Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  “I want to report a murder,” she began.

  • • •

  By the time Kate Rosenlieb made that call, the missing-persons report that Pat Dunn had phoned in to the sheriff’s department had been entered into Kern County’s local law-enforcement computer system. In theory, this meant the police would be on alert about Sandy’s disappearance, but in practice, it meant nothing more would be done. No one other than Pat had been looking for Sandy for the past three days. No bulletins had been sent. The file containing Pat’s report had been dumped on the desk of a detective who was away on vacation through the Fourth of July weekend and, in any case, even if he had been in the office, he wouldn’t have done anything. Police agencies adhere to the general rule that, by and large, most missing adults are missing by choice, usually because of disagreements or other tensions at home. Most such reports are resolved when the “missing” person calls or returns (or files for divorce). Such reports are routinely taken by police agencies and just as routinely ignored. The benign neglect is disturbed only if the missing person is a child, or if evidence of foul play surfaces.

  As the case stood, there were no such suspicions initially, and in the normal course of events, the report could have languished for days or weeks before anything at all was done. But then Kate Rosenlieb and Pat DeMond got busy. Kate repeatedly called the Bakersfield Police Department, only to learn the Kern County Sheriff had jurisdiction over the Dunns’ neighborhood. So she called the sheriff’s department, trying to report her suspicions, but she could find no one of consequence to listen to her. Frustrated, she finally drove to sheriff’s headquarters in person. She found a building emptied by the national holiday as she wandered through the unlocked offices, marveling at the unoccupied desks and wide-open file room, as if crime, or at least the machinery for dealing with it, had suddenly come to a standstill. At last, she stumbled across someone sitting at a desk shuffling papers, who directed her down a hall to a room with radios and the day’s official watch commander. “My friend’s been murdered,” she blurted, “and no one is even here to deal with it.”

  As opening lines go, it was a grabber, but once it was established that Kate had not actually witnessed a murder, the ensuing heated discussion went nowhere. Kate announced that she knew that Sandy Dunn had been killed in her home, but as she could not say how she knew this, nor provide one bit of evidence to support such an allegation, the watch commander apparently saw no reason to take Kate seriously. She left the sheriff’s office more frustrated than ever, feeling desperate and frightened.

  But Rosenlieb had set into motion more than she realized. City Councilwoman DeMond used her clout to get in touch with Carl Sparks, the sheriff of Kern County, and to personally voice her suspicions and desires in the matter. Sheriff Sparks listened deferentially, then called the watch commander who had dismissed Rosenlieb. And the Dunn case abruptly took on a newfound urgency.

  On the morning of Saturday, July 4, the same sheriff’s watch commander telephoned a redheaded, easygoing detective named Vernon Kline—“Dusty” to most everyone who knew him. It was Kline’s day off, but the watch commander instructed him to postpone his Independence Day barbecue plans so he could interview someone about the disappearance of one Alexandra Paola Dunn. It was supposed to be another detective’s case, the watch commander said, but Dusty would have to fill in because of the holiday. Kline was in the sheriff’s sex-crimes unit—which handles missing-persons cases as a sideline—and the watch commander told him he would have to take the report.

  In a missing-persons case, the source of the report is almost always the first witness to be interviewed—the detective will seek out the spouse, the parent, whoever first noted and reported the disappearance. But in this case, Dusty Kline did not immediately seek out Pat Dunn. Instead, in accordance with the wishes of two politicians—a city councilwoman who disliked Pat and the county sheriff whose ear she had—the first person interviewed about Sandy’s disappearance was Kate Rosenlieb. It would be Pat’s dear friend Kate who provided authorities with their critical first impressions of the case, and whose opinions indelibly shaped the police investigation that followed.

  When Dusty Kline met her for the first time, Rosenlieb had just returned from her breakfast appointment with Pat Dunn. By then, she had become so riled by her discussions with Pat DeMond and the watch commander, and so convinced Pat had killed his missing wife, that she left hidden at her home a tape recording of her theories about the murder—just in case she, too, met Sandy’s fate, whatever that was. She also stuck a pistol in her handbag, ready to blow a hole in her second father’s head if need be.

