Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  “C’mon, just tell me what you want,” Coble pleaded.

  “What do I want?” Banducci said, exasperated by the tenacity of this thief. “I want you to be a man for once in your life and take responsibility for your actions. Why don’t you just come clean? Just once in your life?”

  Coble stared at Banducci as if the detective had lost his mind. Then he said, “Man, get me a dope cop in here. I can do a dealer who never touches anything less than quarters.”

  Instead, Banducci brought Coble to the county jail to book him. Once in the jail, the ex-con suddenly doubled over, a pained look on his dark, lined face, and pronounced himself an epileptic in need of treatment, and suffering from heroin withdrawal to boot. Coble knew jail policies better than the detention officers who ran the place—his declaration triggered an automatic transfer out of the jail to a secure ward at the county hospital. Softer time, free drugs, nurses: Now it was Banducci’s turn to stare at Coble with grudging admiration. The thief had indeed found a way to avoid jail. For now.

  “But you’ll have to do better than that to stay out,” Banducci muttered to himself. Many months later, the detective would be surprised to learn that Jerry Coble had done just that.25

  9

  FOR THREE WEEKS, PAT DUNN SEARCHED AND WAITED, alternately paralyzed by depression, then frantically active. He spoke repeatedly with the family lawyers, brokers and accountants, hoping to find some way to keep their real estate ventures going without Sandy’s signature on the checks. That’s what Mom would want, he kept saying. They tried to help, asking to see Sandy’s bank accounts, her will, her important papers. In the end, though, they told Pat there was nothing that would allow Sandy’s separate accounts to be touched. The one thing that would have empowered Pat to write the checks—the living trust Sandy had asked their financial planner to draw up—had not been completed. And so Pat finally gave up. Morning Star and the theater project ground to a halt. There would be no more riding fence. His and Sandy’s dreams for their vacant properties died.

  After that, Pat found himself just sitting in his kitchen, staring blankly at the newspaper, dirty cups piled in the sink, his hands shaking. The worst moments were the brief flares of false hope, when someone would call and claim to have seen Sandy in a restaurant or out walking or sitting by the curb. Pat and a friend checked out many of these calls themselves, and passed all of them on to the sheriff. None panned out. Either the person who was supposed to be Sandy had vanished by the time the tip could be checked out, or it was the wrong person. Several of the calls were prompted by the wanderings of a mentally disturbed homeless woman bearing a passing resemblance to a disheveled and grimy Sandy. Each call was as crushingly disappointing as the first.

  No one, it seemed, could find Sandy or tell Pat what had happened to her—not friends, not neighbors, not strangers on the streets she used to walk, and certainly not the sheriff’s department. Pat’s relations with the detectives investigating her disappearance had deteriorated over the weeks, as their questions became more pointed and Pat’s frustration mounted. “You’re not doing anything,” he exploded at one detective. “Why aren’t you out looking for my wife?”

  They were looking, of course, but not for Sandy. They were looking for evidence against Pat. Every witness they located, every friend of the family they talked to, every neighbor interviewed, every accountant, financial advisor and secretary—all were questioned about Pat and his relationship with Sandy. There was no physical search for a missing woman, nor any comprehensive follow-up on the reported sightings of her. The detectives instead wanted to hear about fights, about plans for divorce, about any attempts by Sandy to cut Pat out of her will. When they asked about Sandy’s habits, it was more to debunk Pat’s account rather than to find clues to her disappearance. Yet Pat, friend to the police to the end, could not or would not see the full implications of all this.

  Three weeks after Sandy Dunn disappeared, however, the reality of Pat’s situation hit home—literally. Just before half past nine in the evening, a loud knocking at the front door and his dogs’ frantic barking awakened Pat from a deep sleep. Disheveled and out of sorts, Pat told the dogs to be quiet and pulled the door open, blinking. Fourteen members of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department stood waiting outside on his doorstep. After a moment, he let them in, a look of resignation on his face as the crowd pushed its way through the door.

