The Reversal Read online

  She looked at me as if I were responsible for the poor defense of the accused, even though I hadn't even gotten out of law school by 'eighty-six.

  "Who was his lawyer?" I asked.

  "Charles Barnard," she said. "I checked with the California bar. He won't be handling the retrial. He's listed as deceased as of 'ninety-four. The prosecutor, Gary Lintz, is also long gone."

  "Don't remember either of them. Who was the judge?"

  "Walter Sackville. He's long retired but I do remember him. He was tough."

  "I had a few cases with him," Bosch added. "He wouldn't take any shit from either side."

  "Go on," I said.

  "Okay, so the prosecution's story was this. The Landy family--that was our victim, Melissa, who was twelve, her thirteen-year-old sister, Sarah, mother, Regina, and stepfather, Kensington--lived on Windsor Boulevard in Hancock Park. The home was about a block north of Wilshire and in the vicinity of the Trinity United Church of God, which on Sundays back then drew about six thousand people to its two morning services. People parked their cars all over Hancock Park to go to the church. That is, until the residents there got tired of their neighborhood being overrun every Sunday with traffic and parking issues and went to City Hall about it. They got the neighborhood turned into a residential parking zone during weekend hours. You had to have a sticker to park on the streets, including Windsor. This opened the door to city-contracted tow truck operators patrolling the neighborhood like sharks on Sunday morning. Any cars without the proper resident sticker on the windshield were fair game. They got towed. Which finally brings us to Jason Jessup, our suspect."

  "He drove a tow truck," I said.

  "Exactly. He was a driver for a city contractor named Aardvark Towing. Cute name, got them to the front of the listings in the phone book back when people still used phone books."

  I glanced at Bosch and could tell by his reaction that he was somebody who still used the phone book instead of the Internet. Maggie didn't notice and continued.

  "On the morning in question Jessup was working the Hancock Park patrol. At the Landy house, the family happened to be putting a pool in the backyard. Kensington Landy was a musician who scored films and was doing quite well at the time. So they were putting in a pool and there was a large open hole and giant piles of dirt in the backyard. The parents didn't want the girls playing back there. Thought it was dangerous, plus on this morning the girls were in their church dresses. The house has a large front yard. The stepfather told the girls to play outside for a few minutes before the family was planning to go off to church themselves. The older one, Sarah, was told to watch over Melissa."

  "Did they go to Trinity United?" I asked.

  "No, they went to Sacred Heart in Beverly Hills. Anyway, the kids were only out there about fifteen minutes. Mother was still upstairs getting ready and the stepfather, who was also supposed to be keeping an eye on the girls, was watching television inside. An overnight sports report on ESPN or whatever they had back then. He forgot about the girls."

  Bosch shook his head, and I knew exactly how he felt. It was not in judgment of the father but in understanding of how it could have happened and in the dread of any parent who knows how a small mistake could be so costly.

  "At some point, he heard screaming," Maggie continued. "He ran out the front door and found the older girl, Sarah, in the yard. She was screaming that a man took Melissa. The stepfather ran up the street looking for her but there was no sign. Like that, she was gone."

  My ex-wife stopped there for a moment to compose herself. Everyone in the room had a young daughter and could understand the shearing of life that happened at that moment for every person in the Landy family.

  "Police were called and the response was quick," she continued. "This was Hancock Park, after all. The first bulletins were out in a matter of minutes. Detectives were dispatched right away."

  "So this whole thing went down in broad daylight?" Bosch asked.

  Maggie nodded.

  "It happened about ten-forty. The Landys were going to an eleven o'clock service."

  "And nobody else saw this?"

  "You gotta remember, this was Hancock Park. A lot of tall hedges, a lot of walls, a lot of privacy. People there are good at keeping the world out. Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything until Sarah started screaming, and by then it was too late."

  "Was there a wall or a hedge at the Landy house?"

  "Six-foot hedges down the north and south property lines but not on the street side. It was theorized at the time that Jessup drove by in his tow truck and saw the girl alone in the yard. Then he acted impulsively."

  We sat in silence for a few moments as we thought about the wrenching serendipity of fate. A tow truck goes by a house. The driver sees a girl, alone and vulnerable. All in a moment he figures he can grab her and get away with it.

  "So," Bosch finally said, "how did they get him?"

  "The responding detectives were on the scene in less than an hour. The lead was named Doral Kloster and his partner was Chad Steiner. I checked. Steiner is dead and Kloster is retired and has late-stage Alzheimer's. He's no use to us now."

  "Damn," Bosch said.

  "Anyway, they got there quickly and moved quickly. They interviewed Sarah and she described the abductor as being dressed like a garbage man. Further questioning revealed this to mean that he was wearing dirty coveralls like the city garbage crews used. She said she heard the garbage truck in the street but couldn't see it through a bush where she had hidden from her sister during a game of hide-and-seek. Problem is that it was a Sunday. There was no garbage pickup on Sundays. But the stepfather hears this and puts it together, mentions the tow trucks that run up and down the street on Sunday mornings. That becomes their best lead. The detectives get the list of city contractors and they start visiting tow yards.

