The Cop That Cried
San Jose Mercury Sunday Magazine, 1992
Undercover operations are dangerous, stressful and morally ambiguous. And certain kinds of police officers shouldn't be involved in them at all. Unfortunately, Belmont police officer Lisa Thomas didn't know that in January of 1985 when she volunteered to go undercover against a happy-go-lucky bike- riding serial killer. In her naiveté, Thomas threw her whole heart and soul to the project. She made getting an admission of murder a matter of her personal and professional honor. And when she failed to get it, she totally fell apart.
"I just about lost it for a while," Thomas tells me as she drives around Sacramento one bright clear morning. She started neglecting work, wearing wrinkled old jeans and T-shirts, sleeping around, dating an ex-con, and pushing the limits on her credit cards till the plastic cracked.
Sometimes at night, she says, she'd go out drinking in the fields and fire off her service revolver. She suffered from insomnia, only getting 3 or 4 hours sleep for weeks on end, alternating with periods of depression where she'd sleep 18 hours a day. She found herself bursting into tears for no apparent reason.
"I don't understand," I tell Thomas. She had gone undercover to try and catch a serial killer. It didn't work out. But later the killer was caught anyway. "It doesn't sound very traumatic to me."
"I'm not a psychiatrist," protests Thomas, who alternates between cool detachment and fragile vulnerability. "I don't know how it affected me. I haven't dealt with it yet."
"But what was there to deal with? You went out and did a good job. You were a little bit disappointed."
"A little bit disappointed ?" says Thomas, with a flash of irritation as she downshifts for a traffic light. "Can you imagine, the feeling of guilt and responsibility you can feel when a 12-year-old loses his life because you failed to do your job?"
AS THE FBI REPORT would later note, Lance Turner was not someone who was a "high-risk" candidate for murder. Capable and responsible, he was interested mainly in Dungeons and Dragons, Lego blocks, Apple II computers and Garfield the Cat. He was 12 years old, 5 feet tall, 96 pounds, athletically lean, blond- haired, blue-eyed with unusually long lashes and so handsome he was pretty. He lived in Belmont, California, a quiet sun-drenched upper-middle-class bedroom community for San Francisco lawyers and Silicon Valley engineers, characterized by curving shaded residential streets, hillside homes with bay views, and a small steep-sided hillside reservoir known as Water Dog Lake.
The lake had been built in the middle of the last century as an irrigation pond for the orchards and grounds of William C. Ralston, a wealthy banker who drowned himself in the San Francisco Bay when an 1875 audit revealed his accounts were $4.5 million short. Eventually, his lake became a city park, favored by generations of hikers, joggers, picnickers and adventurous students from nearby Ralston Elementary School a quarter mile through the woods and up the hill.
On Tuesday, Oct. 2, 1984 at 4 P.M. Lance Turner was half-an-hour early for soccer practice at Ralston School. Telling his friends he wanted to swing on the rope over Water Dog Lake, Turner disappeared down the trail. When Turner failed to come home after soccer practice, Lance's father, Quincy Turner, and a family friend, attorney Bill Russell, went to search for him on the trail to Water Dog Lake.
Around 8:30 p.m. at a sharp bend in the trail, Russell's flashlight picked up the glow of a pair of blue soccer shoes 25 feet up a gully. It was Lance, lying on his back, eyes rolled back, feet crossed, stabbed, sliced and slashed some 25 times in the legs, arms, chest and throat.
The Belmont police department wasn't geared up for murder investigations. In those days, it was a small force--32 sworn officers jammed three to an office in a cramped wing of the Arts Council building. The detective in charge of the investigation, Sgt. Jim Goulart, was a genial outgoing cop with tousled curly hair, a walrus mustache under black wire rim glasses and a belly laugh that sometimes trailed off in a giggle. Unlike some cops from larger more violent cities, Goulart wasn't hardened or bitter, which is one reason perhaps he so quickly came up with a suspect.
On the afternoon that Lance Turner was killed, Goulart discovered, four girls had snuck out of Ralston School to smoke marijuana at the big tree behind the athletic field fence. There they ran into a friendly young man, 17 to 20 years old with a chunky build, 5'8" to 5'10" tall, wearing faded blue jeans and a blue polo shirt, sitting on a low branch and drinking Budweiser from a 16- ounce can. He had hazel green eyes and sandy blond hair which he wore unparted over his forehead. He said his name was John and that he'd gone to Belmont's main secondary school--Carlmont High. From the girls' descriptions, a forensic artist drew a composite sketch of the suspect. When the police showed it around Carlmont High School one of the counselors said: "That looks like Jon Dunkle."
DUNKLE WAS A WELL-REMEMBERED CHARACTER around Carlmont High. Although he was 24, he acted more like 15--he used to ride around Belmont in a little white Honda Civic hatchback playing a five-speaker stereo at full blast. He loved that car. The only problem was his temper. "That's why it has so many dents," he once told a friend. "I kick it when I get mad."
Dunkle had a 130 IQ, but had such a severe case of dyslexia he could barely read or write. Perhaps because of this, he became easily frustrated in the classroom. His face got red. He blew up. Sometimes he'd go in the counselor's office, put his head down and cry. Most adolescent males have a turbulent emotional life, but Dunkle's was boiling over. After he learned to drive, he was convicted so many times of drunken driven he lost his license (once when a police officer tried to give him a field sobriety test, he ripped the form out of the officer's hand and tore it up).
He suffered from recurring nightmares in which demonic figures with red glowing eyes carried him off in the night. He believed God spoke to him (including warning him of danger on the freeway and smiting drivers who annoyed him). Once at San Francisco airport, God spoke to him with such force that it knocked him down.
Like many young males, he thought he'd been chosen for a special mission, but he just hadn't figured out what it was yet. Despite his desperate need for affection, he had no girlfriends. He had doubts about his own masculinity and was embarrassed by his penis which, he complained, even when fully erect was only 4 3/4" long. Once when he was drunk in Half Moon Bay, he injected it with bacon fat to make it larger. He ended up in a hospital over that.
Although all this was vastly fascinating to Sgt. Goulart, it was ultimately less pertinent to the murder case perhaps than the fact that three days after the murder, Dunkle moved from Belmont to Sacramento where he was now living with his older sister and working as a Carl's Jr. fry cook in charge of french fries and onion rings. Goulart and his investigators interrogated Dunkle several times but nothing ever came of it. It wasn't that he wouldn't talk or even seemed offended by police insinuations about his sexual orientation or alleged responsibility for the death of Lance Turner.
In fact, for a murder suspect he was astoundingly cooperative, allowing detectives to make videotapes of him to show witnesses and take his pants and shoes for evidence. He never asked for an attorney. And although he was free to go at any time, he enjoyed sparing with the cops. "He liked all the attention," says Goulart. "We didn't have as much finesse as we should have. He beat us at our own game."
Concluding that pressure didn't really work on Dunkle, Goulart decided to try to earn his trust instead. For that he needed a female undercover officer who was warm, personable, more than a little ballsy and smart enough to convincingly act dumb.
LISA THOMAS IS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who like to frame mementos. In the hallway of her home in a Sacramento housing tract, there's a display under glass of 8 over-extended (and now canceled) credit cards on which she ran up $25,000 in charges. There are a dozen little simulated wood plaques on the hallway ("With my luck, when my ship comes in, I'll be at the airport.") There's a book of spiritual meditations on the kitchen counter. But the most prominent feature of the house are lion photographs: the living room, hallway and bedroom walls are covered with pictures of lions sitting, sleeping, walking, nursing, fighting and otherwise looking magnificent, regal and self-assured.
"What is it you like about lions?" I ask."
"Because they're so majestic," says Thomas, "and they don't take any shit."
When off duty, Thomas dresses very casually--plaid wool lumberjack shirts over T-shirts and blue jeans. She lives alone with two large rambunctious dogs and three cats ("My family," says Thomas.) Like Dunkle, Thomas goes through tremendous mood swings, light and bubbly one minute and moody and abrupt the next. It had never had occurred to her to be a police officer when she was a child growing up in Sacramento--she was too shy, fearful and self-effacing. "My parents separated when I was a year old," she says. Her mother, an IBM programmer, was gone a lot. In the meantime, her father was remarried with a new family and she didn't see him much either. "I didn't feel like I had a family at all."
