Help Arrived--and Then Left : For police officers, ‘You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’ But a woman is dead, and her family is questioning a police decision.

Just before midnight on Sept. 1, Sharon Massey, a 911 emergency telephone dispatcher, received a call from a woman in West Los Angeles who was screaming hysterically.

For almost two minutes, Massey tried to decipher the pandemonium on the other end of the line, but could only detect, between screams, that the woman was struggling with an assailant.

Less than two minutes into the call, Massey had heard enough to convince her that the woman needed immediate police help. She called out an emergency signal to West Los Angeles police, heard on police car radios and displayed on car computer terminals.

“Unknown trouble. Heard struggling on an open line,” Massey broadcast from her computerized switchboard in a City Hall sub-basement. “Female asking for help. Code 2 High.”

High-Priority Call

The high-priority code was heard by Sgt. Thomas Maeweather and other officers in the parking lot of the West Los Angeles Division, less than a mile from the woman’s apartment on Armacost Avenue. They were about to go home, but instead they responded to the call.

There was no answer when the officers knocked on the door of the woman’s second-floor apartment. A next-door neighbor said he hadn’t heard anything. All was quiet. There were no windows near the door, so they couldn’t look inside.

Maeweather then walked to the back of the two-story building, noticed a second-floor balcony over a parking area and saw a light on in what he assumed was the apartment’s bathroom. He then returned to the other officers.

Convinced that there was no emergency, Maeweather, a 14-year veteran and the senior officer at the scene, decided they should leave without breaking into the apartment.

Just before driving away, Maeweather took a last look at the rear of the apartment and noted that the light had been turned off, indicating that someone was home.

Less than a week later, the brutally stabbed body of Betty Jo Bolton, 44, was discovered by Detective Gary Fullerton. He had been alerted by her boss when she didn’t return to work after the Labor Day weekend.

What emergency operator Massey heard was a homicide in progress--the chilling screams of Betty Jo Bolton being murdered. Her live-in boyfriend, Robert Kenneth Daniels, 36, was arrested a few days later in San Francisco and charged with the murder.

Bolton’s family is enraged over the police decision not to break into the apartment.

“They’re wrong, wrong, wrong,” sobbed Bolton’s sister, Adrianne Norris, outside a West Los Angeles municipal courtroom where Daniels appeared for a preliminary hearing earlier this month. “I can’t believe it.”

Screams Recorded

Moments earlier, she had heard a playback of her sister’s screams for help, which were automatically recorded by the 911 emergency call system. “They could have walked from the police station and saved her,” she cried.

Some Los Angeles police detectives, who talked to a Times reporter about the case, believe the responding officers should have done more than knock.

“Why didn’t they kick in the door?” asked a veteran detective who requested anonymity. “If this is not a major neglect of duty, I’ve never seen one.”

The West Los Angeles-area commander, Capt. Maurice Moore, is angered by such criticism. On the basis of an investigation he ordered after the discovery of Bolton’s body, he concluded that the officers acted properly.

Upon arriving at Bolton’s apartment, Moore said, Officer Jesse James, 31, an eight-year veteran, “knocked for a significant time, but received no answer.” At the same time, he added, James yelled, “Police officer. Did anyone call the police?” There was no response.

Moore said Maeweather observed that “nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. . . . In his mind he had determined that whoever was in the apartment didn’t want to talk to them.”

Moore declined to make public a 17-page internal report on the case.

Norris anguishes over whether her sister was still alive when police arrived and whether quick medical attention could have saved her life.

Police investigators believe that, given the brutality of the knife attack, Bolton died a minute or so after she made the 911 call.

Deputy Medical Examiner Sara K. Reddy, who performed the autopsy on Bolton’s body, is not absolutely sure of the time of Bolton’s death, but believes she died quickly.

Reddy, through a coroner’s spokeswoman, said that in view of the nine stab wounds and other cuts on the body, death could have been “immediate to half an hour, but most likely only a couple minutes.”

Difficult Decision

Maeweather, 41, also is reportedly in anguish over the decision not to break into Bolton’s apartment. He declined to be interviewed.

Moore and his staff underscored that the decision to break down a door in response to a 911 emergency call is a complex one. Each situation is different, they said.

“We’ve all been there,” Fullerton said. “We know what it’s like. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

What would have happened, he reflected, if there had been a lovers’ quarrel and the officers, having broken in, found that the lovers had made up and were in bed? Worse, what if the apartment’s occupant, thinking someone was breaking in, had opened fire on the officers?

