Disturbed Ground (33 page)

But the defense wouldn't give up so easily. Just prior to summations, they again zeroed in on count nine to try to have it stricken. Vlautin launched the attack, quoting case law. Williamson rebutted him, point by point, and the courtroom air crackled with accusations.

Judge Ohanesian, who seemed to weigh everything as carefully as an anorexic on a Weight Watchers diet, finally ruled, "I'm satisfied that the death of Ruth Munroe was not part of the plea bargain."

In the back of the courtroom, William Clausen stage-whispered, "All right!"

George Williamson had submitted his summation in writing. He would stand by that.

Then Peter Vlautin rose to argue that, despite two months of testimony by some eighty witnesses, there was still no proof that any of these people had been murdered and "no reasonable inference of criminal agency." Case by case, he argued that each of these individuals had been chronically ill. He protested that various people's testimonies were "unreliable, incredulous." He accused the DA of having to stretch to make a case against his client, and in conclusion, he asked the court to find insufficient evidence to bind his client over to trial.

After a short recess, Judge Ohanesian, who had exasperated everyone with her apparent indecisiveness over the prior two months, resumed the bench and gave her final ruling. On June 19, 1990, she told the packed courtroom, "In this case I do find that there is ample evidence by reasonable inference to all nine counts." Dorothea Montalvo Puente would be tried on nine counts of murder.

Afterward, William Clausen was swept up in the spirit of relief and celebration. When the television cameras turned toward him, he stated that he had faith in Deputy DA Williamson, adding, "I believe we'll see justice done."

Clausen's wife later turned to Williamson and smirked. "Can I watch her fry?"

CHAPTER 35

Puente was in jail awaiting trial, and the well-oiled wheels of justice should have been rolling along smoothly. But now came the wrench.

Blessed with brains and talent, Williamson had done a sterling job on Puente's preliminary hearing, even with precious little time to prepare. But though he may have seemed like the Golden Boy in the DA's office, he didn't see eye-to-eye with the new district attorney. "The killer for me," Williamson grumbled, "was when he waltzed the press into my office."

Williamson was a prosecutor who rarely gave interviews, and he zealously avoided the unwholesome practice of "trying a case in the media." District Attorney Steve White should have understood this, but one day the new DA unexpectedly came through the door of Williamson's office, reporters at his elbow. The press wanted a statement, White announced. They wanted to see the Puente file.

Williamson looked up, astounded, then jumped up out of his chair. He pulled a fat binder off his shelf, slapped it down on his desk,
barked, "There it is!" then bolted from the room, leaving them with mouths agape.

That may have been the beginning of the end.

Perhaps rumblings of resentment toward the district attorney compelled him to make a move, or perhaps Williamson was simply too good to languish for long without a promotion. In any case, when the attorney general's office offered George Williamson a position as assistant chief deputy early in 1991, he snapped it up.

Once Williamson had left the DA's office, the Puente case was in danger of slipping back into legal limbo. How long would this case languish before being brought to trial?

Maybe John O'Mara figured that after losing two prosecutors—first Tim Frawley and now George Williamson—he really had only one option: just go ahead and try the damn case himself.

It seemed natural enough. O'Mara and Williamson had been trying the toughest cases. And as head of major crimes, Assistant Chief Deputy John O'Mara had handled the case while Puente was on the run. But while O'Mara was bright, experienced, and well-respected, his caseload was approaching overload.

Lately, it seemed that nearly every high-profile case ended up on O'Mara's calendar. Before Puente, Sacramento's most notorious murder case was the
People
v.
Morris Solomon,
and O'Mara was not only handling this seven-murder-count death penalty case, but also a host of other major cases. In fact, he was prosecuting so many of Sacramento's biggest cases that others in the office began to secretly grouse that he was becoming "a glory hound."

John O'Mara was a quick study, but at the very least, he was stretching himself awfully thin. "I'd be worried," he admitted, "except that George handled the prelim."

The news that George Williamson wouldn't be prosecuting Puente left Ruth Munroe's children feeling stung. William Clausen, in particular, felt victimized by the assembly-line judicial process, betrayed by the attorneys who had invited his confidence and then abandoned the case, passing his mother's file along to the next guy.

And he felt fresh aggravation over the botched investigation of 1982. Why hadn't Puente been tried for their mother's murder back then? They'd put their faith in Deputy DA William Wood, coming to him for justice. But Wood, who'd just finished prosecuting Puente on other charges and was wrapping up so he could leave the DA's office to start a writing career, just wrote a few memos, passed the case along, and disappeared.

The investigation went nowhere, and it's clear that somebody dropped the ball. With bitterness, Bill Clausen grumbled, "I feel that the DA's office just didn't want to do anything."

Meanwhile, the change in prosecutors gave the defense team reason to grin. As Clymo saw it, O'Mara would be "less combative" than Williamson. Better yet, while they'd had more than two years to map strategy and gather information, the overburdened Mr. O’Mara was starting from scratch.

The legal machinery moves to its own rhythms—at times gliding with a sleek and awful beauty, at others, as slow and creaky as worn brakes—and the Puente case, plagued with problems, would be an example of jurisprudence at its most sluggish. Delays and false starts would be its hallmark.

