by Edward Humes
This paled, however, next to the detective’s interview of Maria’s mother, Miriam, which had been accomplished with the translating help of her “son-in-law,” Victor Perez. First, it turned out Victor was not Miriam’s son-in-law, but her eldest daughter, Marisol’s, former live-in boyfriend. He had been arrested and jailed repeatedly for beating Marisol, as well as for a variety of other crimes. Marisol had eventually dumped Victor and moved in with one of the Shafter policemen who had investigated him for domestic abuse. Victor, meanwhile, stayed on living with Miriam, a curious arrangement made all the stranger by the fact that Maria had told several friends and one teacher that she despised and feared the man, and that she kept a heavy stick under her bed to fend off his unwanted advances. That the Kern County Sheriff’s homicide detectives would press such a man into service as a translator of key information was unfortunate enough, but still more surprising was the fact that they seemingly never considered him a potential suspect in Maria’s murder, even after learning of his background and history of violence. Once they had focused on Offord as their suspect, investigators appeared reluctant to do anything that might undermine their case—such as suggest there might be an alternative suspect.
Moreover, beyond questions about Victor’s character, was the simple fact that virtually all of the information Detective Raymond gleaned that first crucial day from Victor’s supposed translation was wrong. Raymond had come away from that interview with an image of Offord as a jealous suitor angry at Maria’s relationship with another boy. In fact, Offord and Maria were not “going steady,” as Victor claimed, nor were they quarreling over her other boyfriends. The truth was, they had not seen each other for several months. And it was Offord, not Maria, who had another girlfriend and wanted to distance himself from the relationship. If anyone was obsessed, it had been Maria, who pursued Offord whenever possible, doodled his name and “I love you Offord” all over her schoolbooks and calendars, and who had page after page written out with variations of her own name were she to marry Offord, along with a list of prospective names for their children. She had other boyfriends and lovers, but Offord was her first choice. Victor revealed none of this to the police.
Victor had also told police that Offord called that last morning and arranged to meet Maria in a park across the street. The only completely accurate part of this statement was that Maria did receive a phone call in the morning from someone, and she did, in fact, go to the park, saying she was meeting Offord. But this was something she often claimed, sometimes falsely, to get permission to go out, because her mother trusted Offord more than any of her other friends.31 No one actually heard Offord on the phone that day or saw Maria with him that morning at the park. (One member of the Rodriguez household said the caller identified himself as “Dre,” short for Andre, a friend of Offord’s.) A friend of Maria’s who was walking by at the time saw her sitting on a bench in the park—talking to a woman. Later, as the friend returned from the store, he saw that Maria was sitting by herself. She got up and announced that she was going to walk to someone’s house, turning down an offer of a ride from the friend, who then watched Maria walk off alone.32 She had not met Offord in the park, as Victor had said: Whoever Maria saw between ten that morning and the time of her death was unknown.
But the biggest whopper by far was the statement by Victor that Maria’s Aunt Lucy had seen the girl with Offord in a maroon car on the night of her disappearance. When contacted, Aunt Lucy said she saw no such thing, and she didn’t know what Victor was talking about. Not that this mattered—a host of witnesses had accounted for Offord’s whereabouts that day, and had done so for all but a two-and-a-half-hour period between noon and 2:30 that afternoon (which is why it was so important to the prosecution case that the fresh, wet blood some people observed at the scene suddenly became hard, dry blood in police reports—the murder, originally thought to have occurred at night, must have happened in the drying heat of day if Offord had done it). Offord could prove he was more than one hundred miles away in Los Angeles when Victor said he was riding around with Maria.
The parallels to the Dunn case were obvious to Laura—the misinformation Kate Rosenlieb provided at the outset that made Pat Dunn a prime suspect bore a striking resemblance to Victor Perez’s role in the Rollins case. Like Rosenlieb, Victor was the first witness to raise suspicions about Offord Rollins by suggesting he had both motive and opportunity to kill. And, as with Rosenlieb, virtually everything of significance Victor told the police that first crucial day was wrong. Maria’s mother eventually denied saying any of what Victor attributed to her. Whether it was bad translation, unintended error, or outright lying by Victor, no one could say. All Laura knew for sure was that bad information from Victor Perez, who might otherwise have been considered a potential suspect, had made it a certainty that the sheriff’s department would go after Offord Rollins. And, as with Pat Dunn, they never looked back.
