Mean Justice (48 page)

There is no evidence that John Soliz or John Somers had direct knowledge of Coble’s new fraud case before Pat Dunn’s trial began, so they cannot be faulted personally for failing to disclose its existence to the defense team, as the law would require.
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Conversely, Taylor had no legal obligation to disclose anything, since he was not involved in the Dunn homicide investigation at all. However, the duty to provide such information extends beyond individuals to whole law-enforcement and prosecutorial agencies, and it’s clear that Pat Dunn was denied important, powerful information about his case and the main witness against him.

Inadvertent, coincidental or deliberate, the effect of this remained the same: It benefited the prosecution in the Dunn case and allowed Deputy District Attorney John Somers to stand before a jury and declare that “Mr. Coble was very honest with you. . . . He was credible and he was believable in his testimony.”

The new case against Jerry Lee Coble remained buried. And Jerry Lee Coble helped bury Pat Dunn.

•   •   •

Pat and his defense team were missing another important element of their case besides Jerry Coble’s past and present criminal justice history: They were denied the full story behind Kate Rosenlieb’s role in Pat’s arrest and prosecution. The omission had a profound effect on the course of the trial—once again, to the prosecution’s benefit and Pat Dunn’s detriment.

Just before the trial commenced, the defense received the packet of notes written by Rosenlieb in the form of a journal, detailing her conversations with Pat and detectives. The last entry contained in this sheaf, dated August 1, 1992, strongly implied that Kate had severed her relationship with Pat and the case long before his arrest in October. In it, Kate states that she had to face the fact that she had lost both Sandy and Pat, and that she just had to get on with life.

But there was more to this journal, and to Kate’s role in the case, than was ever disclosed to the defense. The journal’s remaining entries—which were not turned over—show that Rosenlieb, far from sitting back and letting the investigation take its course, had actively lobbied for Pat’s arrest while organizing a group of Bakersfield movers and shakers to do the same.

Later in August, according to the journal notes not given to the defense, Rosenlieb grew concerned that there had been no progress in the case. She called Detective Soliz and asked, “Is this it? Aren’t you going to arrest him?” She became quite angry with him, accusing him and his colleagues of incompetence in the case and of failing to take the most basic steps necessary to put Pat Dunn away. “If I knew it was this easy to kill a spouse,” she railed, “I would have killed mine a long time ago.”

Soliz bristled at the criticism, wrote Rosenlieb, but in the end told her to keep faith in the system. The case would move forward, he promised.

A few weeks later, on September 16, after Jerry Lee Coble had come forward and the sheriff’s department had asked the DA to file charges against Dunn, Rosenlieb again called Soliz to find out what was happening. The detective told her that Somers, another deputy DA and their supervisor were examining the case and would decide whether Pat should be prosecuted.

“If it takes political pressure on the DA’s office, I can try that. I know a lot of people who will help,” Rosenlieb suggested to the detective. She offered to organize a lobbying effort to persuade the prosecutors, and District Attorney Ed Jagels himself, to go after Pat.

Soliz said no, give it some more time.

Her October 8, 1992, entry finds Soliz in a different mood. When she spoke with him then, Rosenlieb would later recall, he seemed angry and bitter. “I have no respect for Ed Jagels,” she remembers Soliz saying. “They have no guts over there at the DA’s office.” Now Soliz did want Rosenlieb to ready a campaign to get Dunn prosecuted, she wrote in her journal.
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An entry dated a week later finds Detective Soliz even more frustrated. According to Rosenlieb, he called her and said, “Now is the time.” If she could exert any political pressure on District Attorney Jagels to force him to prosecute Pat Dunn, she should do it now.

With that, Kate Rosenlieb put a two-step plan into motion, a strategy that she had been preparing and rehearsing in her mind for weeks. First, she checked in with Soliz’s boss, Sheriff Carl Sparks. Of their conversation, Rosenlieb’s notes say, “Carl said the DA is a politician
and he plays the percentages. The DA has the highest conviction rate in homicides in the state . . . and he doesn’t want to jeopardize his record with a circumstantial case. We believe, like you do, that Pat Dunn’s a murderer, but he [Jagels] doesn’t want to screw up his prosecution record.”

