los angeles — Paul Kovacic, the K-9 commander serving a life sentence for the 1982 murder of his wife, has a mixed message for the California Parole Board ahead of his first chance at freedom: He doesn’t want early release — and he didn’t kill his beloved dachshund.
Far from pleading guilty, the 76-year-old says newfound FBI misconduct should overturn his 2009 conviction in a cold case haunting the Northern California foothills. His defense team contends that long-hidden evidence debunks decades-old allegations that Kovačić dashed himself to death, wearing his K-9 badge, weeks before his wife disappeared. Her body was never found.
The dog’s death became a focal point for the FBI years after Janet Kovacic’s disappearance, as agents exhumed and analyzed Voz’s remains in an attempt to prove that her husband had violent tendencies. Paul Kovacic contends that was an alibi that misled jurors to convict him, and he is using his first parole hearing Thursday as an opening shot to clear his name.
“I would like the courts to release me — not parole,” Kovacic told The Associated Press in an interview this month from the California Institute for Men. “I have something to prove – that I am innocent.”
Kovačić’s presentation is based on never-before-seen emails between a forensic anthropologist and a veteran FBI agent who used his personal Hotmail account to describe Kovačić as “our bad guy” and, before testing, walk the expert through “the need to prove to the jury that he has a violent side.”
The use of a private account excluded these emails from FBI servers and what is known as the Brady Materials – potentially useful evidence that was turned over to the defense before the trial.
“This is a very important aspect of our case,” the now-retired agent, Christopher Hopkins, wrote in 2005 about determining Foz’s cause of death. Just months ago, local police asked the FBI to reopen the case.
The FBI declined to comment. But current and former agents told the AP that the messages violate office policy, which prohibits the use of personal email on government business unless specifically excluded for classified activities.
“There is no exculpatory information in those emails,” Hopkins, who long worked as a forensic examiner for the FBI, told the AP.
“I believe my FBI email had significant restrictions at the time or I sent these emails when I did not have access to my FBI email,” Hopkins wrote in a LinkedIn message. “I don’t need to defend my actions to you.”
David Tillman, who prosecuted Kovacic, said the private emails were “troubling” and could prompt authorities to “investigate the integrity of this conviction.” But he said the emails would not have changed the outcome of the four-month trial that included 77 witnesses, many of whom described Kovacic’s fraught marriage and muted reaction to his wife’s disappearance.
“We are not aware of any new facts that have undermined the evidence related to these pressing cases,” Tillman, the Placer County deputy prosecutor, told the AP.
Prosecutors are opposing Kovačić’s parole, saying he failed to complete domestic violence and anger management classes behind bars.
In Auburn, outside Sacramento, the disappearance of Janet Kovačić has been described as “the case that police cannot forget” — steeped in mystery and implicating a law enforcement official.
On the morning she was last seen in 1982, Janet Kovačić argued with her husband and said she planned to leave him with their two young children. The night before, she told her friend that she was afraid of her husband.
Paul Kovacich, who worked for the Placer County Sheriff’s Office from 1974 to 1992, told authorities he ran some errands that morning before stopping at the county jail. He said he returned home to find his wife and her wallet missing.
Investigators were not convinced by the alibi — defense lawyers say they also failed to investigate it — but they lacked any basis to charge Kovačić. Investigators believed it was unlikely that Janet Kovacic would have willingly left her children, citing handwritten entries in her diary that showed how close they were.
Auburn police and dozens of other agencies spent thousands of hours searching for the missing woman. Authorities offered a reward of $10,000. Law enforcement combed the American River canyons and nearby caves. National Guard aircraft deployed infrared heat-seeking equipment.
The FBI excavated an apron using ground-penetrating radar and an instrument that emits sonar pulses. Nearly a quarter-century after the woman’s disappearance, an FBI agent descended into a mine armed with an underwater camera and what the bureau described as a “human scent vacuum.”
“Years before the victim disappeared, her husband told two people that he could commit the perfect murder by dumping the murdered victim’s body down a mine shaft,” Hopkins explained in FBI records obtained by the AP.
A big surprise came in 1995, months after a judge declared Janet Kovačić legally dead, when hikers found a partial skull at the bottom of a dried-up lake. The skull lacked a lower jaw and teeth, but it had a hole behind the right ear that authorities attributed to a bullet.
A prosecutor later described the discovery — and DNA testing that linked the skull to Janet Kovačić in 2007 — as “a pure series of miracles.”
With physical evidence pointing to Paul Kovacic scarce, authorities set their sights on another skeletal remains: a K-9 known as Fuzz. Kovacich had long maintained that the dog had been poisoned in 1982, but the FBI and others close to Janet Kovacich were convinced that the lawman had kicked the dog to death while disciplining it for getting into some garbage.
“I loved that dog,” Kovačić told the AP. “He was a bundle of energy and pure beauty.”
The office exhumed Fawz’s remains, which were kept intact in a plastic garbage bag, in 2005 and sent them to an orthopedic trauma expert for analysis. This is where the client’s emails become relevant, Kovačić’s defense team asserts.
The expert couldn’t pinpoint exactly what killed the dog in 1982, but he found no signs that it had been trampled to death — a discovery that Kovačić’s defense team says Hopkins concealed in his personal emails. The analysis also found an undigested pork rib bone in Fuzz’s remains which the defense claims caused the dog’s death.
“I cannot imagine a more egregious and more clearly documented violation of Brady,” defense attorney Christine Reed wrote to state prosecutors. “Not only did Special Agent Hopkins suppress physical and forensic evidence that would raise doubts about guilt, he concealed evidence of actual innocence – helping the real killer escape justice.”
Kovačić’s defense team urged authorities to investigate whether Janet Kovačić was indeed targeted by the notorious Golden State KillerJoseph DeAngelo, who patrolled the area around Kovacic’s home before he was fired from the Auburn Police Department. DeAngelo met with Kovacich on a case involving another German Shepherd K-9, Adolph.
A judge in 2009 sentenced Kovačić to 27 years to life in prison for first-degree murder, calling the killing “cold, calculated and selfish.”
“It’s hard to be here for something I didn’t do,” Kovačić told the AP. “But if we can prove all the misconduct in this case, it will be worth it. It will open a can of worms.”