Crime Beat: A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

KILLER ON THE RUN

WILDER CHARGED WITH SLAYING HOUSEWIFE

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

April 7, 1984

As federal fugitive Christopher Bernard Wilder continued to elude authorities Friday, he was charged with the first-degree murder of an Oklahoma City housewife and another grim stop-off was added to the trail FBI agents suspect he has taken west from South Florida since March.

The charge filed in Junction City, Kansas, near where the woman’s body was found March 26 is the first murder charge lodged against the Boynton Beach man who authorities suspect has gone from Miami to Las Vegas, Nev., on a kidnapping and murdering spree.

Wilder, 39, has been charged in Florida for the kidnap and rape of a Tallahassee college coed. The electrical contractor, part-time race car driver and self-styled photographer was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list this week and is now suspected in at least eight abductions or murders of young, attractive women.

In Miami, FBI agents Friday released a 1981 video recording of a well-groomed and quiet-spoken Wilder, sitting relaxed before a camera and discussing what he called his goals, his need to meet more women and his description of who the right person for him would be.

Agents said they hope broadcasts of the cassette tape across the nation will help lead to Wilder’s capture.

“It’s a hell of an investigative aid for us,” said bureau spokesman Dennis Erich. “Anyone who has seen this and then sees him will know it’s him.”

The FBI declined to identify where the six-minute tape came from. In what appears to be an interview for a dating service, the cassette depicts Wilder in a yellow sports shirt and jeans, sitting on a couch while being questioned by an unseen interviewer.

“I have what I call a need to meet and socialize on a more wider basis than I’ve been,” Wilder said. “I want to date. I want to socially meet and enjoy the company of a number of women.”

When asked what his objectives for the future were in the three-year-old tape, Wilder said, “Hopefully meeting the right person. Somebody with depth, somebody with some background specifically to themselves. Somebody that I can feel comfortable with.”

Wilder discussed his contracting business, his hobbies of car racing and water skiing and his dislike for “barhopping” as a means of meeting women.

“Barhopping is not and never has been one of my greater joys,” he said. “I’ve reached the point where I can’t go to Big Daddy’s and feel comfortable.

“I’m a little out of that category,” he added with a laugh.

The version of a reserved and good-natured Wilder captured on the videocassette seems a contrast to the man authorities across the country suspect him to be.

Wilder, who investigators believe fled from his Palm Beach County home in mid-March following the disappearances of two Miami models, was charged Friday with the murder of Suzanne Wendy Logan, a 21-yearold Oklahoma City woman who disappeared March 25 from a shopping mall.

The victim’s body was found the next day in a picnic area at Milford Lake in Geary County, Kans.

Wilder “very definitely is our man,” said Geary County Deputy Sheriff William Deppish. The warrant listed bond for the elusive fugitive at $2million.

Officials said Wilder became the prime suspect because Mrs. Logan’s murder was similar to the other disappearances and the murder fits into the path and time frame of the fugitive’s alleged trek west.

“We suspect Wilder because of the way he operates, tying a women’s wrists with duct tape, bruises about the wrists and body and long knife wounds in the back,” said John DiPersio, Geary County undersheriff.

“The time schedule and the geography make him a prime suspect,” said Max Geiman, FBI special agent in Kansas City, Mo.

Positive identification of Mrs. Logan was made Thursday through dental records. A fisherman had discovered her body partially hidden beneath the low branches of a pine tree on the banks of Milford Lake near Junction City. An autopsy showed she had died of one stab wound to the back.

FBI officials in Washington this week said that if Wilder is responsible for the murders and disappearances he is sought for, then it would be a classic case of sexual serial murders. Wilder was placed on the Ten Most Wanted list faster than any other fugitive before.

Agents said Wilder approaches young women in shopping malls and identifies himself as a photographer. He comments on the woman’s appearance and potential as a model, and then tries to persuade her to accompany him for a photo session.

In separate incidents since 1980 in Palm Beach County and Australia, Wilder has been charged with abducting and assaulting young women after presenting himself as a model photographer. He is wanted on a kidnapping warrant for the Australian case and for violation of probation in the local case.

The massive search for Wilder began in late March after FBI agents connected the kidnapping and rape of a Florida State University student with two earlier disappearances from the Miami area.

After fleeing his Boynton Beach home authorities believe he headed west and is suspected of leaving several disappearances and murders in his wake:

Feb. 26; Rosario Gonzalez, 20, a part-time model, disappeared from the Miami Grand Prix. Still missing.

March 3; Elizabeth Kenyon, 23, a part-time teacher and model, disappeared from Miami. Her car was found abandoned at the airport. Still missing.

March 18; Theresa Ferguson, 21, an aspiring model, disappeared from a Merritt Island shopping mall. Her body was found three days later in an isolated creek near Haines City in Polk County.

March 20; a 19-year-old Florida State University coed was abducted from a Tallahassee shopping mall after a man identified as Wilder offered her $25 an hour to

pose for pictures. She escaped from a Bainbridge, Ga., motel where she told authorities Wilder had tortured and raped her. Wilder was charged with abduction.

March 23; Terry Walden, 24, a nursing student, disappeared from Beaumont, Tex. Her body was found in a canal outside the city three days later.

March 25; Suzanne Wendy Logan, 21, a housewife, disappeared from Oklahoma City, Okla. Her body was found in a picnic area at Milford Lake in Geary County, Kans., the next day.

March 29; Sheryl Bonaventura, 18, vanished from a Grand Junction, Colo., shopping mall. Still missing.

April 1; Michelle Korfman, 17, an aspiring model, disappeared from a Las Vegas, Nev., shopping mall after appearing in a fashion show. Still missing.

Sun-Sentinel staff writers contributed to this report.

April 15, 1984

Long before Christopher Bernard Wilder became the most wanted fugitive in America, he haunted the fringes of South Florida ’s modeling and fashion circles.

Investigators said Wilder was able to enter these circles through his cunning charm, smooth talk, money and most of all, his camera.

Armed with these credentials, Wilder bluffed his way into top beauty pageants and fashion shows and stalked shopping centers and beaches as a self-styled photographer and talent agent. At least one modeling agency sent him models for photo sessions.

“Wilder lurked in the shadows,” said Ken Whittaker, Jr., a 28-year-old private detective who first brought Wilder’s name to authorities. “He was cunning and smooth, very manipulative with women.”

“He was active for quite a while,” said Tom Neighbors, a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s detective. “He had a nice scam he used to get close to the type of women he liked.”

A massive search for Wilder across 8,000miles of the country ended Friday when the Australian-born electrical contractor and race car driver accidentally shot himself to death while struggling with a police officer at a small town gas station in New Hampshire.

Wilder, whose journey was grimly charted by the abductions or murders of at least 11 women, appears to have led a double life: one opulent, marked by financial success, fast cars and attractive women; the other sinister, tainted by arrests, investigations and suspicions.

That is the assessment of court records and those who came to know the 39-year-old Wilder.

“As far as I knew he was a real photographer,” said a woman who met Wilder through car racing and once went to his home for a photo session. She asked not to be identified.

“I’m flabbergasted by this whole thing,” she said. ”He must have been flipped out to be doing all these things and hiding so much. He seemed like a normal, nice guy.”

The startling chain of events has had a greater impact on Wilder’s family in Australia. His mother and American-born father have gone into seclusion while a 41-year-old brother Stephen has been in the United States aiding the FBI.

“The family has been completely broken up,” said Valerie Wilder, a sister-in-law. “Life has not been easy. We are trying to live one day at a time.”

She said Christopher Wilder first came to the United States when he was one year old. He spent much of the next several years on the road, as his father, who was in the U.S. Navy, was transferred about the nation. The Wilders did not permanently return to Australia until 1959. Christopher Wilder, the second oldest of four brothers, moved back to the United States when he was 25.

“Chris was always a perfect gentleman in the way he treated me,” his shaken sister-in-law said. “My kids adored him.”

But detectives said their investigations suggest Wilder’s gentle and friendly demeanor shrouded a darker side.

“I felt he was a Jekyll and Hyde character from the beginning,” said attorney and investigator Ken Whittaker, Sr., former special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami office.

Early last month, Whittaker and his son repeatedly questioned Wilder and began to suspect him in the disappearances of two Miami models. They had been hired by one of the models’ family to find her.

A week later, Wilder checked his three dogs into a kennel and embarked on an odyssey that took him from Florida to California and then back across the nation to the tiny town of Colebrook, N.H., five minutes from the Canadian border.

FBI agents suspect the macabre trek included stop-offs in at least nine cities where women were abducted or murdered.

Wilder’s neighbors on Mission Hill Road in Boynton Beach told of occasional parties, several female visitors and a racing Porsche parked atop a trailer. Lately, the car and property have been the focus of police detectives and newspaper reporters.

“It’s become a historical monument,” resident Ken Bankowski said of the Porsche.

Though investigators said the cross-country rampage of rape and killing has stopped with Wilder’s death, many mysteries surrounding the man remain unanswered.

Joseph Corless, special agent in charge of the FBI office in Miami, said the bureau will continue to investigate Wilder’s past for possible links to other unsolved disappearances.

“We are not eliminating anything,” said Detective Neighbors.

Some of Wilder’s movements in recent years have already been documented.

Wilder was captured on film at the 1983Miss Florida pageant in Fort Lauderdale. Pageant officials said last week that a review of videotape taken during an Oct. 1, 1982, media day at the beach shows Wilder among about a dozen photographers. The tape was turned over to the FBI.

Elizabeth Kenyon, 23, a part-time teacher and model who disappeared March 5from Miami, was a finalist in that pageant and possibly met Wilder there. She is still missing and authorities said Wilder is a suspect in her disappearance.

“He was at the pageant and he represented himself as a photographer for Pix magazine from Australia,” said Grant Gravitt, one of the pageant’s producers.

Blaine Davis, media coordinator for the pageant, said Wilder presented a media identification card but it apparently was not checked with the Australian magazine for authenticity.

“Normally, with a magazine from Australia, I wouldn’t check,” Davis said. “He did present some credentials that were acceptable at the time.”

In Australia, Pix officials said there is no record of the magazine ever employing Wilder or purchasing photographs from him.

More recently, in what the FBI termed a “close call,” a 20-year-old Fort Lauderdale model was forced to turn down an invitation Feb. 23to pose for Wilder when she couldn’t arrange transportation to his Boynton Beach home.

The young woman, who talked on condition that her name not be used, said a photographer told her Wilder had seen photos of her, was “dying to meet her” and wanted to take her photograph for a beer advertisement at the then upcoming Miami Grand Prix.

“When Wilder called later that night, he said he was doing a Budweiser commercial and wanted to do a shoot in his garage, with a car he was going to race the next day,” the model said. “I thought that was strange, taking pictures in a garage. But since my photographer recommended him, I didn’t think any more about it.”

The model said she decided against the trip when her parents, fearing something was “not right,” refused to lend her their car.

“I called Wilder back and told him I couldn’t make it,” she said. “He seemed upset and wanted me to take a cab. But when I said no, he asked me to meet him the next day at the race. I told him I was busy.”

Aspiring model Rosario Gonzalez disappeared from the Miami Grand Prix on Feb. 26. The 20-year-old woman is still missing. FBI agents said Wilder is a suspect in her disappearance.

“The FBI told me I was lucky,” the Fort Lauderdale model said. “They said it was a close call. I’m still shook up about it.”

Ted Martin, the photographer who attempted to set up the “shoot” between Wilder and the Fort Lauderdale woman, said he believed Wilder was a legitimate photographer. He had met Wilder at a fashion show at the Cutler Ridge Mall two years ago.

“I spent my time professionally with him,” Martin said. “He was very into the business.”

Investigators don’t know how many other young aspiring models were unlucky enough to cross Wilder’s path.

Detective Neighbors said he is suspected in a 1979 rape case. A 17-year-old girl reported at the time that she had been approached on the Lake Worth beach by a man claiming to be a talent agent for a prominent modeling agency in Fort Lauderdale. After luring the girl to his car, the man took her to a secluded area west of West Palm Beach and raped her. Neighbors said the woman recently told detectives her abductor was Wilder.

Investigators suspect Wilder used several aliases, business cards and ploys to lure young women to photo sessions where he would attempt to seduce them or rape them.

“There is evidence of different names and cards he would flash,” said Neighbors. “That is part of his M.O. He had quite a line.”

William Silvernail, who operates the Blackthorn modeling school in West Palm Beach, said Wilder approached his agency in 1981as a freelance photographer looking for work. He didn’t get any work, but Silvernail suspects Wilder may have taken a business card and then had copies made that identified him as a Blackthorn photographer.

Silvernail said his agency began getting calls from parents checking on a photographer who had approached their daughters. The name of the photographer was often different but the description was always the same: blond, balding and bearded – a description similar to Wilder.

At the Barbizon School of Modeling in Broward County, talent director Dorothy Girard said Wilder also used the name of her agency to approach young women and girls. In those cases, Mrs. Girard said Wilder was often wearing a Barbizon T-shirt.

“And, at that time, we didn’t even have Barbizon T-shirts,” she said. “When he was using our name, our students called up to check on him and we said, ‘Forget it, he is not with us.’”

Some of the girls Wilder approached apparently didn’t bother to check him out. He was arrested in 1980 for raping a 16-year-old girl after luring her from a West Palm Beach shopping mall with promises of appearing in a pizza advertisement as a Barbizon model.

According to court records, Wilder first told the girl to strike poses for him at different stores in the mall. “My eyes are the camera,” he told the girl, according to court records. “Don’t pay attention to me.”

