by Edward Humes
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
Laura Lawhon had watched the lawyer stagger to his car and drive off, shaking her head, feeling just as devastated as he did, but willing herself to stay strong, to meet the eyes of the gloating cops and jurors who had gathered together like conspirators after the trial. The defense lawyer could drive off and lick his wounds; Laura, the private investigator, had to stay on and continue with the case, to try to turn things around, to hunt down some forgotten clue that might pry the case back open and offer another chance to prove the client innocent. The odds of this were not good.
It wasn’t really the lawyer’s fault, Laura knew, yet she couldn’t help feeling as if something had been missed, some words left unuttered, some proof left unoffered—some path she, as an investigator, had not taken. They were an out-of-town defense team new to Kern County and its ways, with only three months to prepare for trial. They had tried to take a crash course on the place—or so they had believed. Laura had carefully researched the local judges and they managed to get their case before a former public defender, figuring that he, at least, would give them a fair shake in a county known for its hanging jurists and merciless prosecutors. This judge, Laura learned, had distinguished himself during a dark episode in Bakersfield’s recent past that many called the Witch Hunt. Hysteria had swept the community then after the “discovery” of massive rings of child molesters, some of them suspected of devil worship and human sacrifice. The wave of arrests that followed sparked a national panic about satanic child abuse and spawned a torrent of similar prosecutions. That such a baneful national phenomenon began not in sin-addled Los Angeles, but right here in California’s heartland, became a lasting source of shame for a community that considered itself a shrine to family values—the “All-America City,” as Bakersfield billed itself. Much of the evidence turned out to be bogus, but dozens of people went to prison anyway, some with sentences of hundreds of years, as the authorities sought to purge the evil—and stepped over the line from prosecution to persecution. The Witch Hunt became so pervasive that innocent mothers and fathers grew afraid to discipline or touch their own children for fear they, too, would be accused. But Laura had learned that one judge in Kern County had stood up to the hysteria, accusing the sheriff and the district attorney of brainwashing children and breaking the law, and he insisted on reuniting families that the authorities had torn asunder. The judge was pilloried at the time, but now, six years later, as innocents falsely imprisoned during those terrible years were set free, he seemed a visionary. When Laura told the defense lawyer about him, the attorney excitedly announced, “This is the judge we want.”
To their dismay, however, this same judge seemed to take every opportunity to rule against Laura’s client. He skewered the defense regularly and vigorously, seeming to take offense at the slightest suggestion, real or imagined, that the big-city, out-of-town lawyers considered him a bumpkin. His rulings had greatly bolstered what on paper appeared to be a very shaky prosecution case.
Yet, even with a hostile judge and adverse rulings, Laura had given the defense attorney all the ammunition he should have needed to take apart the prosecutor’s case and reveal it as a passel of unproved suspicions, outright lies and insinuations lacking evidence to back them up. So what if the defendant hadn’t acted like the Hallmark greeting-card version of a devoted, grieving husband? So what if he laughed a little when he called the sheriff’s department? So what if he waited a while before calling the cops? Maybe he kept hoping against hope she would return to him. Maybe he wanted to spare her the embarrassment of telling all her friends she was losing it. So what? Laura had fought such insinuations with hard evidence and testimony that, she felt certain, demonstrated her client’s innocence. She had even marched into court with the brother of the state’s star witness in tow, who explained how the key testimony in the prosecution’s case had been concocted. What more could a jury ask for? The DA had been left reeling, Laura thought, and the defense lawyer, exhilarated.