Puente's trial date was slated for March 18, 1991… then rescheduled to June 15, 1991… then Clymo was suggesting October or November as more realistic. When O'Mara mentioned to Vlautin that they should try to finish pretrial motions before Christmas, Vlautin blinked at him and said, "How about starting everything
after
Christmas?" So, when it was rescheduled for January 15, 1992, it seemed that Puente's trial would start more than three years after her arrest. But even that late date would prove overly optimistic.

One delay came as no surprise: a change of venue hearing.

On February 8, 1992, Clymo and Vlautin began a carefully choreographed presentation of charts and diagrams showing that Dorothea Puente's name and visage had never fully disappeared from the public eye. National coverage may have waned from time to time, but the local media's appetite for Dorothea Puente stories was never sated. She would never get a fair trial here, the defense said.

Beyond the normal helping of news, a good deal of peculiar humor had percolated through Sacramento, further contaminating the jury
pool. To back their argument, they presented the humorous handbills and fliers they'd collected.

Several blowups were submitted as evidence, including one large display of a widely circulated "gift certificate" touting "Dorothea Puente's Bed and Breakfast":

Come be our guest for an indefinite stay in one of
our luxury suites. (Social Security welcome.)  
Everlasting tours of the beautiful gardens by
special arrangement. (Complimentary drinks!)

House sleeps 4; yard sleeps 7.

Peter Vlautin also presented a popular T-shirt showing Dorothea Puente standing with a pocketful of pills and a shovel (a takeoff on the famous painting,
American Gothic),
with body parts sticking out of the ground behind her, and "Sacramento: I Dig It" emblazoned across the front.

For much of the week-long hearing, the defense team relied on two expert witnesses (Edward Bronson, a California State University professor of public law, and Dr. Linda Meza, a litigation consultant), who provided persuasive testimony that Dorothea Montalvo Puente could not get a fair trial in Sacramento County. According to their surveys, for example, 98
percent
of the population in Sacramento County had heard of Dorothea Puente, and of those, over 75 percent believed she was guilty!

In his heart, John O'Mara was resigned to the judge granting a change of venue. He managed to shoot a few holes in his opponents' case, but in the end their evidence was overwhelming. The judge ruled that Dorothea Puente should be tried out of county.

Another delay.

The trial could be sent anywhere in the state, north or south. The problem would be finding a county able to accommodate such a mammoth trial. It would be a burden, tying up a courtroom for months, jamming up the local court calendar with an out-of-county headache.

"Nobody wants it," O'Mara admitted with a shrug.

Time seemed to be on Dorothea's side. For the defense, waiving Puente's right to a speedy trial may have been a strategic ace. With each delay, vigor was slowly drip, drip, dripping out of the prosecution's case like an old, leaky faucet. And with each passing year, their client grew more sympathetic: older, paler, more
grandmotherly. Serial killers were supposed to have tattoos and heavy beards; Dorothea Puente looked about as menacing as a slow-moving, fat old cat.

Boxes of files and binders of reports jammed the shelves climbing all four walls of John O'Mara's office, which wasn't any larger than others on the fourth floor of the DA's office, despite his title: Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney, Major Crimes Division Supervisor. Sitting in the midst of this, O'Mara calmly sifted through piles of documents. His desk seemed a tiny island of calm, threatened by towering waves of white paper poised to crash down with horrific tales of murder and mayhem.

He was a paradox. Leaning back in his chair for a moment, O'Mara might look relaxed—in a snapshot, he might even appear serene or merry—yet he ran on nervous energy, fueled by the coffee that he gulped continuously from dawn till nearly midnight. He could be brusque and abrasive, bulldozing through ideas nonstop, words blasting out of him in the habit of courtroom oratory; or he could be wryly funny, turning his quick wit to the stress-releasing antics that often commenced at the end of the working day, dubbed the "four o'clock follies."

Irish Catholic and a dedicated family man, John O'Mara was intensely private about his personal life. He kept his office bare of any framed pictures of his family: his wife of twenty-two years, Pat, and their children, Molly, sixteen, and Conner, eleven. He strove to keep his personal and professional lives separate, preferring to arrive at the office at 5:00
a.m.
rather than work late and miss his family's daily dramas. Still, while tending chores on his five-acre property
,
his profession would intrude. "That's when I have my best ideas," he said. "Things come to me when I'm shaving or mowing the lawn."

In the office, wearing natty suspenders with a conservative suit, O'Mara was hard to picture in a pastoral setting. He claimed that he had "never intended to be a prosecutor, never wanted to be a lawyer," yet he'd landed in the Sacramento DA's office in 1973, and had been prosecuting homicides almost ever since.

The secret to O'Mara's success as a prosecutor was his ability to single-
mindedly obsess about a case. Problem was, while Kevin Clymo and
Peter Vlautin had been studying Puente's case since day one, O'Mara was
now utterly immersed in another murder trial, that of Morris Solomon.

Maybe it hadn't been the best idea for him to handle both Solomon and Puente himself. Even O'Mara conceded, "The fire that's about to bum you is the one you work on." And while the Solomon trial was scorching his heels, the Puente files lay cold. He had yet to do even a thorough review of the record. And it showed. Bottom line, whenever O'Mara was asked about Puente, he instead ended up answering about Solomon.