Mean Justice (14 page)

Kline didn’t know then—and apparently never realized—that there was nothing suspicious about Pat’s response. Pat had already told sheriff’s dispatcher Valley Braddick about the keys in the kitchen, and he had assumed Detective Kline already possessed all of that information. Pat also assumed, incorrectly, that Kline had come to his house in the first place after reading the missing-persons report—why else would the detective even be there? But Kline didn’t even know such a report existed. He was at Dunn’s house because of Kate Rosenlieb. If Pat appeared confused by Kline’s question, it wasn’t because he had been caught in a lie or an incomplete cover story—it was, Pat would later say, because he was surprised at the detective’s ignorance. If he looked away, it wasn’t out of fear of the detective, but out of embarrassment
for
the detective.

Dusty Kline would later say he went to see Pat Dunn that day with an open mind. However, in the report he later wrote, it is clear that Kate Rosenlieb’s perspective on the case left a powerful impression on him. The observations—and the misinformation—relayed by Rosenlieb in her initial meeting with Kline would forever color the investigation of Alexandra Dunn’s disappearance and death. Almost everything Rosenlieb said was accepted at face value. Almost everything Pat Dunn said was dismissed or interpreted as incriminating.

From that moment on, the search for Sandy virtually ended—before it had really begun. The case became a search not for a missing woman, but for evidence—evidence that Pat Dunn had murdered his wife.

And so the homicide investigation began, based on
misinformation that led to suspicion. Now the sheriff’s department needed a body, a murder weapon, blood, a confession—any or all would do. Best of all, though, would be a witness. An eyewitness. The sheriff’s detectives who began working the case as a murder knew, sooner or later, something would turn up. In Kern County, it almost always did.

8

I
WANT A DEAL
,” J
ERRY
L
EE
C
OBLE REPEATED, EYES DARTING
around the small, antiseptic interrogation room. Blunt as a bullet, Coble looked older than his thirty-four years. He smelled of sweat and stale beer, his eyes rimmed red. He cleared his throat, the dry sound of an engine that wouldn’t catch, then added, “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But you gotta cut me a deal.”

Eric Banducci leaned back in the interrogator’s chair and regarded Coble without expression. By the detective’s count, it was the fifth, maybe sixth time this skinny little hype had used the word
deal
in the space of fifteen minutes. By this, Sheriff’s Detective Banducci understood Coble, an ex-convict, desperately wanted what every ex-con wanted—not to go back to prison. Of course, Coble hadn’t wanted it badly enough to stop committing crimes. But now that he had been caught stealing sixty grand in brass fixtures and copper wire from the irrigation company that had been generous enough (or, as Banducci figured it, stupid enough) to hire him, Coble was willing to sell out whoever he could in order to stay free.

The thing is, Banducci knew Coble. And he knew heroin addicts. He expected this man would give up his best friend, his brother, even his mother if that’s what it took to walk out that door free and clear. Or, to be more
specific, he’d do anything to stay free long enough to score his next fix. That he would lie in the process, Banducci believed, was axiomatic. That’s what addicts do. The only heroin junkies who don’t lie through their teeth, Banducci would tell junior cops with dreams of nailing Mr. Big through the likes of Jerry Coble, are in the graveyard. “And they just lie still,” he’d say with a grim laugh.

“Why should I cut a deal with you, Jerry Lee?” Banducci asked after a long pause. The detective had a narrow smile on his craggy face. “I’ve already got you, and I don’t have to cut any deals with you or anyone else to put you away. So why should I trade steak for hamburger?”

Jerry Lee Coble hung his head, then said, once again, “Man, I got to make a deal. I can’t go back.”

Coble’s scam had been sweet while it lasted. On parole from prison for a long string of felonies, Coble had hired on as an electrician for a Bakersfield pump company. He was, to be fair to the company’s hiring officer, a more than capable electrician, having been trained by the Marine Corps a lifetime ago to install instruments on jet aircraft. But his heroin habit was far stronger than his work ethic, and within weeks, he began to systematically divest his employers of brass fittings, copper cable—anything he could get his hands on. He’d strip the wire of its insulation at his parents’ trailer or his brother’s place on the ragged southern edge of Bakersfield, a farming center called Weedpatch, one of many crossroads communities adrift in the sea of farmland and oilfield that is California’s vast Central Valley. Weedpatch had once been home to one of the dreaded Okie labor camps that John Steinbeck had scathingly
portrayed in
The Grapes of Wrath.
Now it was a quiet, perfect place for Coble to dispose of his stolen goods. His brother or his teenaged nephew would sell the stripped metal at scrap yards. They got only pennies to the dollar, but when you’re moving tons of the stuff, it still brings in thousands. Plenty of money for Jerry to score all the dope he needed.

But the thing about heroin is, you always need more. As his need for drugs grew more insatiable, Jerry’s thefts grew increasingly reckless until he was finally placing orders for new electrical cable, expensive braids of copper thick as a man’s wrist that his company didn’t even use. It came straight off the spool and went right to the scrap yard, gleaming and new. Once the thefts became that oafish and obvious, it was only a matter of time before Coble found himself staring at Eric Banducci’s scuffed cowboy boots propped up on the table between them.

