California P.I.

By Rachel Sommerville

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Rachel Sommerville
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74223-287-4

Contents

Author’s note,
Introduction: ‘The Alcatraz of the Rockies’,
1 The apprentice,
2 PI training,
3 Asking the right question,
4 Cruel and unusual punishment,
5 A death penalty case,
6 Marquis’s story,
7 Two trials,
8 Post-conviction work,
9 Jurors,
10 LWOP: Life without the possibility of parole,
Postscript,
Acknowledgements,

CHAPTER 1

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, correctly, that I had no sense of belonging – not in Australia and now not in the United States. Belonging, Tom thought, was somehow connected to becoming an adult, to growing up and finally accepting that one had left home and was entering a relationship with the public world.

Sitting in our kitchen, with me very pregnant and the jarring sounds of San Francisco’s Mission District accompanying our dinner, Tom worried about my future life with a baby but with no social network, and no place in the world.

‘Rachel, you will not be happy if you don’t think about a public life’, Tom said in his emphatic, self-confident way. ‘It’s as clear as the fact that boiling water is very, very hot that you require a public life!’

‘Having a child will take me out of myself and into the public domain. There are those informal mothers’ clubs, and then there’ll be preschool,’ I said, unconvincingly.

Tom was not a fan of the private space of the single family. He had grown up in a Buffalo tenement building with his mother and sister, a Greek family in a building filled with Italian families. His father had disappeared back to Greece, deported for being a Greek patriot. That’s a story that deserves its own book, not just a line in this one. But in this building filled with poor migrant families, apartment doors were left open and children ran from one family home to the next. The men made grappa and prosciutto in the basement, and shared them with all the tenants. His mother’s life, and hence his and his sister’s too, was saved by the openness and generosity of others in that building.

‘I think a private existence, as a mother at home, won’t satisfy you. You need to find an identity that extends past being a wife and mother.’ Tom, never one for small statements, then added, ‘I know you well enough to know that the private economy of the family will make you crazy!’

After our son Lachlan’s birth, and as I waited for my permanent US residency, Tom urged me to make use of his well-paid work in Silicon Valley and our access to good childcare to find this public life. There was, however, a caveat: I had to give this search for a new career some conscious effort, and I had to give it some goddamn determination.

But despite Tom’s rousing evocation of the American work ethic, my attempt to re-enter the public sphere began blandly. I read What Color Is Your Parachute?, the popular job-hunting and career change manual, and arranged a number of sessions with a career counsellor. I attended an open house for those interested in non-academic positions at the local university, but that was a diversion from what Tom and I had agreed on: it was a job, not a career. I was following my usual path with employment and work – the path of least resistance.

And then one day, while the baby slept, I read aloud to Tom parts of an article from The Economist magazine on how Western societies punish their criminals. It was a typically well-written Economist article reviewing a series of books about the history of punishment and the present state of the justice system.

‘Did you know,’ I said to Tom, ‘that America spends $25 billion a year on prisons? $25 billion!’

I continued to read out other facts about the penal system in the US and Europe, and then he and I argued some of these points.

Tom said he thought there was still a place in Western society for the death penalty. ‘There’s always going to be some guy, the worst of the worst, who we are better off without. Someone who is just dangerous, and who committed some really horrible crimes, and did so repeatedly. Actually I think a lot of my friends would agree with me.’

‘The death penalty is just wrong,’ I replied firmly, without any dithering. ‘A nation should not sanction the killing of one of its own.’

‘You know what, Rachel?’ Tom said after he and I had spent close to half an hour talking about the article, ‘Issues to do with prisons, punishment, crime seem to be the ones that really engage you. Have you ever noticed that?’

In that one comment, in my husband’s recognition of a particular interest in the public world that I had never been fully aware of, I saw a possible career trajectory – something in the world of criminal justice. But on the heels of this certainty, came the all-important question: how do I pursue it?

