Disturbed Ground (42 page)

CHAPTER41

Back from a long Easter break, stretched to three weeks by another trial Clymo was handling, the jurors came in on April 26 tanned and smiling. Peter Vlautin, who had run a 10K race the day before, seemed full of pep.

But not everyone was embraced by the sweet buoyancy of reunion. Dorothea Puente was still recovering from some minor surgery, having had a small abscess removed. Kevin Clymo was understandably fatigued, having squeezed one trial into his "vacation" from another. And John O'Mara, who'd spent the whole time bent over a desk, was volubly regretting that he hadn't brought down an assistant months before.

Usually, O'Mara knew a case backward and forward after handling the preliminary hearing. But now, lacking that experience, he was feeling overwhelmed. Despite random help from his investigators and whatever miracles the secretaries in Sacramento could fax down, he complained that "there just aren't enough hours in the day to get it all done." Sunk in a swamp of "to do" lists, O'Mara was biting back the sour realization that he needed full-time help, preferably another
attorney. But it was office policy to work solo. Besides, now it was too late.

As usual, O'Mara had been overly optimistic in scheduling. A local hotel brimmed with waiting witnesses, including Dorothea Puente's mysterious friend and confidant, Mervin John McCauley.

McCauley had no idea how eagerly he was awaited. Whatever anticipations hummed around his name, he had more pressing concerns: He needed a drink. Never mind the hour, never mind the constraints, McCauley was a man with priorities. So, on the morning of April 28, while O'Mara was hoping to question him in court, McCauley was intent on consuming a pint of vodka.

By the end of the day, McCauley was feeling not the least intimidated by the thought of testifying. In the hallway, he boozily joked, "This is the first time I've been in court when I'm not the defendant!"

O'Mara ruefully postponed McCauley's testimony until the next day, when some last-minute supervision managed to keep McCauley from downing more than "a couple shots of vodka" before being called to the stand Tuesday morning.

Thin and gray as a nail, he ambled into court, laying eyes on Dorothea Puente for the first time in four-and-a-half years.

An unrepentant drunk, McCauley set the tone for his testimony when the court clerk asked him to raise his right hand; he responded, "Why?"

A bright blue baseball cap remained atop his head for a good hour of testimony, hiding even more of a face already concealed by large glasses
and a bristly gray beard. When O'Mara spoke, he turned his good ear
toward him, then cantankerously replied with a graveled voice, "I couldn't
tell ya," or, “I have no idea." When O'Mara asked him to ID people in
photographs, he tossed them aside with hardly a glance.

The jury couldn't help but snicker at McCauley's gall, and this seemed to set him at ease. Gradually, he warmed to his role. The cap came off, revealing a high, lined forehead and steel-gray hair slicked back in a straight plunge to his collar. The court reporter noticed that he smelled of alcohol.

He admitted doing some of the yard work at 1426 F Street. "Mostly, I supervised," he said, confirming the testimony of various ex-cons Puente had hired through work furlough. But, parroting the landlady, McCauley maintained that the concrete covering some of the graves was merely "to keep the weeds down." And he stubbornly denied knowledge of any digging, other than "planting, stuff like that."

McCauley also suffered convenient memory lapses, particularly when trying to remember any of the victims other than Leona Carpenter and Bert Montoya. Of Leona's disappearance, he said, "It just seemed to be general knowledge that she had to go to a nursing home." And he said that he and Bert used to drink together at Joe's Corner Bar: "He'd put down a beer in three gulps."

Dismissing all others with a wave of his hand, McCauley said, "People come and people go."

By this time, McCauley was feeling quite comfortable on the stand, so comfortable that during one break, he called out to the defendant, "Dorothea, how the heck are ya?"

Defense attorney Vlautin hurried over and whispered some sort of reprimand.

"However, I am coherent," McCauley retorted loudly. "I'm a lucid alcoholic."

When the jury was again seated, O'Mara continued. Working from transcripts of multiple police interviews, he got McCauley to admit to his most damning act: digging a hole in front of the house, where Betty Palmer's truncated corpse had been buried beneath a religious shrine.

"How far in front of the shrine did you do this digging?"

"A foot. Or less."

"All right. And what kind of hole did you dig at that location?"

"About two by two."

"Do you remember when you did that digging?"

"Shortly after I moved in."

"Did someone ask you to dig, or did you do it on your own?"

"No, I did it on my own. I was asked to. Dorothea asked me to."

McCauley claimed the hole had been dug to plant some camellia bushes, but Ricardo Ordorica had asked him to fill the hole back up because it was too dangerous for Ordorica's small children. McCauley maintained that he'd buried nothing.

McCauley also volunteered the astonishing news that he was the one who'd built the shrine, and his motivation for this seemed oddly out of character. "I thought it'd be a nice gesture," the irascible old fellow said, "because I knew that Dorothea was kinda religious... A lot of people would come by and admire the garden. It seemed like a good spot."

When O'Mara pressed him for an explanation of where he'd come up with this idea, McCauley yielded only marginally: "I really can't
tell you who put the incident in my head. But heck, I was glad to do it."

