A Family Business (21 page)

“Here’s what we could do,” David proposed, settling down for some more bargaining. “Just lower my bail to a hundred thousand or something so that I can bail myself out, and then immediately upon bailing out I’ll go with you and give you a deposition. Immediately! And then I’ll tell you about Waters.”

For a moment no one said anything, but David picked up on Diaz’s hesitancy. He let the conversation wander some more before he came back with another offer. Rather than having his bail lowered, he suggested that probation might be appropriate.

“As long as I hear that I’m going to have probation, then I’ll be more cooperative with you in respect to what’s going to transpire from this day forward,” he said. “I mean, if I know I’m not going back to jail, if I know that I’m going to be able to go home with my family, then that’s all I want.”

To sweeten the pot, he threw in a little contrition. “I want to get into a completely different line of work,” he confessed. “Eventually I want to move away somewhere and just start my life over again, get back into going to church and stuff and being the way I was before.”

When Diaz continued to balk, David poured it on even thicker. “Dennis,” he said, looking the detective in the eye, “truly, I’m a good person. I’m not going to fabricate anything to get out of jail, because eventually it would come out anyway and it would only be to my detriment. I realize that. I never did anything or say I’d want to hurt my grandfather.”

And again he denied involvement in the Hast, Nimz, and Waters beatings. “I can give you motive and I can give you reasoning,” he said, adding pleadingly, “I just want out of jail. I’ll talk to anybody if they get me out of jail.”

“All right,” Diaz replied evenly. The session was over. It had lasted almost exactly three hours; they had worked straight through lunch. The talking was over, but there was still tension in the air. David broke it. Look at the bright side of spending the whole morning here, he urged: “I missed lunch.” Then he added with a laugh, “Thank goodness.”

All the way back to Pasadena, less than an hour’s drive in the early afternoon when the freeway was not jammed, Diaz weighed the value of the discussion. Ricky Law, the detective who had accompanied him to the interview, was not familiar with the case, so the two didn’t talk about what David had said. For the most part, Diaz was alone with his thoughts, which was precisely what he wanted right then. As he mentally reviewed the experience, he became certain of one thing: Walt Lewis was not going to go for any deal. And, while that had been the main item on David’s agenda, Diaz looked at the discussion from an entirely different perspective. He had gone into the interview anticipating that his meeting with David would be a learning experience. And it certainly had proved to be that. It had given him a tremendous opportunity to study David, to measure the man, and to determine what kind of opponent the prosecution was facing.

David had been clever, Diaz admitted. In fact, he had been even sharper, smoother, and more charming than the detective had expected. He could understand how David had won so many supporters among his jailers. But that made him even more dangerous, he reminded himself. If David could win over cynical law enforcement officers who dealt with all types of criminals on a day-to-day basis, no telling what he could do with naive civilians. In the detective’s mind, David was a man totally without conscience, a man who could commit the most vile acts but never feel a twinge of regret or remorse. He was one of those people who had an excuse for everything. No matter what happened, it was always someone else’s fault.

Maneuvering down 1–5, Diaz concluded that David was a classic sociopath, definitely
the
most sociopathic person he had come across in his almost two decades of police work. But deciding that David was without morals was a relatively easy conclusion to come to. What to do about him was something else. The prosecution would proceed; he was confident of that. But what would happen when David eventually got his chance to tell his story to a group of vulnerable jurors or a sympathetic judge was anyone’s guess. Diaz decided that he wasn’t going to take any bets on that one. The way he figured it, it was going to be too close to call.

Something that apparently did not occur to Diaz or anyone else at that juncture was the irony of the thrust of David’s argument. Everything that he had proposed to Diaz regarding a deal revolved around his alleged knowledge of what had happened to Tim Waters. But at that point Tim Waters technically was a nonissue. His death was still listed as a natural one. Police had a confession from Galambos in which he admitted attacking Tim, so the assault issue was settled. And right then there was no other point to consider. Officially, Tim Waters was not a murder victim.