Instead Thomas spent most of her time home alone with a hamster for company. When one died she would get another: Sam I, II, III & IV. Her jeans were from K-Mart, cheap, green and embarrassing. Once a group of girls took Thomas out in a field where the leader of the group, a popular girl named Cindy (now a successful attorney) punched her in the shoulder and said: "We don't like you."
Thomas had never had much confidence to begin with but that, says Thomas, made her feel "like a geek." After that, she sat by herself in the back of the classroom, remained inconspicuous and kept her mouth shut. Thomas didn't really blossom till she graduated from the police academy and got a job at the Belmont Police Department in 1983. She loved her work. She won the Rookie-Of-The-Year award. She really felt for once in her life she was helping people. She was the kind of police officer who, when she stopped you for drunken driving, would hand you a brochure Alcoholics Anonymous along with the ticket.
Which is not to say she couldn't be tough when she had to be.
In Sept. 1984, when she and her partner went to quell a domestic disturbance, the man of the house fought with Lisa's partner and pointed a gun at her. Taking no chances, Lisa dropped into a cover position behind the couch, fired her .357 revolver and both shattered his femur and ripped a major artery. The victim who nearly died from blood loss, was so indignant to have been shot by a woman that all he could do was scream: "You bitch! You bitch!"
After that, the guys in the department treated her with renewed respect. "I remember thinking," Thomas recalls in amazement, "Hey, I'm one of the guys because I shot someone.'"
AT FIRST, THE DUNKLE UNDERCOVER OPERATION didn’t seem to Thomas to be any big deal. Sgt. Goulart happened to mention one day in the department photocopy room that this guy Jon Dunkle, whom they suspected of killing two boys from Belmont, was now working at a Carl's Jr. fast food outlet in Sacramento and they were thinking that if they could arrange for a female undercover cop to become his girlfriend, perhaps he'd relax enough to confess.
"I don't know whether he asked me or I offered," says Thomas. "That was obviously something way out of the norm for a small department like ours. But if we could pull it off, 'Yeah,' I said, 'I'd be willing to do it.'"
With the assistance of the restaurant management, Thomas got a job as Dunkle's assistant. That first night they went out for a beer. "It was amazing," says Thomas. "He just started in talking about everything: the case, the investigation, his bicycle trips, this that and the other thing. He had a newspaper clipping that said he was a suspect in this case but that he didn't do it. He would just go on and on and on talking about. He was just flattered to be the source of so much attention."
Quickly the undercover operation fell into a routine. They would work together till late-afternoon. Then they'd go bicycling, walking along the Sacramento River, playing monopoly at Dunkle's sister's house or, most frequently of all, drinking beer and playing pool for hours on end at the Wit's End, a small low-ceilinged bar in one solitary corner of a sprawling asphalt parking lot. Thomas would wear a hidden transmitter and Sgt. Goulart or his partner Sgt. Joe Farmer would be waiting in a van a block or two away tape recording the transmissions.
Most of the time, says Thomas, Dunkle was actually a quite "pleasant person to be around, very jovial, always happy and laughing and joking ... but the things he would laugh at were sick."
To ingratiate herself with Dunkle, Thomas had told him that she was currently on probation for cracking the ribs of two little girls one day while babysitting. That ticked Dunkle's funny bone. "Hey, all right ... that's pretty good. At least I got the right girlfriend... What did you do--pick 'em up and throw 'em against the TV set?"
For Thomas, Dunkle was a fascinating study: when cutting up big blocks of lard for the french fries, he noted in her nightly reports, he held the butcher knife like a dagger. Once when he got mad, he threw a basket of Carl's Jr. french fries clear across the kitchen. Still, says Thomas, the hardest part of the operation wasn't the danger--he never threatened her or laid a hand on her in anger--but the need to submerge her own personality.
It amazed and frightened Thomas how easily she dropped into the role of Dunkle's girlfriend. She would talk in this pouty little voice, like a 13 year girl in her first relationship, leaving endings off "ing" words and mangling her grammar. "I just played dumb, naive and not let myself be outspoken about what I thought or felt," says Thomas. "We always did what he wanted to do. If he had an idea and I had an idea, his idea would always go. He was the center of attention. I played a stupid bubbly girl ... a puppy dog," says Thomas, still rankled by the memory. "I followed him around every day and laughed at his stupid jokes."
Because Thomas didn't want to be fighting off Dunkle's sexual advances all the time, she dressed down--no makeup, big loose sweaters both to hide her figure and the transmitter she wore taped to her abdomen. But Dunkle was frisky anyway. "He had the sexual mind of a kid," says Thomas. They'd be playing pool in the Wit's End bar and he'd be poking her in the butt with his pool cue.
"Would you mind if I squeezed your boobs?" Dunkle would say.
"Yes," Thomas would answer.
"That's what I thought you'd say."
For Dunkle the whole investigation was one big joke, a game. "He would see what he thought was an [unmarked police car go by] and he'd laugh and wave," says Thomas. But he was shrewd too. He worried about the $45,000 reward being offered the killer's arrest and conviction. Given the police's suspicions about his involvement in murder, he asked Thomas one day, "Why would a girl be hanging out with me?"
"Is it against the law or against God to like somebody?" replied Thomas.
For Thomas, the pressures never stopped. As the Belmont chief of police pointedly observed three weeks into the operation--there was no evidence against Dunkle. The cost of the operation had postponed the department's computerization plan for an additional three years. How did they know they even had the right man?
Nor was her job made any easier by the opinion of a forensic psychiatrist that Dunkle was a sexual psychopath who liked killing, was getting better at it and was certain to kill again. In recent years he'd attacked two friends (one with a 2X4 and the other a butcher knife) and he was the prime suspect in the disappearance of another Belmont boy--15-year-old John Davies three years before.
Dunkle used to hang out at the Davies's house, eat dinner with the family, call John Davies's parents "mom & dad." Then one day John Davies simply disappeared. Over the next three years his parents, Jim and Joan Davies, spent so much time scouring the Bay Area in search of John they were forced into bankruptcy, losing both their home and their business. Finally one day in the fall of 1985, Joan Davies picked up the newspaper and saw a composite drawing of the suspected killer of Lance Turner. Suddenly it hit her. They'd wasted three years looking for their son when he'd been dead all the time. And the killer was Jon Dunkle.
GIVEN THE PRIDE with which Dunkle volunteered information about the murder investigation, Thomas had assumed that he could be induced to confess in the first couple of weeks. Instead, when he talked about the murders he would say, "If I did it, which I didn't" or "if it was me, which it wasn't." Thomas tried being empathetic and supportive, playing on their alleged "relationship majigger, or whatever you want to call it."
But Dunkle, says Thomas, "totally unpredictable. He would cancel plans at the last minute or else suddenly call you up and want to do something else." No one in the department had ever come up against anything like this before. Since it was clear that Dunkle was not going to volunteer a confession, Thomas decided to confess to a ficticious killing herself, hoping that Dunkle, in trying to top her story, would then admit to the murders of John Davies and Lance Turner.
One lazy balmy afternoon in February, while they were sitting on a log on a muddy bank of the Sacramento River drinking Jack Daniels and Coke, Thomas told Dunkle that any frank and open relationship depended on trust and that was the reason why, she said, she was now going to entrust him with her worst sins. "This is heavy duty we're talking here, I mean you could still turn me in and I'd get in trouble for this."
Dunkle was intrigued. "Give me a hint."
Thomas, who was so nervous she was giddy, explained that in San Jose a year before she and her girlfriend had gone out drinking. It was dark and rainy. There was this lonely intersection. "I was pretty messed up and like I was driving on the wrong side, okay, and .... there was a little old lady crossin' in the street."
"And you ran her over?" joked Dunkle.
"Yeah."
Dunkle was flabbergasted. "You ran her over!! "
"She was old," explained Thomas. "She was ready to die anyway. I just kinda helped her along."
"What did the paper say? Hit and run?"
"Yeah," said Thomas, showing Dunkle a phony newspaper clipping which the department had prepared. "`Little old lady, 79 years old, dies of a hit and run.' I guess some of my paint came off, you know, because the paper said they were looking for this light green car... I don't know. Maybe it stuck to her nose or something."
