On the morning of January 11, while Lambkin and Marcia put the finishing touches on their props, Homicide Special picks up its first case of the new year. This is another cold case of sorts. The murder took place three weeks ago—an eternity for homicide detectives.
The victim was Susan Berman, and she had a premonition that she would die a violent death. At the age of thirty-five, twenty years before her murder, she wrote: “I am never secure and live with a dread that apocalyptic events could happen at any moment.”
Her father, Dave Berman, was a notorious gangster whose FBI file described him as a “trained killer” and a “stickup man.” Arrested during the Depression for kidnapping a mob bootlegger, Berman eventually served seven years in Sing Sing. A New York City detective called him “the toughest Jew I ever met.”
During the early 1940s, Berman headed a gambling empire in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but when Mayor Hubert Humphrey shut down the illegal clubs, Berman headed for Las Vegas. He helped run hotels and casinos for Mafia bosses—Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano. Berman also was a business partner of several gangsters, including Bugsy Siegel. After Siegel was knocked off in 1947, Berman and his partners took over his project, the Flamingo Hilton. Eventually, Berman would own parts of several other hotels, including the Riviera.
Susan Berman grew up on the Las Vegas Strip as a Mafia princess. When she was four, her father taught her to play gin rummy so the three bodyguards who lived with the family could keep her occupied. In third grade she learned math when her father gave her a slot machine and a roll of nickels. She finished her homework every afternoon in a casino counting room. Liberace sang “Happy Birthday” to her when she turned twelve.
Yet, Berman was unaware of her father’s extensive arrest record and organized crime connections. He was always nattily attired in a tie and business suit with a monogrammed white handkerchief in the pocket, and she believed he was simply a hotel owner. Berman was told that the three men who lived with them were simply her father’s “friends.” Her mother, a former tap dancer, referred to the family’s occasional late-night trips to Los Angeles during mob wars as “vacations.” Decades later Susan finally realized that the reason the windows in their custom-built house were set so high was to prevent assassination attempts from the street.
Her childhood abruptly ended shortly after her twelfth birthday when Dave Berman died during an operation. The threat of violence that permeated the family’s life in Las Vegas rapidly destroyed Susan’s mother, who suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and was institutionalized. A year after her husband’s death, she died of an overdose of barbiturates. Some friends believed she had been murdered to prevent her from inheriting a share of her husband’s Las Vegas hotels.
Susan was sent to live with an uncle in Lewiston, Idaho. Chickie Berman was a bookie and a compulsive gambler who had dodged several contracts on his life. A sharp dresser with a rakish charm, he smoked English Ovals and always wore silk shirts and French cologne. Susan adored him, but he could not run a gambling operation while caring for a young girl, so for the next five years, she was shuttled off to several exclusive boarding schools. During holidays and summers, she stayed with Uncle Chickie.
She attended UCLA, a serendipitous choice because the Westwood campus was less than an hour from the Terminal Island federal prison, where Chickie had been sentenced to six years for stock fraud. On her regular visits, Susan wore Chanel No. 5, as Chickie requested, so “he could smell the real world.” When Susan told him she planned to pursue journalism as a career, he said, “You’ll be the first Berman to break into print legitimately.”
She earned a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and spent the next decade working as a reporter. In her memory, her father was a devoted, loving family man who always protected her, but when she was in her early thirties, she vowed to finally learn the truth. After obtaining her father’s FBI files, traveling to Las Vegas and the Midwest, where he was raised, and interviewing relatives, former business associates, and aging mobsters, she wrote a memoir: Easy Street: The True Story of a Mob Family. The book was published in 1981, to excellent reviews. She sold the film rights for $350,000. Berman was at the apex of her career. Although eccentric, with numerous phobias, she had a charismatic personality and an acerbic wit, and was a spellbinding storyteller. She lived in Manhattan and wrote regularly for New York magazine and frequently lunched at Elaine’s with writers and actors.
