Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  Sometime after Sandy’s disappearance, the housecleaner, Cindy Montes, found a woman’s blue jogging jacket hanging with other clothing in a hall closet—a different location than the one Pat searched. The discovery of the blue jacket, Somers said, showed Pat had been lying. But contrary to the prosecutor’s argument, there was nothing inconsistent, inaccurate or even vaguely suspicious about this—the most Pat could be guilty of was not looking thoroughly through every closet in the house for Sandy’s jogging jacket.

  Then there was the matter of Sandy’s glasses. Most people who knew her did say, as Somers argued, that Sandy almost always wore her glasses, even though her eye doctor had explained to Laura Lawhon that Sandy only needed them for reading. Cindy Montes, in particular, testified that when she would get to the Dunns’ house early in the morning to clean, Sandy still would be in her walking clothes—and always had her glasses on. So when Sandy’s glasses were found at home, Somers said, that again showed she never left the house that last night, at least not alive. Only Pat, then, had the opportunity to kill her. Somers failed to mention, however, that the police had established that Sandy owned multiple pairs of glasses, some of them prescription, some bought at the drugstore, which meant she could have been wearing any one of a number of pairs that night, just as she could have been wearing clothes other than the blue jacket. (There was also the possibility that, if Pat were being truthful about Sandy’s deteriorating mental state, she could have simply forgotten the glasses.)

  Then there was the jewelry. Much was made of Pat’s admission that he had all of the jewelry at home and that none of it was missing. Had the jewelry been missing, it would have supported the notion that Sandy had been robbed or murdered during a walk, Somers said. But that was not the case. Relying on Kate Rosenlieb’s testimony (though Kate had never seen Sandy in her walking attire and had exaggerated the value of her jewelry by a factor of ten), Somers argued that Sandy always went walking with her jewelry on. So the fact that Pat said she didn’t wear it and that all her jewelry was at home showed that she had died nude in bed and that Pat Dunn had lied to cover his tracks, Somers declared.

  But this scenario couldn’t hold up, either. During her testimony, Cindy Montes hadn’t just remembered Sandy’s glasses. The housecleaner also recalled when she would see Sandy early in the morning after her walk, Sandy never wore jewelry—just a wristwatch and her glasses. With this statement, the only witness in the case who could attest firsthand to Sandy’s walking attire shot down a major portion of the prosecutor’s “opportunity to kill” theory. However, by coincidence, Montes made this point from the witness stand in a very low voice—so low that the defense team didn’t catch what she said. When Montes was asked to repeat her answer, she only mentioned the glasses, neglecting to repeat the part about Sandy never walking with her jewelry on. Somers didn’t correct her.

  Even before the trial, Montes had told John Somers and sheriff’s investigators that Sandy never wore her jewelry on her walks, just as Pat had always claimed. Yet this information was not put into any police reports, and therefore was never disclosed to the defense.4 As a result, in his closing argument in the Dunn trial, Somers was able to say without challenge, “She did wear her jewelry when she walked and the defendant was well aware of it. . . . This is consistent with the theory she was killed while nude in bed . . . but not consistent with the theory that she was killed while out walking.”

  The argument sounded powerful and sure. But it was based on a premise John Somers had been told was false.

  • • •

  The prosecutor rounded out this portion of his case with a series of witnesses to rebut Pat’s account of a memory-impaired Sandy wandering off and falling victim to some predator in the night. To refute the notion that Sandy might have been suffering from the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, Somers asked eight of the thirty-two prosecution witnesses about Sandy’s mental state. Each one of them denied she had memory problems, and doubted that Sandy would ever just walk out in an Alzheimer’s-induced haze, as Pat had suggested.

