She's so Cold

She’s so Cold by Donald E. McInnis is nonfiction work about one of the more famous murder cases in San Diego County. The murder of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe occurred in January 1998, in Escondido, California. Initially, the police focused on the murder having been committed by Michael, Stephanie’s 14-year-old brother, along with two of Michael’s friends, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser. Mr. McInnis was the defense lawyer for Aaron.

In one sense, this was a terrible book. For the sake of accuracy, the author relied on court transcripts and other recorded materials to present his facts. Personally, I find the reading of court transcripts and depositions to be incredibly tedious. I’ve provided expert opinions in nearly 2,000 cases (nearly all of it having been outside the criminal arena) and I’ve been deposed approximately 500 times. Proofreading my own depositions has got to be the worst and most boring part of this. But, that’s beside the point. It was just hard to read through all of the transcripts.

This Crowe murder case was a mess from the outset. The author clearly proves that the Escondido Police Department mistreated the boys in the course of extracting two probably false confessions from them. “Mistreatment” is probably an understatement regarding the way the boys were treated. I don’t disagree with the author that the police interrogation techniques were the equivalent of “psychological torture.” The boys were kept from their parents, not Mirandized until much later, and they were denied food, water, and sleep until their initial interrogations were completed. It is outrageous that such behavior still occurs in our legal system. Not only were the boys eventually exonerated, but also the City of Escondido had to pay out $11,250,000 for the violation of the boys’ civil rights. McInnis makes their mistreatment very clear. It was 14 years after Stephanie’s death in 2012 that the San Diego Superior Court ruled that the three boys were factually innocent of the charges against them.

Subsequently to the boys’ trials, 28-year-old Richard Tuite, a transient who may have been schizophrenic, was arrested and convicted of voluntary manslaughter. McInnis presented the evidence against Tuite. That three-month Tuite trial took place in 2004, so the Crowe case once again dominated the local news. However, in 2011, the 9^th Circuit Court opined that Tuite was entitled to a new trial, and on 12/6/13, Mr. Tuite was found not guilty of the murder of Stephanie Crowe. Then 44 years old, after spending about 15 years in custody, Mr. Tuite was allowed to freely walk away from prison. So the Crowe case was never solved.

As a further connection to the ongoing importance of this case, when the current County DA Bonnie Dumanis resigned from her post in 2017, the appointed interim DA was Summer Stephan who had lost the Crowe trial against the boys. Ms. Summer was then elected to a four-year term as the San Diego County DA. So, in real life, all court matters are not as neat and tidy as what we see in the mystery books we often read.