Sheriff ’s Detective Arthur Newcomb, who arrested Wilder for the rape, later said in a court deposition that Wilder was believed to have continually used the photographer-agent ruse to seduce young women.

“[Wilder] stated this was a common operation, posing as this modeling agent, and that this is something he has done often,” Newcomb said in a deposition. “He tries to get girls in order to have relations with them. I have non-crime reports that show this man has done this frequently. It is nothing he denies.”

In that case, Wilder pleaded guilty to attempted sexual battery and was placed on five years’ probation. He began receiving psychiatric counseling but never ended his life as self-styled fashion photographer.

Detectives said that in the early 1980s he built a studio in his home on Mission Hill Road. The room was complete with developing, printing and lighting equipment, backdrops and cosmetic supplies. A friend said Wilder even had fans “for blowing a model’s hair back.”

In December 1982, two months after he had bluffed his way into the Miss Florida Pageant, Wilder was arrested in Australia and charged with the abduction and indecent assault on two teen-agers he had lured from the beach with a promise of modeling jobs. Wilder had first taken the girls to a zoo where he took their pictures as they posed on a rock sculpture.

Police said there was no film in the camera he was using. On April 4, he failed to show for a court hearing on the case in Australia.

According to records in Australia and with Interpol, Wilder showed the girls a card identifying himself as a photographer for Tide International, a talent agency located on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.

Detective Neighbors said Wilder was associated with Tide as a freelance photographer in the early ’80s. According to the detective, models were referred to Wilder’s home studio for photo sessions.

“He used [Tide] as a source for models,” said Neighbors. “He would call and say I need a model and they would send one over. He legitimately hired them. What he did with the pictures, I don’t know.”

Neighbors said the sheriff’s office has received no complaints from any Tide models that posed for Wilder. He said several that were interviewed said Wilder had acted very professionally and they expressed shock that he was suspected in several abductions or murders.

Tom Davis, owner of Tide, said Wilder was not associated with the business. While Davis acknowledged that he had met Wilder through Grand Prix racing, he said Wilder was not one of about 40freelance photographers associated with Tide.

“We never sent him models, no way on that,” said Davis.

Though Neighbors said Wilder may have had arrangements with other agencies throughout the area in the early ’80s, he said Wilder removed the studio and photographic equipment from his home after his arrest in Australia. The self-styled fashion photographer then began dropping off his film at a local Kmart store to be developed.

Sun-Sentinel staff writers Ott Cefkin and Patricia Sullivan, along with correspondent Nick Yardley in Australia, contributed to this report.

February 23, 1985

Haydee Gonzalez will think about the wedding that was planned for her daughter last June and she will cry.

Delores Kenyon will talk about the bedroom, filled with her daughter’s unused belongings, and she, too, has to cry.

It has been 12 months now since Rosario Gonzalez disappeared and nearly as long since Beth Kenyon has been gone, but to each of the missing young women’s families, the pain and the questions have not been diminished by time.

Though it has been a year since Christopher Wilder began a cross-country odyssey of kidnap, rape and murder that authorities believe started with the disappearances of the two South Florida women and ended in his own death 8,000miles later, he keeps a grim hold on many.

The families of Gonzalez and Kenyon still don’t know the fate of their daughters. Neither do Wilder’s many investigators. And they don’t know how many other unknown victims he may have claimed, either.

With the suspected murderer gone, the families, FBI agents and police officers continue to follow clues and search for the missing women, all the while piecing together bits of the Wilder puzzle.

“It has been a year and we still cry,” said Delores Kenyon, of Pompano Beach. Delores and William Kenyon’s daughter, Beth, 23, was last seen March 6with Wilder at a Coral Gables gas station.

“You can’t help but cry,” she said this week. “I don’t think my heart could be broken any worse. We’ve gone through a year of this, and we are still at that gas station. We don’t know what happened to her after that.”

“Whatever has happened we will accept as God’s way. But we need to know what happened,” said Haydee Gonzalez, of Miami. Rosario Gonzalez, 20, daughter of Haydee and Blas Gonzalez, disappeared from the Miami Grand Prix a year ago this weekend.

In the last year, the two families have hired private detectives, consulted psychics, distributed thousands of “missing” posters, placed newspaper ads from here to El Salvador and traveled as far as Mexico and Canada in hopes of finding their daughters – whether it would be to find them alive or not.

The Gonzalezes and two relatives were arrested for trespassing on Mother’s Day last May when they searched the outside of Wilder’s Boynton Beach home for clues. Mrs. Gonzalez said it was the frustration of not knowing; she had to do something. The charges were later dropped.

The families have found no trace of the two women. Of the 13 women Wilder is believed to have abducted, six were murdered, four escaped their abductor and three are still missing. The missing are Kenyon, Gonzalez and Colleen Orsborne, 15, who disappeared from Daytona Beach on March 15.

Wilder was killed April 13while struggling for a gun with a state trooper in Colebrook, N.H.

Not knowing what happened to the missing women is the thing that hurts their families most; it hurts more than knowing.

“They have found their daughters and buried them,” Delores Kenyon said of some of the other families from which Wilder took a daughter. “We don’t even know what happened to ours.”

“The not knowing is the worst thing about this,” said Haydee Gonzalez.

That’s why the Gonzalez family had gone as far as Mexico City looking for Rosario; why each weekend they take a drive out to a different spot of western Dade County to look for her in the Everglades areas; and why they will be at the Miami Grand Prix this weekend distributing 10,000flyers with her photograph on them.

And that’s why the Kenyons call the FBI week in and week out to see what is happening on their daughter’s case; why they have spent thousands of dollars on three different private detective agencies; and why they have followed even a psychic’s advice and searched underbrush as far away as Alabama for their daughter.

And that’s also why the FBI and police, even close to a year after Wilder’s death, follow any plausible lead or clue in an effort to locate the missing women.

“It is a continuing process,” said Miami Police Detective Harvey Wasserman. “Leads still come in. We still follow them. But so far nothing has worked out.”

“We follow up on any kind of lead that comes in,” said FBI spokesman Joe Del Campo. “We won’t stop until all logical investigation has been completed and all leads are followed out.”

As late as last week, Miami police got a call that Rosario Gonzalez had been seen in Washington, D.C. The tip didn’t check out.

And for the FBI, following the leads has recently led agents to the death row of a California prison to talk to a man who once knew Wilder and is now awaiting execution for murder, a source with knowledge of the investigation said.

The source said the prisoner claimed he could help investigators find the missing women, but information he provided did not check out. Del Campo acknowledged that agents went to California recently, but would not confirm that they spoke to a prison inmate.

While continuing a search for the missing women, the FBI is also pursuing another branch of investigation. Agents are following Wilder back in time along a trail of credit-card, telephone and other traceable records.

Del Campo said agents intend to trace Wilder’s trail backward for years and will compare each stop to any unsolved crimes in that area that involve the abduction, rape or murder of young, attractive women.

“It is very much an ongoing investigation. We are piecing together the Wilder puzzle,” Del Campo said. “In the case of Mr. Wilder, there could be victims from years in the past that we don’t know about yet. We will leave no stone unturned.”

Wilder had a record of arrests for sexual offenses dating back to the 1970s in Palm Beach County and his native Australia. So far, investigators have learned that Wilder crossed the country in the year before the murderous spree that made him the most wanted fugitive in America. Agents said they have attributed a 1983kidnapping and rape of a young woman in San Mateo, Calif., to Wilder.

“It is difficult to track,” Del Campo said. “We are trying to put it all together. It is going to take time.”

Time is something the families of Rosario Gonzalez and Beth Kenyon have had to pass in agonizing pain since their daughters were reported missing last year.

Gonzalez was last seen Feb. 26, 1984, distributing samples of an aspirin product at the Miami Grand Prix. Investigators have placed the aspiring model at the race that day speaking at one point to a man fitting Wilder’s description.

Wilder, an electrical contractor with an affinity for car racing and photography, had raced his black Porsche in a preliminary Grand Prix race a day earlier and had returned to the race grounds Feb. 26 with his camera, the device investigators say he used often to lure women to their deaths.

The missing woman’s family hopes the 10,000 flyers they will distribute this weekend will bring out new information on her disappearance. The flyers offer a $50,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts.

“The FBI has not proven it was Wilder who took her,” Mrs. Gonzalez said. “There were people from all over the country at the Grand Prix. There were yachts from all over. Maybe some of these people will be back this year and will see her picture and remember something that will help us.”

In her heart, Gonzalez believes that her daughter, who had planned to get married last June, can be found alive.

“I feel she is still alive,” she said. “I have no idea where, but it could be she was kidnapped and taken away somewhere.”

The Gonzalezes and Kenyons share a unique, though tragic, bond. Family members often call each other to console one another and share information on their similar searches. When the Kenyons were pursuing a tip that their daughter might be in El Salvador, members of the Gonzalez family came to Pompano Beach from Miami to translate telephone calls.

“We share what we know and stay in contact, usually every few weeks,” said Selva Menendez, a cousin of the Gonzalez family who often acts as a translator for Haydee and Blas Gonzalez, who speak little English. “We believe if we find one of the girls, the other will be nearby.”

The trail of Beth Kenyon, also an aspiring model like many of Wilder’s victims, ended at the gas station near the Coral Gables elementary school where she taught. Her car was found at Miami International Airport. Her family has never stopped looking for her.

“If somebody calls up and says our daughter is on the moon, we will send somebody to the moon to look for her,” said Mrs. Kenyon.

But the family’s search has come up painfully short of information on what happened to Beth. The posters mailed to churches and sheriffs’ offices and supermarkets across Florida have resulted in no plausible leads. A six-day search for a cabin in North Alabama where a psychic said the woman might be also proved fruitless. Dead ends – just as with leads to Canada and South America.

“We are still where we were March 6. We haven’t gotten her past that gas station,” Delores Kenyon said.

Like Haydee Gonzalez, Mrs. Kenyon keeps a small hope in her heart that her daughter is still alive. She has shipped all of Beth’s belongings from her Coral Gables apartment to the family’s permanent home in Lockport,

N.Y. And she waits, hopes and prays for the day her daughter will use them again.

“Everything is waiting for her,” Mrs. Kenyon said. “Her bedroom is waiting for her. Everything is as it was. You just have to hope, that’s all. And pray.”

And then she began to cry.

DARK DISGUISE

Crime: A former Granada Hills resident is in jail in Florida on a murder charge. Wife says he claimed to work for the CIA and married again without divorcing her.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

September 29, 1991

In his Granada Hills office, David Russell Miller surrounded himself with reminders of the things that meant the most to him.

A fixture at civic and business functions across the San Fernando Valley, the former Chamber of Commerce president covered a wall in his office with the photos of the important people he knew and had met. There was the governor, local assemblymen, international figures such as Oliver North, even Desmond Tutu.

But there was no photo of his wife, Dorothy. None of her two young children. Indeed, most of the people who knew Miller – including those who worked with him for years – say they did not know he was even married.

Neither did saleswoman Jayne Marie Maghy when she met him on a plane in January. And after a six-week romance that included limousine rides and meals at expensive restaurants, she married him in Las Vegas. But soon after the glow of her whirlwind courtship dimmed, the new Mrs. Miller became suspicious of her husband’s business and personal dealings.

With the help of a private detective she stumbled onto the other Mrs. Miller and on Sept. 15confronted her husband.

It was a confrontation that cost her her life, police say. Jayne Miller was shot to death in the Central Florida town where the couple had moved earlier this year. David Miller, 41, is being held in a Sanford, Fla., jail without bail on a charge of murder.

The killing has sent a wave of astonishment across the Valley and served to pull back the veil that shielded David Miller’s secret life.

Many who thought they knew him now count themselves as victims of a con man. Some wonder if the violent end to David Miller’s double life could have been averted if they had voiced suspicions they had early on.

Dorothy Miller said she met David Miller in Granada Hills in 1979. The recently divorced owner of a hair salon was raising two young boys and after she met Miller in an attorney’s office, a romance began.

Dorothy Miller said her future husband told her that he had been divorced once and had just moved to the Valley from the Washington area where he had held government jobs, including being an aide in the Nixon Administration. He was raised in Sardis, Ohio, and wore an Ohio University ring. University officials last week confirmed that he attended the school but refused to reveal other information until Miller cleared up financial obligations to the school.

Within six months, the couple moved in together and later bought a house on Aldea Avenue in Granada Hills. They weren’t formally married until Aug. 11, 1985, when they drove to Las Vegas and were wed in a roadside chapel. Dorothy Miller still has the marriage license. She says there was never any divorce.

As a Valley-based lobbyist, David Miller initially specialized in representing the printing industry on state legislative issues. In 1987, his reputation as a lobbyist landed him a job as a legislative aide to Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), but McClintock said he fired Miller after six months because of unexplained absences and poor performance. Miller then opened an office called David Miller & Associates in the same building that housed the Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce.

His firm expanded to include developers as clients, and civic activities had him involved in chamber functions. He served a term as president of the chamber and then as president of the United Chambers of Commerce, an umbrella organization for 20Valley chambers.

Those who know Miller described him as a name-dropper who drove a Jaguar and stayed at first-class hotels while traveling. He took clients and business acquaintances out for pricey meals and picked up the tabs. Some said Miller told them he was an attorney, though there is no record of him as a member of the California Bar.

“He was so good at stories,” said a businesswoman who knew Miller for years but who didn’t want to be identified. “They would get long and complicated. He could tell wonderful stories, but there was always the feeling that that’s what they were, stories.”

