Death by Stranger : The Unsolved Murders of Two Women Who Never Made Headlines

In the killers’ minds, their victims are mushrooms, just some fungus that used to be in the way of their bullets. . . . It’s frightening. --LAPD Cmdr. William Booth It is still true that most murder victims are killed by people with whom they are acquainted--often a relative. But in Los Angeles, a different kind of killing is cropping up in increasing numbers: murder by stranger.

Some victims have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, chance targets of a madman on a shooting rampage. Others, like Norma Elizabeth Maldonado, 27, who was shot to death while selling pots and pans door to door, are victims of robbers for whom the take may be little more than the price of the next drug fix.

“Life is cheap,” says Los Angeles Police Cmdr. William Booth. “Somebody else’s life just doesn’t mean anything. We’re seeing that more than we’ve ever seen it.”

In Los Angeles County, where the coroner’s office reports 1,809 cases investigated as homicides through the first nine months of this year (up 17.5% from 1989), a person has a better chance of being murdered than of winning at Lotto; about 25 of every 100,000 are expected to die this year at the hands of a killer.

And increasingly, police confront cases in which the motive is “unknown.”

One of these involves Amanda Ayers, 32, whose body was found in April, 1989, stuffed in a storm drain in rural Chatsworth, her hands tied behind her back.

The killings of Maldonado and Ayers were not deemed news; in an urban area like Los Angeles, where violence is routine, such deaths command no media attention.

Their killers are not known.

There are no suspects.

But their cases and others like them deserve more than callous, big-city anonymity, for as human beings, Ayers and Maldonado had families, friends and life stories.

John Defelice, 30, a fireplace installer living in Chatsworth, was pedaling his new bicycle up Santa Susana Pass Road toward the Simi Valley late on the afternoon of April 19, 1989. Stopping three-quarters of the way up the hill to catch his breath, he sat down on a concrete storm drain to rest.

He soon noticed a stench and, peering through the drain opening, saw “what looked to me like red hair. I thought, ‘God, some creep has stuffed an animal in there.’ ” Looking more closely, he made a grisly discovery: A decomposed human body in a sitting position.

“That’s about the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me,” he says.

Frantic to get help, he stood in the road, waving his arms. Car after car zipped by. Finally, a man in a truck stopped and drove him to a construction site a mile down the road. There, Defelice called 911.

It was a case for homicide detectives from the LAPD’s Devonshire Division in Chatsworth.

A curious case. Someone had removed the manhole cover and stuffed the victim inside. Her hands had been tied behind her. The condition of the body indicated that she had been dead for months.

Why, during that time, had no one reported her missing? Who was she?

On April 20, an autopsy was performed at the county coroner’s office; it revealed a lethal amount of cocaine. It was impossible to obtain fingerprints. As is routine in “Jane Doe” cases, dental X-rays were taken.

Los Angeles Police Detective Michael Brandt says, “Had she not been bound, we’d have probably carried her as an O. D. But when you tie someone up and dump her in a storm drain . . . . “

Sometime in April, Amanda Ayers’ adoptive mother, who lives in Spain, filed a missing-person report. She hadn’t heard from her daughter, an only child, since Jan. 1, when she had called her to wish her Happy New Year.

Amanda hadn’t mentioned being in trouble.

Later, the mother, who asked that her name not be published (“I haven’t told anyone” about the murder) began getting back letters she had sent her daughter; in all, 10 would be returned. Amanda’s post office box in Reseda had been closed. “I knew something was wrong, something drastic,” her mother says.

It had been about 18 months since she had seen her daughter, on a trip to California--”We bought a lot of clothes and we had fun.” She had planned to visit again in April “to take a big trip with her, to the Grand Canyon.”

The missing-person report provided the first clue to the identity of the body in the storm drain; the height and weight were a match.

Through her mother, police learned that Amanda had a great aunt in Culver City. At the aunt’s house, they found Amanda’s possessions stored in the garage--department store bills, little plastic flower pots, old letters, books, a Moroccan tea set. They also found a 1983 paper with the name of a dentist in Granada Hills. Detectives spent hours sifting through thousands of patient records, none of them alphabetized or dated.

Finally, in the third to last box, they found Amanda Ayers’ 1983 X-rays; they matched those taken by the coroner. “Root canals are like fingerprints,” Brandt says. On Oct. 19, six months after the body was discovered, the coroner identified this “Jane Doe.”

