CHAPTER SEVEN

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16, 1994, 6:15 P.M.

Grocery bags still unpacked covered the gold linoleum floor in Dana’s kitchen. The brown bags rimmed the kitchen floor and covered part of the living room. Greco and Bentley wanted to do a quick walk-through of the house while Dana waited in the back seat of Greco’s car. Jim, tall and lanky with a sandy blonde pony tail and jeans, had been escorted from the house and was sitting handcuffed in a police car, looking around, bewildered as he watched his home become a hive of activity for people in uniforms. Jason, a tow-headed boy with an elfin grin, was being kept occupied by an officer in an unmarked car. Each of them would be transported separately to the police station.

There were so many grocery bags, Greco and Bentley had to step around them to get to the rest of the house. Greco peered into a few of the bags as he went by. He saw cake mixes, dinosaur cake decorations, bottles of spice, Baxter gourmet soups, diet drink mix, Shake ’n Bake, Bake ’n Fry, Kibbles ’n Bits dog food, Knorr sauce mix, batteries, olives, capers, hair coloring, a saute pan. And vodka and cigarettes. The pantry shelves were crammed so full that a loaf of wheat bread, mayonnaise, rice cakes, pasta noodles, canned corn, tea and plastic bags had spilled in a jumble on the floor. As Greco walked through the house, he recognized the other housewares purchased from June’s credit cards—the golf and pig switchplates, poultry scissors, dog shampoo, the blue glass plates.

In the hallway he saw the left side was lined with boxes that were clearly Dana’s. More boxes filled with Jim’s belongings lined the right side. It looked to Greco like they had a line dividing the house or maybe that she just hadn’t finished moving her things in. He thought it was odd.

Aside from the clutter, it was a nice home. A big, comfortable black leather couch dominated the living room. By the modern block-style coffee table sat exercise equipment. Off to one corner was a desk surrounded by breathtaking pictures of Dana in her sky-diving days, dangling thousands of feet in the air from a rainbow-hued parachute. Greco was a little appalled but not surprised to see a grinning plastic skull on top of a stereo speaker. Bizarre. Fashionable whitewashed oak cabinets set off the kitchen. The dinette had a round kitchen table with a white lace tablecloth and four white chairs resembling those at an old-fashioned soda fountain. Dana had put the brand-new blue sheets on the bed in the master bedroom. Stuffed animals sat on top of the wood cabinet that made the headboard. There was more exercise equipment and a fold-up floor mat. The bottles of Opium, still in their boxes, were on her dresser. Her closet was crammed with new workout clothes, some with hangtags still attached, the black, fringed leather jacket, boxes of expensive Nike shoes, and two new pairs of cowboy boots. The multi-colored fish tote bag held the black fishnet beach cover-up, the new bathing suits, and the Murrieta Hot Springs massage receipt. The purple boogie board was propped against a wall in Jason’s room. His closet held stacks of new Levi’s, new shirts and new shoes.

The house reminded Bentley of Christmas morning, before everything was put away. A glint of steel in Dana’s closet caught Bentley’s eye. It was a Trek mountain bike, a nice one. He took a closer look at the aluminum frame. As a mountain bike aficionado, he knew that it cost upwards of $1,000. Bentley wondered where she’d gotten it.

As they headed back to the car where Dana was sitting, Bentley volunteered to drive while Greco sat in the back seat to keep an eye on Dana. Greco’s car was equipped with child-safety locks, so no one but the driver could unlock the doors from inside the car. Their intention was to interview her. Bentley suggested handcuffing her to the front instead of the back so she would be a little more comfortable. Greco agreed.

While Greco and Bentley were gone, another officer had been watching her. The color had returned to her face and she had recovered her composure to the point of being rather nonchalant, given the platoon of officers invading her home, and that she was sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car. One of the back-up officers who’d arrived later had retrieved a pair of white Birkenstock sandals from her bedroom and had put them on her feet. He noticed that she had perfectly manicured purple toenails.

“What’s this all about?” she asked as Greco and Bentley approached.

Her question caught Greco a little off-guard. He didn’t want to start talking to her right then. He had to follow procedure. He had learned a whole routine for interrogation that had worked for him in the past. He had used it to get quite a few confessions and he wanted to start from the beginning and do it right.

“Let’s talk about it when we get to the station,” he said.

He got into the car with Dana. She sat directly behind Bentley. Greco sat right next to her and turned slightly to face her so he could keep an eye on her. In the bright glow of the car’s dome light, Greco saw that Dana was wearing a very loose-fitting, tie-dyed purple, orange and yellow dress. It was a handmade batik-print dress from Indonesia, a fashionable, somewhat expensive item often sold at art fairs, but Greco regarded it as an ugly muu-muu. He scanned her face, arms and hands for bruises, cuts and scratches but saw nothing. He also caught a whiff of soap. She must have just gotten out of the shower.

