The day after Taga is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, Garcia and Jackson arrive at work rejuvenated and enormously relieved that the case is cleared. Still, there is hard labor ahead before the preliminary hearing and trial. Taga has made numerous admissions, but this is still a circumstantial case, with no eyewitnesses. Taga continues to insist that Yuriko took the poison voluntarily and administered it to Michelle. Because the prosecution might pursue the death penalty, even the most minute aspect of the case will be scrutinized. The detectives still have many leads to follow to buttress the case.
Garcia and Jackson want to update Lieutenant Farrell, but he is not at his desk. “He took a few days off,” a detective explains. “His wife’s sick.”
Another calls out, “He probably stole some of Taga’s cyanide at the search warrant and slipped it into her Cheerios.”
Knolls and McCartin walk across the squad room and congratulate Garcia and Jackson. “When you going to hook up your Russian?” Jackson asks.
“First we have to find him,” Knolls says.
Another detective walks up to Jackson and points to the captain’s office, where a summary is kept of every Los Angeles homicide case from the turn of the century until recent years. “That poison angle,” the detective says, “is one for the books.”
The century-old binders in the captain’s office catalog a vast array of human frailty, the same litany of sins and motives and methods that keeps homicide detectives busy today. The earliest murders, listed in the first dusty blue binder, typed on yellowed paper, the letters faded with age, include:
May 31, 1900: Copeland, A. R., Private Watchman. Held up and shot in back of neck by 2 highwaymen; 6th and Union, 8:45 this p.m.
July, 15, 1900: Mitchell, Elmer, Fireman Santa Fe R.R.… Shot last night by C. C. Tilley, grocer, for being intimate with his, Tilly’s wife.
Oct. 19, 1902: Brag, Andrew. Old man conducted small restaurant, 617 N. Alameda St. Found dead in his restaurant about 7 this a.m.… Brag had been stabbed 17 times. Believed to have been done by Mexicans; purpose robbery.
July 28, 1904: Smith, William. About 3 this p.m.… Smith (colored) became involved in a fight with Bud B. Green and Jim Green near the Pickwick Club on San Pedro St.… Fight started in a conversation relative to Smith’s ability as a chauffeur.… Green stabbed Wm. Smith in the left side, the point of the knife entering the left ventricle of the heart.
During the next few decades, the burgeoning murder rate matched Los Angeles’s population boom. By the 1930s, the LAPD, however, was not much of a bulwark against this criminal tide. Already, it was known as one of the most corrupt departments in the country, where police officers often obtained their detective stripes by paying off downtown politicians or buying answers to promotion exams. Officers routinely used rubber hoses, which leave no marks, to beat suspects during interrogations. Vice detectives padded their salaries with payoffs from madams, con men, bookies, and boodeggers. As a result, crime flourished; and by the late 1930s, Los Angeles had about 1,800 bookmaking operations, 600 brothels, 200 gambling dens, and 2,300 illegal slot machines. When police raids were planned, the LAPD’s Central Vice Squad frequently tipped off the targets ahead of time. A madam named Lee Francis was famous for chilling bottles of French champagne and preparing dishes of Russian caviar for officers while she awaited an imminent raid.
Business owners also paid LAPD officers handsomely for their after-hours work, storming picket lines and busting the heads of union strikers. During the Depression, LAPD officers deputized by counties bordering Arizona formed the infamous “bum blockade.” They met Oakies and Arkies at the state border and roughed them up, discouraging them from looking for work in Los Angeles.
Some civic leaders, clergymen, and businessmen were so outraged by the pervasive corruption in the LAPD and at city hall that they formed an organization called Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC) to eliminate graft in the city. The head of CIVIC and several other members of the Los Angeles County Grand Jury issued a report that stated: “Los Angeles Police work in complete harmony and never interfere with … important figures in the underworld. The police investigation squad is spending its … budget… not on the investigation of crime, but to build up a file of dossiers designed to intimidate respectable citizens whose only crime consists of their unswerving opposition to the present city administration.”
