Police Search High-Rise Gunman’s Home, Office

Searches of the Woodland Hills home and office of the gunman who killed eight people last week in a San Francisco high-rise office building provided detectives with conflicting views of the killer but no clue to his motivation, the lead investigator said Thursday.

San Francisco Police Inspector Napoleon Hendrix said investigators found Gian Luigi Ferri’s apartment cluttered, notably with gun magazines and ammunition boxes, but the gunman’s Ventura Boulevard mortgage brokerage office was neatly kept and appeared to be the center of ongoing business activity.

Neither of the locations that were searched Tuesday provided investigators with any indication why Ferri, 55, went on the shooting spree July 1 and then killed himself, Hendrix said.

According to a four-page note found on Ferri’s body, he was beset by financial problems and business failures. The note contained a list of people he thought responsible. He entered a law firm on the 34th floor of the high-rise and began firing. By the time the 15-minute massacre was over, he had killed eight, wounded six and taken his own life when cornered by police.

Ferri had lived in Woodland Hills for about a year after leaving Marin County. Hendrix said Ferri’s one-bedroom, $750-a-month apartment on Erwin Street was generally unkempt with dirty glasses in the sink, empty ammunition boxes, gun receipts, magazines and ammunition in other rooms. He said detectives found Donald Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal” in the bedroom and receipts and records indicating that Ferri was heavily in debt.

“We’re just going through it all, but it looks like more than $20,000” in debts, Hendrix said.

When investigators went to ADF Mortgage Inc., Ferri’s Ventura Boulevard office, they found the two-room office to be neatly kept with paperwork on Ferri’s desk suggesting ongoing business transactions.

“It looked like a flurry of activity had been happening there, but whether he was making any money or not, I don’t know,” Hendrix said. “We’re just looking into it. But he had a back room full of business machines--two fax machines and other machines. It looked like a legitimate business.”

Hendrix said San Francisco police also are looking into information provided by a Van Nuys private detective agency that suggests that Ferri may have used a variety of aliases in recent years.

Milo Speriglio, director and chief of the Nick Harris Detectives agency, said Thursday that he gave Hendrix a list of aliases found during computer background searches of Ferri. Speriglio said the names are variations of Ferri’s real name.

Speriglio said the background check on Ferri was conducted because the agency received a note from Ferri, mailed from San Francisco apparently just hours before the massacre.

Speriglio said the Manila envelope with a stamped return address of Ferri’s Woodland Hills business came in the mail Tuesday morning. It was postmarked July 1 and marked “p.m.” The massacre took place that afternoon.

The envelope that the detective agency received contained a copy of the typewritten note that police found on Ferri’s body and a handwritten request on yellow note paper saying: “If you don’t want to investigate, please send it to someone who will.”

“The same letter was found on his body,” Speriglio said. “It was mailed in San Francisco just hours before he killed people.”

Ferri was never a client of the agency, but the gunman could have decided to send the note because the agency is well-known and not far from Woodland Hills, Speriglio said.