Mean Justice (41 page)

Pat Dunn explained this sequence of events next to Kate Rosenlieb, who then recounted it to Detective Dusty Kline. Kline, in turn, recorded Rosenlieb’s story in an official report. According to this thirdhand account, Sandy went to bed at 6
P.M
. on July 2. Rosenlieb made a mistake here, one of greater magnitude than any Pat could be accused of making, as the true date in question was June 30. Somers carefully avoided mentioning the July 2 error—he even told the jury that Rosenlieb had said it was June 30 all along. Otherwise, this account exactly mirrors what Pat told the dispatcher—in fact, he told the same consistent story to Rosenlieb twice, on July 3 and July 4.

Yet Somers still argued that Pat was being deceiftul, on account of his supposedly telling Rosenlieb that he did not want to report Sandy missing because, as Kate put it, “he didn’t want anyone to know.” The obvious conclusion to be made here—since Pat already had filed a missing-persons report days before this conversation with Kate—was that Rosenlieb was the incorrect or inconsistent one, not Pat. Instead, the prosecutor listed this statement about not wanting anyone to know as another of Pat’s “lies.” The sheriff’s department already did know, the prosecutor said, yet Pat concealed this fact from Kate—a lie. Why a murderer would lie to a friend to make himself look
more
suspicious was never explained, yet that was Somers’ curious argument to the jury.

After his talks with Kate Rosenlieb, Pat next gave an account of the disappearance to Detective Kline directly. Again, what Kline heard mirrored all the other renditions, except Kline wrote in his report that Pat returned home from his second bout of searching at 4
A.M
. and slept until 6—a two-hour discrepancy from the statement to Valley Braddick, which Somers seized upon as another “lie.” This is the first genuine inconsistency in the prosecutor’s litany. Kline, however, did not write notes or tape-record as he interviewed Pat, instead crafting his report a full day later. The defense argued that it was just as likely the detective made the mistake in chronology as it was Pat, given the poor record of accuracy in other sheriff’s reports in the Dunn case.

But Somers wanted to show a pattern of deceit and he kept at it, with no detail too small to earn a place on his chart of lies. He brought in the engineer, Roger McIntosh, who, seven weeks after the fact, had told detectives about a conversation in which Pat supposedly gave
yet another time for Sandy’s last, fatal walk. McIntosh put the time at two-thirty or three in the morning, instead of the nine to ten o’clock range that Pat had told everyone else. Somers pronounced this “the biggest and most major conflict in his statements,” though the prosecutor expressed no such concern when McIntosh could not remember other details of this long-ago conversation—the one incriminating fact was enough. Laura, for her part, reckoned that the engineer simply confused Sandy’s normal waking and walking hour with the time of her disappearance.

Another witness, Judith Paola Penney, the late Pat Paola’s niece, was summoned to provide proof of Pat’s supposed lies, but she ended up being the one with inconsistent recollections. She testified that Pat had told her of noticing Sandy missing at one o’clock in the morning—which would be a discrepancy—except that Penney had previously told detectives that Pat said three o’clock. On the stand, she admitted that her memory on the subject was vague. Yet despite this, Somers put only one set of times on his chart where it referred to Penney, making her appear far more reliable in her recollections than was warranted.

Pat gave another statement to Detectives Soliz and Kline on July 9, nine days after Sandy vanished. According to Soliz’s report on this interview, Pat reiterated the same basic story and times he had given in all of his other statements to police. Every detail was consistent except for one small point: Soliz reported Pat arrived home at 10:30
P.M
. to find the dog in the yard and the car keys on the counter, when earlier statements placed this at midnight. Neither detective seemed to notice this discrepancy at the time, although they immediately
pounced on and demanded explanation for any inconsistencies arising in other areas of questioning. As was his practice, Soliz used no tape recorder and took few notes during this interview with Pat, and he waited three weeks to document it. The defense pointed out this delay, arguing that it was just as likely that Soliz had made this minor mistake as Pat.

