Mean Justice

by Edward Humes

  Banducci had impounded the license after arresting Coble. This original grand theft case had then dragged on, even after Coble pleaded guilty, because sentencing kept getting delayed to allow Coble medical treatment for epilepsy, the legacy of a head injury sustained many years before—or so Banducci thought. Recently, there had been a new and secret reason for the delays: the Pat Dunn case.

  “What do you want Coble’s license for?” Banducci asked. “Is he a suspect in something?”

  “He needs it back. He’s a witness in one of my cases.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” Banducci said, the disbelief in his voice obvious. He waited for Soliz to explain, but the homicide detective offered no additional information. Banducci dug out the license and handed it over.18 Months later—and then only through news coverage of the Dunn trial—Banducci finally found out just what Coble was testifying about, and that the six-year prison sentence facing him in Banducci’s case had been reduced by the Kern County DA to five years’ probation.

  “You’d think somebody might have mentioned it to me,” the detective later complained, “since it was my case.”19

  The DA’s failure to pass on information did not end with the Banducci report. Even after eluding punishment in Banducci’s case and cutting his deal, Coble could not bring himself to stay out of trouble—but that, too, remained unknown to Pat Dunn’s defense team.

  Jerry Coble formally entered his new plea agreement and promise to testify against Pat on November 3, 1992, three months after he first called Detective Soliz. In exchange for his anticipated testimony, he got probation with the condition that he refrain from using drugs and committing other crimes. The judge who accepted the plea bargain made it clear that if Coble violated those conditions, he could be sent to prison, yet still have to testify in the Dunn case.20

  Yet, Jerry Coble continued using heroin before, during and after that hearing in court. The Dunn defense team knew that, because Coble admitted as much when he took the stand. The DA even suggested to the jury that Coble’s willingness to admit such an unflattering detail showed he was being candid and truthful. But Coble also swore he committed no other crimes since cutting his deal. That was why, he said, he could only afford to do heroin five or six times a month after agreeing to testify, instead of his preferred five or six times a week. Had he been committing thefts, he could have afforded more drugs, he claimed. “I wasn’t working. I didn’t have any money and I wasn’t doing any crime,” he testified under oath.

  This testimony was a lie. And though Detective Soliz and Deputy DA Somers may not have personally known it, other law-enforcement officials in Kern County did.

  In late December 1992, a month after his plea bargain—and less than two weeks after he testified in Pat Dunn’s preliminary hearing—Jerry Coble was seen in a Bakersfield bar called the Belvedere. A barmaid there remembered Coble distinctly, because he had been a regular there until Thanksgiving, when he had gotten into a fight and stopped coming around. Then he came back one last time late in December.

  On the day of Coble’s reappearance, five or so blank payroll checks were found missing from the Belvedere. The checks had been kept in an office that was normally off-limits to customers—but which a careful thief could enter if he watched and waited until the bartender went in back to fetch supplies to restock the bar. Two days after the theft, on December 23, a short, bearded man wearing a baseball cap walked into Sherry’s, a liquor store in downtown Bakersfield, and identified himself as Richard Scott Anderson. Sherry’s had a lucrative side business cashing paychecks, and Anderson had a payroll check for $944.49 from the Belvedere bar he wanted to cash. He also wanted to wire fifty dollars via Western Union to someone named Aaron Coble, as a Christmas gift.

  Anderson produced an American Express corporate card, an insurance card and a photo ID to serve as identification, but the manager at Sherry’s felt suspicious. She telephoned the Belvedere to make certain that a Richard Scott Anderson indeed worked there. She was told the bar had no such employee, and that whoever was in her store had a forged and stolen check. While Anderson filled out the Western Union forms, the manager discreetly called the police, then tried to stall the thief until help arrived. Sensing that something was up, Anderson inched toward the door, then suddenly darted outside and began running. The manager got to the door just in time to see the forger climb into an El Camino pickup truck, and she caught the first three digits of the license plate, which she remembered as 4DB. Bakersfield police officers arrived a few minutes later, but too late to find Anderson. All that turned up was a wallet discarded in a nearby parking lot with Anderson’s identification in it and a check stub from the Belvedere. The photo identification proved to be phony—whoever Richard Scott Anderson was, he was not the man who tried to cash the check at Sherry’s.

