After four hectic days on the East Coast and in the South interviewing Bakley’s friends and family, Knolls and McCartin, the designated travel team, return to squad room, spread out their interview notes in the captain’s empty office, and brief Ito, Eguchi, and Hartwell.
McCartin says a close friend of Bakley’s who lives in Mississippi related an interesting conversation: Bakley had told her that if she was killed, “Call the L.A. police department and tell them that Blake did it and don’t let him get away with it.” Bakley explained to the friend that she believed Blake and Caldwell had conspired to murder her during the vacation a few weeks before her death. After they visited Arizona and drove to the Sequoia National Park in central California, Bakley and Blake were in the woods having sex—for the first time on the trip—when she heard a noise. Bakley then saw Caldwell holding a gun and vomiting in the bushes. Blake walked over to Caldwell, Bakley told the friend, and attempted to comfort him, saying “It’s okay, don’t worry about it. I’ll have someone else do it,”
Knolls and McCartin talked to another friend of Bakley’s in New Jersey, who said that she had told him the same story.
Most of Bakley’s immediate family and close friends have sold their stories to the tabloids, McCartin says, but he still believes they are credible. None of them could identify any angry victims of her scams who were likely suspects.
The friend from New Jersey said he told Bakley, “I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to get the hell away from him. Something is going to happen. You’re going to get hurt.”
“I want to get my baby,” Bakley responded. “If anything happens, be sure to tell the police.” Then Bakley asked him, “Do you think I’ll feel any pain? I hate pain.”
He told her, “I’m sure it will be over quick. But don’t put yourself in this harm.”
“I always wanted to be famous,” she told him. “If it happens, I guess I will be. I’ll get my dream.”
About a week after Haro and Soler first talked to the stuntman Ronald Hambleton, they decide to pay him another visit. He denies that Blake solicited him to kill Bakley, but the detectives are certain he is lying. They believe the informant, the handyman who once worked for him. So they will employ another approach with Hambleton: they obtain a search warrant. Sometimes this can be an effective interrogation tool. If detectives unearth evidence related to the case, that might convince a person to talk, or if they stumble upon evidence of other crimes—illegal drugs, for example—the threat of jail can also be used to pressure a reluctant witness.
In the late afternoon, Ito and Eguchi head out for Hambleton’s place at the edge of the Mojave Desert, several hours from downtown. As they drive through the city streets on the way to the freeway, they pass stands of jacaranda trees in full bloom, the vivid lavender blossoms heralding the end of spring. Eguchi drives east on the freeway, inching along in rush hour. As traffic thins and the housing tracts give way to verdant foothills, he cuts north, climbs four thousand feet over the crest of the San Bernardino Mountains, and cruises down into the dusty, dun-colored flatlands of Southern California’s high desert.
Ito stares out at the limitless horizon and says, “We need this guy to ‘fess up.”
McLarty’s comments were crucial, he tells Eguchi, but if Hambleton levels with them, “Blake is bought and paid for.” Tonight’s interview could wrap up the case.
They finally reach a sheriff’s substation, where Hartwell and a few other detectives are gathered in a meeting room. After they plot out how they will approach Hambleton and conduct the search, Ito asks a sheriff’s deputy for a dinner recommendation. When he suggests a Chinese place, all the detectives stare at him skeptically. The deputy assures them the food is excellent, so they walk down a stretch of desert road and stop in front of the small restaurant, its windows coated with dust. They venture inside, where the owner, excited at seeing another Asian in the desert, asks Ito whether he is Chinese. When Ito responds that he is Japanese, the owner shuffles forlornly back to the kitchen. Ten minutes later, he returns with heaping plates of kung pao beef, beef with snow peas, and almond chicken. The detectives take a few bites and then turn toward Hartwell for an expert assessment. In culinary matters they always defer to him.
“Not bad at all,” Hartwell says. “Actually, it’s surprisingly good.”
Hartwell has an improbable background for a gourmet. He grew up in a small blue-collar town in the Northwest and after high school worked a union job in a Washington paper mill for six years. Searching for sunshine, he eventually moved to Los Angeles and joined the LAPD. He married young and raised a son. His wife did most of the cooking, but occasionally, after dining out, Hartwell experimented in the kitchen and attempted to re-create the dishes he enjoyed.
