Date With the Devil (7 page)

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Authors: Don Lasseter

BOOK: Date With the Devil
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Peter Means recalled that Kristin went through a couple of relationships, but the guys turned out to be less than admirable, and one of them physically abused her. She worked at several restaurants, but never again found a place that gave her the feeling of contentment she had experienced at Polli's.
Kristin's mother, Marie, had moved to Mesa, Arizona, just outside the capital city, Phoenix. Kristin joined her for more than a year, but she missed being near the Pacific surf. Arizona, she joked, had huge stretches of beach, but no ocean. By 2005, Kristin moved back to Southern California. Between jobs, when she ran short of cash, Peter always came to her rescue. Even though she loved him, Kristin changed her surname to Baldwin. Robin explained why: “Kristin was in Orange County driving an old car and ran into a big pink Cadillac. It was her fault and she was going to lose her driver's license. A lawyer friend advised her to apply for a license in the surname of a close relative. He said the Department of Motor Vehicles did not have computer hookups across the nation and wouldn't be able to check it out. Women do it a lot, using maiden names, and married names. So Kristin followed his suggestion and reverted to Baldwin, the name of our first stepfather.”
Back in the San Fernando Valley, Kristin stayed for a while with Robin. A particularly pleasant memory of that period has lingered in the sister's memory. On Sunday mornings, Kristin would get up and make pancakes for the kids. The aroma of warm pancakes and syrup filled the rooms, and seemed to make everyone happy. “There was a lot of silly stuff too,” said Robin. “I have four daughters, and when Kristin was there, it was like a girly house. My kids were quite young and they would be so enthralled watching her get ready to go out, putting on makeup, doing her hair, and getting dressed. They would do their best to imitate every step, [and] pretend they were going out. Those were precious times.”
Something not quite so precious occurred when Kristin drove north to Ventura one weekend. She partied with a few friends, then headed back to the valley. Flashing red lights behind her wrecked the whole experience. The traffic officer smelled alcohol on Kristin's breath, administered a test, and arrested her for driving under the influence. Booked, photographed, and fingerprinted, she spent a few hours in jail before Peter Means bailed her out.
Even if Kristin experienced a few bumps in the road of life, she still maintained loving relations with her family. In 2005, she joined them for a reunion in Vermont to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of her maternal grandmother, Frances O'Neill. A special bond existed between Kristin and Grandma, who later said, “She has always been very special to me. No matter where she lived, Kristin always kept in touch sending me cards and notes for every occasion. She was the only one that ever sent me a Grandmother's Day card. And she always provided pictures with them.”
Still searching for herself and seeking some sort of permanence, Kristin also lived for a period of time with her best friend from school days, Jennifer Gootsan. Reminiscing about it, Jennifer said, “Kristin was so cute. I had stepped out of the house for a few minutes and she was in there with my little boy. He was about eighteen months old, loved Kristin, and called her ‘Uncle Kwisty.' He was a little confused about aunts and uncles. She used to decorate her face to entertain him—make a mask by painting her skin all green or white with circles around her eyes. I got back in just in time to see him sitting on the bed as she stepped out of the bathroom with her goofy mask. She goes, ‘Hi, Anthony.' He looked at her and said, ‘Uncle Kwisty, your face is cwacking.' He meant ‘cracking,' and we just broke up laughing.”
According to Jennifer and Robin, Kristin had a couple of unusual obsessions. First, she always needed to be clean. Second, she didn't want anyone ever touching her feet. If someone sat next to her and accidentally made contact with her foot, she would instantly pull away. No one understood either of these characteristics, but just accepted them as part of Kristin's makeup. Jennifer later spoke of a remarkable exception. “One evening she came in, obviously very tired. She seemed sort of needy and vulnerable. I had a bunch of nail polishes out and I was doing my toenails. I poured a glass of wine for each of us. And it really amazed me when she slipped her shoes off, put her feet up, and said in this sweet little girl's voice, ‘Do my toes.' So she laid there and I painted her toenails. She fell asleep while I was doing it. She was so comfortable and her face was angelic. That was the last time she was ever at my house.”
