Police Have Their Own ‘HITMAN’: Computer File on Killings

Recently, in a tiny Texas jail, a troubled man told police of a robbery and murder he had committed in Los Angeles two or three years before. The confessor could not recall the neighborhood, but he was sure of one thing:

The body, its face riddled with bullets, was thrown in a dumpster next to a bar.

The jailers contacted the Los Angeles Police Department to pass along the sketchy report, expecting little to come of it.

But in Texas, they’d never heard of “HITMAN,” the city’s innovative computer program for cataloguing the 800 or so killings that occur in the city every year.

“We asked HITMAN for all the unsolved murders where the body was left in a dumpster, and we instantly identified a single case that occurred behind a bar, bullets in the face and all,” said Lt. Edward T. Hocking, HITMAN’s creator.

“A couple of years ago, we could have spent days going through unsolved cases and we may never have found the one,” Hocking said. “The killer probably would have walked.”

HITMAN, a $5,000 IBM computer whose program was designed by Hocking and Officer Jeff Willis, is attracting national attention for its ability to process thousands of bits of information to find an obscure detail that might help solve a murder.

First used in the Hollywood Division in 1985, HITMAN is now under scrutiny by police in Tucson, Chicago and Boston, who are considering similar projects.

HITMAN, an acronym for Homicide Information Tracking Management Automation Network, can almost instantly scan reports on 3,800 homicides committed in Los Angeles since 1983, and can be asked 98 different questions about each death.

“It can locate cases by murder weapon used, the color of the getaway car, the nationality of the victim, or the street where it happened,” Willis said. “If there’s a rash of murders involving an Uzi--a 9-millimeter machine gun-type weapon--we can figure it out instantly.”

HITMAN can search for 10 variables at once, electronically tracking cases involving prostitutes, domestic situations, homosexuals or gangs, while at the same time narrowing the list by neighborhood, race, or motives such as revenge, robbery or insurance benefits.

“Killers are strange, but they’re also creatures of habit,” Willis said. “For instance, if you have a victim strangled by a telephone cord, you might wonder if there were others, in some other part of the city.”

Curious about his own example, Willis turned to HITMAN and typed the letters “t-e-l-e,” asking the computer to search its memory for weapons beginning with those four letters. The computer screen went blank for a few seconds, then offered a list of four telephone-cord killings since 1983.

“Surprisingly few, huh?” Willis said, quickly reading over each report on the screen. In each case, a different suspect was sought and the circumstances varied greatly.

“You can see that these homicides weren’t related,” he said. “But they could have been.”

Willis and Hocking said HITMAN’s ability to detect patterns in homicides may prove particularly valuable in cracking serial murders, which can go unnoticed by police if they occur in different areas of the city.

In fact, Hocking said, he created HITMAN on a borrowed, outdated computer in the Hollywood Division after “becoming really frustrated” by a long string of serial murders in 1982 and 1983 that were discovered only belatedly by police.

The first murder occurred in Hollywood when an elderly woman was killed and her house set on fire. Months elapsed before Hocking and other detectives in neighboring police divisions realized that a serial murderer was at work, killing a dozen or more women.

“I had a killing and arson in January and never heard of another one, so I thought it was just a one-time deal,” Hocking said. “Meanwhile, somebody else in another division had one just like it in March that seemed like a single case to him, and so on.

“Through no plan of the suspect, he had hit four different corners where four geographical (police) divisions came together, so we each had only a piece of the picture. Much later, we noticed the pattern.”

Eventually, downtown robbery-homicide detectives took over the case, laboriously researching 36 unsolved homicide cases involving elderly women and arson.

Detective Kirk Mellecker said he and his partner, John (Jigsaw John) St. John, “went back through old Teletypes, tried to pick our own memories and called around trying to jog the memories of detectives throughout the city. Every case had to be hand-researched for similarities.”

Eighteen cases were ultimately linked to the suspect, and 12 of those were declared officially solved. The killer was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

HITMAN, Mellecker said, “would have been a tremendous tool. We use it all the time now, not only for serial murders but individual murders where, for instance, all you have is a name. You can at least plug it into the computer and get some idea of where to look next.”