• • •
That the investigative shortcomings of the Offord Rollins case might mirror those in Pat Dunn’s did not concern Laura so much. Indeed, they served only to confirm that she was on the right track in her own investigation. It was the Rollins trial that terrified her, for it seemed there was nothing the young man’s defenders could do in the face of the relentless prosecutor intent on putting him away, or the jury and judge seemingly willing, even eager, to help achieve that goal.
No doubt the prosecutor felt she had to be ruthless, Laura thought, for the problems facing her in the Rollins case appeared considerable. The evidence against Rollins was far from overwhelming, which would not be such a problem if the defendant were some disreputable career criminal, but which did pose difficulties with Offord, with his sterling reputation as a student, athlete and churchgoer in his small Kern County town of Wasco. The eldest son of a respiratory therapist and a utility-company executive, Rollins was a star high school football player and track champion in the triple jump, an event in which he ranked third in the nation and had a realistic shot at making the United States Olympic team. He was more than just well liked around town—the school superintendent let him date his daughter, and he had a long line of school administrators, teachers, coaches and ministers lined up to attest to his good character. He was the kind of kid who was profiled in heartwarming stories in the Wasco weekly newspaper, a class president who had overcome dyslexia to earn passable-to-good grades, who had tempered his legs into iron rods capable of immense jumps, who had never been in trouble with the law in his life.
He was not the perfect teenager, by any means—he somewhat cynically used Maria Rodriguez for sex while going steady with another girl he liked much better but didn’t sleep with. And he wrote some truly bad, amateurish rap lyrics with his friend Andre Harrison, creating a notebook full of crude, sexist and violent images that emulated the misogynous music popular with so many of his friends, and which he hoped might earn him a little money someday. But none of this made him all that different from other teenagers at Wasco High School, where sex often became a contest and where rap music blared from boom boxes in the school yard.
In a case with ambiguous physical evidence, no witnesses and no apparent motive, the accolades Offord received, coupled with his reputation, might have tilted matters in his favor at trial. But the assistant DA on the case, a successful and aggressive career prosecutor named Lisa Green, had something extra to work with when the case came to trial: she had a defendant who was black and a victim who was not—and she had an all-white Kern County jury in the box, having systematically excluded the already disproportionately small number of blacks summoned that day for jury service.33
As Rollins’ defenders saw it, long before pundits commenting on the O.J. Simpson murder trial popularized the term, Green expertly played the “race card,” thereby tipping the scales in her favor. Through the course of a month-long trial held just two months before Sandy Dunn vanished, Green portrayed Rollins as a sexual savage who got his kicks from exhibitionism, sodomy, extreme promiscuity and
copulating on his own mother’s bed—though there was no evidence to support any of this beyond the prosecutor’s own loaded questions to Rollins and other witnesses in the case.34 Isn’t it true, Green asked a friend of Rollins, that he let you watch him have sex with the victim? That he did it where his mother slept? She asked such questions knowing the answers would be no—as they had been at pretrial hearings—yet equally aware that the mere asking would leave an indelible impression on the jury.35 The audacity of the tactic spoke volumes to Laura about what the defense might be up against in Pat’s trial.
