Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  “Don’t worry, Pat,” Pohlson assured his client, who was as shaken by the mock cross-examination as the lawyers had been, reduced to a subdued silence by the ease with which his words had been twisted and used against him. “We’ve got the evidence on our side. We’re going to do far worse to Jerry Coble, and the rest will take care of itself. We don’t need to roll the dice by putting you on the stand.”

  But with Laura, Pohlson was not so sanguine. He knew about the disaster with Stan Simrin and the last-minute phone call to Detective Soliz, and he worried that Pat might again do something foolish in his desperation. “You’ve got to help me keep him under control,” Pohlson told Laura. “If anyone can lose this case for us, it’s Pat Dunn himself.”

  • • •

  Laura did not see Pat’s poor performance as a witness as evidence of his guilt. On the contrary, it reassured her in an odd way: She told herself there was no way this man could also be the clever, meticulous killer prosecutors made him out to be, capable of eliminating every bit of physical evidence from a violent, bloody murder. She knew the pressure on Pat to be enormous: The deputy district attorney assigned to the case, John Somers, one of Kern County’s top prosecutors, kept waffling on the question of the death penalty for Pat, a subject known to weigh heavily on the calmest of men. It was not until February 23—with the trial scheduled to begin March 10—that Somers finally announced he would not ask the jury to execute Pat Dunn. Life in prison, without possibility of parole, would be the worst Pat could get.

  Pat had not borne up well under this pressure. His letters and calls to Laura and Pohlson remained a constant barrage, increasingly shrill, a continual distraction for the defense team and a source of additional frustration for Pat, as no one had the time to deal with his innumerable requests, suggestions and demands. Jailhouse lawyers were giving him advice, suggesting legal motions to file. He had become his own worst enemy, it seemed, stewing in his helplessness and only adding to his predicament. He was never nasty about it, just desperate. Laura had given him her phone number and told him to call anytime, particularly if the urge to talk was leading him to speak to fellow inmates, one of the defense team’s greatest fears. He was soon on a first-name basis with Wayne Lawhon, who did not have the heart to turn down the constant collect calls. It was Laura’s job to baby-sit Pat through these tough times.

  The “Pat Problem,” as Laura came to refer to it, had started soon after he was arrested and taken into custody. At that point, he already had become embroiled in a dispute with Nanette Petrillo, Sandy’s estranged sister, who had flown to Bakersfield for the first time in years after Detective Soliz called her with the news that Sandy’s body had been identified. Nanette had visited briefly with Pat, accompanied him when Sandy’s ashes were cast over the Morning Star project site, and then sent him a cordial, if cold, letter thanking him for his kindness and expressing an interest in obtaining only the possessions Sandy had inherited from their late mother. She particularly wanted her mother’s jewelry and crystal. During her visit, Pat had given Nanette a jeweled dragon pin that had been her mother’s and promised she could have the other jewelry as well. But Pat had been angered by Nanette’s letter. It suggested Sandy had somehow acted improperly or taken advantage of their mother in moving her to California and becoming her sole heir. Sandy had always told Pat she had all but rescued her mother and that Nanette had been the problem, but the letter disputed this. All Pat knew for sure was that he could only recall one telephone conversation between Sandy and Nanette in the past six years, and it did not go well. “She made Mom cry,” he told Laura. “I didn’t like that.” Still, he had tried to be civil, and Nanette’s letter seemed to reflect that as well by expressing hope that Pat would allow “my Mother’s original wishes [to] come to fruition,” so that Nanette and her children would receive the jewelry and crystal.

  “I wish you peace,” Nanette wrote in closing, “and thank you again.”