On the morning of January 14, 1937, Harry Raymond, a private detective working for CIVIC, climbed into his car and turned the key. The car exploded, destroying his garage and peppering Raymond with 125 pieces of shrapnel that almost killed him. Investigators soon discovered that Captain Earl Kynette, the head of LAPD intelligence, had been tapping Raymond’s phone and monitoring his activities from a house across the street. Kynette, investigators suspected, had been ordered by Police Chief James Davis to follow enemies of Mayor Frank Shaw’s administration. Kynette and his lieutenant were eventually convicted of the bombing and sent to San Quentin prison. Voters elected a new mayor, Fletcher Bowron, who during his first year rid the LAPD of its police chief, almost fifty corrupt policemen, and about twenty high-ranking officers.
During the 1940s, the five Los Angeles newspapers, instead of filling their front pages with the latest LAPD scandal, now trumpeted the many lurid crimes that plagued the city. Gangsters, including Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Al Capone’s brother, Phil, had gained a foothold in the city, but Los Angeles was simply too spread out geographically for mobsters to be able to control it as they did some East Coast cities.
After World War II, 10,000 people a month descended on Los Angeles, and precipitated even more crime. By the late 1940s, when the city had more than a hundred murders a year, the lawyer Bernard Potter wrote: “Los Angeles has become the dumping ground for the riffraff of the world. Racketeers of every type, bootleggers, bookmakers, black market operators, thugs, murderers, petty thieves, procurers, rapists, fairies, perverts, reds, confidence men, real estate sharks, political carpetbaggers and opportunists. Ask for any violator of the law and we can promptly fill the order.”
The most complex cases—baffling, sometimes sadistic crimes that challenged the resources of divisional investigators—were transferred to the Homicide Bureau, located on the ground floor of city hall and manned by a crew of seasoned detectives with citywide jurisdiction. If a case was more intricate than a “Ma and Pa Kettle murder,” it was sent downtown.
These detectives soon developed a cachet that set them apart from the other officers in the department. Most accepted into the unit were big, burly World War II combat veterans. They dressed in double-breasted suits, florid silk ties, and expensive snap-brim hats; they wore gold ID bracelets and flashy gold rings, and they jotted notes with gold mechanical pencils. They were able to afford their stylish clothing and jewelry because they were privy to valuable information. There was an acute housing shortage after the war, and homicide detectives were the first to know when a body was shipped off to the morgue and an apartment suddenly was available. Some detectives supplemented their income by tipping off rental agents, who expressed their gratitude with envelopes of cash.
These Homicide Bureau detectives were made famous—and in some cases infamous—in the movies and pulp novels of the noir years. The apogee of this era was 1947, when the city’s demimonde and detectives dominated the headlines. On January 15, every investigator in the Homicide Bureau was called into action when the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, was discovered at Thirty-ninth and Norton streets. The city’s most notorious unsolved murder prompted thousands of fruitless tips and more than a hundred false confessions during the year.
Three months later, a matronly woman named Louise Peete captured the city’s curiosity when she was executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber. Peete, whose first three husbands supposedly committed suicide, had served eighteen years in prison for murdering a Los Angeles boyfriend. After her release, she killed again—this time, the wife of a Pacific Palisades man she was trying to swindle.
In July, the gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was lounging on a sofa at his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills house when a hit man, aiming through the living room window, knocked him off with nine blasts from a .30-.30 carbine—a grisly capstone to the mobster era in Southern California. A number of other sensational murders mesmerized residents that year, establishing Los Angeles as a crime capital equal to New York and Chicago—and as a locus for corrupt cops.
The LAPD’s road to reform began in 1950, when William H. Parker, a decorated army captain during World War II, was named chief. Rooting out corruption, Parker created an aggressive, efficient, militaristic organization. Officers who stole money and took bribes were immediately fired. Visitors from other cities, accustomed to slipping $20 bills under their driver’s licenses, were stunned when LAPD patrol officers returned the money with a lecture.
Parker, a law enforcement innovator who emphasized technology, was one of the first chiefs in the country to establish a division to analyze crime patterns. But what he gained in efficiency he lost in community relations. This was an era when many police departments assigned officers to walk neighborhood beats, getting to know residents and merchants. Known today as community-based policing, this approach is now recognized as a good way to fight crime and defuse tension in the inner city. Ever vigilant against police corruption, Parker wanted his officers to regularly rotate assignments so they would not become too familiar with the people they were policing or with one another. Gradually, Parker ordered his men off the street and into squad cars, where they would be mobile and aggressive, and make more arrests. Parker felt it was important to discourage criminal activity before it happened. He called this proactive policing.
