17

In a placid San Fernando Valley neighborhood, an elderly couple have been stabbed and slashed to death and their home set on fire. The woman might have been raped, so Lambkin and Marcia have been assigned the case. They are forced to set aside the Gorman investigation. People living near the victims are terrified; hundreds pack churches for Neighborhood Watch meetings; reporters press the detectives about the progress of the investigation. A headline in a local paper reflects the mood: “Neighborhood Swept Up in Fear.” Stephens, who worked with Lambkin in Hollywood, walks over to Rape Special and tosses the article on Lambkin’s desk.

“Maybe we haven’t solved our homicide, but at least the neighborhood where our victim was killed is not swept up in fear,” Stephens jokes.

Later in the afternoon, one of the few people Berman allowed into her house stops by, as arranged, for an interview. An aspiring writer, he visited Berman twice a week and paid her $75 an hour to edit his screenplay. Stephens has to leave the office briefly, so Coulter interviews the man, who carries a bottle of Evian into the small, monastic interview cubicle.

“You mind if I drink?” he tells Coulter. “I’m very nervous.”

“Relax,” Coulter says.

“How can I relax in a room like this?”

The man, who is in his mid-forties, has a mustache and goatee and his hair is flecked with gray. Jittery, he continually runs his hands through his hair.

“Didn’t Wambaugh work here?” he asks.

“No,” Coulter says. “He worked at Hollenbeck Division.”

“Didn’t the LAPD have a five-time Jeopardy! champion?”

“Yeah. He’s a sergeant.”

Steered back to the case, the man tells Coulter that during the past six months he usually visited Susan Berman every Tuesday and Thursday. “If I ever wanted to change the time, she’d spend thirty minutes excoriating me. Then she’d tell me, ‘I can’t trust you. I feel threatened.’ Just because I wanted to change the time.… She was brilliant but crazy.”

He sips the water. “This whole thing gives me the willies. She said she owed me a session and told me to come the Saturday before Christmas. I was going to come from one to three, but I needed a break. What if I’d have come? If I was there I’d be toast.” He hyperventilates and says, “There were times when I was at her place and I thought, ‘If anyone wanted to kill Susan, I’d be stuck here.’”

Coulter looks surprised. “What made you say that?”

“She’d always say, ‘The only time I feel safe is when you’re here.’ Paranoia is contagious.”

Coulter mentions that he heard a man was stalking Berman.

“One day she got a letter and ripped it up,” the man says. “She said, ‘Someone is stalking me.’” But she never mentioned the stalker again. He tells Coulter he does not know much about Berman’s relationship with any of her friends, including Nyle.

“Who do you think could have done it?” Coulter asks.

“I could have killed her,” the man says.

Coulter stares at him for a moment. “Did you?”

“No, no, no,” the man says, laughing nervously. “I have receipts up and down San Vicente where I was doing Christmas shopping.”

Coulter smiles and says, “I had to ask.”

The man gulps the rest of his water and says in a conspiratorial tone, “About three weeks or a month before she died, I came to the door and she says, ‘I just got the worst news. My best friend got charged with murder for something that happened eighteen years ago. I can’t talk about it.’ She got hysterical and disappeared into another room, where she talked on the phone.”

During the next few sessions, instead of sitting with him in the living room, Berman huddled in a back room, making surreptitious telephone calls. He tells Coulter he believes that Robert Durst killed Berman. “My girlfriend doesn’t believe it because she doesn’t think Bobby Durst would kill his friend. I said, ‘Honey, you’re so naive.’”

When Stephens returns to the room, the man, a former high school teacher, tells the detectives that when he attempted to determine who had cheated on a test he examined three variables: “Motive, opportunity, and history. That was my philosophy when I was a teacher. That’s why I thought Bobby Durst did it. If he’s connected this could be huge. It could be as big as that case in Boston involving Claus von Bulow.”

While he rambles from topic to topic, Stephens cuts him off and asks, just to assess his reaction, if he is willing to be polygraphed. The man readily agrees.