Bentley got in the car and started the engine. He thought it was a good sign that she was asking questions because it probably meant that she’d be more open to being interviewed. From his point of view, he thought it was important to establish a rapport and to make the suspect feel comfortable. He wanted to keep her talking. He and Greco hadn’t taken the time to discuss how they would handle the interview.

Bentley said something about making certain her rights were protected, so they didn’t want to discuss anything of any substance before they performed a formal interview. But he was curious about one thing.

“Was that your mountain bike?” Bentley said. “I liked your bike.”

“Thanks,” Dana said.

“You do much mountain biking?” Bentley asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Dana said. “I just got that for Christmas.”

“Yeah?” he said.

“It is a nice bike,” she said. “It’s a Trek. I put it on layaway and Jim paid it off and got it for me for my Christmas present.”

Bentley nodded his head and, glancing at her in the rear-view mirror, caught a glint of something.

“Where do you like to ride?”

“Well, sometimes I go down to Newport and take my dog,” Dana said. “He loves going. He loves the beach.

“How long is this going to take?” she asked. “You know, Jason has a bedtime and it’s really going to mess him up if he isn’t in bed on time.”

“He’ll be taken care of,” Bentley said. “Don’t worry about Jason. We all have kids, so we know how important bedtimes are …

“So, do you go down to Newport Beach a lot?”

“Yeah, I do silk-screening and I sell crafts down there,” Dana said. “I go down there quite a bit—about every other week. I was just down there, as a matter of fact.”

Bentley glanced in the rear-view mirror again. This time he caught the glint. It was her earrings. She was wearing diamond drop earrings. He wondered if they were the same ones she’d bought with June’s credit card.

7:05 P.M.

The ringing phone startled Jeri.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Jeri. It’s Joe. I just wanted to let you know that we have her, we have Dana in custody. She’s here at the police department. We’re going to be talking to her.”

“Thank you,” Jeri said, hanging up the phone.

This was the moment she had been dreading. Jeri had thought about it all afternoon and wanted to break it to Russell as gently as possible.

The police had arrested the person they thought was responsible for killing Norma and June, she began carefully. “It’s the person that Jason calls ‘Mom.’”

“You mean Jason’s mom did all this?” Russell barked.

“No,” Jeri said, shaking her head. “It’s Dana.”

Russell refused to believe it.

Jeri knew that Russell would probably never understand this tragic turn of events, but she took a deep breath and tried her best to explain it to him.

7:25 P.M.

Greco was nervous. But at the same time, he felt strangely confident. He was hoping she’d confess.

Dana was sitting in the interview room by herself; James and Bentley were outside the door waiting for him and half-keeping an eye on her. Instead of bringing Dana in through the enclosed garage, which was the usual procedure for transporting prisoners, Greco and Bentley had brought her in through the back door of the police station and walked her down the hallway to the interview room. Other than asking, “What is this all about?” she was very cool. Greco just kept putting her off until he finally sat her down in the room where she settled into a big, comfy armchair. He politely asked her if she needed to use the ladies’ room or if she wanted a glass of water or some coffee. It was weird. Here was a brutal murderer and he was playing the host and being nice to her. But being nice would make her comfortable, maybe comfortable enough for her to talk to them. He didn’t want to lose this case. The stakes were too high. This was it. This interview could make or break the case.

Dana had asked for water and Greco told her he’d get her some. But first he walked over to the detectives’ wing to a file cabinet behind his desk. On the view camera there, he could see Dana fidgeting in her chair and blowing her nose into a tissue. Dana didn’t know it, but she was being videotaped. The interview room in which she was sitting had a tiny, hidden camera and a state-of-the-art microphone that would pick up her voice even if she whispered. The controls and the videocassette were hidden in the file cabinet. He wanted to check on the equipment and insert a blank cassette. Greco saw that the camera was working, though it wasn’t recording, and he could hear Dana’s sighs and nose-blowing, so the microphone was also functioning.

Greco walked back to the supply room to grab a couple of blank videocassettes. As he walked by the report-writing room, he recognized a Riverside County homicide detective who was on the phone, and asked him what was going on. The detective cradled the phone, and told him that an elderly woman had been killed in Sun City that afternoon. Greco nodded, got a handful of cassettes, loaded one into the machine by his desk, got a Styrofoam cup of water and joined McElvain and Bentley outside the room. He wanted to make sure they were all on the same page in terms of their approach during the interview.

Greco felt uncomfortable with the prosecuting attorney in the room while they were interviewing a suspect who hadn’t even been formally booked. He thought that would reduce the chance of her telling him everything, and he also thought it would be harder for her to talk with three people asking questions instead of just two. Or maybe just him. He feared that she would think they were ganging up on her. But he didn’t feel like he had the authority to tell Bentley he couldn’t come in. Greco still felt a bit of insecurity and didn’t feel comfortable confronting Bentley while his suspect was in there waiting for them. This was the woman who left knives buried to the hilt in Norma Davis’s body, who strangled a woman in broad daylight and strangled and bludgeoned June Roberts, only to go on a dizzying, two-day shopping spree. They walked into the room.