He was first exposed to French cuisine when his mother joined the Cookbook of the Month Club and received Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. His mother, who was more interested in meat and potato recipes, tossed the book aside. But Hartwell was entranced by the exotic ingredients and complex sauces. He began experimenting, occasionally inviting his cop friends over for small dinner parties. He soon started collecting cookbooks, occasionally taking days off to search specialty stores for truffles, foie gras, French beans, and young spring lamb. His avocation soon became a passion. He installed in his kitchen a commercial range, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and side-by-side sinks, bought a set of heavy hammered-copper pans, and built a wine cellar in his basement.
When his marriage dissolved and he found his evenings suddenly free, Hartwell began taking classes at restaurants and cooking schools throughout the city. At one class, he met Patrick Jamon, the renowned chef of Les Anges in Santa Monica. Les Anges was one of the finest French restaurants in Southern California, popular with actors and directors. Hartwell had dined at the restaurant several times and marveled at the intensity of Jamon’s sauces and his signature dishes, such as poached oysters with sea urchin sauce and turbot stuffed with scallops and lobster mousse. Hartwell, the only man in the class, often chatted with Jamon. His knowledgeable questions impressed the chef, who invited Hartwell to visit the kitchen, have a glass of wine, and watch him work.
One Friday night, Hartwell stopped by and Jamon told him, “As long as you’re just standing around, why don’t you slice some leeks.” When Hartwell saw how much faster and finer the others in the kitchen sliced vegetables, he realized that for all his enthusiasm, he was still a rank amateur. Over the next few months, he stopped by the restaurant several nights a week after work and volunteered. When Jamon was satisfied that Hartwell had learned the basics, he allowed him to prepare hors d’oeuvres and then a few fish dishes. After Jamon’s sous-chef was hired as head chef at another French restaurant, Hartwell was promoted.
A new owner took over the restaurant, but he liked Hartwell’s cooking and asked him to stay on. Hartwell began cooking the fish, another chef prepared meat dishes, and Jamon supervised. For weeks at a time, when Jamon was on vacation, Hartwell assumed the role of head chef—ordering the meat, fish, and poultry, and rising early to shop for vegetables at the produce market. For the next four years he worked during the day as a detective lieutenant in charge of the missing persons section and other downtown units, then spent his evenings at the restaurant.
The days were long, but he loved the creativity and freedom he was afforded in the kitchen, a bracing contrast to the bureaucratic tedium of the LAPD. In 1989, Les Anges closed, but Hartwell continued to work with Jamon occasionally at private clubs and at banquets. Today, he no longer cooks professionally, but is still a fervent epicure. He owns almost a hundred cookbooks, stores cases of first growth Bordeaux and vintage California Cabernets and Zinfandels at wine warehouses, and dines at the city’s most celebrated restaurants.
The other cops used to view Hartwell as an eccentric, but now value his expertise. Before special occasions, they often ask him for restaurant suggestions or wine recommendations. And a few detectives who will admit that they like to cook come to him for tutorals on sauce preparation or sautéing techniques.
Ito and the other Homicide Special detectives enjoy working for Hartwell because he respects their knowledge and skills, allows them to work their cases with minimal interference, handles most of the administrative tasks, and runs interference with the brass. And Hartwell’s interests are so eclectic that he can explain why he paid top dollar for a 1961 Bordeaux, but still discuss the Dodgers’ pitching woes and USC football.
When the detectives finish their Chinese food, they caravan to Hambleton’s house. The dusk is warm, a bone-dry breeze kicks up clouds of dust, and a few low stars prick through the sky, milky white against the enameled blue of the desert horizon. The detectives pull off the highway onto a long, serpentine dirt road, bumping over ruts and rocks, bugs smashing against their windshields. Finally, they reach Hambleton’s isolated four-acre compound. Hours ago they were in Los Angeles; now they feel as if they are at the ends of the earth, standing in a barren moonscape with a few jagged Joshua trees looming on the perimeter like lonely sentinels. It is perfectly quiet in the gloaming as the light suddenly fades, cobalt to black, sky to ground. Soon there is an infinite expanse of stars overhead, more stars than are ever visible in the neon glare of Los Angeles.
