To Die For (26 page)

All night, he had been escorting Dana back and forth down the hallway. This time, it was different. Starting tonight, her life was going to consist mostly of being led in handcuffs from one place to another, wearing ugly blue jail jumpsuits and eating crappy food. If everything went right, she would never see her home or sleep in her own bed again.

The tears that had flowed freely during the interview were gone. Greco was intrigued with how she could turn them on and off. When she wanted them off, they stayed off. He was also impressed with her ability to hold them at bay and extract information from them while they were trying to get information from her. Greco was a little frustrated that he hadn't obtained a full confession to make the case airtight. Other than Dorinda, they had no live witnesses, which meant that the case would rest on a jury's ability to piece together circumstantial evidence. No one saw her going into Norma's house, June's house, or Dora's house. As far as they knew, she left no fingerprints, blood or hair, although the evidence gathered at the crime scenes would be examined and tested. Their case consisted of showing jurors that Dana had spent June's credit cards and used Dora's bankbook less than an hour after each of them was murdered. Greco hoped that Dorinda would identify Dana. There were no credit cards or checks with Norma's murder. He hoped the search of Dana's house turned up the shoe that had left the shoeprint. Greco thought that the June and Dora murder cases were strong, but he wanted something indestructible.

Getting a confession could have been instructive. She could have told them how she chose her victims, how she killed her victims, why she so brutally slaughtered them and why she used household items, like the iron and the wine bottle. In the case of Dorinda, he wanted to know why she attacked a woman in a retail store during business hours.

Greco walked behind Dana, as he did with every other prisoner he arrested, guiding her by the elbow out of the carpeted, softly lit interview room and down the hallway past the detective bureau and the report-writing room.

They turned a corner past the dispatch center, to the hard linoleum floors and bright lights of the lock-up area. Dana squinted slightly, her red-rimmed eyes swollen, her sandals making a soft noise on the hard floor. Greco paused by the office where the on-duty watch commander sat at his desk behind a row of video monitors. Video cameras were aimed at prisoners in each cell for two reasons—so they wouldn't hurt their officers, and wouldn't hurt themselves. If they were busy trying to make some kind of a weapon or using something to hang themselves with, the police could intervene. Over the years, Perris had lost two prisoners to suicide.

“I have a prisoner,” Greco said to the watch commander, who wrote the information in the station's jail logbook. “Dana. Sue. Gray, with an ‘a.' 187,” he said, giving the penal code section for murder. The watch commander also wrote down the time—2:08 a.m.

“This is going to be a no-bail, special circumstances case,” Greco said. He wanted that entered into the logbook so no one would make a mistake and release her in the morning. After she was booked, the watch commander would come by to see if she wanted to eat. At this time of the morning, it would be breakfast. Greco thought the food was putrid, although it was the same stuff supermarkets sold in the frozen food section. Eggs, sausages and pancakes in a cardboard box, plus a little tin of maple syrup.

They passed the cluster of six cells where Dana had been kept off and on during her interrogation. One of those cells was the drunk tank: no bunk, no blankets, just a cold floor with a drain in the middle. The smell permeated the lockup and booking areas. Every time Greco had to go back there for a prisoner or to book someone, he was glad he'd never been arrested. The stench alone was enough to keep him out of jail.

When she hesitated, Greco said, “Just keep walking straight. Now turn right.”

Once they turned the corner, they entered the booking room, an open area consisting of a computer on a counter and a wooden bench secured to a wall about eight feet away. A Breathalyzer was in an adjoining room. For some reason, the booking area was a lot colder than the rest of the station. It was always colder in there. That and the smell spilled over from the drunk tank.

