Confused Portrait Emerges of Suspect Freed in Wife’s Death

Harry J. Conklin, a 39-year-old Reseda man with a penchant for hunting knives, pet leopards and swastika tattoos, works as a studio grip. His credits include “Hill Street Blues,” “Remington Steel” and “Coverup.”

Now Conklin finds himself starring in a real-life drama. He is playing a man who claims he was falsely charged with shooting to death his 38-year-old wife in front of their 3-year-old daughter last summer.

The case against Conklin hinged on testimony from daughter Amanda, who told police that she had witnessed the slaying. But, after a judge refused to allow the girl to testify in court because of her age--stripping the prosecution of its only firsthand evidence--charges against Conklin were dropped two weeks ago.

Both the police detective and the deputy district attorney who investigated the case say they remain “absolutely convinced” that Conklin killed his wife.

Clear Conscience

Conklin answers: “I know my conscience and my heart are clear. I can go up to Forest Lawn and kneel next to my wife’s grave and speak my sentiments and have no guilt.”

Released after five months in jail, Conklin says he doesn’t know who killed his wife or for what reason.

To police he was a logical suspect. Enrolled in a series of reformatories before he reached his 15th birthday, Conklin went on to serve terms for two burglaries, a prison escape and assaulting a police officer, court records show.

“I know it looks bad for me, but they’ve closed the case,” he said. “They think I did it. If you’ve done something wrong and you’ve paid your dues, it should be over and done with.” Because there is no statute of limitations in murder cases, prosecutors can reopen their case against Conklin whenever they want--in one year or in 20 years. Prosecutors say they may wait until Amanda, ruled by a judge to be an unreliable witnesses last month, can be certified at an older age.

“This will always hang over my head,” he said. “It’s like living in the shadow of a guillotine--you can have the blade fall on your head at any minute.”

Interviews with friends and relatives draw a contrasting portrait of Conklin.

On the surface, Darlene and Harry Conklin appeared to be a happy couple with a 4-year marriage, lovingly raising their only daughter. Darlene’s brother, Lewis Cohen, said the couple “never argued, and looked lovey-dovey all the time.”

But others described Darlene Conklin as a woman in constant fear of a sadistic man with a violent temper who habitually terrorized her. One former neighbor recalled a pregnant Darlene hysterically saying that Harry had stuck a loaded gun into her stomach and threatened to shoot.

Wearing a plaid cowboy shirt with snaps at the pockets, faded jeans and scuffed white tennis shoes, Conklin this week talked about the case against him. He is a compact, muscular, man with a wide, toothy smile.

His arms, wrists and legs are covered with tattoos. On his right biceps he has a tattoo of a growling black panther; on his stomach is a skull-and-crossbones tattoo in the shape of a swastika. The stomach tattoo is merely “a war and peace sign,” he said. “It has nothing to do with anything. It’s significance is the turmoil I’ve been through.”

On this day, staying at a relative’s home in the San Fernando Valley, he was preparing to leave for work at a motion picture shoot in Moorpark.

Conklin calls himself a patriot, a survivalist, a man ready to defend his family with a home arsenal of knives and guns. When police searched his Reseda home after the slaying they found a photograph of Conklin dressed in army fatigues, a camouflage-colored headband and an orange T-shirt with the emblazoned slogan: “I’d Rather Be Killing Communists.”

At age 18 he was convicted of commercial burglary in Kentucky. While on parole, he was convicted of grand theft auto. In 1968, he was sentenced to the California Institution for Men at Chino for residential burglary. While he was assigned to the fire patrol detail at Chino, he escaped.

Pulled Gun on Officer

Three weeks later, as he sat in a Long Beach bar, police made a routine identification check of patrons. Lined up and about to be frisked, Conklin said, he pulled a gun on the officer, who returned with five shots that missed him. This time he wound up in San Quentin.

Released in 1973, Conklin resettled in Los Angeles. He resumed his hobbies of collecting motorcycles, rifles, shotguns, pistols and vintage hunting knives. He bought a pet leopard that he said he eventually had to shoot after it mauled a neighborhood child.

He returned to the vocation he had entered in 1969, working as a grip, a handyman on motion picture and television sets. He married in 1974, but, after six months, he and his wife filed for divorce. He remarried in 1976, and that marriage ended after two years because of irreconcilable differences.

In October, 1979, Conklin married Darlene Cohen, whom he met when he was doing carpentry on her house.

“It was like we had known each other our whole lives,” Conklin said in a dreamy reverie. “There were a lot of people who were jealous of the life Darlene and I had together. We lived, we enjoyed.”

They would often take off on Conklin’s powerful motorcycle, driving 800 miles on a single weekend. “We’d just pick a direction and go,” he said.

With their daughter, Amanda, born in the summer of 1981, the three became a family, first living in Panorama City and eventually moving to Reseda. He doted on his wife and daughter, he said. Whenever he was working on a movie set, he said, he would call home two or three times to check on them.

However, two former neighbors--a husband and wife who spoke on the condition that their names not be used, explaining that they fear Conklin--described the relationship differently.

One neighbor said Darlene told her that Harry often held a gun to Darlene’s head.

“Darlene said to me if she ever told her sister and brother anything about” their private life, “he would kill her,” the neighbor said.

The other neighbor said Conklin boasted that he “kept his wife pregnant and her mouth shut.”

