by Edward Humes
Eighty-five more adults were ultimately implicated, and more than sixty children came to be identified as victims, with many taken from their families. Dozens of baby murders were suspected, and the sheriff was intent on prosecuting them even if no bodies were ever found in the furtive excavations of suspected ritual sites. The task force began to examine the older ring cases, including those already tried, for ties to the newly discovered conspiracy. With that, the investigation into Bakersfield’s satanic heart went full circle, returning to the children who launched the first molestation ring case: Jenny and Jane McCuan, and their guardian Mary Ann Barbour.
Soon after seeing the county therapist who tended to all of the other satanic victims, the McCuan girls began making similar accusations as well—something they had never before done in four years of interviews, testimony and promises that they had told everything. Based on their new revelations, the satanic task force began digging up a field outside the girls’ grandparents’ home in San Luis Obispo County, looking for victims of human sacrifice that the children promised were there. Secrecy was abandoned and the dig became a media spectacle, fueling new public hysteria as the residents of Kern County prepared for a battle for their very souls.
Nothing was found. Teams of forensics experts made similar excavations at homes and businesses throughout Bakersfield. Bones were triumphantly unearthed behind one house, creating a sensation—until it was ascertained the remains belonged to a family dog that had died of old age. There were no fire pits, no bad churches, no films or videos, no secret graveyards of ritual victims. A half million dollars in manpower and machinery failed, for the third time, to turn up any of the evidence the children described. At the same time, concrete proof that the new charges were utter fantasy surfaced time and again. In groundbreaking stories, the Fresno Bee reported that babies named by the children as victims of human sacrifice were found alive, safely at home. Other supposed victims, it turned out, had been stillborn in hospitals. Suspects were described incorrectly, addresses proved fictional—the children’s, and thus official, accounts were riddled with obvious fabrications.
Yet, even then, there was no letup—just an increase in paranoia, a belief among task force members that the satanists were so numerous, so powerful and smart that they could cover up anything. When the attorney appointed to represent the interests of two of the children, Jay Smith, expressed doubts about the investigation and asked a judge to appoint an independent psychologist to determine whether the kids truly had been molested, the district attorney’s office reacted with reflexive suspicion and intolerance. Smith had listened to the tape of one of his young clients at Stan Simrin’s office, and he believed he knew a terrible truth at the root of the investigation. The district attorney, however, publicly attacked Smith and sued to remove him from the case. Smith was later warned by a former prosecutor that he had been placed under investigation himself.
At the same time, Sheriff’s Sergeant Brad Darling, head of the Satanic Abuse Task Force and husband of Carol Darling, the DA’s point person on molestation rings and ritual abuse, met in Los Angeles with investigators in the notorious McMartin Preschool case. Darling described for the LA cops’ benefit the satanic murders and molestation rituals that were being disclosed by children in Kern County, and how best to combat such crimes. By then, he told his rapt audience, the suspects included lawyers, doctors, deputy sheriffs, coroner’s staff members, a mortuary owner, a cemetery owner, two ministers—all supposedly tied to a cult with tentacles throughout the world. Darling said he believed there was a massive cover-up being engineered, a conspiracy of money-grubbing defense lawyers, cowardly judges, lying news reporters, publicity-shy civic leaders and all-powerful, massively wealthy molesters.
“If you make enough stinkeroo in the newspaper and the other media, if you file enough writs, if you make enough mailed threats to the judges, it’s going to have an impact,” Darling asserted at a subsequent seminar for child-abuse workers. “Many times we’ve found the courts backing away from what should have been their responsibility to handle things.”