  "There were three contractors who worked the Wilshire corridor. One of them is Aardvark, where they go and are told they have three trucks working in the field. The drivers are called in and Jessup is one of them. The other two guys are named Derek Wilbern and William Clinton--really. They're separated and questioned but nothing comes up suspicious. They run 'em through the box and Jessup and Clinton are clean but Wilbern has an arrest but no conviction on an attempted rape two years before. That would be good enough to get him a ride downtown for a lineup, but the girl is still missing and there's no time for formalities, no time to put together a lineup."

  "They probably took him back to the house," Bosch said. "They had no choice. They had to keep things moving."

  "That's right. But Kloster knew he was on thin ice. He might get the girl to ID Wilbern but then he'd lose it in court for being unduly suggestive--you know, 'Is this the guy?' So he did the next best thing he could. He took all three drivers in their overalls back to the Landy house. Each was a white man in his twenties. They all wore the company overalls. Kloster broke procedure for the sake of speed, hoping to have a chance to find the girl alive. Sarah Landy's bedroom was on the second floor in the front of the house. Kloster takes the girl up to her room and has her look out the window to the street. Through the venetian blinds. He radios his partner, who has the three guys get out of two patrol cars and stand in the street. But Sarah doesn't ID Wilbern. She points to Jessup and says that's the guy."

  Maggie looked through the documents in front of her and checked an investigative chronology before continuing.

  "The ID is made at one o'clock. That is really quick work. The girl's only been gone a little over two hours. They start sweating Jessup but he doesn't give up a thing. Denies it all. They are working on him and getting nowhere when the call comes in. A girl's body has been found in a Dumpster behind the El Rey Theatre on Wilshire. That was about ten blocks from Windsor and the Landy house. Cause of death would later be determined to be manual strangulation. She was not raped and there was no semen in the mouth or throat."

  Maggie stopped her summary there. She looked at Bosch and then me and solemn
ly nodded, giving the dead her moment.

  Six

  Tuesday, February 16, 4:48 P.M.

  Bosch liked watching her and listening to the way she talked. He could tell the case was already under her skin. Maggie McFierce. Of course that was what they called her. More important, it was what she thought about herself. He had been on the case with her for less than a week but he understood this within the first hour of meeting her. She knew the secret. That it wasn't about code and procedure. It wasn't about jurisprudence and strategy. It was about taking that dark thing that you knew was out there in the world and bringing it inside. Making it yours. Forging it over an internal fire into something sharp and strong that you could hold in your hands and fight back with.

  Relentlessly.

  "Jessup asked for a lawyer and gave no further statement," McPherson said, continuing her summary. "The case was initially built around the older sister's identification and evidence found in Jessup's tow truck. Three strands of the victim's hair found in the seat crack. It was probably where he strangled her."

  "There was nothing on the girl?" Bosch asked. "Nothing from Jessup or the truck?"

  "Nothing usable in court. The DNA was found on her dress while it was being examined two days later. It was actually the older girl's dress. The younger girl borrowed it that day. One small deposit of semen was found on the front hem. It was typed but of course there was no DNA in criminal prosecutions back then. A blood type was determined and it was A-positive, the second-most popular type among humans, accounting for thirty-four percent of the population. Jessup matched but all it did was include him in the suspect pool. The prosecutor decided not to introduce it at trial because it would've just given the defense the ability to point out to the jury that the donor pool was more than a million men in Los Angeles County alone."

  Bosch saw her throw another look at her ex-husband. As if he were responsible for the courtroom obfuscations of all defense attorneys everywhere. Harry was starting to get an idea about why their marriage didn't work out.

  "It's amazing how far we've come," Haller said. "Now they make and break cases on the DNA alone."

  "Moving on," McPherson said. "The prosecution had the hair evidence and the eyewitness. It also had opportunity--Jessup knew the neighborhood and was working there the morning of the murder. As far as motivation went, their backgrounding of Jessup produced a history of physical abuse by his father and psychopathic behavior. A lot of this came out on the record during the death penalty phase, too. But--and I will say this before you jump on it, Haller--no criminal convictions."

  "And you said no sexual assault?" Bosch asked.

  "No evidence of penetration or sexual assault. But this was no doubt a sexually motivated crime. The semen aside, it was a classic control crime. The perpetrator seizing momentary control in a world where he felt he controlled very little. He acted impulsively. At the time, the semen found on her dress was a piece of the same puzzle. It was theorized that he killed the girl and then masturbated, cleaning up after himself but leaving one small deposit of semen on the dress by mistake. The stain had the appearance of a transfer deposit. It wasn't a drop. It was a smear."

  "The hit we just got on the DNA helps explain that," Haller said.

  "Possibly," McPherson responded. "But let's discuss new evidence later. Right now, I'm talking about what they had and what they knew in nineteen eighty-six."

  "Fine. Go on."

  "That's it on the evidence but not on the prosecution's case. Two months before trial they get a call from the guy who's in the cell next to Jessup at County. He--"

  "Jailhouse snitches," Haller said, interrupting. "Never met one who told the truth, never met a prosecutor who didn't use them anyway."

