Crime Beat: A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

NAMELESS GRAVE

IDENTITY OF MURDER VICTIM STILL SHROUDED IN MYSTERY

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

April 14, 1986

The grave at Hollywood Memorial Gardens has no name on it. There simply isn’t one to put there. The identity of the man who is buried there is a mystery.

He was murdered March 11, 1985, in a Fort Lauderdale motel room. He was strangled. Authorities have since solved the mystery of who killed him; one man was convicted and sentenced to life in prison last week, and another suspect is being sought.

What remains to be learned is the identity of the victim.

“We don’t have anything, not a clue to who he was,” said Edwina Johnson, an investigator for the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office. “We have gone to great lengths to find out. We’ve done everything we could think of and gotten no luck whatsoever. It would seem that somebody has to know who he was.”

Fort Lauderdale Police Detective Phil Mundy said that in his 10 years in the homicide bureau there have been unidentified murder victims before, but not a case where a killer is caught and convicted while the name of the victim remains unknown.

“It’s unusual,” he said. “In a whodunit type of murder, you first try to identify the dead man and go from there. But we never got anywhere with the identification. All we have is a dead man who has nothing extraordinary about his appearance. He could fit the description of thousands of men.”

On police and medical examiner’s records, the murder victim is simply known as “unidentified white male, case no. 85- 43959.” On court documents, photographs of the man slumped in the motel room and laid out on a medical examiner’s table are attached to that identification.

The man is described as having been 5-foot-8, weighing 180 pounds, with brown hair, eyes and mustache. He was approximately 35years old.

He was found sprawled on the floor of a room at the Interlude Motel, 1215 S. Federal Highway. Police think he accompanied two male prostitutes to the room and then was robbed and killed. His body was nude. There were no clothes or other belongings in the room. No wallet. No I.D. Just the signs of a struggle and a bloody handprint on the wall – a print that would later lead to the identification of one of his killers.

“There was nothing left in that room that could help us identify the victim,” said Mundy. “The killers took it with them.”

So the detective started with the dead man’s fingerprints. They were sent to state and national agencies, to Canadian authorities and to Interpol for comparison. They got no matches.

Missing persons bulletins were sent out across the country with an artist’s drawing of the victim attached. A few leads came back, but they were dead ends.

“Nothing panned out. They weren’t our guy,” said Mundy. “Usually the description wouldn’t match. We ran down a few of the names we got and found each guy was still alive and well.”

Locally, investigators had the drawing published in newspapers and magazines, put it on TV, passed it around hotels and bars frequented by a mostly homosexual clientele. They found no one who had seen the man.

Believing the victim had been a tourist, investigators checked with auto rental agencies in Broward in hopes of finding a report of an overdue car with the name of the murder victim on it. They visited local car towing agencies to check on abandoned vehicles that had been towed in the city after the murder. They found no clues.

“If he did rent a car, God knows where he rented it,” said Mundy.

A month after the murder, the bloody palm print on the wall of the motel room led to the positive identification of Peter L. Ruggirello as a suspect. He was arrested in Jacksonville a year ago today. His accomplice, a man police identified as Wayne Moore, remains at large.

Mundy said Ruggirello never cooperated with investigators in providing the name of the murder victim. At his trial in Broward Circuit Court, Ruggirello said the man’s name was Adam and that he had met him and Moore near the Backstreet bar on West Broward Boulevard near downtown. He denied being involved in the murder.

Prosecutor Peter LaPorte said an informant told authorities that Ruggirello once said the man’s name was Henry Faulkner. Authorities aren’t sure whether either of the names is the real one but believe Ruggirello knows more about the man he is convicted of killing than he has said.

“There are still a lot of questions that only Ruggirello and the individual that is still at large could answer,” said Mundy.

Because of those questions, Mundy keeps the investigation file on the top of his desk. The case is still open, though the chances of identifying the victim grow slimmer with time.

“My guess is he was from out of state,” Mundy said. “He could have been reported missing in some other jurisdiction and we might never know it.”

DOUBLE LIFE

MICHAEL BRYANT’S DOUBLE LIFE

Neighbors who knew the amiable man are shaken by the murder charge against him.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

April 22, 1990

To those who knew him in Woodland Hills, Michael Bryant was a soft-spoken and generous man who kept mostly to himself. Though reclusive, he was far from unfriendly. He was quick to volunteer his help to neighbors. He sent

Christmas cards and friendly notes to his landlady. He liked to show off the tricks he had taught his pet Doberman.

Bryant, 44, told people he was a freelance photographer. But often he spent his time gardening in his fenced backyard and was proud of the cherry tomatoes he gave to friends. “They were better than you could buy in a supermarket,” his landlady said.

But authorities say Michael Bryant and the life he led in Los Angeles was a facade; that, in fact, Bryant was Francis W. Malinosky, a Vermont school administrator who dropped from sight in 1979 after he became the prime suspect in the disappearance of a teacher with whom he had been romantically involved.

Malinosky’s double life came to an end earlier this month when he was traced by local and Vermont authorities to Woodland Hills. He was arrested and charged with the murder of the missing teacher. And while Malinosky waits in Los Angeles County jail for an extradition hearing, mystery still surrounds him.

Investigators say that when they searched Malinosky’s belongings they found cameras and a business card suggesting he, indeed, was a photographer. But the only photos found were of him smiling amid fields of marijuana plants. No tomatoes were found at his house, but police said several pounds of packaged marijuana seeds were found in the garage. And in the unpretentious, 23-year-old Volkswagen he drove, investigators found a coffee can crammed with $217,000 in $100 bills.

“Finding this guy just opened up more questions,” said Sgt. Leo Blais, a Vermont State Police detective who has tracked the Malinosky case for years. “I am trying to get an idea of what he has been doing for 10 years and it is hard. We don’t know much about him.”

Those who thought they knew Michael Bryant of Woodland Hills have also had to face the same enigma. A man they viewed as a good neighbor or tenant is charged with murder and is suspected of hiding behind at least four aliases and earning his living at least in part by selling marijuana seeds along with instructions on their planting and cultivation.

“This really comes out of left field,” said Lilian Darling Holt, Bryant’s landlord for nearly five years. “It is devastating. Michael was a marvelous tenant and person.

“This whole thing doesn’t seem right,” she said. “It seems that over the years there would have been something that would now click and I’d be able to say, ‘Son of a gun, I now see how this could be.’ But there is nothing like that. I just feel very bad. I wish I could do something for him.”

Holt is not alone in being both perplexed and supportive of Bryant. Neighbors he was friendly with in the 4900 block of Topanga Canyon Boulevard have volunteered to care for his dog while he is in jail. And an attorney who met Bryant a few years ago in a coffee shop is now helping him fight extradition to Vermont.

“There is complete shock among those who knew him,” said the attorney, Greff Michael Abrams. “He was the kind of guy most people would want as a neighbor.”

Abrams said Malinosky disappeared from Vermont and began using false names because he was being hounded by authorities for a crime he did not commit.

“There is more to this case than meets the eye,” Abrams said. “You don’t need to be a genius to see why he would leave Vermont. He believed a witch hunt was under way, and he decided to leave.”

But authorities insist they have made no mistake. Malinosky is the only suspect in the Nov. 5, 1979, disappearance and apparent murder of Judith Leo-Coneys. The 32-year-old mother of a small boy disappeared after telling friends she was going to a house owned by Malinosky.

“Everyone out here I talk to about him can’t believe it,” said Blais while he was in Los Angeles last week investigating Malinosky’s life here. “They keep telling me he isn’t the type.”

So far Blais has established that Malinosky lived in the Los Angeles area in the early 1980s and worked as a house painter. He later moved to Utah and then back to Los Angeles, where beginning in late 1985he lived alone in the two-bedroom Topanga Canyon Boulevard house.

Along the way, Malinosky somehow picked up one alias – Barry Vandiver Bryant – that actually was the name of a real person, Blais said. The real Barry Bryant, of Charlotte, N.C., has since changed his name because of credit problems that began when Malinosky took his identity.

In 1979, Malinosky was, on the surface, an unlikely murder suspect. He had taught for several years in Burlington area schools and was known to many in the northern Vermont community. At 34, he was assistant director of special education for the Burlington School Department.

Bearded and slightly balding, he was a man who enjoyed the outdoors. He had an apartment in Burlington and owned a house in the rural town of Shelburne, which was more convenient for hunting and skiing. A mellow-voiced widower, his wife having shot herself to death in 1976, Malinosky was raising a daughter and son.

But in mid-1979 Malinosky’s life apparently went into a tailspin when Leo-Coneys broke off a two-year relationship with him. According to Chittenden County court records, he was deeply hurt by the breakup, had sought psychiatric counseling and had been seen at least once spying through the windows of Leo-Coneys’ apartment.

Two weeks before her disappearance, Leo-Coneys was held at gunpoint by Malinosky for several hours while he unsuccessfully attempted to persuade her to resume their relationship, records say.

On the morning of Nov. 5, 1979, Leo-Coneys told friends and relatives she was going to drop by Malinosky’s home in Shelburne to retrieve something of hers. She chose that morning to go because she knew he was scheduled to be at work in Burlington.

But Leo-Coneys was never seen again. She was reported missing by her family later that day and investigators learned that Malinosky had not gone to work or even called his office to explain why. That night, when he was spotted driving his van in Shelburne and questioned by police, he said he took the day off to go bird hunting and did not see Leo-Coneys.

Leo-Coneys’ car was found at a junkyard in the town of Roxbury the next day. A handwritten note on the windshield said the car could be stripped for parts and was signed “R. Peterson.”

Malinosky was questioned repeatedly after the disappearance. But on Dec. 2, 1979, he put his children on a bus to his former in-laws’ home, emptied his bank accounts and disappeared. Though Leo-Coneys’ body has never been found, authorities claim they have amassed convincing evidence pointing to Malinosky.

According to court records, FBI experts matched Malinosky’s handwriting to the note found on Leo-Coneys’ car at the Roxbury junkyard. Investigators also found a cab driver who reported picking Malinosky up in Roxbury on the day of the woman’s disappearance. A cab dispatcher who took the call remembered talking to Malinosky. She had once been one of his students.

Detectives had also noticed while interviewing Malinosky the first time that his parka was torn and leaking its down filling. The same type of down was found in Leo-Coneys’ car, court records say.

Police believed after Malinosky’s disappearance that he might have killed himself, and the case languished without any charges being filed.

In 1986, the Leo-Coneys case was assigned to Blais to be updated and, using a computer search, the detective learned Malinosky was alive and had apparently lived in Salt Lake City in the mid-1980s, where he used his own name to get a driver’s license.

Blais went to Utah but Malinosky was gone.

Once again, the case languished, until last year when a new state attorney, William Sorrell, was appointed and made the Leo-Coneys investigation a priority. The case was presented Feb. 20, 1990, to a grand jury, which concluded that Leo-Coneys was dead, and a warrant was issued two days later charging Malinosky with her slaying.

According to court records, Malinosky’s daughter told investigators she had met her father earlier this year at the St. Moritz Hotel in New York City. Blais learned that the hotel room Malinosky used was paid for by a credit card issued to a Barry Vandiver Bryant. From that point, credit card billings under that name were traced to four private mailboxes in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood.

Members of the Los Angeles Police Department fugitive squad questioned the private mailbox proprietors, who identified Barry Bryant as Malinosky. And on April 12, the detectives were alerted by one of the mail-drop operators that Bryant had just picked up his mail.

Police and FBI agents immediately went to the area on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills, but Bryant was already gone.

The investigators decided to check area motels, and a clerk at a Best Western in the 21800 block of Ventura Boulevard identified a photo of Malinosky as a guest who had been renting a room since Feb. 20- the day the grand jury hearing began in Vermont. Investigators now believe he moved to the motel after learning, possibly through friends or family in Vermont, that the grand jury was investigating the case.

Police watched the motel room and Malinosky was arrested that afternoon when he drove up in his 1967 Volkswagen. He had papers identifying himself as Michael Bryant and that showed his address as a house about five blocks away on Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

In the car, police found the coffee can containing $217,000, along with a material normally used to keep moisture out of packages. Detectives said the powder indicated the can of money may have been buried previously.

Investigators were puzzled by where Malinosky had gotten the cash. But the next day, his house was searched and dozens of packets of marijuana seeds were found in the garage. Police theorized that Malinosky may have accumulated the cache of money by selling drugs or the seeds.

Los Angeles Police Detective Ronald Tuckett said marijuana cultivation instructions and other drug paraphernalia were found in the garage.