Some months later, Darling was compelled to take the witness stand in one case and admit that much of what he had said at the seminar was exaggerated or inaccurate. There had been no threats, no corrupt judges and lawyers, no wealthy defendants. Indeed, if the defendants prosecuted in the Kern County ring cases had anything in common, it was their blue-collar ordinariness—and the fact that they seldom had the money or clout to hire the best attorneys in town or mount a serious challenge to prosecutors and their “scientific” evidence. And, contrary to his claim that judges backed away from their “duty,” Darling had to admit—with the judiciary of Kern County bristling and listening to every word—that thousands of years in prison sentences had been dished out to molestation-ring defendants, breaking all records in the state and the nation.73
But paranoia had infected the entire investigation by then, and the inevitable soon happened. The children began accusing even the men and women of the task force. A detective who had busted a half dozen ring members, a senior deputy district attorney who prosecuted them, a social worker who worked with the first girl who supposedly revealed the existence of satanic abuse—each was accused of molestation and of worshiping the devil. The young boy whom Susan Penninger and Stan Simrin had captured on tape a year earlier sounding normal and denying being molested was now a virtual automaton, spewing allegations in all directions: The social worker and the prosecutor on his case had gone to the “bad churches” and killed babies and burned the bodies, he swore. For this boy, the bad people were everywhere he looked. And he finally turned on those who had created him.
These new allegations marked a turning point. In the past, every adult accused by the children became a suspect, no questions asked. If the kids said it, it must be true. But that unflagging principle changed when the detective, the prosecutor and the social worker were fingered. In their cases, the authorities, District Attorney Jagels chief among them, simply decided the children could not be believed—though no substantive attempts to investigate the allegations were made, a double standard Kern County officials have never explained.74 Some of those involved in the satanic investigation believed the new allegations, and concluded their task force had been infiltrated and corrupted.
A curious thing happened then. The technique of aggressive and leading questioning of children had just led to a number of provably false charges—dead babies who were alive, bodies that didn’t exist, evidence that couldn’t be found, suspects who could not have done what the children said they had done—along with a number of other extremely uncomfortable charges against officials few wanted to investigate. Until that moment, in the spring of 1985, the Witch Hunt, though incomprehensible in hindsight, could have been chalked up to well-meaning but poorly trained and misinformed investigators and prosecutors caught up in something beyond their experience—overzealous, perhaps, but not corrupt.
Now, though, law-enforcement officials in Kern County were on notice that mistakes had been made—grievous ones that had ripped families asunder, destroyed lives, held people out to unbearable public shame and put others in jail. They knew, then, that their witnesses—and their methods—could not be completely trusted.
Yet Kern County authorities did not begin to question their investigative methods, nor did they begin to wonder how many innocent people could have been accused by the children. They continued instead to press forward on their molestation-ring cases and, to accomplish this, the sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office made a fateful—and unlawful—decision. As individual cases came to court, prosecutors decided to keep any satanic aspects secret.
To accomplish this, they created a file on a single fictional suspect—nothing more than a “John Doe” folder into which all satanic allegations against all defendants were placed—whose case never came to trial, who had no attorney, and who therefore had no rights. (The McMartin detectives and prosecutors in Los Angeles, in a ca
se that received much more publicity, used the same tactic to hide claims by the children that accused child molesters could fly, change shape and become invisible.) The paperwork dodge allowed the sheriff and prosecutors to bring to trial a variety of defendants as if they were handling straight cases of molestation free of the incredible or provably false ritual allegations. Keeping the satanic elements of cases secret preserved the credibility of the remaining ring cases. This practice, carried out by the sheriff’s department with the acquiescence of the district attorney, appears to have violated laws requiring disclosure of relevant information to the defense—but it allowed them to continue to imprison men and women for victimizing children whom the authorities knew had made false accusations.75
• • •
In the end, out of the hundreds of suspects investigated as ring molesters or satanic abusers or both in Kern County, fifty-five were formally charged. Another dozen, though not criminally prosecuted, were accused as unfit parents under the State Welfare and Institutions Code so that their children could be taken from them. Many more were arrested or referred by the sheriff for prosecution, but ultimately were not formally charged—though many faced public ruin anyway. Combined, these cases constituted the largest prosecution effort to target child-molestation conspiracies in the nation. And they helped ignite similar cases against as many as a thousand other “ring” members throughout the country, as Kern County investigators and social workers fanned out to spread the word of their winning techniques.76 The Bakersfield ring cases also produced their own body of literature, including a book called Satan’s Underground, which encouraged the hysteria and made national headlines as the account of a supposed survivor of ritual abuse. Written by a Bakersfield woman under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford, the book was subsequently discredited; the author’s only provable connection to devil worship was revealed to be her work as a piano teacher for one of the Satanic Abuse Task Force detectives.77
But the word spread, and similar cases soon appeared coast to coast. Names like Little Rascals, Wenatchee and, of course, McMartin, quickly entered the national lexicon. Still, to this day, out of all the many communities that generated such cases, and out of all the many allegations of official improprieties that have followed in their wake, no single place has discovered more molestation rings or imprisoned more people for joining them. Kern County remains the national capital of child-molestation conspiracies, the place where a modern-day witch hunt began.