Indeed, the DA’s office had attacked Offord’s character and sexual proclivities from the start, long before the trial in this highly publicized case. It started even as Offord, still seventeen, began his case in juvenile court. To buttress the case for moving him into adult court, the assistant DA on the case—a prosecutor who preceded Green—argued that Rollins’ crime was particularly sophisticated and heinous because he raped and sodomized Maria before murdering her. Rape was the motive for murder, it was argued, probably because Offord got angry when Maria refused his request to have anal sex. The judge happily moved the teenager into adult court. Problem was, the DA’s office at that time had in hand an autopsy report showing Maria had not been raped. Furthermore, the autopsy revealed she had regularly engaged in anal sex for months, if not years, but that she had not done so for at least twenty-four hours prior to her murder. The DA’s office revealed this information and dismissed the rape and sodomy charges only after winning Offord’s transfer to adult court—and after the incendiary allegations had been thoroughly reported in the news media.36
Once Rollins’ trial started, the prosecution came up with a new theory. It was suggested that Maria, obsessed with rekindling a failed relationship, bothered Offord too much. So he decided to eliminate her. There was absolutely no evidence to support this—indeed, Maria’s own journals and writings indicated that, while she still loved Offord, she also pursued sexual relationships with a number of other men in the weeks and months before she died. There was not a shred of evidence or testimony that Offord had ever exhibited or expressed any anger toward Maria.
Although the prosecution’s theory of motive in the case had totally changed, Deputy DA Green kept asking witnesses at trial if Rollins liked having anal sex, hammering on a point no longer relevant to the case. Many of the jurors undoubtedly considered sodomy both distasteful and immoral, and repeated allusions to it allowed Green to score points as Offord squirmed in embarrassment. Even the judge got in on the act, asking a lascivious question of his own about what sorts of acts of “penetration” Offord and his new girlfriend enjoyed together.37
Green also used to similar effect some of the crude rap lyrics Rollins had written. Even though the judge had previously ruled most of them inadmissible, the jury was exposed to a broad selection of his songs. Green argued that one particular verse (“She wouldn’t let me go, so I slapped the ho”) out of more than a hundred pages of drivel, proved that Offord wanted to get rid of a clinging Maria. Nowhere in any of the raps is there any mention of Maria specifically, or any girl who resembles her, but the judge allowed this lyric to be used by the prosecution as evidence of motive. Other rap songs, however, were not supposed to be introduced, yet Green repeatedly recited some of Offord’s most obnoxious lyrics to the jury, including one proclaiming, “I’m the nigga of the ’hood. Damn, this is feeling good . . . I’m reaching my gold, direct a bullet to your sold.” The defense watched helplessly as the mostly white, middle-aged jurors recoiled.
The rap lyrics had made for potent ammunition from the start of the case, long before trial. A local newspaper obtained copies of Offord’s rap lyrics, apparently leaked by sheriff’s department sources. The paper described the raps as “sadistic scribblings,” “evil poetry,” and “fiendish jottings,” writing that “glorifies drug dealers, degrades women, and promotes violence.”38 (Leaks of negative—and even false—information about Pat Dunn would later emanate from the sheriff’s department as well once his case was pending.) Detective Randy Raymond was quoted at length in the article, which went on to explain how Offord’s writings gave “a look inside his head.” Green portrayed the writings in a similar way, as revolting revelations of a sick mind, as opposed to what Offord’s friends and defenders claimed them to be—childish attempts to imitate a phenomenally successful and popular form of music that no more revealed a propensity for violence in Rollins than a Stephen King horror novel betrayed a murderous nature in that author.
Green underscored her portrait of Offord as a violent sexual predator by eliciting inadmissible hearsay testimony from one witness, who recalled “someone” had said that Rollins might have had a gun at his house in the months before the murder—a statement the judge on the case never should have allowed.39
At the same time, Green successfully argued that the jury should not hear about other potential suspects in the case whom the defense wished to accuse, namely, Victor Perez. Perez’s incorrect information to police, his past violence against Maria’s sister, and the witnesses prepared to testify that Maria feared and hated Victor were not enough, Green reasoned: In addition to a possible motive and a propensity for violence, there had to be some evidence that Victor actually might have committed the murder as well. And that couldn’t be shown, Green said, because Victor had an airtight alibi. Miriam Rodriguez, Maria’s mother, said she was with Victor the entire day that Maria disappeared, the prosecutor asserted. The judge agreed: No mother would lie to cover for her daughter’s killer. So the jury never heard about Victor Perez.