“What it comes down to, you just have to use your best judgment,” Fullerton said. “If you’re right, fine. If not, you take the heat.”

Lived Together

Bolton and Daniels had met six months earlier while he was working as a janitor in a high-rise commercial building at Wilshire Boulevard and Bundy Drive, where Bolton was an assistant to building manager John K. Dunbar. About three months later they were living together, a decision that did not sit well with Bolton’s family.

Norris emphasized that the two were vastly different people.

A San Diego native, Bolton held a bachelor’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills, where she graduated in 1983 with a dual major in Afro-American studies and sociology. Her interests ranged from painting to computers.

Daniels, from Louisville, Ky., was a blue-collar worker. He had a limited education and kept to himself. The two had little in common. Still, other factors pulled Bolton into the star-crossed relationship.

According to her family, Bolton had been lonely since a 1974 divorce. Her three children were grown and she saw her marriage prospects as slim. Then she met Daniels.

“She felt sorry for him,” Dunbar said. “He needed a place to live. He was kind of bouncing around from one place to another.”

Need for Attention

Bolton’s best friend, Chini Collins of Atlanta, who met the victim while the two attended Cal State Dominguez Hills, said Bolton was initially attracted to Daniels because “Betty needed the attention. She needed the intimacy.”

Norris saw the two in a kind of “Pygmalion relationship.” Her sister thought she could motivate Daniels toward a better life, Norris said. One of the first things she did, Norris said, was to urge Daniels to enroll at Santa Monica College.

“She thought she could fix him,” Norris said.

But a few months after Daniels moved into the Armacost Avenue apartment, Bolton became disillusioned with him, Collins said in a telephone interview. Collins said Bolton called her about 5:30 p.m. on the day of her death while Daniels was out and declared that her boyfriend “has to go.”

“Chinita, what have I done?” Collins recalled Bolton saying. “What have I gotten myself into now?”

Later that evening, at about 8:30 p.m., Collins called Bolton back and they talked for almost two hours. Collins said that Bolton told her that when she--Bolton--confronted “Kenny,” as she called Daniels, and told him how frustrated she was with their relationship, “he would just cry.”

At about 10 p.m., Collins said, Daniels returned to the apartment; about 20 minutes later their telephone conversation ended.

At 11:40 p.m., 911 emergency telephone operator Massey received the call from Bolton.

“I heard a feminine voice struggling on the phone,” Massey recently recalled. “It sounded like someone was pulling the phone.”

Massey, however, was never sure what was happening to Bolton. She heard only snatches of the victim’s voice between screams. Bolton never yelled that she was being attacked with a weapon.

Massey, 37, a 911 operator for two years, assigned a Code 2 High designation to the call, rather than the highest priority, Code 3. “All unknown troubles are Code 2 High,” she said.

A Code 2 High signal--unlike a Code 3--doesn’t require that a police car’s siren or emergency lights be turned on.

Still, four responding officers quickly arrived at the white stucco apartment complex. Within a few minutes, they had made the determination that no emergency existed and they left.

Reflecting on his investigation, Moore called the decision not to break into Bolton’s apartment “a judgment call. (The officers) made an honest, forthright decision. They didn’t make any mistakes.”

The Bolton murder case speaks volumes about the awesome responsibility of police officers who often face snap life-and-death decisions.

“It gnaws at us all,” Moore said.

THE 911 TRANSCRIPT

A police transcript of part of Bolton’s 911 call:

Bolton: Stop. You’ve got to stop. Please stop. Kenny, you’ve got to stop . . . (garble) . . .

Massey: 911 emergency.

Bolton: Kenny . . . (garble) . . . Look out . . . No . . . (garble) . . . No . . .

Massey: Hello?

Bolton: (Garbled scream) . . . Kenny, you’ve got to stop . . . (garble) . . .

Massey: Hello? What’s going on there?

Bolton: No . . . Kenny, Kenny, stop it. No, this is not right . . . (garble) . . . I tried to help you. I did everything I could . . . No . . . (scream).

Massey: Hello?

Bolton: Please, Kenny, stop. Stop it. Please stop. Stop. Stop. (scream) . . . (garble) . . . Stop. Kenny, Kenny, stop it. Kenny . . . oh . . . oh . . . (scream).

Massey (About 1 minute and 40 seconds into the tape): West L.A. units . . . Unknown trouble. (Gives address). Heard struggling on an open line. Female asking for help. Code 2 High.