by Edward Humes
Bunch not only lost a child in a fire. She lost another to seventeen years in prison, as the judge’s assurance was prophetic: Bunch’s sister raised her son.
With the help of two private attorneys and the staff of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, an innocence project based at Northwestern University in Illinois, the entire arson case against Bunch finally was revealed to be baseless. The laboratory tests for accelerants were flat-out wrong—the fire was not started with petroleum products, and evidence in a later civil suit suggests it was fabricated by the authorities. Three other fire experts said the burn pattern analysis was wrong and that the correct ruling on the origin and cause of the fire could only be “undetermined.” The original trial judge scoffed at these findings and upheld the conviction. Years more of appeals were needed to finally set Bunch free.
The most striking similarity to the Parks case, however, was in the prosecutorial portrait of a murderous mom, which helped drive the jury to convict Bunch. That portrait also may explain why the trial judge remained unmoved by new evidence of innocence that appellate judges new to the case found to be powerful. The official attack on Bunch’s character was virtually the same as the portrait of Jo Ann Parks drawn by Deputy District Attorney Dinko Bozanich. At Bunch’s trial, the prosecutor argued that she was a neglectful mother who had barely tried to save her son from the burning mobile home, if she’d tried at all. After the fire, the prosecutor said she showed little or no remorse—she didn’t cry enough, or sincerely enough. The prosecutor also claimed (despite testimony to the contrary) that Bunch had wanted to give up custody of her son before the fire. The prosecutor argued that this desire to be rid of parental responsibilities demonstrated a motive for murder—not unlike the prosecution’s take on tubal ligation in the Parks case as demonstrating motive to kill.
According to a study by attorneys Andrea L. Lewis and Sara L. Sommervold of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, this sort of attack on women defendants in arson murders and other “heinous” criminal cases is very common and extremely effective. They found:
“Two types of flawed mothers are portrayed within the criminal justice system: the ‘mad’ mother, the superior caretaker who has conformed to traditional gender roles but merely committed an irrational act because she was mentally ill; and the ‘bad’ mother, who simply is a cold, callous woman incapable of caregiving and is therefore non-feminine.
“The bad mother falls into the cultural archetype of the Female Monster.”
Kristine Bunch was lucky, a Female Monster released after just seventeen years in prison.
Jo Ann Parks is in her twenty-eighth year as resident Female Monster.
15
The Monster Speaks
I try not to hope,” Jo Ann Parks whispers into a grimy visitor’s-room telephone. “I have resigned myself to life in prison. To working here. To friends here. Hoping and then still not getting out, that would be too much. Too hard.”
But a moment later, the woman in the rumpled blue county jail overalls, her long, dark hair plaited and streaked with gray, admits this isn’t quite true. She does hope. After two decades of seeing every roommate, friend, coworker, and enemy come and go as she remained, the LWOP on her file—Life Without Parole—giving her every reason never to hope again, she has given in. She has a habeas hearing under way, which she never really believed would happen. She has been visited by a representative of California governor Jerry Brown to see if she’d be worthy of a pardon, something she never thought possible. And her former roommate and girlfriend has gotten out and found a job in Hawaii, and given Parks a standing invitation to join her there if she wins her freedom.
“So, yeah, I am hopeful,” she says reluctantly, without a smile, almost without expression, but eyes pressed closed. “To be honest, I’m on pins and needles.”
It is Christmastime at the cheerless, slit-windowed twin towers of Los Angeles County’s Century Regional Detention Facility. The main holding place for LA’s women inmates, it is tucked next to a feverishly busy elevated freeway in an industrial zone of the city of Lynwood, across the highway from an auto dismantling plant. If there were views available to inmates at the top of its West Tower—which there are not—the neighborhood where Jo Ann Parks’s first house fire took place would be visible a couple of miles up the road. The West Tower is Parks’s home away from home while her habeas corpus hearing is held. She has spent half her life at the state’s largest penitentiary for women, 265 miles north in rural Chowchilla, California. The distance is too great to keep shuttling her back and forth to hearings in downtown Los Angeles, so she is in the jail indefinitely. And jail time is hard time: She misses her job, her meds, her friends, the ability to walk the yard, to be on familiar ground, to know what to expect. County jail means most hours spent in a cell, with little to do but worry.
The jail visitor’s center is decorated for Christmas with a sad gaudiness. Big tempera Christmas trees, elves, and snowmen are painted on the windows behind the front desk, which is festooned with shiny gold garlands. The airport-style metal detector to safeguard against visitors bringing in contraband has been decorated with white and red candy-cane stripes. A small silver Christmas tree is set up on top of a display warning visitors against bringing forbidden items into jail (prescription drugs, makeup, ballpoint pens—the list is extensive and not very merry). Another poster urges visitors to tell someone in authority if they witness severe signs of depression in an inmate. YOU COULD SAVE SOMEONE’S LIFE!
