Mean Justice (47 page)

Banducci’s report was never given to Pat Dunn or his lawyers, as the law requires.
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And Banducci, the detective who busted Jerry Coble, never appeared on the lengthy list of witnesses and officers relevant to the Dunn case painstakingly compiled by Laura and her colleagues, because they never heard of him. Prosecutors are legally obliged to reveal all information in a case that might be helpful to a defendant. Even an inadvertent failure to disclose important material can be grounds for a new trial or dismissal of charges. In the Dunn case, though, no one on the defense team knew what they were missing. For his part, Detective Banducci was relieved—and surprised—at not being called as a defense witness in the case.

Had they been given the report, the defense could have called Banducci to the stand and asked him why he had not made a deal with Jerry Lee Coble immediately after Coble’s arrest, given that such arrangements are not uncommon in criminal investigations, and Coble seemed more than willing. The detective has since said he would have explained his refusal to deal by pointing out that Coble had been caught in numerous lies during his interrogation and had little credibility at the sheriff’s department. Banducci said he would never base a case on the word of such a person as Jerry Coble: “I believed Jerry Coble would say or do anything to avoid going to prison, so he could get back on the street and score more dope.”
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Such testimony, had the defense known it was available,
could have been devastating to Coble’s credibility as a witness, as well as the prosecution’s entire case, particularly because Banducci could also have shed new light on the unusual manner in which Coble finally got his deal with Detective Soliz and Deputy DA Somers. Contrary to typical practice in such cases, Banducci was kept in the dark about his own suspect and case when the deal was forged. When Soliz returned from his initial meeting with Coble, he knew he had a witness who could be the turning point in the case. Yet Soliz, who knew that Banducci was in charge of the pending case against Coble, did not talk to his colleague. Banducci and Soliz worked in the same office and occupied desks less than ten feet apart, yet Soliz never asked his fellow detective’s opinion about Coble’s credibility or reliability.
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Instead, Detective Soliz decided to keep his new witness in the Dunn case a secret, and never mentioned it to Detective Banducci. Nor did Deputy District Attorney Somers consult with Banducci before dispensing with his grand theft case against Coble as part of the plea bargain that made Jerry Lee a witness against Pat Dunn. Such consultation is normally made when a prosecutor settles a detective’s case, but this time, Somers dealt only with Soliz, and therefore presumably had no idea that Banducci thought Coble would make an untrustworthy witness.
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Banducci would not know anything about Coble’s involvement in the Dunn case until Soliz approached him in the office several months later and requested Jerry Coble’s driver’s license.

Banducci had impounded the license after arresting Coble. This original grand theft case had then dragged on, even after Coble pleaded guilty, because sentencing kept getting delayed to allow Coble medical treatment for
epilepsy, the legacy of a head injury sustained many years before—or so Banducci thought. Recently, there had been a new and secret reason for the delays: the Pat Dunn case.

“What do you want Coble’s license for?” Banducci asked. “Is he a suspect in something?”

“He needs it back. He’s a witness in one of my cases.”

“You gotta be kidding,” Banducci said, the disbelief in his voice obvious. He waited for Soliz to explain, but the homicide detective offered no additional information. Banducci dug out the license and handed it over.
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Months later—and then only through news coverage of the Dunn trial—Banducci finally found out just what Coble was testifying about, and that the six-year prison sentence facing him in Banducci’s case had been reduced by the Kern County DA to five years’ probation.

“You’d think somebody might have mentioned it to me,” the detective later complained, “since it was my case.”
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The DA’s failure to pass on information did not end with the Banducci report. Even after eluding punishment in Banducci’s case and cutting his deal, Coble could not bring himself to stay out of trouble—but that, too, remained unknown to Pat Dunn’s defense team.