“You know what’s really weird,” he tells the detectives. “I returned to her house to get my stuff. And on a bookshelf in the back bedroom, above a bloodstain, you know what the first book I saw was? A Place of Execution.”

The man pulls Berman’s autobiography out of his briefcase and reads in a stentorian manner, like an English teacher lecturing a class of eleventh-graders: “There are scars within me that will probably never heal; I have uncontrollable anxiety attacks that occur without warning. Death and love seem linked forever in my fantasies and the Kaddish [the Jewish mourning prayer] will ring always in my ears.”

He snaps the book shut and says, canting his head, “That’s Susan.”

After the interview, Coulter points out to Stephens that this man was the first friend of Berman’s to finger Durst. Her other friends and relatives have dismissed him as a suspect. Of course, the man bases his supposition on the behavior of high school cheaters, not exactly overwhelming evidence.

In the afternoon, the detectives drive through the drizzle to West Los Angeles and interview one of Berman’s aunts and a cousin, neither of whom suspects Durst. The aunt tells the detectives, “Everyone loved Susan. Only one person had a problem with her: the landlady. Susan told me that the woman had a gun. She threatened to harm her dogs.”

The cousin dismisses the mob angle. “That Mafia princess stuff really makes me mad. The Mafia couldn’t have anything to do with this. That’s ridiculous. Those guys she wrote about are probably a hundred years old now, if they’re still alive.”

Later, Stephens attempts to circumvent the landlady’s attorney and question her. He and Coulter knock on her front door, but she is not home. On their way back downtown, Stephens suggests they canvass a few more of Berman’s neighbors. And while they are there, he says with a sheepish smile, they might as well check on Berman’s dog Lulu.

When the dog’s caretaker answers the doorbell, Stephens immediately asks, “How’s Lulu doing?”

“Much better,” the neighbor says. “We got a crate for her to sleep in. We lined it with a blanket. She seems much more secure in there. That helped a lot.”

Stephens looks genuinely relieved.

Stephens, who has obtained Durst’s cell phone number from one of Berman’s friends, calls him and leaves a message. Durst surprises him by calling back. Stephens does not want to press Durst too hard and prompt interference from his high-priced attorneys, so just to keep him talking, he asks Durst how he met Berman. After describing their friendship at UCLA, Durst acknowledges sending Berman several checks during the past decade. “I lent her a lot of money,” he says. “But it’s no big deal because I have more money than I can ever spend.” Durst says he has a house in Northern California, “but I can’t stay there. I keep getting pestered by the press. Even when I get off the plane I’m followed. So I’m in New York now. No one knows me here anymore.”

When Stephens slips in a few questions about his whereabouts during the weekend before Christmas and the last time he saw Berman, Durst’s tone changes. “I can’t talk about that now. But I don’t mind speaking with you later, after I’ve had a chance to talk with my attorneys.” Durst agrees to a formal interview next week, when he comes to Los Angeles to attend Berman’s memorial service. After the service, Stephens will attempt to fingerprint Durst, obtain his handwriting sample, and ask him if he is willing to take a polygraph exam.

Stephens then calls the landlady. She is reluctant to talk without her attorney, but he keeps her on the line by explaining why the police have been unable to release the house to her yet. After he has schmoozed with her for a few minutes, she opens up to him.

After he hangs up he tells Coulter, “She said, ‘Yeah, I was concerned about the rent because that’s what I live on.’ She said she was in a bad auto accident last year and was in a nursing facility for a while. Berman had a friendly visit with her there and later at home.”

The landlady said Berman—apparently after receiving the check from Durst- had paid her rent until March and had agreed to move out in June, which the detectives confirm after talking to a few of Berman’s friends. The landlady told Stephens she had had no contact with Berman since November because her rent was paid.

“The landlady denies threatening the dogs,” Stephens says. “Whether she did or not, I don’t think she’s a suspect. She’s just a crusty old lady.” He looks discouraged. “This is a tough one.”