“It looks like he may have been in the mail-order business,” Tuckett said.

Though the drug investigation is continuing, it is unlikely local charges will be filed against Malinosky because they could hinder his extradition to Vermont to face the murder charge, authorities said.

Alerted on the morning of April 12, the day Malinosky picked up his mail, Blais was already flying from Vermont to Los Angeles when the man he had pursued since 1986was taken into custody. The detective and suspect met for the first time in a holding cell.

“All he did was stare at the ground,” Blais said. “He was very upset. I introduced myself and he said, ‘I know who you are.’ I said, ‘I know who you are, too, but do you want me to call you Frank or Michael or Barry or what?’ He said to call him Frank. It was a strange feeling to finally meet him face to face.”

DEATH OF AN HEIRESS

Judy Kanan, a tough-minded businesswoman, came from a pioneer family. Two men are still suspects in the 1985 slaying, but a detective says he has no idea who killed her.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

January 29, 1990

Five years ago today, Judy Kanan, a strong-willed 68-year-old businesswoman and descendant of a pioneer family, stopped by a Woodland Hills corral to feed her pets – six Arabian horses that she fawned over like children.

It was her daily ritual to care for the horses she loved, and residents near the stables on a cul-de-sac on Collins Street knew the sight of Kanan and her old Chevy well.

But on that Tuesday afternoon – Jan. 29, 1985-a killer also knew Kanan’s routine well. When she got out of her car, a masked gunman stepped forward and shot her four times. She died on the sidewalk next to the corral.

One of the detectives originally assigned to the murder, Phil Quartararo, remains on the case. Recently, as he looked through one of the thick files he has filled with investigative reports over the years, he offered a quick summary of the case.

“I don’t have any idea who killed Judy Kanan,” he said.

That is how things stand with the murder that gripped public attention for weeks after it occurred. It is now largely forgotten – except by those who knew Judy Kanan well or have the responsibility of looking for her killer.

The case remains a puzzle for Los Angeles police and a source of bitter frustration for those who wait for justice for Kanan.

“We don’t want what happened to be forgotten,” the victim’s niece and family spokeswoman, Patty Kanan, said last week. “If people don’t remember it, it will go away. We don’t want that because we want to catch this person.

“The killer is still out there. That’s the frightening part. Anyone who would kill an old woman would kill anybody. That should scare everybody, not just us.”

Judy Kanan was a descendant of the Waring family, which settled Agoura in the 1860s. By the 1980s, Kanan and her older sister, Patricia Kanan, had parlayed inheritances and acquisitions into landholdings in Agoura worth millions of dollars. Kanan Road, which runs north-south through Agoura, was named for the family.

The sisters lived together in Hollywood and at the time of the murder owned and operated Kanan Village Shopping Center – the centerpiece of the family’s holdings – in Agoura. In the shopping center, the sisters also operated a small restaurant specializing in roast rabbit and chicken.

Judy Kanan was an enigma. Of the two sisters she was the one on the front line of their business deals. She forged a reputation as a tough-minded, aggressive businesswoman who often took disputes to court – once she even settled a business argument on the syndicated People’s Court television show. At the shopping center, she was known to tenaciously press workers to finish projects or tenants to pay rent.

Yet friends and other business associates described her as kind and fiercely loyal. Despite her family’s wealth, she worked many hours each day at the shopping center and restaurant. She drove a 13-year-old car and lived modestly. And she took time out each afternoon to drive from the shopping center to Woodland Hills to feed and care for her horses.

But police said it was her tough business style and litigious image that left her with many enemies and perhaps provided a motive for her slaying. After she was killed, one Agoura businessman said, “You’re going to have half the population of Agoura as suspects.”

Quartararo said the killing was carefully planned and executed. The killer knew her routine and knew she would be alone when she fed her horses each afternoon.

“Whoever it was, he chose the one time Judy and my mother were separated,” Patty Kanan said. “It was the only place he could get to her.”

The man who gunned Kanan down was wearing a raincoat and had a mask or hood to disguise himself, according to a lone witness to the slaying. The car in which he fled had been stolen from a car dealer’s lot. Twenty minutes after the killing it was parked near Ventura Boulevard and set on fire. That obliterated any evidence and helped cover the killer’s trail.

The killing had many of the earmarks of a professional assassination but police still can’t say for sure that it was.

“There was almost no physical evidence for us to work with,” Quartararo said.

Detectives investigated Kanan’s business deals and disputes. They examined each lawsuit, every complaint Kanan had made to friends or authorities and interviewed dozens of people.

In the weeks after the slaying two men emerged as “prime” suspects because of disputes they had had with Kanan, Quartararo said.

The first man had argued with Kanan at the shopping center a week before the killing. The dispute centered on the man’s desire to rent space in the shopping center for a stereo equipment store. The two quarreled over the rent and then Kanan refused to rent to the man at all.

During the following weekend Kanan received several threatening phone calls from an unidentified woman. The following Tuesday she was killed.

After police publicized a composite drawing of the unidentified man, he came forward with an attorney but refused to answer questions about the slaying. His identity was not released.

Detectives determined that the man’s girlfriend had made the threatening phone calls to Kanan and a warrant was obtained to search the man’s home. But no evidence was found connecting the man to the murder, Quartararo said. He was not arrested.

The second man, whom police also declined to identify, had been accused by Kanan several weeks before the slaying of stealing building supplies from the shopping center. Quartararo said the man was arrested in the theft but denied stealing anything. A week before the killing, authorities dropped charges against him.

Quartararo said detectives believed that the second suspect might have held a grudge against Kanan. A warrant was obtained from a judge and the man’s home was searched, but again there was no evidence linked to Kanan’s death and no arrest was made.

Both search warrants remain under court seal, and other details of the investigation of the two men were unavailable. Quartararo said no evidence was found linking the men to the slaying, but neither has been eliminated as a suspect.

Quartararo, who routinely handles other murder cases in the west San Fernando Valley, said it has been three years since a new lead has come in on the Kanan case. He believes it will take more than detective work to break the case.

“If we don’t have anybody come forward with some information, we aren’t going to solve this one,” Quartararo said.

That the case remains unsolved is frustrating to Kanan’s family. Patricia Kanan, now in her late 70s, sold the restaurant she operated with her sister. Because of ill health, she turned management of the shopping center over to her daughter, Patty.

The older Kanan declined to comment on the case.

“Frustration is the word for what we feel,” Patty Kanan said. “And we feel sadness. We really want to know who did this.”

Patricia Kanan, who is unmarried, moved last year from the home she had shared with her sister and now lives with her daughter in an undisclosed location. Though the Kanans do not live in fear of the killer, they anxiously wait for justice.

“My mother and our family have the basic concern that someone out there has killed someone and believes they have gotten away with it,” Patty Kanan said. “It could be anybody. It was a chilling and very calculated act. And that person is still out there. I hate the thought of someone getting away with murder.”

NEPHEW IDENTIFIED AS SOLE SUSPECT IN KANAN KILLING

September 29, 1990

Nearly six years after Judy Kanan, a strong-willed businesswoman and descendant of a pioneer family, was shot to death at a Woodland Hills horse stable, the investigation of the unsolved slaying has narrowed to one person – her nephew, according to police and court documents.

A search warrant filed this month in Van Nuys Municipal Court identifies 34-year-old Michael Kanan, the son of the victim’s brother, as the killer.

After the slaying, according to the court document, the suspect told an acquaintance who later became a police informant: “It’s a real trip to see something you’re responsible for… The bitch got what she deserved.”

Los Angeles police say they are seeking additional evidence before asking the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to file murder charges against Michael Kanan, who is in jail on an unrelated burglary charge.

The suspect, through his attorney, denied having any part in the slaying.

Judy Kanan, 68, was shot four times by a masked gunman in a raincoat on Jan. 29, 1985, as she followed her daily routine and arrived at a stable at the end of a cul-de-sac on Collins Street. She was there to feed six Arabian horses she owned. The killer gunned her down on the sidewalk and escaped in a stolen car that was later abandoned and set on fire.

Police said little evidence was left behind at the shooting scene. And while the investigation stalled, the mystery of who killed Judy Kanan deepened.

The victim was a descendant of the Waring family, which settled Agoura in the 1860s. By the 1980s, Judy Kanan and her older sister, Patricia Kanan, had parlayed inheritances and acquisitions into landholdings in Agoura worth millions of dollars.

When she was gunned down, police acknowledged there was no shortage of potential suspects and concentrated largely on reviewing her business disputes. The killing prompted one Agoura businessman who was interviewed at the time to say: “You’re going to have half the population of Agoura as suspects. The most hated woman in Agoura got assassinated.”

In January of this year, as the fifth anniversary of the killing approached, police said they still were no closer to solving the mystery. “I don’t have any idea who killed Judy Kanan,” Detective Phil Quartararo said at the time.

Court records and police, however, reveal that investigators now believe the slaying was carried out by Michael Kanan and motivated by a financial dispute within the family.

Shortly after the fifth anniversary of Judy Kanan’s death, a person who knows Michael Kanan came forward with details about the slaying. That person said he had been asked by the suspect to kill Judy Kanan.

According to court records, the informant told police the slaying centered on a dispute between Judy Kanan and her brother, George Richard Kanan – Michael Kanan’s father – over a $2,600loan. Coupled with that was the belief George Kanan impressed upon his son that Judy Kanan had unfairly controlled most of the family’s land, the informant said.

“The informant indicated that George Richard Kanan hated his sister and preached this hatred to his son, Michael…,” the search warrant reads in part. “George Kanan had preached to his son that Judy Kanan had stolen all of his property.”

According to the court records, the informant said the slaying unfolded this way:

In 1984, George Kanan signed an agreement to borrow $2,600 from his sister for unknown reasons. But by the end of the year, he believed he was going to default on the loan and thereby lose a large piece of property he owned in Agoura to her.

“The informant stated that George Kanan was extremely upset Judy Kanan made him sign the agreement,” according to the search warrant.

“Shortly after the loan was made, Michael Kanan approached the informant with a plan to kill Judy Kanan… Michael Kanan had originally planned to kill both Judy and her sister, Pat, at their Agoura restaurant and had planned to make it look like a robbery. The plan was later changed to kill only Judy and it was to be done at the corrals where she went daily to feed her horses,” the warrant stated.

The informant said that a few weeks before the killing, Michael Kanan showed him a handgun that would be used to kill Judy Kanan. Police and the informant believe the gun was stolen during a burglary of a car parked near Balboa Park in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. But neither the gun nor its owner has been found.

The informant told police that in mid-January 1985he stole a car and parked it near the stable where Judy Kanan’s horses were kept. The car was to be used as a getaway car after the killing, but the car was noticed by police Jan. 25and impounded.

The informant said he believed the plan would not go any further, but four days later he said he was shocked when he saw a news report on television about the slaying of Judy Kanan.

“… it was done in the same manner as previously planned,” the search warrant reads. “Shortly after watching the newscast, the informant confronted Michael Kanan, who admitted to him that he had committed the murder…The informant believes that Michael Kanan committed the murder because he sensed that the informant would not be able to go through with the plan.”

Quartararo, who has been assigned to the case since its start, said Michael Kanan was questioned along with other family members in the early stages of the case, but “we never narrowed in on him.”

About a year after the slaying, Michael Kanan became a fugitive when he jumped bail after his arrest for a commercial burglary in Van Nuys, police said. He wasn’t arrested until last month in Burbank and now is being held in the county jail without bail.

William H. Schultz, an attorney representing Michael Kanan, denied that his client had any involvement in the Kanan slaying.

“The charges are groundless and illogical,” Schultz said. He declined further comment.

George Richard Kanan could not be located for comment.

Police are confident of the informant’s story because he has furnished details about the crime that were never made public. They declined to identify him as a safety precaution.

Acting on the informant’s story, police earlier this month searched a rental storage unit in Chatsworth used by Michael Kanan. A raincoat and gloves were found, but detectives did not find the gun.

Meantime, Quartararo said he has corroborated some of the informant’s story, finding legal documents relating to the $2,600 loan and confirming that a stolen car was impounded by police on the Collins Street cul-de-sac four days before Judy Kanan was shot there.

Before seeking charges against the suspect, police said they must also corroborate the informant’s version of where the gun used in the slaying came from. Because Michael Kanan was once arrested for attempting to burglarize a car near the Balboa Golf Course in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, police believe the weapon might have come from a similar burglary in that area.

