Conviction in 9-Year-Old Murder : Detective Finally Gets His Man

The case was 9 years old and, by most accounts, amounted to a complex tangle of evidence.

On Aug. 25, 1976, two armed intruders entered a Rossmoor home and held a mother and her three children hostage while they ordered her husband to empty the safe at a grocery store he managed.

When the ransom did not materialize, the kidnapers left the children tied up in a van. Then they took the store manager’s wife, Johann Seigman, to a vacant lot in Carson where she was killed execution-style with five bullets to the head.

“It was my first case I ever worked as an investigator,” recalled Stan Kinkade, then an Orange County sheriff’s patrol deputy, whose detective work and determination was vital to the recent first-degree murder conviction of William Gullett, 35, of Bellflower, one of the defendants in the case.

At 40, Kinkade--a 17-year veteran of the sheriff’s office--hardly fits the hard-drinking, chain-smoking image of detectives romanticized in dime novels.

But he gets results, contend his superiors, who recently promoted Kinkade from investigator to sergeant.

Gullett’s sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 12. Ronald L. Ewing, 35, also of Bellflower, Gullett’s alleged accomplice, is expected to be tried next month. Charges against a third man, Jack Bird, 43, of Garden Grove, are pending.

And although Kinkade played down his role in the Gullett case, both he and prosecutor Tony Rackauckas have won praise from superiors, prosecutors and the victim’s family.

During the investigation, Kinkade traveled thousands of miles, often with Bill Grandey, a district attorney’s investigator, and interviewed more than 125 prospective witnesses in a dozen states. He managed to persuade several ex-convicts, including a key witness, to testify on behalf of the prosecution and attempted--although unsuccessfully--to introduce into evidence a pioneering technique of identifying bullets by their casings.

‘Total Devotion to Duty’

“What’s unusual about Stan,” said Kinkade’s supervisor, Lt. Robert Kemmis, “is his total devotion to duty. He’s the type of individual to spend 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week to make sure the job gets done. If someone was going to obtain the evidence, Stan was the one.”

What added to the complexity of the case was that both Gullett and Ewing had been prosecuted for the murder before. A Superior Court judge ruled that a municipal judge who heard the preliminary hearing had erred in binding the men over for trial in 1977 because of insufficient evidence. The case was dismissed but not forgotten.

At first, Kinkade worked on the case for nine months, then department transfers kept him occupied until mid-1983 when the case was again assigned to him. For weeks, he worked with the determination of a mad scientist, testing one theory, then another. Reports, studies and court documents piled up. Information on ballistics, fingerprints and interviews so overwhelmed Kinkade and other investigators, he said, that “it started to consume us.”

No Clue Forgotten

Later, in part to get a positive footing and ease some tension, he would routinely act out what he thought the killers did. “We even knew their personalities.”

No clue was forgotten. With each new clue a new file was begun, necessitating a customized filing system.

Even a small piece of paper with scribbling on it took on new significance. The note was allegedly written by Gullett to Curtis Eddy, who later testified that he and Gullett had planned the kidnaping. Eddy said he backed out just a few hours before the kidnaping occurred because Gullett and Ewing said they would probably have to kill the victims.

The note, which was found in a pocket of one of Gullett’s shirts, put Gullett at Eddy’s residence --although Gullett maintained he was elsewhere, Kinkade said.

“By itself, it’s a small piece of the puzzle. But when taken with all the other evidence, it has a cumulative effect on the case,” Kinkade said. “And I like taking puzzles apart and putting them together.”

Kinkade, who is something of a gun enthusiast, seemed proudest of an experimental procedure that he tried to offer into evidence that apparently identifies bullets by the spent casing, similar to the way that bullets are linked to the barrel they were fired from.

In this case, the murder weapon, believed to be an older, five-shot .38-caliber pistol, was never found. However, a casing, or empty shell, was found in Gullett’s possession.

With ballistics experts, Kinkade tried to prove that a bullet found in the dead woman’s body came from that casing.

He said that marks on bullets, like the microscopic impressions a bullet gets as it travels out of a gun’s barrel at high velocity, can be linked to individual casings.

Kinkade said that with older weapons, cartridges don’t “seat” as tightly in the barrel as they do with newer barrels.

“That meant that some markings on the casing, instead of obliterating when fired, would still be intact,” he said.

“We even made lead and wax casts of bullets for comparison purposes. But it all was inadmissible because the court concluded that there was no great data base to help substantiate that evidence enough to prove that a positive identification can be made,” Kinkade said.