by Edward Humes
The tape had been made less than a month after the Nokes children were removed from their parents and placed with an aunt. When the DA’s office learned that Kevin’s aunt had allowed a defense investigator to talk to the boy, the county swooped in and took both children away—though the aunt had every legal right to allow Susan Penninger to speak with Kevin, and the DA had no legal authority to remove the children. Nevertheless, the Nokes children were taken to foster care and group therapy and separated from all family members from that day on. The official reaction to what Kevin Nokes told Susan Penninger was not to question the validity of the case against his parents but to encircle the children with an impenetrable barrier. From that day on, the Kern County District Attorney barred defense lawyers and investigators from talking to other suspected victims of molestation rings—not only in the Nokes case, but in all molestation-ring cases. Only sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors, social workers and their allies in the investigation could get access. Any foster parent or relative of a victim who defied this directive would lose custody, no questions asked. The stated motive was to protect the children from further abuse, but there was a secondary effect: One side—the prosecution—held all the cards.
Jay Smith had met the Nokes children for the first time two months after Susan Penninger made her tape. At that time, he decided they were the most traumatized, dysfunctional abuse victims he had ever encountered. Yet now, as Simrin’s tape recorder played on, Smith sat in the attorney’s small office stricken, his face pale. He felt dizzy. He had always assumed the Nokes family was responsible for the kids’ thousand-yard stares, their robot-like answers to questions, their numbed, emotionless manner. But this tape . . . This tape was of a normal boy, a happy boy, a boy totally confused and upset about what was happening to his family—but who had not been traumatized in any noticeable way. Jay Smith had never met the boy on the tape. He only knew the child whose life had been taken over by Kern County, and who, after two months of the county’s ministrations, appeared profoundly damaged and would never be the same. Smith had walked into Simrin’s office believing certain things, things the social workers and detectives had told him: that children couldn’t lie about being molested, that there was no way these kids could be induced to make false allegations against their own parents. Now the ground had shifted beneath his feet. He realized everything he had believed to be bedrock truth was wrong. Kern County’s sheriff and district attorney were on a crusade, Smith saw. It wasn’t about justice or truth. They wanted monsters to hang. And if they couldn’t find any monsters, Smith decided, then they’d create some.
Jay Smith wanted to cry out, My God, what have they done? What have we done? But he had no voice, no words. All he could do, as the tape spun to an end, was place his face in his hands and weep. As Stan Simrin searched through the clutter of his office for a box of tissues, Smith sat and cried for the families, for the children, for his town, for himself. Something had happened. The impulse that had started it all had been good and decent—a desire to protect children, to make the community safe for everyone, to hold wrongdoers accountable. But something had happened to this impulse, something twisted and dark, and no one had thought to question it, not even a good and decent man like Jay Smith. Which is how witch hunts are born, Smith realized in one searing instant—not through the designs of evil people, but within the hearts of the good.
There were indeed monsters in the world, Smith now realized with a terrible certainty. And, without knowing it, he had been one of them.10
3
A DECADE LATER, AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS OWN ordeal, Pat Dunn would also turn to Stan Simrin for help. At first, Pat hadn’t thought he’d need a lawyer, but once it became clear the police considered him more suspect than grieving husband, Jim Wiens, one of the Dunns’ real estate attorneys, had passed on Simrin’s name and number. “Call him,” Wiens advised. “Listen to him. He’s the best.”
Pat did talk to Simrin, but opted not to retain him at the outset, certain that the authorities sooner or later would accept his protestations of innocence and look to other explanations for Sandy’s disappearance. Simrin cautioned Pat to be as cooperative as he could in helping the police find his missing wife. “Of course I’ll cooperate,” Pat had started to answer, but Simrin interrupted him with the second half of his warning: When it came to questions that pertained not to Sandy but to Pat—questions about his movements and motives, alibis and feelings—it would best if he declined to answer. When viewed through the prism of a suspicious mind, Simrin explained, anything a person says about such matters can sound like the words of a guilty man.
