COVER STORY : Arresting Drama : With ‘Reality’ Cop Shows Helping Crack Tough Cases, Beverly Hills Police Turn to TV Viewers to Solve Slaying

The cameras started rolling. An actor playing a gunman snuck up behind another actor dressed as a Brink’s guard, raised his pistol and fired. The guard crumpled to the sidewalk, and the gunman seized the bag of money and hurried away.

Two months earlier, on Sept. 6, this scene had been played out in real life: Guard Dennie Plese was shot dead in a robbery outside Manufacturers Bank in Beverly Hills. Now a television crew was re-creating the brutal murder for the TV crime show “America’s Most Wanted.”

TV at its sensationalistic worst?

Not to Beverly Hills Police Detective Tom Linehan, who invited the “America’s Most Wanted” crew to the scene of the crime.

Coached by the program’s producer, Linehan patiently stood before the camera, telling and retelling the facts of the case. Linehan has high hopes that the publicity will lead him to the murderer.

“A murder is like a puzzle. The more people we can reach through shows like this, the better the chances are that someone will give us a piece of information that will lead to an arrest,” he said.

Linehan’s optimism is well-founded. Law enforcers say reality-based crime shows have produced impressive results, helping to solve cases across the country.

The two top shows, Fox’s weekly “America’s Most Wanted” and NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries,” attract millions of viewers--and thousands of tipsters who dial the programs’ toll-free numbers to pass on tips to police. The programs enable law enforcement agencies to broadcast a fugitive’s photograph or composite drawing to homes from Key West, Fla., to Weed, Calif.

“With law enforcement (budgets) being cut, and since our ratings are so high, (law enforcement) reaches out and calls us,” said Tony Zanelotti, West Coast producer of “America’s Most Wanted.” “They can’t beat our 10 to 15 million viewers.”

Representatives of “Unsolved Mysteries,” whose format covers not only fugitives but also lost loves and missing heirs, say 40% of the suspects the show has identified by name or photograph have been caught since the show premiered in January, 1987.

“America’s Most Wanted,” which celebrated its seventh season this year, claims the clues it has presented have led to the capture of 329 fugitives, more than a third of the criminals it has profiled.

“There is something like 280,000 fugitives in the country, and I know that 329 is just a little dent,” said Donna Brant, a reporter for “America’s Most Wanted.” “But a lot of these cases wouldn’t be solved without us.”

Some of the successes have come in local cases.

Homicide Detective Dan Andrews of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire Division says eight of his cases have been featured on “America’s Most Wanted,” “Unsolved Mysteries” and NBC’s recently canceled “Prime Suspect.” Most of them, he says, have been solved with the help of tips from viewers.

One such effort is expected to culminate this week with the sentencing in Los Angeles of Franklin LeGrand Perkins, who was convicted in the murder of Lee Selwyn, a popular disc jockey who worked at clubs on the Sunset Strip.

The case illustrates not only that reality crime shows can help law enforcers, but also that the critical information does not always come immediately.

On Oct. 8, 1988, Selwyn and some friends were riding motorcycles and got into an argument with the driver of a red and white Ford Bronco. The driver of the Bronco chased Selwyn and forced his motorcycle into a telephone pole on La Cienega Boulevard, according to police.

When the “Unsolved Mysteries” story about the Selwyn case aired on Jan. 11, 1989, the response was overwhelming, said Los Angeles Police Detective Dan Andrews. It was the first time the LAPD’s Wilshire Division had ever had one of its cases featured on one of the reality-based programs, which were new at the time.

“That show generated about a thousand clues,” Andrews said, referring to the tips the show’s telephone operators took down during the program. “We had boxes of computer printouts to go through.”

Yet the detectives, Andrews said, were unable to come up with a suspect.

“At first we kept hanging on to the hope that there would be closure. But as years passed, I didn’t think he’d be caught,” said Lori Selwyn, Lee Selwyn’s sister.

But as the show’s popularity grew, “Unsolved Mysteries” was syndicated and its reruns began airing on several channels--with the high-profile Selwyn murder case often being shown.

