Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  Anywhere else, Laura thought, the evidence in Pat’s favor would probably be more than enough to carry the day. But what she had learned about the Offord Rollins conviction had shaken her. It didn’t shock her that jurors and prosecutors might misbehave in a criminal trial—that happened, and far more often than anyone liked to admit. What horrified Laura was that when the misconduct was revealed, the Kern County justice system ignored it, dismissed it, said it didn’t matter, even rewarded it. If there had been errors, they had been harmless errors, judges ruled after extensive hearings. The end, it seemed to Laura, justified the means.

  Of course, Laura kept telling herself, there had been at least some tangible evidence in the Rollins case: fibers, plants, a car seen leaving the scene. You could touch them, hold them, argue over their significance—bits and pieces, however ambiguous, that a reasonable person could rely upon in declaring Offord Rollins a murderer. You didn’t have to agree with that conclusion to understand it.

  There was no such tangible evidence against Pat. It just wasn’t there. Yet here they were, with trial fast approaching, and Laura couldn’t shake the feeling that it was going to get worse, not better, even as the rest of the defense team brimmed with confidence.

  She could understand why they felt confident. For reasons large and small, it appeared they were in good shape. There was more than just Gary Coble’s willingness to testify, more, even, than the witnesses who swore Jerry Coble had cased Pat Dunn’s house weeks after Sandy disappeared. Laura had found reasons to challenge the veracity of the whole investigation into Sandy’s murder. Several witnesses she had contacted complained that homicide Detective John Soliz’s memory was faulty, that he had gotten times, dates and facts wrong in his reports, and that damning conclusions about Pat had been drawn from this erroneous information.

  As Laura saw it, such mistakes always seemed to be to Pat’s detriment. Typical was one of the detective’s reports concerning his interview with Sandy’s investment counselor, Roger Norwood. According to Soliz’s report on Norwood, “Alexandra Dunn told him she did not wish for anyone else, in particular Pat Dunn, to know what her investments were and what they were worth.” This fit nicely into the prosecution’s theory of motive: If Sandy had put a wall between Pat and her fortune, then the only way he could get to that money was to kill her.

  It fit—but it was untrue. “It’s absurd. Not only did I never say that,” the graying, sixty-three-year-old Norwood told Laura when she showed him the report, “it’s absolutely not true. Pat would sit in on meetings, he’d have input on the accounts, he even selected the fund manager for one account. There were no secrets.” Norwood, who remembered Sandy fondly and said he would never do anything to protect her killer, even if it was Pat, insisted Sandy never expressed any such desire. “She was charming. She had that New York accent, never lost it, and always called me ‘Rajah dahling,’ ” he said, mimicking the actress Zsa Zsa Gabor. “But that detective is trying to put words in my mouth. I have nothing bad to say about Pat Dunn.”44

  Soliz, Laura found, had gotten it wrong. With a few scratches of his pen, he had made it appear that Sandy wanted Pat kept away from her money right up to the time of her death, when in fact, the opposite was true. Another investment broker—Norwood’s predecessor in handling Sandy’s accounts at Merrill Lynch—had told Soliz Sandy had wanted Pat kept in the dark about her finances. But that counselor had stopped handling Sandy’s accounts in 1988, about a year after Pat and Sandy got married, at a time when Sandy was still reeling from her difficult experiences with her second husband, Leon. The secrecy, if it existed at all, ended years ago, yet Soliz seemed to be putting the old broker’s words in Norwood’s mouth.45

  The detective also attributed to Norwood an even more damning remark. According to Soliz’s report, a few days after Sandy’s disappearance, Pat tried to get the investment counselor to send him a quarter of a million dollars from Sandy’s bond account—without ever mentioning the fact that Sandy had vanished.

  This made Pat out to be a looter of Sandy’s accounts, but the truth was, as Norwood explained it to Laura, that Pat and Sandy had asked him to sell off some of her bonds to pay bills on the Dunns’ Morning Star housing project. Norwood did just that. But Sandy disappeared before a check could be cut. As for the phone conversation, it was Norwood who called Pat—to express his condolences over Sandy’s disappearance. There was no attempt by Pat to hide the news about Sandy, Norwood recalled. To him, Pat sounded extremely upset about his wife. During the conversation, Norwood explained to Pat that he had liquidated the bonds, but that he couldn’t release the funds without a signature from Sandy. Pat, Norwood told Laura, said he understood. There was no wheedling, no anger.