Dana was curled up in the comfy armchair, her knees drawn under her chin, her arms draped around her leg. There was a table to her left. She straightened up when they walked into the room. Greco, McElvain and Bentley introduced themselves by their first names and they sat down facing her, their backs to the camera. Greco started right away with questions. He intended to go by the book and ask a series of questions from the interrogation seminar that he and James had attended. He wanted to get her talking and get a personal history—the correct spelling of her name, her address, employment history, education, family history, where she was born and raised, her marital history. This took a few minutes and Dana answered dutifully: She was born about 50 miles away in Pasadena, earned Bs and Cs in school, became a nurse, was fired and now took care of Jason, who was Jim’s son from a previous relationship. She said she was awaiting paperwork from the court that would make final her divorce from Tom Gray, whom she married in 1987. Dana said she was “job searching. I’ve done a few screen-printing jobs but I’ve been interviewing and phone calling and going to the unemployment office.”

“How do you feel today?” Greco asked.

“Today? Right now?”

“Right now.”

“Depressed. I want to know what’s going on. I’m really worried about Jason,” Dana said as she started to cry.

It was her first show of tears. Greco watched her carefully as she reached for the tissue box and at the same time he attempted to comfort her.

“OK. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re here. I’ll explain everything, OK?” Greco said.

With no prodding, Dana volunteered that she was on her period, said she had been depressed as a result of her separation and divorce, was visiting a psychiatrist and a counselor and was taking anti-depressant medication. She gave Greco an alphabet soup of medications she had been taking and spelled out the names of the drugs—Paxil, an anti-depressant; Darvocet, for back pain and cramps; and birth control pills. She admitted having had a vodka and water that evening.

A discussion of Dana’s medication got Bentley thinking about her defense options. If Dana was taking an anti-depressant like Paxil, available only by prescription, that meant she had to be undergoing some kind of treatment by a psychiatrist. If you put the medication together with the counseling, the intense brutality of the murders, and the post-killing compulsion for spending, Bentley expected her attorney to mount a mental defense or even have her plead insanity.

At the same time, Greco was trying to make sure that if Dana decided to discuss the killings, her remarks would be admissible. He didn’t want to get some great statement from her and then find that he hadn’t asked the right questions to determine if she had been under the influence of alcohol, medication or anything that would give a trial judge a reason to find that she was unable to make a clearheaded decision when talking to police. Greco thought the videotape of her calmly answering questions would also show that she was in a rational state of mind. Satisfied that she was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, Greco decided to discuss her Miranda rights.

“We do this with everybody, OK? You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in court. You have the right to talk to an attorney before and during any questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before questioning if you wish. Do you understand each of these rights I’ve explained to you?” Greco held his breath for a second.

“Yes,” Dana said.

“OK, having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to me?”

“Well, I don’t mind talking to you, but I’d like to call my dad.”

Greco breathed a sigh of relief.

“OK. You will get your phone calls,” he said.

“What am I being charged with?” Dana asked.

“I—I need to find out a little bit more about where you’re coming from ’cause I really don’t understand the clear picture either. OK? I need to put this together in my mind,” Greco said.

Dana had verbally agreed to the Miranda rights, but he wanted her to sign the form to prevent a defense attorney months down the road from challenging the interview in court.

He asked for her signature and she signed.

“OK, Dana,” Greco said. “Can you tell me in your own words why you think we’re talking today?”

“Well, it obviously has something, um, to do with the search warrant,” Dana said. “With, with June.”

“OK.”

“With June Roberts.”

“OK,” he said.

“That’s what I saw on the search warrant,” Dana said. “It was a little description. That’s why they were searching my house.”

“OK, how do you feel about talking to me about that?”

“I’m comfortable,” Dana said. “I just, I don’t understand, you know, why you guys are talking to me in connection with her.” Dana started to cry again. “I mean, she’s been a longtime friend. She went to our wedding. I met her husband before he died. And you know, we talked a lot about health stuff because she was really knowledgeable. She used to help me with recipes and stuff like that.”

Greco let her cry for a few moments, watching her. This is just the beginning, he thought. Dana’s display of raw emotion suggested that she finally realized she’d been caught. None of those tears were for June. She was crying for herself.

“If you had anything to do with this, OK, I want you to tell me now,” Greco said.

“Do with what?”

“What do you understand about what we were looking for?”

“I understand they were looking for stuff of June’s in my house,” Dana said. “But I don’t know what.”

“Basically, we were looking for items that were purchased, OK, so if you had anything to do with that, I need, I need to know now,” Greco said.

“Purchased what?” Dana said. “I mean, ‘items that were purchased’?”

“Yes,” Greco said.

“I don’t understand.”

“With June’s credit card. OK? So you don’t know who did this?”

“Who did?”

