Crime Beat (15 page)

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

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

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

Bitter Divorce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buried Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUSPECT REMAINS AT LARGE ALMOST 2 YEARS AFTER HIS FATHER’S SLAYING

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

November 6, 1989

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WIFE KILLER

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

LOS ANGELES TIMES

January 15, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRIAL ORDERED FOR MAN ACCUSED OF KILLING WIFE, BURYING HER IN YARD

January 16, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SELF-PROMOTING ‘CONTRACT KILLER’ ENTERS PLEA TO KILLING WIFE IN ’85

August 17, 1991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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