Mean Justice (44 page)

The defense had been wounded by Judge Baca’s decision to compel Teri Bjorn to testify, but though Laura was uneasy, the team by no means considered it a fatal blow. Gary Pohlson mounted Pat’s defense as planned, presenting witnesses to speak of the good relations between the Dunns, to deny there were any serious fights, money problems or plans for divorce, and to confirm that Pat had confided in a select few early on about Sandy’s disappearance. In addition to these, there was Jim Marino,
who could testify about his own experiences with Sandy’s memory problems, bolstering Pat’s statements to police. Together, these witnesses provided a different mosaic than the prosecution’s, a portrait of a man who had no reason to want his wife dead and who acted reasonably after her disappearance, and of a woman whose mental state left her at risk to wander off—making her easy prey for street criminals or worse.

The financial planner, Kevin Knutson, returned to the stand a second time, now a defense witness key to building this alternate assemblage of the puzzle pieces—Laura Lawhon’s version. Knutson all but destroyed the prosecution’s theory that a desire to get Sandy’s money provided Pat’s motive for murder. Knutson swore that during their June 30 meeting, one of the things Sandy said that she wanted was a living trust to allow all of her money to go to Pat without a will, without inheritance taxes, and without the ability of relatives such as her sister to interfere. There was no way Sandy wanted a divorce, Knutson added. The Dunns were getting along well, loving and at ease with one another when he left them on Sandy’s last day alive.

Knutson went on to say that he would have had the papers drawn up in a week or two, and that Pat’s financial position would have been infinitely better once Sandy signed them. Citing Knutson’s testimony, Tom Goethals, one of Pat’s lawyers, would argue, “There is no evidence Pat Dunn killed his wife to get her money. He didn’t need to. . . . On June 30, he had every reason to let her live.”

As important as the defense regarded this meeting on the day before Sandy disappeared, something that happened on the day
after
she vanished was equally critical.
Somers had tried to portray Pat’s behavior that day as inappropriate for a worried husband with a missing wife, wanting jurors to see Pat as greedy, insensitive and, ultimately, very aware that the wife he claimed as missing was actually dead. But the defense wanted jurors to hear about
Sandy’s
activities on the day after she disappeared—as told by Rick Williams’ secretary, Ann Kidder.

Kidder reiterated the story she had told the sheriff’s department, recounting how Sandy had called the accountant’s office that morning of July 1, canceling her appointment for later that day with Williams. Kidder knew Sandy’s distinctive voice from a dozen phone conversations, and had no doubt it was her calling.

Her testimony mirrored her previous statements: “She seemed to be upset, mumbling, going on. . . . She said her husband had scheduled an appointment with some Indians, and the Indians were coming down out of the hills and he didn’t let her know about scheduling this appointment, and so she was real upset about that. . . . She said . . . ’my husband doesn’t like to wear any clothes.’ ”

Ann Kidder was a godsend for Pat Dunn, or so it seemed to Gary Pohlson and Laura Lawhon. Attractive, soft-spoken, competent and professional—and lacking any reason to lie either for or against Pat Dunn’s interests—Kidder seemed irreproachable. Which is exactly what the Kern County Sheriff and District Attorney thought when they considered her a prosecution witness, before they realized her story exonerated Pat rather than hanged him. For Ann Kidder had marked dates and times on her office calendars, providing her with documentary evidence to support her recollections about the
exact time and date of this babbling phone call: Sandy Dunn talked to Ann Kidder eight hours after Jerry Coble swore her dead body had been hauled out of Pat Dunn’s house.

Kidder provided the added bonus of making Sandy sound addled and bizarre, consistent with a woman suffering an episode of mental impairment and out wandering, perhaps placing her call from a phone booth somewhere en route to her encounter with a killer.

It was powerful testimony for the defense, though there was more to it than anyone appeared to notice during the trial. No one attributed any particularly significance to the content of Sandy’s babbling—at the time, it seemed enough to the defense that she babbled at all.

