Sunday, July 11, 2004
LIFESTYLE
A BADGE OF COURAGE In the Crowe case, this cop ignored the politics while pursuing justice
John Wilkens and Mark Sauer
STAFF WRITERS
Some friends warned sheriff's detective Vic Caloca not to dig too deeply into the Stephanie Crowe killing. You'll have to step on people's toes, they told him. You'll ruin your career. "What career?" he'd reply.
Caloca, a stocky bull of a man with slicked-back black hair and a boxer's rugged face, has been a cop for 29 years, the past 13 in homicide. He thinks he has the best job in the department. If getting involved in the Crowe case meant no promotions, well, so what?
So he dug. And what he unearthed made him a hero to some. "Without him, nothing good ever would have happened," said Cheryl Crowe, Stephanie's mother.
The 12-year-old girl was stabbed to death in her Escondido bedroom in January of 1998. Police arrested three teens, including her brother, after two of them confessed.
But on the eve of trial, in a plot twist straight out of a John Grisham novel, lab tests found drops of Stephanie's blood on a shirt worn by a mentally ill transient roaming the Crowe neighborhood the night of the slaying.
By the time the case landed in Caloca's lap, in February of 2000, it was a moldering mess. The charges against the teens had been dismissed. The transient, Richard Tuite, was in prison on an unrelated burglary conviction. Various authorities were facing lawsuits.
Nobody would have blamed Caloca if he had shoved the scandal into a corner, labeled it an unsolvable
mystery, and walked away.
He didn't do that. He investigated and decided the original case against the teens was wrong, and that Tuite was the killer. He convinced the state attorney general to file charges.
On May 26, a jury convicted Tuite of voluntary manslaughter. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29.
All that took four years and a thick skin. Caloca said some local prosecutors, still convinced the teens were guilty, stonewalled requests for assistance. He heard they were calling him an "out of control" cop.
A judge scolded him privately, Caloca said, and asked whether investigating the case was worth all the trouble. Other cops he thought were his friends stopped talking to him.
It was, he said he soon realized, a wounded and embarrassed judicial system trying to protect itself.
"I'm too dumb to know what I was getting myself into," Caloca said. "I thought that the people who worked the case in the beginning had the same ideals that I had, which was to get justice for this little girl. But it didn't happen that way."
o o o
When Caloca met for the first time with the Crowe family, the air was chilly enough to freeze a Popsicle. "We didn't really trust him," Cheryl Crowe said.
They had their reasons. On the morning Stephanie's body was found, they called the Escondido police for help and got compounded grief instead. Their son, Michael, was arrested within days, joined shortly by two of his friends, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser.
Even when the blood was found on Tuite's clothes a year later, and the charges against the teens were dismissed, the cloud of suspicion remained.
So Caloca didn't exactly win the Crowes over when he said, "If the evidence leads me to Michael, I'm going to arrest him."
One of the first things he did was watch videotapes of the interrogations. Escondido detectives had questioned Michael, then 14, for about 10 hours over two days. By the time they were done, Michael said he'd killed his sister in a jealous rage.
Detectives questioned 15-year-old Treadway for about 18 hours, also over two days, and at the end he explained in considerable detail how the three planned and carried out the murder.
Caloca, 51, has by his estimation worked hundreds of homicides. He's done hundreds of interrogations. Earlier in his career, he investigated child abuse, and he knew from experience that "sometimes kids tell you things just to please you."
He said he was a few hours into the tapes when "I realized something was wrong. Almost everything you're trained not to do was being done in these interviews."
He saw threats and promises of leniency, which a judge had cited as illegally coercive tactics in suppressing the bulk of the confessions, back when the teens were still facing trial.
"I'm not a liberal," Caloca said. "I'm not a member of the ACLU. I've done my share of interviews, and I've had to be aggressive with suspects. But I do know there are limits."
Caloca said it's also important for investigators to match a suspect's story with the evidence.
