Michael Connelly: The Reversal

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.”

“The hit we just got on the DNA helps explain that,” Haller said.

“Possibly,” McPherson responded. “But let’s discuss new evidence later. Right now, I’m talking about what they had and what they knew in nineteen eighty-six.”

“Fine. Go on.”

“That’s it on the evidence but not on the prosecution’s case. Two months before trial they get a call from the guy who’s in the cell next to Jessup at County. He-”

“Jailhouse snitches,” Haller said, interrupting. “Never met one who told the truth, never met a prosecutor who didn’t use them anyway.”

“Can I continue?” McPherson asked indignantly.

“Please do,” Haller responded.

“Felix Turner, a repeat drug offender who was in and out of County so often that they made him a jail orderly because he knew the day-to-day operations as well as the deputies. He delivered meals to inmates in high-power lockdown. He tells investigators that Jessup provided him with details that only the killer would know. He was interviewed and he did indeed have details of the crime that were not made public. Like that the victim’s shoes were removed, that she was not sexually assaulted, that he had wiped himself off on her dress.”

“And so they believed him and made him the star witness,” Haller said.

“They believed him and put him on the stand at trial. Not as a star witness. But his testimony was significant. Nevertheless, four years later, the Times comes out with a front-page exposé on Felix ‘The Burner’ Turner, professional jailhouse snitch who had testified for the prosecution in sixteen different cases over a seven-year period, garnering significant reductions in charges and jail time, and other perks like private cells, good jobs and large quantities of cigarettes.”

Bosch remembered the scandal. It rocked the DA’s office in the early nineties and resulted in changes in the use of jailhouse informants as trial witnesses. It was one of many black eyes local law enforcement suffered in the decade.

“Turner was discredited in the newspaper investigation. It said he used a private investigator on the outside to gather information on crimes and then to feed it to him. As you may remember, it changed how we used information that comes to us through the jails.”

“Not enough,” Haller said. “It didn’t end the entire use of jailhouse snitches and it should have.”

“Can we just focus on our case here?” McPherson said, obviously tired of Haller’s posturing.

“Sure,” Haller said. “Let’s focus.”

“Okay, well, by the time the Times came out with all of this, Jessup had long been convicted and was sitting in San Quentin. He of course launched an appeal citing police and prosecutorial misconduct. It went nowhere fast, with every appellate panel agreeing that while the use of Turner as a witness was egregious, his impact on the jury was not enough to have changed the verdict. The rest of the evidence was more than enough to convict.”

“And that was that,” Haller said. “They rubber-stamped it.”

“An interesting note is that Felix Turner was found murdered in West Hollywood a year after the Times exposé,” McPherson said. “The case was never solved.”

“Had it coming as far as I’m concerned,” Haller added.

That brought a pause to the discussion. Bosch used it to steer the meeting back to the evidence and to step in with some questions he had been considering.

“Is the hair evidence still available?”

It took McPherson a moment to drop Felix Turner and go back to the evidence.

“Yes, we still have it,” she said. “This case is twenty-four years old but it was always under challenge. That’s where Jessup and his jailhouse lawyering actually helped us. He was constantly filing writs and appeals. So the trial evidence was never destroyed. Of course, that eventually allowed him to get the DNA analysis off the swatch cut from the dress, but we still have all trial evidence and will be able to use it. He has claimed since day one that the hair in the truck was planted by the police.”

“I don’t think his defense at retrial will be much different from what was presented at his first trial and in his appeals,” Haller said. “The girl made the wrong ID in a prejudicial setting, and from then on it was a rush to judgment. Facing a monumental lack of physical evidence, the police planted hair from the victim in his tow truck. It didn’t play so well before a jury in ’eighty-six, but that was before Rodney King and the riots in ’ninety-two, the O.J. Simpson case, the Rampart scandal and all the other controversies that have engulfed the police department since. It’s probably going to play really well now.”

“So then, what are our chances?” Bosch asked.

Haller looked across the table at McPherson before answering.

“Based on what we know so far,” he said, “I think I’d have a better chance if I were on the other side of the aisle on this one.”

Bosch saw McPherson’s eyes grow dark.

“Well then, maybe you should cross back over.”

Haller shook his head.

“No, I made a deal. It may have been a bad deal but I’m sticking to it. Besides, it’s not often I get to be on the side of might and right. I could get used to that-even in a losing cause.”

He smiled at his ex-wife but she didn’t return the sentiment.

“What about the sister?” Bosch asked.

McPherson swung her gaze toward him.

“The witness? That’s our second problem. If she’s alive, then she’s thirty-seven now. Finding her is the problem. No help from the parents. Her real father died when she was seven. Her mother committed suicide on her sister’s grave three years after the murder. And the stepfather drank himself into liver failure and died while waiting for a transplant six years ago. I had one of the investigators here do a quick rundown on her on the computer and Sarah Landy’s trail drops off in San Francisco about the same time her stepfather died. That same year she also cleared a probation tail for a controlled substance conviction. Records show she’s been married and divorced twice, arrested multiple times for drugs and petty crimes. And then, like I said, she dropped off the grid. She either died or cleaned up her act. Even if she changed names, her prints would have left a trail if she’d been popped again in the past six years. But there’s nothing.”