Once again I took an unimaginative path: I enrolled in a Masters program in Criminal Justice at a local California State university. This was the only university that accepted me as a Masters candidate and that was within tolerable driving limits. California has two state university systems. The more prestigious one is the University of California system, which includes the famous University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles and eight others. Then there is the second tier, the California State University system, whose most popular degrees are in fields like nursing and accounting. It was a university in that tier that accepted this ‘mature’ student from Australia who had a vague idea about studying alternative sentences to the death penalty.

I had no tertiary education background in criminal justice, so despite having a Masters from Melbourne University, I was required to do a couple of semesters of undergraduate subjects. These prerequisites from the Criminal Justice Department included Administration of Justice, Justice Systems Research, and History of Corrections. I drove many miles during the worst hours of the often horrendous Bay Area commuter traffic to be in a classroom full of students who were nearly 15 years younger than me, and who mostly resented their professors’ demands to inquire a little deeper into issues they had no interest in. I put aside my sense of humiliation at being the oldest in the class and kept on at these courses, mainly because I didn’t know how else I could be involved in the world of criminal justice.

And then Tom made another crucial intervention in my search for a public life: he returned from two weeks at a writers’ retreat and told me about one of the other resident writers. She was a San Francisco Bay Area woman who had been a private investigator for many years, specialising in working for criminal defence attorneys representing men and women facing the death penalty. Melody, Tom said, appeared to be connected to many non-profit groups and individuals doing interesting and progressive work on criminal justice issues. Tom pressed me to call her and ask her for advice on how I could become more engaged with these issues.

‘Go on, Rachel,’ he urged. ‘She’s really nice.’

I was feeling dragged down by my coursework, and feeling too old to be trying my hand at study again, and wondering what was best for my toddler son, so I dropped my usual concern about bothering this stranger, this busy person, this published writer, this wellrespected private investigator. I needed direction – and I needed to get away from the 20-year-olds who, the week before, had told the lecturer that the appellate court system was a waste of money and should be abolished. I called Melody and we made a date for coffee.

On a rainy morning in a café in Berkeley I met a petite, sweetly smiling grandmother who had worked for the last 25 years as a private investigator. Through Melody I learned the meaning of being tougher than you look.

As we sat sipping coffee, Melody described her job as an investigator as one that demanded erudition – attention to scholarly books and journals – but was also grounded in the everyday. The work, she said, involved reading and comprehending books and essays on criminology, psychology and law, and cultural histories of towns and regions, but also, most importantly, it required the ability to engage with people from nearly every level of American society. It also needed good writing skills, as writing extensive, detailed reports of interviews with witnesses was an important part of investigating. As she put it, the PI talks and writes. She also described working alongside other investigators and attorneys who sounded like dedicated protectors of the American Constitution. In turn I told her about my studies and my interest in the US penal system, criminal sentencing and the death penalty, and about my frustration with the course I was studying.

And then Melody said, ‘Rachel, you have a lot of qualities which actually make you well suited to being a private investigator.’

‘But I don’t know anything about law enforcement or the law or how the courts work,’ I replied. ‘I actually know close to nothing about the justice system or the people caught up in it.’

‘You don’t have to have a law enforcement background. It is not a requirement. Being an ex-cop will not automatically make you a good investigator. Anyway, you’re doing a Masters in Criminal Justice, and that shows me that you’re sincerely interested in the area.

‘This job,’ Melody went on patiently, ‘is about getting people to talk. Your age and being a woman will help a lot.’

Beginning in the 1970s and increasingly in the 1980s, she ex– plained, the ranks of private investigators in California went from being filled by ex-law enforcement officers to being filled by people from all walks of life: teachers, roofers, journalists, PhDs, peace activists, university lecturers, social workers, film critics and car mechanics. Melody herself had been a kindergarten teacher.

The late Hal Lipset, one of the nation’s most famous private investigators, is often credited with this shift. His fame came from three things: being one of the first users of the wiretap to collect damaging statements from possibly hostile witnesses, putting the profession on a more equal footing with the hiring attorney, and making a lot of money. But he also made another crucial change to the profession: he hired people who had a range of backgrounds and experiences of the world.

(Continues…)Excerpted from California P.I. by Rachel Sommerville. Copyright © 2012 Rachel Sommerville. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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