by Edward Humes
Dignified and understated, Simrin was not the type to raise his voice or make a scene, but neither was he the sort to cede control of a case. He quietly threatened to quit if Pat did not heed his advice in the future, or if Mike Dunn had anything more to do with the case other than paying the bills. Pat wavered, but in the end, shortly after the preliminary hearing, Mike prevailed upon his brother to fire Simrin and hire a well-regarded criminal attorney he knew out of Orange County, Gary Pohlson.12
Which is how Laura Lawhon came to be in Kern County with just a few short months to prepare a defense before Pat Dunn began the trial of his life.
4
AS THE GRAPEVINE SLOWLY FADED INTO THE DIS-tance behind her, Laura took the Highway 99 branch off the Golden State Freeway, twenty-five flat, straight miles to Bakersfield. Looking north down Highway 99 was like sighting down a gun barrel at a distant target, now a dirty brown smudge on the horizon in front of her. The smoggy pall hanging over the city, as gritty and thick as anything surrounding Los Angeles, always looked out of place to Laura in this wide-open land, an incongruous haven for some of the dirtiest air in California.
Gradually, the communities of Pumpkin Center, Greenfield and Weedpatch drifted by amid the groves and fields. The occasional crop-dusting plane riding low atop white plumes of spray, the smell of smoke, manure and chemicals rich in the air. Reddish iron clusters of valves and pipe rose from the soil on either side of the highway every half mile or so, massive knots of irrigation pump and line, feeding the long, muddy trenches that kept the crops from withering in their shadeless landscape. The few arthritic trees planted along the shoulders and median were gray with dust, their branches twisted by constant thirst. There was nothing natural about this blasted landscape, and the sight of it left Laura feeling adrift and alone each time she passed through.
After a half hour on the curveless road, the city slowly began to take form around her car, bits and pieces of Bakersfield rising out of the farmland like scouts of an advancing army, first a gas station by a highway exit, then a concrete shopping center, then the inevitable strips of convenience stores and fast-food drive-throughs and cut-rate nail salons that were gobbling up America’s most productive farmland at a phenomenal pace. This paving over of cropland promised an uncertain future for Kern County, and represented a continual source of friction between the city dwellers, the farmers, the environmentalists, the developers and the elected representatives who wished to offend no one with a checkbook. Each trip up, Laura noticed the tentacles of development extending a bit farther, just one more burger joint, another field bulldozed and covered with asphalt.
She had returned to Bakersfield to resume interviewing the witnesses against Pat Dunn, her third trip in as many weeks. She was going through the government’s witness list one by one, revisiting each step in the sheriff’s investigation, looking for new information and old contradictions. Experience had taught her that the police reports never told the whole story, and that what wasn’t there could be just as important as what was. Law-enforcement agencies prefer to produce reports that tell a certain story—a story of guilt. Inconvenient details that fail to contribute to the desired story line, Laura knew, often got left out, like unwanted scenes on the floor of a Hollywood cutting room. In Laura’s experience, there was nothing impartial about most police investigations. There was always an agenda. And so every witness in the Dunn case had to be reinterviewed, so Laura could learn what the police reports failed to say. Today’s assignment was a woman named Marie Gates.
Laura took a freeway exit near downtown and drove to a block of single-story homes with small, exhausted lawns. The pulse of heat that enveloped her as she opened her car door felt tangible, like the surge of a crowd. She felt perspiration bead her forehead even before she could shut her door and squint through the glare for the correct address.
“Come on in, dear, excuse the house. I’ve been having a terrible time getting my kitchen cabinets done,” Marie said brightly after answering Laura’s first knock. Inside, past the pale woman with the long white hair and brilliant turquoise nylon jogging suit, Laura could see a house in shambles, the rugs rolled up and standing in a corner, the kitchen ripped apart, as if a remodeling job had been halted midway. A dog and several cats roamed amid the debris. Marie continued to fuss and apologize as she ushered Laura to a seat inside the cool, dark living room.
