Mean Justice (37 page)

“No,” Gary Pohlson had told her when she brought up the subject. “It suggests just one thing: A suspect in a criminal case should keep his mouth shut. That’s the only thing that could have saved Pat, saying nothing at all. Truth or lies, it didn’t matter what Pat had to say once he became a suspect. His words were going to be used against him no matter what.”

10

A
S THE
M
ARCH
1993
TRIAL DATE APPROACHED,
Laura found herself on the phone almost daily with Pat, trying to keep him from despair while continuing to prepare him for courtroom battle. She had to stave off any repeats of the disastrous tip-off to Detective Soliz that had so undermined his defense at the preliminary hearing in December—a real possibility, she feared, because Pat still did not grasp the fundamental nature of his situation. In his heart, he still seemed to believe that if he just would be allowed to tell his story his way, everything would be fine, the authorities would see the light, and he could go home. With the sting of the mock-trial session fading with time, he had even started talking about wanting to testify again. Laura’s response was to keep Pat occupied, putting him to work analyzing police reports and transcripts. It was busywork that, nevertheless, left Pat feeling like he was doing something constructive—and kept him from doing anything destructive.

Pat’s family, though, was another matter. Laura found herself helpless to stop Mike Dunn, who contacted at least three prosecution witnesses on his own—Jerry Lee Coble, Coble’s father, and Marie Gates among them. The defense team only learned of this after the fact. The three witnesses would all later claim that Mike tried to bribe them in some
fashion or another so that they would not testify against Pat. Coble would later say he almost took the offer. Marie Gates’ allegations, meanwhile, soon spun to wild extremes, as she declared Mike Dunn an evil, powerful man who hired a hit man to accost her and cut off her hair.
⁸²

When questioned by Pohlson, the Dunns denied any attempt at bribery, saying it was Jerry Coble who extorted money from Mike. Coble, they said, promised to produce evidence that would clear Pat if he was paid off. But he simply took several hundred dollars without delivering, and threatened Mike Dunn with a knife.
⁸³
No one on the defense team knew what to believe.

Then, just before trial, Mike Dunn whisked his mother, Lillian, to his home two hundred miles away in Orange County, where a doctor reported to the court that she would be medically incapable of testifying—despite the fact that, to Laura, she had seemed lucid and fit prior to her departure. This seemed a strange development: Though listed as a prosecution witness, Lillian might have helped Pat’s case more because her previous statements to police contradicted some of Marie Gates’ most incriminating recollections about Pat’s behavior. But it was clear the rest of the family viewed Lillian Dunn as a loose cannon—she did not hesitate, for one thing, to accuse Jennifer Dunn of wrongdoing—and they were relieved that she would not be called as a witness.

All of these various setbacks to Pat’s case could have been taken in stride, Laura believed, if not for the other shortcomings she saw arising in the defense case. For one thing, they had been unable to penetrate the shield the DA had erected around Jerry Coble. Laura knew Coble had been an informant in the past, but neither she nor
her team could learn anything more. No help came from Soliz, either, who, despite his previous work in narcotics, where Coble was well known, claimed never to have heard of Coble before meeting him at Denny’s to discuss Pat Dunn. There were tantalizing but ultimately unprovable hints from one former cop turned private investigator that Coble was a “pocket snitch,” a euphemism for an informant who the police kept in reserve—in their pocket, so to speak—ready to be put into action in troublesome cases, just like Pat Dunn’s. But that would mean Coble had been instructed by someone in law enforcement to target Pat, and neither Laura nor any of her partners could find the slightest proof to substantiate this tip. She had spent days at the little photo shop where Rex Martin recalled following Coble’s green Pontiac. Laura had gone through every receipt and cash-register tape for the month after Sandy disappeared, searching for a transaction that might correspond to Coble’s casing of Pat’s house, but she came up empty. Laura also searched for “Ray,” Coble’s drug dealer—someone the police had not even bothered attempting to find—but came up empty there as well. Laura believed Ray did not actually exist, that he had been made up by Coble to pad out his story. If heroin addicts know anything, it’s how to contact their dealers. Coble’s statement to Soliz that he had no idea how to reach “Ray” was patently implausible, Laura knew, but she could not
prove
it was a lie. And only proof, not hunches, would serve Pat in court.