The visitor line is long at the women’s lockup. It is always long, but the holidays bring the hordes and a special air of desperation. The queue is filled with children gripping the hands of their grandmothers or fathers, waiting to be ushered through the candy-striped metal detector. Then they must follow painted lines on the floor that match a colored ticket the guards hand each visitor. This leads them to the correct bank of elevators to be whisked up the tower, where Mommy waits behind a visiting booth’s thick glass window.
Parks gets few visitors. Her mother stopped coming just two years after she was imprisoned. Her siblings have never visited. Her lawyer visits regularly now that she is in Los Angeles, as well as Mary Ross, daughter of fire investigator Robert Lowe, a principal link to the outside world. Parks has been sick with flu-like symptoms that everyone in the jail seems to have. She worked for years in prison in a facility that makes dentures, but here in the jail she says she has been put to work counseling younger inmates on how to prepare for prison life. She had certainly learned the hard way, targeted at first by other inmates for being a convicted child killer, learning over time how to avoid confrontation, keeping her background quiet, gradually building friendships and trust with a few other lifers.
She has taken classes and jobs that she felt would make her marketable if she ever got out.
After all these years, she still finds it hard to talk about the fire without tearing up—quiet tears, not sobbing. She is still emotionally flat outwardly. “It’s just who I am.” She shrugs.
She says she regrets not testifying at her trial, not telling her story to the jurors. She is tortured by the possibility that it might have made a difference, but her attorney assured her it was an unnecessary risk, that “We don’t need it.” She says she wanted to jump up time and again and shout, “No, that’s not true!” during the prosecution’s case, but all she did was stare straight ahead, not making eye contact with jurors, as her attorney had instructed. The hardest part was listening to her husband, Ron, describe the children as “spilt milk.”
“He made me feel like he didn’t love the kids at all,” she said. “That they meant nothing to him.”
Yet she refused entreaties to implicate Ron, who died of cancer in 2011, having divorced Jo Ann and married again in 2009. When the guilty verdict came in and the penalty phase that would determine a life or death sentence was about to begin, Parks had a choice. As she tells it, her defense team pointed out that
if it were true, she could save her own life by saying she knew Ron had set up some sort of device to start a fire that night. Did he want to sue the landlords? Was it her job to save the kids, but the plan backfired?
According to Parks, she refused to say anything of the kind. “It’s not true. I couldn’t say that. I wouldn’t.”
She says she’s taken responsibility for what happened in another way. “Even though I didn’t set the fire, I felt like I shouldn’t be alive. If anybody should have died that night, it should have been me, not them.”
The habeas hearing has been hard, she says. The holding cells in the court building are intensely uncomfortable, long waits on hard benches in handcuffs. She arrives in court stiff and limping, hands cuffed to belly chain, but that’s not the worst of it, she says. The worst part is the hearing. Each day in court consists of hours of delay and waiting, bracketed by interminable stretches of technical testimony. And then, just when everyone in the court is fighting to maintain focus, eyes heavy, seat aching, some riveting and terrible bit of information will surface: a description of the 911 call, a reference to Ronnie’s closet, or a projection of some chilling photographs of her old burned house. That’s all it takes to trigger the old shock, the old memories of that night. She buries her face in her hands. When pictures of her burned children flash up on the courtroom’s big screen, Raquel Cohen rubs her back and murmurs, “Stay calm, it’ll be okay.” The prosecution team eyes her with steely resolve and suspects it’s all theater.
“I just want it be over,” she says. “I loved my babies. I didn’t set the fire. But I didn’t save them, either.”
* * *
• • •
While at the jail, Parks took an English class to pass the time and try to learn something instead of worrying and pacing. The teacher was so impressed with Parks’s work on an essay on prison life he assigned that he entered it into an annual talent show contest sponsored by the posh, old-money Los Angeles Athletic Club. She would get to read her work at the club—if she earned her release in time. The essay was entitled “Inside/Outside.”
INSIDE
When you first go to prison you are scared of the unknown. You see nothing but chain-link fences, buildings, dead grass, dirt, and bushes. You notice all the different gangs for they are all separated in groups and by color. The women are talking, laughing, some are even crying. You hear alarms going off and see the women get to the ground. You hear the clanging of keys all around you. Your senses are on overdrive because there is so much going on around you that you are not used to seeing or hearing, it takes a minute to adjust. The smells are strange to you. You’re outside, you smell dirt in the air or the stench of the porta pottys being cleaned, the traps from the kitchen being cleaned. You even get the smell of death because there is an animal that hid and died somewhere near. The unit’s swamp coolers have this fishy-moldy smell. You even get the smells from the kitchen. When the food is being cooked, sometimes it smells good, sometimes it smells like rotten meat. Over the years of being there the unknown becomes normal to you. You get used to the smells and sights all around you. This is your new normal.