  Despite such sentiments, and unbeknownst to Pat, Nanette Petrillo by that time had already hired a private investigator and had expressed her suspicions of Pat to Detective Soliz—whom she had gone to see immediately after visiting Pat. “He was totally abnormal,” Nanette told the detective, showing no “remorse,” though he was calm and polite as could be. She and her husband also told Soliz that they thought Alexandra had been an alcoholic, although in a previous phone conversation, Nanette had told the detective Sandy didn’t drink and that she found it suspicious that Pat recalled Sandy having two glasses of wine before disappearing. If nothing else, the contradiction showed the siblings did not know each other very well. Still, Nanette did not hesitate to criticize her late sister, informing the detective that Sandy had been jealous of her, and physically and verbally abusive of their mother and probably abused Pat Paola as well.78

  Soon after speaking to Soliz Nanette retained a Bakersfield attorney, David Goldberg, who put his own private investigator on the case, looking for evidence to attack Sandy’s will and Pat’s control of the estate. Even without such evidence in hand. Nanette promptly filed suit to block Pat from inheriting anything and to remove him as executor. Nanette asked to be appointed executor instead, and she claimed entitlement to Sandy’s entire estate—not just her mother’s possessions. In her suit, Nanette claimed Pat had coerced Sandy into leaving everything to him. He supposedly insisted she write him into her will during an emotionally vulnerable time in her life—her pending divorce from her second husband. The allegation, coming from a woman who had barely spoken to Sandy in years and now sought to inherit her fortune, was provably false, as the attorney who had drawn up Sandy’s will knew there had been no coercion. The will’s language had been in place for seven years without Sandy once expressing any interest in changing it, not to mention the fact that, on the last day of her life, she told a financial planner she wanted to make it easier for Pat to inherit everything should she die. Everyone who knew Sandy and Pat—particularly during the early part of their marriage—saw quite clearly that Sandy was fully in command of her financial matters, with Pat providing input, but not the final say. There was no coercion.

  Still, the suit, combined with Pat’s arrest, served a purpose: It prevented Pat from paying his legal bills (or anything else) with money from Sandy’s estate. Even some of the assets that they jointly owned, like his antique-gun collection, were in limbo while he sat in jail. In effect, Pat was left nearly penniless. The Bakersfield Californian learned of Nanette Petrillo’s suit and ran a lengthy story about it, quoting the allegations that Pat was a gold-digging cad, but without checking with the attorney who had prepared the will to see if the allegations were true.79 Pat was apoplectic over the story, and then was floored a short time later when the same newspaper linked him to a woman named Diane Dunn-Gonzalez. This woman had been accused in probate court of using a position of trust to become the beneficiary of a mentally confused woman’s million-dollar trust fund. The newspaper informed all of Bakersfield that these were “allegations strikingly similar to ones brought against Dunn-Gonzalez’s brother, Patrick Dunn.”80

  Now Pat was not only a gold digger and murderer, he came from a family without scruples when it came to co-opting other people’s hard-earned money. There was only one problem: Pat Dunn and Diane Gonzalez were not related. They had never even met. However, a high-ranking source at the Kern County Sheriff’s Department had told a Californian reporter that the woman was Pat’s sister and that their two “schemes” were clearly identical. In so doing, investigators used the media against Pat, just as they had used it to disseminate negative and erroneous information about Offord Rollins and the molestation-ring defendants, a tried and true method of getting innuendo and damaging facts to potential jurors that would never be admissible in a courtroom. The sheriff’s investigators were happy to believe the false allegations about Sandy’s will—they, too, never bothered to check with Sandy’s probate lawyer or to verify the supposed sister-brother connection between Pat and Dunn-Gonzalez—as these tidbits pr
ovided more building blocks for their theory that Pat Dunn killed his wife for her money. Although the Californian ran a tiny correction about Pat’s relationship to Diane Gonzalez a few days later, the net effect of the sheriff’s department’s bogus tip was to paint an extremely negative public portrait of Pat through the press as the money-grubbing member of a money-grubbing, dishonest family. That this whole element of the prosecution’s case was shown to be untrue did nothing to subvert the official theory that Pat had been after Sandy’s money, an accusation Kern County authorities tried in the press long before bringing it to court.81

  Meanwhile, Pat, desperate to find money for his defense and hoping to make bail so that he could escape the oppressive environment of jail, did something he shouldn’t have. From his cell, shortly after his arrest, he wrote two massive checks totaling several hundred thousand dollars to his daughter, Jennifer, hoping that she would be able to cash them before he was removed as executor of Sandy’s estate. Instead, the checks were seized and entered into evidence against him. To Pat, he was just taking what belonged to him. But to the DA, those checks were tangible evidence of Pat Dunn’s avarice.

