FBI exhumed a K-9 commander’s dog in a cold case murder. But what really killed Fuzz?

LOS ANGELES– Paul Kovacich, a K-9 commander serving a life sentence for the 1982 murder of his wife, has a mixed message to send to the California Parole Board before his first chance at freedom: He doesn’t want early release — and he didn’t kill his beloved German shepherd.

Far from admitting guilt, the 76-year-old says misconduct recently discovered by the FBI should overturn his 2009 conviction in a cold case that haunted the foothills of Northern California. His defense team says long-suppressed evidence refutes decades-old claims that Kovacich stomped Fuzz, his K-9 badge, to death weeks before his wife’s disappearance. His body was never found.

The dog’s disappearance became a focal point for the FBI years after Janet Kovacich’s disappearance, as agents exhumed and analyzed Fuzz’s remains in an effort to prove that her husband harbored violent tendencies. Paul Kovacich claims it was a red herring that misled jurors into convicting him, and he is using his first parole hearing Thursday as an opening salvo to clear his name.

“I would love for the courts to release me — no parole,” Kovacich told The Associated Press in an interview this month from the California Institution for Men. “I have something to prove: that I am innocent.”

Kovacich’s candidacy is based on previously unpublished emails between a forensic anthropologist and a veteran FBI agent who used his personal Hotmail account to describe Kovacich as “our bad guy” and, before conducting the test, explained to the expert “the need to demonstrate to the jury that he has a violent side.”

Using a private account excluded those emails from FBI servers and the so-called Brady material — potentially valuable evidence turned over to the defense before trial.

“This is a very important part of our case,” retired Agent Christopher Hopkins wrote in 2005 about identifying Fuzz’s cause of death. A few months earlier, local police had asked the FBI to reopen the case.

The FBI declined to comment. But current and former agents told AP that the messages violated bureau policy, which prohibits the use of personal email for government business unless specifically exempted for undercover activities.

Hopkins, who long worked as a forensic scientist for the FBI, told AP there was “no exculpatory information in these emails.”

“I assume that my FBI email was under significant restrictions at the time or that I was sending 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 Tellman, who prosecuted Kovacich, said the private emails were “concerning” and could prompt authorities to “investigate the integrity of this conviction.” But he argued the emails would not have changed the outcome of a four-month trial that featured 77 witnesses, several of whom described Kovacich’s troubled marriage and his muted response to his wife’s disappearance.

“We are not aware of any new facts that would undermine the evidence on these critical issues,” Tellman, Placer County’s chief deputy prosecutor, told the AP.

Prosecutors oppose Kovacich’s parole, saying he has failed to complete required classes on domestic violence and anger management behind bars.

In Auburn, near Sacramento, the disappearance of Janet Kovacich was described as “a case the police couldn’t forget” – steeped in mystery and involving one of the law enforcement officers.

The morning she was last seen in 1982, Janet Kovacich argued with her husband and said she planned to leave him with their two young children. The night before, she had told a 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 errands that morning before stopping at the county jail. He said he returned home to find his wife and her purse missing.

Detectives didn’t believe the alibi — defense attorneys say they didn’t investigate it either — but had no basis to charge Kovacich. Investigators believed it was unlikely that Janet Kovacich voluntarily left her children, citing handwritten notes in her diary showing how close they were.

Auburn police and a dozen other agencies spent thousands of hours searching for the missing woman. Authorities offered a $10,000 reward. Law enforcement searched the American River canyons and nearby caves. National Guard aircraft deployed infrared heat-seeking equipment.

The FBI excavated land using ground-penetrating radar and a sonar pulse-emitting tool. And nearly a quarter-century after the woman’s disappearance, an FBI agent rappelled down a mine shaft, armed with an underwater camera and what the bureau described as a “human odor vacuum.”

“Years before the victim disappeared,” Hopkins said in FBI files obtained by AP, her husband “told two individuals that he could commit the perfect murder by throwing the murdered victim’s body down a mine shaft.”

A major breakthrough came in 1995, months after a judge declared Janet Kovacich legally dead, when hikers discovered a partial skull at the bottom of a dry lake bed. The skull was missing the lower jaw and teeth, but had a hole behind the right ear that authorities attributed to a bullet.

A prosecutor later described that discovery — and the DNA testing that linked the skull to Janet Kovacich in 2007 — as a “pure series of miracles.”

Lacking physical evidence pointing to Paul Kovacich, authorities set their sights on other skeletal remains: the K-9 known as Fuzz. Kovacich has long maintained that the dog was poisoned in 1982, but the FBI and others close to Janet Kovacich were convinced that the lawman kicked the dog to death while disciplining it for littering.

“I loved that dog,” Kovacich told AP. “It was a concentrate of energy and pure beauty.”

The office exhumed Fuzz’s remains, preserved intact by a plastic trash bag, in 2005 and sent them to a bone trauma expert for analysis. That’s where the agent’s private emails become relevant, Kovacich’s defense team argues.

The expert couldn’t determine exactly what killed the dog in 1982, but found no signs that it had been trampled to death – a conclusion that Kovacich’s defense team says Hopkins suppressed in his personal emails. The analysis also revealed the presence of an undigested pork rib bone in Fuzz’s remains which the defense claims caused the dog’s death.

“I cannot imagine a more clearly documented or egregious Brady violation,” defense attorney Kristen Reid wrote to state prosecutors. “Special Agent Hopkins not only suppressed physical and forensic evidence that would have raised doubts about guilt, but he also hid evidence of his true innocence, thereby helping the real killer escape justice.”

Kovacich’s defense team has urged authorities to investigate whether Janet Kovacich was actually targeted by notorious Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo, who patrolled the area around Kovacich’s home before he was fired from the Auburn Police Department. DeAngelo crossed paths with Kovacich on a case involving his other German Shepherd K-9, Adolph.

In 2009, a judge sentenced Kovacich 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,” Kovacich told AP. “But if we can prove all the wrongdoing in this case, it will have been worth it. It will open a Pandora’s box.”