Mean Justice (24 page)

She went on to explain how Sandy had given her husband
until the end of the month to get out—which would have been June 30, the very day Sandy disappeared. The authorities loved that, as it fit perfectly with their theory of the case, a perfect trigger for murder.

“She said she wanted his girl out, too,” Marie added. At the time, Marie thought Sandy meant that Pat had a girlfriend living in the house. Now, she told the detective, she realized Sandy had been talking about Pat’s daughter, Jennifer. She did not explain how she knew this, or why she had been mistaken in the first place, and, at least as far as Laura could tell from the police reports, Detective Kline didn’t ask. (In any case, Laura knew Jennifer, then five months pregnant, was living with her mother, not Pat, at the time.) Marie also claimed Sandy was upset because her husband and his daughter had hit her. This alarmed Marie enough that she begged Sandy to get in the car and come home with her.

“No, I’ll be okay,” Marie recalled Sandy saying in an uncertain—and unconvincing—voice.

Gates concluded this first conversation with Detective Kline by contradicting one of her earlier Taylor 1 statements, in which she had said she suspected Pat of murder because he failed to report Sandy missing without delay. Her new version asserted that she began suspecting Pat Dunn of murder when she learned he had never mentioned Sandy’s disappearance to his mother, Lillian. “She found out from the television news,” Marie said. “Isn’t that awful?”
¹⁵

Marie also thought it highly suspicious that Pat had Sandy quietly cremated without religious services, choosing instead to spread her ashes over the Morning Star project site that she loved so much. “She was a devout Catholic and should have had a service,” Marie said
indignantly. A few other witnesses, Councilwoman Pat DeMond among them, had voiced similar sentiments, and sheriff’s detectives considered the cremation another reason to doubt Pat, evidence that he hated his wife and sought not only to murder her physically, but to harm her in death as well.

But Marie Gates was wrong on all of these points. Laura knew—as did the sheriff’s detectives—that Pat had told Lillian Dunn about Sandy within three or four days of her disappearance, right around the July Fourth holiday weekend and well before any television coverage of the case. Lillian herself had told this to the sheriff’s investigators. Nor did Marie Gates seem to know that Sandy had left the Catholic Church in anger in the mid-1980s, after a disagreement over a charitable contribution. Sandy had donated a large sum of money to the diocese with what she thought was an understanding that a facility under construction would be dedicated to the memory of Pat Paola—a promise church officials denied making and never fulfilled, though they kept the money. Sandy was extremely bitter about this, and had even filed suit against the church. All her close friends knew this, that she had vowed never to go to church again—but not Marie Gates.

Once again, detectives did not press Marie on these issues, Laura could see from the reports. They wanted to believe her. Nor did anyone ask Marie why she waited six weeks to tell her story to the authorities, why she never mentioned this last encounter with Sandy during her Taylor 1 calls, or why Pat’s supposed failure to tell Lillian about the disappearance, rather than this far more damning conversation on the street with Sandy, triggered Marie’s suspicions. To Laura, it made no sense.

When police interview a suspect—or a hostile witness—they try to lock him or her into an initial, detailed story, Laura knew. Then, any deviations from that original story line can be labeled lies and used as evidence of a guilty state of mind. But the standards are very different for witnesses favorable to law enforcement, whose changing stories may be welcomed and given the innocuous label “refreshed recollections”—so long as the changes benefit the prosecution’s case. In subsequent renditions, Marie’s story kept evolving, always to the detriment of Pat Dunn. In the next telling after the initial interview with Kline, Marie recalled Sandy looking nervous as she walked that day, something she never mentioned before. Now Marie was not simply stopping for a pleasant chat, but had pulled over to ask what was wrong. In later renditions, Sandy was walking along sobbing, tears streaming down her face, when Marie pulled over to ask what was wrong. In this more dramatic version, while Marie tried to talk Sandy into getting into her car and coming home with her, someone drove up and yelled at Sandy to go home. Marie said at first that she wasn’t sure who this was, but she thought it might have been Pat Dunn. In subsequent versions, she became sure the man was, in fact, Pat Dunn. Still later Marie said Sandy had told her she had made a terrible mistake in marriage, but that she didn’t believe in divorce.
¹⁶

