Mean Justice's Dirty Secrets
Ed Jagels put two dozen innocent people behind bars on charges that they molested their own kids -- while ignoring evidence that his friends were throwing orgies with teenage boys. So why is one of America's most reckless prosecutors still in power?
By Kimberley Sevcik
(c) 2005, Rolling Stone
The day Jeff Modahl's daughters were spirited away from their school in the back of a squad car, no one would tell him where they were taken. He spoke to plenty of people in Bakersfield, California, who knew: The sheriff. The district attorney. The Department of Children's Services. "Your girls are safe," one official after another assured him. "But we can't let you talk to them." Earlier in the week, Modahl, a soft-spoken thirty-year-old mechanic with the build of a heavyweight wrestler, had called Children's Services to report that he suspected the girls' baby sitter of touching them inappropriately. Officials told him that they were investigating his charge, but until they had finished questioning Carla, 10, and Teresa, 12, no one in the family would be allowed to speak to them.
The morning sun was still low and tentative when police knocked on Modahl's door two weeks later and arrested him. Panicked and confused, Modahl repeatedly asked the officers what he was being charged with, but they refused to tell him. He sat on the couch, his hands cuffed behind his back, as they ransacked the house, rummaging through drawers and closets, confiscating all of his family photographs.
The cops had been dispatched by Ed Jagels, the county's new chief prosecutor, as part of a sweeping investigation into allegations that dozens of local children were being molested. The son of a prominent attorney and an heiress who lunched with Nancy Reagan and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Jagels bears a passing resemblance to Paul McCartney, with tamer, more Republican hair. Buoyed by family money, swaggering self-confidence and a prep-school pedigree, he had surprised everyone by moving from his native Pasadena to the hardscrabble town of Bakersfield and running for district attorney at age thirty-two.
When Jagels took office in 1983, it seemed as though the entire country was in the grip of a growing hysteria over child molestation. People saw pedophiles and satanic cults at every turn, and Jagels recognized an opportunity for glory when he saw one. From his office on the fourth floor of the Kern County Courthouse in downtown Bakersfield -- a shrine to conservative manhood with its Remington bronze, its stuffed pheasant, its photographs of high-profile Republicans -- Jagels directed what would become the largest prosecution of child molesters in the nation's history. He assembled a task force specifically designated to investigate sex crimes against children and assigned his most ambitious young attorneys to the cases. "This place was like Mayberry before Ed came along," says Dennis Beaver, a former Kern County prosecutor. "It was full of sweet, older guys who left work early to get to the local watering hole." Under Jagels, police and social workers didn't just follow up on accusations of molestation -- they sought them out like desperate salespeople working on commission. Investigators drove children around and asked them to point out the "bad people." They whisked kids away from their parents in the middle of the night without explanation, deprived them of sleep and interrogated them like prisoners of war, feeding them scenarios of sexual abuse until they broke down and "confessed." Kids described being hung from hooks and sodomized, being forced into group orgies and videotaped, watching their captors kill babies and drink the blood. No physical evidence was found to corroborate any of their testimonies: no hooks or holes where hooks might have been, no pornographic videotapes, no dead bodies in the fields behind the churches where the sacrifices had allegedly taken place. Yet Jagels identified eight pedophilia rings in Kern County between 1983 and 1987 and sent twenty-nine people to prison for molesting children, some for sentences as long as 400 years.
The campaign of fear and intimidation orchestrated by Jagels became a nightmare for parents like Jeff Modahl. Two years passed between the day Modahl was arrested and the day he saw his daughters again at the county courthouse. From the witness stand, Carla smiled down on her father, her tone eerily buoyant as she described the various ways he had sexually abused her: how he had touched her breasts, put his fingers inside her, had sodomized her repeatedly. When his older daughter Teresa was put on the stand, she broke down crying, insisting that she had never been molested. There were no other testimonies against Modahl, no physical evidence presented. On the strength of Carla's accusations, Modahl was sentenced to eighty years in prison.
Not long after his incarceration, Modahl received a letter from Carla, written in the careful, deliberate handwriting of a child with something important to say. "Dear Dad," she wrote. "I lied in court. I'm sorry for lying about this, Dad. I sure do miss you and love you so much. I wish you could come home soon." In her letter, Carla explained that a social worker had tricked her, grilling her every day for weeks and promising her that she would be reunited with her father if she would simply "admit" that Modahl had abused her. The deception prompted a motion for a retrial. Clutching a copy of her letter, Carla testified that her father had never touched her and begged to have him released.
