by Edward Humes
On December 7, 1978, a small-time white drug dealer from Oildale, twenty-five-year-old Daniel Stewart, was shot to death over nine pounds of marijuana. The dealer’s girlfriend, Leticia Mendez, was sitting next to him in his pickup truck when the killer opened the door, sat down and fired a single bullet into Stewart’s head. When the police arrived, Mendez described the killer as a short, stocky black man with a bushy Afro—nothing like the lanky, long-haired Treetop Tomlin. But a detective on the case who had had a number of run-ins with Tomlin in the past tracked down a teenager who had helped set up the fatal drug deal. The kid, the detective later testified, was too terrified to speak the killer’s name, but instead scrawled “Treetop” on a piece of paper. Bakersfield Police Detective Les Vincent then showed Leticia Mendez a photo lineup that included Tomlin; she picked out Treetop as the shooter. Following his arrest, Tomlin was placed in a live lineup, and, after some hesitation, Leticia identified him as the killer. Though Tomlin had by then retained an attorney who by law should have been present for this, Detective Vincent did not notify the lawyer about the lineup.
At trial, the police claimed that they had lost a central piece of evidence—the “Treetop” note—and the teenager who supposedly wrote it, charged as an accomplice to murder, did not testify. (He later denied fingering Treetop and said he never wrote a note to detectives.) There were fingerprints in the dead man’s truck and on the passenger-side door, none of them Treetop’s. Meanwhile, Tomlin brought in multiple alibi witnesses, most of them family members and neighbors, who testified that he was home at the time of the killing. But the prosecution labeled the defense witnesses liars and argued that its own eyewitness had sat right next to the killer, all the proof anyone should need of Tomlin’s guilt. Tainted as that evidence was—the lineup had been illegal, and this could have been used to attack and even throw out of court Leticia Mendez’s identification of Tomlin as the killer—Tomlin’s defense attorney inexplicably failed to pursue this point.33 Treetop Tomlin was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to twenty-eight years to life in prison.
Afterward, Mendez became increasingly concerned that she had helped convict the wrong man. She had been afraid to say so at trial, but she had picked out Tomlin’s picture not because she recognized him, but because she had been tipped off by detectives’ facial expressions—she could see, as she looked over the photos, what the “right” answer would be. And she recognized Tomlin at the lineup the next day only because she had already seen his photo, and even then she had started to say she couldn’t be sure. Then one of the detectives cut her off, telling her any doubts would kill the case, she would later recall. Such pressure would never have been attempted with Tomlin’s lawyer present, but alone with the police, Leticia felt she had to come through for her boyfriend’s sake. She picked Tomlin and stuck with it, then lived quietly with her guilt.
Six years later, Gerson Horn, a Beverly Hills attorney who took on Tomlin’s appeal as a personal crusade, knocked on Leticia Mendez’s door, expecting to get it slammed in his face by the woman whose boyfriend had been murdered. Instead, Leticia burst into tears and blurted, “I convicted an innocent man.” Together Gerson and Mendez went to court to correct her mistake. In 1986, she told a judge in Kern County everything: Tomlin was innocent. She had been wrong. The detectives had improperly pressured and influenced her. Treetop deserved a new trial.
But the district attorney vehemently fought reopening the case, and the judge—Robert Baca, who would preside over Pat Dunn’s case—was unmoved except by his disdain for out-of-town attorneys descending on Kern County to criticize its justice system. “You talk to me like I’m some kind of idiot who doesn’t understand the law or the case,” Baca railed at Horn. “Just argue the case. Don’t argue a lot of propaganda.”
At the end of the hearing, Judge Baca ruled that the woman whose word had been sufficient to send Tomlin to prison years before was no longer a credible witness—a common judicial finding whenever prosecution witnesses recant their testimony. Mendez’s story of being pressured to identify the wrong man could not be believed, Baca stated. Tomlin would stay in prison. Case closed.
