CHAPTER 30
THE HUMAN CRY
Retired sergeant Frank Salerno, the partner in a legendary pairing of investigators, looked comfortable in the witness chair, having occupied hundreds of them during his thirty-two-year career.
To Beth Silverman’s first question, Salerno revealed that his retirement from the LASD did not mean he had gone fishing. On the contrary, he gave his profession as a “private investigator.”
During the next few hours, Salerno spoke of a protocol he had developed and taught regarding homicide cases in which no body had been found, and how he applied it in the Racz investigation. Jurors and spectators were treated to a narrative that might equal a crime movie directed by Martin Scorsese. The witness took them through interviews with a smart, evasive suspect, endless searches through mountains, digging in deserts, crawling into a bootlegger’s cave, and exploring rugged canyons, where actual movies had been filmed. He offered insight into dealing with brokenhearted relatives. And he detailed grisly discoveries of human remains cast aside by savage killers.
The other side of detective work also came out through Salerno’s testimony—hundreds of phone calls, the dull examination of bank records, airline manifests, telephone bills, repeated visits to a shadeless parking area, and a multitude of plodding, hard work. The search and mystery dragged through weeks, then months, and years. Yet, two homicide cops stuck it out with dogged determination. It disappointed Frank Salerno that no forensic evidence ever turned up.
Mostly, they had dealt with a myriad of inconsistent statements, evasion, and outright lies from John Racz.
Salerno’s testimony lasted the rest of that Wednesday and all day Thursday, July 19. He got a short break when a crime lab expert took the stand for a few minutes to verify that an entry on a wall calendar in the Racz home, for April 18, 1991, had been modified. The original words, he said, were “Hell Day.”
After resting over the weekend, Salerno faced a final blitzkrieg of questions. First, though, on that Monday morning, July 23, Judge Coen announced the loss of another juror, who had taken sick. By lottery one of the four alternates would become a regular. Among the three remaining alternates, Barbara Kaplan kept her fingers crossed, hoping to be promoted to serve with the twelve triers of fact.
Fortunately for Salerno, the great bulk of his testimony came from questioning by Beth Silverman, simply because she needed his narrative to lay out investigation facts to the jury.
After lunch the detective caught another break when the prosecution put a telephone company expert on the stand. Jeff Bertrand, an area manager, Asset Protection, said, “I do investigations. Thefts against our property, internal matters, and anything that would affect the assets of AT and T.” His previous twenty-six years with LAPD, after which he retired in 1998 as a lieutenant, had gained him training in bunko schemes. Bertrand had gained expertise in coin-operated telephones, the generation of phone bills, and placement of collect calls.
With Lewin posing hypotheticals, Bertrand established the possibility that someone had placed three telephone calls to the Racz number on Fortuna Drive, from pay telephones at Terminal One, LAX, on April 26, 1991. The first two, at 3:00 and 3:07 P.M., lasted fifty-one and forty-three seconds, respectively. The third call, at 3:14 P.M., lasted four minutes, and was billed as a collect call.
Did that last one mean that someone was necessarily at the house to accept the collect call charges? Not if there was an answering machine, said Bertrand.
According to the expert, “In those days it was very routine for law enforcement units, who are constantly receiving calls, to do it through an answering machine announcing, ‘Operator, we accept collect calls.’” It didn’t escape observers that John Racz had been a sergeant in law enforcement with office duties at the Malibu substation.
In Lewin’s hypothetical, a person could have made the first call, left a message on the machine, made the second call and used a code to make certain the message had been recorded. The third call could be made on a collect basis, and it would be recorded on the receiving number’s bill. Bertrand agreed that the whole scenario would work.
Israels established that the phone company wouldn’t necessarily know if a subscriber had connected an answering machine to his line. And he set his own hypothetical about someone using coins to make calls, runs out of change, and makes the third call collect. Bertrand said it could happen.
The jury would have to decide which one they believed, and if it fit into the matrix of other facts.
Replacing the telephone man, Frank Salerno spent some time explaining the videotaped interview he and Louis Danoff had conducted with John Racz on June 28, 1991. He finished the day with comments about what officers found with a search warrant at the Fortuna house on July 5, which included phone bills and a calendar Racz snatched from an evidence collection bag and defaced the date of April 18.
Salerno spent the entire court day testifying on Tuesday, July 24, and occupied the stand another hour on Wednesday morning. Drained, he finally stepped down.