“Did this with June’s credit cards,” Greco said.

“No, I don’t.”

“OK. Do you have any idea who did it?”

“I have no idea,” Dana said. “I’m kinda still in shock over that, you know. It was a big deal for our family.”

“Is there anyone you can eliminate from this investigation as a suspect?”

“Well, I don’t know who would be a possible suspect,” Dana said, quickly recovering from her tears and beginning to gesture, a wadded tissue in one hand. “I mean, you know, Jason and Jim didn’t know June, and so they would be eliminated. My parents would be eliminated.”

Greco and James immediately knew that Dana had a guilty conscience. Greco had just asked one of those trick interrogation questions. When an innocent person is asked who can be eliminated as a suspect, they shout out, “Me!” A guilty person, unless they’re extremely sophisticated, will hem and haw.

“Um, June was kinda, after her husband died, she went a little strange, you know. She just got more, like, secluded to herself and stuff, and you know, when we all golfed together, she was more gregarious when Duane was alive, and she just seemed a little snippier later. But we still talked and stuff, you know.

“But it wasn’t as … like it was when he was alive. It’s like when you lose someone. They just get a little cooler. I can’t say who to eliminate ’cause I don’t know. I don’t know her circle of friends, ’cause her circle of friends are my father’s circle of friends.”

Greco was appalled. She was sitting here trying to minimize June as a person, like it was some perverted way of justifying why she killed her. To Greco, she was making an admission just short of a confession.

“Tell me why you didn’t do it,” Greco said.

“I didn’t do what?”

“With the credit cards.”

“’Cause I wouldn’t do that.”

“Do you think you’re capable of doing something like this?”

“No,” Dana answered.

“No? OK. Did you ever seriously think about doing something like this?”

“Well, I, I seriously thought about, well not, not with a credit card, because we didn’t have any before we went through bankruptcy right before my divorce, foreclosure, miscarriage, bankruptcy, all in one year. But I thought, that I was angry with my husband, you know, and I wanted to make him pay for things that financially, that I haven’t paid for. But I couldn’t do it. I got stuck with it. But we didn’t have any credit cards…”

Bentley thought that if he was a defense attorney, he’d go for the insanity defense. Not that Bentley thought she was insane. Once a defense attorney heard that she’d weathered all of these hardships leading up to the crimes, that was the most logical defense. It might work with a juror or two, but all a defense attorney needs is one vote to hang up a jury.

“OK,” Greco said.

“I paid [the bills]. Well, actually, my parents paid … and I paid them back for our divorce and our bankruptcy and I left him with, um, some utility bills that still aren’t paid.

“I’d like to wring his neck, you know, and grab him by his long hair and make him pay that stuff, you know?”

As she spoke, Dana placed her fingertips and thumbs in a circle as if she were strangling someone. It made Greco feel sick inside, but he tried not to show it.

“Is there any reason why somebody would say that they saw you using the credit card?”

Dana’s face went blank.

“Well…”

“Is there any reason why someone would say that?” Greco asked.

“Well, I think I’ve been told that I look like a lot of other people,” Dana said.

Greco tried hard not to roll his eyes or show any reaction. He had expected her to be evasive. She was also throwing out a lot of baloney, but the more she talked, the more she was likely to say something incriminating.

“I have a lot of people come up and say, hey, you look just like so-and-so, or, or, do you have a sister, or do you have a brother, so-and-so,” she said, gesturing again. “I think I have a pretty common face.”

“OK,” Greco said.

Dana wasn’t done.

“I’ve been in the valley a long time, too, you know, maybe they’ve seen me around and you know, with a familiar face. I’ve been out here for a long, long time.”

It was obvious that Dana thought she could talk herself out of it and be home in time to put Jason to bed. Greco decided to change tracks. He learned during the interrogation seminar that you can measure a suspect’s veracity by asking whether he or she would be open to taking a polygraph test. If the suspect is eager to take a polygraph, then barring a con artist’s overconfidence, he or she is probably telling the truth. If they throw out a lot of excuses, they’re probably lying.

Greco asked what she knew about “the incident” at Canyon Lake with June.

“I heard about it, but I don’t really know any of the details,” she said. “Um, my dad said that they were keeping a lot of stuff quiet because they didn’t want to wreck the case … He said that she was murdered and um, he said that she was, um, strangled just like, um, Nana was, and I said, I didn’t know Nana was strangled. I thought she was just stabbed. I didn’t even know.”

“OK. Did you, uh, tell anybody jokingly that you did it?” Greco asked.

“Why would I say that? I didn’t do it,” Dana said. “No, no, I wouldn’t joke about anything like that. That’s sick. This is my family.”

“OK. Are you willing to take a polygraph? You know what a polygraph is?”

“I want to say yes, but I don’t really believe in ’em, you know, and I don’t think that they’re 100 percent,” Dana said.

“So is that a yes, no or maybe so?”

“I don’t really believe in them,” Dana said.

