Mean Justice Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  EDWARD HUMES

  AND

  MEAN JUSTICE

  “Fascinating reading. . . . Mean Justice unfolds like a good mystery, with gripping detail, surprising, not to say extraordinary revelation, superb background, a lucid style and solid, commanding conclusions.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “The story is told like a movie. . . . Humes’ nonfiction account reads like many of the courtroom novels so popular now—except Pat Dunn is real, a victim and in prison.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Gripping. . . . We should read this book and weep for all who have lost their liberty or even their life because of a prosecutor who wanted to win too badly.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “In Mean Justice, Humes describes in jolting detail how a society obsessed with punishing criminals has provided almost unlimited new power to prosecutors.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “An eye-popping tale of justice miscarried that will shock anyone who believes our criminal justice system still works just fine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Humes’ account of prosecutorial overreach shows how easy it is for the legal system to ignore truth in pursuit of convictions. . . . The people are fascinating and the novelistic narrative is compelling. Even the appendix is worth reading.”

  —Star Telegram (Fort Worth, Texas)

  “Fascinating and eye-popping. . . . For those that believe that investigative policies work only to separate the guilty from the innocent, you must read this book.”

  —Columbia Fire Weekly

  “Read this and you will have nightmares, fail to read it and you might have to live some nightmares. The choice is yours.”

  —The Chief of Police (official publication of the

  National Association of Chiefs of Police)

  “A compelling narrative of a horrifying story. . . . Humes demonstrates the ease with which police, prosecutors, and judges can manipulate the process to convict even the innocent.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mean Justice is an extraordinary nonfiction work. . . . The reader is simply swept along.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  MISSISSIPPI MUD

  “A story almost too unbelievable to be true. But it is. . . . Terrific.”

  —Ann Rule

  “Reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. . . . Read[s] as smoothly as a finely crafted suspense novel.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mississippi Mud reads like a well-constructed mystery novel, and Edward Humes’ lucid and unadorned prose admirably suits this complex story of venality and betrayal.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT

  “Passionate. . . . A sad, maddening, brilliant book.”

  —Washington Post

  “A finely etched, powerfully upsetting portrait.”

  —The New York Times

  “The book reads like a pilot for a Michael Crichton TV series. . . . Stories careen by in an ER-style blur but still manage to touch a nerve. . . . Humes has produced a thoughtful, nuanced work, set apart from the flood of wonkish policy books by his often beautiful prose.”

  —Washington Monthly

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  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue: Beginnings and Endings

  Part I: Pat and Sandy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II: Laura

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part III: Trial and Error

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part IV: Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Endnotes

  Appendix A: Wrongful Prosecutions in Kern County

  Appendix B: The Toll of Misconduct

  PREFACE

  This book owes its origin to an off-hand remark made in 1994 by private investigator Laura Lawhon, whom I had come to know both professionally and socially: She suggested I might be interested in writing about the experiences of a client of hers recently convicted of murder in Kern County, California. I am usually skeptical of such suggestions, and Laura’s was no exception; my experience as a newspaper reporter and author writing about the justice system taught me that claims of innocence from convicted criminals are often made, seldom proved, and usually refuted. But four boxes of documents and many trips to California’s Great Central Valley later, I found I had discovered a tale worth telling about the People of Kern County vs. Patrick O’Dale Dunn. And I had found a much larger issue to ponder as well: how a town’s—and, indeed, an entire nation’s—fear of crime and desire to be safe has made the conviction of innocent men and women startlingly common.

  Many individuals aided in the research and writing of Mean Justice. I wish in particular to thank Tamara Koehler, formerly of the Bakersfield Californian, for her invaluable assistance, generosity and insights, and Richard Beene, executive editor of the Californian, for his hospitality in making the considerable historical resources of his newspaper available. Also generous in their sharing of time and information were Stanley Simrin, H. A. Sala, Susan Penninger, Jim Fahey, Offord Rollins III, Offord Rollins IV, Denver Dunn, Pamela Kniffen, Eric Banducci, Jeff Niccoli, Vernon “Dusty” Kline, Kate Rosenlieb, Marie Gates, David Goldberg, Gary Pohlson, Georgia Herald, Jerry Mitchell, Rex Martin, Jennifer Dunn, the excellent staff of the Kern County Superior Court Clerk’s criminal section and Pat Dunn. As always, my literary agent, Susan Ginsburg, and my editor, Laurie Bernstein, were unflagging in their support and assistance. And, as always, my wife, Donna, proved to be my best editor, best writing coach and best friend.

  If little faults, proceeding on distemper,

  Shall not be wink’d at, how shall we stretch our eye

  When capital crimes, chew’d, swallow’d and digested,

  Appear before us?

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V

  The function of the prosecutor under the Federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible to the wall. His function is to vindicate the right of people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.

  —JUSTICE WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS

  Innocent until proven guilty? Talk about legal fiction.

