by Edward Humes
He couldn’t prove that the television started the fire, Lowe admitted. But, given Ablott’s specious reasons for ruling out the TV as a possible cause, Lowe argued, there was no way the prosecution could prove the television did not start the fire. He said Ablott’s use of negative corpus to claim that Parks had to have started the fire by hand was therefore unacceptable. The cause of the fire should officially be “undetermined,” Lowe said.
Bozanich responded by successfully drawing Lowe and Gessler into an argument about what model television had been in that apartment—a Zenith, RCA, or Magnavox brand TV. Ron and Jo Ann Parks had been unsure and contradictory in their statements about the brand of the swap-meet TV. Some old models of Zenith had been recalled as a fire hazard, and the two attorneys each brought in a TV expert to argue about which TV was which. The bottom line was that no one could say for sure, because the police had not saved the television as evidence. This whole TV-brand issue was a red herring—all those old models posed a small but real fire risk, whether recalled or not. But Bozanich had succeeded in shifting focus to a confusing side issue about TV models, distracting from what should have been the only issue that mattered: the possibility that any television fire, regardless of brand or year of manufacture, had been improperly ruled out in order to support Ablott’s finding of arson.
Lowe also remained equally adamant that there had been no sabotaged wiring. He pointed to the photos of the discovery of the cut cords and showed how the copper wiring below the supposedly suspicious cuts in the insulation was bright and shiny, like new. Had they been exposed during the fire and buried in chemically harsh wet ash overnight, they should have looked blackened or tarnished. Their pristine condition suggested to Lowe that the fire overhaul, or the digging up of the wires the next day with a metal rake, could have caused those nicks in the cords.
Finally, Lowe argued that the closet door in little Ronnie’s room was open during the fire and that the hamper could not have been barricading it. The wicker hamper had burned completely down to the base. The prosecution asserted that the hamper protected the bottom of the closet door during the fire, which is why that part of the door appeared in photos to be less burned than the rest. But Lowe said that protection theory would be true only if the hamper had not burned. Photos taken by Ablott during the reconstruction, however, showed a hamper that had been consumed almost completely, down to its base. And that, Lowe pointed out, meant the burning wicker hamper was pouring out heat and flames as it was consumed. If it really had been right next to the closet door, the bottom of the door should have been more burned than other areas of the door, not protected.
If the authorities had preserved the best piece of evidence, the closet door itself, and if they had competently examined or at least kept the television set, these questions might be answered definitively, Lowe said. Perhaps they would have proved Parks’s guilt, or perhaps they would have set her free. But those key pieces of evidence had been destroyed by the government, Lowe said, either through negligence or deliberate choice. By the time charges were filed and defense experts had come along, the authorities had allowed the house to be torn down. When Lowe drove out to see the place, only the concrete slab remained. Only police and the landlord’s insurance investigators ever had the chance to examine the actual fire scene and evidence.
By the time Lowe was done testifying, Bozanich worried that the jury might call the battle of the arson experts a wash, or perhaps decide it slightly in Lowe’s favor. And so he continued to relentlessly go after Parks’s credibility and character. He called witnesses who had never been interviewed until years after the fire to say Jo Ann appeared unemotional or unconcerned about the loss of her children. When neighbor Shirley Robison, who was with Jo Ann for hours on the night of the fire and who had been interviewed by police early on, described her as “very upset,” Bozanich shot back, “Do you know she was upset or did she just appear to be upset?” He peppered every witness who thought Jo Ann had been sad, crying, or emotional during the fire with pointed, sometimes sarcastic questions. He particularly challenged Shirley Robison’s account of restraining Jo Ann from running back into the burning house. She didn’t try very hard, Bozanich asked, did she? Isn’t she much bigger than you? Could she have gotten away if she wanted to? By the end of the case, Bozanich referred to that moment as Jo Ann’s “halfhearted” attempt to appear to want to run in and save her kids. This courtroom warfare to frame and reframe events was relentless and, it would turn out, quite effective.