Since Berman had been orphaned at a young age and had only a few distant relatives, she felt extremely close to her friends. And when her friends were in trouble, Susan invariably came to their aid. Shortly after Easy Street was published, one of those friends, Robert Durst, needed her help. They had met at UCLA and, although they’d never been romantically involved, they were extremely close; he is mentioned in the acknowledgment section of her book.
While her family was infamous, his was merely famous: the Dursts own one of New York’s largest real estate empires, including ten of Manhattan’s most prominent skyscrapers. When Robert Durst’s wife, Kathleen, disappeared in 1982 under suspicious circumstances, the couple’s difficult marriage attracted extensive press coverage. Defending him unequivocally, Berman served as his unofficial press spokes-woman. In a sworn affidavit, she supported Durst’s version of events. Kathleen’s disappearance was never solved, and during the next few decades the case was dormant. Robert Durst led a reclusive life, but kept in touch with a few close friends, including Berman.
After the success of Easy Street, Berman moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a screenwriter. Two months later she met a man while standing in the Writer’s Guild script-registration line. He was more than a decade younger than she, but he quickly moved into her home and they later married. Robert Durst, assuming the traditional paternal role, gave her away. This was the happiest day of her life, she told friends. She purchased an elegant home in a fashionable Brentwood neighborhood and hoped to have children. Her exhilaration, however, did not last long.
The marriage failed after a year, and a short time later her husband died of a drug overdose. Although they had already split up by then, Berman had hoped for reconciliation. Her life spiraled downward, into depression and despair. She spent several years living off her savings. Although Berman’s father had left a trust fund for her, she was convinced that the money was a pittance compared to what she was owed. She knew her father had owned a share of several Las Vegas hotels, and she believed that Meyer Lansky and other mobsters had cheated her and her mother.
In the late 1980s, she dated a man with two children, and the family eventually moved in with her. She and her boyfriend attempted to produce—using her money—a Broadway musical based on the Dreyfus affair. The project was a disaster. She ended up broke, was forced to sell her house, and the relationship failed.
Although she lost everything after the musical debacle, Berman felt she had gained the family she desperately wanted. She had become a mother to the two children—a boy and a girl—and when she moved into a West Hollywood condominium, the girl lived with her for five years. But Berman still hoped to have a baby. She considered, she told friends, becoming a single mother and asking Durst to father the child.
Berman wrote two mystery novels, but neither was as successful as her memoir. Struggling to pay private school tuition and expenses, friends said, she contacted her old friend Robert Durst, who sent her $20,000.
In 1996, her dormant career was resurrected when she returned to the subject she knew best: Las Vegas. She wrote a four-hour television documentary called Lady Las Vegas and then completed a book to accompany the project. Her name, she discovered, still meant something on the Strip. She called publicity-shy entertainers and hotel moguls, said sweetly, “I’m Davie Berman’s daughter,” and convinced them to appear on camera. The infusion of cash and acclaim the documentary brought her—she was nominated for a Writer’s Guild award—delivered her from a deep depression.
During the late 1990s, however, several screenwriting projects failed, and she found herself in dire financial straits and months behind in her rent. A cable television station rejected a Las Vegas project she had suggested. She had just completed a book proposal that she was trying to sell, a memoir about growing up wealthy and ending up broke. Desperate, she again wrote Durst, asked for a loan, and described several writing projects she expected would succeed—proof that she planned to repay him. Durst never responded. In the fall of 2000, however, shortly after New York authorities had reopened the investigation into his wife’s disappearance, he sent her $25,000—a gift, he emphasized, not a loan. Berman immediately repaid her landlady.
In November 2000, she wrote Durst a chatty note, effusively thanking him for the money. She assured him that during the past thirty years, he had been “a wonderful friend … like the brother I never had.” She emphasized that their friendship “was never about money,” and apologized for her impoverished state. She described herself as “waif thin and on Prozac from the lack of security and no feeling of well-being about the future.” But she also emphasized that she still felt “strong and I work every day trying to turn this around.”
About a month later, New York investigators began trying to arrange an interview with Berman about the disappearance of Durst’s wife (the body had never been found). They were too late.
