Mean Justice (7 page)

Given their odd hours and other eccentricities, the Dunns were by no means universally beloved. Some
acquaintances felt their relationship seemed to be based as much on bickering as on love, and there was some truth to this. Both could be stubborn and opinionated people at times, and Sandy in particular was known as much for the staying power of her grudges as for her genteel manner. Their detractors, and there were several right in the neighborhood, saw only this negative side of the Dunns. These people tended to describe Sandy as a flighty snob who at times affected an ostentatious manner reminiscent of Zsa Zsa Gabor. They considered Pat a gold digger who had risen above his station in life. (Still, even their critics had to admit that the Dunns’ humble clothes, home and habits suggested that the couple had little interest in flaunting their wealth—to Pat and Sandy, money was a tool, not something to be displayed.) Those in the neighborhood who had known and liked the legendary Pat Paola seemed particularly unkind about “the new husband,” as they called Pat Dunn. They never really forgave Sandy for marrying a mere schoolteacher, and they were particularly scandalized when Pat drove Paola’s vintage tail-finned Cadillac in the Bakersfield Christmas parade, something Paola traditionally had done before senility left him incapable of carrying out the annual ritual. “As if Dunn could take Mr. Paola’s place,” sniffed one angry neighbor. “He has no right to drive that car.”

Pat and Sandy seemed oblivious to much of this, though Pat was known to play the occasional practical joke on neighbors who disliked him. He continually feuded with one next-door neighbor in particular, a retired plumber named Otis Coppock, whose partial deafness exacerbated his and Pat’s regular misunderstandings. In one of their more memorable bouts, Coppock’s daughter, a former schoolmate of Pat’s daughter,
yelled over the fence at Pat one day during a Dunn family barbecue, and Coppock later telephoned with a follow-up complaint. Apparently, the Coppocks felt the Dunns were being too noisy. “Listen, Coppock,” Pat snarled into the phone, shouting so his neighbor would hear every word, as his daughter, Jennifer, and son Patrick listened. “Meet me outside and bring your dog. And I’ll kick your ass and my dog will kick your dog’s ass and go ahead and bring your daughter, too, and my daughter will kick her ass to boot.”

Pat could barely keep from laughing during this mock tirade. To him and his kids, who were giggling in the background, it was all an absurd joke. But Coppock took it as a serious threat and slammed the phone down. He never spoke to Pat after that day, and made no secret of his animosity toward his neighbors. Though Sandy wasn’t there on the day of the barbecue, she battled with Coppock as well, and he once accused her of mistreating the ailing Pat Paola, whom he idolized. Coppock had occasionally seen the naked Paola in the backyard, and believed the ailing financier when he ranted about Sandy taking his clothes and locking him out. The plumber would later say Sandy struck and abused her elderly first husband, thereby contributing to his death, though he also once claimed Sandy drove her second husband to death as well, despite the fact Leon was very much alive.

Still, most people who knew the Dunns seemed willing to accept their eccentricities—his practical jokes, her unshakable habit of hoarding everything from plastic bags to old clothes. They were known as loyal friends willing to help those close to them when trouble struck. Pat and Sandy helped one financially strapped couple start a business of their own, and Pat gave work and one
of his trucks to a troubled young man—an old friend of his son Danny—when no one else would hire him.

Mostly, every day seemed the same at the Dunn household. Sandy would rise before dawn to go for her early morning walk, and Pat would have the coffee ready by the time she returned two hours later. As he kept the cups full, Sandy sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper aloud for Pat. They liked keeping informed about doings in their city, particularly about city politics, as they began laying plans to develop some of the vacant land Sandy had inherited from Pat Paola, still trying to fulfill his visions for East Bakersfield. In the last year of Sandy’s life, Pat became much more active in her financial affairs as they worked on two large developments, a housing tract and a movie-theater complex. The theater project had run afoul of certain city officials, and so Pat began to read voraciously about city politics. The city council, the planning commission, the county government—all had to be understood, massaged and placated if the plans were to go through, he told Sandy.