  —LAURA LAWHON,

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  PROLOGUE

  BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS

  JULY 1, 1992

  He postponed calling the sheriff for hours, seizing on any interruption that would let him avoid the moment he dreaded most. He paced. He drank beer. He called his son for advice. He drank more beer. He drove past the dusty corners of East Bakersfield, staring at pedestrians as they braved the glare and spongy asphalt of summer. He returned home
and tidied the house, startled by every unexpected creak or rustle. And when a prospective tenant for the shopping plaza that he and his wife owned stopped by unexpectedly to discuss plans for a new pizza parlor, he welcomed the man into his home, spoke at length about the virtues of his College Center strip mall, and then even drove the visitor out to squint approvingly at his other properties in the area. Burned a good ninety minutes that way.

  He just did not behave like a man worried about his missing wife, the prosecutor would later say. No way. He took that man out to the mall, and he acted like he hadn’t a care in the world. He never once mentioned his wife. Not once.

  Finally, late in the afternoon, he found himself alone again in the silent, empty house, out of excuses, out of hope. He picked up the phone and sighed, a pleasant, beefy man in his late fifties with blondish gray hair and pale blue eyes that puffed and drooped like a hound dog’s. The hands holding the phone were rough and chapped, though he had given up physical labor years ago.

  “Sheriff’s department,” a woman’s voice answered on the third ring. “How can I help you?”

  “Hi, sheriff’s department,” he answered, his tone forced and bright. Though he was Californian born and raised, he spoke in the flat midwestern accent of his Oklahoma forebears, in a deep, rumbling voice that slipped often and easily into a nervous chuckle. “Who am I speaking with? This is Pat Dunn.”

  “Valley,” the dispatcher said.

  “Valley? Like in San Joaquin?”

  “Yeah,” the woman answered warily.

  “Oh, that’s a neat name.”

  “Thank you,” the dispatcher said, laughing obligingly.1

  Listen to the tape of that call, the prosecutor would say. He’s laughing, joking. Do you laugh and joke because the woman you supposedly love has disappeared? Or because you think you just got away with murder?

  The dispatcher’s name was Valentina Braddick, though she preferred Valley. Each day, she took dozens of calls from angry people, sad people, panicked, confused and distraught people. Pleasantries, much less compliments, were in short supply; Pat had immediately gotten on her good side. “Okay, Pat,” Valley Braddick said. “What can I do for you?”

  He took a deep breath, sounding unsure, groping for words. “Well, my wife went walking yesterday afternoon or evening, and, uh, she’s fifty-six years old and, uh, she took the big black dog with her. And she didn’t come home.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Valley murmured. It was one of several small sounds she habitually made, her way of prodding callers along without actually interrupting them.

  The caller cleared his throat and continued. He and his wife normally went to bed early in the evening, he explained, often by seven o’clock. And most times Sandy got up by three in the morning to go walking. She’d bring one or two of their dogs along. Been doing it for years now, always at three or four in the morning, before the desert heat could blast the city into submission. She insisted it was the safest time to walk, even though she plowed through some of Bakersfield’s worst neighborhoods.

  But, last night, he had awakened with a start a little before ten to find Sandy and their big black Labrador gone—five, six hours before her usual walking time. He said he looked around the house, growing more and more uneasy at her absence. He and Sandy were creatures of habit, he said, and he knew this wasn’t right; she would never go walking at this hour. Still, he decided to drive her usual route. He searched East Bakersfield until midnight—and found no sign of his wife anywhere. When he got back home, though, he found the Labrador in the yard where he belonged and Sandy’s keys on the kitchen counter. He called out, he searched the house, but it was silent and dark: no Sandy, no note, nothing. He said he had been alternately waiting and searching their part of town ever since. Finally, though, he convinced himself to call the sheriff’s department for help.2

  He waited eighteen hours to report his wife missing. Eighteen hours. Is that what a husband who fears for his wife’s safety would do? Is that what you’d do? “She took some cash and, uh, she’s gone,” he finished. “I don’t know where she is.”

  So, this was a routine missing-persons report, Valley thought to herself. Nothing she hadn’t heard a hundred times before. Husbands and wives took off all the time without a word to their spouses. Nothing the sheriff’s department could do—or would do—about it, unless there was something unusual about the case, some suggestion of endangerment or foul play.

  “Okay,” she said, another prod for the caller to continue.

  “It’s been less than twenty-four hours, but I’m—I’m worried,” he said. Then he switched gears and volunteered something else. “Her mother died of Alzheimer’s disease.”

  This got Valley’s attention. A report that someone’s wife grabbed cash and took a powder was not news at the sheriff’s department, but a missing woman with mental problems was an entirely different matter. “Did your wife have Alzheimer’s disease?” she asked.

