To Die For (40 page)

She discussed books, movies and her bad marriage with her outside friends, but with inmates buddies, she was hungry for gossip on the floors below her—who was also in lockdown, who was talking about her case in the day room, how to sweet-talk the guards into sharpening the pencil nubs they left outside their cells and euphoria over scoring a new bra on their weekly clothing exchange. While she was on the seventh floor, Dana bragged about how the male inmates across the pod lined up in their cells to wave and steal a glimpse at their high-profile female neighbor when she went to her cell door to get her daily dose of Motrin.

Inspired by Indio's poetry and Bill Suff's ambitions to write books, Dana also decided to write a book about being in jail from a women's standpoint titled “Beneath Still Waters,” inspired by her favorite Emmylou Harris song: “Beneath still waters there's a strong undertow … the words are perfect, wish I could still remember them all.”

THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1994, 10:30 A.M.

Tom nervously fingered the $100 bills in his pocket as he sat waiting for Dana to show up in court. Today they were supposed to settle the divorce. The court attendant told him it would take a little longer for Dana to arrive because the deputies typically transport the vast majority of in-custody defendants to criminal court first. Since very few have to go to civil court, they arrive later. From what he'd been hearing from Russell and Jim, he knew that Dana was not going to be that happy to see him. He'd brought $1,000 in cash with him hoping that it would, in part, help to convince her to settle with him. Dana had completely wiped him out financially with her spending and he had hoped to sell a couple of pieces of equipment to settle things up, but, through Jim, she put her foot down. He was leery of visiting her in jail, so his lawyer volunteered to see her the night before with a proposed property settlement that he thought was fair. But once Dana found out who it was on the other side of the visitors' glass, she stormed off. Tom came by himself to court, bringing only the proposed settlement with him and wondering what he was going to have to do to get her to sign it. He thought a cash-for-equipment deal might work.

Tom had been confused about why they weren't divorced earlier in the year. He had been expecting dissolution paperwork in January but it never came. He got a chill when he thought about his decision to skip their meeting on February 14. That was the day, he later learned from the newspaper, that Norma Davis was murdered. He was supposed to have met Dana that morning. Maybe if he had met her, Norma might not have been killed. But Tom couldn't help but wonder if he was the intended victim. After Dana's arrest, he wondered why their divorce paperwork hadn't gone through in mid-January like it was supposed to. When he looked at their court file for the divorce, he found that Dana had filed two documents. One paper delayed the divorce, extending the marriage by six months. The second paper gave him a chill. It was an insurance policy. When he read it carefully, he found a clause in it stating that if one of them was to die, the policy would completely pay off the Canyon Lake home and it would belong to the surviving spouse.

Tom couldn't believe it. He didn't want to believe that Dana would have killed him. A part of him could not believe that she had done what she was accused of, but another part of him knew that she was capable of violence. There was another strong part of him that still loved Dana. He didn't know if he could ever stop loving the sassy, hippie girl he fell for in seventh grade.

The rattling chains startled him. Looking up, he saw a thinned-down woman with reddish-brown hair in a blue jail jumpsuit being led by two deputies into the courtroom, her hands cuffed to a chain around her waist, her ankles shackled. He saw her eyes harden when she saw him. It was a family law courtroom, commonly referred to as divorce court. It was not set up for criminal cases, so the deputies brought her to the counsel table a few feet from Tom and stood nearby as the judge called the case. Tom felt a lump in his throat. Seeing Dana in her jail clothes brought the reality of the murders and her criminal case right under his nose. He was devastated. He hadn't seen her in months before her arrest. He was trying not to stare, but he couldn't keep his eyes off the inmate who used to be his beautiful, sky-diving, windsurfing, devil-may-care wife, whose smart mouth used to set his pants on fire. How could she have done this to herself? To her family? To him? To her victims?

Before the judge, Dana vehemently protested signing the property settlement that Tom put before her, and demanded the Cadillac and the silk-screening equipment. Tom found it hard to speak. They were at an impasse. The judge calmly addressed them and offered them a counsel table and chairs in her courtroom after she had finished with the rest of her cases so they could sit down and work out an agreement. In remarks directed primarily to Tom, the judge diplomatically suggested that, given the gravity of Dana's case, it would be a very, very long time before the two of them had another opportunity to resolve these issues one-on-one and suggested that they leave court that day with a signed agreement. Tom took the hint and within the hour, when the judge completed her calendar for the day, he was sitting face-to-face with Dana.