Dunkle was ecstatic. "That's good; that's good--`Stuck to her nose.'"
Now it was Dunkle's turn to share an intimacy. But instead of talking about Davies and Turner, says Thomas, Dunkle told some ridiculous story about "a hit and run accident where he hit this kid, dumps him down a ravine and [leaves] him for dead."
Thomas was so frustrated, she says, she wanted to shake him till his teeth fell out. Either that or kill him herself. Not that she really could have done it, says Thomas, but sometimes when she was alone with Dunkle these idle thoughts would cross her mind--"Why don't I just kill him and scream 'self-defense' on the tape?"
Then at other times she felt so guilty about the constant surveillance, the interminable lies about trusting one another, that she would wonder, "Am I ruining his life?" It was so hard to reconcile such brutal vicious murders with the happy dippy kid she saw in front of her. "Maybe," she told herself, "he did it in a blackout."
Having failed to entice Dunkle to confess by winning his trust, in april Goulart went back to pressuring him again, this time by posting the police artist composite of the killer on every telephone pole from Dunkle's house to Carl's Jr, on the bulletin board at the local library where Dunkle used to go to read his clippings, in the back room at Carl's Jr, and most prominently on the wall at the Wit's End bar.
It really hurt Dunkle to find his composite at the Wit's End. He couldn't believe they would do that, he told Thomas indignantly, given all the money he spent in the place. When Joanne, the bartender, came over the first thing she said was that the composite sure looked a lot like Dunkle.
"It does," Thomas helpfully agreed.
Dunkle was miffed. The cops, he complained, were putting up posters all over town. Even the girls at work were saying the composite sure looked a lot like him. In that case, said Joanne, Dunkle had better be real careful because there were lot of "nuts out there" and Dunkle could get hurt real bad. "Anyone in their right mind can look at those posters and see that it's you."
Dunkle spent the rest of the evening pouring down beer like Gatorade. He kept looking at the poster, then he'd look away and then he'd look back again. The more he drank, the more morose he became. He didn't have a college degree. The only jobs he could ever get were minimum wage. "Why was life so hard?" he asked Thomas over their third pitcher of beer. He said he was going to call a meeting with the cops--"cause there's really no call for this."
There was only one thing for them to do, he told Thomas, rob some houses, tie up the kids, steal the jewelry and move to Alaska. Either that or Africa. By this time, Dunkle was so drunk he was sliding off the bar stool. He started playing with Thomas's hair, trying to force her hand between his legs, pawing at her breasts. "Would you like to feel my balls?" he asked.
"No."
And then the next thing Thomas knew Dunkle was out the door walking fast towards the river in a strong determined stride while Thomas behind him struggled to keep up. As they passed a remote residential area near the river, Dunkle saw a house with an open sliding door. Telling Thomas to keep a lookout, Dunkle said he was going inside to steal the stereo.
When he came back out again, Goulart was waiting. He shined a flashlight in Dunkle's face, threw him down, dragged him through the open doorway into the house and arrested him for burglary. But there was still no direct evidence connecting Dunkle to murder. and after 5 frustrating days they had to let him go on bail.
THOMAS HAD GIVEN the undercover operation everything she had and nothing had come of it except a third-rate burglary case in which nothing was even stolen. Her department canceled the operation and Thomas moved back to Belmont where early one July morning three months later, she got a call from a police investigator: Dunkle had done it again. A blond 12 year old boy had been found naked along a Sacramento bicycle path, stabbed to death.
As Sacramento Co. Sheriff's deputies later reconstructed the third murder, Dunkle spent the afternoon in a park along the Sacramento River with two other men, drinking sixpacks of Coors and Michelob and smoking marijuana. At 8:30 pm, July 3, 1985, shortly after the party broke up 12-year-old Sean Dannehl, blond- haired and hazel-eyed, wearing a polo shirt and soccer shorts, came riding by on his way home. Dunkle raced after him, rammed his bike and knocked Dannehl down. Dannehl, who was 5'4" tall, weighed 90 pounds and was wearing a cast on his left arm, pleaded with Dunkle not to hurt him.
"What are you going to do?" he asked. Dunkle ordered him to take off his clothes and lie on his back.
When he did, Dunkle picked up a 2X4 and cracked him in the skull. He took out a pipe cleaning knife and stabbed Dannehl in the chest, in the heart and in the corners of both eyes. According to a former cellmate of Dunkle's he also had oral sex with the boy.
Because Dannehl's remains weren't found for six days in the summer heat, they had turned a dark mahogany color. The arms were partially mummified and maggots had eaten away much of the flesh from the back of the shoulders to the buttocks.
IN OCTOBER, Thomas made one final attempt to get Dunkle to confess. She bought fried chicken and mixed drinks and invited Dunkle on a picnic at Folsom Lake. But now instead of playing some humble little waif anymore, she was forceful, direct and blatantly accusatory: "You know the cops told me about you. They said you liked little boys and that's why you killed them. Although I don't think they were right about that. I don't think you have the balls to kill anybody. Although, maybe you killed the little kid cause he wouldn't give you a blow job?"
"Not hardly," answered Dunkle.
"Well that's what you say."
In order to maintain Thomas's cover, it had been pre-arranged that on the way home, the Sacramento Sheriff's would pull over Thomas and arrest her as an accessory to burglary.
"Jon," screamed Thomas right on cue, "There's a cop behind us."
When Thomas pulled over, the deputy handcuffed her and threw her in the back of the police car. "I started screaming at Jon," says Thomas. "I was really making a scene: 'You got me into this!' It was the only time I got to be aggressive with him and really enjoy it."
AFTER THAT, the Sacramento Sheriff's Department put Dunkle under what they called "bumper-to-bumper" surveillance. Patrol cars followed him down the street. If he tore a poster off a utility pole, another officer would follow along behind, putting up another one. When he went into the Wit's End bar, as many as four deputies would follow him and sit silently at the other end of the bar. Dunkle was so beside himself he burst into tears. On another occasion, he blindly walked into traffic.
Dunkle finally went to court on the burglary charge in May 1986. Dunkle had thought he might get off with a light sentence or no sentence at all--he was drunk at the time, nothing was taken and no one was hurt. But the judge, in the meantime, had been appraised of not only of police suspicions regarding the Davies, Turner and Dannehl murders but also of a savage hit and run case which so far had gone unsolved.
When Dunkle told Thomas that time at the river about having hit a kid one night and left his body for dead, Thomas had at first dismissed the story as one more twisted filament from Dunkle's fevered brain. But Belmont Detective Joe Farmer later discovered that 18 months previously a 16-year-old Belmont boy named Steve Murphy had been walking home from a party when someone slammed into him with his car, leaving him with a concussion, broken pelvis, shattered kidney and ruptured spleen.
First offense residential burglary charges are usually treated lightly. But in light of all the other testimony regarding Dunkle's character, which included personal pleas by the parents of the boys he allegedly killed, the judge gave Dunkle the maximum sentence permitted by law--six years in state prison.
Goulart was relieved. They didn't get him for murder yet but at least he'd be of the streets for the next six years. As to whether they would ever be able to solve the murders, Goulart honestly couldn't say. "In my own mind, I know who did it," Goulart told a newspaper reporter at the end of July. "I just can't prove it in court."
Then in September, Sgt. Goulart got stunning news. After being convicted of the burglary, Dunkle was sent to the mens' colony at San Luis Obispo where he was placed in a cell with a slender soft-spoken young man named Charles Rice. According to what Goulart later heard on the prison grapevine, Dunkle fell so deeply in love with Rice that he unburdened his soul and confessed to all three murders.
Actually, Charles Rice now says, sex had nothing to do with it. Right after they were put in the same cell, Dunkle asked Rice if he were bi-sexual. "I told him a definite no," says Rice. And that, by Rice's account, was the end of that.
So why did Dunkle confess?
"Jon never really knew me," says Rice. "I said I had come from an Italian family. He thought I was a member of organized crime."
Thinking Rice was someone he could surely trust, Dunkle began to talk obsessively, says Rice. Not that he admitted to killing anyone. His story instead was that he was just walking down the trail to Water Dog Lake when this big guy came along, took his knife and stabbed Lance Turner.
