by Edward Humes
The catalyst for the murder, Somers vowed to prove, was the Dunns’ meeting with financial advisor Kevin Knutson, on the very day Sandy vanished, in which Pat Dunn seemed stunned to learn that he was the sole beneficiary of Sandy’s will. This was the moment Pat decided to kill his wife, the prosecutor suggested, the knowledge that he could finally get his hands on Sandy’s money being the trigger that set his deadly plans into motion.
Finally, Somers promised the jury would hear of an exterminator who stopped by the Dunns’ house to do monthly spraying after Knutson had left. Pat, the prosecutor asserted, gave the bug man a wink and a nod and said he could spare himself a little time and effort by skipping the office, a separate room detached from the house and out by the swimming pool. Somers did not spell out the significance of this, but his implication was clear: He wanted jurors to conclude Pat had killed Sandy late in the afternoon, after Knutson left but before the exterminator arrived, stashed her body in the office, then waited until 1 A.M. to dispose of the corpse, when he would be spotted by Jerry Coble.
An important point of corroboration here, Somers told the jury, was the fact that the Dunns’ cleaning lady, Cindy Montes, had telephoned at five the following morning to confirm her appointment, with Pat Dunn answering out of breath and with the sound of water running in the background. The timing of all this left just enough time for Pat to have driven the sixty miles to Sandy’s mountainous burial site, where he dug a hasty grave, then returned for a quick cleaning of the bloody mess he had left behind.
“It all fits together,” Somers said. “The evidence points to only one possible conclusion: Pat Dunn is guilty.”
In opening statements, this scenario did indeed sound compelling, even to Laura. But it soon fell apart for the prosecutor, who had been relying upon Detective Soliz’s reports on the case, rather than his own firsthand interviews, for most of these facts. And as Laura knew they would, witness after witness took the stand and said the detective had misquoted or misunderstood them, leaving Somers’ far-reaching promises largely unfulfilled.
First, Kevin Knutson remembered Pat as not at all surprised by Sandy’s will during their meeting that last day of Sandy’s life. Detective Soliz had gotten that wrong, Knutson said. Nor was the Dunns’ marriage in trouble, he went on; Sandy had told him that she wanted Knutson to arrange things to allow Pat more access to her money, and to make sure he would be well taken care of if anything happened to her.
Then the exterminator took the witness stand and said he had done his work at the Dunns’ house before the time Knutson left, which meant Sandy could not have been dead in the office when the exterminator arrived—she had hugged Knutson good-bye more than an hour later. John Somers and Detective Soliz had gotten that wrong, too.
Then the man who had been Sandy’s investment broker since 1988, Roger Norwood, also complained that Detective Soliz’s report on their interview was inaccurate. The report—and Somers’ representations of it to the jury—starkly contradicted the actual state of affairs. Norwood swore Sandy had never wanted Pat kept in the dark about her investments—in fact, Pat participated in most every decision made regarding Sandy’s money, he said.1 The whole theory of motive laid out by Somers for the jury—that Pat deeply resented Sandy’s control of the purse strings and seized an opportunity to kill her for profit upon learning of the will—had been shot down.
Then there was the testimony of Cindy Montes, the housecleaner. Under Somers’ straightforward questioning, Montes first explained how her normal cleaning day for the Dunns fell on Wednesday, but that she did not go to the house on Wednesday, July 1, the day Pat reported Sandy missing. Now, here was something Somers had expected to hear. He anticipated that Montes next would explain this failure to clean on Wednesday by describing how she had called to confirm that morning, but an out-of-breath Pat picked up the phone and canceled. Again, though, Somers was taken by surprise by his own witness: Montes began telling jurors a completely different story.
The housecleaner explained that Pat and Sandy had instructed her days earlier not to come that Wednesday. “They had an appointment that week, and I had made prior arrangements to go in on the Tuesday before, and I was to show up at five in the morning. And I called that morning to just let them know I was heading over. And Mr. Dunn answered the phone, and at that time he said that he wanted to cancel and that we should reschedule.”