The outcome seemed so obvious that, toward the end, the foreman of the jury, a country-and-western musician with long dark hair and an oversized wooden cross around his neck, had started flashing thumbs-up signs and small, sly grins at the defendant’s family and the defense team when he’d walk by in the hall. It was totally improper, of course, but what were they supposed to do? Complain? God, Laura thought now, if only they had.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
It was a setup, a cruel joke. They had come to Bakersfield and figured it would be like trying a case anywhere else, cocky big-city lawyers slumming in a small town. Instead, they had stumbled into the front lines of the nation’s “war on crime,” a buzz saw of a justice system manned by veteran, accomplished career prosecutors, juries that were inclined to convict more often than most, and a startling record of imprisoning more people per capita than most any other place in the country. Only later did Laura find out that, inside the jury room, the jury foreman with the smile and the thumbs-up gestures had been leading the charge to convict. It seemed unbelievable: A second lawyer on the defense team, a veteran former prosecutor who knew a good case when he saw one, had to excuse himself to throw up after the verdict was read. The head of the private investigation firm that employed Laura had sat slack-jawed in disbelief when the clerk unfolded the scrap of paper and read the verdict. Only Laura had seen hints of things to come. Before deliberations began, her boss had offered her double or nothing on her fee if the client was found innocent, but she had said no, she’d just take her hours, win or lose, and leave it at that. Somehow, Laura had known. She had looked at the jurors and had seen what everyone else on the defense team had missed, just as she had sensed something dark and troubling below the surface of this case—and this town—from the very beginning. She had even tried to warn the others, to tell them about some of the other cases she had come across here, convictions that seemed to materialize out of thin air. There had been suspects threatened, coerced and tricked into confessing to crimes that they did not necessarily commit. In some cases, remaining silent when accused had been considered evidence of guilt rather than a constitutional right dating back to the Founding Fathers. Blacks and Hispanics complained of being excluded from jury service, as if this were the 1950s instead of the 1990s. The same people responsible for imprisoning innocents during the Witch Hunt days were still in power, as popular as ever, and prosecuting this case. The war on crime was out of control here, Laura had warned. The local lawyers even had a saying for it, rueful and sad, one she had heard over and over again in this courthouse: “Only in Kern County.”
The rest of the defense team hadn’t taken it seriously. The local lawyers were just whiners, it was suggested. Other cases didn’t matter. Their client was one of Bakersfield’s elite: Republican, white, a high school principal who married into wealth, yet still a country boy through and through. Jurors would see him as one of their own. The lawyers were sure of it: This one was a winner, even in Kern County.
“But I’m innocent,” Patrick O’Dale Dunn had whispered numbly after hearing the jury pronounce him guilty of murdering his wife for her millions. The defense lawyer had cried then, too, bawling like a baby right in the middle of the courtroom, and the client had tried to comfort him with a pat on the back, saying it would be all right. Which only made it worse, because everyone on the team knew that it would take something close to a miracle for it to be all right now. They’d have to scrape around frantically for some new bit of evidence and then fight like hell to justify a new trial. Even then, the satisfied look on the judge’s face and the burning in Laura’s stomach told her how it would likely end up. Unless she could come up with that miracle, a man she felt certain was innocent would spend the rest of his life in prison.
For now, the attorney who had been so sure of victory just a few hours earlier couldn’t do a damn thing about it except cry, his face wet with angry, useless tears as his car climbed the Grapevine Pass and raced toward the Kern County line. Laura envied hi
m his escape. It was up to her now, to knock on more doors, to ask more questions, to search for answers that she thought she already had found, but which twelve seemingly reasonable people had rejected. If there was to be a reversal of this verdict and a new trial for her client, she would have to start from scratch and unearth new answers, ponder once again who killed Alexandra Dunn and why—and what forces at work in this place might have led to her client’s conviction. And, given the confidence-shattering verdict, she’d be a fool not to entertain another possibility: Could she have been all wrong about this evidence, this town, this client? Might it be that this irascible man with the stubborn streak and ill-timed quips—whom Laura nevertheless had come to care for deeply—had killed his wife after all?
