Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [117]
One of Hunter’s lessons about the law came from an earlier case involving a child’s murder. Elizabeth Manning’s three-year-old son, Michael, had became what one newspaper called “a punching bag” for Manning’s live-in boyfriend, Danny Arevalo. On December 19, 1982, Manning helped wrap her son’s body in a green blanket and a shower curtain and hid it in an air-conditioning vent. The body was later carried to an irrigation ditch in the dead of winter.
Before Christmas, neighbors noticed that the child had disappeared and informed the police.
While the winter snow was still on the ground, Manning was brought before Judge Murray Richtel in a civil proceeding and ordered to tell the police where her child was. She said her son was with friends but refused to say where for fear that social services would take the child away, she said.
Richtel sentenced Manning to jail for contempt of court, but she still wouldn’t talk. As she sat in jail and refused to disclose her child’s whereabouts, the public was aghast.
Three months later, on April 8, Manning was released pending an appeal of her sentence. As she left the jail, the police officer in charge of the case, Detective Greg Bailey, told her, “Betsy, you can either be a witness in a murder case or you can be a suspect in a murder case. It’s up to you.”
The next day, Manning decided to talk.
“I am going to interview you as a witness in this thing,” Bailey said to Manning. “Because I am not going to advise you of your rights, they [the DA] cannot prosecute you for this.”
“I’ll do whatever I have to do,” she replied, “to make sure he [Arevalo] pays for what he did to Michael.”
“Go ahead and tell me what you’ve got.”
“Mikey’s dead.”
“Elizabeth,” Bailey said, “you don’t really mean that.”
“Yes, Danny beat Michael to death.” Manning told Bailey that she had played a major role in her son’s death and had helped hide the body.
Hunter, knowing that Manning had not been given the Miranda warning and that her statement could not be used against her, took the position that his office “hadn’t agreed to immunity for anyone.”
The public outrage over the murder and the fact that this mother sat in jail when she knew her son’s body lay exposed in the snow convinced Hunter to file murder and child abuse charges against Manning as well as Arevalo. He took the position that discovery of the body would inevitably have occurred when the snow melted and that the shower curtain would have linked Manning to the crime. She would have been charged, Hunter said, statement or no statement.
The court ruled against Hunter. Manning’s statement was deemed inadmissible, and all evidence uncovered as a result of her statement, including her son’s body, was excluded. Hunter spoke out publicly against the judge and the judiciary.
All Hunter could do now was charge the defendants with felony child abuse and assault. Manning, furious with Hunter for prosecuting her, pled guilty and was out in a year. At Arevalo’s trial she refused to testify, and he received ten years for felony child abuse.
Politically, Hunter had lost.
For his part, Hunter said that after this and a few similar experiences, he no longer allowed himself to be swayed by public sentiment into trying an unwinnable case, because in the end no one wins. He also believed that to charge an innocent person with a serious crime—and virtually destroy his life—was worse than not filing charges at all.
Pete Hofstrom, conservative by nature, agreed, and when the DA’s lawyers wanted to file a case that he thought would be lost in court, he usually convinced them not to.
Despite some horrifying local crimes, the position taken by Hunter and Hofstrom has remained unchanged. In 1990 Michael Bell, an escapee from the state penitentiary, murdered four people indiscriminately. Hunter, who is not opposed to the death penalty, talked to the families of the victims. He explained how the death penalty works in reality—how