Somers, like the detectives had before him, tried to confuse Kidder by throwing a passel of dates at her rapid-fire, hoping she would get some details wrong and give him some inconsistency with which to assail her credibility. He did find a few—for instance, Kidder recalled in her testimony that one earlier appointment made by Sandy was for 1:30, when the calendar said 2:00—but such minor niggling did not affect Kidder’s core story, which had been consistent from the start. Somers also suggested the caller could have been someone imitating Sandy, but Kidder made it clear that this had not been the case. The prosecutor’s attempts to suggest Kidder might be wrong about the July 1 date were countered by her boss, Rick Williams, who remembered it exactly the same as Kidder.

“Ann Kidder alone gets us an acquittal,” Pohlson declared after she was through. And Laura had to admit that, in a swearing contest, she couldn’t imagine the jury choosing Jerry Coble over Ann Kidder. Yet, Laura knew,
that’s exactly what happened at the sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office when they chose to prosecute Pat.

•   •   •

As good a witness as Ann Kidder was, the heart of the defense lay in proving Jerry Lee Coble had actively plotted to frame Pat Dunn with lies. The groundwork had already been laid by Coble’s erroneous description of the cars in Pat’s driveway. The defense hoped to make the case against Coble overwhelming with the testimony of Rex Martin, who said that he saw Coble casing Pat’s house weeks after the murder—when the white Tempo Coble described was in the driveway.

To Laura, Rex Martin was everything in a witness that Jerry Coble was not. A respected real estate developer and builder, Rex Martin projected an outwardly appealing image on the witness stand, silver haired and square jawed, a plain-talking former military pilot, as outgoing and open as Pat Dunn could be closed and prickly. Martin had served on the Kern County Parole Board and was as anti-crime as any Bakersfield bedrock conservative. Though he had known Pat for fifty years, Martin avowed he would not lie for Pat or help him get away with murdering Sandy, whom he had liked and respected. Laura watched with satisfaction as Martin repeated his story just as he had told it to her months earlier—no inconsistencies, no changes, nothing that would let John Somers say, see, it must be a lie, because the truth never changes.

Martin explained to the jury how, nearly a month after Sandy disappeared, he had tailed a man in a green Pontiac Sunbird who had been lurking outside Pat’s house. He followed the man to a nearby photo shop,
where he got a good look at the man’s face. Martin then identified Coble as that man, identified a photo of Coble’s mother’s green car as the one he had followed, and identified a piece of brown paper on which he had written the Pontiac’s license plate number. Martin could not give an exact date for when this occurred; he knew only that he had taken Pat to rent the white Ford Tempo on July 24, when Pat’s own cars were seized, and that his pursuit of Coble had occurred a few days later. He did recall returning to work after the encounter with Coble and mentioning the adventure to his secretary, so he could say with certainty that it had been a weekday. That would make it either Monday, July 27, or Tuesday, July 28, a few days after a major article on the Dunn case appeared in the local paper—an article that would have given Coble all the information he would have needed to begin constructing a frame. Even Martin’s ambiguity about the date was consistent, as he had expressed a similar uncertainty in earlier statements. Recalling precise dates was difficult, he explained: By the time Pat was arrested and he realized that the green Pontiac might be significant, many months had passed, dulling memories. At the time, following the stranger in the green car had been a lark, an attempt to make Pat feel better, something Martin never dreamed would have such a monumental bearing on the case.

The exact date was unimportant, however, because Jerry Coble already had sworn he had gone to Pat’s house but twice in his life—once on the night of the murder and once when Soliz took him there to refresh his memory. Laura knew that believing Martin meant disbelieving Coble’s entire story.

Rex Martin’s testimony was in part corroborated by
Jerry Mitchell, the retired sheriff’s deputy and friend of Pat’s, who confirmed getting a license number from Pat and Martin sometime during the summer, then passing it on to Detective Soliz. Mitchell was unequivocal in his testimony: He didn’t have an exact date, nor could he find the piece of paper on which he had written the number, but he knew it happened. Since neither Pat, Rex Martin nor Jerry Mitchell had ever heard of Jerry Coble at that point—Pat was not arrested until October 28—there was no way any of them could have picked his license number out of thin air in order to construct a phony defense. Soliz’s testimony, meanwhile, seemed less than solid on the subject. Rather than firmly denying Mitchell’s story, he simply told the jury, “I don’t have a recollection of Mr. Mitchell giving me a license-plate number.” Out of court, Mitchell accused Soliz of lying to preserve his case, for had the detective admitted receiving the license number, it would almost certainly have ended the trial in Pat’s favor.