Quartararo said he has been searching through reports on crimes in the sprawling park area for the months prior to the killing but has not found a report containing a stolen gun. He asked that anyone who might have had a handgun stolen while in the park area in late 1984 or early 1985 contact police. He cited a $50,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Kanan slaying.

“We do need to corroborate this part of the story,” Quartararo said. “If we can establish that the gun came from a car in that area as the informant said, the district attorney’s office will file the case” without having the actual weapon used in the slaying in evidence.

CHARGES WILL NOT BE FILED IN KANAN CASE

March 21, 1991

Prosecutors have decided not to file charges against a man suspected in the highly publicized slaying six years ago of his aunt, a wealthy landowner and descendant of a pioneer Agoura family. However, Los Angeles police continue to identify him as the prime suspect.

After a lengthy review by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, prosecutors decided there was insufficient evidence to charge Michael Kanan, 34, with the murder of Judy Kanan, said Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the prosecutors’ office.

Michael Kanan, through his attorney, has in the past denied any part in the killing.

Judy Kanan, 68, a descendant of the family that settled Agoura in the 1860s, was shot four times by a masked gunman in a raincoat who approached her as she arrived at a Woodland Hills stable on Jan. 29, 1985, to feed horses she kept there.

The killer escaped and no arrests were made. Early last year, an informant who said he was troubled by feelings of guilt contacted police and identified Michael Kanan, son of the victim’s brother, as the gunman.

According to court records, the informant said the slaying was motivated by long-simmering family tensions brought to a head by a dispute over a $2,600 loan from Judy Kanan to Michael Kanan’s father, George Richard Kanan.

Detectives felt no need to arrest Michael Kanan because he was already in jail for violating probation terms on an unrelated burglary conviction. He is now serving a two-year prison term for the probation violation.

After corroborating parts of the informant’s story of how the murder took place, detectives seeking a murder charge submitted the case to the district attorney late last year.

Gibbons declined to reveal why the case was rejected, saying the investigation is continuing.

The investigators on the case did not dispute the district attorney’s decision not to file charges.

“It was a close call,” Lt. William Gaida said, and Michael Kanan “remains the primary suspect. We need to get additional information or evidence. We consider the informant to be reliable and we are convinced we are looking in the right direction.”

According to court records filed during the investigation, Michael Kanan had once asked the informant to help him kill Judy Kanan, suggesting a plan that was similar to the way the actual killing occurred.

The informant, according to the court records, said the slaying was later carried out without his involvement, and afterward Michael Kanan told him, “It’s a real trip to see something you are responsible for… The bitch got what she deserved.”

The informant also told investigators of a storage locker Michael Kanan used where police then seized a raincoat and gloves officers believe were worn during the killing.

However, police conceded that the informant’s credibility could be questioned by a jury if the case were brought to trial now because some of the details of the crime he gave police could not be corroborated by investigators.

The gun used in the slaying has never been found. A key part of the informant’s story was that Michael Kanan stole the gun from a car parked by a jogger in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, said Detective Phil Quartararo.

Quartararo reviewed reports of hundreds of crimes in that area in the months before the killing without discovering one involving such a theft, he said.

Quartararo, who has been assigned to the killing from the beginning, said he has no plans to drop the case, but the investigation has gone “as far as we may be able to go unless somebody else comes forward.”

note: Five years after prosecutors decided not to file charges against Michael Kanan, he engaged police in an armed standoff at his mother’s San Fernando Valley home. He shot and killed a dog and a horse and then fired several shots at arriving police officers. No officers were injured. After a two-hour standoff, Kanan killed himself by shooting himself in the head. He died without ever admitting he had been Judy Kanan’s killer. Police later revealed that the informant who in 1990 pointed the finger at Michael Kanan in his aunt’s death had been his own brother.

HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE

‘COTTON CLUB’ CASE LED TO ARREST IN ’84 SLAYING OF PROSTITUTE

LOS ANGELES TIMES

June 25, 1989

Five years ago, June Mincher, a 245-pound prostitute with a lavender Rolls-Royce, was shot to death on a Van Nuys sidewalk by a swift and efficient killer, setting off an investigation that unearthed a bizarre cast of characters and seamy tales, but convicted no one.

This month some of the mystery appears to be unraveling in a court hearing into another killing a world away – the world of the “Cotton Club” slaying with its Hollywood celebrities and high-finance film and cocaine deals.

Testimony in the Cotton Club hearing, and related documents filed with the court, contain accusations that both slayings were carried out by some of the same hired killers, who boasted of their work to an informant wearing a tape recorder for investigators.

The question of who might have hired them to kill Mincher is still open, but at least one document filed with the court quotes an informant as saying that it was the grandmother of the man who had been acquitted of the killing. An attorney for the woman, a Beverly Hills investment executive, denied the accusation. Police say they are still investigating and will not comment.

Mincher, who billed herself in local sex-oriented publications as a “Sexy Black & Indian Goddess” with a 56inch bust, was shot to death May 3, 1984. Two years later, Gregory Alan Cavalli, a 24-year-old body builder from a prominent Beverly Hills family, was charged with her murder. Authorities said he drove the getaway car after a hit man killed Mincher.

But at Cavalli’s trial, prosecutors could not produce or even name the hit man. And the chief witnesses against Cavalli included a former cocaine addict, a transsexual performer in pornographic films and a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered after her son killed her mother.

At the end of a three-week trial in 1986, Cavalli walked out of the Van Nuys Courthouse a free man. It took a jury less than an hour to find him not guilty.

But now, three years later, the Mincher murder case begins a new chapter.

Authorities have charged two men with killing Mincher, identifying them as bodyguards who formerly worked for a security firm that the Cavalli family had hired. Detectives now say Cavalli was not the getaway driver and was not even present the night of the killing.

The question of who ordered Mincher’s killing remains, but authorities say Cavalli is not a target of the investigation because he can’t be tried for the same crime twice.

“Never,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Ed Entwisle. “He has been tried and that is it.”

Investigators will not discuss whom they consider suspects. But in a summary of the investigation filed with Los Angeles Superior Court, in connection with the Cotton Club case, the key informant in the case is quoted as telling officers that one of the suspects told him that Mincher “had been bothering a wealthy Italian family and the grandmother contracted the ‘hit.’”

Attorney Mitchell W. Egers, who represents the Cavalli family, identified “grandmother” as a reference to Mary Bowles, a partner in the Beverly Hills real-estate investment firm of Bowles & Associates. “There is no other grandmother… with a part in this case,” he said, denying that anyone in the family had anything to do with the Mincher killing.

“It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s absolutely impossible,” Egers said. “It is beyond my conception that anybody in the Cavalli family would have anything to do with anything illegal, let alone a murder. They are gentle, refined people with an excellent reputation.”

New leads in the Mincher case emerged almost by accident in the last two years during the lengthy Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigation of the slaying of would-be movie producer Roy Radin.

William Molony Mentzer, 39, of Canoga Park and Robert Ulmer Lowe, 42, of Rockville, Md., two of the alleged hit men arrested in Radin’s 1983slaying, have also been charged with killing Mincher in 1984.

Mentzer has pleaded not guilty, and Lowe is fighting extradition from Maryland.

A preliminary hearing is under way in Los Angeles Superior Court into the slaying of Radin, which was dubbed the Cotton Club case because Radin was killed during a financial dispute over the making of the movie of that name.

Although the Mincher murder is involved in the hearing, it has been overshadowed by the headline-grabbing testimony in the Radin killing, which has involved cocaine deals, limousines and accusations involving movie producer Robert Evans.

But investigative records filed with the court and the statements of prosecutors and detectives about the Mincher case weave a portrait of an investigation that was started and stopped two different times before the present inquiry began.

According to stories told by friends and associates at the time of her death, June Mincher, 29, parlayed advertisements in underground newspapers offering sexual services into a lucrative lifestyle. Friends told investigators that she had spent at least $20,000 on cosmetic surgery to alter her face and hips and enlarge her bust. She drove a lavender Rolls-Royce and carried as much as $12,000 in a case beneath her wig.

In the summer of 1983, according to testimony at Cavalli’s trial, Cavalli began calling Mincher after seeing her ad in an underground newspaper. The telephone relationship lasted several months, with the two talking for several hours on some days. Cavalli wanted to meet Mincher but she declined. Finally, he went to her West Hollywood apartment and broke down the door.

Cavalli discovered that Mincher weighed 60 or 70 pounds more than she appeared to in the picture in her advertisement, and he ended the relationship.

Angered by the rejection, Mincher then began to harass Cavalli; his father, Richard Cavalli; and other relatives, including Bowles, with repeated threatening phone calls. Mincher was suspected by authorities of firebombing Greg Cavalli’s car in late 1983 and setting fire to his father’s military-surplus store in Santa Monica in 1984.

The Cavalli family spent $200,000 on private security guards to protect them from Mincher, according to trial testimony, and Gregory Cavalli moved to Phoenix to get away from her.

On May 3, 1984, Mincher had just left an apartment in the 6800 block of Sepulveda Boulevard with a friend when she was shot seven times in the head. She died instantly. The friend was shot in the chest but survived. The gunman ran to a waiting car, which sped away.

Los Angeles police began investigating Cavalli’s possible involvement in the slaying within three hours of the shooting, according to court records. Though two witnesses identified Cavalli as the driver of the getaway car, investigators could not identify the gunman. The investigation stalled and was shelved two months later.

As is routine with unsolved killings, the case was reopened by two new investigators the following year. According to police records, they immediately focused on the more than six bodyguards who had been provided to the Cavalli family by a Studio City firm, A. Michael Pascal & Associates. The detectives got the names but could not locate and interview all of the men because they had left Pascal.

“At that particular time, we were trying to get all the bodyguards identified,” Entwisle said recently. “We were never able to determine if these were the suspects in the killing although our investigation pointed that way.”

Two of the bodyguards they could not find were Lowe and Mentzer. In December 1985 police and prosecutors decided to go ahead with the arrest and trial of Cavalli without knowing who the hit man was.

During the trial in June 1986a transsexual pornographic film performer who was a close friend of Mincher’s testified about the relationship between Cavalli and Mincher. But the case relied most heavily on the two witnesses who had identified Cavalli as the getaway driver.

However, on the stand, one of those witnesses admitted that at the time of the shooting, he was a cocaine addict and could have made a mistake. The other witness, Cavalli’s attorneys brought out, had originally told police that he could not see the driver.

Jurors later said the witnesses lacked credibility and chose to believe the defense’s contention that Cavalli was in Phoenix, and had made phone calls from there, when the killing took place. Cavalli was acquitted, and the Mincher case was shelved once again.

Meanwhile, sheriff ’s investigators working on the Radin killing of 1983 were investigating Mentzer and Lowe.

Radin, 33, of Long Island, disappeared May 13, 1983, after getting into a limousine in Hollywood to go to a dinner engagement to discuss the financial backing for Cotton Club. His decomposed body was found a month later on a wilderness shooting range south of Gorman.

Mentzer and Lowe were among the possible suspects identified in the slaying, but the sheriff ’s investigation moved slowly until 1987when deputies contacted William Rider, a former security chief for Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. Rider knew Mentzer and Lowe from security jobs.

Rider, according to court records and testimony in the Cotton Club case, told investigators that Mentzer and Lowe had told him about murders they had been involved in. One was the Radin killing. Another was the slaying of a woman in Van Nuys who the men apparently thought was a transvestite.

Rider told the investigators of a 1986 conversation he had with Lowe while they were on a security job in Texas.

“Lowe began drinking heavily and told Mr. Rider about Mentzer murdering a black transvestite,” a sheriff’s investigative report says, and continued:

“Lowe said that he drove the getaway vehicle and that Mentzer shot the victim several times while standing on Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley… Mentzer also shot the victim’s companion, but the companion survived.

“Lowe stated Mentzer began calling the murdered victim names and kicking her after the shooting, and Lowe, who was in the driver’s seat of their vehicle, had to call to Mentzer to get in the car so they could get away before the police arrived.”

The investigators connected the facts Rider gave to the Mincher slaying. Rider later told investigators that he had unknowingly lent Mentzer the gun used in the killing and turned over a.22-caliber semiautomatic pistol, equipped with a silencer. According to the court records, investigators matched the gun to the slugs that killed Mincher.

Rider next went undercover for the sheriff’s investigators, agreeing to meet with Lowe, Mentzer and a third former bodyguard for the Pascal firm, Robert Leroy Deremer, 38, while the conversations were secretly tape-recorded.

