by Edward Humes
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• • •
A few weeks after the Lynwood fire, the Parks family moved fifty miles inland to the desert city of Fontana, where housing costs were low and a nearly new apartment complex, complete with swimming pool, awaited. The apartment was a find, clean and spacious and one of the nicest places Ron and Jo Ann would ever rent together. Unlike the Lynwood home, which put the family in a neighborhood frequented by street gangs, drug dealers, and plagued by high crime, Fontana felt safe to Jo Ann. Yet there was trouble from the start. She felt isolated in the new town, far from family and friends. Ron’s commute to downtown Los Angeles was long, and the Parkses fought constantly over whether Jo Ann should keep the car in the evenings and drive Ron to and from work.
The move to Fontana also coincided with a change in three-and-a-half-year-old Ronnie’s behavior. One morning Jo Ann woke up and found half the contents of the refrigerator on the floor. Ronnie had climbed out of bed before sunrise and raided the kitchen. Another night, Jo Ann recalls getting out of bed to investigate a noise she heard, only to find the front door open and Ronnie running around outside at three in the morning. More often he would just get up after everyone fell asleep, then turn on the battered old Zenith television. And one time, Ronnie turned up with a book of matches he had discovered outside in an old barbecue grill.
By phone and in person, Paul Garman repeatedly counseled Ronnie about his wanderings and about playing with matches. Garman recalls how bright, articulate, and responsive the little boy was during these chats.
“Okay, Uncle Paul,” he promised. “I’ll be good.”
A deadbolt lock on the front door that required a key solved the problem of Ronnie leaving the house. But the other late-night wanderings, though diminished in numbers, did not stop completely.
Life took a turn for the better for Jo Ann, though, a few months after moving. She found a new friend: Kathy Dodge, who had just moved into the apartment next door.
They first met when Dodge’s pit bull lunged at the Parkses’ cocker spaniel outside the apartment while Ron was walking the dog. Jo Ann, standing in the doorway, panicked and shrieked, “Get that dog out of there.” But her alarm dissipated when it became clear the bigger pit just wanted to play, not fight.
“She’s okay, you just have to get to know her, she’s just an animal nut,” Ron whispered to Dodge, who was looking askance at the screaming woman in the doorway. Soon the new neighbor had been invited in, and the two women hit it off despite the jarring first impression. They found they shared a few things in common: Dodge had a son close to Jessica’s age, she understood the struggles of a young mom on a tight budget, and the two women shared a passion for crafting, knitting, and crochet work. Soon they were spending three evenings a week making pillows, afghans, and baby blankets.
“We both liked each other right away,” Dodge initially would tell police. Later, she would tell a different story: Jo Ann wasn’t her type of person to hang out with, but she associated with her anyway because she “felt sorry for her.”
Either way, they did hang out quite a bit. Besides spending evenings together crafting, on weekends they’d hit the swap meets together, kids in tow. Some nights they’d watch videos together at the Parkses’ apartment, even the Disney movies Jo Ann liked to watch. Dodge had trouble deciding if she found Ron handsome and charming, or a “pervert” because something about his behavior around kids, his off-color comments at inappropriate times, left her uneasy. According to Jo Ann, one of the things that put Dodge off was a comment Ron made about the house fire in Lynwood: “If one of the kids had died in that fire, I’d be a rich man.” Dodge would remember things very differently a year later, to Jo Ann’s detriment. In any case, nothing seemed amiss between Dodge and Jo Ann during the summer, fall, and winter of 1988. The two women spent time together almost every day.
They were an unlikely duo. Dodge, though a mere three years older than Jo Ann, looked a decade older, harder, and far more streetwise. Though slight, only five-feet-one-inch tall, Dodge took pride in being tough, combative, and handy with a gun. She would go on to accumulate a record of minor scrapes with the law, including shoplifting.
If she was bothered by Jo Ann’s messy house, her approach to childcare, or her persona of a young mother overwhelmed by life and responsibility, Dodge never let on—not then, at least. In response to her acceptance and friendship, Jo Ann confided in Dodge. She spoke of her unhappiness with her marriage to Ron. She spoke about the fire and the electrical malfunctions that plagued her last home. She even revealed her deepest secret: her rape, first pregnancy, and the birth and death of David. Jo Ann rarely shared her past with anyone. She could not speak of David without weeping, not even to her mother. Yet she found herself telling Dodge, able to unburden herself with her new best friend.