But given Soliz’s equivocal testimony in the matter, Somers was free to suggest that Martin and Pat had cooked up the story of the green car to get Pat off the hook, and that they had duped Jerry Mitchell. Somers also suggested a motive for Rex to lie: If Pat were acquitted, he could then get hold of Sandy’s money and restart the now-defunct real estate projects the Dunns had going with Martin. To back this up, the prosecutor asserted that Martin had been caught in a lie by Detective Soliz: The sheriff’s detective had written a report months earlier, quoting a telephone conversation in which Martin supposedly denied the handwriting was his on the scrap of brown paper on which Coble’s license number was scrawled. If true, such a statement would directly contradict
Martin’s sworn testimony at trial and undermine Pat’s entire defense.

Martin grew angry at this, retorting that he had said no such thing. What Martin had told Soliz was that he wouldn’t identify any piece of paper for the detective over the telephone or anywhere else. Martin had come to distrust Soliz, he said, after concluding the detective had badly misquoted him in an earlier report—echoing a complaint jurors had heard repeatedly from other trial witnesses. “I didn’t want to talk to him without a tape recorder,” Martin said. “I wanted what I told him put down the way I told it.”

The rest of the defense team seemed unconcerned by this interlude, but Laura’s doubts began to rise again. If the jury had turned against Pat, if they wanted to convict, she knew that Soliz’s report on Rex’s “lie”—a report she knew to be inaccurate from her own investigation—would give them all the excuse they needed.

Still, Martin struck her as a powerful witness as he described how Pat seemed genuinely worried about Sandy’s disappearance and grieved her death, despite what some people implied or thought. If Pat appeared unaffected, Martin testified, it was only because Pat could be a bit odd, a loner who hid his feelings well, sometimes too well.

“I have never known Pat to be very demonstrative of his feelings,” Martin said. “It was obvious to me that he was concerned and upset, but you know, as far as breaking out crying or anything, no.” That, according to Martin, wouldn’t be Pat. If Pat had broken down and wept excessively, then Martin might have gotten suspicious.

When Rex Martin was through, the final attack on
Jerry Coble and the prosecution’s case was delivered by Jerry’s own brother, Gary. The defense hoped that, even if the jury worried about Martin and Mitchell possibly coloring their accounts out of loyalty to Pat, Gary Coble had no such potential for bias. Why would he tell lies to help a stranger and hurt his brother?

Hesitant and ill at ease on the witness stand—and joking about being more accustomed to the defendant’s chair—Gary Coble recounted that Jerry, before even contacting Detective Soliz, first told him of witnessing a murder. The heavyset ex-con, looking far older than his forty years, shrugged and shook his head. He didn’t believe Jerry’s story from the beginning, he said, “Because I know my brother . . . He’s pretty smart. . . . Sometimes he’s too smart.”

Months after that conversation, and after Jerry had testified at Pat’s preliminary hearing, Jerry had gone to stay with Gary in Los Angeles, where he tried, unsuccessfully, to kick his heroin habit. It was during this difficult time that the truth came out, Gary Coble testified, reconstructing the conversation for the jury:

“I made a mistake. I messed up,” Jerry told his brother.

“What do you mean?” Gary asked.

“That case. I didn’t see what I told them I seen. I didn’t see it.”

Gary recalled getting angry at this revelation and berating his younger brother. This wasn’t something minor, like a forgery or a bad-check case—this was murder. “You don’t do stuff like that,” he recalled telling his brother.

Jerry seemed to agree, Gary said in court, but he felt he no longer had any choice but to stick with his story implicating Pat Dunn in murder: “I’m so far in now, I
can’t back out. The cops told me if they caught me in a lie, they’ll have my ass.” And, more than anything, Jerry Coble did not want to go back to prison, his brother said.

Then Gary told the jury how Jerry set up his scam. While looking for a case in which he could manufacture testimony (and thereby cut a deal to stay out of jail) Jerry spotted a news article about Sandy Dunn’s murder and found his opportunity. He then sat out in front of the Dunns’ house for days, checking out the place and waiting to get a look at Pat so he’d be able to identify him in a lineup. When he saw someone leave a package on the front steps, he ran up, grabbed it and rang the bell. When someone answered the door, Coble handed over the package as if he were the delivery man, getting a good look at the man of the house.