Crime Beat (24 page)

OPEN-UNSOLVED

VALLEY POLICE PUZZLE OVER MAN’S DEATH DURING RIOTS

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

S
OMETHING 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 co-workers 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 60 killings 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 3 when 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.

AFTERWORD:

THE NOVELIST AS REPORTER

by Michael Carlson

M
ICHAEL CONNELLY
is a reporter. A good one. Not in the tabloid sense of someone who, like a pulp fiction writer, does whatever it takes to twist the elements of a story into a recognizable template that doesn’t stretch his audience’s emotions beyond the certainties in which tabloids deal. Nor is he an “investigative journalist,” the modern term applied to grad school rewriters of press releases when they score a celebrity interview. He’s a reporter in the best sense of the word, able to gather information and see the story buried beneath all those facts, able to sort through the impressions of all sorts of people and see how they affect those facts and, most of all, able to put it all down on paper so his reader can do the same thing.

When I began my career, I had to study the UPI style book. All the things it said about structuring a story—the famous who-what-when-where-why and how—are laid out in Connelly’s stories, clearly and cleanly. He organizes his stories like a reporter should, to make sure the reader sees what he has seen. This is much more than doing a Jack Webb “just the facts, ma’am.” That ability to set a story out clearly serves Connelly’s greatest strengths as a reporter: his perception and his empathy.

By perception I mean the ability to see and to hear, or, better, to listen to what is being said and to see what it means. This involves the greatest skill a good reporter can have, the ability to understand people. You can’t
see
a good story unless you can see where it is coming from. Too often in our world, journalists move from graduate schools into hermetically sealed newsrooms, protected by security passes and cut off from the real lives of the people about whom they are supposed to report. They’ve grown up in a world where the relationships are clearly delineated, the conflicts take place along a very narrow perimeter and the people they write about exist only as fodder for copy.

This is not the world cops inhabit. Not the ones who are out on the streets.

Cops know that tragedy arises from the contrast of expectations with reality. They know the real lives of the victims they find, and the real effects of the deeds perpetrated by the criminals they pursue. They can’t escape that knowledge, can’t put a story to bed and then go home and sleep soundly.

The most important story in this collection, as it relates to Connelly’s fiction, is “The Call,” in which he spent a week on call with the Fort Lauderdale homicide squad. Connelly says that what he saw informed everything he has written in fiction, and if you read the story carefully you will see how true that is. It is not just the details of crime and investigation, but the way that Connelly the reporter absorbs the mind-set of the cops, internalizes it. Their fatigue becomes palpable. When Connelly sets out the facts about how hard it will be to solve the case, you feel the emotions of the investigators, the frustrations that are part of their everyday life. This, to me, is the starting point for everything we know about Harry Bosch, and the sense of tiredness which pervades the Bosch novels so effectively.

Empathy is not identification; there is a crucial difference. Connelly tells us that, like Bosch, he collected the shell casings from police funerals and kept them in a jar. He rode with cops and examined crime scenes and corpses with them, but he is not a cop. He is a reporter, and he manages to keep a reporter’s distance from his subjects, which allows him to see the bigger picture of the world that they inhabit.

There is a wonderfully understated moment in a story about the LAPD’s Foreign Prosecution Unit, which pursues Mexicans who have returned to their own country as suspects in crimes committed in the United States. Connelly details the differences in Mexican law that cause civil libertarians to assert that suspects traced by the unit to Mexico may not receive the same rights they would have if they had been captured in the United States. He writes, “Ross and his fellow officers contend that a murder suspect who flees to avoid prosecution in Los Angeles is accepting the justice system of the country he runs to. ‘You have to accept the risks that you have incurred by fleeing,’ Moya said.”

I’ll bet that raised more than one wry smile, but it’s the way it is reported with a straight face that makes it work: you understand exactly the cops’ view of the world, especially in the face of criticism you realize they see as naïve, if well-meaning.

