Cooper Even Denies Seeing House Where 4 Were Slain

The prosecution continued to grill Kevin Cooper on Friday, but San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Dennis Kottmeier was unable to get Cooper to admit to the Chino Hills killings or to admit that he even saw the house where the slayings occurred.

“I didn’t kill the Ryens. I didn’t attempt to kill Christopher Hughes, and I didn’t attempt to kill Joshua Ryen,” Cooper said quietly at one point as Kottmeier pressed him for details on the slayings.

Kottmeier questioned Cooper for the third day about his activities inside a house down the hill from the one where the bodies of Doug and Peg Ryen, both 41; their daughter, Jessica, 10, and Christopher Hughes, 11, were discovered on June 5, 1983, hacked with an ax and stabbed with a knife and ice pick.

Cooper said that he hid inside the unoccupied house for two days after his escape from the California Institute for Men in Chino on June 2, 1983. Cooper, who was sentenced to the prison on a burglary conviction, was charged with four counts of murder on June 9, 1983. He was captured on July 30, 1983, in an island bay near Santa Barbara where he was working as a sailboat deckhand.

On Friday, Kottmeier continued his strategy of attempting to elicit detailed answers from Cooper about his every move during the time he was in the vacant house.

At one point Kottmeier quibbled with Cooper over a flashlight that Cooper found inside the garage on the night that he let himself into the unlocked house.

Under direct examination by defense attorney David Negus, Cooper had testified that he walked through the house with the flashlight turned on. But, under questioning from Kottmeier, Cooper testified that the flashlight was on as he checked each room, but turned off in the hallway.

Kottmeier said the two answers showed inconsistencies in Cooper’s testimony, to which Cooper replied quietly:

“You’re trying to make me remember detail by detail . . . I only know what I didn’t do. I didn’t kill the Ryens. I didn’t attempt to kill Christopher Hughes, and I didn’t attempt to kill Joshua Ryen.”

Investigators were able to recover only the ax allegedly used in the killings. Kottmeier said in his opening statement that that suspected murder weapon, which did not have any fingerprints, was found on the fireplace mantle of the house that Cooper used as a hide-out.

TV Placement

At one point during Friday’s hearing, Kottmeier asked Cooper to explain how he removed a television from a stand, placed it on the floor and turned it on to listen for news reports about his escape.

As Cooper pointed to a diagram of the house to show where the television was situated, Kottmeier quickly inquired, “And that’s about two feet from where the hatchet was kept?”

Cooper, equally quick and without hesitation, answered, “I don’t know where the hatchet was kept.”

On several occasions during his cross examination, Kottmeier has attempted to get Cooper to admit that he saw the Ryen home from the house where he hid. But each time Cooper has calmly denied seeing the Ryen home at all.

Cooper testified that he went to sleep in the nude on the night of June 3 after washing his prison-issue clothes and waiting for them to dry. Cooper made a bed on the floor of a bedroom closet. Kottmeier asked if sleeping nude did not make Cooper vulnerable if someone entered the house.

“If somebody catches you, what happens?” said Kottmeier.

“I go back to jail,” said Cooper.

“You weren’t concerned, Mr. Cooper, because you had plenty of weapons lying next to you,” said Kottmeier.

“No, sir,” said Cooper politely.

“You had the hatchet?”

“No, sir.”

“You had the hunting knife?”

“No, sir.”

Throughout his cross examination, Kottmeier has accused Cooper of being armed after his prison escape. But prosecutors have failed to produce any evidence to back up that contention.

Also Friday, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Richard Garner granted a request by Cooper to bar television and still cameras from the courtroom while he testifies. Garner recessed the trial for 15 minutes while an attorney for NBC-TV petitioned the court to allow camera coverage.

“Mr. Cooper is not just any witness. He is the focal point of this trial. Were it not for him, we would not be here (petitioning),” said attorney Donald L. Zachary, who argued that the public’s right to see Cooper’s testimony on television outweighed all other considerations.

Judge Won’t Budge

But Garner refused to budge. “You’ve educated me on the matter, but not persuaded me . . . With a lesser case, with less at stake, I would be more inclined” to allow camera coverage, Garner said.

Prosecutors have not presented any direct evidence to link Cooper to the scene of the killings. Most of the evidence against Cooper has been circumstantial. Blood samples matching Cooper’s blood type were found in the Ryen home. And tobacco similar to that issued to inmates at Chino state prison was found in the Ryen station wagon when it was recovered in Long Beach, prosecutors said.

But neither the blood found at the murder scene nor the tobacco in the car was traced to Cooper.

After his prison escape, Cooper went to Ensenada, where he signed on as a deckhand on a sailboat owned by Owen and Angelica Handy.

The trial will resume Monday, with Cooper still on the stand.