On Christmas Eve, Berman was found shot to death at home.
The first major storm of the year batters Los Angeles during the second week of January. Countless traffic accidents snarl the morning commute, and power outages plague the city. Inexplicably, the squad room’s air-conditioning is blowing full blast and the detectives huddle at their desks, still wearing their suit jackets, while rain clatters against the windows. On Thursday morning, the LAPD brass informs an RHD lieutenant that Homicide Special has just been assigned the Susan Berman murder. He apprises the on-call team, Paul Coulter and Jerry Stephens.
Stephens, who will turn fifty-five in the spring, is the second-oldest detective in the unit and plans to retire before the end of the year. He spent twenty-five years as a detective, fifteen of them at RHD. He joined the LAPD in 1967, after two tours in Vietnam on a destroyer escort. For a few years he worked as a motorcycle officer, enjoying the cachet and the freedom of the job. Detectives, he believed, were nerds, drudges who spent their days examining bloodstains and bullet trajectories and poring over dry documents in the office. But after a few years on the motorcycle he tired of flagging speeders and drunk drivers. For the first time, the intellectual challenge of detective work appealed to him.
After being promoted to detective, Stephens was assigned to the Hollywood rape unit, where his work attracted the attention of Russ Kuster, the legendary detective in charge of Hollywood Homicide who hired Rick Jackson and was later killed in a shootout. Kuster transferred Stephens to homicide after less than six months. He was scheduled to begin on a Monday morning. But on the previous Friday afternoon, before Stephens had a chance to leave the station after finishing his last shift in the rape section, Kuster sent him out on his first murder. A female bartender had invited a man home, and he slit her throat. Stephens eventually identified and arrested the man—an ex-con on parole—because he had left a fingerprint on the woman’s back—in blood.
Hollywood detectives were considered among the best in the city, and many alumni had come to RHD. They vouched for Stephens. Since he was transferred downtown in 1986, he has helped solve a number of major cases, including several murders of police officers; the Koreatown stabber, a paranoid schizophrenic who killed six transients and wounded seven, all with the same kitchen knife; and the William Leasure case. Leasure, once dubbed “the most corrupt cop in L.A.,” eventually pleaded no contest to setting up the murders—for cash—of two people.
Stephens is one of the few detectives remaining in the squad room who was assigned to Homicide Special during the O.J. Simpson case. Stephens was one of several detectives who arrested Simpson and booked him into county jail after he led police on a nationally televised low-speed chase with a friend at the wheel of his white Bronco. Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden described Stephens in his autobiography as “raucous and friendly … one of those guys who could stand still at a bar for twelve hours and never pull his wallet, one of those guys you never minded buying a drink.”
While Stephens is gregarious and confident and enjoys swapping insults in the squad room, Coulter, forty-six, is reserved and soft-spoken. His mother is Latino and his father is from Tennessee. Although Coulter was raised in Venice, near the beach, he has retained some of his father’s southern mannerisms. If he slipped on a pair of sunglasses, he would bear a strong resemblance to the stereotypical, big, barrel-stomached, slow-talking, slow-moving southern cop.
By the time the lieutenant finishes briefing Coulter and Stephens and they slip on their trench coats and trudge across the street to the parking lot, the rain has subsided. Ominous clouds still darken the eastern horizon, but in the west, toward the ocean, shafts of sunlight filter through the mist.
“They gave it to us because they couldn’t solve this piece of shit in three weeks,” Stephens says.
Another detective, who overhears the discussion, calls out, “West L.A. is probably down to their last fucking clue. Nobody wrote on the wall ‘I did it,’ so they’re cutting it loose.”
Coulter, driving a blue Ford Crown Victoria, snakes through the heavy traffic and exits the San Diego Freeway on Sunset Boulevard. He cruises east through Bel Air, past the estates of Beverly Hills, and then heads straight up Benedict Canyon, climbing the slick, sinuous road past clouds of pink and white oleanders beaded with raindrops, and crimson bougainvillea cascading over fences. They speed past steep olive-drab hillsides, sheathed in chaparral, studded with live oaks.