  Pat ended up raising money by selling Sandy’s jewelry, which he had hidden from authorities in a secret cache in the ceiling of the Dunns’ house before his arrest. His family retrieved it, and the fifty thousand dollars earned from the sales helped pay for Pat’s defense. It was a desperate violation of the law that he justified by asserting that, once his innocence was proven, the entire estate would be his anyway. The sale was eventually uncovered by Nanette Petrillo’s Bakersfield attorney and private investigator, but too late to do anything about it other than damage Pat’s already worn image.

  Pat, in fact, had been forthright with sheriff’s detectives about hiding the jewelry, though he refused to reveal the hiding place. The irony of this, Laura later realized, was that by telling the truth about still having the jewelry in his possession with none of it missing Pat had made himself seem more guilty in the eyes of the authorities, since Kate Rosenlieb assured them that Sandy never went out without scads of jewels. Therefore, they reasoned, if Pat’s story of his wife’s disappearance were true, he would not have all the jewelry in hand. Had Pat lied at the outset and said that some or all of Sandy’s jewelry was gone, his story would have agreed with Kate Rosenlieb’s extravagant claims about Sandy’s jewelry-wearing habits and bolstered the notion she had been the victim of robbery, kidnapping and murder at the hands of a stranger. A lie about the jewelry might have changed the whole tenor of the initial investigation by making Pat’s story of Sandy’s disappearance jibe with Rosenlieb’s and thereby sound all the more likely. Instead, Pat had told the truth about having all the jewelry at home—and about withholding it from the investigators—and he was pilloried for it. But if Pat were the killer, Laura wondered, wouldn’t he have claimed that the jewelry was missing so he could sell it with impunity? Didn’t his honesty really suggest his innocence?

  “No,” Gary Pohlson had told her when she brought up the subject. “It suggests just one thing: A suspect in a criminal case should keep his mouth shut. That’s the only thing that could have saved Pat, saying nothing at all. Truth or lies, it didn’t matter what Pat had to say once he became a suspect. His words were going to be used against him no matter what.”

  10

  AS THE MARCH 1993 TRIAL DATE APPROACHED, Laura found herself on the phone almost daily with Pat, trying to keep him from despair while continuing to prepare him for courtroom battle. She had to stave off any repeats of the disastrous tip-off to Detective Soliz that had so undermined his defense at the preliminary hearing in December—a real possibility, she feared, because Pat still did not grasp the fundamental nature of his situation. In his heart, he still seemed to believe that if he just would be allowed to tell his story his way, everything would be fine, the authorities would see the light, and he could go home. With the sting of the mock-trial session fading with time, he had even started talking about wanting to testify again. Laura’s response was to keep Pat occupied, putting him to work analyzing police reports and transcripts. It was busywork that, nevertheless, left Pat feeling like he was doing something constructive—and kept him from doing anything destructive.

  Pat’s family, though, was another matter. Laura found herself helpless to stop Mike Dunn, who contacted at least three prosecution witnesses on his own—Jerry Lee Coble, Coble’s father, and Marie Gates among them. The defense team only learned of this after the fact. The three witnesses would all later claim that Mike tried to bribe them in some fashion or another so that they would not testify against Pat. Coble would later say he almost took the offer. Marie Gates’ allegations, meanwhile, soon spun to wild extremes, as she declared Mike Dunn an evil, powerful man who hired a hit man to accost her and cut off her hair.82

  When questioned by Pohlson, the Dunns denied any attempt at bribery, saying it was Jerry Coble who extorted money from Mike. Coble, they said, promised to produce evidence that would clear Pat if he was paid off. But he simply took several hundred dollars without delivering, and threatened Mike Dunn with a knife.83 No one on the defense team knew what to believe.