In May 1988 while sitting with Rider in a car in Frederick, Md., according to sheriff’s records, Deremer spoke about the Mincher killing and said he drove Mentzer by the murder scene shortly after the shooting so that Mentzer could see what police were doing. The next day, Rider met with Lowe at a bar in the same city and while the conversation was secretly recorded, Lowe told of his part in the killing, the records say.

Two months later, it was Mentzer’s turn. Rider met him in Los Angeles and steered the tape-recorded conversation toward the murder. According to the records, Mentzer said that in the weeks before the murder, he had placed a bomb under Mincher’s car but it failed to go off. He said he had also broken into Mincher’s apartment and pistol-whipped her. In another conversation, Mentzer said he used hollow-point bullets during the killing because he believed – erroneously – that they were impossible to match to a weapon.

The tapes of the conversations, along with testimony by Rider, are expected to be key evidence against Mentzer and Lowe, if they come to trial. Authorities said last week that Deremer has agreed to testify against his two fellow bodyguards and will not be charged in the case.

While authorities are confident that they finally know how Mincher was killed, the question of who ordered her death remains unclear.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles police began their third look at the case after the sheriff ’s investigation broke it open.

“We’re following up on loose ends,” Entwisle said. “There are still people out there that were involved.”

Authorities declined to comment on who the suspects are. But one thing they are sure of is that Gregory Cavalli cannot be tried again.

“As far as Mr. Cavalli is concerned, the case is over,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew W. Diamond, who headed the unsuccessful prosecution in 1986. “He can’t ever be prosecuted again for killing June Mincher.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn, who is handling the case against Mentzer and Lowe, would not comment. “I don’t want to speculate on Gregory Cavalli’s role,” Conn said. “He has been acquitted.”

Cavalli, who has moved back to Southern California since his trial, could not be reached for comment.

Pascal, whose security firm is now in Beverly Hills, confirmed last week that Mentzer and Lowe worked for his firm when it was hired by the Cavalli family. But he would not comment further. Pascal has not been charged with any crime.

THE FAMILY

4 MEN ARRESTED IN LAKE VIEW TERRACE QUADRUPLE KILLING

LOS ANGELES TIMES

September 30, 1988

Four men were arrested Thursday in a quadruple slaying in which two men, a mother and her 28month-old daughter were shot to death at a Lake View Terrace house where “rock” cocaine was sold, Los Angeles police said.

The four men may also be implicated in two more San Fernando Valley murders, police said.

A team of nearly 200 police officers, including members of the department’s Special Weapons and Tactics team, raided three fortified drug houses and 12other locations in the northeast Valley before all the suspects were arrested, a department spokesman said.

Lt. Fred Nixon identified the suspects as Stanley Bryant, 30, of Pacoima; Antonio Johnson, 28, of Lake View Terrace; Nash Newbil, 52, of Lake View Terrace; and Levi Flack Jr., 24, whose address had not been determined.

Bryant and Johnson were arrested on suspicion of murder, and Newbil and Flack were arrested on suspicion of being accessories to murder. All four were being held without bail at the Foothill Division jail.

“The arrests of all four of these people refer to the quadruple murder,” Nixon said. “There are indications they are implicated in two others. The warrants for the searches of the 15locations came out of the investigation of all six murders. The investigation is continuing.”

The locations of the raids and arrests, as well as complete details of the investigation, were unavailable Thursday. But detectives said the arrests stemmed from an investigation centered on the Lake View Terrace shooting Aug. 28that left the four people dead.

In that incident, police said, two St. Louis men, Andre Armstrong, 31, and James Brown, 43, were killed after they went inside the house in the 11400block of Wheeler Avenue. After the two were shot, a man ran out with a shotgun and fired into the car in which Armstrong and Brown had traveled to the house.

The blasts killed Lorretha Anderson English, 23, of Seaside and her daughter, Chemise, who were sitting in the backseat. English’s 1-year-old son, who was also in the backseat, was only slightly injured. Police would not release the boy’s name.

After the shooting, police said, the man with the shotgun jumped into the car and drove about a mile away from the house before abandoning it in an alley. The bodies and the injured child were still inside.

Meanwhile, the bodies of Armstrong and Brown were loaded in another car and driven away from the house, police said. Police found them three days later in Lopez Canyon.

Nixon said he could not comment on the motive for the slayings. Earlier, police speculated that a drug dispute ignited the violence.

County records show that Newbil is the owner of the Wheeler Avenue house, which police said had been the scene of drug sales for two to three months before the shootings.

The house was formerly owned by Jeffrey A. Bryant, 37, once described by police as a drug kingpin who controlled a sales network in the northeast Valley.

In February 1986Jeffrey Bryant pleaded guilty to operating a drug house at the Wheeler Avenue location and was sentenced to four years in state prison. He is believed to be the brother of Stanley Bryant, one of the suspects arrested Thursday.

The Wheeler Avenue case may be linked to shootings July 31, in which Douglas Henegan, 21, of Panorama City was killed, and Sunday, in which Tracy Anderson, 24, of Sylmar was slain, police said. The victims of those shootings were close friends, police said.

Henegan was gunned down while he sat with friends on a curb at Hansen Dam Park. Anderson was shot to death on a Pacoima street after an argument involving several men. On Monday, Leroy Wheeler, 19, of Sylmar surrendered to police and was arrested on suspicion of murder in the Anderson case.

Police declined to discuss the motives for the Henegan and Anderson killings or how they may relate to the other four. However, Nixon said Wheeler is also suspected of involvement in the quadruple slaying.

DRUG RING KINGPIN CALLS THE SHOTS FROM PRISON, POLICE SAY

October 16, 1988

Los Angeles police think that a prison inmate in San Diego is directing a San Fernando Valley drug organization whose top members were charged this month in the slayings of four people at a Lake View Terrace “rock” house.

Investigators said they think that the inmate, Jeffrey A. Bryant, 37, of Pacoima, is the leader of a drug ring with as many as 200members that has controlled the sale of rock cocaine in the northeast Valley for nearly a decade.

Bryant is serving a four-year sentence at the Richard S. Donovan Correctional Facility for a 1986 conviction for operating a drug house.

“We believe he calls the shots from prison,” said Lt. Bernard D. Conine, chief of Foothill Division detectives.

Authorities said Bryant and other top-level members of his organization have been linked to the Black Guerrilla Family, a gang formed in California prisons in the early 1970s. The BGF, as it is more commonly known, at first focused on revolutionary politics but now is accused of operating a statewide drug network, authorities said.

Bryant faces no charges in the Aug. 28quadruple slaying at the house he previously owned in the 11400block of Wheeler Avenue. But investigators said the arrests of several lieutenants in the killings have depleted his organization’s top echelon.

Although police think they eventually will be able to break up the Valley organization, they noted that lower-level members are in line to take over for those arrested in the Wheeler Avenue killings.

“We know there are people in the organization who want to step up,” Conine said. “The bottom line is, you can still buy rock cocaine in Pacoima.”

Through informants and witnesses and from evidence gathered during searches of 26locations where organization members lived and operated, authorities said, they have pieced together what happened at the house on Wheeler Avenue and why.

Andre Louis Armstrong, 31, and James Brown, 43, both of the Pacoima area, were hit with shotgun blasts at the door of the house, police said.

They said Lorretha Anderson English, 23, of Seaside, and her 28-month-old daughter, Chemise, were fatally shot while waiting in a car parked out front. English’s 1¹⁄2 -year-old son, Carlos, was slightly injured by flying glass.

So far, 11people, including Bryant’s younger brother, Stanley Bryant, 30, have been charged in the killings. Stanley Bryant; Le Roy Wheeler, 19; Levie Slack III, 24; Tannis Bryant Curry, 26; James Franklin Williams III, 19; John Preston Settle, 28; and Antonio Arceneaux, whose age was unavailable, each face four charges of murder and one charge of attempted murder. All are Pacoima residents.

Antonio Johnson, 28, and Nash Newbil, 52, both of Lake View Terrace, and William Gene Settle, 30, and Provine McCloria, 19, both of Pacoima, each face charges of accessory to murder.

The Settle brothers, McCloria and Arceneaux are still sought.

Only Stanley Bryant, Wheeler, Slack and Johnson have been arraigned. Each pleaded not guilty. Wheeler also has pleaded not guilty to a fifth murder, the Sept. 25 fatal shooting of a Pacoima drug dealer who police think was attempting to compete with the Bryant Organization.

According to police and court records, the slayings occurred during a power struggle in which Armstrong, who had served a prison term for a killing attributed to the organization, demanded money and a top position in the so-called Bryant Organization.

Instead of giving Armstrong what he wanted, the organization decided to kill him at a meeting at the Lake View Terrace house, where the group kept money and cocaine, authorities said. When other people showed up with Armstrong, gang members decided to eliminate them too, police said.

Wheeler told a police informant, “They had to be killed to protect the organization,” according to court records.

“They were shot… through the metal door,” he is quoted as saying, referring to Armstrong and Brown. “The woman and baby had to be killed. She was writing down license numbers. I had to shoot them.”

Authorities think the Bryant Organization took control of cocaine sales in the northeast Valley after James

H. (Doc) Holiday, a leader of the BGF, was accused in a 1979double murder in Pacoima.

The charges against Holiday, who police think had controlled cocaine traffic in the area, were dismissed. But he was convicted of the attempted murder of a witness in the case and was sent to prison, leaving the northeast Valley to Jeffrey Bryant’s group, authorities said.

The Bryant Organization began to distribute cocaine through street sales and at as many as six drug houses in the Pacoima and Lake View Terrace areas, police said. The organization soon earned a reputation for violence, police said.

“The rock cocaine business is controlled by Jeff Bryant,” according to a police statement filed in the 1986 drug case that sent Bryant to prison. In the words of the statement, “He is the head of an organization consisting of family members and associates, which exists for the sole purpose of the distribution and selling of large quantities of cocaine.”

Police think the organization was responsible for several unsolved slayings and attempted murders. Another court document filed in the 1986 case says an informant told police: “Jeff Bryant is a sergeant-at-arms in the BGF and often uses BGF soldiers to commit shootings and murders to enforce his hold on the cocaine distribution in the Pacoima area.”

Bryant served time in prison in the mid-1970s for a bank-robbery conviction and may have become associated with the BGF then, police said. “Our intelligence shows the Bryant Organization is closely aligned with the BGF; in fact it claims to be the BGF,” Conine said.

Bryant and his brother, Stanley, who police say is second in command of the Valley drug gang, were charged in 1982 in the contract killing of a man who vandalized one of their cars after buying $150 worth of cocaine that he thought was of poor quality, according to court records.

Charged as the triggerman in that shooting was Armstrong, an ex-convict who had moved to Pacoima from St. Louis and had “gained a reputation for being a hit man,” court records state.

But after a preliminary hearing, the charges against the Bryant brothers were dismissed when a judge ruled there was insufficient evidence that they had ordered the killing. Armstrong later pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sent to prison for six years.

Narcotics detectives began to focus intensively on the Bryant Organization after the murder case was dismissed, records show. Police said they identified three houses owned by Jeffrey Bryant, including the house in the 11400block of Wheeler Avenue, where cocaine was being sold. Police said the drug operation was directed from a pool hall on Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima.

The drug houses were virtual fortresses; bars covered windows, and steel doors opened into cages, which cocaine buyers entered to do business, police said. Money was exchanged for cocaine through slots in the cages.

Stanley Bryant recruited people to work in the houses for $25 an hour, court records show. The workers were locked inside for eight-hour shifts. In each house, a pot filled with oil simmered 24 hours a day. Workers were instructed to dump cocaine in the oil should a police raid occur.

In the first two months of 1985, police raided the three cocaine fortresses, made several arrests and confiscated weapons and small amounts of cocaine. Evidence obtained from the raids was used to charge Jeffrey Bryant with operating drug houses. In 1986he pleaded guilty to one of the charges and was sentenced to four years in prison.

But with the group’s leader imprisoned in San Diego, the organization did not wane, police said. Stanley Bryant headed the ring on the outside while his brother pulled strings from his prison cell, police said. Investigators said they think Jeffrey Bryant has commanded the organization by telephone and through organization members who visit him in prison.

Police have identified nearly 200 people associated with the group. Intelligence files contain a pyramid-type diagram of the organization’s structure. Jeffrey Bryant’s name is at the top, followed by four levels of increasingly larger groupings. Those listed on the diagram range from organization lieutenants to drug distributors, rock house operators and finally street-sales people.

Whereas those in the top levels are thought to be associated with the BGF, those on the bottom are mostly members of teen-age street gangs, police said. The street gangs are recruited to sell drugs so that higher-echelon members of the organization are protected, police said.