When he tried to do that to Treadway's tale, he said, the whole thing fell apart. The time of death, the eight-mile walk in the dark on the night before final exams, the passing around of the knife after the killing -- none of it fit the facts, he said.
Escondido detectives "were working under good intentions initially," he said. But he thinks a lack of experience and tunnel vision caused them to disregard Tuite too quickly and go down the wrong path.
In various court proceedings over the years, the detectives have defended their actions as fair and reasonable. They are declining to comment in the media now because of a civil lawsuit filed against them by the Crowe, Treadway and Houser families.
As Caloca sifted through crime-scene reconstructions, knife comparisons and blood-stain work, he said he also was disturbed by what he saw as attempts by police, prosecutors and consultants to come up with evidence that would fit their theory of the crime, instead of letting the evidence shape their theory.
He eventually compiled a 300-page report that identified "speculations, misjudgments and inconclusive evidence" used in the case against the teens.
"I was in shock," he said. "I lost a lot of sleep because everything I'd been taught since my first day as a cop had been turned upside down. Right and wrong had been turned upside down."
o o o
About the last thing any veteran detective wants to do is spend time with a defense attorney -- especially one famous in part for successfully defending a man accused of killing a cop.
Milt Silverman drew the ire of local law enforcement when he convinced two juries that Sagon Penn was acting in self defense when he killed a San Diego officer and shot another and a civilian ride- along during a 1985 Encanto traffic stop that went terribly wrong.
But Silverman had a lot of information about the Crowe case. The family had hired him for the civil suit. So Caloca met with him. He also contacted Mary Ellen Attridge, who defended Treadway.
He heard through the grapevine that people were accusing him of "being in bed" with the defense lawyers. He shrugged it off. "I wanted credible, reliable information, and I didn't care where I got it," he said.
The more he looked, he said, the more he kept coming back to Tuite.
The transient, 28 at the time of the stabbing, was seen by several people as he knocked on doors and peered in windows near the Crowe house that night, searching for a young woman named Tracy. Escondido police dismissed him as too disoriented by drug use and schizophrenia to be a viable suspect.
Caloca developed a fuller picture of Tuite's activities before and after the slaying -- some two-dozen incidents that involved carrying knives, entering homes, stalking young women. The detective also found it significant that additional lab tests had discovered more of Stephanie's blood on Tuite's shirt.
"As I looked at Richard Tuite, I was saying, 'How can I eliminate him as a suspect?' I couldn't," Caloca said. "Every time I turned around there was another reason to think he was the guy."
But the district attorney's office didn't share his conclusions, he said. Caloca remembers being stonewalled for months when he asked for help getting more information out of the Crowe family computer. He said he met resistance when he wanted to get a court order to obtain evidence from a crime lab.
"I couldn't figure out why it was getting so difficult for me to do my job," he said. "It shouldn't be that way."
Jeff Dusek, the deputy district attorney assigned to the case, denied there was any interference. "We stayed out of the way," he said. "We didn't even know what the sheriff's investigators were doing."
Sheriff Bill Kolender, who characterized the investigation as "a mess" when his office got it, said he was unaware of any hurdles and tension Caloca faced.
"Nobody ever came to me about it," Kolender said. "If there was grief that came Vic's way during his investigation, he must have just dealt with it. It shows the guy has class and honesty."
After about a year of investigation, Caloca wanted to arrest Tuite. But he said it was clear local prosecutors still believed the teens were responsible. "I realized that if this case goes to the DA, it's going to die," he said.
Paul Pfingst, who was DA at the time -- and whose handling of the Crowe case was an issue in his unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2002 -- did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
In a February 2003 deposition in connection with the civil suit, Pfingst said he knew detectives wanted Tuite charged but prosecutors weren't comfortable doing that.
In his opinion, Pfingst testified, nothing significant had changed since he dismissed the charges against the teens, and conflicting evidence in the case -- the confessions versus the blood on Tuite's shirt -- meant there was reasonable doubt about who killed Stephanie.
"If something broke the case one way or the other, then I would have followed that," Pfingst said in the deposition.
