otherwise. Because California was often ranked at or near the top nationally in terms of punishing criminals, Jagels legitimately could lay claim to being one of the toughest prosecutors in the United States.

  The tough new approach had its price, however. The office, led by a man once upbraided by the court of appeals for a “legion” of misconduct, began taking increasing, sometimes withering, criticism for the conduct of several of its prosecutors as they put together their unparalleled record. By Jagels’ second term in office, complaints of prosecutorial misconduct in Kern County had tripled compared to when his predecessor was in office.19 Many local lawyers concluded that Jagels’ no-holds-barred brand of prosecuting encouraged—perhaps even rewarded—such transgressions.

  “They have apparently got a DA down there who’s playing this thing close to the line every time,” one disgusted appellate justice complained in the midst of a hearing in 1989, in which Jagels’ office was accused of hiding key information about a jailhouse informant’s credibility. “That fellow down there that’s the DA is just outlandish . . . And his deputies all have the same philosophy. Whether they violate certain rules or principles or not, they depend on harmless error and so forth to get them out of it.”20

  The appeals justices expressed concern that a victory-at-any-cost culture had taken root in the district attorney’s office under Ed Jagels, a Wild West approach that sometimes put winning the case above following the rules. But such criticism had no effect on how Jagels ran his office or on his enormous popularity with his Kern County constituency, whose concern was crime and punishment, not the technical niceties of courtroom behavior. They wanted Jagels to put the bad guys away, and all they knew was that he was good at it. Many concluded he had come just in time, as his arrival in office seemed to coincide with an explosion of huge and sensational cases—big drug cases, big child-molestation cases, big murder cases. And always, there was Ed Jagels, on the TV screen, smooth and steely, righteous and sure of himself, promising to put an end to it all whenever a new crisis loomed, the solution always being the same: tougher laws, tougher judges, more power to police and prosecutors.

  His message resonated. Even as schools and parks and clinics suffered, Kern County bolstered the budgets of the sheriff, police and prosecutors. It built a new, bigger jail far out in the desert, doing everything it could to crack down on crime, hard and sure, stretching every nickel to keep the darkness at bay. None of this was unique, of course. In an age of rising crime and anxiety, many communities have made similar efforts. But unlike other communities that made like sacrifices only to see the plague come knocking anyway—the teenagers who killed, the crack houses spreading like cancer, the random violence that could strike anyone, anytime—in Kern County, the sacrifices seemed to pay off. If there was to be a war on crime, Kern County intended to play to win.

  By the time a silver-haired woman named Sandy Dunn disappeared in 1992, local law enforcement had assembled an impressive record of solving crimes. The district attorney had put together an all-star staff that rarely lost a big trial. The county became known nationally for its massive, ground-breaking and largely successful investigations of child sex crimes, helping abate a terror that had gripped the community for years. No matter how horrible the crime or how intricate the mystery, a solution almost always seemed at hand in Bakersfield. So it would be with Pat Dunn.

  7

  BY INDEPENDENCE DAY, SANDY HAD BEEN GONE FOR three days. For three days, Pat had searched along the looping route Sandy liked to walk every morning long before dawn. He found no sign of her. No one else saw her, either—no one who spoke up, anyway.

  Pat would later say he felt paralyzed by his fears. He was afraid to tell people Sandy was missing, knowing if she came back, she’d be angry with him for saying anything that made her look silly or sick. Yet he was afraid of keeping silent, fearing that the only way to save Sandy might be to spread the word she had vanished. The problem was, with Sandy gone, he felt aimless, ineffectual, a broken clock stuck in place, motor grinding. He didn’t know how to fill his mornings anymore—none of the rituals were possible. There was no one to listen to his bad jokes or to ride fence with or to make sure the toothpaste didn’t run out. Mom had always taken care of him. Now he had to fend for himself. Pat swore to himself he’d never take Sandy for granted again if she could only come back to him. Her absence tore at him as he berated himself for not doing more, for not foreseeing this crisis, for not being there when Sandy needed him most. Alone in the big, empty house, he’d pace through the rooms, whispering over and over, “Where are you now? Where are you now?”

  When he wasn’t out searching, Pat filled the time by drinking, more than ever. He started downing beers and whiskey together, beginning early in the morning, then leaving to drive Sandy’s walking route. If she was mentally confused but otherwise okay, he would later explain, he figured she might return to familiar places and patterns. This had happened before, Pat would tell the police: She once got lost while driving in a familiar neighborhood and had to call Pat from a phone booth to ask him to come get her.21

  Pat kept telling himself he was charting a sensible course: He continued to search; he had called the authorities, who presumably were searching as well; and he otherwise kept up appearances, telling almost no one else what was going on, hoping for Sandy to return to him. He talked to a store owner at College Center, he rescheduled an appointment with the housecleaner, he spoke with several other friends and acquaintances, going on with his daily routines and conducting business as usual, all without mentioning Sandy’s disappearance and, in some cases, sounding normal, untroubled, even upbeat to some people he encountered. “Everything’s great,” he told the housekeeper over the phone on July 1. “I had two meetings today, and both went well.”

