by Edward Humes
“That is the most reprehensible thing that has ever come to my attention . . . You have made the children virtual prisoners, and brainwashed them,” the judge raged.44
It took years, but eventually attention shifted from pending ring cases contaminated by satanic allegations to the older ones that had never involved the devil and had already ended in convictions. The district attorney tried to argue that any cases that arose before the satanic allegations surfaced should not be called into question, but because the same children and the same investigators asking the same leading questions were involved in both, this argument did not carry much weight. The stunning convictions won in the original ring cases, the victories that had thrust the Kern County District Attorney into the national spotlight, were now being overturned one by one, crumbling in the face of grave questions about the medical evidence, about the way kids were interviewed, and about the conduct of prosecutors. People who had been sentenced to hundreds of years in prison regained their freedom. It was a pattern that repeated itself around the country as well, as other similar cases fueled by hysteria and misconduct self-destructed, a process that bewildered communities that had been taught to believe and fear. Nowhere was this process more dramatic than in Kern County.
In one extraordinary opinion, the California Court of Appeal in 1990 struck down the convictions of seven defendants in the Pitts ring case, rescinding their more than two thousand years in collective prison sentences. The court excoriated both the judge, Gary Friedman, for his numerous errors and proprosecution bias, and the deputy DA, Andrew Gindes, who engaged in acts of prosecutorial misconduct “too numerous to chronicle”—though the court’s opinion included nearly a hundred pages citing instances of every type of misconduct imaginable, from providing false information to the jury to introducing Jesus Christ himself as an unsworn witness for the government.
In unusually strong language, the court further wrote of Gindes, “The record is replete with examples of an overzealous prosecutor who, in his blind quest to convict, forgot or ignored his constitutional and ethical duties as representative of the People.”45 Even the indignant Gindes, who denied behaving improperly, called the Pitts opinion “the harshest condemnation of a deputy district attorney in the history of California.”
After losing a bid to have the state supreme court reinstate the Pitts case, District Attorney Jagels decided not to retry it, though he denied that he had prosecuted innocent men and women. He suggested instead that it was unfortunate that appeals judges, his favorite targets, had overturned a legitimate jury verdict because of some “minor” problems in the trial. Meanwhile, Deputy DA John Somers, who worked to defend the ring convictions from further appeals when he wasn’t prosecuting Pat Dunn, went a step further. He told a news reporter that the appeals court based its decision in the Pitts case solely on prosecutorial misconduct, not a lack of evidence. “This was a solid case with a proper investigation. This was not a case of hysteria with fabrication of charges,” Somers proclaimed. “We never had any doubt about their guilt then and we don’t have any doubt about their guilt now.”46
Somers’ statement expressed the DA’s party line: Once again, rather than look inward, Kern County officials circled their wagons. In this instance, they scapegoated Andrew Gindes, citing him and his performance in the Pitts case as isolated examples of misconduct that had marred otherwise strong, well-investigated cases. This, however, does not square with the record. Gindes may have been unique to the Pitts case, but his presence was all that distinguished it—all of the molestation-ring cases, Pitts included, were dogged by the same claims of bogus medical evidence and suggestive, even abusive, questioning of children. But the appeals court never had to consider the merits of these claims, at least as far as they applied to Pitts, because Gindes’ conduct, the first factor that they examined, provided more than enough reason to throw out the convictions.
It would fall to other ring cases to reveal how the errors and misconduct went far beyond one wayward prosecutor, to show they were, indeed, systemic and had been going on long before the excesses of the satanic investigation were exposed. Donna Sue Hubbard’s prosecution was one such case. Yet another high-profile ring prosecution from the 1980s, the Hubbard case began with a single allegation against David Kelly, a self-styled “big brother” who insinuated himself into families, took kids on trips to amusement parks, then fondled and sodomized them. Even after all the reversals and questionable evidence, there seemed to be little doubt about his guilt.47
But the case unfolded during the hysteria of the Witch Hunt, and the feverish investigation that sprang from solid evidence of Kelly’s alleged abuse of three boys soon led to less substantial accusations against two others, including Hubbard, who had reported Kelly to the police in the first place. She ended up accused of molestation and of selling her ten-year-old son as a sex slave. The third defendant was named David A. Duncan. The investigation featured the usual discredited medical evidence and repeated, high-pressure interrogations of child-victims, with one investigator accused of verbally and physically abusing children because they insisted (truthfully, it turned out) that they had not been molested. The case also produced the familiar laundry list of grotesque allegations—drugged children, kiddie porn, hooks in the ceiling—none of which could ever be found, let alone proved.48 Still, all three of the ring “members” were convicted.
Four years into a sixty-year prison sentence, Duncan was freed on appeal because he had been illegally interrogated while in jail, despite having invoked his rights and being represented by a lawyer. The paid undercover informant who questioned him later testified that Duncan confessed, which Duncan swore was a lie. In any case, once his conviction was reversed, the Kern County DA declined to try Duncan a second time. When he sued Kern County for civil rights violations, a local judge not only dismissed the suit as frivolous, he ordered the impoverished Duncan to pay $123,000 to the county for its time and trouble in fighting his suit. District Attorney Jagels expressed satisfaction with this ruling.