Years later, Laura Lawhon would learn of this history and feel a measure of the futility that must have overwhelmed those falsely accused during the Witch Hunt. To Laura, it was all ominously instructive. Although the questions, recriminations, outside investigations and revelations of official misconduct began almost immediately in the Kern County ring cases, many of the falsely accused still languished in prison through the eighties and well into the nineties. Some waited sixteen years for the truth to set them free, far longer than their counterparts in discredited ring cases elsewhere in the nation, as the Kern County authorities fought hard and long to sustain their flawed convictions. Some are waiting still.
And so Laura had to wonder: If it has taken so long to correct such flagrant injustices against so many innocents in Kern County, what chance did a lone Pat Dunn have to win his freedom?
9
I’LL BET HE WAS TERRIBLE,” LAURA LAWHON SAID. “Wasn’t he?” The lawyers had just put Pat Dunn through a bout of mock cross-examination, to see how he would bear up under the pressure. His trial was just weeks away, and the defense strategy and witness list had to be locked down.
“The worst,” a weary Gary Pohlson answered. “He was absolutely awful. There’s no way I can put that man on the stand.”
Laura really couldn’t say she was surprised by the lawyer’s comment. She knew from her long visits with Pat that he was a good storyteller, a man who felt considerable empathy for others—but who also, quite understandably, felt sorry for himself and resented his predicament. Pat had to tell things his way, slow and roundabout, with plenty of digressions and colorful detail. The rigid question and answer ritual of cross-examination was not a good forum for him. He did not like to be cut off or interrupted or stopped from saying what he wanted to say, which is what good cross-examination is all about. It rattled him. The old principal in him liked to take charge, something opposing lawyers like to see—anything that can make a witness seem more overbearing than an attorney is a victory in itself. Pat started out fine on direct examination, but he just couldn’t handle the cross.
The disappointing mock-trial session capped a difficult final month before The People vs. Pat Dunn came to trial, a time of lost opportunities and intense pressure. Now any thought of putting Pat up as a witness was out the window. That meant they could not address certain things only Pat could explain—like why he seemed so amiable on the tape of his missing-persons call to the sheriff. No one else could tell the jury how he had thought it necessary to coax and cajole the authorities to take a report before seventy-two hours had elapsed, a common fallacy. And it meant they had to live with his unfortunate, and inaccurate, testimony from his preliminary hearing, in which he misstated the date that Jerry Lee Coble cased his home. Inconsistencies might be overlooked in prosecution witnesses, but Pat, as the defendant, would be held to a higher standard. To the Kern County District Attorney and Sheriff, the slightest deviation meant Pat Dunn was a killer.
The thing was, Pat still wanted to testify, badly. He begged Laura and Pohlson, just as he had begged Stan Simrin months before.
“If I just get up there and tell them the truth, they’ll understand I could never hurt Mom,” Pat said over and over. “I’ve got to testify. The jury’ll expect me to.”