“We would get a flurry of clues every time the (Selwyn) program would air,” said Andrews, the only LAPD detective who has remained on the case since its start.

Nothing came of the tips until the program was broadcast as a rerun on the Lifetime channel on March 15, 1993. The call that broke the case came through the program’s 800 number, and the anonymous tipster tied Perkins--then serving time in a Georgia prison for illegal possession of firearms--to the Selwyn murder.

Perkins was served with an indictment in the Selwyn case five days before his scheduled release and was extradited to Los Angeles, where he was tried and convicted of second-degree murder. His sentencing is scheduled for Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

“It had been almost five years. I didn’t tell the family, but I was discouraged about ever solving that case,” Andrews said. “We never would have solved (the Selwyn) case except for ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’ ”

The geographical reach of the crime programs was illustrated more dramatically in 1990, when “America’s Most Wanted” helped lead police to the murderer of Hollywood resident Barry Glick, a sunglasses salesman.

The killer, Gerald Reeves, reportedly befriended Glick and then robbed and fatally stabbed him in April, 1990, fleeing to Modesto in Glick’s car, said LAPD homicide Detective Dennis Kilcoyne. In Modesto, Reeves committed a robbery and kidnaping and successfully eluded police--until Kilcoyne asked “America’s Most Wanted” to profile the Glick murder.

After the program aired, police were inundated with 350 telephone tips indicating that Reeves had traveled across the country, befriending and robbing women and gay men in half a dozen states.

When the show profiled Reeves a second time in December, a Maryland woman called in and said she had just spoken to Reeves, who was planning to spend Christmas with her daughter. Reeves was visiting the Circus Circus casino and hotel in Reno, she said--a fact confirmed by other “America’s Most Wanted” callers who said they had seen him in the casino that night.

The next morning, Reeves was captured in a Western Union office where police had lured him with a phony money transfer. In 1992, he was convicted of murder in Los Angeles and is now serving a sentence of life without parole, Kilcoyne said.

Such results have caught the attention of local law enforcement agencies, who now work closely with crime shows that many were skeptical about when such programming began in the late 1980s.

Tim Rogan, coordinating producer of “Unsolved Mysteries,” estimates that his weekly show garners a few thousand calls during or immediately after each program airs. And with shows rerunning in syndication, that can add up to about 10,000 tips a week, he said.

Despite the massive number of tips, it has taken the shows some time to prove their worth to police, Zanelotti said.

“When we started the show, law enforcement agencies were suspicious of what we wanted to do, and what we could do for them,” he said.

Not so now. Said Brant of “America’s Most Wanted”: “Some (police) call us the day after a crime occurs.”

These days, in fact, police are practically part of the production crew. After successfully lobbying “America’s Most Wanted” to profile the slaying of Plese, the Brink’s guard, Linehan of the Beverly Hills Police Department appeared on televised interviews and voice-overs for the program. He and his partner, Detective Michael Hopkins, were flown to the show’s headquarters in Washington for its airing on Nov. 12.

There, they were stationed at a 30-line telephone bank. Operators connected them with callers who appeared to have promising leads and took down other callers’ information that the police could study later, Linehan said.

After the show aired, 60 calls came in. Linehan declined to discuss any prospective clues. But he says that one of the calls was from Plese’s half-brother, who first learned from the TV show that his sibling had been killed.

Crime show producers say there is no guarantee that their programs will produce clues. Indeed, many cases profiled on crime shows have yet to be resolved--among them, the disappearance of Adam Hecht, a 24-year-old tennis instructor who vanished from his Beverly Hills apartment in June, 1989.

Hecht’s rental car was found abandoned in Beverly Hills with his wallet, containing cash and credit cards, inside the vehicle.

Before his disappearance, police say, Hecht had expressed interest in being among homeless people and helping them. They speculate that he may have dropped out of sight to become a street person.

Hecht’s family successfully lobbied “Unsolved Mysteries” to profile the case, but so far the broadcasts have failed to help explain his disappearance.

“We’re not giving up hope,” said Beverly Hills Police Lt. Frank Salicido. “In the case of a missing person, you never know where they might be.”