Rice was unimpressed. "If I was on a jury and you told that story, I'd vote to convict," he said.
The next night, says Rice, Dunkle apologized for lying. He had killed the three boys after all. In fact he went into so much detail, the next day Rice went to prison authorities to ask if it was true. They in turn wired him for sound and sent him back to find out more.
It wasn't any problem getting Dunkle to talk, says Rice. He kept Rice up all night long talking about the murders for weeks on end. Dunkle's biggest fear, says Rice, was that the police would find the body of John Davies, which he had left lying on the ground in the woods, and find a way to connect the crime to him.
Rice says he then concocted a story that he had a couple of friends in the FBI who might be able to help Dunkle out. "He thought they were crooked cops," says Rice, who for a price would dispose of the body.
Two FBI agents came to the prison and met with Dunkle and Rice in a private room. And, says Rice, Dunkle "bit"--in the process of explaining how to find the body of John Davies he signed a confession to all three murders.
Contrary to what Rice says, says Sacramento Sheriff's detective Bob Bell, trickery had nothing to do with the confession. Dunkle badly wanted to get the murders off this chest, but he was too mad at the Belmont Police Department to confess to them and he was too embarrassed to confess to Sacramento (he'd become close to Bob Bell and spent hours on the phone talking about his problems). On the other hand, Dunkle had always been thrilled by the notion of being investigated by the federal government. "So," says Bell, "we contacted the FBI."
ALTHOUGH LISA THOMAS’S LIFE had begun to fall apart right after the murder of Sean Dannehl, at first she didn't make any connection. What she did know was that for some inexplicable reason things kept happening to her. After the undercover operation was canceled in April 1985, she found to her surprise that she drove back to Belmont from Sacramento in a state of acute depression. "I cried all the way back and I don't know why," says Thomas. "I had a feeling of loss and a feeling of sadness. I felt like a failure."
Her department, on the other hand, was very pleased with the work she'd done--even though she hadn't gotten the confession--and they immediately sent her on another undercover operation, this time to buy drugs in Hawaii.
It was, says Thomas, the most incredibly stressful and demanding month- and-a-half. "If they had done anything else to me they would have had to kill me. I crashed two patrol cars. My partner killed himself. There was no trial. All the cases were dismissed. My cousin died of a cocaine overdose. I moved. This [ex-con] that I got involved with came back into my life. I told him to get back out of my life. He broke into my house and stole my [.357 and VCR]. Then he threatened to kill me. Then work found out about it and work was gonna fire me ... on charges of knowing and associating with a known criminal."
Finally, the department relented in favor of a year's probation and a 5% reduction in pay. "All this happened in a month and a half in 1988."
At the end of her probation, Thomas's chief sent her to Los Angeles for a three-day post traumatic stress seminar run by a local sheriff's deputy and Orange County psychologist. By the middle of the first session, she was so furious she went into a little room and "cried and cried and cried."
Thomas had never had a clue why for the last four years her life had been so screwed up, why she kept crying all the time, why all her relationships were such disasters. But now it suddenly dawned on her: when she was with Dunkle her undercover role required her to be the naive terrified lonely girl she was when she was a child. That's why she was able to drop into the role of a dumb kid so easily and that's why she cried all the way home once the operation was over. "I was relieving my childhood," says Thomas. "It was like the way I used to be in high school"--stupid, incompetent, naive, "a mouse."
At the same time, says Tom Maloney, a San Carlos police officer and Thomas's boyfriend during the undercover operation, Thomas felt guilty about deceiving Dunkle. Here she was talking him all the time about love and trust even as she was doing her level best to send him to the gas chamber. And suddenly in Thomas's mind, says Maloney, Dunkle went from being "a cold blooded murder to a poor guy who needed help. She began to feel sorry for him: "He thinks of me as a friend and I'm screwing him over."
But it was the news that Dunkle had confessed that left Thomas totally devastated. It proved what she'd feared and suspected all along. Dunkle had been on the verge of confessing to her half-a-dozen times. All he had needed was some little extra step, a little deeper intimacy, a little greater trust but she couldn't pull it off. And as a result, another boy was dead.
AFTER A THREE YEAR DELAY to determine if Dunkle was mentally competent to stand trial, Dunkle was finally tried for the killing of John Davies and Lance Turner last December in Redwood City.
The result was a foregone conclusion. Dunkle's attorney freely admitted in his opening statement that the trial was not a who-done-it--"Jon Scott Dunkle done it."
Instead he saved the jury's limited supply of sympathy for saving Dunkle's life. But by the time the jury had seen Dunkle's videotaped confession (he laughed and joked on part of it and at times seemed to be playing for the camera), they didn't have any sympathy left. The jury recommended the death penalty and this past February Judge Judith Kozloski, her voice trembling in emotion, pronounced the sentence, telling Dunkle to "look beyond this earth for forgiveness" because he certainly wasn't going to get any from her.
RECENTLY I VISITED DUNKLE in Sacramento County Jail where he is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Sean Dannehl. Whether he is genuinely insane or just acting is hard to tell. He wears a long dark beard and his hair combed forward over his forehead. Talking to him now is not unlike talking to Robin Williams on speed, except Dunkle's speech is darkly elliptical, full of allusions to "mind control," "CBS computers," "replicas," "sonic booms," "submarine explosions," "organized crime" and "toxic waste."
When I try to get him off this rap into something I can make sense of, he laughs and shakes his head disgustedly as if to say "You're pathetic. You don't understand anything I'm telling you."
First of all, he informs me, Lance Turner isn't even dead. "He is alive at the Ambassador in New York or Washington." And in any case, Jon Dunkle didn't kill him. "CBS computers is running at test in California. CBS has been conducting this test since the day I was born."
A lot of his conversation is flat-out wish fulfillment, if he is executed, Lt. Biondi will have his legs amputated "below the knees;" "Bombers will come from Philiadelphia"; "Jon dunkle can't be killed. He is the richest man in the world."
As to why Dunkle confessed when he knew it meant he could get the gas chamber, Dunkle (who often speaks about himself in the third person) says he confessed because he had "personal feeling regarding my body. I wanted find out why Jon Dunkle did these things. But as soon as they got [a confession] they forgot about him. All they care about is executing him. They threw him in a room with a bunch of homosexuals."
I repeatedly ask Dunkle about Lisa Thomas. But he refuses to discuss her. "She doesn't mean anything," he says, dismissing the question. "She's nothing."
LAST SPRING, Thomas began seeing a therapist to help put her life back in order. "I'm not a basket case," says Thomas, "but I have a lot of personal problems." She has totally repressed her feelings about the undercover operation--even about things as ultimately as devastating as that morning when the Belmont police officer woke her say that Dunkle had struck again. "I remember rolling over. 'Oh God! He did it again!' But I don't remember if I cried. I don't remember if I didn't cry. It's all gone too deep and I can't get to it."
What she can get to is the guilt feelings she still has about Dunkle. Sometimes, she says, she feels like she'd like to talk to him one last time. Not to apologize exactly--"apologize is too strong a word"--but she does feel "troubled" by all those hours she spent lying to him about trust and love. "Intentional deceit," says Thomas, "goes against the human grain."
On the other hand, she points out, so does murder. And Dunkle viciously slaughtered three little boys and forever wrecked their parents' lives. "It makes me sick," says Thomas, when she thinks about what he did those little boys. "It makes me want to rip this throat."
As to why Dunkle killed the boys in the first place, one psychiatrist who testified at Dunkle's competency hearing said the problem was that Dunkle was a paranoid schizophrenic. But for Thomas, as for many of the other people involved in the Dunkle case, that answer is too easy. Once at end of 1988, when Dunkle was in the County Jail in Redwood City facing murder charges, says Thomas, went to the jail on another case and while she was there she looked up saw Jon talking to his mother on the phone. "I was in uniform and he just waves and laughs and gives me a big old smile--no evil eye, no remorse, no nothing."
But at his murder trial, says Thomas, another side of him came out--one that was silent, sullen, sinister and evil beyond all comprehension. she didn't used to feel this way before, but since becoming a police officer it's become more than clear that for some people the death penalty is the only remedy.
"Look," she says. pulling out a newspaper photograph from Dunkle's trial. "isn't that the most evil look you ever saw?"
