Date With the Devil (13 page)

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Authors: Don Lasseter

BOOK: Date With the Devil
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C
HAPTER
15
C
ONFRONTING
E
VIL
Fuming, pouting, angry, worried, and fidgeting while sitting in the Hollywood Station holding tank, David Mahler couldn't believe he had been arrested. How dare they? He was a lawyer and knew his rights. Sure, they had found him hidden inside a closet at his own home, but this was certainly no crime.
While he still had possession of his cell phone, David had called Stacy up in Visalia. She promised to come right away to be with him during this ordeal.
Vicki Bynum later commented about David Mahler's summoning of Stacy Tipton. “She was afraid of him. When we let him make some phone calls, he reached her, and he was screaming at her, insisting that she come to Hollywood right now. She drove down from Visalia in panic. He is extremely demanding of everybody. Anyone he called, he expected them to help, probably because he had something on them. Everything is an obligatory contract with him.”
After enduring several hours of idle stagnation in a cell, waiting for the inevitable interrogation by detectives, Mahler impatiently wondered what was taking so long.
To make matters worse, a series of sharp spasms made his back feel as if he had suffered a terrible beating. He yelled for someone to help him, complaining of debilitating pain. An officer responded and escorted him to the interview room, which Donnie Van Develde had left just moments earlier. Within a few moments, an emergency medical technician (EMT) checked him out, gave him some aspirin, and left. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) captain, with the EMT, asked Mahler if he felt better and then asked him to sign a form indicating no further need of medical attention. Mahler said he felt okay and signed it.
Detectives Bynum and Small needed a few minutes to reorganize themselves and regain a sense of order after the cat-herding interview with Donnie Van Develde. He had tried his best to be cooperative and respectful, but his scattergun delivery had required infinite patience to understand and to summarize in a written report.
Now they faced a distinctly contrasting challenge with David Mahler. Both detectives realized the need for an entirely different approach to questioning him. “With Mahler, because he was an attorney, we came up with a game plan of how to approach him,” Bynum recalled.
Tom Small explained, “At the beginning of the interview, we figured he would be surveilling us at the same time we would be checking him out. We wanted first to gauge him and find out where his head's at. And to keep it level, we decided to avoid being adversarial, up to a point. We also wanted him to believe that we didn't yet know we had a murder—that we just wanted to talk about a missing girl. Because he was in custody, being handcuffed when brought into the interview room, we took precautions and carefully informed him of Miranda.”
Bynum and Small both knew that the interview with David Mahler would be a challenge. They had already been on the job nearly five hours. His interview would last more than nine exhaustive hours. They were playing a verbal chess game with a self-confident, hubristic man accustomed to dominating everyone around him. They realized it would be a confrontation with intelligence, avarice, and evil.
C
HAPTER
16
W
EB OF
S
ELF-
D
ESTRUCTION
The long session with David Mahler opened on a note of relaxed informality. Bynum suggested he take the more comfortable chair and offered some water. Dressed in a cotton long-sleeved, pullover black jersey and dark slacks, Mahler accepted the seating arrangement and a drink. In a distinctive, clipped New Jersey accent, he suggested the detectives might need some ID, which he had in his wallet, but complained that it had been taken away from him. “I don't know what this is all about yet, but there may be documentation in my wallet that I can show you.” Vicki Bynum replied with a genial smile that it would be taken care of. He kept talking. “I have to say again, and I said it earlier, I understand the process—being a lawyer for eighteen years.”
In less than thirty seconds, Mahler had wanted them to understand his importance and ability to deal with people of lower status.
“Right,” Bynum replied with deliberate saccharine.
Mahler responded in kind. “Your attitude I must commend. I'm not—at least at this moment—yet charged with anything. I'm not a criminal yet. If that happens and then you take a dislike to a criminal, that's different. But thank you for treating me as a human being until then.”
Tom Small, unsmiling, said, “No problem.”
Extending an arm across the table, Mahler said, “Now I can shake your hand, I suppose.”
“Certainly,” said Small. “By the way, I'm Detective Small. This is Detective Bynum. We work the Hollywood Detective Unit. And I've got some information that came to us that we would like to share with you, and also see what your side of it would be.” Mahler nodded his understanding. “Being that you are an attorney, you understand the legalities here, right?”
Mahler kept his voice low and calm. “Yes. Please, please understand that it's my profession. If I come—I'm trying to work with you. I'm not usually on this side. If anything I say comes off a little too legalese, or if—”
“If I don't understand it, I'll ask you,” Small interrupted.
Sounding a little apologetic, Mahler muttered, “Sometimes I have a tendency to come off a little harsh. That's just my training... . I'm going to try to be as humble as possible.”
