Taking Sides

We check in with former San Diego district attorney Paul Pfingst, now a defense lawyer, and chat with 2008 Prosecutor of the Year Kristen Spieler

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Appearing for the Prosecution. . .

WITH HER CHEERLEADER GOOD LOOKS and easy smile, it’s difficult to imagine Kristen Spieler prosecuting San Diego’s most notorious stranglers, sexual predators and criminally minded monsters.

Her ocean-view office on the 11th floor of the Hall of Justice reflects her accomplishments and personality. Alongside her computer hangs a print of Marilyn Monroe lifting weights, along with pictures of Spieler’s family and her beloved golden retriever, Farley. The window ledge behind her boasts last year’s Prosecutor of the Year Award from the San Diego District Attorney Association; on the opposing wall is a photograph of the media frenzy that followed the arraignment of Heather D’Aoust, a 14-year-old accused of murdering her mother with a claw hammer. Spieler, 43, was assigned to prosecute Heather and announced to the press in May 2008 that the district attorney’s office decided the teen would be tried as an adult.

Spieler was then targeted to prosecute Samuel Graham III, accused of a double homicide. The demands of both high-profile cases conflicted, and prosecutor Rick Clabby was chosen to replace Spieler and face former D.A. Paul Pfingst, who is currently the defense attorney for D’Aoust.

Previously, Pfingst was Spieler’s boss. He calls her one of his “best hires,” a woman with a “lot of personal credibility.” But Spieler was nearly passed over for the deputy district attorney position she holds today.

“I was hired in 1998, when I was a city attorney,” she says. “It was a three-interview process, and for the last interview, Paul Pfingst and Assistant District Attorney Greg Thompson asked me to come in, and I thought it would be automatic: As long as you didn’t throw up on their shoes, you would get an invitation. Then Paul said, ‘I want you to know you were the 11th person, and we only had 10 openings.’ Obviously, I was crushed.”

Then Spieler was asked to step outside while Pfingst took a phone call that changed the young lawyer’s destiny. While waiting, she burned with remorse over the fact she had agreed to be the last person interviewed and, subsequently, lost a job opportunity. Pfingst summoned her back into his office and said, “Let’s start over. Congratulations, we just got another spot.”

“It sounded like they had just gotten word there was a grant position that had just been funded, so they had one more opening than they had thought,” Spieler says.

Though she says prosecuting criminals is “the best job in the world,” the desire to become a lawyer crept up on Spieler.

She was born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Point Loma and still calls the seaside community her home. Her older brother took advanced classes, but Spieler says she didn’t pay attention in high school.

“I wasn’t exactly an academic star,” she says wryly. “I went to Mesa College for two years and transferred to UCSD. All of a sudden, I liked classes. I liked studying, and I got more confident.”

After college, Spieler figured a law degree would help her in any career of her choosing, and she enrolled at California Western School of Law. But she still didn’t imagine herself as an attorney until Professor Daniel Yeager, her criminal law teacher, told her she would make a great prosecutor.

He was right. Many of Spieler’s convictions have made headlines.

There was the case of Samuel Joseph Graham III, 26, who was sentenced to two terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of fatally stabbing Rock Walker, 51, and Daniel Collins, 50. Their bodies were found April 24, 2007, in a ransacked duplex on Woodman Street in the Skyline neighborhood.

Spieler and prosecutor Allen Brown argued that Graham intended a robbery but was surprised by the victims and murdered them. Items belonging to Walker and Collins were found in the Carmel Valley residence Graham shared with a girlfriend.

“It was a difficult circumstantial case because there were no eyewitnesses,” Spieler says. “Ultimately, DNA evidence showed he touched an item in the home that had blood on it. By that, we were able to move forward. The challenge was piecing together for the jury what happened because the bodies were decomposed. We had to call in an entomologist and use the maggots to establish when each person died, because we didn’t know how long the bodies had been there.”

RECENTLY, A FRIEND ASKED Spieler how she managed to cope with the murder and mayhem that are a regular part of her life. She says she never gave it much thought until she was assigned the Gerald Nash case.

Nash, 62, was convicted last year of first-degree murder in the death of Allen Burton Hawes, a homeless acquaintance whose body parts were found scattered around San Diego County. The challenge, Spieler says, was sorting through a mountain of evidence.

“There were a lot of his writings that went back years and years. They were about torture and sexual sadism and talking about how to dispose of a body and how to get rid of body parts—everything from tossing them in the woods to grinding them up. It was disgusting. You have to read through this stuff when you are trying to find what you will use in the case and trying to understand a person. It was very dark and disturbing writing.”

When Spieler was assigned the case, she was driving home from a trip to Mammoth, and the contrast between enjoying the beauty of nature and the intensity of criminal prosecution hit her.

“I was visiting my brother and my nieces,” Spieler says. “I had been out in the wilderness, and it was beautiful. The scenery was so pretty, and I was totally relaxed. Then I got that call from my boss, saying there were body parts turning up all over San Diego and they were going to assign the case [to me]. That’s when I realized: Yes, that’s what I do. That’s my life.

“But I think this is the best job to have if you are an attorney. Prosecutors get to go in and dismiss a case or convict. That’s what we do. Nothing is ever boring. The cases are always interesting and stranger than fiction.”

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