But it was too late. The judge didn't believe her recantation. Modahl was taken back to prison and Carla was taken back to her foster home. That evening, she took two handfuls of the medication she was on for manic depression and was rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped. She was twelve years old. It was the first of seventeen suicide attempts she would make.
By that time, though, the cases against Modahl and other convicted parents were beginning to unravel. An investigation by the California attorney general revealed that Jagels and his team were guilty of multiple instances of prosecutorial misconduct. Before some of the children appeared in court, prosecutors took them shopping for toys and new clothes, rehearsing their testimony with them until they sounded convincing. At Modahl's trial, the DA's office deliberately withheld two key pieces of evidence: a medical exam revealing that Carla had not been sodomized and a tape of a social worker inventing explicit descriptions of sexual abuse by Modahl and pressuring Teresa to affirm them. Prosecutors also pressured Carla's foster parents to put her on Thorazine, the pharmaceutical equivalent of a straitjacket, keeping her hazy and compliant during the false testimony they elicited from her.
"It's clear that at a certain point Jagels knew these prosecutions were wrong, but he continued anyway," says Michael Snedeker, an attorney who helped to free Modahl and seventeen others whom Jagels wrongly prosecuted for child molestation. "He saw where that train was going, and he rode it long and hard, all the way to the end."
Today, the Bakersfield molestation trials -- and the dozens of similar molestation cases that rippled across America in the 1980s -- are widely acknowledged to have been a witch hunt, a sort of mass hallucination born of fear and misconception. Since 1991, all but five of the twenty-nine convictions secured by Jagels have been overturned. Yet Jagels continues to stand by all of the wrongful prosecutions, without exception. He has fought the release of every parent, insisting, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that justice was done.
He has also continued to rule Kern County with an iron fist. During his twenty-two years in office, Jagels has become the most feared man in Bakersfield -- and one of the most ruthless prosecutors in the country. In the ongoing war on crime that he is waging, defendants are guilty until proven innocent, the Constitution is treated as an impediment to law enforcement and vendettas are subject to prosecution. Under Jagels, Kern County has the highest incarceration rate in the state, a fact proudly trumpeted on the DA's Web site. The city's reputation even extends to nearby Los Angeles, where residents joke about the danger of visiting Bakersfield: "Go on vacation, leave on probation."
"Ed Jagels will stop at nothing to do someone in if they cross him," says a former prosecutor under Jagels who asked not to be identified. "He is really poison. They call him J. Edgar Jagels. Hoover had so much dirt on people and so much power, you couldn't take him out. That's the way Ed is."
Bakersfield was an unlikely place for a guy like Ed Jagels to end up. Populated by the ancestors of Dust Bowl refugees who still make their living off the land, it feels closer in spirit and landscape to Oklahoma than California. No ocean breezes or redwood forests to be found here. No surfers or yoga junkies or war protesters either. What you will find is a bleak moonscape of oil fields; a chorus of radio-talk-show hosts ranting about illegal immigrants and welfare moms; a store called Second Amendment Sports, which does a brisk business; and, along the highway that leads into town, a billboard of a radiant Jesus that urges be an organ donor. give your heart to the lord. The downtown streets feel frozen in the 1950s: the family shoe stores, the swivel-stooled burger joint, the coffee shop where the waitresses call all their customers "hon." Merle Haggard was raised in a boxcar in a section of town called Oildale, where residents post beware of dog signs on their cracked windows, and Buck Owens made his mark here singing about thwarted love in honky-tonks with corrugated tin walls. Teen births and high school dropout rates around Bakersfield are among the highest in the state.
Most people didn't think that Jagels stood a chance in hell when he ran for DA in 1982. He was an outsider in Kern County, a guy far more comfortable in wingtips and power ties than work boots and a feed cap. His opponent, on the other hand, was a prominent judge, born in Bakersfield and endorsed by both the local newspaper and the sheriff's department. But the campaign took a sudden turn when an associate of Jagels lied to obtain a confidential case file that showed the judge had issued a lenient ruling that may have contributed to a four-year-old girl's death. Using the file, Jagels attacked the judge, speaking the law-and-order language that residents wanted to hear. "Kern County has roots in the Bible Belt, and a lot of people here have a fundamentalist attitude toward crime and punishment," says Kathleen Faulkner, an attorney in Bakersfield for eighteen years. Jagels sailed into office as the tough-on-crime candidate.
