Mean Justice (2 page)

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 colder 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.

E
IGHT MONTHS LATER:
M
ARCH
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.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Laura Lawhon had watched the lawyer stagger to his car and drive off, shaking her head, feeling just as devastated as he did, but willing herself to stay strong, to meet the eyes of the gloating cops and jurors who had gathered together like conspirators after the trial. The defense lawyer could drive off and lick his wounds; Laura, the private investigator, had to stay on and continue with the case, to try to turn things around, to hunt down some forgotten clue that might pry the case back open and offer another chance to prove the client innocent. The odds of this were not good.

It wasn’t really the lawyer’s fault, Laura knew, yet she couldn’t help feeling as if something had been missed, some words left unuttered, some proof left unoffered—some path she, as an investigator, had not taken. They were an out-of-town defense team new to Kern County and its ways, with only three months to prepare for trial. They had tried to take a crash course on the place—or so they had believed. Laura had carefully researched the local judges and they managed to get their case before a former public defender, figuring that he, at least, would give them a fair shake in a county known for its hanging jurists and merciless prosecutors. This judge, Laura learned, had distinguished himself during a dark episode in Bakersfield’s recent past that many called the Witch
Hunt. Hysteria had swept the community then after the “discovery” of massive rings of child molesters, some of them suspected of devil worship and human sacrifice. The wave of arrests that followed sparked a national panic about satanic child abuse and spawned a torrent of similar prosecutions. That such a baneful national phenomenon began not in sin-addled Los Angeles, but right here in California’s heartland, became a lasting source of shame for a community that considered itself a shrine to family values—the “All-America City,” as Bakersfield billed itself. Much of the evidence turned out to be bogus, but dozens of people went to prison anyway, some with sentences of hundreds of years, as the authorities sought to purge the evil—and stepped over the line from prosecution to persecution. The Witch Hunt became so pervasive that innocent mothers and fathers grew afraid to discipline or touch their own children for fear they, too, would be accused. But Laura had learned that one judge in Kern County had stood up to the hysteria, accusing the sheriff and the district attorney of brainwashing children and breaking the law, and he insisted on reuniting families that the authorities had torn asunder. The judge was pilloried at the time, but now, six years later, as innocents falsely imprisoned during those terrible years were set free, he seemed a visionary. When Laura told the defense lawyer about him, the attorney excitedly announced, “This is the judge we want.”

To their dismay, however, this same judge seemed to take every opportunity to rule against Laura’s client. He skewered the defense regularly and vigorously, seeming to take offense at the slightest suggestion, real or imagined, that the big-city, out-of-town lawyers considered him a bumpkin. His rulings had greatly bolstered
what on paper appeared to be a very shaky prosecution case.

Yet, even with a hostile judge and adverse rulings, Laura had given the defense attorney all the ammunition he should have needed to take apart the prosecutor’s case and reveal it as a passel of unproved suspicions, outright lies and insinuations lacking evidence to back them up. So what if the defendant hadn’t acted like the Hallmark greeting-card version of a devoted, grieving husband? So what if he laughed a little when he called the sheriff’s department? So what if he waited a while before calling the cops? Maybe he kept hoping against hope she would return to him. Maybe he wanted to spare her the embarrassment of telling all her friends she was losing it. So what? Laura had fought such insinuations with hard evidence and testimony that, she felt certain, demonstrated her client’s innocence. She had even marched into court with the brother of the state’s star witness in tow, who explained how the key testimony in the prosecution’s case had been concocted. What more could a jury ask for? The DA had been left reeling, Laura thought, and the defense lawyer, exhilarated.

The outcome seemed so obvious that, toward the end, the foreman of the jury, a country-and-western musician with long dark hair and an oversized wooden cross around his neck, had started flashing thumbs-up signs and small, sly grins at the defendant’s family and the defense team when he’d walk by in the hall. It was totally improper, of course, but what were they supposed to do? Complain? God, Laura thought now, if only they had.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

It was a setup, a cruel joke. They had come to Bakersfield and figured it would be like trying a case anywhere
else, cocky big-city lawyers slumming in a small town. Instead, they had stumbled into the front lines of the nation’s “war on crime,” a buzz saw of a justice system manned by veteran, accomplished career prosecutors, juries that were inclined to convict more often than most, and a startling record of imprisoning more people per capita than most any other place in the country. Only later did Laura find out that, inside the jury room, the jury foreman with the smile and the thumbs-up gestures had been leading the charge to convict. It seemed unbelievable: A second lawyer on the defense team, a veteran former prosecutor who knew a good case when he saw one, had to excuse himself to throw up after the verdict was read. The head of the private investigation firm that employed Laura had sat slack-jawed in disbelief when the clerk unfolded the scrap of paper and read the verdict. Only Laura had seen hints of things to come. Before deliberations began, her boss had offered her double or nothing on her fee if the client was found innocent, but she had said no, she’d just take her hours, win or lose, and leave it at that. Somehow, Laura had known. She had looked at the jurors and had seen what everyone else on the defense team had missed, just as she had sensed something dark and troubling below the surface of this case—and this town—from the very beginning. She had even tried to warn the others, to tell them about some of the other cases she had come across here, convictions that seemed to materialize out of thin air. There had been suspects threatened, coerced and tricked into confessing to crimes that they did not necessarily commit. In some cases, remaining silent when accused had been considered evidence of guilt rather than a constitutional right dating back to the Founding Fathers. Blacks and Hispanics complained
of being excluded from jury service, as if this were the 1950s instead of the 1990s. The same people responsible for imprisoning innocents during the Witch Hunt days were still in power, as popular as ever, and prosecuting this case. The war on crime was out of control here, Laura had warned. The local lawyers even had a saying for it, rueful and sad, one she had heard over and over again in this courthouse: “Only in Kern County.”