Mean Justice (40 page)

There was a reason, after all, that Somers ranked as one of his office’s top prosecutors, no small accomplishment in a DA’s operation that tried more felonies and sent more people to prison per capita than any other California county. Juries loved his homespun charm; he liked to throw in a mention here or there of his humble origins in Missouri, and he could be seen during the Dunn trial piously crossing himself as jurors entered the courtroom. But as good as he was with juries, his legal acumen carried just as high a value in the Kern County District Attorney’s office: Somers was the lawyer Ed Jagels sought out to shore up the molestation-ring prosecutions when they began crumbling on appeal. Somers waded through the tens of thousands of pages accumulated in those cases, an entire room filled with materials, and found ways to fend off successful appeals and
habeas corpus
writs for years. He seemed to genuinely believe in the righteousness of his cause—one of the qualities that made him so formidable in court—but the net effect of his dedication was to keep men and women in prison for many years longer than they otherwise might have stayed behind bars until finally, in the end, they were cleared and set free.

In the trial of Pat Dunn, Somers slowly assembled, witness by witness, his puzzle-piece portrait of Pat as someone who had acted in a completely bizarre fashion
and who was entirely capable of killing. Laura could feel the momentum building in the prosecutor’s favor, though the rest of the defense team still felt certain that the prosecution couldn’t win that way, especially after they finished with Jerry Coble.

Somers’ evidence of marital discord between Sandy and Pat revolved around a few acquaintances’ recollections of Pat growing angry at Sandy, usually during discussions of the movie-theater development that had been rejected by the city council. One of them, Roger McIntosh, the engineer on the project, described again how, during a project meeting, Pat told Sandy to shut up, then made a move toward his wife, causing her to retreat. (Others present at the meeting later recalled no such incident, with one pointing out that they were all seated around a large conference table, making the notion of Pat lunging at Sandy, and her backing off, an impossibility.)

Somers also turned to Ken Peterson, then a city council member (later he became a member of the Kern County Board of Supervisors), who spoke of a conference call with the Dunns during which Pat and Sandy argued about the development project, then hung up on him. Peterson also remembered another conversation in which Pat proclaimed himself “finished financially” if the project fell through, adding to the prosecution’s notion that Pat was somehow desperate for money at the time of Sandy’s death. (Pohlson disputed Peterson on this, pointing out that Detective Soliz’s initial interview report on the councilman stated only that Pat would be “finished,” which could be interpreted to mean he simply would give up attempts to develop that particular piece of land. Peterson, however, joined the chorus of witnesses who said Soliz wrote the statement down wrong. In any case,
the substance of Peterson’s statement simply was not true, Pohlson argued: The demise of the project would not have finished Pat financially. Though the eighty to one hundred thousand dollars the Dunns had spent readying the property for construction would represent a substantial loss for them, the Dunns possessed assets of over a million dollars in cash and millions more in real estate at the time of Sandy’s death. Besides, the money was Sandy’s to lose, not Pat’s. Why, Pohlson reminded jurors, would he be desperate?)

Then there was Kate Rosenlieb, brought in by Somers to swear that the Dunns fought constantly and with increasing ferocity toward the end. Her testimony, surprisingly brief, was delivered with typical dramatic flair, as she seemed intent upon saying what she wanted to say—most of it to Pat’s detriment—regardless of what the lawyers asked. To Laura, her responses seemed pitched in a way that made them as harmful to Pat’s case as possible. For instance, when asked by a prosecutor if she saw Pat drink alcohol, instead of a simple yes, she responded, “I don’t think I ever saw Mr. Dunn that he wasn’t drinking.” When asked if the Dunns argued, Pat’s dear friend answered not yes or no, but, “There were tremendous fights, tremendous fights.” When asked if Pat had been crying or upset by Sandy’s disappearance, Kate didn’t say no, not so far as she could see. She said, “Not in the least.” Twice. Her choice of phrase said as much as the words themselves.

