Scene of the Crime: LAPD's Most Famous Exhibit

by Cathy Scott

Los Angeles Police Department authorities recently put on a show--the LAPD's Homicide Exhibit at the California Homicide Investigators Association conference in Las Vegas. And the community came out in droves to view the two-day "Famous Crime Scenes Exhibit."

It offered a unique behind-the-scenes look at the evidence police gather at crime scenes. Police cases ran the gamut from robberies, murders, serial killings, bank hold-ups, high-speed pursuits and hostage situations.

LAPD Homicide Detective Dennis Kilcoyne explained the reasoning behind making an exhibit and taking it on the road.

"Homicide investigators very rarely invite people under the crime scene tape and into the murder scene; this may be as close as some will ever get," he said, to seeing the scene as a detective would.

And so it was for the thousands who stood in line for up to an hour and a half to get in. The evidence of L.A.’s gritty past was more than sobering.

A respectful silence fell over the room as viewers quietly filed in, one by one, during the tour. They looked at evidence, photos, videos, get-away cars, weapons, documents, and autopsy photos. Included was evidence from the Black Dahlia case and Hollywood mob-era contract hits, all on loan from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office and LAPD’s evidence vaults.

It showed evidence from the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, who in 1994 was killed after she was repeatedly and brutally stabbed, along with Ron Goldman, in the courtyard of her Brentwood townhouse courtyard. It was almost chilling to see the bloody leather gloves, displayed behind glass, that were made infamous when suspect O.J. Simpson tried on the gloves in court and struggled to get them over his hands.

There were a bullet-riddled police car and similarly ventilated

suspect get-away auto from the notorious North Hollywood bank robbery and shootout.

But perhaps most grisly were evidence and photos from the ritualistic killing at a Benedict Canyon mansion where Charles Manson’s followers murdered five people, included pregnant including pregnant actress Sharon Tate, in the summer of 1969.

Still, it was the Robert F. Kennedy assassination display that seemed to stop people in their tracks. On display was the revolver used to cut down Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel on a June night in 1968.

I toured the site of the killing not long before the historic Ambassador Hotel was razed in 2005 so a public school could be built in its place.

Linda Deutsch, longtime special court correspondent for The Associated Press, led the media tour to some of Los Angeles's more notorious crime scenes. We were taken inside the hotel to the upstairs ballroom where the presidential candidate gave a short speech. We walked the path Kennedy took from the ballroom to the kitchen’s pantry area, where he was gunned down at point-blank range.

The Kennedy evidence exhibit led to controversy. Robert Kennedy’s son protested when he learned it included the torn and bloody shirt, tie and jacket his father was wearing when he was assassinated. Maxwell Taylor Kennedy expressed outrage that his father’s clothing was transported across state lines, from California to Nevada, to be publicly exhibited in Las Vegas.

Maxwell Kennedy said he was particularly bothered that his family was denied possession of those items when they requested them. The younger Kennedy's protests made national news that night, after the first day the public was allowed to see it. The next morning, people waited in a line that wrapped around the interior of the Palms casino, where the exhibit was set up in a conference room.

"My request was refused by the district attorney's office," Maxwell Taylor Kennedy told the media. "The District Attorney promised, though, to keep the personal items with care and out of public view."

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck issued a public statement and an apology: "The last thing we want to do is to traumatize a victim's family, and I am very sensitive to that. But at the same time, we want to preserve the history of the city of Los Angeles and improve the quality and understanding about our homicide investigations."

The LAPD pulled the shirt, tie and jacket from the exhibit after the first day.

Based on the response from a member of the Kennedy clan, it is doubtful the displays will go on tour again anytime soon, making the exhibit in Las Vegas a one-time-only viewing.

Photos by Cathy Scott

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Who Are Police?

by Andrea Campbell

Alarming Realities

In an older book called Protecting Your Life, Home and Property: A Cop Shows You How, a seasoned police officer from Indianapolis, Captain Robert L. Snow, explains that we should try to understand and treat police as individuals if we are to truly comprehend the dynamics between crime, law enforcement, and prevention.

Snow says one of the first questions usually asked by citizenry is, “Why become a police officer?" And after hundreds of police applicants under his review, Snow classifies police officers as falling into basically four different groups.

The first type, Snow says, are people who from their earliest years thought of law enforcement as the only career conceivable for them. They usually made all the right moves, took courses in law, participated in law enforcement internship, studied criminal justice in college and applied and joined a department.

The second type of individual saw a career with the police as a secure, fairly well-paying job with good benefits. The work they assumed would not be boring, and he believes they may have worked at a monotonous job previously, became disenchanted, or laid off.

Another group, he says, came to law enforcement by falling into it. The local police department happened to be hiring, they heard about it from a friend and applied without knowing much, but wound up loving it. Snow says he, himself, fell into that type.

