Mean Justice (25 page)

She quickly wrapped up the interview, stowing her tape recorder and her notebook, and gently begged off Marie’s invitation to dinner, saying, “Oh, I didn’t realize how late it was.” As Marie walked her to the door, she again declared that she loved Laura like a daughter. “I can see the goodness in you, dear,” she said.

Laura started to smile at this endearment, but then her expression froze in place as she saw the older woman’s eyes go cold and her mouth become a thin, white line. “But that man you’re working for is as guilty as sin, and I hope he fries,” Marie spat. “And I’ll do anything I can to see that he does.”
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Laura felt her stomach lurch, for it seemed like another person had replaced the kindly old lady. Some might argue Laura had simply witnessed the reaction of a woman who, understandably, hated the killer of a friend and wanted justice done. But to Laura, something else had peeked out from behind Marie’s saintly mask, just for a moment, and caused her to wonder anew about all of the inconsistencies and evolutions in the woman’s story she had been ready to dismiss as honest errors or the haze of old age. And, even beyond that, there was something
else, something less obvious and more fundamental, that ran through everything this woman had said about Pat and Sandy and her knowledge of them. Laura couldn’t put her finger on it, but she knew it would be vital to the case. She shivered, though it was still very hot outside.

Then the moment passed. The warm smile was back in place on Marie Gates’ face. The plate of sugar cookies was being waved under Laura’s nose and the kindly grandmother to every kid on the block was asking, “Would you like to take some with you, darlin’?” Laura shook her head, forcing a smile, resisting the urge to bolt. This interview would haunt her for the rest of her time in Bakersfield, as would the fear that nothing she encountered in this case was what it appeared to be on the surface.

This was truer of Marie Gates than Laura ever realized. She had made an important discovery—but the full significance of what Marie told her that day would continue to elude her.

5

F
OR THE POLICE, A MURDER CASE INEVITABLY BEGINS
with a body. Even the Dunn case started that way—though in Sandy’s case, it started with a missing body. For private investigators, however, the process begins very differently, starting where the police work ends: with the “Murder Book.”

The Murder Book is the compendium of all the police reports assembled over the course of a homicide case. It can run several inches thick, providing a detailed road map of how the police assembled their case, charting the path taken from suspicion to evidence to arrest. Murder Books can be dry or compelling, depending on the authors, and though they use jargon and official terms to evoke an air of objectivity, they are anything but unbiased. They often begin with a suspect, and the separate reports that make up its chapters reflect the slow accumulation of evidence and witnesses in support of the detective’s theories about that suspect. Witnesses like Marie Gates, who help the case, are given prominent roles. Witnesses who tend to disprove the detective’s suspicions are often minimized or disregarded as irrelevant, mistaken or liars. They often are barely mentioned in the police reports, if at all, and of course these unexplored avenues, deemed fruitless by the authorities, are gold
mines for people like Laura Lawhon. In them lie the seeds of a defense.

The murder book Laura picked up detailing the disappearance and death of Alexandra Paola Dunn read with the usual air of inevitability, as if a veritable evidentiary juggernaut had led police to lay this terrible crime at Pat Dunn’s door. That is, they read that way once she had pieced together the jumbled stack of reports and files retrieved from the DA’s office, more than a thousand pages handed over out of order and in disarray. Laura felt certain they had been shuffled purposely. The laws of legal discovery require the government to turn over all pertinent information to the defense before trial (there are no Perry Mason moments in today’s courtrooms, at least when the attorneys are behaving ethically), but those laws do not require the information to be given in any particular order. Indeed, some appeals courts have sanctioned the tactic of burying evidence valuable for the defense inside tens of thousands of pages of useless material, where it might never be found or recognized. The mess was not so big in the Dunn case, however, and Laura didn’t really mind anyway: She enjoyed the process of assembling the raw reports herself, putting them into large, white plastic binders, in chronological order and cross-referenced with a master witness list, almost like a cast of characters at the beginning of a playbill. There was no point in getting upset about the jumble—the defense handed over its own disclosures in just as messy a fashion. It was all part of the game.

Before interviewing any witnesses or even the client himself, Laura had read and reread the Murder Book. She had never seen anything quite like the Dunn investigation—a missing-persons case in which no one looked for
the missing person and everyone seemed to assume the husband was a murderer long before any evidence of a murder actually surfaced. Even reports that Sandy had been spotted roaming around various parts of Kern County, looking disheveled and disoriented, had been largely ignored—dutifully recorded in the police reports, but seldom pursued in any meaningful way by detectives on the case, who already had decided Sandy was dead long before her body had been identified. One of these sightings was made just three days after Sandy disappeared—a time when the coroner who later performed the autopsy on her shriveled corpse conceded she might still have been alive. But the sheriff never followed up on it.

Now Laura was racing the calendar, with a mere six weeks remaining to match and counter the accusations leveled in the Murder Book. Marie Gates offered some promising, if confusing, avenues to explore. But there were so many other leads that Laura wasn’t sure where to begin. She had come to the case late and she feared that she might not be able to do it justice. Everything took time, too much of it: To thoroughly discredit a single, seemingly convincing witness like Marie Gates would require days of work and interviews with at least a half dozen people who could gainsay various bits and pieces of her story—one person to say Sandy did in fact walk at night, another to describe her marriage to Leon and to authenticate the divorce papers, yet another to say no, Sandy and Marie Gates weren’t close friends at all. And assembling all that didn’t begin to address the strategic problem of packaging the resulting jigsaw of witnesses and information into a palatable, easy-to-understand presentation for jurors who would want very much to believe Marie Gates. And Marie was only one witness.
The same complex recipe would have to be assembled to combat each and every major prosecution witness.

