Body Parts (33 page)

As a teenager, Dave Mazurek was recruited to play quarterback for the Cornell University football team, but he had to return to California two years later after tearing his rotator cuff and coming down with mononucleosis.

He transferred to San Francisco State University, where he became managing editor of the
Golden Gater
and graduated with a journalism degree. He earned a law degree from the University of La Verne in Ontario, California, in 1993, then went into private practice in nearby Claremont, taking any case that would pay the rent.

After three years, he decided to pursue trial work, and despite his lack of criminal experience, he landed a job with the DA’s office in San Bernardino in 1996.

Mazurek won his first two death penalty cases, in 2003 and 2004. He was already having a very busy year in 2004, expecting to do four murder trials, when he inherited the Ford case, his third death penalty case.

Mazurek already knew of it from reading about it in the newspaper and chatting with Whitney.

“I think everybody had heard of this case,” Mazurek said later, recalling that Wayne was known as “the guy who walked in with a breast in his pocket.”

“It was pretty shocking,” he said. “It kind of had the Jack the Ripper quality—the dismemberment, the girls who were disadvantaged and vulnerable and at bad places in their lives, living the kind of lifestyle that put them in his path, and the brutality that he carried out . . . on [them].”

Mazurek first saw Wayne in court in 2004, dressed in a sport coat, looking somewhat subdued, his shoulders slumped. He looked older and smaller than Mazurek had expected, given how he’d physically dominated his victims.

“There’s no such thing as somebody who looks like a killer,” Mazurek said, hastily adding the exception of serial killer Richard Ramirez. “You would have seen him [Wayne] walk down the street and wouldn’t have given him a second thought.”

It also surprised him that Wayne seemed to enjoy talking to people, regardless of which side they were on. Wayne would start conversations with Mazurek about what he had for lunch, for example, stopping only after Canty leaned over and said, “Don’t talk to him. He’s not your friend.”

Then, to Mazurek, Canty would say, “Please don’t talk to him.”

Mazurek didn’t start digging into the case until January 2005. He walked into the DA’s board room, which was lined with walls of blue binders containing more than twelve thousand pages—forty-eight binders full—of discovery materials.

When Whitney had handed over the case, he gestured at these binders, saying they contained everything Mazurek needed to know.

“If you have any questions, call me,” Whitney said, just as a father would hand the car keys to his son and tell him to have fun driving it.

Mazurek felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of paper. But once he got over the initial shock, he began formulating ideas and talking to the various detectives involved.

At first, he was struck by the fact that Wayne had turned himself in. However, he later decided that Rodney had essentially talked him into it.

“Had his brother not been involved, I don’t think he ever would have gone to the sheriff’s station, and more girls would have been murdered,” he said.

He felt it would be a natural human reaction for a juror to dismiss Wayne’s peculiar behavior as crazy, so Mazurek set out to craft a counterargument so as to say, “No, he’s very disturbed, a sick individual and a perverted individual, but he still is somebody who deserves to be accountable for what he did.”

Sadly, Mazurek was already familiar with Patricia Tamez’s history because he had seen her around the courthouse before she was killed.

The prosecutor didn’t think Wayne met the standard for an insanity defense, because he “was far too aware of what was going on and he knew it was wrong.” Wayne went to elaborate lengths to cover up his crimes and was able to hold a steady job.

Mazurek noticed there was so much finger-pointing between Wayne’s mother and father that it was virtually impossible to know who was telling the truth. That said, he didn’t blame either one of them for the way Wayne turned out.

“It’s his choice and his decision. There are lots of kids who grow up in messed-up houses and don’t go on to become serial killers,” he said, noting that a local boy had parents who chained him to his bed and fed him dog food. “Rodney went through the same thing and he turned out all right.”

Mazurek was going through a few personal issues of his own when he became immersed in the case. He and his wife had not been getting along while he was in back-to-back trials in 2004; the Ford case didn’t help matters.

After they separated in early 2005, Mazurek moved to his parents’ house in La Quinta, which more than tripled his commute to three hours a day. But he became so involved in trial preparation that he was happy to have that time to think. He’d listen to witness interviews on CD, anticipate what the defense would say on direct, and come up with his responses for cross-examination.

“When you’re in trial, it just becomes what you eat, live, and breathe,” he said.

By the time the trial started in 2006, Mazurek was in the throes of divorce and faced another complication as well. After applying to become a judge in late 2005, Mazurek was called in for interviews with the governor’s office and the Judicial Nominating Evaluation Committee, both in the middle of the trial.

Steven Mapes, a deputy public defender who considered Canty a mentor in the Death Penalty Unit, eventually joined the defense team.

A graduate of Brigham Young University, Mapes spent a year at a Spanish-language weekly newspaper in Washington State before earning his law degree from Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana. The son of a Los Angeles Police Department officer and a dispatcher, Mapes worked for three years as a criminal defense attorney on indigent cases with which the public defender’s office had a conflict of interest, then joined that office in 1998.

The prosecution team was able to track down Rachel Holt, aka “Sonoma County Doe,” as well as the prostitute known as “Orange County Doe.” They found “OC Doe” homeless in Arizona, but decided she was too strung out on meth to be an effective witness.

Mazurek met a number of times with forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, with whom Whitney had consulted. He also ordered every book that Reid Meloy had written, so he’d be prepared to cross-examine him about inconsistencies in his testimony.

“It wasn’t a whodunit,” Mazurek said. “It was what was his psychological state at the time he was murdering these girls.”

In Mazurek’s view, Wayne did not feel remorse for the brutal acts he’d committed against these women, merely sorry for himself.

Early in his career, Mazurek was bothered by the gruesome details of his murder cases. But over time, he—like most prosecutors—became desensitized to such things.

