Cash Rewards Don’t Often Pay Off in Solving Crimes : Justice: O.C. families of victims sometimes put up large sums that draw attention--but draw few leads.

After an attacker bludgeoned the great-granddaughter of Knott’s Berry Farm’s founder nearly to death in her bedroom in November, distraught relatives moved fast to try to solve the crime with a potent weapon of their own: cash, lots of it.

The family of 17-year-old Desire Anderson posted a $10,000 reward for information on the baffling Nov. 28 assault, which hospitalized her for weeks before the honor student was well enough to return to her home in San Diego County, where the attack occurred.

Since then, two other Orange County families whose loved ones were murdered offered even heftier rewards after detectives hit dead ends in their cases. Surviving relatives of Newport Beach entrepreneur William F. McLaughlin last month posted a $40,000 offer in hopes of solving his Dec. 15 slaying. Inspired by that offer, the family of Frances M. Van Uden put up $50,000 two weeks later for information into her unsolved murder last March.

And when a Laguna Beach ice-cream shop owner was killed and her husband wounded during a robbery attempt at their Baskin-Robbins store last week, the City Council and Baskin-Robbins wasted no time in putting up rewards totaling $15,000.

The cash offers have yet to produce a breakthrough in any of those cases. And if recent history is a guide, the odds are poor that they ever will.

Rewards make headlines and offer strong incentives to aid police, experts say, but they seldom crack mysteries--especially the whodunits where cash offers are often the last resort. Most big rewards in Orange County during the past decade went uncollected and cash offers played little or no role in most of the cases that were finally solved, authorities said.

“The majority of time it doesn’t work,” said Bob Blackburn, an investigator with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “But it’s just another tool to use. You never know if it’s going to work. . . . I’d use it every opportunity I had. We’d be remiss if we didn’t.”

Rewards have figured into almost every high-profile criminal case in the county in recent memory: the disappearance of Denise Huber, the murders of college students Cathy Torrez and Robbin Brandley, the slaying of Garden Grove Police Officer Howard E. Dallies Jr., the Laguna Beach firestorm and the post office rampage for which Mark Richard Hilbun awaits trial.

The Placentia City Council has twice posted a $10,000 reward, in the Torrez case last year and after the still-unsolved 1987 murder of 14-year-old Wendy Osborn. The Yorba Linda City Council offered $10,000 regarding the murder last year of an Alpha Beta store manager, but the chief suspect is still at large.

It’s a tradition going dating back to the Old West, the idea that a pile of cash and a “Wanted” poster might help snare the bad guy by doing what police work alone often cannot--jar a fuzzy memory or coax an accomplice to rat on a friend. Rewards are offered in cases small and great, from graffiti vandalism and petty theft to the notorious O.J. Simpson case, during which defense lawyers last year posted $500,000 for information leading to the “real killer or killers” of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Long before police detectives came into being in the United States in the late 1800s, most crimes were probed by bounty hunters or private investigators funded by wealthy victims or their families, said James Farris, a criminal justice professor at Cal State Fullerton. The reward tradition never died out.

“It’s a terribly strong incentive,” said Gilbert Geis, a retired criminologist at UC Irvine who has written about the use of rewards in criminal cases. “Americans are used to being compensated for what they do. Here’s a very handsome compensation.”

Geis said rewards have made a difference in selected cases and programs, such as an Internal Revenue Service reward system for turning in tax cheats.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis R. Rosenblum said he has prosecuted at least two cases in which rewards prompted crucial witnesses to step forward. But he said cash offers succeed in a only a “small minority” of cases. Part of the reason is that rewards are offered only in the most difficult cases, experts said.

“Rarely will they offer the reward unless they can’t solve it any other way,” said Geis. “The reward generally is a function of frustration, so the odds are (police) aren’t going to solve it anyway,” he said.

A public offer of money can have other benefits, some say, by symbolizing community outrage over a crime or easing a surviving family’s feeling of grief and powerlessness.

“I would sell my shoes--everything I have--if it would solve this,” said Genelle Reilley, who with her husband has offered $50,000 for information on the murder of their daughter, Robbin Brandley, found fatally stabbed on the Saddleback College campus in Mission Viejo in 1986. “It’s the only thing you can do.”

And though an offer of a huge cash reward can open a Pandora’s box of false leads and crank callers, police said, it can also be an inexpensive price for that one-in-a-million breakthrough.

“You always hope, ‘Jeez, for 35 grand they’re going to roll over on their mother,’ ” said Corinne Loomis, a spokeswoman for the Placentia Police Department. “You’re hoping that will be the impetus for somebody to come forward.”

Rewards have played a role in some success stories.

