Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  Once again, detectives did not press Marie on these issues, Laura could see from the reports. They wanted to believe her. Nor did anyone ask Marie why she waited six weeks to tell her story to the authorities, why she never mentioned this last encounter with Sandy during her Taylor 1 calls, or why Pat’s supposed failure to tell Lillian about the disappearance, rather than this far more damning conversation on the street with Sandy, triggered Marie’s suspicions. To Laura, it made no sense.

  When police interview a suspect—or a hostile witness—they try to lock him or her into an initial, detailed story, Laura knew. Then, any deviations from that original story line can be labeled lies and used as evidence of a guilty state of mind. But the standards are very different for witnesses favorable to law enforcement, whose changing stories may be welcomed and given the innocuous label “refreshed recollections”—so long as the changes benefit the prosecution’s case. In subsequent renditions, Marie’s story kept evolving, always to the detriment of Pat Dunn. In the next telling after the initial interview with Kline, Marie recalled Sandy looking nervous as she walked that day, something she never mentioned before. Now Marie was not simply stopping for a pleasant chat, but had pulled over to ask what was wrong. In later renditions, Sandy was walking along sobbing, tears streaming down her face, when Marie pulled over to ask what was wrong. In this more dramatic version, while Marie tried to talk Sandy into getting into her car and coming home with her, someone drove up and yelled at Sandy to go home. Marie said at first that she wasn’t sure who this was, but she thought it might have been Pat Dunn. In subsequent versions, she became sure the man was, in fact, Pat Dunn. Still later Marie said Sandy had told her she had made a terrible mistake in marriage, but that she didn’t believe in divorce.16

  With many witnesses, such inconsistency and outright mistakes—coupled with a virulent and admitted dislike of the defendant—would be fatal to their credibility. Certainly the sheriff’s investigators seized on every inconsistency in Pat’s story, no matter how minor, to brand him a liar and a murderer. The problem was, Marie Gates was the sort of lovely older widow that every neighborhood seems to have, the one with no children of her own, but who is always baking for the neighbors and watching their kids. She was in her seventies but still vigorous, with that perfect, long white hair and clear blue eyes and a melodious, soothing voice. She told a tragic tale of how all seven of her children had died at birth or in infancy, and how, now that her husband had died, she had no one left—except for the children in her neighborhood, whom she cherished as her own, walking them to school and showering them with treats.

  Marie, then, was clearly a sympathetic witness, so when it came time for her to tell her story in court, it wouldn’t matter that all of the Dunns’ other friends agreed that there never was any talk of divorce. It wouldn’t matter that Sandy told her financial planner just hours before her disappearance that she wanted Pat to have more control over her finances—hardly the words of a woman intent on divorce, or who had given her husband until the end of the month to get out (particularly when the meeting with the financial planner was on the last day of the month). And it wouldn’t matter, in the end, that Marie Gates was wrong on so many points, or that her story never seemed to come out the same way twice. Laura knew jurors would look at her serene face and hear that angelic voice with the slight quaver in it, and believe anything she said on the witness stand. And, after all, they would hear her tell her story only once, and it would sound good. Like the authorities, they would want to believe her. Any defense lawyer who tried to attack her would come off as an ogre, unless he was very, very careful—and, even then, only if Laura provided the proper ammunition to support an all-out attack.

  And, she just might find it, Laura realized. Here was Marie, telling the story yet again, kindly and patient and sounding utterly believable—and, once more, scrambling it into a new version. This time, Sandy wasn’t just walking along and crying. Now she had her face buried in her hands and had been walking around town sobbing all day. Then Marie told Laura something else she claimed to know, but that she had never mentioned before in conversations with sheriff’s detectives—that she knew for a fact Sandy took her daily walks during daylight hours, not in the dark. This provided further evidence of Pat’s perfidy, she said.

  “He keeps saying she used to walk after midnight and stuff,” Marie scoffed, adamant and sure of herself. “That’s a lie.”

