He’s in prison yet free at last

LOUIS Bostich went to Mt. Shasta and prayed.

Sober for about a year, he found himself reaching for the bottle again. And he knew why. It was the same reason he drank away a promising Navy career, a string of other respectable jobs and his only meaningful relationships.

He was thinking of what he did to Jami Vitteli.

Bostich never told anyone what happened. Not his father, who raised him after his mother died of an aneurism when he was 5. Not his friends or U.S. Navy shipmates.

He began drinking himself to sleep. His addiction didn’t go unnoticed. When he tried to reenlist, the Navy said no, sending him on his way with an honorable discharge.

Trained as an electrician, Bostich sought jobs that allowed him to work in virtual isolation and drift from place to place. Over the years, he was a technician for Southern California Edison in San Diego, a pipe fitter in Long Beach and general hand at a small sawmill in Washington state.

He donated money and time to charities, working for such outfits as Habitat for Humanity, hoping somehow it might balance out the events of that dreadful night in Huntington Beach. It didn’t.

Sitting behind security glass at Orange County’s Theo Lacy Jail, Bostich recently shared his story about that night, admitting that some details had been lost to years of hard drinking.

He’s at Perqs, a bar in Huntington Beach. It’s Memorial Day weekend, 1987. He’s on leave from his Navy ship, the frigate Roark stationed in San Diego. The place is crowded. He had gone there alone, the second or third joint that night. She is standing in a group near him. Her dark hair is long and thick, and she carries a few extra pounds. Not his type. But they strike up a conversation. She’s intelligent and friendly. An artist. That’s what draws him in.

They talk for a while, mostly about art. Bostich had sketched as a kid and thought one day he might become an artist. At some point, she asks him whether he‘s interested in trying the latest fad drug. Intrigued, he follows her outside. He doesn’t want to risk getting caught doing it in the open. So they head to her place, a few blocks away.

ALWAYS something of a free spirit, Jami Vitteli had left home on Long Island, N.Y., midway through college, planning to transfer to a California school to finish her degree in communications.

The last her parents knew, she was doing just that, taking classes part time in Long Beach while studying Buddhism, working odd jobs and selling her paintings to help make ends meet.

“She was very artistic,” her mother, Vickie Vitteli, said in a recent interview. “And she had a heart of gold.”

During the six years Vitteli lived in California, her parents called often, wishing she would come home. Their biggest fear, they told her, was that she would die in an earthquake.

When police called with the news, Vickie Vitteli suffered an anxiety attack. She has relied on a prescription inhaler from that day. She woke up many nights with her heart racing, thinking she was going to die.

“There’s a lot of things that remind you,” she said. “It never goes away. Never.”

Vickie Vitteli lost her husband to diabetes a few years later. A deeply religious woman, she never lost faith that someday she would learn the truth about her daughter’s last moments.

Inside Vitteli’s cramped apartment, Bostich, 25, sits next to her on her beat-up couch. They drink. Talk. About her paintings, politics, the military. He makes a move. Are we going into the bedroom or what? She backs him off. Tells him men are all the same. He says maybe he should go home. He gets up and walks out. She follows him to his truck. He doesn’t have to leave, she says. He just has to behave. They head back to her apartment.

BACK in Huntington Beach, lead detective Dale Mason was stumped despite working on the case every day for eight months.

A set of bloody footprints trailed from Vitteli’s front door, heading west down her street until they disappeared near a curb. Inside the apartment, the 26-year-old’s body was covered in blood and found in a sitting position, leaning against the couch with her legs blocking the front door.

She was fully dressed, but something about the disarray of her clothing seemed to indicate a sexual curiosity on the part of her attacker. A glass vial with a powdery substance was found in a pocket.

There was no forced entry, no obvious motive or weapon. Moisture in the kitchen sink led Mason to believe that whoever was there might have washed up.

Staff and patrons at Perqs saw her chatting with other locals that night, but no one saw her leave. A woman who lived down the street from the bar thought she might have seen Vitteli walk by about midnight but couldn’t remember if she was with anyone. An autopsy showed she died between 2 and 4 a.m. A neighbor heard music and voices about that time -- nothing unusual in that apartment complex.

One of her neighbors called police the next morning, finding it odd that Vitteli’s door was ajar. She also saw traces of blood outside.

