Mean Justice (69 page)

By contrast, the Bakersfield Police Department, serving just as large and diverse a population as the sheriff’s adjacent jurisdiction, conducted its own independent investigations in every suspected molestation case, without relying on Carol Darling or Velda Murillo. In their investigation, the city police force (long considered the premiere police agency in the county in terms of pay, experience and skills) turned up plenty of one-adult, one-child molestation cases. But not one of these cases ever metamorphosed into a large-scale molestation ring, as so many sheriff’s department cases seemed to. Neither did cases in the police departments serving the smaller towns and cities of Kern County. In 1984, the Bakersfield Police Department’s requests to the district attorney to prosecute child-molestation cases were less than half the total of those brought by sheriff’s department—a statistical improbability that should have been a glaring red flag to indicate that something was wrong, given the similar size and demographics of the neighboring populations patrolled by the two departments. Why should molestation rings only operate in the unincorporated areas of Kern County? The anomaly
was
duly noted, but not as evidence something might be out of kilter at the sheriff’s department. The
Bakersfield Californian—
quoting unnamed prosecutors, social workers and sheriff’s deputies involved in the ring cases—chalked the disparity up to the inadequacies and lack of aggressiveness of the
city
police, suggesting that if only the rest of the cops in town would get on board with the sheriff’s practices, even more molestation rings could be busted. Source: Steve E. Swenson and Michael Trihey, “Sex Abuse Statistics Contrast,”
Bakersfield Californian,
February 3, 1985.

70
. Source: Stan Simrin. Similar examples of the destructive nature of the investigation abound. The head of the local postal workers’ union was fingered by one child; though he was never charged, he lost his position, as well as custody of his daughter for several months. The preacher of a local church was also accused after accompanying an accused parishioner to court, though he, too, was never charged. Fearing his own children might be taken, the preacher moved away, forfeiting his job and his congregation. Another man became a suspect simply because his wife went to court to provide moral support to a friend charged in one ring case. A child victim, scanning the courtroom at the behest of a
social worker who warned that “they” might be anywhere, picked the woman out of the audience and said, “She’s one of them. Her and her husband, the man with the ponytail.” The woman was promptly arrested, as was her husband, who did not wear his hair in a ponytail and never had. Yet another man—who had fully cooperated with authorities when his daughter accused neighbors of running a molestation ring—lost his daughter and son after he began to express doubts about the case. (This girl, Brooke, played a prominent role in the satanic cases. See note 71.) As soon as he started questioning the authorities about the fact that some of his daughter’s statements couldn’t be true, he became the enemy. His children were isolated in Kern County custody, and the inevitable accusations of molestation followed. It took a year of hearings and agony for that man and his family, but, finally, his children were returned to him by none other than Judge Marvin Ferguson, the failed DA candidate who had presided over the Kniffen-McCuan trial. Ferguson by then had his own doubts about molestation prosecutions in Kern County. “The evidence is overwhelming these parents did not molest the child,” the judge ruled. “Her story . . . is fraught with inconsistencies. More than that, it was unbelievable.” His ruling was too late to save the devastated family, however. The young girl who had made the allegations had been taught to fear her parents and wanted to stay with the social workers who “saved” her.

71
. What came to be known in Kern County as the satanic case began on March 15, 1985, with one child, Brooke—a girl later determined to be unbelievable by Judge Marvin Ferguson, who returned her to her family. Brooke first was questioned after a child victim in a ring case named her as a fellow victim. Once interviewed, she initially accused two men of abusing her. One of them was her neighbor, Reverend Willard Thomas, pastor of a small Kern County nondenominational church. Brooke described Thomas as a short and stout black man—though Thomas actually was tall and thin—and, when asked to identify him, she picked out the wrong photo from a lineup put together by a sheriff’s deputy. It seemed then the case would go nowhere. But then the deputy on the case left Brooke alone with a social worker named Cory Taylor, another adherent of the leading-question school of child interviewing. When the deputy returned, Brooke picked
Thomas out of the lineup without hesitation, and had changed her description of her abuser to tall and skinny. The deputy knew something wasn’t right, but said nothing. This, and the information about the suspicious photo lineup was kept secret, so Thomas’s defense attorney could not use its obvious implications to assert that the minister had been framed. The deputy would later say that she knew what had happened was wrong, that the case was “tainted from the very beginning,” but that she could not bring herself to speak out; to do so would have been both difficult and dangerous. Her fears were common in Kern County law enforcement at the time, as former cops and prosecutors would admit much later: You were either a true believer, or you kept your mouth shut. Ironically, as the investigation later spiraled out of control, at least one child “victim” accused Cory Taylor of being a molester and devil worshiper. (Source: John K. Van de Kamp, California Attorney General, “Report on the Kern County Child Abuse Investigation,” September 1986, including supplementary reports and data; and Michael Trihey, “Agencies’ infighting, procedural errors triggered collapse of molestation case,”
Bakersfield Californian,
January 25, 1987.)