Finally, Somers turned to the marathon interrogation of July 23, when a team of three investigators questioned Pat nonstop all night while others searched the house for clues to link him to the murder. Again, no notes and no tape recordings were made, while the three detectives took turns interrogating Pat. Their quarry was apparently so consistent in his statements that night that the detectives did not bother to submit separate reports detailing what he said to each of them. Instead, Soliz summarized for his colleagues by simply writing: “Dunn kept giving the same answers or he would say he had already answered those questions and for us to ask new questions.”

However, out of that fifteen hours of search and interrogation, Somers still managed to find one alleged inconsistency from the police report: At one point, Somers stated, Pat told Detective Soliz that Sandy went to bed at 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon, though previously he had always said she went to bed at 5:30 or 6:00—another glaring example, Somers argued, of how “it was getting tough to keep his story straight.”

The problem with this point was that it, too, was as questionable as most of the others. On the witness stand, Somers asked Soliz about the July 23 interrogation, wanting to know when Pat said Sandy went to bed that last night. Detective Soliz immediately responded, “To the
best of my recollection, it was about 5:30 or 6:00
P.M.
”—completely consistent with Pat’s other statements, and contrary to the prosecutor’s big chart. Only after a perturbed Somers suggested that Soliz take another look at his report—this one was written seven days after the interrogation—did the detective change his testimony to say Pat had said 3:30 or 4:00.

The jury had no way of knowing it, but even after looking at his report, Soliz didn’t quote it quite accurately in his testimony. The report did not say 3:30 or 4:00, as he claimed. It says Sandy went to bed at 15:30 or 16:00, using the twenty-four-hour “military” time equivalent of 3:30 or 4:00
P.M
. It is also one simple typographical error away from 5:30 or 6:00—the times Soliz initially remembered when questioned on the matter.

In short, a majority of the discrepancies cited by Somers can be disproved, explained or dismissed as the recollections of witnesses who were at least as inconsistent as Pat Dunn was made out to be. And even if there were a few small inconsistencies here and there, the defense argued, they meant little. Did saying four in the morning instead of two in the morning make Pat a murderer? Or just a confused, stressed-out husband who had a habit of drowning his grief in alcohol?

Still, Somers knew that the simple visual presentation of all of those entries on his chart would leave an indelible impression on the jury. Never mind that many of them were reaching, highly questionable or just plain wrong. When the arguing was over and the lawyers sat down, the prosecutor knew that big chart of “lies” would still be there, helping the jury decide what to think about Pat Dunn.

•   •   •

Still avoiding Jerry Lee Coble, Somers next turned to another important element of his case: attempting to prove only Pat had the
opportunity
to kill Sandy. As in all of Somers’ cases, there were several components to this theory that fit together like puzzle pieces into a neat whole. First, Pat told detectives that Sandy slept in the nude, and her body was found naked rather than in her normal walking clothes. From this, Somers asked jurors to conclude she must have been killed in bed. Next, there was the fact that a pair of Sandy’s glasses and her jewelry remained in the house—a grave discrepancy in Pat Dunn’s story, Somers argued, because Sandy
always
wore her glasses and jewelry on her walks. Finally, the prosecutor accused Pat of telling an unintentionally revealing lie, one that only a man who committed the murder would tell: Pat, according to Somers, had claimed that Sandy was wearing a blue jogging jacket when she disappeared—yet that jacket later turned up in the Dunn home.

“The defendant told the police and others that she was wearing that garment when she left the house. . . . The fact of the matter is that that jacket was still at the house because Sandy Dunn didn’t leave the house wearing it. She left the house wrapped in sheets and a blanket or something similar—because she was dead.”

Again, the prosecutor had formulated a persuasive argument, weaving together a pastiche of small bits of circumstantial evidence that, alone, proved little, but that together might amount to something—were they true.

But the fact that Sandy’s body was found nude really proved very little. The bodies of people kidnapped, molested and murdered by strangers outside the home have on occasion turned up unclothed, even in Kern County. Dana Butler, for instance, was found only partially
clad, with the rest of her clothing never recovered—but no one suggested this meant she had to have been killed while home in bed. And there were signs that Sandy could have been attacked by some sort of sexual predator, as her body had been mutilated in the rectal-genital area. For the killer to have done that to her, she would have had to be stripped. (Rape could not be proven or ruled out, due to the advanced state of decomposition.)