Trembling, he felt his anger rise. He was angry for how she'd spent every last dime they had, building a mountain of debt and then blaming him for it. He was angry that she chose to hurt him when she was hurting, instead of talking things out. He was angry that instead of resolving her own pain, she chose to kill, lashing out at innocent victims, just as she had lashed out at him. He was angry that she wouldn't let go of the things they'd bought together—the music and the silk-screening equipment—and wanted to use the material remnants of their life together as a means of striking out at him. He was angry that despite everything, he still loved her.

Tom couldn't get over the fact that he was sitting across the table from her. There was so much that he wanted to say. It would be easier to talk business first. Under the watchful eye of the deputies, they negotiated for a while and finally worked out a settlement in which Tom paid Dana $2,600 in exchange for the music and silk-screening equipment. When the paperwork had been signed, he knew it was time to go, but he couldn't leave without saying something, without finding out if she realized how her actions had affected everyone around her. The hard part was that he couldn't help looking at her. He knew that it might be a very long time before he ever saw her this close, face to face, again.

“Do you realize how many people you've hurt by what you've done?” he finally blurted out.

She looked at him, her ice-blue eyes frosty.

“I didn't kill anybody,” Dana said.

“And if I did,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, “it would have been you.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 1995, 12 P.M.

“Do you know why I'm here?” the psychiatrist asked.

Dr. Martha Rogers wanted to put her subject at ease. Dana, sitting across the table from the short, stocky psychiatrist, seemed anxious. They sat in an interview room at the jail, separated by a desk. When the psychiatrist arrived, the guard had insisted that a deputy be posted nearby because, the deputy warned, Dana had a history of assaulting staff members, but Dr. Rogers thought the presence of a deputy would inhibit Dana during their session. The deputy finally agreed to a compromise—that a guard could watch them from just outside the interview room through the glass-paneled door.

“To test me to see if I am really crazy, I guess. Nobody has sat down and said, ‘This is what we are looking for,'” Dana said, breaking into tears. “It was so hard for me to change my plea. It took me almost a year to decide to change my plea because it took me that long to come to grips to understand a lot of what happened.”

On March 10, 1995, Dana went to court, withdrew her “not guilty” plea and pleaded “not guilty by reason of insanity,” which means that, under California law, a defendant was “incapable of understanding the nature and quality of their acts” and could not distinguish right from wrong when the crime was committed. The psychiatrist was well aware that the insanity plea was not the sole source of Dana's distress. Most of Dana's anxiety came from the legal notice, filed by prosecutor Rich Bentley several months before, informing the defense that he intended to seek the death penalty. Anything she said to Dr. Rogers would be used in court before jurors who would decide whether she was guilty, whether she was insane and whether she deserved to die.

An insanity plea would add another layer to a criminal trial. The first part of her trial would be staged like any other trial where evidence about the crimes would be presented to a jury, which would render a verdict of guilty or not guilty. If she were to be found guilty, the defense would carry the burden of proving that Dana was insane during the commission of the crimes. The same jury would deliberate a second time to reach a verdict regarding her sanity. If the jury were to find that she was insane, Dana would be sent to a state mental hospital, which would have the authority to release an inmate back into society once they found that the inmate's sanity had been restored.

But if the jury were to find that she was sane, the trial would enter the third phase, where the prosecution would try to convince jurors to recommend the death penalty, and the defense would present more evidence in the hope that jurors would recommend a sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. In this phase, the prosecution would highlight the egregiousness of her acts, bring relatives of the victims, and introduce her record of misbehavior in jail, illustrating that her violent tendencies continued after her garrest. The defense would undoubtedly describe her productive life helping people as a nurse, and Dana's family and friends could testify in an effort to convince jurors to spare her life.

Dana's lawyer first suggested an insanity defense shortly after her arrest, but Dana resisted. As the months wore on and she reflected on being emotionally whipsawed by an unhappy marriage, alcoholism and drug abuse, multiple miscarriages, bankruptcy and joblessness, an insanity defense made sense to her. Who wouldn't be pushed against the wall by these psychological landmines? In preparation for a possible insanity defense, Stuart Sachs had hired a psychiatrist a few weeks after Dana's arrest to conduct a full psychological examination.

