Informant’s Murder Led Prosecutor to Suicide : Investigation: The tragedy haunted a deputy D.A. who felt he was wrongly blamed. He took his life.

Collier Vale was one of the most respected lawyers in the Monterey County district attorney’s office, a driven prosecutor who won numerous high-profile convictions and was a prime candidate for a judgeship.

But after 10 years as a prosecutor, where he frequently worked 60 to 70 hours a week and slowly rose through the ranks in the office, Vale felt that a single case had ruined his reputation and destroyed his career.

On a Thursday evening last month, after telling friends he was tired of defending himself against accusations that never seemed to end, Vale put a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The case that friends say led to Vale’s suicide involved the death of a confidential informant in one of his murder investigations. He was unjustly blamed for the woman’s death, his colleagues say, and he was haunted by the case.

His ordeal highlights the pressures and responsibilities prosecutors face when dealing in the shadowy world of confidential informants. It is a world where prosecutors try to protect people who sometimes can’t be protected, where blame is quickly assigned when the interests of witnesses and suspects suddenly collide.

“Collier’s case was a prosecutor’s nightmare,” said Ann Hill, a deputy district attorney who worked with Vale. “What makes it so frightening is something like this could happen to any of us, no matter how conscientious we are . . . and Collier was maybe the most conscientious of us all.”

Vale’s informant was killed in a burst of automatic gunfire, after her identity was inadvertently revealed. Local press reports appeared to blame Vale for the mix-up, and the story eventually received national attention on the tabloid television show, “A Current Affair.” Vale was extremely upset, friends said, when the controversy became a major issue in the June election campaign for district attorney.

When the family of the murdered informant filed a wrongful death suit against the county and a local police department, Vale knew he would soon face a series of hostile depositions and possibly an embarrassing, highly publicized trial.

Vale, 39, was a proud man, friends said, and he could no longer endure the indignity of being constantly blamed for a witness’s death.

“Collier saw this whole thing as a humiliation and a failure,” said his girlfriend Melinda Young. Her eyes filled with tears and she slowly shook her head. “He just couldn’t let it go.”

The confidential informant first contacted police in Seaside, a blue-collar suburb near Monterey, and told them she had information about a drug-related murder. After Seaside police interviewed the woman, Vale was brought in to talk to her and to prepare to prosecute the case.

Two days later Vale and a Seaside police officer decided to check in with the informant. The police officer, according to court records, called the number, talked briefly to a woman and then Vale picked up the phone.

But Vale discovered that a terrible mistake had been made. Through a mix-up in telephone numbers, the officer had called a woman named Sognia Petite Johnson, 20, instead of Sonjii Yvette Johnson, 23, the informant. Both women lived in the same small city, both their names were pronounced “Sonya,” and both recently had contact with the Seaside Police Department.

While inadvertently talking to the wrong woman, Vale said enough for her to figure out that the other woman was an informant. To protect herself from drug dealers, according to court records, Sognia Petite Johnson spread the word on the streets that “the other Sonya was a snitch.”

Two weeks later, in August, 1989, Sonjii Yvette Johnson was shot to death in the driveway of her parents’ home.

Vale did not learn that the phone call had led to Johnson’s death until about six months later, when a district attorney investigator uncovered new information in the case. Vale realized, friends said, that the tragic mix-up was not his fault. And, after interviewing the woman, Vale had repeatedly offered to place her in a witness protection program. Still, he was plagued by it.

“When you’re a prosecutor, you feel very responsible for your witnesses,” Hill said. “If one gets killed, even if you know it’s not your fault, you’re going to search over and over again in your mind wondering: ‘Is there anything else I could have done?’ You wouldn’t become a prosecutor if you had a casual attitude toward the protection of people.”

And Vale was more protective of his witnesses than most prosecutors. He never simply subpoenaed witnesses to compel them to testify, said Dist. Atty. Michael Bartram. He always attempted to contact them personally. If witnesses wanted protection, he handled the arrangements himself, rather than refer them to the police or the witness protection coordinator. In one murder case he was prosecuting, he kept a picture of the victim on his desk for three months.

Vale never had the chance to prosecute Johnson’s killer. Because of his involvement in the case, the district attorney was disqualified and the state attorney general took over the prosecution. A Seaside man, who had been accused of shooting Johnson so she couldn’t testify against him in a drug- related killing, recently pleaded guilty to her murder.

Vale eventually came to terms with the woman’s death, friends said, but he could not escape the scrutiny of others. In the small, tight-knit legal community of Monterey County, the controversy was a frequent topic of conversation. And for months Vale was confronted with almost daily reminders of the case.

