by Edward Humes
Decades later, Cohen would argue that falsely telling the jury that flashover never occurred had rendered the trial fundamentally unfair and invalidated Ablott’s key findings about the origin and cause of the fire. That mistaken expert opinion alone merited an overturning of the guilty verdict, as Cohen saw it.
But there was one significant finding by Ablott in which the issue of flashover did not really apply, and it was arguably the most devastating testimony against Parks: Ablott’s opinion that Ronnie Jr. had been barricaded inside his bedroom closet.
Ablott spent more time in that bedroom than any other part of the house during the investigation, as he tried, with the help of several investigators and firefighter Dirk Wegner, the first nozzleman to enter the house, to reconstruct the scene in Ronnie’s room during the fire. Reconstruction is always a challenge because of the destructive effects of firefighting and overhaul, but Ablott felt it was essential to understanding how and why Ronnie died in his closet.
Few of the firefighters or policemen who responded to the fire that night could say definitively whether the closet door was open or shut when they entered the house. Prosecutor Bozanich admitted as much during the trial—he said there was no reliable human testimony to say if the door was open or closed. Figuring out the position of the door during the fire was complicated by the fact that high-pressure fire hoses, air movement when windows fail, search and rescue efforts, and the post-fire overhaul to remove smoldering debris each could have altered the position of the door several times, opening or closing it. The two first responders who seemed certain it was closed during the fire repeatedly contradicted each other and themselves in their accounts, and also incorrectly remembered the door being completely intact when the fire was put out. Photos show most of the three panels that made up the bulk of the door’s surface were burned away, leaving little more than the rails and stiles—the outer edges of the door—in place. Photos of the door in a closed position still provide a clear view of the inside of the closet, although the very first picture taken of the scene depicts the closet door wide open with debris piled in front and inside. This photo, part of a series taken to document evidence in the bedroom, was snapped shortly after the fire was extinguished and before the boy’s body was found.
In his reconstruction efforts, Ablott sought proof of two things: that the door was shut during the fire, and that something had been placed in front of the door that blocked Ronnie Jr. inside and prevented him from escaping. Ablott swore he finally found what he was looking for.
To prove the door was shut during the fire, the prosecution relied upon the condition of the boy’s body—his burns were less severe than his sisters’, suggesting he was protected by a closed door—and on the condition of the door hinges. The hinge plates showed mirror image patterns of oxidation, Ablott asserted, which he said could only occur if the door was shut, pressing the plates together. However, the door itself was not preserved by investigators. It had been treated carelessly, thrown to the floor, marked by ashy boot prints that show it was walked on, and Ablott took no measurements to see whether the inside or the outside surfaces were more deeply burned and charred. Few photos were even taken of the inner side of the closet door, so that only witness memories—police and firefighter witness memories—can attest to which side was more burned. Only the hinges were preserved for examination.
Ablott next claimed to have found powerful evidence that there was something in front of the closet during the fire that had protected the carpeting from burning, allowing little more than soot and smoke damage underneath. He and his helpers spent hours trying to find objects that had been thrown around the house or taken outside during overhaul, trying to fit them into the roughly rectangular protected pattern on the carpeting in front of the closet threshold. After trying many objects and furnishings that might fit that spot like a jigsaw puzzle piece, they came up with the rectangular base of a wicker clothes hamper, most of which had been consumed in the fire, though the surviving base with its plastic corners seemed to fit the shape on the carpet. One of the plastic corners on the base had melted, and the plastic looked like it had flowed onto and adhered to a pet bowl that fit another protected area on the carpet near the closet. This, Ablott concluded, meant the hamper had been placed in front of the closed closet door to form a barricade, blocking the door from opening and trapping the child inside. The closed door had provided some protection from the flames, but not from deadly fumes and smoke that ultimately killed him.
A closed closet door by itself meant nothing. Children often hide in closets and shut the doors during fires. And if the four-year-old had surreptitiously gotten out of bed and either turned on the TV, which then caught fire, or had been playing with matches and accidentally started the fire, he would have been even more likely to hide because he had misbehaved. That was one of the reasons a police search party had combed the neighborhood before his body was found—under the theory he might have run away out of guilt or fear of getting in trouble.
Similarly, a clothes hamper standing in front of the closet by itself meant nothing, either. If the closet door had been left open, the hamper’s placement provided no evidence of criminal intent. Only the two together—proof of a door closed and a hamper pushed against it—could be used to suggest an intent to kill.
Ablott would later reconstruct this scene in the courtroom, with the side of the jury box serving as a simulated closet door. Why such a pivotal piece of evidence as the door itself was not saved has never been explained.
Cohen argued that it is impossible to tell from the available evidence and testimony whether the closet door was open or closed during the fire. She also believed that the validity of Ablott’s reconstruction was dubious at best, and that other rectangular objects, even falling ceiling tiles, could just as readily explain the protected areas of the carpeting. The problem was, unlike other elements of the government’s case against Parks, the damaging claims about the hamper and the closet could not be undermined by claiming that the evolving understanding of flashover and fire science invalidated Ablott’s findings. All Cohen had—so far—were dueling expert opinions. Unless she found some overlooked piece of evidence that crushed the prosecution’s theories about the closet door, this would remain her greatest challenge to overcome in trying to free Parks. The attorney feared she could prevail on all the other points, but still lose if the judge accepted that part of the prosecution’s case.
