Soon after ambulance personnel wheeled Monica off to the hospital, Paul looked down and saw for the first time his blood-covered hands. “I tried to give her CPR,” he said. The other officers ordered him not to wash. Paul, feeling himself in shock, didn’t have the energy to take care of himself anyway. And it didn’t dawn on him the extent of what was going on in the minds of the officers.
Memories flashed through Paul’s mind like dreams. Meeting Monica, dancing so close their heartbeats intermingled, their children’s births. Their passionate, almost violent lovemaking, her body glowing afterward in the low light. Her warmth. The most beautiful woman in the world! Those pictures quickly metamorphosed into a bloody, gasping, yet still amazing-looking creature. Even death couldn’t erase her beauty.
For two hours, New Mexico State Police officers who had been Paul’s comrades questioned him, while Monica’s blood dried on his hands. Although his fellow officers wouldn’t let him go to the hospital to be with his wife in her last moments of life, he felt as if he had been there when the last of her body’s physical energy joined its spectral.
Paul relived that macabre moment in the bedroom again and again. Nervousness as he opened the door; Monica’s brown eyes fixated on his frightened, confused blue ones. The shotgun—her body, flying into the air, soaring, then crashing violently, blood gushing. Words were superfluous: the shotgun told instantly of all the unhappiness and pain, leaving no room for talk.
Farmington and state police officers intermixed, measuring blood spots, collecting evidence. Officers buzzed almost, but not quite out of Paul’s earshot. Finally, what they were saying slowly penetrated his fog.
“Monica would never kill herself!” “You can’t kill yourself with a shotgun!” “She’s too tiny to reach the trigger.” “Paul always kept loaded guns in his house.”
But he didn’t understand why Dusty Downs, Chief Richard Melton and Captain Mark McCloskey didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t hit Monica and that he wasn’t taking steroids, another of her accusations to Downs. Paul volunteered 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