LIFESTYLE
A BADGE OF COURAGE In the Crowe case, this cop ignored the politics while pursuing justice
John Wilkens and Mark Sauer
STAFF WRITERS
Some friends warned sheriff's detective Vic Caloca not to dig too deeply into the Stephanie Crowe killing. You'll have to step on people's toes, they told him. You'll ruin your career. "What career?" he'd reply.
Caloca, a stocky bull of a man with slicked-back black hair and a boxer's rugged face, has been a cop for 29 years, the past 13 in homicide. He thinks he has the best job in the department. If getting involved in the Crowe case meant no promotions, well, so what?
So he dug. And what he unearthed made him a hero to some. "Without him, nothing good ever would have happened," said Cheryl Crowe, Stephanie's mother.
The 12-year-old girl was stabbed to death in her Escondido bedroom in January of 1998. Police arrested three teens, including her brother, after two of them confessed.
But on the eve of trial, in a plot twist straight out of a John Grisham novel, lab tests found drops of Stephanie's blood on a shirt worn by a mentally ill transient roaming the Crowe neighborhood the night of the slaying.
By the time the case landed in Caloca's lap, in February of 2000, it was a moldering mess. The charges against the teens had been dismissed. The transient, Richard Tuite, was in prison on an unrelated burglary conviction. Various authorities were facing lawsuits.
Nobody would have blamed Caloca if he had shoved the scandal into a corner, labeled it an unsolvable
mystery, and walked away.
He didn't do that. He investigated and decided the original case against the teens was wrong, and that Tuite was the killer. He convinced the state attorney general to file charges.
On May 26, a jury convicted Tuite of voluntary manslaughter. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29.
All that took four years and a thick skin. Caloca said some local prosecutors, still convinced the teens were guilty, stonewalled requests for assistance. He heard they were calling him an "out of control" cop.
A judge scolded him privately, Caloca said, and asked whether investigating the case was worth all the trouble. Other cops he thought were his friends stopped talking to him.
It was, he said he soon realized, a wounded and embarrassed judicial system trying to protect itself.
"I'm too dumb to know what I was getting myself into," Caloca said. "I thought that the people who worked the case in the beginning had the same ideals that I had, which was to get justice for this little girl. But it didn't happen that way."
o o o
When Caloca met for the first time with the Crowe family, the air was chilly enough to freeze a Popsicle. "We didn't really trust him," Cheryl Crowe said.
They had their reasons. On the morning Stephanie's body was found, they called the Escondido police for help and got compounded grief instead. Their son, Michael, was arrested within days, joined shortly by two of his friends, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser.
Even when the blood was found on Tuite's clothes a year later, and the charges against the teens were dismissed, the cloud of suspicion remained.
So Caloca didn't exactly win the Crowes over when he said, "If the evidence leads me to Michael, I'm going to arrest him."
One of the first things he did was watch videotapes of the interrogations. Escondido detectives had questioned Michael, then 14, for about 10 hours over two days. By the time they were done, Michael said he'd killed his sister in a jealous rage.
Detectives questioned 15-year-old Treadway for about 18 hours, also over two days, and at the end he explained in considerable detail how the three planned and carried out the murder.
Caloca, 51, has by his estimation worked hundreds of homicides. He's done hundreds of interrogations. Earlier in his career, he investigated child abuse, and he knew from experience that "sometimes kids tell you things just to please you."
He said he was a few hours into the tapes when "I realized something was wrong. Almost everything you're trained not to do was being done in these interviews."
He saw threats and promises of leniency, which a judge had cited as illegally coercive tactics in suppressing the bulk of the confessions, back when the teens were still facing trial.
"I'm not a liberal," Caloca said. "I'm not a member of the ACLU. I've done my share of interviews, and I've had to be aggressive with suspects. But I do know there are limits."
Caloca said it's also important for investigators to match a suspect's story with the evidence.
When he tried to do that to Treadway's tale, he said, the whole thing fell apart. The time of death, the eight-mile walk in the dark on the night before final exams, the passing around of the knife after the killing -- none of it fit the facts, he said.