Connelly’s empathy extends beyond the police, however, to the victims of crime, and sometimes to the criminals themselves. When you read the Wilder stories, about a South Florida serial killer who went nationwide, the story that haunts you is about the families whose daughters remain missing after a year. “We haven’t gotten her past that gas station,” repeats the mother of one girl, referring to the last place her daughter was seen. It’s the repetition that gives the words their power to move the reader.

This combination of empathy and perception creates an authorial position that is both detached and involved at the same time. Usually, the result of this formula is cynicism, and it has long been the bane of journalists and cops alike. Connelly’s creation of Bosch, who avoids becoming a hard-boiled cynic by internalizing the pain he sees, is thus a remarkable achievement, and even more so because of the way Connelly has been able to sustain that position even when writing about Bosch in the first person, as he did to great effect when he switched to the classic first-person narration for the books in which Harry operates like a classic L.A. private detective.

O
NLY ONCE
, in
The Poet,
does Connelly use a journalist as his protagonist. By and large, the press does not play a major part in the Bosch series. In general reporters are treated the way Connelly himself says he was when he first arrived on the crime beat in L.A.: tolerated as an inconvenience you can’t get rid of, like ants at a picnic. Harry has a police reporter he more or less trusts, but he also gets set up by the television news, and shows much less anger about it than I did on his behalf when I read
City of Bones.

The Poet
was the first of Connelly’s novels that he wrote end-to-end after leaving the journalist’s trade, his first non-Bosch stand-alone and, perhaps not by coincidence, his first bestseller. He has said that his major motivation was the fact that when he took away his files on unsolved murders, he realized how often killers got away with it, and he wanted to write a book in which the guy would get away and there would never be a sequel. He hadn’t anticipated that audience reaction would be so strong.

If you’re reading this you probably realize that eventually Connelly came around to the idea of doing a sequel. He attributed it to “recovering from my cynicism,” in large part after the birth of his daughter. He has also moved from Los Angeles back to Florida, and perhaps that has something to do with the change as well.

Compare the stories written for the
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
with those done later for the
Los Angeles Times
and you can sense some serious changes within Connelly. He has said that the newsroom at the
Times
was older, the veteran journalists more cynical and with a much greater sense of their own importance. You can see why. Los Angeles is a city redolent in crime, and being the backdrop for so many movies, television shows and novels gives every crime within the city more resonance. Americans have headed west for centuries, and wound up in la-la land. Latinos head to El Norte to fulfill their dreams of making a living. Asians came to build the railroads or to flee wars. The choice of the name
Bosch
made the point metaphorically;
The Garden of Earthly Delights
ought to hang in the lobby of the
Los Angeles Times
building.

Connelly’s attitude is that of an outsider rather than a native Angelino. He says he arrived for his job interview at the
Times
immediately after a major robbery, which wound up serving as the basis for
The Black Echo,
and said to himself, “Jeez, this is the place to be.” Being an outsider allows him the little bit of distance he needs to observe all sides of the equation. It gives him the leeway to place the nature of the city, its history and culture, as backdrop to the equation.

In Los Angeles, his view of the police and of the world of crime itself both broaden. He gains a deeper perspective of the cop’s world, both its good and bad sides. His empathy begins to be extended to the criminals, some of whom become victims themselves in that strange world of the LAPD, a sort of paramilitary bureaucracy headed by a succession of police chiefs who make Donald Rumsfeld look like Jimmy Carter.

Connelly reports both sides of the story, giving a downbeat counterpoint to the police point of view. A burglar who killed a cop in the struggle for a gun is shot and killed by the police, shot three times in the head. Twice he survives, and twice reaches miraculously for conveniently placed guns. The subtext, that he had already killed a cop, is brought to the surface, subtly but unmistakably. A car full of armed robbers shoot it out with the shotgun-wielding cops from the Special Investigations Section, who watched them rob a fast-food outlet and then surrounded them. Connelly reports the incident straightforwardly but saves for the end the revelation that the robbers were armed with unloaded pellet guns, and were thus unlikely to have chosen to shoot it out.

