Mean Justice (28 page)

Laura knew strange things sometimes happened in criminal cases, subtle changes in testimony and evidence that occurred, usually early on and almost always to the detriment of whoever the police suspected. Neither Pat Dunn nor Offord Rollins were unique in this regard. Witnesses’ memories often grew more specific with time, although common sense suggests the opposite should occur. Police officers would come to court to testify and recall crucial observations they had made months earlier, though they had somehow forgotten to note those telling details in their reports at the time—reports that were supposed to be all-inclusive. Detectives would tape-record lengthy interviews with suspects, then report key, incriminating statements were made when the recorder was switched off—through sheer happenstance, of course. These sorts of things happened everywhere, but Susan Penninger told Laura they seemed to come up in every case she worked in Kern County, leading her to name the phenomenon “The Bakersfield Effect.”

The testimony of Dale Knox, the man who had seen a maroon car like Offord’s speeding from the vicinity of the murder scene, provided a perfect example, she told Laura. Knox had originally given his report on the day after Maria’s murder, speaking at length about the maroon car and the “dumb Mexican” he had seen driving it with his friend Deputy Hussey, who also had been one of the first patrol deputies called to the crime scene. Hussey had taken notes on the conversation, but after relaying the information to Detective Raymond,
Hussey was told not to bother writing a report. Instead, he destroyed his notes, contrary to common police practice.
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When Raymond conducted his own interview of Knox the next day, he reported Knox had seen a black or Hispanic male driving the maroon car.
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This change was crucial to the case, because Offord Rollins was black. His very dark complexion and facial features made mistaking his ethnicity an unlikely proposition. Here was a case in which a witness’s uncertainty was more useful than a definite (and incorrect) opinion. And so, like magic, Penninger saw, the report of a Mexican driving a maroon car changed—right after Offord was identified as the prime suspect. Many months later, when the case came to trial and Knox took the witness stand, he couldn’t say it had been Offord in the car, but he wouldn’t rule him out, either.

This ambiguity could have been fatal to the prosecution, except that Detective Raymond remembered Knox describing the car as having some damage on its left side. The car Offord had driven that day also had damage on its left fender. Again, this was crucial, since it seemed to buttress the notion that it was Offord whom Knox saw fleeing the scene, not someone else in a similar vehicle. Yet Detective Raymond had not put this key piece of information in his police report at the time, nor did he ever mention it while testifying at pretrial hearings when asked to summarize what Knox had told him. It only came to light at Rollins’ trial. Prosecutors saw nothing nefarious here, just the innocent omission of one small detail in an enormous and complex case. To Penninger, it was another example of the Bakersfield Effect.

This paled, however, next to the detective’s interview
of Maria’s mother, Miriam, which had been accomplished with the translating help of her “son-in-law,” Victor Perez. First, it turned out Victor was not Miriam’s son-in-law, but her eldest daughter, Marisol’s, former live-in boyfriend. He had been arrested and jailed repeatedly for beating Marisol, as well as for a variety of other crimes. Marisol had eventually dumped Victor and moved in with one of the Shafter policemen who had investigated him for domestic abuse. Victor, meanwhile, stayed on living with Miriam, a curious arrangement made all the stranger by the fact that Maria had told several friends and one teacher that she despised and feared the man, and that she kept a heavy stick under her bed to fend off his unwanted advances. That the Kern County Sheriff’s homicide detectives would press such a man into service as a translator of key information was unfortunate enough, but still more surprising was the fact that they seemingly never considered him a potential suspect in Maria’s murder, even after learning of his background and history of violence. Once they had focused on Offord as their suspect, investigators appeared reluctant to do anything that might undermine their case—such as suggest there might be an alternative suspect.

