Arrest in Bogus AIDS Prescription Case Surprises Friends of Suspect

It took awhile for some of Hal Speers Rachman’s friends and associates to realize that he was the person accused of calling in a bogus prescription for a patient dying of AIDS in a Santa Monica hospital and then looting the man’s credit and bank accounts.

For one thing, Rachman customarily used Speers as his last name. Another version of his surname was Speers-Rachman. Relatively few of his acquaintances knew him as Rachman.

But more important, friends and former employers reached by The Times in recent days have uniformly expressed surprise that the stout, soft-spoken nurse would have been capable of such an act.

“I never got any complaints about him,” said Catherine Winteringham of Associated Health Professionals Inc. of Culver City, who referred Rachman to hospitals for more than a year. “I respected him as a registered nurse. His performance was adequate and many times above average.”

He had worked for at least three local nursing firms over the past four years and was referred by them to many hospitals and private patients.

“He was always very helpful, generous with his time . . . ,” said a friend who often played racquetball with the 39-year-old Rachman at the Santa Monica Athletic Club. “He seemed level-headed, kind of gracious.”

Rachman, who lived with his wife, Vickie Sue Speers, in a pleasant but not swank apartment house in Venice, near Marina del Rey, was known to friends as a man who liked computers and had several around his house. He was worried about his weight.

He had given up weightlifting recently. But he played a lot of racquetball, and when he seemed to have come into some money in recent days, one of his first acts was to plunk down $300 to become an executive member of the athletic club.

Money, according to police investigators and court records, was a problem for Rachman. He had stopped working for a Radio Shack store in the Marina and gone back to nursing because, he told friends, it brought in more money.

“We understand that he was recently in serious financial straits,” said Ray Cooper, the Santa Monica police detective who has put together the case against Rachman.

He apparently had fallen behind in child support payments. This had been true before.

Los Angeles County court records show that he was $1,525 in arrears in 1982 on an order that he pay $175 a month in child support to a former wife in Texas. At the time he was making about $500 a week in nursing, according to the court record.

Police who arrived at his apartment last Friday were told by his wife that she thought the officers were there on a child support matter.

Rachman is now charged with stealing about $32,000 from the accounts of Edward Lebowitz between May 17, when he attended him as an AIDS patient, and May 23, the day Lebowitz died. Rachman, who has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder, grand theft and forgery, is being held on $250,000 bail pending a preliminary hearing.

One friend, who asked not to be identified, said Rachman often talked about difficult Vietnam War experiences.

“He said he had been in combat, in helicopters, and had dealt with a lot of people who were dying or were very sick,” the friend recalled. “He said he had done some killing in the war himself. I know he had periodically been under psychiatric care.”

For the most part, however, Rachman’s problems were rarely visible on the surface. His employers found him mild-mannered and so did the police officers who arrested him.

When Detective Cooper told him that he was suspected of stealing from Lebowitz’s accounts and of trying to murder him by prescribing an insulin injection in a call to St. John’s Hospital, pretending that he was Lebowitz’s doctor, Rachman replied, according to Cooper: “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about and I didn’t have anything to do with anything like that.”

But he went quietly when he was notified that he was under arrest. And he not only consented in writing to a police search of his home, but also told officers where they could find Lebowitz’s driver license and credit cards--in a small box on a shelf next one of his home computers.