And then, unfortunately, he says, there exists the last type of applicant, who, no matter how much psychological screening is heaped, possess personality quirks or inadequacies that go undetected and they inevitably exhibit large amounts of suppressed anger. Often their darker side thrives with the power that comes, and they cause police departments embarrassment before they eventually come to be fired.

What does this type of examination tell us? Well, despite the applicant’s general perception of the kind of excitement the job portends and the prestige they came to associate with law enforcement, police are still representative of the public at large. Often, few have considered the dangers involved and few others had a burning desire for public service.

Altogether, they represent all levels and all segments of society. A police department then, it follows, despite our media’s depiction of the police in films and novels, are not a homogeneous group, but individuals with a distinct personality who work the same job. Police are human, with human fallacies and prejudices, but it is their power of discretion, that has the most effect on the ability or inability to exact justice.

Case Handling: A Misnomer?

Considering the plethora of information and statistical data available about all aspects of crime today, one area of police investigation remains neglected: the actual pattern of police investigation response to citizen complaints of serious crime.

In today’s milieu there are numerous constraints on investigative activities. The first and major factor for this limitation is enabled by bureaucratic set-up: Investigator’s have found themselves shackled to their desk. For every case assigned, the detective must produce a completed investigative report within 14 days. The report account must consist of:

1) description of relevant information about the incident;

2) the type of investigation undertaken; and

3) the classification of the status. For classification purposes, three designations are possible: *one, a case is closed, assuming an arrest has been made and no further action is required; *two, a case is suspended, whereupon the available information has proved fruitless and no further investigation is warranted; and *three, the case is open, which indicates that a continued investigation beyond a 14-day period holds some promise of arrest (generally “major” cases are classified “open” with special justification required).

The discretion of the investigative officer colors all areas of the report. For example, his personal assessment of the “typicality” of the event is factored in—meaning, for instance, that a type of crime is:

• common for this area;

• considered routine; and

• only low-effort treatment is required.

Also, the discretion of the officer appears again when he is dealing with the victim of the offense, and here he may often give the impression that, "everything is being done” to solve the problem (a short-cut type of public relations).

Supervisors seldom challenge the content of the reports, but their main input into the process is that the time deadline of the report is monitored, and findings are often used as a basis for performance and evaluation. A component in this supervisory technique is that the police investigator comes to understand there is an informal pressure on him to produce a number of arrests, or his assignment can change—read this as a “demotion” in nature—and said officer can find himself back on the beat.

Detective work carries some prestige, not necessarily in wages but in attitude and demeanor, number of shifts, and detectives often wear civilian clothes and drive around in unmarked cars. One other note of interest here, is that the public’s conception is often that the detective is doing the “real police-type work,” that is, crime control; whereas the other, regular-type cops are engaged in peace-keeping.

Between the incidence of this kind of self-reporting and the internal pressure that exists, the inadvertent results of the report are then somewhat skewed. For example, there exists a private notion called “skimming.” Skimming, in simple terms, is when police select from their workload cases that appear likely to result in arrest. Obviously, the effect of working in this manner is that other, more routine cases, receive only the most cursory treatment.

Detectives employ an instrumental kind of “shorthand” in this sense:

Cases with potential, versus time-consuming cases. Those with some hope of reward, versus those with dead-ends. Burglary and robbery are seen as routine and require minimum effort. Whereas assault, rape and homicide provide a higher level of effort, because of these factors:

Since these cases frequently involve:

• persons of acquaintance they may prove more solvable;

• information is readily available; and

• the case has characteristics (but interestingly, since no great investigative acumen is involved, less credit is accorded).

With cases where the suspects are strangers, the case is automatically tainted as being “major” by supervisors, and even the terminology changes, the killing becomes “murder.” The stranger-related murder then involves more methodically-processed information, even though the police have a difficult time in solving this latter type of case.

There are also discretionary politics employed in the investigative techniques of crime. For example, a routine burglary, often referred to as “pork chop” burglaries, are suspended after a brief interview or perfunctory investigation; (sometimes they are also reclassified as a lesser offense).

The ability or inability to provide information in “I.D.-ing the perp(etrator)” is the single most important feature and given the greatest interpretive significance. If the victim of lost property has a named suspect, the case becomes non-routine. Other characteristics of major importance in the weighing of a crime’s effort include: Character of victim; social class; position in the community; and race. These are all said to have a decisive impact.

In those cases which evolve in a so-called “respectable” neighborhood, a more detailed investigative report is prepared and the officer may even outline his reasons for justifying “suspension,” because the officer may feel the victim will be more likely to inquire into the process and progress of the case, often complaining to their supervisors. This can be defined among detectives as the cases that, “come back on them.”