  “He was in agony over ‘Momma’s’ disappearance,” Norwood stated. “Just devastated.” Yet Soliz wrote in his report that Norwood “got the impression Pat Dunn was more concerned about the progress of the Morning Star project than he was about the disappearance of his wife.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Norwood responded when Laura asked him about it. If Pat truly were interested only in getting his hands on that quarter of a million dollars, he could have waited a few days until Sandy signed for the check and deposited it in their joint account. Then he really would have had access to the money—and a motive for murder. But not before the check came in.

  Likewise, Detective Soliz apparently misquoted Kevin Knutson, the financial planner who met with the Dunns on the afternoon of Sandy’s disappearance to discuss a living trust that would grant Pat more control over the couple’s finances. According to Soliz’s report, Pat Dunn told Knutson that he had zero assets—meaning he was entirely dependent on Sandy’s money at the time of her death. But according to the defense team’s interview with Knutson, what Pat really said was that, after his divorce from his first wife, he brought zero assets to his marriage with Sandy—five years earlier. Since then, Pat had made plenty of money through his mortgage-foreclosure business. Soliz also wrote in his report that Knutson recalled a surprised look on Pat’s face when Sandy announced he was the sole heir named in her will, as if Pat had just learned of it for the first time. In the prosecution’s theory of the case, this could have become the triggering event for murder. But Knutson later said the detective once more was mistaken: Knutson said he told Soliz that he had no idea if Pat was surprised by the will or not. Again, a witness had claimed the detective twisted information to make Pat look bad, and then used that incorrect information to obtain search warrants from the court and, ultimately, an indictment from the DA.

  Then there was the matter of Sandy’s mental state. Throughout the investigation, Detective Soliz and his colleagues at the sheriff’s department insisted that no one who knew Sandy well had seen her exhibit any symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease or memory loss. Pat’s talk of memory impairment was a lie, a cover story, they believed. The district attorney adopted this theory, but its architect was Detective Soliz. His initial report on the case stated that a main “cloud of suspicion” over Dunn was the fact that everyone contacted, other than Pat, proclaimed Sandy sharp as a tack, with no memory problems. Soliz repeated this contention in a sworn affidavit filed in court to obtain the search warrant for Pat Dunn’s home.

  But in reading the reports, Laura saw immediately that Soliz was misstating the evidence in this instance, too. While it was true that most of Sandy’s acquaintances said they noticed no memory or mental problems, the sheriff’s own Murder Book quoted others suggesting that Pat might be right, that Sandy had become extremely forgetful and at times acted erratically. Pat’s daughter, Jennifer, and a friend whose husband worked for the Dunns both attested to this. A banker recalled Sandy once forgot how to sign her name correctly. Then there was the accountant’s secretary, Ann Kidder, who recounted the phone conversation with Sandy on the morning after she disappeared, in which Sandy babbled and ranted about the Indians coming down from the hills and how her husband hated to wear clothes. All of this information had been in hand whe
n Soliz claimed in his reports and affidavits that no one had seen any memory or mental problems in Sandy Dunn. And on top of those statements, Laura had found at least three other witnesses who saw Sandy experiencing mental or memory problems at times—people readily available to the detective, including a local television reporter, City Planning Commissioner Jim Marino, and the wife of the Dunns’ handyman.

  It went on and on, it seemed. The Dunns’ architect, a city council member and other witnesses contacted by the police all said they had been misquoted when Laura showed them what they supposedly said to Detective Soliz. Even Kate Rosenlieb would later say the detectives had incorrectly attributed statements to her.

