Chapter 7
The Morass
On December 9, 1983, the Alameda Sheriff’s Department conducted a very interesting interview. It concerned a thirteen-year-old girl named Trina Bence, who had known Kellie Poppleton at Fremont’s Centerville Junior High School. Bence’s story about her whereabouts on the day of Poppleton’s disappearance was so inconsistent that the police brought her in again for questioning on December 10. Under intense scrutiny, Bence’s story began to unravel. By midafternoon she admitted that she and another thirteen-year-old girl, Cynthia Reppond, had lured Poppleton to a liquor store where a seventeen-year-old boy and a twenty-seven-year-old drug dealer, Julian Ramirez, were waiting. Bence and Reppond were sure that Poppleton had been snitching on their drug operations with Ramirez at Centerville Junior High. They vowed to teach her a lesson.
But according to Trina Bence, the “lesson” soon got out of hand after they hustled Kellie into Ramirez’s 1973 Grand Prix. Driving up Niles Canyon Road, Reppond and Bence held Kellie’s arms while the seventeen-year-old boy hit her repeatedly in the face and chest with brass knuckles. When Ramirez stopped the car in a rural location, he began working Kellie over with a wooden billy club. Then things really got out of hand. According to Bence, Ramirez and the boy sprawled Poppleton on the ground and pulled her pants down. In a frenzy they sexually mutilated her with a nine-inch butcher knife. The boy took off his red necktie and tightened it around Poppleton’s throat while Ramirez stuck a plastic bag over her head and fastened it with a wire. They drove to Kilkare Road in Sunol and dumped Poppleton’s barely alive body alongside the pavement into the wet grass.
At 6:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, December 11, Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies swooped down on three separate addresses and arrested Cynthia Reppond, Julian Ramirez and the seventeen-year-old boy. The news hit the papers and airwaves like a thunderbolt.
It certainly seemed like the twenty-seven-year-old Ramirez was the right man for the crime. He was a known drug dealer with arrests for heroin possession, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary and possession of stolen property. It seemed logical that he had decided to get even with a “snitch” who threatened his operations by killing her in the most brutal fashion possible, thereby scaring off any other future snitches. For all intents and purposes it seemed like the Kellie Poppleton murder had been solved.
Then things began to fall apart.
Teacher Dave Dillon said, “I can’t believe about those drugs. It just doesn’t seem possible.”
Rob Taylor, an ex-boyfriend of Cynthia Reppond’s, echoed Dillon’s comments regarding Reppond. He told a reporter for the Fremont Argus, “It’s a shock. I can’t believe it. I know she wouldn’t kill anyone.”
It was true that a different portrait of Kellie Poppleton was now being painted by students at Wells Middle School in Dublin, where she had attended classes before moving to Fremont. Several said she had been a depressed girl who often cut classes, talked about using marijuana, and sometimes wept for no apparent reason. But all of them doubted she had been part of any drug ring or a snitch.
“Kellie was not a discipline problem,” Assistant Principal Ken Kohler at the middle school stated. “Her aptitude tests showed above average intelligence. She was just a nice little girl who didn’t have any direction.”
At some gut level these people sensed something the Alameda Sheriff’s Department did not: Trina Bence was a liar.
It soon became apparent to even the Alameda Sheriff’s Department that something was amiss. Bence kept contradicting the statements she had given earlier. Her story always seemed to change in small details. Under further questioning her original story of the murder began to unravel until it was in shreds. In their rush to make an arrest, the Alameda Sheriff’s Department had fallen into Bence’s deranged fantasies. She had made up details wholesale as she went along, taking what she needed from the news reports she had read and heard on television, and what the police were feeding her. She knew just enough about the case to let them hear what they wanted to hear. It was a case of self-fulfilling expectations.
Sheriff Glen Dyer of Alameda admitted on December 12, “Miss Bence recanted some of her testimony and is vacillating on some statements about the murder.”
But it was much worse than just a recantation and vacillation. Her story had more holes in it than a colander.
Tom Orloff, the Alameda assistant district attorney, was furious. It was making his office and the sheriff’s department look like a bunch of fools. He told reporters for the Argus that the Alameda Sheriff’s Department “had acted prematurely in arresting suspects and that the case was drug related.” Deputy District Attorney John Burke went even further to state that no physical evidence even linked the suspects to the Poppleton case. Cynthia Reppond and the seventeen-year-old boy were released from juvenile hall on December 13. Julian Ramirez was kept in Santa Rita jail on an unrelated charge.
The fallout from the rush to arrest the killer of Kellie Poppleton was just starting. The seventeen-year-old told a Fremont Argus reporter, “I don’t like having a label as a murderer. I guess Trina was trying to cover up someone’s name or something. I got a bum rap. I’m a known hoodlum in the neighborhood. I even burglarized a police officer’s house four years ago. But I didn’t kill Kellie. I didn’t even hardly know her. I was home with a friend when she was killed.”
Julian Ramirez was even more outraged. “I’m not a sex-perverted killer,” he told a reporter of the Argus. “Whoever beat and strangled Kellie should be sentenced to death. That’s a terrible crime. That’s as low as a person can get. I might have had drug problems, but I’m not violent.”
Ramirez went on to say that he didn’t know Kellie Poppleton, Cynthia Reppond, Trina Bence or the seventeen-year-old boy. “She [Trina] must have known about my background and made it all up,” he said.
In fact, he didn’t know at the time that Trina Bence lived in the same apartment complex that he did. She had watched his drug operations in the neighborhood and fingered him as a likely suspect in the Poppleton murder.
Ramirez went on to tell the reporter that inmates at Santa Rita’s maximum security unit, Big Greystone, had made life for him “difficult” after they had seen a report on the television news about him and the murder. It made him very nervous.