  Laura just nodded, knowing that Sandy’s nocturnal walks were well documented and not just based on Pat’s word. She, and the sheriff’s detectives, had interviewed neighbors, one of Sandy’s walking partners, her jeweler, and all backed up Pat’s description of the odd hours Sandy kept. Even the cops conceded that much. Yet again, this “dear friend” of Sandy’s seemed to know very little about her.

  Marie also told Laura that Sandy had met with an attorney the day before she disappeared, apparently to talk about a divorce. Marie had heard about this supposed legal consultation from a woman who knew Sandy, but didn’t want to get involved. “I can’t give you the name,” Marie whispered. “I promised to keep her out of it. She’s afraid of the Dunns.” Laura had heard about this alleged meeting before, too, and knew it never happened. The rumor mill had confused Kevin Knutson, the financial planner who met the Dunns on Sandy’s last day, with a lawyer.

  As Marie continued to pass on other such revelations, it gradually became clear to Laura that she was incorporating into her story all sorts of things that other witnesses in the case had said. One minute, she parroted a neighbor of the Dunns who claimed to have heard a loud argument between Sandy and Pat, from which Sandy drove off in an angry, erratic fashion, two days before she disappeared. Marie and this neighbor had apparently compared notes at length. Then Marie quoted something Kate Rosenlieb had said, about seeing a small cut on one of Sandy’s shins several months before she disappeared, which Sandy supposedly blamed on Pat.17 Moments later, she repeated something that Pat DeMond had told sheriff’s detectives about Sandy’s sister Nanette, who was challenging Sandy’s will and trying to leave Pat Dunn penniless by taking over the estate. (DeMond was a paralegal by trade; she worked for the sister’s attorney even as she lobbied law-enforcement officials from her city council position to prosecute Pat Dunn.) As Marie spoke, it suddenly dawned on Laura that the prosecution’s witnesses might all be talking to one another, sharing information and recollections. And Marie—consciously or unconsciously—was beginning to repeat other witnesses’ information as if it were her own. Could that be how this story of seeing Sandy in the street evolved? Was it a gradual merging of the events Marie had actually witnessed with other stories she had heard over a period of months, until Marie herself couldn’t be sure which was which?

  Laura asked Marie to go over once again her last conversation with Sandy, and Marie happily obliged. “Sandy was crying . . . and she says, ‘Oh, Marie, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a terrible mistake.’ ” This much Laura had heard before—the mistake in marriage Marie had previously mentioned. But then came the inevitable new revelation: “Because when she met Pat, Sandy had told me, ‘Oh, I met a guy, he’s in real estate, he has holdings out of town, la-di-da. And, you know, he wouldn’t be after my money.’ ”

  Laura put her teacup down and listened intently. Marie, she felt certain, was about to disclose something crucial.

  “And she said, ‘I made a mistake. He told me he had money, he told me he had holdings out of town. But he doesn’t. He lied.’ ”

  There it is, Laura thought to herself. Gotcha.

  Marie continued speaking, reliving the moment, oblivious to Laura’s intent gaze. “And she said, ‘He’s after me all the time, let’s do this, let’s do that . . . He says he don’t like tightwads and pennypinchers.’ ”18

  Laura and Marie talked a good half hour more after that, but Laura had everything she needed, relaxing, putting her notepad down, just chatting. The subject changed, with Marie reminiscing about how she met her husband, how happy they
had been until the day he died, and how she later dumped a would-be second mate for cheating on her even as he proposed marriage. Laura nodded and smiled, and Marie rambled, a lonely woman happy for the company of someone who actually listened. She even offered to take Laura out to dinner, but Laura only half heard, for she kept thinking about Marie’s account of Sandy’s last words, this image of a doomed woman talking so fast she could hardly be understood, describing a husband who lied about his own riches while coveting his wife’s money and real estate, who couldn’t wait to get his hands on Sandy’s wealth and spend it.

