Mean Justice (29 page)

Green also used to similar effect some of the crude rap lyrics Rollins had written. Even though the judge had previously ruled most of them inadmissible, the jury was exposed to a broad selection of his songs. Green argued that one particular verse (“She wouldn’t let me go, so I slapped the ho”) out of more than a hundred pages of drivel, proved that Offord wanted to get rid of a clinging Maria. Nowhere in any of the raps is there any mention of Maria specifically, or any girl who resembles her, but the judge allowed this lyric to be used by the prosecution as evidence of motive. Other rap songs, however, were not supposed to be introduced, yet Green repeatedly recited some of Offord’s most obnoxious lyrics to the jury, including one proclaiming, “I’m the nigga of the
’hood. Damn, this is feeling good . . . I’m reaching my gold, direct a bullet to your sold.” The defense watched helplessly as the mostly white, middle-aged jurors recoiled.

The rap lyrics had made for potent ammunition from the start of the case, long before trial. A local newspaper obtained copies of Offord’s rap lyrics, apparently leaked by sheriff’s department sources. The paper described the raps as “sadistic scribblings,” “evil poetry,” and “fiendish jottings,” writing that “glorifies drug dealers, degrades women, and promotes violence.”
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(Leaks of negative—and even false—information about Pat Dunn would later emanate from the sheriff’s department as well once his case was pending.) Detective Randy Raymond was quoted at length in the article, which went on to explain how Offord’s writings gave “a look inside his head.” Green portrayed the writings in a similar way, as revolting revelations of a sick mind, as opposed to what Offord’s friends and defenders claimed them to be—childish attempts to imitate a phenomenally successful and popular form of music that no more revealed a propensity for violence in Rollins than a Stephen King horror novel betrayed a murderous nature in that author.

Green underscored her portrait of Offord as a violent sexual predator by eliciting inadmissible hearsay testimony from one witness, who recalled “someone” had said that Rollins might have had a gun at his house in the months before the murder—a statement the judge on the case never should have allowed.
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At the same time, Green successfully argued that the jury should not hear about other potential suspects in the case whom the defense wished to accuse, namely, Victor Perez. Perez’s incorrect information to police, his past
violence against Maria’s sister, and the witnesses prepared to testify that Maria feared and hated Victor were not enough, Green reasoned: In addition to a possible motive and a propensity for violence, there had to be some evidence that Victor actually might have committed the murder as well. And that couldn’t be shown, Green said, because Victor had an airtight alibi. Miriam Rodriguez, Maria’s mother, said she was with Victor the entire day that Maria disappeared, the prosecutor asserted. The judge agreed: No mother would lie to cover for her daughter’s killer. So the jury never heard about Victor Perez.

There was just one problem. Long after the trial, it would become clear that Lisa Green had been mistaken: There was no such alibi. Miriam would swear that she went out alone to search for Maria when the girl failed to come home from the park that day, walking the streets for hours—without Victor. But Offord’s jury would never know that.

Finally, in closing arguments, the prosecutor employed a tried-and-true, yet devastating tactic: likening the defendant to infamous criminals. Green tried to seal the case against Rollins by casting his lot with child molesters, Charles Manson, Judas Iscariot (“On the night of the last supper, Judas would have had twelve of the best character witnesses in the world,” Green intoned), and, finally, the most notorious and threatening black athlete of the day, boxer Mike Tyson, who had recently been disgraced and sent to prison for rape (though he had not yet committed his most infamous act, trying to bite off the ear of an opponent during a prizefight). The analogy seemed clear: Rollins was just another black athlete out of control, a walking stereotype of rage, violence
and promiscuity, committing unspeakable crimes with seeming impunity. Unable to offer evidence of a coherent motive for Rollins to have murdered Maria, the prosecutor turned him into a beast instead.

In an attempt to overcome these hardball tactics, Rollins’ attorney brought in several scientific experts, including David Faulkner, a nationally recognized pioneer in the new field of forensic entomology—the study of insect activity at crime scenes. The experts testified there was no way Maria could have died before sunset, a crucial contention of the prosecution, given that Green conceded Offord’s alibi for the late afternoon and evening. Her bloody body would have shown evidence of fly eggs and larvae if it had been left in the desert in the daytime, Faulkner told the jury. He even performed an experiment with the body of a dead pig at the murder scene that supported his conclusions—flies appeared in great numbers during the day, but not at all at night, because flies cannot see or navigate in darkness. The prosecution tried to rebut this testimony with its own expert, but the scientist brought in by the DA turned out to be an expert in mosquitoes, not flies, and even he ended up admitting that Maria’s body should have had fly eggs on it had she died when the prosecution claimed. Laura, like Susan Penninger before her, thought the defense presented an overwhelming case, offering the jury tangible evidence to weigh against what she regarded as mostly innuendo, speculation and personal attacks. Even if the jurors were concerned by the fiber, plant and fingerprint evidence from the car and therefore were not convinced of Offord’s outright innocence, Laura figured, surely there were too many doubts to sustain a conviction.

But the jury felt otherwise. As his father wept and whispered, “This town is evil,” Offord was pronounced guilty of first-degree murder. The verdict left Laura wondering just what was needed to win an acquittal in Kern County. Could she do any better for Pat Dunn?