“Then you would not want to take a polygraph to verify your truthfulness? If you took the polygraph, what do you think the results would be?” Greco asked.

“I have no idea,” Dana said. “I just don’t know, but I know there’s been a lot of cases where, however they read them, they’re like wrong and sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re in the middle. I just don’t think it’s a very accurate measurement. I just don’t.”

She was lying. Her answer to his question was exactly what he’d expected. Now he was going to lay a little trap.

“Um, is, is there any reason why you would be on a videotape using June’s card?” Greco asked. “At Mervyn’s, let’s say.”

“No,” she said. Dana’s face was blank, expressionless.

There was no videotape of Dana at Mervyn’s. But the law allows investigators to mislead a suspect into thinking that evidence like fingerprints or an eyewitness links them to a crime scene.

“There’s no reason that you would be on a videotape using June’s card at Mervyn’s? No?” Greco said as Dana shook her head, watching him.

“OK, let’s all break,” he said, getting out of his chair.

As Dana sat immobile in her chair, eyes straight ahead, McElvain and Bentley also got out of their seats. On his way out, Greco said it would be a minute or two while they went to the men’s room. McElvain asked Dana if she wanted more water and she said yes. The three men left the room, but instead of going to the men’s room, Greco, McElvain and Bentley hovered around the video monitor by Greco’s desk to watch Dana.

It was a ploy. Greco wanted to give her a reason to think they had information and then look at her reaction when she thought she was alone. Sometimes suspects will shake their heads, wring their hands, or talk to themselves. Greco recalled one suspect who shouted, “Oh, crap!” as soon as he left the room. When something like this happens, it gives him an edge when he returns to continue the interview because he knows the suspect is under stress, and he can use that to persuade him to discuss the crimes. It’s also interesting to show it to jurors.

But Dana was a cool customer. She wiped her nose, shifted into different positions in the chair and wiped tears from her eyes. Other than heavy sighing and sniffling, she said nothing.

She was very, very smart and cagey. Confronting her about being followed that day to Provident Bank was the last thing they were going to do. Instead, they would keep her talking by feeding her tidbit after tidbit, some of it not true. Once she either denied her involvement or got locked into a story, then they would give her another tidbit and see if she changed her story. The more she became tethered by her different stories, the harder it would be for her to deny her participation in the crimes. But first they wanted to apply a little pressure.

After watching her for a few minutes, James went into the room with the fingerprint kit and a handwriting exemplar package. His specialty was paper crimes and he had administered the handwriting samples to suspects on many occasions. He rolled each of Dana’s fingers, reassuring her that her prints and a sample of her handwriting could be used to clear her as a suspect. He took the handwriting forms out of a folder and spread them out on the table. The first one was a generic form in which the suspect writes numbers and letters of the alphabet in various combinations, using both upper- and lower-case letters. The second sheet was specifically geared toward Dana and had the name “June Roberts,” “Hemet Savings and Loan” and the words “dollars” and “cents,” a dollar sign, and the words “bank,” “savings,” “federal” and “loan.” Dana even complied with signing June Roberts name as if it were a signature.

“OK, in this box and in this box, sign the name ‘June Roberts,’” James said. “Like you were signing a check.”

“OK,” Dana said.

“Now, instead of printing, put it in signing, like, uh … you’ll cursive-write,” James said. “You know what I mean by cursive?”

“Yeah,” Dana said, “but that’s how I cursive-write. See, this is what I do. You know, that’s what I was trying to do.”

“Do you know how to, how they make J’s, like this?” James said, demonstrating a handwritten “J” with a loop at the top.

“Yeah, but I never do,” Dana said.

“OK, well go ahead and try and write your J’s that way also,” he said.

“OK. But I never do that,” Dana said. “And, um, I usually just, N-E, see, I don’t connect all the time on the letters.”

“OK. Do the same thing with the cursive ‘J,’ right here. ‘Roberts,’” James said.

“I’m just not used to writing like that,” Dana said.

“OK.”

“I’m a printer.”

While McElvain worked with Dana and Greco watched them on the monitor, Bentley picked up a phone in the detective bureau and called one of the best forensic psychologists he knew, leaving an urgent message asking him to call as soon as possible. If Dana was going to plead insanity or a mental defense, he wanted to be ready with an experienced psychiatrist to administer a full battery of tests and a full examination as soon as possible.

It took a few more minutes, but Dana finished up with the handwriting exemplars. She then announced that she had to go to the bathroom. Before she went, she asked what was next.

James told her that Greco was going to come back in and they’d talk some more.

Greco had been watching on the monitor. He had expected her to try disguising her handwriting—shaping her J’s differently, balking at cursive instead of print writing. By now, Dana had to know they had information on her about June’s credit cards. Greco knew it might take a while to convince her to tell the truth. He had already been getting resistance from her—answering his questions with questions. Right now, it seemed as if she was testing them, as well. She wanted to know how much they knew.

