Mean Justice (6 page)

When he finally died three years earlier, in 1983, Alexandra had tried to keep his businesses and real estate dealings going. But Paola had maintained a complex web of interlocking companies and transactions, and after so many years of being so sheltered by her husband, Sandy confessed, “I did a pretty poor job of it.” Her woes had escalated
recently when she learned that a trusted bookkeeper—a woman who had worked for Paola Enterprises since 1961 and who had seemed like a member of the family—had been embezzling from them for years. Seventy thousand was gone at minimum, perhaps as much as a quarter million, Sandy whispered, shaking her head, nearly trembling at the thought. “Maybe more,” she said. “The police don’t know, the accountants don’t know. I don’t know.”

The turmoil brought by this betrayal had been compounded by Sandy’s impulsive, almost desperate decision to remarry a year after Paola’s death. As Sandy told it, her new husband, Leon—the older man playing solitaire at the mall—had misrepresented his own wealth and holdings and had run up all sorts of debts against Sandy’s money. She called him a smooth-talking charmer who loved only the Paola fortune. In her loneliness, the woman who always feared that she would be thought of as a gold digger had ended up being preyed upon by one, she told Pat with a bitter smile. They had separated within a year, amid a nasty battle over property he had hauled off and tried to sell through the classifieds. Pat wondered to himself why Leon was still hanging out at the mall, but he bit his tongue, not wanting to pry, letting Sandy tell him what she wanted to tell him. Now, she continued, all sorts of other people were coming out of the woodwork to offer impossibly good investments and real estate deals, if only she would give them a piece of the Paola holdings. Her late husband’s real estate on the east side had finally jumped in value as Bakersfield relentlessly grew from a town into a major city and open space fetched an increasing premium. “I know just enough to say no,” Sandy said ruefully.

Pat spoke little of himself during the drive, saying only that his own troubles seemed small indeed compared to
Sandy’s. But he had an engaging, supportive way of listening, of not seeming to judge, and Sandy would later say he seemed at that moment one of the kindest and most understanding men she had ever met.

They drove on to the weed-choked property cited by the fire inspector, and Pat said he would take care of it, then call her back. In a few days, he had removed the weeds and trash from the lot, as well as cleared the grounds of a neighboring apartment building that Sandy owned, too. He refused to charge her, and Sandy, who had remained extremely thrifty despite her wealth, seemed particularly delighted by this gesture. When Pat mentioned that he and Nancy were separated, Sandy invited him to her house on Crestmont Drive, where she had lived for a quarter century with Pat Paola—the same house Pat Dunn had helped measure years before. Pat remembered admiring the big ranch-style house, with its pool and cabana and rich tile work.

Arriving for his visit in 1986, however, he barely recognized the place. Sun and heat had etched and faded the paint. There were cracks in the plaster. Green plastic garbage bags stuffed with old clothes sat on the porch and in the side yard, a rusty old bicycle propped against them.

When Sandy opened the front door for Pat, a wave of heat washed over him. It was July and quite hot outside, but the interior of the house was well over ninety degrees. The house had air conditioning—a matter of survival in desert summer—but Sandy would not run it. Instead, she would turn on several floor fans in the living room and aim them at whatever chairs were occupied. Pat sat down gingerly, the hot stream of air from the fan washing over him like jet exhaust. He felt like he had climbed into a kiln.