“And we’re not even getting involved in the mob angle,” Coulter says.

Stephens leans back in his chair, kicks his feet onto his desk, and says—it is now his signature refrain—“Something will turn up.”

Beside the stage at the Writer’s Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, between two enormous red floral hearts, is a large easel with pictures of Susan Berman and her parents. Her book covers, videos of her television projects, and writing awards are displayed on an adjacent table.

Coulter and Stephens hope that this February 2 memorial service will provide them with a break. An eclectic mix of writers, relatives, actors, actresses, and television executives are gathered in the theater. Nyle arrives with his aunt, and Robert Durst is also expected to attend.

A half-dozen friends deliver eulogies, all marveling at Berman’s talent and mourning her loss. From childhood until death, several people say, Berman could never escape the shadow of violence. “Death lapped at Susan’s ankles in a way none of us can even imagine,” one friend says. “A sense of doom surrounded her.”

She reads a section of Susan’s memoir that depicts the day she discovered her mother was dead: “‘I was still so confused from my father’s death I couldn’t even comprehend it. Was it something I had done? I wondered. Could I have saved her; could I have been a better daughter? It seemed like I had been missing her all my life and now I would miss her even more. I thought I could never feel weaker than I did when my father died, but now I felt there was even less of me. Was there to be anything left?’”

The friend shuts the book and says, “In the end she had a desk, a chair, an ancient computer, and three cantankerous dogs. She was convinced her luck would change. It very well might have.”

Because Berman was orphaned so young, a cousin says, she valued her small circle of relatives and treasured her friends. He closes on a portentous note. “We have to be prepared,” he says somberly, “that we may never know why or who.”

The detectives are extremely disappointed when Durst does not show up. Stephens calls his cell phone number and leaves a message, but Durst does not call back. After the service, Coulter and Stephens interview Berman’s friends who have come to Los Angeles from out of town, even across the country. Several knew her for decades, and they view Durst differently from her West Coast friends.

One longtime friend, a writer, stops by RHD the day after the service. The woman, who wears a green velour top, purple pants, and clogs, says that although Berman had always professed that Durst did not kill his wife, she also always said, without elaborating, “I think his family was involved in her death.”

“A man came up to me at the memorial, a guy who has known Susan for a long time,” she tells the detectives. “He talked to me like he was unburdening himself. He said that Susan told him once, ‘Bobby did it.’ He asked her, ‘How do you know?’ Susan told him, ‘Because Bobby told me.’”

Another writer friend of Berman’s visits the squad room and tells the detectives that a mutual friend had just told her, “Susan said she once provided an alibi for Bobby Durst regarding his wife’s disappearance.”

A third friend reports that while Berman did not believe Durst killed his wife, she did tell him, “I think I’m the only person who knows what happened.” The friend asked, “Do you mean you have a theory or you have knowledge?” Berman refused to elaborate.

The detectives find all this intriguing, but marginally useful. “That stuff might be fine for the tabloids, but how are we going to use it?” Stephens asks Coulter. “A lot of it wasn’t just hearsay, it was double hearsay: Berman told all this stuff to a friend. Then the friend told another friend, who told us. That’s pretty far removed from the source.”

“Those New York cops still might want to hear about it,” Coulter says. “They’re pretty interested now in Durst’s marriage and his missing wife.”

In 1972, Robert Durst was working for his father, one of Manhattan’s most prominent real estate developers. Kathleen McCormack, a nineteen-year-old dental hygienist from a middle-class Long Island family, lived in an apartment owned by the Durst Corporation. Durst and McCormack began dating and married less than a year later.