Then one afternoon, early in December 1988, the friendship ended—over money.
Dodge babysat for the Parkses that day. When Jo Ann returned, Dodge grinned from her living room chair and held up an American Express money order she had purchased for five hundred dollars. Like the Parks family, Dodge often lived paycheck to paycheck, and when she did have more cash reserves than usual, she could not resist boasting about it. “I’m stupid,” she’d later explain, “but I kind of show off money.” She had received a settlement from a complaint against a restaurant chain, and she had converted a portion of it to a money order she intended to use as payment to join a travel time-share. It was an old-school money order, thick with copies and carbon paper, and Dodge waved it around dramatically.
“God, look at all the carbons, Jo Ann,” she said. “How come they need so many carbons?”
Jo Ann smiled and nodded. They chatted briefly, then Dodge got up to check on the kids playing outside. Before she walked out, Dodge would later recall, she placed the money order inside her purse and left it in the living room. A minute or two later, Jo Ann soon followed her outside, saying she had to go home. Jo Ann would recall that there were other people in the house at the same time, including a pair of teenage boys she didn’t know.
A short time later someone from the time-share arrived to pick up the money order. But when Dodge went to her purse, the money order had vanished. A minute later, Jo Ann heard loud banging on her front door, and the sound of Dodge cursing her out.
“Get out here, Jo Ann!” Dodge shouted. “Were you in my purse? Did you take it? Give me back the money order!”
Jo Ann opened the door and started to say she had not touched the purse and didn’t steal the money order, but Dodge cut her off, screaming, “I’m saying you did steal it!”
Jo Ann slammed the door shut and shouted her denials through the wood as Dodge resumed banging. Then Jo Ann surprised Dodge by throwing open the door again, this time dumping a glass of water on her head. This did not cool things down. Dodge responded by grabbing Jo Ann and repeatedly punching her. Then she called 911 to report the theft and to request a patrol car to swing by to get her money back.
When Dodge told the police Jo Ann had stolen the money order, one of the officers asked if she had witnessed the theft. Dodge shook her head. Did anyone see it? Again, no. Jo Ann, standing there listening, invited the police in to search her apartment for the money order. They declined and soon left.
Dodge wagged a finger and said, “Only God and you know who did it. And it’s all gonna come out in the end.”
She stormed off. Over the course of the next few days, a bizarre apartment-complex siege began. Someone flattened the four tires on the Parkses’ van. Christmas decorations Jo Ann had put up on the apartment front door were slashed with a knife. Jo Ann claimed Dodge walked up to her and flashed a handgun, then spoke threateningly about her three children.
Then it was Jo Ann’s turn to phone the Fontana police—repeatedly. According to Dodge, officers first warned her that she could be arrested for harassment if she didn’t back off. Then they told Dodge that any
one who left a young son home alone to go out to harass a neighbor could have her kid taken away by child protective services for neglect.
By the end of the week, Jo Ann and the kids had decamped to her mother’s house in Los Angeles, their furniture and possessions taken to storage. Lorraine insisted Ron had to sleep outside in the van, so after a few days, the family moved to a cheap motel instead. Then after the holidays, Ron got laid off at the dairy, forcing the family into a homeless shelter. After two months there, Darigold rehired Ron. As soon as they had enough money for the first and last month’s rent, they found their next rental house.
For the first time, there would be three separate bedrooms for the family, and a yard for the children to enjoy. “It’s what we both long desired,” he told his new landlord while making his rental agreement over the phone.
Rent of six hundred dollars and a deposit of another six hundred dollars secured the place, paid in cash to their new landlord, who met them near her home in the oceanfront enclave of Sunset Beach, many miles and millions of dollars from their new place in Bell. A day later, the Parks family began moving into the tiny converted garage at 6928 ½ Sherman Way.