Of course, Jo Ann Parks had been her own worst enemy. Had she stuck with her first account to police describing the night of the fire, Bozanich would have had a much harder time of it. She said she heard screams, opened her bedroom door, faced a wall of flame, and immediately turned and ran outside for help. Bozanich speculated that her lack of any sign she was near a burning house, the fact that she had no injuries or smell of smoke on her, fit his arson theory better than any other scenario: She had set two small fires inside and then left the house and her kids to meet their fate, returning only when the apartment was fully engulfed, just in time to bang on the neighbor’s door and pretend she had just run out of the house.
Lowe offered another explanation for her lack of fire injury or smoky smell: backdraft. He said every part of the house was aflame or filling with smoke when Parks awoke to a child’s screams—except for the master bedroom, where she slept. This room was an add-on to the original garage structure, connected by a single door to the rest of the apartment, with a solid, formerly exterior wall separating the room from the rest of the flaming apartment. Jo Ann and Ron had a water bed; it was their habit to keep the door shut at night, so the cat didn’t come in and puncture the bed with its claws. When she opened the door to see why Ronnie was screaming, the master bedroom offered a fresh source of oxygen for the fire. Eventually that would cause the fire to spread rapidly into the master bedroom. But the first thing that would happen, Lowe said, was that air would rush from the bedroom past Parks in the doorway and into the burning house. This initial backdraft meant no smoke or flames moved into the master bedroom or toward Parks in those first seconds. She would still have felt a blast of radiant heat, however, as if standing near a furnace, but she would not necessarily get burned or smell of smoke unless she lingered or tried to advance into the burning apartment.
Leaving that door open, then running out through the exterior door and leaving it open, too, fed the existing fire and allowed it to spread quickly into the master bedroom as well, Lowe explained. This is why neighbor Bill Robison could run into the master bedroom once roused by Parks, but could not go farther into the house.
Had she stuck with that original story, Gessler later explained in his summation to the jury, there might have been a very different ending to the investigation. Instead, after that horrible scene at the police station in which Ron Parks accused his wife of killing the children (or letting them die), Jo Ann changed her story, saying she tried to crawl through the flames on the night of the fire but finally had to turn back and run for help.
“That is a lie. She didn’t do that,” Gessler told the jury. “This is why we are here. It’s because Mrs. Parks is not a heroine. Mrs. Parks did not die in that fire with her children. And Mrs. Parks did not make what would have turned out to be a heroic but futile effort to save her children and die of the carbon monoxide and smoke inhalation and heat . . .
“It is understandable with Mr. Parks on her case, she would make up a version that was a little more heroic than the truth. Is that so sinister that she should be convicted of three counts of murder?”
Gessler compared this fake story Parks told about crawling to save the children to Ablott’s “reconstructive memory of a television set in the living room that he never saw,” as well as claiming he carefully dug up sabotaged wires another investigator had excavated a week earlier.
“I guess that clues you in a little bit,” Gessler said, “about a man who is
reaching, who wants to be right, and who will grab the facts to support his opinion.”
The long trial stretched across eight months, with numerous delays and holiday breaks. The atmosphere remained testy throughout. Bozanich has an in-your-face aggressive style even on his best days, but with such a close-fought battle, he and Gessler spent much of the trial accusing each other of misconduct of one kind or another. Gessler’s co-counsel thought they were about to come to blows one afternoon. Bozanich grew incensed when a paralegal on the defense team kept running up from the gallery on breaks to comfort Parks and to provide tissues to dry her tears while jurors were still in the courtroom. The prosecutor railed aloud about the defense wasting scarce taxpayer dollars to pay an employee for useless comfort duty. Then he begged any news reporters in the courtroom to investigate the propriety of paying a paralegal to facilitate crocodile tears.