“You’re not gonna give up on this old man, are you, Laura?” he whispered to her as she gathered her files to leave the courtroom. His eyes were wide and glassy. Shock, Laura thought to herself, and she forced a smile, feeling guilty for the questions she had been silently asking. Yet part of her did wonder, even then: Was it all an act? Then Pat Dunn’s papery voice called out to her again, sounding harsh and loud in the empty courtroom though still but a whisper. “You still believe in me, don’t you?” he pleaded.
The room suddenly seemed musty and disused with the crowd departed. Laura stared at Pat a long time before she finally nodded and answered, a sad half smile on her lips: “Only in Kern County.”5
PART I
Pat and Sandy
And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains. . . . They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to find a home, and they found only hatred. Okies.
—JOHN STEINBECK,
The Grapes of Wrath
1
BAKERSFIELD IS LESS THAN A TWO-HOUR DRIVE FROM downtown Los Angeles, yet it has always existed in happy isolation, kept separate from the smog and sprawl of its southern neighbor by the iron gray of the Tehachapi Mountains and the treacherous asphalt snake of the Grapevine Pass, its one connection to the urban centers of Southern California. To cross the Grapevine and its sparse brown brush and stony thumbs of granite jutting through thin soil is to enter a different world, the antithesis of the California of popular imagination.
On the northern side of the Grapevine lies the vast brown and green checkerboard of Kern County, a fertile flatland dominated by big farms and small towns and a people who take outsized pride in being not Los Angeles. It is a land not of glitter or oiled bodies on white-sand beaches or any of the other icons of the California Dream, but of crude oil and tractors, of black dirt under the fingernails and molten, breezeless summers, a place virtually unknown to tourists, though the fruits of its oil derricks and furrows can be found in most every American’s gas tank and pantry.
The city of Bakersfield and its 221,700 citizens preside over an otherwise rural county larger than many states. Once a wonderland of lakes, streams and riparian forest, it was blasted into desert seventy years ago by the voracious faucets of Los Angeles, then irrigated just as voraciously into some of the most productive farmland on earth. As a boy, Pat Dunn ran home from his summer job through a dense, green jungle of trees and brush lining the riverbed that divides the city. The chapped landscape of Bakersfield today was known to its frontier settlers as Kern Island, but the river that cut through and enveloped it long ago became a dry and empty sandlot most years. Gone, too, is the vast Tulare Lake, where fishermen once caught giant terrapin for turtle soup served in San Francisco restaurants, and where steam-driven paddle-boats once traveled from the Bakersfield area to the San Francisco Bay. Now the ghost of that lake rises only in years of record snowfall, when spring comes to the Sierras and snowmelt flows down to flood the farmland now claiming the ancient lake bed. The rest of the time, the water is given to the carrots, almonds, grapes, citrus and vegetables of every shape and color—most of the nation’s table food comes from Kern and the neighboring counties that make up California’s Great Central Valley.
The place and the people north of the Grapevine evoke the Great Plains more than Hollywood. Immigrants fleeing the midwestern Dust Bowl of the thirties—Pat Dunn’s family among them—boosted Kern County’s population by more than half during the depression. The newcomers’ descendants, once derided as “Okies” by the same folks who denounced Steinbeck and banned The Grapes of Wrath (in large part set in a mortified Kern County), now run the place. Theirs is the heartland of California—the real California—conservative, law-and-order, the toughest jurisdiction in the toughest state in the Union when it comes to cracking down on crime, no small claim in a state with a prison system dwarfing that of every nation on earth save China. Here, the most powerful and feared politician in town is not the mayor or the local congressman. It’s the district attorney.