The satanic allegations arose almost a year after the questionable lineup. When Brooke’s father began to express doubts about the case and its new, bizarre direction, investigators decided that, though he had always been cooperative with authorities, he, too, must be part of the conspiracy. As detectives and social workers arrived to take Brooke away, she tried to hit the police with her shoes to stop them from carting her off. It took fifteen days and repeated contacts with Kern County officials before she finally accused her parents. Within a month, she announced she was too fearful of her own family to have even an officially supervised visit with them.

72
. In keeping with the past practice of interviewing children over and over as allegations multiplied, the nineteen most talkative children in the satanic case were interviewed a total of one hundred thirty-four times. Such repetition is almost guaranteed to generate false information, according to the testimony of psychologist Maggie Bruck and other evidence presented in the 1996 Kniffen habeas hearing. One kid was interrogated a total of thirty-five times, and rarely told the same story twice—yet he became the
star witness in the satanic case. Source: Van de Kamp, “Report on the Kern County Child Abuse Investigation.”

73
. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sergeant W. Gleason, “Satanic Related Child Abuse Investigations in Kern County-Lamont Area,” a May 21, 1985, report to the McMartin task force; Michael Trihey, “’High elements’ in society linked to satanic acts,”
Bakersfield Californian,
April 17, 1986; Jim Boren, “Child abuse investigator speaks out,”
Fresno Bee,
April 17, 1986; Steve E. Swenson, “Speech on Satanism was ‘exaggerated,’ ”
Bakersfield Californian,
May 28, 1986.

74
. There were other double standards at that time in Kern County. One case that arose in this era stood out and proceeded quite differently from the others, not because the evidence was any stronger or weaker against this particular “ring,” but because, in this case, police and prosecutors decided to do nothing. No charges, no arrests, not even credible attempts at investigation were made. Alone among the many children identified—and misidentified—as sex-abuse victims in Kern County during the Witch Hunt years, young Robert Mistriel was deemed unworthy of saving.

Mistriel entered the Kern County justice system through its juvenile court, a victim of neglect and abuse. An older brother molested him, while his alcoholic mother provided a perpetually squalid series of hovels and motel rooms to call home. Juvenile court did little to help. By age twelve, Mistriel was prostituting himself to older gay men. Around this time, his probation reports started talking about his sociopathic tendencies. At thirteen, Mistriel was implicated but never charged in the murder of one of his older lovers, a well-known, middle-aged hairdresser named Tommy Tarver, whose Bakersfield shop was frequented by Kern County’s elite. Tarver was found bludgeoned, comatose and dying on the floor of his salon early one morning in 1978; he died a few days later. Mistriel had been dropped off at Tarver’s place by a cab driver a short while before the attack, and later was found with Tarver’s car in addition to stolen goods from the salon. But the Kern County District Attorney chose to prosecute him only for burglary, pinning the murder on an out-of-town university student who was promptly acquitted.

