California P.I.

By Rachel Sommerville

Marquis is accused of involvement in the murder of a man from a rival neighborhood. Darren has been found guilty of murdering a gas station attendant. Charles has been charged with the murder of a homeless teenage girl. All three men are facing the death penalty in California. A passionate account, this book follows an Australian-born private investigator as she attempts to save these men's lives. A journey from genteel, middle-class Adelaide, Australia, to the ghettos and prisons of the United States, this is also an insider's view of the U.S. justice system and the injustices it often commits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781742241302

Book preview

one.

Introduction:

‘The Alcatraz of the Rockies’

I often drive long distances to interview a prisoner. Whether it’s from my San Francisco Bay Area office or from a hotel in Las Vegas, the prison interview usually involves a journey of many highway miles, several rest area stops, numerous energy bars, and terrible coffee. Yet I’m grateful for these drives, and more often than not I find myself wishing they were longer. The early morning drive to the Federal Supermax was one drive I wished had been longer than the 45 minutes it took from my crummy motel room in a small Colorado town to the prison gates.

First of all, the drive was beautiful. This prison is in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and is often referred to as ‘the Alcatraz of the Rockies’. In nearby towns you can buy souvenir coffee mugs and T-shirts printed with this motto. I considered buying some of the T-shirts for friends back in Australia, but it wasn’t really that funny to think of friends sitting on an Australian beach wearing the motto of a US prison wholly devoted to long-term solitary confinement.

Prisons are sad places, and that was the second reason why I wanted the drive not to end. The drive through the beauty of these foothills did not give me enough time to prepare for the transition from this ancient landscape to what I knew lay ahead: the concrete interview room of a modern maximum security prison occupied by a heavily shackled human being.

I was visiting this prison because I’m a private investigator working in a defence team. My ‘team-mates’ are attorneys, other investigators, and experts in such areas as psychology, psychiatry, and substance abuse, who over the course of the next three years or so would defend a man charged with the death of another prison inmate. I was involved because Federal prosecutors had decided to pursue the death penalty. My job was to investigate the client’s life and develop a detailed social history of it, using the documents and records generated during its course, along with interviews with the client, his family, his friends, and any other people who’d had significant encounters with him. If the worst happened and we had to defend him from the death penalty, we would present this social history, through the testimony of witnesses – expert and lay – to the jurors who would vote on his fate. Our hope was that they too would come to see what we had learned through investigating his life: how poverty, chaos, instability, physical and emotional abuse, poor schooling, depression and excessive drug use lead to adult criminal behaviour.

As the road leading off the highway crested, I could clearly see the complex of four separate prisons, though it was still several miles away. ‘Supermax’ – or, as it is formally known, US Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) – was the most secure of the four prisons that occupy this site.

Before I entered the grounds, the prison guard at the gated entrance checked my credentials, confirmed my name on the visitors’ list and recorded my rental car’s make, model and numberplate. There were the usual first few tense seconds of contact, but as I replied to his list of questions, he ended with the question I always welcome: ‘Are you Australian?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You’re a long way from home! I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.’

There’s so much goodwill towards Australia in the US. Way out here in Colorado, my Australian credentials lifted the guard and me momentarily out of prison officialdom, and into the world of crocodile hunters, beaches and barbecues. We smiled at each other, then into the prison grounds I drove, past one prison, past another, and then another, until the road ended at the ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’ car park.

Somewhere here, below my line of vision, prisoners were housed in long-term isolation, with little or no social contact with other human beings. Inmates here spend 23 hours confined to a concrete and metal cell not much bigger than my motel’s bathroom. Their one hour’s exercise is done in a metal cage. Even there, the inmate’s only view of the outside is through the iron mesh roof of his cage, past the high concrete walls that surround him to the sky above. There is no other view.

Prison interviews are, at the best of times, difficult for me. After having conducted many of these interviews, I’ve recognised that part of the difficulty lies in the sheer anxiety of dealing with prison bureaucracy: has my authorisation to visit reached the prison visit staff? Has the prison gone into lockdown, with no prisoner allowed out of the cell and no visitor allowed in? Will the prisoner agree to talk to me? But that’s not all of it. Here in Colorado, surrounded by great natural beauty, in one of the heartlands of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, my anxiety’s source was more obvious to me than ever: it was the loss of freedom, as it is so profoundly embodied in this institution. Here, in this place of sensory deprivation, of concrete and steel, the punishment of losing one’s freedom was at its most terrifying to me. The men here have had all autonomy taken from them. Every part of their day is dictated. They are allowed no choice and certainly no beauty.