This testimony eroded the prosecution’s case even more. Montes had just repeated the same thing she had said months ago to David Sandberg, but then later retracted: that she had called the Dunns at five in the morning on Tuesday, June 30, sixteen hours before Sandy vanished. In other words, the fact that Cindy recalled the notoriously out-of-shape Pat being out of breath, that she heard water running in the background, and that he canceled cleaning on June 30, meant nothing. Sandy was alive and well at the time—maybe it was her in the shower when Montes heard the water running. So, just as Knutson and Norwood undermined his theory of motive, Montes shot Somers’ whole timetable for the crime. If Cindy Montes had gone on to explain how Detective Soliz had told her that her information about the case was “significant,” and that therefore she figured her cancellation from Pat Dunn must have happened on Wednesday, July 1, after all, the entire prosecution case might have died then and there.
But John Somers could not allow this to stand, and he didn’t. Remaining cool and outwardly unconcerned, he simply asked a leading question that contradicted what Montes had just said—and seemed to lead her to change her testimony more to suit Somers’ theory of the case.
“You indicated it was five that you called,” the prosecutor said. “Was that five A.M. on Wednesday, July 1?”
Montes looked at him. She and Detective Soliz had discussed in detail how important her testimony was to the case, that it must have been the day Sandy disappeared when she called. To stick with her initial answer that she had called on Tuesday would mean her observations really added nothing to the prosecution’s case, that she had nothing “worthwhile” to contribute. After a moment, she answered, “Yes, correct.”
The prosecution of Pat Dunn was back on track.2 This time, for good.
2
FOR A WHILE, IT SEEMED THAT PAT DUNN MIGHT BE marching toward acquittal and the district attorney headed for an embarrassing defeat. But after that pivotal moment with the housecleaner, the breaks began going John Somers’ way.
When the Dunns’ least favorite neighbor, Otis Coppock, took the stand, he, too, told a story that differed from the account in Detective Soliz’s report. But this time, the contradictions helped Somers, giving him a new theory to argue, one even better than the flagging one with which he started. Soliz had written in his report that Coppock heard Sandy and Pat arguing around five or five thirty in the afternoon on June 29, more than twenty-four hours before Sandy vanished. Coppock was too hard of hearing to know what the argument was about—in fact, he had heard only Sandy’s voice, not Pat’s—but he claimed to have seen her drive away in the Dunns’ Chevy Blazer, looking very angry. He recalled that he had heard loud fights between the Dunns in the past as well. Since this happened a day before Kevin Knutson’s meeting to discuss Sandy’s living trust, the defense considered Otis’ testimony marginal at best.
However, on the stand, Coppock joined the long line of witnesses claiming that Detective Soliz had gotten the facts wrong. Now Coppock testified that he had overheard Sandy yelling and angrily driving off on June 30—not a day before Sandy vanished, but just a few hours before. By his recollection of the time, this would have been an hour after Kevin Knutson hugged Sandy good-bye. Before Coppock said this, Knutson had been the last person other than Pat to see Sandy alive, and he had said the Dunns seemed happy and content when he left. That was bad testimony for Somers, good for Pat.
Now, even though it contradicted his opening statement, Somers could argue that Otis Coppock was the last person to see Sandy alive, and that the Dunns had fought furiously enough that evening for Sandy to storm off in
a rage, driving fast and erratically as she tore out of the driveway. And as Pat Dunn had denied to the police that there had been any argument at all between him and Sandy that day, Otis’ new story provided the added bonus of making Pat out to be a liar.