Durst, then twenty-eight, was eager to escape the strictures and expectations of his prominent family. The couple moved to Vermont and opened a health food store. But Durst’s father was unhappy with this alternative lifestyle, and Kathleen was too ambitious for life behind a counter. Robert and Kathleen eventually moved back to Manhattan, where he returned to the family business. Kathleen enrolled in nursing school and, later, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The wealthy real estate executive and the aspiring doctor seemed to have an idyllic life. They had a penthouse apartment in a fashionable Upper West Side neighborhood. They were often seen at Manhattan’s trendiest nightspots, where they skipped past the lines, and doormen immediately ushered them inside. The marriage was troubled, however, and in 1981, Kathleen, considering divorce, hired a lawyer. In the winter of 1982, she disappeared. Five days later, Durst contacted the police. He had not called earlier, he told investigators, because it was not unusual for him and Kathleen to spend days apart.

On Sunday, January 31, 1982, the last night she was seen alive, Kathleen attended a party at the Connecticut home of a college friend. The friend later recalled that the Dursts had argued on the telephone. Kathleen then told the friend that she was afraid of her husband and to “check it out” if anything happened to her.

That night, Kathleen drove from the friend’s house to the couple’s vacation home in South Salem in Westchester County. After dinner, Durst told authorities in 1982, he drove her to the train station because she planned to attend class the next day. When he returned to South Salem, he drank a cocktail with neighbors and then called his wife, who was at their Manhattan apartment. He never saw or spoke to her again.

Although he was never officially named as a suspect in 1982, investigators were suspicious of his alibi. The neighbors did not recall seeing him on the night of Kathleen’s disappearance. And when investigators informed him that his telephone records would list the call to his wife, Durst said that he had called her from a pay telephone while walking his dog. But the closest pay phone had been several miles away and a wet snow was falling on that dismal winter night.

Investigators also discovered that Kathleen, perhaps in preparation for a possible divorce settlement, had obtained data about the Durst Corporation’s assets and asked two friends to safeguard the papers. Both of the friends’ homes were burglarized in 1982, they told detectives, and the papers were stolen.

The disappearance of a beautiful blond medical student whose inlaws owned some of Manhattan’s most notable skyscrapers was headline news. Durst was hounded by reporters who had learned about the couple’s unraveling marriage. At the time, Susan Berman was his stalwart ally. But the investigation eventually stalled and Kathleen’s body was never found. Her family, however, was convinced that Durst knew the solution to the mystery. The year after her disappearance, in a court hearing to allocate her assets, relatives and friends filed affidavits expressing their suspicion. Kathleen’s sister said that Robert’s “behavior and reactions surrounding this event [her disappearance] strongly suggest that my sister may have been murdered, and that Robert Durst is either directly responsible for her death or privy to information concerning her disappearance.” Several people filed affidavits claiming that Kathleen told them she had been beaten by her husband and feared for her life. Others maintained that Durst discarded some of his wife’s possessions a few days after he told police she was missing.

Durst filed his own affidavit, in which he stated, “I have no responsibility in any manner direct or indirect for Kathy’s disappearance.… I have not disposed of any of Kathy’s belongings.… I never threatened her life or threatened her in any way or assaulted Kathy or caused her any physical harm or abuse.” The couple was considering a separation, Durst claimed, and she fabricated the stories of abuse to gain “a more advantageous negotiating position.”

Berman also submitted an affidavit, which supported Durst’s contentions. She asserted that Kathleen was an alcoholic, suffered from chronic anxiety and depression, and needed psychiatric help. “Bob and Kathy Durst have been two of my closest friends for a number of years,” Berman stated. “During the two years before Kathy disappeared, she was under a great deal of pressure. She did not handle stress well.… Although they argued constantly in my presence, I never saw Bobby physically abuse Kathy in any way.… At one point … she told me she had just changed lawyers in the pending divorce and that she wanted to provoke Bobby to physically abuse her in public to get a bigger settlement.… I want to stress that Kathy was a lovely, gentle girl who had severe emotional problems the last two years before she disappeared.… I hope and pray that she is alive. I miss her today.”

Durst continued to work for the Durst Corporation. Since he was the oldest of three sons, he expected to take over the business when his father retired. In 1994, when he realized one of his brothers would eventually succeed their father, he resigned. For the rest of the decade Durst invested in real estate and divided his time between the East Coast and his beachfront home in Northern California.

