Mean Justice (8 page)

By this time, the night that Sandy had Pat arrested for spousal abuse seemed a part of the distant past, almost forgotten and never discussed. There had been no recurrences—if anything, the incident had served only to strengthen Pat’s faith in the hard-as-nails justice system of Kern County. Indeed, he considered the experience a demonstration of how well the system worked. “The police had to err on the side of protecting her,” he would later say. “I understand that, and I think it’s right. The truth came out in the end. That’s the way the system works.”

To almost everyone’s astonishment, it was a faith Pat Dunn seemed to retain right up to the day he was convicted of first-degree murder.

5

T
RACING
S
ANDY’S MOVEMENTS AFTER SHE VANISHED
on the night of June 30, 1992, should have been child’s play, for her habits were utterly predictable. Indeed, even the police who came to believe wholeheartedly that Pat Dunn was the culprit would concede that anyone could have stalked Sandy with ease. Each day was the same: Sometime between 3 and 4
A.M.,
she would rise in the darkness and change in the laundry room, where she would not disturb Pat. She’d layer T-shirts against the desert’s morning chill, but she always wore shorts—she was very proud of her trim, smooth legs. Then she’d run a comb through her short, silver hair, grab the dog leash, and head out the door.

A brisk walker, Sandy covered nearly six miles of East Bakersfield every day, winding through the College Center strip mall that she and Pat still owned and managed. Sandy would let her dogs, J.D. and Buddy, run in a field next to the Mervyn’s department store, then head back home, all before sunrise. Her route rarely varied.

“I like to walk then,” she would say whenever Pat or anyone else expressed concerns for her safety at that hour. “That’s when the good people are out.” By that she meant her companions in wakefulness at that hour were policemen, security guards, farmers, bakers, milkmen—the people
whose work is preparing the world for each new day. Pat eventually stopped objecting, figuring this actually made some sense, though he persisted in complaining about her jewelry—the twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds and gold she habitually wore. “Leave the damn baubles and bangles off when you’re walking,” Pat exhorted her. Sandy ignored his warnings. Only after her jeweler added a cautionary warning to Pat’s did she reluctantly remove her rings, necklaces and other adornments during her predawn power walks. “You just don’t know who you might run into,” the jeweler said, and Sandy finally acquiesced, six months or so before her disappearance.

Jewelry was the one indulgence of an otherwise frugal person who spent little on clothes and whose idea of dining out during her and Pat’s courtship was finding some office party or business opening from which she could filch a free meal of hors d’oeuvres. When Pat started dating her, she was eating dinners of microwaved cabbage four nights a week—not for lack of money, but because she just didn’t care much about food. Gold and gems, however, particularly interested her. “I like to put my money in jewelry,” she once told Pat. “That way, no matter what happens, we’ll never be broke.”

From time to time, Sandy walked with other women, but her early hours and fast pace soon wore out would-be walking partners. At first, Pat used to try to keep up with her on her morning expeditions, but too much booze and belly made that a losing proposition. Sandy ate next to nothing and, in her fifties, still played in tennis and soccer leagues with college students. Pat used to say Sandy wore the pads off the paws of their poor old Labrador, J.D., which is why he bought a German shepherd
and named him Buddy—to be her new walking buddy, so the aging J.D. could rest up. But the old Lab couldn’t bear being left out, and both dogs usually ended up joining her. Except on the day she disappeared.

Pat had initially reported to the sheriff that Sandy took Buddy with her on her last walk. He told the dispatcher who took his missing-person’s report that Sandy must have returned while he was out searching, left the dog in the yard and her keys in the kitchen, then departed again and vanished. But as the days passed, Pat became less and less sure about these events. He didn’t really know for certain that she had come back while he made that first search of East Bakersfield, he would later tell detectives. Perhaps, in a fog of sleepiness and worry that first night, he simply overlooked the keys and the big dog when he got up. Buddy could have been sleeping in the shadows out in the yard when Pat first looked around. The keys could have been there on the counter all along. He just didn’t know.