If arson expert Robert Lowe was Gessler’s secret weapon, Bozanich’s nuclear bomb on the witness list was Kathy Dodge. She was the one witness with the potential to devastate the defense with her claim that Parks had longingly talked about the millions she could have made if their first apartment fire in 1988 had killed little Jessica. If she were persuasive on the witness stand, Dodge’s appearance in the case could almost guarantee a trip to death row for Parks. She was literally the last person in the world Gessler wanted to see walk into the courtroom.
A highly respected defense attorney, Gessler specialized in defending against the death penalty and had tried many high-profile murder cases, including representing Lyle Menendez, one of the two brothers charged in Los Angeles’s most famous case of parricide. In thirteen death-penalty trials, not a single one of his clients ended up on death row.
In the twilight of his thirty-year career at the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s office, he did not want Jo Ann Parks to become the first of his clients to be sentenced to die. Each day he dreaded finding out that Bozanich would be calling Kathy Dodge to the stand to provide what no other witness on the list could: evidence of premeditation and motive for murder. Would she also blurt out something about the alleged five-hundred-dollar money order theft as evidence of Parks’s alleged avariciousness or bad character? Worse, would the judge permit Bozanich to ask her about the allegations of child neglect and dosing the kids with cough syrup? Even with autopsy results that showed no signs of cough medicine in their bodies, and no physical injuries to suggest abuse in the past or on the night of the fire, Dodge’s accusations would be a home run for the prosecution. Without Dodge, the only explanation for RoAnn to die unrestrained in her bed with the door open was that she had succumbed in her sleep to carbon monoxide poisoning. But that only tracks if the fire was accidental. The prosecution’s theory that her mother started a separate fire right next to the girl’s bed, without restraining her or locking her in the room, seems inexplicable. Nearly three years old, healthy and active, she would have just run out, perhaps even helping little Jessica escape her crib, too, the moment fire-setting mom left the room. The girls’ seeming unfettered ability to flee also made the alleged barricading of Ronnie in the closet anomalous: Why restrain one child but not the other? It made no sense.
The cough medicine accusation would bring a more sinister explanation to these inconsistencies. The unlikely scenario of starting a fire in the girls’ room without waking them suddenly would make terrible sense if the children had been drugged.
The specter of Kathy Dodge had a marked effect on Gessler’s trial strategy. A capital case is divided into two parts: the guilt or innocence trial and then, if there is a guilty verdict of first-degree murder, a penalty phase provides the big finish. In most states, the jury makes the call after each side presents a case for execution or mercy (in the form of a life sentence without parole in California). But Gessler, like all defense attorneys skilled at death-penalty cases, crafted a defense against a death sentence in both phases of the trial, evoking from the witness’s trial phase not only information to support innocence, but also to give jurors reasons for sparing the life of the client. And so Gessler did just that—pushed into it by Bozanich when the prosecutor somewhat surprisingly called a hostile witness to the stand early in the trial: Ronald Parks.
The very first question Gessler put to him when he was invited to begin cross-examination was intended to be a shocker: “Mr. Parks, are you trying to kill your wife now because you didn’t succeed in April 1989?”
Long silence. Blank stare. Then: “No. I am not trying to do anything.”
Gessler went on to build a portrait of a vile, uncaring father who had the electrician’s skills and the sociopathic tendencies that could lead him to create an incendiary device to kill his family, then attempt to profit from it.
But in doing so, Gessler had set the terms of his defense. He had reserved his opening statement for later in the case, which meant the jury had heard nothing but the prosecution’s version of events before the first witness took the stand. Until Gessler hurled that accusation at Ron Parks, jurors had no idea what direction the defense would take. The first message in defense of Jo Ann Parks sent their way was not that the fire was accidental, but that someone started it on purpose. The only distinction Gessler suggested was just that the culprit was the husband, not the wife.
It was, in short, an endorsement of the prosecution’s arson theory.
Later in the trial, of course, a second defense—accident, not arson—would be raised as well. But when Lowe learned of this dual approach, he was furious. He felt his entire role in the case, his careful analysis aimed at convincing the jury that the fire had been accidental, not criminal, had been undermined before he set foot in the courtroom. His opinion would be just one choice in a buffet of options Gessler was offering up.