In 1999, a New York State Police detective investigated a tip about the case from a prisoner attempting to negotiate a reduced sentence. The information was wrong, but the disappearance of Kathleen Durst piqued the investigator’s curiosity. The cold case was reopened.

In 1982, the detectives were certain that Kathleen had disappeared from Manhattan, so they did not examine the couple’s upstate house, which Durst had sold in 1990. But during the fall of 2000, after the case had been reopened, state police and New York City detectives, aided by dogs, thoroughly inspected the place. They questioned the retired detective who first investigated Kathleen’s disappearance, and they interviewed or reinterviewed many of the Dursts’ friends and acquaintances. In December, investigators were preparing to interview Susan Berman, when she was shot in the back of the head.

Although some of Berman’s friends found the timing of her murder suspicious, others contended that Durst would never have killed a friend who provided unconditional support after his wife disappeared and who filed an affidavit that powerfully affirmed his version of events. Why would he kill his most reliable witness? they asked. After Berman’s memorial service, a few of these friends encouraged Coulter and Stephens to look at another suspect: Nyle.

Berman and Nyle were extremely close and spent several evenings a week together. Although they did sleep together once, the friendship was otherwise platonic, Berman’s friends told detectives. She pressed for a more serious relationship, but Nyle resisted.

One friend of Berman’s, an East Coast writer who flew to Los Angeles for the memorial service, tells the detectives she found Nyle surprisingly cavalier about the murder. “I don’t get the feeling he was sorry about her death. He was not sorry at all.… He seemed angry.… At the memorial service his face was like a mask. No emotion. I asked him to sign the guest book and he’d only print his name.… He shrugged and said, ‘Well, I don’t have anyone calling me ten times a day anymore.’”

She also reports that at the memorial service Nyle told another friend, “This was the only way it could have ended between Susan and me.”

Another friend of Berman’s, a heavyset woman wearing faded jeans and yellow sneakers, stops by the squad room and relates a disturbing conversation she had with Nyle. She works at a movie studio and met Berman about five years ago, when Berman was pitching a script.

“He called me on December twenty-seventh … and told me Susan was killed by a bullet to the back of her head. Later he told me police also were investigating suicide. I asked, ‘How can it be suicide if the bullet’s to the back of the head?’ He didn’t really answer.” Her face is flushed and she nervously bites her lower lip. “After I was leaving the memorial service, what struck me was that all of Susan’s friends were talking about her, telling stories. He was the only one not saying anything.”

After the service, this friend continues, Nyle complained that because Berman was dead he would have to find another writer to slip him into the Writer’s Guild Theater for free movies. She shakes her head, looking disgusted. “I thought that was a very harsh, unnecessary comment.”

A woman who has known Berman since they were graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley also tells the detectives that she was startled by Nyle’s insensitive comments. “At the memorial service … I said to him that Susan really loved her friends. But he replied, ‘She created a web that was difficult to get out of.’ I thought that was very strange.”

“Was there any physical volatility in the relationship?” Stephens asks.

She quickly nods. “He pushed her once. They were out in public and he shoved her. She was very embarrassed. She told me it was over, and she wouldn’t put up with that. But obviously it wasn’t over.”

When Coulter and Stephens finish the round of interviews after the memorial service they realize that while they have been investigating the Berman case for more than three weeks, the physical evidence had so far yielded nothing of value. The fingerprints lifted at the house did not lead to a suspect. Ballistics could not connect the slug to another weapon. The shell casing revealed neither prints nor a link to a gun. Coulter and Stephens are still waiting for the department’s Scientific Investigation Division to analyze Berman’s clothing for hair and fibers. DNA from a hair might identify the killer. Criminalists will later check for semen traces.

Meanwhile, they will continue to investigate Nyle. On a blustery February morning, the detectives discuss the case against him over plates of ham and eggs at Nick’s, a café owned by an LAPD detective. The squat stucco building is perched on a dusty patch of gravel north of downtown, next door to a Chinese food warehouse and across the street from an abandoned railroad yard. The roof is ringed with razor wire and a graffiti directive to the local gang is emblazoned on a back wall: “Dogtown. Please write on this side.” Inside, swivel stools are arrayed around a horseshoe-shaped Formica counter.