In most cities, people would be hard-pressed to tell you the name of their chief prosecutor, but half of Bakersfield seems to have a story about Jagels ruining the reputation or career of someone they know, based on some trivial charge that was ultimately dropped. "You don't have to do anything at all in this town to be convicted of a crime," says a former employee of Jagels'. "I tell my kids, 'Get out of this county after high school or you'll wind up in prison.'" As DA, Jagels decides who to charge with what crime, as well as whether to offer a plea bargain, or grant immunity, or push for the death penalty, and no one has veto power over his decisions. Wrongful prosecutions are so commonplace that a used-record dealer in town hands out bumper stickers that read Ed Jagels Hates Me, Too.
When he's threatened, Jagels goes for the jugular. A few years ago, a neighbor banged on his door one night, calling for his scalp. "I'm going to kill you and your entire family!" the man screamed, apparently misdirecting his rage at having been prosecuted for child molestation in another county. Jagels pulled a Glock out of the closet, charged down the stairs and ran the intruder off. "Ed is completely fearless," says Bryanna Jagels, his wife at the time. "Never mind that he's five foot eight. There's not a cowardly bone in his body."
Some who know Jagels insist that his hard-charging style is all about protecting victims. And if securing a conviction means he has to bend the rules - withholding evidence, bartering with jailhouse snitches, intimidating witnesses - well, so be it. In his mind, the ends justify the means. "I think Ed is actually a good person, in the same way that Don Corleone is a good person," says Bryanna. "You see Don Corleone in a Mafia movie, and he's killing this person and that, but you know that down deep, he thinks he's doing it for the right reasons."
In reality, the only victims Jagels encountered in many cases were the ones he prosecuted. Dozens of working-class families were torn apart by his crusade to lock up child molesters. Alvin McCuan, a sheet-metal worker, was stabbed while in prison. Teresa Cox, a nineteen-year-old newlywed at the time of her conviction, got divorced while in prison and became addicted to meth when she was freed after six years behind bars. Howard Weimer, who had won awards as a foster parent, wasn't released until he was seventy-five - too old to go back to work. He and his wife now scrape by on $1,000 a month in Social Security.
The children who were forced to testify have suffered too, burdened with the guilt that their words deprived innocent people of their freedom. When Eddie Sampley was only seven years old, he was interrogated by a sheriff's deputy and a social worker in the living room of his home. They tried to bully him into saying that he had been touched by a neighbor named John Stoll. "I remember them yelling at me, crouching down so they could look me right in the eye," Sampley says. They described what Stoll had supposedly done to other kids, using words and descriptions that made Sampley feel dirty and uncomfortable. "I wasn't supposed to be talking about these things," he recalls. "I was supposed to be riding my bike and playing G.I. Joe like all the other kids."
Sampley is twenty-nine now, a signmaker with a three-year-old daughter. He comes across as an archetypal guy's guy. His apartment is decorated with Budweiser collectibles, his refrigerator stocked with beer, red meat and condiments. He's easygoing and good-natured, the kind of person you'd fall into conversation with in a bar. But when he talks about how he was coerced by the investigators working for Jagels, his voice becomes pinched and his pale blue eyes narrow. They visited him seven or eight times, Sampley recalls. "You need to tell us what happened," they told him. "It's not going to go away if you don't tell us. We are not going to leave." Finally, they hauled him into an interrogation room in the county courthouse. In tears, Sampley finally told them what they wanted to hear. He "confessed" to everything they were suggesting. "I just wanted them to go away and leave me alone," he says.
Days before the trial, Sampley was brought into the district attorney's office and introduced to Stephen Tauzer. Tauzer was Jagels' right-hand man, the assistant DA entrusted with the job of putting Stoll and other alleged child molesters behind bars. Tauzer sat across from Sampley and ordered the boy to recount the stories of molestation that had been foisted upon him. As he listened, Tauzer made suggestions and amendments. "We need to make sure you say it this way in the trial," he explained. Sampley's memories of the scene are distilled to a few images from his child's mind: Tauzer's white hair, his pen scratching against his notepad, the tape recorder that Tauzer rewound every time Sampley revised the story to correspond to Tauzer's directions.
