by Edward Humes
Throughout the long investigation of Sandy’s murder, and in multiple police interviews, Kate had consistently told Detectives Kline and Soliz the same story of how she learned Sandy was missing: Pat called her on July 3, two days after the disappearance, and told her about it. She hadn’t heard anything about it before then, she repeatedly told detectives. It was this July 3 conversation with Pat, along with their meeting the next day, that left Kate so suspicious of her former teacher and dear friend that she reported him to the authorities. His supposedly calm demeanor, his lack of concern, his pronouncement that he feared the worst, his reluctance to go to the sheriff’s department with her to report Sandy missing (never mind that he had already done so days before)—all convinced Rosenlieb that the man she loved like a second father was a killer.
It was this rendition that the defense had prepared for. But eight months after Sandy died, on the verge of Pat’s trial, Rosenlieb went to Deputy DA John Somers and told him a new, more damning story: She had really learned about Sandy’s disappearance a day earlier, on July 2, and not from Pat Dunn, but through a phone call from Bakersfield attorney Teri Bjorn. Somers knew Bjorn was Pat and Sandy Dunn’s real estate lawyer, as well as a good friend of Kate, with whom she served on the city planning commission.
According to the revamped story Rosenlieb told the prosecutor, she learned about Sandy’s disappearance when Bjorn somewhat breathlessly broke the news. According to Kate, Bjorn had received a call from Pat a day earlier—July 1—before he had reported Sandy missing to the sheriff’s department. In that call, Pat is supposed to have told Teri about the disappearance, then asked if he could somehow get power of attorney in Sandy’s name and thus access to her money.84
In other words, Rosenlieb said, Pat had been trying to loot Sandy’s accounts, just hours after she supposedly walked off and vanished. Undoubtedly, Kate told the astonished prosecutor, this was because Pat knew Sandy was already dead. Because he killed her.
In this new version, Pat never did call Kate to tell her about Sandy. It was Kate who called Pat the day after hearing from Teri Bjorn, to ask what he was up to. This is when, Rosenlieb now claimed, Pat told her he wasn’t doing so good, because, “I can’t find Mom.” According to her new account, Rosenlieb knew that Pat was a killer before they ever had this conversation. This contradicted her earlier statements to detectives, in which she minutely detailed all the things Pat said and did to first arouse her suspicions. Months later, though, she recalled things differently: “I knew what he had done right away. I didn’t have to talk to him.”
When the prosecutor asked why she had kept silent for so many months, Kate apologized for deceiving the sheriff’s detectives in her earlier statements, but explained that she had been caught in the middle by desperate pleas from Bjorn for her to keep quiet. Attorneys who blab about private communications with clients can be censured or worse, Rosenlieb said, and even if nothing official happened to Bjorn, Kate believed her friend’s reputation in the legal community could be ruined.
“This was a big thing over my head. I wanted to tell the police everything, but I couldn’t. Teri begged me not to say anything. She said she should never have told me, that it was privileged, that she could be disbarred . . . When I said I wanted to tell everything, she went to her baby, took him out of his crib, held him to her and said, ‘He is all I have in the world. You will take my ability to make a living away. And then what about my baby?’ ”85
So Kate had sat on the information for months, she said, and lied to the detectives. (She never explained why, in her original story, she found it necessary to repeatedly insist that Pat called her with the news about Sandy’s disappearance, then later change her story to say she called him.) In the end, as the trial approached and she feared Pat might get off, she told the DA she had to reveal the whole story. Almost in tears, she went to Somers’ office and confessed everything, apologizing profusely and, knowing that she had probably just ended yet another friendship, asking if there were any way Bjorn could be spared.
