A Victim or a Vigilante? : Crime: An ex-cop, convicted of murder 13 years ago, says the system betrayed him. A judge is asked to overturn the verdict.

Behind the towering walls of the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, ex-policeman Billy Joe McIlvain sits alone in an 8-by-10-foot cell, convinced that he was betrayed by the system he once served.

To those who put him there, he is still “Crazy Hutch,” an overzealous cop with All-American looks who got what he deserved--a life sentence--for abducting and brutally executing a teen-age gang member in 1977.

But to family, friends and a growing cadre of supporters, McIlvain was the victim, a dedicated San Gabriel officer who defended himself against a ruthless street gang at a time when the small suburban town closed its eyes to such problems.

Every year, prosecutors and the slain youth’s mother travel 300 miles up the California coast to parole hearings to ensure that McIlvain, 45, remains behind bars. At the same time, he is on the White House Christmas card list, the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police insists he is innocent and actor David Soul--who played McIlvain’s hero in the 1970s TV series “Starsky and Hutch”--has become a confidant.

Now, 13 years after the killing, the McIlvain murder case is back in Los Angeles Superior Court, where a judge is being asked to overturn his conviction based on a number of alleged discrepancies in the original trial.

At the core of his appeal, filed last week, is McIlvain’s contention that jailhouse informants lied about him to win leniency for themselves. It is a practice detailed in a recent Los Angeles County grand jury report, which sharply criticized the district attorney’s office and the Sheriff’s Department for tolerating suspected perjury from snitches and rewarding them for their cooperation.

“They have one of the strongest cases compelling a new trial,” said Gigi Gordon, an attorney who investigated the abuse of jailhouse informants for the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Assn. “These are some very, very serious allegations.”

The authorities who put together the case against McIlvain, however, deny that informants provided fabricated testimony or that any deals were cut.

More important, they say, the testimony of dozens of other witnesses provided overwhelming proof of McIlvain’s guilt--that he kidnaped 18-year-old David Dominguez, blasted him repeatedly with a .12-gauge shotgun, then tried to make it appear as if the youth had abducted him.

“We had him nailed,” said retired West Covina Police Detective John Forrester, who arrested McIlvain and now works for an insurance firm in the San Fernando Valley. “This was a cold-blooded, calculated killing. Somewhere along the way, Billy Joe lost the calling.”

The story that emerges from dozens of interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of court documents is a disturbing tale of contradiction.

Was the blond, blue-eyed McIlvain a real-life Dick Tracy who became the target of firebombings, ambushes and assaults because of his crime-busting exploits?

Or, was he a vigilante who staged the attacks for attention--once allegedly even shooting himself in the groin--just as a demented fireman might deliberately set a fire in order to be a hero when he stamps it out?

Most of the stories about Billy Joe McIlvain’s life are extraordinary and the one about why he decided to become a cop is no less so.

While walking his dog in El Sereno one day at the age of 9, he says he stumbled across a cardboard box that contained the severed head of a woman. Her eyes were open, her mouth was filled with blood and her expression, he recalls, was one of utter helplessness.

“I can still picture her face now,” said McIlvain during a recent interview at the prison in Soledad. “I think that day I just decided I wanted to help people so they wouldn’t end up that way.”

That same year, 1954, his parents--conservative, working-class folk of Irish and Italian descent--divorced. Virginia McIlvain, who made circuit breakers on an assembly line, soon remarried and took Billy and his sister to live with her new husband in West Covina.

There, he played tackle on the high school football team, labored over his silver ’64 Plymouth, enjoyed target shooting with a bolt-action .22-caliber rifle and worked part-time with his stepfather making cement mixing machines.

“When most teen-agers were out doing stupid things, he wasn’t,” said his stepfather, Larry Olesen, 58. “He was such a big kid, so big he could probably beat the hell out of anybody. But he never did. He was always smiling.”

In 1971, when McIlvain joined the San Gabriel Police Department as a rookie, he found a small, quiet residential community of 29,000 people that officers referred to as “sleepy hollow.” Murder was rare and street gangs were in their infancy.

About 30% of the population was of Mexican descent, most living just east of the San Gabriel Mission and south of the railroad tracks, an area known then simply as the barrio. The neighborhood belonged to “Sangra,” a tough band of about two dozen youths with monikers such as “Spooky,” “Wango,” “Termite” and “Wolf.”

David Dominguez, the fourth of 10 children born to Josie Escarcega, was “Lil’ Loco,” the little crazy one.

By 15, he had been to a juvenile camp for receiving stolen property. San Gabriel police suspected him of burglary, arson and several shootings. In a gang profile prepared by one officer, Dominguez was said to “have access to numerous guns and should be considered dangerous.”

He also had been a shortstop on his Little League team, worked installing sprinklers at a local park, cared for a collection of rabbits, turtles, pigeons and cats and drove a two-tone ’57 Chevy with a miniature steering wheel that officers frequently ticketed him for.

“He wasn’t a perfect boy,” said Escarcega, 54. “He had problems in school and he may have been disrespectful at times. But he was a young man just beginning to live life and he didn’t do anything to deserve being killed in such a horrible way.”

McIlvain says that Sangra began to target him because he was such a good cop. He traces the harassment back to 1974, when he helped two Alhambra officers make a traffic stop.

An armed Sangra member jumped from the car, just as McIlvain pulled up with a shotgun and told the youth to freeze. “The guy looked at me and said, ‘You’re a dead man,’ ” McIlvain recalled.

From that point on, he chronicled more than 36 threats or assaults by Sangra, from affixing a funeral home sticker to his car to tossing a dummy grenade on his porch to an alleyway ambush that left the front window of his patrol car shattered.

Some officers, such as McIlvain’s partner, Dave Rios, were in awe of his professionalism and courage.

“He went out of his way to help people all the time,” said Rios, 41, then a reserve officer who now works as a deputy sheriff. “If he saw anything, a traffic accident or a garage on fire, he’d stop and do something about it. He was the best cop I’ve ever known.”

Others called him a “walking dead man” and refused to ride in the same car.

“A lot us thought he just went over the deep end,” said one longtime San Gabriel officer, who asked not to be identified because the department’s policy is not to comment on the case. “We just thought, ‘He’s a danger; he’s lost it.’ ”

By 1976, McIlvain nearly had. He was hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer. His left hand was almost paralyzed from a scuffle with a suspect. And he had a bullet wound in the groin that, he says, came from a masked assailant outside his home.

He took to wearing a bullet-proof vest, placed guns at strategic locations around his house and carried three more with him at all times--a .25-caliber automatic in his back pocket, a .357 Magnum at his side and another .357 in a boot holster.

“They were bent on getting me and they weren’t going to give up,” said McIlvain, who was placed on disability that year. “I was beat. It was like I was in a helpless state.”

The way McIlvain tells it, he was driving home on the morning of Feb. 28, 1977, when David Dominguez pulled up alongside him, pointed a shotgun and demanded he pull over.

After driving around for several hours, they ended up at McIlvain’s home in West Covina. He said he pleaded with Dominguez to spare his family, then ran inside and told his wife to grab their infant daughter and flee.

Over the next two hours, 106 shots were fired out the living room window, as police and a sheriff’s SWAT team surrounded the house. McIlvain said he watched helplessly, his feet bound with surgical tape. He also claims that Dominguez popped pills and even forced McIlvain to take his picture with a 35mm camera that was in the house. Finally, when the gun was turned on him, McIlvain said he pulled the .357 concealed in his boot and fired a bullet into Dominguez’s chest. Then he picked up the shotgun and fired a few more times.

“Looking back on it years later, there’s a lot of things you can think of doing differently,” McIlvain said. “But you don’t understand the kind of fear and emotion I was under. I felt almost like a robot. I was going to do exactly what he said.”

McIlvain emerged a hero. There were murmurs of relief and even some light applause from the news crews and spectators. Forrester, the West Covina detective, ran up and congratulated him.

But by the time he was taken to the police station for a statement, McIlvain’s story had begun to unravel. A few hours later, he was behind bars.

“I’m not a brilliant individual, but I didn’t just fall off the truck,” said Forrester, 54, a man with a big mustache, long sideburns and a Texas drawl. “I looked at him and I said, ‘Billy, you’ve been messing with me.’ ”

Besides McIlvain’s fantastic-sounding story, Forrester said, he was troubled by the fact that blood splattered on the walls and on Dominguez already appeared to be dry. The supposed captor, just 5-feet 4-inches tall and weighing 135 pounds, was in his stocking feet--not exactly kidnaping garb. And his family had filed a report of him being falsely arrested that morning by a San Gabriel officer in a drugstore parking lot.

When the case went to trial a few months later, an even darker tale emerged. Rather than McIlvain as the target of harassment, prosecutors portrayed him as the the one doing the harassing. They said he stalked Dominguez, photographed him and once hurled a firebomb--made of shotgun shells and a flare--at his house.

Two young reserve officers who had been assigned to protect McIlvain testified that he had given them ammunition to shoot up Dominguez’s car, that he had supplied them with spray paint to write “sheriffs” and “police” on Dominguez’s driveway and that he once displayed a toy gun that he said could be planted on the kid to justify shooting him.

Deputy Dist. Atty. John F. Hayes, one of two prosecutors in the case, painted a picture of a man who lived in a fantasy world, whose story was fiction and whose life was a fraud.

“McIlvain has watched too many police programs on TV,” Hayes told the jury. “Did you see what was engraved on the belt he was wearing? ‘Hutch.’ He’s still playing the role. He’s still Supercop.”

