Burned by Edward Humes

Author:Edward Humes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Bob Lowe remained furious with the defense attorney for undermining him as a witness. He fervently believed Parks should have been exonerated. He thought Kathy Dodge should have testified, so jurors would understand that her bogus allegations had biased the fire investigation and turned a tentative finding of an accidental blaze into an arson case.

He also felt it was a fatal error not to call Bell police officer Jeff Bruce to testify. Bruce was the first responder who pounded on a back bedroom window with his flashlight in order to break through to rescue the children, instead triggering a sudden increase of ventilation and a flare-up of flame that Lowe believed had sent the girls’ bedroom into flashover. Lowe believed Bruce’s testimony was key because it contradicted Ablott’s theory that Parks had set a separate fire in the bedroom. Bruce saw a room filled with black smoke; Lowe believed the fire didn’t start in earnest in that room until the window broke and fresh air flooded in.

But in his police report, Bruce seemed to overstate his actions, claiming he entered the room and searched for the girls before the flames drove him out. Later he admitted that he never managed to get fully into the room. The explosion of flame drove him back. Scheduled to testify for the defense at the trial, Bruce had been flown into town from Wyoming, where he had taken a job as a small-town police chief after leaving Bell. But then Gessler chose not to call him as a witness.

Bozanich maintained that Bruce had no credibility and, thirty years later, the district attorney’s office continued to maintain that Bruce’s testimony had no value and could not be believed. However, all the key parts of his account of the night of the fire were corroborated by a neighbor whom detectives interviewed, and who saw a police officer do everything Bruce claimed except for entering the house through the back bedroom window.

Crushed by Parks’s conviction, Lowe began a correspondence with her in prison that lasted the rest of his life, as he gathered all the documents and evidence in the case—more than ten thousand pages of material—and worked tirelessly to get the Parks case reopened, writing the governor, the media, even Oprah Winfrey.

Lowe provided the basic theories, timeline, and discoveries that eventually helped persuade the California Innocence Project to take on Parks as a client. Lowe died of cancer in 2013, but his daughter Mary Ross has continued in his place, serving with her sister and nieces and Lowe’s widow as a surrogate family for Parks, attending her hearings, visiting her, writing her, and helping her lay plans for her freedom, if it should come.

After two decades of effort, it seemed Lowe’s advocacy finally had borne fruit. Raquel Cohen and her colleagues at the innocence project had put together the habeas petition for Parks, and had also informally provided background information to the Los Angeles County District Attorney in order to discuss a possible settlement.

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