Like the porch, the interior of the house—living room, dining room, halls—was piled high with debris. Cardboard boxes of all sizes had been stacked one on top of the other like child’s blocks, with pathways through their rows—a shut-in’s maze. Nothing was dirty; the house was just impossibly cluttered, as if Sandy had not thrown anything away in twenty years. Pat later learned this was exactly the case: Sandy never tossed out a newspaper, a magazine or a worn-out article of clothing. Even the plastic bags from the produce section of the supermarket were kept. Sandy had an enormous roll of them in her kitchen cabinet, washed, dried and ready for reuse so she wouldn’t have to spend money on sandwich bags. She had kept in the house all of her late husband’s clothes and possessions, as well as some of her second husband’s things, and everything left behind by her mother, who had recently died after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease—an entire second household of furniture, clothes and bric-a-brac crammed into this one home. Pat imagined he had entered some dark and crowded curio shop, where one table might hold beautiful jade sculpture, clearly valuable, while another was piled high with yellowing copies of
Ladies’ Home Journal
or chipped jelly-jar glasses. Once again, it struck him that this handsome, gracious woman who welcomed him into a labyrinth of junk did not seem to fit her surroundings. He figured that when her first husband died, Sandy had started bleeding money to embezzlement and an unscrupulous new spouse, and ended up broke, forced to live like a bag lady. No wonder she wouldn’t clear the weeds from those lots, he told himself. He remembers thinking,
Here’s someone who really needs me.

He suggested they go out for lunch, and they decided
to drive to a place up in the canyons outside Bakersfield called Balanced Rock, where Pat knew of a restaurant famous for its home-style coleslaw—their first date. It was July 4, 1986, a brilliant, sunny day so hot the sky seemed burned clean of color. Within the year, as soon as each of their divorces became final, Pat and Sandy married.

Exactly six years after that first date, on July 4, 1992, the murder case against Pat Dunn began in earnest.

4

I
N AUTUMN
1986,
AFTER
P
AT AND
S
ANDY HAD BEEN LIVING
together in the old Paola house on Crestmont Drive for two or three months, she got up one morning and said, “Let’s take a ride. I need to see the lawyer.”

Pat said sure, and, once in the downtown law office, he sat in the waiting area watching the secretaries while Sandy met with her attorney privately. It was a law firm that specialized in family law, real estate matters and other kinds of civil litigation, and Pat assumed that the meeting had to do with Sandy’s imminent divorce from her second husband. But when they left the office an hour later and settled into the car, Sandy tossed a thick brown envelope onto his lap and said, “Here, put this away somewhere.”

He looked at her and raised an eyebrow, and she said, “It’s my will. I’m leaving you everything.”

Pat thought she was joking at first, but, sure enough, inside the envelope was a simple four-page will prepared by Sandy’s lawyer just that morning. The will named Pat as Sandy’s sole heir and appointed him estate executor. It left nothing to the Paola family and omitted Sandy’s only sister, Nanette, with whom Sandy had been feuding for years since their mother died and left everything to Sandy. The new will also specifically bequeathed just one dollar to any potential heir who contested the will.

Touched and surprised, Pat wasn’t sure what to say. Speaking aloud about such emotionally charged subjects still made him uncomfortable. He chuckled to cover the mixture of warmth and embarrassment he felt, then breezily asked, “So, what are you worth?”

He figured Sandy had little left at that point, just whatever the house might bring in, perhaps a bit more. He had seen the way she was living before they began dating, and he had taken it upon himself to clean out the pack-rat clutter, the rooms crammed with boxes and the trash bags on the porch. He had heard her talk of Leon misrepresenting his own wealth, then trying to dive with open arms into the Paola fortune. So he almost veered the car off the road when Sandy nonchalantly answered, “About three million, give or take a couple hundred thousand.”

Pat shook his head in wonder. Apparently, Sandy had been a lot smarter with her money than she let on—something Pat would come to understand firsthand as he watched her over the years deal confidently, sometimes ruthlessly, with various accountants, brokers and businessmen.

When they got home from the law office, Pat stuck the will in a desk drawer, where it remained for six years. It was September 16, 1986, the day, prosecutors would later claim, Sandy became worth more to Pat Dunn dead than alive.

•   •   •

Though that last will and testament would one day become a dagger-like piece of evidence against Pat—part of his motive to murder, police and prosecutors would say—there had been no pressure on Sandy to write it that day.
⁵
Pat hadn’t asked for it, and Sandy offered him no
explanation as to why she suddenly found it necessary to craft a new will leaving him everything before they had even married. Pat shrugged it off. Perhaps she just wanted to make sure her second husband got nothing should she die before their divorce became final. It did seem that the will and the divorce were linked in Sandy’s mind; she signed papers the very next day at the same law office to put formal marriage dissolution proceedings into motion against Leon.

