Mean Justice (16 page)

“Why did it take so long to identify her?” Pat croaked.

“The body was badly decomposed when it was found, and we were unable to get fingerprints. We ended up using dental charts.” This last was said bitingly—Soliz had previously asked for the name of Sandy’s dentist, and Pat had said she had none. But the detective nevertheless found a dentist who had treated Sandy—yet another reason for Soliz to suspect Pat. Soliz didn’t notice, it seems, that the dental records predated the Dunns’ marriage. Pat hadn’t lied—he simply hadn’t been around when Sandy saw that dentist.

Unspoken also was Kate Rosenlieb’s role in all this. Soliz didn’t mention it, but the only reason the Kern County Sheriff’s Department had even tried to identify
the desiccated, fifty-three-pound corpse as Sandy’s was because Kate Rosenlieb had spotted a tiny article in the newspaper about the chance discovery of an unidentified body in the desert. Once again, it was Rosenlieb’s excited call to the sheriff’s department that set things in motion, when she insisted to Dusty Kline, “That’s her, that’s her. That body in the desert was Sandy.” Dusty Kline’s reply had been, “What body?”
³⁰

Kline checked into it, though, and then he called Rosenlieb back to say that there was no way that this “Jane Doe” could be Sandy. The body was too small, the hair was blonde, the weight was way off. It had been murder, all right, but some sicko had done it. Stripped her, stabbed her, mutilated the body by cutting tissue out of her rectum, then half buried her in a strange sitting position, almost like you’d bury someone in the sand during an outing to the beach. Pat Dunn might be a killer, Kline figured, but he wouldn’t do that to his wife’s body.

But Kate, amazed and furious that the authorities were not trying to identify Bakersfield’s most prominent missing person—and probable murder victim—had insisted it must be Sandy. There was no logic to this, just Kate’s instincts again. If Kline didn’t listen to her, she said, she would lobby the sheriff and the DA: she would get Pat DeMond and her other friends on the city council involved, she’d go to the press—Kate was continually threatening reprisals and lobbying efforts if the detectives failed to aggressively investigate Sandy’s disappearance and Pat’s involvement. So Kline and Soliz finally relented. They went ahead and had the tiny body of Jane Doe checked, had examiners cut off the withered fingers with tin snips and soak them in dish detergent to raise the ruined fingerprint ridges. (“It really does soften hands,
Madge,” one of the other detectives joked, parroting the old TV commercial for Palmolive dish soap.)

In the end, though, the old dental records did the trick, proving Kate right after all. There was no question, then, that the unrecognizable corpse was Sandy’s, something the police might never have determined without Rosenlieb’s pushy insistence that they make a comparison. After that, Kate’s credibility was never questioned by the sheriff’s department. She became, at times, an unofficial part of the investigation. No one questioned how she could have known that the unidentified body was Sandy’s, though had Pat displayed similar intuition, detectives immediately would have assumed it was based on inside—and guilty—knowledge. Through it all, Pat knew nothing of Kate’s role in the investigation. He thought Kate was still his best friend, the one ally he could count upon.

“Was Mom molested?” Pat asked after handing back the pictures.

“Why would you ask that?” Soliz responded, eyes narrowed.

“Because it was one of her greatest fears.”

Soliz made it clear he found this hard to believe. “Why would she go out walking at three in the morning without any type of protection other than her dog if this was her greatest fear?”

Pat knew the answer to this, as did many of Sandy’s friends: her firm belief that such times were inherently safe because only “the good people” were out working then. But, for some reason, the answer eluded him. He had just been confronted with the discovery of his wife’s body, by the terrible allegations suggested by the search warrant, and, worst of all, by those grisly photos. He didn’t
know what to think anymore, and so he just slumped on his stool and muttered, “I don’t know.”

Things went downhill from there. The search of the Dunn house lasted through the night, a total of fifteen hours, as the technicians and criminalists tromped through every room, spraying, sweeping, scooping up records and papers. Soliz, Kline and Sergeant Johnson spelled one another as they interrogated Pat the entire time, virtually nonstop, accusing him, pleading with him, even reducing him to tears. They made him repeat his story of Sandy’s disappearance over and over, looking for the merest inconsistencies in times and dates, letting him pour himself tumblers of liquor between sessions. They accused him of knowing Sandy was dead all along, that he had said as much to Kate Rosenlieb, that he had never acted like a truly concerned husband. They said they knew he had murdered Sandy, and they berated him for leaving her body half buried in the desert like so much discarded trash.

“I can’t believe you wouldn’t even take care of your own wife’s body,” Dusty Kline said at one point during the long interrogation, as Pat sat gaping. “I had told everyone, sure, you had done it, but I knew you would at least show some respect for the dead, that when we found Sandy, she would be taken care of. But you didn’t even do that. What kind of piece of shit are you?”
³¹

Pat had wept at this, big, silent tears rolling down his pale cheeks, and Soliz and Kline had leaned forward, their faces expressionless, waiting for the admission that so often comes when you push a crook to the edge like this. The air was charged. This was what they had been working for through the night.