Escondido detectives "were working under good intentions initially," he said. But he thinks a lack of experience and tunnel vision caused them to disregard Tuite too quickly and go down the wrong path.
In various court proceedings over the years, the detectives have defended their actions as fair and reasonable. They are declining to comment in the media now because of a civil lawsuit filed against them by the Crowe, Treadway and Houser families.
As Caloca sifted through crime-scene reconstructions, knife comparisons and blood-stain work, he said he also was disturbed by what he saw as attempts by police, prosecutors and consultants to come up with evidence that would fit their theory of the crime, instead of letting the evidence shape their theory.
He eventually compiled a 300-page report that identified "speculations, misjudgments and inconclusive evidence" used in the case against the teens.
"I was in shock," he said. "I lost a lot of sleep because everything I'd been taught since my first day as a cop had been turned upside down. Right and wrong had been turned upside down."
o o o
About the last thing any veteran detective wants to do is spend time with a defense attorney -- especially one famous in part for successfully defending a man accused of killing a cop.
Milt Silverman drew the ire of local law enforcement when he convinced two juries that Sagon Penn was acting in self defense when he killed a San Diego officer and shot another and a civilian ride- along during a 1985 Encanto traffic stop that went terribly wrong.
But Silverman had a lot of information about the Crowe case. The family had hired him for the civil suit. So Caloca met with him. He also contacted Mary Ellen Attridge, who defended Treadway.
He heard through the grapevine that people were accusing him of "being in bed" with the defense lawyers. He shrugged it off. "I wanted credible, reliable information, and I didn't care where I got it," he said.
The more he looked, he said, the more he kept coming back to Tuite.
The transient, 28 at the time of the stabbing, was seen by several people as he knocked on doors and peered in windows near the Crowe house that night, searching for a young woman named Tracy. Escondido police dismissed him as too disoriented by drug use and schizophrenia to be a viable suspect.
Caloca developed a fuller picture of Tuite's activities before and after the slaying -- some two-dozen incidents that involved carrying knives, entering homes, stalking young women. The detective also found it significant that additional lab tests had discovered more of Stephanie's blood on Tuite's shirt.
"As I looked at Richard Tuite, I was saying, 'How can I eliminate him as a suspect?' I couldn't," Caloca said. "Every time I turned around there was another reason to think he was the guy."
But the district attorney's office didn't share his conclusions, he said. Caloca remembers being stonewalled for months when he asked for help getting more information out of the Crowe family computer. He said he met resistance when he wanted to get a court order to obtain evidence from a crime lab.
"I couldn't figure out why it was getting so difficult for me to do my job," he said. "It shouldn't be that way."
Jeff Dusek, the deputy district attorney assigned to the case, denied there was any interference. "We stayed out of the way," he said. "We didn't even know what the sheriff's investigators were doing."
Sheriff Bill Kolender, who characterized the investigation as "a mess" when his office got it, said he was unaware of any hurdles and tension Caloca faced.
"Nobody ever came to me about it," Kolender said. "If there was grief that came Vic's way during his investigation, he must have just dealt with it. It shows the guy has class and honesty."
After about a year of investigation, Caloca wanted to arrest Tuite. But he said it was clear local prosecutors still believed the teens were responsible. "I realized that if this case goes to the DA, it's going to die," he said.
Paul Pfingst, who was DA at the time -- and whose handling of the Crowe case was an issue in his unsuccessful re-election campaign in 2002 -- did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
In a February 2003 deposition in connection with the civil suit, Pfingst said he knew detectives wanted Tuite charged but prosecutors weren't comfortable doing that.
In his opinion, Pfingst testified, nothing significant had changed since he dismissed the charges against the teens, and conflicting evidence in the case -- the confessions versus the blood on Tuite's shirt -- meant there was reasonable doubt about who killed Stephanie.
"If something broke the case one way or the other, then I would have followed that," Pfingst said in the deposition.