It would do well to mention some other factors involved with case-solving efforts: public relations moves; reducing juvenile crimes to criminal mischief; awareness of changes in a neighborhood; and the organizational weight of the group committing the crime.

In summary, case stereotypes do happen, pursuance is vigorous and methodical in only a small percentage of cases and a differential treatment because of a victim’s status is not uncommon. The work orientation emphasizes practicality over product, and tends to encourage substitutions of assumption for information gathering due to time, money and supervisory restraints. Not quite the picture we citizens had hoped for. The image of a special arsenal of sophisticated technical methodology is substantially misleading. All the more reason to engage ourselves in crime knowledge and prevention.

I have a lot of law enforcement friends and this is not meant to be a diatribe, but I wanted readers to know what police are up against and to look at them as men and women who are doing the best they can in difficult situations to help keep us safe. They are putting their lives on the line in some way, every day—and we should try to do what we can as citizens to help them in their tasks.

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One Cop Who Never Quit

by Kelly Siegler

We are all raised to believe that what we should strive for in this life is the knowledge that when we leave this earth, we do so having made this world a better place. Isn't that what we have always been told?

If leaving this world better off because you have lived means helping people when they believe that everyone else has failed them or forgotten about them . . . If it means teaching someone that doing the right thing means telling the truth when you would rather not get involved . . . If it means convincing people to speak up and speak out even when doing so might put their very lives at risk . . . If it means taking on the cause of those among us who oftentimes never get heard . . . then I know such a man.

His name is Johnny Bonds. He recently retired from a lifetime career in law enforcement. He spent the first part of his career working for the Houston Police Department eventually finding his way to the Homicide Division. He retired from the Harris County District Attorney's Office as an Investigator. He spent most of his life doing what few have done better, as a "murder cop."

Johnny worked on the high-profile cases often enough during his career. One of his most difficult cases is profiled in The Cop Who Wouldn't Quit , a book Rick Nelson wrote about Bonds. But this article is written to tell you about all of the not-so-high-profile deeds that Johnny Bonds did for so many years.

Because my friends and I were fortunate to work alongside Johnny Bonds for so long, we got to see him in action close-up. His ability to convince people who were reluctant or defiant witnesses to come clean and tell what they knew the truth to be was masterful. His easy-going approach to handling dangerous and tragic situations was a lesson that all rookies would be lucky to study. His innate perception at how best to approach people from all walks of life was impeccable. The number of investigations and unsolved cases he closed are too numerous to count.

In the world of homicide cops, Johnny would tell you that he was no different than any of the other guys he worked alongside. He had far much less machismo and ego than one might expect. He was first and always a team player more committed to getting the job done than to anything else. His ability to laugh and to make others laugh when all seemed so bleak and his ability to size up a situation will always be remembered.

Ah, Johnny Bonds, the families you have given justice, sometimes single-handedly. The grieving parents you have given some measure of solace. The innocents you have helped make safe from the evil visited upon them. The wrongs you have helped right. The good you have done in this at-times terrible world. May God's blessing be always upon you. For all you have done for all of us.

You have truly left our world a better place because you decided to become a cop.

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The Trophy Exchange

by Diane Fanning

Spending dozens of hours talking with a serial killer has a permanent impact. The experience often pops up in your mind at predictable, as well as, quite unlikely and inappropriate times.

So, of course, when I sat down to write my first police procedural, I just had to put a serial killer in it. Nonetheless, that is not the character in the book that fascinates me the most.

Lieutenant Lucinda Pierce, Homicide Detective, is my real focus. Life's been rough for her lately. She lost an eye and disfigured her face responding to a domestic violence call. She accidentally killed a small child in the middle of a shoot-out with his father.

Now she's up against a serial killer and her main suspect is a highly respected doctor known for his international relief work.

It's a good thing Lucinda doesn't mind bending the rules.

In a starred review, Kirkus wrote: "Fanning has produced an exciting, emotionally intense story with a complex heroine whose future adventures will be widely anticipated."

Library Journal "highly recommended" THE TROPHY EXCHANGE calling it a "near-perfect police procedural." And Booklist chimed in, too: "Fanning's true-crime experience gives the story added verisimilitude and she has made great strides in tightening her storytelling. She is one to watch." Verisimilitude? Now, that's a word you don't see in a sentence too often.

The first chapter is posted on my website so that you can sample the book.

I have a signing in Houston at Murder By the Book on Thursday, August 7 at 6:30pm. Check the calendar on my website for other signings in San Antonio, Austin and Round Rock.

So hurry up and read it. The next Lucinda book is already at the publisher. PUNISH THE DEED is scheduled for release in the UK in December and in the US in March 2009.

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