The homes abut the canyon roads and the backyards are bordered by towering bluffs, shaded by cypress, sycamores, and an occasional redwood, ringed with thick stands of bamboo, banana plants, or yucca. Canyon living offers the best of Los Angeles. The drive down to the city is a short cruise, but the canyons are rural respites where the smell of sage wafts through bedroom windows, where houses hover above the smog and feature mountain vistas, where foxes timidly sip from backyard swimming pools, where coyotes roam the foothills and howl at night.
Benedict Canyon is popular among successful actors, directors, and musicians. Berman’s modest house, however, is an anomaly in this fashionable district. A rustic wood-shingle cottage, squeezed between a busy road and an overgrown hillside, it seems distinctly out of place at the edge of Beverly Hills.
Coulter and Stephens stand in the middle of Berman’s weed-choked lawn, which is bracketed by desiccated hydrangeas and withered Japanese boxwood, listening to the cars roaring down the canyon and the wind rusding the oaks. The air is pungent with wet eucalyptus.
“This isn’t what I expected,” Coulter says.
“What a dump,” says Stephens, a dapper dresser with styled silver hair, who wears a chocolate-colored Jones of New York suit, a pale green shirt, and a green silk tie.
Coulter wears a rumpled gray suit and generic white shirt.
Berman’s house, which is about a mile from the estate where Sharon Tate and four others were killed by Manson Family members, has not been heated for several weeks and is bitterly cold. Her living room is a jumble of unopened Chanukah presents, books and magazines, and Christmas cards taped to the walls. In the center of the room, a computer and printer are perched atop a chipped white table. A Liberace ashtray, shaped like a piano, with a few crumpled butts, is lined up beside the keyboard. Nearby are Berman’s framed book jackets, a Writer’s Guild award, and magazine covers featuring her articles—mementos of a better time. Fingerprint dust streaks the walls and doorknobs.
Throughout the living room, Berman has hung pictures of her parents. One wall is covered with newspaper photos of her mother tap dancing, her parents at Las Vegas banquets, a World War II army photograph of her father, a shot of him in the casino, and one of his Wanted posters, which reads: “Reward $8,000. Wanted for hold-up and post office burglary. Dave Berman—alias Dave the Jew.” Another wall features a 1950s photograph of Susan in a party dress, posing with Jimmy Durante, who wrote: “To Susan, I love you. Uncle Jimmy.”
Stephens studies the pictures and says to Coulter, “She’s living in the past, Roy.”
Berman dined on a plastic card table—flanked by two mismatched folding chairs—in the corner of the kitchen. Her freezer is empty and the refrigerator contains only a few items: a carton of milk, a half-stick of butter, a jug of cranberry juice cocktail, and a package of cheddar cheese.
The bedroom is shabby and cluttered, the room of a woman running out of hope. The floor is a bare cement slab. The windows are covered with tattered blankets. The bed is unmade.
“She’s a writer down on her luck,” Coulter says.
“I don’t care how down on her luck she is,” Stephens says. “I’ve been to better crack houses in the south end. A rookie cop has more stuff than her.”
The original investigators from West Los Angeles arrive and lead Coulter and Stephens to the spare bedroom, where Berman was killed. One of her three wire-haired fox terriers, which did not get along with the other two, was kept here, a West L.A. detective says. Empty, except for a stripped bed and mattress and a metal cage, the room reeks of dog hair, urine, and mold. Faint winter light bleeds through the window and illuminates a few brownish-red commas of blood and a single bloody paw print that gleams with an enameled sheen.
Stephens crosses the room, crouches, and studies a chipped door jamb. Flecks of paint dapple the hardwood floors. “Looks like a struggle by the door,” he says. “Maybe she was thrown against it or she struggled to get away.”
Berman was found, the West L.A. detectives say, barefoot, dressed in a white T-shirt and purple sweatpants. A single bullet casing was discovered next to her body. She was shot once in the back of the head.