  Though they had planned to stop at a diner that morning, Kate and Pat skipped eating—Pat said he wasn’t hungry and would rather drive and talk. “Let’s go up in the mountains,” he suggested. Kate said no, she had a work-related appointment later in the morning and had to stay close to town. This was a lie, but Pat was too preoccupied to question why she would be working on July 4. He simply drove them around town, each of them drinking canned beers from a six-pack on the seat next to them, though it was still early morning. They returned without exchanging gunfire (and without Pat having any idea what Kate suspected).

  During the drive, Pat told her much the same story he had related on the phone, with Kate believing him even less than before. Pat would recall feeling exhausted from sleepless nights and worry, drained of emotion, but Kate saw next to her a man who seemed not in the least bit upset. “I just don’t know what happened to her,” he said, and then added, once more, “I fear the worst.” Later, he would say, “She’s dead, Kate.” When she asked why he seemed so pessimistic, Pat hesitated a few seconds, then pointed at the car keys dangling from the ignition. “These are her keys. If she was alive, she’d have them.”

  Kate would later recall begging Pat to go to the sheriff’s department with her, but Pat shook his head. She thought that was very significant. When they parted, Pat felt a little better having unburdened himself to a friend. Kate left to tell Detective Kline that there was no way Sandy Dunn could be missing.

  “She’s dead,” Rosenlieb told him with an angry certainty, without offering any evidence beyond her gut feeling. “You don’t have a missing-persons case here, you’ve got a murder. I know it.”

  And though it pained her to say so—she assured Kline she loved Patrick Dunn like a father—Rosenlieb told the detective she was quite certain of one thing: Pat Dunn was the killer.

  She then gave Kline a long list of reasons to justify her suspicions. She said Sandy never left home without a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of jewelry on—yet Pat claimed none of her jewelry was missing. “That’s impossible,” Kate swore. “Unless he killed her himself.”

  She next told Detective Kline that Pat had refused to drive with her to the sheriff’s department to report Sandy missing, an obvious indication of guilt, as Kate saw it. “He said he didn’t want anyone to know.”

  Then she explained how Pat had been trying for months to build a cover story for this moment by trying to convince her that Sandy was showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. But Kate said neither she nor anyone else who knew Sandy would believe him. “She was sharp as a tack—child-like at times, but totally together,” Kate told Kline. “He’s been talking about this for six months, but it’s crap.”

  Kate told Kline that Pat’s whole story of Sandy’s disappearance reeked—because, she said, there was no reason for him to have gone searching for Sandy. It was normal for Sandy to go walking at night. “Why would he search when nothing was out of the ordinary?”

  Then she told Kline to check his department’s files for past crimes by Pat Dunn. “He was arrested for beating her before, you know. Your reports won’t show it, but I was there.”

  Finally, she told Detective Kline that the Dunns had been drinking excessively and arguing terribly for months. They were under terrific stress, battling over their development projects, and were losing a fortune, she said. It was so bad, she
half expected to go over there one day and find one had killed the other, then followed in suicide. “Obviously,” she said, “I was half right.”

  In all, it was a startlingly harsh indictment, particularly as Kate also described Pat as a dear friend and someone about whom she cared deeply. Kline took it all in, then said he would go talk to Pat.

  “Don’t go alone,” Kate warned. “He could be dangerous.”23

  Promising to be careful, Kline excused himself and drove over to the Dunns’ house. He wasn’t yet sure what to make of Kate Rosenlieb, but she seemed believable to him—her status as a city official, and her friendship with Pat, certainly enhanced her credibility as an accuser. He had no way of knowing then that Kate had been wrong about most everything she had just told him. She was wrong about Sandy wearing jewelry on her walks (and she inflated its value tenfold besides). She was wrong about Sandy’s walking habits—Sandy never walked in the evening, only early in the morning. And she was wrong when she said no one else believed Sandy might be developing Alzheimer’s. As for constant and vicious arguments, Kate seemed to be the only one who had observed them. No one else who knew the Dunns had noticed any unusual fights. Kline could not have known any of this; he didn’t even know then that Pat had reported Sandy’s disappearance to the sheriff’s department days before talking to Kate. Kline had not yet checked the files or the missing-persons log, and so Kate’s claims about Pat being reluctant to go to the sheriff’s department sounded quite serious. Indeed, Kate’s account, as reflected in Detective Kline’s written report, shows she even got the basic time frame wrong, telling the detective that Sandy disappeared on July 2, when the true date was June 30. Again, Kline had no way of knowing the truth.