  Although it did not strike Valley as unusual at the time, his answer, like so many other parts of this conversation, would later seem ambiguous and odd to those scrutinizing his every word and action. He said, “Well, I don’t know that. I’m not a doctor. I just know she forgets things.” He said the problem was infrequent, slipping in and out of sight, and he gave one example: His wife might feed the dogs three times in a single evening, forgetting that she had done so each time.

  “Yeah, she does have memory problems,” the dispatcher agreed.3

  The people who knew her best never saw any evidence of a failing memory in Alexandra Dunn. Only the defendant claimed she had Alzheimer’s disease. And I submit to you that’s nothing more than his cover story.

  As they talked, the dispatcher occasionally had to place him on hold to attend to other calls and he was twice disconnected, forcing him to call back but giving him ample opportunity to gripe and chuckle about modern technology. Finally, Valley told him the sheriff’s department would indeed log a formal missing-persons report on Sandy. Because of the memory problems he described, Sandy would be listed as a “dependent adult,” which meant that, if the police found her, they would pick her up whether she wanted to come home or not. Valley then asked for Sandy’s description—her looks, her clothing, her vital statistics. She also asked for the name of Sandy’s dentist. Valley did not explain the need for this particular bit of information, so as not to distress her caller. She knew what he did not, that dental records can be used to identify the missing, but only when they turn up dead.

  Later, when she asked for his full name, he sounded relieved not to be talking about his wife as he answered, “Patrick O. Dunn, ‘O’ for ‘Outstanding.’ ” It was said in a self-deprecating, sarcastic way, and he and Valley laughed. Others, though, would not be amused. They would call his humor unseemly, as they would his response to the dispatcher’s next query about his race. He joked: “How ’bout old and fat?”4

  There’s no other way to say it. He was flirting. It’s right there on the tape. It simply is not the voice of a man desperate to find his wife.

  Valley entered the information into the Kern County Sheriff’s computer system, then told her caller to get a pencil and paper and to write down the case number, KC92-14851, so he could call back and have it canceled should his wife return home.

  “I got it,” he said. His voice, for the first time in their conversation, sounded weary and defeated.

  After some words of encouragement and a suggestion that he check the hospitals and the jails in case Sandy had an accident or got arrested, Valley said good-bye and went on to her next call. He hung up and stared at the telephone for a long time, as if waiting to see what would happen next. Time passed—minutes, hours, he couldn’t be sure anymore. The ice in his tall glass of whiskey made soft cracking sounds as it slowly melted. Outside, the relentless desert sun of Bakersfield’s summer shriveled the lawn and made the air shimmer outside his kitchen window, but the man who reported his wife missing that day would later remember feeling colde
r than he had ever felt in his life.

  When he made that call, I assure you of one thing: Alexandra Dunn was already dead. And he knew it. Because he killed her.

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER: MARCH 24, 1993

  The lawyer wept as he drove south on Highway 99, great heaving sobs that left the wheel unsteady in his hands. He struggled to keep his charcoal Mercedes between the lines and on the asphalt, but the tears occasionally blinded him. Mercifully, the highway was ruler-straight here, not a curve for miles, the rows of crops and irrigation pipes flashing by in a seventy-mile-per-hour blur. The Kern County courthouse parking lot was twenty-five miles behind him now, the low sprawl of Bakersfield just a small blur in the rearview mirror, and still he couldn’t stop crying. The jury’s verdict kept drowning out everything else in his head, a vicious chant, a sucker punch.

  Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

  The lawyer tugged on his tie, blinking hard. The black-leather interior of the car was littered with papers, transcripts, yellow legal pads. On top, mocking him now, were the notes he had scrawled for his closing argument. As he had delivered those words, he had told himself the stony looks and crossed arms in the jury box meant nothing—that’s how sure he had been of this one. “Please do the right thing,” he had said just before sitting down at the defense table for the last time, putting it in their twelve pairs of hands. “This guy’s not guilty. Do the right thing.” He had harbored no doubts they would heed his plea. The case was such a winner, he and his partner and one of their investigators literally had the champagne on ice. He had never done that before. Never. Nor had he ever said to a client, “Don’t worry. There’s no way they’ll convict.” Until this case.

  And no matter what else happened in a case, he never, ever told himself that a client accused of murder was innocent. Not guilty, yes. Reasonable doubt, yes. In all the many other cases he had tried, he had always talked the good lawyer talk, even to himself, focusing on the paucity of the evidence, the holes in the testimony—the stuff of doubt and acquittal. Otherwise, you couldn’t do the job; it would drive you crazy. Every good defense lawyer knows it. Only this time, in Bakersfield, far from his home turf and his comfortable practice and the judges he knew by first name, he had dared to say it—and, more to the point, to believe it: “My client is an innocent man. I know it. He is being framed for a murder he did not commit.” After twenty-six years in the courtroom, with dozens of capital cases under his belt, he had never before allowed himself the luxury to believe wholeheartedly in a client’s absolute innocence. He had always considered it irrelevant. Until now.