“It is one of the ironies of our system,” he told the Bakersfield Californian, “that a person who is convicted by a jury of his peers can sue years later after his case is reversed on a technicality in order to try to collect money from everybody who was involved in the case.”
As Pat Dunn’s trial was wrapping up, the California Court of Appeal reached into Kern County again, this time ruling that the judge and Jagels were wrong—Duncan’s suit should not have been thrown out, as he had the same rights as anyone in Kern County to seek redress in court. And, contrary to Jagels’ thoughts on the matter, the appeals court did not deem the violations of basic constitutional rights committed in order to falsely convict Duncan a mere “technicality.”
Meanwhile, Donna Sue Hubbard, sentenced to one hundred years in prison, remained behind bars. She had no illegal confession in her case,49 just the by-then standard claims of false medical evidence and coercive questioning of children that Kern County judges and juries routinely rejected. Her son, Richie, had recanted, saying pressure by investigators led him to make false accusations against his mother when only Kelly had molested him. Although many of the ring “victims” in other cases had told similar stories by then, no one in the Kern County justice system would accept the word of Hubbard’s son.
Still, she was given one more chance at freedom. Because of irrefutable evidence that false allegations had been made in other ring investigations, the appellate courts ordered Kern County to hold a hearing on Hubbard’s claims. Superior Court Judge Clarence Westra, the same judge who had presided over Hubbard’s conviction, held this habeas corpus hearing even as Pat Dunn was being tried in the same courthouse basement. Westra heard testimony from Hubbard’s son and a variety of experts, including one psychiatrist who called the questioning of children in the case “a virtual catalog of every mistake you can make if you are looking for the truth.”
It was Judge Westra who, as a senior prosecutor years earlier, had resisted
charging Glenn Fitts in the Dana Butler case. But when it was time to rule on Hubbard’s request for a new trial, he showed no such hesitation. His blistering opinion branded her and her son’s recantation unbelievable; Hubbard’s attorney, Michael Snedeker—a Portland, Oregon, lawyer who had grown unpopular in Kern County by winning appeals in several other ring cases—was called specious. And the judge savaged the expert who challenged the manner in which children were questioned in the case, labeling him biased and elitist for implying that Kern County jurors were too stupid to tell a coerced interrogation from a proper one. Hubbard’s trial was fair, Westra decided, as was the investigation of her case. Any other ruling, the judge wrote, “would be an absolute outright attack on the cornerstone of our legal system—the jury system.”50
District Attorney Ed Jagels pronounced Westra’s opinion an extraordinarily fine one. Donna Sue Hubbard would spend two more years in prison before the Court of Appeal in August 1995 told Judge Westra and the Kern County District Attorney that exactly the opposite was true, that the questioning of the children was so tainted by coercion that it could not be believed.51 Donna Sue Hubbard finally was free.
Jagels launched a war of words with the Court of Appeal’s Fifth District after this ruling, accusing it of bias against Kern County. In a press interview, he characterized the inch-thick opinion, with its discussion of fundamental violations of the Constitution, as having “to glom on to one tangential minor point” in order to reverse Hubbard’s conviction. He urged the state attorney general—the same office that had years earlier criticized Kern County’s ring-investigation practices—to appeal to the California Supreme Court, to try to put Hubbard back in prison. Surprisingly, the attorney general did so, despite objections from some staff members who felt that the office should not defend the Kern County DA in the ring cases, but it mattered little. The supreme court let matters stand: Donna Sue Hubbard would remain free. As in other such cases, Ed Jagels made no attempt to retry her, even as he continued to insist she was guilty.
“The basis for the reversals,” he said, “do not, in my opinion, lead to the conclusion that innocent persons were convicted.”
“My mother is innocent,” Hubbard’s son, Richie, said in retort. By the time Hubbard was out of prison, he was twenty-one and had named his newborn daughter after her. “I’ll never forgive Kern County for what it did to her. And to me.”
• • •
The fallout from this string of embarrassments in the ring cases and other short-circuited prosecutions was not obvious to the public, as Ed Jagels, with his thunderous attacks on liberal judges, remained as popular and electable as ever. Beneath the surface, though, everything had changed.
Andrew Gindes, once lauded by Jagels as brilliant, left the DA’s office in disgrace. He began accusing his former boss of improprieties, of burying cases for friends, and of deliberately “throwing” the appeals and retrials of ring cases because he was unwilling to stake his political career further on risky cases. Gindes’ legal career was in ruin, and he was forced to take a minimum-wage job as a cashier before finally getting work as a court-appointed attorney in Kern County Juvenile Court—representing the interests of abused kids.52 Several of the other ring-case prosecutors also left the office a short time later.