His old partner, Louis Danoff, filled the chair once more. The detective had worked alongside Salerno until his colleague’s departure in August 1993, then continued investigating the Racz case with the help of a new teammate. Danoff accepted the golden umbrella, and retired on March 30, 2001. But he kept probing the mystery of Ann Racz as a dollar-per-year volunteer.
Danoff told Beth Silverman that the lack of physical evidence certainly did not signify that no crime had been committed. And the passage of so much time had strengthened it.
“Why?”
“Because, after five years, you might have doubts whether Ann is just missing or is deceased. After sixteen years, I think it becomes pretty easy to believe that Ann Racz is dead.”
His face turning gentle, Danoff commented about one of Ann’s children. “I have been in touch with Joann over all these years. Joann was the first one to put in the human cry that her mother is missing. Over these years—and it took a long time to get her trust—Joann has said to me that she believes her father killed her mother, and she has confronted him on numerous occasions in which he never answers her.”
The prosecution next called Joji Yoshiyama, Ann’s brother. Ann, he said, had told him of her plans to end the marriage, and at one point asked Joji if she might be able to stay with him in Gardena for a while if necessary. She had been exceptionally loving and close with her family. “I remember when my dad was ill, she always came to visit him with the children. She would never have abandoned them.”
John Lewin brought up the meeting Joji, his brother, Takeo, and sister Emi had with John Racz on the second anniversary of Ann’s disappearance. With the court’s permission, he asked Joji to read aloud the document he had written afterward. Toward the end of the memoir, Lewin stopped Joji to ask, “Did John appear to be more concerned about the fact that his wife was missing or more concerned about what people might be saying about him?” Before Joji could answer, Judge Coen sustained an objection from Israels.
Joji’s written statement about John’s deliberate answers and “thinking before answering” brought another objection, but Coen overruled that one.
Israels worked on cross-exam to show that anyone might have memory loss, as John had professed, two years after an event, even a traumatic one. He asked, “Did you know your sister had a lover?” but a sustained objection made it moot.
Joji Yoshiyama’s written record of a long-ago conversation had hinted of evasion or lies by the defendant, but only the jury could decide which it was.
Sergeant Delores Scott stepped from the gallery to the witness stand after Yoshiyama’s exit. She told Beth Silverman she had taken on the cold case of Ann Racz in 2005. It had consumed a considerable amount of time to review stacks of previous records before she regenerated the investigation. Detective Cheryl Comstock partnered with her, beginning in the middle of 2006. Numerous discoveries of human remains in the region had not led to any new facts about Ann Racz. Interviews with a variety of people, including Pastor Thorp, Kristin Best, Bob Russell, and John Racz, had reconfirmed known inconsistencies, and spotlighted some additional ones.
Scott described the arrest of John Racz at LAX on October 21, 2006.
After a lengthy cross-examination, Philip Israels asked, “In all of the investigation that you have done in this case, have you ever found any physical evidence that linked John Racz to any harm done to Ann Racz?”
Scott said, “What do you mean by physical evidence?” She made reference to countless pages of investigative information.
“So you’ve got documents, you’ve got papers, right? Do you have any physical evidence, scientific evidence?”
“No scientific evidence. No.”
“Of any kind?”
“No.”
“I have no further questions,” said the defense attorney.
Emiko Ryan, now age seventy, came forward with a spry step, looking determined.
Beth Silverman announced, “Your Honor, for the record, this will be our last witness. I thought you were going to be happy.” Judge Coen smiled.
The witness acknowledged numerous conversations with her “baby” sister in which they discussed the unhappy marriage and plans to dissolve it, but Ann had never even hinted of giving up her children.
Silverman brought up the black-and-gold ring Ann had bought in Hawaii. Emi said that Ann had given it to her aunt Kay, who lived in Hawaii, to take back to the jeweler for sizing.
The final conversation between Emi and Ann, said the witness, took place by telephone on April 21, at three-thirty in the afternoon. According to an MCI phone card bill, it had originated from a pay phone in Newhall, connected to Emi’s number in Mesa, Arizona, and lasted thirty-two minutes. Beth Silverman emphasized that Ann had not made a collect call. According to Emi, Ann had sounded “happy and relieved” about moving from the Fortuna house. She had not mentioned anything about a forthcoming trip, but she looked forward to visiting their mother on April 24.