Using this assessment as a prod, Rosenlieb then recruited to her cause three city council members, including two who ultimately testified for the prosecution in the Dunn case, to call Jagels and ask, on behalf of their constituents and themselves, why he was failing to pursue murder charges against Pat Dunn. The goal was to “gently” urge Jagels to do the “right thing.” Stan Harper, the Republican consultant, friend and campaign manager for Jagels, also attempted to persuade Jagels to charge Dunn.
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Looking back years later, Rosenlieb would recall that Step One, as she called it, failed to get Pat Dunn charged. That, she said, forced her to proceed to Step Two. She called Ed Jagels personally and, dispensing with gentle urging, threatened to go to the press or the grand jury with allegations of cover-up and selective prosecution. As she would tell it, “Jagels said, no murder weapon, no confession, and no one witnessed the crime occur. So I won’t prosecute.”

To this reasoning, Kate responded, “You had no murder weapon, no confession and no one saw it happen in the Offord Rollins case, either. So if you’re poor and black in this town, you go to jail. And if you’re rich and white, you get off.”

Rosenlieb recalled going on to tell Jagels she would quit her job, make the prosecution of Pat Dunn her full-time work, and make sure everyone in Kern County
knew that the district attorney was both racist and willing to let a murderer walk—all unless he prosecuted Pat Dunn. Her memory of this exchange remained quite detailed years later: “Forty-eight hours after all this screaming about Offord Rollins, Pat Dunn was charged. In my mind, if I wasn’t the ultimate bitch from day one, nothing would have happened. It just didn’t seem important to anyone else.”
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Upon further reflection, however, Rosenlieb altered her account of this campaign to prosecute Pat Dunn. She didn’t actually threaten Jagels directly, she claimed, but left a threatening message on his voice mail. She later changed her recollections again and said she only
contemplated
threatening Jagels, and that Step One, the initial “gentle” lobbying effort by city council members, had worked immediately. Pat Dunn was charged before Rosenlieb had to set Step Two into motion, making it unnecessary for her to carry out her threats to politically “eviscerate” Ed Jagels. She would have happily done so, however, if necessary to see justice done.
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Whatever steps Rosenlieb actually carried out, as opposed to actions she merely contemplated, Pat Dunn’s defense team knew nothing of this lobbying effort at all. They had no idea that the lead detective on the case, Kate Rosenlieb and other city officials (who were about to be sued by Pat Dunn over the canceled movie-theater project, and who therefore may have had reason to think the worst of him) had all moved behind the scenes to orchestrate a campaign to put Pat in jail—turning a legal decision into a political cause. Rosenlieb and the other witnesses were all presented to the jury at Pat’s trial as unbiased individuals who just wanted to tell the truth, but had all of Kate’s notes been turned over—or if the
District Attorney and the sheriff’s department had revealed the existence of the lobbying efforts, as the law required them to do—the defense could have painted a very different picture.

If all of the information on Kate Rosenlieb had been known to the defense, its impact is impossible to gauge with certainty. John Somers could have told the jury that her efforts mattered not at all, that Kate was simply doing the right thing by coming clean and providing her entire journal, and that she should be admired for making such difficult choices—for doing everything she could to see justice done. The defense team, meanwhile, could have cast her as a woman whose memory was prone to exaggeration and inaccuracy, who had convicted Pat Dunn in her own mind before even speaking with him, who had betrayed a friend’s confidences, who had lied to the police, then plotted with them to bolster their case, and whose various accounts since Sandy’s disappearance were riddled with contradictions. Finally, the defense could have alleged that Rosenlieb and the other prosecution witnesses she recruited had not remained unbiased, but had instead joined together to conduct a covert campaign to have Pat Dunn jailed at a time when some within the district attorney’s office harbored reservations about the case. The defense could, in short, have painted a portrait of a woman and a detective on an unswerving quest to get Pat convicted at all costs—and of a district attorney’s office that kept these behind-the-scenes machinations by its own witnesses secret.