  In number, these witnesses appeared impressive, but it turned out that not one of the eight was a close friend of Sandy’s. Most were business associates who saw her just a handful of times during the year. One was the investment broker who hadn’t seen her since 1988, and another was her former dentist, who hadn’t seen her since she stopped coming to him in 1986—six years before she died. One was a secretary who talked to her on the phone twice a month about her investment accounts. One was the city councilwoman, Pat DeMond, who had sought to have Pat prosecuted from the outset, and who had not spoken with Sandy for almost a month before the disappearance. None of these witnesses saw Sandy more than once a month, on average—if they saw her at all. They all could easily have missed the sort of brief, episodic bouts of confusion and memory loss Pat had described.

  The only really close friend of the Dunns to testify for the prosecution—Kate Rosenlieb—was never asked whether she had observed memory problems in Sandy.5

  The defense responded to this part of the prosecution’s case by calling just one witness, a man who was close to the Dunns and saw Sandy regularly—Rosenlieb’s fellow city-planning commissioner, Jim Marino. Marino told the jury Sandy had displayed memory problems several times in his presence, and he described the time he visited the Dunns for lunch and Sandy kept asking over and over how his kids were doing, forgetting the most basic comments from one moment to the next. At other times, he said, she seemed perfectly fine.6 (Marino also countered Kate Rosenlieb’s description of the Dunns’ marriage as a battlefield, saying he had never noticed any “tremendous fights.” Though he admitted the Dunns could get “testy” with one another at times, he characterized their relationship as sound and built on love and respect.)

  The fact that Sandy’s mother died of Alzheimer’s disease could have bolstered Pat’s defense that Sandy might have been facing a similar fate, as there is considerable evidence of a genetic component to the disease—particularly with early-onset Alzheimer’s, which would have been the type afflicting Sandy. Once Sandy’s body was cremated, however, there was no way to know for sure: The only definitive test for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease—dissection of the brain after death—was not conducted. The defense did not pursue this point during the trial, however.

  Although the medical examiner who performed the autopsy was not asked about the failure to perform this Alzheimer’s test, Deputy DA Somers did make a point of posing a series of odd questions on a very different scientific topic, one that had been a key element in another recent murder trial: The People vs. Offord Rollins. He brought up the subject of flies.

  Weren’t there maggots and fly eggs, Somers asked, found on portions of Sandy’s badly decomposed body? The medical examiner said yes—and not only on parts of the body found exposed to the elements, but also in areas that had been buried when the body was discovered.

  Somers wanted to know how that could be. Did flies lay eggs underground?

  No, the medical examiner answered, flies could not do that. The entire body had to have been exposed to the elements for some length of time before it was buried. Otherwise, there would be no flies or maggots where he had found them.

  With that answer, Somers moved on to other subjects, ending an odd, brief interlude few people in the courtroom understood. But with his questions about the flies, the prosecutor had just proven that Sandy’s body lay outside for an extended period of time before it was buried. It was not clear to anyone else involved with the trial just why Somers had elicited this grisly testimony, so similar to the pivotal evidence in the Rollins trial, where the absence of fly eggs had been cited as evidence of innocence. Whatever the reason, it seemed Somers did not like the answer he got, for he never brought up the subject again. Pat’s defense team had no interest in flies, either, and the whole matter was soon forgotten in the heat and rancor of Jerry Coble’s appearance on the stand.

  And so, no one outside the Kern County District At
torney’s office realized just how significant such testimony about maggots could be—or that those lowly flies could, just possibly, have proven Pat Dunn’s innocence.

  4

  BY THE TIME JERRY LEE COBLE TOOK THE STAND, TWO radically different views of how the trial was going had emerged. Normally, both sides in a criminal case share a reasonably similar sense of where things are headed (which is to say that, in most cases, the defense knows it is getting creamed). But in the Dunn trial, it was as if the prosecution and defense were watching two different cases unfold.

