Even Some of the Bad Guys Will Miss Him

Sitting in the lounge of Reuben’s restaurant, John McClain looks more like one of the courthouse lawyer crowd surrounding him than a guy who first became a cop during the heyday of “Dragnet.”

His suit looks expensive, he drinks Grand Marnier. The only thing unfashionable about him are the Pall-Mall nonfilters he puffs for the next seven hours on this, the last night of his 30-year career with the Santa Ana Police Department.

Can this be the guy who solved all but one of his murder cases before turning in his badge last week? The detective who wooed a confession out of a killer who ate his victim’s heart? An investigator who gets thank-you’s and Christmas cards from burglars and murderers he has busted?

You bet, say his fans, including prosecutors and judges, criminal defense attorneys and his barber of 15 years, and many others who dropped by the bar to say farewell. One fan, a free-lance writer, hopes to feature McClain in a detective magazine.

“If we have a half-dozen outstanding homicide police detectives in this county, he is absolutely one of them,” said James G. Enright, Orange County’s chief deputy district attorney.

But with his 30 years on the force, McClain, 53, is eligible for a pension equal to 75% of his salary. He plans to take some time to decompress, then pursue a new career with the skills of his old profession: consulting for law firms that specializes in defending cops.

Says Enright: “He will be missed.”

McClain grew up in a succession of homes in Southern California, the result of his parents’ divorces and remarriages. He sometimes loses count of them all. Football offered him a sense of belonging and he played on scholarships for both Riverside City College and San Diego State. A knee injury (his third) ended his college football career.

He joined the Army and became a military policeman, serving 1 1/2 years in Korea. He finished his 3-year tour at Ft. Lewis, Wash.

In 1959, McClain decided while reading a magazine that he would become a cop, a story he tells with his trademark dry humor. The magazine combined scantily dressed women and “articles like, ‘I Fought My Way Out of a Tribe of Blood-Thirsty Pygmies in the South African Jungle,’ ” McClain said. “High adventure stuff.”

“I was lying around in the barracks . . . wondering what I was going to do next, and picked up this magazine. There was a page full of things for men interested in high adventure, including job openings for police officers in Santa Ana.”

He bought a ’52 yellow and black Mercury and headed south. The car broke down along the way, so he rolled it off a cliff and hitchhiked the rest of the way. He joined the Santa Ana police force that month and married a few years later. He has a daughter, 28, and a son, 27, from that marriage, which ended in divorce. He has since remarried.

In 1964 McClain left patrol for the investigations bureau, where he handled a variety of crimes. “Resorting,” a now defunct city law, was one of them. Men and women who stole off to have sex out of wedlock in motels were guilty of “resorting,” said McClain, who mused that he always felt sheepish arresting someone “for resorting to something we were all interested in doing.”

At both solving a crime and finding the bad guy, McClain was gifted, former partners and co-workers said.

In those pre-Miranda rights days, he said, it was much easier to get a burglar to confess. But former partners and colleagues say McClain also made his own luck because of his way with people. They say he is able to size them up, figure out how to appeal to them, then say just the right thing to get them to talk.

There was the case of Bob, a member of a gang suspected of commiting a rash of burglaries 25 years ago, including a break-in at the presidential campaign headquarters of Barry Goldwater.

Unlike most burglars, Bob did not drink or take drugs. He just got in with the wrong crowd. When Bob was captured in Florida, McClain flew back to bring his prisoner home for trial. The jailers there barely provided Bob with food and water and, in fact, treated him roughly. McClain fed Bob, then gave him what he calls “The Program.”

The shackles could be removed and Bob could walk to the car with dignity if he agreed to walk one step ahead and one step to the left of McClain. “That way,” McClain recalled telling him, “everybody won’t be staring at you like a dog, and more importantly they won’t be staring at me. Now, if you pull something funny, it’s not going to be like TV where I chase you up and down escalators. I’ll just have to shoot you dead. OK, Bob?”

Bob nodded. They got in the car and McClain told Bob he wanted him to tell the truth, to unburden himself of the burglaries by telling him all about them, every one of them.

