On a scorching, smoggy Friday afternoon in August, a Homicide Special lieutenant in downtown Los Angeles answers a call from a detective supervisor in North Hollywood.
“I might have one for you,” he says. “We had a call-out last night in Studio City. A Russian lady shot in the chest. Lots of condoms around. Probably a call girl. Very attractive. But here’s the kicker: the FBI has a tap on her phone.”
“Why?” the lieutenant asks.
“Don’t know. That’s why we’re calling you. You want it?”
“I’ll send some guys over this afternoon.”
The lieutenant crosses the squad room and briefs Detectives Chuck Knolls and Rich Haro. This is their last day as partners. They had hoped to make it through the night without a corpse, but Knolls is first on the weekend on-call list, which officially began at noon today. He has to take the case. His new partner, currently on vacation, won’t show until tomorrow. So Knolls and Haro will track a homicide together one last time.
Haro, who is fifty-five, has tired eyes, a thick black mustache, and a sun-lined face. The oldest detective in the unit, he is on the verge of retirement. A case he picked up two years ago—the murder of a 468-pound Hell’s Angel known as Large Larry and his girlfriend—is scheduled for trial Monday. He will be tied up in court for months. After the trial, Haro wants to stay at Homicide Special just long enough to solve a Guatemalan triple murder he has been investigating for the past year and a half. Then he will pull the plug.
Haro knows this might be his last homicide, and he is already feeling nostalgic about leaving the unit. During his sixteen years at Homicide Special and, before that, as a divisional detective, he has investigated hundreds of murders and has solved many of them. It has been a good run, but he is getting too old to stand on his feet all night at murder scenes, to jump out of bed at three A.M. after callouts, to work twenty-four hours straight, grab a nap, and then work another shift. He thinks back to his first interview at the unit, when a grizzled homicide detective known as Jigsaw John leaned over, Canadian whiskey on his breath, and asked, “You speak any language besides Spanish?”
“Yeah,” replied Haro curdy, aware that there was only one other Latino in Homicide Special. “English.”
Everyone in the room laughed, and he was accepted into the unit.
Haro has never been the diplomatic sort. When he arrived at Homicide Special, he addressed any colleague who annoyed him as “Butt Licker.” Butt Licker, or B.L., became his nickname, and he derived a perverse pleasure in the sobriquet; in the pre-politically correct days of police work, he handed out business cards with the initials “B.L.” beneath his name.
Haro feels like a dinosaur and worries that his style of investigation is outmoded. When he first joined the unit, detectives slowly, methodically sifted through leads and clues and hints of evidence. Because his caseload was lighter then, he worked at his own deliberate pace. The wave of intense detectives who have recently joined the unit are so harried and impatient that Haro believes the quality of their investigations suffers.
Knolls, who just spent a grueling five years investigating murders in South-Central Los Angeles and has been at Homicide Special only nine months, is one of these new, driven detectives. He is forty-four, with pale green, hard-to-read poker eyes, thinning sandy brown hair, and a solid build from daily weight-lifting sessions. Blunt, stubborn, and accustomed to taking charge, Knolls has clashed in the past with Haro, his only partner at Homicide Special. Neither detective regrets splitting up.
As the lieutenant finishes up his briefing, Haro wonders whether the case will keep him out all night. He has lost track of the number of mornings he has arrived at home as his family was waking up. This is one element of the job he is not going to miss.
Haro and Knolls grab their suit jackets and roll out in separate cars. The detectives cruise through downtown, heat waves shimmering in the distance, the horizon veiled by a tawny band of smog. Less than an hour after the call-out, they speed on the freeway toward North Hollywood.
On another day, in another century, in a city that even then was famous for its dark and disturbing crimes, private detective Philip Marlowe climbed the redwood steps to his small house in the Hollywood Hills, fixed himself a stiff drink, and listened to the cars rumble through a canyon pass. “I … looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills.… Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent.… Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him.”
Today, half a century after Raymond Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye, twenty-four hours a day somebody is still running in Los Angeles. But while there are many more killers in this sprawling city now, and many more detectives trying to catch them, one thing has remained unchanged: a select downtown unit with citywide jurisdiction is still assigned to investigate the most brutal, most complex, most high-profile murders in Los Angeles. This unit is called Homicide Special.
Murders that involve celebrities are transferred from the local police divisions to Homicide Special. Organized-crime killings, serial murders, cases that require great expertise or sophisticated technology are investigated by Homicide Special. Any murder that is considered a priority by the chief of police is sent to Homicide Special.
A unit that tracks such singular murders is perfectly suited to Los Angeles. Teetering on the edge of the continent, the city has always been an urban outpost, conceived in violence, nurtured by deception, enriched by graft, riven by racial enmity, and plagued throughout its history by heinous homicides.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Los Angeles was known as the most murderous town in the entire West, a way station for the most vicious desperadoes, gamblers, grifters, and drifters. The only police chief in the city’s history to die in the line of duty was murdered in 1870. East Coast reporters suggested that Los Angeles should change its name to Los Diablos. By 1900, L.A. was a cow town of about 100,000 people, unable to grow because of its limited water supply. The event that precipitated the city’s population explosion and transformed it into a major metropolis was itself a crime: civic leaders hornswoggled farmers in the Owens Valley, 233 miles away, and siphoned off their water, enriching a handful of prominent men who had devised a real estate scam.