Hambleton’s property, encircled by a chain-link fence, is cluttered with more than a dozen cars, trucks, and motorcycles in various states of disrepair and a vast carpet of engine parts. When the detectives show him the search warrant, he reluctantly lets them through the gate.
Because Haro and Soler have already questioned Hambleton and established a rapport, they, along with Ito, will interview him in RHD’s traveling command post, a mobile home outfitted with a table and chairs that another detective has driven to the desert. Eguchi and a few other detectives will search the cluttered ranch-style house—a bachelor’s residence with a dartboard in the living room and a coffee table covered with National Enquirers. Tacked on a wall, beside a window shaded by threadbare drapes, is a newspaper article about how police cannot protect witnesses.
Hambleton, in his mid-sixties, is a desert rat, a wrinkled, grizzled character with a bushy mustache and a fringe of gray hair. He frustrates Haro and Soler by sticking to the story that Blake discussed only a movie project with him. Eventually he acknowledges that a few days after Bakley was killed, he told the handyman that Blake had offered him $100,000 to kill her, but he insists he made up the story only because he wanted to “seed” his friend—to determine if he was a snitch.
“I knew that if it came back to me, then this gentleman was, in fact, nothing more than a snitch. And I don’t like snitches around me.… After the incident I figured, well, we’ll find out if he’s a yackety yacker.… That’s why we’re talking now.”
Ito eventually joins in the questioning. “Don’t you think it’s kind of odd that you meet with Blake and a few weeks later she’s dead?”
“Yes it is,” Hambleton says earnestly.
“Isn’t it true,” Ito asks, “that … he gets ahold of you for one reason: it’s to kill his wife. And you turned him down. Isn’t that the main reason you met with him? And it wasn’t for no bull script.”
“It was specifically for a script,” he insists.
Soler asks whether he is willing to take a polygraph exam.
Hambleton says he is not familiar with polygraphs and does not trust them. After a few more minutes of jousting, he finally acknowledges that he is afraid to cooperate with the detectives because he associates with members of the Hell’s Angels and the Mongols motorcycle gangs. They hate snitches: “I know for goddamn sure if I go and testify in a huge case of this nature, I know the collar I’ll be wearing and I know my life’s not going to be worth a shit.”
“How do you know we’ll ever need you to testify?” Ito asks. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“If you guys give me an affidavit that I don’t have to testify, I’ll be happy to tell you what I know.”
“We can’t do that,” says Ito.
“Then I don’t know nothin’,” he says sullenly.
Soler asks, “What would it take to get you to tell us the truth? Would it take a relocation out of state?”
Hambleton considers the question for a few seconds. “You guys can prove the case without me being involved. I have no doubts in your capabilities. You guys are sharp as a tack. It isn’t worth it to me to put myself in that position.”
Ito says, “You didn’t answer my partner’s question. What would it take?”
“I don’t know,” Hambleton says wearily.
“You’re not being totally truthful with us,” Ito says.
Hambleton laughs. “I think I’ve copped to that. I think that’s pretty well established.” His mood quickly changes and he says, his voice straining in frustration, “For crying out loud, I’m trying to be righteous. But I’m over a barrel.”
Finally, when Ito is certain Hambleton will not deviate from his story, he asks, “If you were on your deathbed, would you tell us the truth?”
“I imagine on my deathbed I would,” he says, chuckling.
When the interview is over Ito discovers that the detectives searching the house did not have much luck, either. Eguchi drives back to the city in a glum mood as Ito dozes off in the front seat.
After the Memorial Day weekend, Ito compiles a list of about a dozen stuntmen who worked with Blake in the past. During the next few weeks, he plans to slog through the list, interview each stuntman, and hope Blake solicited one of them. Ito also plans to question Snuffy again—since he was Blake’s go-between with both McLarty and Hambleton—and hopes he is more forthcoming.
For three and a half weeks, the investigation has hummed along briskly, the detectives following up on critical clues and tracking down significant leads. Now the next phase of the case begins, the tedious process of reinterviewing people, attempting to persuade reluctant witnesses to talk, pressing the crime lab for results, chasing marginal tips and peripheral players. As Ito compiles a to-do list, a detective informs him that the film Pearl Harbor just opened and says, “That’s one movie that should cheer you up.”
