Redondo Shoot-Out’s 1st Victim: a Mystery Man With a Rap Sheet

Neighbors say the strains of a piano were often heard floating down from the hillside home in Rolling Hills Estates. “Someone who lives there plays beautifully,” a smiling middle-aged woman said, gesturing to the home next door. “Classical and jazz.”

But what people on Harbor Sight Drive didn’t know was that the sweet sounds were mechanical. Their neighbor owned a player piano.

Said one guest who is in on the secret: “You can sit down there and fake it real good.”

Gary Taylor owned that piano.

And, like the piano, much in Taylor’s life was not what it first appeared to be, police say.

Taylor, 52, was shot to death last Tuesday afternoon, apparently by his best friend since high school, Roger Bollinger. Just moments after the killing, police stormed Bollinger’s Redondo Beach condominium and shot him to death in a short, point-blank gunfight.

An officer injured in the shoot-out, Leonard Knott, was moved from Harbor-UCLA Medical Center to Torrance Memorial Medical Center, where he was listed in serious condition Saturday.

Redondo Beach police said they still cannot find a motive for the killing. Although the 52-year-old Bollinger had reportedly been severely depressed, his ex-wife, Margaret, said he had no disagreements with Taylor.

Taylor, initially described by police as a successful businessman, owned a home on “the hill,” as locals call the affluent Palos Verdes Peninsula. Gardeners kept the grounds immaculate. A pool glistened at one side of the home, and several cars filled the driveway on the other. Taylor, who stood 5-foot-11 and weighed 200 pounds, carried a stack of credit cards and a membership in the swank Los Angeles Athletic Club.

But police and court records revealed last week that Taylor had a criminal record and multiple aliases.

It took a routine traffic stop in Palos Verdes Estates a little more than a year ago to reveal that Taylor had another side.

When Palos Verdes Estates patrolman Mike Mitchell pulled Taylor over for an illegal U-turn, he produced a driver’s license from Florida, a police report on the incident says. Taylor “acted very excited and refused to show any additional identification,” the report says.

Mitchell reported that he took Taylor to jail for the illegal turn and that a search there revealed that he was carrying a total of six driver’s licenses. Each was under a different name, but each pictured the same smiling, corpulent face. The names on his credit cards also varied. And Taylor’s identifications showed three different Social Security numbers.

Taylor told police he was an unemployed accountant.

On his wrist he wore a Rolex watch. In his wallet he carried $8,300 in cash.

According to the police report, he told officers that all the names were his. “When I asked him what his birth/legal name was, he stated that he did not remember,” Officer Mitchell wrote in his report.

Pleaded Guilty

Four months later, in January, Taylor pleaded guilty in South Bay Municipal Court to a charge of possessing a fictitious driver’s license. He was placed on two years’ probation and ordered to pay a total of $1,310 in fines and court costs.

A follow-up police report shows that detectives used the identifications to determine that Taylor had an FBI rap sheet, showing an arrest for transporting stolen vehicles. The report did not indicate if Taylor was convicted.

Neighbors said they knew little about Taylor, except that he would keep as many as a dozen cars at his home. One neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous, said that young men drove the cars to the home, where some were refurbished and detailed.

People would come to the winding street, with its sweeping view of the South Bay and the ocean, to buy Taylor’s cars. “They would be selling, negotiating right in the driveway there,” said the neighbor. “He gave the impression to people that he was selling his own cars or relatives’.”

Sold Her a Lemon

One day when Taylor was away from home, a woman called on one of his neighbors and said that Taylor had sold her a lemon.

“We knew something funky was going on,” another neighbor said Friday.

Bollinger’s neighbors had reported earlier in the week that he, too, had been selling used cars off the street in front of his Redondo Beach condominium. Police said the two men appeared to be in business together.

In the same month that he pleaded guilty to the license charge, Taylor was in trouble with the law again, according to South Bay Municipal Court records.

A Southern California Edison investigator came to Taylor’s home and found that the electric meter had been tampered with, according to a sheriff’s report filed with the court. Someone had drilled a hole in the glass meter and inserted a paper clip, causing the meter to give unusually low readings, the report says.

Taylor stole nearly $4,000 in electricity from 1985 until this year, the report says. A misdemeanor charge of theft of utility services was pending when he was killed.

Airline Identification Cards

During the stolen-electricity investigation, deputies searched Taylor’s home and found two USAir employee identification cards. Taylor’s girlfriend, Angela Brighton, claimed that the couple had the cards because Taylor’s daughter worked for the airline, according to a police report. But an airline security representative said the cards were forgeries.

Brighton could not be reached for comment.

There is one final irony in the court files on Taylor: A report from the electric company shows that he used an alias, Al Brighton, when the utility turned on the power at his home. The Southern California Edison records show that Taylor had said that he previously received electric service at several addresses. One of those was 312 Francisca Ave., Roger Bollinger’s Redondo Beach condominium, where Gary Taylor died.