Mean Justice (9 page)

Later that last morning, around 11:30, Kevin Knutson, the insurance agent and financial planner, came by for lunch and to discuss the living trust he and Sandy had spoken of at the barbecue a few weeks earlier.

Knutson, a tall, glib former college baseball player, settled into the Dunns’ den, where a sandwich from Pat’s favorite deli already awaited him. While he ate, he played a videotape for the Dunns that explained how an irrevocable trust worked, how it allowed the transfer of an estate to an heir without necessitating probate or incurring hefty estate taxes, because it accomplished this transfer without a will. The video also described how a living trust could be set up to direct decisions about finances and medical care to a spouse or other family member if an individual were to become ill or unable to manage his or her own affairs. The example used in the video was of a woman who became incompetent due to Alzheimer’s disease.

As far as Knutson was concerned, this living trust was academic at this point—he had never noticed any mental or memory problems in Sandy or Pat. “But you have to plan for contingencies, to prepare for the future. That’s the essence of financial security,” he explained.

Knutson questioned the Dunns about their assets, and Pat readily admitted that, with his business shut down, he really had no assets to speak of. Nor did he have a will. Sandy said most of their money was in her name—her cash, bonds and real estate were by this time valued at about five million dollars. In place of her existing will leaving everything to Pat, she said she would like most of their wealth transferred to an irrevocable trust in her and Pat’s names—meaning that each would have access to the funds, and one would retain control if the other grew ill or died. “I want Pat taken care of if anything ever happens to me,” she told Knutson. “And I don’t want it all bleeding away in taxes.”

When Pat left the room, Sandy quietly asserted that
she wanted to make sure that none of Pat’s children inherited anything. She didn’t care for any of them, particularly the youngest, Jennifer, who had become pregnant with a second child out of wedlock, much to Sandy’s embarrassment and outrage. Sandy suspected Jennifer stayed close to her father only to get at the Paola fortune, and she didn’t think much more of the two Dunn boys. “I don’t want them to get a penny,” she said coldly. “And the same goes for my sister. I don’t want her to get one penny. Nothing.”

She also told Knutson that, if she ever were to develop Alzheimer’s disease, she wanted Pat to be able to take over without problems. Knutson said all of these stipulations could be written into the trust. Sandy nodded with satisfaction.

After a few hours of lunch and discussion, Pat suggested he and Knutson take a ride so the planner could see some of the real estate that would be placed in the trust. So they went out riding fence, as Pat and Sandy had earlier that day, and Pat pointed out each property. At one point while they were alone together, he told Knutson, “You know, I really am worried about Mom. I think she’s having some memory problems, maybe Alzheimer’s. It’s little things, but I’m worried.”

Knutson turned to Pat in surprise. “I don’t really see it, Pat. My mother had Alzheimer’s, and I don’t see any of those symptoms in Sandy. I really don’t.”

Pat grew quiet for a moment, then said, “You really wouldn’t notice it unless you were around all the time. But I hope you’re right.”

By the time they got back to the house, it was somewhere between four and five in the afternoon. As Knutson walked to his car to go home, Sandy came out of
the house and gave him a hug. “Thanks for all your help,” she said. Both Pat and Sandy seemed relaxed and happy, he would later say.

“I’ll put together a proposal and I’ll call you Thursday or Friday to set up a time to go over it.”

“Great,” Sandy replied.

It would be the last time Kevin Knutson would see Sandy alive.
¹⁰

After Knutson left, Pat cooked two thick steaks on the barbecue. Sandy fried some rice. She seemed quiet and even a bit depressed, perhaps by Knutson’s video and its discussion of Alzheimer’s, Pat would later say. She went to bed early in the evening, as usual, with Pat following an hour later. By ten that night, she was gone. She had left their bed hours before her habitual walking time and never returned. Something happened to her, Pat Dunn told the authorities. I’m sure of it.

The authorities thought so, too. And they had some very firm beliefs about where to start looking for answers.