  Pat’s defense team, impatient to bring out their big guns against Coble, had viewed the preceding witnesses primarily as a drawn-out waste of time and energy. Somers had, at most, used them to arouse some suspicion about Pat’s behavior, point out his supposed inconsistencies and expose his supposed motive. But Pohlson felt sure the jury would look past the prosecution’s insinuations and demand hard evidence. They would understand that Pat had kept quiet early on about the disappearance simply to avoid embarrassing his wife. Later, Pat clearly had been grief-stricken—the defense had the witnesses who could say so. Likewise, the defense felt certain the jury would see through Somers’ inaccurate chart, the prosecution witnesses who couldn’t keep their own stories straight, the fact that promise after promise made in the DA’s opening statement had been broken by his own witnesses.

  “All he has left is Coble,” Pohlson said. “We get him, and everything else is just window dressing.”

  Laura remained troubled, but even she felt encouraged at this point. The prosecutor, so far as she could see, had delivered no knockout blows, though she wondered if they were underestimating the impact of Somers’ little puzzle pieces, particularly the missing-persons call to the sheriff—with its the nervous joking and laughter that could easily be misinterpreted by people who didn’t know Pat.

  The other view of the trial—John Somers’ view—was that he had made Jerry Coble’s story almost beside the point. The chain of events, theory of motive, and circumstantial evidence pieced together through many witnesses, each of whom held a small part of the puzzle, had created a powerful case without Coble’s eyewitness account, Somers believed.

  “This testimony shows motive,” he would argue. “It shows the opportunity Patrick Dunn had, Patrick Dunn and Patrick Dunn alone, who was alone with Alexandra Dunn during the last hours of her life. . . . It is about the conduct of the defendant, which, ladies and gentleman . . . defies reason if, in fact, she did wander off with Alzheimer’s and disappear. But it’s perfectly consistent with a man who has murdered his wife and knows it.”

  In laying the groundwork for that statement, Somers wanted to persuade jurors that his theory of motive to kill, the opportunity to kill, and the inconsistencies he charted in Pat’s story were enough to pronounce the defendant guilty—or, at least, almost enough. If his strategy was working, the jurors would already believe the worst of Pat Dunn before they met Jerry Lee Coble, and they would need only an excuse to put them over the edge to convict. They might not like Jerry Lee Coble, Somers knew, but Coble could well prove all they would need to give the prosecutor the guilty verdict he sought.

  • • •

  Certainly it seemed clear to Laura Lawhon that the jury did not care one bit for the thin, ponytailed Jerry Coble. Their stony expressions and crossed arms said it all, particularly as he described his long criminal record and his decision to cut a deal so that he could elude six years in prison. But would dislike amount to disbelief?

  Under Somers’ gentle prodding, Coble told his now-familiar story about looking for a lost bindle of heroin at one in the morning, hearing a noise, hiding behind a trash can, and gazing across the street at Pat’s driveway, brightly illuminated by a sodium-vapor light on the side of the house, which Pat conveniently left turned on while committing a capital offense. That’s when, Coble claimed, he saw Pat Dunn drag a large bundle wrapped in a sheet and a dark blue blanket out his front door. Pat put the bundle into the back of a white pickup truck with a camper shell. The punch line remained the same as before.

  “When he turned,” Coble swore, “that’s when I could see there was a hand sticking out of it. . . . It looked like a left hand.”

  Coble’s would be the only testimony in the trial to directly link Pat Dunn to murder.

  Even as he provided this pivotal evidence, Coble told the jury he really did not want to be in court testifying against Pat Dunn or anyone else, that it was not something he had sought out with any particular vigor, and that he hadn’t really needed or wanted a deal on the theft case pending against him when he came forward with his information. He claimed that, despite his previous record, he would have gotten quick parole anyway, rather than the six years in prison he faced under the law—a claim belied by court records. In any case, Coble said that he had decided to come forward because he was trying to turn his life around by doing the right thing, so he could start over fresh. He had been crime-free ever since, he swore.

