‘Case Without a Corpse’ Resolved at Last : * Slaying: A tenant’s grisly discovery three years ago of a blood-caked mattress ultimately leads to the unearthing of a buried body. The killer is the tenant’s former lover.

Just after dawn on Feb. 23, 1989, Bob Kaesler walked into a Los Angeles police station to talk about the horror he had found in his former lover’s bedroom: The underside of Christopher Lebeda’s mattress, he told Rampart Division detectives, was covered with an enormous amount of dried blood--so thick it resembled cooled lava.

Kaesler said he had found the blood six months earlier, while trying to flip the sagging mattress, which be believed was giving him a backache.

He did not report his discovery at the time, he said, because Lebeda had told him that the bloody mattress was left behind by a previous tenant in the duplex on Micheltorena Street in the Silver Lake District. Shortly afterward, Kaesler said, he helped his lover get rid of it.

But months later, when the relationship had cooled, Kaesler learned that just before he met Lebeda, the previous tenant had mysteriously vanished. So, still troubled by the stained mattress, Kaesler went to the police.

His grisly story triggered a three-year investigation that ended last week when Lebeda led police to a remote hillside in Griffith Park, where human bones were unearthed.

Last Dec. 18, after prosecutors agreed to drop a murder charge, Lebeda, a 32-year-old cable television installer, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. After reaching the plea bargain, he finally told police where he had dumped the body of Robert Holzman.

Authorities say Holzman’s slaying might never have been discovered, let alone solved, if Kaesler had not told them about the mattress and stuck by his story while detectives slowly assembled a case without a corpse.

But others, including attorneys in the case, are not so quick to label Kaesler a hero. Why, they ask, did he wait so long before going to the police? Why did he help dispose of the mattress? And why, after talking to detectives, did Kaesler tell Lebeda about the investigation, giving the killer time to eliminate other crucial evidence?

These questions were considered by the lawyers, who finally negotiated the plea bargain.

Kaesler says, simply, that he was blinded by his affection for Lebeda.

“Some of the blunders I’ve made in this case are hideous,” he said in a recent interview.

Kaesler, 43, who asked that his occupation and place of residence be withheld, believes Lebeda’s sentence was too lenient. Lebeda was sentenced Jan. 9 to six years in prison and he could be paroled in three years, court officials said.

As the key witness, Kaesler said, he has lived in terror for the last three years, fearing that Lebeda, or one of his friends, would harm him. Although the investigation began in 1989, Lebeda was not arrested until June.

Kaesler never met the murder victim. Holzman, a 43-year-old furniture maker who grew up near Cleveland, had moved into the duplex in late 1987. Investigators said Holzman, who had financial problems, subleased one of the rooms to Lebeda.

In the spring of 1988, police later learned, Holzman’s regular phone calls to his mother in Florida abruptly stopped. Lebeda, who moved into Holzman’s room and found a new housemate, told the landlord, police and Holzman’s friends that the man had moved out abruptly and left no forwarding address.

“It breaks my heart that he could kill someone, dump the person and, when the deal is nice and sweet for him, he could give them the body,” Kaesler said. “He not only took this man’s life, he took his house, his toothbrush, his furniture--and he almost got away with it.

“Had I not lifted that bed, he would have gotten away with it. That’s why I stuck to it and did what I did.”

Still, some investigators and attorneys involved in the case say Lebeda’s manslaughter plea and his agreement to lead police to Holzman’s remains were an acceptable outcome. A trial that would have hinged on Kaesler’s astonishing story and on tiny traces of blood pulled from the floorboard of Lebeda’s room could easily have resulted in acquittal, or a mistrial, they said.

“I realized it was going to be a very difficult and complicated case to prove,” said the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia R. Clark. “I could never establish for the jury exactly how, or why, the person was killed. . . . We have no way of assuring the jury this was a murder as opposed to a manslaughter, because we don’t know any of the circumstances that attended the killing.”

Deputy Public Defender L.H. Farenhold, who represented Lebeda, said he would have challenged some of Clark’s evidence and suggested other reasons for Holzman’s disappearance--including the missing man’s history of debts and alleged drug use. But the defense attorney also said he could not have guaranteed his client an acquittal.

In the end, he said, Lebeda chose the manslaughter plea because, if he had gone to trial and been convicted of first-degree murder, he could have been sentenced to life in prison.

“This is one of the most fascinating cases of my career,” said Farenhold, a public defender for 12 years. “For starters, it’s a no-body murder case. Then there’s this Hitchcock-movie moment, when Kaesler turns over the mattress and finds the blood. And then there were all the alternate explanations for the victim’s disappearance.

“All that makes for an extremely unusual case.”

Investigators said the primary concern for Holzman’s family was to find his remains, so they could be returned to Ohio for a proper burial.

Police Detective Chuck Salazar said the Griffith Park excavation yielded a jawbone that is being checked against Holzman’s dental records to confirm the identity. The circumstances surrounding his death are likely to remain a mystery, however.

Meanwhile, Kaesler, the man who uncovered the puzzle, is anxious to put it all behind him.

“I thought they would have this solved in a short period of time,” he said. “I had no idea it would stretch into a three-year nightmare for me. Several years ago, any personal interest in Mr. Lebeda was wiped out by finding out what a monster he is.

“From the bottom of my heart, my one regret is that I did not have enough information to go to the police sooner. But if it took another four or five years, I would do it again.”