“Oh, that’s all right,” Laura said diplomatically. “You can see how nice it will look when everything’s done.”
“Oh, I just love you to pieces. I feel like you’re my own daughter,” the woman told Laura warmly as they walked inside, basking in the compliment. It was a somewhat odd thing to say, given that they had met only once before, and then for a mere half hour, but Marie was the sort who put great stock in first impressions. Laura settled in and Marie brought over tea and cookies, occasionally cooing to her pets in baby talk. Then, her hostess duties complete, she sat down and asked, “Now, what can I tell you, dear?”
Laura hesitated for a beat, looking at the older woman’s kind smile and clear blue eyes. Marie Gates was an old friend of Pat’s mother, Lillian, and one of the witnesses Laura most needed to pursue. She had provided the only unequivocal testimony that the Kern County authorities could find suggesting Pat Dunn might have had an unambiguous motive for murder. The informant, Jerry Lee Coble, had given the sheriff the who, what and when of Sandy’s demise. But Marie Gates put it all together for them. She gave them the why of Sandy’s murder: She had sworn Sandy planned to leave Pat—and to leave him penniless.
Marie Gates was also the first witness to give Laura that odd feeling that haunted her during this case, the one that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, the one that had her glancing in the rearview mirror just a bit more often than traffic safety dictated. Maybe it was the eager way in which this sweet, kindly older woman pulled Laura aside during their chat a few days earlier, when Laura went to speak with Pat’s mother and found Marie there, too. Maybe it was the smile on her face that never quit, even as she pulled Laura out of earshot of Lillian Dunn so she could say the most terrible things about Pat, how he was a drunk and a wife beater and a murderer. “Everyone knows it,” Marie had said earnestly. “I don’t know a single person who thinks he’s innocent. Really.”
As she spoke, her voice had been suffused with such jovial certainty that Laura did not know how to reply. All she could think of was how convincing this woman would sound to a jury: Unchallenged, Marie Gates could destroy Pat. So Laura had asked for a more detailed talk, on tape. She left unstated the reason for her request—to see if Marie would hold up while testifying for the prosecution, or if her credibility could be undermined, as Laura hoped. Prosecution witnesses often are told they do not have to talk to the defense if they don’t want to, and many are wary, but not Marie. To Laura’s surprise, she had readily—even excitedly—agreed to today’s taped interview and invited the out-of-town private investigator to her home.
“So,” Marie asked again, eager for questions. “What can I tell you?”
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about the last time you saw Sandy,” Laura began, and that was all it took to get started. Marie brushed her white hair from the sides of her face, almost as if drawing curtains, as she leaned forward in her chair and began narrating a story she had already told the sheriff’s detectives, as well as her neighbors, friends and just about anyone else interested in Sandy’s murder—the story of a last, fateful conversation with Alexandra Dunn.
The story had changed over time, but it always started the same way, with Marie behind the wheel of her old, finned Chrysler, spotting the figure of her friend Sandy. In this rendition, Marie’s first sight was of Sandy shaking and sobbing at the curb not far from the Dunns’ home. It had been a few weeks before the disappearance, Marie asserted, though she could not give an exact date. She was, however, exacting in her description of her despondent friend.
“All that day she was crying in the street,” Marie said
, shaking her head. “She had her hands up like this”—Marie demonstrated the gesture, covering her face as if in despair—“And I pulled over and said, ‘What’s the matter, darlin’?’ ”
Laura nodded, taking notes in addition to recording the conversation.
“Sandy was crying,” Marie continued, animated, reliving the moment, unconsciously mimicking Sandy’s voice as she recounted the dialogue. “And she says, ‘Oh, Marie, I’ve made a mistake, I’ve made a terrible mistake.’ ”
When Marie asked what she was talking about, Sandy explained that her marriage had been a mistake, her husband was a terrible man, and she wanted out. She’d pay for the divorce herself if she had to, Marie recalled Sandy saying. She just wanted him out of her life, away from her money, away from her house. Immediately.