“This is how the leaders insulate themselves,” said a detective familiar with the case. “The people on the bottom are just fodder. If they get arrested, it’s easy to get someone to take their place.”

But the insulation broke down with the Aug. 28 killings at the Wheeler Avenue house, police said.

Detectives said the cause of the four killings relates to the 1982 killing that resulted in a dismissal for the Bryants and imprisonment for Armstrong.

Armstrong was released from prison in April. Police said he returned to St. Louis briefly, but early this summer moved to the Pacoima area with a friend, James Brown.

Investigators think that Armstrong was angry with the Bryant Organization because it had reneged on a promise to support his wife while he was in prison.

Police said a meeting was scheduled between Armstrong and the top members of Bryant’s group at which Armstrong intended not only to demand a top spot in the organization but the money he thought his wife should have received.

But before the meeting took place, Armstrong, Brown, English and her daughter were ambushed. Their bodies were quickly removed from the property and dumped elsewhere. The house was empty by the time police arrived, after receiving calls from neighbors.

It was another four weeks before police had gathered evidence of what happened and began arresting the lieutenants in the Bryant Organization.

Times staff writer Claudia Puig contributed to this story.

MASSIVE DRUG, MURDER CASE INCHES ITS WAY TOWARD TRIAL

Courts: Charges against the so-called Bryant Organization grew out of 1988 slayings. Getting verdicts may take years.

April 19, 1992

With its 10 defendants, 58 volumes of investigative records containing 20,000 pages, and 34 defense attorneys, prosecutors and investigators, the Bryant Organization murder and drug conspiracy case moves through the justice system like an elephant.

Its sheer bulk dictates that it move slowly.

Already nearly 4 years old, the massive prosecution resulted from the slayings of three adults and a child at a Lake View Terrace house where the proceeds from a $500,000-a-month rock cocaine business were allegedly counted. And the end is nowhere near.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan L. Maurizi, the lead prosecutor in the case, said the criminal trial of the 10 people charged with either the slayings or with taking part in a conspiracy to control the crack trade in the northeast San Fernando Valley could make U.S. legal history.

“I think there is every possibility that it will be the longest and most expensive trial ever,” Maurizi, who has been working full-time on the case for most of the last three years, said last week.

A trial date for the case has not been set. Court officials have not found a courtroom that will be available – and big enough – for a trial expected to last by some estimates as long as three years.

Bills for the taxpayer-paid attorneys representing both sides in the case run nearly $2,000 per hour when court is in session. The prosecution’s investigation has already cost at least $2million, by one defense attorney’s estimate.

And when a courtroom is chosen for the trial, there will undoubtedly be renovations. Bulletproof glass partitions will be added for security. Bleacher seats will likely be built to allow all of the attorneys and defendants a clear view of the witness stand. All of it will add to the cost of the case.

Once the logistics of where and when are set, the complexities will continue. The case may require more than one jury, and the selection process may take months. Each witness who takes the stand will be subject to cross-examination by 10 attorneys representing the different defendants. Since four defendants face a possible death penalty, a lengthy penalty phase could follow any convictions.

The landmark case for such lengthy and costly prosecutions was the McMartin Pre-School molestation case. The first of two Los Angeles trials in the McMartin case lasted 32months from the start of jury selection until the return of verdicts. The bill to taxpayers was estimated at $15million.

The murder and drug case is the result of a sweeping investigation of the so-called Bryant Organization, named for two Pacoima brothers who allegedly headed the group. The investigation began after the Aug. 28, 1988, shootings on Wheeler Avenue.

Also known on the streets as The Family, the organization had as many as 200 associates and had controlled much of the flow of cocaine to the northeast San Fernando Valley since 1982, according to the charges against the defendants.

Maurizi said the group also was extraordinarily violent in maintaining a grip on its territory. She blames the organization for 25 murders over the past 10 years.

Those killed in the 1988 shootings were Andre Louis Armstrong, 31; James Brown, 43; Lorretha English, 23, and her 2-year-old daughter, Chemise. Investigators said the killings occurred at a time when the Bryant group was fending off competition and demands for money from Armstrong, a former associate who had recently been released from prison.

According to authorities, Armstrong was set up to be killed when he was lured to a meeting at the organization’s “cash” house on Wheeler Avenue. Armstrong and Brown were shot to death as they entered the house. A gunman then ran out to their car and shot English and her daughter. The little girl was executed with a point-blank shot to the back of the head.

Within six weeks of the slayings, squads of officers with search warrants raided 26 houses where suspected members of the Bryant Organization lived or did business. Investigators said they recovered numerous records detailing the group’s drug business – which grossed at least $1.6million quarterly.

Evidence from the raids and the shooting scene and information from a key member of the organization who agreed to cooperate with authorities led to charges being filed against 12people believed to make up the top leadership and enforcement arms of the organization.

Among those charged is Stanley Bryant, now 34, the alleged leader of the group at the time because his older brother, Jeff, was in prison. Also among the defendants is Le Roy Wheeler, 23, a suspected hit man for The Family who authorities said ran to the car where English and her daughter were sitting and dispatched them with a shotgun and handgun.

Because it took three years to round up all 12 suspects, six separate preliminary hearings – some lasting months – and a grand jury session have been held during the past few years. It wasn’t until September that the last suspect was ordered to stand trial.

Earlier this month, two of the defendants pleaded guilty to drug and aiding and abetting charges, the first convictions in the case. One was put on probation after spending the last 18months in jail. The other has not yet been sentenced.

What remains to be decided on is a date for the trial – and a venue.

“We still haven’t found a home,” said Maurizi, explaining that a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who has been hearing pretrial motions in the case has been reassigned to civil matters, leaving the Bryant case without a courtroom.

With trial length estimates running from Maurizi’s conservative one year to as long as three years, courtrooms with clear dockets are difficult to find. Finding a courtroom large enough is also a problem. During pretrial hearings the defendants and attorneys have filled audience seats and jury boxes.

But that extra room won’t be there during the trial. Steve Flanagan, an attorney representing defendant Tannis Curry, said the case may require two or more juries because evidence against some defendants cannot be heard by jurors considering different charges against other defendants.

“I think at a minimum we are looking at two juries and possibly even more,” he said.

Maurizi said a courtroom may have to be renovated for the case. She also said all of the logistic problems may make it so unwieldy that the defendants will have to be tried separately – possibly in simultaneous trials.

However, the prosecutor said she opposes breaking up the defendants and hopes the case will find a home soon in one of six courtrooms used for “long cause” cases in downtown Los Angeles or the four courtrooms used for that purpose in Van Nuys. She believes that the trial may finally start by early fall – four years after the killings.

Attorneys involved said the trial is expected to be lengthy because of the complex conspiracy charges, which require a massive amount of documentary evidence as well as testimony. Also, having so many defendants automatically lengthens the process.

“With 10defendants there could be 10attorneys conducting cross-examinations of every witness,” Maurizi said.

“The more defendants you have, the length of trial increases geometrically, not arithmetically,” said Ralph Novotney, who represents defendant Donald Smith. “I think somebody even said this would last four years. I think one to two years is realistic.”

Flanagan said jury selection alone could take months. Between the prosecution and all of the defendants, there will be more than 200 challenges to jurors allowed, he added.

“I have no idea how long it will take,” Flanagan said of the trial. “As a general rule, a prosecutor’s estimate is conservative. If she says one year, I would at least double it.”

In addition to the defendants, the case has a massive attachment of attorneys and investigators. There are 17 defense attorneys – all court-appointed. Seven defendants have been granted two attorneys each because they face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted. Each defendant also has at least one court-appointed investigator.

On the prosecution side, Maurizi heads a team of four deputy district attorneys and four investigators, including Los Angeles Police Detective James Vojtecky, the lead investigator since the beginning of the case.

Most of the prosecutors and investigators have been working full-time on the case for a year or longer. They primarily work out of an office near the San Fernando Courthouse, its location kept secret for security reasons. In the course of the investigation, members of the team have traveled to 11 states to interview witnesses and gather evidence.

While most murder cases result in investigators accumulating reports and other documents that fill two or three thick blue binders called “murder books,” the Bryant case has filled 58 so far. During one preliminary hearing, they were lined up in the unused jury box so they could be easily referred to by prosecutors. Side by side, they stretched more than 10feet.

“It’s a nightmare when you try to get everything collated,” Flanagan said. “I have attempted to computerize everything. But there is so much. There are approximately 20,000pages. There are thousands and thousands of telephone numbers.”

It is difficult to estimate how much has been spent on the case or how much taxpayers will eventually have to pay. The investigation of the shooting involved numerous law enforcement agencies, and at times as many as 200officers were brought in to conduct searches. Flanagan estimated the investigation has cost more than $2 million. Maurizi said that estimate could be in the ballpark, but she could not confirm it.

The true costs of the case would include the salaries of prosecutors, police investigators, bailiffs, judges and court staff. The defendants’ attorneys are each paid about $100an hour. At that rate, a year in trial – minus a two-week vacation – will cost taxpayers more than $3.5million for defense attorneys alone.

Defense attorneys said the cost of the trial should not be criticized because the defendants are constitutionally guaranteed competent counsel and a fair trial. They said the prosecution has set the stage for the lengthy and expensive battle by alleging complicated conspiracy charges.

“Millions have been spent on their investigation,” Flanagan said. “I don’t think anybody can quibble over the money” spent on defense attorneys.

Novotney said that if the prosecution dropped some of the “garbage charges” against the defendants, such as the allegation that the organization was involved in a drug conspiracy, the trial and costs would be greatly trimmed.

“The cost of justice sometimes is expensive,” Novotney said. “This is a megacase. I have a client who faces a possible death penalty. I have an obligation to prepare the best defense possible. It’s an expensive proposition.”

Citing confidentiality, he declined to say what his defense team has been paid in the 1¹⁄2 years he has been on the case.

Maurizi said the length of the case works to the advantage of the defendants as well as their attorneys. As a case drags on, the prosecution’s evidence can unravel.

“Memories fade to a certain extent, evidence can be lost or destroyed,” she said. “In this case, there has always been a great danger factor to our witnesses.”

Vojtecky said one of the case’s defendants, Nash Newbil, 56, had been free on bail awaiting trial but was then jailed in September when he allegedly directed an assault against a witness in the case. Newbil was charged with assault for allegedly ordering two men to hold down the witness and inject a hallucinogenic drug into her tongue with a hypodermic needle. During the alleged attack, Newbil called her a “snitch,” police said.

Defense attorney Flanagan countered that the slow movement of the case causes defendants an enormous hardship.

“It’s a nightmare for those individuals,” he said. “There is a presumption of innocence, but they languish in jail.

“I don’t think it is anybody’s fault. There is an investigation that has been done by both sides. I don’t think anybody is trying to hold it up.”

note: The sheer size of the prosecution spawned by the quadruple murder in Lake View Terrace proved to be unmanageable. The case was eventually pared down and split. Still, over the next five years there were several prosecutions and convictions of members of the Bryant Family Organization for crimes ranging from murder to drug dealing and money laundering. Stanley Bryant and two others were eventually sent to death row for the killings. His brother, Jeffrey Bryant, was returned to prison as well after being convicted of drug-related crimes. By 1997, the organization most responsible for bringing rock cocaine to the northeast Valley was completely dismantled and irrelevant, according to police and federal authorities.

HIGH TIME

BILLY THE BURGLAR

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

June 7, 1987

Billy Schroeder is 24 years old. But he looks, at his best, like 24 going on 40. Put him up next to his boyish mug shot of just a few years ago and the boy is long gone. The bleached blond hair has turned to brown and shows signs of thinning. The body, too, is thin, having been tapered by its addictions. Sometimes the eyes, set in a ruddy face, are glassy and have a thousand-yard stare in a six-by-six room.

Permanent blue ink wraps around both his arms. The lion, the hawk, the skull. He wears his philosophy – his former philosophy, mind you – forever beneath his sleeve: the man with a dope pipe, the inscription “Get High” on his biceps. All of it the work of jailhouse tattoo artists.

Looking at Billy Schroeder, it is easy to imagine what a nightmare it would have been for someone to have come home to find this stranger inside. Though on occasion that did occur, hundreds of times in the last year Schroeder was in and out of homes without being seen. He was a burglar, one of the most prolific that local police have known about in recent years.

For a time, it seemed as though nothing could stop him. He cruised through the streets of South Broward and North Dade, through the back doors and windows of up to five homes a day. Fueled by cocaine or the craving for it, he broke into at least 350homes in a year’s time and stole an estimated $2million worth of property.