“Thank you very much,” Pat had said heartily. He may have intended to take Simrin’s advice, but in the end, he did not. Out of arrogance, ignorance or a combination of both, Pat Dunn felt certain the authorities would come around to his way of seeing things, and he kept talking to them and trying to answer all of their questions, sometimes sober, sometimes not. He even gave an interview to the Bakersfield Californian, which covered the case extensively and quoted Pat as saying that he was the prime suspect, though an innocent one.
And then the addict-turned-star-witness Jerry Lee Coble came along. He, too, spoke to police many times, refining his story, adding new details. Unlike Pat Dunn, who police never tape recorded, one of Coble’s statements was taped—but only after he had told his story several other times and Detective Soliz drove him out to view the Dunn house and neighborhood to “refresh” his memory. Still, even with Coble as a star witness, two more months elapsed before the district attorney’s office—lobbied by Kate Rosenlieb and other prominent citizens, including various members of the Bakersfield City Council—finally charged Pat with the murder of Alexandra Paola Dunn.
Held without bail, Pat was cut off from the estate by the accusations of murder and by objections to Sandy’s will filed by her sister, Nanette Petrillo, who appeared far less estranged from Sandy in death than she had been in life. Pat had spent most of his personal savings, about one hundred thousand dollars, to prop up the real estate ventures, leaving him with no money for a legal defense once he realized he needed one. So he had turned to his brother Mike to finance Stan Simrin’s hefty retainer.
One of the first things Simrin did was put an investigator on Jerry Lee Coble, guessing that the state’s star witness might also be its weakest link. It wasn’t long, then, before Simrin saw the significance of the ponytailed man in the green Pontiac who had been lurking outside Pat’s house in late July, the man that Rex Martin had pursued. The piece of brown paper on which Rex had scribbled the mysterious car’s license plate number was still in Pat’s house, saved, ironically, because it had a phone number for Sandy’s sister penned on the other side. Simrin checked it against motor-vehicle records and found a match: The car belonged to Coble’s mother. Coble had been to Pat’s house, all right—but he was there three weeks after the murder. No doubt, Simrin told Pat pointedly, Coble had constructed his account from observations and news reports, and from scouting out the Dunn household while driving by long after the fact.
The clincher to this theory, what made it so powerful, was that it did not rely solely on testimony from friends of Pat Dunn, who conceivably could have looked up Coble’s license number, then concocted their story. No, it was backed by Coble’s own words. Simrin noticed that in his tape-recorded interview with Detective Soliz, Coble recounted seeing two cars outside Pat Dunn’s house on the night of the murder: a white, full-sized, newer-model Chevy pickup truck with camper shell, into which the body was allegedly loaded, and a white Ford Tempo or Taurus. Coble never mentioned an ancient twenty-three-foot Cadillac covered with enough blue canvas to outfit a clipper ship, or another covered car, the old Chrysler Cordoba, both parked and never moved from Pat’s driveway until police took them away days later. Everyone else who went to the house around the time of Sandy’s disappearance had seen those cars, along with Pat’s white Chevy Blazer. Kevin Knutson, the financial planner, saw them. So did the exterminator wh
o came to the house on the afternoon of Sandy’s disappearance. So did all the neighbors. It was all in the police reports: Even Detective Dusty Kline saw the three cars there on July 4, when he first chatted with Pat. But not Coble. Instead, Coble described two vehicles that sounded just like the ones that were parked in the driveway on the day—three weeks after Sandy’s disappearance—that Rex Martin chased a ponytailed man in a green Pontiac: the rented Ford Tempo and Martin’s Suburban, a model that has the same grille and body design as a full-sized Chevy pickup. Simrin, scrutinizing the tape-recorded interview Coble gave at the sheriff’s department, believed that Detective Soliz had also spotted this discrepancy, as the detective asked not once but twice about any other cars Coble might have seen in the driveway that night. But Coble had not caught the hint and had stuck with his story. “Now he’s trapped,” Simrin said with a predatory smile during a jailhouse meeting with Pat. “We’ve got him.”