“A lot of people said Nyle’s demeanor at the memorial service was odd,” Coulter says.

“Everyone in this crowd is odd,” Stephens says.

Coulter nods knowingly. “They’re writers.”

The detectives recently discovered that the son of Berman’s former boyfriend left his car parked in her driveway for a few weeks during late December, while he was visiting Europe. A friend of Berman’s has suggested that the detectives should dismiss Durst as a suspect: unfamiliar with the car, he would have assumed someone was visiting Berman, and so he would not have approached the house at night. But Nyle knew the car and knew its owner was out of the country.

“I think we’re ready to bring him in for an interview,” Coulter says.

“We’ll ask him if he’ll take a poly,” Stephens replies. He tells Coulter he does not trust polygraphs, and the last time he used one was fifteen years ago. “The examiner said this one guy either did it or knew who did. They were wrong on both counts. We later found the right guy.”

“The equipment’s a lot more sophisticated today,” Coulter says.

“I still don’t trust ’em,” says Stephens, who is decades older than many LAPD detectives and sometimes reluctant to deviate from traditional methods. “But I’m going to ask this guy to take a poly anyway. I’d rather just question the guy myself, but with the laws the way they are, if he asks for a lawyer, we’re through. This gives us another method of interviewing him.”

Coulter pushes aside his plate and says, “When you ask him about the poly, I’ll be very curious to see how he responds.”

Paul Coulter never had any burning desire to be a cop, he tells friends, but simply “stumbled onto the job.” The work appeared interesting, he admired the camaraderie he observed among the officers, and he was impressed with the pay, benefits, and job security. When he turned twenty-one he applied to the LAPD academy.

After cruising the city in a patrol car and walking a beat in Hollywood, he was promoted to detective trainee on a robbery table. As a patrol officer, Coulter had been frustrated by continually lurching from crisis to crisis, but now that he was investigating his first robberies, he enjoyed following cases from the initial crime scenes, through interviews with victims and witnesses, to arrests. Uncovering disparate clues and linking them together until they formed a coherent pattern was particularly satisfying. He knew he would spend the rest of his career as a detective.

A supervisor recruited him for Wilshire Division homicide and Coulter spent nine years there, personally investigating almost two hundred murders. During the 1990s, Coulter, like many detectives throughout the city, was unimpressed with Homicide Special. Many in the unit, he believed, were unmotivated, indolent, and arrogant. Because they handled so few fresh cases, compared to the divisional detectives, he believed their skills were rusty.

Coulter hoped for a promotion to detective grade three, the highest rank an investigator can reach, but in the divisions, D-IIIs are supervisors without their own caseloads. Coulter still enjoyed working murders. The only unit in the city that allows D-IIIs to investigate cases is RHD, so, despite his reservations, he applied.

Shortly after Coulter was accepted, he was assigned to the biggest case of his career, one of the most notorious unsolved cop killings in the history of the city.

In 1976, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy George Arthur and his partner approached three robbery suspects in a bank parking lot. One pulled out a gun and clubbed Arthur in the head. Arthur’s partner exchanged shots with another suspect and was critically wounded. Despite a serious skull fracture, Arthur shot and killed a suspect and managed to broadcast an “officer needs help.” A second suspect was arrested and the third fled. Arthur was considered a hero in the department, a man whose bravery and quick thinking had saved his partner’s life.

By 1985, Arthur had been promoted to sergeant at the men’s central jail near East Los Angeles. At 9:30 P.M., on a spring night, he climbed into his Chevrolet van and headed south on the Santa Ana Freeway. Five minutes later his van crashed. California Highway Patrol officers believed that Arthur had died of massive head trauma from the crash, but during the autopsy a fluoroscope located four .25-caliber slugs in the back and side of his head.

