COLUMN ONE : 3 Bodies, 3 Killers, No Suspects : A night on the beat with Detective Dick Simmons shows why it’s so hard to solve a murder in L.A. A rise in street slayings means hard evidence--and witnesses--are scarce.

The first murder of the night is a drive-by. Homicide Detective Dick Simmons studies a patch of sidewalk in South-Central where a 15-year-old boy was shot. He examines the pool of blood near the curb, the serpentine pattern of shell casings in the street, the boy’s bloody T-shirt.

As Simmons begins interviewing a neighbor he is beeped and sent to another shooting scene, half a mile away. He spots a 32-year-old woman sprawled near an alley. She has been dead 20 minutes but is still tightly clutching a glass cocaine pipe.

An hour later, Simmons is dispatched to the edge of the Harbor Freeway where he examines an abandoned car riddled with bullet holes. About 100 feet away, beside a concrete wall, he finds the body of a 28-year-old man, who was shot twice.

Three murders within one square mile on a summer weeknight in Los Angeles. And Simmons has no witnesses, no clues, no leads, no suspects.

“What a night,” says Simmons as he studies the car beside the freeway. “We’re going to need some luck on all of these cases.”

The obstacles he faces on this recent night shift highlight a troubling trend: More people are getting away with murder.

Thirty years ago, police in the nation’s cities solved more than 90% of murders. A decade ago, it was less than 75%, according to FBI statistics. Today, the rate is 65%. At the Los Angeles Police Department--where homicide “clearance rates” mirror the national average--detectives are overwhelmed by the number of unsolved murders.

Police are increasingly confronted with a type of homicide that is extremely difficult to solve, and a type of killer who is extremely difficult to catch.

In the past, the majority of killers knew their victims, said Albert Cardarelli, a criminologist at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who has done extensive research on homicide clearance rates. Most murders were committed by a spouse, a family member or an acquaintance. Police did not have to go far in their search for suspects.

While police still clear most of the domestic cases--what they call “Ma and Pa Kettle” murders--these are just a fraction of the more than 2,000 homicides that occur each year in Los Angeles County.

More than half are “stranger homicides,” Cardarelli said, where there is no relationship between victim and killer. These include drug-related assaults, robberies and drive-by shootings, all of which have increased dramatically. Because most stranger homicides take place on the street, detectives often cannot obtain any physical evidence.

“Most of the homicides we were seeing 10 years ago were indoor scenes, where we’d get prints, clothing fibers . . . all kinds of leads,” said Detective Terry Wessel of the Rampart Division. “Out of the 150 murders we had in the division last year we probably didn’t solve 10 from physical evidence.”

And many potential witnesses refuse to come forward, fearing retribution by gangs. Some residents, particularly in areas such as Rampart, with large immigrant populations, are afraid detectives will report them to immigration officials, even though officers tell them it is against LAPD policy.

“We’ve had homicides where we know for a fact that there’s been 30 to 40 witnesses,” Wessel said. “Then we arrive at the scene and nobody saw nothing.”

Detectives are contending with these problems at a time when homicides in the city have increased from about 750 a year in the mid-1980s to more than 1,000 a year. But the number of LAPD homicide detectives--190--has remained about the same. So detectives have less time to work new homicides--they call them “fresh blood cases”--and are forever juggling investigations.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department faces similar problems. In 1950, sheriff’s detectives investigated 20 murders and solved 19 of them. Last year, swamped detectives investigated 565 murders and solved 324.

“All these unsolved murders is what’s creating so much fear in our cities,” Cardarelli said. “The randomness is what makes them so difficult to solve. And the randomness makes them so frightening.”

But detectives can solve some homicides today, which probably would have gone unsolved, by using high-tech tools such as computerized fingerprint analysis and DNA genetic code testing.

Still, Simmon’s Wednesday night illustrates how difficult it is to solve a murder when the only evidence left at the scene is a bloodstain or a shell casing or a bullet hole.

The Drive-By

Midnight.