  After the Christmas holidays had passed, a Bakersfield Police Department detective named J. E. Taylor inherited the case. Taylor contacted the real Richard Scott Anderson by telephone in Alamo, California, where Anderson worked as a real estate broker. It turned out that in January 1992, during a road trip to San Francisco from Los Angeles, Anderson had stopped at a service station and used the restroom. While he was washing up, his wallet and checkbook were stolen from the counter next to him. Since that time, he had received nearly a dozen calls from irate Bakersfield residents who had listed items for sale in the newspaper classified ads, then sold them to someone calling himself Richard Anderson. This Anderson had paid with the stolen checks, using Anderson’s identification, but the checks all bounced—since the real Richard Anderson had closed the account. The forger had never been caught.

  Then, when Detective Taylor read over the patrol officer’s report from Sherry’s, he immediately recognized the name Aaron Coble. Having worked several burglary investigations involving the Coble family, Taylor knew that Jerry Lee had a young son named Aaron. A records check told him that Coble owned an El Camino with the license number 4D80212—very close to the partial plate number spotted outside the liquor store. Taylor’s next step in the investigation was to go to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, where he obtained a booking photograph of Jerry Lee Coble to show to witnesses at Sherry’s and the Belvedere. The day was January 11, 1993, two months before Pat Dunn’s trial was to begin. Detective Taylor had just linked Jerry Coble to a new crime and was on the verge of solving the case.

  Coble’s arrest could have had a dramatic effect on the prosecution of Pat Dunn, for at the time, Coble was on probation for grand theft, thanks to his deal, as well as parole for his previous conviction and two-year prison sentence for receiving stolen property. Even with his arrangement in the Dunn case, another bust would make prison a virtual certainty. And if imprisoned, he almost surely would refuse to testify. What would he have to gain at that point? And without Coble, the whole murder case against Pat could fall to pieces. One alternative, of course, would be for the DA to cut yet another deal with Coble, giving him another free pass, but the result would still leave the prosecution in dire shape—Coble would be revealed as a liar and a scam artist who couldn’t stay straight for just a couple of months, even when his entire future was at stake. The DA, in turn, would appear desperate and willing to bend over backward for a dubious witness. Furthermore, the crime Coble was accused of committing—posing as someone else, lying about his identity, forging documents—was uncomfortably close to the sort of trickery and fraud that the Dunn defense team believed he had committed in framing Pat. A habitual criminal who could assume a new identity was undoubtedly capable of collecting enough information to frame another man for murder, they would argue.

  Only one thing was certain to preserve the case against Pat Dunn: The new case against Jerry Lee Coble could simply go away. And whether by accident or design, that’s exactly what happened.

  For reasons unstated in his report on the case, Detective Taylor took no further action on the new Coble case for three months after contacting the Kern County Sheriff’s Department—which, of c
ourse, was relying on Coble as a star witness. Taylor’s reports reveal no attempt to show the photograph of Coble to the manager at Sherry’s Liquor, which is why he went to get it from the sheriff’s department in the first place. Nor was there any documented investigation of Richard Anderson’s statement that his ID and checks had been used to commit a number of other thefts and forgeries throughout Bakersfield over the past year, to see if Coble might be responsible for those as well. And Taylor did not try to contact Coble’s parole officer or probation officer, either of whom could have arrested Coble immediately had they known he was passing stolen payroll checks.

  It was not until April 5, 1993, that Detective Taylor requested that the Bakersfield police lab process the stolen Belvedere check for fingerprints. Four days later, Coble’s prints were identified on the check. The prints made for a cold, irrefutable case against Coble—the kind of hard, objective evidence detectives had searched for so hard in their investigation of Pat Dunn, only to come up empty.

  Taylor’s request to the police lab was made seven working days after Pat Dunn’s trial ended on March 24, 1993, just late enough to be of absolutely no use to the defense.21 Jerry Lee Coble had been able to take the stand and swear he had committed no crimes since making his deal to testify against Pat. He swore he had received very little in return for his testimony. He portrayed himself as a law-abiding citizen who even went to church shortly after seeing Pat Dunn drag Sandy’s body out the door, a man who, despite his long criminal record, just wanted to do the right thing.