Even assuming she succeeded in amassing all that information, Laura did not feel confident. She kept hearing things around the courthouse, from a local private investigator she had run into and who had briefly worked on the Dunn case. “He may be innocent,” the other PI, Susan Penninger, had said. “But in Kern County, that’s not always enough.”

Penninger possessed a wealth of experience with Bakersfield’s justice system and some of its most controversial cases, including working with Stan Simrin to unravel the Nokes molestation-ring case. “You know, I still write letters to a guy doing life in prison, and I know he’s innocent,” she said. “I
know
it. And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”

It was another of those Bakersfield moments for Laura. Almost eighty degrees, and Penninger’s words made her shiver.

And this only intensified another problem Laura had to deal with in this case. Contrary to the bulk of her cases, in which the evidence proving her clients’ guilt left little room for doubt, she had come to the decision that Pat Dunn was an innocent man. Which wasn’t to say she thought he was a terrific guy. In fact, he was a very odd man, quirky and difficult one moment, self-effacing and kind the next, then just as likely to turn selfish, arrogant and overconfident. He had screwed himself royally, him and his brother Mike, by tipping his first lawyer’s hand to Detective Soliz. It had blown up in their faces, Laura knew—Jerry Coble was still the prosecution’s star witness, and now he was ready for them. Meanwhile, Pat was beside himself, writing endless notes and commentaries
and letters about the case, deluging both his lawyers and the investigators, making collect calls whenever his jailers would permit it, driving everyone nuts. He had to be counseled repeatedly not to tell his story to fellow inmates, any one of whom could gladly turn state’s evidence and get in line behind Coble as a prosecution informant given the chance. “Sometimes, I just have to talk to someone, and I don’t care anymore,” Pat had lamented. Yet, despite it all, Laura had come to like Pat Dunn, to appreciate his sense of humor and his own brand of cranky toughness.

After studying the Murder Book, after concluding that the police selectively chose who and what to believe, and after talking with Marie Gates, Laura felt certain that whatever else he might be, Pat Dunn was no killer. This no doubt would make Pat happy, but not so his private investigator. She knew, just as every good defense lawyer knows, that believing in the innocence of a client makes things harder, ratcheting up the pressure and the stress, interfering with the cold and rational assessments necessary to win a case. By believing in Dunn’s innocence, Laura
had
to find a way to win. Nothing else would be acceptable.

“Problem is,” her husband, Wayne, had reminded her in his eternally blunt way just before she left for Bakersfield, “your side usually loses.”

•   •   •

Laura returned to her motel room and began thumbing through the police reports, drawn once again back to the Murder Book and to the question of why the sheriff, and now the district attorney, so single-mindedly pursued Pat Dunn as the one and only suspect. Not even the complete absence of any physical evidence deterred those suspicions.
When search after search of the Dunn home and cars came up empty, it slowed the authorities down, of course—they couldn’t arrest him without any evidence. But they never turned their suspicions elsewhere. It puzzled Laura, convinced her something more was at work in this case. Here was a woman reported missing, with a documented history of walking at three and four in the morning through a rough area of town, sometimes wearing expensive jewelry, whose habits were utterly predictable and who easily could have been stalked and kidnapped by anyone hanging around the shopping center at night. Here was a woman who had not just been stabbed, but carved up, with tissue excised from her rectum—a gruesome touch the police had not even attempted to explain. Here was a woman whose own court testimony had put her first husband’s embezzling bookkeeper behind bars—a bookkeeper who reasonably could be expected to harbor bitterness toward Sandy, and who was now out of prison. And here was a woman who had just told her financial planner she not only wanted her husband to have more control over their money, but she also wanted to cut off from any inheritance her own sister and all of Pat Dunn’s children. Furthermore, Laura had learned that several workmen making repairs on offices at Sandy’s College Center mall late at night and early in the morning were drug abusers with criminal records—and friends of Danny Dunn, Pat’s troubled middle child. Sandy would have walked right by them on the night she disappeared if she stuck to her normal route.

In Laura’s view, it should not have required much imagination for the sheriff’s department to figure out an alternative and just as likely solution for their case: Take one middle-aged woman, walking alone at night in a
high-crime area. Add her unwavering habits over a period of months. Then factor in the possibility she was slipping mentally. She might as well have had a target mounted on her back, as far as Laura was concerned: She was ripe for robbery, abduction or worse at the hands of the unsavory characters working in the mall, or someone else with an old grudge, or any passing stranger with a hunger for money or violence who spied an easy victim.

No one could say any of these alternative theories was accurate, but to Laura that was the point. Each of these potential avenues of suspicion—any one of which could have pointed to possible motives and killers having nothing to do with Pat Dunn—had been ignored by sheriff’s detectives from the start. Such alternatives had not received even cursory attention. They might all be blind alleys, certainly, but no one had bothered to check them out. From the moment the case began, thanks to Kate Rosenlieb’s passionate complaints about Pat and the sheriff’s own initial theories on the case, the focus had been in one direction only.

They wanted Pat Dunn. Period.

Detective Soliz made no bones about it. There had never been any other suspects, he would later explain. He had never felt a need to find any. As far as he and his department were concerned, everything pointed to husband murdering wife. It had been obvious within a matter of days. Had Soliz learned anything that pointed his investigation of Sandy’s death toward another theory, he would have pursued it happily. But that, the detective would say, never happened.
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