by Edward Humes
Her most damaging statement three days after the fire had turned by the time of the trial into this: “I don’t remember if they left Jess—I don’t think they left Jessica in there, but they said that if they did or they didn’t—if they would, then she would have got burned. Then they could have either got a big—they would have got the money out of there. They could have got a lawsuit. And I was thinking—I don’t know if she meant it where, darn, she should have left Jessica in there or, you know, she didn’t leave her in there, she’s happy, she doesn’t—I don’t know.”
Worse still for the prosecution, Dodge trashed the credibility of two of her friends who might have corroborated portions of her accusations against Parks. Dodge told police one of them was actually a dangerous and violent methamphetamine addict—she actually warned two sheriff’s homicide detectives that they should bring backup if they decided to visit her. She said the other friend had recruited her to participate in a welfare fraud scam and couldn’t be trusted, either. A third person from the same circle of acquaintances wrote a letter to authorities detailing similar allegations of child neglect but then later admitted little of it was true.
During a hearing with the jury not present, the judge looked at the transcript of Dodge’s latest recorded statement to detectives and pronounced it “gibberish.” The danger of bringing such a witness into court for Bozanich was that it could undermine the credibility of his entire case. So he cut his losses and rested the people’s case without calling her, although she could still be called as a rebuttal witness later if necessary, to refute any claims Parks might make on the witness stand.
The defense team appeared beyond relieved. The jury would never hear about Dodge, or about allegations of neglect or drugging, or that damning quote Parks allegedly made. Gessler could now focus the defense case on the accidental-fire theory. And he told his client she need not testify. That way there would be no risk of Parks melting down on the stand, he said, or that her testimony would provoke Bozanich to call Dodge in as a rebuttal witness, warts and all.
Reluctantly, Jo Ann Parks recalls, she agreed to remain silent and not testify, for better or worse. The jury would not hear Dodge’s incendiary allegations, but neither would they hear from the mother of three dead children, which would surely disappoint them. Gessler, however, appeared confident to Parks. The defense team had dodged a bullet and argued to the jury that there were way too many doubts about the prosecution’s case to sustain a conviction.
But the last word those jurors would hear at the end of the case was the word Bozanich chose to describe Jo Ann Parks: executioner. No one wants to think of a mother that way, he said, but that is the word that fits.
After ten days of talking it over, the jury agreed. The ten men and two women pronounced her guilty.
Afterward, several jurors explained their verdict. In part, it had been Bozanich’s portrait of Parks that swayed them into believing she behaved more like a killer than a mother. Yet the key detail was something the defense hadn’t anticipated, a bit of information that seemed to help rather than harm Jo Ann’s case: the testimony of Bell police officer Pete Cacheiro.
Cacheiro had repeatedly misled Parks by telling her the kids were okay as she stood watching the burning house. He told her that everything was and would be fine. The defense was based on the calculation that jurors would feel that no concerned mother would leave the scene if she thought her kids remained in jeopardy. So Cacheiro’s false assurances would provide an explanation for why she would be willing to leave the scene to go to the police department to make a statement: She thought the danger had passed. Add to that the fact that she was in shock, a passive, traumatized person used to deferring to others, and the defense lawyer seemed to have the bases covered. The jurors plausibly could conclude that Parks simply did what the nice policeman told her to do—wait for her kids in the police station just blocks away.
But the jurors didn’t see it that way. Some of them, at least, felt there was no way any mother—any mother who wasn’t a killer, that is—would hear her kids were okay and then leave the scene without first seeing them for herself, grabbing them up, and hugging and kissing them.
No lawyer had argued this particular point. No witness testified about it. Some of the jurors just felt this behavior was wrong. And for them, everything flowed from that small yet huge moment, the lens through which they viewed the rest of the evidence. For those particular jurors, the key wasn’t just about the battle of the experts. Or the puzzle-piece reconstruction of the closet. Or whether a second fire was set in the girls’ room. It was about how Jo Ann Parks acted that night.
Why, they asked, would a mother leave that fire scene without first making certain her kids were really okay—unless she already knew they were dead?
To be sure, not all jurors felt that way. Others said they found her behavior suspicious but not definitive. They needed the arson and fire evidence to be there, too.
Gessler had been right in part about one thing, however. His tactics may not have kept Jo Ann Parks out of prison, but his targeting of Ron Parks likely saved her from a death sentence. A majority of jurors reported that they thought the husband was involved, and may have been the instigator. They would not sentence a mother to death when the man they thought might ultimately be responsible walked free.
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Bob Lowe remained furious with the defense attorney for undermining him as a witness. He fervently believed Parks should have been exonerated. He thought Kathy Dodge should have testified, so jurors would understand that her bogus allegations had biased the fire investigation and turned a tentative finding of an accidental blaze into an arson case.