20

Diaz had been exactly on target in his assessment of how Lewis would react to David’s proposals; in the DDA’s opinion, no one was going to ever get the truth out of David, and a deal was totally out of the question. When a transcript of the Diaz interview appeared on his desk, Lewis picked it up and got no further than the first page before he broke up laughing. Oh, God, he guffawed, this is great. This is really great. David Sconce saying “thank God for jails.” David’s trying to sound so innocent, Lewis mumbled, continuing to cackle. He laughed until he was afraid his co-workers might think he’d gone round the bend. Then he wiped his eyes, threw the transcript onto an empty chair and picked up a stack of statements that he had to go through to start preparing the case for court. Reading the words of those who had worked for the Sconces, he quickly lost sight of the humor he had enjoyed just moments before.

A week later Lewis emerged from his office and David from his cell for a brief confrontation in court, just long enough for David to plead not guilty to the charges of soliciting the murder of Lawrence and Lucille Lamb, an accusation that the grandparents and David’s parents felt was ludicrous. Then both the prosecutor and the accused resubmerged into their separate prisons to await the next encounter. It came on August 3 before Judge Victor Person.

Required to appear along with David were his parents, Jerry and Laurieanne. All three had been summoned for the opening of a court proceeding designed to determine the disposition of the myriad charges against them. Each had his own lawyer: Diamond represented David; Edward Rucker represented Laurieanne; and Thomas Nishi, Jerry. The Sconces had pleaded not guilty to the accusations, so the next move was up to the court. Would they be ordered to stand trial? Or would the charges be dismissed? That was up to Person.

Although the forty-one-year-old jurist, who pronounced his surname Purr-sahn, carried the title of Municipal Court Judge, a job description more accurately would have read Preliminary Hearing Judge. Since March 1986, some five months after he had been appointed to the bench by Governor George Deukmejian, Person’s only judicial role had been that of conducting preliminary hearings. Sometimes he handled as many as sixteen in a single day.

Frequently referred to by lawyers as probable cause proceedings, preliminary hearings have a single purpose: to give a judge the opportunity to determine if the prosecution has sufficient reason—probable cause—to bring a defendant, or defendants in this case, to trial. In many states prosecutors rely on grand juries to perform the same function. Typically, a panel of civilians—a grand jury as opposed to a petit or trial jury—meets in secret to examine evidence compiled by a prosecutor. If the group feels the evidence is strong enough to warrant a trial, it issues an indictment, a formal listing of charges, which then is handed up to a trial court. Although California has a functioning grand jury system, it has been largely ignored by prosecutors since the state supreme court ruled in the mid-eighties that a defendant, even if he had been indicted by a grand jury, was still entitled to a preliminary hearing. To district attorneys, it seemed senseless to hold two sessions if one would suffice. As a result, the preliminary hearing became the proceeding of choice. In fact, as a matter of course, every felony charge was aired at a preliminary hearing, a policy that kept the municipal courts extremely busy. Because of the demand, some municipal court judges did nothing but hold preliminary hearings. Person was in that group.

For the most part, preliminary hearings are comparatively brief, ho-hum affairs. Commonly during such proceedings prosecutors present only enough material that they feel is necessary to convince the judge that there is a “strong suspicion” the defendant committed the offense. The object is to get the judge to order a trial, not to try the defendant at a hearing. While the defense also has the right to call witnesses and present evidence, it seldom is used to any appreciable extent. Defense attorneys figure if the district attorney has much more than a smidgen of evidence, there is going to be a trial anyway, so why tip their hand?