While Parker regarded this style of policing as aggressive, residents in black and Latino neighborhoods, who bore the brunt of proactive policing, considered it harassment. Many LAPD officers believed they had the authority to stop anyone, at any time, for any reason. When minorities entered white neighborhoods, they were routinely tailed, stopped, and searched. They also complained that they were often bullied, intimidated, and beaten in their own neighborhoods. Outrage against the LAPD, department critics contended, ultimately ignited the 1965 Watts riots. When it was over, after six days of mayhem, thirty-four people were dead, more than a thousand had been injured, and the damage was estimated at almost $200 million.
While patrol officers and divisional detectives contended with the explosion in street crime and gang problems, the downtown Homicide Bureau remained above the fray, investigating select cases such as mob hits, killings that captured headlines, and the sadistic sex crimes of predators such as Harvey Glatman, known as the Murderous Momma’s Boy.
Then, in 1968, the LAPD was overwhelmed by an assassination that changed the course of the nation’s history. Shortly after midnight on June 5, Robert Kennedy, who had just won the California presidential primary, was following a maitre d’ through the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel after addressing supporters. A Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan jumped off a tray rack, yelled, “Kennedy, you son of a bitch,” and jammed a .22-caliber revolver near the senator’s ear. Then he pulled the trigger.
Although Sirhan was apprehended with the pistol still in his hand, LAPD leaders feared a debacle like the botched investigation by the Dallas Police Department of the John F. Kennedy assassination. They assured the public that there would be no enduring conspiracy theorizing or interminable second-guessing after they wrapped up their case.
Now, for the first time, there was a murder case of such vast scope that the Homicide Bureau’s resources were inadequate. The LAPD created a massive task force called Special Unit Senator. Fifty detectives drafted from the Homicide Bureau and other divisions throughout the city launched an immense investigation and eventually compiled a ten-volume report, chronicling almost five thousand interviews, which concluded that Sirhan had acted alone.
At the end of the year, Deputy Chief Robert Houghton, who headed the task force, decided that in an era of political assassinations and serial killers, the Homicide Division was understaffed and overburdened. Detectives handled troublesome cases from throughout the city, but they were also responsible for the more mundane murders in the downtown area, since Central Division, at the time, had no homicide investigators.
Houghton envisioned a specialized unit, with adjoining squad rooms, combining robbery and homicide specialists who would investigate only the most difficult cases in the city. Many murders are robbery-related, so Houghton figured the two units could benefit by sharing information. Because this new unit would have more detectives than the old Homicide Bureau, investigators could handle a mammoth case like the Robert Kennedy assassination without a special task force.
In 1969, Robbery-Homicide Division was created. A few weeks later, Homicide Special detectives were called out on a case that immediately taxed the resources of the new unit. Roman Polanski’s twenty-six-year-old pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four others were found slashed and slaughtered on Cielo Drive in an exclusive canyon estate off Benedict Canyon. A single word had been scrawled in blood on the front door: PIG.
The Manson Family murder investigation was an inauspicious beginning for this new unit.
The next night another team of Homicide Special detectives was called out to investigate the murder of a Los Feliz couple. There were a number of obvious parallels between the two murders: both sets of victims had been stabbed many times; there was no evidence of robbery; ropes had been wrapped around the necks of two victims on Cielo Drive, and cords had been wrapped around the necks of the Los Feliz couple. Finally, at both murder scenes, there was bloody writing. At Los Feliz, DEATH TO PIGS and HEALTER (it should have been HELTER) SKELTER was scrawled inside the house. Yet Homicide Special detectives decided that the two cases were not connected.