  “We have a warrant to search your house,” one of the detectives said, thrusting some papers in Pat’s face. “And we want to ask you a few more questions.”

  They didn’t say so just then, but they also wanted to tell Pat something. There had been a big break in the case, but they wanted to reveal it at the right moment, so they could gauge his reaction. Would he be surprised, they wondered, or did he already know? That was the question they wanted answered, not with words, but with expressions, body language, eye contact. These are the subtle clues in which police interrogators place great stock. Entire courses are taught on the subject—along with methods of psychological warfare designed to wrest confessions from suspects while dissuading them from uttering the four words cops hate most: I want a lawyer. Pat was about to experience this brand of interrogation firsthand.

  This confrontation had been building for weeks. There had been several previous visits by detectives, and many conversations, none of which satisfied either Pat or the detectives. A week earlier, they had even called Pat down to the station, kept him cooling his heels for more than an hour in a meeting room, then told him the detective who wanted to see him had left. They capped this with a surprise request that he take a lie-detector test, then and there—the examiner was standing by. It was all a calculated ploy to throw Pat off guard, and it worked. He finally lost his temper.

  “You’re just jerking me around,” he had yelled, storming out, refusing the test—and raising even more suspicions.26 He had already angered the detectives by bitterly complaining about the picture of Sandy used by the sheriff’s department for a missing-persons poster—they had dug up the old police photo taken when Pat was arrested for domestic abuse. No injury was apparent in it, but the picture was very unflattering, showing a confused frown on Sandy’s face, her heavy glasses dominating the image. Pat hated it. “Mom would be horrified if she saw it,” he had told Detective Kline. “You never asked my permission to use that photo.”

  “We’ve been asking you for days to give us a picture, and you never did,” Kline had shot back. “So we used the only one we had. And we don’t need your permission.”

  “I told you, I couldn’t find one,” Pat replied miserably. He had looked around the house, but he and Sandy just weren’t picture takers, he said.

  Kline, however, had not believed him, though he never could figure out what Pat’s problem was. It didn’t make sense, Kline reasoned, whether Pat was guilty or not: If innocent of murder and sincere in his belief that Sandy was wandering and missing, Pat should have been glad the sheriff found a photo to use. And even if Pat had killed his wife, Kline thought, he would want at least to appear to cooperate. Why not provide a snapshot? At this point, what could it hurt? “Mom would just be devastated by this,” was all Pat would say, through gritted teeth.

  The flap over the photo, followed by the polygraph refusal, had been the last straw for the detectives. Any lingering doubts they might have had about Pat’s involvement evaporated when he passed up this supposed opportunity to clear himself once and for all with a lie detector. “If it were me, I’d demand it myself,” Detective Kline would later say. “But not Pat.”

  Pat, however, felt he had tolerated enough official insinuations. He had no intention of entrusting his life and liberty to a box of wires. He didn’t trust technology, nor did he trust its operator, a sheriff’s department that seemed more interested in pursuing him than his missing wife. “No thanks,” he had said as he stalked out of the department. To Pat’s way of thinking, he had showed guts, character and righteous indignation, the hallmarks of an innocent m
an. To the sheriff’s detectives, he was showing his fear of being found out.

  The simple fact was, Pat could do no right in their eyes. Kate Rosenlieb’s view of the case had prevailed. Her passionate, detailed allegations won out over the irascible and distracted Pat Dunn. By July 6—a mere five days after Pat reported his wife missing—the sheriff’s department had decided Sandy was dead. There was no body, no blood, no evidence of foul play. Yet the sheriff had placed a homicide detective named John Soliz in charge of the case, with Kline, the missing-persons specialist, assisting. Together, they tried to find support for their belief that the Dunns’ marriage had been falling apart and that Sandy’s millions, along with an impending divorce, gave Pat a motive for murder. Several witnesses, Kate Rosenlieb among them, had fueled this speculation, though such a theory meant disregarding what many other witnesses had to say. To the detectives, a room-by-room search of the Dunn house was the next logical step in their quest.