It was unclear why Miller kept his wife away from his business and social interests. Dorothy Miller said that the story her husband told her was that the life he led in California was a front.

His real work, he said, was for the CIA.

“From the day I met him, he always told me CIA stories,” she said in a recent interview from Belle Vernon, Pa., where she now lives. “He told me it was freelance work. He was always involved in international incidents. Whatever was in the news.”

Though admittedly embarrassed now, Dorothy Miller said she believed her husband. And there was some evidence that he was traveling abroad. He often brought back souvenirs from foreign countries and there were calls home that were put through by Spanish-speaking operators.

Sometimes, he told her of international events that she saw on the news. Sometimes, he told her of events that never hit the news – like the time he came home with a cut leg and said he had been grazed by a bullet.

“It was convincing,” she said. “He could explain enough and include enough details to make it believable. When I had questions he just told me I would have to trust him on it. He told me that a lot.”

Dorothy Miller said she met few of the people her husband did business with in the Valley and never once set foot in the office because her husband said it would be a security risk. He explained that the business was a CIA front set up to trap a target in a web of unspecified international crime.

But the trap was apparently never sprung. In 1989, David Miller moved his wife and her two sons to Orlando, Fla. She said he explained that he was closing the California office and selling their house because the family could be in danger.

“He said it was for security reasons,” Dorothy Miller said. “He said, ‘You have to trust me.’ ”

The Millers bought a new house in Orlando and Dorothy got a job at a local hair salon. She said her husband continued to travel, coming home for only a few days at a time and always regaling her with tales of international intrigue.

What Dorothy Miller did not know was that her husband did not close his Granada Hills office and continued to live in the home they had shared there. And while it is unknown where all of his travels took him, it is clear his business and civic activities in the Valley continued until at least early this year.

Business acquaintances said that until early this year Miller was heavily involved in establishing the San Fernando Valley Leadership Program, a 10-month seminar in which citizen activists and business and government officials spend one day a month learning about and discussing an issue of public importance, such as environmental health, transportation or crime.

Participants in the program, sometimes numbering as many as 30, each paid $700tuition when it was first instituted by Miller in 1987. The program, deemed a success by alumni such as Richard Alarcon, now Valley deputy for Mayor Tom Bradley, has been repeated every year since and the tuition has risen to $1,200. Inspired by its success, Miller & Associates began efforts to market the concept in other communities across the country.

Heavily involved in the program and also anticipating an increase in his company’s lobbying and business consulting clients, Miller added Ross B. Hopkins, a former public affairs manager for Lockheed Corp., to his firm in November.

But the anticipated boom went bust, Hopkins said.

“He overextended,” Hopkins said in an interview. “He counted on some contracts coming in that didn’t come in.”

Meantime, older sources of revenue – developments on which Miller had consulted – dried up as the work was finished and the contracts completed, Hopkins said. By early 1991, Miller was facing severe financial problems.

One creditor was Jacklyn Smith, owner of a Glendora firm that sells supplies to printing companies. Smith said she had given Miller, whom she had known for several years, a $17,000 loan that he repaid in January with a check that bounced. He then supplied another check from another bank, which also bounced, she said.

Smith later made a complaint to Los Angeles police, and investigators are attempting to determine if Miller committed fraud by giving her the checks knowing that they would not be covered by his banks.

Marge Russo, owner of a Reseda real-estate agency, said that she loaned Miller $6,500 for the purchase of a Palm Springs condominium, but that he also failed to pay her back. She has since filed a lien against him.

According to records with the county recorder’s office, Miller stopped making mortgage payments on his home and foreclosure proceedings had begun. Records also show his company failed to make at least $4,500 in tax payments to the state.

There were other debts as well. Hopkins said Miller stopped paying him and other employees soon after the start of the year. He said that on at least two occasions people came into the office looking for Miller and saying he owed them money.

But after the first of the year, Miller was rarely in the office to greet clients or creditors. While his financial world was crumbling, his personal life was apparently quite active.

Dorothy Miller said her husband spent the Christmas holidays in Orlando with her, but on Jan. 1 said he had to leave on a secret government assignment to South America.

But acquaintances said Miller actually flew back to his life in California. And while on the plane he met 33-year-old Jayne Maghy, a divorced mother, with whom a romance blossomed as soon as the plane touched down in Los Angeles.

According to Jodie Bowen, who describes herself as Maghy’s best friend of 10years, Miller “wined and dined” Maghy, boasting that he was an attorney worth $4million.

There were front-row seats to The Phantom of the Opera, weekends at expensive bed-and-breakfast inns in Newport Beach, dinners at formal political functions.

“He was Prince Charming,” Bowen said. “We had to go out and buy gowns for her so she could go to some of these functions with him. And he was obsessed with her. He called her every day. She was not happy with her job and thought, ‘Here is someone who can take me away from this life.’ ”

Miller and Maghy were married Feb. 16 in a Las Vegas chapel. Bowen was the witness and that weekend the new Mrs. Miller won $3,000 playing video poker, a lucky start to what would be an ill-fated marriage.

David Miller did not keep the marriage a secret. Before the wedding, he had announced the marriage plans at a Granada Hills Chamber of Commerce dinner and after taking the vows he promptly called his associates from Las Vegas.

“It had been difficult getting a hold of him,” Hopkins, his former associate, said of the period. “He was not in the office and I thought he was out trying to round up clients. Then he called and said, ‘Guess what? We’re married.’”

A group of friends and associates gathered at Miller’s office on March 1 for a small reception for the couple. Hopkins said the happiness exhibited for the Millers was tinged with somberness. Some of those toasting Miller had not been paid by him in a month.

“I felt very bad for the staff because they were having problems and here the guy was getting married,” Hopkins said.

At least one of Miller’s friends believes that some people who knew him were uneasy about his marriage because his financial problems were becoming known. There were also rumors that he was already married.

“The joke was that he wanted to marry her quick, before she found out the truth about him,” said a woman who worked with Miller on Chamber of Commerce projects. “Everybody knew he didn’t have any money. And I think some people specifically knew he was already married.”

After the marriage, Miller’s financial problems quickly escalated, according to financial records and acquaintances. Business associates and creditors said it was increasingly difficult to contact Miller and recalled that in the instances where he was seen, he often became emotionally upset. Miller alternately explained that he was facing financial crisis or said he had cancer.

Alarcon, Mayor Bradley’s Valley deputy, said that at a meeting of representatives of Valley political officeholders Miller tearfully announced that the Leadership Program would be his legacy in the Valley.

“When I asked him what was wrong, he told me he had cancer,” Alarcon said.

John Dyer, a business consultant who subcontracted with Miller to share office space with him, said that on the occasions that Miller did come to the office, his moods changed noticeably.

“I think it was obvious to everyone who saw him that his state of mind had changed – changed considerably,” Dyer said. “He would have times of anger – open outbursts. And sometimes, he was open, his friendly old self.”

Miller was finally forced to close his office April 18, Hopkins said. Faced with foreclosure and liens for unpaid debts, he and his new wife signed ownership of the Granada Hills house over to a bail bondsman named Bert Hopper on May 7, according to county records.

The mortgage foreclosure was withdrawn, but other debt holders said they never got their money. Hopper did not return repeated phone calls for comment on the house transfer.

Miller then moved his new wife to Sanford, Fla., a small town outside Orlando. Dorothy Miller said that by this time her husband had already moved her from Orlando to Belle Vernon, Pa., once again telling her that the move was required as a security precaution.

But after making the move, Dorothy Miller said her husband stopped his routine of calling her every day. He also stopped making even infrequent visits home and she had no idea where he was. She said years of building suspicion finally got to her and she began making calls.

First, she said, the CIA told her David Miller was not an employee, freelance or otherwise. Next, calls to Chamber of Commerce officials in the Valley revealed that her husband had been active in the area until only a few months earlier – until he had gotten married.

“I thought, ‘That’s funny, since I already am his wife,’ ” Dorothy Miller said. “But nobody knew about me there. They thought I was a crazy woman.”

Dorothy Miller said that when her husband did finally telephone her in midsummer, she confronted him and he admitted that he had remarried. She said she cut off all communication with him and asked the police in Belle Vernon to investigate.

Meantime, David Miller had taken his new wife and her parents to Europe in June despite his financial burdens. It is unclear how he paid for the trip. Vince Bertolini, also a former United Chambers of Commerce president who had worked with Miller, said he happened to run into his old friend June 26in the lobby of a hotel in Rome.

“It was very strange,” Bertolini said. “He told me he was representing the Kuwaiti government, resolving issues from the Persian Gulf War. It was kind of off the wall.”

Bertolini said Miller also acknowledged that he was having financial difficulties and said the experience taught him that “you really know who your friends are.”

After returning from Europe, the marriage of David and Jayne Miller foundered. Police said the two separated after repeated fights and each sought restraining orders against the other. Jayne Miller said in court documents that her husband had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

Suspicious of her husband’s dealings and debts, Jayne Miller next hired private detective Bob Brown to make inquiries. Brown said Jayne Miller told him her husband had claimed to be a tax attorney in California who moved to Florida to work at Disney World.

Brown made routine computer checks and found David Miller’s name linked with the name Dorothy Miller on car and house titles and tax rolls. He found no record of the couple being divorced.

“I told Jayne that it looked like this guy already had a wife,” Brown said. “It looks like he had two houses, one here and one in California. He had evidently been commuting back and forth between wives.”

Using Brown’s information and old phone records left behind by her husband, Jayne Miller tracked down Dorothy Miller in Pennsylvania and the two confirmed each other’s existence. Dorothy Miller said Jayne Miller told her that she was determined to confront their shared husband and expose him by going to the media with the story of the high-profile bigamist.

“I told her he was dangerous and warned her to stay away from him,” Dorothy Miller said.

Brown said he gave his client the same warning. And her friend Bowen sent her a plane ticket so that she could move back to California.

But Jayne Miller would never take the flight. On Sept. 15, according to Sanford police records, Jayne Miller called her husband and told him she was removing his property from a self-storage locker and that he would have to come and pick it up.

Brown believes his client planned to empty her husband’s property out of the locker and then leave before he arrived. She may also have felt less fear of her husband because a month earlier she had insisted that he turn a handgun he owned over to police for safekeeping and he had agreed to do so.

However, Jayne Miller was still at the storage facility when her husband arrived. According to police, the couple began arguing about Miller’s other wife and he struck Jayne Miller in the face. When she walked to her car, saying she was going to call the police, David Miller calmly walked back to his car and got a handgun, police said.

Miller walked up to his wife’s car and fired six times through the driver’s side window at her, police said. He then walked around to the other side of the car and fired once more into the car, police said. Two cabdrivers who had been called by David Miller to help him take away his belongings said they witnessed the shooting and tried to aid Jayne Miller, but she was dead. They also held her husband and the gun until police arrived.

Sanford Police Chief Steven Harriett said the gun Miller used to kill his wife was the weapon he had checked in at the police station Aug. 27for safekeeping.

However, Miller had reclaimed the weapon three days later. Harriett said the department had no authority to keep the gun from him. “We had no basis to know what he was going to do with it,” the police chief said.

Brown said he doubted his client knew her husband had retrieved the gun before going to the storage locker.

“She would never have gone there if she knew he had the gun back,” he said. “She made a mistake and paid for it.”

Harriett said that while his investigators are aware of the accusations of bigamy and fraud surrounding Miller, they are not actively investigating the suspect’s activities before the killing. “It’s interesting and intriguing, but not pertinent to our case,” he said.

Some who knew Miller believe that more will remain unknown about him than what is known.

“It’s so frustrating,” said Dorothy Miller, who is now living on welfare. “David did a lot of things nobody can explain or that they thought he would never have been able to do… He’s a bad person and what he did wasn’t right.”

There is also at least some frustration and guilt in the Valley. The woman who worked with David Miller on Chamber of Commerce functions said she believes that there are many who knew him who now wish they had voiced suspicions about his previous marriage and financial problems.

“I firmly believe that all of us knew it, but nobody wanted to take responsibility,” she said. “No one wants to be connected with it now. They just say he was a nice guy and they are shocked. Nobody wants to open up and say we should have told poor Jayne.”

note: A Florida jury later rejected David Russell Miller’s insanity defense and found him guilty of murdering his wife. He was sentenced to life in prison.

THE STALKER

MAN CHARGED IN 1982 DEATH MAN CHARGED IN 1982 DEATH ALLEGES POLICE VENDETTA

LOS ANGELES TIMES

February 25, 1991

Jonathan Karl Lundh says he feels like a character in a suspense novel – an innocent man accused of a heinous crime and left to use his own wits to clear himself.

“It’s like a cheap dime-store novel – I can’t believe what they are doing to me,” Lundh said from behind the bars of Los Angeles County Jail.

The 39-year-old Minnesota man pleaded not guilty last week to a charge he strangled a Cal State Northridge staff member nine years ago. Charges of robbery and rape in the case were dismissed because the statute of limitations for those crimes had expired.

Lundh appears bright and educated and can seemingly quote case law like an attorney. In fact, he has chosen to defend himself against the charges, although he said he quit Harvard Law School before getting a degree. He is soft-spoken and reserved. He has a young wife and friends who share his astonishment and outrage at the murder charge against him.

But authorities say it is the picture of Lundh as an innocent victim of the justice system that is fiction. They contend that he is a skilled con artist and killer who fabricates much of what he says about his life and hides the rest.

“There is no doubt that he is very bright,” Los Angeles Police Detective Larry Bird said. “But I don’t know whether I would believe anything he said… He is a con man.”

