Beneath the Mystique of Homicide Work : Detectives: For real-life sleuths, the stress can be overwhelming.

There had been 16 weeks of peace. Sixteen weeks without being called out in the middle of the night to some trash-strewn alley heavy with the sour odors of urine, beer and blood.

But now the killing season was on.

In 10 days last October, there were five homicides. The detectives who occupied the tiny homicide office on the second floor of the Van Nuys station were shambling around, bleary-eyed, with ink stains on their shirt pockets. The media were demanding to know whether a serial killer was loose in town.

“The only difference between us and the Titanic is they had a band,” says Dan O’Hanian, a stocky detective trainee.

The mystique of the homicide detective has been inflated by a century of mythology stretching from Holmes to Warshawski. In fiction, they get their man. In Van Nuys, however, their foes are different from Moriarty-like criminal masterminds.

On a department in transition, homicide detectives face some of the same stresses as everyone else, and then some. The homicide manual is obsolete, work stations are cramped--barely larger than the table on which Killer, the adopted stray cat, eats his meals--and the interview room needs soundproofing. It was ordered two years ago, but still hasn’t arrived.

While a fictional detective spends all his time dueling with a single psychopathic killer, his real-life counterpart juggles several cases. And when they get a high-profile case, such as two elderly women who were murdered within days of each other, the heat is turned up.

In 1992, there were 39 homicides in Van Nuys, a record. The next year, reflecting a nationwide downward trend in violent crime, there were 27. Through the first week of October, 1994, there were seven.

Then the dam broke. On Sunday, Oct. 9, Berneda McMackin, a 77-year-old widow who slept with a teddy bear on her couch for fear of earthquakes, was murdered in her home on Blewett Avenue. Someone slashed off part of her ear, punctured her skull with a blunt instrument, strangled her to death and tried to set her body on fire.

Two days later, a few blocks away on Norwich Avenue, Aliza Levi was stabbed to death. Levi was a 72-year-old survivor. She escaped the Nazis as a girl. Only four months before her death, she fought off robbers in the courtyard of a church while vacationing in El Salvador.

She fought just as hard with the intruder who broke into her house the morning of Oct. 11. Blood was found from the kitchen all the way down the hallway to the bathroom where her naked body was discovered by her husband, Zvi, when he returned from the store, arms full of packages.

Thirty years ago, when most murders were committed by people who knew the victims, the clearance rate was 95%. The 1993 clearance rate in Van Nuys was 70%, partly because of cases like these.

The detectives are bending over shoe prints in the mud next to the porch when one of the victim’s two daughters arrives. O’Hanian, still learning his job, is unable to bring himself to tell Iris Levi what happened to her mother.

“There’s no one inside,” O’Hanian says.

Looking confused, the woman goes back to her van.

Steve Fisk, the 50-year-old supervisor in homicide, asks O’Hanian if he told her. “Not exactly,” O’Hanian says.

“She needs to be told, right now,” Fisk replies, his jaw rigid.

He walks over to the van, O’Hanian trailing behind. Fisk, a broad-shouldered man with a bushy red mustache, reaches in and turns off the motor. He puts a hand on her shoulder and tells Iris her mother is dead. “Oh God,” she screams.

Relatives come running and the woman staggers out of the van and falls into their arms.

Head bowed, Fisk walks back to the house. “Oh man, it stinks, just stinks,” he says.

Shouldering painful responsibility is nothing new for Fisk. In the past, his problem has been shouldering too much. He left police work for nine years after watching another policeman shoot and kill a 13-year-old girl with a shotgun blast to the head.

Fisk was a member of the Special Investigations Section, which conducts surveillance of suspected violent criminals. On Aug. 10, 1977, Fisk and eight other SIS detectives watched a 17-year-old rob and rough up the attendant at a gas station.

There was an exchange of gunfire and Toni Hyams, 13, a passenger in the getaway car, was killed.

Four sleepless nights later, Fisk was admitted to Van Nuys Psychiatric Hospital, where he was found to be suffering from “auditory and visual hallucinations” of people he had shot. Fisk was involved in three fatal shootings in five years with SIS.

“He feels terrible that you are made a hero when you kill someone when he, in fact, feels so terrible about it,” according to a psychiatric report.

Fisk was awarded a stress pension in 1978. He returned to the force in 1986 as a detective in the Foothill Division. His experience taught him the danger of letting your job rule your life. “You stay in the fast lane too long, you get in the gravel,” he said.

Knowing the toll the job can take, he takes a parental interest in his own detectives. When Roberta Moore forgot her granddaughter’s birthday, it was Fisk who reminded her.

“The important thing to me is to always keep things focused on the family first,” he said. “If their family falls apart, they fall apart.”

He can also be a taskmaster. Detail-oriented and driven to strive for perfection, he insists that his detectives keep their top button buttoned. He is known for his meticulous record-keeping. Without bothering to try to negotiate the city’s interminable purchasing process, he installed his own computer in the homicide office to keep track of leads. One case has 117.