  In those early days of Sandy’s disappearance, Pat revealed the crisis to only a handful of people. He told his son Patrick Jr. and his daughter, Jennifer. He reported Sandy missing to the sheriff’s department. And he spoke to his real estate attorneys, Teri
Bjorn and Jim Weins, trying to arrange the payment of some large bills—several hundred thousand dollars’ worth—that were coming due on the Morning Star housing project. This was a ticklish matter because the money was still mostly in Sandy’s name. Kevin Knutson hadn’t set up the trusts yet—if he had, Pat could have gotten the money himself. To pay the Morning Star debt, Sandy had started cashing in some of her municipal bonds and transferring the two hundred thousand in proceeds to a joint account, but the process had not been completed before Sandy vanished. She still had to sign for the transfer. Pat faced a quandary: He couldn’t touch that money on his own, but paying the bills was vital to keeping their project alive. “If we don’t get these bills paid,” Pat told his lawyers, “Mom’ll kick our butts when she gets home.” The lawyers assured him that some sort of arrangement could be worked out, since Sandy’s intentions were clear. And, after all, they asked, she leaves everything to you in her will, doesn’t she?

  “Yes,” Pat had answered. “She does.”22

  Finally, Pat told one other person about Sandy’s disappearance: Kate Rosenlieb, the city planning commissioner, his former student and current friend, perhaps his closest friend. Sandy might have stopped talking to Kate after the disastrous vote on the Dunns’ movie-theater project, but Pat had continued seeing her on the sly. He tried to be careful about these visits, straining to keep Kate and Sandy apart without seeming to be doing so, arranging for drives and lunches away from the house. “Shuttle diplomacy,” he had called it. Now he needed to talk to his young friend. He wanted to confide.

  “I can’t find Mom,” Pat told Kate. It was July 3, and Pat was exhausted, his fingers numb as he grasped the telephone. “I’ve been looking all over for her and I can’t find her anywhere. I’m afraid something terrible has happened. I fear the worst.”

  He would later remember trying to stay calm, trying to keep his fears in check so they could have a rational conversation, willing his voice to remain a strong monotone even though he was beside himself with fear. Kate would remember him sounding as if he didn’t care. “I just fear the worst,” he repeated.

  As Kate listened quietly, he told her the whole story, how he had reported Sandy missing to the sheriff’s department, how he had searched for her every day during her normal walking hours, how he thought she had suffered some sort of memory lapse. And he explained something he hadn’t really told anyone else before—what made him think that Sandy might have taken the large sum of money he had mentioned in his missing-persons report. In her typical hoarder’s fashion, Sandy kept thousands in cash stashed around the house, usually in rolls of ten one-hundred-dollar bills bound with a rubber band and hidden in the pockets of clothes in her closets. In looking around for a clue to Sandy’s whereabouts, Pat said, he had found six rubber bands in a pocket where there should have been cash. Though he couldn’t be sure—the rubber bands could have been there for weeks or months—he reasoned she could have taken six thousand dollars with her.

  “But why?” Pat asked in a tired, toneless voice. “I just don’t know what’s going on.”

  Kate Rosenlieb didn’t know what to say. Something about the story Pat told her, and the way he told it, did not sit well with her. She asked some pointed questions, though Pat didn’t seem to notice their implication as he answered dutifully. Kate asked about Sandy’s jewelry and wallet, and Pat said she had left behind her purse, her identification, her jewelry—everything, even her house keys and her dogs. Kate decided that didn’t sound right. The Sandy she knew would never leave without her wallet and her keys. On the verge of panic as she listened to Pat, Kate, too, began to fear the worst—but those fears were of Pat, not for Sandy. Maybe it was her memory of that night three years earlier when the police arrested Pat for spousal abuse, and Sandy had stood there in the living room looking dazed, blood on her ear. Or maybe it was the dead-calm voice she heard from Pat’s end of the phone. Or maybe it was the fact that he had been trying to convince Kate for the last six months that Sandy was developing Alzheimer’s disease, forgetting things, losing it. “Bullshit,” she had said then. Sandy could be childish and eccentric, she believed, but not senile. Was it all a cover story? Kate wondered now. Had he been setting up an alibi for months?

  Despite these inner doubts, Kate kept her voice as calm and even as Pat’s, feeling almost as if someone else were talking when she asked, “What was Sandy wearing when she disappeared?”

