Slaying Charges Against Deputy Dropped : New Tests Fail to Link His Gun to Murders of 3 L.A. Prostitutes

Murder charges were dismissed Monday against Rickey Ross, a veteran Los Angeles County sheriff’s narcotics investigator who had been accused of slaying three South-Central prostitutes with his service handgun.

Prosecutors said original ballistics tests linking Ross to the slayings had been proven wrong.

The reversal appeared to be a major embarrassment for the Los Angeles Police Department, which had arrested Ross after its forensics tests purportedly linked Ross’ handgun to three in a series of unsolved prostitute slayings. Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block had stood together at a press conference in February to announce the startling arrest, which they described as a “devastating” blow to the Sheriff’s Department.

Municipal Judge Elva R. Soper, acting on a prosecution request, formally dismissed the three first-degree murder counts against Ross. He faced the death penalty if convicted. Prosecutors said Ross remains a “suspect.”

“The people hereby move to dismiss the complaint against Rickey Ross,” Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman told the judge. “We so move because the LAPD forensics experts have re-examined the evidence and no longer can be certain” that Ross’ gun fired the shots.

Ross, 40, an 18-year veteran of the department, was not in court when the charges were dismissed. He broke down sobbing and repeatedly said “Praise the Lord!” and “Thank God!” when told of his impending release, according to Don Ingwersen, Ross’ court-appointed investigator.

“Obviously,” Ingwersen said, “he was in a state of shock. He was just emotionally drained.”

Later in the afternoon, Ross was released from Los Angeles County Jail where he had been held for 81 days. He said nothing to a throng of reporters as he left the jail and was driven away in a private automobile to join his wife at an undetermined location.

Since his arrest, Ross has been dismissed from the department. Sheriff’s officials would not respond Monday when asked whether Ross would be reinstated.

Ross, who had built a virtually unblemished record as an undercover narcotics investigator and who was described by friends and colleagues as a highly religious man, had protested his innocence since his arrest.

In the aftermath of his highly publicized arrest, Ross’ acquaintances had been at a loss to explain his seeming transformation from Bible study leader to accused murderer. Some had focused on apparent behavioral changes--dropping out of his Bible class, for example, and breaking off contact with some old friends--as they groped to understand his arrest.

Ross had been stopped in South-Central Los Angeles in the early morning of Feb. 23 on what was described as a routine traffic check. The deputy was seated next to a prostitute and he drove erratically away from the curb as officers approached the car, police said then.

At the time of his arrest, Gates said there was evidence that Ross and the woman were smoking cocaine. No drugs, however, were found in his system.

Hodgman explained Monday that Ross’ fingerprints were found on a Pepsi can that had been used as a crack pipe and was tossed out of one of the car’s windows. No drug charges will be filed against Ross, he said..

Police found Ross’ 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in the trunk of his county-owned undercover car.

The first firearms tests of the gun were performed by four Los Angeles police experts, all of whom said there was a match--a “make”--between the gun confiscated from Ross’ car trunk and the three slugs and a shell casing found at the murder sites of Judith Simpson, 27; Cynthia Walker, 35, and Latanya Johnson, 24.

After the arrest, a Los Angeles police officer expressed total confidence to news reporters that Ross was their man. “We wouldn’t put an active-duty sheriff’s deputy in jail for homicide on an ‘iffy make,’ ” he said.

But Monday, Hodgman said: “I think we can in all honesty say that is not the gun.”

Cmdr. William Booth, the Police Department’s spokesman, said the agency intends to continue to investigate Ross as a possible murder suspect and will continue ballistic testing of the weapon recovered from Ross’ trunk. The LAPD alone was equivocal on the accuracy of its ballistics tests.

“The gun has not been ruled in with 100% certainty,” Booth said, “and it hasn’t been ruled out with any degree of certainty.”

While he would not concede that the LAPD had erred, Booth acknowledged that officials had launched an internal administrative review to determine why the department’s experts had linked Ross’ gun to the murders when examinations by other experts could not.

“We all agree, all of experts agree now . . . that the original conclusions should have been inconclusive,” Booth said.

Subsequent firearms tests by defense expert Charles Morton of Oakland had concluded that the slugs were not fired by Ross’ weapon. Morton had been retained by Ross’ counsel, a routine step in capital cases.

Even as Morton was testing, the prosecutor and co-defense counsel Guy O’Brien agreed to a third firearms examination. They selected Al Biasotti of the California Department of Justice and John Murdock of the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department who, in Hodgman’s words, are “among the best in the West.”