Kate also recalled that, when she asked Pat to go to the sheriff’s department to report Sandy missing—something he had already done—his response terrified her: He had said it was too late, that he feared the worst, that Sandy already was dead, and that he didn’t want anyone
to know. There were charitable interpretations to all of these statements, but neither Kate nor Somers could give Pat the benefit of the doubt. Laura looked over at Pat to see how he was reacting to all this, but he looked dazed. He seemed to be shrinking before her eyes, as if he, too, saw what was coming.

Kate went on to provide Somers with some other key bits for his growing puzzle. She said Pat had once complained that Sandy wore too much jewelry on her early morning walks, and from that statement Rosenlieb and Somers then implied, incorrectly, that this remained Sandy’s practice until the day she died. One of the first things Kate recalled asking Pat after Sandy vanished was whether her jewelry was gone, too. Pat told her no, it wasn’t—all the jewelry was at the house, causing Kate to wonder how that could be, if Sandy always wore it—unless Pat’s story was a lie. Now Somers had something else with which to attack Pat’s defense.

When Somers was through with Rosenlieb, Gary Pohlson decided not to attack her credibility for changing her story and lying to the police. If he went after her hard, Pohlson feared she might blurt out something even worse, perhaps about the attorney Teri Bjorn. At that stage in the trial, the judge had not yet ruled on whether Bjorn could testify about her conversation with Pat about Sandy’s disappearance, money and power of attorney, and Rosenlieb had not mentioned her during her direct testimony. Pohlson wanted to keep it that way. Kate left the stand blinking in surprise, astonished that she hadn’t been roasted alive.

Pohlson took the same hands-off approach with Marie Gates, even though her testimony ended up doing much more damage to Pat than Kate Rosenlieb’s had.
Gates repeated her story about running into a distraught and weeping Sandy one day in mid-June, two weeks or so before the disappearance (which Somers continually characterized as a “few days” before). Marie recalled for the jury how she heard Sandy announce her plans to divorce her husband because she had made a “terrible mistake” in marriage. And she recalled how Pat grew coldly angry after Sandy disappeared and ordered both his mother and Marie to stop talking about Sandy and to “Keep your dang mouths shut” because it would all “blow over.” Laura and the defense team listened to this, frustrated, as they knew from interviewing Lillian Dunn that Pat’s mother could refute this last claim. But Lillian was unavailable, thanks to Pat’s brother Mike spiriting her off to Orange County.

Instead of grilling Gates, Pohlson tried to counter her emotional testimony by recalling to the stand Kevin Knutson, who said Sandy’s last words to him were instructions to set up a trust that would give Pat greater control over their finances, so that, as she explained, “If anything happened to me, Pat would be taken care of.” These were not the words of a woman about to divorce a husband, Knutson suggested.

But Pohlson did not go after Marie Gates directly, a tactical decision that left Laura uneasy, though she conceded it appeared to make sense at the time. Pointing out each of Marie’s inconsistencies would have been a time-consuming exercise that could easily confuse the jury as well as introduce extraneous allegations that Marie had spouted in the past. It should have been clear from Knutson’s testimony that Marie was just plain wrong, Pohlson reasoned, and Laura tended to agree. Why risk alienating the jury by attacking the grandmotherly woman? Even if the
jury believed her, and Kate Rosenlieb, for that matter, Pohlson felt little damage was done. So what if the Dunns had arguments? So what if Sandy threatened him with divorce two weeks earlier, a threat she never acted on? If that proved murder, then half of the men in America could be on trial here, Pohlson said. Pat wasn’t on trial for being a bad husband, nor was it a crime to be happy your spouse died, as Somers seemed to be suggesting. The prosecutor had to link Pat Dunn to the crime of murder itself, and for that, he needed Jerry Coble. And Gary Pohlson just knew he’d burn the chair out from under that witness. Eager to get to the meat of the case, he let Marie Gates go after just a few minutes of cross-examination, seemingly unconcerned by her testimony.

