Disturbed Ground

by NORTON, CARLA

  Williamson looked up, astounded, then jumped up out of his chair. He pulled a fat binder off his shelf, slapped it down on his desk, barked, "There it is!" then bolted from the room, leaving them with mouths agape.

  That may have been the beginning of the end.

  Perhaps rumblings of resentment toward the district attorney compelled him to make a move, or perhaps Williamson was simply too good to languish for long without a promotion. In any case, when the attorney general's office offered George Williamson a position as assistant chief deputy early in 1991, he snapped it up.

  Once Williamson had left the DA's office, the Puente case was in danger of slipping back into legal limbo. How long would this case languish before being brought to trial?

  Maybe John O'Mara figured that after losing two prosecutors—first Tim Frawley and now George Williamson—he really had only one option: just go ahead and try the damn case himself.

  It seemed natural enough. O'Mara and Williamson had been trying the toughest cases. And as head of major crimes, Assistant Chief Deputy John O'Mara had handled the case while Puente was on the run. But while O'Mara was bright, experienced, and well-respected, his caseload was approaching overload.

  Lately, it seemed that nearly every high-profile case ended up on O'Mara's calendar. Before Puente, Sacramento's most notorious murder case was the People v. Morris Solomon, and O'Mara was not only handling this seven-murder-count death penalty case, but also a host of other major cases. In fact, he was prosecuting so many of Sacramento's biggest cases that others in the office began to secretly grouse that he was becoming "a glory hound."

  John O'Mara was a quick study, but at the very least, he was stretching himself awfully thin. "I'd be worried," he admitted, "except that George handled the prelim."

  The news that George Williamson wouldn't be prosecuting Puente left Ruth Munroe's children feeling stung. William Clausen, in particular, felt victimized by the assembly-line judicial process, betrayed by the attorneys who had invited his confidence and then abandoned the case, passing his mother's file along to the next guy.

  And he felt fresh aggravation over the botched investigation of 1982. Why hadn't Puente been tried for their mother's murder back then? They'd put their faith in Deputy DA William Wood, coming to him for justice. But Wood, who'd just finished prosecuting Puente on other charges and was wrapping up so he could leave the DA's office to start a writing career, just wrote a few memos, passed the case along, and disappeared.

  The investigation went nowhere, and it's clear that somebody dropped the ball. With bitterness, Bill Clausen grumbled, "I feel that the DA's office just didn't want to do anything."

  Meanwhile, the change in prosecutors gave the defense team reason to grin. As Clymo saw it, O'Mara would be "less combative" than Williamson. Better yet, while they'd had more than two years to map strategy and gather information, the overburdened Mr. O’Mara was starting from scratch.

  The legal machinery moves to its own rhythms—at times gliding with a sleek and awful beauty, at others, as slow and creaky as worn brakes—and the Puente case, plagued with problems, would be an example of jurisprudence at its most sluggish. Delays and false starts would be its hallmark.

  Puente's trial date was slated for March 18, 1991… then rescheduled to June 15, 1991… then Clymo was suggesting October or November as more realistic. When O'Mara mentioned to Vlautin that they should try to finish pretrial motions before Christmas, Vlautin blinked at him and said, "How about starting everything after Christmas?" So, when it was rescheduled for January 15, 1992, it seemed that Puente's trial would start more than three years after her arrest. But even that late date would prove overly optimistic.

  One delay came as no surprise: a change of venue hearing.

  On February 8, 1992, Clymo and Vlautin began a carefully choreographed presentation of charts and diagrams showing that Dorothea Puente's name and visage had never fully disappeared from the public eye. National coverage may have waned from time to time, but the local media's appetite for Dorothea Puente stories was never sated. She would never get a fair trial here, the defense said.

  Beyond the normal helping of news, a good deal of peculiar humor had percolated through Sacramento, further contaminating the jury pool. To back their argument, they presented the humorous handbills and fliers they'd collected.

  Several blowups were submitted as evidence, including one large display of a widely circulated "gift certificate" touting "Dorothea Puente's Bed and Breakfast":

  Come be our guest for an indefinite stay in one of our luxury suites. (Social Security welcome.) Everlasting tours of the beautiful gardens by special arrangement. (Complimentary drinks!)