Meanwhile, Carol Darling, the sexual-abuse coordinator whose questioning of children had absorbed harsh criticism as the ring cases unraveled, also left the DA’s office. Jagels, who once praised Darling for making the molestation prosecutions possible, now opined that she should never have been allowed to interview victims in the first place—a startling indictment of one of the main instigators of the ring prosecutions. During the attorney general’s investigation, in fact, he called Darling “the great crack” in the DA’s system of investigating cases. (For her part, Darling told investigators for the attorney general that, based upon the children’s discredited accusations against a DA, a sheriff’s deputy and a social worker, she still believed there was a satanic influence in Kern County law enforcement—but was too fearful to say more.)
Around the same time, her husband, Brad Darling, was transferred to the sheriff’s transportation department and away from child-abuse cases for good. Other task-force investigators were transferred out of sex crimes; one, Don Fredenburg, who had been caught on tape coercing accusations from the Kniffen boys, was fired, arrested and sentenced to prison for four years for misappropriation of funds and other improprieties related to his affair with a jail inmate. His boss, Sheriff Larry Kleier, enmeshed in a variety of scandals after staking his career on the satanic-abuse cases, was voted out of office. Within a year of the attorney general’s seething report, virtually everyone involved with putting together the massive ring cases and the Satanic Task Force was gone.
The impact of that personnel shift would appear to be dramatic. To this day, no more molestation rings have ever been uncovered in Kern County. Almost immediately, the number of felony molestation prosecutions requested by the Kern County Sheriff’s Department dropped by nearly half and became statistically consistent with the Bakersfield Police Department and the police in other communities in Kern County. News coverage of these numbers—in the past so critical of the city police for failing to find any molestation rings—began to suggest that something must have been very wrong at the sheriff’s department to produce such an abnormal number of cases. The room at the district attorney’s office with the toys and crayons, where the child-victims once were interviewed, became a secretaries’ lunch room.
In the end, of the fifty-three men and women formally prosecuted in Kern County as members of molestation rings, only six continue to serve their prison sentences. All the rest have had their cases dismissed or overturned, or else they were allowed to plead to crimes requiring no incarceration. Fewer than one out of six ring defendants prosecuted in Kern County were actually guilty of the charges against them. And these figures do not include the twenty-one other cases in which children were removed from families for as long as two years, only to have every allegation against them dropped as well, or the eighty-five other people suspected and traumatized, but never charged.
Yet no one in power in Kern County would admit to making any mistakes when it came to those who still remained in prison, among them the original ring defendants, Scott and Brenda Kniffen, and Alvin and Debbie McCuan. After everything that had come to pass, after all the questions, scandal and dismissals, the Kern County District Attorney still insisted that those four, whose case had started it all, were clearly guilty. Prosecutors—particularly John Somers—insisted that nothing could shake their confidence in those original convictions. The Kniffen boys had recanted and proclaimed their parents innocent, the medical evidence had been shown to be unreliable, and the investigators’ credibility and prosecutor Gindes’ reputation had been reduced to a shambles. Yet the DA had continued to prevail in the Byzantine world of appeals, writs and habeas corpus pleas that Ed Jagels so liked to criticize. Although each ring case involved the same issues, each, for purposes of appeals, required the defense to start from scratch and prove everything, every allegation of misconduct and mistake all over again. Improprieties in one case might lead to freedom, while similar official behavior would be condoned in the next, depending on which judge or panel heard the appeal. The Kniffens and McCuans watched all the other ring prosecutions come unglued, for all the same reasons that they believed their own convictions were flawed, and wondered if their turn might ever come.
By 1993, when Pat Dunn’s trial ended and he joined them in prison, they were still waiting.
9
KERN COUNTY, THOUGH IT SEEMS TO HAVE SENT AN unusual number of innocents to prison, is by no means unique. Just as the county pioneered a national explosion of molestation-ring cases, so did it anticipate a broader trend—a trend of increasing law-enforcement and prosecutorial misconduct. Kern County, it seems, is not an anomaly. It has merely ridden the crest of a wave just now breaking upon the justice system. And no region of th
e country has been immune.
In March 1993, the same month as Pat Dunn’s trial, Walter “Johnny D” McMillian of Monroeville, Alabama—the model for the racially torn town at the center of To Kill a Mockingbird—was set free after seven years on death row. Three key prosecution witnesses in the case had lied, and law-enforcement officials knew it and even encouraged it. The misconduct was revealed only after an appeals attorney accidentally received an unedited police tape of one of the witnesses’ statements. Unlike earlier versions given to the defense and appeals teams, this one included a portion in which the witness complained that the police wanted him to frame an innocent Johnny D. Even then, the television news show 60 Minutes had to air a report on the scandal before Alabama authorities finally agreed that the case had been mishandled and decided to reopen it. By that time, McMillian had already been through four rounds of failed appeals and was within days of being executed. Once free, he was asked to testify before Congress about his experience. “I was wrenched from my family, from my children, from my grandchild, from my friends, from my work that I loved, and was placed in an isolation cell the size of a shoe box, with no sunlight, no companionship and no work for nearly six years,” he testified. “Every minute of every day, I knew I was innocent.”53
Pat Dunn heard about Johnny D on 60 Minutes. “Laura,” he said, calling her collect from jail. “That’s me on TV.”