If Fisk is cautious to the point of nit-picking, there is a reason. Because so many murder cases are plea-bargained away, none of his mostly green homicide detectives have tested a high-profile case in court. “My job is to make sure when these guys finish and go to court, [the defense] can attack the ID and the physical evidence, but they can’t attack my detectives.”

Inexperience is another factor complicating homicide work. A decade ago, all four Van Nuys homicide detectives were seasoned pros, Fisk said. Recently, he did a survey of his staff and found that the average amount of experience was 18 months.

“That’s not homicide experience,” Fisk says. “That’s total detective experience.”

Because of a department policy to transfer people to other divisions when they promote up, he is losing detectives as fast as he trains them.

Fisk’s boss, Lt. Richard Blankenship, says experience “is a factor” in solve rates. It would be more of a factor if it weren’t for senior detectives such as Fisk who watch over the rookies.

The Levi murder strikes Fisk as a burglary gone awry, or “sideways,” as they say in homicide. A glass stereo cabinet is standing open and valuables are strewn on the floor, apparently left behind when the burglars were surprised during the act.

“There’s a lot of blood, defensive wounds,” says O’Hanian.

“We’ve got to do something with these guys; they’re going to kill again,” Fisk says.

The only break the detectives get is the discovery of a worn shoe with an unusual snakeskin design. A pair of Zvi Levi’s tennis shoes are missing. It looks like the killer changed before leaving.

Blankenship, a slender, balding man, says he is going to have to scrap his deployment strategy. During the 16-week lull, he cut back homicide to two detective teams. Now, he would need one more. That would mean cutting back somewhere else on a department where victories in one area always come at the expense of something else.

As night falls, the media gather outside the yellow police tape. They lift their cameras above the high hedges and point them into the yard.

The relationship between the police and the media is a symbiotic one--each needs the other--but never comfortable.

“The vultures,” says Detective Lee Jett, turning away.

The coroner, taking a break for a smoke on the porch, says he hasn’t had a day off in three weeks. Jett says that when the coroner showed up on another one of his cases recently, he had five bodies with him.

The coroner pulls his blue cap down and stands up to leave. “See you at the next one,” he says.

At 11:40 p.m., Fisk does his last television news interview. “One thing I want to make clear,” he says firmly, “is that this is not related” to McMackin.

Fisk’s admonitions don’t cool the media’s ardor. Speculation linking the two cases begins immediately.

Of the two high-profile killers, McMackin’s is considered the more twisted, because of the attempt to set the body on fire.

It could be “a total flipped-out nut,” says John Edwards, the detective handling the case. A person with “something repressed in his mind about the elderly.”

Even though firefighters wet down whatever evidence was left behind in McMackin’s house when they put out the flames, Edwards takes a fingerprint expert out there a few days later in the thin hope that they can turn up something.

The house is cluttered with stacks of clothing. There is a blanket on the couch, where the woman had slept since the earthquake with her two dogs, a German shepherd named Girl and a small mutt named Freeway.

“Why didn’t the dogs get into it?” Edwards wonders, walking around and looking at bloodstains.

Aside from Fisk, Edwards, a laconic man who favors loud ties and sports jackets with patches on the elbows, has the most experience in homicide, with only two years under his belt. But he is not the highest-ranking detective. Moore has just been promoted to a Detective 2, while Edwards is stuck at Detective 1.

He believes his career came to a screeching halt when his name was included on the infamous list of 44 cops that the Christopher Commission singled out as “problem officers.”

Edwards, who has been in five shootings and received 150 commendations, is 15th on the list.

“They want to fire me,” he says. “I’ve been told I’m a liability.”

As a result, Edwards has become less of a hard-charger than he used to be. Early one morning, he was sitting in front of the house of a suspect scheduled for a polygraph examination. Edwards was there in the dark because he suspected the man might run for it rather than take a chance on flunking.

While he waits, a young man comes up the street and breaks into a car, right in front of him. Edwards radios for a black-and-white patrol car but is told no one is available, not an infrequent occurrence in Van Nuys.

“Do I want to get involved in this alone?” he asks himself. What if the guy decides to fight? If the incident turns sour, will they believe one of the 44? He decides the danger isn’t worth the reward.

He waits until the man leaves, inspects the minimal damage, calls in a report and gets back to his surveillance.

Councilman Joel Wachs calls a news conference to announce a $25,000 reward for information leading to Levi’s killer. Roberta Moore is worried that Zvi Levi, who intends to speak, may reveal something that the detectives don’t want out.

“He’s going to have his say,” she says.

“Let him,” says Fisk, calming her. “We don’t want to pull his chain and have him regret later that he didn’t do all he could.”

The 80-year-old man in thick glasses has his say and then some. “You animal murderer,” he shouts into a bank of microphones set up in front of the house.

“You remember how she cried and ask for her life? How she called, ‘Zvi, Zvi.’ This is my name. And I could not help her.”

