Lambkin and Marcia are back at their desks after a week off following Christmas. Marcia spent the holiday with his wife, children, and large extended family. Lambkin joined his sister and her husband for an early dinner at a fashionable restaurant. Like Lambkin, his sister is childless, but passionate about her pets. They bought gifts for each other’s dogs and exchanged them on Christmas night.
The detectives are hunched over their desks, with the twenty-two Gorman murder books stacked up beside them. The books’ headings include “Suspects A-K,” “Suspects L-Z,” “Phone Threats,” “Crime Reports,” “Hamilton High School Data.” A dozen photocopied newspaper articles about the crime are taped to the wall. The murder was covered extensively, and the headlines included: “Honor Student, 16, Found Slain in Home”; “Father, Sister Find Body of Victim”; “Police Seek Clues in Sex Slaying of Girl, 16”; “Beverlywood Slayer Still Hunted”; “Security Patrol Begins Job in Beverlywood.”
Marcia is called out to help detectives search for a man who raped three young girls in a South-Central alley, so Lambkin will conduct the interviews this week without him. He drives to the west Valley, to visit one of the last people to see Stephanie Gorman alive. Illene Jackman was sixteen years old and living with her family a few blocks from the Gormans, when she dropped Stephanie at home after summer school. Now fifty-one, she lives in a spacious, ranch-style home and has a daughter in college.
Lambkin joins Illene, her husband, and their daughter at the dining room table. He tells her that the handwritten statements compiled during the interviews in the original investigation are gone. All he has now are the synopses of interviews conducted in 1965. “All I know from the summaries is that you dropped her off at twelve-fifteen and you were with a male.”
Illene explains that her companion was a high school friend. They let Stephanie out in front of her house and watched her walk through the backyard, to her back door. Then Illene drove off.
“And that’s the last time I saw her,” she says, gazing out a window. She turns toward Lambkin. “I don’t remember much else about that afternoon.”
The car she drove that afternoon, she says, was a 1965 Mustang, which she’d won in a radio contest. “It was a very simple time. Our neighborhood was our world. We didn’t drive far, maybe to Beverly Hills or Westwood. It wasn’t like kids today, who drive everywhere.”
Illene says she will never forget Stephanie’s funeral. One of the Gorman relatives ran up to her shouting, “You could have saved her!”
Lambkin removes photographs of Stephanie and other girls from the murder book. The pictures are grouped under the heading “Phi Delts.”
“Was that a sorority?” Lambkin asks.
“It was more like a high school club.”
The girls in the photos smile demurely and are neatly dressed in cashmere sweaters and skirts. They wear headbands, and their shoulder-length hair is lacquered, with perfect flips at the ends.
Lambkin pushes aside the photographs and asks, “What would have been her nature if she was confronted by someone in the house?”
“She was very athletic,” Illene says. “But she’d be in total shock. I don’t see her putting up a big fight.”
“Do you know if she was sexually active?”
“No,” she says, firmly. “Not too many of us were then.”
“Do you recall any major work being done on the house?”
She shakes her head.
Lambkin drops a picture of Rossi on the dining room table. “He look familiar?”
“No,” she says.
He then places the 1965 suspect composite beside Rossi’s picture.
Illene’s daughter, who has quietly watched her mother during the interview, studies the two pictures and says, before anyone can respond, “They look exactly alike.”
Back in the squad room, Lambkin studies two of Michael Goldsmith’s old arrest reports that Marcia recently unearthed. In 1986, a vice officer scanning an underground paper discovered an odd personal ad: “For Women Only. Male Outcall.” When a woman officer called the phone number listed, Goldsmith told her he charged $75 an hour for a “date.” Two days later, the officer met Goldsmith at a San Fernando Valley restaurant.
The arrest report documents the conversation:
“What do I get for seventy-five bucks?” the officer asked Goldsmith.
“Are you into spanking, fetishes, or bondage?”
“No, I’m just a normal person.”
“Then I’ll give you straight sexual intercourse.”
Goldsmith was booked for prostitution. After waiving his rights, Goldsmith told officers, “Yeah, I run my own outcall service. Mine is for women only. But I do have four whores working for me.”
Because Stephanie was tied up with rope, Goldsmith’s comments about bondage pique Lambkin’s interest. He locates the second arrest report, which details Goldsmith’s arrest for spousal abuse. According to the report, Goldsmith’s wife told the officers, “Take him away. He’s beaten me up.”
“Yeah, I hit her,” Goldsmith responded. “She’s banging everyone in the building.”
Lambkin calls an LAPD psychologist, who suggests that Goldsmith “might have been a goofy kid who interjected himself into the case for attention.” Still, Lambkin continues to feel uneasy about Goldsmith. And that casual comment, “Yeah, I hit her,” interests Lambkin.
Lambkin continues scouring files, thinking through each new bit of information from every perspective. His attention grows more intense when he learns that the friend Goldsmith claimed he intended to visit, Robert Gelf, told detectives that his family had sold the house to the Gormans four years before the murder.