  Marie Gates had never said any of this to the authorities—or at least if she had, they weren’t admitting it. For that man Marie described couldn’t possibly be Patrick O. Dunn, Laura knew. Pat had never claimed to have any wealth when he met Sandy. He was a retired school principal with a marginal foreclosure business. And, at Sandy’s urging, he had even shut down that business while recovering from appendicitis. Sandy had paid for the operation, twenty thousand in cash. Later, during discussions with their financial planner, Pat candidly announced, “I don’t have any assets of my own,” at which Sandy had shown no surprise, no anger, no reaction at all. Clearly, then, Sandy had no illusions about Pat’s net worth. She well knew who had the money in the Dunn family, and had known it all along.

  Yet Marie wasn’t totally wrong, either, Laura knew: Sandy once did have a husband whom she accused of misrepresenting his financial worth and of wanting to spend her money on luxuries and get-rich schemes. She once did have a marriage that she often described as a mistake—and a husband she considered a con man. But it was her second husband, Leon, she had always described in this way. Not Pat.

  Somehow, Marie had gotten the two confused, Laura decided. She saw no other explanation. The statements Marie remembered Sandy uttering made no sense unless applied to Leon rather than Pat. They clearly matched up with a husband Sandy had dumped in a hurry after finding out he was not what he claimed be—not Pat, to whom she had been married for five years. Even the way Marie quoted Sandy—talking about “my husband” and “his girl,” rather than naming them as Pat and Jennifer—fit perfectly. Placed in this light, all the contradictions made sense. Laura never really believed Marie would simply fabricate this encounter with Sandy, no matter how much Marie might have hated Pat Dunn. It was much easier to believe that, over the past several months, Marie, in her desire to help and see justice done, might simply have confused some earlier conversation with Sandy about the failings of her second husband. Because Marie never knew about Leon, she could easily have thought Sandy was talking about Pat. Laura couldn’t wait to get back to her motel room to dash off a memo to Pat’s lawyer.

  She quickly wrapped up the interview, stowing her tape recorder and her notebook, and gently begged off Marie’s invitation to dinner, saying, “Oh, I didn’t realize how late it was.” As Marie walked her to the door, she again declared that she loved Laura like a daughter. “I can see the goodness in you, dear,” she said.

  Laura started to smile at this endearment, but then her expression froze in place as she saw the older woman’s eyes go cold and her mouth become a thin, white line. “But that man you’re working for is as guilty as sin, and I hope he fries,” Marie spat. “And I’ll do anything I can to see that he does.”19

  Laura felt her stomach lurch, for it seemed like another person had replaced the kindly old lady. Some might argue Laura had simply witnessed the reaction of a woman who, understandably, hated the killer of a friend and wanted justice done. But to Laura, something else had peeked out from behind Marie’s saintly mask, just for a moment, and caused her to wonder anew about all of the inconsistencies and evolutions in the woman’s story she had been ready to dismiss as honest errors or the haze of old age. And, even beyond that, there was something else, something less obvious and more fundamental, that ran through everything this woman had said about Pat and Sandy and her knowledge of them. Laura couldn’t put her finger on it, but she knew it would be vital to the case. She shivered, though it was still very hot outside.

  Then the moment passed. The warm smile was back in place on Marie Gates’ face. The plate of sugar cookies was being waved under Laura’s nose and the kindly grandmother to every kid on the block was asking, “Would you like to take some with you, darlin’?” Laura shook her head, forcing a smile, resisting the urge to bolt. This interview would haunt her for the rest of her time in Bakersfield, as would the fear that nothing she encountered in this case was what it appeared to be on the surface.

  This was truer of Marie Gates than Laura ever realized. She had made an important discovery—but the full significance of what Marie told her that day would continue to elude her.

  5

  FOR THE POLICE, A MURDER CASE INEVITABLY BEGINS with a body. Even the Dunn case started that way—though in Sandy’s case, it started with a missing body. For private investigators, however, the process begins very differently, starting where the police work ends: with the “Murder Book.”