Greco sat Dana on a bench and cuffed one hand to a solid steel eyebolt on the seat while he pulled out the booking forms and grabbed a Polaroid camera. She gave him a blank face for her booking photo and, in contrast to hours of cat-and-mouse interrogation, Dana obediently answered all of his questions regarding her vital statistics, employment history and next-of-kin. Greco took his time and double checked all of the information, including the murder charges, and making certain it was clear that she was a “no bail” case. Her booking information would accompany her to the Riverside County Jail, which would be her home while she was arraigned and awaiting trial. Because she'd killed more than one person, Greco expected Bentley to file special circumstance allegations, California's legal gateway to the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Greco called a twenty-four-hour nursing service to take blood and saliva samples and scrape underneath her fingernails in hopes of collecting evidence linking her to the murder of Dora Beebe hours before. He also arranged to have a community service officer take photos of Dana without clothing to see if she had any bruises or cuts, particularly on her arms and hands. He unhandcuffed Dana and fingerprinted her. Even though James had taken a set that night, he needed additional sets for regional, state and national law enforcement databases. As Greco rolled her fingers, he examined her hands and fingers for cuts and saw nothing.

By the time he was finished, Julie, the community service officer, had arrived to take pictures. He walked Dana back to her cell and went back to the detective bureau to do paperwork.

He picked up the phone and called Wyatt to see how the search was going at her house. Wyatt briefed him about the merchandise they found from Mervyn's, Nike and the other mall stores. They'd also found some credit card slips as well as the receipts for the massage from Murrieta Hot Springs, Baily's Wine Country Café and the Ferrari Bistro. Greco asked about the Nike shoes and Wyatt said there were plenty. They were taking all of the Nikes. Greco said he'd be out there soon and hung up, satisfied that the search seemed to be going well. He was happy that he and Wyatt were working well together. With Dana in custody, they knew the importance of the case took priority over personalities.

At 3:20 a.m., Dispatch rang his desk to let him know the nurse was there. He escorted the nurse to the lock-up and stood by as he took fingernail scrapings and clippings, a saliva sample and a vial of blood.

The nurse gathered up his equipment, packed away the vials and left Greco with the evidence samples of Dana's genetic material. Dana stood there for a moment surveying her surroundings. The bars were about six inches apart with heavy-gauge mesh between them. A cot built into the wall had a wafer-thin plastic mat with an olive-green wool blanket folded on top. The rimless, stainless-steel toilet had a sink and drinking fountain built into the tank portion of the toilet. A window, too high to look out of, had double-paned glass and was covered with bars and the heavy steel mesh. The concrete floor and walls, painted a faint peach hue, were unadorned except for stains left by prior occupants. Dana had been bagged and tagged and was now an official prisoner with no control over when she would eat, when she would sleep and when she could make phone calls. Every half-hour, the watch commander would come by her cell to see what she was doing and make a note in the logbook. If Dana was hungry, the watch commander would feed her. Unlike the severe emotional outbursts Dana had displayed during her interviews, she hadn't even sniveled.

Greco slammed the door shut and turned away. He was glad she was behind bars, but it wasn't his style to pat himself on the back. Arresting and booking Dana at 2 a.m. that morning had triggered the forty-eight-hour time limit within which the system had to file charges and arraign her. They had a little leeway because the time would technically run out Saturday at 2 a.m., so she wouldn't have to be in court until Monday. Greco had to pull the paperwork together and present the case to the DA's office later that day. A committee of DAs would review the case, decide what charges to file and do their own paperwork so she could be arraigned. Even though arresting Dana was the slam dunk to a successful investigation, the game wasn't over. Now they had to prove it.

Greco yelled into the microphone for someone in Dispatch to let him out. A second later, he heard the buzzer, pushed open the door and left.

THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 1994, 6:45 A.M.

As Greco was driving home, the rosy sunrise cast a warm glow on the large “M” marking the entrance to Moreno Valley, where he lived. He felt happy, satisfied, and a little numb from fatigue. He'd solved a high-profile case—and the case seemed pretty tight—all in one month. It was only his second homicide case and the experience had been overwhelming. But within that month, he'd come a long way from the near-crippling feeling of self-doubt.