Police and prosecutors said that beneath Lundh’s calm, articulate demeanor is a dangerous man who stalked women. It is a characterization that Lundh, who is being held without bail, said he finds as aggravating as his loss of freedom.

“I am not some mad dog cruising the streets, looking to prey on women,” he said during a recent interview.

“Anybody who would do that to a woman should be put away.

“But it’s not me. I am innocent!”

Lundh is accused of murdering Patty Lynne Cohen on April 27, 1982, in a case that received wide attention in Los Angeles.

Cohen, 40, an assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, was abducted from the garage of a Holiday Inn in Burbank, where she had attended a self-improvement seminar. Her nude body was found in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley five days later.

Lundh, who according to court records has nine aliases and records of arrests for nonviolent crimes in at least five states, became a suspect less than two weeks after the slaying. He was later convicted of assaulting another woman outside the hotel just minutes before Cohen disappeared.

But he was never charged with the Cohen murder until last year – after police reopened the dormant investigation and said they found new evidence linking him to the case.

By then, Lundh had moved back to his native St. Paul. He was extradited to Los Angeles last month from a Minnesota prison where he was serving a sentence for grand theft in a case in which he used several thousand dollars of an unsuspecting woman’s money to buy a car, authorities said.

In interviews and court records, Lundh has given different accounts of his background.

In 1983, according to records, he told a probation officer that he had attended Harvard Law School for a year before dropping out for financial reasons. He said he also attended six other universities, including Princeton.

Lundh told the probation officer that he made his living providing cars for film sets but also was an agent for several top entertainers. The officer concluded: “This defendant is viewed as a very sophisticated manipulator and con artist who uses his intelligence to defraud the public.”

In a recent interview, Lundh added a year to his law school experience but said he left Harvard after two years because he was recruited to play defensive end with the Los Angeles Express, a now defunct professional football team.

“I wanted to attend law school but once I got there, my interests changed,” he said.

Lundh said he was recruited by Express coaches because he had played defensive end for UCLA, from which he said he graduated in 1974. In addition to UCLA, Lundh said, “I did some time at the University of Hawaii.”

But efforts to verify Lundh’s claims were unsuccessful.

“We have no record of that person ever registering or attending the law school,” Harvard spokeswoman Mary Ann Spartichino said.

Officials at UCLA and Hawaii also said they could not find any records indicating that Lundh attended those schools.

A media guide listing former UCLA football players did not include Lundh’s name. And the Express lasted only a few seasons after beginning in 1982, a period during which Lundh spent most of his time in jails and prison.

When told that any discrepancies in the biography he furnished might be published, Lundh said his background was not important. “If you want to look for inconsistencies, look at the evidence in my case,” he said.

Lundh said he is the victim of a police vendetta, that he was wrongly convicted of the 1982 assault at the Burbank hotel and is now a scapegoat for an unsuccessful investigation into Cohen’s slaying.

“Why they singled me out, I don’t know,” Lundh said. “I was not in Burbank that evening and they know that. If there was a shred of evidence against me, they would have charged me in 1982, but they had the wrong man. It’s not that they had insufficient evidence; they had no evidence.

“This has continued to disrupt my life for nine years,” he added. “I’ve had my fill of justice.”

But Bird, an investigator on the case since its start, said the evidence against Lundh has always been substantial. He said it was only with the reopening of the case and the gathering of additional evidence that prosecutors decided to file charges.

“It was a strong case,” he said. “It’s much stronger now.”

Bird and the Los Angeles County prosecutor assigned to the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip H. Rabichow, have refused to disclose what additional evidence against Lundh was found.

But Lundh, who has access to legal documents on his case because he has acted as his own attorney, said an extradition warrant he studied stated that investigators had a witness who positively identified Lundh as a man seen driving Cohen’s Mustang the night of her death.

Lundh scoffs at such evidence, saying it will be unbelievable to a jury hearing the witness nine years after the slaying.

“There is no possibility that someone is going to believe that somebody can remember something like that nine years later,” he said.

According to police and court records, this is what happened April 27, 1982:

Cohen had gone to the Holiday Inn to attend a self-help seminar with about 100 others. When the meeting ended about 10:30 p.m., Ruth Kilday, another woman who had attended, saw a man standing in the hallway outside the seminar room. She said the man followed her to the parking lot, where he approached her with a knife as she was opening her car door.

Kilday was able to jump in the car and begin honking its horn to signal that she needed help. The man ran and she started her car and attempted to follow. But the man ran into the hotel’s underground parking garage and Kilday gave up the pursuit.

Authorities said Cohen had parked in the garage and they believe that when she returned to her car, she encountered the man who ran from Kilday.

“I think he stalked her like he stalked the other victim,” Rabichow said.

Cohen was reported missing the next day. Her car, with her body in the trunk, was not found until a North Hollywood resident saw it in an alley and recognized it from media reports about the woman’s disappearance. Meanwhile, police had issued a drawing of the suspect made with the help of Kilday.

A week later, Lundh was arrested in North Hollywood when a police officer saw him in a stolen Corvette. Lundh gave the name John Robert Baker, and he immediately became a suspect in the Cohen and Kilday cases because of his likeness to the drawing of the suspect.

Although Police Chief Daryl F. Gates labeled Baker/ Lundh “a very likely suspect” at the time, prosecutors charged Lundh only with the auto theft and the assault on Kilday because there was insufficient evidence linking him to Cohen.

After his arrest, Lundh claimed that he was at a West Los Angeles gas station at 11p.m. the night of the attack on Kilday, making it impossible for him to have been in Burbank. But during a 1983 trial, he was identified by Kilday as her attacker and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and auto theft. He was sentenced to four years in prison and released in 1986.

The Cohen murder case languished until a chance occurrence in 1990. A detective working on another murder case ran a routine check on the department’s HITMAN – for Homicide Information Tracking Management Automation Network – computer looking for similar slayings.

Bird said the computer, which contains information on all Los Angeles homicides in the last decade, printed out the Cohen case in reply. Prosecutors then discussed the Cohen case with Bird but decided that it was not related to the case the other detective was investigating.

However, after reviewing the Cohen case, the prosecutors told Bird that there was nearly enough evidence to file charges against Lundh and urged that the case be reopened and the investigative ground covered again.

Bird said he located Lundh in St. Paul, where he had recently been paroled from prison for grand theft. Bird said he interviewed Lundh there, then returned to Los Angeles and began gathering new evidence.

In early 1990, Lundh was arrested in Colorado for violating his parole by leaving Minnesota and was returned to prison. Lundh said he left the state to get married and go on a honeymoon. Police believe that he left because he knew that the Cohen case had been reopened.

He was charged May 31, 1990, with Cohen’s murder and returned to Los Angeles in January. The trip back took a week because detectives had to drive him after he cited a fear of flying and refused to go on a plane.

He now awaits arraignment but that may be delayed because Lundh said he has not had enough time to prepare for the hearing.

Lundh’s wife, Gale, who has moved to Los Angeles, is convinced her husband of 1¹⁄2 years is not a con man or a killer.

“They have the wrong man,” she said. “But in this system, it’s not really innocent until proven guilty. It’s guilty until proven innocent. The sad part is that the person who really did this is still out there.”

note: Lundh was tried twice for the murder of Patty Lynne Cohen. He represented himself in both trials. After the first trial ended with a deadlocked jury, he was tried again and found guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

AMERICA’S MOST WANTED

TARZANA MAN HELD IN MURDER OF HIS MISSING FATHER

LOS ANGELES TIMES

December 4, 1987

A 21-year-old Tarzana man was arrested Thursday on suspicion of murdering his father, a wealthy Japanese businessman who has been missing for seven months, Los Angeles police said.

Toru Sakai was being held without bail in the North Hollywood Division jail, Lt. Dan Cooke said.

Sakai ’s father, Takashi (Glenn) Sakai, 54, has not been seen since the day before he was reported missing April 21.

“Based on evidence we have obtained, we believe he was killed,” Cooke said.

Police declined to disclose what evidence either indicates that the man is dead or links his son to the killing.

Toru Sakai was arrested when police officers conducted a search of family financial records at the Braewood Drive home he shares with his mother, Sanae Sakai.

Police said the suspect’s parents had been estranged for about three years. The couple were in a legal battle over their finances and impending divorce at the time Takashi Sakai disappeared.

Sanae Sakai, 50, who operates a real-estate business out of the hillside home, was also arrested during the

7:15 a.m. search, but “during the all-day investigation, the investigators felt she should be released,” Cooke said. He refused to elaborate.

Police said Takashi Sakai, founder of the Pacific Partners investment firm in Beverly Hills and a consultant to many other investment firms, was last seen leaving his office April 20.

Police declined to say where he was living at the time. He was reported missing the next day by a girlfriend.

Three days later, his car was found at Los Angeles International Airport, but authorities found no record of his having taken a flight.

Cooke said detectives then began gathering evidence of foul play.

Robert Brasch, president of World Trade Bank, of which Pacific Partners is a subsidiary, said Thursday that Takashi Sakai was a well-respected businessman and entrepreneur who had been involved in helping Japanese companies invest in businesses in the United States.

note: After three days in jail Toru Sakai was released from jail when police and prosecutors determined they did not have enough evidence at that point to hold him on a murder charge. He then disappeared.

May 24, 1988

Toru Sakai planned the murder of his father for three months, but from the moment the victim was lured inside a Beverly Hills mansion, things started going wrong, a man who said he helped Sakai with the killing testified Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Takashi (Glenn) Sakai, 54, a wealthy international businessman who lived in Tarzana, was killed inside the home but not before a bloody and unexpected fight in which he almost was able to escape, Gregory Meier testified.

“I was behind the door,” Meier said. “He took a couple of steps in, and I came up behind him. I was successful in hitting him in the neck, but he didn’t go down. For some reason I thought I would be able to knock him out – like in the movies. But it doesn’t work that way. He ran for the door.

“I helped Toru bring him back inside,” Meier said. “We kept trying to knock him out.”

It was only after the elder Sakai had been struck repeatedly with a steel bar and handcuffed that his son stabbed him to death in the house’s basement, Meier testified.

Meier, 21, a friend of Toru Sakai’s since they were members of the same high school tennis team, has been granted immunity in the case.

Sakai, also 21, has been charged with murder but is still being sought by authorities. His mother, Sanae Sakai, 51, has been charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact.

Meier revealed the details of the April 20, 1987, slaying during a preliminary hearing on the charge against Sanae Sakai. After Meier and other witnesses testified, she was ordered by Judge David M. Horwitz to stand trial in the case.

The body of Takashi Sakai, founder of Pacific Partners, an affiliate of the World Trade Bank in Beverly Hills, was found buried in Malibu Canyon in early February, about 10months after his slaying.

According to Meier and authorities, Toru Sakai carried out the killing because his parents were embroiled in a bitter divorce and he feared that he and his mother, with whom he lived in the family’s Tarzana home, would face financial difficulties.

“He told me, basically, that he hated his father and he didn’t know what else to do,” Meier said.

Meier said that on three occasions in early 1987 he and Toru Sakai discussed the killing. But Meier said he wanted no part of the plan. Meier said he finally agreed to help his friend in early April 1987, when Toru said he had paid another friend $1,000 to do the job but the friend failed to follow through.

“I didn’t volunteer,” Meier said. “He persuaded me. He told me he would help me out when I needed him.”

Meier said the plan was to lure Takashi Sakai to the empty Beverly Hills home at 718 Crescent Drive that Sanae Sakai was managing for a Japanese investor. Once there, Sakai would be kidnapped and taken to Malibu Canyon and then killed and buried, he testified.

In early April, the two friends dug a grave in a secluded spot off Malibu Canyon Road, Meier testified. Then on April 20, Meier said he went to the Beverly Hills home and waited while Toru met his father at a nearby hotel to ask the elder Sakai to come with him to the home.

When he arrived at the house, Takashi Sakai was attacked, subdued after a struggle at the front door and then thrown down the basement stairs, Meier said.

“He was moaning and yelling for help at the bottom of the stairs,” Meier said.

After that, Toru Sakai decided to change the plan and carry out the killing in the basement, Meier said.

“He brought out a knife and asked me to go down and finish off his father,” Meier said.

Meier said he refused and then watched Toru take the knife down to the basement. When Meier later went down, he saw the older Sakai had been stabbed to death. He said the body was then wrapped in trash bags, rolled in the blood-soaked rug from the house’s entrance hall and loaded into Toru’s Porsche. The two then took the body to Malibu Canyon for burial, Meier said.

Meier said he and Toru spent the next two days getting rid of evidence. He said they dropped Takashi Sakai’s car at Los Angeles International Airport, took the murder weapon and the piece of carpet from the entrance hall of the Beverly Hills house to a landfill in Glendale and painted over blood-spattered walls in the house.

“We put several coats in the basement,” he said.

Meier testified that he later received $1,400from Toru Sakai for his part in the killing.

A carpet salesman and an installer also testified Monday that two days after the killing, Sanae Sakai had purchased carpet and had it installed in the entrance of the Beverly Hills house. The witnesses said the new carpet was a small piece that closely matched the color of the surrounding carpet in the house.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lonnie A. Felker said Sanae Sakai’s quick replacement of the rug was part of the evidence that showed she knew of the killing and was aiding her son. Sanae Sakai has denied she had anything to do with her husband’s killing.

Tough choices in deal for crucial testimony.

June 1, 1988

Police were able to break open the Takashi Sakai murder case because one of the men who took part in the killing made a mistake: He left a fingerprint on a parking lot ticket when he left the dead man’s car at Los Angeles International Airport.

