Slain Woman’s Identity Pulled From a Venice of Another Era

Four months after the gruesome discovery of scattered bones, a concrete death mask and some mud-caked clothing under a bungalow in Venice, police say they have finally identified the mystery woman who was killed there about 14 years ago.

Adrianne Piriano, 30, a heavyset woman who apparently lived in Venice at the time she was stabbed to death, was positively identified after Los Angeles police and coroner’s office specialists painstakingly reconstructed both her remains and the counterculture setting in which she died.

Lt. Ross Moen said police should have a much easier time tracking her killer now that her full name and other details about her life are known. “This is a big breakthrough for us,” he said. “It will be a lot less difficult to backtrack and find relatives.”

Frustrated Police

Until now, the investigation into Piriano’s murder had frustrated police and preyed on the minds of the professionals who have purchased and renovated most of the homes in the 900 block of Nowita Place, a narrow tree-lined walk street leading to the beach.

The area is fairly quiet these days. But in the early 1970s when Piriano moved in with a man named Hercules Butler, who was known for riding around on a wobbly bicycle at all hours of the day and night and for picking up stray people at the beach, the street was filled with flophouses and Venice was something of a haven for drug dealers, fading hippies and bikers.

It was in that environment that Piriano lived and brutally died, according to police, who initially believed that their victim was much older because Piriano, though barely out of her twenties, wore a full set of false teeth and a back brace.

“The mystery always was, ‘Who is the person?’ ” Moen said. “She was somebody’s mother and somebody’s daughter. She had to come from somewhere.”

But where? For weeks Moen’s case moved in fits and starts as police and coroner’s office officials using sophisticated crime lab techniques produced an amazingly accurate composite drawing of Piriano, only to discover that no one knew her full name. They then located Butler, only to discover that he was not in a condition to help them.

A key clue finally emerged this week when a man who adopted one of Piriano’s children put detectives on the trail of court records that listed her name. Police confirmed that they had made a positive identification when fingerprints taken from an old job application matched the partial prints recovered from the shallow concrete grave where Piriano was buried.

“Until you have a positive identification, you can’t go anywhere with a murder investigation,” Moen said. “Until now she was just Jane Doe No. 70.”

Moen said detectives will intensify efforts to locate a suspect. There is also the job of notifying any relatives that can be found and ensuring that Piriano receives a proper burial.

While the Piriano case is just one of 15 that Pacific Division homicide detectives tackled in 1987, Moen said it easily stands out as the strangest and most challenging, requiring considerable manpower and ingenuity.

It all started Dec. 19 with the discovery made by a contractor who was strengthening the foundation of the house belonging to a young couple, Randall and Elizabeth Johnson, both of whom are attorneys. That afternoon, he walked in on the couple as they were entertaining her parents and suggested that Randall Johnson follow him outside.

As they reached the back yard, Randall Johnson saw a long bone in the dirt. “When I looked at the bone, I had the same reaction he had,” he said. “It looked like a human thigh bone. But in a situation like that you can never be sure, so I held it up to my leg and it was the right size.”

Detective David R. Straky, a homicide investigator who was one of the first policemen on the scene, recalled that other bones came into view each time someone overturned a shovelful of dirt. Police stopped digging and called in a coroner’s office team that specializes in reconstructing remains.

Along with coroner’s officials, Detectives Robert Howe and Robert Ockey spent two days on their hands and knees, pushing the remaining dirt aside with spoons and paint brushes as they went about the delicate task of finding bone fragments.

On day 2, they discovered that cement had been poured on the body when it was buried in the shallow grave, hardening into an impression of much of the victim, including some of her fingerprints.

‘Good Reverse Image’

“What we had was a very good reverse image of her face,” Straky said.

The investigation proceeded quickly at first. A weathered blue-and-green L&M; cigarette pack found at the site turned out to be a test package that the company had distributed only in 1974 and 1975. Examining property records from that period, police also determined that the house had belonged then to a Hercules Butler.

By late January, detectives had located a relative of Butler’s who said the composite drawing taken from the death mask looked like a woman named “Adrian” who had lived at the house for a period of time. In bulletins, police described Butler as a 40-year-old black man who “frequented the Venice Beach area, usually riding a bicycle,” and made his home available as a crash pad for people he met at the beach.

The police bulletin also described what police knew about their victim by that time: She was a heavyset white woman with “full dentures,” a smoker and someone who “favored wearing plaid flannel men’s shirts and denim pants;” she had two sons who had been put in foster homes; she may have worked in real estate or she may have been on welfare.

Police soon managed to track down Butler but found they could get no answers from him. Now 56, he was living in a convalescent home, paralyzed and severely brain damaged after falling onto his head from a third-story window.

“We really wanted to sit down and have a long talk with him,” Straky said. “But he was in no shape.”

What police do know of Butler has mostly come from neighbors who lived in the area at the time. Several remembered him well for his boisterous conduct and bicycle rides through the area at all hours of the day and night.

“He was a character,” said Jim Conway, who moved into the neighborhood shortly after Piriano’s death. “He looked like a kind of a wasted, sweaty Chuck Berry, with marcelled hair, a thin face and real interesting eyes.”

“He always reminded me of a transplanted mountain person,” said Ray L. Crenna, who had lived on the street since the 1960s.

Crenna and Conway have no memory of Piriano. But both men noted that the neighborhood was a vastly different place at the time of the murder.

Many of the homes were in disrepair and occupied by transients, they said, and the area was quite dangerous. Although Venice still attracts more than its share of drifters, derelicts and bizarre crimes, all of those were far more pervasive then.

“It still had remnants of the counterculture and still had the strong presence of outlaw types,” recalled Tom Moran, a local historian. “There were bikers and that sort of thing. . . . It permeated everything.”

The Johnsons were aware of the area’s past when they purchased the home in 1985. Within weeks of moving in they discovered several “stash holes” that had apparently been used to hide contraband, Randall Johnson said, and uncovered a kind of a motorcycle graveyard when they started to clear out the dense foliage that covered their back yard.

Around the time of the murder, police estimate, as many as 80 people passed through the house at 918 Nowita Place for various lengths of time. Finding it nearly impossible to locate those occasional visitors, police made little progress in February and March.

What they needed was a break, something more solid than the tips they were receiving from psychics and private investigators. Early this month, they got it. A woman, a former neighbor who had seen a news report showing the composite drawing of Piriano, brought in a photograph.

Like other sources, she told police that she did not know anything more than the woman’s first name. But it did not matter. The picture was nearly identical to the drawing. And when it appeared in newspapers and on television shortly afterward, it was the bait that drew in the biggest fish to date.

At 9 a.m. Monday, a man called police and said he was fairly certain that the woman was the person who had put her two young children up for adoption, one of whom was his. With the name of the child in hand, police obtained a court order to examine the adoption records.

‘Looking for More Details’

From there it was simply a case of verifying what they already knew. “We were positive it was her,” Moen said. “Now we’re just looking for more details.”

By finding out more about Piriano, Moen said, investigators may be able to find out more about how she died. The investigation now will go ahead full tilt, he said.

The Johnsons, meanwhile, who were surrounded by police and the probing lenses of television cameras when the bones were discovered, are hoping that their lives will return to normal now that a major part of the mystery is solved.

Randall Johnson said he still thinks about Piriano quite a bit. On the day after the bones were uncovered, he took his infant son to church and said a few words for her.

“I’m not a strongly religious person,” Johnson said. “But I wanted to offer a prayer for the woman. I imagined that she had never gotten one.”