  Primed, then, to be suspicious, when he got to the Dunns’ house, Kline did indeed find Pat’s behavior odd, not at all what the detective expected from a man whose wife was missing. Pat had been drinking and seemed out of sorts, though he readily invited the detective in to have a look around. Too readily, almost anxiously, Kline thought, as if Pat were making a show of cooperating, rather than showing actual concern. Kline was so ready to believe the worst at this point, even Pat’s cooperation seemed suspect. Pat, once again, told the story of Sandy’s disappearance, with the details closely matching Rosenlieb’s account, only without her incriminating interpretations and without any of the changes and inconsistencies that police expect to find in cover stories and lies.

  When Pat finished, Detective Kline asked him about Sandy’s keys. Rosenlieb had told Kline about Pat’s previous remarks about the keys, but Pat hadn’t brought them up in this latest rendition. Now, a look of confusion passed across Pat’s face as if, Kline later would remember thinking, he were a child who had just been confronted with a lie. Pat stumbled over his words, then finally pointed to his wife’s keys on the kitchen counter, right in front of them, and said, “Well, there they are. Right there.”

  Kline watched the older man standing there, and Pat looked away, breaking eye contact. He’s lying, Kline thought. Rosenlieb’s right.

  “It was almost as if he had forgotten about those keys—like he had made up a story about Sandy going out, but forgot to hide the keys that she would have taken with her,” Kline would later recall, years after the case had ended. “It was pretty boneheaded, really. But it was one of the main reasons I started feeling he was lying.”24

  Kline didn’t know then—and apparently never realized—that there was nothing suspicious about Pat’s response. Pat had already told sheriff’s dispatcher Valley Braddick about the keys in the kitchen, and he had assumed Detective Kline already possessed all of that information. Pat also assumed, incorrectly, that Kline had come to his house in the first place after reading the missing-persons report—why else would the detective even be there? But Kline didn’t even know such a report existed. He was at Dunn’s house because of Kate Rosenlieb. If Pat appeared confused by Kline’s question, it wasn’t because he had been caught in a lie or an incomplete cover story—it was, Pat would later say, because he was surprised at the detective’s ignorance. If he looked away, it wasn’t out of fear of the detective, but out of embarrassment for the detective.

  Dusty Kline would later say he went to see Pat Dunn that day with an open mind. However, in the report he later wrote, it is clear that Kate Rosenlieb’s perspective on the case left a powerful impression on him. The observations—and the misinformation—relayed by Rosenlieb in her initial meeting with Kline would forever color the investigation of Alexandra Dunn’s disappearance and death. Almost everything Rosenlieb said was accepted at face value. Almost everything Pat Dunn said was dismissed or interpreted as incriminating.

  From that moment on, the search for Sandy virtually ended—before it had really begun. The case became a search not for a missing woman, but for evidence—evidence that Pat Dunn had murdered his wife.

  And so the homicide investigation began, based on misinformation that led to suspicion. Now the sheriff’s department needed a body, a murder weapon, blood, a confession—any or all would do. Best of all, though, would be a witness. An eyewitness. The sheriff’s detectives who began working the case as a murder knew, sooner or later, something would turn up. In Kern County, it almost always did.

  8

  I WANT A DEAL,” JERRY LEE COBLE REPEATED, EYES DARTING around the small, antiseptic interrogation room. Blunt as a bullet, Coble looked older than his thirty-four years. He smelled of sweat and stale beer, his eyes rimmed red. He cleared his throat, the dry sound of an engine that wouldn’t catch, then added, “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But you gotta cut me a deal.”

  Eric Banducci leaned back in the interrogator’s chair and regarded Coble without expression. By the detective’s count, it was the fifth, maybe sixth time this skinny little hype had used the word deal in the space of fifteen minutes. By this, Sheriff’s Detective Banducci understood Coble, an ex-convict, desperately wanted what every ex-con wanted—not to go back to prison. Of course, Coble hadn’t wanted it badly enough to stop committing crimes. But now that he had been caught stealing sixty grand in brass fixtures and copper wire from the irrigation company that had been generous enough (or, as Banducci figured it, stupid enough) to hire him, Coble was willing to sell out whoever he could in order to stay free.