But the man who left the fingerprint, 21-year-old Greg Meier, will not face a day in jail for his role in the murder, although he admitted that he helped ambush the wealthy Japanese businessman, club him with a steel pipe and bury the body after Sakai had been stabbed to death.

Using the fingerprint as the key piece of evidence gathered in a 10-month investigation of Sakai ’s disappearance, authorities in February persuaded Meier to tell what happened to the missing Tarzana man and lead them to his body.

In exchange for that help and for agreeing to testify about the murder, Meier was granted immunity from prosecution. He is now expected to be the key witness in the prosecution of his best friend, Toru Sakai, 21, who is charged with murder and conspiracy in the fatal stabbing of his father.

Meier is also expected to play an important role as a witness in the prosecution of the dead man’s widow, Sanae Sakai, who is charged with being an accessory to murder.

The granting of immunity to Meier points out the frustrations authorities faced in solving what they called an almost-perfect crime.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lonnie A. Felker, who will prosecute the Sakais, is not happy that Meier will avoid prosecution but said there was little choice. Evidence gathered against Meier might not have been sufficient to convict him of participating in the murder, Felker said, but the information he provided after receiving immunity was critical in bringing charges against the man believed to be the actual killer, Toru Sakai.

“Unfortunately, we had to let someone go without any jail time,” Felker said. “There was nothing else we could do.

“It was a choice between everybody going free and seeing just one go free. We didn’t want the person who actually inflicted the fatal blows to Takashi Sakai to walk away. Toru was the one we wanted.”

But the prosecution of Toru Sakai will have to wait until he is found by police. His whereabouts have been unknown since he fled from the family home in Tarzana while Meier was cooperating with authorities. Meanwhile, his mother has pleaded innocent in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Takashi (Glenn) Sakai, 54, a founder of Pacific Partners, an affiliate of World Trade Bank in Beverly Hills, disappeared April 20, 1987. Police from the outset believed he was the victim of foul play. They said it was hard to believe Sakai would leave behind a successful career as an adviser to Japanese businesses seeking to invest in the United States.

Investigators soon learned that Sakai was in the midst of a divorce and that there were bitter feelings with his son and 51-year-old wife, a one-time Japanese beauty contest winner and a descendant of one of the top five families of Japan ’s pre-1945nobility.

Two days after the disappearance, Sakai ’s Mercedes-Benz was found parked at Los Angeles International Airport. Police found no signs that he had taken a flight from the airport and only one clue to what happened to him: the fingerprint on the airport parking ticket stub that had been left in the car.

During the next several months, the investigation moved slowly. Sakai ’s body had not been found, and police had no match for the fingerprint.

Then, in November, the operator of a private mailbox company in Hollywood where Takashi Sakai had kept a box told Los Angeles police that a young man had come in, presented the key and requested access to it. The man left when he was turned down because he was not Sakai, but the business operator wrote down the license plate number of the car he was driving.

Detectives Jerry Le Frois and Jay Rush traced the car to Greg Meier of San Marino.

According to authorities, Meier and Toru Sakai were close friends who had met at San Marino High School when they played tennis together. Both were known as quiet youths who did not participate in many school activities. Tennis and a shared interest in becoming musicians made the basis of their friendship.

Beneath his senior photo in the 1983 Titanian yearbook, Toru Sakai skipped the inspirational messages most students chose and placed a bleakly pessimistic quote attributed to Mick Jagger:

“There’ve been good times; there’ve been bad times; I’ve had my share of hard times too, but I lost my faith in the world…”

Beneath Meier’s photo, the caption he chose read, “If you don’t get life, life will get you.”

The friendship lasted well after high school and the Sakai family’s move from San Marino to Tarzana. The two briefly attended UCLA together and later worked occasionally doing renovation and maintenance work on homes that Sanae Sakai managed for Japanese investors.

After tracing the license number to Meier, investigators asked him to come to police headquarters to answer questions and be fingerprinted. Meier complied and was released. There was not enough evidence to charge him with a crime.

By early February, however, police had matched one of Meier’s fingerprints to the print on the parking stub.

Investigators took Meier into custody on Feb. 9, this time telling him that the fingerprint and other evidence added up to probable cause to charge him, Felker said.

“We confronted him,” the prosecutor recalled. “He indicated he might be able to help us.”

Meier consulted an attorney and then offered to tell what happened in exchange for immunity. Felker said that with no body, no crime scene, no motive for Meier to kill Sakai and little other evidence beyond the fingerprint, authorities had no choice.

“We concurred – it was the only way to go,” said Lt. Ron Lewis, who supervised the Los Angeles police investigation of the case. “I can’t imagine that any law enforcement officer would be too happy about an individual being allowed to walk away, but you have to take in the total picture. Certainly it bothers me, but it was our only option.”

Before granting immunity, Felker said, authorities determined through investigation and discussions with Meier and his attorney that Meier had not been the one who stabbed Takashi Sakai to death.

“We assured ourselves that he was not the actual killer, and we assured ourselves that he did not initiate the thought of the killing,” Felker said. “We gave him immunity because he was not the person who inflicted the fatal injuries.”

The day after immunity was granted, Meier led a team of investigators to Malibu Canyon and pointed out the spot where Takashi Sakai had been buried 10months earlier. He also provided details of the murder that had frustrated investigators for just as long.

Those details were revealed publicly for the first time last week when Meier testified at Sanae Sakai’s preliminary hearing. His audience included more than two dozen Japanese journalists, there because the standing of the Sakai family and the alleged patricide, a rarity in Japan, have drawn the interest of the Japanese community here and across the Pacific.

Speaking calmly, but often exhaling nervously into the microphone, Meier said that Toru Sakai talked on and off of wanting to kill his father for three months in early 1987. He said the talks often occurred while the two friends cruised in Toru’s Porsche over the Santa Monica Mountains or dined and drank in Westwood restaurants near UCLA.

According to Meier and authorities, Toru Sakai wanted to kill his father because his parents were embroiled in a bitter divorce and he feared that he and his mother would face financial difficulties.

“He told me, basically, that he hated his father, and he didn’t know what else to do,” Meier testified.

On April 20, 1987, according to Meier, Toru lured his father to a vacant home in Beverly Hills that Sanae Sakai managed for an investor. Meier said he was standing behind the front door with a steel pipe in his hand when the older Sakai walked in.

“He took a couple steps in, and I came up behind him,” Meier said. “I was successful in hitting him in the neck, but he didn’t go down. For some reason, I thought I would be able to knock him out – like in the movies. But it doesn’t work that way.”

There was a bloody struggle and Takashi Sakai was struck several more times by his son and Meier before being subdued, handcuffed and pushed down the basement stairs, prosecutors said.

“He was moaning and yelling for help at the bottom of the stairs,” said Meier, who testified that Toru Sakai then asked him to kill his father.

“He went over to a bag and pulled out a big knife,” Meier said. “He asked me to go down and finish him off.”

Meier said he refused, so Toru Sakai went down and killed the elder Sakai. The two friends then wrapped the body in a rug, Meier testified, and loaded it into Toru’s Porsche. They drove to Malibu Canyon, he said, and buried the body before returning to the Beverly Hills house the next day to get rid of evidence and paint over the blood-spattered walls.

Meier told investigators that when he drove the dead man’s car to Los Angeles International Airport the day after the murder, he wore gloves so that there would be no fingerprints left in the car. But when he had to reach out the window to take the parking stub, he took the gloves off so that he would not look suspicious. After he got the stub, he put the gloves back on and rubbed the stub to erase any fingerprints, he said.

“But the oil from one of his fingers had already been absorbed into the paper,” Felker said. “The print stayed there. It was the one thing” that connected him with Takashi Sakai’s disappearance.

Several months later, when Meier confessed his role in the murder to authorities, he added one other grim detail to an already gruesome case, Felker said.

Meier told investigators that he and Toru Sakai returned to Malibu Canyon about two months after the murder and partially dug up Takashi Sakai’s body. Toru Sakai used a pair of shears to cut a finger off the body so he could remove a gold ring. Then the body was reburied.

A year later, Felker said, the case has placed authorities in the uncomfortable situation of having to choose for whom justice would be served.

“Our only concern is that at the end of this thing justice is done for as many people as possible,” Felker said. “On a professional level, I do not feel badly about it because I am doing what needs to be done to make sure justice is done.

“On a personal level, I feel badly that everyone that is involved cannot be prosecuted. It is a terrible thing to see some person who is involved just walk away.”

Although Meier faces no criminal charges in the Sakai case, he does face his own guilt, the prosecutor noted.

“I don’t really know how to judge how much he feels remorse,” Felker said. “I know he feels badly about it. He has told me about it several times. The murder wasn’t reality to him until it happened. He was so deeply involved then that he had to stay involved.”

Meier could not be reached for comment. But during his testimony last week, he momentarily faltered while being questioned about the murder.

“This is tough,” he said. “It’s tough, emotionally.”

Toru Sakai was held in 1987after his father’s death, but was released for lack of evidence. Now police say they have a case, but the suspect is gone.

November 6, 1989

On Dec. 3, 1987, Los Angeles police had Toru Sakai right where they wanted him: in a North Hollywood jail cell, under arrest on suspicion of his father’s murder.

But the one thing they didn’t have at the time was the body of his father, Takashi Sakai, a wealthy Japanese businessman who had lived in Tarzana. Without the body or any other conclusive evidence that a murder had occurred, Toru Sakai, then 21, was released uncharged after two days in jail.

The police never got another chance to arrest the diminutive former UCLA student. By the time investigators found the victim’s body and the evidence they needed to charge his son with the slaying, Toru Sakai had vanished.

Today, after nearly two years of sifting through more than 500 leads and traveling as far as Washington in one direction and Tokyo in the other, investigators say they have no clue as to Toru Sakai’s exact whereabouts. They say one of Los Angeles ’ most notable crimes in recent years remains at an unusual standstill. It has been solved, police say. But the suspect remains free.

“We are still looking for Toru, we still get clues,” said Detective Jay Rush. “But he is in the wind…

“It is frustrating when you know who killed someone and why, but you can’t catch him. It is more frustrating than an unsolved case.”

The Takashi Sakai case was unsolved for most of 1987. The 54-year-old founder of the Beverly Hills-based Pacific Partners, a subsidiary of World Trade Bank, disappeared after leaving his office April 20, 1987.

At first the case was handled as a missing person investigation, but detectives quickly suspected foul play. They regarded the sudden disappearance of Sakai, who used the name Glenn in the United States, as unusual, because he was in the middle of a major business deal. His Mercedes-Benz was found at Los Angeles International Airport, but a fingerprint found on the parking stub was not his.

Because Sakai, a former president of the Little Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, was well known and influential in international business circles, authorities theorized he might have been kidnapped. The missing person case was turned over to the Robbery-Homicide Division, which handles kidnappings.

After finding no evidence of an abduction, Detectives Rush and Jerry Le Frois turned their attention to Sakai ’s family. In the previous year the missing man had moved out of his family’s hillside home in Tarzana and was divorcing his wife, Sanae Sakai, a descendant of Japanese nobility and former beauty pageant queen. At the time of his disappearance, he was living in the Hollywood Hills.

Investigators said the marriage was not ending amicably, and Toru Sakai had sided with his mother in a bitter dispute with his father over money. The detectives believed that dispute was the motivation behind the elder Sakai ’s disappearance.

“Glenn Sakai had told people that if anything ever happened to him, his wife and son would be at fault,” Le Frois said.

But the investigators lacked evidence. The break in the case didn’t come until November 1987, when a man with Glenn Sakai’s key to a private mail deposit box in Hollywood attempted to collect mail from the box. The man was turned away because he was not Sakai, but the operator of the mail drop got the license plate number from his car.

The tag number was traced to Gregory Meier, a former classmate and tennis partner of Toru Sakai. Meier told police he had gotten the mailbox key from Toru, and that led to Toru’s arrest on Dec. 3, 1987, on suspicion of murder. But with no body, no crime scene and little other evidence, no charges were filed and he was released.

However, two months later, after police had matched Meier’s fingerprint to the LAX ticket stub, Meier agreed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. He said Glenn Sakai was stabbed to death by his son after being lured to an unoccupied Beverly Hills mansion, which was managed for its absentee owner by Sanae Sakai. Meier, who said he took part in the attack but did not inflict the fatal wounds, led police to the executive’s grave in Malibu Canyon.

On Feb. 10, 1988, police once again went to the Sakai house to arrest Toru, but he was gone. They arrested Sanae Sakai, and she was charged as an accessory to murder after the fact. Authorities said she helped her son cover up the crime.

The charge against Sanae Sakai was dropped, and she has repeatedly denied any knowledge of the crime or of her son’s whereabouts.

The only trace of Toru Sakai police believe may be credible was an anonymous call in early 1988 from a woman who knew unpublished details about the Sakai family and the case and told investigators that Toru had left the country by crossing the Canadian border to Vancouver.

But authorities say that if the suspect did leave the country, it was without his passport, which had been confiscated when he was arrested in 1987. Still, authorities believe Sakai might have been able to get to Japan from Vancouver. Clues phoned to detectives from the Japanese community in Los Angeles as recently as a month ago place the fugitive in Japan, Le Frois said. “We assume he could have gotten a passport and gotten to Japan,” the detective said.

Toru Sakai was born in Japan, but he left with his family for California when he was 1 year old. Investigators said he spoke Japanese poorly and as a teen-ager had had plastic surgery to westernize his eyes – factors that might make him noticeable in Japan.