The region clings to its frontier legacy, a rough-hewn place built by gold and oil fever, where gunfights and lynchings continued well into the twentieth century, and where a fierce desire for law and order still competes with an intense distaste for government, regulations and outside interference in local affairs. Homesteads are still sold by the acre here, not the square foot. Horse ownership is common, gun ownership more so. Huge banners along Highway 99 politick against conservation and in favor of subsidized water for farmers: “Food Grows Where Water Flows,” they say. Smaller, hand-lettered signs dot the side roads with more iconoclastic messages: “IRS stands for In Range Shooting.” The American Civil Liberties Union may have closed down its Bakersfield office, citing lack of interest, but the tax-protest and militia movements have flourished here. Indeed, a flamboyant local state senator suffered no loss of popularity for associating with white separatists or for rising in the Capitol rotunda in Sacramento to inveigh against the “one-world government” conspiracy so popular with his militiamen admirers. Around the same time Pat Dunn’s legal travails began, this senator tried to avoid paying the IRS $150,000 in back taxes by renouncing his U.S. citizenship in favor of something he claimed took precedence: “white man’s citizenship.”1 The senator served eighteen years representing Kern County in the California state legislature before term limits—not the voters—forced him to retire in 1997.
While the politics of water, taxes and fear of one-world governments may be a factor behind the scenes, out front, on the stump and in the headlines, it is crime that most often concerns this community. Crime is a concern that, though shared with the rest of the nation, seems a special obsession here, part of a long and vivid history that has repeatedly drawn the nation’s eyes toward Kern County in ways both dramatic and bizarre. The pursuit of wild criminal conspiracies are a recurring theme, with widespread belief in them rarely hindered by a lack of evidence: satanists, poisoned watermelons, killer bees and a sinister shadow government dubbed the “Lords of Bakersfield” all have aroused fears and demands for harsh punishment in recent years.
Even a century ago, journalists passing through remarked on the extremes of frontier justice in Bakersfield. One trial in particular drew headlines in 1877, a sensational case of horse thievery that ended in the summary execution of five rustlers. The fate of the accused was not so remarkable for the era, perhaps, but the courtroom argument that led to their sentence was quite extraordinary, setting the standard for justice in Kern County for years to come: “If it please the court, and the gentlemen of the jury, of all the low, miserable, depraved scoundrels that I have ever come in contact with, these defendants, without any grounds for defense, are the most ornery rascals that I have ever met, and I think the best thing we could do is take them out and hang them as soon as possible.”
This passionate argument, which preceded the lynch mob’s handiwork by a matter of minutes, was made by the defense attorney appointed in the case.2
Yet this same town that could b
e so ruthless in its war on crime was at the same time also gripped by a breath-taking municipal corruption far more costly than any stolen horse. Beginning early in the century, open partnerships existed for years among police chiefs, elected officials, houses of prostitution, illegal casinos and the protection rackets that sustained them all. The civic corruption in Bakersfield became so institutionalized that, on certain downtown streets, one sidewalk would be reserved for “proper” citizens, while across the street the promenade belonged to hookers, gamblers and drug dealers operating in plain sight. The situation continued for much of this century, surviving even a 1950s threat of occupation and martial law from the commander of a nearby Army base. The essential contradiction here—of a community fanatically intolerant of crime, yet curiously accepting of official misconduct—would become another recurring theme in Kern County history.
This civic schizophrenia revealed itself again when a different and far more malevolent brand of corruption came to light in the 1920s, when the county grappled with a wave of terrorism, beatings and arsons sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan. The white-hooded riders of the KKK had taken over the county by night—and many government offices by day, as one after another elected official swore allegiance to the Klan. KKK violence in California, particularly in Kern County, rivaled that of the Deep South in this era, though the West Coast version was aimed at whites as well as at black and brown citizens. Doctors, dentists, detectives and businessmen were beaten, threatened and driven from town for opposing the KKK’s “invisible empire.” One evening in the Kern County city of Taft, an oil-laden desert town just west of Bakersfield where beer was cheaper than water, most of the police department and civic leaders turned out to watch the Klan torture several people in a local ballpark. They gathered as if viewing a spectator sport; refreshments were served. (In 1975, Taft again made national headlines when thirteen black athletes were run out of town by a white mob, while neighboring Oildale became infamous for its “No Niggers Allowed” road signs.)