Somers, however, was not angry, as she had expected. He was jubilant. Kate Rosenlieb had handed him precisely the evidence he needed to slam Pat Dunn—and his defense team—down hard. If what Rosenlieb was saying was true, it meant the first person Pat called about his missing wife was not the sheriff but his own lawyer—so he could get his hands on Sandy’s money. Such a scenario would reveal Pat Dunn as a cold-hearted monster and bolster the prosecutor’s argument that the killing was for financial gain—the “special circumstance” that could earn Pat Dunn the longest possible sentence, life without parole. All the prosecutor had to do was find a way to force Teri Bjorn to testify, attorney-client privilege notwithstanding. He began flipping through a law book, then stopped and peered at a page.
“You did the right thing,” he told Rosenlieb, his boyish face solemn, though he must have felt like dishing out a high five. “Your friend will be all right. There’s a loophole in the law. There’s no privilege if the client is trying to commit a fraud or a crime. She can testify about it. If he was asking for a power of attorney—which only Sandy could legally grant—that’s a fraud. He was asking his lawyer to help him commit a crime, and that’s not privileged.”86
“That’s what he asked for,” Rosenlieb excitedly agreed. “Power of attorney.”
Kate next handed over seven pages of typewritten notes she had prepared on her views of the murder case, detailing her new story, her contacts with Pat, the way she believed she had spurred the detectives on when they seemed lackadaisical, and how she personally had led them to identify Sandy’s body when she read about a corpse found in the desert. Dramatic and breathless, placing their author at the center of much of the action in the case, the notes were assembled many months after the disappearance, penned with the help of tape recordings and a few things Rosenlieb had jotted down over time. Even these original tapes and notes on her conversations with Pat were begun two weeks after Sandy disappeared, rather than immediately after, when her memory remained fresh. Moreover, she destroyed those original notes and recordings, making it impossible to check the accuracy of her newly typed notes.
Somers duly turned over to the defense those new notes, along with his intention to call Teri Bjorn as a prosecution witness, two weeks before trial. This came as a complete surprise to the defense, and all the more difficult to deal with, given Rosenlieb’s refusal to speak with Pat’s lawyers and investigators.
In a criminal case, late disclosure of information can sometimes lead to sanctions against prosecutors, but in this case, because Somers did not gain this new material until late in the case himself, he did nothing wrong. The problem is, the notes did not tell the whole story. They do not mention that Kate Rosenlieb deceived the police initially, nor do they explain the supposed reason for it: her desire to protect her friend Teri Bjorn.
More importantly, the notes passed on to the defense, written in the form of a journal, stop on August 1, weeks before Jerry Coble came forward, and three months before Pat was arrested and charged. The last entry Kate made in the notes given to the defense concerned her surreptitious surveillance of Pat’s house. In it, she explained that she had decided to watch the house without contacting Pat just to make sure that he had not killed himself and that the dogs were fed. “This was the last time I checked,” she wrote. “I finally came to grips with the fact that I could not take care of Patrick and that in reality, I had lost them both and I had to let go.”
The clear implication of this final journal entry was that Kate, after this point, ceased being involved in the case and in Pat’s life. But nothing could be further from the truth. There were more journal entries after that, ones that seemed to display a marked bias against Pat, though they were never given to the defense.87 Kate, it seems, took a continued, active role in the case, a role that the district attorney knew about yet never revealed.
• • •
We’re missing something, Laura kept saying, mostly to herself, as she watched the
trial date approach and the rest of the defense team’s confidence grow. The lawyers had decided they could best counter Kate Rosenlieb simply by keeping Teri Bjorn from testifying, something they felt reasonably sure they could accomplish, given the rigorous confidentiality surrounding communications between clients and lawyers. As for Rosenlieb herself, the defense could take a page from the prosecution’s book and argue that her story had changed so radically that it could not be trusted. It all sounded good, but Laura sensed some terrible surprise, some new and unexpected testimony, looming just over the horizon.
As it turned out, Laura’s instincts were on the mark: The defense team was missing even more crucial information before the trial of Pat Dunn began—information about witnesses, about evidence, about the police and the prosecution, all of it far more important than anything Kate Rosenlieb had to say. As happened in many other Kern County cases, from the molestation rings to the Offord Rollins prosecution, information that could only have helped Pat’s defense and hurt the prosecution was kept secret.