  House sleeps 4; yard sleeps 7.

  Peter Vlautin also presented a popular T-shirt showing Dorothea Puente standing with a pocketful of pills and a shovel (a takeoff on the famous painting, American Gothic), with body parts sticking out of the ground behind her, and "Sacramento: I Dig It" emblazoned across the front.

  For much of the week-long hearing, the defense team relied on two expert witnesses (Edward Bronson, a California State University professor of public law, and Dr. Linda Meza, a litigation consultant), who provided persuasive testimony that Dorothea Montalvo Puente could not get a fair trial in Sacramento County. According to their surveys, for example, 98 percent of the population in Sacramento County had heard of Dorothea Puente, and of those, over 75 percent believed she was guilty!

  In his heart, John O'Mara was resigned to the judge granting a change of venue. He managed to shoot a few holes in his opponents' case, but in the end their evidence was overwhelming. The judge ruled that Dorothea Puente should be tried out of county.

  Another delay.

  The trial could be sent anywhere in the state, north or south. The problem would be finding a county able to accommodate such a mammoth trial. It would be a burden, tying up a courtroom for months, jamming up the local court calendar with an out-of-county headache.

  "Nobody wants it," O'Mara admitted with a shrug.

  Time seemed to be on Dorothea's side. For the defense, waiving Puente's right to a speedy trial may have been a strategic ace. With each delay, vigor was slowly drip, drip, dripping out of the prosecution's case like an old, leaky faucet. And with each passing year, their client grew more sympathetic: older, paler, more grandmotherly. Serial killers were supposed to have tattoos and heavy beards; Dorothea Puente looked about as menacing as a slow-moving, fat old cat.

  Boxes of files and binders of reports jammed the shelves climbing all four walls of John O'Mara's office, which wasn't any larger than others on the fourth floor of the DA's office, despite his title: Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney, Major Crimes Division Supervisor. Sitting in the midst of this, O'Mara calmly sifted through piles of documents. His desk seemed a tiny island of calm, threatened by towering waves of white paper poised to crash down with horrific tales of murder and mayhem.

  He was a paradox. Leaning back in his chair for a moment, O'Mara might look relaxed—in a snapshot, he might even appear serene or merry—yet he ran on nervous energy, fueled by the coffee that he gulped continuously from dawn till nearly midnight. He could be brusque and abrasive, bulldozing through ideas nonstop, words blasting out of him in the habit of courtroom oratory; or he could be wryly funny, turning his quick wit to the stress-releasing antics that often commenced at the end of the working day, dubbed the "four o'clock follies."

  Irish Catholic and a dedicated family man, John O'Mara was intensely private about his personal life. He kept his office bare of any framed pictures of his family: his wife of twenty-two years, Pat, and their children, Molly, sixteen, and Conner, eleven. He strove to keep his personal and professional lives separate, preferring to arrive at the office at 5:00 a.m. rather than work late and miss his family's daily dramas. Still, while tending chores on his five-acre property, his profession would intrude. "That's when I have my best ideas," he said. "Things come to me when I'm shaving or mowing the lawn."


  In the office, wearing natty suspenders with a conservative suit, O'Mara was hard to picture in a pastoral setting. He claimed that he had "never intended to be a prosecutor, never wanted to be a lawyer," yet he'd landed in the Sacramento DA's office in 1973, and had been prosecuting homicides almost ever since.

  The secret to O'Mara's success as a prosecutor was his ability to single-mindedly obsess about a case. Problem was, while Kevin Clymo and Peter Vlautin had been studying Puente's case since day one, O'Mara was now utterly immersed in another murder trial, that of Morris Solomon.

  Maybe it hadn't been the best idea for him to handle both Solomon and Puente himself. Even O'Mara conceded, "The fire that's about to bum you is the one you work on." And while the Solomon trial was scorching his heels, the Puente files lay cold. He had yet to do even a thorough review of the record. And it showed. Bottom line, whenever O'Mara was asked about Puente, he instead ended up answering about Solomon.