  To Laura’s surprise, Coble initially came across as far more pleasant and easygoing a man than she had expected—or hoped. But after that first impression was made, it went downhill for Somers and his informant, and it was here that all of Laura’s research and groundwork began to pay off. First, Coble reluctantly had to admit that, in addition to describing a pickup truck that Pat didn’t own, he also had originally told Detective Soliz that he had seen a white Ford Tempo or Taurus in the driveway that fateful night, and that he never saw the huge and unmistakable old Cadillac that the Dunns kept in the carport. Pohlson, with car-rental documents and witnesses, then showed that vehicles like those Coble described seeing on the night Sandy disappeared were not actually in the Dunns’ driveway until weeks later, after Pat’s cars were seized by the sheriff as evidence and he had to rent a replacement—a white Ford Tempo.

  Under pressure, Coble tried to back off his statements to Soliz about the cars—and it was here that the defense nearly was hurt by Pat and Mike Dunn’s early tip to the prosecution during the preliminary hearing. Coble was ready: He had gone over photos of Ford Tempos, and when Somers showed him one in court, he firmly denied that it depicted the car he saw outside the Dunn house. But he was undone by the firm and sure descriptions of the cars he gave to Detective Soliz at the time. Coble’s only explanation for the change was that he had been “stressed” and hadn’t really paid attention to the cars after all. All his attention was on the wrapped-up body, he said. Coble, of course, also denied casing the house or framing Pat. Still, even with his being tipped off and his attempts to parry the challenge to his story, it seemed the defense had scored big on cross-examination, just as Pohlson had promised. Coble’s explanations did not appear to convince the jury, Laura observed.

  Pohlson furthered his attack by forcing Coble to admit that he had previously claimed he could precisely remember the day all this happened because he was working for his girlfriend’s father the next morning. Under questioning—and aware that the father was sitting outside in the courthouse hallway waiting to brand him a liar—Coble had to admit that was untrue.

  Next, Pohlson had Coble tell the jury how he and Detective Soliz had driven through the Dunns’ neighborhood and visited the house—before Coble gave a detailed, taped statement, thereby contaminating Coble’s whole account.

  “Soliz . . . doesn’t test his recollection of the thing,” Pohlson later lamented to the jury. “He doesn’t test it so the defense can look at it, at an honestly taped statement. He goes out and shows him the house and shows him the light, the whole thing, then asks him the question, ‘What did the house look like?’ . . . That’s rot!”

  As for Coble’s professed lack of interest in making a deal to testify, Pohlson elicited a grudging admission that the first words out of his mouth when he called Detective Soliz—even before he gave his name—concerned whether he could cut a deal on his own charges. If Coble was so disinterested in testifying and didn’t really need a deal to get probation, Pohlson wanted to know,
why was the prospect of a deal for leniency the first thing he talked about?

  Even Coble’s claims about seeing the body wrapped in a blue blanket were subject to attack, thanks to the work of the prosecution’s own criminalist, who analyzed the handful of fibers found clinging to Sandy’s body. First, none of them could have come from a white bedsheet. And, second, although there were some dark blue fibers collected, these were from a synthetic fabric with the trade name Olefin—which is used primarily for carpeting, and never in the sort of bedroom blanket Coble described, because of its flammability. Neither Pat’s house nor his cars had Olefin carpeting in them.

  Finally, the defense lawyer forced Coble to reveal his recidivist tendencies by making him admit that he had continued buying and using heroin for at least four months after cutting his deal to testify in the Dunn case, even though he had promised to stop using and knew that getting caught could have canceled his plea bargain and put him back in prison. Coble tried to minimize the sting of this, by saying that he used only five or six times a month, not much at all—his habit being limited by his lack of income at the time.

  “I wasn’t working,” he explained. “I didn’t have any money and I wasn’t doing any crime.”

  And so the star witness left the stand a short time later, his credibility severely eroded. Pohlson felt he had just about won the case then and there, and Laura started feeling things might come out all right, after all. But she looked over at John Somers, too. He didn’t look happy, but neither did he look devastated, and that worried her anew.