And why lie, Somers asked, unless he killed his wife? The prosecutor immediately dropped his theory about the exterminator and the body hidden in the office as Otis’ unexpected testimony made that an impossible scenario anyway. Now he claimed that the Dunns had argued so viciously and irreconcilably that last night that Pat saw himself with no choice but to kill Sandy or be left homeless and penniless by divorce. It was a stunning example of just how fluid the “truth” is in a trial, how not only the defense can shift its story to accommodate the ebb and flow of evidence, but how the prosecution can alter its key positions as well, and without ever questioning the underlying, bedrock premise that a defendant is guilty. In this case, Somers made such a shift, even though it meant conceding that the lead detective on the case had erred in his reports. Altering the “theory of the case”—the interpretation of the evidence, as opposed to the evidence itself—is perfectly legal. Indeed, the United States Supreme Court has found nothing amiss when a Texas prosecutor, in successive trials, accused two different people of being the lone triggerman in the same murder. Using two utterly contradictory theories, a prosecutor won the death penalty for one man, then repudiated his own evidence from that case to go after another defendant for the same crime.3
Gary Pohlson, of course, went after Otis Coppock. First the defense lawyer argued that the contradiction in times—June 29 or June 30—made it impossible to know what the truth was. Second, he complained that Otis really didn’t know what Sandy said during the argument, and got him to admit he couldn’t hear Pat at all. For all Otis knew, Sandy could have been yelling at the dogs for barking too loudly, rather than shouting at Pat (Pat later claimed that Sandy was actually yelling at Otis, whom she despised—but without Pat taking the stand, there was no way to tell this to the jury.) Coppock’s enmity toward Pat also was offered as a source of bias, but the damage had been done. Somers’ negative portrait of Pat had begun to take shape. None of this made him a murderer, not yet, but it did set the stage, with images of angry tirades and careening cars. And this gave the DA his first clear victory in the trial.
At this point, Laura began to see just how badly the defense had underestimated Deputy District Attorney John Somers. It had been easy to do, she realized, particularly for those who didn’t live and work in Kern County. Somers was small and boyish in appearance, seeming both younger and more inexperienced than he really was. With rumpled, inexpensive suits and tousled brown hair, he had an air about him that all but begged to be underestimated—a misjudgment he had used to his advantage time and again. He did not traffic in the hard-line rhetoric that had made his boss, Ed Jagels, a legend, nor was he ever tarred by the allegations of misconduct that sometimes plagued other prosecutors in the Kern County District Attorney’s Office—though more than once he has been called upon to defend their work and to save it from reversal.
For the most part, Somers was known on both sides of the Bakersfield legal community as a man of reason and integrity. He avoided flash and drama in the courtroom; his style was to remain quiet, exceedingly polite and deferential. He seldom attacked witnesses with aggressive cross-examination unless he absolutely had to—but when he did, he could be startlingly effective. He didn’t live for the “Perry Mason moment,” that mostly mythical, cathartic revelation that so often turns the tide of a television court case and even, on occasion, figures into a real-life trial, as when a former football star tried on a pair of blood-caked gloves in a Los Angeles courtroom. Somers preferred to slowly build a fortress of a case, a gradual, almost imperceptible assembling of small blocks that in the end crushed the defense under its sheer weight—less a knockout punch than the slow squeeze of a boa constrictor. He believed wholeheartedly in the maxim that, as children, prosecutors loved to build things, while future defense lawyers enjoyed kicking things down. And so he always tried to build cases too strong to be uprooted by even the toughest courtroom bully. Attorneys often thought they were beating John Somers right up to the end of the case, only to sit mesmerized as he assembled all those little pieces into one coherent mosaic in his closing argument. And then they’d watch, palms suddenly gone sweaty, as one by one, the jurors began to nod in agreement while Somers spoke, as if to say, Yeah, it was there all the time. More than one lawyer in Bakersfield had experienced this moment, when they would turn to look at John Somers with new respect—and vow never to underestimate him again.
There was a reason, after all, that Somers ranked as one of his office’s top prosecutors, no small accomplishment in a DA’s operation that tried more felonies and sent more people to prison per capita than any other California county. Juries loved his homespun charm; he liked to throw in a mention here or there of his humble origins in Missouri, and he could be seen during the Dunn trial piously crossing himself as jurors entered the courtroom. But as good as he was with juries, his legal acumen carried just as high a value in the Kern County District Attorney’s office: Somers was the lawyer Ed Jagels sought out to shore up the molestation-ring prosecutions when they began crumbling on appeal. Somers waded through the tens of thousands of pages accumulated in those cases, an entire room filled with materials, and found ways to fend off successful appeals and habeas corpus writs for years. He seemed to genuinely believe in the righteousness of his cause—one of the qualities that made him so formidable in court—but the net effect of his dedication was to keep men and women in prison for many years longer than they otherwise might have stayed behind bars until finally, in the end, they were cleared and set free.