But defense attorneys have one big advantage at a preliminary hearing: they can cross-examine prosecution witnesses. This, again, is unlike a grand jury proceeding, where the panel hears only the prosecution side of the case. In fact, the defense is not even allowed in the room when the grand jury is hearing the prosecution’s evidence. The judge in a preliminary hearing does not rule on guilt or innocence. His function is to act as referee, making sure that the hearing proceeds in an orderly fashion and that the lawyers keep within their defined legal boundaries. Once the evidence is presented—which in run-of-the-mill criminal cases does not take very long—it is up to the judge to decide if the case should be moved up the ladder for trial. All in all, most preliminary hearings are fairly uncomplicated affairs; in more cases than not, the judge goes along with the prosecution. Since so little evidence is needed to determine probable cause—usually no more than it takes for a police officer to decide to make an arrest—the outcome of most preliminary hearings tends to be predetermined. But nothing in the Sconce case up to then had been simple, and the preliminary hearing would not be an exception. And while most preliminary hearings are culminated rather rapidly, the Sconce hearing would drag on interminably.

From the beginning, Person realized the Sconce hearing was going to take longer and be more complex than any hearing he had been involved with previously. However, he did not anticipate just
how
long and
how
convoluted it was going to be. Before it was over, it would set a record as the longest preliminary hearing in the history of the Pasadena Municipal Court. Testimony began on August 3 and ran through December 18. During that time, the prosecution presented ninety-nine witnesses whose words filled some 125 volumes, enough to make a pile of transcripts more than three feet tall. After the testimony, Person spent another five months reviewing the record, so the hearing was not officially over until he issued his ruling on May 9, a little more than nine months after it began.

In every court proceeding, and the Sconce hearing was no exception, there is a subtle factor at work that commonly effects the outcome: the mix of personalities of the opposing lawyers and the defendants, as well as the quirks of the judge.

Before he was appointed to the bench, Person was a deputy district attorney for twelve years. As a result, he probably tended to lean toward the prosecution in any given case. At least, this was his reputation, and as a result, most prosecutors who came into his courtroom regarded him as a sympathetic fellow traveler. On the other hand, defense attorneys, particularly public defenders, viewed him as blatantly prejudiced against them.

The Sconce case was not going to settle the argument. While it seemed as though Person gave Walt Lewis tremendous latitude in the breadth of the evidence he was allowed to present, the judge’s supporters argued, not unreasonably, that this was justified because it was an especially tangled case and the crimes were unusually vile. In such a situation, the argument went, the more evidence that could be presented, the better. Another judge, even one without a DDA’s experience, might have allowed the prosecution the same freedom.

There was one other thing that made the Sconce preliminary hearing, if not unique, at least highly unusual. As soon as the hearing opened, Diamond renewed his request for a reduction in David’s bail. Commonly, such pleas are considered at a separate hearing, but facing an unwelcome potential delay in getting the preliminary hearing started, Lewis suggested that the two proceedings be combined.

The proposal had considerable merit. That way witnesses would not have to be called twice: once to testify about David’s dangerousness, and again to testify about broader issues that had to do with the criminal cases itself. Person agreed. In the end it was a momentous decision. While it undoubtedly extended the time the hearing would take had bail not been an issue, it also cleared the way for a rare, broad display of evidence, much more than would have been allowed in either a bail reduction hearing or a preliminary hearing if they had been held individually.

In one way, this was a boon to the prosecution, since it allowed Lewis to present a more comprehensive, more cohesive case. But it also helped the defense because in the long run it proved quite beneficial to the Sconces. After the hearing, when the transcripts were forwarded to the superior court judge who would conduct the trial, he already had before him, just by reading the record, a remarkably detailed outline. If circumstances had been different, this fact might have helped the prosecution rather than the defense. But as it turned out, it was a disastrous blow for the district attorney’s efforts.

In the beginning Lewis was delighted with Person’s decision to wed the two proceedings. Instead of being restricted to introducing just enough material to show that there was probably cause to bind them over for trial, he had license to literally bury the court in a mass of detail. With the bail reduction hearing being shoehorned in, Lewis was free to roam across a very broad landscape in his efforts to show that David not only probably committed the crimes of which he was accused—with his parents in collusion and possibly in active participation in the funeral home crimes—but that he was one vicious character besides.