  There were similarities, sure. Serial killer. Multiple buried bodies. Complex forensic studies. But except that he was African American, Morris Solomon fit fairly snugly into the serial killer profile, with his history of violence, with his victims being mostly prostitutes who hazarded across his path, and with the simple facts of his age and gender. Dorothea Puente was a whole 'nother animal.

  (But both defendants were equally affected by the events of April 21, 1992. For the first time in twenty-five years, after a frantic volley of last-minute appeals, San Quentin's gas chamber was readied and California carried out a state-run execution. For a quarter of a century, California's death penalty had been given in name only. That changed as lethal cyanide fumes reached the nostrils of Robert Alton Harris. Every prisoner on death row, every defendant facing murder charges, felt the seismic jolt of California's legal apparatus. The road to San Quentin had just gotten shorter.)

  It was hard not to see Solomon's death penalty trial as a dress rehearsal for Puente's, because opposing counsels in the Solomon case were both Puente's prosecutor, John O'Mara, and her defense attorney, Peter Vlautin.

  A months-long trial eventually convicted Solomon on six of seven murder counts, but then the jury slammed all expectations: They were hung on the penalty phase. This could mean a sentence of life without parole by default, but the DA's office deemed this case too big to let slip to a lesser sentence. The penalty phase would have to be retried, which put an ugly knot in the court calendar. Puente's trial was delayed again.

  In the meantime, John Mara's amusing, satirical side vanished beneath a load of worry. What if the second jury was hung too? As the retrial wound toward completion, he grew edgy and snappish. One colleague muttered, "It's like he has PMS."

  On July 6, 1992, the second jury weighing the fate of Morris Solomon sentenced Solomon to death. Though the trial was finally over, this raised a vexing question: Could Puente's trial, too, end in a hung jury? After all, big, mean Morris Solomon was a much scarier defendant than little old Grandma Puente.

  Beyond trying to prove Dorothea Puente innocent, Clymo and Vlautin were also trying to limit the ways in which she might be found guilty, to shave off bits here and there. Their tool for this task? Pretrial motions.

  The list was long and the files were thick. Two dozen motions were developed, word-processed, photocopied, and added to the fray; in every way imaginable, Clymo and Vlautin implored the judge to restrict the ways in which Dorothea Puente could be found guilty.

  O'Mara scoured each motion for hints, trying to anticipate tactics. He felt handicapped by his embryonic understanding of the case. They'd had four years to investigate and refine, but O'Mara was only beginning to dredge the files for nuggets of insight. They knew more about his case than he did.

  In mid-September, Judge Michael J. Virga heard motions to strike, motions to dismiss, and motions to exclude. Some O'Mara conceded without a fight, others he railed against. The judge granted some but denied most.

  The defense also presented material for a questionnaire to be used in screening potential jurors. Reviewing this, O'Mara drew the conclusion that the defense would argue that Dorothea Puente was a victim of child abuse. Psychology was not his strong suit.

  Even at this late date, the prosecutor knew very little about the defendant he was trying to put to death. He was still so green to this case that he accepted the probation reports as gospel, even swallowing Puente's unlikely version of her history (that she was Mexican, the youngest of eighteen children, and so on).

  One morning during these proceedings, O'Mara was confused when he overheard Clymo and Vlautin talking about "Dot." He finally broke in, "Who's Dot?"

  Clymo grinned at him. "Dottie. Dorothea."

  With just over a month until jury selection, John O'Mara was finally focusing his considerable mental wattage on the trial of Dorothea Montalvo Puente. He spoke with witnesses for the very first time, including Judy Moise, who wasn't thrilled to have this ghastly business haunting her again. So much time had passed, she'd begun to feel content with letting her memoiy fade.

  To O'Mara's surprise, Ruth Munroe's children came in "with an attitude." He bristled at how they edged in to "audition" him, "to see if I was good enough to handle the case." He couldn't understand why the family hadn't come in before.

