by Edward Humes
Finally, there were friends of the Dunns—Rosenlieb especially—who described the couple’s marriage as a battleground. One friend said she was certain Sandy planned to get a divorce—plans a tearful Sandy supposedly had announced just weeks before her demise. That was the key, Soliz figured. Because of Sandy’s will, Pat had a lot to gain if his marriage outlived his wife, and a lot to lose if the marriage died first. Pat had five million reasons to kill, Soliz knew. But odd behavior and a possible motive, as suspicious as they might be, did not amount to hard evidence. If he was going to nail Pat Dunn, the detective needed more.
John Soliz had a reputation as a dogged investigator, a Texas transplant who had been with the Kern County Sheriff since 1975, first as a patrol deputy, then in narcotics, and now in the most prestigious assignment for a detective in any police department, robbery homicide. He trusted his instincts in a case—which is why, after observing Pat Dunn, hearing him talk, seeing him refuse the lie-detector test, he felt confident that Dunn was guilty, a lack of hard evidence notwithstanding. In Soliz’s estimation, Pat was smart enough and wily enough to clean up a crime scene. Enough time had passed, perhaps, to account for the fact that even microscopic evidence was missing from Dunn’s home and cars. He felt Pat had been trying to divert him toward fruitless avenues of investigation—spurious sightings of his wife, tales of Alzheimer’s—and he observed Pat getting defensive and resistant as he pressured and provoked him, another sign of guilt in Soliz’s opinion.
Soliz saw himself working hard and diligently on this case, interviewing far more witnesses than in many other murder investigations. Throughout, he would later reflect, he tried to keep an open mind, to look at other possibilities. But everything kept pointing at the husband. No surprise there, really: It has long been a truism that a majority of homicides are committed by family members or lovers, rather than by strangers (though this balance has in recent years shifted somewhat). Every indication in the Dunn case suggested to Soliz that the old pattern applied here.
And so it had galled the veteran detective that, after their long interrogation, they had to leave Dunn’s house empty-handed, their handcuffs still clipped to their belts instead of on Dunn’s wrists. Soliz knew what happened. And there’s nothing worse for a cop than knowing what happened—and not being able to prove it. What they needed, he knew, was a witness, someone who could finger Dunn as the killer. The vain searches, Pat’s denials, none of it would matter if they had a witness. And for a long time, Soliz had felt certain something would pop up: The case had been all over the papers and television, with increasing hints that the authorities suspected Pat Dunn. Soliz’s boss had even made an on-air appeal for information. But nothing came of it.
Then, on August 19, a month and a half into the case and just as it was drifting to the bottom of the pile of human misery accumulating on Soliz’s desk, the call came in that would change everything. Anonymous. A gruff, male voice who asked the secretary for Soliz by name and claimed to have information on the Dunn case. As the secretary transferred the call, Soliz wondered: Would it be another worthless tip, like the dozen other calls they had gotten reporting Sandy, dazed and dirty, supposedly roaming around a Bakersfield slum—a week after the body was found in the desert. Or would it be something of value? The detective grabbed the phone and barked one word, as he always did: “Soliz.”
Silence. Then the voice. “I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to identify myself. But I have some information for you . . .”
“I’m listening,” Soliz said. And he did.
After the caller and the cop chatted for a while, and Soliz heard enough to conclude that there might be something of value here, the caller abruptly abandoned his desire to remain anonymous. He would get involved after all, and agreed to meet the detective for lunch at a Denny’s restaurant off the freeway, so he could pass on his information in person.
Once they were together and the waitress had filled their coffee cups, Soliz’s new informant had quite a story to tell. A month and a half ago, he told the detective, he drove to a market on the east side of Bakersfield for a rendezvous with a drug dealer named Ray. It was after midnight, the parking lot deserted and quiet, perfect for scoring a fix. But upon arrival, Ray lamented that he had lost his dope. A police cruiser had started tailing him and he panicked, tossing out the window his bindle of heroin wrapped inside a crumpled cigarette pack. The cop car had moved on, but the dope was gone, Ray said. He wasn’t sure exactly where this happened—he had no street names—but he described the intersection. Faced with a gnawing need for heroin, Soliz’s new informant decided to try to find it himself, and he began trolling the area at one in the morning in search of an old Marlboro box with a precious, dirty secret inside.
While cruising through an east-side neighborhood of spacious homes with broad green lawns, the informant spotted an intersection that looked like it might be the right one. He stopped his car so he could search for Ray’s lost drugs. Then, while poking around in the middle of the street, he heard a strange noise. It sounded like furniture moving inside one of the houses.
“I got scared. So I hid behind some trash cans,” he told Soliz. That’s when he saw a man dragging something out of a house across the street, about thirty feet away, a large, heavy bundle wrapped in a sheet and a blanket. The man loaded his bundle into a white Chevy pickup truck with a camper shell, which was parked in the driveway next to a white Ford Tempo or Taurus. Then, just as the bundle was sliding out of sight, the informant saw something else. “A human hand flopped out of one end—a woman’s left hand.”
The man was Pat Dunn, the informant told Soliz, and the hand had to have been his wife Sandy’s. The witness was so shaken by what he saw that he hightailed it out of there and fled in his mother’s green Pontiac Sunbird, borrowed for the evening drug buy.
It was a wild story, Detective Soliz knew. But he saw no reason to doubt the tale, which confirmed all of his suspicions about his prime suspect. And if it checked out, the detective had his witness—just what he needed to nail Pat Dunn.
There was a catch, though. The informant had some legal troubles of his own. For him to cooperate with the police and testify in court against Pat Dunn, he would need a break on his own grand-theft charges. He was out on bail, but his sentencing hearing, after many delays, was coming up soon.
“I need a deal,” Jerry Lee Coble told the homicide detective, shaking his ponytailed head. “I can’t do any more time.”
Soliz nodded. He could have put in a call to his department then, so he could talk to the man who had busted Jerry Coble for grand theft. Detective Eric Banducci, after all, occupied a desk close to Soliz’s. Soliz might have asked his colleague about Coble’s background, his credibility, his penchant for truthfulness or lies, his fervent desire to snitch his way out of going to prison for his many thefts and frauds. But Soliz saw no need to do that: He believed Jerry Lee Coble. He needed Jerry Coble, to complete his quest for justice in the murder of Sandy Dunn.
“Let’s talk to the DA,” Soliz told his new witness. “See what we can work out.”36
PART II
Laura
It becomes inescapably clear that the prosecutor, for good or ill, is the most powerful figure in the criminal justice system.
—BENNETT GERSHMAN,
Prosecutorial Misconduct
1
FEBRUARY 1993
THE LONG CLIMB OUT OF THE LOS ANGELES BASIN into the Kern Valley is a twenty-mile uphill trek of singular scenic monotony, a steady rise through the stony Grapevine Pass, where gusting summer winds can topple a mobile home as if snuffing a candle, and where a December rain mild at sea level can glaze the Grapevine summit with sheets of black ice even tire chains cannot bite. On the best of days, lines of tractor-trailers inch up the steep incline like a march of garden slugs, great black clouds of diesel grit trailing from their stacks, staining the procession of yellow signs urging summer drivers to turn off their air conditioners lest they overheat thei
r engines. Despite these sensible warnings, a few northbound motorists, unable to relinquish the Los Angeles custom of exceeding all speed limits by at least twenty miles an hour with air conditioner on full blast, daily push their cars beyond the tolerance point as they climb the grade. Now and then these unfortunates can be seen trudging the highway shoulder or speaking into cellular phones from inside their expired cars, provoking slight, smug smiles from passing locals who would just as soon see the road to LA closed down entirely.
The Grapevine was meant to be a lifeline to Bakersfield and Kern County, carved out in one form or another a century ago to allow riders and stagecoaches to make easier passage from San Francisco. But in truth the residents of the Kern Valley have come to view the Grapevine as their Great Wall, limiting both entrance and flight. The locals have always taken comfort in the knowledge that no amount of urban development, no matter how feverish or sprawling, will ever climb the Grapevine and envelop the oil wells and carrot fields to link the evils of Los Angeles with their town. The gangs and the crime and the misery of LA could stay on its side of the mountain. Downtown Bakersfield’s wide, empty Main Street with its big, empty stores—standing where pioneer land baron Thomas Baker’s alfalfa once grew around a sign inviting travelers to graze free in Baker’s Field—would stay safe from the worst excesses of Southern California. Kern County would remain a family town, a sanctuary amid the madness. Or so it seemed for a very long time.