With help from a friend and someone with a truck for hire, the Parkses carried their belongings into the cramped apartment’s 528 square feet, with its tattered carpeting and yard overgrown with weeds. The windows in one of the back bedrooms were jammed or nailed shut, and Ron could not get them to open. There was no use in complaining, he told Jo Ann: The rental agreement made minor repairs and lawn care the tenants’ responsibility. “I’m only charging you six hundred dollars’ rent,” the landlord had said. “You can afford to put some money into the place.”
And so they did. Jo Ann bought and hung latex-lined floor-to-ceiling drapes for the living room. The curtains would prove to be nice-looking, inexpensive, and, it turned out, highly flammable. The old-school swap-meet television set with the big picture tube that had to warm up before viewing, along with its patched, taped, and extra-long electrical cord, came out of a dusty storage locker to be set up on a fiberboard TV stand in front of the living room windows and curtains. Ron stacked a brand-new videocassette recorder on top, with an electric window fan positioned next to it to ease the heat in the stifling apartment. All three appliances had to be plugged into the same outlet in a corner of the living room with the help of an extension cord. The cords ran along the wall to the outlet, where they may have gotten tangled in the drapes by accident, by small children playing, by the action of hoses and firefighters putting out the fire or, as the police would later allege, on purpose by an arsonist. Also under the window sat piles of cardboard boxes and plastic crates, filled with clothes and toys that awaited unpacking—or positioned as a fuel supply for an inferno. The Parkses recalled that they had placed the electrical and extension cords across the tops of the boxes; fire investigators would later claim the cords were placed dangerously—and deliberately—beneath the boxes, which created a fire hazard.
During the first week in the apartment, according to Jo Ann, she scolded little Ronnie twice for getting up late at night and turning on the old television set.
The family that had just experienced a devastating house fire a year earlier did not take the time to install the smoke alarms that their landlord had neglected to provide.
On April 8, 1989, Ron and Jo Ann would later say, they dropped the kids off at a babysitter’s house. Then the couple spent the day at Universal Studios, where in 1989 the leading attractions were Earthquake: The Big One, which simulated an 8.3 magnitude quake, and Burning House, predecessor to Backdraft, a burning building attraction.
Then they left the park at six P.M., picked up the kids, and went home. While Jo Ann continued unpacking, Ron got ready for work, then tinkered with getting their new VCR to work with a television set built before there were such things as VCRs. He got it working just before he left a little before eight P.M. His time card shows he clocked in at Darigold at 8:24 P.M., but nothing else about the next four hours in the life of the Parks family can be known with certainty.
Did Jo Ann put her kids, then herself, to bed, only to be awakened hours later by screams, followed by the utter terror of being trapped inside a burning house? Or did she carefully stage the scene, drug and trap her kids, start multiple fires, then sit back and wait in safety for minutes or even hours until the house was engulfed, only then running next door, feigning terror? Can a witness, an investigation, a test, a burn pattern, or an experiment determine which is more likely, the accident or the crime?
All that is known for sure is that shortly after midnight, Bob Robison opened his front door to a seemingly frantic Jo Ann Parks pounding and begging for help, the night tinged orange by flames.
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Three days later, Kathy Dodge made a horrifying and convincing phone call that seemed to fill those critical four hours with a chilling tale of murder by fire.
Jo Ann had no recollection of running into Dodge after leaving Fontana amid threats and fear. But Ron and Jo Ann did return there a few weeks later to pack up their hastily abandoned apartment, and Dodge would tell police the two women made amends at that time over the money order dispute.
“I’m not saying you did it, I’m not saying you didn’t, but I’m gonna miss you and I do forgive you,” Dodge recalled telling Jo Ann when they parted for good. She told the police that both women cried while saying their goodbyes. “It was sad,” Dodge explained, “and I still do like her.”
Yet Dodge’s opinions about Jo Ann seemed to have changed radically in the four months between their fight over a money order and Dodge’s call to the police about the death of the Parks children. In December 1988, it had been Jo Ann Parks whose call to the police led to talk of alleged child neglect by Dodge. It had been Ron who spoke of getting rich if only one of his children had died in an earlier fire and who had immediately responded to a newspaper ad guaranteeing “million dollar verdicts.” And it had been Ron whose ex-wife claimed he doped his son with cough medicine to get him to sleep.
