A 3rd District judge has dismissed a $6 million "whistle-blower" lawsuit filed against the city by a former patrolman who believes the Salt Lake Police Department botched a serial-murder investigation.
Homicide detectives who have been muzzled by the lawsuit for half a decade say they feel vindicated."I think I've been portrayed for a long time as being the bad guy," said police Sgt. Don Bell. "It's comforting to know that (the judge) has found no wrongdoing."
During a hearing this week, Judge Anne Stirba summarily dismissed the suit that Frank Hatton-Ward has been pursuing since he was fired in 1989 by then-Police Chief Michael Chabries.
Hatton-Ward claimed, among other things, that he was wrongfully fired for going public with allegations that the city wasted taxpayer money by improperly investigating the murders. Firing a government employee for exposing waste is illegal under the Utah Protection of Public Employees Act, the so-called "whistleblower" law. But Stirba ruled there was no evidence to show that the city wasted money.
The ruling came as a big surprise to Skip Jacobsen, Hatton-Ward's attorney, who expected the case to go to trial.
"We're just extremely disappointed in the court's ruling. We disagree with the court's view of the law," said Jacobsen, who works for the Wyoming law firm of Gerry Spence, one of the country's most famous attorneys.
A veteran street cop whom many peers considered a maverick, Hatton-Ward was fired after going public with allegations that the police department's homicide task force botched the investigation of the slayings of several young women in the mid-1980s.
Hatton-Ward believed the task force ignored leads that he and two crime analysts developed that showed members of a local Hispanic street gang were responsible for the deaths of Christine Gallegos, 18, Carla Maxwell, 20, and Lisa Strong, 25, as well as several other girls whose deaths remain unsolved.
In early 1989, Hatton-Ward tried unsuccessfully to get the courts to compel the task force to take his theory and leads seriously.
The task force - which determined that Gallegos, Maxwell and Strong were killed with bullets fired from the same gun - maintained that it pursued Hatton-Ward's information but that it led nowhere. When Hatton-Ward persisted in his own theory, some task force detectives derided him as a "junior varsity detective."
Chabries eventually ordered Hatton-Ward to leave the cases to the homicide squad. But Hatton-Ward continued his investigation, prompting Chabries to fire him in October 1989.
For the past five years, Hatton-Ward, who now works as a private investigator, has been pressing his lawsuit, which was once dismissed by a district judge. That dismissal was subsequently overturned by the Utah Court of Appeals.
"Frank Hatton-Ward's goal in bringing the whistleblower suit was to force good government and that's still his goal," said Jacobsen, who has advised his client not to speak to the press. "We don't believe the city has been forced to show that it properly investigated these homicides."
Stirba ruled that the whistle-blower law does not apply to "judgment calls" in government operations.
"It is clear to this court that there must be room for individuals in government to . . . exercise their discretion, even if those calls might be in error or improvidently made," Stirba said.
Jacobsen said he is considering an appeal of Stirba's ruling but noted that Hatton-Ward is becoming weary of the case. "It's been hard, expensive and draining for him."
Bell said the actions of Hatton-Ward and the two crime analysts, who have since left the department, have been detrimental not only to the investigation but to the families of the victims.
"If they really had great concern about society and the victims' families, they wouldn't have been running their mouths off on talk radio and in the newspapers," said Bell, who up until now has been prohibited from speaking about the case. "Certain individuals wanted their 15 seconds of glory and they got it."
The police department plans to meet with the victims' families soon to show them why Hatton-Ward's theory is wrong.
"They've been the true victims in this whole charade," Bell said. "They've been told only one side of the story by an individual who didn't have the facts . . . (Hatton-Ward) had the ability to obtain the true facts of this case and elected not to. Why he did that, I don't know."