Once again working in a restaurant, Kristin met a man who told her he had been in several movies. He first introduced himself as Damien Michaels, but quickly confessed that his real name was Michael Conoscenti and “Damien” was his screen name. While growing up, Kristin had brushed shoulders with numerous celebrities, so this man's claim to fame didn't impress her. But his relaxed, friendly attitude did. At five-eight, and weighing a slim 145 pounds, Conoscenti looked much younger than his fifty-four years of age. His brown eyes retained a youthful sparkle, and very little gray showed in his full mane of brown hair. In their conversation, she mentioned having trouble with her car. Conoscenti suggested that he might know someone who could help her get it fixed. Kristin agreed to a subsequent meeting.
A few days later, in the fall of 2006, Conoscenti took her to a large, gated Calabasas residence in the San Fernando Valley, about twelve miles east of Westlake Village. He explained that he lived in a guest room there. The place belonged to Sheldon Weinberg (pseudonym), who had made his fortune in the film and finance industries. Inside, Kristin met Weinberg, a frail, gray-haired man only ten years older than Conoscenti, but appearing to be of more advanced age. He said he had lived in Calabasas for many years.
Decades ago, Calabasas drew visitors interested in the history of California. It had once been a stagecoach wayfarer's stop on the original El Camino Real linking the Spanish Missions. One of the oldest adobe buildings in the county still stands there. Tourists, after viewing the Old Town structures, often associate the town with cowboy days, as seen in countless B movies. Silent-movie directors found it great for background shots. From the 1920s to modern day, the lower slopes of the Santa Monica Hills on the south edge of Calabasas drew celebrities who wanted to live outside the hubbub of Hollywood. Entertainers from the Lone Ranger (actor Clayton Moore) to Lady Gaga have lived there. Loretta Swit, who played “Hotlips” Margaret Houlihan in the long-running
M*A*S*H
television series, owned a home only about ten miles from the remote, mountainous site where exterior scenes were filmed for both the movie and the series. Legions of actors, directors, and sports stars have found Calabasas a comfortable place to live.
One prominent resident of Calabasas, Jose Menendez, later moved to Beverly Hills. The name became world famous in 1989 when Jose's two sons, Lyle and Erik, used shotguns to slay him and their mother. Convicted of first-degree murder, both are now serving life sentences in prison.
While living in Calabasas, Menendez had allegedly been connected to the pornographic film business. Their neighbors had pressured the family to leave the community, not because of the pornography issues, but as a result of suspicions that Lyle and Erik had been burglarizing their homes. The boys had later rationalized that Jose, despite his fabulous wealth, had refused to provide them with an allowance, preferring that they learn to work for their money. They chose the wrong line of work.
No evidence exists to connect Jose Menendez with porn producer Sheldon Weinberg. The multibillion-dollar industry is well known to have long tentacles throughout the San Fernando Valley, and business relationships can be somewhat secretive.
Neither Weinberg nor Conoscenti bothered to mention to Kristin that the films they participated in were pornographic. Having performed in a long line of triple X-rated films as Damien Michaels or sometimes just “Damien,” Conoscenti knew the business intimately. Now in the twilight of a career that requires unfailing libido among male stars, Conoscenti had entered into a partnership with Weinberg to produce the “adults only” movies.
Whether or not Kristin learned that her new acquaintances worked in pornography, she appeared to be content with the friendship. She and Conoscenti enjoyed just hanging out once in a while over a period of several months.
Through her new friend, she met a man named David Mahler.