It’s normal to hear loud intercoms all day long of all kinds of announcements, or deputies yelling. It’s normal to hear a locker slam or drawer to a door being slammed. Hearing women yelling down the halls or even screaming. To see fights or even to witness someone getting beat by more than one person at a time. You adjust quickly because it’s a different world and you have to survive. So you watch everything that everyone is doing. You see more than you like to at times. You see women selling or doing drugs, tattooing being done, women having sex in the dayroom or on yards. You notice arguments starting and you know you need to get away. You are scared and shocked at first but with time it becomes normal. You get schooled by the lifers that have been there longer than you. They show you how to survive and the unspoken rules of prison.
The unspoken rules are: 1. You don’t tell anything you see. 2. You don’t get involved. 3. You never cosign for anyone. 4. Never buy anything you can’t pay for because they will beat you up and steal all your property, canteen, and boxes that your family sends and you will still owe them. 5. Never stop a fight, you may end up taking the beating for the girl you tried to save. 6. You tell, you are considered a snitch and sometimes they will slit your face from ear to mouth as a sign that, “you hear, you tell.”
So you have choices and decisions you need to make. You can run the yard with the gangbangers and help them to do their dirty work. You can do drugs or pills, stay high and in trouble. You can make pruno (alcohol), stay drunk, sick, and fighting. You can even fight your way around prison. All of this gets you write-ups, jail (the hole), [or administrative segregation] c/c (you get out only two hours a day).
Or you can make the decision that you are going to do something positive with your time. . . .
16
The Bias Man
The battle over bias in the forensic sciences—and fire investigation in particular—is the justice system’s holy war. It’s not just about finding the best way to investigate flashover fires, or arguing the scientific reliability of using dogs to sniff out accelerants used by arsonists. (As to that: The National Fire Protection Association says that canine alerts are useful but too error prone unless confirmed by lab tests, though some jurisdictions insist on prosecuting based on dog evidence alone.)
The question of investigative bias is something else entirely, striking at the fallibility of the humans who employ the technique and technology of forensics and crime-fighting. And that is anything but impersonal. The divide over bias has grown as absolute as a religious schism, as evolution versus creationism, as nature versus nurture, or baseball versus football. There is little common ground between the purists, who say the scientific determination of the origin and cause at a fire scene should focus solely on the physical evidence at the scene, and the practicalists, who say a proper analysis must be informed by the totality of the circumstances, from the character of the suspect to their potential motives for causing a fire.
The two sides are so far apart that they often seem to speak different languages during the ritual confrontations of the courtroom. Observing one of them testify while the other side sits and watches is a distinctive spectacle, marked by the constant shaking of heads on one side or the other.
The very first witness in the Jo Ann Parks habeas corpus hearing sits squarely in the purist camp, an absolutist whose views earn scorn from many in law enforcement. But Paul Bieber argues that the facts are on his side. The former San Francisco firefighter turned fire investigator turned expert witness has researched wrongful arson convictions in the United States and has found that a large majority were contaminated by cognitive bias that, he believes, affected the outcome of the investigation. And the source of that bias, Bieber argues, is investigators’ exposure to information that has nothing to do with the scientific analysis of a fire scene.
“It is not an insult to say cognitive bias is present in an investigation, though many investigators take it that way,” Bieber says. “Here’s the problem: Once you make up your mind, it is violently contrary to human behavior to change your mind. . . . That is the challenge. That is the starting point of cognitive bias.”
Bieber argues this tendency exists in even the most well-intentioned experts, which is why he believes fire investigators need to be a blank slate when they walk into the remains of a house fire. In his view, the only information that should contribute to a scientific opinion on how a fire started should be the burn patterns and other physical evidence present at the scene. Eyewitness accounts of fire behavior, whether from firefighters, occupants of the house, or neighbors, can also be considered. And that’s it. No exceptions.
He believes the Parks case is a textbook example of how failure to exclude extraneous information can lead an investigation astray. Consider, he suggests, the electrical cords deemed to be an incendi
ary device by the lead arson investigator in the Parks fire.
“Let’s say you go into the Jo Ann Parks home without any knowledge of the background. You don’t know she had a previous fire. You don’t know she has a friend talking about dosing kids with cough medicine. You’re simply performing a forensic investigation of a fire scene, which means you are applying scientific, engineering, and technical principles to the investigation of physical and empirical evidence. That’s what it is supposed to be.
“Now, say you have five experts of equal experience, but they go in in blind, shielded circumstances, never hearing any of this extraneous bullshit about the mom or the case, because they don’t need to know that to examine the physical evidence. How many of those five experts look at those wires and say, I don’t know what that is; it looks like a bunch of wires? And how many say, This is clearly a failed incendiary device?
“What value is that opinion scientifically if I can’t reach it without adding in extraneous information? Because without that extraneous information, all I see there is a bunch of wires.”
A classic example of an arson finding based on expectation bias instead of a scientific analysis was described years ago by author and fire investigator Shelly Reuben, in an essay recalling a nonfatal house fire on the Jersey shore in the 1980s. Before the origin and cause investigation of the fire scene had begun, insurance and police detectives had determined that the house had been burned down deliberately by the owner. They had compiled an extensive list of “red flags” that seemed to make an arson finding inevitable: