A Search for Pair of Mystery Witnesses : Killings: The two may have unwittingly helped suspected killers on their way to bury the victims near the Salton Sea.

At first, the disappearance of flashy, 300-pound Kenneth Masters and his longtime employee, James Hetsler, seemed no cause for alarm.

Every month or two, Masters would leave his home in Bell, a small city at the southeastern edge of Los Angeles, and become a high-roller in Las Vegas. He wore a gaudy gold pendant--rumored to be worth $10,000--and seven or eight gold rings. He often bet $40 a turn at blackjack, and he kept as much as $50,000 hidden in his big green 1972 Ford, neighbor Robert Beman recalled.

Because he had emphysema and a bad heart, Masters always took Hetsler along to act as his chauffeur.

“All of the neighborhood was saying Jim had driven (Masters) to Vegas,” Masters’ sister, Evelyn Dawson, said of the pair’s disappearance last fall. “The only concern was whether he was ill somewhere.”

But a week after the two men were last seen alive, the sister learned that the rumor of the gambling trip was untrue, and possibly planted. Entering Masters’ home, she found it ransacked of money and valuables. Then on Nov. 9--after a five-week police investigation--Masters, 65, and Hetsler, 39, were discovered in a shallow grave in the desert near Salton Sea.

Based partly on an anonymous tip, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide investigators arrested three men: Allen Carberry, 19, Gilbert Robles Jr., 31, and Ronald Wagner, 21, all Bell residents who had known the two victims, authorities said. Wagner was identified by neighbors as a former live-in employee of Masters who helped clean the coin-operated laundry he owned, located only steps from Masters’ house. All three are being held without bail on murder charges.

Now a search is under way for two men who may be important witnesses if police can find them in time for trial, homicide Detective John Yarbrough said.

Masters, a graduate of Bell High School who once worked as a chef, was moderately well-known in the blue-collar, mostly industrial town of 30,000 residents. Bell, just three square miles in size, is a city crowded with small businesses, warehouses and closely packed neighborhoods.

The nearest thing to a landmark is the Bell House, a two-story, ranch-style home built in 1875, which is now being renovated. There is City Hall, a card club, two grocery stores--but not much else.

“There are no large things like May Co. or anything like that,” said 30-year City Councilman Jay Price, 74, an acquaintance of Masters since the early 1960s.

Murders in Bell totaled 10 in 1989, an unusually high number for a town that normally records three or four, Bell Police Detective William Talbott said. Typically, they are domestic disputes. A few arise out of drug deals gone bad.

The Masters case is considered especially vexing because of the close relationships between the suspects and the victims and the apparent profit motive to the crime.

A major focus of the investigation is on the two unknown witnesses who were said to have been in a pickup truck that stopped to assist a car stuck in the sand along a Riverside County road leading to the Salton Sea, police said. Investigators believe the stuck car was Masters’ Ford, driven by the killers, and that the victims’ bodies were hidden in it at the time.

Investigators said they learned of the possible witnesses from a third witness, whom they declined to identify.

If the two missing witnesses can be found, police believe they could provide an important link between the suspects, the desert burial site and the car, which eventually was recovered--stripped and abandoned--in Bell Gardens.

“The car was missing at the time we discovered that Masters and Hetsler were missing,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jodi Rafkin said. “To show that (the suspects) were in the car . . . would certainly be nice evidence. Any time you can place a suspect near a crime scene, that’s dynamite. . . . It’s something that anybody who tries a case would love to have.”

Third Witness

Police declined to say whether the third witness was actually at the scene when the bodies were left in the desert. The investigation is continuing and preliminary court hearings are scheduled for Feb. 6.

“This is a long, detailed case and (the additional witnesses) are merely one portion of it that we are pursuing,” Yarbrough said. “It certainly isn’t the pivotal point in the case, but it is certainly one thing we would like to add to it.

“This is not a real simple case,” he continued. “This isn’t like (the attackers) walk in, kill somebody and walk out. Here we have an intricate case having to do with interrelationships between everybody.” Yarbrough declined to elaborate on those relationships.

But neighbor Beman said in an interview that one suspect, Wagner, worked for Masters and lived in his house. Another suspect, Robles, is Wagner’s brother, and the third suspect was a close friend of Wagner, according to Beman.

Masters’ modest beige home on Heliotrope Avenue was protected by barred windows and located adjacent to his laundry on busy Gage Avenue. During the day, he would go back and forth, occasionally to collect coins from the machines. Masters also dabbled in second trust deeds and stocks and kept a deadbolt on his bedroom door to safeguard his money and jewelry, according to Beman.

“He had an enormous amount of jewelry . . . more jewelry than anyone else I know,” the longtime friend said, describing one gold ring with a large diamond. “When I estimate (the jewelry’s) value at $20,000, I’m being very conservative.”

Masters’ driver, Hetsler, was a striking contrast to his 300-pound employer. Hetsler was about 5 feet 4 inches and 130 pounds, and he lived in a crudely built shack behind Masters’ house, Beman said. Although Hetsler could have had the garage--with “a bed, television, hot water and everything else”--he liked being outside and chose to sleep in a rather primitive lean-to built against a wall, Beman said.

Hetsler supported himself by driving Masters’ car, stenciling addresses on curbs and sometimes collecting signatures for petitions, the friend said.

“He was a very paranoid person,” Beman remembered. “He’d get scared and go run . . . (into) the garage. I got mad at him one time, he ran in the garage and was there about two days. It made me feel bad.”

Shortly before the two men disappeared, Masters had returned from Las Vegas, where he had withdrawn $18,000 or $20,000 from a safe-deposit box, according to Beman. It is Beman’s suspicion that the money was among the stolen cash and valuables. Police declined to comment on how much was taken.

“(The killers) did it at a time they knew he had the money,” Beman said. “They might have been planning this for a long time.”

In their investigation, police calculated that the murders occurred on Sept. 21 in Masters’ home, two days after Masters’ sister last heard from him. Evelyn Dawson, who lives in Long Beach, said her habit was to talk with him by phone almost every day.

After becoming concerned over Masters’ whereabouts, Dawson used her own key to search the house and the laundry. She found the deadbolt on Masters’ bedroom door “kicked in and the door jamb shattered,” she later wrote in a letter to Beman and other friends. “All drawers and the closet were open and items thrown every place.”

Money was removed from the laundry and a sign--”Closed for repairs”--was placed on the door, she wrote.

In an interview, Dawson declined to elaborate on what was taken, citing instructions from police.

Anonymous Tip

Shortly after the home was found ransacked, police received an anonymous tip saying the two men were murdered and buried in the desert.

The investigation was unusual because, Detective Yarbrough said: “We actually developed information to arrest the suspects and prosecute them without the bodies. And then the bodies were found afterward.”

Residents eagerly followed the developments. “There was a rumor going around that it was planned by the workers,” said one neighbor, Mike Romero, 18. “There was a rumor that they killed them, but that (police) couldn’t find the bodies.”

Arrest warrants for Carberry and Robles were issued Nov. 1. Carberry was arrested in Topeka, Kan., and Robles was taken into custody in Pico Rivera, Yarbrough said. The third suspect, Wagner, kept the keys to Masters’ home and laundry business and moved out “a day or two” after the victims disappeared, according to Beman. Wagner was arrested in Bell in mid-December.

Meanwhile, an extensive search by land and air was closing in on the grave.

“In two searches we were off by three-tenths of a mile,” Yarbrough said. Then, “We went down on Nov. 9 and found the bodies after about a six-hour ground search. The bodies were still there; animals hadn’t destroyed them or anything.”

A friend of Wagner--an employee named David who worked in a liquor store adjoining the laundry--said the 21-year-old’s arrest, like most aspects of the case, was a shock.

“A nice guy . . . smart,” the friend said of Wagner. “I don’t think he did it.”