Disturbed Ground (34 page)

There were similarities, sure. Serial killer. Multiple buried bodies. Complex forensic studies. But except that he was African American, Morris Solomon fit fairly snugly into the serial killer profile, with his history of violence, with his victims being mostly prostitutes who hazarded across his path, and with the simple facts of his age and gender. Dorothea Puente was a whole 'nother animal.

(But both defendants were equally affected by the events of April 21, 1992. For the first time in twenty-five years, after a frantic volley of last-minute appeals, San Quentin's gas chamber was readied and California carried out a state-run execution. For a quarter of a century, California's death penalty had been given in name only. That changed as lethal cyanide fumes reached the nostrils of Robert Alton Harris. Every prisoner on death row, every defendant facing murder charges, felt the seismic jolt of California's legal apparatus. The road to San Quentin had just gotten shorter.)

It was hard not to see Solomon's death penalty trial as a dress rehearsal for Puente's, because opposing counsels in the Solomon case were both Puente's prosecutor, John O'Mara, and her defense attorney, Peter Vlautin.

A months-long trial eventually convicted Solomon on six of seven murder counts, but then the jury slammed all expectations: They were hung on the penalty phase. This could mean a sentence of life without parole by default, but the DA's office deemed this case too big to let slip to a lesser sentence. The penalty phase would have to be retried, which put an ugly knot in the court calendar. Puente's trial was delayed again.

In the meantime, John Mara's amusing, satirical side vanished beneath a load of worry. What if the second jury was hung too? As
the retrial wound toward completion, he grew edgy and snappish. One colleague muttered, "It's like he has PMS."

On July 6, 1992, the second jury weighing the fate of Morris Solomon sentenced Solomon to death. Though the trial was finally over, this raised a vexing question: Could Puente's trial, too, end in a hung jury
?
After all, big, mean Morris Solomon was a much scarier defendant than little old Grandma Puente.

Beyond trying to prove Dorothea Puente innocent, Clymo and Vlautin were also trying to limit the ways in which she might be found guilty, to shave off bits here and there. Their tool for this task? Pretrial motions.

The list was long and the files were thick. Two dozen motions were developed, word-processed, photocopied, and added to the fray; in every way imaginable, Clymo and Vlautin implored the judge to restrict the ways in which Dorothea Puente could be found guilty.

O'Mara scoured each motion for hints, trying to anticipate tactics. He felt handicapped by his embryonic understanding of the case. They'd had four years to investigate and refine, but O'Mara was only beginning to dredge the files for nuggets of insight. They knew more about his case than he did.

In mid-September, Judge Michael J. Virga heard motions to strike, motions to dismiss, and motions to exclude. Some O'Mara conceded without a fight, others he railed against. The judge granted some but denied most.

The defense also presented material for a questionnaire to be used in screening potential jurors. Reviewing this, O'Mara drew the conclusion that the defense would argue that Dorothea Puente was a victim of child abuse. Psychology was not his strong suit.

Even at this late date, the prosecutor knew very little about the defendant he was trying to put to death. He was still so green to this case that he accepted the probation reports as gospel, even swallowing Puente's unlikely version of her history (that she was Mexican, the youngest of eighteen children, and so on).

One morning during these proceedings, O'Mara was confused when he overheard Clymo and Vlautin talking about "Dot." He finally broke in, "Who's Dot?"

Clymo grinned at him. "Dottie
.
Dorothea."

With just over a month until jury selection, John O'Mara was finally focusing his considerable mental wattage on the trial of Dorothea Montalvo Puente. He spoke with witnesses for the very first time, including Judy Moise, who wasn't thrilled to have this ghastly business haunting her again. So much time had passed, she'd begun to feel content with letting her memoiy fade.

To O'Mara's surprise, Ruth Munroe's children came in "with an attitude." He bristled at how they edged in to "audition" him, "to see if I was good enough to handle the case." He couldn't understand why the family hadn't come in before.

To his dismay, O'Mara now found dozens upon dozens of angles that needed to be followed up, yet the files had been lying fallow for all these years. No one in the police department was eager to roll up his sleeves, so O'Mara cranked up his own investigation, wearing the soles off the shoes of John Dacre and Frank Dale, criminal investigators with the DA's Office.

"The defense has more money to spend," O'Mara groused. "And they do spend it. Lavishly. We don't have the resources."

The years had eaten away at his case like battery acid. Records had been lost or destroyed. Witnesses were impossible to locate, had trouble remembering details, or had passed away. There was virtually no one left from the 1982 charges that O'Mara could call to the stand—Malcolm McKenzie, Dorothy Gosling, and Esther Busby had all died.

Steeped in these files, O'Mara felt a fresh anxiety: Maybe George Williamson hadn't done as complete a job as he'd thought. Of course, Williamson couldn't have imagined that it would take so long to bring this case to trial
.

Now O'Mara grappled with the elements of nine alleged murders— nine!
—
wondering how to make all of the pieces fit, feeling like he was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark.

How could she have accomplished these seven burials without a single witness, or without an accomplice? Who was lying? What if the jury couldn't tolerate the purely circumstantial evidence?

Dorothea Montalvo Puente. She was baffling, so far outside the ugly sweep of "common" killers
,
so far beyond the almost prosaic brutality
of those he'd prosecuted before. Other serial killers attract attention with guns and blood, with the violence of their slayings. Yet she'd killed quietly, as women often do, and no one even noticed.