  Then there was Cynthia Montes, the Dunns’ housekeeper, who spent one full day per week cleaning for Pat and Sandy. She, too, appeared to be a key witness for the prosecution—in Soliz’s reports. Those reports had Montes telephoning the Dunns at 5 A.M. on Wednesday, July 1, just hours after Sandy disappeared, to confirm a cleaning appointment early that same morning. Pat answered the phone, sounding out of breath; Montes heard the shower running in the background. He told her not to come because of an appointment they had that day. Montes said this exchange was most unusual, because every other time she called, Sandy or the answering machine picked up. Never Pat. And even more suspicious than that, Montes said, was that Pat never mentioned Sandy being missing when he rescheduled the cleaning time.

  What Soliz and the prosecution made of all this was clear: They attributed Pat’s being out of breath to his having just returned from carting a body, digging a grave and making the one-hundred-twenty-mile round trip to Sandy’s burial site. The water was running in the background because he had been cleaning up the bloody mess his deed had left behind.

  It sounded impressive, except, once more, there were indications that the witness’s account and Soliz’s report might not quite match up. Montes told Laura’s boss, the investigator David Sandberg, that there had indeed been a change in the regular cleaning schedule around the time of Sandy’s disappearance—that much, at least, was correct. Montes said she usually went to the Dunns’ on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, but that week Sandy asked her specifically to come on Tuesday, June 30, at 5 A.M., a much earlier hour in the morning than usual. Montes would have to work around “a very important appointment” the Dunns had at about eleven that morning, she recalled. She was to start in the den, where the meeting was to occur, then clean other parts of the house after the Dunns’ appointment had begun. This rescheduling had been discussed with Montes at least a week in advance, she said; either Soliz reported this incorrectly, or Montes had simply forgotten it during her interview with the homicide detective. In any case, Laura felt sure the “important appointment” had to be a reference to Kevin Knutson’s visit—which took place on Tuesday, June 30, before Sandy disappeared. So the fact that Pat answered the phone out of breath and with the water running that Tuesday morning, and that he canceled Montes’ house-cleaning visit, meant nothing: Sandy was quite alive at the time. It only became significant if the day of this call was moved forward to Wednesday, July 1—as it was in Soliz’s report.

  When this discrepancy was pointed out to Montes, she amended her story and told Sandberg the day must have been Wednesday after all, the morning after Sandy vanished. This must be so, Montes said, because she and “John,” as she referred to Detective Soliz, had talked things over and decided her recollections were crucial to the case. In other words, Laura thought, Montes would adjust her recollections to fit the prosecution’s theories.46

  Though such discoveries were victories for the defense, they left Laura all the more uneasy. The Kern County District Attorney’s Office had formed its theory of Pat’s motives based on such misinformation. But as had happened with Victor Perez and Offord Rollins, even with the errors exposed, the DA was sticking with the original theory, no matter how much Laura might discredit it. They were going with Detective Soliz’s version, even if their own witnesses later disputed it.

  There had been roadblocks thrown up as well, and Laura remained frustrated and in the dark about some aspects of the case. A few key witnesses refused to talk to her, Jerry Coble chief among them. Pat DeMond, the city councilwoman, reacted similarly. This was doubly troubling to the defense because DeMond, in her day job as a paralegal, was assisting Sandy’s sister in an attempt to wrest the estate away from Pat. DeMond left a terse message after Laura tried to contact her to arrange an interview: “I have nothing to say to you.” And Roger McIntosh, a well-connected Bakersfield engineer hired to work on the Dunns’ failed movie-theater development, would not talk to the defense team either. He had told Soliz that, during a meeting with the theater-project team, Pat ordered Sandy to shut up and sit down—a nasty confrontation that bolstered the prosecution’s contention that there were bad feelings between the Dunns. Laura badly wanted to ask him about it, and why, somehow, no one else at the meeting could recall this outburst by Pat.

  Most disappointing, though, was Kate Rosenlieb, Pat’s supposed closest friend. She would have nothing to do with his defense, even slammed the door in the face of one of Laura’s colleagues. She remained a troubling cipher to Laura, who wanted to understand why such a good friend had turned on Pat so completely, so quickly. But Pat couldn’t help. He still thought the world of her, and had no idea of the role she had played in his legal woes.