He also felt it was a fatal error not to call Bell police officer Jeff Bruce to testify. Bruce was the first responder who pounded on a back bedroom window with his flashlight in order to break through to rescue the children, instead triggering a sudden increase of ventilation and a flare-up of flame that Lowe believed had sent the girls’ bedroom into flashover. Lowe believed Bruce’s testimony was key because it contradicted Ablott’s theory that Parks had set a separate fire in the bedroom. Bruce saw a room filled with black smoke; Lowe believed the fire didn’t start in earnest in that room until the window broke and fresh air flooded in.
But in his police report, Bruce seemed to overstate his actions, claiming he entered the room and searched for the girls before the flames drove him out. Later he admitted that he never managed to get fully into the room. The explosion of flame drove him back. Scheduled to testify for the defense at the trial, Bruce had been flown into town from Wyoming, where he had taken a job as a small-town police chief after leaving Bell. But then Gessler chose not to call him as a witness.
Bozanich maintained that Bruce had no credibility and, thirty years later, the district attorney’s office continued to maintain that Bruce’s testimony had no value and could not be believed. However, all the key parts of his account of the night of the fire were corroborated by a neighbor whom detectives interviewed, and who saw a police officer do everything Bruce claimed except for entering the house through the back bedroom window.
Crushed by Parks’s conviction, Lowe began a correspondence with her in prison that lasted the rest of his life, as he gathered all the documents and evidence in the case—more than ten thousand pages of material—and worked tirelessly to get the Parks case reopened, writing the governor, the media, even Oprah Winfrey.
Lowe provided the basic theories, timeline, and discoveries that eventually helped persuade the California Innocence Project to take on Parks as a client. Lowe died of cancer in 2013, but his daughter Mary Ross has continued in his place, serving with her sister and nieces and Lowe’s widow as a surrogate family for Parks, attending her hearings, visiting her, writing her, and helping her lay plans for her freedom, if it should come.
After two decades of effort, it seemed Lowe’s advocacy finally
had borne fruit. Raquel Cohen and her colleagues at the innocence project had put together the habeas petition for Parks, and had also informally provided background information to the Los Angeles County District Attorney in order to discuss a possible settlement. If they could convince prosecutors that a mistake had been made—as they had done with Luis Vargas, falsely accused of being the Teardrop Rapist—they could work something out without court proceedings. The project had done this before in other cases and jurisdictions: There would be a joint press conference, prosecutors standing together with innocence project attorneys, together righting a wrong from long ago. Instead of smearing one another with accusations and hostility, this would be a chance for everyone to look good. “No blame,” Justin Brooks promised, “just sharing credit for doing something right.”
Cohen thought the initial talks with the DA, though preliminary, seemed promising. The prosecutor on the case, Deputy District Attorney Erika Jerez, seemed willing to consider the possibility that the case against Jo Ann Parks was flawed. It’s not an entirely comfortable position for prosecutors, who by nature tend to consider themselves a force for fighting crime, the one bright line between public safety and societal chaos. At the same time, even on the best of days, being a career DA in Los Angeles is a mostly stressful, messy, and thankless job. You’re expected to win all the time, whereas defense attorneys are considered successful for winning only a handful of their cases. The workload can be numbing, routine, and far out of the public eye. There are rewarding moments, of course, the ones that keep you going—the lives you improve or even save, the bad guys you put away, the mom or dad or wife or husband who embraces you as a savior. Maybe after twenty or thirty years of these infrequent moments there’s a judgeship waiting for you. But the fact is, a lot of the cases suck: You have reluctant witnesses, reluctant victims, witnesses who lie or forget or change their stories and make you look like an idiot, or who just don’t show up. Prosecuting domestic violence can shift from vital cause to minefield in a heartbeat: You meet the bruised and battered victim at the start of the case, she wants the bastard who broke her jaw in jail, thank you, and throw away the key while you’re at it, but by the time of the trial months later she has yielded to his pleas for forgiveness and wants her husband back, and suddenly you’re the enemy trying to destroy a family. It takes a level of commitment few people possess to slog it out in these trenches and to champion the people’s point of view in such cases—which is to say, the 99.99 percent of criminal actions that never make the eleven o’clock news.
Jerez came up through these trenches to the habeas section in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, where her job usually amounted to defending convictions from being overturned. Occasionally there were cases in which she found herself accepting that mistakes had been made and that an exoneration or a sentence reduction was warranted. But if the tendency of innocence lawyers is to see potential exonerations as plentiful, a veritable ocean of injustices, the tendency of prosecutors is to see a very small wading pool of possible exonerations, with the rest viewed as gimmicks and lies. And so it grates on many prosecutors when innocence cases draw headlines and condemnations for the authorities. Jerez complains of feeling vilified just for doing her duty of seeing justice done as she balances twin school-age boys with a job that, for the most part, consists of upholding criminal convictions.
She was willing to hear out the innocence project attorneys on the merits of their petition to free Jo Ann Parks. First, though, she wanted to have a current sheriff’s arson expert look over the file and give his take on the case. If he thought an injustice had been done, they could start serious talks about a deal to release Parks. The arson expert accepted the files and the assignment, assuming he was going to find a problem-filled investigation that might be difficult to defend.