  The thing is, Banducci knew Coble. And he knew heroin addicts. He expected this man would give up his best friend, his brother, even his mother if that’s what it took to walk out that door free and clear. Or, to be more specific, he’d do anything to stay free long enough to score his next fix. That he would lie in the process, Banducci believed, was axiomatic. That’s what addicts do. The only heroin junkies who don’t lie through their teeth, Banducci would tell junior cops with dreams of nailing Mr. Big through the likes of Jerry Coble, are in the graveyard. “And they just lie still,” he’d say with a grim laugh.

  “Why should I cut a deal with you, Jerry Lee?” Banducci asked after a long pause. The detective had a narrow smile on his craggy face. “I’ve already got you, and I don’t have to cut any deals with you or anyone else to put you away. So why should I trade steak for hamburger?”

  Jerry Lee Coble hung his head, then said, once again, “Man, I got to make a deal. I can’t go back.”

  Coble’s scam had been sweet while it lasted. On parole from prison for a long string of felonies, Coble had hired on as an electrician for a Bakersfield pump company. He was, to be fair to the company’s hiring officer, a more than capable electrician, having been trained by the Marine Corps a lifetime ago to install instruments on jet aircraft. But his heroin habit was far stronger than his work ethic, and within weeks, he began to systematically divest his employers of brass fittings, copper cable—anything he could get his hands on. He’d strip the wire of its insulation at his parents’ trailer or his brother’s place on the ragged southern edge of Bakersfield, a farming center called Weedpatch, one of many crossroads communities adrift in the sea of farmland and oilfield that is California’s vast C
entral Valley. Weedpatch had once been home to one of the dreaded Okie labor camps that John Steinbeck had scathingly portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath. Now it was a quiet, perfect place for Coble to dispose of his stolen goods. His brother or his teenaged nephew would sell the stripped metal at scrap yards. They got only pennies to the dollar, but when you’re moving tons of the stuff, it still brings in thousands. Plenty of money for Jerry to score all the dope he needed.

  But the thing about heroin is, you always need more. As his need for drugs grew more insatiable, Jerry’s thefts grew increasingly reckless until he was finally placing orders for new electrical cable, expensive braids of copper thick as a man’s wrist that his company didn’t even use. It came straight off the spool and went right to the scrap yard, gleaming and new. Once the thefts became that oafish and obvious, it was only a matter of time before Coble found himself staring at Eric Banducci’s scuffed cowboy boots propped up on the table between them.

  As it happened, Jerry’s nephew got busted first. The first thing out of the kid’s mouth when the deputies burst through the door told Banducci all he needed to know about Jerry Coble’s integrity: “That fucking bastard,” the kid blurted, “That goddamn Jerry set me up.” Not even his own family trusted Jerry Lee Coble.

  Jerry Lee had tried to escape when the cops came for him, driving his El Camino past the orchards and cattle farms of Weedpatch with deputies in pursuit, at first refusing to pull over, then leaping from his pickup and trying to dash on foot through backyards and over fences. When he finally was brought down, heaving and exhausted, a gun to his head, Jerry Lee started right in with his negotiations. Before his interrogation had begun, before he had even caught his breath, he told one cop, “I don’t want to go back. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  It’s a sad, hard truth, Banducci would later say, that dealing with people like Jerry Coble is a way of life in the justice system. Whether it was in a major city like Los Angeles or a farm town like Bakersfield, there wasn’t much difference, the detective knew: Deals make the wheels of justice turn, and we’d hardly ever put crooks away if not for their blabbing about themselves or their colleagues. But Coble was a three-time loser from a family that produced several career criminals. He had no credibility, in Banducci’s estimation, even though he had been an informer in the past. Some cops might have tried to use Coble on that day in April 1991, when he was so desperate to stay out of jail he would say or do practically anything a detective might want. But not Banducci. He told Coble there would be no deals with the likes of him.