  So now, three weeks into their homicide investigation, the detectives had a search warrant in hand, issued by a Kern County judge who had found probable cause that Pat had committed a felony—although the papers filed by the sheriff in support of this finding seem curiously devoid of evidence that Pat broke any laws.27 Nevertheless, the compliant judge had granted almost unlimited authority to the team of fourteen detectives, deputies and technicians to search every inch of the Dunns’ home on Crestmont Drive and their three cars for any evidence of a violent death.

  A week earlier, Pat had let another team search the house without a warrant. They found nothing incriminating, but detectives later groused that they were hampered in this examination. They said Pat was “hostile” and kept hovering over them. The detective in charge later admitted he had been allowed to linger in the home as long as he wished and that the out-of-shape Pat could not, in truth, intimidate a phalanx of cops. But the homicide detective, John Soliz, still wanted to come back, in part because certain laboratory tests had to be done in complete darkness, and the voluntary search had been done by day.

  The warrant handed to Pat was thick, twenty-three pages, but something on the cover page caught Pat’s eye right away: the sheriff’s team was authorized to search for “blood stains and/or blood splatters which are consistent with a significant injury resulting in the loss of blood.” Pat had to read it over several times before he realized what it meant.

  They think I killed her right here.

  “While the criminalists do their job, Mr. Dunn, why don’t we go in the den to talk,” Detective Soliz suggested. “We’re still investigating the case and we were wondering if you had any new information.”

  But Pat was mesmerized. Another line in the warrant grabbed his attention: Among the property that could be seized under the warrant was “the person of Alexandra Jeanette Dunn, a.k.a. Alexandra Jeanette Paola.”

  My God, they think I’ve got her body here.

  It took an effort for Pat to tear his eyes away from the legal papers and to focus on what was being said to him. They were all staring at him curiously. The homicide detective was flanked by Dusty Kline and his boss, Sergeant Glenn Johnson, the head of the homicide unit. But Detective Soliz was clearly calling the shots. It was his name on the search warrant application, and he was doing the talking. He had an air of authority about him, deliberate in his movements, a man with impenetrable eyes and a clipped way of speaking that, when he wanted it to, could make the most polite utterances sound blunt, even rude.

  Pat vaguely waved the thick sheaf of papers in his hand and ushered the detectives, Sergeant Johnson and a fourth officer, a member of the sheriff’s department brass, into his den. In the past, he had treated them like guests even when their insinuations grated on him, telling himself they were just doing their jobs and assuming—incorrectly—they at least were actively searching for Sandy as well. This time, however, Pat pointedly failed to offer them anything to drink. As the technicians and deputies began rooting through his house, he perched on a bar stool and watched.

  “So, do you have anything new to tell us?” Soliz asked again. All four of the sheriff’s people were still staring at him. Kline had his arms crossed.

  Pat cleared his throat, his head still ringing with the words he had read on the search warrant. Knowing they suspected him was one thing, but to see it in black and white, that changed everything. He decided to try one more time to point them in another direction. “Well, I got a call from a man named Rutledge who said he saw Mom around town,” he finally said. “We’re still putting up fliers.” Pat had also been getting calls from a self-described psychic named Louise, who refused to give her last name or number. “She called again,” Pat told the cops. “She says Sandy is by some water and by some rocks. Maybe Santa Barbara.”

  Soliz took no notes, nor did he use a tape recorder,28 and Pat felt the detective seemed uninterested in what he was saying. Whether this was really the case or simply an interrogation tactic eluded him—Pat simply couldn’t read Soliz. The detective abruptly changed the subject and asked, “Why did you take Rex Martin on a drive out to Caliente and Paris-Lorraine?”

  Pat seemed taken aback by the unexpected question. “I needed someone to talk to,” he answered after a pause.