The Dunns also obsessively read about crime in Bakersfield, their main concern and fear, something they shared with many of their neighbors. Their interest was particularly keen because the College Center mall Sandy had inherited—where she took her daily walks—was now in a high-crime area. They also followed the increasing power and prestige of Kern County’s tough, law-and-order district attorney, whom they both supported in his uncompromising approach to law enforcement. Pat and Sandy felt Bakersfield needed someone like this DA in control, for the city seemed increasingly prey to the most bizarre and frightening crimes—escalating violence, serial killers, a Dungeons and Dragons murder ring that
claimed the life of the district attorney’s own barber, a disturbing number of corrupt cops, judges and other officials, and, of course, the devil-worshiping child molesters who had made national news in recent years. “I was one of the first principals to bring counselors into the school to talk about child abuse and abductions,” Pat said every time one of the big molestation cases hit the papers. “I saw it coming.”

Like most of their neighbors and peers, Pat and Sandy had been horrified when, one by one, these molesters began walking out of prison after appealing their convictions. Now, the newspapers said, the molesters were supposed to be the victims—of tainted evidence, of prosecutorial misconduct, of mass hysteria. But the Dunns, along with nearly everyone they knew in Bakersfield, didn’t buy any of it. They believed their district attorney when he declared that the appeals judges were wrong, that these jurists were misguided liberals who cared more about criminals’ rights than crime victims. “It’s those damn judges,” Pat agreed heartily when Sandy read him the latest news about convicts appealing their way out of prison. “They won’t let the police do their job.”

It never seems to end, Pat often said when Sandy finished reading the crime news. Just a few months before Sandy disappeared, the Dunns had followed the case of a high school track star named Offord Rollins, convicted of murdering his former girlfriend to clear the way for a new girl. It was an ugly case that, because of its racial overtones, tore an enormous rift in the community. Rollins was black, the murdered girl Latina, the judge and jury all white. The prosecutor pointed to violent rap lyrics penned by the young athlete as evidence of his viciousness; the defense lawyer complained that official
racism and misconduct, not hard evidence, put his client in prison. Even an archconservative like Sandy had wondered aloud one morning over her newspaper whether the defense lawyer might be right. “That case just doesn’t make sense” she had started to say.

“They wouldn’t have arrested him if he hadn’t done it,” Pat interrupted reflexively, adamantly—a true believer. “He
must
be guilty.” To Pat’s way of thinking, no innocent man could ever be prosecuted in America without the truth sooner or later coming out. “There’d be no reason to do it,” he told Sandy, applying free-market reasoning to the justice system. “What would the cops and the DA get out of framing that kid? It’s not like they get paid by the arrest. There’s nothing in it for them.”

Pat’s law-and-order attitude, his trust in “the men in blue,” never seemed to waver, not even after he and Sandy had their own brush with the legal system three years after moving in together—the one documented instance of marital discord in the Dunn household.

On October 19, 1989, shortly before nine in the evening, Sandy dialed 911 on her bedroom telephone. When the dispatcher answered, Sandy said, “He hit me. My husband hit me. And I want him arrested.” She reported that the assault had happened five minutes before she placed the call to the authorities. The dispatcher promised help would be there quickly.

When sheriff’s deputies arrived exactly six minutes after Sandy placed the call, they found Pat sitting calmly in the den of the Crestmont house. He was chatting with one of his best friends, Kate Rosenlieb, a former student who, at Pat’s urging, had gone on to take a seat on the Bakersfield City Planning Commission, which reviewed every proposed real estate project in the city. The two
were sitting and drinking beer, and Rosenlieb clearly had arrived before Sandy called the police and had been there for some time. Pat had telephoned her earlier in the evening and asked her to come over for a visit. She would later say she had seen nothing untoward happen, and hadn’t even set eyes on Sandy until the deputies arrived.
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Once the police walked in, Sandy emerged from the back of the house. She had a small cut behind her right ear that had left a touch of blood on her earlobe and in her hair, though she refused any medical treatment. “He was angry with me, I don’t know why,” Sandy told the deputies. “He was drinking and yelling. I came in the bedroom and pulled back the covers to go to bed, and that’s when he hit me. Twice, with his fist.”

