Dead-End Cases Pile Up : <i> Detectives Armed With Fewer Resources Tackle the Growing Problem of Unsolved Homicides </i>

The news shocked the Chinese American community in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Ho Fu (Eric) Chiu, 20, a state amateur badminton champion and president of Cypress College’s Chinese student association, was dead.

Likable, hard-working, handsome and athletic, Chiu led a life full of promise in his adopted country. Nonetheless, the Taiwan native was found dead May 20, 1992, shot inside his car, which was left in a recreation center parking lot in El Monte.

Nearly two years later, Chiu’s killing remains unsolved, despite hours of investigation and dozens of people questioned. “There’s absolutely no reason that we’ve found for this murder,” said El Monte Police Det. Linda Parrott, frustration in her voice.

Chiu’s death typifies a growing phenomenon nationwide that has hit San Gabriel Valley cities especially hard. People are literally getting away with murder.

Nationwide over the past 30 years, homicide detectives have found themselves stymied by more and more unsolved cases. In 1961, 92% of homicides were declared solved, with suspects arrested. Three decades later, the rate has plummeted to 67%, two out of three solved.

In the 30 San Gabriel Valley cities, the rate is even worse. Less than half--47%--of all homicides resulted in arrests, according to 1992 state Department of Justice Statistics.

That same year, the Los Angeles Police Department solved 59% of its homicides, 640 of 1,094, while the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department solved 62%, 333 of 565 homicides, according to state statistics.

“The solves are going down, that’s true,” said El Monte Police Lt. Ken Jeske, who oversees homicide investigations in his city of 106,000.

“We should be at 80% or 90%,” Jeske said. “But it’s about 50% for everybody in Southern California because we all suffer the same problems.”

Gone are the days when detectives spent their days mainly on domestic dispute slayings--husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend killings, such obvious crimes that police call them “walk-throughs” or “self-solvers.”

More victims now are felled by strangers or by gang members, end up as unidentified bodies dumped in parks and streets or come from vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and immigrants.

And these kinds of cases are coming when police departments find themselves in some ways less equipped to investigate them. The informant network, used by detectives for decades, is withering. Plus, detectives are a younger, less experienced group with less commitment to staying in homicide bureaus, say criminologists and veteran detectives.

All of it combines to make murder, the most heinous of crimes, one of the least solvable. A look at a handful of the San Gabriel Valley’s unsolved killings illustrates why homicide detectives are having a tough time solving cases.

*

At 8:15 on a Friday evening in September, 1992, Tung Kuang Ku, 39, the sole employee in the Teriyaki Bowl on West Duarte Road in Arcadia, was shot when an armed gunman demanded the couple of hundred dollars that was in the cash register. The Rosemead father of two died from a gunshot to his torso.

Witnesses saw only the race of the gunman but could not describe him or his getaway car in detail. With no one to question and little else to go on, police hit a dead-end, said Arcadia Police Lt. Dave Hinig.

*

Ku’s death is a typical “stranger homicide,” a killing in which the victim didn’t know his slayer. Absent a relationship between victim and slayer and with no description of the killer or a weapon, police can’t even begin to look for a suspect, Hinig said. Instead, they must rely on luck: that fingerprints taken at the scene might lead them to someone later.

Stranger homicides represent a changing pattern of murder in American society, said Albert Cardarelli, professor of criminology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a specialist on unsolved killings. These murders often are gratuitously violent, he said, with gunmen pulling off a successful robbery and killing cooperative victims for no reason.

*

About 9 p.m. on Feb. 12, 1992, Hipolito (Junior) Villalobos, 16, was walking home in Baldwin Park with three new high school friends, all alleged gang members, when gunmen jumped from a passing car and chased down the group. The youth was felled by six gunshots to the head and upper torso.

Villalobos’ three companions, who faced the same gunmen just steps away, told police they couldn’t describe the car or the shooters--even after witnesses and anonymous tips pointed to possible suspects.

“There’s nothing we can do (to the companions),” Baldwin Park Police Det. David Reynoso said. “We can interview them until we’re blue in the face, but if they don’t want to tell us, they don’t want to tell us.”

Silence is a common obstacle in gang-related slayings, swelling the number of unsolved homicides in cities such as Baldwin Park, Pomona and Pasadena, where gang killings account for one-third to half of all murders.

Fear of retribution keeps most witnesses quiet in gang-related slayings, Reynoso said. Threats of physical harm and death--mere words a few years ago--are now backed up by violence from gang members.

