By Count Friedrich von Olsen
This week I am going to take up the rather dangerous topic of abuse – yes abuse – of the trust we are putting in our prosecutors. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, be it known that I am vigorously pro-law enforcement. The police have no more faithful friend than I. I believe in the majesty of the law and have the utmost respect for those who enforce it. But for my respect to abide, it must be justified by prudent action on the part of the lawgivers…
What brings me to this topic are two cases, both of which arise out of the Victor Valley. One is the killing, or at least suspected killing of Jodette Wren. The other is the prosecution of Charles Merritt, the accused murderer of the McStay family. I am sorry to say that, while I am by nature inclined to give the police and prosecutors the benefit of any doubt, I am moved to believe that the suspected and charged perpetrators of the Wren and McStay murders are very possibly and perhaps likely innocent…
Let us take the Wren case first. This we know: On March 28, the body of Jodette Wren was found inside her home on Lindsay Street in Hesperia by sheriff’s deputies responding to a call. They promptly arrested her 55-year-old husband, Christopher Wren on suspicion of killing his wife. Mr. Wren was kept in custody on a no-bail hold, which clearly implies that the sheriff’s department – and prosecutors – represented to the court that they had probable cause to believe he was responsible for his wife’s death. But Mr. Wren has since been released from custody and no charges have been filed. There is no indication in court records at all of his future need to appear in court…
The Merritt case is far less obscure. Like just about everyone, I first learned of that matter in 2010, shortly after Joseph McStay, his wife Summer, and their two sons Joseph Jr. and Gianni went missing from their San Diego County home and San Diego County authorities were seeking the public’s help in trying to locate them. There was a report they had likely abandoned their vehicle in San Ysidro before crossing, for some mysterious reason, into Mexico. It was baffling at the time, and I remember some intense speculation as to why the McStays would need to vanish south of the border, but with the march of succeeding events and all of the other issues of my life, in time the episode receded from my immediate consciousness. Then in October 2013, the McStays sprung back, unfortunately not to life, but to the fore of my and everyone else’s attention when their corpses were unearthed, not in Mexico or the Anza Borrego Desert in San Diego County but very close to home, here in San Bernardino County, in the desert just north of Victorville. Thirteen months later, in November 2014, Charles Merritt, who had business dealings with Joseph McStay in a water fountain and landscaping decoration business and who had attended Apple Valley High School and in recent years had a business in Hesperia, was arrested and charged with the four murders. All of the law enforcement personnel involved in the case expressed confidence in the case against Merritt…
I must say, I am a little ashamed. I am ashamed because I assumed that both Mr. Wren and Mr. Merritt were guilty. I knew very little of the facts, yet I assumed their guilt. In that respect, I am not much different from the prosecutors. In another respect, there is however a vital difference. I am just an observer. The prosecutors are professionals. They can’t just assume. They can speculate in formulating their approach to gathering facts. But in making their case they cannot speculate. They must marshal those facts and evidence. Presenting speculation in lieu of facts is intellectually dishonest and an insult and abuse of the public they are in place to serve. To do so is a blot on the prosecutorial profession…
The district attorney’s office, which supported holding Mr. Wren without bail, is now seeking to get as far away from him and the matter as possible. My conclusion is he had nothing at all to do with the death of his wife. I can only imagine the horror of losing your spouse and then being accused of murdering her. Recounting Mr. Wren’s experience of the last two weeks would require the skill of no less a talent than Franz Kafka…
In November, when Mr. Merritt was arrested, my curiosity was naturally piqued and I made my typical round of inquiries. I spoke directly with a prosecutor in the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office who assured me that Merritt was guilty. “We wouldn’t be charging him if we did not have substantial physical evidence,” I was told. I accepted that at face value. But two months later, the first indication that the case against him was shaky came when 18 media outlets went to court seeking the search warrants and arrest warrants pertaining to the McStay/Merritt case and all of their attendant affidavits. The district attorney’s office opposed that request, asserting the release of the 25 sealed warrants would “hamper the ongoing investigation.” This was two months after Mr. Merritt was not only arrested but charged. He was in custody with no chance whatsoever of being released. He had no means by which to destroy or compromise any further evidence the sheriff’s department or prosecutors were seeking. Moreover, why would that be an issue anyway? He had already been charged. With its opposition to the release of the search warrants and affidavits, the district attorney’s office was acknowledging that the case so confidently touted in November was far less solid than they assured everyone at the time…