  Under the circumstances, Jerry Lee Coble sounded quite believable, given that his latest arrest was kept secret.

  The delay in handling Coble’s case remains unexplained. The significance of this new information could not have been lost on anyone who followed the Dunn trial, which received daily coverage in the Bakersfield news media, including stories about Coble’s involvement as a key witness for the prosecution. And Detective Taylor already knew quite a bit about the Dunns on his own, having been acquainted with Sandy years before—Taylor had been the investigating officer in Sandy’s embezzlement case against her longtime bookkeeper, Delores Craig. Sandy had talked with Taylor many times and had testified at length against the bookkeeper, who pleaded guilty in 1986 in exchange for a two-year prison sentence. Six years later, early in the Dunn homicide investigation, Sheriff’s Detective Soliz and his partner on the case, Dusty Kline, collected information about Taylor’s investigation of Craig. Then Detective Taylor, after visiting the sheriff’s department in January 1993, delayed his new case against Jerry Coble for three months, even though he had identified Coble as the culprit.

  There is no evidence that John Soliz or John Somers had direct knowledge of Coble’s new fraud case before Pat Dunn’s trial began, so they cannot be faulted personally for failing to disclose its existence to the defense team, as the law would require.22 Conversely, Taylor had no legal obligation to disclose anything, since he was not involved in the Dunn homicide investigation at all. However, the duty to provide such information extends beyond individuals to whole law-enforcement and prosecutorial agencies, and it’s clear that Pat Dunn was denied important, powerful information about his case and the main witness against him.

  Inadvertent, coincidental or deliberate, the effect of this remained the same: It benefited the prosecution in the Dunn case and allowed Deputy District Attorney John Somers to stand before a jury and declare that “Mr. Coble was very honest with you. . . . He was credible and he was believable in his testimony.”

  The new case against Jerry Lee Coble remained buried. And Jerry Lee Coble helped bury Pat Dunn.

  • • •

  Pat and his defense team were missing another important element of their case besides Jerry Coble’s past and present criminal justice history: They were denied the full story behind Kate Rosenlieb’s role in Pat’s arrest and prosecution. The omission had a profound effect on the course of the trial—once again, to the prosecution’s benefit and Pat Dunn’s detriment.

  Just before the trial commenced, the defense received the packet of notes written by Rosenlieb in the form of a journal, detailing her conversations with Pat and detectives. The last entry contained in this sheaf, dated August 1, 1992, strongly implied that Kate had severed her relationship with Pat and the case long before his arrest in October. In it, Kate states that she had to face the fact that she had lost both Sandy and Pat, and that she just had to get on with life.

  But there was more to this journal, and to Kate’s role in the case, than was ever disclosed to the defense. The journal’s remaining entries—which were not turned over—show that Rosenlieb, far from sitting back and letting the investigation take its course, had actively lobbied for Pat’s arrest while organizing a group of Bakersfield movers and shakers to do the same.

  Later in August, according to the journal notes not given to the defense, Rosenlieb grew concerned that there had been no progress in the case. She called Detective Soliz and asked, “Is this it? Aren’t you going to arrest him?” She became quite angry with him, accusing him and his colleagues of incompetence in the case and of failing to take the most basic steps necessary to put Pat Dunn away. “If I knew it was this easy to kill a spouse,” she railed, “I would have killed mine a long time ago.”

  Soliz bristled at the criticism, wrote Rosenlieb, but in the end told her to keep faith in the system. The case would move forward, he promised.

  A few weeks later, on September 16, after Jerry Lee Coble had come forward and the sheriff’s department had asked the DA to file charges against Dunn, Rosenlieb again called Soliz to find out what was happening. The detective told her that Somers, another deputy DA and their supervisor were examining the case and would decide whether Pat should be prosecuted.

  “If it takes political pressure on the DA’s office, I can try that. I know a lot of people who will help,” Rosenlieb suggested to the detective. She offered to organize a lobbying effort to persuade the prosecutors, and District Attorney Ed Jagels himself, to go after Pat.