Jerry Coble formally entered his new plea agreement and promise to testify against Pat on November 3, 1992, three months after he first called Detective Soliz. In exchange for his anticipated testimony, he got probation with the condition that he refrain from using drugs and committing other crimes. The judge who accepted the plea bargain made it clear that if Coble violated those conditions, he could be sent to prison, yet still have to testify in the Dunn case.
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Yet, Jerry Coble continued using heroin before, during
and after that hearing in court. The Dunn defense team knew that, because Coble admitted as much when he took the stand. The DA even suggested to the jury that Coble’s willingness to admit such an unflattering detail showed he was being candid and truthful. But Coble also swore he committed no other crimes since cutting his deal. That was why, he said, he could only afford to do heroin five or six times a month after agreeing to testify, instead of his preferred five or six times a week. Had he been committing thefts, he could have afforded more drugs, he claimed. “I wasn’t working. I didn’t have any money and I wasn’t doing any crime,” he testified under oath.

This testimony was a lie. And though Detective Soliz and Deputy DA Somers may not have personally known it, other law-enforcement officials in Kern County did.

In late December 1992, a month after his plea bargain—and less than two weeks after he testified in Pat Dunn’s preliminary hearing—Jerry Coble was seen in a Bakersfield bar called the Belvedere. A barmaid there remembered Coble distinctly, because he had been a regular there until Thanksgiving, when he had gotten into a fight and stopped coming around. Then he came back one last time late in December.

On the day of Coble’s reappearance, five or so blank payroll checks were found missing from the Belvedere. The checks had been kept in an office that was normally off-limits to customers—but which a careful thief could enter if he watched and waited until the bartender went in back to fetch supplies to restock the bar. Two days after the theft, on December 23, a short, bearded man wearing a baseball cap walked into Sherry’s, a liquor store in downtown Bakersfield, and identified himself as Richard
Scott Anderson. Sherry’s had a lucrative side business cashing paychecks, and Anderson had a payroll check for $944.49 from the Belvedere bar he wanted to cash. He also wanted to wire fifty dollars via Western Union to someone named Aaron Coble, as a Christmas gift.

Anderson produced an American Express corporate card, an insurance card and a photo ID to serve as identification, but the manager at Sherry’s felt suspicious. She telephoned the Belvedere to make certain that a Richard Scott Anderson indeed worked there. She was told the bar had no such employee, and that whoever was in her store had a forged and stolen check. While Anderson filled out the Western Union forms, the manager discreetly called the police, then tried to stall the thief until help arrived. Sensing that something was up, Anderson inched toward the door, then suddenly darted outside and began running. The manager got to the door just in time to see the forger climb into an El Camino pickup truck, and she caught the first three digits of the license plate, which she remembered as 4DB. Bakersfield police officers arrived a few minutes later, but too late to find Anderson. All that turned up was a wallet discarded in a nearby parking lot with Anderson’s identification in it and a check stub from the Belvedere. The photo identification proved to be phony—whoever Richard Scott Anderson was, he was not the man who tried to cash the check at Sherry’s.

After the Christmas holidays had passed, a Bakersfield Police Department detective named J. E. Taylor inherited the case. Taylor contacted the real Richard Scott Anderson by telephone in Alamo, California, where Anderson worked as a real estate broker. It turned out that in January 1992, during a road trip to San Francisco from Los Angeles, Anderson had stopped at a service station
and used the restroom. While he was washing up, his wallet and checkbook were stolen from the counter next to him. Since that time, he had received nearly a dozen calls from irate Bakersfield residents who had listed items for sale in the newspaper classified ads, then sold them to someone calling himself Richard Anderson. This Anderson had paid with the stolen checks, using Anderson’s identification, but the checks all bounced—since the real Richard Anderson had closed the account. The forger had never been caught.

Then, when Detective Taylor read over the patrol officer’s report from Sherry’s, he immediately recognized the name Aaron Coble. Having worked several burglary investigations involving the Coble family, Taylor knew that Jerry Lee had a young son named Aaron. A records check told him that Coble owned an El Camino with the license number 4D80212—very close to the partial plate number spotted outside the liquor store. Taylor’s next step in the investigation was to go to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, where he obtained a booking photograph of Jerry Lee Coble to show to witnesses at Sherry’s and the Belvedere. The day was January 11, 1993, two months before Pat Dunn’s trial was to begin. Detective Taylor had just linked Jerry Coble to a new crime and was on the verge of solving the case.