But if Pohlson’s logic was so sound, Laura found herself thinking, why, then, did John Somers look so remarkably content? Sure, the prosecutor had just established at least some evidence of a motive, and he had a timetable for the killings, thanks to changing details in the stories of a neighbor and housecleaner. But if he was worried about an approaching courtroom land mine named Jerry Lee Coble, Laura couldn’t see it. Instead, as he approached the heart of his case—something he had to know the defense was well prepared to attack—he looked positively delighted with the course of the trial. And that worried Laura.

The reason for Somers’ contentment would soon become clear. The prosecutor had indeed reached the heart of this case. But to everyone’s surprise, he did not use the words of Jerry Coble to get there.

He used the words of Pat Dunn.

3

J
OHN
S
OMERS HAD DECIDED TO MAKE
P
AT
D
UNN, NOT
Jerry Coble, his best witness. Pat didn’t have to take the stand for this. In fact, the strategy worked better with the defendant sitting mute, looking befuddled and angry on the sidelines—a posture Pat seemed to be adopting with increasing regularity as the trial progressed.

No, the prosecutor didn’t need Pat on the stand to use his own words against him. Instead, Somers pulled out sheriff’s reports, transcripts and a host of witnesses to chronicle every utterance Pat had made about Sandy’s disappearance over the course of months. Every minor detail, every niggling discrepancy, every inconsistency—what Somers called “the lies”—became fodder for a full-scale assault on Pat’s credibility and character.

The prosecutor knew, as did Gary Pohlson, that there were no smoking guns in this case, no hard evidence that fingered Pat as a murderer—just Coble. But he also knew that the law allowed juries to decide that a defendant’s lies about important facts in a case could prove “consciousness of guilt,” the theory being that innocent people tell one consistent and truthful story, while the guilty weave a web of falsehoods to cover their tracks. Keeping track of the lies can be difficult, the theory goes, which leads to inconsistencies. A classic prosecution axiom is
that the truth never changes, only lies do—at least when the words are the defendant’s.

To demonstrate this principle, Somers brought in a procession of witnesses who purported to prove that Pat could not keep the story of Sandy’s disappearance straight. The fact that Pat was so cooperative, talking to the detectives many times for many hours—and drinking copiously before and sometimes during these interrogations—ended up being used against him in this regard. Every inconsistency, real or imagined, arising during these many conversations became evidence of guilt in Somers’ carefully crafted presentation. There were no big whoppers to be found in Pat’s many statements about Sandy’s disappearance, no inconsistency that could be proved an outright lie in the traditional sense. So Somers went for quantity, knowing that while one or two minor deviations in Pat’s story would seem like niggling details, ten or twelve might have a far different impact on the jury. Somers even produced a huge chart of the “lies” for the jury’s benefit, a virtual road map of deceit he said proved Pat Dunn could not tell the truth about the simplest matters.

First in this lineup came Valley Braddick, the dispatcher at the sheriff’s department who took Pat’s missing-persons report late in the afternoon following Sandy’s disappearance. On the tape of the call, jurors heard Pat giving his first rendition of what happened to Sandy. He was somewhat vague on details, saying at various junctures that he woke up to find his wife missing at nine, nine-thirty, or ten o’clock at night. It was clear he hadn’t been keeping track of exact times, and thus expressed uncertainty. Then, he said, at nine thirty or ten he started driving around looking for his wife and asking
everyone he encountered if they had seen her. He returned home around midnight, then spotted the black dog in the yard and Sandy’s keys on the counter—both of which he thought had previously been missing. He immediately resumed his search in the wake of this discovery, first around the house, then back out on the streets. He returned around two, went to sleep for a couple hours, then recommenced the search at four thirty.

Point by point, this first account matched the statements he would next make to sheriff’s detectives. But Somers, anxious to build in as many contradictions in Pat’s story as he could find, misquoted the tape, telling jurors in argument and on his big chart that Pat informed the dispatcher he “got up and drove around from nine to twelve.” This was incorrect—Pat had given a range of possible times, from nine to ten for his discovery that Sandy was gone. Even the prosecutor, who was so critical of Pat’s inconsistencies and so certain that they revealed a guilty state of mind, apparently could not keep all the times straight, either.