The deputies arrested Pat on the spot for misdemeanor spousal abuse. They asked him no questions, but he volunteered, “No, I did not hit her.” Later, they took him to the county jail, where he asked for a lawyer, though he never actually saw one or hired one.
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Kate Rosenlieb, meanwhile, offered to stay at the house to help, but Sandy said, “No, I want you out of here.” Sandy looked dazed, but Rosenlieb still left—without the deputies asking her a single question, not even taking her name. She left feeling deeply disturbed, certain that her friend Pat, someone she long admired, had indeed struck Sandy. The incident would leave a long-lasting impression on the young city official, one that would return to haunt her and Pat Dunn. No one—not Pat, not Rosenlieb and not the sheriff’s department—realized Kate actually could have provided an alibi of sorts for Pat, as she was sitting talking with him over beers when Sandy claimed to have been beaten.
Something was wrong with Sandy’s account, though no one knew it at the time.

As Pat would later tell it, this incident marked the first time that he noticed Sandy display a memory or mental problem. He didn’t recognize it at the time, but he would later come to see this episode as a first symptom, perhaps, of the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. According to Pat, there had been no fight and no hitting that night—Sandy simply went rigid, her face blank as she stood in the bedroom. Then she lost her balance, slipped and struck her head on a bench at the foot of the bed. As Pat bent to help her up, she looked up at him with a dazed expression and said, “You hit me.” She then refused to listen to his denials, refused his offers of help, and insisted she just wanted to be left alone. So he left the room and called Kate Rosenlieb, who came over a short time later. He didn’t realize Sandy had called the police until they walked through the door and arrested him.

After that night, Sandy rarely talked of this incident, so only Pat Dunn’s account survives. What is known is that Sandy immediately went down to the jail and posted Pat’s five-thousand-dollar bail, and he returned home with her. They continued living together, and most of their neighbors remained unaware that anything had happened. Even Otis Coppock, who watched every move at the Dunn house, was unaware that Pat had been arrested. The case against Pat was eventually dismissed after Sandy told prosecutors that nothing had happened, that she had made a mistake, and that she would not press charges. Legally, this meant Pat was innocent of spousal abuse, just as he had claimed all along. Given that Sandy initially claimed Pat struck her at a time when he apparently was sitting having a beer with a friend, there is every reason
to accept her recantation at face value. It is also true, however, that many wives lie to protect abusive husbands. Though she never let him know it, Pat’s good friend Kate Rosenlieb secretly suspected this was exactly what Sandy did: She lied to protect him. It was an assumption that would later have grave implications for Pat Dunn.

Whatever happened between the Dunns that night—accident or violence or the beginning of a long, slow mental decline for Sandy—their marriage and their daily rituals continued as if nothing had happened. If anything, the couple seemed to grow closer. They searched for retirement homes in Hawaii and Cabo San Lucas, putting bids in on several properties, but in the end deciding to stay in their comfortable home in Bakersfield, at least for the time being. And when Pat grew ill with a ruptured appendix in January 1992, Sandy withdrew twenty thousand dollars from one of the Paola accounts and paid cash for the surgery, as neither of them had medical insurance. Then Sandy nursed Pat back to health at home, caring for him constantly for nearly a month. Several of their friends remarked on how solicitous Sandy seemed throughout Pat’s convalescence, and how grateful he was for all the care and attention she lavished upon him. He repeated his now familiar boast: “Nobody takes care of me like Mom.”

During this time, however, Pat’s business began to falter for lack of attention. Normally, he aggressively telephoned banks and mortgage lenders daily, pursuing their business and seeking new homes in foreclosure. But since falling ill, he had let things go. “Why don’t you just close it down?” Sandy finally asked. “We don’t need the money. Let’s play with what we’ve got.”

Pat felt hesitant at first, but Sandy got their accountant
to pull together some figures to show that the business was now costing more than it brought in, and Pat finally said, “Good idea. Let’s play with what we’ve got.”

A short time later, Sandy made an appointment with Kevin Knutson, a financial planner, to discuss forming a living trust. Knutson lived with Teri Bjorn, the Dunns’ real estate attorney, and the couples occasionally socialized. At a barbecue at the Dunns’ house, Knutson and Sandy began chatting about investments, and she mentioned her desire that Pat have greater access to her finances and the Paola properties, particularly if she were to slip mentally, from Alzheimer’s disease or any other cause. When Knutson remarked on how trusts could be used to shield assets and avoid inheritance taxes far better than a simple will would, Sandy seemed very interested. She invited Knutson over to discuss the details of setting up such a trust for her and Pat. The meeting was set for the morning of June 30, a Tuesday. “Come at lunch time,” Sandy said. “We’ll feed you.” It would be the very day Sandy disappeared.
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