Six more years passed with Tomlin behind bars, as first the state appeals court, and then the California Supreme Court, agreed with Baca’s ruling. But his federal habeas corpus appeal caught the attention of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, where the justices questioned the conduct of the police and prosecution, and found that the authorities had given false information to the defense.34 However, one of the oddities of appeals in the nation’s criminal justice system is the rigorous limits put on them, notwithstanding complaints by Ed Jagels and like-minded critics about endless appeals that undermine finality and common sense in the courts. No matter what might surface during a habeas hearing, the appeals courts can only consider points raised in the original pleadings—and, in Tomlin’s case, prosecutorial misconduct was not among those points. Appeals justices also are required to accept as true many of the determinations made by the lower-court judges who preceded them in the case and saw the witnesses face to face, instead of simply reviewing a transcript. Baca found Leticia Mendez’s recantation unbelievable, and the appeals justices therefore had to accept this finding even though they thought the opposite to be true, and that, as the court later wrote, “There is a serious risk that Tomlin was, in fact, wrongly identified as the assailant.” In other words, the court found ample evidence to show that Tomlin might be innocent, yet evidence of innocence was not sufficient to overturn his conviction. This, too, is a common dilemma faced in the criminal-justice system: After a jury renders its verdict, the only questions that can be raised are strictly “legal” ones—was the trial fair, was there egregious misconduct, did jurors violate their oaths and consider extraneous evidence? “Factual” questions—did he really commit the crime?—are almost always irrelevant.
By the time the Ninth Circuit got the case in 1992, around the time of Pat Dunn’s trial, the only legal justification left to free Tomlin was a finding that his original attorney had been so incompetent over the matter of the lineup and identification that, as a result, Treetop did not receive a fair trial. In a 2-1 decision, the Ninth Circuit found just that. The decision was immediately decried by Kern County authorities, who felt the justices simply didn’t like the outcome of the trial and had seized on a technicality to free a guilty man. Either way, at age forty-two, with sixteen years in prison behind him, Charles Tomlin walked free, legally innocent. The DA made no attempt to retry him, knowing that, with an eyewitness who recanted, they’d have no chance of winning.
There was one little-known footnote to the Tomlin case. In late 1992, in a completely unrelated trial, an eighteen-year-old man charged as the getaway driver in a robbery and murder at a fast-food restaurant was acquitted despite testimony from a Bakersfield police detective who said the young man had confessed to his part in the crime. After the trial, a juror explained why they had set the defendant free: They had doubts about the detective on the case. The detective was Les Vincent, the same investigator who made—and ultimately lost—the case against Treetop Tomlin.35
• • •
At the same time Charles Tomlin was winning his freedom, Kern County’s vaunted molestation-ring convictions were also coming back to haunt the courts, a process that would span a decade and raise uncomfortable questions about the entire system of justice in Kern County.
The cases had begun unraveling years before, soon after investigative reports in the Fresno Bee broke the satanic story—and revealed the provably false allegations at its root. The Kern County Sheriff at the time, Larry Kleier, who fervently believed even the most outlandish devil worship-conspiracy allegations because “children don’t lie,” ended up at war with District Attorney Ed Jagels, because the DA’s top deputies had refused to lodge molestation and murder charges against eighteen alleged satanists. Kleier considered this a slap in the face, but the only evidence produced by the sheriff’s secret satanic t
ask force to support the charges lay in the wild accusations of children. There were no bodies, no forensic evidence, no corroboration that satanic murders and molestations had taken place. Had the DA filed these cases, it would not have been the first time the office had prosecuted Kern County citizens with insufficient evidence or a lack of corroboration of its child witnesses.36 But the presence of the devil in the mix changed everything; too many of the satanic allegations could be disproved for them to fly, now that word of the secret investigation was out.