At the West Los Angeles station, off a hectic stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, Coulter and Stephens meet with the two detectives and their supervisor, Ron Phillips, in an interview room. Phillips and Stephens were partners decades ago, at the old Highland Park station.
“Any grandkids?” Phillips asks Stephens.
“Yeah,” Stephens says. “Two.”
Phillips shakes his head. “Where have all the years gone?”
Phillips opens up the murder book and begins. “The press really pushed this one. They kept running all those stories about Berman’s connection with the mob. It got all the higher-ups interested. Everyone kept calling me: the commander, the press, RHD brass. I didn’t want to lose the case. But, finally, after I got four calls one morning, I said, ‘Okay. Everyone wants this case to go downtown. Let ’em have it.’”
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Phillips says, a neighbor of Berman’s was concerned: one of her dogs was wandering down the street, her back door was wide open, and nobody answered when he rang the bell. He called police. Two patrol officers arrived at the house, discovered Berman, and spotted a pool of blood beneath her head. When homicide detectives arrived, the front door was closed, but unlocked. All the windows were secured with the screens in place. There was no sign of a break-in. The interior did not appear to have been ransacked. Berman’s purse lay on the kitchen counter with her credit cards and a small amount of cash, so robbery was not an obvious motive. The coroner determined that Berman had been dead over twenty-four hours.
She was discovered on her back, arms to the side, which defies the laws of physics. Since she was shot in the back of the head, she should have crumpled forward. The detectives reasoned that the killer had flipped her over for some reason. While they examined the crime scene, Berman’s cousin called and agreed to meet them at the station. She told detectives that Berman was security conscious to the point of neurosis and always peered out a window before opening her front door. So the detectives figured that the killer had to be someone she knew well. The relative said that Berman had only one enemy—the landlady. She had attempted to evict Berman several times because she had not paid her rent.
During the next week, the detectives interviewed a dozen friends and relatives, most of whom mentioned the tension between Berman and her landlady. Several suspected she had killed Berman. One relative recounted numerous heated arguments between the two. Berman had told several friends that the landlady packed a gun and threatened to kill her dogs. The landlady, she complained to another friend, “showed up at all hours of the day and night demanding that she get out.”
The detectives obtained several letters Berman wrote to the landlady during their eviction dispute. “Please,” said one, “don’t ever threaten me again, saying that if I didn’t pay the rent ‘something bad is going to happen to you and your dogs,’ or that you’ll ‘come up here and throw my ass on Benedict Canyon.’ I take such threats seriously.” In another letter, Berman quoted the landlady threatening her and her boyfriend’s daughter, who used to live with her: “‘Something very bad is going to happen to you and your daughter and your dogs. I have a key.’”
Phillips tells Coulter and Stephens that shortly after Berman’s body was found, the Beverly Hills Police Department received a brief letter informing them that there was a corpse at Berman’s address. The detectives believe the killer wrote the letter because it was mailed before the body was found. The stamp was submitted for DNA testing, but the laboratory was unable to extract a sufficient saliva sample.
“We figured maybe the landlady didn’t want a rotting corpse ruining her hardwood floors and smelling up the house,” Phillips says. “Another thing that interested us was that the landlady left on a vacation right after the murder and was driving a rental car. When we talked to her, she told us the vacation was preplanned and her car was being repaired. But it still seemed odd.”
Berman’s friends and relatives steered detectives away from Robert Durst; they did not believe he was involved. Berman and Durst had once been so close that their relationship was almost like siblings, friends said. Berman had always insisted that Durst did not kill his wife. Even if she had known something about Kathleen’s disappearance, friends told detectives, Berman never would have spoken out now, especially after keeping silent for eighteen years. Perhaps because of her upbringing, friends said, Berman believed in the Mafia code of omertà—silence. She would never roll over on one of her closest friends, a man who had been so generous to her. Durst, Berman’s friends contended, was fully aware of her loyalty.
“Will Durst talk to us?” Stephens asks.
“I asked his attorney that,” one of the West L.A. detectives says. “He said, ‘That’s an interesting question. I’ll have to talk to my client. We’re handling things gingerly.’”