Despite the big numbers he posted, Schroeder was no master burglar. He lived high and blew every dollar he got. He was just another crack addict, who in actuality was not as good as he was lucky. Locked up now, even he will tell you that. And he’ll tell you that his luck worked against him as much as it worked for him.

“I guess I was a good burglar, but it seemed like I was lucky more than anything,” he says. “I was sloppy. It seems if they really wanted me, they could have gotten me sooner. I wish now that they would have. My good luck was really bad luck, I guess.”

Burglary is a mid-level crime, meaning that on a seriousness scale it is far below murder, somewhere above petty theft. Also meaning it inspires similar priorities in most police departments and prosecutors’ offices.

Still, burglary is a crime that cuts across social strata, leaving its scars on the poor and the rich, the young and the old. And it is one of the most prevalent of crimes in our society. In Broward County there were 25,000 burglaries last year; 22,000 in Palm Beach County. Across Florida it happened more than 250,000 times. Only 16 percent of the cases were cleared by arrest.

The story of one of the most prolific burglars in Broward is not just a story of a man’s addiction to a drug and what that drug made him do. He is part of an epidemic. And the proper way to tell Billy Schroeder’s tale is to also tell the stories of those he stole from, and those who hunted him.

Billy Schroeder was born and raised in the blue-collar Lake Forest area west of Hollywood. He grew up in a home with a mother and sister, and sometimes he lived with his grandparents. There was no father in the house after he turned four. He learned about authority and manhood on the streets. And by the time he was 11 the streets had already led him into the sampling of drugs and burglary. It was during his 11th year that he was caught for the first time: he was inside a neighbor’s home, and placed on juvenile probation.

From there he moved deeper into a life of drug use and thievery. He was kicked out of Hallandale High School for dealing the drug THC in the bathrooms. He was arrested selling Quaaludes to an undercover cop.

Incarceration may have been the best thing for Schroeder, but he avoided prison and always won the second chance. That changed in 1981when, at 17, he was sent as an adult to DeSoto Correctional Institute for burglary. In prison, he finished high school, took carpentry classes, got his tattoos, temporarily ended his addiction to drugs and, most of all, waited for his release. That came in late 1984and he returned to his old neighborhood.

Schroeder says he stayed clean for more than a year, working first as a gas station attendant and then using his prison-learned skills as a carpenter. When he was tempted by the old life of drugs and thievery he would carefully unfold the prison release papers he kept in his wallet.

“Every time I was slipping I would look at my papers,” he says. “I didn’t want to go back. I looked at them and said I’d earned my freedom and paid my debt.”

But by the end of 1985, Billy Schroeder had misplaced his papers and he started slipping. And one night a friend came by his apartment and introduced him to cocaine in the form called crack. Within 24 hours of smoking his first rock, all that Schroeder had learned was gone. So was his TV and stereo and living room furniture, all traded for crack. A week later the job was gone, too. Urges controlled Billy Schroeder again. His first break-in was into the house next door.

Schroeder quickly became re-addicted to both drugs and burglary. The two were the all-consuming parts of his life. He could not have one without the other. He began cruising the neighborhoods of South Broward wearing a phony Florida Power & Light shirt and carrying a screwdriver.

On Easter Sunday 1986 Gladys Jones became one of Billy Schroeder’s statistics. The revelation came to her like a cold finger running down her spine when she opened the front door of the home where she lived alone near Hollywood. Immediately she saw the doors of the dining room buffet standing open and its contents spilled on the floor. She turned to the left and saw the empty shelf in the living room, the TV gone.

She knew right away what had happened. It came to her with the weakness in her knees and the catch in her breath. Gladys, who is in her 60s and asked that her real name not be used, turned and ran.

It was two hours before she returned. That was after the police searchers had come and gone, the K-9dog had come and gone, and her son-in-law had even searched the house. Gladys walked unsteadily into her home to learn what the invader had taken. She found that the floors were covered with things apparently considered by the burglar and then discarded. The jewelry boxes were dumped on the bed, Gladys’ underwear drawer had been rifled, and the Easter basket for her granddaughter was turned over on the kitchen floor.

About halfway through this sad inventory she realized that mostly it was her peace of mind that had been taken. She asked her daughter to stay with her. She couldn’t sleep alone in the house.

Broward CountySheriff ’s Investigator Bill Cloud has worked burglary cases for nine years. His experience has taught him two constants: That nowadays almost all burglars break into homes to get money for drugs, and that drug-fueled burglars do very careless work – to the point of hitting homes in their own neighborhoods before moving on to other areas.

When in early 1986Cloud began getting a number of similar Lake Forest burglary cases dropped on his desk, he figured he had one burglar out there hitting homes at a fast pace. So he took to the neighborhood streets and culled a list of suspects’ names from the steady cast of informants he maintains.

One of the names was Billy Schroeder’s. Cloud ran it through the crime computer and learned of Schroeder’s rap sheet. He then asked the Sheriff’s Office crime lab for a “zone run,” a comparison between Schroeder’s fingerprints and those found at burglaries in the patrol zone that included Lake Forest. It was a request that would take weeks because of the backlog of requests to the crime lab. While he was waiting, Cloud distributed fliers bearing Billy Schroeder’s 1983 mug shot to deputies and South Broward police departments. And he went out looking.

Billy Schroeder worked enviable hours, usually less than five hours a day. He worked when he had to, when the cocaine ran low and his body’s craving for it ran high. He would put on the FPL shirt and cap that he had had made at a flea market T-shirt concession, and clip a can of Mace to his belt. The getup made him a meter reader. He would drive a borrowed car through neighborhoods before and after lunch – 9 to 11 and 2 to 4 – the best times of finding empty homes. After spotting a target house he would just knock on the front door.

If somebody answered, Schroeder was ready with a variety of lines and would then move on. But if the knock went unanswered, he’d go around back – a meter reader doing his job – and break in after checking for alarm systems. With his screwdriver he was an expert at breaking locks and windowpanes, removing jalousie windows. He knew how to pop a sliding glass door in just the way that it would crumble into a pile of glass dust without noise enough to alert a neighbor.

Once inside, first to consider was the refrigerator, full of all the food he had neglected while binging on crack. After a snack, he’d grab a bag or a pillowcase, and then there were all those drawers and cabinets and hiding places to find. It was a quick operation: 10, maybe 15 minutes max. Cash and jewelry, guns if there were any, and on the way out he’d grab the big stuff, a TV or a VCR or both, the hot trade items in the crack houses of South Florida. “I didn’t care about being seen by neighbors or anybody,” he says. One time he broke in the front door of a home while a woman was watering flowers across the street. He just ran when she yelled. Once while driving through Miramar he saw a lighted Christmas tree through the front window of a house. He backed his car up, broke through the front window and loaded his car with gifts from beneath the tree, going back three times for more.

After every dayof burglary, Billy headed to the crack houses west of Hollywood to trade his goods. The drug peddlers who worked the perimeters of the houses called him the “gold man” because of the jewelry he always had for trade. On a good day, he’d have loot from four or five homes.

Schroeder kept nothing he stole, turned everything into crack and the cash he needed to pay for the hotel rooms where he binged on cocaine, crashed and hid. Detective Cloud estimates that if Schroeder stole $2 million in merchandise, his return was not much better than a dime on the dollar: a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cash and drugs.

“Almost every single day I was robbing another family,” Schroeder says. “It started with one burglary a day to support my habit for the day. I needed $200. Then it got to be $300 and I had to rob two houses. Then it got to be $500 a day and four houses and on and on from there.

“It got to be a game. I didn’t care about anything else. I would drive down a street and decide, Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, that’s the house I’m going to do.

“I was living for my drug. It was my life, my future. I spent every penny I had on it.

“And I was scared. I figured the cops were looking for me because of my prints so I was living in hotels, moving almost every day. I never came out except to rob another house or get drugs. I would stay in the room behind a chain, a deadbolt and a desk pushed up against the door.”

The zone run with Billy Schroeder’s fingerprints that Detective Cloud had asked for came back with several positive IDs. Cloud asked the State Attorney’s Office for a felony warrant, a request that would take several weeks to go through the legal morass. Still, Cloud was now sure who his man was. He just had to find him.

Meanwhile, detectives in other departments – Hollywood, Hallandale, Miramar and North Miami – were learning that Schroeder was an increasingly active break-in artist.

“It got so that I could just pick up a burglary report and be able to tell Billy had been there,” says Hallandale Detective Dermot Mangan. “When it was a daytime job with the place ransacked and food eaten, it was usually him.

“We were all looking for him,” recalls Cloud. “I once got word that he was going to a certain store to cash a check. I waited in there and when he saw a man in a jacket and tie he ran. He was so paranoid, anybody in a suit was a cop. That time he just happened to be right. We kept just missing him like that. At the motels, on the streets. Sometimes by minutes. It became a mission to get him.”

Gladys Jonesspent the time after the burglary arranging for new lights to be placed outside her home, having the bushes cut away from the windows, putting steel mesh screens over every window.

“I hate it,” she says. “The house looks awful and it makes me feel like I’m the prisoner when I’m the victim. I’m still afraid to be here by myself.”

One night long after the burglary, Gladys was dressing for an evening out when she reached into her jewelry box for a certain gold necklace. It was gone, one of the belongings she hadn’t noticed missing after the burglary. The discovery brought the whole thing, the intrusion, the loss, the anger, all back down on her. Most of all it rekindled the fear.

Gladys started counting the days left until her retirement from her office job in two years. That would be when she would put her house up for sale and move away from South Florida. But, still, at night, she would lie awake in bed and listen… She would return from outings, unlock the door, stand there and listen…

Often when home alone, she found herself asking, did I just hear a noise out there or is it my imagination? The legacy of fear that Billy Schroeder left behind will remain with her always, she says.

Billy Schroeder could have gotten away. On one job, in North Dade, he hit the jackpot – a pile of jewelry that he converted to bags of cash and crack.

“I ended up with $20,000 cash in my hands,” he recalls. “I said to my girlfriend, ‘Let’s get out of here. I have the money now, let’s go to a rehab center and get off this.’ ”

They decided on New Jersey, even got the airline tickets. But on the way to the airport, Billy and his girlfriend went to a friend’s house to say good-bye. And they celebrated the good-bye with one more rock. Within a few hours Billy checked into a Hilton suite with a bag full of rocks. Within days the jackpot money was gone.

Schroeder wouldn’t get another chance to get away. His habit was growing and costing him close to $1,000a day. He was breaking into more homes each day and the risks were getting greater while he was getting sloppier. He even stopped wearing his phony FPL uniform.

On Feb. 26, 1987, Davie Police got a call about a possible burglary in process. Officers went to the home and saw an open window, and a screen leaning against the outside wall. The screen was the giveaway. A few minutes later the cops entered the house and found a burglar hiding in a bathroom shower stall. He said his name was William Burns.

As the Davie officers were booking the burglar into the county jail, a sheriff ’s deputy booking his own prisoner looked over at Burns and recognized him as the man on the wanted fliers Detective Cloud had been circulating for almost a year.

“You’re not William Burns,” the deputy said, and the long crime spree of Billy Schroeder was over.

The copswho wanted to speak to Schroeder had to take turns. It took two days for the elusive burglar to come out of his cocaine intoxication and figure out he was in jail, but when he did, he considered his lot – the fingerprints, the evidence, his past record – and simply said, “Let’s go. I want it behind me.”

Schroeder sat handcuffed and shackled in the backseats of several detectives’ cars as they drove through neighborhoods of South Florida. It took him three weeks to go over the territory, pointing out the houses he remembered being in. The detectives matched Schroeder’s recollections against their own burglary reports. All told, Cloud says they cleared close to 350burglaries. And there are perhaps dozens of others Schroeder can’t remember.

Of the millions of dollars in property that Schroeder stole, nothing was recovered. “It’s gone forever,” Cloud says.

Schroeder was charged with 13 burglaries. (It would take years to prosecute him if he were charged in all his burglaries.) On May 21, he tearfully pleaded guilty to the charges in a plea agreement that could leave him facing as many as 20years in prison.

“I want to get this behind me,” he told the judge. “I have to look to the future.”

While waiting for that future, he has been kept in the east wing of the North Broward Detention Complex, home to all inmates undergoing drug counseling and detoxification. Schroeder takes part in the jail’s “New Life” programs, works in the laundry and volunteers to speak to visiting groups of teenagers about the dangers of drugs.