  The Murder Book is the compendium of all the police reports assembled over the course of a homicide case. It can run several inches thick, providing a detailed road map of how the police assembled their case, charting the path taken from suspicion to evidence to arrest. Murder Books can be dry or compelling, depending on the authors, and though they use jargon and official terms to evoke an air of objectivity, they are anything but unbiased. They often begin with a suspect, and the separate reports that make up its chapters reflect the slow accumulation of evidence and witnesses in support of the detective’s theories about that suspect. Witnesses like Marie Gates, who help the case, are given prominent roles. Witnesses who tend to disprove the detective’s suspicions are often minimized or disregarded as irrelevant, mistaken or liars. They often are barely mentioned in the police reports, if at all, and of course these unexplored avenues, deemed fruitless by the authorities, are gold mines for people like Laura Lawhon. In them lie the seeds of a defense.

  The murder book Laura picked up detailing the disappearance and death of Alexandra Paola Dunn read with the usual air of inevitability, as if a veritable evidentiary juggernaut had led police to lay this terrible crime at Pat Dunn’s door. That is, they read that way once she had pieced together the jumbled stack of reports and files retrieved from the DA’s office, more than a thousand pages handed over out of order and in disarray. Laura felt certain they had been shuffled purposely. The laws of legal discovery require the government to turn over all pertinent information to the defense before trial (there are no Perry Mason moments in today’s courtrooms, at least when the attorneys are behaving ethically), but those laws do not require the information to be given in any particular order. Indeed, some appeals courts have sanctioned the tactic of burying evidence valuable for the defense inside tens of thousands of pages of useless material, where it might never be found or recognized. The mess was not so big in the Dunn case, however, and Laura didn’t really mind anyway: She enjoyed the process of assembling the raw reports herself, putting them into large, white plastic binders, in chronological order and cross-referenced with a master witness list, almost like a cast of characters at the beginning of a playbill. There was no point in getting upset about the jumble—the defense handed over its own disclosures in just as messy a fashion. It was all part of the game.

  Before interviewing any witnesses or even the client himself, Laura had read and reread the Murder Book. She had never seen anything quite like the Dunn investigation—a missing-persons case in which no one looked for the missing person and everyone seemed to assume the husband was a murderer long before any evidence of a murder actually surfaced. Even reports that Sandy had been spotted roaming around various parts of Kern County, looking disheveled and disoriented, had been largely ignored—dutifully recorded in the police reports, but seldom pursued in any meaningful way by detectives on the case, who already had decided Sandy was dead long before her body had been identified. One of these sightings was made just three days a
fter Sandy disappeared—a time when the coroner who later performed the autopsy on her shriveled corpse conceded she might still have been alive. But the sheriff never followed up on it.

  Now Laura was racing the calendar, with a mere six weeks remaining to match and counter the accusations leveled in the Murder Book. Marie Gates offered some promising, if confusing, avenues to explore. But there were so many other leads that Laura wasn’t sure where to begin. She had come to the case late and she feared that she might not be able to do it justice. Everything took time, too much of it: To thoroughly discredit a single, seemingly convincing witness like Marie Gates would require days of work and interviews with at least a half dozen people who could gainsay various bits and pieces of her story—one person to say Sandy did in fact walk at night, another to describe her marriage to Leon and to authenticate the divorce papers, yet another to say no, Sandy and Marie Gates weren’t close friends at all. And assembling all that didn’t begin to address the strategic problem of packaging the resulting jigsaw of witnesses and information into a palatable, easy-to-understand presentation for jurors who would want very much to believe Marie Gates. And Marie was only one witness. The same complex recipe would have to be assembled to combat each and every major prosecution witness.

  Even assuming she succeeded in amassing all that information, Laura did not feel confident. She kept hearing things around the courthouse, from a local private investigator she had run into and who had briefly worked on the Dunn case. “He may be innocent,” the other PI, Susan Penninger, had said. “But in Kern County, that’s not always enough.”

  Penninger possessed a wealth of experience with Bakersfield’s justice system and some of its most controversial cases, including working with Stan Simrin to unravel the Nokes molestation-ring case. “You know, I still write letters to a guy doing life in prison, and I know he’s innocent,” she said. “I know it. And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”