Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  The exact date was unimportant, however, because Jerry Coble already had sworn he had gone to Pat’s house but twice in his life—once on the night of the murder and once when Soliz took him there to refresh his memory. Laura knew that believing Martin meant disbelieving Coble’s entire story.

  Rex Martin’s testimony was in part corroborated by Jerry Mitchell, the retired sheriff’s deputy and friend of Pat’s, who confirmed getting a license number from Pat and Martin sometime during the summer, then passing it on to Detective Soliz. Mitchell was unequivocal in his testimony: He didn’t have an exact date, nor could he find the piece of paper on which he had written the number, but he knew it happened. Since neither Pat, Rex Martin nor Jerry Mitchell had ever heard of Jerry Coble at that point—Pat was not arrested until October 28—there was no way any of them could have picked his license number out of thin air in order to construct a phony defense. Soliz’s testimony, meanwhile, seemed less than solid on the subject. Rather than firmly denying Mitchell’s story, he simply told the jury, “I don’t have a recollection of Mr. Mitchell giving me a license-plate number.” Out of court, Mitchell accused Soliz of lying to preserve his case, for had the detective admitted receiving the license number, it would almost certainly have ended the trial in Pat’s favor.

  But given Soliz’s equivocal testimony in the matter, Somers was free to suggest that Martin and Pat had cooked up the story of the green car to get Pat off the hook, and that they had duped Jerry Mitchell. Somers also suggested a motive for Rex to lie: If Pat were acquitted, he could then get hold of Sandy’s money and restart the now-defunct real estate projects the Dunns had going with Martin. To back this up, the prosecutor asserted that Martin had been caught in a lie by Detective Soliz: The sheriff’s detective had written a report months earlier, quoting a telephone conversation in which Martin supposedly denied the handwriting was his on the scrap of brown paper on which Coble’s license number was scrawled. If true, such a statement would directly contradict Martin’s sworn testimony at trial and undermine Pat’s entire defense.

  Martin grew angry at this, retorting that he had said no such thing. What Martin had told Soliz was that he wouldn’t identify any piece of paper for the detective over the telephone or anywhere else. Martin had come to distrust Soliz, he said, after concluding the detective had badly misquoted him in an earlier report—echoing a complaint jurors had heard repeatedly from other trial witnesses. “I didn’t want to talk to him without a tape recorder,” Martin said. “I wanted what I told him put down the way I told it.”

  The rest of the defense team seemed unconcerned by this interlude, but Laura’s doubts began to rise again. If the jury had turned against Pat, if they wanted to convict, she knew that Soliz’s report on Rex’s “lie”—a report she knew to be inaccurate from her own investigation—would give them all the excuse they needed.

  Still, Martin struck her as a powerful witness as he described how Pat seemed genuinely worried about Sandy’s disappearance and grieved her death, despite what some people implied or thought. If Pat appeared unaffected, Martin testified, it was only because Pat could be a bit odd, a loner who hid his feelings well, sometimes too well.

  “I have never known Pat to be very demonstrative of his feelings,” Martin said. “It was obvious to me that he was concerned and upset, but you know, as far as breaking out crying or anything, no.” That, according to Martin, wouldn’t be Pat. If Pat had broken down and wept excessively, then Martin might have gotten suspicious.

  When Rex Martin was through, the final attack on Jerry Coble and the prosecution’s case was delivered by Jerry’s own brother, Gary. The defense hoped that, even if the jury worried about Martin and Mitchell possibly coloring their accounts out of loyalty to Pat, Gary Coble had no such potential for bias. Why would he tell lies to help a stranger and hurt his brother?

  Hesitant and ill at ease on the witness stand—and joking about being more accustomed to the defendant’s chair—Gary Coble recounted that Jerry, before even contacting Detective Soliz, first told him of witnessing a murder. The heavyset ex-con, looking far older than his forty years, shrugged and shook his head. He didn’t believe Jerry’s story from the beginning, he said, “Because I know my brother . . . He’s pretty smart. . . . Sometimes he’s too smart.”

  Months after that conversation, and after Jerry had testified at Pat’s preliminary hearing, Jerry had gone to stay with Gary in Los Angeles, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to kick his heroin habit. It was during this difficult time that the truth came out, Gary Coble testified, reconstructing the conversation for the jury:

  “I made a mistake. I messed up,” Jerry told his brother.

  “What do you mean?” Gary asked.

  “That case. I didn’t see what I told them I seen. I didn’t see it.”

  Gary recalled getting angry at this revelation and berating his younger brother. This wasn’t something minor, like a forgery or a bad-check case—this was murder. “You don’t do stuff like that,” he recalled telling his brother.

  Jerry seemed to agree, Gary said in court, but he felt he no longer had any choice but to stick with his story implicating Pat Dunn in murder: “I’m so far in now, I can’t back out. The cops told me if they caught me in a lie, they’ll have my ass.” And, more than anything, Jerry Coble did not want to go back to prison, his brother said.