Following the Tarver episode, Mistriel was placed in a series of Kern County foster homes, from which he ran off regularly, and
was allowed, with other delinquents, to work for a prominent local businessman who also used the juveniles as his sexual playthings. At the same time, Mistriel, still a teenage county ward, prowled the men’s rooms of Beach Park, a notorious Bakersfield rendezvous for casual gay sex, where he forged relationships with a number of men prominent in the community. By age sixteen, Mistriel could be seen around town driving expensive cars belonging to some of these men, and he boasted openly to friends about the money, drugs and privileges he earned by sexually servicing some of Kern County’s most powerful.

This was an open secret: Kern County authorities were aware of these relationships. A probation officer assigned to Mistriel’s case would later swear that she confirmed these relationships, but took no action other than counseling the boy about them. Yet then, as now, any sexual relationship with a minor—particularly one who was a ward of the juvenile court—was a crime for the adults involved. If the relationships as Mistriel described them occurred, the same laws were broken that were tenaciously being enforced in all the ring cases. But Mistriel’s probation officer explained that she felt that Mistriel, though only sixteen, was the one taking advantage of the older men, manipulating them for monetary gain.

Another factor influencing the lack of action on Mistriel’s case may have been who Mistriel was sleeping with: Edwin Buck, the personnel manager of Kern County, one of the local government’s most senior and powerful administrators, had a long-standing affair with Mistriel, whom he met in Beach Park. Buck was widely respected, a pillar of the community, a wily politician with enormous clout. He had been personnel director since 1955, in charge of hiring, firing and dispensing all county patronage jobs. Local vice officers had repeatedly warned the fifty-five-year-old Buck and several of his cronies about their brazen solicitations at Beach Park and assignations with minors, but no official action was taken. Nor was anything done to protect, help or even punish Robert Mistriel with regard to his liaisons with the rich and powerful.

Then, in July 1981, Buck’s body was found nearly cremated in the back of his burned-out car. He had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer—the same weapon suspected in the murder of Tommy Tarver three years earlier—before his body was set ablaze. The trail quickly led to Mistriel and a friend, Roy Matthew
Camenisch, he had recruited to rob and murder Buck. By then seventeen, Mistriel was transferred from juvenile to adult court. His trial—moved to another county so an unbiased jury could be picked—brought some startling testimony about the men he worked for, lived with and slept with in Bakersfield. (He had previously shared this information with Bakersfield police, who did nothing.) Mistriel—and his probation officer—took the stand and named as the boy’s long-term gay lovers Ted Fritts, the publisher of the
Bakersfield Californian
newspaper, the city’s only daily paper, and another man, a powerful political consultant who had worked for numerous politicians in Kern County, including District Attorney Ed Jagels. Mistriel was said to have lived with this man, while Fritts (who had received and ignored the same warnings from vice cops as Ed Buck, and who since has died of AIDS) loaned his luxury car to the veteran delinquent, sent him on errands out of town and put him to work at the newspaper. This unrebutted testimony garnered two paragraphs near the bottom of two articles in the local newspaper, and was forgotten.

Such testimony, however shocking, could not overcome the overwhelming evidence of Mistriel’s guilt in the murder of Edwin Buck, even though it suggested Kern County authorities could have prevented the murder by doing something about Mistriel’s prior conduct—and the men who used him sexually. Mistriel received a sentence of thirty-two years to life in prison, which, as of July 1998, he is still serving. None of Mistriel’s or the probation officer’s testimony about the publisher or the political power broker or any of the others Mistriel identified as having sex with minors was ever disputed, in court or out. But no official action was ever taken, even though this testimony came to light just as the first ring case, Kniffen-McCuan, was coming to trial, and Kern County authorities were in the midst of their fervent pursuit of other molestation-ring cases. Sources:
People vs. Robert Glenn Mistriel,
record on appeal archived with the California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, Division Two, Case No. E000323 (appeal from Riverside County Superior Court, Case CR-19638); testimony of Deputy Probation Officer Sally Rockholt and defendant Robert Mistriel, and argument of Deputy District Attorney Clarence Westra and defense attorney David A. Huffman, in
People vs. Mistriel;
Detective W. D. Vines, homicide investigation
report dated July 28, 1981, Bakersfield Police Department Case 81-18080; Michael Trihey, “Mistriel admits planning murder,”
Bakersfield Californian,
June 30, 1983.