It should have done a lot more than that. At 8:25 A.M. on December 15 someone in the day room of Big Greystone stabbed Julian Ramirez in the neck with a sharp object, attempting to sever his jugular vein. He was attended to by Lieutenant Dale Berry, who said, “There’s no doubt in my mind, this was done with the intent to kill.” Ramirez had to be rushed to Oakland’s Highland Hospital for surgery—all because of a crime he didn’t even commit.
Phillip Schnayerson, Ramirez’s lawyer, was beside himself. “The Alameda Sheriff’s Department released a kind of feeding frenzy, a blood lust [when they made their arrests]. It seems we turned the clock back to the 1940s when people said, “We don’t care about who it is, just arrest someone.”
All the police had left now was scared, confused, lying Trina Bence.
But not for long. Her hearing was scheduled for March 14, 1984, but on Friday, February 17, Richard Iglehart, Alameda County assistant district attorney, brought the whole sordid matter before Judge Richard Hodge. He told the judge that Trina Bence had concocted the entire story. After reviewing 600 pages of transcripts and other evidence, he pronounced, “I’m convinced she wasn’t even there [at the death scene] and never even knew Kellie!”
Robert Shuken, Trina Bence’s attorney, was furious. He blasted the Alameda Sheriff’s Office, saying they should have known she was fabricating the story. “She [Trina] comes from a troubled, confused background, and fabricated the story to get attention. She garnered information from the police and the press, and then fed it back to them, making them believe she had firsthand knowledge of the slaying details.” In effect, Bence was giving the police and press exactly what they wanted to hear. He went on to say that she barely knew Julian Ramirez, who lived across the street from her, and knew the seventeen-year-old boy and Cynthia Reppond only by sight.
Berry Simon, one of Shuken’s private detectives who had been put on the case, concurred. “We were surprised with the lack of quality of the [sheriff’s] investigation. We refuted every point in their investigation by proving it impossible.”
Investigators had already searched Julian Ramirez’s home on December 11 for brass knuckles and a billy club and came up empty. They had also impounded Ramirez’s 1973 Grand Prix to test bloodstains in the backseat.
But as Assistant District Attorney Iglehart said on February 17, “You would have heard about it by now if the bloodstains linked Ramirez to the slaying.”
Phillip Schnayerson, Ramirez’s lawyer, chimed in. “The one ground they were holding him on is the complicity in a murder. He was never involved and he damn near was killed over it!”
ADA Iglehart did stick up for the Alameda deputies, saying, “Hindsight is 20-20. It’s not every day that police officers are faced with a situation where someone is strongly implicating themselves and other people. The police are in the difficult situation of having to make a charging decision within forty-eight hours after an arrest.”
All in all, the Alameda Sheriff’s Department came off looking pretty bad. Only Trina Bence’s mom, Pam Hansen, was ecstatic. She announced, “This terrible ordeal has brought our family together. It’s made us learn a lot about ourselves. We’ve become closer.”
But perhaps not close enough. Trina opted to live in a distant foster home for a while after she was released, to put some distance between herself and those she had implicated. The obvious reason was feared retribution.
Pam Hansen said, “Trina experienced some problems with other kids in juvenile hall, her first two days there. But on Friday, after her release, all the children clapped for her as she left.”
But there were no happy endings to this whole miserable affair. Everyone in the case had been damaged as it sank further and further into a morass. Cynthia Reppond had been tarred by the false accusations and scorned by classmates. Trina Bence continued to have her own problems, finding it hard to get back to a normal life. Three years after the incident, Julian Ramirez was right back in Santa Rita Prison once again. He may not have been the one responsible for Kellie Poppleton’s abduction, rape and murder, but Trina Bence must have known something about his character to have made him such a viable suspect. On the night of September 12, 1987, he lured a fourteen-year-old girl to his doorstep. She had been walking to a high school dance at American High School and was thirsty. Ramirez promised her a glass of water. When she reached out for the glass, he grabbed her arm and pulled her into his apartment. He tried to rape her, but she struggled free and called the police. Ramirez ran, but he didn’t get far. The police caught and arrested him on a corner not far from where Kellie Poppleton had disappeared three years before. Julian Ramirez found himself heading right back to Santa Rita Prison, where he had been stabbed in the neck almost four years earlier.
Worst of all was the fact that Trina Bence’s lies had kept the authorities from looking for the real killer for nearly three critical months while the clues were still fresh. When they went back to pick up the pieces, many of the key witnesses’ memories had already begun to fade and evidence that might have remained in the area was either washed away by the winter rains or degraded by time.
For the parents of Kellie Poppleton, life became a living hell. Tormented by the memory of their slain daughter, they moved out of the area. Even with their absence, the case, like a festering wound, refused to heal.
By 1997 Kellie Poppleton’s murder remained unsolved. By then the Alameda Sheriff’s Department had gone through several “changeovers” at the top. All of those who had been implicated in the “screwups” surrounding the Poppleton case were now gone. The department looked at the case with a fresh viewpoint by officers not tainted by the original debacle.
With a clean slate and some new information not available in 1984, they drew up a fresh list of prime suspects in her violent murder. It was a very small list. On top of that list were two names: James Daveggio and Michael Ihde. Daveggio had been a bartender in Sunol at the time. He even knew Hans Kuendig, the man who had found Poppleton’s body lying by the side of the road. Ihde lived fairly close to where Poppleton had been abducted. Just like Gloria Hazelwood of Jackson, California, Poppleton had been beaten in the face by some blunt object. Her hyoid bone had also been bruised on the right side. And just like in the case with Hazelton, a red rag or red tie had been attached to her body. A red rag had been used to tie Hazelwood’s hands together while she was being raped. Poppleton had had her life choke out by one.