Bentley had been waiting for an insanity defense. He had tried to get a psychiatrist to interview Dana the night she was arrested, but once she invoked, he was legally prevented from having an expert examine her. He knew that Sachs had very little to work with in mounting a defense. Dana was using the victims' credit cards and checks within minutes of the murders, clerks and cashiers identified her and were backed up by handwriting comparison, and all the merchandise from the stores was found at Dana's house. Dorinda also identified Dana, and her eyewitness testimony was backed up by the fact that the antique-store keys were hanging on a hook on Dana's entertainment center. Bentley had wanted to file charges against Dana for the Norma Davis murder, but if he had, it would have slowed the entire case, since she would have had to be separately arraigned on that sole charge, and she would be entitled to a preliminary hearing before it could be consolidated with the other charges. But he was planning to present evidence of Norma's murder under a section of the penal code allowing the introduction of evidence of similar crimes—type of victim, time of day the murders occurred, relationship of the victim to the accused, choice of weapon, etc.—to show continuity in the violent conduct of a defendant. He also intended to use the Davis murder in the penalty phase of the trial.

Insanity cases could be a nightmare for the prosecution, depending on the willingness of a jury to believe the experts. If Dana were to be found insane, she could go to a mental hospital and be released in a matter of months if one of the hospital psychiatrists found her to be sane. Then she would be released back into the community. In the two insanity cases he'd tried, Bentley was prevented by law from warning jurors in his closing argument that if they found a defendant insane, they could look for that person haunting their neighborhoods in a few years. Bentley also knew that Riverside County jurors didn't like the insanity defense—it was very tough to get an insanity verdict—and he figured Sachs knew that as well.

When Dana changed her plea, Bentley hired Dr. Rogers on behalf of the prosecution and Sachs hired another expert, Dr. Lorna Forbes, for the defense, even though Dr. Michael Kania was about to wrap up his report. By the time Dr. Rogers sat down with Dana in April, Dana had already undergone twenty-five separate sessions over nine months with both Kania and Forbes. Even so, Dr. Rogers did her best to soothe Dana's fears about the exam and answer her questions, explaining that she had been hired by both the defense and the prosecution in the past to examine defendants in various criminal cases and had, in several cases, found inmates to be insane. Dr. Rogers' charge was to perform a thorough psychological examination of Dana and submit a report to the judge containing her opinion on whether Dana could distinguish right from wrong at the time she killed or assaulted her victims.

Each of the three experts obtained a full written history from Dana about her childhood, her parents, her brothers, and major incidents in her upbringing, her marriage, her education and her career. Each of the experts interviewed family members, friends and former co-workers. Each expert administered a full complement of psychological tests, including the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Rorschach inkblot test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the Personality Assessment Inventory, the Beck Depression Inventory, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, and the Thematic Apperception Test, in which the subject looks at black-and-white drawings and suggests scenarios they might depict. The written tests, like the Millon Clinical Multi-Axial Inventory III, includes a series of true or false questions asking the subject to describe themselves, such as, “I know I'm a superior person, so I don't care what people think.” “People have never given me enough recognition for the things I've done.” “If my family puts pressure on me, I'm likely to feel angry and resist doing what they want.” “I often criticize people strongly if they annoy me.” “I've had sad thoughts much of my life since I was a child.” “I am often cross and grouchy.” Dana seemed to be in an upbeat or perhaps sarcastic mood when she filled out one of the forms, listing her occupation as “jailbird.” Some of the questions are patently bizarre, like those in the Structured Interview of Reported Symptoms, designed to root out disorders like paranoia, psychosis, obsessive-compulsive behavior, multiple personalities and schizophrenia. The questions must be read by the examiner and start off with a cluster of inquiries bearing the same prefix: “Do you have any major problems with … people reading your mind?… noticing very strange smells?… fighting evil forces?” “When outside, do you become afraid of things like grass or flowers?” “Do you often have upsetting sexual thoughts which bother you only on elevators?” “Is the government trying to keep track of your actions? Are they using military aircraft to do this?” “Can common insects be used for electronic surveillance?” “Do you believe that trees have supernatural powers?” “Do you have any unusual beliefs about automobiles? Do you believe they have their own religion?”