Bozanich, the trial prosecutor, had come up with an ingenious summation at the end of the case that piqued her fears, because he avoided the conventional argument that the sum of the proof and testimony was overwhelming. Instead, the prosecutor suggested each line of evidence was more than sufficient to convict on its own. Even if the jury distrusted Ablott and his findings on the cause of the fire, Bozanich argued, there was more than enough other evidence to convict:
I refuse to be hamstrung or bound by this contention that Ablott is the People’s case, and without him it is zilch. To show you what I’m talking about, take Ablott out and throw him away, and just say, it’s inconclusive from the arson expert evidence as to how many fires were set, one or two.
But if you find that there was a prior fire in Lynwood, there was a sabotaged wire, and the boy was in the closet with something in front, and her total lack of explanation for [her absence of smoke and fire exposure], you don’t even need an arson expert opinion, ladies and gentlemen.
Those facts, if they have been established, conclusively prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty as charged. . . . If you take the sabotaged wire, just by itself, it starts telling us someone wanted to start a fire. . . . Even if you had no expert opinion, no evidence about the defendant’s lack of fire damage, no evidence about that closet door and hamper, and that’s all you had . . . you could conclude there is no other reasonable conclusion than arson occurred.
If you just find a blocked closet door, and the fire occurrin
g, that’s enough to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt it’s arson, without anything else.
Forget the closet door. The defendant not having any fire damage. That cries out to you, she set it.
But when you start combining all these things . . . you convict her, absolutely. An overwhelming case. No arson expert opinion needed, none.
* * *
• • •
Decades later, the district attorney’s office was still quoting this summation as justification for denying the habeas corpus petition. Each time Cohen read it, the reasoning made her shudder a bit. If the new judge bought into that old argument, she knew, her case and Jo Ann Parks would be done.
13
“If I Am Wrong, Then Everything I Have Ever Been Taught . . . Would All Be Wrong.”
Inviting jurors to feel free to disregard key pieces of evidence sounds like a bold expression of confidence. In truth, Deputy District Attorney Dinko Bozanich had been engaging in a bit of creative damage control. He was deeply worried that the jurors already might be disregarding major parts of his case.
“This was not a slam dunk for me. Far from it. It was a close case,” Bozanich recalled many years after the trial. He felt that “one more scintilla” of evidence for the defense could have tipped the scales the other way.
“So I wanted to make it clear that any of those facts on its own would be enough to convict. The sabotaged wires. Her lack of fire injury or smell of smoke. The boy blocked in the closet. You believe any one of those beyond a reasonable doubt, and it’s full stop. Enough to convict. And I think making that clear to the jury helped them arrive at the correct verdict.”
Bozanich spent nearly thirty years as a career prosecutor for the Los Angeles County District Attorney. He charged and convicted defendants with high-enough profiles to earn such nicknames in the media as the Sleepwalker Killer and the Alphabet Bomber, responsible for twenty-five murders and multiple bombings.
The Parks triple-murder trial convened on October 13, 1992, in the Norwalk branch of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, which serves the southeast section of Los Angeles County, where the fatal fire occurred in the city of Bell. Prosecutors liked trying cases in Norwalk because the defense attorneys always griped that jurors there seemed particularly tough and more law-and-order minded. Their nickname for the courthouse was “No Walk”—a “walk” being slang for a non-guilty verdict. Whether it was true or merely urban legend, prosecutors loved that their opponents felt that way.
Bozanich believed in his case and in Jo Ann Parks’s guilt, but even in No Walk, he feared he might lose the battle of the arson experts with his jurors. He thought the defense might kick up enough doubt and confusion about Ablott’s story to make it a draw or, perhaps, to win outright. He ended up spending so much time flapping his arms and pacing the courtroom as he traded barbs with Parks’s arson expert that the defense team quietly nicknamed him “the Stork.”
Under the best of circumstances, the scientific and technical testimony about any fire and arson case can confuse jurors, if not put them to sleep. Investigator Ablott, large and shambling and a bit intimidating, had done well on the stand under Bozanich’s friendly questioning. But during cross-examination, the prosecutor’s nemesis, Deputy Public Defender Charles Gessler, had caught Ablott in a credibility-damaging contradiction—bad enough that Bozanich worried it could cost him the case.
Ablott had provided a detailed account of how he examined the Parks’s badly burned TV set during the same April 17 survey of the house in which he discovered the seemingly sabotaged wires. In his testimony at Parks’s trial, he swore he made that examination in the living room, where he also saw pieces of glass from the shattered television screen scattered on the floor. After looking over the sagging, gutted electronics and shattered picture tube, he ruled out the television as a possible cause of the fire because, he said, he determined it had stood outside the area of origin. He also found that the picture tube had imploded, indicating that the television had been attacked by fire from the outside. Had the fire begun inside the television, Ablott explained, the cathode-ray picture tube would have exploded, and the damage from that would differ from what he had observed at the fire scene. He confidently told jurors that the television had nothing to do with starting the fire.