In the end, it seemed to Laura that the deck must have been stacked against Rollins, that there was a reason why an absence of flies just couldn’t compete with the fiendish jottings of a sodomizing Mike Tyson clone. And she was right. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the jury room, a juror named Gregory Piceno told his colleagues he was well acquainted with the crime scene, having worked on a nearby farm for fifty years. In violation of his sworn oath to consider only evidence presented in trial, Piceno told the other jurors that there could have been pesticides sprayed near the body, thereby explaining the absence of flies. The defense testimony—which included assurances that no pesticides had been sprayed near the murder scene—was all “a damn lie,” one fellow juror recalled Piceno saying during the trial.
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This other juror, an alternate who did not participate in deliberations, would later claim several other members of the jury busily violated their oaths throughout the trial as well, by discussing the evidence and pronouncing Offord guilty in private conversations long before all the evidence was in—despite the judge’s daily admonitions not to do so.

These allegations of jury misconduct came to light only after the trial had ended, and then, only because the alternate juror, aghast at the verdict, spoke up. Susan Penninger helped uncover this information and more—including new witnesses, one of whom had heard another man confess to killing Maria—but Judge Len
McGillivray declared that the proceedings had been fair and just. The alternate juror could not be believed, McGillivray decided, while accepting the other jurors’ denials of any misconduct
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In a courtroom with eleven armed guards posted inside because Kern County officials were alarmed about protesters—mostly black—converging on the courthouse, Judge McGillivray announced that Offord Rollins’ conviction would stand.

The only comfort Laura could take from the Rollins case was the unexpectedly merciful sentence imposed by Judge McGillivray. Over the DA’s protests, the judge invoked a little-used law that let him return Offord to the juvenile justice system, where the case began. Offord’s age, exemplary past and otherwise clean record justified this sentence, the judge ruled, which meant instead of serving the life term District Attorney Ed Jagels sought, Offord would go free at age twenty-five, after enduring a maximum of eight years of incarceration with the California Youth Authority. It was the only flaw Jagels found in what he considered to be an otherwise remarkable victory for his office.
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As Susan Penninger told it, questions about the performance of police and prosecution—not to mention judge and jury—in the Rollins case seemed obvious and legion, and she believed they should have led to much soul-searching, if not formal inquiries, within the Kern County justice system. Instead, there were only accolades for those responsible and this, more than anything, left Laura afraid for Pat Dunn and unsure of her own case, which had seemed rather powerful before she heard of Offord Rollins. You reward what you want to see more of, she knew.

A few months after Offord Rollins’ sentence, Jagels
named Lisa Green his office’s prosecutor of the year, the first such award he ever bestowed. Responding to claims that the Rollins trial was tainted by racism and official misconduct, Jagels told a reporter such attacks were “an utterly unwarranted and vicious smear offered up by bad losers.”

“Not only did she try the case extraordinarily well,” Jagels said of Green, “but she exhibited a level of class and professionalism which was an example to us all.”

7

T
HE MOBILE HOME SAGGED IN THE MORNING SUN
-light, its metal sides rippling and dirt-streaked, the yard around it strewn with blackened parts from dismantled cars and machinery. Laura Lawhon, for the third time, had driven from the Marriott in Bakersfield to this lonely outpost on a rural road in Weedpatch, surrounded by farms and the thick smells of manure and pesticide. She watched the home, watched the cars, took license-plate numbers. She waited. Coble patrol, she called it: Looking for Jerry Lee Coble, his family, his associates—and information that would unravel his critical eyewitness testimony about Pat Dunn dumping his wife’s body into the back of a pickup truck.

She took a deep breath and walked to the rickety wooden fence enclosing the rectangle of grassless yard. A weathered man, looking at least sixty years old, with a cap bearing a tractor logo on the front, peered out of the screen door, then slowly walked toward Laura, careful to keep several feet between himself and the fence. It occurred to Laura that he might be afraid she would thrust a subpoena at him, and he wanted to stay out of reach.

“Mr. Coble?” she said brightly, putting as much wattage into her smile as she could muster.

The old man said nothing, just looked her up and
down, shaking his head slightly, making her acutely aware of just how out of place her light business suit and gold jewelry looked in this barren stretch of blacktop and scrubby fields. She knew this man was Elvin Coble, Jerry Lee’s father, a thirty-year employee of a cement company—a gruff man and a hard drinker, but, unlike his four boys, someone who had never been in trouble with the law. His company thought so highly of his long service and loyalty to two generations of owners that it presented him with a shiny red pickup truck as an honorarium. Gleaming and new in front of that tired yard and weathered house, it appeared to be his most prized possession.

“Mr. Coble, my name is Laura Lawhon,” she announced, sensing that, with this man, short and to the point was the only way to go. “I’m a private investigator. I work for—”

“I know who you work for,” the elder Coble cut her off. “You work for that Dunn fellow. The one that killed his wife.”

Laura flashed another smile at him and shrugged. She could have protested this pronouncement of guilt, said that nothing had been proven against Pat, that he remained innocent under the law, the usual rap. But she knew it would be a waste of time, knew this man wasn’t going to help, knew the Cobles would stand behind Jerry Lee no matter what. Jerry was family. He was blood. And without his deal to testify, he was looking at six years in the slammer. Pat Dunn, on the other hand, was a stranger. Who else could the elder Coble support, other than his own blood? Who else could he choose to believe? Elvin’s bulbous nose, red and thickly veined, bobbed in front of Laura. She could smell alcohol on his breath and his clothes, but his eyes were unclouded and, even though
he had to know her job was to attack his son, she saw no malice in his stare, only a weary resignation, the look of a man who had been down this path one too many times with his wayward boys. Laura found to her surprise that she felt sorry for this man, knowing, thirty-odd years ago, he had held a baby son in his arms, had felt the wonder and possibilities of new life, and had never imagined that his boy would become a hype and a convict and a snitch. Elvin Coble could never have envisioned the day that cops and private investigators and attorneys would visit his home more frequently than neighbors and friends. She could see the pain etched in the lines of his broad, open face. But she had to push on, had to do the job, had to try.