That changed with the Ford case. Looking at the autopsy and crime scene photos of Wayne’s victims brought back the same kind of queasy feeling. Ironic as it was for a prosecutor to avoid funerals and talk of death, dealing with those pictures meant Mazurek had to confront one of his greatest fears, which previously he’d been able to squash.

Sometimes, while he was trying to fall asleep, his mind conjured up visions of Wayne opening and closing his freezer, taking out the neon-colored sherbet and putting it back, next to the frozen limbs. Or of Wayne cooking Jane Doe’s breasts in his trailer oven.

He was particularly haunted by the fact that Wayne had carried Lanett White’s body—black and bloated—in his truck for days, then dumped her in an irrigation ditch so many miles from home.

“There was something about that that really bothered me,” he recalled.

Mazurek didn’t speak to any of Wayne’s family members, but he did interview the victims’ parents before trial. They all seemed to have the surreal expectation or hope that their child would walk through their door one day.

Lanett’s mother, Debra, cried when they talked. Tina’s mother, Mary, seemed completely devastated, speaking very softly and choking up in the middle of sentences. Patricia’s father Rudolfo’s voice cracked and wavered as his eyes welled up with tears.

“There’s something about seeing an older gentleman break down and cry,” Mazurek said. “He seemed almost defeated by the whole experience and very regretful for perhaps not being able to be successful in getting Patricia off drugs and back home.”

None of them seemed to be able to come to grips with what had happened.

“The pain and the grief never go away,” Mazurek said.

CHAPTER 22

P
ROSECUTION
: S
ADISTIC
, S
EXUAL
P
REDATOR

Jury selection started on January 17, 2006, more than seven years after Wayne turned himself in.

After screening a pool of nine hundred potential jurors, Canty and Mapes had 275 of them fill out questionnaires, winnowing the pool down to eighty-five. From there, they were able to select the final panel of six men and six women, plus six alternates.

This was Darlena Murray’s first case as a juror. The English teacher from San Gorgonio High School in San Bernardino had been called for jury service before, but was never chosen.

When she first saw Wayne, sitting quietly, looking well-dressed and nicely groomed at the defense table during jury selection, she thought he was one of the attorneys. But by the time the trial started, the forty-seven-year-old instructor had learned otherwise.

She also soon realized that this case would stick with her for the rest of her life.

The guilt phase of the trial was expected to last four to six months. If the jury found Wayne guilty, a penalty trial, estimated to go for two to three weeks, would determine whether Wayne should receive a death sentence.

Canty told the San Bernardino
Sun
that his client was ready to have a jury decide his future. But, he said, “Nobody looks forward to facing capital murder charges.”

As judges go, Michael Smith was likable, relaxed, and easygoing.

Born in Los Angeles, he grew up in Commerce and suburban Monterey Park. His father worked in quality control at North American Aviation; his mother was an insurance agent and owned a dress shop.

Smith earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from California State University, Los Angeles, in just three years by taking heavy loads and no summer breaks. From there, he attended law school at the private University of San Diego, clerking at two law firms that specialized in personal injury cases.

Smith was hired as a prosecutor by the San Bernardino County DA’s Office in 1974, while he was still waiting for his bar exam results.

He’d also applied to the DA’s offices in San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties, hoping for a nice beach area. But “San Berdoo,” as it’s nicknamed, was the first to call and offer him a job. He started there as a clerk, then became a full-blown prosecutor once he passed the bar.

“I always wanted to do trial work,” he said later.

His original intention was to be a prosecutor for three or four years, then go into private practice. But something unexpected happened along the way—he and a group of young turks found that they enjoyed the DA’s office so much that they just stayed on.

“Next thing you know, it was twelve years later,” he said.

Smith had never intended to become a judge, either, but he began eyeing open seats on the bench in the early 1980s.

“It just seemed like a logical progression,” he said, adding that he thought it would be nice to make legal rulings for a change, rather than be subject to them.

Smith ran for an open seat in 1986, edging out his opponent by 2 percent and only two thousand votes out of 150,000 cast.

He had presided over eight or nine death penalty cases when he got the Ford case, which seemed to him like four cases combined, given that it involved four counties and four sets of investigators.

“It was different [from other] cases because there were multiple victims over a relatively long period of time and that’s unusual,” he said. “And the fact that he turned himself in, which is a very unusual circumstance.”

As the judge who handled the county’s longest and most complex cases, this one was right up his alley.

The trial finally began on the afternoon of March 13 as the media crowded into Smith’s courtroom in the Central Courthouse for opening statements.

Wayne wore a jacket and tie, his hair slicked back, and sported a mustache. He could’ve been mistaken for a cop.

The judge announced that he’d decided to prohibit the half-dozen media cameras present from taking pictures or video while court was in session. At the defense’s request, Smith said, he also wouldn’t allow conversations between Wayne and his attorneys to be photographed.

Even before the prosecution could start its statement, Canty’s second chair, Deputy Public Defender Steven Mapes, made the first of many defense motions for a mistrial and asked the judge to strike the jury.

Mapes accused Mazurek of targeting and upsetting teachers in the jury pool during voir dire—“people of helping professions,” who might be sympathetic to Wayne—such that “they volunteered themselves off the jury.” This, Mapes argued, then saved Mazurek from using up peremptory challenges during the selection process.

The judge denied the motion. He said teachers didn’t fit the standard Mapes cited, and besides, he should’ve made the motion earlier, during voir dire. (Not to mention that Murray had been seated on the jury.)

Canty then launched the first of many objections he would make to photographs and exhibits Mazurek planned to show the jury, arguing that they were inflammatory and prejudicial. In general, Smith allowed Mazurek to show most of the photographs he wanted, and although he did order the withdrawal of some of the more gruesome images, there were plenty left to leave a lasting impression on the jury.