Many gang members observe the unwritten credo that they will pay back the death of a fallen comrade. Thus, they remain silent before police or prosecutors, Reynoso said.

Gang slayings usually provide little in the way of hard evidence. The weapon, if recovered, often can’t be traced to the shooter because it has changed hands multiple times, Reynoso said.

Family members of Junior Villalobos understand the fear that keeps witnesses quiet. “They’re scared,” said Maria Rodriguez, his aunt. “Would you talk?”

*

At noon on June 17, longtime United Farm Workers union activist Artemisa Guerrero, 68, was found stabbed to death in her Monterey Park apartment. Her attacker broke in through a back window, sexually assaulted her, stabbed her to death and ransacked her apartment before fleeing. Neighbors, many of them elderly, said they heard nothing, saw no one.

Guerrero, a generous, giving and politically active woman, knew scores of people. Sheriff’s homicide Detective Bob Tauson has searched futilely for a possible motive and suspect. The case also poses problems because Guerrero was among the vulnerable--the elderly and the ethnic, populations with higher rates of unsolved murders, according to Cardarelli’s research.

Asian, Spanish-speaking or Eastern European immigrants may not be able to even speak to police to provide basic information. And negative experiences with corrupt or antagonistic police in their own countries may make them fear officers here.

Among the elderly, the obstacles to solving homicides are physical. Witnesses often are other elderly people, the victim’s roommates or neighbors. Oftentimes, such witnesses have poor hearing, eyesight and memories that make them unreliable, police said. Medication taken by the elderly can increase their unreliability.

For Guerrero’s family, the lack of an arrest keeps them in permanent mourning. “It’s an issue that’s never closed . . . like a wound that keeps on breaking open,” said Andy Apodaca, Guerrero’s son-in-law.

*

On the afternoon of Nov. 12, 1992, Pomona police made a grisly find: the charred remains of an unidentified man with a bashed skull, his body dumped in the flood control channel near Kellogg Park in Pomona.

Fingerprinting proved useless. Only one clue remained--the letters “stelum” on his blackened leather belt. Twelve days later, a breakthrough. Jose Arturo Gastelum, 35, a Mexican living in San Diego County, had been staying at the Shilo Inn in Pomona until his disappearance Nov. 9.

The case ultimately led to Mexico, where Gastelum may have been a currency courier in the drug trade, said Pomona Police Lt. Ron Frazier. Typically, he said, couriers pick up cash from drug sales here and take it back for laundering in Mexico.

Gastelum may have been skimming. His execution may have been meant to send a message, Frazier said. But police still lack hard evidence and a suspect, he said.

*

Gastelum’s murder typifies the difficulties in “body dump” homicides. Bodies without identification are found miles and days away from the actual crime scene and time. Such a find stalls the investigation until the authorities identify the dead person.

“Without knowing who the victim is, it just about shuts you out,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Frank Merriman. “There’s absolutely nowhere to go.”

The number of such cases appears to be growing in part because of increased drug trafficking, investigators say. In Los Angeles County, detectives have found so many bodies of drug traffickers from an eastern coastal state in Mexico that they call such victims “Sinaloa Cowboys.” In the San Gabriel Valley, the Angeles National Forest, the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area and the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area provide plenty of isolated acreage for such dumps.

Beatrice Gastelum, 41, said she thinks her husband of 17 years was killed for “business reasons.” But she insists his business was selling U.S.-purchased auto parts in Tijuana, not carrying money.

The death has shaken her 17-year-old son, Arturo Jr. “He doesn’t want to study and he can’t regain his peace of mind,” she said.

*

The job of solving these homicides has become even more difficult because of two significant changes, criminologists and investigators said: the withering informant network and the mass departure of veteran homicide detectives.

One veteran detective said he used to call on 25 to 30 informants--prostitutes, loan sharks, veteran gang members and bikers. Now “if you have half a dozen informants, that’s a lot,” he said.

Decreasing incentives are largely responsible. Illicit drug wealth has far overshadowed the petty cash or minor legal help offered by detectives in exchange for information. Some gang members have enough money to hire top-notch attorneys; others do a turnaround and offer detectives money.

One investigator recalled a drug dealer who had information about a slaying but refused to divulge what he knew. He tried to end detectives’ questions by offering $1.2 million in cash and a boxful of automobile pink slips from which to choose a Mercedes Benz or BMW; instead he was convicted of attempted bribery.