C
HAPTER
8
A T
ANGLED
W
EB
OF
W
OMEN
When David Mahler finally decided to leave the East Coast and make Hollywood his new base of operations, he wanted to find the perfect residence, one that suited his fantasies and personal needs. Stacy Tipton later spoke of his reasons for the move and his search for an ideal home. “I think he just got tired of living in the East. Maybe he was attracted by the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and the show business lifestyle. But I think he just wanted some new challenges. Later, he would look up at that big Hollywood sign on the hill and say, ‘It should be Mahlerwood.' He took pride in that.
“He told me that when he first came out here, he stayed in a hotel. It took him forever to find what he was looking for, and the house he finally chose fit his needs perfectly.”
The search for a residence took Mahler into the Heights overlooking Sunset Boulevard, and stretching over a series of ridges, in which an eclectic variety of dwellings, from cabins to castles, perch on hillsides, canyons, and mountaintops. A daunting maze of narrow, twisting, crooked lanes provides harrowing access. First-time visitors are amazed at how crowded the region is. Instead of rural, spacious lots, the houses are jammed together on every possible site conceivable for supporting a structure.
Only Mahler knows the exact reasons for his selection of a seven-level cliffside house on a short cul-de-sac called Cole Crest Drive. Viewed from the street, it gave a deceptive appearance of a modest two-story home. Further examination revealed five additional lower levels sloping down a steep canyon wall. Three outdoor decks jutting from rear doors offered spectacular panoramas, including the distant
HOLLYWOOD
sign.
 
 
From the Sunset Strip, Laurel Canyon Boulevard is the most common route into the hills. It begins at an intersection with Sunset Boulevard, climbs a northwesterly, serpentine path through the canyon, and, after a little less than five miles, drops down into the San Fernando Valley. The mountainous region resonates with colorful entertainment history and personalities. Among notable former denizens of Laurel Canyon (named for the abundant laurel vines observed by early settlers) were Mary Astor, Liberace, Anne Baxter, Lupe Vélez, Natalie Wood, Orson Welles, and David Niven. More recent luminaries still occupy lavish mansions in the Heights.
Tourists in search of sites where legendary film and music stars lived, or still reside, often regret turning west onto residential streets such as Kirkwood Drive or Lookout Mountain Avenue. Adventurous drivers invariably find themselves lost or desperate to escape the narrow, twisting, curbless, ascending, or plummeting lanes, where an oncoming vehicle is a breathtaking adventure. Some of the streets, if they can be called that, are no wider than sidewalks in other neighborhoods. They change names without warning and often lead frustratingly to dead ends. The most common utterance from strangers is “Why in hell would anyone want to live up here?”
Yet, thousands of residents love the colorful atmosphere of fame and spectacular city views below. The lure is addictive, almost as much as drugs that have made their way into the Hollywood Hills culture for generations. The “shocking” arrest of Robert Mitchum for using marijuana at a tiny bungalow on Ridpath Drive, shortly after midnight on September 1, 1948, focused the spotlight on substance use and abuse during an innocent era. From Mahler's back balcony, the historic site of Mitchum's misadventure can be seen.
Later, in the flower power 1960s, everything from pot to cocaine to meth flowed abundantly throughout the hills.
It could be that drug-induced euphoria among the Canyon denizens helped inspire a revolution in music. According to author Michael Walker, in his riveting 2006 book
Laurel Canyon,
a new musical genre evolved in the Kirkwood Drive home of Chris Hillman. Jim McGuinn, aka Roger, Gene Clark, David Crosby, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman united to call themselves the Byrds. In 1965, they recorded a song written by Bob Dylan called “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which shot to number one on the charts and changed the music industry. Walker describes this introduction of folk-rock as “a milestone of twentieth-century popular culture.” Four years later, Crosby joined Stephen Stills and Graham Nash at Joni Mitchell's home on Lookout Mountain and sang together for the first time, before becoming world famous as Crosby, Stills and Nash.
