Mean Justice (62 page)

•   •   •

There is one other curious aspect to Pat Dunn’s case and, oddly enough, it has to do with flies—the same sort of evidence so critical to young Offord Rollins.

It came out in Pat’s trial, when John Somers launched an odd series of questions to the medical examiner who autopsied Sandy’s badly decomposed body. Somers wanted to know about the maggots and fly eggs found on portions of the corpse that had been buried. Through his questioning, he established that the insects could have gotten there only if those parts of the body were exposed to the elements for some length of time
before
burial. Otherwise, there would be no flies or maggots.

Somers dropped the subject then, and it played no further role in the case or in the jury’s deliberations. Yet the very same questions had been crucial in the Rollins trial, just a few months earlier. Somers had nothing to do with that case, but he knew that the testimony had been critical. That’s why, he later explained, he brought it up in the Dunn trial, just in case he needed it later. Indeed, because of the Rollins case, the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, as well as the county’s medical examiners, knew all about flies and their habits. They knew that flies lay eggs above ground only. And they also knew something else: that flies lay eggs in daylight only. Entomologists have long known that flies, blind in the dark and unable to navigate without light, neither feed nor lay eggs at night. That’s why the defense in the Rollins case was so sure the murder had happened after dark: There were no flies or eggs on Maria Rodriguez’s body in a desert teeming with them by day.

Yet John Somers, when he argued his theory of the Dunn case to the jury, said that Pat Dunn killed his wife in the evening, dragged her body to his truck at one in the morning, drove ninety minutes into the desert to bury her, then returned home before sunrise in order to receive a five o’clock call from his housekeeper, who
remembered him being out of breath and the sound of water running in the background.

It was the theory that convicted Pat Dunn, so tidy, so neat, seeming to fit together like all of John Somers’ puzzle-piece cases. But how can it be true? When, in that nighttime scenario of murder and covert burial, did Sandy’s body lie exposed to the daylight so the flies could lay their eggs?

At times I think I will explode,
Pat Dunn says.
I spend too much time thinking about the lies and the mistakes and the injustice that put me here. I probably say this too much—Laura can tell you that—but I am sixty-one years old now, and I repeat myself. It is hard to think about anything else.

His voice is hoarse, his stare unfocused. Physically, he is in the prison visiting room. Mentally, he is on the hilltop with his telescope, far away, where it is bearable to speak of such things.

I used to be such a believer. We learned it all in social studies in grade school. Hell, I taught it to my own students: If you need help, call the men in blue. They’re your friends. I always believed that, right up until the day they marched me in here. I even guess I still believe it. I think the system works most of the time the way we want it to. But more often than anyone wants to admit, it fails. When officers of the court violate their oaths and lie—or turn their heads from other people’s lies—the system fails. And the guilty go free. Or the innocent are imprisoned.

Sometimes, though, I can clear my head for a while and think about other things. I think about riding fence with Mom, and looking at the land, talking about our plans for it. I can still see the excitement on her face when we’d make
a decision and know it was good, and I knew it was like looking in a mirror, because I had the same expression on my face, too.

It was a good partnership that we had. I know people lied on me and said Mom and I always fought, but it’s just not true, and least of all when it came to money. We agreed early on that we both would always try to make good decisions, and that neither would ever use the word fault. We kept that agreement to the very end.

I’ll swear here and now and to anyone who cares to listen that I did not kill Mom. But I must confess that at this moment, I sure do miss her.

DAVID P. BAYLES

EDWARD HUMES
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for specialized reporting, and has received a PEN Center U.S.A. West Award for research nonfiction. He is the author of four other nonfiction works,
Buried Secrets, Murder with a Badge, No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court,
and
Mississippi Mud.
He lives in Southern California.

ALSO BY EDWARD HUMES

No Matter How Loud I Shout
Mississippi Mud
Buried Secrets
Murderer with a Badge

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ENDNOTES

PROLOGUE: BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

1
. From the tape-recorded and transcribed telephone call by Patrick Dunn to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department on July 1, 1992, in Kern County Sheriff’s Missing Persons Case KC92-14851, entered in evidence in the case of
People of Kern County vs. Patrick O. Dunn,
Kern County Superior Court Case No. 52347.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Ibid.

4
. Ibid.

5
. The preceding account of the defense team’s preparations and the trial’s concluding moments is based upon the author’s interviews with Laura Lawhon, Pat Dunn and Dunn’s lead trial attorney, Gary Pohlson.

PART I: PAT AND SANDY

1
. Cynthia H. Craft, “Rogers Plans Talk to Group Termed Racist,”
Los Angeles Times,
April 27, 1994; Cynthia H. Craft, “Sen. Don Rogers Finds Favor with Militia Movement,”
Los Angeles Times,
April 30, 1995; “Lawmaker Used Race in Tax Ploy,” Associated Press, April 12, 1996. According to the “tax ploy” article, State Senator Don Rogers owed the IRS $150,000 in back taxes and penalties when in October 1992 he filed a signed and notarized document that argued he was not a U.S. citizen, that the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment applied only to citizenship of freed slaves, and that, as a white citizen, he had no tax or other obligations to the United States. The document was not discovered by newspaper reporters for four years because it was filed in
Sonoma County, in the California wine country, hundreds of miles from Rogers’ own district in Kern County.