Arthur was murdered in the city, so the LAPD assumed responsibility. The sheriff’s department only has jurisdiction in certain parts of the county, but a number of sheriff’s homicide detectives volunteered their services. A joint task force was created and a massive investigation was launched. Forty officers canvassed the homes and the housing project adjacent to the freeway. Dozens of jailhouse informants were interviewed.

Several witnesses told detectives that they had seen two men limping away from Arthur’s van after the accident. Others, however, reported only one. “Detectives have been unable to determine when and where the suspects entered the victim’s van,” said a progress report. “They may have been lying in wait in the van prior to Arthur getting off duty at the jail.”

Detectives focused the investigation on Arthur’s work with the sheriff’s department. He had been a no-nonsense sergeant, a new jail supervisor with exacting standards. Mexican mafia leaders at the jail might have targeted him, detectives speculated. He might have stumbled on a drug-smuggling scam, or on in-house corruption. Before his jail assignment, he had spent years as a hard-nosed gang officer; perhaps, detectives speculated, gangbangers had exacted revenge.

For two years, two RHD detectives and two sheriff’s homicide investigators checked countless leads, clues, and potential suspects. Finally, they disbanded the task force and the detectives moved on to other cases. But in the mid-1990s, a sheriff’s department homicide detective, distressed that the murder had never been solved, was permitted by his supervisors to spend more than a year investigating the case. He believed he had identified the killers. But he could not arrest them; that decision belonged to the lead investigative agency, the LAPD.

The sheriff’s investigator believed that two Latino gangbangers from the nearby housing project had killed Arthur. One of the gangbangers, according to a sheriff’s department document, “was seen running from the van the night of the crash by three separate eyewitnesses who knew him from the projects.… The suspects involved … were known to have been injured in the vehicle crash. Both had injuries consistent with being in a car accident.”

Although the investigator said he based his conclusion on thirteen different interviews, the Homicide Special detective in charge of the investigation was not persuaded. Many of those witnesses had offered conflicting information. He also knew that thieves from the housing projects often ran onto the freeway after crashes and relieved victims of their cash and valuables. But the key reason the LAPD detective distrusted the gangbanger theory was because he believed that the killer had been injured in the crash and left specks of his DNA on the windshield. The DNA of neither of the sheriff’s investigator’s suspects matched the sample on the windshield.

The dispute was the culmination of years of acrimony between the two agencies. Sheriff’s investigators believed that after the joint task force was disbanded, LAPD detectives had abandoned the case. Arthur was one of their own, and they were personally offended by what they believed was a lackadaisical approach. LAPD officers acknowledged that the investigation had languished, but contended that the sheriff’s investigator was abrasive and contentious. They also believed that since the O.J. Simpson case and other LAPD failures, some sheriff’s investigators had treated them in an arrogant and condescending manner.

In 1998, Captain Jim Tatreau, the new head of RHD, met with the sheriff’s homicide captain. He suggested that they form a second task force, made up entirely of new detectives. The sheriff’s captain agreed.

Coulter was assigned to the case along with Rosemary Sanchez; both had been recently assigned to Homicide Special. Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, who was more senior in rank, headed the investigation. They were eventually teamed with four sheriff’s investigators.

The detectives first studied the innumerable documents that delineated the original investigation. After three weeks, the sheriff’s detectives insisted that their colleague had been right: the killers were the two gangbangers from the projects. But the LAPD detectives believed that Arthur’s killer had left his DNA on the windshield, which ruled out the gangbangers.

The issue was settled when the task force detectives interviewed several of the original witnesses and found that their descriptions of the gangbangers were contradictory and their recollections were hazy. This was the turning point in the investigation and forged a bond between the two groups of detectives. They realized that if they were going to solve Arthur’s murder, they had to begin again and work together. Coulter, Kilcoyne, and Sanchez reinterviewed every witness listed in the original crime report. Sheriff’s detectives investigated Arthur’s personal and professional life for leads and examined the Mexican mafia’s jail activities during the mid-1980s.