Other Hollywood Hills dwellers, such as Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, and “Mama” Cass, helped the new sound sweep the nation for the next decade. Nearly every top name in the music industry spent some time in the Laurel Canyon peaks and valleys during that period. Several of them focused their lyrics on local life. Joni Mitchell wrote and sang “Ladies of the Canyon,” painting a fanciful picture of “Trina, Annie, and Estrella” as flower children residents who wear wampum beads and gypsy shawls while baking brownies (presumably spiced with cannabis) and pouring music down the canyon. “Love Street” by the Doors tells of a wise and wonderful female canyon dweller and mentions a store “where creatures meet.”
This store may be a paean to the real-life Canyon Country Store, situated on the east side of Laurel Canyon Boulevard at the intersection with Kirkwood Drive. First established in 1919, the same year the historic Musso and Frank Grill opened on Hollywood Boulevard, the store offers crowded shelves of groceries and a deli, all in small Midwestern-town ambience. If Laurel Canyon is the essential artery of the Hollywood Hills, then Canyon Country Store and the restaurant below it are the heart. Celebrities, such as Sophia Loren or George Clooney, are commonplace in the narrow aisles. Jim Morrison lived a few steps away at one time, and silent film star Lupe Vélez died tragically in her home a block down the hill. During the era of music revolution, everyone knew that a variety of drugs could be found just by hanging out in the parking lot outside the Canyon Country Store.
The music and music makers, along with their money and easy access to drugs, acted as a magnet to young, adventurous women. Author Walker described it:
In the canyon, grinding indulgence was replacing the frothy high-spirits... . A house on the backside of Lookout Mountain hosted weekend sex parties, the rooms crammed with bunks proffering straight and gay sex, bowls of Quaaludes and poppers, and scores of naked bodies groping, snorting, licking... .
Walker told of a female journalist who not only wrote of the wild activities, but experienced them as well. In a magazine story, she noted,
A lot of these parties ended up in orgies.
David Mahler found his ideal home on Cole Crest Drive.
 
 
Before Mahler's arrival in the Hollywood Hills, the Cole Crest home had been leased, occupied, and managed by Karl Norvik for six years. An intelligent, articulate bachelor in his late forties, with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and shaved head, Norvik had achieved success in his profession as artistic technician, mostly in the motion picture industry. His high IQ and adept use of language had often led people to say, “You should have been a lawyer.” He lived in the upper two split-level floors and rented out the lower floors as studio apartments.
The house occupied a narrow lot on a short cul-de-sac street, Cole Crest Drive, near the dead end. Six homes, with only a few feet separating them, occupied the street's north side—all were perched at the top of a steep slope. An eight-foot concrete wall had been erected on the south edge of the narrow street to buttress another rise in the terrain topped by a row of towering eucalyptus trees. A huge modern mansion occupied the hilltop above, and two more luxury homes neighbored them to the west.
Mahler's residence featured a two-car garage at street level. On the right side of the garage, a steel gate blocked the main entrance. Visitors could press a button that would activate an intercom, allowing the occupant to remotely unlock the gate. Opening it would lead into a short corridor. To the left, a door provided access to the garage. A few more steps straight ahead ended at the main entry. The right side was open air, with a view of a long staircase of fifty-four steps descending the steep slope and leading to the bottom-level studio apartment.
Just inside the front portal, a landing at the top of a short stairway provided access to the interior rooms. Two more stair-steps down led to the living room and guest bath. A sharp left turn offered a second flight down to the office and a master bedroom. Another interior staircase, this one offering a series of landings and switchbacks, gave entry to a studio apartment.
Access to the next apartment in descending order could also be made by a continuation of the stairwell. The lowest-level apartment could be entered from the long exterior staircase, which required a certain amount of athleticism to navigate, down or up. A pair of landings provided rest stops.
For a short period after David Mahler moved in, Karl Norvik continued to function as landlord, but the new tenant took over the lease and became, in Karl's words, “the master leaseholder.” In this role, Mahler also acted as manager. Mahler took over the garage, kitchen, and den above the garage, living room, and master bedroom. Karl moved his possessions into a bedroom and bath below him. By mutual agreement, Karl Norvik could also use the den and kitchen. To David Mahler, the place was the ultimate “bachelor pad.”