However, there has never been a confirmed sighting of Sakai in Japan or anywhere else, authorities said. The lack of viable clues to his whereabouts is unusual. Investigators say fugitives often are tracked by their mistakes; using credit cards or passports, telephone records, giving a real Social Security number or leaving fingerprints while using false names.

“Usually there is some kind of a trail,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Lonnie A. Felker, who filed the murder charge against Toru Sakai. “But on this one there is no trail. Japan is a possibility. But so is Canada. He could still be here. We don’t know.”

Detectives went to Tokyo and provided law enforcement officials with details of the case, which was highly publicized there because of the stature of the Sakai family and rarity of patricide in Japan.

Investigators also went to Washington to take telephone calls from tipsters after details of the case, photos of Toru Sakai and mention of his love for tennis and his use of the name Chris were aired twice on the television show America’s Most Wanted. The exposure from the program, which was also translated and televised in Japan, brought hundreds of tips. They led to at least nine different states and Japan, but none led to the real Toru Sakai.

A tip that came from Palm Springs seemed the most promising. The caller said an Asian man was living in a secluded condominium in the desert community. The man went by the name Chris, didn’t seem to work and often played tennis at the complex.

“Everything fit,” Le Frois said. Photos were sent to Palm Springs police, who checked out the tip. The report back was that there was a very close resemblance. It could be Toru Sakai.

Palm Springs police moved in and detained the man after pulling him out of a condominium swimming pool. In the meantime, Rush and Le Frois headed to Palm Springs with a copy of their suspect’s fingerprints. They knew as soon as they got there they had the wrong man. The man pulled from the pool was too tall. Then the fingerprint check confirmed he wasn’t Toru Sakai.

“It’s just cold,” Le Frois said of their suspect’s trail.

Authorities say the search for Toru Sakai remains active and that the detectives meet regularly with Felker, the deputy district attorney, to update the status of the case. But for the most part, they acknowledge that they are still waiting for the call that leads them to the suspected killer, or for him to make a mistake.

“He could make a mistake,” Rush said. “He could get arrested for something else and a fingerprint could be taken.…

“He is out there somewhere,” the detective added wistfully. “And he is probably looking over his shoulder… He better be looking over his shoulder for me.”

note: Toru Sakai has never been captured. His whereabouts remain unknown.

WIFE KILLER

DAUGHTER SAYS FATHER, WIFE HE’S ACCUSED OF KILLING HAD ARGUED

LOS ANGELES TIMES

January 15, 1991

Michael J. Hardy, accused of murdering his wife and burying her body in his backyard five years ago, argued with the victim for hours the day she disappeared, the defendant’s daughter testified in Van Nuys Municipal Court on Monday.

Cheryl Hardy also said she saw that her stepmother, Deborah Hardy, had been temporarily knocked unconscious during the argument at the couple’s Canoga Park home on Thanksgiving Day 1985.

Her testimony came during a preliminary hearing on the murder charge against Michael Hardy, 46, who has pleaded not guilty.

Hardy, now of La Jolla, was arrested Nov. 2after Los Angeles police unearthed a body, later identified as Deborah Hardy, in the backyard of the former Hardy home in the 20600block of Sherman Way.

Police were acting on a tip from the suspect’s 25-yearold son, Robert, who told investigators that his father enlisted him to help bury his stepmother after the elder Hardy had killed her by striking her with a flashlight.

Police said the son, a California prison inmate, told them that he had been bothered by the crime for years. He does not face charges.

Michael Hardy, an unemployed actor, was described as a mob hit man in an appearance on the TV show Geraldo and in a 1977profile in New York magazine. Los Angeles police said they have no evidence linking him to other killings.

In court Monday, Judith Samuel, executive director of the Haven Hills shelter for battered women, said that on the day before Thanksgiving 1985, Deborah Hardy came to the shelter, saying she and her daughter, Cheryl, had been beaten by her husband. Samuel said they left after being told that authorities would be contacted.

Cheryl Hardy, now of San Diego, testified that on Thanksgiving Day, she emerged from her room to find her stepmother unconscious on the floor.

Cheryl Hardy said her stepmother later regained consciousness but the next day was gone. When she asked her father what happened, “he said that she had left,” Cheryl Hardy testified.

Michael Hardy, held without bail in Van Nuys Jail, has three prior felony convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, child stealing and assault on a police officer with a firearm.

According to court records, Deborah Hardy sought a restraining order in 1985to keep her husband away from her, claiming he had broken seven of her ribs, damaged her spleen and beaten her daughter.

January 16, 1991

A La Jolla man was ordered Tuesday to stand trial on charges he murdered his wife five years ago and buried her in the backyard of their former home in Canoga Park.

Michael J. Hardy will stand trial in the death of his wife, Deborah L. Hardy, after a Los Angeles police detective testified at a preliminary hearing in Van Nuys Municipal Court that Hardy had admitted to police that his wife suffered a fatal head injury when he pushed her during an argument.

After police unearthed her body last year behind their former Sherman Way home and arrested him, Hardy told investigators that they had been arguing on Thanksgiving Day 1985when she grabbed a gun and fired into the floor, Detective Phil Quartararo testified.

In a tape-recorded interview, Hardy said he then pushed her and she struck her head, the detective testified.

“He said he slapped the gun away,” Quartararo testified. “He said he pushed her away and she became unconscious” after hitting her head against a wall or table.

Hardy, 46, told police his wife died hours later without regaining consciousness and he asked his son, Robert, to help bury the body, the detective said.

Quartararo said that in a second interview with police, Hardy changed details of the story, saying that his wife fired the gun into the ceiling.

The Hardy family later moved from Canoga Park to La Jolla. The body was not discovered until Nov. 2, 1990, when Robert Hardy, now 25 and an inmate in a California prison, told police about the burial.

The son told investigators that his father had told him he killed Deborah Hardy by hitting her with a flashlight, Quartararo said.

In earlier testimony, Hardy’s 22-year-old daughter, Cheryl Hardy, testified that her stepmother had fired a shot into the ceiling about a week before the Thanksgiving Day argument.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh M. Goldstein told Municipal Judge Robert L. Swasey that the evidence indicated Deborah Hardy did not threaten her husband with a gun at the time she was killed.

At the conclusion of testimony, Hardy’s attorney, Randall Megee, failed to persuade Swasey to dismiss the murder charge or reduce it to manslaughter.

Hardy is an unemployed actor who was described as a mob hit man during an appearance last year on the television show Geraldo and in a 1977 profile in New York magazine. Los Angeles police said they have found no evidence linking him to other killings.

SELF-PROMOTING ‘CONTRACT

KILLER’ ENTERS PLEA TO

KILLING WIFE IN ’85

August 17, 1991

A La Jolla man who fostered what police called an unfounded media reputation as a mob “hit man” pleaded no contest Friday to a charge that he killed his wife six years ago during a Thanksgiving Day argument and buried her in the backyard of their former Canoga Park home.

Michael J. Hardy, 46, entered the plea – equivalent to a guilty plea under California criminal law – in Van Nuys Superior Court to a charge of voluntary manslaughter in the 1985 death of his wife, Deborah L. Hardy, 31.

The victim’s remains were uncovered behind a house on Sherman Way last year when Michael Hardy’s 25year-old son, Robert, who is serving a prison term for burglary, told police about the killing and provided a map detailing where he had helped his father bury the body.

Hardy was characterized in a 1977 New York magazine article and more recently on the Geraldo television show as an organized-crime hit man who had killed 14 people. Police have said, however, that although Hardy has a lengthy criminal record, they don’t believe he was ever a mob hit man.

Hardy faces up to 11 years in prison when sentenced next month by Judge Judith M. Ashmann. Hardy, who had been charged with murder, could have been sentenced to 42years if his case went to trial and he was convicted, so he decided to plead no contest to the lesser charge, said his attorney, James E. Blatt.

“He didn’t want to take the chance of going to prison for the rest of his life,” Blatt said.

Exactly how Deborah Hardy was killed on Thanksgiving Day 1985 may never be known because autopsy results were inconclusive and Hardy himself is the only witness to the death, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsh Goldstein, who handled the case.

Robert Hardy, who said he helped bury the body but did not see the slaying, told police that his father admitted to him that he killed his wife with a blow from a flashlight.

But after his arrest, the elder Hardy claimed in statements to police that his wife was fatally injured when he pushed her as she threatened him with a gun.

Because of those inconsistencies and the couple’s record of violent fights resulting in police reports, the prosecution agreed to a manslaughter plea, Goldstein said.

“While there are overtones of murder, the essence of this case is that they had a long history of problems and he hit her too hard, and that is manslaughter,” Goldstein said.

Blatt said that even if Hardy receives the maximum 11-year sentence, he could be released from prison in five years with time off for good conduct and the year he has already been in jail.

Hardy had three prior felony convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, child stealing and assault on a police officer with a firearm.

In a 1977 profile in New York magazine, Hardy boasted of having committed 800 car thefts and 250 robberies and having connections to organized crime. The article also indicated that he was involved in 14 contract slayings. Last year, Hardy appeared in disguise on Geraldo Rivera’s syndicated television show during a segment on purported hit men. He declined to confirm or deny his involvement in the slayings when Rivera questioned him.

“I’m not going to sit here on national TV and confess to murders because, you know, you really aren’t paying me enough for that,” said Hardy, who used the name Michael Hardin on the program.

Authorities said they found no indications that Hardy was actually a contract killer.

“I think he’s a blowhard,” Goldstein said. “He has lived a long and violent life, but no hit man worth his salt goes around talking about it.”

THE GANG THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT

THE MAIL-ORDER MURDERS

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

October 4, 1987

It would have been comical if it hadn’t been so deadly, if lives hadn’t been mercilessly ended or, at the very least, haunted by terror. They were called the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, yet they were a gang that had so many shots, they were bound to hit their targets sometimes, and people were bound to die.

For months they tried to kill Doug Norwood, but whether they came at him with machine guns or bombs or stun guns, they always managed to screw up. The same thing with Dana Free. Three times they missed. And when it came time to kill Victoria Barshear, well, the gang just decided she was too pretty to die.

Those were some of the gaffes that made them laughable. But there was nothing laughable about what happened to Richard Braun and Anita Spearman. They killed Braun, though it took two tries, in the front yard of his home. It took only one visit from the gang and Anita Spearman was left dead in her bed.

They were want-ad killers, a gang of losers, social outcasts and law enforcement washouts headed by a man with the seemingly appropriate name of Richard Savage. They picked their targets from West Palm Beach to St. Paul, their clients from the Atlantic to the Rockies.

It was nothing personal. In a sleazy Tennessee bar where strippers danced, the gang plotted the deaths of people they had never even seen: Anita Spearman, the well-known and well-liked assistant city manager in West Palm Beach; Doug Norwood, a law student in Arkansas; Dana Free, a contractor in Georgia. And others, many others.

They pictured themselves as guns for hire. One day barroom bouncers, the next day cross-country contract killers. No job too big or too small. One member helped a man put a bomb on a plane loaded with 154 people. One shot down a man in his driveway while his son watched in horror. Another threw grenades into a home where a 14-year-old and his mother were sleeping.

Their crimes were spread across the country, to avoid a pattern of terror that might aid the police in their investigations. What did the bombing of a businessman’s van in Atlanta have to do with a suitcase explosion in the cargo hold of a jet in Dallas? What could the arson of a poultry plant in Iowa have in common with the murder of a city official in Palm Beach County?

Seemingly, the answer would be nothing, the questions not even considered. Even so, in less than a year, a far-flung network of investigative agencies working on the many separate cases found the common denominator in the back pages of a magazine published for gun and battle buffs. From there the investigators picked up the pieces of the puzzle and put it together. Even today, they feel lucky about it.

“This is a case of truth being stranger than fiction – it’s mind-boggling,” says Tom Stokes, special agent in charge of the Atlanta office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). “At times you needed a flow chart to keep it straight. These guys were bouncing all over the country doing these jobs. Thank goodness, we got coordinated on it.”

In the end, two people were dead, several others were injured, and many were scared for their lives. Doug Norwood, who escaped death three times after being shot and bombed, still carries a gun. Who can blame him? Across the country Savage’s gang had left a trail of terror and deadly ineptitude.

The trail started in spring 1985 in Knoxville, Tenn. Richard Savage was into his fourth business venture in almost as many years and there was no telling whether his Continental Club was going to do any better than the restaurant or the motel or the nursing home that had failed before it.

Savage’s new profession – operator of a rundown strip bar – was his strangest yet. It seemed so far from the way he had started out. Born in Knoxville 37 years before, he had joined the Army out of high school, serving for six years, including a tour in Vietnam as a courier. When he left the military he decided to put on a new uniform, that of a cop.

However, Savage found no lasting promise in the new uniform. After earning a criminal justice degree in Kentucky, he worked only briefly as a cop in Oklahoma, then as a federal prison guard in Lexington, Ky. He bounced around the Midwest and by 1980 had drifted into his series of failed business ventures.

By 1985, Savage was determined to put the skills he had learned in his previous careers to good use. He decided to put himself out for hire.

The back pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine are devoted to classified ads offering a whole raft of goods and services to what the magazine calls the “professional adventurer.” On any given month this marketplace might offer anything from countersurveillance information to mercenary manuals to handbooks on revenge.

But in the early 1980s, the Soldier of Fortune classified ads offered more sinister services. Investigators have said it was through ads placed here that a variety of hired killers advertised their lethal skills. And it was into this market that Richard Savage placed his own skills the summer of 1985:

Gun For Hire: 37-year-old professional mercenary desires

jobs. Vietnam Veteran. Discrete [sic] and very private. Body

Guard, Courier and other Skills. All jobs considered.