Lambkin tracks down Gelf and stops by his West Side house on a late Thursday afternoon. Goldsmith’s friend is bald now, with just a fringe of gray hair. He wears a thick gold chain around his neck, and a matching gold bracelet. Lambkin asks him about Goldsmith and shows him his picture.
“I don’t remember knowing someone this odd-looking,” Gelf says.
“You remember any relationship with him?” Lambkin asks.
“No. He just looks vaguely familiar.”
“At the time, you told police he should have known you didn’t live there.”
“That’s probably right. I just can’t remember it,” he says apologetically.
“His story just doesn’t hold up,” Lambkin says. “It’s one of those bothersome things in the case.”
“I wish I could remember more.” Gelf studies the ceiling for a moment and says, “I hope you catch this guy. I remember being really flipped out about the murder, totally shocked. If it was a few years earlier, it could have been my sister.”
Lambkin asks Gelf about the provenance of the real estate. Although highly unlikely, Lambkin knows it is possible Rossi could have left his fingerprint in the hallway before the Gormans lived there. Gelf says his family moved into the house in about 1950 and sold the property to the Gormans eleven years later. Lambkin then lists Rossi’s various jobs to find out whether he had ever had a reason to visit the house.
Gelf shakes his head.
“This is a long shot, but I want to see if there’s any possibility that you might know him.” Lambkin shows him the composite and a picture of Rossi.
Gelf slips on a pair of reading glasses. “It’s a very common-looking face. But no.”
As Lambkin walks out, he notices a Salvador Dalí print on a wall. “I love Dali,” Lambkin tells him. “I’ve got a number of them at home.”
Gelf, who seems surprised that an LAPD detective is a Dalí aficionado, shows him a few other prized pictures, including a Picasso print. Lambkin rhapsodizes about the Picasso museum in Barcelona.
Later in their conversation, Gelf mentions that his sister works for a woman’s fashion design company in Los Angeles. Lambkin is familiar with the name.
“How do you know that?” Gelf asks.
“Since I was in high school, I’ve subscribed to women’s fashion magazines,” Lambkin says. “I came to L.A. to become a fashion photographer.”
On Monday morning, Lambkin studies a Gorman murder book while listening to the English punk band 999 on his CD player. As Marcia ambles into the office, the song “I Believe in Homicide” is blaring.
Marcia rolls his eyes. “That’s worse than what my kids listen to.”
“You need to broaden your taste in music,” Lambkin says. “This song will get you in the right frame of mind to do your job.”
Lambkin flips off his CD player and the detectives head for the parking lot. At Nate ‘n Al’s, a Beverly Hills delicatessen, they meet George Smith, an eighty-two-year-old lawyer with whom Stephanie’s father, Edward, worked in the 1960s and ’70s. Larry King holds court at a corner table.
Just to be thorough, the detectives want to learn whether Gorman ever handled any criminal or divorce cases, which sometimes generate vengeful clients. But Smith says Gorman specialized in business law and estate planning before being appointed to the bench. He assures the detectives that it is highly unlikely Gorman ever had a client or an adversary who sought revenge.
“It’s hard to convey to you people what a decent, nice person he was,” Smith says. “He was a person of the highest caliber—honest, with integrity, and very capable.”
He lifts his spoon from his oatmeal, his eyes opaque with a distant memory. “I’ll never forget where I was when I heard the news. I was driving. I heard it on the radio. I had to pull over. It was like someone punched me in the gut. You read in the paper about three hundred people being killed. It doesn’t mean anything. But I knew those Gorman girls. We’d bring our kids to bar conferences then.”
He pushes his oatmeal aside. “I thought this would kill Ed. At the time, he had a heart problem. I really thought it would kill him.”
Lambkin and Marcia tell him about Vincent Rossi and show him the composite and the current photograph.
“I have no recollection of such a person,” Smith says. “My memory’s not that good. I’ll be eighty-three in March. I do remember that, at the time, I heard a relative did it—a demented cousin who got in the house. But there were a lot of amateur sleuths, a lot of theories going around.”
Smith mentions that he still heads the Stephanie Gorman Memorial Scholarship Fund at Hamilton High School. But the account has dwindled to $9,000. “I doubt the kids there know who she is now,” he says. “She’s probably just a name to them.”
He launches into a long reverie about Los Angeles, a paradise lost. “My dad used to take me for drives and I could smell the fragrant orange groves. It was a wonderful city then. You never locked your door. I used to let my kids sleep in the yard. We were a decent city then. We could take walks at night. I wouldn’t dare do that now.”
He extends his hands toward the detectives. “I really appreciate what you’re doing in this case. It would be an absolute miracle if, after all these years, you were able to run this down.”