Once the water was flowing, millions poured into the city, lured by the promise of sunny days, balmy nights, ocean breezes, and the fragrance of orange blossoms. But beneath the palm trees and the pastel bungalows with their velvety lawns simmered the rage and resentment of rootless people whose troubles did not dissolve in the hazy sunshine. The burgeoning crime rate served as a sinister counterpoint to the Utopia promised by civic boosters and real estate hucksters. The seemingly benign, subtropical landscape also proved violent, beset by earthquakes, wildfires, flash floods, and deadly mud slides.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the city’s dark side inspired the noir genre, spawning such writers as Chandler and James M. Cain and a spate of nihilistic movies. During this era, Los Angeles suffered an increasing number of complex, sadistic murders. Soon, the LAPD began assigning these cases to a specialized downtown unit composed of the most skilled, most experienced homicide detectives in the department. In 1947, this unit—which eventually evolved into Homicide Special—investigated the most infamous unsolved murder in the history of the city, a murder that forever shattered the myth that Los Angeles was a placid paradise. The nude corpse of Elizabeth Short, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actress, was found in a weed-choked lot, neatly sliced in half at the waist. Her organs had been removed, her body drained of blood. A ghastly ear-to-ear grin was carved on her face. Short was christened the Black Dahlia because of her tight-fitting black dress and dyed-black hair, which she wore in a swirling bouffant.
During the next half century, detectives from the unit tracked countless other notorious cases, from Marilyn Monroe’s overdose, to the Manson Family murders, to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. During the 1970s and ’80s, the detectives caught a number of serial killers who terrorized the populace, such as the Skid Row Stabber, who killed ten transients; the Koreatown Slasher, who killed six people and wounded seven; and the Sunset Slayer, who shot six young women and had sex with the corpses. They handled other serial murder cases as well, with varying degrees of success. But their failures were rarely scrutinized, and Homicide Special retained its reputation as the department’s premier investigative unit, with the best detectives in the city.
Astute LAPD detectives in other divisions, however, predicted problems ahead. Homicide Special, they said, was becoming a good-old-boys’ club, a complacent fraternity of middle-aged detectives. Their techniques were outmoded, their best investigative days behind them. Because the workload was so light, some aging detectives spent more time on the golf course than at homicide scenes. Detectives picked up so few “fresh blood” cases that their crime scene expertise and investigative skills were rusty. There was little turnover in the unit, so the best young detectives often were excluded.
These criticisms proved particularly prescient when, on a June morning in 1994, the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, both of whom had been stabbed and slashed more than thirty times, were found at her Brentwood condominium. Police officials transferred the case to Homicide Special, expecting exemplary detective work. But during the trial of O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson’s husband, people throughout the country watched defense attorneys eviscerate Homicide Special detectives and their maladroit investigation.
Homicide Special’s reputation was at rock bottom. But in the wake of the Simpson acquittal, the unit underwent an extensive overhaul. Most of the detectives and both lieutenants retired or were transferred. Today, only a handful of investigators remain from the days of the Simpson case.
Captain Jim Tatreau, the new head of Robbery-Homicide Division—which includes Homicide Special, Rape Special, Robbery Special, and the Officer Involved Shooting team—has brought in almost twenty new homicide detectives. Most are much younger than the previous crew, and their workload has increased considerably.
During the past few years, Homicide Special’s status has risen as detectives have solved a number of nationally publicized cases: The granddaughter of Bernard Parks, the Los Angeles chief of police, was shot and killed by a gangbanger who was aiming for her companion. An Academy Award-winning actor, Haing S. Ngor, who had survived the horrors of the Cambodian killing fields, was shot outside his apartment, and initial reports indicated that he was killed by Khmer Rouge hit men. The first female Secret Service agent to die in the line of duty was blasted by a shotgun while on a stakeout. Bill Cosby’s son Ennis was murdered during a robbery attempt.
When a jury convicted a Ukrainian immigrant named Mikail Markhasev in the Cosby case after only a few hours of deliberation, the Los Angeles Times—which had blasted the LAPD during the Simpson trial—published a laudatory editorial: “Important differences … between the Markhasev and Simpson cases explain the different trials and verdicts. Most important … was the solid professional work in the Ennis Cosby … investigation as opposed to unbelievably sloppy police work in the Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman double-murder investigation.”
The unit, however, has endured recent failures as well. But Homicide Special detectives have learned that they cannot exult after their successes or dwell on their failures for too long. They simply do not have that luxury.
Because, in Los Angeles, twenty-four hours a day somebody is running.
And when a killer has committed a murder deemed sufficiently bizarre, or intractable, or newsworthy, the detectives assigned the task of trying to catch him are still from Homicide Special.