“Okay,” said Small. “Well, if you don't get harsh, I don't get harsh. How about that?”
“You have a deal.”
“That will be fine, and we can be gentleman to gentleman, or gentleman to lady. That's the way we prefer it. Try to keep it as professional as possible.”
Mahler commented that he had the right to a lawyer, since he was under custodial interrogation, under California law, but he volunteered, “I'm waiving it. However, I'd like to keep some notes.” Small agreed, and provided him with paper and a pen.
To be absolutely certain of no misunderstandings, Tom Small read the Miranda advisory again to Mahler, to which the suspect expressed full understanding. “With that in mind,” Small asked, “are we going to talk?”
Giving an affirmative reply, Mahler noted that if things took “a twist,” he could always stop the interview and request legal representation.
Jumping right to the point, Small said that information had been called in regarding a missing person. “She might be known as Kristi. Does that ring a bell?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, what's Kristi's story?”
“I hardly know Kristi, to be honest with you. I don't even know her last name.”
“How did you come to meet her?”
“She was introduced to me through a gentleman named Michael Conoscenti last September. I remember that timing because I had just broken up with my fiancée, and Michael felt it would be a good idea. After that, I hadn't seen Kristi for—God, until last week or two weeks ago. How that came about was she moved in with a gentleman named Sheldon Weinberg, one of my clients. He called and needed some documents delivered to me, because I'm helping him with a federal legal case.” Kristi, said Mahler, had brought the papers to his home. “At that time, I spent another two or three hours with her.”
The detectives had no way of knowing that Mahler had misstated some of the timing and left considerable gaps in the story. He continued, “I was headed down to Newport Beach to meet another client. It was dinnertime. I invited her to go with me. We went down to Newport Beach, stayed there—and I'm sorry if I'm going too fast.”
Vicki Bynum assured Mahler that he was doing fine. “What day was it you went to Newport?”
“Last week.” He said he couldn't be certain exactly which day, but receipts in his wallet could be checked. “I stayed with her at the Island Hotel. I think it was two nights.”
“Did you check in using your name or hers?”
“Under my name.” He either lied or forgot the room had been registered under a different name. Skipping hastily past that point, Mahler said, “I found that it was too quick to ask a girl, you know. At first it was going to be dinner to meet my client ... then it turned into getting late, so we said we'd stay in the hotel room. Then the next day it was ‘Well, we're in Newport. Let's meet a friend.' And things just got dragged out. It wasn't intended to be a two-day sprawl.”
Small and Bynum listened with an occasional “uh-huh,” took notes, and let Mahler speak.
“And we got into some arguments. When I say arguments, [it reached] a point that I said, ‘I'm leaving. Are you coming?' [She] wasn't ready. I said, ‘Checkout time is two o'clock.' Security had to go up to the room three times to ask her to please leave. ‘Mr. Mahler's not paying for another night.' And I left. I didn't mean to be a—please don't get the wrong idea. I'm a gentleman. I sat outside for an hour after they threw us out of the room, waiting in front with the valet, tipping him a few extra dollars to make sure that he didn't ask that I leave.
“At a certain point, I got a phone call from Mr. Weinberg, whereby she was cursing and screaming that she was going to get another ride. I said, ‘Fine. As long as she has another ride, I'm leaving.' And I left. She stayed. I left.”
Mahler didn't explain how Kristi had said those things to Weinberg. Presumably, he meant that she had called him.
“Where did you go?”
“I went home. About two days later, Saturday, I got a call from her asking me if she could have—I'm so bad mechanically—some piece of her car she needed that she had left in my garage.”
A skeptical expression shadowed Tom Small's face. He asked, “A piece to her car?”
“Yeah, a piece to her car. She had taken it off because when she left from Mr. Weinberg's house, she apparently didn't want some of the kids there to use her car... . I said, ‘Fine, come on up.' And that's how I knew Kristi.”
“So you saw her on Saturday?”
“Yes, I did. Everything seemed okay, until she started indicating that she wanted drugs. Which is something that I am—how do I phrase this? I don't consider myself the most conservative guy in the world. I don't want drugs around me or certainly in my home.”
Neither Bynum nor Small let it show in their expressions that statements from Norvik, Van Develde, and Moudy had painted a far different picture of drugs in the house. According to those men, he used cocaine and meth regularly. Small only uttered, “Uh-huh.”
Rushing onward, David Mahler implied that Kristi somehow arranged for a drug dealer to show up. He said, “So she had somebody come to the house. And there was some argument about how she was going to pay for the drugs. And I guess—this is absolute innuendo—so I'm not sure because it wasn't explicitly stated, but I'm a smart guy. It sounded to me like there were sexual favors [offered] in exchange for the drugs. I was in the way, so [they wanted] me to leave.”