There was a problem with this pivotal testimony. According to evidence photographs and the testimony of county fire investigator Bill Franklin and his trainee, Fuzzy Fuzell, firefighters removed the burned hulk of the television from the living room and dumped it outside at the back of the house the day after the fire. The glass Ablott so vividly remembered was swept up long before he ever visited. He never saw where the TV had been set up before the fire. The police diagram of where the television had been before the fire shows it close to and in front of the windows and the flammable draperies—close to or within Ablott’s hypothetical area of origin in that one-hundred-square-foot living room. Finally, wherever Ablott might have examined the TV, his beliefs about imploding and exploding televisions are based on a theory that, according to other experts in the case, was shown to be junk science several years before the Parks fire.
Bozanich spent considerable energy and time attacking Jo Ann Parks’s credibility for contradicting herself and changing her account of events, so it was both embarrassing and damaging to have his key witness tarred in the same way. And if Bozanich tried to explain away those contradictions as simple, innocent lapses in memory on Ablott’s part, he knew it would open the door for Gessler to ask jurors to give the same benefit of the doubt to the woman he was condemning for every misstatement she ever made, including lying about her age on her marriage certificate. Worse, the defense attorney would now happily argue that if Ablott was wrong about that key point, what else might he be mistaken about? The incorrect information about the television and Ablott’s dismissal of it as a potential ignition source for the fire created a possible bombshell, and it wasn’t the only one. The defense attorney went after Ablott for also suggesting he had discovered the sabotaged wires, although they had been partially excavated more than a week earlier by Franklin and Fuzell. The defense attorney wondered aloud—for the benefit of jurors—if Ablott might suffer from memory problems. What, the lawyer speculated, did that imply about Ablott’s habit of sticking his penknife into charred wood to measure how deeply and long it burned, without ever writing down his findings—just keeping track of them in his head? Such methods are considered inaccurate and unacceptable by modern standards—which is why arson investigators today use special gauges to measure the depth of char, and they keep detailed records and charts as each measurement is made, providing a kind of road map that helps uncover the movement of a fire.
On the other side, Gessler had a secret weapon to counter Ablott: his own arson expert, Robert Lowe. Dapper in his cardigan and tie, tall and silver-haired, he was, as even Ablott described him, “everybody’s favorite uncle—everybody just automatically believes him, whether he’s right or not.”
With a long career that began as a navy aviator in World War II, Lowe had left military service to become a Los Angeles City firefighter, then a Los Angeles County Fire Department captain, and, finally, an arson investigator. He retired from the fire department after twenty-two years and more than thirty-five hundred fire origin and cause investigations. Then he went to work as a private fire investigator, accumulating two more decades of experience analyzing everything from house fires to automotive defects to rocket engine explosions. In the Parks case, Lowe provided plausible and innocent explanations for evidence that Ablott had used to form his opinion that the fire had been arson and murder.
Ahead of his time in terms of abandoning arson myths and embracing new ideas about fire behavior, Lowe argued even back in 1992 that flashover played an important role in the Parks fire, despite Ablott’s contrary opinion. He believed the effects of flashover explained the burn patterns Ablott thought were so suspicious. He play
ed a dramatic training video for the jury depicting a chair fire and a television fire to show how quickly a room can be engulfed by flashover—from a tiny flame to an inferno in less than five minutes.
Many arson investigators and prosecutors at that time were pushing back against what was being referred to mockingly as “the flashover defense” in criminal cases. The new understanding of flashover and burn patterns being championed by experts such as Lowe and John Lentini was viewed by many police fire investigators as out of the mainstream and a bit of a joke. They felt the critics were trying to erect obstacles and deal setbacks to those whose business was catching fire bugs.
Bozanich, taken by surprise by Lowe’s flashover conclusions, took a similarly mocking tack, trying to dismiss Lowe as a dishonest kook, calling his theories “ridiculous” and the product of a “slam bang approach” by a “big crackerjack one-man investigative team.” Bozanich tried to sully Lowe’s reputation further by digging up an old appellate court opinion that criticized him for filing an incomplete fire report in a civil suit over an insurance claim. Lowe explained that his partner had filed the report behind his back before Lowe had completed it, because his final conclusions would have alienated their client in the case, cutting off a lucrative source of income.
Then Lowe fought back. He further shook Bozanich with his testimony about his experiences with older models of television sets that were far more prone to starting fires than more modern designs. Their high-voltage transformers and cathode-ray tubes created electromagnetic fields that attracted dust and lint—blankets of it that coated the old-school electronics inside the TV cabinet. Lowe said this allowed heat to build, eventually causing parts to fail and throw sparks out of the ventilation slots in back of the television cabinet, or to cause outright fires inside the TV cabinet. Lowe explained how either development could have set the living room draperies aflame on the night of the fire, starting a blaze that spread to other flammable items in the room, after which the flames could spread quickly through the tiny house. According to Lowe, the patterns and traces left behind on walls and objects by such a fire in that heavily damaged living room would have been indistinguishable from the patterns Ablott insisted could only have been created by Jo Ann and her matches.