A Homicide Special detective also made another critical error the day after the Cielo Drive murders: he dismissed a tip from Sheriff’s Department investigators, which could have quickly solved the case. The sheriff’s investigators mentioned that for the past week and a half they had been tracking a similar murder in Malibu in which the victim was stabbed to death and the words POLITICAL PIGGY had been printed on a living room wall in the victim’s blood. They had arrested a man who was wearing bloody clothing, driving the victim’s car, and had also hidden a knife in the car’s tire well. The suspect was in custody at the time of the Cielo Drive murders. Still, he could have had accomplices. When the sheriff’s investigators mentioned that the suspect lived with a group of hippies who followed a guy called Charlie, the Homicide Special detective insisted that hippies were not involved in his case. The Cielo Drive murders, he contended, were the result of a major drug deal.
Although detectives did not link the three murder cases until months later, the press was unaware of their foul-ups at the time. And at trial, the LAPD’s mistakes were overshadowed by the bizarre cast of characters and their lurid testimony.
A few years later, a unit called Major Crimes was created and the detectives were assigned to investigate all police officer killings, split the high-profile murders with Homicide Special, and track other complex crimes that were a priority of the police chief. Eventually, the unit was disbanded, and its detectives were absorbed into Homicide Special.
Detectives managed to escape the criticism that was increasingly directed at the LAPD from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the era of Police Chief Daryl Gates. Gates, Parker’s former driver, was another enthusiast of proactive policing. While he led the department, Los Angeles was regularly among the nation’s leaders in settling excessive-force lawsuits. The LAPD routinely fired corrupt officers, but brutal cops were coddled. Even officers who had been repeatedly sued for excessive force—and had lost—were treated leniently, given feeble warnings, and allowed to return to the streets.
Gates claimed that his officers had to be aggressive because they were outmanned. Los Angeles had the lowest officer-to-resident ratio among the nation’s six largest cities. Overwhelmed and overworked LAPD officers had to patrol a vast, sprawling city with a swelling crime rate and the worst gang problems in the country.
Los Angeles voters had rejected several bond measures that would have increased police funding, and die city council kept the department’s annual budget and staffing levels well below those of other major cities. The politicians and white, middle-class residents had a Faustian agreement with the LAPD: the police would keep order, in their own way, at a bargain price, and residents and politicians would not ask too many questions about how they did it.
This agreement, department critics believed, led inexorably to the March night in 1991 when—while their sergeant and a group of more than twenty officers looked on—two LAPD officers pummeled Rodney King, a drunk African-American motorist who led police on a highspeed chase before he finally pulled over. The officers, wielding aluminum batons, fractured King’s cheekbone, cracked his right eye socket, broke his ankle, and broke eleven bones at the base of his skull. Suddenly, the LAPD was at the epicenter of a national law enforcement scandal that presaged the worst decade in the department’s history.
In 1992, the all-white Simi Valley jury’s acquittal set off the most deadly riot of the century. Fifty-one people died and about $1 billion worth of property was destroyed. The LAPD was again denounced, this time for its disorganized and poorly prepared response to the unrest.
Two years later, after O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, the LAPD was again the subject of intense criticism. But this time it was not the patrol officers who were denounced. It was Homicide Special detectives.
Supervision of the crime scene was abysmal, and the evidence was treated carelessly. Detective Tom Lange, for example, covered Nicole Brown Simpson with a blanket taken from inside her home when television cameramen focused on the body. This was a gracious gesture, but a rookie mistake: it enabled O.J. Simpson’s defense attorneys to argue that the blanket could have contaminated the crime scene. The detectives’ problems were compounded when they obtained a blood sample from Simpson at the jail and instead of booking it into evidence, Detective Philip Vannatter delivered it later that day to a criminalist collecting evidence at Simpson’s house. That dubious decision enabled defense attorneys to suggest that police had planted Simpson’s blood on his white Bronco, at his home, and at the crime scene. While Vannatter was hamstrung by the LAPD’s burdensome evidence booking policy, he could have avoided transporting the blood to Simpson’s house.
The interview with Simpson at RHD—about thirteen hours after police found the bodies—was also considered amateurish. This was the detectives’ sole opportunity to question him, but the interview was brief—Lange and Vannatter ended the questioning after only thirty-two minutes—and superficial. On numerous occasions, when it was obvious that Simpson was lying, Lange and Vannatter failed to ask trenchant follow-up questions. “It was about as hardball an interrogation as a celebrity interview with Larry King,” wrote Hank Goldberg, a member of the prosecution team, in The Prosecution Responds.