He seems resigned to a lengthy stint in prison. And he seems genuinely repentant. Still, he can only gain by this contrition and therefore his sincerity is open to question.

But he cries when he talks about the time more than a year ago that he smoked that first rock. And he cries when he talks about the families he stole from. He says maybe someday he will make restitution, a possibility that is, in reality, laughable.

“I just want to do something,” he says. “I think about all the families I robbed and I know I’ve got to do something for them.”

Like many a jail inmate, Schroeder says he has got Jesus with him now. He tries to keep his sleeve over the “Get High” tattoo and regrets the day he got it. He says he wants another chance. That’s the bottom line: another chance. But deep down, he knows it might be too late for Billy Schroeder.

“I’m hoping to someday get another shot at society,” he says. “I don’t want to be thrown completely away.”

Billy Schroeder turned his back on society but now hopes it won’t do the same to him. He seeks sympathy for the devil, so to speak. But it is hard to come by.

“I like Billy Schroeder,” says Detective Bill Cloud. “But I have no sympathy for him. I have sympathy for the people he stole from. They have to put up with the feelings of intrusion and their losses for the rest of their lives. They worked all their lives so they can have some of these possessions, and somebody breaks in and it’s all gone.”

Those sentiments are echoed like the clanging of a jail door: “He was destroying people with what he did,” Detective Dermot Mangan says. “He has got to pay something for that.”

“It’s sad,” says burglary victim Gladys Jones. “Sure the kid needs help. But the people he hurt also need something. When I think of what I’ve been through and that I’m only one of the hundreds of people he did this to, I still feel very angry and hurt.”

Lawyer Norman Elliott Kent, who was appointed to defend Schroeder after he confessed to his crimes, declines to use pat arguments like drugs made Schroeder do it, he’s a product of his environment, he deserves a break and so on. Much of that is valid, but somewhere along the line Billy Schroeder made a choice. There is responsibility somewhere.

“Billy was a drug addict and drug money burns quickly,” Kent says. “And for all that he managed to steal, there is nothing left but hurt victims and a troubled defendant. All Billy has to show for it is his empty pockets, his drug addiction and a jail term. If there is a lesson in all of this, that is it: to let people know what can happen. His message is that in the end everybody loses.”

It’s morning in the east wing and a small group of high school students are gathered in the multi-purpose room for a tour of the jail. With all the banging of the heavy doors, sharp clacking of electronic locks and echoes bouncing off the steel and concrete, the students have to lean forward to hear the speaker.

The speaker is an inmate here, a young man with a prematurely aged face. He is here to tell them that he is a loser who found out how to win, how to make it the right way too late. Don’t be like me, he wants to tell them.

“Hello, my name is Bill,” he begins. “And I’m a drug abuser.

“I started doing drugs when I was 11 years old. And pretty soon after that I started going through people’s windows. I hurt a lot of people. And here I am…”

LYING IN WAIT

Nurse killed trying to aid man on street.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

February 23, 1989

A private nurse who stopped her car in the hills above Studio City and apparently got out to help a man lying in the street was fatally shot Wednesday when the man stood up and pulled a gun, Los Angeles police said.

No arrest was made in the ambush killing of 40-yearold Lucille Marie Warren at Montcalm Avenue and Woodrow Wilson Drive in an exclusive neighborhood of hillside homes.

Warren was shot at 6:45a.m. while on her way home to Inglewood, police said. She had left a house on Montcalm where she worked as a night nurse.

Investigators said there were indications that she was the specific target of the fatal attack and may even have known her killer. Detectives are investigating whether Warren, who was divorced and lived with her two teenage children, was involved in any personal disputes that could have led to the shooting.

“This doesn’t appear to be a random encounter,” said homicide Detective Mike Coffey.

While the motive for the shooting was unknown, police said, the killer may have been in the street because he knew that Warren was approaching and would stop if she thought someone needed help.

“She was a nurse,” said Lt. Ron LaRue. “If you knew she was a nurse, you could find a way to make her stop. The suspect was lying in the street and she stopped.”

Warren had been working at the home in the Mont-calm cul-de-sac at least two months, police said. Officials of a Van Nuys-based registry of nurses, through which police said Warren was referred to jobs, declined to comment.

Detectives would not name the person for whom Warren worked. Los Angeles real estate records list the large, gated property where police said she cared for a patient as belonging to Miklos Rozsa, 81, a composer and three-time Academy Award winner for the musical scoring of films.

After finishing her night’s work, Warren was leaving the cul-de-sac when she stopped at Woodrow Wilson Drive after seeing the man in the middle of the street, police said.

When Warren got out and walked toward the front of the car, the man stood up and pulled a handgun out of his clothing. Police said they do not know whether the pair spoke before the man fired several times at Warren.

Warren was hit by gunfire at least twice, including once in the head, and fell mortally wounded in the street, police said. One other shot hit the windshield of her car, which eventually rolled into an embankment on the other side of the street. Police said the gunman ran to a car parked nearby and sped away. The victim was not robbed.

A resident called police on a car phone after seeing the woman in the street. Coffey said several residents saw parts of the crime and provided police with descriptions of the gunman, his car and the sequence of events.

Warren was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where she died at 10:48a.m., police said.

As police cordoned off the area, residents gathered nearby or watched from their windows. Police said the shooting, which occurred near a corner house owned by artist David Hockney, was unusual in the quiet, affluent neighborhood.

“Violence is getting common all over the city,” said a man who declined to give his name. “People pay a lot of money to get away from it but it doesn’t always work.”

Times staff writer Amy Pyle contributed to this story.

note: Lucille Warren’s former boyfriend was arrested, tried and convicted of murdering her. A former probation officer, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison. Of note in the sentencing was that the killer avoided the death penalty because the judge in the case ruled that he had not been lying in wait, a special circumstance that would have made him eligible for the death penalty. The judge ruled that the lying in wait statute was drawn in regard to killers who hide and then surprise their victims. Since the killer was lying on the street in plain sight when Warren approached he was not hiding and was therefore not lying in wait.

TRUNK MUSIC

WHO SHOT VIC WEISS?

A trail gone cold.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

June 11, 1989

The meeting with Jack Kent Cooke and Jerry Buss had gone well. Vic Weiss was close to a deal that would bring University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian to Los Angeles to lead the Lakers, the team Cooke was selling to Buss.

Briefcase in hand, the stocky but energetic Weiss, a 51-year-old sports promoter, sometime agent and businessman, left the meeting room at a Beverly Hills hotel, hopped into his Rolls-Royce and headed over the hill to his house in Encino.

But Weiss never made it home. Three days later, on June 17, 1979, his red-and-white Rolls-Royce was spotted in the garage of a North Hollywood hotel.

People opened the trunk and there was the body of Victor J. Weiss, hands tied behind his back. He had been killed with two gunshots to the head.

Ten years later, Weiss’ killing remains unsolved and one of the San Fernando Valley ’s most puzzling mysteries. Los Angeles police believe Weiss was the victim of an organized crime hit, the most difficult of murder cases to crack.

It is a case that plunged detectives into the milieu of mobsters and informants, where they became suspicious of everyone, sometimes even fellow cops. And once they even found themselves being followed by someone they were investigating.

Still, they were able to learn much about the secret life of Vic Weiss. They learned that while he publicly hobnobbed with legitimate names in sports and business, he privately rubbed shoulders with criminals, ran up huge debts on sports betting and skimmed off the top of laundered money he delivered to mobsters in Las Vegas.

It is believed by police that those latter indiscretions cost Weiss his life. But who ordered the killing and who carried it out remain unknown.

Detective Leroy Orozco, the only original investigator still assigned to the killing, says that after 21 years as a homicide detective, the Weiss case tantalizes him most. He has followed leads across the country but never made an arrest. He has carefully investigated and traced potential suspects, only to learn that, apparently by grim coincidence, they too had been killed.

Orozco has two file drawers filled with reports, notes and evidence on the case to show for a decade of investigation. But even after 10 years, he doesn’t need to open the boxes to recall the details. He can even recall what he was doing – driving his family to an ice cream parlor after a Father’s Day dinner – when his electronic pager beeped and he was called to the parking garage in North Hollywood.

“This case has been my biggest challenge,” Orozco said. “It won’t lie down and die.

“You get a case like this maybe once in a lifetime. How often do you read about a Mafia hit, especially in L.A., with the intrigue of Vegas and the cops being followed by the bad guys? But I knew from the beginning it would be tough. As soon as I walked into that garage and saw that Rolls, I knew I was in deep.”

In life, Vic Weiss presented the image of success. Raised in the Pasadena area – where he went to high school with longtime friend Tarkanian – Weiss first became successful in real estate and insurance ventures and was later known as a part owner in Ford and Rolls-Royce dealerships in Van Nuys. His red-and-white Rolls had a gold interior. He wore a diamond ring and a Rolex watch. He was known as a guy who always picked up the tab after dinner or drinks with friends and business associates.

Weiss became prominent in sports circles beginning in 1973 when he bought the contract of welterweight boxing contender Armando Muniz. Though not a professional sports agent, Weiss handled contract negotiations for his friend Tarkanian as a hobby. It was that hobby that brought him to the negotiating table with Cooke and Buss at the Beverly Comstock Hotel on June 14, 1979.

According to police accounts of the meeting, details of the agreement to bring Tarkanian to the Lakers were written by Weiss and Cooke on a piece of paper that Weiss dropped into his briefcase when he left.

“He was probably confident as he left,” Orozco says. “Negotiations went well.”

Weiss was to go to dinner with his wife, Rose, but first, police say, he planned to call Tarkanian, who was waiting at a Long Beach hotel for word on the negotiations.

Tarkanian never got the call, and the talks would never go further. The Lakers eventually hired another coach.

Weiss was reported missing by his wife, but there was no sign of him until four days later when a security guard spotted his Rolls in the garage of the Sheraton Universal hotel. After Weiss’ decomposed body was discovered and removed, detectives found no clues to what had happened.

Weiss’ wallet and briefcase were gone, but his diamond ring and watch had not been taken. That led police to rule out robbery as a motive. Cooke, Buss and Tarkanian were quickly eliminated as having any involvement. That left police with the mystery.

But the Rolls-Royce, though clean of evidence, generated a lead in the case. Several people who had learned of the slaying in the media called police and said they remembered seeing the distinctive car on the day Weiss disappeared, Orozco says. Through these witnesses, police were able to chart Weiss’ path from Beverly Hills along Beverly Glen Boulevard to Ventura Boulevard and west into Encino.

A witness told police that he had seen the Rolls pull to the curb on a street in Encino and a white Cadillac with three men in it stop behind. The witness said Weiss got out of his car and two men – one described as a 6-foot, 6-inch blond – got out of the Cadillac.

The witness said the blond man angrily pointed a finger in Weiss’ face as he spoke to him. After a few moments Weiss got back in his car, the blond man got in the backseat behind him and the third man got in the front. Then the Rolls and the Cadillac drove away.

As detectives delved into Weiss’ background, they became confident that the witness had seen Weiss’ killers. They learned that Weiss maintained a lifestyle that belied his true financial worth. They learned that many of his associates were involved in organized crime.

Orozco says that Weiss had no financial interest in the car dealerships he reportedly owned; he was merely a paid consultant or promotions man. An associate owned the house where he lived in Encino, and his Rolls-Royce was leased.

“When he died, he had some insurance; that was about it,” Orozco says.

Police also began receiving reports from anonymous callers, organized crime informants and Las Vegas law enforcement officers that Weiss was involved with mobsters in Nevada and Florida. The informants said Weiss had run up gambling debts.

The information convinced police that Weiss had been kidnapped by the three men in the Cadillac and executed in a mob-style hit.

Orozco says he and his partner, John Helvin, traced one of Weiss’ close friends to central Florida, where he had moved immediately after the killing and worked as a car salesman. In exchange for his anonymity, the salesman told the detectives that he knew that Weiss had run up more than $60,000in gambling debts in Las Vegas. To make good on the debts, he had begun flying to Las Vegas and delivering packages of cash laundered in Los Angeles, Orozco says.

Each week, the money came in a brown paper package and was placed in the trunk of Weiss’ Rolls-Royce, the salesman said. Weiss would then fly to Las Vegas and back on the same day. But, the salesman said, Weiss was skimming – stealing money from the deliveries – and had been caught and warned to stop.

Orozco says detectives theorized that Weiss had not heeded the warning and was killed. They began tracking the phone records of Weiss and some of his associates. They documented connections to organized crime figures and went to Las Vegas and New Port Richey, Fla., to serve search warrants on the homes of people believed associated with the killing.