On top of it all, a jailhouse informant named Wendall Hall said that McIlvain confessed the kidnaping to him and also asked if Hall knew someone who might be willing to kill McIlvain’s wife, Joyce, and Dominguez’s mother before they could testify.

But in last week’s appeal, McIlvain’s lawyers contended that Hall--a career criminal awaiting trial on charges of kidnap and attempted rape--lied under oath. They submitted a signed statement by Hall saying his testimony was false, as well as other documents that they say show he was rewarded with only a year in county jail.

“It was the ruthlessness and total lack of ethics by the prosecution that denied McIlvain a fair trial and his freedom,” said his attorney, Charles A. Gangloff, who defended him 13 years ago. “It’s scandalous and it’s horrendous.”

In recent interviews, however, several jurors said that Hall’s testimony was a negligible part of their decision and did not even come up during the 10 hours it took them to decide McIlvain was guilty of murder.

“It was the defendant who just wasn’t credible,” said Morris A. Hooper, a San Fernando Valley pharmacist who served as the jury foreman. “His story was so unbelievable, so wild. You really questioned how in the world he expected to get away with that. Who did he expect to snow?”

Looking back on it, McIlvain acknowledges that parts of his story seem far-fetched, that if he really had been held hostage there was ample opportunity to kill Dominguez much earlier in the siege. But people who look at it that way, he contends, just don’t know Billy Joe.

“Billy didn’t become a policeman to kill people; he became a policeman to help people,” said his second wife, Kittie, 51, a former model who married him in 1987, four years after his first wife filed for divorce.

He also does not believe all the evidence that would support his case made its way into court. The prosecutor, for instance, argued that McIlvain had probably executed Dominguez two hours before the last shots were fired.

But several years after his conviction, a Los Angeles homicide detective who had taken a personal interest in the case discovered two “missing” pages from the autopsy while thumbing through the Dominguez file one day in the medical examiner’s office.

The documents, which had never been introduced in trial, showed Dominguez’s liver temperature had not fallen below normal, making it unlikely that he had been dead for as long as prosecutors suggested. In addition, the report indicated that Dominguez had secobarbital in his system--a fact that McIlvain contended but had been unable to prove.

“Those two factors alone could have put a reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind,” said retired LAPD Detective Steve Tilden, who found the report and for seven years spent his off-duty hours researching the case. “Now, I won’t say Billy is innocent. I don’t think he’s been truthful at all. But I do think he was wrongly convicted, I really do.”

Many others go further. Whether it is McIlvain’s sincerity, the tears he occasionally sheds, the apparent irregularities in his trial or simply an unwillingness to believe that a policeman would do such a horrendous thing, there are those convinced of his innocence.

In a 1988 letter to the state Board of Prison Terms, a top official of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police called McIlvain a hero who should never have been sent to prison.

“Not just because Billy is a police officer (once a P.O., always a P.O.),” wrote the group’s New York president, Albert W. Weir. “But because we always want justice, no matter what the cause.”

David Soul, who played “Hutch” in the TV series from 1975 to 1980, said he made his decision to support McIlvain after traveling to Soledad and meeting him face to face. They speak regularly on the telephone and Soul has pledged to help him any way he can.

“Look, I’m an actor. . . . I’m no fool,” said Soul, who is living and writing in Los Angeles. “After listening to him tell his story the way he told it, I was convinced as a person, as a human being, that this man was innocent.”

There is no reason to believe that President Bush has made the same judgment, but several years ago, in response to a plea for help from McIlvain, he began sending Christmas cards to his Soledad address. “Much happiness and peace for you and those you love,” reads the one that McIlvain--and 125,000 other people on the White House list--received last year.

But so far, no court has extended the same warm wishes. The original trial judge, William B. Keene, who retired years ago and went on to preside over “Divorce Court” on daytime television, concluded that the evidence of McIlvain’s guilt was overwhelming.

In 1979, an appellate court concurred. In 1982, McIlvain filed a motion for a new trial but was denied. Again in 1985, he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, but it also was rejected.

“Locked up in your mind is the truth,” Keene told McIlvain in his ruling. “Someday we may hear the truth. We didn’t hear it here in this court from you.”

In the meantime, McIlvain spends his days writing letters--he estimates 10,000 to date--trying to generate interest in his case. He works as a clerk typing disciplinary reports, watches the news on TV and does pullups on the side of his steel bunk bed.

He said he has saved nine lives while in prison and is friendly with the guards, several of whom have written recommendations that he be paroled. But since he became eligible for parole in 1983, he has been denied each time.

One of these days, he believes he will get out. He says he has offers to teach courses on police-officer survival at several academies and universities. First, he’ll buy a motor home and travel the country with Kittie. But for now, he must wait.

“I know what the truth is,” McIlvain said. “I think eventually someone’s going to listen.”