  To his dismay, O'Mara now found dozens upon dozens of angles that needed to be followed up, yet the files had been lying fallow for all these years. No one in the police department was eager to roll up his sleeves, so O'Mara cranked up his own investigation, wearing the soles off the shoes of John Dacre and Frank Dale, criminal investigators with the DA's Office.

  "The defense has more money to spend," O'Mara groused. "And they do spend it. Lavishly. We don't have the resources."

  The years had eaten away at his case like battery acid. Records had been lost or destroyed. Witnesses were impossible to locate, had trouble remembering details, or had passed away. There was virtually no one left from the 1982 charges that O'Mara could call to the stand—Malcolm McKenzie, Dorothy Gosling, and Esther Busby had all died.

  Steeped in these files, O'Mara felt a fresh anxiety: Maybe George Williamson hadn't done as complete a job as he'd thought. Of course, Williamson couldn't have imagined that it would take so long to bring this case to trial.

  Now O'Mara grappled with the elements of nine alleged murders— nine!—wondering how to make all of the pieces fit, feeling like he was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.

  How could she have accomplished these seven burials without a single witness, or without an accomplice? Who was lying? What if the jury couldn't tolerate the purely circumstantial evidence?

  Dorothea Montalvo Puente. She was baffling, so far outside the ugly sweep of "common" killers, so far beyond the almost prosaic brutality of those he'd prosecuted before. Other serial killers attract attention with guns and blood, with the violence of their slayings. Yet she'd killed quietly, as women often do, and no one even noticed.

  Female murderers are usually drug-crazed girlfriends, betrayed wives, or those infrequent "black widows" who kill their husbands. But Dorothea Puente seemed to have less in common with reality than with fiction; she drugged and disposed of her tenants like the Brewster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace.

  One FBI adage goes: "Men kill in the bedroom, women kill in the kitchen." At least she fit that part of the profile, killing with poisons, the woman's weapon of choice. Non-confrontational. Silent. And so easily mistaken for death by natural causes.

  And what about the victims? O'Mara sipped his coffee and stared at the reports, wondering what these inky pages could possibly say about the last moments of their lives. Had she approached them with a slick routine, handing them cocktails, saying in a low, soothing voice, "Drink this, dear, it will make you feel better?" Had she watched them carefully, reading each flutter of the eyelids, waiting for her cue? Had she then gripped an elbow, cooing softly as she helped them off to bed, laying them down, tucking them in—just like a nurse, just like Mom? Had she stood over
them, watching?

  And had they looked up at her with gratitude, lulled into sweet repose, mistaking the warm embrace of false comfort? Had any of them—even dimly, even for an instant—realized that this was to be their final rest? Staring up into those ice-blue eyes, had they glimpsed the ultimate realization that she was their killer?

  O'Mara took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. There had to be something else, something elusive, something they had all missed. There had to be. There always was.

  He wrestled again with trying to picture the scene. He tried to work out the steps, trying to get inside her head. He flipped through papers and photographs for the umpteenth time, hoping to spot some new pattern….

  A glimmer of an idea began to buzz around his head, like a mosquito just beyond his peripheral vision.

  What was it? It buzzed past him. He looked harder.

  And then he saw it. So simple. Like a child's prank, obvious and surprising at the same moment.

  But was it too simple? Did it prove anything?

  Maybe so. Maybe this could work. Besides, he didn't have much choice.

  With little else to work with, O'Mara plunged into his task of crafting a convincing case out of raw circumstance. Details, details. He swam through them with Olympic speed. This was his strength, fashioning copious amounts of amorphous detail into something strong and sharp with which to pierce the armor of defense.

  Photos of the crime scene were shuffled into order and enlarged. Diagrams of the house, of the yard, of the graves, were blown up and prepared for display. Witnesses were subpoenaed: one hundred-fifty, -sixty, -seventy, on toward two hundred and more. He would bludgeon the defense with bulk, he would confound them with sheer volume. And he would sabotage them with the utter finesse of his logic.

  PART VI: TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

  There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.

  — Clarence Darrow, 1936

  Justice is not blind, nor is she evenhanded. The scales do not balance and they cannot be made to balance. Not, that is, until we are freed of our humanity and turned to demigods. And then justice will no longer be needed.