  Then Gary told the jury how Jerry set up his scam. While looking for a case in which he could manufacture testimony (and thereby cut a deal to stay out of jail) Jerry spotted a news article about Sandy Dunn’s murder and found his opportunity. He then sat out in front of the Dunns’ house for days, checking out the place and waiting to get a look at Pat so he’d be able to identify him in a lineup. When he saw someone leave a package on the front steps, he ran up, grabbed it and rang the bell. When someone answered the door, Coble handed over the package as if he were the delivery man, getting a good look at the man of the house.

  After Jerry left Gary’s home and returned to Kern County, Gary wrestled with his conscience, then called Pat’s original attorney, Stan Simrin. Simrin gave him Gary Pohlson’s number, and after many conversations with Pohlson, Gary finally agreed to testify, though he had fervently hoped to avoid it. Gary swore he had never met Pat Dunn or any member of the Dunn family, that he had not been paid off in any way, and that the only pressure on him came from those who wished he would not testify—namely, his family, who accused him of turning against his own blood. “I just don’t understand why they’re mad at me, but Jerry’s got them,” Gary said. “I’m just trying to do the right thing. I done wrong all my life and I know it’s the right thing.”

  Even under Gary Pohlson’s slow, careful and gentle questions, Gary Coble would never be confused with the best of witnesses, Laura clearly saw. He was nervous and halting, and vague on some details. But, in his favor, he made no attempt to minimize his lengthy criminal record, which included burglaries, robberies, forgery and other property crimes, or the fact that he had spent nearly half his life behind bars. And Gary Coble seemed genuinely perplexed at the notion someone might think he was lying about Jerry, for he had nothing to gain but ostracism from his family, who had rallied around the younger brother. He knew also that testifying for the defense in the case could make him an inviting target for the sheriff’s department and district attorney’s office. Indeed, the DA already had gone after him, filing a court claim against him for back child-support payments allegedly owed to an ex-wife, and attaching his paycheck just days before he was to testify. The easiest thing for Gary Coble to have done was to have kept silent.

  Pohlson suggested the DA’s action against Gary Coble was the prosecutor’s way of making life hard on a troublesome witness, but Somers tried to turn this around. He suggested, in his tough and lengthy cross-examination, that Gary had an axe to grind because he was angry at the DA over the child-support claim. The prosecutor’s theory was that Gary Coble was so angry at the DA, he would lie to set a murderer free, risk sending his o
wn brother to prison, and alienate his entire family—just to get even with prosecutors over his ex-wife. “That’s ridiculous,” Pohlson scoffed, but no one in the courtroom was laughing.

  The normally civil and reserved Somers abandoned his placid manner and tore into Gary Coble, leaving the witness flustered and confused, muttering “Jesus Christ” and “I can’t believe this” from time to time. The prosecutor peppered Gary with questions about when Jerry came to visit, when Jerry admitted to lying, when Jerry first testified in the case. Gary maintained that he didn’t know, but Somers finally got him to confirm that Jerry’s visit and their key conversation occurred in summer, “Because I remember it was still hot out.” Later, Gary amended this to say it might have been October or November. Earlier in his testimony, however, he had said that the visit and conversation came after Pat’s preliminary hearing—which had been in December. Somers had found an inconsistency to pounce upon, and asserted that this problem with chronology made Gary Coble’s entire story unbelievable.

  Then Somers asked a series of questions insinuating that the prosecutor had inside knowledge that Gary, not Jerry, was the lying witness in the Coble family. Didn’t you tell your brother Terry that you disliked the fact that Jerry was cooperating with the police? Didn’t you tell your father the same thing? Didn’t you tell your father that Jerry never really admitted fabricating his testimony?

  The questions suggested Gary’s family knew his testimony about Jerry was a tissue of lies, and that they had told Somers so. Gary denied ever saying any such things, but Somers’ questions planted the notion with the jury that there was a reason Gary had been ostracized by his family—and that it wasn’t for telling the truth. The questions implied the existence of facts for which Somers offered no evidence. Somers never called the father, the brother or anyone else to the witness stand to support his bare insinuations. But neither could the defense challenge them.

  • • •

  John Somers called no witnesses to rebut any part of the defense case. Instead, once again, he used Pat Dunn’s own words against him.

  The prosecutor had already played the tape of Pat’s missing-persons call, taking great pains to point out every laugh, every bad joke, every supposedly flirtatious remark, hoping the jury would see Pat as cold, hateful and unconcerned about his wife. Now Somers had Pat’s preliminary-hearing testimony—in which Pat had shot holes in his own defense, against the advice of his first lawyer, Stan Simrin—read to the jury. Laura could only stew in frustration. If Pat had just heeded Simrin, if he had just kept his mouth shut, or if he had at least prepared for the rigors of the witness stand, he might have avoided this moment. But, as it was, he had provided Somers with a potent weapon.

  In these transcripts, Somers had Pat Dunn, under oath, swearing that he clearly recalled the specific date in which Rex Martin followed Jerry Coble as Friday, July 24, the same day Rex took Pat to get his rental car. Rex had said the two events were several days apart. Pat would later say he made a simple mistake, that the days had blurred together, that he hadn’t meant to sound so sure in his testimony—but during the preliminary hearing he had been so angry at John Soliz and John Somers and the notion that he could be charged with murdering his wife that he had just wanted to set the record straight, and he had wanted to sound as clear and sure as could be.