Because of the condition of the body, the cause of death has never been established. Police do not think she was sexually assaulted. She was barefoot, dressed in a pastel blouse, a dark bulky sweater and jeans.

Motive: “unknown.”

Police can only speculate on why Amanda Ayers’ hands were tied. Was it to make it easier to take the body to its hiding place? Did the crime have a drug connection?

Ayers was, in police parlance, a “doper,” a fallout from society who had no permanent address.

But who was she really? And what path had she taken to this end?

Friends and relatives describe her as “rebellious,” a person who “had a hard time living with some of the rules,” “very independent.” A friend noted that she sometimes showed up barefoot for job interviews. She was, her mother said, “the type who would sneak out the bedroom window, you know.”

She had a spotty employment record, working most recently at a savings and loan where she was fired about two years ago for an incident in which she saw herself as the scapegoat. “She took that very hard,” her mother said, speculating that the dismissal might have intensified her drug abuse.

She was a floater, moving from house to house. “She never asked me for money,” her mother said, although she did send her daughter money from time to time, perhaps $2,000 a year.

Ayers was born in Nicaragua and adopted as a small child by an American embassy aide and his wife, who later retired in Spain. The adoptive mother recalls organizing other embassy wives, who were “doing nothing but playing canasta,” to volunteer at homes for children. At one home, she found the beautiful dark-eyed child she and her husband would adopt.

But, the mother says, she had a troubled relationship from the start with her daughter: “She was, I don’t know, difficult, temperamental. She was very beautiful, gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous, but difficult. . . . I couldn’t talk to her.”

Clay Weber, 36, a Department of Water and Power employee, met Amanda--she liked to be called “Mandi”--while he was a student worker in the Pierce College student jobs office. About 1981, he recalls, she came in looking for a job: “She was very beautiful,” about 5-foot-1, with long auburn hair. Soon afterward, they started dating.

The relationship endured, off and on, for eight years. In the mid-80s, they planned to marry--Amanda bought a wedding dress--but called it off. “We were both kind of immature,” he says.

They remained friends. When Weber went to Wisconsin to spend Christmas, 1989, with his family, he let her use his apartment in the Valley for a month, “to give her a chance to get her feet on the ground.”

He says he last saw her on Jan. 23, soon after he returned to California. He doesn’t know how heavily she was into drugs, but says, “she didn’t really look that good. She’d lost a little weight.” In the past, he says, he had tried to get her to stop using.

On Valentine’s Day, he had a phone call. When he answered, the caller hung up. Amanda used to do this. “In my heart,” he says, “I feel she called me.” He never again saw or talked to her.

For the last few years, Weber says, “She didn’t confide in me.” She had a new boyfriend and a network of friends about whom he knew little, people at whose homes she crashed for short periods. “A lot about her life was a mystery to me.”

The Amanda he remembers liked to go to antique shops, to a rock bar in Reseda to hear ‘60s and ‘70s music.

He wonders what happened the night she died: “Was it somebody she knew or somebody she just met? She’d strike up a conversation with complete strangers. She had a very nice smile. She loved to talk to people.”

He pauses and says, “I can talk about it now. For a long time I couldn’t.”

Karen Peterson, 31, and Ayers were cousins and, from childhood, close friends. Eventually, they both landed in California, staying at different times with the great aunt in Culver City.

Peterson last saw Amanda on Christmas Day, 1988. She recalls, “she called and wanted me to take her to prison to see her new boyfriend,” Steve. “She was thinner. She was a little sad. Her boyfriend was in jail and she didn’t have a place to live. She wasn’t working.”

Amanda had moved to Los Angeles in the mid-70s, following a man she had met in Spain. Peterson moved to California in 1985 and, for a while, lived with Amanda and Weber.

But, she says, “things weren’t the same. We weren’t such good friends anymore. I was confused, and I didn’t know how to get through to her.”

She recalls going with Amanda to a cocaine dealer. “She said, ‘Don’t tell Clay about this.’ She was assuring me this was no big deal for her, just a once-in-a-longtime thing.” There were times, she says, when “I just wanted to shake her and tell her to wake up. But I was afraid to say anything.”

Amanda spent most of her last Christmas alone. Peterson was invited to a relative’s house. She recalls, “I was talking to Mandi about the two of us getting together the next day, just going for a drive. She seemed to like the idea. I called the next day and I never got an answer.”