Beth’s questions allowed Emi to pour out her heartfelt stress and pain from learning about Ann’s disappearance and from the long years of searching for her. The witness described several conversations with John Racz in which he changed his story or cloaked it with evasion. But one thing stood out. Racz had spoken of seeing Ann at the Tips restaurant on hamburger hill, and John said that he noticed Ann was wearing the black-and-gold Hawaiian ring. Emi knew this could not be true.
Time had run out again, and Judge Coen called for the evening recess.
On Friday morning, July 27, Emi Ryan continued her testimony. She told of cleaning out the Peachland condo in preparation for vacating it and finding about $120 in cash. Ann certainly would not have left it there, had she taken a trip.
Another odd comment came from John Racz, said Emi, during a conversation in late May, when Ann had been missing about one month. According to the witness, John said that Ann had no longer wanted to wear her original wedding ring nor to sleep with him. Why? “He told me that he thought Ann was a lesbian.”
A few times, Emi said, she had even accompanied Louis Danoff on a canyon search for Ann. John Racz never had. Also, Emi and her husband, Jerry, had posted rewards for information leading to Ann, something else John Racz had never done.
Emi’s nephew Glenn had made an interesting comment while visiting her in Arizona, the witness recalled. He volunteered, “My father said that maybe Mom is in heaven.”
Joji Yoshiyama, in his previous day’s testimony, had read aloud his notes from a meeting with Racz in April 1993. Emi had also written her recollection of that conversation. Silverman asked her to read it aloud to the jury.
In Emi’s memoir, she noted John’s version of April 22, 1991: Kids came inside, all three. Said kids wanted to eat hamburgers for snacks. So either him or Ann took orders and Ann was going to McDonald’s to get them. Said she came to the garage door and Glenn came to her and said goodbye and kissed her. John said Ann left and never came back. So he went to look for her later.
Observers recognized discrepancies in relation to what had been aired in the trial. All three kids had not been there when Ann left, only Glenn and Katelin. It seemed doubtful that Glenn had said good-bye and kissed his mother. And John’s version of leaving “later to look for her” didn’t fit.
Emi read a notation about John telling Joji that it was the last time he saw Ann. The story later changed to seeing her at Tips to give her money.
The biggest confrontation between Emi and John had taken place on January 19, 1995, in which Racz accused Ann of being somewhere and having sex, and Emi repeatedly slapped him. Beth Silverman asked about that incident and Emi provided all of the details, in specific language.
Winding up, Silverman queried Emi about the likelihood of Ann abandoning her children, failing ever to contact her family again, and missing every important anniversary, birthday, funeral, or celebration among her relatives. Emi said that behavior was beyond any possibility.
As a final point, the prosecutor asked Emi to show Ann’s Hawaiian ring to the jurors. Her aunt Kay had given it to Emi. Withdrawing a red satin bag from her purse, Emi carefully unsheathed a black-and-gold ring and held it up. Silence filled the courtroom.
Philip Israels invoked the possibility that memories can fade over so many years, and gently applied it to what his client might have said to the three siblings in 1993. Next he brought up sex, and asked if Ann had discussed any sexual relationships with Emi. No, said the witness. Had she read the letters between Emi and Bob Russell? No, said Emi, she regarded them as private.
Objections from the prosecution deflated several of Israels’s questions. Regarding the 1995 confrontation between Emi and John in his garage, when she slapped him, Israels asked if John had pushed or hit her. No, she replied, he kept his hands in his pockets the whole time.
Beth Silverman clarified, on recross, that Emi had slapped him about ten times in response, each time, for his saying that Ann was “out there fucking.” Yes, said Emi, that led to each slap.
Israels finalized the testimony by asking if anything had been found when Emi joined Louis Danoff in one of the canyon search expeditions. No, Emi replied.
Alternate juror Barbara Kaplan finally got her wish before court went into recess for two weeks. One of the twelve regulars told Judge Coen that she would prefer not to cancel vacation plans, and he excused her. By lottery, Kaplan’s name came up to be the replacement. She had thought, early on, that fate had put her in this position, and it turned out to be true.
Coen worried, though. With the defense case still pending, he had only two alternate jurors left. As he ordered the jury to return on August 13, and bid them a good two weeks off, the judge warned, “If you forget to come back, I will come and get you.”