As it happened, Jerry’s nephew got busted first. The first thing out of the kid’s mouth when the deputies burst through the door told Banducci all he needed to know about Jerry Coble’s integrity: “That fucking bastard,” the kid blurted, “That goddamn Jerry set me up.” Not even his own family trusted Jerry Lee Coble.

Jerry Lee had tried to escape when the cops came for him, driving his El Camino past the orchards and cattle farms of Weedpatch with deputies in pursuit, at first refusing to pull over, then leaping from his pickup and trying to dash on foot through backyards and over fences. When he finally was brought down, heaving and exhausted, a gun to his head, Jerry Lee started right in with his negotiations. Before his interrogation had begun, before he had even caught his breath, he told one cop, “I don’t want to go back. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

It’s a sad, hard truth, Banducci would later say, that dealing with people like Jerry Coble is a way of life in the justice system. Whether it was in a major city like Los Angeles or a farm town like Bakersfield, there wasn’t much difference, the detective knew: Deals make the wheels of justice turn, and we’d hardly ever put crooks away if not for their blabbing about themselves or their colleagues. But Coble was a three-time loser from a family that produced several career criminals. He had no credibility, in Banducci’s estimation, even though he had been an informer in the past. Some cops might have tried to use Coble on that day in April 1991, when he was so desperate to stay out of jail he would say or do practically anything a detective might want. But not Banducci. He told Coble there would be no deals with the likes of him.

“C’mon, just tell me what you want,” Coble pleaded.

“What do I want?” Banducci said, exasperated by the tenacity of this thief. “I want you to be a man for once in your life and take responsibility for your actions. Why don’t you just come clean? Just once in your life?”

Coble stared at Banducci as if the detective had lost his mind. Then he said, “Man, get me a dope cop in here. I can do a dealer who never touches anything less than quarters.”

Instead, Banducci brought Coble to the county jail to book him. Once in the jail, the ex-con suddenly doubled over, a pained look on his dark, lined face, and pronounced himself an epileptic in need of treatment, and suffering from heroin withdrawal to boot. Coble knew jail policies better than the detention officers who ran the place—his declaration triggered an automatic transfer out of the jail to a secure ward at the county hospital.
Softer time, free drugs, nurses: Now it was Banducci’s turn to stare at Coble with grudging admiration. The thief had indeed found a way to avoid jail. For now.

“But you’ll have to do better than that to
stay
out,” Banducci muttered to himself. Many months later, the detective would be surprised to learn that Jerry Coble had done just that.
²⁵

9

F
OR THREE WEEKS
, P
AT
D
UNN SEARCHED AND WAITED,
alternately paralyzed by depression, then frantically active. He spoke repeatedly with the family lawyers, brokers and accountants, hoping to find some way to keep their real estate ventures going without Sandy’s signature on the checks. That’s what Mom would want, he kept saying. They tried to help, asking to see Sandy’s bank accounts, her will, her important papers. In the end, though, they told Pat there was nothing that would allow Sandy’s separate accounts to be touched. The one thing that would have empowered Pat to write the checks—the living trust Sandy had asked their financial planner to draw up—had not been completed. And so Pat finally gave up. Morning Star and the theater project ground to a halt. There would be no more riding fence. His and Sandy’s dreams for their vacant properties died.

After that, Pat found himself just sitting in his kitchen, staring blankly at the newspaper, dirty cups piled in the sink, his hands shaking. The worst moments were the brief flares of false hope, when someone would call and claim to have seen Sandy in a restaurant or out walking or sitting by the curb. Pat and a friend checked out many of these calls themselves, and passed all of them on to the sheriff. None panned out. Either the person who was
supposed to be Sandy had vanished by the time the tip could be checked out, or it was the wrong person. Several of the calls were prompted by the wanderings of a mentally disturbed homeless woman bearing a passing resemblance to a disheveled and grimy Sandy. Each call was as crushingly disappointing as the first.

No one, it seemed, could find Sandy or tell Pat what had happened to her—not friends, not neighbors, not strangers on the streets she used to walk, and certainly not the sheriff’s department. Pat’s relations with the detectives investigating her disappearance had deteriorated over the weeks, as their questions became more pointed and Pat’s frustration mounted. “You’re not doing anything,” he exploded at one detective. “Why aren’t you out looking for my wife?”

They
were
looking, of course, but not for Sandy. They were looking for evidence against Pat. Every witness they located, every friend of the family they talked to, every neighbor interviewed, every accountant, financial advisor and secretary—all were questioned about Pat and his relationship with Sandy. There was no physical search for a missing woman, nor any comprehensive follow-up on the reported sightings of her. The detectives instead wanted to hear about fights, about plans for divorce, about any attempts by Sandy to cut Pat out of her will. When they asked about Sandy’s habits, it was more to debunk Pat’s account rather than to find clues to her disappearance. Yet Pat, friend to the police to the end, could not or would not see the full implications of all this.

Three weeks after Sandy Dunn disappeared, however, the reality of Pat’s situation hit home—literally. Just before half past nine in the evening, a loud knocking at
the front door and his dogs’ frantic barking awakened Pat from a deep sleep. Disheveled and out of sorts, Pat told the dogs to be quiet and pulled the door open, blinking. Fourteen members of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department stood waiting outside on his doorstep. After a moment, he let them in, a look of resignation on his face as the crowd pushed its way through the door.