Lambkin and Tim Marcia finally locate—with the help of an LAPD pension clerk—the last surviving detective assigned to the Stephanie Gorman murder task force. When they discover he lives in a Santa Monica convalescent hospital, they are elated. After months of studying records and files and interviewing peripheral characters, they will finally be able to talk to someone with firsthand knowledge of the case. The detective, Lambkin and Marcia believe, could be an invaluable resource, so they leave a message for him.
The detective’s wife returns the call. “My husband won’t be much help,” she says. “He suffers from severe dementia. He doesn’t even remember being a police officer.”
A few days later, a dispirited Lambkin discusses the case with an FBI profiler in Washington to gain insight into the killer and his crime. Profilers specialize in psychological portraits of serial killers, sexual predators, and sadistic murderers. A profile consists of the probable personality traits, characteristics, motivations, and compulsions of an offender. Profiling—officially known as criminal investigative analysis—provides detectives with a kind of psychological fingerprint that helps them focus on the most likely suspects.
The profiler talked extensively with Lambkin and thoroughly familiarized himself with the case. Then, drawing on personality disorder studies, statistics, computer tracking, and the Stephanie Gorman crime scene files, and guided by instincts honed from studying hundreds of rape-murders, the profiler offered Lambkin his assessment:
The killer probably did not know the Gormans personally. Because the family did not keep a regular schedule, the situation was “high risk” for him. The suspect approached the door with his gun concealed, the profiler speculated, talked briefly with Stephanie to find out whether anyone was home, and then employed the “blitz approach,” punching her in the mouth to subdue her. While she was dazed, he tied her to the bed.
The suspect probably entered the house with a “preconceived sex fantasy” and did not plan to kill Stephanie. But when she managed to free herself, he panicked. It is possible that the murder “scared the hell out of him,” the profiler said, to the extent that it ended his criminal career. Rossi’s checkered job history, tax problems, and obvious instability might be an indication of the incident’s impact.
Even after the conversation with the profiler, Lambkin and Marcia are still troubled by Rossi’s minimal criminal record. But, as Lambkin knows, sex offenders are not always recidivists.
“Whatever this guy’s criminal record is, if he denies ever being in the house, we’re in business,” Lambkin tells Marcia. “That’s the key to our case, right there.”
The detectives have exhausted their interview list. Now they prepare for their confrontation with Rossi. As they discuss strategy, they keep in mind the advice of the profiler who suggested that Lambkin raise Rossi’s anxiety level by letting him know the LAPD has spent months on the case. Lambkin and Marcia now spend long nights meticulously creating props that look as professional as court exhibits.
Lambkin, who has never lost his love of the theater, has perfected his use of props over almost two decades. When he worked Hollywood Homicide, a prop helped him solve a cold case, the stabbing of a man on the steps of a church. After studying the old files and interviewing a few people, Lambkin and his partner thought they had identified the killer, a man who was in prison for another crime. Lambkin knew he needed convincing evidence to persuade the suspect to talk. So he bought a button that looked similar to the ones on the victim’s coat, and obtained the suspect’s fingerprint card from a previous case. Lambkin duplicated the fingerprint on the button, using his own blood, to make it look as if the killer had left it there. He then bluffed, telling the man that new technology had been used to trace the print to him. Presented with the “evidence,” the suspect asked, “How do I know that it’s my print?”
Lambkin showed the man his fingerprint card and said, “You compare.”
The suspect eventually confessed.
The key to the confession, Lambkin knew, was his extensive preparation: if you are going to lie to a suspect, you had better be ready to back up your lie. He remembers this lesson when he plans for the Rossi interview.
Rossi, of course, does not know that the DNA evidence is gone. Lambkin and Marcia decide to exploit this advantage. They recently assigned an LAPD undercover surveillance unit to follow Rossi, and an investigator has managed to surreptitiously photograph him eating soup at a Chinese restaurant. A few days after receiving the photos, Lambkin and Marcia buy a bowl and spoon similar to those in the photographs and place them in a plastic bag labeled as a container for DNA samples. They also mount a photograph of Rossi at the Chinese restaurant.
Next, they choose a detective with straight black hair—like Rossi’s hair in 1965—–and slip a few strands between some glass lab slides. Beside a photograph of the bed where Stephanie was killed, the detectives draw yellow arrows and print, “Where the suspect’s hairs were found.” Lambkin and Marcia also create an official-looking document, laminated in plastic, that reads: “DNA hair analysis … primary DNA profile of hair matches DNA profile from second source (soup spoon).… Vincent Rossi has been identified as the donor of the primary DNA source (hair).”
From Marcia’s late father’s painting business, the detectives obtain a yellowed invoice form that they plan to fill out. It will be used to create the impression that the Gormans painted their house just a few months before the murder, so Rossi will not be able to claim that he left his fingerprint on the wall years earlier. In their final act of showmanship, the detectives will mount mason line-similar to the rope that was used to bind Stephanie—on a board, beneath the heading: “FBI Rope Analysis.”
Lambkin and Marcia plan to secure a search warrant for Rossi’s house, perfect their props, and devise a few others. Then they will knock on his door.