The Reversal (5 page)

“But how would you know what Williams is up to?” he asked. “You’re an outsider. They could’ve brought you in, wound you up and pointed you in the right direction and then sat back to watch you go.”

“He’s right,” Maggie added. “Jessup doesn’t even have a defense attorney. As soon as he does he’ll start talking deal.”

I raised my hands in a calming gesture.

“Look, at the press conference today. I threw out that we were going for the death penalty. I just did that to see how Williams would react. He didn’t expect it and afterward he pressed me in the hallway. He told me that it wasn’t a decision I got to make. I told him it was just strategy, that I wanted Jessup to start thinking about a deal. And it gave Williams pause. He didn’t see it. If he was thinking of a deal just to blow up the civil action, I would have been able to read it. I’m good at reading people.”

I could tell I still hadn’t quite won Bosch over.

“Remember last year, with the two men from Hong Kong who wanted your ass on the next plane to China? I read them right and I played them right.”

In his eyes I saw Bosch relent. That China story was a reminder that he owed me one and I was collecting.

“Okay,” he said. “So what do we do?”

“We assume Jessup’s going to go to trial. As soon as he lawyers up, we’ll know for sure. But we start preparing for it now, because if I was going to represent him, I would refuse to waive speedy trial. I would try to jam the prosecution on time to prepare and make the people put up or shut up.”

I checked the date on my watch.

“If I’m right, that gives us forty-eight days till trial. We’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then.”

We looked at one another and sat in silence for a few moments before I threw the lead to Maggie.

“Maggie has spent the better part of the last week with the prosecution file on this. Harry, I know what you just brought in will have a lot of overlap. But why don’t we start here by having Mags go through the case as presented at trial in ’eighty-six? I think that will give us a good starting point of looking at what we need to do this time out.”

Bosch nodded his approval and I signaled for Maggie to begin. She pulled her laptop over in front of her.

“Okay, a couple of basics first. Because it was a death penalty case, jury selection was the longest part of the trial. Almost three weeks. The trial itself lasted seven days and then there were three days of deliberation on the initial verdicts, then the death penalty phase went another two weeks. But seven days of testimony and arguments—that to me is fast for a capital murder case. It was pretty cut-and-dried. And the defense… well, there wasn’t much of a defense.”

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 solemnly nodded, giving the dead her moment.

Six

Tuesday, February 16, 4:48
P.M
.

B
osch 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.”