to take a polygraph test to prove he never hit her. I want to do it. Why’d she blame me for that when I didn’t hit her? Why’d she tell Dusty I did?
Paul did everything he was asked to do the morning of the shooting. He gave the New Mexico State Police investigator a urine sample, because they wanted to test for steroid use. He cooperated in their blood test for alcohol or other drug use. Their results wouldn’t be finished immediately. They let Paul wash his hands and eventually let him leave. He wasn’t under arrest while he was undergoing these tests at the Farmington Police Department and the San Juan Regional Hospital, but it sure felt like it. Moreover, Paul blamed himself for Monica’s death because of his affair.
That’s nothing unusual in police officers’ lives—or many other human beings for that matter—especially with night shift hours and if they work second jobs to make ends meet. But police officers said later that it was pretty hard to swallow, a beautiful woman with three children and a good job ending it all. Many men and women separate. Some get divorced, some get back together. It’s devastating, but most women don’t kill themselves because of it. And certainly not with shotguns. Officers say most women, if they plan to “off” themselves, do so by taking a bottle of pills.
While officers weighed the options, Detective Dusty Downs brought some news that Monica had visited him the day before. Downs said she showed him her bruises and told the typical domestic violence story. She feared Paul and was afraid of what he would do if she filed charges against him, so she just took the abuse. Now, she finally had the courage to tell someone about the abuse.
“I didn’t shoot her! I didn’t shoot her!” Paul kept telling seemingly blind and deaf officers, who now believed Downs’ account.
Paul turned to Sergeant Mark Hawkinson, “What is happening here?”
“I don’t know, bud.” Hawkinson’s response wasn’t comforting for a “bud.” His unemotional speech belied the fact he had once dated Monica. “If I were you, I would get a lawyer working,” he concluded.
Paul called his attorney friend, Victor Titus. An arm injury had taken Titus from baseball to law school; a divorce took him from Missouri to New Mexico. By age thirty-eight, Titus had been selected as one of the “Best Lawyers in America” three times, served as president of the New Mexico Trial Lawyers and tried hundreds of cases to decision. But he had never tried a murder case.
Titus wasn’t home. A frenetic Steve Murphy, Titus’ new partner who just passed the bar, answered instead. Sensing trouble, Murphy didn’t want to admit his rising panic.
While Paul’s co-workers interrogated him, Titus was watching a Rockies game at Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado. When Titus called his office, his secretary told him the news.
A bewildered Murphy shortly hooked up with Titus via Titus’ cellular phone, which worked despite a raging snowstorm in Colorado. Titus and Murphy both got the impression the police felt Paul was the murderer. As much law experience and arrogance as linebacker-sized Titus had, he didn’t want to admit this was his first murder case, too. And that the client was of all people a close friend. As if that wasn’t enough pressure, Titus could tell the odds were against Paul. He just might be Paul’s only chance.
Titus had another immediate problem. He was snowed in, roads closed. He couldn’t make the eight-hour drive back to Farmington until the next day.
At the hospital, Monica’s family gathered around the now-dead woman, peaceful in that final, eerie way as if she were Sleeping Beauty. But she had a large hole through her body. And they were convinced her handsome prince was the murderer. They couldn’t believe Paul had the nerve to say she shot herself. And with his shotgun, too. The family would never believe their Monica would end her own life. She wouldn’t do that to them, to her little girls. In addition, to them as Catholics, suicide was a sin punishable by the fires of hell, or at least the torment of purgatory, a place just above hell. The bodies of suicide victims cannot be buried on holy ground.
After leaving the police department, Paul went to his apartment. He spoke on the phone with his father, Buzz Dunn, and stepmother, Leslie. He spoke with his mother, Jane. He also talked to his sister, Robin. Finally, when the phone wasn’t pressed to the accused’s ear, it rang.
“What in the hell happened?”
Paul choked up at the sound of her voice. “Anita, she’s gone. Monica’s shot herself.”
Anita already knew. After Monica died, her niece had come to the bank where Anita worked. The niece’s words didn’t exactly break the bad news gently. “I hope you’re happy. That son of a bitch murdered Monica.”
Paul felt Anita believed his explanation of what happened. She knew he’d never hit a woman, even though she’d be careful to add no one should hit anyone—male or female. Still, Monica’s death stunned her.
“I just can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” Anita repeated the words over and over as if saying it enough would help the awful news sink in.
When Victor Titus finally got home around 5:00 P.M. the next day, the attorney attempted to console his friend, but frankly was appalled. The macho cop was gone; in his place was a fearful, grieving man who seemed to cry every few minutes and could not seem to hold his emotions inside. Titus admitted he’d be a wreck, too, if something happened to his own wife, but Paul’s emotional reaction made Titus step out of the friend role and into the lawyer role. “Keep your mouth shut.”
What Titus meant was for Paul not to talk to the media or to the police without his lawyer present. Not that Titus wanted to hear too many details of Monica’s death. He didn’t want his client’s story to get him too focused on one theory. Instead, he liked to peruse all the evidence and then try to “trip them up.” In effect, he played “devil’s advocate” with his clients. Even when that client was a friend. Hell, perhaps especially when the client was a friend. Of course, he’d never had a client suspected of murder.
However, Titus didn’t know that Paul was having an affair or that Monica just found out about it when she had visited Titus and told him that she and Paul were getting divorced.
It jolted Titus that Paul never told him about the affair. But when Titus put his attorney’s hat back on, he realized it was a definite suicide motive. Titus also had a nagging question of his own, a central one. Could Paul have done it?
Paul didn’t see Anita until three days after the shooting. By then, Paul was staying at his friend Andy’s house. Andy’s wife, Margaret, is Anita’s sister. Watching him, Anita sat there in dry-eyed shock, her thick, flaming hair framing an ivory face on which makeup seemed foreign. People at work and in the community had already begun to ostracize Anita because of her affair with Paul, which was public knowledge now.
The media was going hog-wild. Stories appeared every day in The Daily Times, Farmington’s newspaper, in the Albuquerque Journal, the Albuquerque Tribune, the Santa Fe New Mexican and newspapers in surrounding states of Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Paul’s picture appeared everywhere. Monica’s face flirted with readers on the printed page and on television. Articles reported Monica had been shot to death and reported Paul had been