  But he had not set the record straight.

  He had given Somers an opening. For the news article that the defense argued could have tipped off Jerry Coble about the Dunn case, which provided the Dunns’ address and strongly implied that Pat was a suspect and therefore an ideal candidate for a frame-up, had appeared in the Bakersfield Californian on Saturday, July 25. It seemed Pat had been wrong about the date. And though Rex Martin had always been consistent in his account, Somers would argue forcefully that “the story changed.”

  “That’s the first sign of a phony story,” the prosecutor told the jury. “It changes under pressure.”

  The last testimony jurors would hear in the case would be Pat Dunn’s fateful error.

  6

  WHEN IT WAS TIME FOR THE ATTORNEYS TO DELIVER their closing arguments to the jury, the prosecution and defense were still quite divided in their perceptions, with each side believing it had built a winning case. It was only while watching John Somers deliver his masterful final speech to the jurors—and seeing their eager reaction to it, the grim smiles, the nodding of heads—that first Laura, then the rest of the defense team, and finally Gary Pohlson began to see things in a different light. What they thought was a strong case for Pat’s acquittal might not be headed that way after all. The shock and disbelief—the unwillingness to believe—was palpable, and almost crippling at times, especially for a defense team that had champagne chilling in the cooler. Reduced to the role of spectators at a tennis match, they alternately watched Somers and the jurors, suddenly feeling helpless—like every other lawyer who had ever underestimated this skilled and ruthless prosecutor.

  John Somers set about doing what he did best: Assembling all the little pieces of the puzzle into a single, imposing and seemingly irrefutable monolith. He brought out his big chart of Pat’s supposed lies, with all its many niggling or questionable points, and made it seem that Pat Dunn couldn’t tell the truth about anything. He revisited the testimony of Marie Gates and Kate Rosenlieb, and depicted Pat as the angriest, most desperate estranged husband on earth—yet one who had the audacity to tell detectives that he and Sandy never fought. Then Somers went over the finances, and by the time he was done with that recitation, he had Pat broke and without prospects, with murdering his wealthy wife the only way out. Interpreting Pat’s every action or omission in the most negative light possible, the prosecutor reminded jurors of how Pat had failed to tell some friends and acquaintances about Sandy being missing or did not ask for their help in finding her (He didn’t need their help because he knew she was dead, Somers said), how he failed to show grief at her loss (He wasn’t sad—he was happy, because he thought he was getting away with murder), and how he seemed more interested in Sandy’s money than her well-being (He tried to grab her accounts long before her body turned up—again, because he knew she was dead). The day after Sandy disappeared, Pat took his car in to be serviced and had the tires replaced—no doubt, Somers suggested, to hide the fact that he had been to the desert burial site a day earlier. (Though not asked about it during the trial, the mechanic later said changing the tires was his idea, not Pat’s, because of severe and uneven wear.) Somers knew if he could make jurors dislike Pat Dunn, they would want to convict Pat Dunn.

  “This case is not about Jerry Coble,” Somers assured them. “It’s about the collapse of the Dunns’ marriage and the financial necessity—or the financial desire, I should say—for Patrick Dunn to obtain Sandy Dunn’s money. . . . It’s about the conduct of the defendant. . . . Perhaps most importantly of all, this trial is about the statements made to person after person by Patrick Dunn after the crime: false statements, statements which are inconsistent with each other . . . statements which show that Pat Dunn was covering up, that he was telling a falsehood.”

  Somers exhorted the jurors to go to the jury room and replay the tape of Pat calling to report Sandy missing, if they really wanted to know what the case was about.

  “In some ways, that phone call tells you more emotional truth about what happened here than any other piece of evidence in this case. . . . It is less what he said in that phone call than the way that he said it . . . He’s happy in that phone call, or he certainly sounds happy. He is cheerful, he is joking, he doesn’t sound upset. . . . Is that the state of mind, is that what you’re going to hear from a man who is panicked because his wife has been missing for eighteen hours? No. It’s what you’re going to hear from a man who murdered his wife the night before and is starting to think that, maybe, he can get away with it.”

  Laura Lawhon listened to that closing argument, glanced at the jury, and decided that Somers had just won them over to his camp for good. W
hen Gary Pohlson got up and took his best shot, arguing that there was so much evidence for the defense that the case wasn’t even close, Laura knew she was right: the jurors weren’t even listening. They sat stone-faced, polite, but not buying any of it. Laura found it hard to believe they could sit through this trial and hear the defense evidence and still come down on the prosecution’s side, but one look at their body language told her that was what lay in store.

  Gary Pohlson, finally, saw it too. Midway through his closing argument, his voice grew shaky and he began apologizing to the jury for being nervous. He said he wanted them to understand just how clear it was that Pat had no motive for murder, that the police had been horribly biased against him from the start, that Somers’ big chart was riddled with errors, that the secretary Ann Kidder proved Sandy was alive when Jerry Coble said she was dead. It went on and on, Pohlson said, an answer for every prosecution salvo, as good a case for acquittal as any he’s ever seen.