Female murderers are usually drug-crazed girlfriends, betrayed wives, or those infrequent "black widows" who kill their husbands. But Dorothea Puente seemed to have less in common with reality than with fiction; she drugged and disposed of her tenants like the Brewster sisters in
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

One FBI adage goes: "Men kill in the bedroom, women kill in the kitchen." At least she fit that part of the profile, killing with poisons, the woman's weapon of choice. Non-confrontational. Silent. And so easily mistaken for death by natural causes.

And what about the victims? O'Mara sipped his coffee and stared at the reports, wondering what these inky pages could possibly say about the last moments of their lives. Had she approached them with a slick routine, handing them cocktails, saying in a low, soothing voice, "Drink this, dear, it will make you feel better?" Had she watched them carefully, reading each flutter of the eyelids, waiting for her cue? Had she then gripped an elbow, cooing softly as she helped them off to bed, laying them down, tucking them in—just like a nurse, just like Mom? Had she stood over them, watching?

And had they looked up at her with gratitude, lulled into sweet repose, mistaking the warm embrace of false comfort? Had any of them—even dimly, even for an instant—realized that this was to be their final rest? Staring up into those ice-blue eyes, had they glimpsed the ultimate realization that she was their killer
?

O'Mara took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. There had to be something else, something elusive, something they had all missed. There had to be. There always was.

He wrestled again with trying to picture the scene. He tried to work out the steps, trying to get inside her head. He flipped through papers and photographs for the umpteenth time, hoping to spot some new pattern….

A glimmer of an idea began to buzz around his head, like a mosquito just beyond his peripheral vision.

What was it? It buzzed past him. He looked harder.

And then he saw it. So simple. Like a child's prank, obvious and surprising at the same moment.

But was it too simple? Did it prove anything?

Maybe so. Maybe this could work. Besides, he didn't have much choice.

With little else to work with, O'Mara plunged into his task of crafting a convincing case out of raw circumstance. Details, details. He swam through them with Olympic speed. This was his strength, fashioning copious amounts of amorphous detail into something strong and sharp with which to pierce the armor of defense.

Photos of the crime scene were shuffled into order and enlarged. Diagrams of the house, of the yard, of the graves, were blown up and prepared for display. Witnesses were subpoenaed: one hundred-fifty, -sixty, -seventy, on toward two hundred and more. He would bludgeon the defense with bulk, he would confound them with sheer volume. And he would sabotage them with the utter finesse of his logic.

PART VI: TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.

—
Clarence Darrow
,
1936

Justice is not blind, nor is she evenhanded. The scales do not balance and they cannot be made to balance. Not, that is, until we are freed of our humanity and turned to demigods. And then justice will no longer be needed.

—H. L. Mencken, "Note on Justice"

CHAPTER 36

From the crashing azure waves of the bay to the emerald rows of strawberry plants in the rich soils of Salinas Valley, Monterey County is bathed by a luxuriant palette. It reaches up the foggy coast from Los Padres National Forest, past Big Sur, quaint Carmel, and panoramic Seventeen-Mile Drive, beyond prolific artichoke fields, inland past pines and eucalyptus, into the sunny heartland and the rugged, amber hills around Soledad. The demographics range from the moneyed residents of opulent Pebble Beach, to overworked, underpaid, and often illegal farm workers.

Sprinkled throughout, Puente's defense team noted with interest, was a large Mexican-American population. Would Hispanics tend to be more sympathetic to Dorothea Puente? Perhaps. Most were Catholic, after all, and as Clymo noted, "They at least have a pope who is opposed to the death penalty."

Monterey County was the chosen venue for Dorothea Puente's trial, which, in October 1992, shifted its ponderous weight two hundred miles south. Kevin Clymo, after boxing up reams upon reams of paper, moved to a rented house in Carmel, joining Peter Vlautin, who had
already found a house on the beach. Their legal aid rented an apartment, their investigators would be in town off and on. The judge, his clerk, and a court reporter also packed up and shifted operations. Lastly, John O'Mara, who had been too busy to personally scout for a rental, booked one through an agency; when he arrived he discovered that it was a tight squeeze just to move in.

The price of justice was up and running, with sixteen-hundred-dollars per month housing allowances for each of the attorneys and the judge, plus a per diem. All the expenses of Puente's trial would be paid by the county, of course, including the fees of expert witnesses, consultants, investigators, and staff. Many witnesses would have to be flown in, and virtually all would have to stay at least one night in a hotel. But weighty considerations of saving the taxpayers a chunk of money weren't permitted to even touch the scales of justice, much less tip them.

Meanwhile, taking a long ride in a motor vehicle for the first time in years, Dorothea Puente was secretly transported to her new accommodations in the Monterey County Jail in Salinas.

The potential jurors came in waves of more than a hundred, clutching the paper that had brought them to the courthouse, checking the summons twice, asking for the floor, then finding themselves among a jury pool that would climb to twelve hundred before the attorneys were through. Judge Michael J. Virga graciously introduced himself, the attorneys, and the defendant, then explained to the restless crowd that this case would take many months. He asked whether this posed undue hardship for anyone, hastening to explain that "inconvenience" and "undue hardship" were not synonymous.