Another flicker of doubt showed in Tom Small's eyes. “They wanted you to leave your own house?”
“Yes, in my house—making me obviously quite uncomfortable to the point that I'm asking them both to leave. Make sense?”
It made no sense at all to Small or Bynum, but the time had not yet come for a dispute. Instead, Small simply asked, “Who is this person who suddenly showed up?”
Haltingly, as if he had trouble recalling, Mahler seemed to be searching his memory. It came to him. The guy's name was Edmund.
“Do you know his last name?”
Mahler said he couldn't recall it at the moment, but would be able to supply it later. Acknowledging that he had met Edmund previously, he described him as an overweight Mexican man who dealt drugs and fancied himself a “ladies' man.” Suggesting that Edmund had once offered to bring prostitutes to Cole Crest, Mahler snorted and said, “Needless to say, that wasn't going anywhere with me. It got to the point ...” Mahler didn't complete the sentence. Instead, he said, “Please forgive me if I'm being a little careful.” Citing the absence of legal representation in the room, he apparently thought he was saying too much and cited the old adage “A lawyer that represents himself has a fool for a client.”
“I need to be a little careful, but I do want to make sure that I'm open enough that you can get all the facts you need,” David remarked.
Tom Small asked for a description of Kristi. Mahler said, “Well, I only spent two days with her, but she was white, about five-six, slender, blondish hair, maybe dyed.” Pointing to Bynum, he noted, “Her hair was longer than this young lady's.” The compliment about her age didn't impress the detective. Asked about jewelry Kristi might have worn, Mahler couldn't recall any. He was equally vague about her clothing, remembering only that she wore white pants.
“And the last time you saw her was where?” Small inquired.
“At my house, Saturday night.” Reconsidering it for a moment, he said, “The last time I saw her was around three, Sunday morning.” With that, Mahler began spinning a tale of Edmund slapping Kristi, his own consternation and fear, and making telephone calls to ask for advice. “It was a very strange situation for me. You can imagine. I have so much expensive stuff in my house. Who is this guy? Why does he feel comfortable slapping her in front of an attorney? My licenses are plastered all over the place.” (It had all taken place in his bedroom.)
With a hint of suspicion in his voice, Small asked, “In your bedroom?”
Mahler's vacuous answer reflected that his radar had picked up the detective's mistrust. “Obviously, there wouldn't be any, you know. I mean, I'm not going to indicate in any way that I was—let me rephrase that. Since it can't be anything incriminating ... I'm not going to indicate that I was unaware of his relationship with her.”
Small and Bynum exchanged a quick glance, silently agreeing to stick with their game plan to extract as much information as possible from the suspect before challenging his evasion or outright lies. Small simply asked, “Did you leave?”
“I did. Absolutely. I went to another part of the house and spoke to Karl Norvik. I also called Donnie, who lives all the way downstairs.” Mahler denied knowing Donnie's surname, stating that he always thought of him as Donnie.
“What did they say?”
“Both of them said that I shouldn't be involved. As a matter of fact, Karl said, ‘You want me to take you out of here? We'll both get in the car and leave right now, because I'm also uncomfortable. This is a weird situation.' I didn't want to leave my house with people I didn't know still in there. So I said, ‘That would mean locking all the doors, putting valuables away. That takes time.'”
Both detectives knew that Karl Norvik had made the telephone report accusing David Mahler of killing Kristi. Perhaps Norvik had offered to transport Mahler away from Cole Crest on Saturday evening, but probably not in the context of Mahler's self-serving account. Donnie's long interview completely contradicted Mahler's version of getting advice from him. The detectives let him continue weaving a web of self-destruction.
Mahler's narrative took him back to an alleged confrontation with Edmund. “I turned to him and said, ‘Listen, I'm leaving. You're going to have Donnie around. You're going to have Karl around. By the time I get back, I expect and anticipate that you [will be gone]. Kristi, you know, it was nice that you came over to pick up your stuff. Time's up. Take whatever you might have in the garage. And good luck.' I said I was really uncomfortable with the talk about drugs. I left and checked into the Marriott Hotel, near LAX, because I know they have good rates. I stayed there Sunday and Monday.”
“You left Kristi and Edmund in your house?” It took some Academy Award acting by Tom Small not to betray his contempt. “Were you concerned?”
“Oh yeah, I was very nervous. Wait till you look at the record of my calls. I was calling every hour, thinking maybe somebody would answer the phone. I was calling Donnie, Karl, my phone. I was absolutely flipping out. I finally got Stacy. I said, ‘Stacy, this thing's sort of wigging me out. What do you think I should do?' She said, ‘David, I'll come be with you.' Stacy lives in Bakersfield. She came and we stopped at my house [briefly] on Monday.”

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