Pat’s response was immediate: “Well, we’ve got to tell the DA and the sheriff that Coble’s a liar, so they’ll know they made a mistake and they’ll drop the charges.”
Simrin stared at his client, shaking his head. “Absolutely not. We won’t say a word.”
Pat, anxious to be out of jail and out of trouble, could not comprehend Simrin’s reasoning. He started to argue, but Simrin cut him off. The authorities have decided you’re guilty, Simrin told Pat. Anything you tell them, they will try to twist against you or disprove. They will consider our attack on Coble’s credibility to be a trial tactic, a defense trick. They will say that your friend Rex Martin would do anything to cover for you, even fabricate this story—and it will not bother them at all that they previously found it to their advantage to argue that he was not a close friend, when they insinuated it was somehow odd for you to talk to him about Sandy. “In any case,” Simrin warned, “they will not drop the charges. You will only be hurting yourself and helping them.”
Pat still couldn’t understand this. He did not know, as Simrin did, how things worked in Kern County, how the district attorney’s office had accumulated a long history of pursuing charges with unrivaled aggression, winning at all costs, even if the evidence was tainted or the informants were lying. Simrin knew, and he had proven it in case after case, though nothing ever seemed to change. Prosecutors here, as in many places, did not readily admit to being in error. They assumed any defense must be a lie or a trick.
“But don’t they want the truth?” Pat asked.
“Yes,” Simrin said, “and they are convinced they have found it. They believe the truth is you are guilty. And now they will do whatever it takes to convict you.”
He again tried to explain how they were long past the point of convincing the sheriff’s department or the Kern County District Attorney that Pat was innocent. That point had been reached and passed within a week of Sandy’s disappearance, before, even, the discovery of her body. The only ones to convince now were the twelve people who would be sitting on his jury. And toward that end, they had to keep the information they had learned about Jerry Coble secret, reserved for trial, where they could spring it on the prosecution when Coble took the stand. “That way, he’ll have three seconds to think of a response, instead of three months to cook up some new lie.”
Despite such dire warnings, persuading Pat to remain silent proved an arduous and ongoing task. As the weeks went by, Pat would periodically suggest going to the authorities with “the truth.” But Simrin, with help from Pat’s daughter, Jennifer, managed to keep Pat silent. They would have a preliminary hearing in December, Simrin said, where they would get a chance to question Coble on the stand without tipping their hand and thus lock him into a story. Then, at trial, they would expose him as a liar. “It’s exactly the position we want to be in,” the lawyer told Pat at one meeting. “Knowing more about their witness than they do.”
Simrin left, thinking he still had Pat under control. But Mike Dunn, who was footing the bills, disagreed with the attorney after Pat brought him up to speed. Mike, like his brother, had little experience with the justice system, though that didn’t stop him from writing lengthy critiques of Simrin’s work and shooting his own amateur-video reenactment of Jerry Coble’s story of seeing Pat dispose of Sandy’s body, in which he illustrated how some of the things that Coble described were physical impossibilities. Mike Dunn assured Pat that the police, once they realized Coble had lied, would back off the case. He also was concerned that the $50,000 up-front fee demanded by Simrin did not begin to cover actual trial costs. So he advised Pat to go against Simrin’s advice. “I think we should tell them everything,” Mike said, and Pat, envisioning a quick release and a return home for Christmas, said okay, big brother. Let’s do it.
On the eve of Pat’s preliminary hearing, a formulaic proceeding in which the prosecution presents the bare minimum of evidence necessary to hold a suspect for trial, Mike Dunn called Detective Soliz. After complaining to the detective about Simrin’s fees and insistence that they keep quiet about their evidence against Coble, Mike Dunn told Soliz all about Rex Martin following Jerry Lee Coble, and how the cops had it all wrong about his brother Pat. He garbled the story, though, saying Coble had been spotted by Rex on the night before Sandy disappeared. In Mike Dunn’s flawed rendition, Coble wasn’t just a liar looking to skate on his own legal troubles. “Coble,” Mike Dunn announced, “was the murderer.”