But I had a job to do. I had to meet our client and build a working relationship, one that would allow him to share his life experiences with me so the team could begin his defence. I descended the stairs from the immaculately clean reception area, led by a friendly guard (he too liked Australia). I passed through four security doors, and was then ushered into a small, enclosed interview room that was divided in half by a glass and concrete barrier. This facility has the highest level of security, so all legal visits are non-contact. The client and I would meet through glass. I sat down on the cement stool, the guard locked me in, and I could not see or hear another human being. Just silence, except for my heart pounding against my chest. So I took some deep long breaths, and waited for the sound of metal hitting metal: the shackled prisoner walking towards me.

| | | | | | | |

‘Do you write this stuff down?’ I’ve often been asked. Another common question has been, ‘Have you considered writing a book about your work?’ For years I’ve shooed these questions away because I’m not a ‘writer’, and because it seemed vain to gain publicity from writing about the suffering of others: my clients, their families, and the victims of the crimes these men and women have been charged with – and in some cases found guilty of. And, finally, because the job had slowly become commonplace to me, seeming less likely to interest others.

The first indication that there really was a book in my working life, and an audience for it, came a few years ago, when I was interviewed at length on ABC Radio National about my career as a California private investigator working to defend men and women against the sentence of death. Between tapings of our interview, the program host expressed several times his wonder at the scope and nature of my job. I had been doing this type of investigation for so long that by the time I did the interview I thought it was all pretty straightforward and unremarkable. My interviewer’s attitude reminded me that it wasn’t.

In particular, the host’s insistent questioning about how this particular type of investigation had come into existence was a reminder to me of what an extraordinary event it was when, in the mid 1970s, the US Supreme Court ‘created’ the possibility for my job. The Court mandated that for the death penalty to continue as a sentence, its imposition must be carried out in a ‘fair’ and ‘rational’ manner. The central part of this change, which would evolve over the course of the next three decades, was the presentation to the jury of the defendant’s social history before they deliberated on whether he should live or die. Any book about my work would have to tell a little of this history, of the landmark Supreme Court cases that laid the foundations for the job I now do.

The interviewer was also interested in how a ‘nice girl’ from Adelaide had entered a profession that put her bang in the middle of the harsh and monolithic world of the American criminal justice system. So if I did write the book, it would have to attempt to explain how that ‘nice girl’ ended up in the ‘Supermax’ prison in Colorado, interviewing a man who was facing the death penalty for the alleged murder of another inmate.

And that is what I’ve tried to do.

What follows is a story about how I got into the business, about my training, about those who helped me learn how to be a criminal defence investigator, and about why I decided to concentrate on one aspect of investigation – life history investigations. It has not been an easy job for me to get a handle on, and I have wondered at times why I was doing it. Those difficulties come to the fore in parts of the book.

One aim in writing this book is to tell, from my vantage point, the story of the American system of the death penalty, and to show that it is a penalty that, despite decades of Supreme Court cases that attempt to make it otherwise, remains irrational, random and cruel. Another is to provide the stories of those who have been charged or found guilty of a capital crime, and what I have learned from their stories about the conditions that lead to violent crime. These are the conditions that Hollywood movies or TV crime shows rarely present.

As Joe, one of my PI teachers, told me, when you interview a person charged with a serious crime, ‘Don’t forget to ask about their car. It’s a good place to start.’ Why? Because often the descent into violence can be triggered by what seems a minor event, like a car breaking down. If there was no money to fix it, and if the local morning bus was unreliable, then a factory job was lost through repeatedly arriving late. Such a sequence of events can be the penultimate catastrophe in the life of a man who as a child was maltreated and neglected, who attended ill-equipped schools, experienced profound poverty, and endured brutal juvenile detention practices – and who, when he turned 18, had zero life skills. I hope the stories this book help to counter the persistent narrative that violent crimes are committed by psychopaths and evil misfits.

I also hope this book shows that to have one’s liberty taken is in itself a profound punishment. If there’s one myth that really needs debunking, it is that the bad guy, once caught and convicted, is sent to a summer camp – with barbed wire fences.

The book also traces the evolution of my views on the death penalty, the prison system and the purpose of punishment, as I have built my career as a private investigator.

O  |  N  |  E

The apprentice

I couldn’t pull my car over to the footpath quite fast enough. My passenger’s nausea beat me to it, and she vomited onto the passenger-side floor of the car. On a busy street in one of San Francisco’s rougher South of Market neighbourhoods, my 6-month-old career as a private investigator trainee specialising in criminal defence looked precariously close to falling off a cliff. It was a lovely winter’s day, mild and sunny, but this job was casting a dark shadow over me.

The task I had been handed was straightforward enough: interview this young woman about her boyfriend. Reggie, the father of my passenger Michelle’s unborn child, had been arrested and charged with being an accessory to a murder. His criminal defence attorney, who had hired the small PI agency I was working for, had listened to the tapes of the police interviews with his client. All he had heard was a man doing anything, saying anything, to end the pain and misery of his drug withdrawal. The extent of Reggie’s addiction was crucial to his defence, which was why this attorney, experienced and smart, wanted interviews conducted with witnesses to this drug use. For two years Michelle had seen, first hand, Reggie’s heroin addiction. She might be the best one to answer questions about the depth and extent of his addiction.