The detective thinks it is highly unlikely that Berman was killed because of her father or her Mafia writing projects, a theory popular in the tabloid press because she was shot once in the back of the head, the signature of a mob hit.
“These mob guys would have no reason to knock her off,” Phillips interjects. “The stuff she wrote about happened too long ago.”
A man who paid Berman to edit his screenplay stopped by her house twice a week but, Phillips says, he seems harmless. Another suspect West L.A. has discounted is a stalker whom Berman’s friends mentioned, an older man who sent her love letters.
“Have you talked to him?” Coulter asks.
“We don’t have a clue who he is,” a detective says. “But she was so security conscious I don’t think she’d ever let this old man in the door.”
Initially, West L.A. focused on the landlady, questioning her and obtaining a search warrant for her house, which yielded very little. And the writing samples they found did not appear to match the letter sent to the Beverly Hills Police Department. They now believe it is unlikely that she killed Berman.
“If landlords started killing people over arguments like that,” Stephens says, “we’d have thousands of murders a year in L.A.”
The West L.A. detectives tell Coulter and Stephens that one of Berman’s close friends finds it curious that Durst sent the $25,000 check shortly after the New York Times published an article reporting that police had reopened the investigation into his wife’s disappearance.
“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” Phillips says. He believes that Durst is a viable suspect, but Stephens is skeptical. “I’m not ruling anyone out at this point, but I don’t think the two cases are connected,” he says. “Eighteen years is a long time. If she were going to say something now, she probably would have mentioned it to a friend. But she never said a word about it, according to all the people you talked to.”
Phillips tells Coulter and Stephens that Berman’s friend, a writer from the East Coast, also provided another possible direction for the investigation. Berman had a close, platonic friendship with Nyle, her manager. He runs a small agency out of his house and represents mostly actors. Berman was his only writer client.
Berman’s friend told the West L.A. detectives that Nyle had behaved in a strange manner since the murder and uttered some disturbing comments. He had cared deeply for Berman, but she was such a difficult woman that he was often angry and frustrated after spending time with her, Nyle told the friend. Then he added that now, after her murder, he was “dealing with a lot of anger,” and felt “pissed off.”
Nyle also told the friend that on Christmas morning, he climbed through one of Berman’s windows because he heard that her relatives were unable to contact her. He noticed soot on the walls, so he assumed there had been a fire. When he played the messages on her answering machine, he heard a neighbor say that he had found one of Berman’s dogs. Nyle said that he walked next door and the neighbor said that Berman fell, hit her head, and died. “That makes sense,” he told the friend. “Susan was such a klutz.”
The friend later discovered that die neighbor told Nyle that Berman had either been killed or had fallen. She found it curious that Nyle did not mention the possibility that Susan was a murder victim. He later told the friend, “It seems very much like a professional job. It was very quick.” She wondered how Nyle came to that conclusion when he told her, initially, that he believed she had died after a fall.
The friend also told the West L.A. detectives that a few weeks before the murder, Berman underwent eye surgery. Nyle had taken care of her during the next week, but he resented the imposition. Berman fell down once on the street and instead of helping her, Nyle appeared embarrassed and shouted at her.
“I didn’t think much about him at first,” one of the West L.A. detectives says. “Then I talked to that friend of Berman’s and I got interested.”
“He’s weird,” the other detective says. “He was acting hinky when we talked to him. Then he settled down.” The detective taps his finger on the murder book. “There’s something funny about him. He and Berman supposedly talked all the time. But before the murder he said he hadn’t been in touch with her. And there were no messages from him on her answering machine.”
“He have any criminal record?” Coulter asks.
“You run him for guns?”
“No guns.”
After Phillips hands over copies of his notes and reports to Stephens, they reminisce about the old days when they were rookies. “Remember that old guy who felt young cops couldn’t do anything right the first time, so he’d tear up all our reports?”
“He raised hummingbirds,” Phillips says. “The way to get on his good side was to read up on hummingbirds and talk to him about them.”
