Murder Investigation : Clues Are Faint, Few in 23-Year-Old Mystery

On a quiet afternoon in late March, Sheriff’s Lt. Gary Vance was getting ready to go home when he got the call: A partially buried skeleton had been discovered in the crawl space beneath a house in Baldwin Park.

Within minutes, Vance was on his way to one of the strangest cases of his career.

At the scene, detectives found a skeleton clothed in a shirt, denim jeans and tennis shoes. Only a sneaker-shod foot bone protruded from the sandy soil. The skeleton had been discovered earlier in the day by a workman who was cleaning up after helping refurbish the house.

Within hours, detectives--through interviews with neighbors, a check of local police and dental records and a forensic anthropologist’s preliminary examination of the skeleton--identified the remains as those of 14-year-old James David Gilmore, whose family once lived in the house and reported his disappearance 23 years ago.

Vance, who heads a 13-member sheriff’s homicide team, immediately designated the case a possible homicide on a simple theory: Dead people can’t bury themselves.

But after six weeks and hundreds of hours of investigation, the case remains unsolved. Investigators have so little evidence, Vance said, that even the cause of death is being kept a secret so it can be used as a polygraph question.

“I’ve worked a lot of assignments,” said Vance, a 17-year veteran of the department. “Rarely do we get one this old. This is very different because it was 23 years ago as opposed to last Saturday. Unlike most cases, we don’t have a whole lot of physical evidence to work with. No fingerprints or anything like that. So we’ve got to find out everything we can about the victim and his last movements.”

The obstacles are substantial.

The policeman who handled the original missing-person investigation for the Baldwin Park Police Department is dead and his notes on the case are gone.

Investigators said a potential key witness, James’ older half-sister Linda, was killed in San Francisco in 1979. Her husband was subsequently convicted of the crime, investigators said. Other witnesses, including acquaintances and playmates of the dead boy, have left the area. And surviving family members, their memories perhaps clouded by the passage of time, have given conflicting accounts, Vance said.

Longtime residents said the working-class neighborhood around the Gilmores’ former residence--a 1920s-vintage house in the 12700 block of Bess Avenue in Baldwin Park--has changed since James disappeared. At that time, the area was dotted with truck farms and horse barns.

Today, the rural flavor is gone. The smell and roar of traffic from the nearby San Gabriel River Freeway (Interstate 605) fill the air, and broken beer bottles litter the sidewalks.

James’ mother, Donna Jean Gilmore, has told investigators that on the night her son disappeared, Jan. 7, 1962, she went to visit friends about 7:30 p.m., leaving James to watch television with Linda and his brother, Wayne, then 13. Some time later, Donna Gilmore told investigators, there was a knock at the door. She said James got dressed and told his siblings he had to go out. He was never seen alive again.

Donna Gilmore, who refused to be interviewed for this story, was separated from her husband at the time. She has since been divorced and has moved to San Diego. In an interview last month, she told The Times that she thinks she reported James missing the next day. “You’ve got to remember,” she said in that interview, “it’s been a long time.” She also said James had never been in serious trouble and that he had been expected to return.

Investigators, however, said Donna Gilmore told them recently that she waited three days to report James missing.

A Different Version

Wayne Gilmore, now 36 and living in Azusa, tells a different story.

“If I remember correctly,” he said in an interview, “my sister wasn’t home that night, just me and him (James). He was already dressed. He had been going in and out of the house all night because he had a new puppy he was taking care of in the barn. He went out the last time and didn’t come back. I went out about 9:30 or 10 p.m. and shut off the lights in the barn. It was a quiet night 23 years ago.”

Wayne Gilmore, who, investigators said, passed a polygraph test last week, said that his brother did not get along with him or anyone else in the family. He said that James was the neighborhood bully who terrorized younger children and hung around with older, tougher boys.

“He used to beat me up just to keep in practice,” Wayne Gilmore said. “There was a feeling of relief when he wasn’t around.”

Mike Whitehead, a boyhood friend of Wayne Gilmore who lived across the street, said, “Jimmie was a pain in the butt most of the time. He was the Eddie Haskell of the neighborhood.”

Afraid of the Dark

Wayne Gilmore said that despite his brother’s behavior, James was afraid of the dark and was the only Gilmore child who had not run away. “My mother was asleep most of the day and worked at night, and the kids had more or less free rein,” Wayne Gilmore said. “We took off when we wanted and we came back when we wanted. Jimmie stuck pretty close to home, especially at night.

“People who knew him well thought he was dead. People thought someone would do him under and even five and six years later, people would ask me what I thought. I thought about him a lot in the earlier years. I searched some old trunks in the barn for his body. Always, in the back of my mind, I thought that one of these days he would be back. He would pop up somewhere. I didn’t really figure he’d pop up under the house.”

Neighbors and family members said Donna Gilmore and her former husband, also named James, often argued and more than once fired guns at each other.

“The police were called to the house frequently,” Wayne Gilmore said. “When we said our name was Gilmore, they didn’t even ask the address. It wasn’t no ‘Leave It to Beaver’ type home. It was a madhouse. There were four or five shooting (incidents).”

Points to Puzzle

Among the questions in the case that continue to puzzle him, Vance said, is why, if the body was buried only a foot deep, no one smelled the odor of decomposing flesh.

Vance said, however, it is possible that no one noticed the smell because the body was buried in a ventilated crawl space and the yard contained the stench of chickens and other animals.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s Department, which is handling the case at the request of the Baldwin Park Police Deparment, is continuing its investigation. Vance said the boy’s father, who now lives in the Mojave Desert area, has been interviewed, and Vance also plans to talk with James’ older half-brother, Richard Gilmore, who lives in the San Diego area. Reportedly, neither Richard Gilmore nor the father was at home that night.

Unlike most of the 350 or so homicide investigations conducted by the Sheriff’s Department each year, in which the murderers’ identities already are known or easily determined, Vance said, this case is a true mystery. But he expects to solve the case at some point, even if there is not sufficient evidence to prosecute.

“I’ve got a good feeling about this case,’ said the burly, 44-year-old detective. “Everybody loves a mystery and somebody out there is going to give us something. Someone we talked to is going to remember something.”