• • •
Wild West. Frontier law. Hanging judges. The half-serious words of warning about Kern County dished out as a kind of bon voyage to Laura Lawhon from various lawyers she knew kept coming to mind as she began the steep descent from the top of the Grapevine to the floor of the valley. Her view was as if from an airplane, squares of brown tilled earth tiled in with the faded yellow of aging hay and the drab green of orchard and vineyard, stretched out in a neat geometric grid, orderly, precise, the random contours and ragged edges of the once wild land wiped clean by man. It was a familiar sight to her now; she had made this tedious drive far too often in recent weeks. Not for the first time she thought, if only the loose ends of her case could be fit together in such an orderly pattern as the one arcing across her windshield, her life would be far easier.
Murder had brought Laura Lawhon to Kern County—a client charged with murder. Patrick O’Dale Dunn faced the death penalty, accused of killing his millionaire wife, Alexandra, after she threatened to throw him out and leave him penniless—or so the prosecution claimed and the local news had dutifully reported. Laura had other theories in mind. She just needed the time to develop them. The state’s case seemed weak to her, hinging, as she saw it, on one key witness, a heroin addict who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Jerry Lee Coble’s account of his fortuitous predawn visit to Crestmont Drive not only brought a sudden solution to a case that had stymied the authorities for months, but it also guaranteed the convicted career criminal1 the one commodity he craved more than anything—freedom. His payment as star witness in People vs. Patrick Dunn had come in the form of a generous plea bargain from the Kern County District Attorney, a deal that allowed Coble to elude what had been an impending six-year prison sentence for grand theft. It was all far too convenient for Laura’s liking. She believed Coble to be an opportunistic liar. Now it was her job to prove it.
But Pat Dunn’s trial would begin in less than two months, giving Laura very little time to pick apart a case that the police and the prosecution had had nearly a year to construct. She had to dismantle their investigation like so many jigsaw pieces, then try to force it back together into a new pattern—one that would exonerate Pat or, at the least, let a defense attorney raise reasonable doubt about his guilt.
Rednecks. Gun nuts. Cowboy cops. The words of warning kept coming to mind, though, to be sure, Laura knew stereotypes when she heard them. They were unfair, the easy shorthand city dwellers employed to describe places where farms and livestock and scuffed cowboy boots dominate. She knew they weren’t right, not entirely, anyway. After all, people looked at the expensive jewelry and clothing she wore, the Rolex on her wrist, the Louis Vuitton handbag she lugged when visiting clients at the county jail, and sometimes they drew sweeping and unfair conclusions about her, too: rich girl, spoiled, shallow—the usual crap. Laura’s colleagues—and courtroom opponents—all came to understand that you underestimated her at your own peril. Well, all right, maybe she was rich and spoiled, Laura would concede, an unlikely private eye who had come to the business late, after graduating college at twenty-nine and falling in love with detective work during a semester’s internship. But there were reasons she was prized by the defense attorneys who paid for her services: her insights, her intelligent analyses of complex criminal cases, her ability to get people to talk in a way most lawyers and police officers, who too often attempted to dominate their subjects, never could.
Getting people to talk was Laura’s forte: Somehow, the crooks, cops and ordinary citizens who inevitably get caught together in the complex web that surrounds any big criminal case would look at Laura, the smile lines on her freckled face, the hazel eyes that met theirs without flinching, and they would trust her. They would talk, and they would say the most amazing things. Some would want to mother her, others to flirt with her, still others figured her for a pushover they could lie to. Didn’t matter to Laura—the important thing was they were talking. Truth, lies or a mixture of both, all were welcome, all were fodder for the case, for all could be used to enhance or undermine credibility as needed during a trial. Some people would spend twenty minutes talking to Laura on the doorstep, explaining why it was they didn’t want to talk—and in the process give up a complete interview without even knowing it. That’s why Laura never called ahead of time—people could hang up on her that way and that would be the end of it. Instead, she just knocked on doors cold, her invulnerable smile and gleaming white teeth at the ready. Very few doors slammed in her face. These were the qualities that got Laura the Dunn job in Kern County, far from her usual turf.