“Maybe so, Pat. But if you’re not honest with them, they’ll sense that, too,” Laura warned. She was referring to Pat’s continued insistence that he and Sandy had never quarreled or fought, that their marriage had been uneventful, merrily dull. Perhaps it was not the constant war zone Kate Rosenlieb had painted it to be, Laura knew, but too many people had seen spats—normal spats—between them for Pat to be believed. They had arguments, like any normal couple. Why deny it? She counseled her client just to be honest, to admit to being human.
The prosecution wouldn’t be allowed to use Pat’s domestic-violence arrest against him in the trial, because the charge had never been proven and was ultimately dismissed. But the fact that Sandy called the police about Pat was a different matter. Regardless of whether Pat ever struck Sandy or not, the mere fact that she dialed 911 and claimed that it happened implied some sort of discord in the house, even if Sandy initiated it with a false report. The prosecutor would hold information about the call in reserve. And if Pat took the stand and denied the existence of any marital discord, the prosecutor could then introduce evidence that Pat was a liar by proving Sandy had once called the police to have him arrested. The judge would say Sandy’s report to the police could be used only to challenge Pat’s credibility on the subject of marital discord in the Dunn household, not that Pat was actually a wife beater, but Laura knew this legal distinction would almost certainly be lost on the jury. The result of even mentioning Sandy’s call to 911 would be disastrous. Yet Pat remained stubborn on the subject, insistent that they never fought—just as he insisted neither he nor Sandy had drinking problems, which Laura believed to be patently false as well. People had talked of the smell of alcohol practically oozing from their pores at times, as if the Dunns had been pickled in it. There really was no doubt, yet Pat denied it, another of his odd blind spots.
In the grand scheme of a murder case, these were minor points, seemingly insignificant. In truth, however, they were crucial, for if Pat were to take the stand and be caught in any lie, no matter how innocuous, Laura knew the jury could easily decide to believe nothing he had to say. Were he sitting at home reminiscing with a friend, Laura thought, this fervent desire to portray his life with Sandy in the best possible light would have been endearing.
Every husband should be so dedicated to a wife’s memory—to Laura, this blind spot provided further evidence that Pat really loved his wife. But in the crucible of the courtroom, where the prosecutor would leap on everything he could to dispute Pat’s version of things (just as the defense would do with Jerry Coble), what sounded to Laura like well-intentioned, rose-tinted memories might sound to jurors like cover-up, denial, a sham. If he lied about ordinary arguments, the prosecutor would thunder, what else might he lie about?
Still, Pat had a point. Juries are routinely instructed that it is a defendant’s absolute right to choose not to testify, and that jurors must not hold a decision to remain silent against him or her. But everyone involved with Pat’s defense knew juries still wanted to hear from the accused, and that this would be particularly true with a husband accused of murdering his wife. What is he hiding? they would ask themselves, no matter what the law or the judge instructed. Which is why the defense team had staged the mock cross-examination.
Gary Pohlson had almost been persuaded to put Pat on as a witness without a mock session. But one of his law partners, a former prosecutor whose instincts told him that Pat would be easy game on the stand, persuaded Pohlson such a gamble could be disastrous. “Let me have a go at him,” the partner, Thomas Goethals, said. “I’ll pull him apart, and you’ll see. He’ll self-destruct.”
Held in a cramped jail visiting room, with Pat in his blue jailhouse coveralls, it turned out to be worse than even the former prosecutor imagined. Defensive and contradictory, arrogant one moment and at a loss for words the next, Pat withered under the harsh and accusatory questioning. He stammered, he hesitated, he looked uncertain—all the qualities you never want a jury to see in a client if you’re a defense lawyer. Mostly, it was a question of Pat’s delivery, not the substance of his answers, but to a jury trying to decide whom to believe and whom to doubt, demeanor counts a great deal. It became clear to Pohlson that Pat could never be allowed to take the stand. He just wasn’t up to it. It would be out-and-out malpractice to allow it.