  "Can I continue?" McPherson asked indignantly.

  "Please do," Haller responded.

  "Felix Turner, a repeat drug offender who was in and out of County so often that they made him a jail orderly because he knew the day-to-day operations as well as the deputies. He delivered meals to inmates in high-power lockdown. He tells investigators that Jessup provided him with details that only the killer would know. He was interviewed and he did indeed have details of the crime that were not made public. Like that the victim's shoes were removed, that she was not sexually assaulted, that he had wiped himself off on her dress."

  "And so they believed him and made him the star witness," Haller said.

  "They believed him and put him on the stand at trial. Not as a star witness. But his testimony was significant. Nevertheless, four years later, the Times comes out with a front-page expose on Felix 'The Burner' Turner, professional jailhouse snitch who had testified for the prosecution in sixteen different cases over a seven-year period, garnering significant reductions in charges and jail time, and other perks like private cells, good jobs and large quantities of cigarettes."

  Bosch remembered the scandal. It rocked the DA's office in the early nineties and resulted in changes in the use of jailhouse informants as trial witnesses. It was one of many black eyes local law enforcement suffered in the decade.

  "Turner was discredited in the newspaper investigation. It said he used a private investigator on the outside to gather information on crimes and then to feed it to him. As you may remember, it changed how we used information that comes to us through the jails."

  "Not enough," Haller said. "It didn't end the entire use of jailhouse snitches and it should have."

  "Can we just focus on our case here?" McPherson said, obviously tired of Haller's posturing.

  "Sure," Haller said. "Let's focus."

  "Okay, well, by the time the Times came out with all of this, Jessup had long been convicted and was sitting in San Quentin. He of course launched an appeal citing police and prosecutorial misconduct. It went nowhere fast, with every appellate panel agreeing that while the use of Turner as a witness was egregious, his impact on the jury was not enough to have changed the verdict. The rest of the evidence was more than enough to convict."

  "And that was that," Haller said. "They rubber-stamped it."

  "An interesting note is that Felix Turner was found murdered in West Hollywood a year after the Times expose," McPherson said. "The case was never solved."

  "Had it coming as far as I'm concerned," Haller added.

  That brought a pause to the discussion. Bosch used it to steer the meeting back to the evidence and to step in with some questions he had been considering.

  "Is the hair evidence still available?"

  It took McPherson a moment to drop Felix Turner and go back to the evidence.

  "Yes, we still have it," she said. "This case is twenty-four years old but it was always under challenge. That's where Jessup and his jailhouse lawyering actually helped us. He was constantly filing writs and appeals. So the trial evidence was never destroyed. Of course, that eventually allowed him to get the DNA analysis off the swatch cut from the dress, but we still have all trial evidence and will be able to use it. He has claimed since day one that the hair in the truck was planted by the police."

  "I don't think his defense at retrial will be much different from what was presented at his first trial and in his appeals," Haller said. "The girl made the wrong ID in a prejudicial setting, and from then on it was a rush to judgment. Facing a monumental lack of physical evidence, the police planted hair from the victim in his tow truck. It didn't play so well before a jury in 'eighty-six, but that was before Rodney King and the riots in 'ninety-two, the O.J. Simpson case, the Rampart scandal and all the other controversies that have engulfed the police department since. It's probably going to play really well now."

  "So then, what are our chances?" Bosch asked.

  Haller looked across the table at McPherson before answering.

  "Based on what we know so far," he said, "I think I'd have a better chance if I were on the other side of the aisle on this one."

  Bosch saw McPherson's eyes grow dark.

  "Well then, maybe you should cross back over."
/>   Haller shook his head.

  "No, I made a deal. It may have been a bad deal but I'm sticking to it. Besides, it's not often I get to be on the side of might and right. I could get used to that--even in a losing cause."

  He smiled at his ex-wife but she didn't return the sentiment.

  "What about the sister?" Bosch asked.

  McPherson swung her gaze toward him.

  "The witness? That's our second problem. If she's alive, then she's thirty-seven now. Finding her is the problem. No help from the parents. Her real father died when she was seven. Her mother committed suicide on her sister's grave three years after the murder. And the stepfather drank himself into liver failure and died while waiting for a transplant six years ago. I had one of the investigators here do a quick rundown on her on the computer and Sarah Landy's trail drops off in San Francisco about the same time her stepfather died. That same year she also cleared a probation tail for a controlled substance conviction. Records show she's been married and divorced twice, arrested multiple times for drugs and petty crimes. And then, like I said, she dropped off the grid. She either died or cleaned up her act. Even if she changed names, her prints would have left a trail if she'd been popped again in the past six years. But there's nothing."

  "I don't think we have much of a case if we don't have her," Haller said. "We're going to need a real live person to point the finger across twenty-four years and say he did it."

  "I agree," McPherson said. "She's key. The jury will need to hear the woman tell them that as a girl she did not make a mistake. That she was sure then and she is sure now. If we can't find her and get her to do that, then we have the victim's hair to go with and that's about it. They'll have the DNA and that will trump everything."