“And she says, ‘He’s hitting me, or hitting on me,’ ” Marie went on. Laura looked up, frustrated. The two phrases held very different, even contradictory, meanings, but Marie was unsure which it had been. The conversation with Sandy, it seemed, had been hurried, and it was hard to remember exact phrases. “She was talking so fast and I was on my way to pick up children,” Marie said, and then lapsed into a characteristic digression, this time to explain how she baby-sat various kids in the neighborhood, walking them to and from school at times, except school was out for the summer when this encounter with Sandy supposedly occurred. However, before Laura had a chance to question the point, Marie had returned to her main narrative about Sandy.
“She says, ‘I’m afraid, I’m afraid,’ ” Marie recalled, again mimicking Sandy in a wistful, forlorn little voice.
Marie looked at Laura then, and speaking in her own voice heavy with foreboding, told of how she wanted Sandy to get in her car, to come home with her only to have Sandy say no, she’d be okay, she could handle the divorce—and her husband—on her own.
“And she walked home, it’s just around the corner,” Marie finished with a mournful flourish, as if delivering a eulogy. “And I never saw her again.”13
Laura scribbled furiously, sensing she was onto something: Marie’s story had changed from the one she had told the sheriff’s detectives, in ways both subtle and dramatic. Laura knew this because she had spent days poring over Marie’s past statements to the authorities, as recorded in sheriff’s department reports on the case. The reports, by law, had been turned over to the defense once criminal charges had been filed against Pat, and they revealed some startling inconsistencies in Marie’s various accounts.
For one, in her many conversations with the authorities, Marie had claimed to be an old friend of Sandy’s who saw her regularly. They had been “the best of friends,” Marie said. Yet Pat told Laura he and Sandy barely knew Marie Gates, that she had never once set foot in their house. To Laura, Pat’s version seemed to make more sense, for no one else close to the Dunns knew anything about Marie Gates. Marie herself said that she had never even known that Pat and Sandy were married until a year before Sandy’s disappearance—well after the Dunns’ fifth anniversary. How close, then, could Marie and Sandy have been? This startling admission was right in the police reports, but the sheriff’s detectives hadn’t confronted Gates with this inconsistency. And Marie hadn’t even known about Leon, Sandy’s second husband. Laura had to tell her about Leon.
“Oh, I guess I was living out of state then, dear,” Marie explained, dismissing the contradiction with a wave of her hand. But Laura had established something crucial: Marie Gates was not as close to Sandy as she claimed, and certainly couldn’t be classified a confidante.
Then there was Marie’s shifting story. She had first come to the attention of the sheriff’s department by making several anonymous phone calls to the authorities, offering nothing more than a little speculation each time. Initially, it seemed, she was regarded at the sheriff’s department more as the neighborhood busybody than as someone with hard information. Unwilling to identify herself at first, she had been randomly assigned a code name as a matter of routine under the sheriff’s “Secret Witness” program. She was known as “Taylor 1.”
In appropriately hushed whispers, Taylor 1 had called first to accuse Pat of murder, pointing out that he hadn’t reported Sandy missing right away, and therefore must be guilty. Then she called back, changing her story to suggest that Pat’s daughter, not Pat himself, was responsible for the murder. Taylor 1 also upbraided the sheriff’s department for failing to search Pat Dunn’s “Bronco”—she apparently meant his Blazer, a somewhat similar four-wheel-drive utility vehicle—but this, too, was incorrect. All of Pat’s cars, the Blazer included, had been seized and searched inch by inch. Throughout these anonymous calls, Marie Gates offered no evidence to back up her assertions, no real details and no indication of whether she was passing on firsthand information or simple gossip. In those first calls, she never mentioned anything about Sandy seeking a divorce, either, nor did she say anything about seeing Sandy walking around crying and proclaiming her marriage a mistake—though these points would later form the centerpiece of her story.14
The first time Marie Gates spoke to a sheriff’s detective without the comfort of anonymity was in a phone conversation with Detective Dusty Kline, who happened to pick up her Taylor 1 call that day. By then it was August 18. More than six weeks had passed since Sandy disappeared, with Marie never mentioning her last encounter with Sandy to anyone. (Coincidentally, August 18 was the day before Detective John Soliz and Jerry Lee Coble found one another.) Nevertheless, when Taylor 1 called the sheriff’s department this time, she received a very different reception from the usual perfunctory humoring: For the first time, someone showed interest in what she had to say, with Kline questioning her at length, then cajoling her into identifying herself.