Judge, jury and defense were all kept in the dark. With predictable results.
PART III
Trial and Error
But O the truth, the truth! The many eyes That look on it! the diverse things they see.
—GEORGE MEREDITH
All sides in a trial want to hide at least some of the truth.
—ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
1
AS FAR AS LAURA LAWHON WAS CONCERNED, THE trial started slipping downhill before even a single witness was called. The disastrous slide began with Pat’s new suit.
When she saw what Pat Dunn wore on the first day of trial, that shiny shapeless suit of brown polyester dug out from some forgotten rack in back of Montgomery Ward, she thought to herself, We’re going to lose. Right or wrong, it’s the little things that make or break your case, and they’re gonna look at him and say he looks like a used car salesman. A really shifty used car salesman.
Pat rarely wore suits, and when Laura had gone by his house before the trial to see if anything in the closet would do for trial, she found nothing of any use. But she saw this as an opportunity. She found a local store that specialized in Western wear and picked out a subtly styled sport coat, slacks and boots, an outfit that would give Pat the prosperous look of a rancher, which she felt would go over well in this country-and-western town. Her boss, David Sandberg, however, said no way, take it back. He wanted a tweed jacket with elbow patches, the retired-schoolteacher look, which Laura didn’t like, but could have lived with. Instead, Mike Dunn had settled the wardrobe debate for his brother with a quick trip to Ward’s. Pat now sat in court encased in a cheap and ill-fitting coat and open-necked shirt that made him look like someone who otherwise never wore suits—in other words, like a person pretending to be someone he was not. It was exactly the wrong subliminal message to be sending to the jury, Laura told herself. And there was nothing she could do about it.
She couldn’t even complain to Pat’s lawyer, Gary Pohlson, because over the course of the investigation, her relationship with Sandberg had soured and now she was prohibited from speaking directly with defense attorneys. Sandberg had not wanted Laura on the case in the first place. Early on, he had allowed her to believe that the firm wasn’t even going to get the Dunn case, and let her leave on a vacation trip, only to be forced to bring her back because Pohlson wanted Laura involved. Then, during the investigation, he had parceled out assignments to her, but saved witnesses he deemed important for himself. She could not, for instance, interview Pat and Sandy’s housekeeper, Cindy Montes, or Ann Kidder, the accountant’s secretary who had spoken to Sandy after her disappearance—Sandberg wanted them. Such restrictions created problems, though, as Laura had questions of these witnesses that remained unanswered. Worse still, from Laura’s point of view, was the order not to speak directly with Pohlson and the other defense lawyers. She had to report to Sandberg, who would then pass on her information. Laura chafed under these restrictions, but tried to live within them most of the time—something she would later regret.
On that first day of trial, after blanching at the sight of Pat’s wardrobe, she sat in a hallway of the Kern County Courthouse, watching prospective jurors emerge after being questioned in court about their backgrounds and biases. Two of them stood near enough for Laura to overhear them chat and get to know each other. One of them, a man with dark hair and a large wooden cross close around his neck, mentioned that he played in a band.
“Oh, what kind of music do you play?” the other man asked.
“Country-western,” the man with the cross said. Then, Laura watched as the musician’s mouth drew back in a sneer and his head nodded toward the courtroom doors. “You know, the kind of music those defense lawyers would hate.” The word defense was pronounced with particular disdain.
The men moved off then, headed for the basement cafeteria for coffee and snacks. Laura was horrified. She had worried that the out-of-town attorneys in their expensive suits would be viewed as outsiders, but even she had not expected this sort of hostility. Her first instinct was to run to Pohlson to tell him to make sure to strike the man with the cross from the jury. But she restrained herself, instead telling her boss David Sandberg what she had heard, so that he could pass it on. She followed the chain of command, just as he had asked.