And Kate Rosenlieb kept something else to herself that could have aided the defense. As the closest friend of the Dunns to testify for either side in the trial, she could have revealed a statement that Sandy had made to her not long
before her murder: that she would never divorce Pat. Years later, Kate would recall suggesting that the Dunns should consider ending their marriage. But Sandy said no way: “They seemed to enjoy making one another miserable,” Rosenlieb would say in an interview, long after Pat’s trial. “Sandy said she would never divorce Pat.”
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Rosenlieb might not have known the potential impact of this knowledge, for she did not hear Marie Gates’ testimony about Sandy wanting a divorce, one of the key elements in the prosecution’s theory of motive. Rosenlieb’s information suggested Gates might be wrong, but this would be yet another revelation the jury never heard. Without Rosenlieb to challenge Gates’ credible-sounding testimony, jurors felt they had no choice but to believe Pat was about to lose his marriage, and his meal ticket—and therefore had a very good motive for murder.
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Kate’s failure to mention Sandy’s feelings about divorcing Pat did more than merely sustain Marie Gates’ credibility. Marie spoke of encountering Sandy Dunn weeks before her death, weeping in the street and complaining about wanting to divorce a husband who had lied about his finances and wanted to spend all her money. While investigating the case, Laura had theorized that Marie was confusing Pat with Sandy’s second husband, Leon. But there was no ready way to convey this to the jury. If Kate had made known her information about Sandy’s unwillingness to divorce Pat, however, the missing pieces of a puzzle that had eluded Laura and the rest of the defense team would have slipped into place:

It wasn’t necessarily Marie Gates who was confused about that day in the street. It was, perhaps, Sandy.

If Sandy Dunn truly were suffering the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, she may have been experiencing an
episode of confusion that moment on the street, in which she relived her “mistake in marriage” with Leon as if it were still going on. Were that the case, Marie Gates could have been rendering an accurate account of Sandy’s words, without understanding that Sandy had been talking about a husband other than Pat. This would explain how Sandy could tell Marie she wanted a divorce because of a “mistake in marriage”—without ever using Pat’s name—while vowing to Kate she would never divorce Pat and telling Kevin Knutson she wanted a living trust to benefit Pat. This theory could have been buttressed further through Ann Kidder’s testimony—if the defense pointed out that Sandy, again confused, might have been reliving her marriage to a senile Pat Paola when she babbled about her husband not liking clothes. That comment was a perfect fit not for Pat Dunn, but for Pat Paola, whose habit of stripping and running outside naked was well known.

But with Kate remaining silent on the question of divorce, these pieces never fell into place for the defense. Pat’s team was left with no firm repudiation of Marie Gates, leading the jury to feel it had no valid reason to question her credibility.

Even after Pat’s conviction, Laura Lawhon and the rest of the defense team remained ignorant of Kate’s full knowledge and role in the case. And as much as anyone or anything in the trial, Kate Rosenlieb ensured Pat Dunn would go to prison.

8

T
HE MONTHS SURROUNDING
P
AT
D
UNN’S ARREST AND
conviction for murder were interesting times for the justice system in Kern County and the rest of the country as well. If there were official errors and omissions in the Dunn prosecution, they were far from unique. For it was at this time that the problem of withheld evidence and other forms of misconduct in the nation’s criminal justice system began receiving serious attention, as complaints about police and prosecutors arose like never before. Major cases in courthouses throughout America started to unravel owing to false or misleading evidence, testimony or argument that had been used to convict people who might otherwise have been found innocent. Other cases crumbled as a result of the chance discovery that the government itself had broken the law, hiding evidence that tended to show innocence. As Laura Lawhon continued digging for some proof that would free Pat Dunn, she saw case after case revealed as a sham.