His Guilt Goes Unfulfilled : Confessed ‘Killer’ Remembers Skid Row Beating, but Police Can’t Find Evidence of Crime

Gary Hennig has a confession to make: On a drunken night on Skid Row, eight years ago, he walked out of a bar at closing time and killed a man.

He describes it all vividly: Two men followed him toward his hotel. They tracked him into a tiny parking lot and tried to rob him. In the fight that broke out, one man ran. He beat the other man against the pavement until the body was limp and bloodied. He checked vainly for a pulse and threw the body in a trash dumpster.

Now, years after he quietly skipped town, Hennig has come forward, in a calm and rational voice, offering to resolve the case. Los Angeles police, who are investigating his story, say they are certain he is sincere.

The trouble is, there is not really a case to resolve. No body was ever found. No disappearance was ever reported. Investigators are now looking for a crime to fit their suspect, a backward task that has gone nowhere.

In the futile search for witnesses and evidence, police have found nothing.

“We’ve done all the obvious things,” said Detective John Dunkin, who has handled the case for a year. “We’ve checked the missing-person reports . . . we’ve called the coroner’s office . . . we’ve checked with various trash-disposal companies for bodies discovered in dumps during that period of time.

“We keep very detailed records on all of our unsolved homicides. There’s just nothing.”

Police say Hennig, 43, does not fit the mold of a phony confessor. Confined now to a Massachusetts state prison, where he is serving a life sentence for another killing, Hennig has told his story for more than a year in unwavering detail. He has also told authorities he is dying of an illness he declines to disclose.

His one hope, he says, is to get the killing off his conscience. He would like to prove it all happened and have someone perform a funeral for the victim, an unknown Latino man he describes as

just 18 or 20 years old.

“Gentlemen, I am begging for you to . . . clear this whole thing up and thus perhaps the young man who fell victim to me can at last be laid to rest,” Hennig wrote in one of several letters to Los Angeles police. “I fully realize that I could possibly be facing a sentence of death if I am convicted by a jury of the crime. However, this is not at all my concern.”

In his letters and in a telephone interview, Hennig has laid out a compelling story of the crime. On the night it happened, Hennig and a friend, his roommate at the time, were drinking at a downtown bar when a bartender warned them they might be in for trouble.

Two other men were huddled in the bar, one 6 feet tall or more and a second man who was perhaps 5-foot-7 and 120 or 130 pounds, Hennig recalled.

“The bartender came over and pointed these two guys out to me,” Hennig said. “He told me he overheard a conversation they were having, and they were looking for somebody to rob.”

Two Men Follow

A short while later, his roommate left the bar and returned alone to the Russ Hotel, where they were staying, Hennig said. Hennig left at closing time. The two men followed him south on Wall Street to a parking lot behind the hotel, just south of 5th Street and across from an LAPD substation.

“I just stepped into the parking lot and moved to the back of the parking lot to see if they were really following me,” Hennig recalled. “It turned out they were. I backed myself up against an automobile. I asked what they wanted, and they told me they wanted my money. I told them there was no way they were getting it.”

They threatened him and he knocked down the taller man by striking him in the groin, Hennig said. That man got up and ran, he said. “And I just went crazy on this other kid,” Hennig said. “He wound up pulling a knife on me and I just went right at him, wound up beating him to death.”

Hennig, who describes himself as 5-foot-6 and trained in martial arts, is accurate with his descriptions of Skid Row names and places, even though he was in jail in Massachusetts shortly before and shortly after the purported 1980 visit to Los Angeles, police said.

“There’s no doubt in my mind he was here,” Dunkin said. “He’s not a mental case. He truly believes he beat some guy to death.”

Police speculate, however, that perhaps there was no murder. They theorize that the beaten man lived but Hennig was too keyed up to tell whether the man had a pulse.

“We’re talking about a guy who’s been in a fight for his life,” Dunkin said of Hennig. “His own pulse is racing and he’s checking someone else’s pulse. I’m not sure how much credence to put into it.”

If so, it is unlikely a would-be robber would have reported the beating to police, the detective said.

But Hennig said the beating was especially brutal, lasting 10 or 15 minutes. “Even if he wasn’t dead at the time, where I placed him in the dumpster and the condition that body was in . . . I really doubt he could have gotten out,” he said. “The whole back of his head was bashed wide open.”

Although he had “four or five” beers, Hennig discounts the possibility he was too excited or drunk to detect a pulse beat. His own scenario is that the victim was an illegal alien, a fact that would help explain why his disappearance was never reported.

Roommate a Witness

Roommate a Witness

The key to the case may be to find his former roommate, Hennig said. As the beating took place, his roommate was on an upper floor of the hotel, looking down at the partially lighted parking lot, according to Hennig.

“He witnessed the whole thing,” he said.

Hennig cannot recall the roommate’s name, however. He was a drifter like Hennig, on the run from personal problems. Hennig would know the name if he saw it, he said.

Hennig has directed police to places where he and the roommate hung out together during the nearly two months Hennig says he was in Los Angeles. For a while, they worked together at King Labor, a Skid Row employment agency. Hennig told investigators of a foreman there, a man named Nick Freedman, who might remember the roommate.

But Harold Veo, owner of King Labor, told police that Freedman is gone, whereabouts unknown. Veo, who said he hires about 70 men at a time, has no memory at all of Hennig or his roommate. Neither, it seems, does anyone else on Skid Row.

“All records--the work records where he was employed, the hotel records where he was staying--have all been destroyed,” detective Dunkin said.

Hennig, who talked of his life as a troubled succession of orphanages and prison cells, acknowledges his own capacity for violence. When he was 5 his mother died, and afterward his violent father turned most of his 12 brothers and sisters over to orphanages and foster homes, he said.

He was 23 and living in a poor section of south Boston when he first killed a man, a crime that drew him a second-degree murder conviction in 1968, Hennig said. In that case, the victim, a man about 65, had been molesting a 15-year-old boy, Hennig said. After warning him several times, Hennig said, “I invited the guy over to my apartment to talk. I wound up stabbing him to death.”

Hennig said--and the Los Angeles detectives confirmed--that he escaped prison during a 72-hour furlough for good behavior in 1979, traveling to Texas and later California. He ended up in Los Angeles because that’s where a car was heading when he hitched a ride out of Tennessee. “I was just taking a free ride across the country,” he said.

Fearful of Revenge

Ultimately, Hennig said, he left Los Angeles a few weeks after the Skid Row killing, fearful that the victim’s partner would exact revenge. He surrendered to Massachusetts authorities later that year, he said.

Although he expresses no remorse over the Massachusetts slaying--”I feel justified,” he said--he talks differently of the one in Los Angeles. He got the knife away from the assailant long before he beat him to death, Hennig said.

He said he threw the knife over a fence--another piece of evidence that has disappeared.

“Thinking about it over the years, once I got that knife away from him, it was no longer a life-or-death situation,” Hennig said. “I used tactics on him that were really unnecessary.

“I dream about it. If anybody remembers that going down, I wish they’d come forward. That’s all I want.”