Undercover operations are dangerous, stressful and morally ambiguous. And certain kinds of police officers shouldn't be involved in them at all. Unfortunately, Belmont police officer Lisa Thomas didn't know that in January of 1985 when she volunteered to go undercover against a happy-go-lucky bike- riding serial killer. In her naiveté, Thomas threw her whole heart and soul to the project. She made getting an admission of murder a matter of her personal and professional honor. And when she failed to get it, she totally fell apart.
"I just about lost it for a while," Thomas tells me as she drives around Sacramento one bright clear morning. She started neglecting work, wearing wrinkled old jeans and T-shirts, sleeping around, dating an ex-con, and pushing the limits on her credit cards till the plastic cracked.
Sometimes at night, she says, she'd go out drinking in the fields and fire off her service revolver. She suffered from insomnia, only getting 3 or 4 hours sleep for weeks on end, alternating with periods of depression where she'd sleep 18 hours a day. She found herself bursting into tears for no apparent reason.
"I don't understand," I tell Thomas. She had gone undercover to try and catch a serial killer. It didn't work out. But later the killer was caught anyway. "It doesn't sound very traumatic to me."
"I'm not a psychiatrist," protests Thomas, who alternates between cool detachment and fragile vulnerability. "I don't know how it affected me. I haven't dealt with it yet."
"But what was there to deal with? You went out and did a good job. You were a little bit disappointed."
"A little bit disappointed ?" says Thomas, with a flash of irritation as she downshifts for a traffic light. "Can you imagine, the feeling of guilt and responsibility you can feel when a 12-year-old loses his life because you failed to do your job?"
AS THE FBI REPORT would later note, Lance Turner was not someone who was a "high-risk" candidate for murder. Capable and responsible, he was interested mainly in Dungeons and Dragons, Lego blocks, Apple II computers and Garfield the Cat. He was 12 years old, 5 feet tall, 96 pounds, athletically lean, blond- haired, blue-eyed with unusually long lashes and so handsome he was pretty. He lived in Belmont, California, a quiet sun-drenched upper-middle-class bedroom community for San Francisco lawyers and Silicon Valley engineers, characterized by curving shaded residential streets, hillside homes with bay views, and a small steep-sided hillside reservoir known as Water Dog Lake.
The lake had been built in the middle of the last century as an irrigation pond for the orchards and grounds of William C. Ralston, a wealthy banker who drowned himself in the San Francisco Bay when an 1875 audit revealed his accounts were $4.5 million short. Eventually, his lake became a city park, favored by generations of hikers, joggers, picnickers and adventurous students from nearby Ralston Elementary School a quarter mile through the woods and up the hill.
On Tuesday, Oct. 2, 1984 at 4 P.M. Lance Turner was half-an-hour early for soccer practice at Ralston School. Telling his friends he wanted to swing on the rope over Water Dog Lake, Turner disappeared down the trail. When Turner failed to come home after soccer practice, Lance's father, Quincy Turner, and a family friend, attorney Bill Russell, went to search for him on the trail to Water Dog Lake.
Around 8:30 p.m. at a sharp bend in the trail, Russell's flashlight picked up the glow of a pair of blue soccer shoes 25 feet up a gully. It was Lance, lying on his back, eyes rolled back, feet crossed, stabbed, sliced and slashed some 25 times in the legs, arms, chest and throat.
The Belmont police department wasn't geared up for murder investigations. In those days, it was a small force--32 sworn officers jammed three to an office in a cramped wing of the Arts Council building. The detective in charge of the investigation, Sgt. Jim Goulart, was a genial outgoing cop with tousled curly hair, a walrus mustache under black wire rim glasses and a belly laugh that sometimes trailed off in a giggle. Unlike some cops from larger more violent cities, Goulart wasn't hardened or bitter, which is one reason perhaps he so quickly came up with a suspect.
On the afternoon that Lance Turner was killed, Goulart discovered, four girls had snuck out of Ralston School to smoke marijuana at the big tree behind the athletic field fence. There they ran into a friendly young man, 17 to 20 years old with a chunky build, 5'8" to 5'10" tall, wearing faded blue jeans and a blue polo shirt, sitting on a low branch and drinking Budweiser from a 16- ounce can. He had hazel green eyes and sandy blond hair which he wore unparted over his forehead. He said his name was John and that he'd gone to Belmont's main secondary school--Carlmont High. From the girls' descriptions, a forensic artist drew a composite sketch of the suspect. When the police showed it around Carlmont High School one of the counselors said: "That looks like Jon Dunkle."
DUNKLE WAS A WELL-REMEMBERED CHARACTER around Carlmont High. Although he was 24, he acted more like 15--he used to ride around Belmont in a little white Honda Civic hatchback playing a five-speaker stereo at full blast. He loved that car. The only problem was his temper. "That's why it has so many dents," he once told a friend. "I kick it when I get mad."
Dunkle had a 130 IQ, but had such a severe case of dyslexia he could barely read or write. Perhaps because of this, he became easily frustrated in the classroom. His face got red. He blew up. Sometimes he'd go in the counselor's office, put his head down and cry. Most adolescent males have a turbulent emotional life, but Dunkle's was boiling over. After he learned to drive, he was convicted so many times of drunken driven he lost his license (once when a police officer tried to give him a field sobriety test, he ripped the form out of the officer's hand and tore it up).
He suffered from recurring nightmares in which demonic figures with red glowing eyes carried him off in the night. He believed God spoke to him (including warning him of danger on the freeway and smiting drivers who annoyed him). Once at San Francisco airport, God spoke to him with such force that it knocked him down.
Like many young males, he thought he'd been chosen for a special mission, but he just hadn't figured out what it was yet. Despite his desperate need for affection, he had no girlfriends. He had doubts about his own masculinity and was embarrassed by his penis which, he complained, even when fully erect was only 4 3/4" long. Once when he was drunk in Half Moon Bay, he injected it with bacon fat to make it larger. He ended up in a hospital over that.
Although all this was vastly fascinating to Sgt. Goulart, it was ultimately less pertinent to the murder case perhaps than the fact that three days after the murder, Dunkle moved from Belmont to Sacramento where he was now living with his older sister and working as a Carl's Jr. fry cook in charge of french fries and onion rings. Goulart and his investigators interrogated Dunkle several times but nothing ever came of it. It wasn't that he wouldn't talk or even seemed offended by police insinuations about his sexual orientation or alleged responsibility for the death of Lance Turner.
In fact, for a murder suspect he was astoundingly cooperative, allowing detectives to make videotapes of him to show witnesses and take his pants and shoes for evidence. He never asked for an attorney. And although he was free to go at any time, he enjoyed sparing with the cops. "He liked all the attention," says Goulart. "We didn't have as much finesse as we should have. He beat us at our own game."
Concluding that pressure didn't really work on Dunkle, Goulart decided to try to earn his trust instead. For that he needed a female undercover officer who was warm, personable, more than a little ballsy and smart enough to convincingly act dumb.
LISA THOMAS IS ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE who like to frame mementos. In the hallway of her home in a Sacramento housing tract, there's a display under glass of 8 over-extended (and now canceled) credit cards on which she ran up $25,000 in charges. There are a dozen little simulated wood plaques on the hallway ("With my luck, when my ship comes in, I'll be at the airport.") There's a book of spiritual meditations on the kitchen counter. But the most prominent feature of the house are lion photographs: the living room, hallway and bedroom walls are covered with pictures of lions sitting, sleeping, walking, nursing, fighting and otherwise looking magnificent, regal and self-assured.
"What is it you like about lions?" I ask."
"Because they're so majestic," says Thomas, "and they don't take any shit."
When off duty, Thomas dresses very casually--plaid wool lumberjack shirts over T-shirts and blue jeans. She lives alone with two large rambunctious dogs and three cats ("My family," says Thomas.) Like Dunkle, Thomas goes through tremendous mood swings, light and bubbly one minute and moody and abrupt the next. It had never had occurred to her to be a police officer when she was a child growing up in Sacramento--she was too shy, fearful and self-effacing. "My parents separated when I was a year old," she says. Her mother, an IBM programmer, was gone a lot. In the meantime, her father was remarried with a new family and she didn't see him much either. "I didn't feel like I had a family at all."
