Nowhere in the state’s discovery was there mention of Dwayne Jeffery Corliss, the jailhouse snitch who had contacted the prosecution with a tale to tell about Louis Roulet. Minton had either decided not to use him as a witness or was keeping him under wraps for emergency use only. I tended to think it was the latter. Minton had sequestered him in the lockdown program. He wouldn’t have gone to the trouble unless he wanted to keep Corliss offstage but ready. This was fine with me. What Minton didn’t know was that Corliss was the stone I was going to put into the slingshot.
And while the state’s discovery contained little information on the victim of the crime, Raul Levin was vigorously pursuing Reggie Campo. He located a website called PinkMink.com on which she advertised her services. What was important about the discovery was not necessarily that it further established that she was engaged in prostitution but that the ad copy stated that she was “very open-minded and liked to get wild” and was “available for S&M role play—you spank me or I’ll spank you.” It was good ammunition to have. It was the kind of stuff that could help color a victim or witness in a jury’s eyes. And she was both.
Levin also was digging deeper into the life and times of Louis Roulet and had learned that he had been a poor student who’d attended five different private schools in and around Beverly Hills as a youth. He did go on to attend and graduate from UCLA with a degree in English literature but Levin located fellow classmates who had said Roulet paid his way through by purchasing from other students completed class assignments, test answers and even a ninety-page senior thesis on the life and work of John Fante.
A far darker profile emerged of Roulet as an adult. Levin found numerous female acquaintances who said Roulet had mistreated them, either physically or mentally, or both. Two women who had known Roulet while they were students at UCLA told Levin that they suspected that Roulet had spiked their drinks at a fraternity party with a date-rape drug and then took sexual advantage of them. Neither reported their suspicions to authorities but one woman had her blood tested the day after the party. She saidtraces of ketamine hydrochloride, a veterinary sedative, were found. Luckily for the defense, neither woman had so far been located by investigators for the prosecution.
Levin took a look at the so-called Real Estate Rapist cases of five years before as well. Four women—all realtors—reported being overpowered and raped by a man who was waiting inside when they entered homes they believed had been vacated by their owners for a showing. The attacks went unsolved but stopped eleven months after the first one was reported. Levin spoke to an LAPD sex crimes expert who worked the cases. He said that his gut instinct had always been that the rapist wasn’t an outsider. The assailant seemed to know how to get into the houses and how to draw the female sales agents to them alone. The investigator was convinced the rapist was in the real estate community, but with no arrest ever made, he never proved his theory.
Added to this branch of his investigation, Levin could find little to confirm that Mary Alice Windsor had been one of the unreported victims of the rapist. She had granted us an interview and agreed to testify about her secret tragedy but only if her testimony was vitally needed. The date of the attack she provided fell within the dates of the documented assaults attributed to the Real Estate Rapist, and Windsor provided an appointment book and other documentation showing she was indeed the realtor on record in regard to the sale of the Bel-Air home where she said she was attacked. But ultimately we only had her word for it. There were no medical or hospital records indicative of treatment for a sexual assault. And no police record.
Still, when Mary Windsor recounted her story, it matched Roulet’s telling of it in almost all details. Afterward, it had struck both Levin and me as odd that Louis had known so much about the attack. If his mother had decided to keep it secret and unreported, then why would she share so many details of her harrowing ordeal with her son? That question led Levin to postulate a theory that was as repulsive as it was intriguing.
“I think he knows all the details because he was there,” Levin had said after the interview and we were by ourselves.
“You mean he watched it without doing anything to stop it?”
“No, I mean I think he was the man in the ski mask and goggles.”
I was silent. I think on a subliminal level I may have been thinking the same thing but the idea was too creepy to have broken through to the surface.
“Oh, man…,” I said.
Levin, thinking I was disagreeing, pressed his case forward.
“This is a very strong woman,” he said. “She built that company from nothing and real estate in this town is cutthroat. She’s a tough lady and I can’t see her not reporting this, not wanting the guy who did it to be caught. I view people two ways. They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people. She’s definitely an eye-for-an-eye person and I can’t see her keeping it quiet unless she was protecting that guy. Unless that guy was our guy. I’m telling you, man, Roulet is evil. I don’t know where it comes from or how he got it, but the more I look at him, the more I see the devil.”
All of this backgrounding was completely sub rosa. It obviously was not the kind of background that would in any way be brought forward as a means of defense. It had to be hidden from discovery, so little of what Levin or I found was put down on paper. But it was still information that I had to know as I made my decisions and set up the trial and the play within it.
At 11:05 my home phone rang as I was standing in front of a mirror and fitting a Dodgers cap onto my head. I checked the caller ID before answering and saw that it was Lorna Taylor.
“Why is your cell phone off?” she asked.
“Because I’m off. I told you, no calls today. I’m going to the ballgame with Mish and I’m supposed to get going to meet him early.”
“Who’s Mish?”
“I mean Raul. Why are you bothering me?”
I said it good-naturedly.
“Because I think you are going to want to be bothered withthis. The mail came in a little early today and with it you got a notice from the Second.”
The Second District Court of Appeal reviewed all cases emanating from L.A. County. They were the first appellate hurdle on the way to the Supreme Court. But I didn’t think Lorna would be calling me to tell me I had lost an appeal.
“Which case?”
At any given time I usually have four or five cases on appeal to the Second.
“One of your Road Saints. Harold Casey. You won!”
I was shocked. Not at winning, but at the timing. I had tried to move quickly with the appeal. I had written the brief before the verdict had come in and paid extra for expedited daily transcripts from the trial. I filed the notice of appeal the day after the verdict and asked for an expedited review. Even still, I wasn’t expecting to hear anything on Casey for another two months.
I asked Lorna to read the opinion and a smile widened on my face. The summary was literally a rewrite of my brief. The three-judge panel had agreed with me right down the line on my contention that the low flyover of the sheriff’s surveillance helicopter above Casey’s ranch constituted an invasion of privacy. The court overturned Casey’s conviction, saying that the search that led to the discovery of the hydroponic pot farm was illegal.
The state would now have to decide whether to retry Casey and, realistically, a retrial was out of the question. The state would have no evidence, since the appeals court ruled everything garnered during the search of the ranch was inadmissible. The Second’s ruling was clearly a victory for the defense, and they don’t come that often.
“Man, what a day for the underdog!”