Mike Dunn then asked if, given this new information, his brother might get released from jail on his own recognizance until the DA dropped the charges. “I’ll get back to you,” Soliz replied.
The official response to this information, however, was just as Simrin had predicted. Soliz immediately conferred with the prosecutor assigned to the case, and they decided the defense was lying. They then set out to undermine Rex Martin’s story, calling him at his office, catching him off guard, hoping to build some contradictions into his story. Jerry Lee Coble was questioned at length about the cars in the driveway, so he could prepare for the witness stand. Later, the prosecutor would show him pictures of the vehicles, to help sort things out for him.
Meanwhile, someone in law enforcement told Jerry Coble that the Dunn defense team was trying to pin Sandy’s murder on him, making Coble all the more anxious to testify against Pat, and hardening his and his whole family’s attitude and resolve when previously it had wavered. Now it was personal—the Dunn forces were trying to get him. (For years after the trial, Coble believed that the heart of Pat Dunn’s defense strategy was to accuse him of murder, when, in fact, no one other than a mistaken Mike Dunn had ever espoused that theory in or out of court. Indeed, it was crucial to Pat’s defense to prove Coble was nowhere near the house until weeks after Sandy vanished.)
Jennifer Dunn called Simrin in a panic that night before the preliminary hearing. “They told the police everything,” she wailed. “Uncle Mike told them everything.”
The next morning, Simrin confirmed what Jennifer had told him. He arrived at the courthouse furious, his careful preparations wasted. He always tried to use preliminary hearings as tools to hone his defense in a case, not as a forum for educating the government. It was the one and only time in a criminal prosecution that the defense holds a true advantage—the prosecution has to show its cards, while the defense doesn’t (a procedure few states other than California mandate, and one that prosecutors have long opposed).11 Now Simrin’s hand was exposed.
“You don’t know the damage you’ve done,” he told Mike and Pat Dunn. “Don’t you know that you are facing the rest of your life in prison? Or worse. They can still seek the death penalty if they choose.”
Mike Dunn remained unapologetic. Pat claimed he had no part in the communication with Soliz, though now that it was done, he wanted to mount a full defense, including taking the witness stand himself. “We can end it right here,” he and Mike Dunn predicted.
They still didn’t get it, Simrin realized. Pat still believed there were some magic words that could be uttered to make it all go away, that
he could say just the right thing and he would walk out of the hearing a free man. He simply didn’t understand the process, how the justice system even now was marshaling its considerable forces with one purpose in mind: not to listen to him, not to consider his point of view, but to put him away. Simrin argued and pleaded with Pat to stay silent, to minimize the damage already done, but when the client insists on invoking his right to testify, the lawyer, in the end, has no choice but to comply. Simrin threw up his hands and let Pat try to talk his way to freedom.
It didn’t happen, of course. As Simrin predicted, Pat was bound over for trial, an outcome never in doubt. The prosecution did everything it could to bolster Jerry Coble’s testimony and to undermine Pat’s defense—a “free shot,” Simrin called it. Worst of all for Pat was his utter lack of preparation for the rigors and intimidation of testifying in open court. In the end, he blundered badly on a key point—his testimony about the day Rex Martin wrote down Jerry Lee Coble’s license plate number.
This was the heart of his defense. Rex had been very clear about the fact that he didn’t remember the exact date of this incident, saying only that it was a few days after he had given Pat a lift to a car-rental agency following the search and seizure of Pat’s three cars. Given that months had passed, this vagueness was reasonable, even expected. But Pat was adamant about giving a specific date.
The problem was, he gave the wrong date. The run-in with Coble could not have happened on the day he swore to, for a variety of reasons, the most compelling of which was the fact that there was no way for Jerry Coble to have even heard of Pat or Sandy Dunn at that time, much less set him up. The first major news article on the case was not published until a day later. The district attorney now had a powerful weapon in his arsenal to use to diffuse Pat’s defense: a glaring inconsistency.