Moreover, beyond questions about Victor’s character, was the simple fact that virtually all of the information Detective Raymond gleaned that first crucial day from Victor’s supposed translation was wrong. Raymond had come away from that interview with an image of Offord as a jealous suitor angry at Maria’s relationship with another boy. In fact, Offord and Maria were not “going steady,” as Victor claimed, nor were they quarreling over her other boyfriends. The truth was, they had not seen each other for several months. And it was Offord, not
Maria, who had another girlfriend and wanted to distance himself from the relationship. If anyone was obsessed, it had been Maria, who pursued Offord whenever possible, doodled his name and “I love you Offord” all over her schoolbooks and calendars, and who had page after page written out with variations of her own name were she to marry Offord, along with a list of prospective names for their children. She had other boyfriends and lovers, but Offord was her first choice. Victor revealed none of this to the police.

Victor had also told police that Offord called that last morning and arranged to meet Maria in a park across the street. The only completely accurate part of this statement was that Maria did receive a phone call in the morning from someone, and she did, in fact, go to the park, saying she was meeting Offord. But this was something she often claimed, sometimes falsely, to get permission to go out, because her mother trusted Offord more than any of her other friends.
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No one actually heard Offord on the phone that day or saw Maria with him that morning at the park. (One member of the Rodriguez household said the caller identified himself as “Dre,” short for Andre, a friend of Offord’s.) A friend of Maria’s who was walking by at the time saw her sitting on a bench in the park—talking to a woman. Later, as the friend returned from the store, he saw that Maria was sitting by herself. She got up and announced that she was going to walk to someone’s house, turning down an offer of a ride from the friend, who then watched Maria walk off alone.
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She had not met Offord in the park, as Victor had said: Whoever Maria saw between ten that morning and the time of her death was unknown.

But the biggest whopper by far was the statement by
Victor that Maria’s Aunt Lucy had seen the girl with Offord in a maroon car on the night of her disappearance. When contacted, Aunt Lucy said she saw no such thing, and she didn’t know what Victor was talking about. Not that this mattered—a host of witnesses had accounted for Offord’s whereabouts that day, and had done so for all but a two-and-a-half-hour period between noon and 2:30 that afternoon (which is why it was so important to the prosecution case that the fresh, wet blood some people observed at the scene suddenly became hard, dry blood in police reports—the murder, originally thought to have occurred at night, must have happened in the drying heat of day if Offord had done it). Offord could prove he was more than one hundred miles away in Los Angeles when Victor said he was riding around with Maria.

The parallels to the Dunn case were obvious to Laura—the misinformation Kate Rosenlieb provided at the outset that made Pat Dunn a prime suspect bore a striking resemblance to Victor Perez’s role in the Rollins case. Like Rosenlieb, Victor was the first witness to raise suspicions about Offord Rollins by suggesting he had both motive and opportunity to kill. And, as with Rosenlieb, virtually everything of significance Victor told the police that first crucial day was wrong. Maria’s mother eventually denied saying any of what Victor attributed to her. Whether it was bad translation, unintended error, or outright lying by Victor, no one could say. All Laura knew for sure was that bad information from Victor Perez, who might otherwise have been considered a potential suspect, had made it a certainty that the sheriff’s department would go after Offord Rollins. And, as with Pat Dunn, they never looked back.

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That the investigative shortcomings of the Offord Rollins case might mirror those in Pat Dunn’s did not concern Laura so much. Indeed, they served only to confirm that she was on the right track in her own investigation. It was the Rollins
trial
that terrified her, for it seemed there was nothing the young man’s defenders could do in the face of the relentless prosecutor intent on putting him away, or the jury and judge seemingly willing, even eager, to help achieve that goal.

No doubt the prosecutor felt she had to be ruthless, Laura thought, for the problems facing her in the Rollins case appeared considerable. The evidence against Rollins was far from overwhelming, which would not be such a problem if the defendant were some disreputable career criminal, but which did pose difficulties with Offord, with his sterling reputation as a student, athlete and churchgoer in his small Kern County town of Wasco. The eldest son of a respiratory therapist and a utility-company executive, Rollins was a star high school football player and track champion in the triple jump, an event in which he ranked third in the nation and had a realistic shot at making the United States Olympic team. He was more than just well liked around town—the school superintendent let him date his daughter, and he had a long line of school administrators, teachers, coaches and ministers lined up to attest to his good character. He was the kind of kid who was profiled in heartwarming stories in the Wasco weekly newspaper, a class president who had overcome dyslexia to earn passable-to-good grades, who had tempered his legs into iron rods capable of immense jumps, who had never been in trouble with the law in his life.