Mahler furnished his space in a masculine fashion, with black leather couches on light gray wall-to-wall carpeting gracing the living room. In the office, a converted bedroom complete with bath and toilet, he conducted business from a cherrywood desk illuminated by a torchiere featuring a black reflecting bowl. A high-back, black-cushioned rolling chair became his throne, while guests could sit in a pair of sleek, modern office chairs. Wall-mounted shelves above Mahler's head held his books, and a globe of the world stood in one corner.
His master bedroom, carpeted in dark red, contained a king-sized bed, plus a walnut wood dresser and chest of drawers. An imposing black marble fireplace filled one corner at a 45-degree angle. The roomy walk-in closet provided ample space for the expensive suits that Mahler brought with him from New Jersey.
The master bathroom, with black marble counter and giant mirrors, contained an oversized combination spa and bathtub. A bachelor intending to entertain women in his home might have been expected to hang a painting or photo of a beautiful woman in the wall space at one end of the tub. Mahler oddly chose a different image. He hung a framed poster of Al Pacino in the role of Tony Montana, a brutal cocaine dealer and killer in the 1983 film
Scarface.
Mahler's odd taste in bathroom decoration would later raise considerable speculation that it reflected the way he saw himself.
Despite David Mahler's takeover of Cole Crest, he and Karl Norvik worked out an amicable relationship and became close friends. The staircase from Norvik's rooms allowed him free access to the common office space, den, and kitchen they shared.
As soon as Mahler felt comfortably ensconced, Stacy began making trips from Visalia to Cole Crest. “I would stay anywhere from an hour to a few nights. Sometimes we went to Newport Beach and visited my friends. My job in sales gave me a territory all the way from Merced to Bakersfield, which made it convenient for us to meet. Sometimes he would come up to Bakersfield for a rendezvous.” Describing this, Stacy laughed. “What a rendezvous place. Bakersfield is not exactly the entertainment capital of California. We did that several times.”
Of course, spending time at Cole Crest meant that Stacy came to know Karl Norvik. She had mixed feelings about him. “He seemed kind of remote to me at times. They had a baby grand piano in there. David and I would be getting ready to go out and he would be in there playing the piano. It was strange. You're up there in the hills being serenaded by this concert pianist, but he was absolutely great in playing it. I can't explain it. I just had this weird feeling about him.”
At one point in time, said Stacy, Mahler considered forcing Norvik to move out. She explained, “His room was the one with a hardwood floor and David wanted to get him out of there so he could turn it into an art studio for me. I was going to attend art classes at UCLA, but it never happened.”
Even social occasions with Karl Norvik bothered Stacy. “Karl had a girlfriend and we four were all going out to dinner one night. She had a male roommate, and when we went to her place, that guy had a dress on. Every time we would go anywhere with them, it would get more weird. His girlfriend finally left him and went back to her husband.”
While Stacy thought the house was beautiful, she hated the narrow, tortuous streets. “You couldn't get me to even try to drive up there on those crazy, winding roads. Sometimes, to avoid them, I would take the train to Los Angeles and get him to come pick me up at Union Station.” She made the trip, either by car or train, numerous times. “I would go every chance I got and spend time with him—but I never lived in that house with him; I just commuted back and forth.” Stacy eventually discovered she was not the only woman who spent prodigious time at Cole Crest.
 
 
David Mahler reportedly tried twice to pass the bar exam in California, but he failed. Unlicensed to practice law in the state, he became a “commodities trader” who also dispensed legal advice. It didn't take him long to establish a network of clients and associates and to find profitability in his business. For his own reasons, he used aliases in some of the transactions. In these trades and with his income, he acquired a BMW and two Jaguars, one brand-new and one three years old. Mahler registered two of the vehicles in fictitious names.

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