With many witnesses, such inconsistency and outright mistakes—coupled with a virulent and admitted dislike of the defendant—would be fatal to their credibility. Certainly the sheriff’s investigators seized on every inconsistency in Pat’s story, no matter how minor, to brand him a liar and a murderer. The problem was, Marie Gates was the sort of lovely older widow that every neighborhood
seems to have, the one with no children of her own, but who is always baking for the neighbors and watching their kids. She was in her seventies but still vigorous, with that perfect, long white hair and clear blue eyes and a melodious, soothing voice. She told a tragic tale of how all seven of her children had died at birth or in infancy, and how, now that her husband had died, she had no one left—except for the children in her neighborhood, whom she cherished as her own, walking them to school and showering them with treats.

Marie, then, was clearly a sympathetic witness, so when it came time for her to tell her story in court, it wouldn’t matter that all of the Dunns’ other friends agreed that there never was any talk of divorce. It wouldn’t matter that Sandy told her financial planner just hours before her disappearance that she wanted Pat to have
more
control over her finances—hardly the words of a woman intent on divorce, or who had given her husband until the end of the month to get out (particularly when the meeting with the financial planner was on the last day of the month). And it wouldn’t matter, in the end, that Marie Gates was wrong on so many points, or that her story never seemed to come out the same way twice. Laura knew jurors would look at her serene face and hear that angelic voice with the slight quaver in it, and believe anything she said on the witness stand. And, after all, they would hear her tell her story only once, and it would sound good. Like the authorities, they would
want
to believe her. Any defense lawyer who tried to attack her would come off as an ogre, unless he was very, very careful—and, even then, only if Laura provided the proper ammunition to support an all-out attack.

And, she just might find it, Laura realized. Here was
Marie, telling the story yet again, kindly and patient and sounding utterly believable—and, once more, scrambling it into a new version. This time, Sandy wasn’t just walking along and crying. Now she had her face buried in her hands and had been walking around town sobbing all day. Then Marie told Laura something else she claimed to know, but that she had never mentioned before in conversations with sheriff’s detectives—that she knew for a fact Sandy took her daily walks during daylight hours, not in the dark. This provided further evidence of Pat’s perfidy, she said.

“He keeps saying she used to walk after midnight and stuff,” Marie scoffed, adamant and sure of herself. “That’s a lie.”

Laura just nodded, knowing that Sandy’s nocturnal walks were well documented and not just based on Pat’s word. She, and the sheriff’s detectives, had interviewed neighbors, one of Sandy’s walking partners, her jeweler, and all backed up Pat’s description of the odd hours Sandy kept. Even the cops conceded that much. Yet again, this “dear friend” of Sandy’s seemed to know very little about her.

Marie also told Laura that Sandy had met with an attorney the day before she disappeared, apparently to talk about a divorce. Marie had heard about this supposed legal consultation from a woman who knew Sandy, but didn’t want to get involved. “I can’t give you the name,” Marie whispered. “I promised to keep her out of it. She’s afraid of the Dunns.” Laura had heard about this alleged meeting before, too, and knew it never happened. The rumor mill had confused Kevin Knutson, the financial planner who met the Dunns on Sandy’s last day, with a lawyer.

As Marie continued to pass on other such revelations, it gradually became clear to Laura that she was incorporating into her story all sorts of things that other witnesses in the case had said. One minute, she parroted a neighbor of the Dunns who claimed to have heard a loud argument between Sandy and Pat, from which Sandy drove off in an angry, erratic fashion, two days before she disappeared. Marie and this neighbor had apparently compared notes at length. Then Marie quoted something Kate Rosenlieb had said, about seeing a small cut on one of Sandy’s shins several months before she disappeared, which Sandy supposedly blamed on Pat.
¹⁷
Moments later, she repeated something that Pat DeMond had told sheriff’s detectives about Sandy’s sister Nanette, who was challenging Sandy’s will and trying to leave Pat Dunn penniless by taking over the estate. (DeMond was a paralegal by trade; she worked for the sister’s attorney even as she lobbied law-enforcement officials from her city council position to prosecute Pat Dunn.) As Marie spoke, it suddenly dawned on Laura that the prosecution’s witnesses might all be talking to one another, sharing information and recollections. And Marie—consciously or unconsciously—was beginning to repeat other witnesses’ information as if it were her own. Could that be how this story of seeing Sandy in the street evolved? Was it a gradual merging of the events Marie had actually witnessed with other stories she had heard over a period of months, until Marie herself couldn’t be sure which was which?