A few hours later, the jury-selection process was completed. Sixteen men and women—twelve jurors and four alternates—had been chosen to decide Pat Dunn’s fate. When Laura saw them file out of the courtroom, the man with the cross walked among them. Laura was surprised to see him still on the panel, but figured Pohlson must have had a very good reason for keeping him. She shuddered, though, when the time came for the members of Pat Dunn’s jury to elect a foreman: They chose the man with the cross.
When she saw the suit Pat Dunn wore, and the man who would serve as foreman of the jury seated in judgment, Laura had a premonition of what no one else on the defense team even guessed at that point: Pat was going to be convicted. Her head told her otherwise, she would later say, for the facts seemed overwhelmingly on Pat’s side. But her heart was already breaking.
• • •
The rest of the defense team, and Pat Dunn himself, walked into court still brimming with confidence. In his opening statement to the jury, Gary Pohlson launched the promising strategy that he and his colleagues had plotted out months before, announcing that the case was about Jerry Coble and nothing else. The government had but one significant witness, the defense lawyer said, and if you believe him, go ahead and send Pat Dunn to prison. But that wouldn’t happen, Pohlson predicted, looking into the eyes of the jurors, who seemed attentive and receptive at this early stage of the case. Coble would be revealed as a liar, a cheat and a con man. His claim that he saw Pat Dunn dispose of his wife’s body was a concoction, the lawyer promised to prove, a frame job handed to police detectives willing to accept just about anything if it allowed them to make an arrest. Without Jerry Coble, Pohlson asserted, all of the other prosecution witnesses will prove just one thing: that the sheriff and the DA built the case on bias, misplaced suspicion and investigative incompetence, without a shred of hard evidence to back it up.
Pohlson paced a bit as he spoke, a comforting figure in the courtroom, stocky and middle-aged, his voice never raised. He had handled many tough murder cases in his regular practice in Orange County, and he had a good reputation on his home turf—though here in Kern County, that didn’t count for much. But he was earnest in his presentation, straightforward and plainspoken, never slick, never sounding like he was hiding something or talking down to his audience. Laura thought he got off to a good start.
“This case is about Jerry Coble, pure and simple,” the defense lawyer said, supremely confident in his ability to skewer Coble as a witness, and that nothing else in the case mattered.
But Pohlson’s opponent at the prosecution table, Deputy DA John Somers, had already decided that his star witness might also be his greatest liabili
ty. So, in his opening statement, and throughout his long presentation of witnesses, Somers all but ignored Jerry Lee Coble. Instead, he focused on ostensibly minor witnesses, people who talked about Pat’s demeanor, Sandy’s mental state and the couple’s finances. Somers was going for a portrait of Pat as a cold, unfeeling man fully capable of murder, who coveted his wife’s money and who could not be trusted to tell the truth. He didn’t need Coble for that. It was a bold, risky and somewhat unexpected strategy, and it delighted Gary Pohlson.
“He can’t win that way. We’ve got an answer for all of it and none of it proves a thing,” Pohlson told Pat, who had sat stiff and morose throughout Somers’ opening remarks. “He’s talking smoke and suspicion—it’s like he’s ashamed of the meat of his case. Jurors can sense that.”
And, for a time, it appeared that Pohlson was right, for Somers’ strategy fared poorly at the outset and the early breaks clearly cut Pat’s way. News reporters and courtroom observers began, like the defense team, predicting an acquittal, as prosecution witnesses began saying things John Somers did not want to hear. As he had talked about Pat’s behavior, his alleged fights with Sandy and his motive to kill, the prosecutor had made a number of promises to the jury—promises he could not keep.
He said, for one thing, that his witnesses would clearly reveal Pat’s motive for murder: Sandy controlled the purse strings in the family and had instructed her investment brokers to keep Pat in the dark about her money. This enraged Pat, Somers asserted, setting the stage for vicious arguments, then fatal violence, between the Dunns.
Somers next promised evidence to show that the Dunns’ marriage had been crumbling for some time, and that the couple was overheard by a neighbor quarreling bitterly just one day before Sandy disappeared.