Instead Thomas spent most of her time home alone with a hamster for company. When one died she would get another: Sam I, II, III & IV. Her jeans were from K-Mart, cheap, green and embarrassing. Once a group of girls took Thomas out in a field where the leader of the group, a popular girl named Cindy (now a successful attorney) punched her in the shoulder and said: "We don't like you."
Thomas had never had much confidence to begin with but that, says Thomas, made her feel "like a geek." After that, she sat by herself in the back of the classroom, remained inconspicuous and kept her mouth shut. Thomas didn't really blossom till she graduated from the police academy and got a job at the Belmont Police Department in 1983. She loved her work. She won the Rookie-Of-The-Year award. She really felt for once in her life she was helping people. She was the kind of police officer who, when she stopped you for drunken driving, would hand you a brochure Alcoholics Anonymous along with the ticket.
Which is not to say she couldn't be tough when she had to be.
In Sept. 1984, when she and her partner went to quell a domestic disturbance, the man of the house fought with Lisa's partner and pointed a gun at her. Taking no chances, Lisa dropped into a cover position behind the couch, fired her .357 revolver and both shattered his femur and ripped a major artery. The victim who nearly died from blood loss, was so indignant to have been shot by a woman that all he could do was scream: "You bitch! You bitch!"
After that, the guys in the department treated her with renewed respect. "I remember thinking," Thomas recalls in amazement, "Hey, I'm one of the guys because I shot someone.'"
AT FIRST, THE DUNKLE UNDERCOVER OPERATION didn’t seem to Thomas to be any big deal. Sgt. Goulart happened to mention one day in the department photocopy room that this guy Jon Dunkle, whom they suspected of killing two boys from Belmont, was now working at a Carl's Jr. fast food outlet in Sacramento and they were thinking that if they could arrange for a female undercover cop to become his girlfriend, perhaps he'd relax enough to confess.
"I don't know whether he asked me or I offered," says Thomas. "That was obviously something way out of the norm for a small department like ours. But if we could pull it off, 'Yeah,' I said, 'I'd be willing to do it.'"
With the assistance of the restaurant management, Thomas got a job as Dunkle's assistant. That first night they went out for a beer. "It was amazing," says Thomas. "He just started in talking about everything: the case, the investigation, his bicycle trips, this that and the other thing. He had a newspaper clipping that said he was a suspect in this case but that he didn't do it. He would just go on and on and on talking about. He was just flattered to be the source of so much attention."
Quickly the undercover operation fell into a routine. They would work together till late-afternoon. Then they'd go bicycling, walking along the Sacramento River, playing monopoly at Dunkle's sister's house or, most frequently of all, drinking beer and playing pool for hours on end at the Wit's End, a small low-ceilinged bar in one solitary corner of a sprawling asphalt parking lot. Thomas would wear a hidden transmitter and Sgt. Goulart or his partner Sgt. Joe Farmer would be waiting in a van a block or two away tape recording the transmissions.
Most of the time, says Thomas, Dunkle was actually a quite "pleasant person to be around, very jovial, always happy and laughing and joking ... but the things he would laugh at were sick."
To ingratiate herself with Dunkle, Thomas had told him that she was currently on probation for cracking the ribs of two little girls one day while babysitting. That ticked Dunkle's funny bone. "Hey, all right ... that's pretty good. At least I got the right girlfriend... What did you do--pick 'em up and throw 'em against the TV set?"
For Thomas, Dunkle was a fascinating study: when cutting up big blocks of lard for the french fries, he noted in her nightly reports, he held the butcher knife like a dagger. Once when he got mad, he threw a basket of Carl's Jr. french fries clear across the kitchen. Still, says Thomas, the hardest part of the operation wasn't the danger--he never threatened her or laid a hand on her in anger--but the need to submerge her own personality.
It amazed and frightened Thomas how easily she dropped into the role of Dunkle's girlfriend. She would talk in this pouty little voice, like a 13 year girl in her first relationship, leaving endings off "ing" words and mangling her grammar. "I just played dumb, naive and not let myself be outspoken about what I thought or felt," says Thomas. "We always did what he wanted to do. If he had an idea and I had an idea, his idea would always go. He was the center of attention. I played a stupid bubbly girl ... a puppy dog," says Thomas, still rankled by the memory. "I followed him around every day and laughed at his stupid jokes."
Because Thomas didn't want to be fighting off Dunkle's sexual advances all the time, she dressed down--no makeup, big loose sweaters both to hide her figure and the transmitter she wore taped to her abdomen. But Dunkle was frisky anyway. "He had the sexual mind of a kid," says Thomas. They'd be playing pool in the Wit's End bar and he'd be poking her in the butt with his pool cue.
"Would you mind if I squeezed your boobs?" Dunkle would say.
"Yes," Thomas would answer.
"That's what I thought you'd say."
For Dunkle the whole investigation was one big joke, a game. "He would see what he thought was an [unmarked police car go by] and he'd laugh and wave," says Thomas. But he was shrewd too. He worried about the $45,000 reward being offered the killer's arrest and conviction. Given the police's suspicions about his involvement in murder, he asked Thomas one day, "Why would a girl be hanging out with me?"
"Is it against the law or against God to like somebody?" replied Thomas.
For Thomas, the pressures never stopped. As the Belmont chief of police pointedly observed three weeks into the operation--there was no evidence against Dunkle. The cost of the operation had postponed the department's computerization plan for an additional three years. How did they know they even had the right man?
Nor was her job made any easier by the opinion of a forensic psychiatrist that Dunkle was a sexual psychopath who liked killing, was getting better at it and was certain to kill again. In recent years he'd attacked two friends (one with a 2X4 and the other a butcher knife) and he was the prime suspect in the disappearance of another Belmont boy--15-year-old John Davies three years before.
Dunkle used to hang out at the Davies's house, eat dinner with the family, call John Davies's parents "mom & dad." Then one day John Davies simply disappeared. Over the next three years his parents, Jim and Joan Davies, spent so much time scouring the Bay Area in search of John they were forced into bankruptcy, losing both their home and their business. Finally one day in the fall of 1985, Joan Davies picked up the newspaper and saw a composite drawing of the suspected killer of Lance Turner. Suddenly it hit her. They'd wasted three years looking for their son when he'd been dead all the time. And the killer was Jon Dunkle.
GIVEN THE PRIDE with which Dunkle volunteered information about the murder investigation, Thomas had assumed that he could be induced to confess in the first couple of weeks. Instead, when he talked about the murders he would say, "If I did it, which I didn't" or "if it was me, which it wasn't." Thomas tried being empathetic and supportive, playing on their alleged "relationship majigger, or whatever you want to call it."
But Dunkle, says Thomas, "totally unpredictable. He would cancel plans at the last minute or else suddenly call you up and want to do something else." No one in the department had ever come up against anything like this before. Since it was clear that Dunkle was not going to volunteer a confession, Thomas decided to confess to a ficticious killing herself, hoping that Dunkle, in trying to top her story, would then admit to the murders of John Davies and Lance Turner.
One lazy balmy afternoon in February, while they were sitting on a log on a muddy bank of the Sacramento River drinking Jack Daniels and Coke, Thomas told Dunkle that any frank and open relationship depended on trust and that was the reason why, she said, she was now going to entrust him with her worst sins. "This is heavy duty we're talking here, I mean you could still turn me in and I'd get in trouble for this."
Dunkle was intrigued. "Give me a hint."
Thomas, who was so nervous she was giddy, explained that in San Jose a year before she and her girlfriend had gone out drinking. It was dark and rainy. There was this lonely intersection. "I was pretty messed up and like I was driving on the wrong side, okay, and .... there was a little old lady crossin' in the street."
"And you ran her over?" joked Dunkle.
"Yeah."
Dunkle was flabbergasted. "You ran her over!! "
"She was old," explained Thomas. "She was ready to die anyway. I just kinda helped her along."
"What did the paper say? Hit and run?"
"Yeah," said Thomas, showing Dunkle a phony newspaper clipping which the department had prepared. "`Little old lady, 79 years old, dies of a hit and run.' I guess some of my paint came off, you know, because the paper said they were looking for this light green car... I don't know. Maybe it stuck to her nose or something."