Those last months, Peterson says, Amanda “talked big” about how well things were going. Still, she borrowed $500 from Peterson and asked for another $1,000. She had never been a student and her work history was spotty.

“As a kid,” Peterson says, “she always wanted so badly to be a model. Twiggy was her idol. But she was too small.”

When she moved out of Weber’s apartment the last time, she took her dog, Bucky. “We never found out what happened to that dog,” Peterson says. She had owned a small foreign car, but it was always in need of repair and Peterson guesses that she simply abandoned it. She adds, “Clay mentioned that she was hitchhiking sometimes. He didn’t want her to.”

Peterson says she first suspected something bad had happened in April, 1989, when she learned that Amanda was three months past due on her payment to the self-storage place where she kept her possessions. She and Weber picked the things up and took them to the great aunt’s house. Peterson noticed that Amanda’s pearls, a diamond and TV were missing, hocked perhaps.

“I started thinking she might not be around anymore,” Peterson says. She and Weber had talked about calling the police, but she was afraid Amanda would turn up and be angry.

Peterson wonders, “Was she picked up hitchhiking by the wrong person? Or maybe somebody at a drug house did something to her? Or maybe somebody she tried to bunk with, to get a place to stay . . . . “

Last Thanksgiving, Peterson took Amanda’s ashes back to Mundelein, Ill., where Peterson has roots and where she now lives. There was a private service at the First Presbyterian Church. Weber attended. Amanda’s mother took her daughter’s remains to Spain for burial, next to the adoptive father she adored.

Ayers’ killing remains unsolved; there are no leads.

“Somebody knows something,” says Brandt, the detective. “There are no perfect homicides.”

But there are those people who get away with murder because nobody talks.” If someone kills, he reasons, “He’s going to tell somebody, somewhere, sometime.” Brandt hopes that “somewhere along the line, someone’s going to get a conscience. Then we can put this case to rest and the family can rest in peace.”

Amanda Ayers’ mother is less optimistic. “Why should they?” she asks. “Why should they? She’s gone, and she’s not coming back. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Elsy Bustillo points out a bleached spot on the pavement of a parking lot behind a small pink commercial building across from a Baptist church in South-Central Los Angeles.

“That,” she says, “was my sister’s blood.”

On that spot, the night of March 27, 1990, Norma Elizabeth Maldonado was found, face down, fatally shot.

For Maldonado and her family, the pursuit of the American Dream had turned into an urban nightmare.

About 10 that night, her body was spotted by Robert A. Smith, who lived in the neighborhood and, walking past, saw her feet protruding from a dark corner. Since the shooting, a heavy iron security gate has been installed at the parking lot entrance, just east of Broadway on 85th Street.

Detective Bruce Wilson of the LAPD’s South Bureau, says, “Our conjecture is that she was the victim of an opportunist street robber who happened upon her and took her watch and her coin purse.”

Norma Maldonado had been canvassing the neighborhood, hoping to sell pots, pans and flatware to Spanish-speaking households. Her days routinely began at 9 a.m., when she was picked up by co-workers at Bustillo’s house on West 95th Street, and ended about 8 or 9 p.m.

Wilson wonders aloud, “Why would somebody in such a hostile environment try to sell stuff at night door to door? The risk must have been worth it to her.”

It was. Maldonado had a dream. Back home, in the town of El Progreso in the state of Yoro, Honduras, she and her husband, Antonio Rubio, had a small mom-and-pop store in their house; he worked in a tailor shop.

Honduras is a poor country, with a per capita income less than $1,000. Maldonado had heard she could get a well-paying job in America and send money home to her mother and her daughter, Jessica, 4.

Arriving in Los Angeles in July, 1989, she soon moved East and found work with a dry cleaner in suburban Washington, D.C. Then, about six weeks ago, Bustillo persuaded her to move to Los Angeles.

Out for a walk one day, Maldonado met a woman who told her about a job where she could make a lot of money and possibly become a supervisor. The company was Rena-Ware, based in Downey; the job was selling kitchenware.

When Maldonado went home that day, to the tile-roofed Spanish bungalow where she lived with Bustillo and the latter’s husband, Godofredo Navarrete, they laughed at her dreams, which included a new car.