“One day I was working day watch,” Stephens says, “and I saw this young officer crying. Tears were running down his face. The old guy had just told him, ‘You’re too dumb to be a police officer! Give me your badge and gun and go home.’
“Two weeks later someone calls the kid at home and asked, ‘What happened to you?’ The kid said he’d been fired. The guy on the phone said, ‘No, you haven’t. Come on back to work.’”
The rain kicks up again as Coulter and Stephens drive back downtown on the cold, windy night. The mist drifts through the beams of their headlights, and colors from the traffic lights reflect off the puddles in the street.
Coulter and Stephens discuss what needs to be done next. They plan to obtain a search warrant for Berman’s phone records, so they can identify the last people she talked to. They also will request that LAPD technicians employ more sophisticated methods and search for additional fingerprints. The chemical ninhydrin, often used on porous surfaces such as paper, wood, and walls, reacts to the amino acids in the fingers’ sweat patterns, leaving a purple residue. The detectives will ask technicians to apply ninhydrin to the walls near where Berman’s body was found because the shooter might have braced himself for balance after firing the shot.
“Fingerprints in the house probably won’t mean much—unless they’re in blood—because she knew her killer well,” Stephens says to Coulter. “But we might as well give it a try.”
Coulter points out that the killer might have left a print on the shell casing—found in the room where Berman was killed—while loading the gun. A method using ordinary superglue is effective on many surfaces, including metal, so the detective will request that technicians use the process. The casing will be placed in an enclosed chamber, where the glue’s vapor might adhere to—and illuminate—the oil and moisture of a fingerprint. The detectives also plan to submit the casing to the FBI database and hope the gun can be traced.
They stop for dinner at Philippe’s, a downtown landmark restaurant with sawdust on the floor, where customers line up at the counter and order French dip sandwiches from waitresses in starched uniforms and aprons. The detectives pick up their sandwiches, ten-cent-a-cup coffee, and pie and sit on wooden stools and eat at a long wooden table. The restaurant’s walls feature numerous articles about how the founder, a French immigrant named Philippe Mathieu, invented the French dip. In 1918, while preparing a sandwich for a policeman, he accidentally dropped the sliced French roll into a roasting pan filled with drippings. The officer enjoyed the sandwich so much that he returned the next day with a group of cops and ordered more au jus-dipped sandwiches.
The manager of Philippe’s greets Stephens warmly and they chat for a few minutes. He knows her well, because when her son was murdered, it was Stephens who arrested the killer and sent him to San Quentin’s death row.
When the detectives finish their dinner, Stephens says, “Why was Berman on her back when she was found?”
“It’s almost like someone cared for her and turned her over because they wanted to make her more comfortable,” Coulter says. “I don’t think the landlady would have the strength to move the body like that.”
Stephens stares at his coffee. “I would have liked to have picked up this case from the beginning.”
“We’re at a real disadvantage, Roy,” Coulter says.
Coulter and Stephens grouse that the West L.A. detectives never requested a coroner’s criminalist, who would have collected hair and fibers from the body at the scene. Instead, Berman’s body was transported to the coroner’s office, where her clothing was packaged. Hairs and fibers eventually will be collected, but the process is not as efficient. A criminalist, using a standard “sexual assault kit,” also could have checked to determine if Berman had been raped, although the crime scene suggests that it was highly unlikely. By the time an autopsy is conducted it might be too late.
The detectives are also stunned that Berman’s fingernails were never clipped and examined. When victims struggle and scratch, their fingernails sometimes scrape microscopic skin samples that yield the assailant’s DNA. Berman had no defensive wounds, but checking a female victim’s fingernails is a standard procedure. After a body has been washed during the autopsy, however, many criminalists believe it is too late to gather evidence from the nails.
“Maybe because she was shot in the back of the head, nobody thought it was necessary,” Stephens says. “But the coroner should have done it anyway. Especially when you consider all those paint chips by the door jamb.”
“It was Christmas Eve,” Coulter says. “People got sloppy.”