Chapter Two: The First Two Cases
He probably shouldn’t have taken them with him. When Mel Jensen was transferred out of the Homicide Unit of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office in 1991, he took two unsolved homicide case files that he had been reviewing and packed them with his books and personal belongings. Technically, as the new supervisor of the Felony Panel, a separate division of the office, Jensen should have left the files in the unsolved cases cabinet drawer of the Homicide Unit when he was transferred. That’s where they would have remained, and it is likely no one would have ever paid any attention to them. But he didn’t.
For a government employee, a civil servant, this was somewhat unusual conduct. Within most government agencies, in my experience, the characteristics of being conscientious, innovative, or even being above average in productivity are not necessarily frowned upon but aren’t exactly encouraged either.
Mel Jensen had been a deputy district attorney in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office for a number of years when I first joined the office in 1975. By then, he was somewhat of a legend. He probably had prosecuted more cases than anyone else in the office. As a result, he had acquired the surprisingly rare and respected reputation of a deputy district attorney who would try any kind of case, anytime, anywhere.
Jensen looked like the former Marine that he was: tall and heavy set with a square jaw, graying short-cropped hair, and blue eyes. Outside of the courtroom, Jensen was one of the calmest, most soft-spoken attorneys I’d ever met. He never seemed to be in a rush. You couldn’t tell by watching him walk down the hall whether he was going out for lunch or up to court for final argument in a murder case. I first met Jensen when we were both assigned to the Homicide Unit. My first two tours in the unit between 1981 and 1989 overlapped with the time he was assigned there.
In 1993, Jensen recruited me to assist him in supervising the Felony Trials Panel. From time to time, when the two of us would meet, Jensen would bring up the two unsolved case files. The 1977 homicide of Deborah Liem, although it had occurred over eighteen years earlier, was still being actively investigated by Detective Dick Lewis of the Fullerton Police Department. The other case involved the 1988 homicide of Malinda Gibbons, in the city of Costa Mesa.
Detective Lewis was a bulldog of a policeman. Muscular and balding, his nickname was “The Crusher.” Lewis often spent time with Jensen reviewing the Deborah Liem case and discussing potential leads he was investigating. Lewis had a suspect he had been looking at for a number of years. Another suspect had been arrested shortly after the homicide had occurred, but the case against him was dismissed during the preliminary hearing. From what Jensen had told me, the chances of solving the case didn’t look very promising.
On a day in early August 1995, I walked from my office in the center of the window offices facing Civic Center Drive, down the aisle towards Mel Jensen’s office. Jensen probably had one of the best offices in the District Attorney’s Central branch in Santa Ana, the county seat. Situated on the northeast corner of the second floor of the Orange County Courthouse, it was larger than most of the other offices and had windows facing in two directions, a great view of Civic Center Drive and the driveway into the courthouse to the north, and the usually empty reflection pool just below the east-facing windows.
Jensen was sitting at his desk, with his back to the windows, looking down at two brown files in front of him. I had a good idea which cases they were. As I came in, he looked up and motioned for me to take a seat in front of his desk. He had just heard from Detective Lewis. There had been a new development in one of the cases. It wasn’t a positive one. Lewis’s prime suspect in the Liem homicide had been excluded as the perpetrator.
“I think we need some new ideas and maybe some new blood to jumpstart these cases,” Jensen stated. Sitting across from me at his desk, he nudged the two brown files in my direction. “Read them,” he said, “then tell me what you think.”
That was it. Jensen oftentimes was a man of few words. I took the files. And that’s how our project got started.