There was just one problem. Long after the trial, it would become clear that Lisa Green had been mistaken: There was no such alibi. Miriam would swear that she went out alone to search for Maria when the girl failed to come home from the park that day, walking the streets for hours—without Victor. But Offord’s jury would never know that.
Finally, in closing arguments, the prosecutor employed a tried-and-true, yet devastating tactic: likening the defendant to infamous criminals. Green tried to seal the case against Rollins by casting his lot with child molesters, Charles Manson, Judas Iscariot (“On the night of the last supper, Judas would have had twelve of the best character witnesses in the world,” Green intoned), and, finally, the most notorious and threatening black athlete of the day, boxer Mike Tyson, who had recently been disgraced and sent to prison for rape (though he had not yet committed his most infamous act, trying to bite off the ear of an opponent during a prizefight). The analogy seemed clear: Rollins was just another black athlete out of control, a walking stereotype of rage, violence and promiscuity, committing unspeakable crimes with seeming impunity. Unable to offer evidence of a coherent motive for Rollins to have murdered Maria, the prosecutor turned him into a beast instead.
In an attempt to overcome these hardball tactics, Rollins’ attorney brought in several scientific experts, including David Faulkner, a nationally recognized pioneer in the new field of forensic entomology—the study of insect activity at crime scenes. The experts testified there was no way Maria could have died before sunset, a crucial contention of the prosecution, given that Green conceded Offord’s alibi for the late afternoon and evening. Her bloody body would have shown evidence of fly eggs and larvae if it had been left in the desert in the daytime, Faulkner told the jury. He even performed an experiment with the body of a dead pig at the murder scene that supported his conclusions—flies appeared in great numbers during the day, but not at all at night, because flies cannot see or navigate in darkness. The prosecution tried to rebut this testimony with its own expert, but the scientist brought in by the DA turned out to be an expert in mosquitoes, not flies, and even he ended up admitting that Maria’s body should have had fly eggs on it had she died when the prosecution claimed. Laura, like Susan Penninger before her, thought the defense presented an overwhelming case, offering the jury tangible evidence to weigh against what she regarded as mostly innuendo, speculation and personal attacks. Even if the j
urors were concerned by the fiber, plant and fingerprint evidence from the car and therefore were not convinced of Offord’s outright innocence, Laura figured, surely there were too many doubts to sustain a conviction.
But the jury felt otherwise. As his father wept and whispered, “This town is evil,” Offord was pronounced guilty of first-degree murder. The verdict left Laura wondering just what was needed to win an acquittal in Kern County. Could she do any better for Pat Dunn?
In the end, it seemed to Laura that the deck must have been stacked against Rollins, that there was a reason why an absence of flies just couldn’t compete with the fiendish jottings of a sodomizing Mike Tyson clone. And she was right. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the jury room, a juror named Gregory Piceno told his colleagues he was well acquainted with the crime scene, having worked on a nearby farm for fifty years. In violation of his sworn oath to consider only evidence presented in trial, Piceno told the other jurors that there could have been pesticides sprayed near the body, thereby explaining the absence of flies. The defense testimony—which included assurances that no pesticides had been sprayed near the murder scene—was all “a damn lie,” one fellow juror recalled Piceno saying during the trial.40 This other juror, an alternate who did not participate in deliberations, would later claim several other members of the jury busily violated their oaths throughout the trial as well, by discussing the evidence and pronouncing Offord guilty in private conversations long before all the evidence was in—despite the judge’s daily admonitions not to do so.
These allegations of jury misconduct came to light only after the trial had ended, and then, only because the alternate juror, aghast at the verdict, spoke up. Susan Penninger helped uncover this information and more—including new witnesses, one of whom had heard another man confess to killing Maria—but Judge Len McGillivray declared that the proceedings had been fair and just. The alternate juror could not be believed, McGillivray decided, while accepting the other jurors’ denials of any misconduct41 In a courtroom with eleven armed guards posted inside because Kern County officials were alarmed about protesters—mostly black—converging on the courthouse, Judge McGillivray announced that Offord Rollins’ conviction would stand.