“I’ll be yelling in the theater, ‘Go get ’em, Uncle. Way to go. You got another one.’” Ito laughs and says, “I’ll watch Pearl Harbor every night. I just won’t see Midway.”
“You’ll get shot in the theater and it’ll be just another OIS we’ll have to respond to,” another detective says.
The deputy district attorney assigned to the Blake case is Greg Dohi, who is half Japanese, which inspires more kidding by the detectives. Rick Jackson, who investigated the murders of Yuriko and Michelle Taga, calls out across the room to Ito: “In my case the victims are Japanese but the detectives and the DA are white. How come in your case the victim is white but the detectives and the DA are Japanese? We should switch.”
Later in the morning Dohi stops by to confer with Ito and Eguchi. Ito stands up when he sees Dohi, gives him a mock bow, and grunts, “Dohi-san.”
“We need to get Lance Ito [the Japanese-American judge assigned to the O.J. Simpson trial] on this case,” jokes Ito. (He is not related to the judge.) “Then we’ll really know we’ve taken over the L. A. justice system.”
Crisscrossing the country interviewing Bakley’s friends and family, Knolls and McCartin have neglected the Lourdes Unson murder. But on a late afternoon in early June, a Hollywood detective calls them. Their Armenian suspect, a parole violator, has just been picked up and is being held at the Hollywood station.
As they cruise toward Hollywood, Knolls realizes that this might be one of his last interviews as a Homicide Special detective. In a few weeks he will transfer to a Valley division where he will work as a patrol sergeant. Knolls is tired of all the late-night and early-morning officer-involved-shooting callouts and the mountains of paperwork that must be filed. He joined Homicide Special because he wanted to work only complex homicides, and he has been increasingly frustrated by the distractions. But he is also leaving because he has missed the street, missed teaching rookies the nuances of patrol work, missed the satisfaction he felt when he grabbed a young cop by the gun belt and pulled him off a belligerent suspect before he took a swing and endangered his career.
McCartin and most of the other detectives believe that Homicide Special, despite its drawbacks, is the apex of investigative work and they think Knolls is making a mistake. One day, Knolls figures, he will probably return to detective work, but for now he is ready for a patrol car. He tells McCartin that he is looking forward to returning to the Valley, where he was raised. But the Valley now bears no resemblance to the bucolic place he recalls from his boyhood, when he would hop on his bicycle and ride east from his home in Panorama City and pedal past orange groves, the blossoms redolent on warm afternoons, and through dairies where the dust and smell of cow manure hung in the air.
A century ago, the San Fernando Valley was a vast, dusty wasteland encircled by low-lying mountain ranges. Not yet part of Los Angeles, the sparsely populated landscape lacked the one element farmers needed to harvest crops and investors needed to subdivide the land: water.
The story of how the San Fernando Valley evolved into the country’s prototypical suburban development is, like so many other chapters of Los Angeles history, a story of how a group of powerful men despoiled the environment, defied nature, and duped the public in order to make a great fortune on Southern California real estate.
At the turn of the century, 100,000 people lived in Los Angeles. During the next four years the population doubled and the area suffered an extended drought—two intertwined events that prompted ambitious civic leaders to seek additional water sources.
In 1904, William Mulholland, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Fred Eaton, who preceded Mulholland as superintendent and was also a former mayor, devised an improbable plan. After a trip to the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, they decided that an aqueduct could siphon off water to Los Angeles from the Owens River, 233 miles to the northeast, and solve the city’s problems.
This new supply greatly exceeded Los Angeles’s needs, so instead of selling the excess water, Mulholland believed, Los Angeles should annex great swaths of land, such as the San Fernando Valley, and provide the new territory with the surplus. An aqueduct, Mulholland told a city commission, “will give Los Angeles standing as the metropolis of the Pacific Coast.”
In order to buy Owens Valley land and water rights cheaply from local ranchers and to prevent land speculation based on inside information, the aqueduct plan was kept secret.