My next indication that something is amiss in the Merritt case came last month when I was told, again by someone in the district attorney’s office, that the case against Mr. Merritt is entirely circumstantial. Gone was the earlier suggestion that hard physical, indisputable forensic evidence tied him to the murders. What we have, it seems, is that Joseph McStay and Charles Merritt were in business together, there was some order of falling out between them, and the McStay corpses turned up in an area near where Merritt lived and worked and with which he was familiar. This may be buttressed by a showing that Mr. Merritt’s whereabouts a little over five years ago when the McStays went missing can’t be entirely accounted for, translating into the possibility he was in San Diego County when they disappeared. Motive, means & opportunity are an investigator’s standby. Motive: a business dispute. Means: Merritt’s theoretical access to whatever type of instrument was used in the killings. Opportunity: Merritt’s knowledge of where the McStays resided, his ability to drive there, and his ability to lure the entire family to a remote location. Not the strongest circumstantial case, but I admit, it is still a circumstantial case. Will it convince a jury? I am not so sure…
The district attorney’s office has caught a break in that regard. It will not need to go up against Clarence Darrow or F. Lee Bailey or Alan Dershowitz to prove to 12 of Merritt’s peers he performed this heinous act. Rather, Charles Merritt is representing himself. The quip goes that any lawyer representing himself has a fool for a client. In this way, I suspect he may be outlawyered. But from what I can tell, he is earnest, and he is pushing for an early trial, this summer, despite the prosecution having flooded him with 10,000 pages of documents relating to its investigation, which he must, from his jail cell, sift through to find exonerating evidence. In the Old West, they scheduled the trial for eight a.m., the sentencing for ten a.m. and the hanging for noon. That the prosecution is in no hurry in making its case against Mr. Merritt tells me it doesn’t really have its ducks lined up. That he wants to get this before a jury as early as he can tells me he believes in his innocence…
My high regard for the law and the police and the prosecutor’s office is tempered by my realization that those institutions are not infallible. I have never been suspected of, let alone charged with, murder. I can disclose to you, trusted reader, that more than half a lifetime ago I was arrested and charged with grand larceny. This particular piece of unpleasant business had to do with a large shipment of manufactured goods en route from Italy, where they had been produced, to Buenos Aires. The shipment had made it as far as Marseille, where I had substantial dockside warehousing. The cargo was offloaded and placed in the warehouse, awaiting transfer to another ship, which was to ferry it to Lisbon, where it was to be transferred to yet another ship that would take it across the Atlantic to Argentina. There was a delay in the arrival of the ship that was to take the goods from Marseille to Lisbon, and I was obliged to keep the material in my warehouse almost two weeks longer than I had anticipated. As the result of what would otherwise have been a routine check, a maritime facility inventory clerk, an agent of the French national government, noted the presence of the goods, the lading receipts for which were out of date. When my warehouse manager was unable to produce transit documentation for the massive amount of material on hand, an inspector with the Marseille Police Department was contacted, who immediately took my unfortunate employee into custody. The next day, three gendarmes descended upon me while I was at my office in Nice. Once they satisfied themselves with who I was, they refused to answer any of my inquiries but insisted that I come with them to the train depot. There I was handed off to another officer, who subjected me to the indignity of handcuffing my right wrist to his left wrist. We boarded a train and a few hours later at the station in Marseilles I was turned over to the same inspector who had arrested my warehouse manager. After some perfunctory questioning, he deposited me into the Marseille jail. Thereafter, I spent nine days with some of the most charming gentlemen you would ever want to meet, punctuated only by four or five rounds of questioning by the police inspector, who was absolutely impervious to, and scoffingly dismissive of, my attempts to explain what so much unaccounted for material was doing in my warehouse. The matter was not resolved until, through a tortuous series of communications relayed through the Marseille Police Department and the Nice Police Department, an inspector in the latter city obtained entrance to my office, and, armed with the combination I was obliged to surrender, opened my office safe to find the bills of lading for the goods which these ministers of French Justice had heretofore insisted were stolen…
I bore you with my history only to illustrate that for Mssrs. Wren and Merritt there exists the real possibility that the damning appearance of circumstance may not, in actuality, bear out their guilt when a full and unbiased rendering of the facts is made…