In April 1989, it was Dodge calling the police to level the same sort of allegations against Jo Ann, all the while assuring the detectives who interviewed her that she was “not doing this because I’m getting vengeance.” Now it was Jo Ann who allegedly neglected her kids. It was Jo Ann dosing them with cough medicine. And now Dodge had Jo Ann as the “lawsuit happy” half of the couple and saying, “If Ron had come home five minutes later, Jessica would be dead and we’d be rich.”
The police had little information on the Lynwood fire at that time, and so they had no way of knowing that this supposedly chilling comment Dodge recalled made no sense. Ron had not come home five minutes early or late on the day of the Lynwood fire—he had been at the park, waiting for Jo Ann to bring lunch. There is no evidence Jessica was ever in jeopardy that day. Dodge’s account was wrong. Yet it would completely alter the course of a fire investigation, turning it into a murder mystery. Even the prosecution’s own fire expert would later agree that the arson and murder case against Parks likely would never have happened without that accusatory call from Kathy Dodge.
As for the alleged theft of the money order that put Dodge and Parks at odds in the first place: If someone did steal it, the thief never tried to cash it. Dodge eventually got her money back from American Express.
12
Everything Which Is Not Law
There are nearly twenty thousand habeas corpus petitions filed in federal court each year in the United States, and several times that number in state courts—more than eight thousand in California’s superior courts alone, where Jo Ann Parks’s case resides. All of them are desperate, last-gasp pleas from men and women in prison. All claim to be victims of great injustice. And almost all of them fail. The courts reject them with breathtaking routineness, the guilt of those petitioning for relief under the ancient law deemed glaringly obvious, unworthy of the ti
me and expense of a formal hearing to revisit old cases and causes. The sheer numbers alone demand a pitilessly high bar in a legal process Alexander Hamilton once described as America’s great bulwark against tyranny, and that Thomas Jefferson praised as the ultimate legal protection for all:
“The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.”
The Founders had no idea what sheer numbers would do to their lofty intentions, which is to render the habeas process into the courthouse equivalent of football’s Hail Mary pass.
But the California Innocence Project’s petitions are different. Inmates may churn out handwritten habeas pleas daily, or they hire jailhouse lawyers paid with cigarettes and canteen credits to do it for them. Only a select few, however, make their way through the innocence project’s Pit to land before a judge, and that selectivity, coupled with the credibility that comes from past success at exonerating the wrongly convicted, means the courts will at least give a careful reading of the project’s petitions.
Every staff lawyer at the California Innocence Project would be named as attorneys of record on Jo Ann Parks’s habeas petition, but Raquel Cohen ran point on the case. It would be her reverse detective work that would have to convince a judge that a formal hearing had to be held for Jo Ann Parks, rather than the pro forma rejection that the vast majority of habeas petitioners face. To do that, to get a hearing, which is a much lower bar than winning a hearing, she would have to blow the government’s case out of the water.
Cohen faced a tall order with that. Even in the sterile language of court filings, the facts of the Parks case—at least the four main lines of evidence that the jury chose to embrace—are undeniably ugly.
First there is the allegation that Parks tried to stage a fire in the little living room on Sherman Way by making small cuts in an extension cord, then wrapping the cord (though not the parts with the cuts) in a bit of the draperies. The prosecution persisted in calling this an “incendiary device,” though it turned out to be incapable of actually starting a fire. Prosecutors said that wasn’t the point; the failed device, just like a poor marksman’s errant shot, showed criminal intent. When the “device” failed, arson investigators resorted to an age-old practice called “negative corpus,” claiming no accidental causes could be found, and therefore Parks must have started it by hand with matches or some other open flame. Negative corpus is a play on the classic Latin term corpus delicti, the “body of the crime,” from which is derived the legal principle that a person cannot be convicted of committing a crime unless that crime can be proven to have been committed. Negative corpus turns that principle on its head, holding that, even without actual evidence, the existence of a criminal act—such as setting a fire with matches—can be assumed to have occurred through the process of elimination. Negative corpus has long been a controversial tool in fire investigation because, unlike the lingering physical evidence often available in shootings, stabbings, rapes, and most other crimes, a deliberately set fire often consumes the evidence that can prove it was intentionally set . . . or that it started accidentally.