6

T
HIRTEEN YEARS BEFORE
A
LEXANDRA
P
AOLA
D
UNN
disappeared and Pat Dunn became a target for prosecution, a combination of events both spontaneous and conspired catapulted into power and prominence a little-known, baby-faced prosecutor with a hunger for authority and a belief that the nation’s justice system had drifted dangerously leftward in favor of criminals. As the new district attorney for Kern County, Edward R. Jagels would transform Bakersfield from an ordinary farm community and oil town into the toughest town on crime in America—in the process, sealing the fate of his ardent supporter Pat Dunn, along with many others like him.

The pivotal moment in this region’s modern war on crime came on April 12, 1979, a time when Sandy still lived with Pat Paola, and Pat Dunn still lived with his first wife and worked as an elementary school principal. It was the day they and the rest of Bakersfield came to know, all too briefly, a girl named Dana Butler.

It was not so much Dana Butler’s murder itself, or even the identity of the prime suspect, who turned out to be a man of power and prominence. It was not even the fact that this case, more than any other, marked the day that Bakersfield’s small-town complacency finally died and just about everyone seemed to realize that nothing—
not distance, not time, not even the mighty Grapevine—could keep the twentieth century’s most fearsome scourge, random violence, from taking root. In the end, what really made this case so important to Kern County’s future came down to what the authorities did about it. Or, rather, didn’t do.

Dana Butler was a fourteen-year-old honors student who vanished on her way home from her church one afternoon. Three days after her mother reported her missing, her corpse appeared on a highway shoulder just outside the Bakersfield city limits. She’d been stabbed forty times, perhaps tortured. There were no witnesses. The murderer had bathed and dressed the body before dumping it by the side of the road. When the police arrived, Dana was still damp, cleansed—or so the killer thought—of trace evidence, the tiny hairs, fibers and fluids so crucial in such cases. Detectives learned in short order from Dana’s friends that she had been one of a number of high school students who had been the underage houseguests of a fifty-six-year-old retiree named Glenn Fitts. Fitts had been throwing parties at his home, where he’d ply teenagers with drugs and booze, then ask some for sex in return. Dana had been to his house shortly before her disappearance, her friends said, and had spoken of plans to party there the very day she died.

With this information in hand shortly after Dana’s body was found, Fitts became an obvious suspect in the murder. Yet the Kern County Sheriff’s Department was reluctant to pursue him, for an equally obvious reason: Until his retirement a year earlier due to a heart ailment, Glenn Fitts had been chairman of the law-enforcement program at Bakersfield Community College, director of
the Kern County Police Academy, and a member of the Bakersfield Police Commission. He had personally instructed most of the cops and sheriff’s deputies in Kern County. Then, as a city police commissioner, he oversaw many of them.

Given his exalted status among many Kern County cops, the investigation of Fitts seemed halting at best. Weeks passed before detectives mustered the nerve to request a search warrant for their mentor’s home, something that would have been done long before in virtually any other murder case. Even with that delay, and the opportunity it offered for evidence to be destroyed, a powerful case against the former police commissioner emerged once the search finally was performed. Traces of blood matching Dana’s rare blood type were found in Fitts’ house on carpeting that had been steam cleaned just after the murder—but not cleaned quite thoroughly enough to eliminate all trace evidence. Fitts told police the blood was his, but testing proved that to be a lie. Further testing linked carpet fibers and human hairs found on Dana’s body to his house and car. Pubic hairs consistent with those of Fitts were found clinging to Dana’s head. This was the sort of cold, hard, clinical evidence detectives dream of finding when they must build a circumstantial case in the absence of eyewitnesses to the crime. In many respects, such evidence can be more convincing and reliable than eyewitnesses. Any hesitation detectives felt about going after the ex-commissioner faded in the face of the physical evidence against him.

However, when the sheriff’s investigators brought their case to the district attorney’s office, they were told no, there would be no prosecution. The DA himself, a veteran prosecutor named Al Leddy, and his top three
deputies made the call, overruling a lower-level trial deputy who had said, sure, of course there’s enough evidence to prosecute Fitts.