When Simmons arrives at the murder scene, a neighborhood of weathered houses and small apartment buildings, the street is blocked off with flares and yellow crime scene tape. There is an eerie quiet; the only sounds are the hissing of the flares and the whirling of a police helicopter in the distance.

Simmons, a supervising detective in South Bureau Homicide, is on call for the night. His job is to roll on homicides in an area from South-Central to San Pedro, assist lead detective teams at the crime scenes and supervise the initial investigations.

The uniformed officers tell Simmons there was a crowd of about 25 people around the body, but no one would cooperate.

“When I got there I asked: ‘Did anybody see anything?,’ ” says Officer Michelle Butello. “Everybody just looked right through me. Nobody would say a word.”

While some of the uniformed police are brusque with the handful of bystanders, Simmons is solicitous. He schmoozes with them, is sympathetic to those who knew the 15-year-old and gently prods them for information without appearing obtrusive.

Simmons, 44, has been a detective in South Los Angeles almost 15 years and knows how to gain the trust of residents who are becoming increasingly hostile to police. He has a rare rapport with people at crime scenes, in part because he is married to a crime victim. Four years ago, a man was killed during a residential robbery, and his sister was shot in the face. Simmons worked the case, caught the killer and married the sister.

At the scene of the drive-by, Simmons is able to gather a rough description of the car used in the shooting and some background on warring neighborhood gang factions. The word on the street, he learns, is that a Crip was shot earlier that evening. Since this is a Blood ‘hood, most of the gangbangers knew to stay inside.

An elderly neighbor tells Simmons that the boy, who died en route to the hospital, did not “hang with gangsters,” so he would not have known about the earlier shooting. He was a ninth-grader, the neighbor says, “who just liked listening to his music.” After a few more interviews with neighbors, Simmons realizes that this promises to be an arduous investigation.

Simmons and the two lead detectives study the pile of bloody clothes on the corner that paramedics had stripped off the boy.

Beside the clothes was a Walkman, headphones and a tape titled “The Best of Minnie Ripperton”--not the gangster rap favored by some in the neighborhood. The boy was listening to the tape and walking the half-block home from a friend’s house when he was shot.

The slain boy’s cousin approaches Simmons. He has just returned from the hospital and is carrying a white plastic bag a nurse gave him. Inside are his cousin’s sneakers that were stripped off in the ambulance.

“His birthday would have been next Sunday,” he says, looking dazed, shaking his head.

The cousin’s girlfriend tells Simmons that her brother died in a drive-by last year only a block away. “Did we ever solve it?” he asks her, gently touching her arm.

She looks up at him, takes a deep breath and says softly: “No.”

The Drug Shooting

1:05 a.m.

Simmons and the two lead detectives on the case find the body of a woman sprawled on the sidewalk just off Century Boulevard. They study the few remnants of evidence to re-create the murder scenario.

They find one earring near an alley, so they figure that is where the woman struggled with her killer.

They know she was shot a few feet away because they find bloodstains near a driveway.

The shooter was probably in a car because the slugs they find are from a semiautomatic pistol, but they cannot find any shell casings.

After being shot, the woman apparently staggered about 20 feet and collapsed on the sidewalk.

The murder scene is a testament to the power of crack cocaine. From the time the woman struggled by the alley, to the shooting, to her last desperate steps when she fell, slamming her head on the pavement, she continued to clutch the cocaine pipe in her right hand.

The detectives knock on a few door, and all the neighbors have the same response: They did not see a thing. A few tell the detectives they have learned not to look out windows when they hear shots--too many people die from stray bullets. Now they hit the ground until the shooting is over.

Simmons begins chatting with the handful of stragglers gathered just beyond the yellow tape and discovers that the woman often smoked crack in a nearby motel. He sends a uniformed officer to the motel to pull the registration cards for the night.

When the officer returns, Simmons studies the stack of cards and realizes they won’t be of much help. Most of the people registered are named “Mr. and Mrs. Jones.”

A coroner investigator arrives, examines the woman’s hands for gunshot residue to determine if she fired a gun, and attempts to determine the cause of death. The detectives assume she died of a gunshot because of the slugs they recovered, but they cannot find an entry or exit wound.