8:31 P.M.

Greco, McElvain and Bentley walked in with solemn faces and took their seats without saying a word. Dana looked up at them and sat forward in her chair.

“Dana, what I have here clearly indicates that you’re involved in this,” Greco said, raising his voice a little. “So I’m asking you to start telling me the truth about what’s going on here. You understand me? What’s going on? What happened?”

“What do you have that clearly indicates that I’m involved?” Dana asked steadily.

“You tell me what’s going on!” Greco said, raising his voice.

“Please don’t raise your voice at me,” she said in a low, calm voice.

“OK. Well let me, let me explain to you that we understand a lot of things that have occurred, OK? And I’m sure you’ve probably figured this out in your mind. And right now, you are playing games with me. I want you to tell the truth—about what’s going on here. Why were the purchases made? How were the purchases made? How did you get the card?”

At this point, Dana paused and looked at all three men sitting in front of her.

“I don’t think…” she began. “I’m actually being questioned like this without my lawyer here. I feel like you’re trying to badger me. I don’t, I mean, I’ve been very cooperative. I feel very badgered.”

Greco’s heart sank. He’d pushed her too hard. Once she invoked her rights and asked for a lawyer, they couldn’t use anything she said after that in court. He looked over at Bentley, who picked up the ball and continued questioning her. Obviously, he felt it wasn’t a complete invocation. They were good to go.

“Why don’t you show her the receipts?” Bentley said.

Greco rummaged though his folder and pulled out copies of the receipts that were stapled together, and held them at an angle so Dana, leaning forward in her chair, could look at them as he slowly turned the pages.

“We got sales receipts that were signed ‘June Roberts’ from every store, OK?” Greco said.

“Uh hum,” Dana said, looking at the receipts.

“The only problem is … June Roberts was dead. Did you know?” Greco asked.

“Yes, I know,” Dana said, starting to cry again. “She was family. She was at our wedding.”

“OK. The people from where these purchases were made said that you made those purchases,” he said.

“Me?”

“Yes. With the credit card,” Greco said.

Dana’s tears disappeared.

“Did they describe me?” Dana asked in a nasty, nasal tone of voice.

“They described you,” Greco said softly. “We found several items that were purchased from the stores in your residence. So let’s do lots of explaining. I’m not, I’m not accusing you of killing June. You understand what I’m saying? I want to know about that card stuff, because if, well, maybe there’s somebody out there that needs to be stopped. You understand where I’m coming from?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. And you may be able to help us. In finding this person,” Greco said.

“Well, I mean, I’ve done some purchases, you know, with the money that’s left over from my retirement savings,” Dana said. “You know, stuff. Just, uh, the clothes for Jason and stuff.”

Dana insisted that she didn’t use June’s card; she used cash.

With each of them holding a list of stores and purchases and the dates she visited each store, Bentley and McElvain started drilling her on the stores she visited and the things she bought. Like a teenager caught using her parents’ credit card, Dana admitted buying only a fraction of what she really bought, then insisted that she’d paid cash. At the Nike Factory Outlet, Dana said she only paid cash for shoes on sale which she claimed she bought for Jim. She admitted having gone to Ferrari Bistro and Baily’s Wine Country Café, but said she hadn’t been to either of them recently. She said she bought underwear and socks for Jason at Mervyn’s “within the last month.” She denied getting a massage at Murrieta Hot Springs, but admitted she’d been there earlier that day to fill out a job application. She denied getting Jason’s boogie board at Sav-On and claimed she paid cash for it at Kmart. She denied knowing about Famous Brands, the housewares store, and “didn’t remember” going there. She admitted buying her favorite perfume “in bulk” at Perfumania. “The only perfume I wear is Opium,” she said.

Interestingly enough, Dana admitted buying earrings at Jewelry Mart, but said she’d purchased them as a birthday gift for herself months ago.

“Do you know where those diamond-and-sapphire earrings are?” James asked, looking straight at Dana.

“Um-hum,” Dana said.

“Where are they?” James asked.

“They are in my ears,” she said. “You want me to take them off?”

“Yeah, I’d like to take a look at them, if you don’t mind,” James said.

“These are the ones I got,” she said, taking out the right earring and handing it to James.

“You bought these a year ago?” James asked, looking at the earring, then handing it to Greco.

“Yeah,” she said. Greco had been to the jewelry store and seen exactly what she had purchased. These were the same. He hadn’t noticed her wearing the earrings until then. The fact that she actually had them on was compelling. It was neat how things were falling into place.

As he handed the earring back to Dana, Greco opened his mouth to ask a question. Before he could, Bentley started asking about the boots she bought at West Dallas. Inside, Greco was seething. He had finally established a solid line of questioning and Bentley was changing the subject. He wanted to continue asking her about the earrings because that was something solid they could catch her on. Once they started talking about the boots, it would be too awkward to change the subject back again to the earrings. He wished he was talking to Dana alone.