Sylvester Stallone, portraying Rambo, was on the cover of the magazine’s June issue in which Savage’s “Gun For Hire” ad promised that all jobs would be considered. The ad carried the telephone number of the Continental Club, and within days the phone was ringing with inquiries.

The calls were from people both looking to hire and looking for work. By midsummer Savage had surrounded himself with a cadre of men seeking dial-a-gun work. There was 21-year-old Sean Doutre, a knockabout who signed on as a bouncer at the Continental Club.

There was Michael Wayne Jackson, 42, the one-time police chief of a tiny Texas town but now a maintenance man. There was William Buckley, 35, a local security guard. And there were others – all men who apparently found the macho image of themselves reflected in the action stories and ads of Soldier of Fortune.

Other callers were clients looking for a variety of questionable jobs done. Savage was asked to guard gold in Alaska, to find men still missing in Vietnam. But for the most part, people called because they wanted someone killed.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Savage would tell a News/Sun-Sentinel reporter a year after his ad ran. “Nearly everybody wanted someone killed. They wanted me to kill their wives, mothers, fathers and girlfriends.”

According to investigators, indictments and court records, Savage and his gang entered into deadly agreements with a number of the callers. The going rate was $20,000a kill.

Investigators believe that within a few weeks of his ad in Soldier of Fortune, Savage had accepted the first assignment and dispatched a crew of hit men to suburban Atlanta to kill a 43-year-old businessman named Richard Braun. On June 9, an explosive device was placed in Braun’s van, but it exploded before Braun got in the vehicle. The bombers would make up for missing him two months later.

The second job was in Fertile, Iowa. A St. Paul, Minn., bar owner named Richard Lee Foster had called Savage, claiming that the Keough Poultry Company in Fertile had ripped him off. Savage assigned Michael Wayne Jackson and William Buckley to the Foster case, and on the night of June 23 an explosion ripped through the Keough plant. No one was hurt, but Foster got his revenge – for the time being.

By early August, the dial-a-hit-man crew was back in Georgia, this time in Marietta to kill a building contractor named Dana Free. Savage had been paid $20,000 by a Denver woman angry at Free over a failed business investment. But killing Free wasn’t easy.

On Aug. 1, Buckley and Jackson planted two grenades under Free’s car. Free drove around with the devices under his car for a day but nothing happened, partly because the pin on one of the grenades had not been removed. So the next night, Buckley slid under the car and reattached the grenades with their pins tied to the drive shaft. If the car moved, the pins would be yanked out and… kaboom!

In the morning, Free got in and as he started to pull out of his driveway, he saw a grenade, pin still attached, roll out from under the car. He managed to jump from the vehicle before the other grenade blew up. He was uninjured – and lucky. He went into hiding.

Next, it was back to the Midwest. Bar owner Richard Lee Foster had been impressed enough with Savage’s handling of his complaint with the Keough company to sign on for another job. But this time the results weren’t as good. Over three nights beginning Aug. 10, members of the gang planted an assortment of bombs in Harry’s 63 Club, a St. Paul bar competing with Foster’s. None of the devices functioned properly, and for the first two nights the bombers crept back into the bar to remove them. On the third night, with the bomb smoking and setting off alarms, the police bomb squad beat them to it.

“They just couldn’t get it right,” says ATF special agent Tom Stokes. “They were like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight or think straight. Sometimes you had to wonder if this whole thing wasn’t a comedy of errors.”

On Aug. 26, the comical bumbling ended. On that day, according to investigators, Savage sent Doutre back to Georgia and, for the first time, the gang struck with deadly accuracy. Richard Braun, who had escaped death once before, was machine-gunned as he drove his Mercedes-Benz out of his driveway. Braun’s 16-year-old son, who was also in the car, was slightly wounded and watched his father bleed to death.

The want-ad killers next took an assignment from an Arkansas man named Larry Gray, who wanted his ex-wife’s boyfriend, a Fayetteville law student named Doug Norwood, eliminated.

Four days after the Braun killing, Norwood answered the door of his apartment and two men came at him with an electric-charged stun gun. Norwood escaped after punching one and throwing the other through a glass door, but was wounded by gunfire as he fled from his apartment. He ran to a car parked nearby and asked a man standing next to it for help.

“He just looked at me, slowly got into the car and drove away,” Norwood recalls.

That was because Norwood had stumbled up to his assailants’ getaway driver, a man he would later come to know as Richard Savage. Norwood then ran into a nearby Laundromat and called the police. His attackers, later identified as William Buckley and another Savage associate named Dean DeLuca, managed to escape.

Norwood had no idea why he was being attacked or who was after him. He bought a.357 Magnum and started carrying it wherever he went. However, the weapon didn’t help him much on Oct. 1. That afternoon, when he turned the ignition key in his car in a University of Arkansas parking lot, a bomb beneath his car partially exploded. The car was destroyed but Norwood escaped without injury.

While some members of the gang waited for another chance to get Norwood, others were working on new assignments.

In Lexington, Ky., investigators say a woman named Mary Alice Wolf hired Savage to kill her ex-husband’s new wife, Victoria Barshear. Savage sent Doutre, Buckley and DeLuca to do the job but it never got done. After seeing Barshear, the hired killers decided she was too pretty to kill and left town.

But Dana Free was still unfinished business. And at 3 a.m. on Oct. 12, William Buckley, the man who had already messed up earlier chances at Free, as well as Norwood and Barshear, threw two grenades into a house in Pasadena, Tex. No one was hurt in the explosion, and Free wasn’t even there. The home belonged to his ex-wife and 14-year-old son, who were inside asleep when the grenades came crashing through the living room window.

The gang’s next assignment was potentially the most lethal they ever attempted. On Oct. 30, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, an American Airlines flight from Austin, with 154 people on board, was taxiing toward the terminal when a small bomb exploded in the luggage hold. Passengers were rushed off the plane, scared but unhurt.

Investigators found the remains of a time bomb in luggage belonging to passenger Mary Theilman. She had been meant to die, presumably along with the rest of the passengers. A month later, authorities charged Theilman’s husband, Albert, with the crime. It would be a year before they would charge William Buckley with selling him the bomb.

In October, Richard Savage began receiving calls from a man in Palm Beach County, Florida. The man, Robert Spearman, said that he had this problem. He was married and didn’t want to be. But he didn’t want a divorce.

On Oct. 16, Savage flew to Palm Beach to meet Spearman and take a $2,000 down payment on a $20,000 contract to kill Spearman’s 48-year-old wife, Anita. Five days later, Savage sent Sean Doutre and Ronald Emert, another associate from the Continental Club, to West Palm Beach to collect the balance.

In the weeks after Doutre and Emert left with the money, Robert Spearman placed several more calls to the Continental Club. Authorities would later charge that these were calls to find out what was happening on the deal and to demand quick service from Savage.

Whatever they were for, Spearman no longer needed to call after the early hours of Nov. 16. On that morning, after Spearman had exited his Palm Beach Gardens home to drop by his marine contracting company’s office, Sean Doutre entered the house through an unlocked door and found Anita Spearman, who was recovering from a mastectomy, asleep. Doutre beat her to death as she lay on her bed.

A short time later, Robert Spearman came home to find his wife dead and the house ransacked. He quickly called the sheriff’s department, portraying himself as a grieving husband. It was an act authorities would not take long to see through.

There were allthese victims, all these bizarre crimes, but seemingly nothing that linked them. This widespread dispersal of investigative effort should have insured the gang’s getaway. But it wasn’t to be. For in addition to having bungled many of their murder attempts, the hit men had operated in a way that belied the very promises of their classified ad.

The ad stated they would be discreet and very private. But they had rented cars, kept receipts, made long-distance phone calls, made themselves memorable to witnesses. They ran out on bills, kept stolen weapons and carried large quantities of cash. They left high-powered weapons displayed on the seats of their cars. And most of all, they talked too much.

This is how discreet and private Sean Doutre was: The day after he killed Anita Spearman, he was stopped by police in Maryville, Tenn., for a traffic violation. On the backseat of his car was a 12-gauge shotgun stolen from Spearman’s house the morning of the murder.

The case of the want-ad killers probably could have been broken with Doutre’s arrest. But when officers checked the serial number of the shotgun against a national computer index of stolen property, they drew a blank. In Palm Beach County, the murder was only a day old and the serial number of the stolen shotgun had not yet been entered in the computer’s data bank.

But Doutre did at least put investigators hard on the trail of Richard Savage. Along with the shotgun, Maryville police had found a submachine gun in Doutre’s car. The weapon automatically meant that the nearest AFT office would be called to see if anybody wanted to question Doutre.

Grant McGarrity, a Knoxville agent, visited Doutre in jail that afternoon. Doutre was talkative, volunteering that he worked for a man named Savage who was in the business of sending people out on contract murders. Of course, Doutre denied that he had committed a crime himself.

It was interesting information. McGarrity had heard of Richard Savage and was already gathering information about weapons being mailed to and from the Continental Club.

Because Doutre said nothing that incriminated himself, he was able to post bond on the weapons charge and leave Maryville. However, the stolen shotgun remained behind in the police department’s evidence lockup.

While all this was happening, Doug Norwood, the Arkansas law student, was still scared and looking over his shoulder. Police were making little headway in their investigations of the shooting and bombing that had nearly killed him. Nor were they listening to his theory that his girlfriend’s ex-husband had put hit men on his trail.

Nevertheless, Norwood ’s wariness eventually helped save him a third time, and helped break open the case. On Jan. 20, 1986, Norwood grew suspicious of a car that followed him to the university, and called the two campus detectives who were investigating the bombing.

The police stopped the car and began talking to its driver, Michael Wayne Jackson. One officer spotted the barrel of a gun protruding from beneath a sweater on the front seat. Jackson was arrested and police confiscated several guns, including a semiautomatic rifle.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” says Norwood, “that Jackson was going to spray me with that machine gun.”

Jackson proved to be as talkative as Sean Doutre. He told police that he and Savage had been hired by Larry Gray, the ex-husband of Norwood ’s girlfriend, to kill Norwood. And he added that Gray had contacted them through a classified ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine.

The next break came on Feb. 5, when Sean Doutre was arrested again near Athens, Ga., simply because he had left a nearby motel without paying his long-distance phone bill. Once again, law officers listened raptly as Doutre gave details about Savage and the murder-forhire business.

Shortly afterward, ATF agent McGarrity decided to visit a former Savage associate named Ronald Emert, who had been jailed in Knoxville on drug charges. Emert turned out to be one more key to the puzzle. In exchange for not being charged in any murder-for-hire plot, he told McGarrity about the trip he had made to Florida with Doutre to collect money from a man named Spearman. He also told McGarrity to check with the Maryville police about a shotgun that was gathering dust in their evidence closet.

Until that point, progress had been slow in Palm Beach County on the Spearman case. Robert Spearman had stopped cooperating with the sheriff’s department, and detectives were mostly waiting for a lucky break. It came after Emert’s conversation with McGarrity, who retrieved the shotgun from Maryville.

Palm Beach detectives flew to Knoxville, and Emert picked Robert Spearman’s face out of a lineup of photographs. Investigators then began to check records of long-distance phone calls, hotels, car rentals and other business receipts gathered from Doutre and others in the Savage gang.

Finally, the net was beginning to close. Law officers from West Palm Beach north to Minneapolis and west to Dallas gathered in Atlanta for a conference on the Savage gang. ATF designated it a national investigation.

“It all sounded so wild and far-fetched – but it was all coming back as true,” recalls the ATF’s Tom Stokes.

Law enforcement agencies began filing charges in the various conspiracies. Savage, Doutre, Jackson, Buckley and the others were jailed. So were many of the people who had hired them.

Among them was Robert Spearman, who walked out of a store on North Lake Boulevard in West Palm Beach on April 4 to find Palm Beach County Sheriff Richard Wille waiting with a warrant charging him with his wife’s murder.

The want-adkillers face a litany of murder, conspiracy and weapons charges in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota and Iowa.

Last month, the chapter involving Anita Spearman ended with Richard Savage’s second-degree murder conviction in a West Palm Beach courtroom. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Earlier, Sean Doutre and Robert Spearman had been found guilty of first-degree murder.

In the Doug Norwood attacks, Savage, Larry Gray, William Buckley and Dean DeLuca all pleaded guilty. Savage and Doutre have been charged in the Braun killing. The grenade attacks on Dana Free resulted in charges against Savage, Michael Wayne Jackson and Buckley. Buckley has also been charged in connection with the plane bomb in Dallas. Richard Lee Foster and Mary Alice Wolf have been convicted of conspiracies to hire the Savage gang.

Charges in other cases are still pending. So far, the guns for hire are serving prison terms ranging from five years to life.

Meanwhile, the victims who escaped the gang’s deadly ineptitude are trying to return to normalcy – if that is possible.

Doug Norwood says it isn’t.

He completed law school this year and is now a prosecutor for Benton County in Arkansas. He sued Soldier of Fortune, claiming negligence on the magazine’s part in publishing the ad that led to attacks on him. He sought $4 million in damages but says he settled last month for an undisclosed amount of money. He still carries the.357 Magnum.

“I take elaborate security measures,” he says. “I live in a Fort Knox. I just don’t allow strangers in to talk to me and I always answer the door with my gun. I’ll probably carry it until the day I die.”