Harry Bosch lives within these ambiguities. His world cannot be defined, nor understood, without a feeling for the pressure under which the police operate, and the frustration endemic in the job. Understanding that helps explain the cop’s instinct to close ranks and protect one’s own. But cops are also part of a fiercely self-devouring bureaucracy. Think back to Connelly’s original description of working at the
Los Angeles Times
. He has said that the newsroom was more like a family, with a strict sense of hierarchy, than his Florida paper, where the staff were of a similar age and socialized outside the office. This is the big leagues. So, too, with the LAPD—arguably America’s most visible police department.

Some of the most satisfying scenes in the Bosch canon involve his clashes with authority, from Harvey “98” Pounds to the Bureau of Homeland Security. Bosch has no time for careerists and turf fighters; he’s too busy trying to keep his integrity as he watches the dividing line between those who keep the rules and those who break them, between order and chaos, disappear. This is what Bosch goes home to. This is why he sits in dark rooms and tries to smooth it over with jazz.

T
HE CRIME WRITERS
I most admire are the ones who do something different with the form. Hammett’s accounting of people’s lies, evasions and self-serving testimonies, with no stylistic value judgment coming between the character and the reader. Chandler’s symphonies of simile. Marlowe’s ability to crack wise in ways that don’t occur to real people until the next day. Donald Westlake crafting Richard Stark’s bare, clipped prose, which matches Parker’s bare, clipped view of the world. George Higgins’ ability to narrate through dialogue, where his characters’ storytelling ability tells you more about them than any description could. James Ellroy’s riffing and agonizing alliterative arsenal.

On the surface, Connelly breaks no new ground. He writes well and cleanly, but look carefully and you’ll see how it goes beyond clean. His prose style is, in fact, an outgrowth of his reporting, hard-boiled without being cynical.

In the 1930s many people compared Hammett to Hemingway, often suggesting Hammett was there first with hard-boiled prose. This was unfair to Hemingway, because
In Our Time
is crafted with a bare purity that has rarely been matched. Hemingway attributed that purity to learning “cable-ese,” the pared-down prose necessary to save on the cost of wiring his reporting back to the paper at home. But neither writer has the raw, hard-boiled quality of Paul Cain’s
Fast One
or Raoul Whitfield’s
Green Ice.
Look elsewhere in Hemingway or at some of Hammett and you’ll find prose crafted in an almost romantic manner, because they refuse to submit completely to cynicism; they’ve seen too much of reality for that.

Connelly decided to become a crime writer after seeing Robert Altman’s cynical version of
The Long Goodbye
and turning to Chandler’s novels, which he devoured one by one. At the University of Florida, he studied creative writing with the novelist Harry Crews. Although he claims Crews’ lifestyle and his success as a writer were more of an influence than his style, I see elements of Crews’ darkness, somewhere between Southern gothic and theater of the absurd, in Connelly’s fiction. I also see, in Harry Bosch, a very Crewsian figure, out of place in his world, and stretched to breaking point trying to make himself fit.

Bosch is the catalyst that allows Connelly to perform the trick of turning reality into fiction. The art of writing good hard-boiled prose requires a certain detachment, the ability to not let the runny emotional yolk of a story break free.

But it doesn’t have to be boiled within the shell. The closest comparison I can make in crime fiction is with Ross MacDonald, whose Lew Archer is an observer of social change, almost a reporter, and whose prose brings the reader a clear perspective on what Archer sees, freed of cynicism and ornamentation.

This is exactly the sense in which I think of Michael Connelly as a hard-boiled writer, and one of the most successful. He has been able to achieve that detachment without losing the emotional center, without sacrificing empathy. He is able to sustain a paradoxical sense of distance and involvement in his fiction—like a reporter, sharing the experience of cops without becoming one himself, balancing the grief of victims, the nature of victimizers, the frustrations of cops. He learned to do it in the pieces collected here.