To the sheriff and his detectives on the case—as well as to other prosecutors in the Kern County DA’s office—the decision looked extraordinarily timid at best and, at worst, smacked of a cover-up and of favoritism of the worst kind. It enraged cops and deputies throughout Bakersfield, creating an instant divide between normally natural allies, the cops in the street and the prosecutors in the courtrooms. Fitts, it seemed, was untouchable. He blithely put his house up for sale and made plans to leave town for good.

But the sheriff made sure that word leaked out about the evidence against Fitts—and about the DA’s unwillingness to prosecute the suspected killer of Dana Butler. The local press picked up the story, and the protests began. A grassroots organization called Mothers of Bakersfield began picketing the courthouse, Al Leddy’s home and Glenn Fitts’ house, demanding justice in the Butler case—an extraordinary sight in a conservative community where protesters generally were reviled. The group begged the California Attorney General to investigate, a request that was summarily denied. Unwilling to relent, the sheriff, despite Leddy’s and the state’s decision to do nothing, placed Fitts under round-the-clock surveillance. Meanwhile, Dana’s parents filed lawsuits against Fitts, putting his name into the public record. Then, after a long refusal to name him as a suspect despite his involvement in the case being an open secret among reporters, the local news media finally published Fitts’ name in connection with Dana’s murder.

Under this mounting pressure, the DA finally agreed
to bring the case before the grand jury. Even then, senior prosecutors withheld key evidence from the panel and ultimately closed the investigation without asking for an indictment. But if this was intended to provide political cover, the tactic failed: District Attorney Leddy finally had to charge Fitts or face a near insurrection in his town. The charge he settled on was not murder, however—it was contributing to the delinquency of minors, for passing out drugs to kids. Even then, prosecutors and a compliant judge tried to shield Fitts by sealing files that normally were open to the public, but the howls of protest that resulted led to the unsealing of the records a day later. The police commissioner’s dalliances with children became instant fodder for public court files and television news shows. In the midst of the ensuing uproar, Fitts was found in his yard shot in the head, a death officially ruled a suicide, though a neighbor reported hearing two shots, and the gun found next to Fitts had been fired only once.

The case, abruptly ended with so many questions unanswered, had a profound and lasting effect on Kern County. District Attorney Al Leddy decided not to run for reelection, and his top prosecutors, who had harbored ambitions to succeed him, also bowed out. Winning the DA’s election in Kern County without support from the cops irate over the Fitts case would have been tough. The police had in the past taken to the streets and banged on doors for candidates with great success. They literally got DAs elected—or defeated. Prosecutors involved with the Dana Butler-Glen Fitts fiasco would have faced long odds indeed if they had run. The race, then, was open to a new candidate, one who could garner support from law enforcement as well as the grassroots Mothers of
Bakersfield organization that had risen to prominence in the wake of Dana Butler’s murder.

And so, an obscure but extremely aggressive young prosecutor named Ed Jagels, with an infusion of family money and the law enforcement support denied his predecessor, stepped into the vacuum left by the Butler case. At the time, he was known chiefly around the courthouse for a combative attitude toward judges, most of whom he openly despised, and for the extreme, almost vicious approach he took to trying cases—he attacked defendants, witnesses and defense attorneys with gleeful vigor, always seeking to take control of the courtroom and the case. He had a habit of accusing anyone who disagreed with his ultraconservative views of being in league with criminals and of “perverting” the law—particularly if the disagreement emanated from a trial judge or appeals court. The local bench suspected that Jagels was the source for some extremely unflattering articles about Kern County judges that appeared in a statewide legal publication, in which one supposedly cowardly judge’s courtroom was derogatorily labeled “Foster Farms,” the name of a popular purvey-or of chicken parts. (Jagels denied being the anonymous source but did not disavow the sentiments expressed.)
¹¹
Later in his career, after he became DA, Jagels’ public tirade over the California Supreme Court’s exclusion of a coerced confession in a murder case left his critics sputtering and even some of his supporters uneasy.