Dana said she never bought boots for either herself or for Jason at West Dallas, but that his mother, Rhonda, had bought boots for Jason.

“Does she look like you?” Bentley asked.

“Well, you know, she does kind of, uh, gosh, she changes her hair color a lot, she just recently cut it,” Dana said. “She has shoulder-length, kind of sandy blonde hair. And a little bit of a shag. But just recently, ummm, she shaved the top like a flat-top.”

“She the same height, the same size?” Bentley asked.

“Yeah, we’re close,” Dana said. “She might be about an inch taller than me. And she is a little…”

“What’s her name?” Greco asked.

“Rhonda.”

“Where does she live?” Bentley asked.

“She lives up by the hospital,” she said, “in a mobile. And, uh, well it’s Wildomar. They have a dirt road and uh…”

There was a pause. Dana was obviously trying to get them to focus on Rhonda, but Greco didn’t want to go there.

“Now this salon, though,” he said. “Esthetiques. Somebody who looked like you was, was in there … on the twenty-eighth,” Greco said.

“Of?” Dana asked.

“Of February, two weeks ago,” James said as Dana emphatically shook her head.

“Can you tell me why Jason, um, says that he knows the name of the person at the salon? And he gives the name of that lady. Can you tell me why Jason gives me that, that name? About getting his hair cut there. Is that a mistake or…”

James wanted to give Dana as much of an opportunity to make excuses as possible. Once she locked herself into an explanation, they could use it further down the road. If they ever do confess, criminals rarely admit their crimes in one quick interview. First they deny, then they blame someone else and make up stories about why incriminating evidence really doesn’t point directly at them. They try to minimize. Sometimes they’ll admit one small part, then maybe another piece. If nothing else, the rationalization and excuses tell how a given criminal thinks.

“He gets his hair cut at, uh, he confuses a lot of salons. I always take him to California Styles,” Dana said. “He makes up a lot of stuff.”

“But, but what I’m saying is he knows the name of, this is not something that’s made up. Because we have a real person here,” Greco said.

“Well,” Dana said.

“That was at a real place that cut his hair and he really remembers the name of a lady,” Greco said, “How can he remember the name of the lady?”

“I don’t know,” Dana said. “He makes, fabricates stuff, sometimes, you can’t tell.”

Bentley cut in. “We’re trying to get an explanation, that’s what we’re trying to do. OK, these people, a lady fits your description comes in with a credit card from your friend. You see the problem that we’re looking at?

“Your friend couldn’t have done it, ’cause she wasn’t here, right?” Bentley said, referring to June’s murder.

“Well, I don’t know exactly what day that happened,” Dana said.

“OK,” Bentley said. “But the point is, it fits your description. So, if you were in there…”

“Well, like I said, I’ve gone in there for waxes…” Dana said. “At Esthetiques ’cause it’s the only place that you can go, or that I found locally that I can get a bikini wax. Lots of people can do your eyebrows, and I went there, uh, the beginning of February maybe, and, you know, a lot of times I go on the day with Jason and he would, runs around and makes friends with everybody in the salon.”

“So he was in there?” Bentley asked.

“At, I, at the last time I got waxed, he was,” Dana said.

By the same circuitous route, Bentley got Dana to admit that she’d taken Jason with her to Mervyn’s “many times,” but said the last time she was there was in January. She specifically denied being at Mervyn’s on February 28. Greco, James and Bentley knew what it meant when, three weeks later, she could instantly recall a specific date when she had not been at a department store. But now was not the time to confront her on that. Bentley wanted to continue pinning her down on specifics that they could use to catch her later in the interview. They knew she’d been in the hair salon and that was as far as he could push her there.

Next, he wanted to discuss her whereabouts that afternoon because he knew exactly where she had been that day. That was the typical strategy—get her lying on the known factors and then confront her piece by piece to get her to change her story.

He asked what she was doing that day from noon on.

Dana said she had gone to the unemployment office, then drove out to Temecula to fill out an application for a waitress job, then stopped at Sav-On and Albertson’s in Temecula to see about work.

“I was home about, uh, 1 p.m. and then I stayed home, and had lunch and drank, fed the dogs, uh, called back a few people and then, uh, the only other time I went out is when I went to Thrifty’s to get my, I forgot to get my birth control pills. I ran out and did that, uh, 4:30 p.m.”

“And, and then you were at home until we came by?” Bentley asked.

“Yes. I was getting ready to make dinner when you guys showed up. We watched Roseanne and then we made dinner,” Dana said.

“OK. So, I just wanna back up,” Bentley said. “Noon. From noon on, I want to get it clear, OK? Noon on, what places were you?”

“I was at home,” Dana said. “Like around 12:30 p.m.”

“OK, OK. Even at 1 p.m., you were still at home?”

“Yeah, and I didn’t leave,” Dana said.

“You remember that? You remember that for sure?” Bentley asked.