Detective Russell Kuster, homicide coordinator in the Hollywood Division, said HITMAN’s arrival “was long overdue.”

Wary of New Crimes

He said detectives in Hollywood “are always wary of some new killer showing up” because of the unusual people drawn to the street life on Santa Monica, Sunset and Hollywood boulevards.

The FBI and several other police agencies have already sought HITMAN’s help, sometimes offering only fragments of information, such as a suspect’s first name.

Recently, San Francisco police asked Los Angeles to run down a nickname passed along by local tipsters who said a man in the Bay Area “was wanted for killing someone in Los Angeles,” Detective Robert Kestler said.

Kestler, who handles the requests made to HITMAN, said that using just the nickname, he found the case in less than a minute.

“I provided San Francisco with the suspect’s real name and description, and also the names of the detectives working the case here,” Kestler said. “That’s a heck of a lot more to go on than a street name.”

HITMAN can even find a suspect based upon a range of personal quirks known as “other oddities.” Detectives have entered descriptions that range from “baby face,” to “looks like a caveman,” to “dressed in a Dracula costume.”

Building a Memory

HITMAN’S extensive memory is the work of detectives citywide, who since 1985 have been transferring their traditional written homicide reports into the computer.

Most of the city’s 18 police divisions have already recorded cases dating back to 1983, and plan to begin work on those from 1982. Eventually, Hocking hopes, HITMAN’s memory will include every homicide in the city since 1978. Next, he would like to include rapes.

“This way, if a guy gets out of prison and starts up again using the same MO, we’ll find out about it immediately,” Hocking said.

Hocking said HITMAN requires little training to operate. However, only a handful of people have access to the computer, which is a stand-alone system that cannot be infiltrated by computer hackers.

Security is tight because HITMAN’s memory contains many police secrets about unsolved homicides, particularly trademark clues that could one day lead detectives to the murderer, Willis said.

“In the Night Stalker serial murder case, you had pentagrams and devil worship-type clues that linked them to the suspect, and we still have a number of unsolved murders where bizarre things were done--where sickies left their mark,” Willis said. “You don’t want everybody in the city to know what those tell-tale clues are.”

Some of HITMAN’s biggest fans are detectives who haven’t even had an opportunity to use the high-tech system.

Sherman Oakes, a homicide detective in Newton Division, said he is “still waiting to make a big hit with HITMAN, because I just love the whole idea. But I keep getting cases that are pretty clear-cut.”

Last week, Oakes said, “I got a new case--a dumped body, very little to go on--so maybe this will be the one.”

He said he wishes HITMAN had been operating a few years ago, when he spent months trying to locate the body in a baffling murder case.

Without the body, which was known to have an Italian good luck charm around its neck, the murder was “unbelievably difficult” to prove, Oakes said.

Much later, Oakes learned that a body wearing a good luck charm had been found almost immediately by police in another division. However, a citywide bulletin announcing the discovery had never landed on his desk because not enough copies were made, he said.

“When I finally got the murder solved--and I mean after months of work--a detective who sat 10 feet away from me said, ‘Hey, I got a department bulletin about that body eight months ago.’ ” At that point, Oakes said, “I just about died. That couldn’t happen with HITMAN.”

HITMAN’s success has piqued the interest of several police agencies, including Tucson’s, which sent a group of detectives to Los Angeles in January.

Sgt. Sixto Molina of Tucson’s homicide division said in a telephone interview that he and other officials “really liked what we saw.”

“I’m not a computer expert at all. My field is homicide,” Molina said. “The beauty of HITMAN is that it’s a simple program that I will feel comfortable with.”

Like most homicide detectives, Molina said he relies in large part upon his memory and the memories of other detectives, to “ring a bell or play out a hunch.”

But when a detective retires or moves to another job “he basically takes his memories with him,” Molina said. “Life is getting too complex to rely on memories.”

Deputy Chief Ron Frankle, who backed Hocking’s idea after he saw it working in Hollywood and pushed for its use citywide, said he isn’t surprised that the system is gaining some national attention.

In fact, he said, Hocking will soon be awarded the department’s distinguished service medal, not only for creating HITMAN, but also for a number of other innovations he has developed.

“Ed Hocking is really known as a renaissance man in the field of detective work,” Frankle said.