Frustration also mounted when, three weeks before trial, the district attorney sent Pohlson a packet of typewritten notes from Kate Rosenlieb, the defense’s first preview of her story in her own words. The notes presented a radically different—and far more incriminating—version
of events than what Laura had learned from the police reports on Rosenlieb. These late revelations renewed Laura’s curiosity about why one of Pat Dunn’s best friends would turn on him so thoroughly and so vehemently. Pat still was no help on this subject, even after seeing the notes, and Rosenlieb still would not speak with Laura or anyone else associated with Pat Dunn’s defense.

It was clear Rosenlieb had become a far more important witness for the prosecution than anticipated—someone who seemed infinitely more credible than Jerry Coble. Rosenlieb was a political appointee, smart and presentable, and had apparently nothing to gain from lying—a claim Coble could never make. As one of Pat’s dearest friends, Rosenlieb seemingly possessed every reason to give him the benefit of every doubt, and jurors would inevitably assume that, if she were biased in any way, it would have to be in Pat’s favor. And that made her a most powerful witness for the prosecution. Her recollections of violent arguments between Sandy and Pat before the disappearance would sound credible, as would her portrayal of a less-than-worried Pat unnervingly certain of his wife’s death long before her body turned up. Others would contradict her, of course, and Laura was sure that Rosenlieb was wrong on some of these very subjective points, given her poor accuracy in other statements to police about Sandy’s habits. But in Kate’s dramatic retelling, the words she attributed to Pat sounded like a virtual confession. Indeed, Rosenlieb had come to believe that Pat had been trying to confess to her in their conversations all along, and lacked only the nerve to say it outright.

Now, as told in the newly arrived notes, her emotion-laden
story had become far more damaging to Pat than anything the defense had anticipated. (And even then, Pat and his defense team had only part of the story—crucial elements that might have greatly aided them at trial remained missing from the packet sent by the DA.)

Throughout the long investigation of Sandy’s murder, and in multiple police interviews, Kate had consistently told Detectives Kline and Soliz the same story of how she learned Sandy was missing: Pat called her on July 3, two days after the disappearance, and told her about it. She hadn’t heard anything about it before then, she repeatedly told detectives. It was this July 3 conversation with Pat, along with their meeting the next day, that left Kate so suspicious of her former teacher and dear friend that she reported him to the authorities. His supposedly calm demeanor, his lack of concern, his pronouncement that he feared the worst, his reluctance to go to the sheriff’s department with her to report Sandy missing (never mind that he had already done so days before)—all convinced Rosenlieb that the man she loved like a second father was a killer.

It was this rendition that the defense had prepared for. But eight months after Sandy died, on the verge of Pat’s trial, Rosenlieb went to Deputy DA John Somers and told him a new, more damning story: She had really learned about Sandy’s disappearance a day earlier, on July 2, and not from Pat Dunn, but through a phone call from Bakersfield attorney Teri Bjorn. Somers knew Bjorn was Pat and Sandy Dunn’s real estate lawyer, as well as a good friend of Kate, with whom she served on the city planning commission.

According to the revamped story Rosenlieb told the prosecutor, she learned about Sandy’s disappearance
when Bjorn somewhat breathlessly broke the news. According to Kate, Bjorn had received a call from Pat a day earlier—July 1—
before
he had reported Sandy missing to the sheriff’s department. In that call, Pat is supposed to have told Teri about the disappearance, then asked if he could somehow get power of attorney in Sandy’s name and thus access to her money.
⁸⁴

In other words, Rosenlieb said, Pat had been trying to loot Sandy’s accounts, just hours after she supposedly walked off and vanished. Undoubtedly, Kate told the astonished prosecutor, this was because Pat knew Sandy was already dead. Because he killed her.