Biasotti and Murdock spent 2 1/2 days last week conducting new ballistics tests. Their conclusion: The three slugs were all fired from the same gun--but not the one found in Ross’ trunk.

“It broke the tie,” Hodgman said.

On Friday afternoon, a meeting was held between prosecutors and co-defense counsel Jay Jaffe, Los Angeles police firearms experts and investigators, where the facts were laid out. Over the weekend, LAPD firearms experts re-conducted their tests and backed off.

‘Never Killed Anyone’

On Saturday, Ross issued his first public statement from his jail cell, declaring: “I have never killed anyone. . . . The gun found in the trunk of the car was a gun purchased by me, registered to me, and used in the performance of my duty as a deputy sheriff for over 15 years. Is it logical that if I were killing people, I would use a gun registered to me?”

Ross said he put the gun in the car trunk after he was issued a new weapon and, after several months, it became water damaged and rusted.

“By LAPD’s own admission,” Ross said, “the gun had to be forced open to be test-fired.”

Ross said he was elsewhere when the killings occurred. “My whereabouts can be documented and testified to by witnesses,” he wrote, but gave no specifics. He did not say what he was doing with the prostitute when stopped Feb. 23.

Explaining why her husband was arrested in the company of a prostitute, Ross’ wife, Sylvia, said Monday: “That’s his job. He works with prostitutes. He works with everybody.”

On Monday, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner and some of his top lieutenants met with Los Angeles police and their ballistics experts. The decision to dismiss the charges, according to one participant in the meeting, was not unanimous.

“But it was agreed that we have no choice,” the participant added.

Hodgman told reporters that Ross was “still a suspect.” After all, he said, Ross was “found in a kill zone with a ‘strawberry’ under suspicious circumstances.

“Even now he’s the only one (suspect), but it now becomes an open investigation.”

He conceded that further investigation “may very well result that we can dismiss him as a suspect.”

But he denied that the arrest was made too hastily.

“No, the arrest was proper,” Hodgman said. “I don’t think everyone moved too quickly at all.”

But, referring to Los Angeles Police Department ballistics, he added, “I think they’re going to re-evaluate their practices.”

Ross’ attorney had stern words on what the dismissal of charges meant.

“I have said in the past that the appearance of guilt and the fact of guilt are two very different things,” Jaffe said, “and what this teaches us is that you can’t rush to judgment on a limited set of facts.

“It’s a good thing that the dismissal is coming now, rather than a year or years down the road. You can just imagine if the defendant is convicted on this type of evidence, not to mention if he was executed. What remedy would he have?”

Prosecutors said all along that the gun was the key evidence against Ross. There was no blood, saliva, semen or other bodily fluids tests linking Ross to any of the victims.

Ross’ arrest came amid a series of unsolved slayings in the area of as many as a dozen “strawberries”--women who trade sex for drugs--since 1985.

“This has been a very sad day for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” a grim-faced Block said at the time, standing beside Gates as the arrest was announced to media.

Block was out of town Monday and not available for comment.

Reaction from some members of the Sheriff’s Department who worked with Ross was one of shock that the LAPD could have made such a key mistake in a case that was so sensitive in terms of interdepartmental relations.

“It’s tough to believe that this has happened,” one department official said. “I said from the beginning that I hoped they had their (act) together on this. It’s obvious they didn’t.”

The sheriff’s official added, however, that he sees no permanent damage to relations between the two departments.

“It just points out that human beings are human beings and mistakes can be made,” he said. “If this was an error, I’m confident it was in good faith. Realistically, as policemen, these things happen from time to time.”

Another senior sheriff’s official, who also requested anonymity, said that the LAPD’s handling of the Ross case from the beginning will make the Sheriff’s Department reluctant to put its full trust in the LAPD in any similar case in the future.

“They should do some internal investigation on this,” the official said. “I think there are 4,000 unanswered questions here. We were led to believe there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in the world that those ballistics matched.

“There will be a feeling that we take enough heat already and that it’s terrible this had to happen from another police department. This is one of our family. Nobody’s perfect, but if you see any of our people accused again, you can bet we will want our own experts in there, too.”

Even the district attorney’s office said it will undertake a review to make sure the same problem does not arise again. Sterling E. Norris, the prosecutor in charge of special trials, said the district attorney’s office needs to consider having “our own experts or contracted experts” to perform firearms tests in the future.

“We’re going to have to have an independent way to verify (firearms) results,” he said.

The ballistics test conducted by Los Angeles police in the Ross case, Norris said, “was an aberration we want to ensure doesn’t happen again.”

Times staff writers Edwin Chen, William Overend and Patt Morrison contributed to this report.