More than a year later, Mason arrested two men who knew Vitteli and were together at Perqs on the night in question. A parking ticket was issued for one of their cars around the time of Vitteli’s death. And one of the men had bragged at a party that he had knowledge of a woman who was killed by a “Colombian necktie,” a reference to a knife wound that was similar to one of Vitteli’s injuries.

Charges were later dropped for lack of evidence. Mason eventually abandoned his belief that they were responsible, returning to the hunch he had the first day he stepped foot in her apartment. Vitteli went home with someone she met at the bar, he surmised, and they got along for a period of time before something went bad.

Mason retired in 2002 closer to the truth than he knew.

Back inside, they drink some more. He is snorting the drug she talked about. A white powder: meth. Then they are arguing again. About politics, the military. Or maybe it’s because he makes another move? ... His mind is fuzzy. He remembers straddling her, holding a bottle of champagne. She fights him. He strikes her over the head with the bottle. It doesn’t break.... Then he’s standing in the kitchen, without her ... heads back to the living room ... blacks out. When he comes to, he is on top of her, slitting her throat with a kitchen knife....

ABOUT six years ago Bostich moved to the tiny town of Forks, Wash., and was working at a sawmill. He was up to a liter of vodka a night.

He made up excuses to avoid family get-togethers and other social events. One night when he did show up for dinner at an aunt’s home in San Juan Capistrano, she was shocked by her nephew’s appearance.

“I had not seen him in a long, long time,” Kathryn Love later recalled in a letter to a judge. “What in the world happened to that handsome young man? The difference in his appearance was amazing.... I did not know what the years had done, but I knew he needed help.”

Bostich’s boss at the mill knew it too. A Baptist minister, he persuaded Bostich to come to church with him and to get treated for his alcoholism. He successfully completed a 90-day outpatient program at a local hospital and after that attended daily Alcoholic Anonymous sessions.

But with no alcohol to numb his conscience, his flashbacks worsened. He even found himself breaking down in tears in public when he saw families together. He had destroyed at least two families -- his and Vitteli’s -- and her chance to have her own one day.

He thought maybe he just needed to get away and clear his head. So he sold his possessions and drove to Mt. Shasta, where he meditated and prayed. He went on another binge. Then he realized he had been dodging two of the 12 steps recommended to members of Alcohol Anonymous.

Step 8: Make a list of all persons we had harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

So he got in his pickup and began the half-day’s drive to Huntington Beach, ready to do what he should have done nearly 20 years ago. Only miles into his trip, however, he pulled off the highway in a panic.

He fled her apartment before dawn, taking the knife and champagne bottle with him. He ditched them and some of his bloody clothing in random strip mall trash bins. When he returned to his dad’s home, where he had been staying for the weekend, no one was awake. He packed his sea bag and headed out. Then he drove around Orange County for several hours, debating whether he should turn himself in. Ultimately, he rationalized that it was better if he didn’t, because that would mean two lives were wasted. He promised himself and God he would make up for it by living an exemplary life....

DRIVING around Redding, Calif., Bostich went from church to church, looking for someone to confess to. Finding no one, he went to a pay phone and began cold-calling from the Yellow Pages. Finally, he heard the voice of the Rev. Gerri Murray on the other end.

Moments later, he was walking through the doors of Christ Unity Church.

Call the police, he told Murray. “I’ve got a confession to make.”

Huntington Beach detectives reacted with disbelief. They told Bostich a confession wasn’t enough.

Bostich told them which way his footprints tracked from the front door, about the head wound from the champagne bottle, two details that had never been made public.

Still not enough.

Remembering how Vitteli fought for her life, Bostich asked if detectives had any DNA evidence. Indeed, the shreds of the attacker’s skin had been found under Vitteli’s fingernails -- but never tested.

After a sample was sent to the lab, the detectives knew they had their murderer.

Bostich pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in September 2006 and was sentenced the same day to 15 years to life.

He said nothing. No one from Vitteli’s family was in the courtroom.

Bostich is now housed with nearly 5,000 other felons at Centinela State Prison, a maximum-security facility in the desert just north of the Mexican border.

A spokesman for Alcoholic Anonymous said he and other officials at the organization, which cites confessions of recovering alcoholics through its “Big Book,” could not recall a case in which someone had accepted responsibility for such a serious crime.

Bostich believes others are out there, still trying to wash away memories.

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christine.hanley@latimes.com