The moment was a classic of modern policing—the
use of intimidation, official lies, apparently damning knowledge, and other psychologically dominating tactics to interrogate criminal suspects. These methods have proven extremely effective since the brutality of the “third degree” was outlawed in the forties and fifties—more effective, in fact, than physical abuse ever was. Modern interrogation methods are so potent they not only solve many crimes, they also have elicited a surprising number of documented
false
confessions by innocent men and women.
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Even so, the courts have given police wide latitude in how they persuade suspects to talk, and there was absolutely nothing illegal about the marathon questioning of Pat Dunn that night, particularly because Soliz chose to conduct the session at his suspect’s home. In that setting, Pat was not under arrest and theoretically remained free to leave at any time. Practically speaking, however, everyone present knew Pat was a captive in his own home, unlikely to abandon everything he owned to fourteen members of the sheriff’s department. By not arresting Pat, Soliz also circumvented the famous Miranda warnings, though even if he had recited them, it is doubtful Pat would have remained silent or demanded a lawyer. Pat, like most suspects (except, ironically, for career criminals well schooled in the system), believed that invoking his rights would be tantamount to an admission of guilt, and that continuing to talk might still allow him to explain things and extricate himself. The police count on this popular misconception that turns the Constitution on its head: Talking, unlike silence, almost always leads to contradictions sooner or later, which can be used as evidence of guilt. With Pat, the detectives had fifteen hours to try to rattle him into slipping and incriminating himself.

But that moment never came. Pat did not contradict himself in any meaningful way, nor did he utter any telling inconsistencies, not even as the night sky turned gray and bloody with a grim new dawn. Pat told the same story so many times that the detectives did not even bother putting it all down when they wrote up their reports days later. Pat continued to insist the investigators had it all wrong, that they were looking in the wrong places, that now that Sandy’s body had been found, they needed to pursue the
real
killer.

As Pat would later recall it, one of the sheriff’s officials present responded to these exhortations by cocking his finger like a gun, then looking Pat right in the eye and saying, “We already are.”

“Mr. Soliz, you will reach a point where you will quit looking at me and start looking for whoever hurt Mom,” Pat said. Pat considered this his definitive protestation of innocence, but Detective Soliz saw it another way. In his official report, Soliz wrote, “He never admitted to killing his wife but he also never denied killing her.”

Even Pat’s willingness to keep talking, to cooperate and endure fifteen hours of sometimes abusive interrogation, was deemed suspicious. “If it were me,” Dusty Kline later said, “if I was innocent and some detective talked to me about my wife that way, I would have said, ‘Arrest me, or get the hell out.’ But he never did, like he thought he could convince us if he just kept talking.”
³³
Pat would later laugh bitterly at this, noting that he just couldn’t win, for when he refused to talk to the detectives on another occasion, they said his lack of cooperation was suspicious as well.

Even so, after all the questions and the long night’s search, the detectives left empty-handed but for the
Dunns’ three cars, which were towed from Pat’s driveway to a county lot for examination. Left stranded, exhausted and humiliated, Pat had to ask Rex Martin for a ride to a car-rental agency, where he leased a white Ford Tempo.

To the detectives’ dismay, Pat had admitted nothing during the long interrogation. And their exhaustive search of the house produced even less: They had found nothing to link Pat Dunn to the murder of his wife, no blood, no sign that evidence had been removed or cleansed, nothing. Only their suspicions remained, stronger than ever.
³⁴

In the morning, as the detectives were leaving, Kate Rosenlieb came by the house to see Pat. He met her in the driveway. “They think I did it,” he told her, shaky and hoarse from his sleepless night. “I can’t wait until they get past me and start looking for who really did it.”

He looked old, beaten down. His now familiar claim of innocence sounded sincere, but Rosenlieb cautioned herself not to accept that at face value. She started crying, though, and threw her arms around him. “I love you,” she said. “And I’m so sorry this is happening to you.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll get through this,” Pat said gruffly, touched by Kate’s heartfelt embrace. He assumed Kate meant she was sorry about him being falsely accused, as opposed to the darker import of her words—that she was sorry that this man she loved was a murderer about to be caught. “Now you better go,” he told his friend. “Those detectives’ll see you and the next thing you know, they’ll be calling you my girlfriend.”

•   •   •

After that day, Pat finally realized he had become the sheriff’s prime suspect in his wife’s death. He assumed he was under surveillance. On several occasions, he saw a car
cruising slowly up and down Crestmount Drive, a shadowy figure inside peering at his house. He told this to Rex Martin and to another old friend, a retired sheriff’s deputy named Jerry Mitchell, who had been helping Pat search for Sandy during the weeks before the body was found and identified. Pat wondered if the car might be an undercover police vehicle.

“I’d be surprised if they weren’t watching you,” Mitchell had told Pat. “As far as they’re concerned, you’re guilty.”

A few days after the big search and interrogation, Pat called Mitchell to say the same car was cruising by his house again. Now, though, he felt even more troubled. It didn’t look like a police car—or a policeman inside, he said. “Maybe whoever hurt Mom is coming back to finish the job with me,” Pat said.

Just then, seeing Rex Martin pull into the driveway, Pat hung up with Mitchell. When his friend came inside, Pat told him about seeing the suspicious car cruising by—and, as they were standing there in front of the living-room window talking, the car returned. “There it is,” Pat shouted.

“I’m gonna follow that sonofabitch,” Martin answered, “and get his license number.” Pat grabbed a scrap of paper and a pencil and handed it to Martin, who ran outside and jumped into his white Chevy Suburban. Martin pulled out of the driveway and sped to the corner, catching sight of the car, a small green Pontiac Sunbird, a few blocks off. He followed it to a nearby shopping center, where the driver, short and thin with a ponytail, got out and walked into a photo shop. Martin wrote down the license plate number and the man’s description, then returned to Pat’s house.

Pat called Jerry Mitchell back and gave the retired deputy the information to check out. “I can’t run license numbers anymore, now that I’m out of the department, but I’ll tell you what,” Mitchell told Pat. “I’ll give it to Soliz and ask him to check it out.”

Some days later, Mitchell informed Pat that he had telephoned the information to Detective Soliz, but that he never heard anything back. “Probably nothing to it,” Mitchell suggested.

Pat didn’t see the green car after that, and soon forgot all about it. For a time.

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