Dunkle was ecstatic. "That's good; that's good--`Stuck to her nose.'"
Now it was Dunkle's turn to share an intimacy. But instead of talking about Davies and Turner, says Thomas, Dunkle told some ridiculous story about "a hit and run accident where he hit this kid, dumps him down a ravine and [leaves] him for dead."
Thomas was so frustrated, she says, she wanted to shake him till his teeth fell out. Either that or kill him herself. Not that she really could have done it, says Thomas, but sometimes when she was alone with Dunkle these idle thoughts would cross her mind--"Why don't I just kill him and scream 'self-defense' on the tape?"
Then at other times she felt so guilty about the constant surveillance, the interminable lies about trusting one another, that she would wonder, "Am I ruining his life?" It was so hard to reconcile such brutal vicious murders with the happy dippy kid she saw in front of her. "Maybe," she told herself, "he did it in a blackout."
Having failed to entice Dunkle to confess by winning his trust, in april Goulart went back to pressuring him again, this time by posting the police artist composite of the killer on every telephone pole from Dunkle's house to Carl's Jr, on the bulletin board at the local library where Dunkle used to go to read his clippings, in the back room at Carl's Jr, and most prominently on the wall at the Wit's End bar.
It really hurt Dunkle to find his composite at the Wit's End. He couldn't believe they would do that, he told Thomas indignantly, given all the money he spent in the place. When Joanne, the bartender, came over the first thing she said was that the composite sure looked a lot like Dunkle.
"It does," Thomas helpfully agreed.
Dunkle was miffed. The cops, he complained, were putting up posters all over town. Even the girls at work were saying the composite sure looked a lot like him. In that case, said Joanne, Dunkle had better be real careful because there were lot of "nuts out there" and Dunkle could get hurt real bad. "Anyone in their right mind can look at those posters and see that it's you."
Dunkle spent the rest of the evening pouring down beer like Gatorade. He kept looking at the poster, then he'd look away and then he'd look back again. The more he drank, the more morose he became. He didn't have a college degree. The only jobs he could ever get were minimum wage. "Why was life so hard?" he asked Thomas over their third pitcher of beer. He said he was going to call a meeting with the cops--"cause there's really no call for this."
There was only one thing for them to do, he told Thomas, rob some houses, tie up the kids, steal the jewelry and move to Alaska. Either that or Africa. By this time, Dunkle was so drunk he was sliding off the bar stool. He started playing with Thomas's hair, trying to force her hand between his legs, pawing at her breasts. "Would you like to feel my balls?" he asked.
"No."
And then the next thing Thomas knew Dunkle was out the door walking fast towards the river in a strong determined stride while Thomas behind him struggled to keep up. As they passed a remote residential area near the river, Dunkle saw a house with an open sliding door. Telling Thomas to keep a lookout, Dunkle said he was going inside to steal the stereo.
When he came back out again, Goulart was waiting. He shined a flashlight in Dunkle's face, threw him down, dragged him through the open doorway into the house and arrested him for burglary. But there was still no direct evidence connecting Dunkle to murder. and after 5 frustrating days they had to let him go on bail.
THOMAS HAD GIVEN the undercover operation everything she had and nothing had come of it except a third-rate burglary case in which nothing was even stolen. Her department canceled the operation and Thomas moved back to Belmont where early one July morning three months later, she got a call from a police investigator: Dunkle had done it again. A blond 12 year old boy had been found naked along a Sacramento bicycle path, stabbed to death.
As Sacramento Co. Sheriff's deputies later reconstructed the third murder, Dunkle spent the afternoon in a park along the Sacramento River with two other men, drinking sixpacks of Coors and Michelob and smoking marijuana. At 8:30 pm, July 3, 1985, shortly after the party broke up 12-year-old Sean Dannehl, blond- haired and hazel-eyed, wearing a polo shirt and soccer shorts, came riding by on his way home. Dunkle raced after him, rammed his bike and knocked Dannehl down. Dannehl, who was 5'4" tall, weighed 90 pounds and was wearing a cast on his left arm, pleaded with Dunkle not to hurt him.
"What are you going to do?" he asked. Dunkle ordered him to take off his clothes and lie on his back.
When he did, Dunkle picked up a 2X4 and cracked him in the skull. He took out a pipe cleaning knife and stabbed Dannehl in the chest, in the heart and in the corners of both eyes. According to a former cellmate of Dunkle's he also had oral sex with the boy.
Because Dannehl's remains weren't found for six days in the summer heat, they had turned a dark mahogany color. The arms were partially mummified and maggots had eaten away much of the flesh from the back of the shoulders to the buttocks.
IN OCTOBER, Thomas made one final attempt to get Dunkle to confess. She bought fried chicken and mixed drinks and invited Dunkle on a picnic at Folsom Lake. But now instead of playing some humble little waif anymore, she was forceful, direct and blatantly accusatory: "You know the cops told me about you. They said you liked little boys and that's why you killed them. Although I don't think they were right about that. I don't think you have the balls to kill anybody. Although, maybe you killed the little kid cause he wouldn't give you a blow job?"
"Not hardly," answered Dunkle.
"Well that's what you say."
In order to maintain Thomas's cover, it had been pre-arranged that on the way home, the Sacramento Sheriff's would pull over Thomas and arrest her as an accessory to burglary.
"Jon," screamed Thomas right on cue, "There's a cop behind us."
When Thomas pulled over, the deputy handcuffed her and threw her in the back of the police car. "I started screaming at Jon," says Thomas. "I was really making a scene: 'You got me into this!' It was the only time I got to be aggressive with him and really enjoy it."
AFTER THAT, the Sacramento Sheriff's Department put Dunkle under what they called "bumper-to-bumper" surveillance. Patrol cars followed him down the street. If he tore a poster off a utility pole, another officer would follow along behind, putting up another one. When he went into the Wit's End bar, as many as four deputies would follow him and sit silently at the other end of the bar. Dunkle was so beside himself he burst into tears. On another occasion, he blindly walked into traffic.
Dunkle finally went to court on the burglary charge in May 1986. Dunkle had thought he might get off with a light sentence or no sentence at all--he was drunk at the time, nothing was taken and no one was hurt. But the judge, in the meantime, had been appraised of not only of police suspicions regarding the Davies, Turner and Dannehl murders but also of a savage hit and run case which so far had gone unsolved.
When Dunkle told Thomas that time at the river about having hit a kid one night and left his body for dead, Thomas had at first dismissed the story as one more twisted filament from Dunkle's fevered brain. But Belmont Detective Joe Farmer later discovered that 18 months previously a 16-year-old Belmont boy named Steve Murphy had been walking home from a party when someone slammed into him with his car, leaving him with a concussion, broken pelvis, shattered kidney and ruptured spleen.
First offense residential burglary charges are usually treated lightly. But in light of all the other testimony regarding Dunkle's character, which included personal pleas by the parents of the boys he allegedly killed, the judge gave Dunkle the maximum sentence permitted by law--six years in state prison.
Goulart was relieved. They didn't get him for murder yet but at least he'd be of the streets for the next six years. As to whether they would ever be able to solve the murders, Goulart honestly couldn't say. "In my own mind, I know who did it," Goulart told a newspaper reporter at the end of July. "I just can't prove it in court."
Then in September, Sgt. Goulart got stunning news. After being convicted of the burglary, Dunkle was sent to the mens' colony at San Luis Obispo where he was placed in a cell with a slender soft-spoken young man named Charles Rice. According to what Goulart later heard on the prison grapevine, Dunkle fell so deeply in love with Rice that he unburdened his soul and confessed to all three murders.
Actually, Charles Rice now says, sex had nothing to do with it. Right after they were put in the same cell, Dunkle asked Rice if he were bi-sexual. "I told him a definite no," says Rice. And that, by Rice's account, was the end of that.
So why did Dunkle confess?
"Jon never really knew me," says Rice. "I said I had come from an Italian family. He thought I was a member of organized crime."
Thinking Rice was someone he could surely trust, Dunkle began to talk obsessively, says Rice. Not that he admitted to killing anyone. His story instead was that he was just walking down the trail to Water Dog Lake when this big guy came along, took his knife and stabbed Lance Turner.
Rice was unimpressed. "If I was on a jury and you told that story, I'd vote to convict," he said.