EVIL UNTIL HE DIES

Trail to Chatsworth Street is traced through the Criminal Justice System.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

October 18, 1987

Roland Comtois knew the routine well. Arrested by Los Angeles police on suspicion of burglary, he hooked his glasses in the open neck of his shirt and stared coldly at the camera. The hard set of his eyes betrayed nothing. No fear. No concern. The camera clicked, and the mug shot was taken.

For Comtois, it was simply part of life.

Today, that June 1 mug shot is part of a history that tells much about the criminal justice system and the man accused in the abduction and shooting of two Chats-worth teen-agers last month.

Wendy Masuhara, 14, was kidnapped Sept. 19, shot in the head and killed. Her body was left in an abandoned car in a canyon six miles from the presumably safe neighborhood from which she and a 13-year-old friend had been taken.

Her friend was drugged, sexually assaulted, shot and also left for dead. But she survived and provided police with the information that identified Comtois, 58, and 33-year-old Marsha Lynn Erickson, accused of being his accomplice, as suspects. Both were familiar to police and the courts.

Comtois had woven a 46-year path through police stations, courtrooms and prisons. He was a man the criminal justice system could not handle, a man it could neither rehabilitate nor protect society from.

“Ever since early incorrigibility,” a probation officer wrote in 1962, “he has lashed back at society with a vengeance, reaching out for what he wants with a total disregard of the rights of others… His personality affect is of a man who is very matter-of-fact, cold, hostile, cynical and daring.”

Twenty-five years later, police describe Comtois as someone who beat the system – not because he has gotten away with crime, but because he has never gotten away from it. All told, records show Comtois has spent at least four stints in prison on convictions including attempted rape, robbery and heroin dealing.

And, after each sentence was served, he apparently returned to society only to lapse back into crime.

“It is not surprising that he was able to do this,” Leroy Orozco, a homicide detective working full-time on Comtois’ background, said last week. “His whole life has been criminal. With our justice system, people can continue to commit crimes and beat the system by continuing to get their freedom. There are people out there with worse records than he has.”

Roland Norman Comtois was born in Massachusetts, the sixth of seven children of a French Canadian couple. According to court records, Comtois’ mother died when he was 3, and he was placed in a succession of orphanages, foster homes and reform schools. As an adult, he would claim he was abused during this period, telling probation officers that he was punished for bed-wetting by being handcuffed and placed in cold showers. He would show scars on his wrists, claiming they were from being handcuffed as a child. Of one orphanage, he would say, “If I should ever run across the old guy who ran that place, I would blow his top off.”

Comtois’ education ended in the sixth grade and was followed by a Massachusetts record of juvenile delinquency that reached back as far as age 11. As a 17-yearold in 1947, he was convicted of breaking into a West Concord, Mass., lumber company office and received a two-year indeterminate sentence. How much time he served is unclear.

When Comtois was 23, a conviction for assault with intent to commit rape in New Bedford put him in a Massachusetts state prison for two years. A year after his release, he was arrested on a Peeping Tom charge, and his parole was revoked, records show.

In 1956, Comtois left a broken marriage and a daughter to move across the country. He subsequently got a divorce. In the next few years in Los Angeles, he remarried, fathered a son, worked as a truck driver and made enough money to buy a truck and begin a transport business.

But, by 1960, the business was failing, and he returned to crime. According to records, when he needed $3,200 to make repairs on the truck, he planned to rob a bank in Bell. The plan failed and he was convicted of attempted bank robbery.

When freed on bail awaiting sentencing, Comtois returned to his Los Angeles home to find his wife living on county assistance funds. Unable to find work while awaiting prison, he broke into an Alhambra home on an April morning in 1960, but was chased out of the house and slightly injured by a homeowner’s bullet. Comtois was charged with burglary and pleaded guilty. “I was desperate for money…,” he wrote to a probation officer. “I took this spontaneous action without rational thinking.”

The probation officer’s August 1960 evaluation of Comtois concluded, “He appears to have no control over his impulses when things don’t go his way, and consequently he resorts to criminal behavior.”

On the day his wife gave birth to a daughter, Comtois was sentenced to a year in a federal prison in California on the attempted bank robbery and burglary convictions.

Within three months of being released from prison, Comtois was jailed again, this time for the July 1961 armed robbery of a market in La Mirada. “I don’t blame somebody else for what I did,” he told a probation officer. “I was clear of mind.” Once again he pleaded guilty to the charge. It was his fifth conviction, and he was returned to prison for his longest stay, until March 11, 1969.

Two months after his release, Comtois – half his life now spent in prisons, reform schools and orphanages – was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. By 1971, his wife was seeking to end their marriage. The couple separated, according to divorce documents, after Comtois flew into a Thanksgiving Day rage, punched his fist through a door in the couple’s home near Long Beach and destroyed the china set on the table for the holiday meal.

The divorce records contain allegations that Comtois had often beaten his wife and had a violent temper that sent him into uncontrollable rages.

Two years later, Comtois would tell a judge that the end of his marriage and failures in attempts to earn a legitimate living had led him into another cycle of crime and a deep involvement with drugs. He was convicted of possession of heroin with intent to sell and of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He admitted he was addicted to the drug as well.

“I started selling my jewelry and other items I owned and refused to believe I was addicted,” he wrote to the judge who would sentence him. “I didn’t know which way to turn. With the loss of everything, I started borrowing from business associates and friends until I had neither left.

“When I finally accepted the fact I was addicted, I started selling drugs to satisfy my addiction.”

Comtois pleaded to be placed in a drug rehabilitation program instead of prison, but the judge sent him to prison for three more years.

Comtois was released from prison in 1977 and completed parole a year later. His activities between then and last month’s abduction in Chatsworth are now being documented by homicide detectives. “So far, I can’t find anything legitimate about him,” Detective Orozco said.

What is known is that he moved to the San Fernando Valley, possibly to be closer to his two children who lived with his ex-wife in Van Nuys.

Police said Comtois was a transient, living at an ever-changing string of addresses. He may have worked at times as a laborer, and he received a monthly disability payment for reasons unclear to police, but detectives believe he largely supported himself as a burglar and scam artist.

Some of Comtois’ activities are already on record. Deputy Dist. Atty. Bradford Stone said Comtois walked into a bank in the Valley on Nov. 5, 1983, and attempted to cash a forged check for $75,000. When the teller attempted to verify the check, Comtois grabbed it back and left.

Three years later on Nov. 7, 1986, Comtois changed the date and took the same check into a bank in North Hollywood and deposited it in his account, Stone said. During the next week he went to other banks in Los Angeles and cashed $75,000in checks against the account. When police finally sorted it all out, he was charged March 18of this year with grand theft and forgery.

Police say Comtois used the check scam money to buy $30,000in gold and a new car. In January he also bought a small motor home, possibly with the same money.

Released after posting $1,500bail, Comtois was arrested at least two more times – in June on suspicion of burglary and in July on suspicion of driving a stolen car – before the abduction. Both times he was released on bail.

By summer, Comtois was living in the brown-striped Roadstar motor home and moving freely about the Valley. Police said he was traveling with a companion, Marsha Lynn Erickson, though investigators have not discovered how or where they met.

Erickson, police say, was a Los Angeles-born transient with a record of 12 arrests in the last decade on charges including prostitution, burglary and drug possession. None of the arrests led to prison sentences. Police and court records show that she was placed on probation for at least one conviction and into drug-treatment programs after another arrest.

Erickson’s father described her as a long-term heroin addict whose need for the drug overcame any attempts to help her. He spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

“Drugs controlled her. Drugs destroyed her,” he said. “All of her problems stemmed from drugs. It was because of the heroin that she got involved in burglary and everything else. We took her to every program you could think of, but she always went back to it.”

Erickson, who has had six children who were all put up for adoption, lived with her mother and father in their Chatsworth home in 1984 and 1985 while she took part in a drug-treatment program, her father said.

But, about two years ago, she left the home, about a mile from the Lurline Avenue spot where Wendy Masuhara and her friend would be kidnapped, unable to shake her dependency, her father said. Her parents have had no contact with her since, but now live with the growing nightmare that their daughter is suspected of involvement in murder.

“I can’t defend her because I really don’t know her anymore,” her father said. “But I do find it hard to believe she could have done anything this drastic. She was always a good kid before the drugs got her.”

Erickson should have been in jail the night the two girls were abducted, authorities said. Last March 16, her probation for a 1983 conviction involving $3,200 in forged checks was revoked after probation officers learned that she had been arrested twice for thefts in 1986.

A warrant for Erickson’s arrest was issued, but she was never picked up by police. Chet Baker, a supervisor in the county probation department’s Van Nuys office, said so many probation violation warrants are issued each year the police cannot handle them as priorities.

“The warrant goes on the computer, but other than that the police can’t spend a lot of time on it,” Baker said. “There are thousands of these warrants out at any one time in L.A. Plus, Erickson was a transient. Where were the police going to go to pick her up?”

Even after Erickson was arrested Aug. 19, she remained free, police said. When Northeast Division police arrested her on burglary charges, she gave a false name while being booked into jail. That allowed her to post bail before a fingerprint check identified her as Erickson and alerted police that she was wanted on the probation revocation warrant.

In less than a month, Wendy would be slain.

“If things had worked right,” Baker said, “Erickson would have been sitting in jail when that took place.”

Police explain the September abduction and murder as a crime of opportunity, an act of violent impulse. So far, police say, it appears that Comtois’ motor home was parked that night on Lurline Avenue near Devonshire Street by coincidence. It might have simply been the spot where Comtois stopped to fix a mechanical problem in the motor home.

“Your guess is as good as mine as to why they did it,” said Harold Lynn, the deputy district attorney who will prosecute Comtois and Erickson. “We don’t believe they marked these particular victims for this. They just happened to be the ones that were there.”

Wendy and her friend had just finished an evening of watching television at her family’s home on Lurline when Wendy decided to walk her friend to her home about a block away. But, parked in their path, police said, they found Roland Comtois’ motor home. Police said the girls were lured inside it when Erickson asked them for help.

Comtois, who police say shot the girls, was shot by officers and captured four days after the abduction. He is recovering but was arraigned last week on several charges in connection with the Chatsworth abduction and slaying, including murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, forcing sex acts on the surviving girl and injecting her with cocaine. He pleaded not guilty. Erickson is still at large.

The suspects could receive life imprisonment or the death penalty if convicted. But, prosecutors say, the fact that Comtois was even in a position to block the path of Wendy and her friend raised questions that some in the criminal justice system find disturbing.

Lynn, the prosecutor, said the reality of the criminal justice system is that it is not rehabilitative.

“The theory of rehabilitation is a pie-in-the-sky dream,” he said. “You take a guy like Comtois, and he is evil from day one, and he is going to be evil until he dies. His record speaks for itself.”

Prof. Ernest Kamm, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, Los Angeles, said a flaw in the way society tries to deal with someone like Comtois is in the presumption “that at one time the person was habilitated.”

In fact, he said, “we find a great number of people have never adopted the mores of society in the first place. And they can’t or don’t want to once they return from prison.”

Kamm said that, although the answer to that might be the warehousing of career criminals to keep them from society, California laws aimed at enhancing sentences for repeat offenders and putting habitual criminals permanently in prison are often circumvented.

“The reality is that there are too many holes in those laws,” he said. “People can get through them.”

Lynn said Comtois had to commit an aggravated crime such as he is now accused of before he could be considered under the habitual crime law. He said Comtois’ previous convictions for robbery, burglary and drugs would not have applied.

“Under our system, you don’t do life until you do something it considers serious,” Lynn said. “As long as he stayed below that line, he was one of the guys who kept coming in and going out.”

Although guidelines allow longer sentences for criminals with previous convictions, it appears Comtois reduced his time in prison by pleading guilty in almost all of his convictions. When he faced the drug and weapon charges in 1974, records show that, in exchange for his guilty plea, his previous convictions were not considered at sentencing.

Finally, authorities suggest, the system is too crowded and has too few resources to give individuals the attention required for true rehabilitation or for the protection of society.

“The system cannot accommodate the intense flow of individuals,” Kamm said. “Too frequently, individuals never get out of the cycle. They may wind up doing intense damage to somebody.”

Roland Comtois’ Criminal Record

April 1941: At age 11, he is charged with petty theft and diagnosed as an incorrigible delinquent. He is committed to reform school in Attleboro, Mass.

March 1947: Charged with breaking and entering in West Concord, Mass. He is given an indeterminate sentence limited to two years.

May 1952: Charged with assault with intent to commit rape in New Bedford, Mass. He is sentenced to three to five years in prison.

August 1955: Charged in Massachusetts in Peeping Tom incident. His parole is revoked.

February 1960: Charged with attempted bank robbery in Los Angeles. He is sentenced to one year in federal prison.

May 1960: Charged with burglary in La Mirada. His sentence is set to run concurrently with federal imprisonment.

July 1961: Charged with robbery in Los Angeles. He is sentenced to five years to life in state prison.

July 1974: Charged with possession of heroin with intent to sell and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He is sentenced to five years in state prison.

March 18, 1987: Charged with grand theft and forgery in Los Angeles. The case is pending.

June 1, 1987: Charged with burglary in Los Angeles.

The case is pending.

July 27, 1987: Charged with car theft in Los Angeles.

Case dismissed.

Sept. 24, 1987: Charged with murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and several other felonies in Los Angeles. Case is pending.

Source: Court records and probation reports

note: Roland Comtois was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. In poor health because of drug abuse as well as being shot during his capture, he died in prison in 1994while awaiting the carrying out of the sentence. Marsha Lynn Erickson was convicted of being his accomplice in the murder and was sentenced to life in prison.