The neighbors and Darlene’s brother said Harry often taunted his wife about the fact that she was Jewish. He would point out to friends that she had a hooknose, they said. One of the neighbors said Harry told him that he hated Jews, and flaunted the four-inch-wide Nazi tattoo as proof.

“She was scared since the day she married him,” said one of the neighbors.

Conklin responded: “I never had occasion to ever get angry with Darlene. There’s no one who can look me in the eye and can say they have ever seen me get angry with my wife.”

Bob Anger, who was Conklin’s boss on the television show “Cover-Up” last summer, recalled Conklin as “a macho sort of man, into bikes and knives, who was a loudmouth.”

When Conklin wasn’t working, he indulged in what was becoming his consuming hobby: survivalism. On at least one occasion he stopped by a North Hollywood store called The Larder, which stocks items ranging from knives and compasses to manuals on the use of submachine guns. It was sometime in 1983 that he went there and bought a step-by-step guide to murder called “The Death Dealer’s Manual,” whose author was listed as Bradley J. Steiner.

Murder Manual ‘a Joke’

Conklin said that, when he returned home with the book, he read it aloud to his wife. “It was strictly a curiosity item. We got a good laugh over it; it was a joke, that’s all.”

But, after Darlene Conklin’s nightgown-clad body was found with two bullets holes--one in her back, the other at the base of her neck--police did not share that view.

They found the 100-page paperback in the headboard of the couple’s bed, and the method described in the manual fit the pattern in which Darlene Conklin was killed.

By 1:15 p.m. on the day Darlene Conklin was killed, her younger sister, Brenda Barry, arrived at the Conklin house in the 17600 block of LeMay Place to baby-sit Amanda while Darlene went to have her hair cut. When Barry walked into the kitchen, she found Darlene’s body lying on the floor in front of an open refrigerator.

Amanda Conklin was shut in her bedroom, the door wedged closed from the outside. She was playing on her bed with a cheap toy kitten stuffed with straw.

Police say they did not suspect Conklin as the murderer until Amanda told a police psychologist one week after the slaying that she had seen her father hit her mother in the kitchen on the morning of the killing. The child, who was 3 years, 1 month old at the time, said she then heard a gun fire.

That, along with evidence that Conklin had bought the murder manual and complained to a family friend that he wanted to “get rid” of his wife, persuaded police to arrest Conklin.

He was taken into custody in late September, five weeks after his wife’s death. When questioned, Conklin denied that he was home when the incident took place. He told police that he had left for work early that morning. Police checked with studio personnel who verified that Conklin had been on location by 6 a.m. However, testimony by a coroner’s examiner at Conklin’s preliminary hearing indicated that the killing could have taken place before Conklin left the house.

‘He Was Sobbing’

Anger says he doesn’t believe that Conklin killed his wife.

On the afternoon of the slaying, Conklin called Anger and told him about Darlene’s death.

“He’s either a great actor or expressing the anguish anyone would feel when his wife gets killed,” Anger said. “He was sobbing; he was full of sorrow. Based on that, I don’t think he killed his wife. His voice conveyed complete surprise. He was completely blown away.”

Conklin dismisses the circumstantial evidence against him.

“The police think I’d leave that book around if I’d followed the instructions?” he asked rhetorically.

“That doesn’t make any sense. You look at any movie about crime these days; you read any cheap paperback, and it lists how to kill someone. If I’m being held because of that book, then you’d have to hold several million other people who read best sellers.”

He contends that his daughter, Amanda, has been coached by zealous prosecutors and by Barry, her maternal aunt, with whom she has been living since his arrest.

Conklin doesn’t deny that his daughter saw the murder.

“I feel that Amanda probably did see something,” he said. “But I don’t think she was sufficiently awake to understand what she saw. I think her mind was in a confused state, and now she’s been tutored about what she thinks she saw.”

Brenda Barry was given temporary custody of Amanda on Oct. 15. Conklin said he wants his daughter back, and, on March 15, when Barry’s custody order expires, he will seek return of her.

“If I have to, I’ll spend every single penny I have to get her back,” he said. “Nobody else is going to care for my daughter and rear her.”

Not allowed to talk to her because of a court order, he said, “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was having to sit in a courtroom looking at her, and not being able to touch her or talk to her,” referring to the witness qualification hearings held in Superior Court last month in Van Nuys.

Conklin said his parents intend to relocate from New Jersey to California to help care for the girl. Because she “has been conditioned into thinking that I killed her mother,” he said, both he and his daughter will seek the help of a therapist.

Unable to raise bail, Conklin remained in jail from the time of his arrest until the district attorney dropped charges.

No physical evidence, not even the weapon, has ever been recovered. There was no apparent motive for the murder, nothing was found missing at the house, the house showed no signs of forced entry and there was no evidence that Darlene Conklin had been sexually molested.

If Harry Conklin didn’t kill Darlene Conklin, who did?

“It could have been someone who went to the wrong house,” Conklin suggested, “or someone reaching out to try to hurt me from my past.” He declined to go into specifics.

Conklin and Darlene’s family members said they miss Darlene. Curiously, her brother, Lewis Cohen, recalled that, the night before the murder, Darlene told him she had a dream that a man had come into the Reseda house and had taken a gun, pointed it to her head, and shot her.

Conklin has heard the story from Cohen. He says he doesn’t know what to make of it. He shakes his head, is silent, and then looks down at his knees.

“As long as whoever did it is out there, I’ll never feel free,” he said.