Police Track Down ’83 Murder Suspect : Law enforcement: Foothill Division detectives arrest a man in a Sylmar killing. It is their second such success in two weeks.

Foothill Division homicide detectives have done it again: Just a week after helping track down a Seattle area man wanted for a 19-year-old Pacoima homicide, they have arrested another murder suspect who was in hiding for 11 years, authorities confirmed Tuesday.

For much of the last six years, authorities said, suspect Richard Label Hill was living right in the San Fernando Valley under several assumed identities.

Hill, 28, was arrested Monday afternoon as he visited his North Hollywood parole officer, who thought he was someone else named Darrell Holcomb who had served a two-year prison sentence for burglary--until the police came Monday and told him who his client really was.

The parolee who called himself Holcomb and who left prison in August was actually Hill, and the detectives said they wanted him for murder. Hill had no idea when he walked into the parole office the reason he was asked to pay a visit.

“He came in and we placed him in custody. We didn’t tell him why. And then the police came and took him away,” said Shirley Poe, a state parole agent supervisor.

Later Monday, Hill was booked on murder charges.

But in interviews with police--after at first denying that he was the man they were seeking all these years--Hill admitted his real identity after being shown his high-school yearbook pictures--which bore a striking resemblance to him, said homicide Detective Ray Broker.

Hill had used at least one other identity, that of Dwayne Johnson, Broker said.

Broker and another Foothill detective cracked the Hill case over the past few days just like they did in the case of Richard Leos--through hard work and the use of police computers that cross-reference the identities and physical characteristics of suspects, especially when they slip up and mention a part of their past they have been trying to hide.

“When you live a lie like that and have several names and several identities, being on the run and having that much contact with authorities, you are going to slip up occasionally,” said Broker. “He was fairly good at what he was doing, or he wouldn’t have been outstanding as long as he was.”

“But he did make some errors,” Broker said, “and that enabled us to catch him.”

Hill is charged in the death of Riley Tucker, 18, who was shot during an argument between two groups of teen-agers in a Sylmar store parking lot in 1983, police said. Police say witnesses can place Hill at the shooting scene and testify that he pulled out a gun and shot the teen-age victim.

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An arrest warrant for murder was first issued for Hill 11 years ago, but authorities determined that the suspect had fled to the East Coast. They have since determined that he returned to the Valley six years ago and had recently been using his grandmother’s address. Broker said authorities will be interviewing Hill’s family members to see if they knew of his whereabouts all these years.

A review of Hill’s case came after authorities tracked down Leos, a murder suspect in an unrelated case, and had him arrested by a multi-agency task force operating in the Seattle area. Leos, too, acknowledged that he was the man that authorities were looking for since a barroom slaying in 1975. He has waived extradition and was brought back to Los Angeles. He has pleaded innocent to murder charges, and a pretrial hearing has been scheduled for Monday in Van Nuys Superior Court.

In Hill’s case, as in other old, unsolved murder cases, police every so often punched his name and criminal identification numbers into national crime computers. Nothing ever happened, especially since his fingerprints were not on file, because Hill had had no brushes with the law before the shooting.

Since returning to the Valley, Hill--under the alias Holcomb--received the burglary conviction and had other run-ins with authorities, but there was no way of seeing through his various aliases and uncovering his true identity, according to state parole officials and police.

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Emboldened by the success in the Leos case, however, Broker and partner Rick Plows set to work.

Detective Frank Bishop, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division homicide unit, said Broker’s relative lack of experience as a homicide detective belies a true genius at finding fugitives who operate anonymously within the murky confines of the criminal underworld.

The two detectives started checking out Hill’s family members’ vehicles to see who has been driving them in recent years. They found that an individual using the name Dwayne Johnson with a similar birth date as that of Hill had been driving a car registered to Hill’s mother, and had received a traffic citation in April, 1991. Johnson matched the physical characteristics of Hill, including a similar birth date.

The detectives then went after Johnson, and found that he had a criminal record in the Valley dating back to 1990, and that he also had a driver’s license and identity under the name Darrell Holcomb. Then, they contacted his parole officer, and set about finding photographs of Hill from before he vanished, and mug shots of the people using the other identities.

“It appeared to be the same individual,” Broker said, “with 10 years of aging.”

Also, Broker said, whoever was using the Johnson and Holcomb identities had cited several of Hill’s relatives on various police documents. They determined the three were one and the same, and asked Holcomb’s parole agent to have him stop by the office.

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Now that two fugitives have been caught, the detectives say they will dust off some of the other old, unsolved cases to see if they can continue their streak. In Foothill alone, there are as many as 40 people wanted in outstanding homicide cases, police said.

But for now, two wins in two tries is a good start, said Broker.

“We were able to drag a few of them back into the system where they belong, so they can address some of these obviously very old charges,” he said. “But there are a lot of them left. There is certainly no shortage.”