Sheriff’s Dept. Bills KROQ $12,000 for Hoax : Radio: The station agrees to reimburse the law enforcement agency for the cost of an investigation of a phony murder confession.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will bill KROQ-FM (106.7) more than $12,000 for the time the department spent investigating a phony murder confession broadcast by the station last June.

The much-publicized confession, which aired during the morning drive-time program of KROQ deejays Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter, was revealed last month to be a publicity stunt concocted by the duo with the help of an Arizona deejay, Doug Roberts, who subsequently was hired at KROQ.

The bill, which the department plans to present to station officials later this week, is for $12,170.98.

KROQ’s parent company, Infinity Broadcasting Corp., said that it will reimburse the sheriff’s department as soon as it receives the bill.

“I’ve pretty much told them to send us a bill,” Infinity attorney Steven A. Lerman said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “We’ve publicly stated that we have no aversion to providing restitution. We’d also offered to make an in-kind or monetary contribution to a community project of their choice. We’ve always been prepared to do either one. The company welcomes the opportunity to do something for the (sheriff’s) department.”

The bill was figured by adding the 149 hours spent in investigation by Sheriff’s Sgt. John Yarbrough and the time spent by technicians in sound laboratory analysis. The analysis--which that department said cost $1,757--was an attempt to determine if the caller who confessed to fatally beating his girlfriend was Roberts, as the department had been told by an informant. (Roberts, now a nighttime deejay at KROQ, and Ryder and Baxter were suspended without pay April 11 and returned to the air April 22.)

The bill includes $450 for long-distance phone calls that Yarbrough made after 400 people from across the nation telephoned a hot line when the call was broadcast on the NBC series “Unsolved Mysteries.”

In a written statement, Sheriff Sherman Block said that although the cost to the department may not seem very significant, “we will never be able to recoup for the time spent away from legitimate unsolved cases. . . . “

The sheriff’s department said that it did not file criminal charges because station officials, when informed of a possible hoax by the department, cooperated in an investigation conducted last month.

Although there is a law prohibiting the filing of a false police report, that statute does not apply to this case because neither the deejays nor anyone connected with the station actually filed a police report, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Lynda Edmunds. Rather, the department learned of it through news media reports about the confession.

“In many cases in evaluating an incident, it could come close (to violation of a law), but if it doesn’t meet the specific criteria, then you cannot charge someone with committing a crime,” Edmunds said.

The Federal Communications Commission is conducting an investigation of the June 13 incident and its aftermath to determine what action, if any, it will take against the station. The investigation centers on whether station management was involved in the hoax by directly participating in it or by failing to disclose the fraud at an earlier date. Station officials have said that they had no idea that the call was a fake until they were informed by the Sheriff’s Department.

On April 19, the FCC sent out a letter with 13 detailed questions for station officials to answer. The response to the letter was originally due last Monday, but KROQ was granted a two-week extension. The station now has until May 13 to respond to the letter, according to Edythe Wise, chief of the complaints and investigations branch of the FCC’s enforcement division.