  Then, just before trial, Mike Dunn whisked his mother, Lillian, to his home two hundred miles away in Orange County, where a doctor reported to the court that she would be medically incapable of testifying—despite the fact that, to Laura, she had seemed lucid and fit prior to her departure. This seemed a strange development: Though listed as a prosecution witness, Lillian might have helped Pat’s case more because her previous statements to police contradicted some of Marie Gates’ most incriminating recollections about Pat’s behavior. But it was clear the rest of the family viewed Lillian Dunn as a loose cannon—she did not hesitate, for one thing, to accuse Jennifer Dunn of wrongdoing—and they were relieved that she would not be called as a witness.

  All of these various setbacks to Pat’s case could have been taken in stride, Laura believed, if not for the other shortcomings she saw arising in the defense case. For one thing, they had been unable to penetrate the shield the DA had erected around Jerry Coble. Laura knew Coble had been an informant in the past, but neither she nor her team could learn anything more. No help came from Soliz, either, who, despite his previous work in narcotics, where Coble was well known, claimed never to have heard of Coble before meeting him at Denny’s to discuss Pat Dunn. There were tantalizing but ultimately unprovable hints from one former cop turned private investigator that Coble was a “pocket snitch,” a euphemism for an informant who the police kept in reserve—in their pocket, so to speak—ready to be put into action in troublesome cases, just like Pat Dunn’s. But that would mean Coble had been instructed by someone in law enforcement to target Pat, and neither Laura nor any of her partners could find the slightest proof to substantiate this tip. She had spent days at the little photo shop where Rex Martin recalled following Coble’s green Pontiac. Laura had gone through every receipt and cash-register tape for the month after Sandy disappeared, searching for a transaction that might correspond to Coble’s casing of Pat’s house, but she came up empty. Laura also searched for “Ray,” Coble’s drug dealer—someone the police had not even bothered attempting to find—but came up empty there as well. Laura believed Ray did not actually exist, that he had been made up by Coble to pad out his story. If heroin addicts know anything, it’s how to contact their dealers. Coble’s statement to Soliz that he had no idea how to reach “Ray” was patently implausible, Laura knew, but she could not prove it was a lie. And only proof, not hunches, would serve Pat in court.

  Frustration also mounted when, three weeks before trial, the district attorney sent Pohlson a packet of typewritten notes from Kate Rosenlieb, the defense’s first preview of her story in her own words. The notes presented a radically different—and far more incriminating—version of events than what Laura had learned from the police reports on Rosenlieb. These late revelations renewed Laura’s curiosity about why one of Pat Dunn’s best friends wou
ld turn on him so thoroughly and so vehemently. Pat still was no help on this subject, even after seeing the notes, and Rosenlieb still would not speak with Laura or anyone else associated with Pat Dunn’s defense.

  It was clear Rosenlieb had become a far more important witness for the prosecution than anticipated—someone who seemed infinitely more credible than Jerry Coble. Rosenlieb was a political appointee, smart and presentable, and had apparently nothing to gain from lying—a claim Coble could never make. As one of Pat’s dearest friends, Rosenlieb seemingly possessed every reason to give him the benefit of every doubt, and jurors would inevitably assume that, if she were biased in any way, it would have to be in Pat’s favor. And that made her a most powerful witness for the prosecution. Her recollections of violent arguments between Sandy and Pat before the disappearance would sound credible, as would her portrayal of a less-than-worried Pat unnervingly certain of his wife’s death long before her body turned up. Others would contradict her, of course, and Laura was sure that Rosenlieb was wrong on some of these very subjective points, given her poor accuracy in other statements to police about Sandy’s habits. But in Kate’s dramatic retelling, the words she attributed to Pat sounded like a virtual confession. Indeed, Rosenlieb had come to believe that Pat had been trying to confess to her in their conversations all along, and lacked only the nerve to say it outright.

  Now, as told in the newly arrived notes, her emotion-laden story had become far more damaging to Pat than anything the defense had anticipated. (And even then, Pat and his defense team had only part of the story—crucial elements that might have greatly aided them at trial remained missing from the packet sent by the DA.)