With a heavy sigh, Bob confided that, yes, he had given it deep thought in his jail cell and he wanted to tell the truth--about all three burglaries. McClain then proceeded to explain the “Posse Comma Tosse” law. He told Bob that if he revealed the whole truth about the number of break-ins, McClain would be able to take him to California for trial. Otherwise, McClain would have to invoke the nonexistent “Posse Comma Tosse” law and leave Bob to the inhospitable jailers in Florida.

That’s when Bob admitted his math was a little off--there were actually four dozen burglaries in which he had participated. Then he took notebook and pencil and wrote down every one of them and included the where and when and how they were accomplished.

Twenty-five years later--and one day before McClain’s retirement--Bob (who served several years in prison for the crimes) showed up at police headquarters. He had read about McClain’s retirement and wanted to wish him well, to tell him he was making a clean living installing car stereos, to thank him for turning his life around.

“He said he wanted to thank me for treating him like a man when I could have treated him like a dog,” McClain said, still marveling at the whole thing.

“That is a classic McClain story,” said Jay Mosely, a deputy district attorney who has known McClain for 24 years.

In 1965, McClain moved to crimes against persons, a detective bureau that investigated murders, rapes, armed robberies and other assaults. These, he said, were “real crimes, crimes that everybody just knows are wrong. You can’t undo the fact that someone was killed, but the work itself was great.”

For the next 10 years, McClain developed a reputation for being “one of the young, hard-working hotshot detectives,” Enright recalled. Of the 37 murder cases he was assigned, McClain solved all but one. And in that case, the only witness to the crime--the victim--died after refusing to identify his assailant.

Former partner Larry J. Cornelison, now resident agent in charge of the Santa Ana office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, tells the story of the pair’s investigation into a grisly hatchet slaying of a service station attendant.

There were few leads until a man called detectives to report that he had spent the night in jail with a man who bragged of the killing, a man who wore what turned out to be the brand new but blood-spattered denim jacket of the victim. McClain and Cornelison traced the jacket to a drifter named Steve Hurd and arrested him.

Hurd insisted he was someone else, that he had stolen the jacket from the real Hurd. As they sat across the table from Hurd, McClain and Cornelison gave the guy the two-punch. Cornelison preached of the immorality of stealing the jacket. McClain, who had been nodding sympathetically as Hurd spoke, all of a sudden slammed his hand down on the table and said, “You took the most important thing to this guy, you took his life!”

Hurd hung his head in his hands and tearfully confessed to his role in the hatchet killing--plus one more murder.

“He was very charitable at this point and he said, ‘Well, now that I’m telling you this I might as well tell you about the other one,” McClain recalled. “And we said, ‘Uh, sure.’ ”

It turned out that the suspect had been involved in the brutal slaying of a schoolteacher whose heart had been removed by Hurd and his fellow Satan-worshipers and consumed by them.

Hurd was convicted of the crimes and is still in prison.

McClain “just knows what to say at the perfect time,” Deputy D.A. Mosely said.

The veteran detective-sergeant’s career almost ended eight months ago when then-Chief Clyde Cronkite gave him four days’ notice that he was being transferred from the detective bureau to patrol.

“They picked the wrong guy to mess with,” said Don Blankenship, president of the Police Benevolent Assn. “Guys were figuring, if they would do this to this guy, it could happen to anybody.”

Charging that his transfer and that of several others was punishment for their roles as union wage negotiators, McClain won a Superior Court restraining order temporarily blocking the transfer. A few weeks later, Cronkite quit and new Chief Paul Walters reinstated McClain and others.

McClain said he decided five years ago to quit police work as soon as he reached the age when his retirement pension was at its highest. That was Aug. 8, last Tuesday.

“You’re almost crazy not to leave when you reach this point so you can go work somewhere else. At 75% of my salary? And besides, I think 30 years is enough at this. There’s more to life than this.”

McClain was remarried nearly 9 years ago to Bonnie, real estate broker and herself a former Santa Ana police officer and the city’s first woman sergeant.

Besides pursuing a job as a consultant to law firms that specialize in defending cops, McClain is busying himself making a blackjack table for a small retirement party he is throwing himself this weekend.

“I got a little weepy when I turned in the badge,” he said, “but I have no regrets. It was a good job.”