Eventually, the three LAPD detectives concluded that Arthur’s murder was connected to his personal life, not his professional life. If a criminal or a gang member knew anything about the murder, they determined, the information would have surfaced after fourteen years: any thug facing prison time would have used it as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

Coulter, Kilcoyne, and Sanchez agreed that when detectives investigate the murder of an off-duty police officer, they often suffer from tunnel vision, immediately assuming that the murder was connected to police work. Sometimes, the detectives concluded, it was best to approach an off-duty-cop killing just like any other homicide and begin with the victim’s private life.

Arthur and his wife, also a sheriff’s deputy, had no children and had been separated for more than a year. They had recently filed for divorce, but friends said the breakup was not acrimonious. The detectives interviewed Arthur’s friends and coworkers and compiled a list of every woman he had dated since the separation. They also questioned his wife extensively, and they contacted all of the men she had been involved with and attempted to obtain their DNA with saliva swabs.

But two months after the investigation was reopened, Arthur’s personal life had turned up no leads. Almost every man his wife had dated had submitted a DNA swab. There were no matches. Then one afternoon, on their way to the LAPD academy, Coulter, Kilcoyne, and Sanchez stopped the car to let a priest cross the street. “This is a sign,” Coulter told the others. “When I was in the Wilshire Division, I stopped to let three nuns cross the street. The next day we ID’d the suspect in a big homicide case.”

At the academy, Kilcoyne’s pager buzzed. One of the sheriff’s investigators reported that he had put off asking a retired sheriff’s deputy—an ex-boyfriend of Arthur’s wife—for a DNA swab because he lived in Spokane, Washington. They finally arranged to obtain the swab, but at the last minute the retired deputy backed out and told the investigator to contact his lawyer.

The three detectives sped to the squad room and excitedly announced to Lieutenant Farrell, “We’re going to Spokane tomorrow. This is the break we’d been waiting for.”

The retired deputy’s name was George Kirby. Arthur’s wife had told the detectives that they had dated in 1985 and that Kirby was extremely disappointed when he discovered that she was not interested in an exclusive relationship.

The detectives flew to Spokane, and Coulter prepared a search warrant for Kirby’s DNA. But a Washington judge refused to sign it, ruling that their investigation had not uncovered enough evidence against Kirby to supply probable cause for the warrant. The detectives decided a woman might have more success obtaining intimate details about Arthur’s wife’s relationship with Kirby. So Sanchez called her from Washington.

Kirby was extremely possessive, she told Sanchez, and often drove by her house late at night, lingering outside. Also, Kirby had been upset when he discovered that Arthur had balked at signing the final divorce papers. After the funeral, Kirby drove her back to the cemetery, where she had left the van that Arthur was driving the night he was killed. She had loaned Kirby the van on several occasions and he had his own key, she told Sanchez. Also, Kirby had a bandage on his head and an injured knee, she recalled. He was a triathlete, and he told her that he had fallen off his bicycle. She had expressed her suspicions about Kirby with the detectives in 1985, but “everyone blew her off,” she told Sanchez.

A sheriff’s detective obtained Kirby’s medical and personnel records and discovered that the morning after the murder, he was treated at a hospital for lacerations to his forehead and injuries to his wrist and leg. He then spent two weeks on sick leave.

This additional information convinced the Washington judge to grant the warrant. On a Thursday in June, in a Spokane Police Department interview room, a nervous, trembling Kirby—he had a scar on his forehead, the detectives noticed—provided the saliva swab.

The following Wednesday morning, Kirby placed his wedding ring on the kitchen table, slipped off his shoes, walked into the woods, and shot himself in the head.

After the battering the LAPD had endured during the past decade, solving the Arthur case provided a much-needed boost. Sheriff’s investigators thanked Coulter, Kilcoyne, and Sanchez for solving the murder. Tensions were eased between the two departments. And after a number of notorious failures, the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division was lauded for its excellent work. LAPD criminalists had meticulously collected evidence at the crime scene and scrupulously stored it for fourteen years.