LAPD Asks State to File Murder Charges in Disappearance of 4

Los Angeles police have taken the unusual step of asking the state attorney general to file multiple murder charges in the 1982 disappearance of a San Fernando Valley family--charges that the district attorney’s office has refused to file.

Police are asking state prosecutors to charge former Reseda auto dealer Harvey Rader with murdering Northridge residents Sol Salomon, his wife and two children. Salomon was an Israeli immigrant who told friends he had invested in Rader’s car business, while running a business of his own refilling fire extinguishers.

“We submitted the case to (Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira) Reiner’s office and they rejected it,” said Detective Larry Bird, chief investigator on the Salomon case. “Now we’ve submitted it to the attorney general’s office. They’re reviewing it.”

Bird said the move to ask state prosecutors to enter the case was “approved by our (Police Department) brass.”

Duane Peterson, press secretary to California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, acknowledged, “We are looking at the case to see if there are any actions appropriate to take. Beyond that I’m not willing to comment.”

A call to Reiner was referred to one of his top aides, Assistant Dist. Atty. Curt Livesay, who said he believed there was clearly not enough evidence to file charges and asserted he would be “shocked” if the attorney’s general office concluded otherwise.

The timing of the Police Department’s push to get Rader charged in the 6-year-old case is tied to his expected release Friday from a federal prison in Phoenix.

Rader, a British subject, has been serving a sentence for attempting to secure a U.S. passport in a phony name. Police expect him to be deported when he is released.

Rader has steadfastly proclaimed his innocence in the disappearance of Salomon, his wife, Elaine, and their two children, Michalle, 15, and Mitchell, 9.

He was arrested in the case in 1983 after his cousin, Ashley Paulle, made a series of statements to authorities accusing Rader of the murders and implicating himself as Rader’s aide.

Paulle reportedly told police that Rader, who has a long criminal record in England, shot Sol Salomon, beat to death Elaine, pounded Mitchell to death with a baseball bat, strangled Michalle, then buried their bodies in a remote area of northern Los Angeles County.

Their bodies have never been found.

Paulle also accused Rader and implicated himself in the 1982 disappearances and presumed murders of Peter and Joan Davis, British subjects living in Granada Hills. Peter Davis was a used car and antique dealer and, according to a law enforcement source, a dealer in stolen art.

Their bodies also have never been found.

Although the district attorney’s office initially gave Paulle immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony against Rader, it later revoked the immunity and prosecuted him for the presumed murders. Courts threw out the case, declaring that the district attorney’s office improperly revoked the immunity. Paulle returned to Britain, where he works as a taxi driver.

The district attorney’s office never charged Rader, saying it lacked evidence.

Bird, the Los Angeles police detective, said Tuesday that police subsequently gathered substantial “additional evidence” against Rader--he would not say what the new evidence was--and presented it to the district attorney’s office last month.

Reiner’s second-in-command, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti, said “the evidence simply will not permit a jury or court to find him guilty. . . . We cannot ethically proceed with a prosecution that we know will end in an acquittal.”

Garcetti said, however, that his office would prosecute if it had a “guarantee” that Paulle, who cannot be compelled to come to this country and testify against Rader, would do so.

But a prominent British lawyer retained by a Salomon relative to determine if there was sufficient evidence to mount a rare private prosecution in England, said he cannot understand that.

The lawyer, Christopher Murray, a partner in the London law firm of Kingsley Napley, said: “We took the view that there was sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution in the absence of Paulle. We could not understand why those proceedings had not been brought in the States and (concluded) that obviously the proper place for a prosecution was in the States. . . . The witnesses were there and the crimes were committed there.”

Rader’s attorney, Tom G. Kontos, did not return phone calls to his office seeking comment.