A Mission Viejo boy was among 19 people who got a share of the bounty in 1989 after the conviction of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker serial murderer. James Romero III, who was 13 when he noticed a suspicious-looking man in his neighborhood in 1985, later received a three-wheel, all-terrain cycle, Rams tickets and more than $5,000 in cash for getting part of a license-plate number that helped authorities track down Ramirez.

And relatives of drum-store owner Robert Wrate, shot dead in his home in an exclusive Orange neighborhood in 1992, paid $12,500 to a witness who first reported the suspect to police, then obtained his taped confession by wearing a hidden recorder. The suspect was convicted.

Though detectives downplay the role of the reward--originally set at $25,000--it was “the glue that put everything together” according to the victim’s brother, Richard Wrate, a Corona del Mar businessman. Wrate said he paid the woman the last of 13 monthly installments last fall. Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful.

Rosenblum said a $10,000 reward offer was instrumental in prompting a key witness to come forward to help solve a gang slaying in Westminster in 1989.

“In a lot of these cases, especially murder cases, these people who come into court are putting themselves in jeopardy,” Rosenblum said. “If that’s what it takes, so be it.”

Other local cases may result in reward payouts yet, including a $50,000 reward claimed by several witnesses who helped authorities convict the gunman in a triple murder at a Tustin auto-parts store in 1990. Two witnesses are awaiting Hilbun’s trial to see if they get to split the $25,000 reward for spotting him in a Huntington Beach bar in 1993. Hilbun allegedly killed two people and wounded five others during a two-day rampage. The Postal Inspection Service said there will be no reward until after a conviction.

“I’m real interested in what happens,” said Humberto Ochoa, 26, an employee of financially troubled Orange County and one of the two men who helped authorities capture Hilbun. “Especially if I get laid off now--I could use the cash.”

An Arizona couple whose tip led police last year to discover the body of Orange County resident Denise Huber--missing since 1991--later declined a $10,000 reward offered by the family, police said.

More common, though, are lingering mysteries like the murder of Robbin Brandley, cases where reward offers renew headlines and generate calls to police before fading again from public view, unresolved.

Brandley’s parents, John and Genelle Reilley of Laguna Beach, hope this year to place a billboard in southern Orange County advertising their reward, which was doubled last year to $50,000, eight years after the murder.

“We feel this person has to have talked,” Genelle Reilley said of the killer. “This person may even be in prison and talked to somebody in prison.”

Besides the offer of money, Reilley said the family has spent more than $50,000, hiring private investigators and even psychics to find out who left Robbin Brandley stabbed and bleeding on Jan. 19, 1986--and why.

“It’s constantly on my mind what happened to her. She was a loving, wonderful person. She didn’t have a crazy life,” Reilley said.

The Reilleys are representative of those who most often post rewards in Orange County--families of crime victims relying on their own money or donations. While Los Angeles County and the city of Los Angeles routinely offer publicly funded rewards, the money offered by municipalities in Orange County is limited mainly to small-scale programs, such as targeting graffiti vandals. Large public rewards have been offered only in cases where the crime has shocked an entire community.

Last year, Placentia posted $10,000 to bring to about $36,000 the total reward offered in the stabbing death of Cal State Fullerton student Cathy Torrez (police last week named Sam Lopez, 24, of Placentia, the victim’s former boyfriend and her sister’s brother-in-law, as a suspect in the case). Seven years earlier, the city offered the same amount after Wendy Osborn was found slain in San Bernardino County after disappearing on her way to school. That case remains unsolved.

“They were so horrible--both of them,” said Councilman Norman Z. Eckenrode, who proposed the reward in the Torrez case. “The entire community was outraged. . . . We’re a smaller community than Santa Ana or Anaheim where there are people killed in drive-by shootings almost every day, it seems.”

Yorba Linda authorities promised $10,000 to anyone who could locate the killer of supermarket manager Timothy Eugene McVeigh, shot dead last July by a robber who made off with $156. Despite that reward--and an additional $10,000 offered by the store owners--police have been unable to track down suspect Stephen Moreland Redd, an ex-convict and onetime Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy.

And just as vexing to Garden Grove authorities is the unsolved murder of Howard Dallies, a city police officer shot dead by a motorcyclist in March, 1993. Gov. Pete Wilson last year raised the reward offered in that case to $100,000--making it the largest reward offer in Orange County and sparking a flood of tips that briefly buoyed investigators’ hopes.

“We had a tremendous number of calls and tips, but nothing that has panned out,” said police Capt. Dave Abrecht. “A reward is probably a good deal but it has to be in a timely fashion--especially in a high-profile case . . . As time goes on, these things fade.”