“We really need some help, and you sound like someone who knows something important,” Kline pleaded. This new enthusiasm for what she might have to say apparently appealed to Marie, and she agreed to speak on the record. Then, warming to her story, Marie gave Kline her first account of seeing Sandy out walking about two weeks before the disappearance, sometime in mid-June, as Marie drove home. Marie told Kline she pulled over to chat with her friend. Kline’s report detailing this interview shows she mentioned nothing about seeing Sandy crying or appearing upset. She told Kline that Sandy came over to the car and announced, “I made a terrible mistake. I want my husband out of my house and out of my life.”
In an aside, Marie confided to Kline that she never had cared much for Pat Dunn—“a con man and a womanizer,” as far as she was concerned. She had much preferred Sandy’s first husband, Pat Paola, who she described as one of the finest men she had ever known. “I would have told Sandy never to marry Pat Dunn if I had known she was planning on it,” Marie proclaimed with an air of satisfaction. “I knew he was no good.”
She went on to explain how Sandy had given her husband until the end of the month to get out—which would have been June 30, the very day Sandy disappeared. The authorities loved that, as it fit perfectly with their theory of the case, a perfect trigger for murder.
“She said she wanted his girl out, too,” Marie added. At the time, Marie thought Sandy meant that Pat had a girlfriend living in the house. Now, she told the detective, she realized Sandy had been talking about Pat’s daughter, Jennifer. She did not explain how she knew this, or why she had been mistaken in the first place, and, at least as far as Laura could tell from the police reports, Detective Kline didn’t ask. (In any case, Laura knew Jennifer, then five months pregnant, was living with her mother, not Pat, at the time.) Marie also claimed Sandy was upset because her husband and his daughter had hit her. This alarmed Marie enough that she begged Sandy to get in the car and come home with her.
“No, I’ll be okay,” Marie recalled Sandy saying in an uncertain—and unconvincing—voice.
Gates concluded this first conversation with Detective Kline by contradicting one of her earlier Taylor 1 statements, in which she had said she suspected Pat of murder because he failed to report Sandy m
issing without delay. Her new version asserted that she began suspecting Pat Dunn of murder when she learned he had never mentioned Sandy’s disappearance to his mother, Lillian. “She found out from the television news,” Marie said. “Isn’t that awful?”15
Marie also thought it highly suspicious that Pat had Sandy quietly cremated without religious services, choosing instead to spread her ashes over the Morning Star project site that she loved so much. “She was a devout Catholic and should have had a service,” Marie said indignantly. A few other witnesses, Councilwoman Pat DeMond among them, had voiced similar sentiments, and sheriff’s detectives considered the cremation another reason to doubt Pat, evidence that he hated his wife and sought not only to murder her physically, but to harm her in death as well.
But Marie Gates was wrong on all of these points. Laura knew—as did the sheriff’s detectives—that Pat had told Lillian Dunn about Sandy within three or four days of her disappearance, right around the July Fourth holiday weekend and well before any television coverage of the case. Lillian herself had told this to the sheriff’s investigators. Nor did Marie Gates seem to know that Sandy had left the Catholic Church in anger in the mid-1980s, after a disagreement over a charitable contribution. Sandy had donated a large sum of money to the diocese with what she thought was an understanding that a facility under construction would be dedicated to the memory of Pat Paola—a promise church officials denied making and never fulfilled, though they kept the money. Sandy was extremely bitter about this, and had even filed suit against the church. All her close friends knew this, that she had vowed never to go to church again—but not Marie Gates.