*

Gang members who could turn into informants also remain silent, knowing that if called to testify in court, they could be killed in retribution, police said.

Finally, many younger investigators avoid gathering informants for fear the association could harm their careers. “Informants are not very nice people--they’re crooks,” one detective said.

The informant-police relationship often includes dining and drinking with informants, giving them home phone numbers, helping their families, looking the other way at their petty crimes and doing them small favors, all in exchange for information. With the internal scrutiny police undergo nowadays, younger detectives prefer to avoid such contact, said criminologist Cardarelli.

Another reason homicide solve rates are decreasing is that older, experienced detectives, hired in the big-budget days of the 1960s and 1970s, are rtiring, police and criminologists say.

“We’re going through a period of losing a lot of very experienced detectives,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Merriman, whose detectives often aid the smaller San Gabriel Valley cities in homicide investigations. “All those people starting to leave are taking with them 30 years of experience.”

Their ranks are increasingly being filled by ambitious officers who see homicide bureaus not as a life goal, but as good resume material, said veteran detectives and criminologists.

*

“My career goal is to be a cop. Their career goal is to be an administrator,” said an older detective of his younger colleagues. “Homicide (bureau) was a goal in and of itself . . . Now it’s a steppingstone.”

In addition, the federal government’s war on drugs has siphoned off younger people who typically work patrol and advance to homicide bureaus. With investigative jobs available in the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs, the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Inspector General’s office, the grind of beat policing can be avoided with a shortcut to a detective’s job, said Robert Lorinskas, an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Crime, Delinquency and Corrections at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Mo.

*

Given the tougher crimes, the shrinking number of informants and the departure of veteran detectives, the unsolved homicide rate is likely to remain the same for the next few years, say police and criminologists.

Meanwhile, homicide detectives say their unsolved cases eat at them daily. They continue to plug away at them in between their new investigations.

“I still ask about this case,” Parrott said of the Chiu murder. “It’s an active and open case . . . I’ve had cases solved five and seven years after the fact with someone coming forward with one little bit of information that finished it.

“I don’t ever give up.”

Case Closed

Homicides cleared by arrests for San Gabriel Valley cities, 1983 and 1992. 1983

Number of Homicides Percent City homicides cleared cleared Alhambra 5 2 40% Arcadia 1 1 100% Azusa 4 2 50% Baldwin Park 12 6 50% Bradbury 0 N/A N/A City of Industry 1 1 100% Claremont 0 N/A N/A Covina 1 1 100% Diamond Bar N/A N/A N/A Duarte 0 N/A N/A El Monte 11 5 45% Glendora 0 N/A N/A Irwindale 2 0 0% La Canada Flintridge 0 N/A N/A La Puente 5 3 60% La Verne 0 N/A N/A Monrovia 1 0 50% Monterey Park 1 2* 100% Pasadena 15 15 100% Pomona 15 14 93% Rosemead 5 3 60% San Dimas 1 0 0% San Gabriel 4 2 50% San Marino 0 N/A N/A Sierra Madre 0 N/A N/A South El Monte 2 2 100% South Pasadena 1 1 100% Temple City 1 0 0% Walnut 1 1 100% West Covina 6 4 66% Totals 95 65 68%

*1992

Number of Homicides Percent City homicides cleared cleared Alhambra 7 5 71% Arcadia 2 0 0% Azusa 1 0 0% Baldwin Park 12 4 33% Bradbury 1 0 0% City of Industry 3 0 0% Claremont 0 N/A N/A Covina 2 1 50% Diamond Bar 0 N/A N/A Duarte 4 0 0% El Monte 17 11 65% Glendora 1 1 100% Irwindale 2 1 50% La Canada Flintridge 0 N/A N/A La Puente 13 3 23% La Verne 0 N/A N/A Monrovia 1 1 100% Monterey Park 2 2 100% Pasadena 21 12 57% Pomona 36 15 42% Rosemead 9 3 33% San Dimas 0 N/A N/A San Gabriel1 0 0% San Marino 0 N/A N/A Sierra Madre 0 N/A N/A South El Monte 4 1 25% South Pasadena 0 N/A N/A Temple City 1 1 100% Walnut 1 1 100% West Covina 4 6* 100% Totals 145 68 47%

* Note: The number of cleared homicides can include arrests for homicides from previous years.

Source: San Gabriel Valley police departments and California Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Information Center, Sacramento, Ca.