After Sampley took the stand and delivered the testimony coached by Tauzer, Stoll was convicted on seventeen counts of sexual abuse and sentenced to forty years in prison. Inmates convicted of pedophilia live in constant danger of being killed; in the prison hierarchy, they are considered the bottom feeders. To protect himself, Stoll devised an alias: He researched the case of a drug dealer who had gotten the same sentence as he did, and that became his autobiography. "I would have lost my mind if I had to live in protective custody, in constant isolation," says Stoll. "Reinventing myself was the only way to make prison remotely tolerable."
Last spring, an evidentiary hearing was held to determine if Stoll had been wrongly convicted. Once again, Sampley took the witness stand - but this time he wept as he recounted how he had been pressured to testify as a child. For two decades he had been steeped in guilt that no one could assuage. "I told a couple of girlfriends who I got close to that I had lied about being molested, and that there was a man sitting in prison for it," Sampley says. "All they could say was, 'Well, there's nothing you can do about it now.'" At the hearing, after Sampley finished recanting his childhood testimony, he looked Stoll straight in the eye and pleaded for his forgiveness.
Four days later, on his sixty-first birthday, Stoll was released from the Kern County jail, the same place where he had first been taken into custody twenty years earlier. As his attorneys drove him away from Bakersfield and over the county line, everyone in the car cheered. Stoll called Sampley from the restaurant where he went to celebrate, just as he was cutting into his first filet mignon in two decades. "Hey, Eddie! I'm talking to you on a cell phone, and I'm about to eat a big ol' steak!" Stoll yelled. Sampley burst into tears. "I felt happier than I'd been in years," he says.
But like others whose lives were destroyed, Sampley is still waiting for the man who put at least two dozen innocent people behind bars to be held accountable. "Ed Jagels is the one who's the criminal," Sampley says. "He's the one who should be in jail."
In a strange karmic twist, the finger-pointing and false accusations and paranoia about pedophilia that Jagels started back in the 1980s are now being directed at him. Every barfly and drug-store cashier in Bakersfield seems to have a take on his sexual preferences: There are people who insist he's gay, people who say he's a child molester, people who claim to know someone who knows someone with photographs of Jagels in compromising positions with young boys. A few years ago, a divorce decree in the name of Jagels' first wife, Stacey, was circulating around town, claiming that Jagels' "sadomasochistic behavior" and "lewd and deviant" relationships with young men drove her to leave him. It was riddled with grammatical errors and is now believed to be fraudulent. In the end, no one has anything resembling proof to support these theories -- just as Jagels had no material evidence against the people he locked up for molesting kids.
The wildest theory started during the same era that Jagels was waging his misdirected crusade against child molesters. Between 1981 and 1984, three prominent men in Bakersfield were murdered by their teenage lovers. At his trial, one boy testified that he had sex with 150 closeted gay men in Kern County, a group of judges, prosecutors and other pillars of the community who became known in local lore as the Lords of Bakersfield. For years, rumors about the dark cabal filtered through town: the wild parties at the house of Ted Fritts, publisher of the Bakersfield Californian, where teenage boys mingled with graying power brokers; the park at the edge of town where homeless kids would swap sex for money or drugs.
But while such accusations were being directed at his friends and associates, Jagels was busy building his political reputation by convicting ordinary citizens. In those days, thanks in large part to all the attention he received for his handling of the high-profile molestation cases, Jagels was the golden boy of California Republicans. People were talking about Ed Jagels being the next attorney general, Ed Jagels being the next governor. The men implicated as the Lords of Bakersfield were part of his crowd - his campaign manager, members of his own staff. They comprised the good-ol'-boys' network that runs the town, and he had nothing to gain by going after them.
