tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11646417.post8958338966528731899..comments2024-03-26T16:11:40.327-07:00Comments on Behind The Blue Wall: [CA] LATE & RAGGEDY, BUT FINALLY, JUSTICE FOR JANET KOVACICH - killed by her deputy husband 26 years agoBehind The Blue Wallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04429113203939514642noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11646417.post-19417890376896344532009-04-26T03:27:00.000-07:002009-04-26T03:27:00.000-07:00NATURE NOIR - JORDAN FISHER SMITH
http://naturenoi...NATURE NOIR - JORDAN FISHER SMITH<br />http://naturenoir.com/Behind The Blue Wallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04429113203939514642noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11646417.post-69743263686359236042009-04-26T03:14:00.000-07:002009-04-26T03:14:00.000-07:00Haunting homicide
Author closes the chapter on Jan...Haunting homicide<br />Author closes the chapter on Janet Kovacich murder<br /><br />By Liz Kellar lkellar@theunion.com<br />Thursday, February 5, 2009<br /><br /><br /> A murder verdict handed down in a Roseville courtroom last week closed the book on more than 26 years of speculation about the Janet Kovacich disappearance — and literally closed a chapter on the mystery detailed in the pages of Jordan Fisher Smith’s book, “Nature Noir.”<br /><br />The Nevada County resident’s critically acclaimed book describes his 14 years patrolling the American River canyon as a park ranger. The chapter “Rocks and Bones” describes in detail the suspicions about Janet’s husband, Paul Kovacich, though Smith uses false names.<br /><br />Smith — who helped Auburn Police investigators review possible dump sites for Janet Kovacich’s body in 1997 — called his involvement in the investigation “never anything more than peripheral.”<br /><br />He perceived his role — with the publication of “Nature Noir” and the subsequent media attention — as keeping alive the memory of the crime.<br /><br />When Smith first was introduced to the Kovacich case, he said, “they’d been schlepping along forever” on the cold case, which was worked intermittently by retired law enforcement volunteers.<br /><br />“I saw a sense of discouragement, a sense of defeat among the (Auburn) police officers, that the case had never come to anything and (Kovacich) was walking the streets as a free man,” Smith said.<br /><br />After all, this was a homicide with no body, no crime scene, no murder weapon and a suspect with professional knowledge of homicide investigations: Kovacich was a Placer County Sheriff’s deputy assigned to the county jail at the time of his wife’s disappearance.<br /><br />Another hindrance was the naïveté of law enforcement at the time regarding the cycle of domestic violence. This was a classic domestic violence killing — but in 1982, the police didn’t have that level of psychological profiling available to them, Smith said.<br /><br />“The Auburn Police Department, when I encountered them, was a great department, but it was a small department,” he said. “I think they saw a homicide once every five years.”<br /><br />‘Rocks and Bones’<br /><br />Smith retired in 2000, after contracting Lyme disease while working in the Auburn State Recreation Area.<br /><br />The next year, he sold a proposal for “Nature Noir” to Houghton Mifflin.<br /><br />“I went through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases for the book — going through my notes, my old reports,” Smith said.<br /><br />The cases he chose had to fit into the larger narrative arc of the fate of the Auburn Dam.<br /><br />“The book was not intended to be a collection of anecdotes,” he said. “It was intended to be the story of a fated piece of land and its inhabitants — and in particular the rangers ... (who were) looking after this piece of land slated to go under water.”<br /><br />The “Rocks and Bones” chapter weaves together geology and murder. Smith included the Kovacich case for several reasons.<br /><br />“I wanted a story that would talk about geology, because at that point in the book, the story was about what slowed the dam down and caused the limbo the rangers found themselves in,” he said.<br /><br />The search for Janet Kovacich’s body in the old mine shafts and geologists’ trenches dug for the dam site made her case a natural fit.<br /><br />“This case allowed the book to talk about rocks under the dam site — but also it was probably the most haunting case I came across,” Smith said.<br /><br />By the time Smith finished “Nature Noir,” Janet Kovacich’s disappearance was “falling away from institutional memory ... This was a case that was rapidly being forgotten.”<br /><br />And Smith wanted to make sure that wouldn’t happen.<br /><br />“A writer is the memory of the people,” he said. “My friend (the late) Utah Phillips used to say, ‘The long memory is the most radical idea in America today.’ ... Politicians want us to have short memories. Murderers in cold cases count on us not having memories. I set out to try to remember Janet.”<br /><br />‘Noir’ shines light on cold case<br /><br />In November 2004, Smith contacted Placer County District Attorney Brad Fenocchio to give him a heads up that an account of the Kovacich case was about to be published.<br /><br />At the time, Fenocchio was only familiar with Janet Kovacich as a missing persons case, not as a homicide, Smith said.<br /><br />The book’s release in February 2005 “put Placer County on notice,” he added.<br /><br />Within weeks, Auburn police and FBI agents searched the Lake of the Pines property owned by Paul Kovacich’s father, finding only the remains of Fuzz, the German shepherd whose fate is discussed in “Nature Noir.”<br /><br />Also that year, a skull fragment with a hole in it, found at Rollins Lake in 1995, was identified as being Janet’s. Paul Kovacich was indicted for her murder in 2006.<br /><br />“No one in Placer County will ever be willing to say this book affected their timelines,” Smith said. “But it did galvanize public opinion in the case — it speeded up the timeline a little bit.”<br /><br />Charging Kovacich in a 26-year-old case was a “risky” move for the district attorney, Smith said.<br /><br />“He is making what ultimately amounts to a political decision as to whether the citizens of the county will stand for that kind of expenditure,” he said. “The book created an atmosphere where people would support the DA doing something of this type.”<br /><br />Kovacich on trial<br /><br />Smith decided not to follow the trial, although he did attend Kovacich’s arraignment. He said he might go to the sentencing, scheduled for Feb. 20.<br /><br />“I didn’t have it in for Paul. I didn’t want to appear a carrion bird,” he said. “My job was done when (the book) came out. I’m on another book now.”<br /><br />He gives the investigators and prosecutors full credit for the guilty verdict.<br /><br />“There is a part of the justice process that is poetry, especially in a case like this,” Smith said. “The prosecution has to tell a story that makes sense to the jurors.”<br /><br />He has no plans to follow up on the Kovacich case in print. Smith is enmeshed in his newest project: A look at the future of American wildlands in a time of global environmental change. The book will be published by Harmony Books, an imprint of<br /><br />Random House, and is scheduled for publication in 2011.<br /><br />To contact staff writer Liz Kellar, e-mail lkellar@theunion.com or call 477-4229.<br /><br />http://www.theunion.com/article/20090205/NEWS/902049894/1081/NONE&parentprofile=1055&title=Haunting%20homicideAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com