On that sunny winter morning I had met Michelle at her cousin’s apartment – a cramped, dark, and chaotic space filled with little children and several young women who I assumed were their mothers. I sat on the arm rest of a couch, which doubled as Michelle’s bed, waiting for her to come out of the shower. I was largely ignored by these women as they floated by me blow-drying their hair or eating bowls of cereal. A TV blared with one of those talk shows where a wife, encouraged by the audience, was shouting at her cheating husband. A little girl stood close to the TV and stared at the shouting figures and then walked around the room looking for something else to do. But there was nothing else to do except watch a fight over a toy between some of the other children.

By the time Michelle finally appeared from the bathroom – tall, graceful, and very pregnant – I knew we had to get out of these surroundings and go somewhere quiet and free of distractions. Michelle and I had not met in person, and we had only talked briefly on the phone the night before. Although she did not object to meeting me and talking about Reggie, she had been blunt and slightly irritated with the entire conversation. She continued to be so in person.

‘Michelle,’ I said gently, ‘I think we should go to a coffee shop. Somewhere a little quieter, that will give us privacy.’

‘Well there’s nothing I have to say to you about Reggie that I wouldn’t say in front of my cousins,’ she replied with a sour face.

‘I understand,’ I said, looking around and wondering how to convince this woman to come with me. After all, I was a total stranger to her and her life. When I saw the empty pizza cartons and the halfempty bowls of cereal on the floor and then looked back at her stomach it came to me that I should offer more than just a trip to a coffee shop. ‘Perhaps we could get something to eat as well?’  

She hesitated. ‘I haven’t got any money.’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay.’

‘Well. OK. This pregnancy sure makes me hungry.’

For a fleeting moment, as we left her cousin’s home and strapped ourselves into my car, I felt I had exerted some control over the situation. Private investigators are masters of whatever situation is thrown at them – that’s the myth I thought of as a fact back then.

However, my new-found mastery was quickly lost because there was a hitch: Michelle was not only seven months pregnant; she was also battling her own addiction to heroin. As she adjusted the seat belt around her beautiful round belly, she told me, ‘I’m on a daily dose of methadone. I’m due for it now, and I ain’t got my own car to get to the clinic. Let’s go to the clinic now, and then we can get some food. I can’t do anything until I get my methadone.’

So by the time Michelle vomited in my car, I had already driven her to the local treatment clinic, a small, nondescript building on the southern fringes of the Mission District. I had followed her into the small waiting room and watched the clinic staff watch her drink her daily dose from a small white cup. Before I could even begin the interview, I had lost precious time – waiting for Michelle to have her shower, transporting her across the city for her drug treatment, and making frequent stops so she could deal with the waves of nausea. An important interview seemed over before it had even begun.

As I looked on helplessly, first at Michelle sitting there with her head in her hands and then at the mess on the car floor, a thought returned: I’m not cut out for this job. A California PI? You’ve got to be kidding. Somewhere, I knew, there was a far more suitable apprentice, someone who was tough, streetwise, and shrewd. Someone who would have navigated this differently, someone who would not be staring at this mess on the car floor.

You’re a nice polite woman from South Australia, so go back to your comfortable home in that middle-class Northern California neighbourhood that you share with your American husband, I told myself. He can finance the family’s life with his Silicon Valley job, so stay home with your baby, cook nutritious meals for your family, and dabble in some graduate study to assuage that decades-long interest in the criminal justice system. Turn back now – you’ve fallen for that American con, the one you and your Adelaide University friends were wise to and mocked while drinking beer in the local pub and watching the opening of the 1984 LA Olympics. The one about the United States being the land of opportunity and of freedom where any individual with fortitude and moral stamina can reinvent herself.

I was living in the United States because I had married Tom, an American, and I was suffering from what is often called a ‘career crisis’. This was funny, considering that to have a career crisis you must first have a career. Which, in fact, I didn’t. I had held many different jobs over the last few decades – university administrative assistant, small-time (very small-time) project manager, temporary teacher – all of them interspersed with return trips to university studies: a BA, a History Honours degree, a Diploma of Education, a Masters. I was always hoping that a career would materialise in my lap. By the time I moved in with Tom I had virtually zero ideas about a career and few prospects of even finding a decently paying job. At 33, I was trying to find a starting point, and I was both too old and too inexperienced.

Tom, however, was relentless. He would not let me give up on finding work I liked. He had always believed in the value of a life of public service. Perhaps it was his Greek inheritance speaking, saying that civic involvement was a duty, a privilege, something we all should do. But he was also convinced that dedication to public service would relieve my sense of homelessness. He had interpreted this homelessness as not just the result of my being an Australian transplant, with all that I had known now thousands of miles away from me; he also sensed,