These concerns were heightened when news broke of an embarrassing meltdown of a very similar series of cases in Jordan, Minnesota, a small town where a supposed ring of two dozen child molesters had been uncovered in much the same way as the rings in Kern County. Just as in Kern County, children had been interviewed time and again in a suggestive fashion. Just as in Kern County, wild and unsubstantiated allegations were the result, escalating until the children of Jordan began to report witnessing satanic rituals, blood drinking, human sacrifices and baby murders, as well as accusing a police officer and deputy sheriff of being part of the satanic conspiracy. And, just as in Kern County, prosecutors in Jordan kept these satanic allegations secret from defense attorneys while pursuing the more conventional sexual abuse charges in court. When a judge found out about this illegal suppression of evidence and ordered the reports turned over, the Scott County (Minnesota) prosecutor in charge of the case dismissed the charges instead, leading to a media sensation, a public outcry and an investigation by Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III into allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Humphrey eventually issued a report criticizing the prosecutor in Jordan, dismissng the ring case as fantasy, and blaming investigators for coercing false allegations from impressionable children through relentless questioning.37
The parallels between Jordan and Kern County were too obvious to miss. Ed Jagels fumed in private that his growing reputation as California’s toughest prosecutor, a man who could bring down even Supreme Court justices, would be ruined if the satanic charges were filed and then blown out of court. He’d be a laughingstock throughout the state, his top molestation prosecutor, Andy Gindes, recalled him complaining.38 It was a concern that slowly began to take hold among many of Jagels’ senior prosecutors, who had begun to wonder what went on in that locked room filled with cookies and toys and leading questions, where the child-victims invariably made some of their most sensational and macabre claims. These senior prosecutors, for the first time, began to complain that the sheriff and his satanic task force had brought them incomplete and unprosecutable cases.39 They wanted more evidence before going forward. The sheriff’s investigators, unaccustomed to being challenged, were stunned, and kept trying to go over the heads of prosecutors who rejected the satanic cases.
Finally, Sheriff Kleier angrily demanded a meeting with Jagels. Meanwhile, Kleier’s staff, joined by some defectors from the DA’s office, embarked on a public-speaking tour to warn Bakersfield of the evils of satanism, and organized a letter-writing campaign to urge Jagels to file charges. When the sheriff arrived at the DA’s office to try to come to terms, Kleier ended up sputtering, “You’re all a bunch of ball-less sons of bitches.”40 The meeting came to an abrupt end as Jagels and his office brass stormed out.
A short time later, DA Jagels decided he would not prosecute any of the new satanic charges. In response, Sheriff Kleier called the DA’s office “the biggest stumbling block” to justice in Kern County, but Jagels and his lieutenants knew that a full airing of the satanic allegations could end up undoing their prosecutions of the dozens of molestation-ring defendants still awaiting trial—cases in which the child-victims had made wild and disprovable satanic allegations that had been kept secret from the defendants and their lawyers. This secrecy was possible because, even though news of a Kern County satanic investigation had leaked out, the identity of specific suspects and children involved had been carefully safeguarded. Full disclosure, prosecutors knew, would undermine all the remaining ring cases—the same calculation that doomed the prosecutions in Jordan, Minnesota.
By then, officials at the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, realizing serious mistakes had been made in these investigations, had quietly gone about changing procedures, usually over the objection of the sheriff’s department—limiting the number of interviews with child-victims to the absolute minimum, requiring tape recording of child interviews to help steer clear of leading questions, and barring the once-praised Carol Darling and Velda Murillo from acting as investigators in place of sheriff’s detectives, as they had done throughout the ring investigations. But those changes affected only future cases. The existing ring cases were allowed to continue as before, with prosecutors still keeping their explosive satanic aspects under wraps—depriving defendants of information that would undermine the credibility of the witnesses against them.