  Soliz said no, give it some more time.

  Her October 8, 1992, entry finds Soliz in a different mood. When she spoke with him then, Rosenlieb would later recall, he seemed angry and bitter. “I have no respect for Ed Jagels,” she remembers Soliz saying. “They have no guts over there at the DA’s office.” Now Soliz did want Rosenlieb to ready a campaign to get Dunn prosecuted, she wrote in her journal.23

  An entry dated a week later finds Detective Soliz even more frustrated. According to Rosenlieb, he called her and said, “Now is the time.” If she could exert any political pressure on District Attorney Jagels to force him to prosecute Pat Dunn, she should do it now.

  With that, Kate Rosenlieb put a two-step plan into motion, a strategy that she had been preparing and rehearsing in her mind for weeks. First, she checked in with Soliz’s boss, Sheriff Carl Sparks. Of their conversation, Rosenlieb’s notes say, “Carl said the DA is a politician and he plays the percentages. The DA has the highest conviction rate in homicides in the state . . . and he doesn’t want to jeopardize his record with a circumstantial case. We believe, like you do, that Pat Dunn’s a murderer, but he [Jagels] doesn’t want to screw up his prosecution record.”

  Using this assessment as a prod, Rosenlieb then recruited to her cause three city council members, including two who ultimately testified for the prosecution in the Dunn case, to call Jagels and ask, on behalf of their constituents and themselves, why he was failing to pursue murder charges against Pat Dunn. The goal was to “gently” urge Jagels to do the “right thing.” Stan Harper, the Republican consultant, friend and campaign manager for Jagels, also attempted to persuade Jagels to charge Dunn.24

  Looking back years later, Rosenlieb would recall that Step One, as she called it, failed to get Pat Dunn charged. That, she said, forced her to proceed to Step Two. She called Ed Jagels personally and, dispensing with gentle urging, threatened to go to the press or the grand jury with allegations of cover-up and selectiv
e prosecution. As she would tell it, “Jagels said, no murder weapon, no confession, and no one witnessed the crime occur. So I won’t prosecute.”

  To this reasoning, Kate responded, “You had no murder weapon, no confession and no one saw it happen in the Offord Rollins case, either. So if you’re poor and black in this town, you go to jail. And if you’re rich and white, you get off.”

  Rosenlieb recalled going on to tell Jagels she would quit her job, make the prosecution of Pat Dunn her full-time work, and make sure everyone in Kern County knew that the district attorney was both racist and willing to let a murderer walk—all unless he prosecuted Pat Dunn. Her memory of this exchange remained quite detailed years later: “Forty-eight hours after all this screaming about Offord Rollins, Pat Dunn was charged. In my mind, if I wasn’t the ultimate bitch from day one, nothing would have happened. It just didn’t seem important to anyone else.”25

  Upon further reflection, however, Rosenlieb altered her account of this campaign to prosecute Pat Dunn. She didn’t actually threaten Jagels directly, she claimed, but left a threatening message on his voice mail. She later changed her recollections again and said she only contemplated threatening Jagels, and that Step One, the initial “gentle” lobbying effort by city council members, had worked immediately. Pat Dunn was charged before Rosenlieb had to set Step Two into motion, making it unnecessary for her to carry out her threats to politically “eviscerate” Ed Jagels. She would have happily done so, however, if necessary to see justice done.26

  Whatever steps Rosenlieb actually carried out, as opposed to actions she merely contemplated, Pat Dunn’s defense team knew nothing of this lobbying effort at all. They had no idea that the lead detective on the case, Kate Rosenlieb and other city officials (who were about to be sued by Pat Dunn over the canceled movie-theater project, and who therefore may have had reason to think the worst of him) had all moved behind the scenes to orchestrate a campaign to put Pat in jail—turning a legal decision into a political cause. Rosenlieb and the other witnesses were all presented to the jury at Pat’s trial as unbiased individuals who just wanted to tell the truth, but had all of Kate’s notes been turned over—or if the District Attorney and the sheriff’s department had revealed the existence of the lobbying efforts, as the law required them to do—the defense could have painted a very different picture.