فصل 10

10

Ventura, 1980

THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT FORMED A SPECIAL COLD-CASE UNIT TO deal with the sudden influx of new leads. Members of the Countywide Law Enforcement Unsolved Element, known as CLUE, began digging through old case files in January 1997. Meanwhile, Mary Hong faxed the Harrington/Witthuhn/Cruz DNA profile to hundreds of crime labs throughout the country. There was no response.

Investigator Larry Pool transferred into CLUE from the sex-crimes unit in February 1998. Pool is an air force vet with a stiff bearing. His moral perspective lacks gray. He loves God and abhors cursing. When cops are asked about their favorite part of the job, most reminisce about times they got to work undercover, the adrenaline that comes with unleashing your dodgy id with no idea of what’s coming around the corner. Pool never worked undercover. It’s hard to imagine that he ever could. He once interrogated a serial killer on death row in another state about a missing woman in Southern California police suspected him of killing. Pool suggested that the killer tell him where to find the body. It was the right thing to do. For his conscience. For the woman’s family. The killer began mild negotiations, remarking about the better conditions in California prisons. Maybe a transfer could be negotiated in exchange for information?

Pool organized his paperwork and stood from the table.

“You’ll die here,” he said and walked out the door.

Cold cases suited him. They were blanks that edgier cops, the ones itching to kick in a door, might never fill in. Pool could. He was an insomniac who liked to “launch a command” in his brain, mull an investigative challenge in the background of his mind, until sometime later, maybe brushing his teeth or getting into his car, an answer came to him. Streetwise cops could sit down with a father who’d just set his family on fire and talk with him as though they were buddies sharing beers at a baseball game; they’d accept a degree of moral ambiguity, or at least pretend they did. For someone like Pool, who couldn’t fake it, cold cases were perfect. He was a twelve-year veteran at the Sheriff’s Department but relatively fresh at homicide investigation. A cardboard box containing three cases (Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz) was his new assignment. Inside were four stolen lives. One featureless monster. Pool told himself he would launch commands until he found him.

Pool noticed a Ventura Police Department case number scribbled in the margin of one of the reports in the Harrington file. He called and inquired. That’s the Lyman and Charlene Smith murders, he was told. Notorious case in Ventura. Lyman was a well-known attorney. He was on the verge of a superior court judgeship. Charlene was his knockout former secretary–turned– second wife. On Sunday, March 16, 1980, Gary Smith, Lyman’s twelve-year-old son from his first marriage, biked over to his father’s house to mow the lawn. The front door was unlocked. An alarm clock buzzing drew him tentatively to the master bedroom. Bark fragments were scattered across the gold carpet. A narrow log lay at the foot of the bed. Two shapes under the covers were the bodies of his father and stepmother.

Investigators were deluged with leads. The Smiths’ hilltop home overlooking Ventura Harbor was a slick sheen obscuring instability and drama. Affairs. Less-than-squeaky-clean business deals. They quickly zeroed in on a friend and former business partner of Lyman’s named Joe Alsip. Alsip had visited the Smiths the night before their murders; his fingerprint was on a wine goblet. Worse, his minister told police that Alsip had essentially confessed to him. Alsip was arrested. The police and prosecution entered the preliminary hearing braying with confidence. They were especially pleased to see that Alsip’s defense attorney was Richard Hanawalt. Hanawalt was best known to them for successfully defending drunk drivers. He was partial to mixed metaphors and non sequiturs.

“Briefly during the lunch hour I wondered what the definition of ‘strong’ was,” he announced to the Alsip courtroom one day. About the opposing narratives in the case, he said, “Little by little it begins to unroll like a long carpet in front of a hotel.”

What they thought were Hanawalt’s fumbling antics hid a bombshell. Anonymous tipsters had encouraged him to investigate the minister’s past. He found a decades-long history, spanning the country from Indiana to Washington, of the minister bizarrely seeking police protection and trying to insert himself into investigations. Sergeant Gary Adkinson, one of the lead investigators on the Smith case, had quietly anticipated the minister’s unraveling and cringed when Hanawalt gleefully began to dismantle his story. The chief had given the minister a police radio after he insisted that he’d received threats on his life after turning in Alsip. One afternoon the minister’s terrified voice came panting over the radio. “He’s here! He’s coming at me!” he shouted. Adkinson happened to be at the intersection of Telegraph and Victoria, just a block from the minister’s house, and he raced over. The minister stood inside the front door, holding the radio dumbly to his chest, looking devastated to see Adkinson so soon.

“He’s gone,” he said quietly.