  “I don’t know,” Pat replied, after a pause that Kate found suspicious. “I was asleep when she left.” He had told the same thing to the sheriff’s department. He could only guess what she was wearing, based on what she usually put on for her walks. “A couple T-shirts,” he ventured. “A blue jogging jacket, shorts. I just don’t know.”

  Still sounding calm and emotionless to Kate, Pat said he wanted to see her. Kate told him she couldn’t at the moment, but she agreed to meet him for breakfast the following morning to talk some more. She would later say she didn’t want to do anything until she had seen Pat in person and heard him out, looking into his eyes as he spoke. But after hanging up the phone, she kept thinking about the conversation. To her, Pat had sounded more than calm and unruffled. It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it: As if he hadn’t just given up hope, but that he knew Sandy was dead. She had no evidence that Pat had done anything wrong, just a feeling. But it was a powerful one. Kate picked up the phone again and called her friend Pat DeMond, the city councilwoman who had helped torpedo the Dunns’ movie-theater project, and who now faced a possible lawsuit because of it. The councilwoman had no use at all for Pat and had not spoken with Sandy for almost a month, but the first words out of DeMond’s mouth, once Kate had told her Sandy was missing, were, “He killed her.”

  That’s when Kate really started to panic.

  • • •

  A thinly attractive, often acerbic employee of a Bakersfield real estate developer, Kate Rosenlieb was known around town for her angelic smile, quick temper and controversial stands on growth and the environment, for which she had been criticized as being too liberal. This was the ultimate insult in a county dominated by two parties: the conservative Republicans and the ultraconservative Republicans. She relished the controversy, however, delighting in making headlines—and in being a source for reporters, the insider who could stir the pot with behind-the-scenes dirt and the occasional conspiracy theory.

  She had known Pat Dunn for years, ever since he had taught her in sixth grade. She remembered him as an affable teacher who used wincingly bad jokes and his six-foot-three bulk to keep the kids interested and in line. Years later, they met again by chance and became fast friends. She often told Pat that he was one of the few people in her life who made her feel she could accomplish worthwhile things—that he had given her support she had never found at home, not with her own father or in her short-lived marriage. Her father, she would say, always seemed dissatisfied with her grades, her career, her appearance. It was Pat Dunn who praised her, flattered her, encouraged her to go for the planning-commission job, then suggested she run for city council as well. She had rebuffed the notion, but was immensely flattered that he thought of her that way. He teased her by calling Kate his little John Wayne, a nod to her willingness to wade into a fight, guns blazing, but you could see the admiration in his eyes when he said it. Just as Pat had become like a second father to her, it seemed to Kate that she helped make up for his own stormy relationship with his daughter, Jennifer, who never really forgave him for the divorce from Nancy and whose relationship with Sandy had been poisonous at best.

  Kate had been a regular visitor to the Dunn household for years, coming over for drinks or dinner or just to shoot pool. That was Pat’s game—she could never best him on the billiard table. “Christ, I’m a drunk old fat man with no eyes, and you still can’t beat me,” he’d taunt, squinting over his thick glasses. Sandy she found to be a bit prickly, rigid and hard to get along with, an odd spendthrift who, despite her millions, lived like she was one step
from the soup kitchen. She and Kate never really clicked. But Pat and Kate would spend time together effortlessly. He was never an outwardly affectionate man, but Kate would sometimes throw her arms around him and tell him, “I love you,” which pleased and embarrassed Pat, invariably evoking some sort of gruff response. “How could you resist?” he’d say with a laugh, sucking in his gut a bit. Though he’d never admit it Pat would do just about anything for one of those hugs.

  Yet now, on the basis of one phone call, Kate had decided Pat Dunn was a killer. She would never be able to adequately explain why. There certainly was no evidence. It was more a feeling, a premonition, she’d later say, a reading between the lines of things Pat had told her. “I think he confessed to me, without actually saying it,” she’d later say. “That’s how well I knew him. In his own way, he was confessing.”

  Kate Rosenlieb may have thought she heard a confession that day, and therefore was justified in what she did next, but others who knew her and Pat later questioned both Kate’s judgment and her motives. Pat’s friends came to see her as a woman who, perhaps only unconsciously, sought the limelight and now imagined herself cracking a sensational murder mystery, even if it came at the expense of a close friend. They also were suspicious of the fact that Kate was part of a Bakersfield city government suddenly at odds with the Dunns, and that she was an even closer friend to city officials embarrassed and angered by Pat’s bald criticism in a public meeting, with its accompanying threat of unpleasant and costly litigation.

  Whatever the motivation for her snap decision, Kate Rosenlieb decided that same night that she could not sit by idly while Pat got away with murder. She wouldn’t wait to see him after all before taking action, she decided. Instead, within a few hours of hearing from Pat that Sandy was missing, and after conferring with City Councilwoman Pat DeMond, Rosenlieb picked up the phone and called the police.