This religious shrine was an oddity. None of the other graves had any sort of marker. And none of the bodies other than Betty Palmer's had been mutilated. Earlier, another former tenant had testified that Dorothea had snapped at him one night because he'd accidentally switched off the light inside the shrine. Apparently, the landlady always kept a single, red Christmas light glowing inside it.

Whether or not McCauley knew more than he was saying, Dorothea was hardly in a position to accuse or contradict him when he announced, "I didn't know anybody was buried there."

If the jurors were wondering whether McCauley and Puente were lovers, if they were hoping that O'Mara might help dispel their curiosity, they would be disappointed. O'Mara would not ask, and McCauley wasn't saying. When O'Mara asked him about Puente, he shrugged. "We had good times, we had bad times. She had a quick temper, but it didn't last long."

Just how much did McCauley know? He seemed the most likely accomplice, and he'd surely seen more than he was letting on, yet the police had questioned him for days and the ornery old drunk had only frustrated them. Some jurors may have hoped that an accomplice would come forward to somehow exonerate Dorothea, but McCauley apparently wasn’t going to budge.

"Did you ever drag any bodies?" O'Mara asked.

"No, no."

That's about what O'Mara had expected. He took another approach, asking, "What were you arrested for?"

"Accessory after the fact."

"To the crime of murder?"

"It came as a heckuva surprise to me!" Then McCauley blurted out, "I also took a lie detector test." (McCauley had passed, but lie detector results are inadmissible in court. And some said that McCauley's "pickled brain" rendered those results meaningless.)

McCauley continued to insist he knew nothing, even though he'd escorted Dorothea away from the house, the two of them sharing a cab to Tiny's Bar in West Sacramento before her escape to L.A.

Now O'Mara asked, "Did you know she had over three thousand dollars?"

"No, I don't inquire into other people's finances," he responded primly.

If police detectives couldn't get more than this out of the old goat during long interrogations, O'Mara couldn't hope to do better now. He finally relented. "No further questions, Your Honor."

Clymo was surprised. He'd expected O'Mara to shake this witness like an angry guard dog. Leaving well enough alone, he waived cross-examination, and McCauley was excused.

He left with a theatrical flair, bowing and gesturing broadly, as if he'd just pulled off a fabulous interview on
David Letterman.
"Thank you individually, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. O'Mara, and"— looking at Dorothea—"I hope everything comes out all right."

Outside the courtroom, McCauley commented on his old buddy Dorothea, saying, "I thought highly of her." He paused. "Maybe a Jekyll-and-Hyde kinda thing, but you couldn't prove it by me." He added, "I wouldn't lie to save her," then left the courthouse, surely on a mission to find another drink.

With a long trial like this, strange things arise. One afternoon, with the other jurors excused, an alternate juror informed the court that downstairs, on the wall by the phone, someone had scrawled messages, perhaps to try to influence the jury. The messages read "Free Dorothea Puente!" and "Go, Dorothea, go!"

The judge thanked the alternate for bringing this to the court's attention, and the messages were promptly removed.

One can only guess who might have written them.

If McCauley's testimony had jolted the courtroom, few outside felt its repercussions. Judge Virga had banned cameras, so (except for
Sacramento Bee
reporter Wayne Wilson, who came like clockwork) most of the media opted for only sporadic coverage; when new reporters popped in, they struggled like rank spectators to put testimony into context.

Meanwhile, the public was curious about the notorious landlady. Senior citizens often huddled together and whispered in the gallery; jurors' relatives came to watch; groups of students came on assignment; courtroom groupies filtered in and out. A screenwriter from Southern California, a cheerful little butterball of a woman, scoured transcripts and
noted, "She looks like
The Bad Seed
all grown up, doesn't she? Did you see that movie?"

Figuring out Dorothea Montalvo Puente had become a spectator sport. Everyone wondered whether she really did it. And if she did do it, was she
crazy,
or truly
evil?

The scales tipped toward crazy when testimony revealed that Puente had been receiving SSI benefit checks since 1978 based on a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Some wondered why she wasn't pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

Why not? Because her attorneys were smarter than that.

For a time, schizophrenia had been a catchall diagnosis; it was almost fashionable. But if Puente were to plead insanity, her mental state would be fair game for courtroom argument. She would be reexamined, her psyche prodded and pushed. And psychologists today would come up with far different analyses.

More than this, the source of the schizophrenia diagnosis, Dr. Thomas Doody, was suspect. The jurors had heard how easily Puente could get prescriptions from her favorite psychiatrist—Dalmane, Valium, whatever she wanted was just a phone call away. (Unfortunately, Dr. Doody was “too ill” to come to Monterey to testify.)

Testimony revealed that Dorothea had helpfully suggested to friends that they, too, could get on SSI benefits if only they would go to Dr. Doody and "act crazy," in the words of one witness.

But Puente's attorneys didn't want to make her alleged "schizophrenia" an issue. They'd invested heavily in mapping out the territory within Dorothea Puente's cranium and decided it was far better to wait, to save what they'd learned about her peculiar cognitive processes—if need be—for the penalty phase of the trial.

The ninety-ninth witness was even more controversial than John McCauley.