In his closing argument, Hanawalt also succeeded in painting the crime scene as an eerie tableau that felt like the work of a stranger psychopath rather than someone known to the Smiths. There was the binding with drapery cord, the devastating blows to their heads with the log, the lack of any lights on in the house, which suggested that the violent encounter may have happened in complete darkness. And the bathroom window. Someone standing there had a clear view into the bedroom. A few yards from the window was the firewood pile, where the killer grabbed the twenty-one-inch piece of wood.

After the preliminary hearing, the Ventura County district attorney released Joe Alsip for lack of evidence. The investigative team returned to square one. They were split. Half thought the killer knew the Smiths; the other half thought it was a random, sexually motivated crime. For years the Smith file sat on a shelf in the investigators’ bullpen; after a decade, it was relegated to the evidence vault.

Larry Pool explained to Ventura PD that the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had an unsolved serial case involving four homicide victims that bore similarities to that of the Smiths. He asked them to send any forensic evidence they still had on Smith over to the Orange County Crime Lab. Mary Hong opened the Ventura PD package; inside were a couple of glass slides. Her heart sank. Q-tip swabs that are routinely taken as part of a rape kit are rubbed against glass slides, as the slides make it easier to look for sperm under a microscope. But usually the swabs are included in the kit too. A criminalist is always looking to work with as much biological material as possible.

On February 17, 1998, Pool received Hong’s report. She’d been able to develop a DNA profile from the semen on the slides. Lyman Smith could be eliminated as the source.

The DNA profile matched the Harrington, Witthuhn, and Cruz profiles.

Some of the old guard at the Ventura PD refused to believe it. Detective Russ Hayes, one of the leads on the Smith case, was interviewed for an episode of Cold Case Files that aired some years later. “I think you could have knocked me over with a feather,” he recalled about the DNA connection. The old-timer’s distrust of technology had him shaking his head.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Hayes said. “Didn’t believe it.”

Hayes recalled his theory that the killer stood outside the bathroom window at the north side of the house, the portal through which he could see Lyman and Charlene’s bedroom, and became enraged at something he saw—an act of intimacy, most likely.

“I thought that it was someone close to them. I thought it was someone who had seen something through that window, looking into the bedroom. And it just infuriated them, causing them to go inside and do what they did.”

Hayes was probably right about the position outside the window. And the rage. But not the familiarity. Charlene Smith was just the latest unlucky stand-in for the lustful, sneering women— mother, schoolgirl, ex-wife—who formed a disapproving circle around the killer in his daydreams, their cacophony of disdain forcing him, always, to his knees; the act of grabbing the log was arousal alchemized to hate, a vicious punishment meted out by one judge: his corroded brain.

THE BODY COUNT STOOD AT SIX. NEARLY TWENTY YEARS TOO late, they were learning his methods. How he adapted. And that he was mobile. Mapping the crimes took on a contagionlike feel, a search for victim zero. Where was he before Ventura? Someone dug up the old newspaper articles, the ones questioning whether not only Ventura and Orange were connected but Santa Barbara too. DOUBLE MURDERS MAY BE LINKED, POLICE SAY, read the headline in the July 30, 1981, edition of the Santa Ana Register. Nearly twenty years later, the three counties compared information again. There were a few dissimilarities—two of the male Santa Barbara victims had been shot when it appeared they fought back—but too many parallels existed to discount a link. Prowling and peeping. Nighttime attacks on middle-class victims who were sleeping. Bludgeoning. Precut ligatures brought to the scene. Tennis-shoe impressions. Many aspects that were present in a pair of double murders in a town forty miles north.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ventura investigation was unquestionably the most labyrinthine of all the stand-alone investigations. Michelle had planned to cover it at great length, but Ventura is only lightly represented in the book due to her protracted quest to obtain the highly elusive case file.

In 2014 Michelle paid the Ventura County Courthouse $1,400 for hard copies of the transcripts from the Joe Alsip preliminary hearings. All 2,806 pages had to be printed from microfilm. Michelle later recalled the clerk eyeing her with some cocktail of confusion and derision as she handed Michelle the massive volume of freshly printed archive material.

Reading the transcripts, which were full of tantalizing allusions to items more fully documented in the official reports, only made Michelle covet the Ventura file that much more. In January 2016, she finally got her hands on the file when she borrowed three dozen boxes of Golden State Killer material from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. She had read through much of that file—which primarily focused on red herring Joe Alsip—by the time of her death, but she did not have time to weave it into the narrative.

For a more complete account of the Smith investigation and the case against Joe Alsip, Colleen Cason’s series “The Silent Witness,” published in the Ventura County Star in November 2002, is an excellent reference.]