  As Pat’s trial approached, Laura’s inability to speak to these key prosecution witnesses increasingly gnawed at her. She knew she was missing something. She feared these witnesses might take the stand and reveal some terrible surprise for which the defense was not prepared, cinching the prosecution’s case and sending Pat Dunn reeling toward prison despite all the work done to unravel Jerry Lee Coble’s testimony and the credibility of the sheriff’s investigation.

  As it turned out, Laura’s instincts were correct—almost. But it wasn’t new revelations from these witnesses that, in the end, decided the case.

  It was what some of them were hiding.

  8

  AS LAURA LAWHON TRIED TO PIECE TOGETHER THE why behind The People of Kern County vs. Patrick O. Dunn, the entire justice system of Kern County was about to be shaken to its core. A series of very different, very high-profile cases was about to come unglued, cases far more troubled—and troubling—than Dunn’s, or Offord Rollins’, or any other single prosecution in and of itself. A legal earthquake was building silently in Kern County, still invisible and unfelt, another mystery just beyond Laura’s reach. She had heard hints of it, of course, but for the most part, the scandal that lay buried in Bakersfield’s past was still ripening for the future.

  When she finally learned of it, long after her work was done in Kern County, all the missing pieces seemed to fall into place for her. The Dunn case had not been one of a few isolated examples, Laura decided, but part of an avalanche. It turned out there had been dozens, even hundreds, of innocent people harmed by blind investigative and prosecutorial zeal in Kern County. The examples were legion: On an almost unimaginable scale, evidence had been manufactured, witnesses coerced, facts twisted beyond recognition to fit government theories, evidence of innocence kept hidden from those accused and tried. Cops, prosecutors and social workers had taken as gospel truth the most outrageous—and easily disproven—allegations of child molestation conspiracies, devil worship, human sacrifice and ritual murder, ruining untold lives in the process of their extraordinary, misguided investigation. The acts of official misconduct ended up filling hundreds of pages of judicial opinion, with the largest criminal investigation in Kern County history thoroughly discredited.

  As far as the courts were concerned, however, none of this had anything to do with Pat’s case, and yet to Laura, it had everything to do with it. Understanding the justice system in this place—and the injustice it could produce and condone—was not possible without acknowledging these revelations. For they pointed to an official mind-set that, Laura would decide, in the end made Pat’s conviction as inevitable as the t
ides. Everything that troubled Laura about the Dunn case—and much, much worse—had already been endured, many times over, in the Witch Hunt cases. And for the longest time—fourteen years—it seemed no one cared a whit.

  • • •

  The events that triggered the Bakersfield Witch Hunt occurred in January 1980, when Pat Dunn was still a school principal and Sandy was still Pat Paola’s trophy wife. It started in a neighboring county, where the authorities eventually dropped the case for lack of evidence—a telling detail all but forgotten in the maelstrom of events that followed.

  It started small, as such things often do, with a little girl named Jenny McCuan, and an obsessed woman named Mary Ann Barbour.

  Jenny was six then, a precocious and bright child, as was her three-year-old sister, Jane.47 They were the seemingly normal kids of seemingly normal parents living in a nondescript Bakersfield tract home. Alvin McCuan was a railroad worker. His wife, Debbie, fifteen when she married Alvin shortly before Jenny’s birth, ran a day-care center at her home. It was licensed and regularly inspected by the Kern County welfare department, and nothing untoward was ever observed by authorities, parents or children who attended. The McCuan children played with the other neighborhood boys and girls; Jenny did well in school, where her teachers noticed nothing unusual about her at all.

  But after a visit to her grandparents’ home in San Luis Obispo County on the Central California coast, Jenny complained that her Granddad Rod Phelps—Debbie McCuan’s stepfather—had fondled her sexually. She made this complaint not to her own parents, but during a visit with her “stepgrandmother,” a troubled thirty-seven-year-old woman named Mary Ann Barbour. Mary Ann was the wife of Gene Barbour, Debbie McCuan’s second stepfather, and though she was not actually related by marriage or blood, Jenny and Jane considered Mary Ann a grandparent. The girls often visited and stayed overnight at the Barbour house.