Dana Butler deserves one last chance at justice
The Dana Butler murder turned 40 this year. I did not remember the anniversary until a reader pointed it out last spring. A few weeks later someone else, an old Highland High School classmate of hers, asked about the bizarre, unsolved crime. Yet another email, particularly haunting, hit my inbox in September.
Apparently, Dana Butler, whether you knew her or not, is a hard one to forget.
Butler never got the justice she deserves. Seems to me she is owed one last chance. The Sheriff’s Office does not appear to agree.
A recap is in order.
It was Easter break of 1979, and about a dozen teens, out of school for the week, were partying at the most unlikely of hangouts: The home of the Bakersfield police commissioner.
Glenn Fitts, according to documents obtained by
The Californian through the federal Freedom of Information Act, was a 56-year-old Air Force veteran who had parlayed a stint in military intelligence into a job with the FBI spying on “communists.” He was booted after bragging about his job one too many times, but, thanks to those impressive credentials, landed at Bakersfield College teaching police science. He bought a house on Kaibab Avenue, two doors down from Assemblyman Don Rogers, and a short time later was named police commissioner, a position that no longer exists in Bakersfield.
Fitts, a pudgy South Carolina native with Cary Grant glasses, kept the shades drawn, the windows closed and the doors locked. He spent his free time with his hillbilly records and his cigarettes, in the company of his
90-pound wife, who had cancer. The smoke permeated every pore of the house.
After his wife died, his behavior changed.
Besides law enforcement and domestic espionage, Fitts’ other interest was teenage boys. Always had been, going back to his days in the Air Force, according to his military records. Now, here in Bakersfield, he became acquainted with a group of teen boys and girls who loitered around Siemon Park, near his house. He started inviting them over to smoke pot and drink beer. For sex, too. It became a regular thing. The teens, as The Californian noted in 1979 and again in 2003, called his house “the center of the universe.”
One night during that Easter break, 14-year-old Dana Charlene Butler showed up. A witness had spotted her in a church parking lot earlier that evening but now, somehow, here she was at Fitts’ house. She never made it home.
Her body turned up three days later with 30 or 40 shallow knife wounds and two deep, lethal wounds. She’d been dumped along the Kern River near Ethel’s Corral, the old barnwood cowboy bar just off Alfred Harrell Highway.
Investigators concluded she’d been at Fitts’ house the night of April 10, along with other teens. As reported by The Californian at the time, they found Fitts’ pubic hair on Butler’s body, as well as dog hairs matching both of his dogs. They found blood matching her type in his house, and neighbors told investigators Fitts had replaced bathroom carpeting and plumbing fixtures the day after Butler disappeared.
Friends who’d met him for dinner at the Rancho Bakersfield coffee shop on April 11 said he’d seemed jumpy, and he didn’t seem to want anyone near his car’s spot in the parking lot.
Investigators presented their evidence to District Attorney Al Leddy on April 30. Sheriff Al Loustalot was so confident they had their man, he told reporters at an unrelated event that same day that they could expect an arrest by the next morning. It didn’t happen.
For two weeks, round the clock, patrol cars were parked around Fitts’ house in a bizarre stakeout probably never before seen in the well-kept, middle-class neighborhood. For two days in May, some 200 people, organized into a group they called the Mothers of Bakersfield, picketed in front of the suspect’s house, the Kern County administration building and the courts building, demanding an arrest. They announced plans to seek Leddy’s recall.
Finally, a week after the pickets laid siege to the courthouse, Fitts was charged with three felony counts of providing marijuana to minors and four other charges. Would the district attorney, pushed into a political corner, also charge Fitts with anything directly related to the murder? Apparently not. One possible reason: The county coroner’s office had failed to take time-of-death tests on Butler’s body. Sheriff’s officials told The Californian they assumed the coroner would take crucial body-temperature readings; the coroner said such tests weren’t taken unless they were specifically requested. By the time investigators realized what had happened, it was too late. The body, too cold for useful evaluation, was cremated.
They would get nothing useful from the primary suspect either: At the end of May, Fitts killed himself in his backyard, over on the side of his house against the fence. Investigators told The Californian he left an odd, incomplete note. “Dana Butler was last scene in front of a church between 11:30 and 12:30 on April 9. I, on the morning of April 9, was home waiting for ...” And there it ended.
Neighbors said they’d seen a car parked in front of Fitts’ house that day, and then heard two gunshots — only one of which actually struck Fitts.
Fitts’ sister, June Gardner, is convinced her brother couldn’t have written that suicide note. “With a word used incorrectly in the suicide note (‘scene’ instead of ‘seen’) — (it) just couldn’t have been written by him. Glenn would never have used the wrong word,” she wrote in an email to me back in 2011.
If Dana Butler is going to ever get justice, the time is now. The window is small and shrinking by the day.
In October, I sent a California Public Records Act request to the Kern County Sheriff’s Office, asking for copies of the original investigative reports. County counsel, responding on the sheriff’s behalf, denied my request.
“There are concerns that the release of these reports would reveal personal information and statements from numerous juvenile victims that were targeted, solicited or engaging in a sexual relationship with one of the suspects,” Deputy County Counsel Bryan Walters wrote. “... Additionally, there were persons of interest identified who denied involvement and not proven to be at the scene. However, there could be evidence or statements in the future that will support criminal prosecution.”
The state public records law, unlike the federal Freedom of Information Act, provides no avenue for appeal. But I tried anyway.
I argued that the public interest served by making the record public outweighs the public interest served by blocking disclosure. I have seen many instances where published articles about unsolved crimes have jarred memories or refreshed long repressed guilt, resulting in arrests. In fact, this is a strategy law enforcement agencies often have initiated themselves, including with me. I argued that witnesses and secondary sources of potential information are now well beyond middle age. We have lost and will continue to lose them. Placing the circumstances of this case before the public has taken on an urgency.
I was denied again. Seems to me we need a state legislator who values government transparency to put his or her concerns down on paper in the form of a grip-loosening amendment to the state public records act that, for one thing, broadens the appeal process.
I didn’t pull my arguments out of thin air. Jack Branson, a retired special agent with the U.S. Department of the Treasury who, with his wife, Mary, has written extensively about the investigation of old, unsolved murders, told an interviewer in 2011 that police, who might otherwise be reluctant to work with media, can benefit greatly when it comes to cold cases.
“They drill it into law enforcement, especially on a federal level, not even to talk to the media,” Branson said. “But on a cold case the media is law enforcement’s friend far more often than it’s a foe. ... A story on an old crime ... Many times, that brings witnesses out. It can alert those who might know something, maybe something they saw when they were young and didn’t know who to tell.”
Cases can also go cold when an investigator focuses on the wrong suspect, Branson said. The real perpetrator has time to establish alibis or get lost in this vast country of ours. People in the life of a witness at the time of the crime who pressured them to keep quiet may no longer be in the picture. Technology that might not have been available at the time may now be useful, assuming evidence still exists. Reopening a case with fresh eyes — perhaps with the public’s assistance — can cast new light.
Opening the case to new public scrutiny could make certain people uncomfortable, of course. Perhaps someone who later became a prominent, respectable citizen is mentioned in those investigative records and now would be embarrassed to be associated with a teen sexand-drugs orgy. Perhaps surviving family members would be outraged at the release of such information.
Disclosure seems worth that risk to me if it sharpens stale recollections or inspires new courage.
One thing is certain: Dana Butler’s murder will be unsolved forever if we do nothing.