Laura asked Marie to go over once again her last conversation with Sandy, and Marie happily obliged. “Sandy was crying . . . and she says, ‘Oh, Marie, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a terrible mistake.’ ” This much Laura had heard before—the mistake in marriage Marie had previously
mentioned. But then came the inevitable new revelation: “Because when she met Pat, Sandy had told me, ‘Oh, I met a guy, he’s in real estate, he has holdings out of town, la-di-da. And, you know, he wouldn’t be after my money.’ ”

Laura put her teacup down and listened intently. Marie, she felt certain, was about to disclose something crucial.

“And she said, ‘I made a mistake. He told me he had money, he told me he had holdings out of town. But he doesn’t. He lied.’ ”

There it is,
Laura thought to herself.
Gotcha.

Marie continued speaking, reliving the moment, oblivious to Laura’s intent gaze. “And she said, ‘He’s after me all the time, let’s do this, let’s do that . . . He says he don’t like tightwads and pennypinchers.’ ”
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Laura and Marie talked a good half hour more after that, but Laura had everything she needed, relaxing, putting her notepad down, just chatting. The subject changed, with Marie reminiscing about how she met her husband, how happy they had been until the day he died, and how she later dumped a would-be second mate for cheating on her even as he proposed marriage. Laura nodded and smiled, and Marie rambled, a lonely woman happy for the company of someone who actually listened. She even offered to take Laura out to dinner, but Laura only half heard, for she kept thinking about Marie’s account of Sandy’s last words, this image of a doomed woman talking so fast she could hardly be understood, describing a husband who lied about his own riches while coveting his wife’s money and real estate, who couldn’t wait to get his hands on Sandy’s wealth and spend it.

Marie Gates had never said any of this to the authorities—or at least if she had, they weren’t admitting it. For that man Marie described couldn’t possibly be Patrick O. Dunn, Laura knew. Pat had never claimed to have any wealth when he met Sandy. He was a retired school principal with a marginal foreclosure business. And, at Sandy’s urging, he had even shut down that business while recovering from appendicitis. Sandy had paid for the operation, twenty thousand in cash. Later, during discussions with their financial planner, Pat candidly announced, “I don’t have any assets of my own,” at which Sandy had shown no surprise, no anger, no reaction at all. Clearly, then, Sandy had no illusions about Pat’s net worth. She well knew who had the money in the Dunn family, and had known it all along.

Yet Marie wasn’t totally wrong, either, Laura knew: Sandy once
did
have a husband whom she accused of misrepresenting his financial worth and of wanting to spend her money on luxuries and get-rich schemes. She once
did
have a marriage that she often described as a mistake—and a husband she considered a con man. But it was her
second
husband, Leon, she had always described in this way. Not Pat.

Somehow, Marie had gotten the two confused, Laura decided. She saw no other explanation. The statements Marie remembered Sandy uttering made no sense unless applied to Leon rather than Pat. They clearly matched up with a husband Sandy had dumped in a hurry after finding out he was not what he claimed be—not Pat, to whom she had been married for five years. Even the way Marie quoted Sandy—talking about “my husband” and “his girl,” rather than naming them as Pat and Jennifer—fit perfectly. Placed in this light, all the contradictions
made sense. Laura never really believed Marie would simply fabricate this encounter with Sandy, no matter how much Marie might have hated Pat Dunn. It was much easier to believe that, over the past several months, Marie, in her desire to help and see justice done, might simply have confused some earlier conversation with Sandy about the failings of her second husband. Because Marie never knew about Leon, she could easily have thought Sandy was talking about Pat. Laura couldn’t wait to get back to her motel room to dash off a memo to Pat’s lawyer.