In this new version, Pat never did call Kate to tell her about Sandy. It was Kate who called Pat the day after hearing from Teri Bjorn, to ask what he was up to. This is when, Rosenlieb now claimed, Pat told her he wasn’t doing so good, because, “I can’t find Mom.” According to her new account, Rosenlieb knew that Pat was a killer before they ever had this conversation. This contradicted her earlier statements to detectives, in which she minutely detailed all the things Pat said and did to first arouse her suspicions. Months later, though, she recalled things differently: “I knew what he had done right away. I didn’t have to talk to him.”

When the prosecutor asked why she had kept silent for so many months, Kate apologized for deceiving the sheriff’s detectives in her earlier statements, but explained that she had been caught in the middle by desperate pleas from Bjorn for her to keep quiet. Attorneys who blab about private communications with clients can be censured or worse, Rosenlieb said, and even if nothing official happened to Bjorn, Kate believed her friend’s reputation in the legal community could be ruined.

“This was a big thing over my head. I wanted to tell the police everything, but I couldn’t. Teri begged me not to say anything. She said she should never have told me, that it was privileged, that she could be disbarred . . . When I said I wanted to tell everything, she went to her baby, took him out of his crib, held him to her and said, ‘He is all I have in the world. You will take my ability to make a living away. And then what about my baby?’ ”
⁸⁵

So Kate had sat on the information for months, she said, and lied to the detectives. (She never explained why, in her original story, she found it necessary to repeatedly insist that Pat called her with the news about Sandy’s disappearance, then later change her story to say she called him.) In the end, as the trial approached and she feared Pat might get off, she told the DA she had to reveal the whole story. Almost in tears, she went to Somers’ office and confessed everything, apologizing profusely and, knowing that she had probably just ended yet another friendship, asking if there were any way Bjorn could be spared.

Somers, however, was not angry, as she had expected. He was jubilant. Kate Rosenlieb had handed him precisely the evidence he needed to slam Pat Dunn—and his defense team—down hard. If what Rosenlieb was saying was true, it meant the first person Pat called about his missing wife was not the sheriff but his own lawyer—so he could get his hands on Sandy’s money. Such a scenario would reveal Pat Dunn as a cold-hearted monster and bolster the prosecutor’s argument that the killing was for financial gain—the “special circumstance” that could earn Pat Dunn the longest possible sentence, life without parole. All the prosecutor had to do was find a way to force Teri Bjorn to testify, attorney-client privilege
notwithstanding. He began flipping through a law book, then stopped and peered at a page.

“You did the right thing,” he told Rosenlieb, his boyish face solemn, though he must have felt like dishing out a high five. “Your friend will be all right. There’s a loophole in the law. There’s no privilege if the client is trying to commit a fraud or a crime. She can testify about it. If he was asking for a power of attorney—which only Sandy could legally grant—that’s a fraud. He was asking his lawyer to help him commit a crime, and that’s not privileged.”
⁸⁶

“That’s what he asked for,” Rosenlieb excitedly agreed. “Power of attorney.”

Kate next handed over seven pages of typewritten notes she had prepared on her views of the murder case, detailing her new story, her contacts with Pat, the way she believed she had spurred the detectives on when they seemed lackadaisical, and how she personally had led them to identify Sandy’s body when she read about a corpse found in the desert. Dramatic and breathless, placing their author at the center of much of the action in the case, the notes were assembled many months after the disappearance, penned with the help of tape recordings and a few things Rosenlieb had jotted down over time. Even these original tapes and notes on her conversations with Pat were begun two weeks after Sandy disappeared, rather than immediately after, when her memory remained fresh. Moreover, she destroyed those original notes and recordings, making it impossible to check the accuracy of her newly typed notes.