Only two weeks after she started selling Rena-Ware, Maldonado was killed. Bustillo says sadly, “She didn’t make anything, just $40.” Later, a few weeks after her death, a commission check for $200 arrived in the mail.

Maldonado had no insurance or benefits. Bustillo paid the $2,300 funeral expenses.

“I told her not to do it,” Bustillo says. “I said, ‘I don’t like you to come home so late because it’s dangerous.’ She said, ‘I’m not alone. I’m with my friends.’ ”

Normally, she was not on the streets alone. A co-worker, Gloria Landeros, and two men picked her up every morning at the house. “They were together, always,” Bustillo says.

But that day, Landeros told police, she dropped Maldonado off about 4 in the afternoon near the spot where her body was found. “We don’t know why she was alone that day,” Bustillo says.

Just before Bustillo left for work the morning of March 27, she saw her sister for the last time. She was sitting on the sofa, eating breakfast. Bustillo’s baby-sitter later told her that her sister had stopped by the house early that afternoon to pick up a jacket.

About 8:30 p.m., Landeros came to the house looking for Maldonado. Landeros was to have picked her up at the corner of 85th and Broadway about 8, but Maldonado hadn’t shown. Landeros had circled the block several times, then had driven to the Bustillo home. About 9:30, she stopped by the house again.

Navarrete recalls her telling him, “I’m scared because I can’t find her.”

About 10 p.m., Landeros returned to 85th and Broadway. What she found was a crime scene. Police had already taped off the area.

About 3 in the morning, police knocked on Bustillo and Navarrete’s door to tell them the news. Bustillo identified her sister from photographs taken at the murder scene.

Next to Maldonado’s body police found the tan plastic tote bag, in which she usually carried her lunch, a small coin purse and contracts for customers, and a blue nylon case that unzipped to display kitchenware samples. The robber had taken the coin purse and an inexpensive watch the victim wore.

Inside a flap of the tote bag was a small plastic-handled knife, a promotional gift she carried to show to prospective buyers. If she thought of pulling the knife on her attacker, she never had a chance.

No one knows how much money Maldonado had on her--it is possible that she had accepted cash deposits that night from customers. Bustillo says she gave her sister $100 the day before to buy clothes, but she hadn’t had time to go shopping. Was she carrying that money?

Whatever was in her purse was “more than enough,” detective Wilson says. “I’ve seen (murders) happen for a dollar.”

One resident reported hearing a shot about 10 minutes before 10. Several others also said they heard shots, Wilson says, “but nobody looked out the window.”

He describes it as a “clueless case.” A one-on-one street robbery where nobody saw anything. “Somebody knows the person who did it,” he says. “They’re out there, on the streets.”

For Maldonado, America had held such promise. Perhaps one day, her husband and children could have joined her here.

She had hoped to save enough money by December to visit her family in Honduras, where she was affectionately known as “Normita,” a happy woman who always wore a smile.

Bustillo, 29, had been the first in the family to come to the United States, in June, 1986. She left two small children, cared for by her mother in El Progreso. “I came here because I didn’t have a job there,” she says. “It’s a poor country. I came here to do something for my children and my family.”

Here, she met and married a Navarrete, a Salvadoran who works for a medical supply firm in Alhambra. They have a daughter, Diana, 3. Two years ago, they were able to buy the house on West Broadway. Both are hard-working, industrious; Bustillo is going to night school to learn English. But now, she says, “I think maybe I will sell this house and go back to my country. When she took her sister’s body back to Honduras in late April, her mother begged her to come home--”She’s so worried.” Later, she talks about saving enough money to move to West Los Angeles.

Bustillo says she is scared now. Their house has barred windows and a locking screen door. “It’s difficult to leave this house,” she says. “I’m not happy to live here. It’s too dangerous.” She seems alert to every sound, peering out the barred window of her living room.

Her husband says he never leaves the house after 6 p.m. Neighborhood violence is routine. Two years ago, as the couple sat in their car at an El Segundo Boulevard gas station, he was robbed of two gold chains and $20 by a man who stuck a gun under his chin.

Navarrete says, “They’ll kill anybody for $20.”

CLUES TO KILLINGS?

* Anyone with information on Amanda Ayers’ killing may contact Detective Michael Brandt of LAPD at (818) 989-8291. Anyone with information on Norma Elizabeth Maldonado’s slaying may contact Detective Bruce Wilson of LAPD at (213) 237-1310.