The next night, says Rice, Dunkle apologized for lying. He had killed the three boys after all. In fact he went into so much detail, the next day Rice went to prison authorities to ask if it was true. They in turn wired him for sound and sent him back to find out more.
It wasn't any problem getting Dunkle to talk, says Rice. He kept Rice up all night long talking about the murders for weeks on end. Dunkle's biggest fear, says Rice, was that the police would find the body of John Davies, which he had left lying on the ground in the woods, and find a way to connect the crime to him.
Rice says he then concocted a story that he had a couple of friends in the FBI who might be able to help Dunkle out. "He thought they were crooked cops," says Rice, who for a price would dispose of the body.
Two FBI agents came to the prison and met with Dunkle and Rice in a private room. And, says Rice, Dunkle "bit"--in the process of explaining how to find the body of John Davies he signed a confession to all three murders.
Contrary to what Rice says, says Sacramento Sheriff's detective Bob Bell, trickery had nothing to do with the confession. Dunkle badly wanted to get the murders off this chest, but he was too mad at the Belmont Police Department to confess to them and he was too embarrassed to confess to Sacramento (he'd become close to Bob Bell and spent hours on the phone talking about his problems). On the other hand, Dunkle had always been thrilled by the notion of being investigated by the federal government. "So," says Bell, "we contacted the FBI."
ALTHOUGH LISA THOMAS’S LIFE had begun to fall apart right after the murder of Sean Dannehl, at first she didn't make any connection. What she did know was that for some inexplicable reason things kept happening to her. After the undercover operation was canceled in April 1985, she found to her surprise that she drove back to Belmont from Sacramento in a state of acute depression. "I cried all the way back and I don't know why," says Thomas. "I had a feeling of loss and a feeling of sadness. I felt like a failure."
Her department, on the other hand, was very pleased with the work she'd done--even though she hadn't gotten the confession--and they immediately sent her on another undercover operation, this time to buy drugs in Hawaii.
It was, says Thomas, the most incredibly stressful and demanding month- and-a-half. "If they had done anything else to me they would have had to kill me. I crashed two patrol cars. My partner killed himself. There was no trial. All the cases were dismissed. My cousin died of a cocaine overdose. I moved. This [ex-con] that I got involved with came back into my life. I told him to get back out of my life. He broke into my house and stole my [.357 and VCR]. Then he threatened to kill me. Then work found out about it and work was gonna fire me ... on charges of knowing and associating with a known criminal."
Finally, the department relented in favor of a year's probation and a 5% reduction in pay. "All this happened in a month and a half in 1988."
At the end of her probation, Thomas's chief sent her to Los Angeles for a three-day post traumatic stress seminar run by a local sheriff's deputy and Orange County psychologist. By the middle of the first session, she was so furious she went into a little room and "cried and cried and cried."
Thomas had never had a clue why for the last four years her life had been so screwed up, why she kept crying all the time, why all her relationships were such disasters. But now it suddenly dawned on her: when she was with Dunkle her undercover role required her to be the naive terrified lonely girl she was when she was a child. That's why she was able to drop into the role of a dumb kid so easily and that's why she cried all the way home once the operation was over. "I was relieving my childhood," says Thomas. "It was like the way I used to be in high school"--stupid, incompetent, naive, "a mouse."
At the same time, says Tom Maloney, a San Carlos police officer and Thomas's boyfriend during the undercover operation, Thomas felt guilty about deceiving Dunkle. Here she was talking him all the time about love and trust even as she was doing her level best to send him to the gas chamber. And suddenly in Thomas's mind, says Maloney, Dunkle went from being "a cold blooded murder to a poor guy who needed help. She began to feel sorry for him: "He thinks of me as a friend and I'm screwing him over."
But it was the news that Dunkle had confessed that left Thomas totally devastated. It proved what she'd feared and suspected all along. Dunkle had been on the verge of confessing to her half-a-dozen times. All he had needed was some little extra step, a little deeper intimacy, a little greater trust but she couldn't pull it off. And as a result, another boy was dead.
AFTER A THREE YEAR DELAY to determine if Dunkle was mentally competent to stand trial, Dunkle was finally tried for the killing of John Davies and Lance Turner last December in Redwood City.
The result was a foregone conclusion. Dunkle's attorney freely admitted in his opening statement that the trial was not a who-done-it--"Jon Scott Dunkle done it."
Instead he saved the jury's limited supply of sympathy for saving Dunkle's life. But by the time the jury had seen Dunkle's videotaped confession (he laughed and joked on part of it and at times seemed to be playing for the camera), they didn't have any sympathy left. The jury recommended the death penalty and this past February Judge Judith Kozloski, her voice trembling in emotion, pronounced the sentence, telling Dunkle to "look beyond this earth for forgiveness" because he certainly wasn't going to get any from her.
RECENTLY I VISITED DUNKLE in Sacramento County Jail where he is currently awaiting trial for the murder of Sean Dannehl. Whether he is genuinely insane or just acting is hard to tell. He wears a long dark beard and his hair combed forward over his forehead. Talking to him now is not unlike talking to Robin Williams on speed, except Dunkle's speech is darkly elliptical, full of allusions to "mind control," "CBS computers," "replicas," "sonic booms," "submarine explosions," "organized crime" and "toxic waste."
When I try to get him off this rap into something I can make sense of, he laughs and shakes his head disgustedly as if to say "You're pathetic. You don't understand anything I'm telling you."
First of all, he informs me, Lance Turner isn't even dead. "He is alive at the Ambassador in New York or Washington." And in any case, Jon Dunkle didn't kill him. "CBS computers is running at test in California. CBS has been conducting this test since the day I was born."
A lot of his conversation is flat-out wish fulfillment, if he is executed, Lt. Biondi will have his legs amputated "below the knees;" "Bombers will come from Philiadelphia"; "Jon dunkle can't be killed. He is the richest man in the world."
As to why Dunkle confessed when he knew it meant he could get the gas chamber, Dunkle (who often speaks about himself in the third person) says he confessed because he had "personal feeling regarding my body. I wanted find out why Jon Dunkle did these things. But as soon as they got [a confession] they forgot about him. All they care about is executing him. They threw him in a room with a bunch of homosexuals."
I repeatedly ask Dunkle about Lisa Thomas. But he refuses to discuss her. "She doesn't mean anything," he says, dismissing the question. "She's nothing."
LAST SPRING, Thomas began seeing a therapist to help put her life back in order. "I'm not a basket case," says Thomas, "but I have a lot of personal problems." She has totally repressed her feelings about the undercover operation--even about things as ultimately as devastating as that morning when the Belmont police officer woke her say that Dunkle had struck again. "I remember rolling over. 'Oh God! He did it again!' But I don't remember if I cried. I don't remember if I didn't cry. It's all gone too deep and I can't get to it."
What she can get to is the guilt feelings she still has about Dunkle. Sometimes, she says, she feels like she'd like to talk to him one last time. Not to apologize exactly--"apologize is too strong a word"--but she does feel "troubled" by all those hours she spent lying to him about trust and love. "Intentional deceit," says Thomas, "goes against the human grain."
On the other hand, she points out, so does murder. And Dunkle viciously slaughtered three little boys and forever wrecked their parents' lives. "It makes me sick," says Thomas, when she thinks about what he did those little boys. "It makes me want to rip this throat."
As to why Dunkle killed the boys in the first place, one psychiatrist who testified at Dunkle's competency hearing said the problem was that Dunkle was a paranoid schizophrenic. But for Thomas, as for many of the other people involved in the Dunkle case, that answer is too easy. Once at end of 1988, when Dunkle was in the County Jail in Redwood City facing murder charges, says Thomas, went to the jail on another case and while she was there she looked up saw Jon talking to his mother on the phone. "I was in uniform and he just waves and laughs and gives me a big old smile--no evil eye, no remorse, no nothing."
But at his murder trial, says Thomas, another side of him came out--one that was silent, sullen, sinister and evil beyond all comprehension. she didn't used to feel this way before, but since becoming a police officer it's become more than clear that for some people the death penalty is the only remedy.
"Look," she says. pulling out a newspaper photograph from Dunkle's trial. "isn't that the most evil look you ever saw?"
posted by Paul Ciotti at 10:36 PM
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