A number of current Homicide Special detectives are, privately, critical of the investigation. They agree that the interview with Simpson was inadequate and that detectives made errors during the crucial initial stages of the investigation. But they also contend that the case was weakened by numerous prosecution errors, by the racist statements of Mark Fuhrman—a detective in the West Los Angeles Division—and by the inadequate funding of the department’s crime lab and the poor training of its personnel. Despite the problems with the case, Homicide Special detectives believe that Lange’s and Vannatter’s investigation would have convicted Simpson had he not been a famous former athlete wealthy enough to hire a team of lawyers with unlimited resources. Even the much maligned interview, which prosecutors ignored during the criminal trial, helped the plaintiffs’ attorneys during Simpson’s civil trial impeach him and destroy his alibi.
During the decade before the Simpson case city officials routinely denied requests for crime lab funding and new equipment. This bureaucratic parsimony and neglect was exploited during the trial by defense attorneys, who portrayed the facility as a “cesspool of contamination.” Since then, the crime lab has added more than two dozen new employees, spent about $500,000 on training programs, and invested $3 million in upgrading the facility. The department’s Scientific Investigation Division is still understaffed and underfunded-detectives frequently complain about long waits for results—but at least the technicians are now better trained, have more sophisticated equipment, and give more persuasive testimony during trials.
During the mid-1990s, Homicide Special solved a string of murders and LAPD patrol officers managed to steer clear of scandal. But in 1997, after rap star Biggie Smalls was murdered, a few journalists contended that high-ranking LAPD officials orchestrated a cover-up to protect dirty black cops. Then, a year and a half later, the LAPD was battered by its worst corruption scandal since the 1930s. Police Officer Rafael Perez, who had pleaded guilty to stealing eight pounds of cocaine from the LAPD property room, agreed to a reduced prison sentence (five years) in exchange for identifying other corrupt officers, who were later charged with beating and threatening unarmed suspects, planting weapons and drugs on them, and lying in court.
Perez was a member of CRASH, the antigang unit in the Rampart Division, a gritty, congested neighborhood west of downtown with a large Central American population and numerous warring gang factions. Because of overcrowding at the division, CRASH moved to a substation almost two miles away. Officers there, free of supervision, created their own rules, Perez told investigators. CRASH evolved into a police department within a department, an insular, hyperaggressive unit that took proactive policing to a new and felonious level. Officers viewed their confrontations with gangbangers as urban warfare, and they considered themselves the occupying army. Rampart members created their own patches, including a skull wearing a cowboy hat. These cowboy cops routinely roughed up drug dealers and gave plaques to officers who shot gangbangers.
Perez implicated about seventy other antigang officers, claiming they were involved in or knew of crimes or misconduct. He told investigators that he and his partner Nino Durden shot an unarmed gang member and later framed him for assaulting a police officer. After the scandal erupted, the man was freed from prison.
In addition to Perez and Durden, seven LAPD officers were charged with crimes and more than two dozen were fired or resigned for misconduct or corruption. About a hundred convictions were dismissed, and city officials anticipate spending $100 million to settle lawsuits stemming from the scandal.
In the wake of Rampart, police officials assigned new duties to Homicide Special. In the past, if a cop was shot at but not hit, or if an officer fired at a suspect but missed, divisional detectives conducted the criminal investigation. Rampart officers, however, had been involved in questionable shootings, and the follow-up investigations were considered inadequate. So LAPD officials decided that to prevent another scandal the city’s elite homicide detectives should roll on all police shootings. Now Homicide Special, instead of the divisions, is called out up to a hundred times a year for shootings and threats against officers.
Some veteran detectives are so irritated by the callouts, which take precious time away from their murder investigations, that they are considering transferring or retiring. Detectives consider themselves specialists, and they want to focus on their specialty. They believe that detectives in a unit as storied as Homicide Special, detectives who frequently face intense scrutiny by the press and the public because of their high-profile cases, detectives who are considered the finest in the city, should be allowed to do what they do best: investigate homicides.