Pat kept going over it all in his head: His and Sandy’s last full day together had begun like every other. By the time Sandy had completed her walk, Pat was up, with coffee made and poured—as always. They had settled in and she read him the newspaper while they sat in the kitchen, the light growing warmer and brighter as the sun rose above the rooftops. Pat listened and kept the cups brimming. As usual, no matter how thick or thin the paper, Sandy had finished reading at 6
A.M
. sharp with a dramatic rendition of their horoscopes. “Make a fresh start,” the stars told Sandy that day. Pat was advised to be serious concerning home and marriage. “Intuition works overtime,” his horoscope warned.

At six, their morning ritual had them climbing into Pat’s white Chevy Blazer to go “ride fence”—their term
for an hour-long drive around town to view the twenty-one properties that Sandy had inherited, several million dollars’ worth of mostly vacant real estate left behind by Pat Paola, waiting to be built up. They particularly liked stopping at their Morning Star housing development, where bulldozers had begun moving earth in preparation for home construction, and at their eleven acres on Columbus Avenue, where they were planning to build a twelve-screen movie-theater complex—if the city would just stop reneging on promises made years earlier.

“I could watch those big yellow machines all day,” Sandy had said outside the Morning Star project. It was what she always said. “We’re really building something, aren’t we?”

Pat remembers the pride in her voice. The long-vacant land, a scraped and dead eyesore on the east side, was finally going to become something useful and attractive, a place for families and children—the realization of a dream that had begun with her late first husband. “It’s going to be beautiful,” Pat agreed.

They chose not to linger that last morning at the inactive Columbus Avenue site, however. Neither of them wanted to talk about their movie-theater project. They had just completed an ugly battle with the Bakersfield planning commission and the city council, and now might be headed toward an even uglier lawsuit over the city’s decision to deny a vital zoning change that would allow the complex to be built. The decision had been a stunner. The same council members who had just said no to their project had two years earlier asked Pat and Sandy to create a detailed and costly plan for the area and led them to believe the eighty thousand dollars they were investing in the planning and engineering would be
rewarded with approval. But a small and vocal group of angry residents had come to the council meeting on June 3 and complained about the project. None had seen the plans, but it seemed to Pat and Sandy they would have opposed any design other than keeping the land vacant. The councilwoman who represented their ward, despite allowing the Dunns to believe otherwise, backed their objections, arguing that this was “her” ward, and that the rest of the council should fall in line with her wishes. That was the way the council worked, each ward a minifiefdom, and a majority of the other members went along with her, previous promises to the Dunns—tape-recorded ones, made in open meetings—notwithstanding. It was a stressful, difficult time for Pat and Sandy. The loss of eighty thousand dollars, while substantial and difficult to stomach, would not break them. But the sense of outrage at being outfoxed and, as far as they were concerned, misled in the political arena left them boiling and bitter.

“It was predestined to be voted down,” Pat had complained, nearly shouting at the podium during the June 3 meeting. “Tell me that’s fair. Tell me it’s legal.” He even tried to question some law students whose class happened to be observing in the audience that day to see if they thought the proceedings were legal.

“Wait a minute, just let yourself rest, Mr. Dunn,” the mayor finally interrupted, alarmed and angry. “We don’t want to poll the audience.”

A few minutes later, the Dunns’ project died. Pat and Sandy were left standing open-mouthed and humiliated.