As for the jogging jacket that Somers found so devastating, the truth was that Pat Dunn never said he
knew
Sandy had worn it that night. Contrary to the prosecutor’s argument, Pat initially said he had no way of knowing what Sandy was wearing, because he was asleep when she left. It’s right on the tape-recorded call of Pat reporting Sandy missing: “I don’t know, because she has a ton of clothes.” He merely described the blue jacket as part of her general walking ensemble, along with a variety of T-shirts, blue jeans, shorts and white tennis shoes she favored. Later, he told detectives he had looked in the laundry room where Sandy normally changed for her early-morning walks to avoid waking him, and because he did not see the jacket or other walking clothes in there, he surmised she had worn them that last night. In subsequent reports, the detectives simply wrote those were the clothes Sandy wore, despite Pat’s expressed uncertainty. But it is clear that, at the outset, Pat simply guessed at what Sandy had worn for her walk when she disappeared.

Sometime after Sandy’s disappearance, the housecleaner, Cindy Montes, found a woman’s blue jogging jacket hanging with other clothing in a hall closet—a different location than the one Pat searched. The discovery of the blue jacket, Somers said, showed Pat had been lying. But contrary to the prosecutor’s argument, there
was nothing inconsistent, inaccurate or even vaguely suspicious about this—the most Pat could be guilty of was not looking thoroughly through every closet in the house for Sandy’s jogging jacket.

Then there was the matter of Sandy’s glasses. Most people who knew her did say, as Somers argued, that Sandy almost always wore her glasses, even though her eye doctor had explained to Laura Lawhon that Sandy only needed them for reading. Cindy Montes, in particular, testified that when she would get to the Dunns’ house early in the morning to clean, Sandy still would be in her walking clothes—and always had her glasses on. So when Sandy’s glasses were found at home, Somers said, that again showed she never left the house that last night, at least not alive. Only Pat, then, had the opportunity to kill her. Somers failed to mention, however, that the police had established that Sandy owned multiple pairs of glasses, some of them prescription, some bought at the drugstore, which meant she could have been wearing any one of a number of pairs that night, just as she could have been wearing clothes other than the blue jacket. (There was also the possibility that, if Pat were being truthful about Sandy’s deteriorating mental state, she could have simply forgotten the glasses.)

Then there was the jewelry. Much was made of Pat’s admission that he had all of the jewelry at home and that none of it was missing. Had the jewelry been missing, it would have supported the notion that Sandy had been robbed or murdered during a walk, Somers said. But that was not the case. Relying on Kate Rosenlieb’s testimony (though Kate had never seen Sandy in her walking attire and had exaggerated the value of her jewelry by a factor of ten), Somers argued that Sandy
always
went walking
with her jewelry on. So the fact that Pat said she didn’t wear it and that all her jewelry was at home showed that she had died nude in bed and that Pat Dunn had lied to cover his tracks, Somers declared.

But this scenario couldn’t hold up, either. During her testimony, Cindy Montes hadn’t just remembered Sandy’s glasses. The housecleaner also recalled when she would see Sandy early in the morning after her walk, Sandy
never
wore jewelry—just a wristwatch and her glasses. With this statement, the only witness in the case who could attest firsthand to Sandy’s walking attire shot down a major portion of the prosecutor’s “opportunity to kill” theory. However, by coincidence, Montes made this point from the witness stand in a very low voice—so low that the defense team didn’t catch what she said. When Montes was asked to repeat her answer, she only mentioned the glasses, neglecting to repeat the part about Sandy never walking with her jewelry on. Somers didn’t correct her.

Even before the trial, Montes had told John Somers and sheriff’s investigators that Sandy never wore her jewelry on her walks, just as Pat had always claimed. Yet this information was not put into any police reports, and therefore was never disclosed to the defense.
⁴
As a result, in his closing argument in the Dunn trial, Somers was able to say without challenge, “She
did
wear her jewelry when she walked and the defendant was well aware of it. . . . This is consistent with the theory she was killed while nude in bed . . . but not consistent with the theory that she was killed while out walking.”