In the trial of Pat Dunn, Somers slowly assembled, witness by witness, his puzzle-piece portrait of Pat as someone who had acted in a completely bizarre fashion and who was entirely capable of killing. Laura could feel the momentum building in the prosecutor’s favor, though the rest of the defense team still felt certain that the prosecution couldn’t win that way, especially after they finished with Jerry Coble.
Somers’ evidence of marital discord between Sandy and Pat revolved around a few acquaintances’ recollections of Pat growing angry at Sandy, usually during discussions of the movie-theater development that had been rejected by the city council. One of them, Roger McIntosh, the engineer on the project, described again how, during a project meeting, Pat told Sandy to shut up, then made a move toward his wife, causing her to retreat. (Others present at the meeting later recalled no such incident, with one pointing out that they were all seated around a large conference table, making the notion of Pat lunging at Sandy, and her backing off, an impossibility.)
Somers also turned to Ken Peterson, then a city council member (later he became a member of the Kern County Board of Supervisors), who spoke of a conference call with the Dunns during which Pat and Sandy argued about the development project, then hung up on him. Peterson also remembered another conversation in which Pat proclaimed himself “finished financially” if the project fell through, adding to the prosecution’s notion that Pat was somehow desperate for money at the time of Sandy’s death. (Pohlson disputed Peterson on this, pointing out that Detective Soliz’s initial interview report on the councilman stated only that Pat would be “finished,” which could be interpreted to mean he simply would give up attempts to develop that particular piece of land. Peterson, however, joined the chorus of witnesses who said Soliz wrote the statement down wrong. In any case, the substance of Peterson’s statement simply was not true, Pohlson argued: The demise of the project would not have finished Pat financially. Though the eighty to one hundred thousand dollars the Dunns had spent readying the property for construction would represent a substantial loss for them, the Dunns possessed assets of over a million dollars in cash and millions more in real estate at the time of Sandy’s death. Besides, the money was Sandy’s to lose, not Pat’s. Why, Pohlson reminded juro
rs, would he be desperate?)
Then there was Kate Rosenlieb, brought in by Somers to swear that the Dunns fought constantly and with increasing ferocity toward the end. Her testimony, surprisingly brief, was delivered with typical dramatic flair, as she seemed intent upon saying what she wanted to say—most of it to Pat’s detriment—regardless of what the lawyers asked. To Laura, her responses seemed pitched in a way that made them as harmful to Pat’s case as possible. For instance, when asked by a prosecutor if she saw Pat drink alcohol, instead of a simple yes, she responded, “I don’t think I ever saw Mr. Dunn that he wasn’t drinking.” When asked if the Dunns argued, Pat’s dear friend answered not yes or no, but, “There were tremendous fights, tremendous fights.” When asked if Pat had been crying or upset by Sandy’s disappearance, Kate didn’t say no, not so far as she could see. She said, “Not in the least.” Twice. Her choice of phrase said as much as the words themselves.
Kate also recalled that, when she asked Pat to go to the sheriff’s department to report Sandy missing—something he had already done—his response terrified her: He had said it was too late, that he feared the worst, that Sandy already was dead, and that he didn’t want anyone to know. There were charitable interpretations to all of these statements, but neither Kate nor Somers could give Pat the benefit of the doubt. Laura looked over at Pat to see how he was reacting to all this, but he looked dazed. He seemed to be shrinking before her eyes, as if he, too, saw what was coming.
Kate went on to provide Somers with some other key bits for his growing puzzle. She said Pat had once complained that Sandy wore too much jewelry on her early morning walks, and from that statement Rosenlieb and Somers then implied, incorrectly, that this remained Sandy’s practice until the day she died. One of the first things Kate recalled asking Pat after Sandy vanished was whether her jewelry was gone, too. Pat told her no, it wasn’t—all the jewelry was at the house, causing Kate to wonder how that could be, if Sandy always wore it—unless Pat’s story was a lie. Now Somers had something else with which to attack Pat’s defense.