In Las Vegas, the detectives got a search warrant from local authorities, but the house they planned to search was empty on the morning they arrived. Orozco speculated that the suspect had been tipped off and moved

out.

In New Port Richey, things also went poorly.

Orozco and Helvin arrived late one afternoon and drove by the house, which they planned to search the next day after obtaining a warrant from local authorities. The house belonged to a man suspected of being an “enforcer” with an organized crime family, Orozco says. The detectives noticed a boat in the canal out back and a black Camaro parked in front, indicating that the occupants had not been tipped to the search and were still living there.

The next morning, Orozco says, he glanced out the window of his motel room and saw the same black Camaro in a parking lot across a canal next to the motel. A man was sitting behind the wheel of the car, watching the motel.

“We flipped a coin to see who’d go out the door first,” Orozco says.

Helvin lost. They drew their weapons and with Orozco covering, Helvin quickly went down to the lobby. Orozco followed, but by the time they got into a rental car, the black Camaro was gone.

Orozco says he and his partner were turned down for the search warrant because they did not have enough evidence that the suspected enforcer had been involved in the Weiss killing.

Orozco says he was paranoid when he returned to Los Angeles.

Not knowing how information about their movements had gotten to the targets of the investigation, he and Helvin stopped talking about the case to some officers inside and outside the department. Orozco says that when a retired Los Angeles detective inquired about the case, he gave the man false information. A few days later, Orozco says, an organized crime informant called with the same wrong information.

“We didn’t talk to anyone after that,” Orozco says. “We just came in, did our work and went home. If I went out of town on the case, I only told my lieutenant.”

Orozco and Helvin continued to work full-time on the Weiss killing for two years. At least three men they investigated would become the victims of apparently unrelated slayings.

One of them was Jeffrey Rockman, whose name was found on a piece of paper in Weiss’ office. Police learned that Rockman, 33, was a jewel thief who worked for a Canadian organized crime syndicate and was believed to have sold stolen property to Weiss.

But police did not find Rockman in time to question him about the killing. On April 29, 1980, he was shot to death in his Marina del Rey town house. Orozco says detectives learned that Rockman’s real name was Anthony Starr and that he had been given the new identity after entering the federal witness protection program when he testified in a Detroit bank robbery case. Police believe his killing was unrelated to the Weiss case.

Ronald Launius was another thief, and a drug dealer, who police learned had associated with Weiss. Though he was investigated, there was never any evidence to connect him to the slaying.

On July 1, 1981, Launius, 37, was one of four people beaten to death in a Laurel Canyon drug den. A former Hollywood nightclub owner and his bodyguard were charged last year with killing the victims in revenge for a robbery.

Orozco says Launius earlier had been associated with Horace McKenna, a former California Highway Patrol officer who operated a string of bars featuring nude dancers. McKenna was believed by police to have ties to prostitution, counterfeiting, narcotics and gambling in the Los Angeles area.

Investigators in the Weiss case attempted to learn whether McKenna was connected to the Weiss killing but never were able to establish that the two men knew each other. McKenna was killed March 9 at the gate of his Orange County estate when a gunman fired a machine gun into the back of the limousine in which he was riding. The slaying remains unsolved.

Through the years, names contained in Weiss case files have often come up in unrelated cases, Orozco says. But detectives have never put a name on the tall blond man. Although a mob informant once told police that the men who killed Weiss were themselves killed to maintain organized crime’s veil of silence, Orozco believes the killers may still be alive and free.

Helvin has retired and Orozco handles other cases. But he still gets calls from informants offering street information on the Weiss killing. And sometimes he hears from law officers who have heard of the case in the course of other investigations.

“In other unsolved cases you usually hit the wall, where you’ve exhausted your investigation and you put it away,” he says. “This one isn’t like that. You can put it away but it keeps coming back.”

Orozco occasionally drives the same route Vic Weiss took on his last ride. He is waiting for the piece of data that will lead to an arrest, or the name of the blond man.

“Somebody will have to get jammed up, arrested on something else, and want to give us some help,” he says wistfully.

note: The Vic Weiss murder case remains unsolved.

OPEN-UNSOLVED

Crimes: The Utah worker’s slaying, plus two other area killings, including of a 15-year-old boy, remain unsolved.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

May 25, 1992

Something made John Willers go back out there. But the reason is a mystery folded silently within a mystery.

On the night Los Angeles was torn open by the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case, Willers, 36, twice stepped out of the safety of his Mission Hills motel room and into the dark. The first time was with other guests curious about a car collision that was followed by shots being fired. The second time he was alone.

His body was found later in the middle of Sepulveda Boulevard. He had been shot to death in one of the most curious slayings to take place during the riots.

Now the detectives assigned to the April 29 killing, Willers’ family and the Salt Lake City construction crew he had come to Los Angeles with are left to wonder who killed the quiet but friendly tile setter and why. Most of all, however, they puzzle over what drew him out into the dangerous night while most everyone else stayed safely inside.

Los Angeles police have stopped short of classifying the killing as riot-related. There is too much that remains unknown, detectives said. But for those who knew Willers, the distinction of whether or not he was a riot victim seems trivial.

“It doesn’t matter,” said the foreman of the construction team that Willers worked on. “Somebody shot him for no reason at all. Los Angeles is a pretty place but you can keep it. I’ll be damn happy when this job is over and I’ll be out of here. And I will not be back. There is just no way to cope with this. It’s like being the victim of a terrorist act.”

The night of April 29, Willers, who was divorced and lived by himself in Salt Lake City, was staying at the Mission Hills Inn on Sepulveda near Chatsworth Street. He had moved through several states in the West in recent years, “going wherever the work was,” his foreman said.

He and the other seven members of the Kerbs Construction Co. crew had come to Los Angeles three days before the riots to do the tiling work at a supermarket under construction in Mission Hills.

Willers’ foreman and another tile setter he worked with agreed to discuss the incident if their identities were not revealed. They believe that they could be targeted as witnesses even though neither actually saw the shooting or the gunman.

They said members of the Kerbs crew were in their motel rooms watching reports of rioting on television when they heard cars racing outside on Sepulveda. They then heard the crash of cars colliding, followed by shots.

Police detective Woodrow Parks said the crash occurred about 10:45 p.m. when three people in one car chased two robbery suspects in another car. The fleeing vehicle circled the motel parking lot, and then collided head-on with the other car on Sepulveda. The suspected robbers fired shots at the three people trapped in the car that was chasing them, but missed. The gunmen then fled on foot.

The incident brought many guests of the motel outside, some just to look, some to help the injured or to direct traffic around the scene. Willers was in the crowd, according to fellow workers. He stayed outside until the injured motorists were taken by ambulances to a hospital and the police – operating under alert status because of the riots – quickly moved on. The two wrecked cars were pushed into the median of the road and left.

Willers and the other guests returned to their rooms, police said. But about half an hour later, Willers decided to go back out. He dropped by the room of two of his coworkers on the way out.

“We had the TV on and knew what was happening with the riots,” said one of the men Willers visited. “We told him he better stay inside. He didn’t say anything. He just left. He wanted to go out.”

A few minutes later, co-workers in several rooms heard shots outside.

“It was him – they had killed him,” Willers’ foreman said. “People went out on the balcony and saw him lying out there in the street. He had made a bad judgment, going back out there. I don’t know what he was thinking. People were shooting out there and yet he wanted to go back out.”

Meanwhile, less than five miles away, police in riot gear were dispersing a crowd that had gathered in front of the Foothill Division station in Pacoima. Rocks and bottles had been thrown at police. Shots were fired into the air and nearby trash bins set on fire.

Foothill Detectives Parks and Robert Bogison left that chaotic situation and rolled to the scene of the Willers shooting. They quickly conducted the on-site investigation while a squad of eight uniformed officers ringed them and kept guard.

“We were out there trying to do the investigation, wearing bullet-proof vests, not knowing if somebody else was going to start shooting,” Parks said. “We were very distracted. We had to keep one lane of traffic open and, every time a car came by, it would get a little tense.”

The detectives managed to locate two people who saw two teen-agers run from the area of the shooting, Parks said. One witness had asked the teen-agers what happened and they cursed at him and kept running. The witnesses said they did not see the teen-agers carrying guns.

He said that while the teen-agers are considered suspects, there is not enough known about the shooting to classify it as riot-related. Willers was white and the two teen-agers black, but there were no other disturbances reported in the immediate area that night.

Parks is seeking additional witnesses or anyone with information about the shooting and has put together a composite drawing of one of the teen-agers.

“The killing had nothing to do with looting, rioting, the things other deaths in the city were related to,” Parks said. “There is really no indication what it was about.”

Other motives common in street killings were easily dismissed. Willers had not been robbed. And Parks believes that the time lapse between the slaying and the car collision and shooting indicates that the incidents were unrelated.

What the detectives are left with is a case in which the victim apparently didn’t know his killer and had not even seen the shooter until moments before the slaying. The detectives said such cases are the most difficult to solve.

“We have very little to go on,” Parks said last week. “In a classic murder case, you spend a lot of time with the victim’s background and many times you get a direction from that. But in this case, the victim doesn’t know anybody in this city. He is just a random victim of L.A. violence. It doesn’t matter who he was or what he did, it’s not going to lead us to his killer.”

Parks said the best hope for making an arrest may be a drawing of one of the teen-agers seen by the witnesses. “It’s all we’ve got,” he said.

Police have more to go on in investigating the two other deaths in the San Fernando Valley that at least were initially counted among the 60killings attributed to the riots.

Edward Traven, 15, was fatally shot in San Fernando about two hours before Willers. He was killed by a gunman who fired into the Cadillac he was sitting in with his brother and a friend at San Fernando Road and San Fernando Mission Boulevard.

The gunman had shouted “Where are you from?” – a gang challenge – and police said Edward had associated with gang members. Police say his slaying was an example of a gang shooting unrelated to the riots, though members of his family have insisted that the boy’s death would not have occurred if not for the atmosphere of violence spurred by the riots.

San Fernando detectives said they are attempting to identify a suspect from among the area’s numerous gang members.

The killing of Imad Sharaf, 31, is also unsolved. His body was found the morning of May 3when firefighters answered a report of a brush fire near the on-ramp to the San Diego Freeway at San Fernando Mission Boulevard. Police said Sharaf, who was a photo lab technician, had been doused with a flammable substance and set afire.

Although he, too, was listed as a riot victim, Los Angeles police believe otherwise. Investigators in that case are concentrating on Sharaf’s business and personal dealings while looking for a motive and suspect.

“It was some sort of dispute, we believe,” Detective Olivia Pixler said. “It seems that whoever killed him knew him.”

She said the fire may have been an attempt to disguise the killing as riot-related.

The Willers killing remains the Valley case from the riot period in which police have the most tenuous grasp on what happened. And part of the mystery that sticks in the minds of those who knew Willers or are investigating his death is the reason he decided to go back outside his motel room.

“We have no idea why he went back out,” Parks said. “He didn’t say why to anybody. The only thing we can think of is maybe he went back out to look at the wreckage” of the cars involved in the earlier chase.

Willers’ sister, Dianne Housden, suggests that her brother did not realize the danger he was in. Raised in a suburb of Portland, Ore., he lived most of his life in the Pacific Northwest and Utah, Nevada and Arizona.

“What was happening in Los Angeles was totally foreign to him,” said Housden, who lives in Everett, Wash. “I think he couldn’t believe what was happening and wanted maybe to go out. I think he must have thought, ‘Gee, this is weird’ and wanted to see. He was a free spirit. I don’t think he could have known the danger he was putting himself in.”

Willers’ foreman agreed.

“John was a friendly, open person,” the foreman said. “He comes from a place where you don’t have this kind of stuff, the riot or the drive-by shooting business. He would never have thought he might be in danger. But he was.”

Housden said she knew that her brother was in Los Angeles because a day before the riots began, he had called and said he was trying to locate his two teen-age children whom he had lost touch with but believed were living with his former wife in Southern California.

“He was going to try to find his kids but never got the chance,” Housden said.

In Willers’ suitcase, police found cards and money orders made out to the boy and girl. Housden said this week that she finally located the children, who live in Hemet, and will forward their father’s last gifts.

Like Willers’ fellow employees, Housden said her family has had a difficult time dealing with the death.

“We are not from an area that is violent,” she said. “We were not brought up in an area like that. It’s not right to have this happen to anybody, but there was no reason for this to happen to him.

“John’s crime was that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

note: The murder of John Willers remains open and unsolved.