Instead, the new investigator came back with a surprising opinion: Jo Ann Parks was a serial arsonist and murderer.
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Edward Nordskog is a twenty-year veteran arson investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Arson/Explosives Detail, with a storied career investigating serial fire-starters and bombers, as well as thousands of more mundane arson investigations. Coincidentally, he took over Ron Ablott’s job when Ablott retired in 1998, though the two never worked cases together. Nordskog is the author of several nonfiction books on arsonists, and he lectures on the behavior of fire setters, which has become a specialty of his. He is a gifted storyteller with a collection of fascinating cases to talk about and truly horrifying accounts of serial arsonists who managed to get away with setting fire after fire without getting caught.
Nordskog believes Jo Ann Parks is such a person: a serial arsonist whose true nature was not even exposed by her trial and conviction for murder in 1993.
In his report on the case and the innocence project’s claims, he endorsed all of Ablott’s findings about arson, and described his original investigation as exemplary, careful, and unbiased.
As for his take on the fire itself, Nordskog concluded that Jo Ann Parks’s crimes are far worse than anyone previously discerned. He asserted that the first fire in Lynwood was no accident but simply Parks’s first failed attempt to murder at least one of her children by staging a seemingly accidental fire. Part of that staging included making phony complaints about electrical problems at the house in advance of the fire. Nordskog believes she deliberately arranged the air conditioner cord to start the first fire. The Nordskog report neglects to mention that the fire department verified Parks’s reports of dangerous electrical problems that posed a fire risk and a possible code violation one day before the first fire. He also failed to include in his report the fact that, during Parks’s trial, Deputy DA Bozanich assured the court in a legally binding stipulation that the first fire was definitely an accident and that Parks was not responsible.
“This first case fooled all the investigators and was not examined or investigated in a detailed manner,” Nordskog countered in his report. In other words, Nordskog was asserting that Ron Ablott, whose work he deemed first-rate in the second fire, was fooled and slipshod in the first.
Nordskog asserted that Parks finally succeeded in committing murder by fire through staging a successful blaze at the Sherman Way apartment. He then vividly described what he believes happened, going far beyond anything presented at Parks’s trial, constructing a diabolical portrait of a remorseless killer who wanted to get rid of her kids, then cash in by lawsuit. He described the incendiary device made of cut wires and drapery as crude and ineffective, but exactly the sort of sabotage that an unskilled person might construct. He described the failed incendiary device as consisting of an eighteen-inch-long section of wiring that had been stripped by Parks of all insulation, then wrapped in drapery and placed under boxes and clothing baskets in order to spark a fire. (No evidence of such a dramatically obvious incendiary device was ever mentioned by any witness at the trial.)
Though he cited no evidence to support the contention, Nordskog believed the autopsy findings were wrong, that Parks must have drugged her children—at least the two girls—into a state of incapacitation for her plot to succeed. The tests are not infallible, he suggested, or the samples may have deteriorated.
When the incendiary device failed, Nordskog theorized, Parks started several fires by hand, left the house (explaining her lack of injuries, soot stains, and smoky smell), delayed seeking help while the fire spread throughout the house, then staged a fake rescue attempt for a neighbor to witness.
“The motive for this attack is based within the phenomenon of filicide [the act of a parent killing his or her children] and possibly Munchausen’s by proxy [a mental disorder in which a person seeks attention by inducing illness in another, typically a child],” Nordskog wrote. “Parks had unwanted children. . . . This is a fairly well documented phenomenon among female fire setters. My own books document several similar cases. Jo Ann Parks was not the fi
rst, nor the last housewife/mother to arrange such an evil plot. Like the others, she fooled investigators at her first fire, but then was subsequently caught.”
Nordskog also dismissed the innocence project’s claims supporting a new trial for Jo Ann Parks as coming from experts whose livelihood and fame rests on their being “in the exoneration business” and requires them to ignore evidence in a way Nordskog finds “distressing and ethically challenged.” He particularly mocked the idea of cognitive bias in the Parks case (and any other arson case) as unscientific and insulting. When Ron Ablott walked into that apartment for the first time, his immediate suspicions that something wasn’t right weren’t due to bias, Nordskog wrote. “It is good detective work.”
Missing from the report is any mention of what others believe was Ablott’s poor detective work: his failure to take into account flashover during the fire, the single most important claim by the innocence project, or his testimony about examining the Parks’s television and why he ruled it out as a possible accidental cause.
When this report arrived from the DA’s office, it shocked Raquel Cohen and her colleagues—for its tone, for the inflammatory serial fire-setter allegation, and for the errors of fact and science she believed it contained. Part of her couldn’t wait to get Nordskog on the witness stand. Cognitive bias unscientific? There had been hundreds of scientific papers published on it since the FBI’s Madrid bombing fiasco. An eighteen-inch bared wire wrapped in drapery? Where was that coming from? What about the flashover claims? She knew the prosecution’s expert had left himself open to withering questions on the witness stand. That part, at least, Cohen thought was good.