Lowe later said this was the moment Parks lost the case. But it appears Gessler felt he could not depend on Lowe alone to sway jurors to acquit. Had the death penalty been off the table, the defense attorney might have just pushed the accidental-fire theory of the case. But that would have been a risky move. If the jurors decided there was arson and murder, Gessler’s fallback strategy was to make them think Ron was getting away with murder. That would make it very hard for them to impose the death penalty on Jo Ann if they thought a much more callous and abhorrent husband walked free.
If the goal of that tense and unpleasant cross-examination was to showcase just what sort of person Ron Parks was, Gessler certainly accomplished that. The jury had heard neighbor Shirley Robison’s account of what he said at the police station on the night of the fire, blaming his wife for the deaths of their children. But on the witness stand, Parks gave a new version: “I told her, ‘Honey, you did everything you possibly could to help them children. It’s not your fault.’”
Next, he explained how, shortly after the fire, he responded to a newspaper advertisement by a lawyer who promised “million dollar verdicts.” He immediately retained the attorney to sue his landlords for the deaths of his children. He said he and his wife dropped the suit, as well as an earlier one filed over the Lynwood fire, because a subsequent attorney warned them they would “look like fire bugs.”
Asked to talk about his children, Ron Parks could not remember either of his daughters’ birthdays—just the years of their births. He confidently named his son’s birthday, but he got it wrong, eleven months off—wrong day, wrong month.
“I’m going by recall,” he said with a shrug. “My children have been dead three years, and I don’t celebrate birthdays.”
He could not remember their bedtimes, either, or kissing them good night or any other bedtime rituals, explaining that he had to “move on.” He offered an even more nakedly cold assessment of this moving-on process than he had during the TV interview he gave shortly after the fire.
“I’ve dropped them out of my life. I have a new life now,” he testified. “I mean, it’s like spilt milk, you’ve got to let it go. You can’t wipe up and carry it with you th
e rest of your life.”
Even Gessler, veteran of thirteen gut-wrenching death-penalty trials, seemed taken aback as Jo Ann Parks burst into tears at the defense table. “The memories of your children are like spilt milk?”
Ron Parks nodded. “That’s what I’m saying.”
Meanwhile, in anticipation of Kathy Dodge testifying, the defense team began preparing an emotionally fragile and easily rattled client to testify on her own behalf. If she risked taking the stand and going toe-to-toe with the pugnacious Dinko Bozanich, Parks could give her version of events on the night of the fire. She could explain why she exaggerated her attempts to save her kids after recounting in her first official statement that she simply turned and ran. She could explain her difficult relationship with Ron. And she could try to explain away Kathy Dodge as a vindictive ex-friend. Eager to tell jurors her side of the story, she even sat for a mock cross-examination in the county jail visiting room. Parks recalls that she “passed with flying colors,” but there was always the possibility that Bozanich might destroy her on the witness stand, creating a dilemma for Gessler. But if Kathy Dodge testified, the defense attorney might have little choice—he’d have to put Parks on the stand.
Then, in a surprise move, Bozanich rested his case without calling Kathy Dodge. It turns out she had become a disaster of a witness, changing her story repeatedly, forgetting key facts, and barely able to speak in coherent sentences when detectives tape-recorded an interview with her to prepare for trial. She went from saying in her first statements to police that she had seen Parks give cough medicine to her youngest child three times to saying she had seen her give it to all her kids all the time. Her initial damning statement about getting rich off Jessica’s death in the first fire had six months later morphed into Parks saying something more ambiguous: “I would’ve got money out of that, you know, I would’ve sued but Jessica would’ve died.” In her next statement, she could no longer remember who said what, Ron or Jo Ann, about the first fire. She no longer believed Jessica was left in the house at all that day, or if anything like that had been said at all. The person who first put Jo Ann Parks under the investigative microscope turned out to have little value as a credible witness.