This is the final indignity of death. The woman, still wearing her pink curlers, is sprawled out on the pavement, her black sweater pulled up around her shoulders. The investigator prods the body, searching for an entry wound while detectives scrutinize the examination and neighbors, craning their necks, press against the yellow tape.

Detectives grumble that this case is so tough to solve the investigator can’t even find a bullet wound. After about five minutes, the investigator gives up, wraps the woman in plastic sheeting, rolls her onto a metal gurney and heads off to the medical examiner’s office.

Later, with the lead detectives crowded around the woman’s body in the autopsy room, a pathologist explains how she died.

“The bullet entered here,” the pathologist says, pointing with a scalpel to a spot under her left arm. Her chest cavity is opened, with her organs exposed. The pathologist points to the heart and says the bullet passed three centimeters above the aorta, clipped a lung and severed the carotid artery.

The lead detectives, Pete Razanskas and Russell Poole, finally figure out why the investigator could not determine the cause of death at the scene. The woman’s black sweater, which was wrapped around her shoulders, had such a rough weave the investigator could not spot the entry wound or the blood.

After the pathologist points to the severed carotid artery he shrugs and say: “That’s it. Case closed.”

But for Razanskas and Poole, the investigation is just beginning. After the autopsy, the detectives discuss the findings in the parking lot. Because the entry wound is just beneath a shoulder blade they figure she was shot while trying to run away.

The suspect might have pulled up in a car. The victim might have tried to buy drugs. There probably was a dispute. The victim tried to run away. The suspect shot her and drove off.

Razanskas and Poole have a cause of death, an entry wound and a possible murder scenario. Now all they need is a suspect.

The Freeway Shooting

3:15 a.m.

Simmons examines a blue Nissan, abandoned for several hours, parked on a ramp leading to the Harbor Freeway. The stereo has been ripped out, and the driver’s side is stippled with bullet holes.

Simmons discovers the rear bumper is dented and covered with flecks of paint.

“That’s fresh,” says one detective, fingering the bumper. “Could be a bump-and-rob.”

A uniformed officer leads them about 100 feet from the car to where the man is sprawled on his back beside a concrete wall. His car keys are on one side of the body and on the other is a photograph that apparently fell out of his pocket. It shows the man, smiling broadly, arm-wresting with a friend.

A detective leans over the man and lightly touches his neck. “Cold,” he says.

They shine a flashlight on the body, study it for a moment and determine that the man was shot twice and has been dead several hours. His body is gray, but pinkish just below the surface, indicating “lividity,” or a settling of the blood.

When the coroner’s investigator examines the body the detectives are even more perplexed. There is no blood trail leading from the car to the spot where the man died. And the man was not robbed. He still has his wallet, his watch and $73 in his pocket.

Simmons and the detectives confer. They have many questions, but no answers. Was it a bungled bump-and-rob or a random freeway shooting? Was it a gang hit or an attempted carjacking? Was the man shot near his car and did he bleed internally until he collapsed? Or was he shot by the wall 100 feet away?

Detectives hope the technicians from the department’s Scientific Investigation Division can provide some leads. The SID truck pulls up and technicians dab the bloodstains around the body with swabs, photograph footprints around the car and tow it back to the lab for further tests.

But even if they are able to lift solid physical evidence from the car, including fingerprints, this may not lead to the right suspect. Detectives still are trying to determine whether the killer, or freeway scavengers who spotted the abandoned car, ripped off the stereo.

As the investigation drags on into the morning and commuters begin filling the Harbor Freeway, Simmons continues to scour the scene. He flicks on his flashlight and keeps retracing the route between the car and the body.

“We don’t even have any neighbors to talk to on this case,” he says over the din of freeway traffic. He crouches beside the car, studies a footprint in the dirt and says: “We don’t even have a motive.”

As the first light of dawn breaks over the Harbor Freeway, Simmons puts his flashlight back in his car, walks off into the distance, and retraces, yet again, a dead man’s final steps.