But not long after Mulholland and Eaton had returned from their fact-finding mission in the Owens Valley, where they concluded that the aqueduct plan was feasible, a syndicate of investors, which included some of Southern California’s wealthiest and most influential men, quietly optioned 16,000 acres of San Fernando Valley real estate at the rock-bottom price of $35 an acre. The syndicate members included the Los Angeles Times’s owner, Harrison Gray Otis; his son-in-law, Times general manager Harry Chandler; Edwin T. Earl, publisher of the Los Angeles Express; Henry E. Huntington, founder of the Pacific Electric Railway; and Edward H. Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Eaton and Mulholland had surreptitiously secured land and water rights along forty miles of the Owens River. Later, Eaton and a group of Los Angeles officials, posing as cattle ranchers, claimed their option on the property.
In the summer of 1905, one day after the city’s Board of Water commissioners privately approved the aqueduct plan, the prominent syndicate members purchased the San Fernando Valley acreage. It defies credulity to suggest that these powerful men were not aware of the privileged information. Many believed they had been tipped off: one of the syndicate members, a streetcar magnate named Moses Sherman, also sat on the water board.
During the next few years, Otis and Chandler regularly ran articles in the Los Angeles Times about the city’s great water crisis and the critical need for the aqueduct. In one editorial the paper railed that anyone who voted against the funding of the aqueduct would be “placing himself in the attitude of an enemy of the city.” When the bond issue was approved in 1907, few were aware of the great fortune Otis and Chandler were about to make and their role in the real estate scam.
In 1909, four years before the aqueduct was completed, Otis, Chandler, Sherman, and two other partners, using their profits from the previous land grab, bought a massive Valley tract of almost 50,000 acres, again for a bargain price: $53 an acre.
When the aqueduct opened, more than 40,000 people gathered along a hillside in the San Fernando Valley for a fireworks show and the firing of military guns. As mountain snowmelt cascaded down the spillway, Mulholland turned toward the mayor and said, “There it is. Take it.”
The San Fernando Valley was the beneficiary of so much water that until development ranged from mountain range to mountain range, agriculture thrived between the subdivisions. But the Owens Valley, drained of its vast water supply, was ravaged. Eventually most farmers and ranchers abandoned the land, and several towns in the area shut down. The once immense, turquoise Owens Lake was sucked so dry the wind kicked up huge alkaline dust storms, spewing noxious clouds and creating a health risk for residents.
Los Angeles, however, prospered. Aqueduct water fueled the massive growth and watered the lush lawns—and later the backyard swimming pools—of countless subdivisions. By 1925, the city’s population had grown to 1.2 million. Soon, Los Angeles was—after Cairo—the largest desert city in the world.
The Armenian suspect is waiting for Knolls and McCartin in a Hollywood Division interview room lined with graffiti-scarred perforated panels. He is in his late twenties, big and burly, with close-cropped black hair, and he wears a V-neck velour shirt, khaki pants, and black loafers. His left arm is cuffed to his chair. After a few preliminary questions, the detectives conclude he is not very bright. He has difficulty responding to even the most basic query and stares at them with a bovine expression, mouth open, eyes opaque.
“Where do you work?” McCartin asks.
He stares at McCartin, concentrating on the question. “I don’t.”
“How do you get money?”
“My cousin gives me money,” he says. “I can’t read too good. I have a slow memory.”
“Where does your mother live?” Knolls asks.
“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks. He knows that Knolls and McCartin are homicide detectives, so he asks whether the interview is connected to the murder at his mother’s apartment building.
“How’d you hear about that?” Knolls asks.
A neighbor told his mother, he says.
“When was the last time you were there?” Knolls asks.
The suspect spends several minutes trying to figure out where he lived the past few months and when he last stopped by his mother’s apartment, but the story is so convoluted that McCartin finally asks in frustration, “Are you under the care of a doctor?”
“I use to be,” the man says. “I use to take stress medication.”
Eventually he figures out that he visited his mother around Christmas.
Because he was so vague about the dates, Knolls tells him, “You’re giving us a lot of reasons for you to do bad things.”
He nervously massages his collarbone. “I’m not stupid enough to harm somebody.”
Knolls asks whether he knew the woman who was killed.
“She lived in the building,” he says, avoiding Knolls’s gaze.
