Ailing Defendant Can Testify

A terminally ill suspect in the 1969 disappearance of a 3-year-old girl can testify from a hospital bed about his role in the case, an Orange County judge ruled Wednesday.

James Michael Kent, 62, who is suffering from liver and kidney failure, has told detectives that he buried Michelle Pulsifer but did not kill her.

“He is not doing well, and we need to have that information on the record if he doesn’t last until trial,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Larry Yellin said.

The lawyer for Donna Pulsifer, Michelle’s mother and a defendant in the case, objected to recording Kent’s testimony before his background could be better researched.

“To examine him, I have to know him better,” attorney Ronald G. Brower said.

Michelle disappeared while in her mother’s custody in the summer of 1969, when Pulsifer and Kent were living together in Huntington Beach. The couple, who moved to the Midwest together later that summer but stopped dating several years ago, were arrested in September and charged with killing Michelle.

According to an affidavit Yellin recently filed in Judge John D. Conley’s Santa Ana courtroom, Michelle’s mother called Kent into their bedroom one morning in early July 1969.

“Mr. Kent has indicated that he was led to the dead body of Michelle Pulsifer by the co-defendant,” the document reads. “When the co-defendant asked, ‘What are we going to do,’ he took Michelle Pulsifer’s body and buried her somewhere on Williams Canyon Road” in eastern Orange County.

A five-day search for the girl’s body after their arrest was futile.

Pulsifer, 58, is being held at Orange County Jail on $1-million bail. She has pinned responsibility for Michelle’s death on Kent, with her lawyer pointing to his drug and assault convictions as evidence of his violent nature.

Brower also said his investigators had gathered information showing that Kent was cruel to children.

Kent is in the inmate unit at Western Medical Center-Anaheim; he was released recently from the intensive care unit there after suffering internal bleeding. At the time of his arrest in Lakemoor, Ill., he was on that state’s waiting list for a liver transplant.

Since his first court appearance in September, Yellin said, Kent appears to have aged 10 years.

Both the prosecutor and Kent’s attorney, Lisa Ann Eyanson, told the judge they wanted to speed up his testimony date to ensure that he would still be healthy enough to testify. The judge seemed to agree.

“It’s something out of the ordinary due to an extraordinary medical condition,” he told them.

A hearing to schedule Kent’s testimony and determine what kinds of medical limitations will be imposed was set for Wednesday, the defendant’s 63rd birthday.