Then, twenty years later, another murder reignited the rumors. In September 2002, Stephen Tauzer -- the prosecutor who served as second-in-command to Jagels -- was discovered dead in his garage with multiple stab wounds to his head. It turned out that Tauzer, who was fifty-seven at the time, had been involved for several years with a teenager named Lance Hillis. Hillis was addicted to crystal meth, and many in Bakersfield believe Tauzer was giving the boy drug money in return for sex. Whatever the nature of their relationship, Tauzer repeatedly used his influence as a prosecutor to prevent Hillis from being sent to jail. Sentenced to a rehab center and high on meth, Hillis stole a car and fled the facility -- only to slam head-on into an oncoming truck. He died instantly. A month later, the boy's father, Chris Hillis, murdered Tauzer.
Hillis told prosecutors that he had twice called Ed Jagels and asked him to tell Tauzer to stop meddling and let the law decide his son's fate. If Jagels did intervene, however, he didn't do it forcefully enough to stop Tauzer. "Jagels was protecting his friend rather than doing the right thing," says Kyle Humphrey, the attorney who represented Chris Hillis. "My client believes that if Jagels had stepped in and reprimanded Tauzer, his son would be alive today."
A few months after Tauzer's murder, the Bakersfield Californian ran a six-part investigation drawing parallels to the Lords of Bakersfield murders twenty years earlier. Running the piece was a gutsy move for the newspaper. Although Ted Fritts is no longer the publisher -- he contracted AIDS, and died in 1997 -- the Californian is still put out by his family. After years of being a virtual mouthpiece for the DA's office, the paper confronted Jagels about his role in both the Tauzer case and the Lords rumors. When Jagels refused to be interviewed, the paper ran a list of the questions submitted to him in writing, asking if he had "helped cover up and protect" those suspected of engaging in sex with minors. Jagels refused to respond, saying the questions were "so loaded with malice, innuendo and false assumptions that they are, for the most part, statements of implied wrongdoing, rather than legitimate investigatory questions."
The response angered many in Bakersfield. "Ed Jagels needs to get over it," one reader wrote to the paper. "Rather than dealing with the controversy in a professional, mature manner, Jagels has pouted, tightening his lips and the lips of many of his staff members." The story also prompted speculation that Jagels had launched his frenzied pursuit of ordinary citizens to divert attention from the illicit sexual behavior of the city's ruling elite. "As soon as I read about Tauzer and the Lords of Bakersfield, I began to think that the 1980s molestation trials were overcompensation - covering up their tracks by going after other people," says Kyle Beckman, who served as an investigator for the district attorney's office under Jagels.
Despite the bad publicity and salacious rumors, despite the widespread anger toward Jagels, nothing has yet loosened his grip on power. He has been re-elected five times, and during the past twenty years he has had only one challenger -- an attorney who was once jailed for biting someone in court. "No one wants to take Jagels on in the DA race, because they would lose," says attorney Kyle Humphrey. Jagels is backed by the sheriff, the highway patrol and the prison guards, and law-enforcement officers go door to door campaigning for him. In a law-and-order place like Kern County, that's all the endorsement he needs. "This is an oil and ag town -- people work hard here," says Dominic Eyherabide, a public defender who has squared off against Jagels in court. "Nobody sits around at night wondering if Ed Jagels is doing a good job, as long as he keeps pounding his chest saying he's tough on crime."
A subdued man with a prepubescent stamp collector's build, Jagels burnishes his macho image by going out on raids with the cops dressed in perfectly coordinated sportswear, a gun shoved into his holster. Last spring, he showed up to nab a trio of bear poachers. Another time, he hooked up with the rural-crime task force, outfitted in virgin Levi's and work boots, as they rounded up a bunch of stolen farm equipment. Jagels makes sure the media are notified about his outings so that he appears on the nightly news, immortalized on video.
Even when he's caught abusing his power, Jagels knows how to play to his constituency. Last October, a federal judge reversed a death sentence that Jagels obtained against a murder suspect, citing the DA for concealing the reduced sentences he gave to jailhouse snitches in return for their testimony. Jagels dismissed the judge as an unpatriotic liberal: "What do you expect from a court that thinks the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional?" he told reporters.
In fact, Jagels seems to devote more energy to public relations than to fighting crime. Former employees say that the DA doesn't spend a lot of time in the office, preferring to delegate tasks to his assistants. "I think of Ed Jagels as kind of an aristocrat," says Eyherabide. "He doesn't really need this job because of his family money. All of his rhetoric about keeping the streets safe for the people of Bakersfield - it feels like a form of noblesse oblige."