“What part of the building?” McCartin asks.
“Next door,” he says, still looking away.
“You know her?”
“Not really.”
When they ask him a few more questions about where he lived recently and the cousin he briefly stayed with, he tugs at his hair and cries, “My head is blowing up. I’m getting frustrated. Why you want to know about my family?”
After the detectives calm him down, he explains that after Christmas he spent a few months in Mexico.
The man has difficulty remembering when he returned, so Knolls asks him, “Do you know when Easter is?”
“Is it in June?” he asks.
“We’re in June now,” Knolls says impatiently.
“I don’t know,” the man says, closing his eyes and grimacing. “My head’s messed up. I’m stressed out.” He eventually figures out that he left Mexico in April.
Unson was murdered in mid-April and McCartin wants to pin down an exact date for the the man’s return to Los Angeles. But he says he cannot remember. McCartin then asks whether it is possible that he visited his mother at her apartment after his trip to Mexico.
The man stares at McCartin suspiciously. “What for?”
“Because you’re a good son,” Knolls says sarcastically.
McCartin loses his temper and snaps, “It’s a simple question.”
The man finally says that because he was on the run from his parole officers, he avoided his mother’s apartment when he returned from Mexico: he knew they would look for him there.
When McCartin presses him about exact dates, the man clenches his teeth and groans, “I don’t know. Something’s fucked up in my head. I got fucked-up head problems.”
When he calms down, Knolls shows him a picture of Unson and asks if he ever talked to her.
The man shakes his head.
“How often did you see her?” McCartin asks.
“A few times.”
“Did you ever visit her in her apartment?”
“No.”
“You ever been to her apartment?”
He drops his chin to his fist and says, “No.”
McCartin leans across the table and says sharply, “Did you do it?”
He crosses his arms and says, “No.”
“Did you kill her?”
“No!” he says, emphatically.
“You ever hear of DNA?”
He nods.
“If you ever visited her, tell us now, so if we found some of your DNA in there—”
The man interjects that he never once visited the apartment.
“You sure we’re not going to find your DNA?” McCartin asks. “If there’s a reason for it, I want to know now. This little case you have here is nothing. You’ll be facing a murder and end up on Death Row.”
The man shakes his head and waves a palm.
“You willing to take a poly?” McCartin asks.
He nods without hesitation. “Bring it.”
After the interview, both detectives have throbbing headaches. They walk out into the squad room and collapse into chairs.
“This guy’s a friggin’ numbnuts,” McCartin says with disgust.
“He’s definitely a wack job,” Knolls says. “My concern is because he’s such a dumb fuck, he could have been manipulated into going along. Maybe he’s involved but he didn’t do it himself.”
“At least we know where he is now,” McCartin says. “He’ll be locked up for a while.”
The detectives believe it is significant that the man readily agreed to take the polygraph. And he insisted he never visited Unson’s apartment, even when they continued to press him. A guilty man might have said that he was once inside the apartment for some innocuous reason. Even a suspect this dim is familiar with fingerprints and DNA. But until they receive the lab results from the murder scene and track down the other suspect, they will not know for sure whether he is the killer.
A few days later, a television reporter in Louisiana calls Homicide Special and tells a detective he recently talked to a friend of Bakley’s who has inside information on the murder. McCartin and Bub—who has replaced Knolls on the travel team because he is preparing to transfer—fly to Louisiana to question the woman. Once they hear what she has to say, they immediately call Ito.
One Friday night in early May, the woman told detectives, Bakley called from her cell phone. She said she had just dined with Blake and was sitting in his car, alone, down the street from the restaurant. After they chatted for a few minutes, Bakley whispered, sounding frightened, “There’s somebody coming.”
The friend told Bakley to flee.
“It’s okay,” Bakley responded with obvious relief. “It’s Blake.”
Then the friend heard two pops and the line went dead. She was so shocked she dropped the phone and fell down, injuring her eye so badly she had to go to the emergency room. The next day she learned that Bakley had been murdered.
McCartin and Bub tell Ito they will try to confirm her story by checking hospital records for the time and date she was treated.
“If her story checks out,” Ito tells Eguchi, “we could book Blake tomorrow.”