He was not the perfect teenager, by any means—he somewhat cynically used Maria Rodriguez for sex while going steady with another girl he liked much better but didn’t sleep with. And he wrote some truly bad, amateurish rap lyrics with his friend Andre Harrison, creating a notebook full of crude, sexist and violent images that emulated the misogynous music popular with so many of his friends, and which he hoped might earn him a little money someday. But none of this made him all that different from other teenagers at Wasco High School, where sex often became a contest and where rap music blared from boom boxes in the school yard.

In a case with ambiguous physical evidence, no witnesses and no apparent motive, the accolades Offord received, coupled with his reputation, might have tilted matters in his favor at trial. But the assistant DA on the case, a successful and aggressive career prosecutor named Lisa Green, had something extra to work with when the case came to trial: she had a defendant who was black and a victim who was not—and she had an all-white Kern County jury in the box, having systematically excluded the already disproportionately small number of blacks summoned that day for jury service.
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As Rollins’ defenders saw it, long before pundits commenting on the O.J. Simpson murder trial popularized the term, Green expertly played the “race card,” thereby tipping the scales in her favor. Through the course of a month-long trial held just two months before Sandy Dunn vanished, Green portrayed Rollins as a sexual savage who got his kicks from exhibitionism, sodomy, extreme promiscuity and copulating on his own mother’s bed—though there was no evidence to support any of this beyond the prosecutor’s own loaded questions to
Rollins and other witnesses in the case.
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Isn’t it true, Green asked a friend of Rollins, that he let you watch him have sex with the victim? That he did it where his mother slept? She asked such questions knowing the answers would be no—as they had been at pretrial hearings—yet equally aware that the mere asking would leave an indelible impression on the jury.
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The audacity of the tactic spoke volumes to Laura about what the defense might be up against in Pat’s trial.

Indeed, the DA’s office had attacked Offord’s character and sexual proclivities from the start, long before the trial in this highly publicized case. It started even as Offord, still seventeen, began his case in juvenile court. To buttress the case for moving him into adult court, the assistant DA on the case—a prosecutor who preceded Green—argued that Rollins’ crime was particularly sophisticated and heinous because he raped and sodomized Maria before murdering her. Rape was the motive for murder, it was argued, probably because Offord got angry when Maria refused his request to have anal sex. The judge happily moved the teenager into adult court. Problem was, the DA’s office at that time had in hand an autopsy report showing Maria had
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been raped. Furthermore, the autopsy revealed she had regularly engaged in anal sex for months, if not years, but that she had not done so for at least twenty-four hours prior to her murder. The DA’s office revealed this information and dismissed the rape and sodomy charges only after winning Offord’s transfer to adult court—and after the incendiary allegations had been thoroughly reported in the news media.
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Once Rollins’ trial started, the prosecution came up with a new theory. It was suggested that Maria, obsessed
with rekindling a failed relationship, bothered Offord too much. So he decided to eliminate her. There was absolutely no evidence to support this—indeed, Maria’s own journals and writings indicated that, while she still loved Offord, she also pursued sexual relationships with a number of other men in the weeks and months before she died. There was not a shred of evidence or testimony that Offord had ever exhibited or expressed any anger toward Maria.

Although the prosecution’s theory of motive in the case had totally changed, Deputy DA Green kept asking witnesses at trial if Rollins liked having anal sex, hammering on a point no longer relevant to the case. Many of the jurors undoubtedly considered sodomy both distasteful and immoral, and repeated allusions to it allowed Green to score points as Offord squirmed in embarrassment. Even the judge got in on the act, asking a lascivious question of his own about what sorts of acts of “penetration” Offord and his new girlfriend enjoyed together.
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