“Yeah. I was tired from running around and I wanted to sit back and watch some TV,” she said.

“From one until two, you were still at home for sure?” Bentley asked.

“Right.”

“Two to three?”

“Yes.”

“Three?”

“Yes. I didn’t leave again until 4:30 p.m.”

“4:30. Where’d you go?”

“Thrifty’s to get my birth control pills.”

“And then you went back home and then we showed up?”

“Uh-huh,” Dana said.

“You’re absolutely sure from what you told me from noon until 4 p.m.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Let me ask you this—do you know, were you driving today, the only car you drive is a Cadillac, right?” Bentley said. He wanted to eliminate her later saying that she had loaned her car to someone else that afternoon.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Did anyone else drive the Cadillac?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Now tell me this, you talk about using cash and it’s kind of hard for me to understand this—you sound like you made a lot of purchases. How do you go about carrying cash? What do you do?” Bentley asked.

“I put it in my purse,” Dana said.

“Well, no, that’s not what I mean,” Bentley said.

“Well, I don’t know what you mean.”

“OK, what I mean is, you go … you have a big bank account with ten grand in it, you grab five hundred bucks…”

“I cashed it when I got, when I got off my job and, uh, Thanksgiving, that weekend, I had a large amount from my savings, then I had an annuity that I cashed. I had a tax shelter annuity for $7,000 from my, uh, Grandpa, and I cashed it. In cash,” Dana said. “I paid off a lot of bills with it, I bought my new screen cleaning equipment with it, and now I’m dwindling down to the last little bit.”

“OK, where do you bank?” Bentley asked.

“Hemet Federal Bank. It’s in Canyon Lake. ’Cause, see, I used to live there and I’d stay with my folks and I go and cook for my dad.”

“OK, so then you’d go up to Hemet Federal to get money when you need it, then?”

“Yeah. Or I can use, I have my, my card … that’s to my bank.”

“What other banks do you use?”

“Uh, I’ve used Household,” Dana said.

“Ever used Provident?”

“No.”

“Ever go to Sun City?”

“Sun City, yeah,” Dana said.

“Do you know where Provident Bank is in Sun City?”

“No.”

“You never been there?”

“Uh-uh. I know where the Von’s and the Stater’s and the health food store, and, uh…”

“But you’ve never been to the, the Provident in Sun City?” Bentley asked.

“Uh-uh,” Dana said.

“Never.”

“Never ever. I don’t even know what it is. I mean, there’s lots of banks around there.”

Bentley decided now was the time to break the news.

“Today, OK, from 12 noon on, what was it, 1:30 p.m. on? Sometime today, OK, 1:30 p.m., I think, on. And they saw you go to the Provident Bank. OK, now in my mind, you kind of, with a straight face, told me a lie. If, if—We had somebody saw you, and I can’t believe an officer that’s following you is lying to us,” Bentley said.

Dana stared at them.

“You were surveilled this afternoon,” James said.

“OK, so why did you go to the Provident Bank and why didn’t you tell us about it?”

Dana dropped her head and began sobbing. There was a long pause.

“’Cause I was scared.”

“Of what?” Bentley asked.

“Well, I’d found a purse.”

“Where, where did you find a purse?”

Dana sighed deeply.

“Over by the Albertson’s,” she said, sighing again.

“Albertson’s where?” Bentley asked.

“In, uh, Elsinore,” she said.

“What was in the purse?”

“A bankbook.”

“From whom?”

“Uh, a lady. I think her name was Betty, Bebe or something.”

Beebe, Beebe. Betty Beebe? Who the hell is she talking about? Greco thought to himself.

“Where did you find it?”

“I found it, uh, this afternoon right before I went home.”

“Where?”

“At the Albertson’s.”

“Where at Albertson’s?” Greco asked.

“Uh, there’s a parking lot and a cleaner’s and stuff, and it was just kind of, uh, thrown by the side. There’s a dirt driveway by Boston Market.”

Betty Beebe. Greco had heard enough. He was starting to put two and two together. He got up, excused himself and walked out of the room.

“OK, what time did you find the purse?” Bentley asked.

“I found the purse at about, um, right before I got home, so, twelvish,” Dana said.

“And how did you find the purse? I mean, how did that happen? You see it and then you pick it up?” Bentley asked.

“Yeah. I was, I was pulling out, I was pulling out of the Albertson’s and I saw it … so I picked it up.”

Outside the interview room, his heart in his throat, Greco half-ran down the hallway to the report-writing room. The Riverside County Sheriff’s homicide detective was still sitting there.

“Hey,” Greco said.

“What’s up?” the detective asked.

“What’s the name of your victim?”

“Our victim? Her name was, um, Dora, let me look,” the detective said, looking at the paperwork. “Here it is. Dora Beebe.”

It was like cymbals crashing in Greco’s head. His heart was pounding so hard, he could hardly speak.

“OK,” he said evenly. “We have your suspect in custody.”