2
. Chris Brewer, “Stringin’ ’em up,”
Bakersfield Californian,
Centennial Edition, 1998.

3
. Kern County Grand Jury report on Ku Klux Klan activities in the County of Kern, C. A. Melcher, chairman, filed with Kern County Superior Court Judge T. N. Harvey on May 19, 1922; and “Klan Report High Lights,”
Bakersfield Californian,
May 20, 1922.

4
. According to Jennifer Dunn, in an interview with the author, her father’s drinking was a principal cause of the family’s problems and the divorce. While many friends and acquaintances of the Dunns’ described Pat as a problem drinker and believed him to be alcohol dependent, he denies this and asserts that he and his first wife simply drifted apart.

5
. Letter and attached reports to Stan Simrin, from private investigator Roger Ruby, November 21, 1992. According to Ruby’s report, Larry Cox, the attorney who drafted the will, recalled that Sandy wanted it, not Pat, that he saw no evidence whatsoever that Pat had pressured her in any way, and that Sandy was alone with the attorney when the will was drafted.

6
. Kate Rosenlieb described the incident in an interview with the author. She recalled that, when she arrived, it seemed to her Pat was acting strangely, babbling about politics and what a great governor Kate would make—things that seemed to make no sense. She assumed Sandy was asleep. Pat would later say he had been rattled and upset by Sandy’s behavior.

7
. Kern County Sheriff’s Department Report KC-8925184, October 20, 1989; and the author’s interview with Pat Dunn.

8
. Financial Planner Kevin Knutson relayed this account on a number of occasions, first to Kern County Sheriff’s detectives in a report dated July 7, 1992, in Kern County Sheriff’s Department Case KC-14851 (the Alexandra Dunn missing persons case); in a second report dated August 17, 1992, in Case M092-00633 (the Dunn homicide case); in his testimony in
People vs. Patrick Dunn;
and in interviews with the author. Although the Kern County authorities investigating Sandy’s murder theorized that Pat was after her money, Knutson was adamant that the trust was entirely Sandy’s idea. It would put Pat in charge were she to become disabled and, in the event of her death, it provided an economical way
of bypassing probate courts and estate taxes, while also eliminating the possibility of other relatives challenging Pat as sole heir—something that easily could happen under a simple will. According to Knutson, Sandy expressed specific wishes that her estranged sister should receive nothing in the event of her death.

9
. Planning Commissioner Marino’s account is contained in his sworn testimony in
People vs. Dunn,
and in a report to attorney Gary Pohlson detailing his March 9, 1993, interview with Laura Lawhon. Although the question of Sandy’s mental state was raised from the first day of the sheriff’s investigation into her disappearance, detectives never spoke with Marino.

10
. The account of Kevin Knutson’s June 30 meeting with Pat and Sandy is based upon Knutson’s testimony in
People vs. Dunn;
his statements as reported in Kern County Sheriff’s Department Case KC-14851 and Case MO92-00633; his January 15, 1993, interview with defense investigator David Sandberg as reported by Sandberg in an undated memorandum to attorney Gary Pohlson; and in interviews with the author.

11
. Michael Trihey, “Feuding in court: Prosecutors rap judges in articles,”
Bakersfield Californian,
November 8, 1981. The article details the fallout from a series of four articles on Kern County judges published October 20-October 27, 1981, in the
Los Angeles Daily Journal,
a newspaper devoted to covering California legal issues. The Foster Farms reference was to Kern County Superior Court Judge William A. Stone, a highly regarded jurist who later rose to the Fifth District panel of the California Court of Appeal that Jagels so despised. The article reports that Stone learned from other Kern County prosecutors that Jagels was the unnamed source and, as a result, he disqualified himself from a death penalty case Jagels was trying. Another
Journal
article again quoted an unnamed prosecutor—the Kern County bench once more suspected Jagels—as harshly criticizing Judge Marvin Ferguson for presiding over “Department 352.” This was a derogatory reference not to Ferguson’s courtroom number, but to the California evidence code section under which a judge may exclude evidence he deems confusing or prejudicial. It is a code section most often used to the benefit of defendants who want to toss out incriminating evidence. The unnamed source for the article claimed this judge used Section 352 more than any other in Kern County. “It’s death
to take a case in there,” the unnamed prosecutor said, “because he’ll emasculate it.” Ferguson was so incensed by the article that he called then DA Al Leddy down to his chambers, screamed at him about his inability to control his arrogant young prosecutors and told him he should punish and possibly fire the culprits. When Leddy declined, Ferguson announced he would run for district attorney, so he could take over the office and banish Ed Jagels to a distant and undesirable branch court deep in the wastelands of the Mojave Desert, where he would spend his days prosecuting traffic violations. The threat, Jagels would later say, provided additional motivation for his own ultimately successful run for the office of district attorney.