In the end, though, Kern authorities could not keep a lid on the subject. There were too many suspects, too many yards dug up, too many people party to the secret. After the satanic-abuse allegations were exposed in regional newspapers, the Kern County grand jury, a standing body with broad watchdog powers over local government, stepped in. Spurred on by information about investigative and prosecutorial improprieties supplied by the original ring defendants, the Kniffens, the grand jury began a probe of all of the big child-molestation cases. Their examination produced a highly critical report suggesting that investigators and prosecutors had mishandled the cases and harmed the children—the first official condemnation of the Witch Hunt.41 The grand jury would have continued investigating officials’ conduct in the ring cases but was unexpectedly shut down when a new presiding judge in Bakersfield refused to reappoint any of the existing grand-jury members, normally a matter of routine. That judge was Gary Friedman, who had earlier presided over the notorious Pitts ring case, in which he had made erroneous rulings and refused to rein in Deputy DA Andrew Gindes’ misconduct. The new grand jurors whom he appointed included several people with close ties to the sheriff’s department and the DA’s office, Gindes’ wife among them.42 To no one’s surprise, the grand jury’s inquiries into ring investigations and law-enforcement misconduct in Kern County abruptly ended.
The old grand-jury panel, however, had already called for a broader investigation by the state attorney general’s office. A year later, in September 1986, that office—normally a booster and protector of local district attorneys—lambasted the ring investigation it analyzed (the Nokes case that had metamorphosed into the satanic investigation) as a textbook example of how not to interview children. “The lessons learned from this case extend far beyond Kern County,” the report said, in finding Kern County’s entire investigation and prosecution of the cases riddled with inconsistencies and improper practices, making it impossible to determine the truth behind the allegations. Every aspect had been contaminated because of the excessive and suggestive questioning of child witnesses by insufficiently trained social workers, therapists and investigators, some of whom suspended all disbelief in accepting even the wildest allegations, the attorney general’s report concluded.43
Kern County officials, particularly the sheriff, expressed anger and disappointment in the report’s conclusions, though even Ed Jagels had admitted to the attorney general’s investigators that the satanic allegations were “obviously untrue.” Still, he steadfastly defended the ring cases his office prosecuted before the devil-worship allegations surfaced.
The defense attorneys of Kern County, who had so long complained in vain about the Witch Hunt, had every right to gloat as the report was released, but their unofficial spokesman, Stan Simrin, offered one of the more sober and thoughtful reactions of the day: “What has taken place now is equally tragic from both points of view because one cannot really tell whether individual children are telling the truth. Innocent people have been hurt and guilty people may not be successfully prosecuted. Everybody loses.”
The portion of the attorney general’s report
released to the public amid massive publicity made the sheriff and DA look bad enough, but the final blow came when Kern County Superior Court Judge Len McGillivray ordered the release of thousands of pages of previously secret transcripts and interviews collected by the attorney general’s investigators. These documents were infinitely more damning, embarrassing and detailed than the attorney general’s published report in exposing the massive official incompetence, back-stabbing and misconduct that pervaded the case. Jagels had fought hard to keep these records under seal, still hoping to preserve some of the ring prosecutions. When he lost the secrecy battle and all the information became public, the Witch Hunt era in Bakersfield came to an end.
One after another, then, the ring cases awaiting trial or a charging decision by prosecutors were dropped. Two men accused of being part of the Nokes ring of satan worshipers, once described as Kern County’s most dangerous monsters, were allowed to plead guilty to a single count apiece, freed from jail time in exchange for a quick dismissal of hundreds of felony charges that could have put them away for life. Though they protested they were completely innocent, the deal was too good to pass up for men who were drained, emotionally and financially, by their long battle. Their four codefendants were exonerated completely, while fourteen other suspected accomplices, as yet uncharged, were freed from further threat of prosecution. Their children, snatched from their homes by Kern County authorities, some for more than a year, were returned over prosecutors’ sullen objections. Freed also was Leroy Stowe, the one Nokes defendant already tried, convicted and sentenced to thirty years—a conviction won while Kern County officials still were keeping secret the children’s false satanic allegations about him and the others. The California Court of Appeal overturned his conviction, with one justice calling Stowe’s case a “travesty of justice”; he was soon reunited with the eight-year-old son he had once been accused of victimizing. Meanwhile, during a custody hearing involving alleged child-victims in the satanic case, Judge Robert Baca ended the judicial passivity that had characterized the Kern County bench’s behavior during the Witch Hunt. Now he flayed the county’s social workers for destroying, rather than saving, children by turning them against relatives who had done nothing wrong and leaving them too terrified ever to return home.