Jagels tends to take off early for the weekend to go hunting, or to one of his three vacation homes in the mountains or at the beach. He travels to exotic locales -- to Kenya, Tanzania, Alaska -- to hunt big game. The stuffed wild boar, Cape buffalo and kodiak bear displayed in his homes testify to his prowess. Once, Bryanna Jagels walked into the couple's ski house in the Sierra Nevadas to find the carcass of a cheetah mounted in the living room. She picked up the phone and called her husband.
"There's a cheetah on the wall," she said.
"Yep," Jagels replied.
"That's an endangered species, Ed."
"Yep," Jagels said, giggling mischievously.
"Ed is very anti-PC," says Bryanna. "I love that about him. It takes a lot of guts to be such a nonconformist."
Bryanna remains surprisingly supportive of her husband, given that she considers herself one of his victims. A statuesque woman with a wicked sense of humor, she spent five years of her marriage addicted to the painkiller OxyContin, often popping as many as sixty a day. Last fall, when she was arrested for giving fraudulent information to a doctor to obtain a controlled substance, she confronted Jagels and accused him of tipping off the cops. "It's my job," he told her. "I can't play favorites."
Jagels told the media that he would stand by his wife and see her through her ordeal. One week later he served her with divorce papers. They were dated November 25th, a few days before he announced his support for her. He also threatened to use his power as DA to give the court additional information on her criminal activities unless she relinquished custody of their five-year-old son, Jeffrey. Doing so would have been illegal, a conflict of interest, but Bryanna believes that the threat alone was enough to lengthen her sentence. "I'm the best example of how cruel and mean the justice in this county really is," she says. "It's personal." She went from dining at exclusive social clubs and bouncing between her husband's four homes to sharing a bedroom with meth addicts in a cramped rehab center whose carpet smelled distinctly of cat urine.
"There were five dogs and cats in that house, and they only came inside to use the bathroom," she says. "Living in that place was like entering Dante's ninth circle."
And yet, after all this, Bryanna thinks that Jagels was trying to save her life. If she hadn't been arrested and forced into rehab, she swears that she'd be dead by now. "Ed is a tough-love person," she says. "He doesn't know how to love any other way."
Word on the street in Bakersfield is that Jagels might not run for DA next year. The torrent of bad publicity over his split with Bryanna and the murder of Stephen Tauzer has taken its toll. You can see it in his face: Once alert and boyish, it looks weary now, defeated, the burden of twenty-two years of vengeance reflected in his sagging cheeks, his pinched mouth, the dark smudges beneath his eyes. He is no longer the Republican Party's golden boy, no longer a contender for state office. "I have a feeling that Ed Jagels will just disappear quietly," says Bryanna. "It's kind of sad. So many people thought he was destined for greatness."
Jagels has also been hurt by the lawsuits brought against Kern County by the innocent men and women he falsely prosecuted for molestation. They have already cost the county $5 million, and John Stoll is suing for $50 million. Stoll walked out of jail last year with seven teeth in his mouth, the clothes on his back and $200. Most members of his family were dead. His son Jed had long ago ceased talking to him, force-fed so many stories of molestation that he still believes they're true. "You can't put a price tag on my life," says Stoll. "You can't give me back my son, or what I lost in those twenty years."
Last year, Kern County was ordered to pay $4.25 million to Jeff Modahl and six others prosecuted as part of the same alleged pedophilia ring. Modahl used his share of the money to buy a seven-acre farm in Nebraska, where he lives with his new wife, Johanna, and their three-year-old son, Jeffrey. His daughters Carla and Teresa have moved to Nebraska as well, just a fifteen-minute drive from their father. This past Thanksgiving was the first they'd spent together as a family in twenty years.
"When I was sitting in my prison cell, I never dared imagine that I would have such a good life again," says Modahl. And yet: Every few weeks, Modahl wakes up in the middle of the night, his heart thundering, convinced that the whole thing -- his daughters, his farm, his wife and son and ten grandchildren -- is nothing more than a dream. He lies in the dark, holding his breath, afraid that his new life will evaporate the moment he opens his eyes. That when he looks up he will see not the slowly revolving ceiling fan he installed over the bed last summer but the steel bridge of a prison bunk.
"It's been five years, and I still can't shake off that fear," he says. "I wonder if I ever will."