The will changed little in Sandy and Pat’s relationship: It was not as if Sandy, while living, was turning over responsibility for her finances to Pat. Most of the money and real estate holdings she had inherited from Pat Paola remained her sole property, even after she married Pat, and she continued to use her first married name on checks and bank accounts—“Alexandra Paola Dunn,” she’d sign, and when she spoke her full name, it was with emphasis on the
Paola,
a symbol of status in Bakersfield, at least in her mind. “That’s the good Paola,” she’d always say with a nervous laugh, “not the bad
payola.”

In time, she and Pat developed some of the Paola properties together, they held joint accounts, and Pat had access to Sandy’s money whenever he asked for it. The pair even opened a line of credit for two hundred thousand dollars at one bank, with either to draw, though it was backed by Sandy’s assets alone. Neither of them ever touched it. Still, it remained clear that Sandy’s money was hers alone. And though Pat might be present for meetings with business partners and investment counselors, dispensing opinions and advice, he also usually concluded by saying to Sandy, “Whatever you want is fine with me.” For most of their time together—until a year or so before Sandy vanished, when Pat began taking a much more
dominant role in their various real estate projects—it was clear to all that Sandy had the final say.

As far as anyone who knew them could tell, this arrangement never bothered Pat. Nor did Sandy’s attachment to her Paola name and identity. If it did trouble him, he never complained to anyone about it. Sandy must not have been overly concerned about Pat having designs on her money, either; when the divorce from Leon came through in March 1987, she sought no prenuptial agreement or any other protection for her assets. She and Pat just piled into the car and drove off for a quiet, private marriage ceremony—in Las Vegas, the one and only flamboyant gesture they made as a couple.

After a weekend in Sin City, as Pat insisted on calling it, they settled back into the same old house in East Bakersfield, where, with very few exceptions, they led quiet and uneventful lives. Sandy was the much more active of the two, with her daily predawn power walks and her penchant for collecting jade sculpture. Pat ran his foreclosure business out of the house and, in fits and starts, collected antique guns as a hobby. They were known to be creatures of habit who had many casual friends but few close ones, who went to bed by seven or eight o’clock most nights, who preferred backyard barbecues with neighbors and friends to going out on the town, and who both drank prodigious amounts of alcohol daily, which in part explained their early bedtimes. Pat was quite open about his round-the-clock drinking, while Sandy tried, often successfully, to conceal hers. Many friends were under the impression that she didn’t drink at all. Together, however, the two of them could easily polish off a fifth of hard liquor in a day, and those
who did business with the couple quickly learned to schedule meetings in the morning.

Even with the drinking, their friends and most of their neighbors considered the Dunns charmingly eccentric—people who genuinely seemed to like and love one another in their own, occasionally crabby way. Pat prided himself on his abilities as a host, never allowing a guest’s glass to stand empty, always putting steak, not hamburger, on the grill. Sandy would sit back and smile at her husband’s fussing over visitors—the kitchen was more his domain than hers. But, in all other matters, she always took care of Pat, catering to him in every way, doing things for him without being asked, making sure he always had fresh stores of shaving cream, enough of his favorite beer, the week’s
TV Guide.
They were little things, really, but things no one had ever done for Pat, a man still stung by childhood memories of having to work just to get new clothes for school. He regularly marveled to friends and family about how Sandy seemed to know just what he needed when he needed it. “And
poof,
just as something’s about to run out, there’s a new one sitting there, a fresh toothpaste or a new razor,” Pat told one friend, as if he were describing an act of magic rather than Sandy’s well-timed trip to the grocery store. This solicitous care would move Pat in ways no extravagant gesture ever could. To Pat’s way of thinking, such small kindnesses were the best way of all to say I love you, and he had finally found a partner in life who felt the same way. As Pat told it, Sandy took care of him in a way his first wife, even his own mother, never would or could, which is why early in their marriage he began calling Sandy “Mom.”