Pocket-Sized Crime Story Told in Shaft

Officer Luis de Leon spent much of the weekend sifting through the dogeared, laminated odds and ends of people’s lives, painstakingly recording the contents of 125 wallets found behind a men’s room wall in a Los Angeles department store.

Construction workers doing remodeling work in a restroom of the May Co. on Wilshire Boulevard in the Fairfax area found the collection of cashless wallets last week, piled at the bottom of a ventilation shaft. They were delivered, in two trash bags, to a nearby Los Angeles police station Friday by a store security manager.

“It’s just kind of strange how they all wound up in the same spot,” De Leon said, speculating that the shaft had become a favorite dumping ground of a thief or a team of thieves.

By Sunday evening, after 20 hours of work, De Leon had only been able to match 10 of the wallets with crime reports. About 75 wallets contained IDs, credit cards and personal effects, the rest had been stripped of any clues to ownership.

Judging from driver’s licenses, the victims were primarily elderly women. One police report had been filed late last year by a woman robbed near the Beverly Center. Another was filed in 1986 by a woman whose purse was snatched near the May Co. A third woman had been mugged by a boy on a bicycle near the store.

“It’s kind of sad,” De Leon said as he looked over four boxes of manila envelopes stuffed with the small essentials of daily life, credit cards and driver’s licenses.

Leather, cloth, simple and ornate, the wallets revealed varied tastes and backgrounds. One woman belonged to the county art museum, another carried with her a recipe for a lentil dish. There were raffle tickets from a Filipino women’s club, food stamp cards, the passport of a Chinese immigrant, and a coupon good for 12 Eskimo yogurts with topping. Only one had been used.