So Laura knew better than to accept at face value the warnings she received about Kern County. Contrary to the clichés she had heard, she found Bakersfield very much like other cities around the country—diverse, growing and complex. She saw from the start that it was a much bigger town than she had anticipated, that it was full of hardworking, honest people like any other city, that most of the cops and prosecutors she met seemed honest, even helpful. This was not the nightmare town she had been warned about. And yet . . . Those warnings kept coming to mind as she drove down the Grapevine. Because there was something to them, too.
You want to know what Kern County’s like? one lawyer had told her. Imagine Mayberry, except Andy Griffith’s got a big ol’ shotgun he likes to mow people down with, and Barney Fife likes to frame people, and Aunt Bea is a John Bircher, and old Floyd down at the barbershop, well, he got a bug up his ass one day and blew up the family-planning clinic, which all the other good citizens of Mayberry thought was just swell. They’d just as soon pin a medal on him.
Bakersfield did make her think of a big, sprawling Mayberry, old-fashioned and quaint, with its dimly lit steakhouses with the green leather booths unchanged since the fifties, and street signs that proudly pronounced the community an “All-America City.” High school athletes were local heroes here. People measured the passage of time by harvests and plantings. The most celebrated favorite sons were Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, the country-music legends who gave Bakersfield a reputation as a kind of West Coast Nashville. Big, goofy billboards inexplicably promoting water sports stood tall out on the highway, welcoming visitors to this city in the desert. There was a wholesomeness to the place, to the fields of grazing cattle and the farmers on their tractors, a celebration of small-town virtues and the value of hard work and common sense, even as the city of Bakersfield grew quite large.
But the dark side was there, too, the “anti-Mayberry,” Laura called it. The sheriff’s department in
Kern County did seem to shoot more people than most police agencies in the state.2 Kern County once was a West Coast haven for the Ku Klux Klan—just as in the 1990s it became a stronghold for armed militias. The only clinic in town that performed abortions was torched that year, an arson widely celebrated and never solved. (Kern County earned the distinction that same year of having the second highest rate of teen pregnancy in California—and the highest birthrate of all among girls fourteen or younger, children having babies on an almost daily basis here.) And some of the judges were right out of the Wild West, it seemed. One infamous judge, now dead, kept a noose hanging in his chambers and liked to be referred to as the “Judge Roy Bean of the San Joaquin” (though he belied this hanging-judge image by once dismissing charges against a courtroom filled with accused criminals, simply to teach a lesson to a police chief whom he disliked).3 Another Kern County judge was censured for playing practical jokes on defendants—sending a rattlesnake head to one man who was phobic about snakes, and a phony signed message and photo from Connie Chung to another defendant obsessed with the celebrity newswoman, nearly provoking a nervous breakdown.4 There was the “Bubble Judge,” who sealed off the air vents to his courtroom, more concerned about dust and “spores” than the stifling atmosphere he created. And then there was the judge who invited a stripper on trial in his court to perform a private dance in his chambers. Not that he would allow that to influence his decisions in the case, of course.5
But as far as police officers framing people, accidentally or otherwise, well, Laura wasn’t ready to go that far. At the courthouse, she had begun to hear from local sources stories about cover-ups and conspiracies, of innocent men and women imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, of a law-enforcement zealousness that sometimes crossed the line. But she wasn’t certain what, if any, credence could be given these sometimes apocryphal stories. She knew the vast majority of men and women in law enforcement were honorable professionals who sincerely desired to help others, to do their duty. But even good intentions could sometimes lead to injustice, she knew. For an outsider like Laura, telling the difference would take time—more time, probably, than she had to solve the case of the People vs. Patrick Dunn. In the end, she sensed Kern County would always be foreign terrain to her. Laura normally worked in urban Orange County, two hundred miles to the south, as did the lawyer who had hired her. The Dunn family had not wanted local legal talent to try the case. Pat had originally retained Stan Simrin, reputed to be the best defense attorney in town, a former local bar association president with an excellent record of winning tough cases—and for taking on the powerful district attorney. But Simrin had been replaced abruptly just before Christmas, after a falling-out with Pat’s brother Mike. Mike Dunn, a well-off Orange County businessman, was footing the bills for Pat’s defense, as Sandy’s accounts and will were all frozen in the wake of the murder charges, and Pat’s own money had been spent in a vain attempt to keep their real estate ventures afloat. So it had been Mike who chose the new lawyer, someone he knew from Orange County.