He felt the local press was laying all the blame on him, Bartram said. He was so disturbed that “A Current Affair” was featuring the case he invited Bartram to his house because he was afraid to watch the show alone. And as a result of the wrongful death suit, he was unable to defend himself because he was advised not to talk about the case.

Vale was particularly disturbed that the woman’s death was attributed to his carelessness. One of his strengths as a prosecutor, other attorneys said, was his meticulous preparation, his almost obsessive attention to detail. Every evening he made a neatly numbered list, written in fountain pen in a tight script, of the things he wanted to accomplish the next day. He typed up all his opening and closing statements and every question he planned to ask prospective jurors or witnesses. He even transcribed all his courtroom notes and stored them in a computer file.

A few days after his death, a judge told Young, Vale’s girlfriend, that a prosecutor “can’t survive in this businesses if he doesn’t have a thick skin and a short memory.” Vale had neither.

He was a perfectionist, a high-strung, self-critical man who was never satisfied, said Young, a court reporter. And these qualities, she said, contributed to his death.

“He was very sensitive and always expected the impossible of himself,” Young said. “When someone like this is wrongly accused of imperfections over and over again . . . sometimes it’s too much for them to handle.”

It bothered Vale that he was criticized for not contacting the informant and telling her they had mistakenly talked to another woman with a similar name. But Vale had no idea the call to the other woman would endanger the informant, colleagues said, and the decision to contact the informant was the responsibility of the police. In a recent deposition, Vale explained: “I informed the lead investigator of the situation and was left with the impression that there wasn’t anything that needed to be done, that this was a coincidence.”

The day after Vale’s death, the district attorney’s office was traumatized. The prosecutors, veterans of countless criminal trials, were somewhat inured to tragedy. But Vale was one of the best-liked attorneys in the office, and his death hit them particularly hard.

“I was crying all that morning so I went to see one of our most hard-boiled prosecutors for some support,” said Ann Hill. “But when he started talking about it, he burst into tears and was grabbing for the Kleenex. . . . So I walked over to our investigator’s office. He’s a former cop, a tough ex-sergeant. Mr. Stoneface. We started talking about Collier and then he starts crying. I mean really bawling. . . . The whole office was a mess that morning.”

Vale was widely admired, Hill said, because of his many talents. He was a fine artist, whose pen-and-ink drawings of Victorian houses and animals were so good many thought he should have a showing. He had a great sense of humor, colleagues said, and people often gathered in his office while he impersonated a Korean judge impersonating John Wayne or did impressions of opposing attorneys. He was a former college tennis player who could have made a living as a club pro.

And he was a charismatic trial attorney who had won a number of big cases, including convictions against a county coroner who stole from estates and school district employees who embezzled public funds. His goal was to become a judge, and many thought he was an ideal candidate.

“He had so much going for him, but after all that had happened, he was convinced he didn’t have anything left,” Young said. “His career was the most important thing in the world to him . . . it was his life.” She briefly closed her eyes. “He thought his career was over.”

On Vale’s last day of work, he wrote on his calender a list of 10 possible career options, including entering private practice, teaching tennis or going to another district attorney’s office. Before walking out, he stopped by the office of Karen Rezai, a young deputy district attorney whose work he supervised. When Rezai passed the Bar, he had given her a pen-and-ink drawing of a Victorian house in Pacific Grove, one of his favorites. Vale spent several minutes staring at the picture before leaving.

He took a long walk on the beach at dusk with his best friend, Greg Lehman, a tennis teacher, and then went to dinner with Young. Vale talked about leaving law and trying to get a job teaching tennis at a club. He was agitated about the case that night, Lehman said, but his concern “would come in waves of anxiety.” One moment he would worry about the case; then he would calm down. At one point he said softly: “It’s always there and it keeps coming up.”

After dinner, Vale returned home to his small cottage in Monterey, where he had lived alone since his divorce five years ago. He packed his car for a trip to Yosemite the next day and set his automatic coffee maker for early the next morning.

Vale never left a suicide note, but his friends and co-workers have little doubt that his death was the final legacy in a tragic case.

“Collier probably had some brandy and smoked his pipe, which he liked to do at night,” Lehman said. “He had a gun around for protection, because of some of the people he had prosecuted. . . .

“It must have been an impulsive act. The case was always roaming around in his brain and he probably got to the point that night where he was in a deep morass . . . like he was in this maze and he couldn’t see any way out.”