  “Why Rex Martin, though?” Soliz persisted. “He told us you really weren’t that close.”

  Pat nodded at this: Soliz was right, he and Rex Martin had never been close—at least, not until Sandy vanished. Rex Martin was a business partner of the Dunns. He was the builder on their Morning Star housing development and he owned a one-third share in the project. Pat had known Rex since kindergarten, but the two had been little more than acquaintances over the years and had rarely socialized. Martin just happened to call on July 5, a day when Pat needed someone to talk to. On impulse, Pat had asked Rex to take a ride with him. They ended up at a distant hamburger stand Sandy always liked, far outside the Bakersfield city limits in the mountainous area near the small Kern County towns of Caliente and Paris-Lorraine. “You can get the best hamburgers here,” Pat had explained to Rex. “With Mom and me, it was always a search for the best of something—the best pie, the best coleslaw, whatever.” During the drive, Pat had told Rex all about Sandy’s disappearance, his search for his wife, his fears about her mental state and what might become of her. Pat had wanted Rex to know because Sandy’s money was fueling Morning Star, and he felt the builder should know that the project might not go forward were she not found. Yet they ended up hardly speaking at all about the project. Mostly, Pat talked about how much he missed Sandy and how worried he was for her, fearful that she had been hurt or worse. Rex responded by offering to help in any way he could, and the two men had seen one another or spoken almost daily ever since.29

  But Pat found it difficult to put any of this into words for the detectives, and he merely told Soliz, “I don’t know why I chose Rex. I just wanted to talk to someone.”

  Then Soliz seemed to switch gears again. “When you went driving with Kate Rosenlieb, why did you want to go into the mountains?” he asked. “What’s so special that you keep wanting to go out that way?”

  Again, Pat said he needed someone to talk to, and he had suggested a drive to the mountains—which Kate refused—because he and Sandy often took the same drive to see wildflowers.

  As he gave this answer, Pat began to see that the detective was getting at something, that he saw some connection here, some theme that tied in with the investigation of Sandy’s disappearance. Pat puzzled over this, squinting at the detective. Soliz, in turn, would later report perceiving a slight sign of nervousness in his suspect when the subject of the mountain drive with Kate Rosenlieb came up. Pat got up from his bar stool and went into the kitchen, where he got some ice and poured whiskey over it.

  Did you and Mom argue a lot? Soliz asked, following his quarry with dark eyes. Did she ever hit you? Why did you refuse to give us a picture of Sandy, so we had to use the old one taken when you were arrested for hitting her? And why did that make you s
o mad? And why did you tell Kate Rosenlieb you “knew” Sandy was dead when you talked to her on July Fourth? The questions bombarded Pat, and he answered without elaboration: No. No. I don’t know.

  They talked for twenty minutes before Soliz decided it was time to spring his surprise.

  “A woman’s body was found in the Kelso Valley two weeks ago,” the detective said in his blunt way. “Just a few hours ago, we identified that body. It was your wife.”

  Pat stared, shocked into silence not so much by the news—after three weeks, he really wasn’t surprised to hear Sandy was dead—but by the hard, almost cruel way in which the news was delivered. It seemed to him as if Soliz’s words were weapons and the detective was trying to batter him with them, to force him into submission. The other men in that room did not even make a pretense of trying to comfort Pat. And then the detective pulled out the photos.

  They were black-and-white glossies, shot by the coroner’s office, a dark and grainy horror show. They depicted a wizened, blackened corpse. The body had been found half buried and half mummified in a barren canyon sixty miles east of Bakersfield ten days after Pat had reported her missing. The burial site was not all that far from the hamburger stand where Pat had taken Rex—up in the mountains, where Pat wanted to take Kate. That was why Soliz had asked Pat about those drives and why he found Pat’s nervousness so telling. To the detectives, it seemed obvious: Pat Dunn had been driven to return to the scene of his crime, perhaps looking for the nerve to confess to his friends, but in the end keeping his secret.