He'd gone by Dana's house again to take a longer look at her environment and see how she lived her life and what magazines she read. When the police had asked Jim whether he and Dana had been reading any newspaper articles about the murders, he said that Dana had been buying papers recently to look at the want ads. Now Greco picked up the Canyon Lake paper and thumbed through it. The front-page article was about the murders, but the little paper carried no classified ads.

Wyatt and the ID techs had also made another discovery. They'd found a coiled plastic ring with keys that seemed to match those described by Dorinda Hawkins, hanging from a hook on Dana's entertainment center. That, along with Dorinda's description of Dana—provided that she identified Dana as her attacker—would solidify that charge. They'd also found one of Dora's credit cards in Dana's sock drawer, where she said it would be. Dana's purse held two bundles of cash: $1,900, just short of the $2,000 she withdrew from Dora's account, and $170 in her wallet, which came from writing checks for $50 over her grocery store purchases. They'd also found six pairs of gloves in her room, an unusually large assortment for a dry, desert climate where winter temperatures rarely dip below 50 degrees in the daytime. Another pair of gloves and several hanks of rope, including water-ski tow rope, were taken from the laundry area. More rope was found in the kitchen cabinet and several lengths of rope were found in the hallway, including new water-ski tow rope still wrapped in plastic. Outside, more rope turned up in the garage, and in a small tool shed. A pair of white latex gloves were found in the trash.

That was about 4 a.m. Greco came back to the station to do the paperwork that the DA's office would need to file charges. Wyatt closed the search at 4:40 a.m. and they hauled 86 bags of evidence back to the department. One of the community service officers who had assisted on the search organized the evidence into piles all over the detective bureau so she could categorize everything while she booked it into evidence. It looked like a yard sale.

Greco sat down with the bags of Nikes at his desk and started going through them, examining the soles. Between Jim and Dana, they had a lot of Nikes, particularly Dana. He had pulled his own copy of the one-to-one picture of the dusty shoeprint from his file cabinet and compared shoe after shoe to the imprint. Each matching pair had been strung together with plastic ties. He didn't know there were so many different patterns on the soles of athletic shoes. About halfway through the bags of shoes he found a white pair of Nike Air athletic shoes, size 6½, that seemed to match. The shoe obviously belonged to Dana, whose smaller sneakers were dwarfed by Jim's size 11s. He placed the shoe over the photo of the imprint. It looked good to Greco, but a forensic shoeprint expert would have to render an expert opinion. Greco was satisfied, though. He didn't have any credit cards, checks, cash withdrawals, key rings or any other evidence directly linking Dana to Norma's murder. Dana said she hadn't been in Norma's house in two years. There's no way that shoeprint should have been in Norma's house. This would do it.

Greco was still excited about the arrest. Discovering the shoe gave him a renewed burst of adrenaline. He returned the remaining shoes to the bag, took the pair that he thought matched to the community service officer and told her to send them to the DOJ for comparison, then he tackled the DA paperwork. He was so excited, he couldn't stop working. Those shoes would definitely place Dana at the scene, he kept saying to himself. With his paperwork just about done, he decided to book the videos of the interviews. It only took a few minutes.

The drive home wound him down somewhat, but a million thoughts were jumping around in his head. Later that day, he would have to go to the DA's office and brief a committee of prosecutors that decides which criminal charges will be filed in murder cases. For example, if Dana had taken credit cards out of the house after killing someone, they could file one count of murder and one count of burglary for that incident. They could also file charges of forgery and credit card fraud.

Something else struck Greco as he was driving. He rifled through his notes to find the phone number and reached for his cell phone.

“Mr. Owens?” Greco said. “This is Joe Greco. I thought you might want to know that I have a suspect in custody who's going to be charged with your mother-in-law's murder.

“I think we have a pretty strong case against her.”

Greco waited a moment. He could hear Owens sighing, as if he was emotional.

“I'm, I'm really relieved,” Owens said, stammering somewhat. “I just want you to know, well, uh, I really appreciate your, everything you've done in this investigation. I have to say, well, I really didn't think you could do it.”