Coble’s arrest could have had a dramatic effect on the prosecution of Pat Dunn, for at the time, Coble was on probation for grand theft, thanks to his deal, as well as parole for his previous conviction and two-year prison sentence for receiving stolen property. Even with his arrangement in the Dunn case, another bust would make prison a virtual certainty. And if imprisoned, he almost surely would refuse to testify. What would he have to gain
at that point? And without Coble, the whole murder case against Pat could fall to pieces. One alternative, of course, would be for the DA to cut yet another deal with Coble, giving him another free pass, but the result would still leave the prosecution in dire shape—Coble would be revealed as a liar and a scam artist who couldn’t stay straight for just a couple of months, even when his entire future was at stake. The DA, in turn, would appear desperate and willing to bend over backward for a dubious witness. Furthermore, the crime Coble was accused of committing—posing as someone else, lying about his identity, forging documents—was uncomfortably close to the sort of trickery and fraud that the Dunn defense team believed he had committed in framing Pat. A habitual criminal who could assume a new identity was undoubtedly capable of collecting enough information to frame another man for murder, they would argue.

Only one thing was certain to preserve the case against Pat Dunn: The new case against Jerry Lee Coble could simply go away. And whether by accident or design, that’s exactly what happened.

For reasons unstated in his report on the case, Detective Taylor took no further action on the new Coble case for three months after contacting the Kern County Sheriff’s Department—which, of course, was relying on Coble as a star witness. Taylor’s reports reveal no attempt to show the photograph of Coble to the manager at Sherry’s Liquor, which is why he went to get it from the sheriff’s department in the first place. Nor was there any documented investigation of Richard Anderson’s statement that his ID and checks had been used to commit a number of other thefts and forgeries throughout Bakersfield over the past year, to see if Coble might be
responsible for those as well. And Taylor did not try to contact Coble’s parole officer or probation officer, either of whom could have arrested Coble immediately had they known he was passing stolen payroll checks.

It was not until April 5, 1993, that Detective Taylor requested that the Bakersfield police lab process the stolen Belvedere check for fingerprints. Four days later, Coble’s prints were identified on the check. The prints made for a cold, irrefutable case against Coble—the kind of hard, objective evidence detectives had searched for so hard in their investigation of Pat Dunn, only to come up empty.

Taylor’s request to the police lab was made seven working days after Pat Dunn’s trial ended on March 24, 1993, just late enough to be of absolutely no use to the defense.
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Jerry Lee Coble had been able to take the stand and swear he had committed no crimes since making his deal to testify against Pat. He swore he had received very little in return for his testimony. He portrayed himself as a law-abiding citizen who even went to church shortly after seeing Pat Dunn drag Sandy’s body out the door, a man who, despite his long criminal record, just wanted to do the right thing.

Under the circumstances, Jerry Lee Coble sounded quite believable, given that his latest arrest was kept secret.

The delay in handling Coble’s case remains unexplained. The significance of this new information could not have been lost on anyone who followed the Dunn trial, which received daily coverage in the Bakersfield news media, including stories about Coble’s involvement as a key witness for the prosecution. And Detective Taylor already knew quite a bit about the Dunns on his own,
having been acquainted with Sandy years before—Taylor had been the investigating officer in Sandy’s embezzlement case against her longtime bookkeeper, Delores Craig. Sandy had talked with Taylor many times and had testified at length against the bookkeeper, who pleaded guilty in 1986 in exchange for a two-year prison sentence. Six years later, early in the Dunn homicide investigation, Sheriff’s Detective Soliz and his partner on the case, Dusty Kline, collected information about Taylor’s investigation of Craig. Then Detective Taylor, after visiting the sheriff’s department in January 1993, delayed his new case against Jerry Coble for three months, even though he had identified Coble as the culprit.