In the weeks that followed, Sandy at times seemed beside herself over the council’s decision. She felt especially betrayed by two friends in city government who had been in a position to assure the project’s future, but
who had instead doomed it. The first of these was Kate Rosenlieb, who, as a member of the planning commission, could have supported her friends’ movie-theater development. Sandy had confided in Kate how much she wanted the project to succeed, and had even threatened to kill herself if the city rejected the Dunns’ latest plan for the vacant property. Kate could not tell if this suicidal talk was mere histrionics or a genuine threat. In any case, she declined to do Sandy’s bidding when the planning commission next met. Instead, citing her friendship with the Dunns as a conflict of interest, Kate abstained from consideration of the project, leading to a narrow vote rejecting the plan. Sandy had always assumed Kate would be an ally, one reason why she had joined Pat in pushing their young friend to run for the commission in the first place. After the vote, Sandy stopped talking to Kate. (Pat, on the other hand, told Kate he had no problem with the abstention—he said he wanted her to do what she thought was right.)

Sandy grew even more angry at another friend, City Councilwoman Pat DeMond. Sandy believed DeMond stabbed her in the back by voting against the project once it got before the city council, which had the power to override the planning commission’s decision. As Pat and Sandy saw it, DeMond had previously hinted she would support the movie-theater development, and her one extra vote was all they needed for passage. Since the vote to reject the project, Sandy refused to speak to the councilwoman and had even snubbed her at the supermarket, leaving DeMond uttering greetings to her retreating back. “I want nothing to do with that woman,” Sandy later told Pat.

A few days after that awful council meeting, the
Dunns had lunch at their home with a longtime friend, Jim Marino, a thirty-year-old engineer and another member of the city planning commission. Marino, a veteran of several of the Dunns’ projects, had supported their theater proposal and, unlike Rosenlieb, chose not to abstain from the vote. At lunch, he noticed how stressed Sandy seemed by the whole ordeal with the city, and he was happy when she turned the subject toward lighter topics. “How are your kids doing?” she asked as she moved in and out of the kitchen preparing the meal and setting the table. Marino gave a rundown of everything his three children were doing—school, summer activities, birthday plans. Pat stood at the bar making drinks, listening. Then, about five minutes or so later, Sandy emerged once again from the kitchen, smiled at Marino and asked, “So, how are the kids?”

It was an eerie moment, Marino would later recall, and he glanced over at Pat, who was looking down, still apparently busy pouring and mixing—but noticeably avoiding the younger man’s eye. Sandy looked at her guest expectantly, so he again told her all about his kids, repeating the story virtually word for word, waiting for her to say, Oh, you just told me all that. But she never did. She just nodded and smiled and then returned to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, she popped out again and asked in a bright, happy voice, “So, how are your kids?”

This time, Marino caught Pat’s eye. His friend just shrugged and smiled helplessly. And Marino repeated the story again, with Sandy oohing and ahhing as if she had never heard any of it. Now the other occasions in recent months when Sandy had somehow forgotten his preferred beverage with lunch—for ten years, it had always
been the same, black coffee—began to make sense. Though still in her fifties, Sandy, whom he liked and respected, was having memory problems, Marino realized. And through her husband’s smiles and shrugs and gentle prods, Marino saw Pat was well aware of it—and doing everything he could to cover it and spare Sandy embarrassment. Marino left the Dunns’ house that afternoon feeling helpless and sad. He genuinely cared for Sandy and Pat, but his affection for them did not cloud his judgment that Sandy’s mental state had begun a slow yet perceptible decline.
⁹

Three and a half weeks later, on the morning of June 30, Sandy seemed fine to Pat as they rode fence. Still, anxious to avoid reliving the stress of the council debate, Pat had studiously avoided mentioning the Columbus project or lingering near the site. Things actually were looking up for the project. Just a day earlier, he and Sandy had spoken with the architect—himself a former planning commissioner and a city hall insider—who said he would make clear to the Bakersfield city attorney that the Dunns had been victimized unjustly. The mere threat of a lawsuit might be enough to change the decision, given the council’s flip-flops with the Dunns, the architect said, for the city had just had to pay out a whopping settlement to another developer for similar broken promises. “I’m very optimistic,” he told them, and Sandy’s mood had visibly brightened after the conversation. Still, the project and everything connected to it remained a sore subject, and Pat just drove on by.