The detectives cannot devote all their energies to the homicides of the elderly women. Others are accumulating. An upholstery shop worker is killed Oct. 17. Two days later, a man is shot in an alley on Roscoe Boulevard in a gang dispute. A transient guns down a man chasing him with a baseball bat by the Los Angeles River. They all look like stranger killings.

With several cases hitting at once, the overtime, always high in homicide, begins to pile up. In the two months after the Levi murder, Moore will put in 95 extra hours.

In a cash-short city, overtime can be a hot issue. But homicide is the one unit that is usually immune to criticism because of the immediacy of their work. Fisk says that when he worked in Foothill, his unit had a 95% solution rate. A new supervisor told them to cut down on the hours.

Within months, the solution rate dropped to an embarrassing 55%.

“What’s wrong?” the supervisor asked.

Fisk shrugged. “It’s too late now.”

The demand homicide work exacts on a detective’s private life is a major reason for problems detectives develop at home. It also is a reason some detectives turn down homicide work. “You make the same money” in other detective units “and you don’t have to answer the phones at night, or have your kid’s birthday party interrupted.”

Edwards found an original solution to domestic conflict. To help his wife understand his job, he took her to several homicide scenes and let her stand around the body for a few hours.

As the cases accumulate, Fisk grows tense. A paper runs a story about the crime wave hitting Van Nuys. “Now that we’ve had five [homicides], the news is making an issue that the world is collapsing in Van Nuys,” says Fisk. “I don’t recall any articles about 16 weeks with no murders.”

Even dead, James (Jimbo) Bowlen had the ability to make the LAPD look bad.

Bowlen, a cantankerous sort who liked to drink with his homeless buddies in Sherman Oaks Park, was found slumped near home plate of the baseball diamond one night with a shattered skull.

Because of some bureaucratic foul-ups nobody ever got to the bottom of, homicide detectives weren’t alerted at first and didn’t get out there until two days later.

“Fortunately, the crime scene was still intact,” says Edwards. If he is concerned about what a good defense attorney could make of a homicide scene left unguarded in a public park, he doesn’t show it.

Bowlen was a 45-year-old transient who listed an auto parts store as his home address. Belying his reputation as one of the infamous 44, Edwards has a fondness for the men and women who spend their time pawing through dumpsters and pooling their money to buy liquor. He digs into the case, interviewing employees at Sherman Oaks Hospital, where Bowlen was treated after a previous beating. He was less than a model patient. He threw a urine-soaked shirt at the nurses, yanked the IVs out of his arm and stalked out.

At the park, Edwards questions two men who are already half-drunk, though the sun is hardly up. His partner, Jett, hangs back. An elegantly dressed man, he didn’t seem to want to get close to the toothless vagrants.

“That’s Jimbo, man,” one of the drunks says to the other. “He was cool.”

He and Jimbo recently took a trip to San Francisco. What did they do? “Party, get drunk,” the man says, shrugging.

“These people are good sources of information,” Edwards says later. “If you approach them with respect.”

“They didn’t even know Jimbo last night,” Jett says.

Edwards brought some of Jimbo’s pals to the office one night for an interview. Jett arrived in a surgical mask to filter the stench.

The dummy appeared a few days later. Dressed in a fedora, mask, black rubber gloves and a smock, it looked like Dick Tracy preparing to take a dip in the Love Canal.

“Dr. Jett’s Interrogation Suit,” read the tongue-in-cheek sign hung around the dummy’s neck at the entrance to the homicide office.

It was Fisk’s way of reminding his young detective that if you want someone to help you out, you shouldn’t insult them--even if they are drunks.

From the dead man’s friends, Edwards and Jett learned that Jimbo had a tendency to fall down when he got drunk. Also, Bowlen was subject to seizures.

It was beginning to look like James Bowlen had done himself in. The suspicion was confirmed when the coroner soaked the man’s brain in a solution that revealed minute injuries consistent with a fall induced by a seizure. Case closed.

The new year brought some good news and some bad to the detectives in Van Nuys.

Edwards was promoted to Detective 2, against his own expectations.

Three detectives Fisk had trained were promoted and transferred to other divisions.

The unit cleared the gang killing and the murder of the upholstery worker.

The Levi and McMackin cases remain unsolved. Zvi Levi moved away from the house he and Aliza shared for 22 years. Nitza Merhav, the other daughter, says the family is “coping” while they wait for the killer to be caught.

Van Nuys ended the year with 17 homicides, 10 after the calm broke, a rate that if it had been maintained all year would have made 1994 a record-setting season of killing. The clearance rate for the year stood at 73%, above the departmentwide average but a disappointment to Fisk.

“We’re not happy with it,” he said. “Whenever you have homicides unsolved you can always do better. You learn from your mistakes and go on.”

“Maybe we’ll get them next year,” Blankenship said.

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Behind the Badge

From the Christopher Commission to the O.J. Simpson trial, the Los Angeles Police Department is in the line of fire as critics challenge its competence, and its integrity. Times journalists John Johnson and Joel Lugavere spent three months in the Van Nuys Division, one of the city’s busiest, to find how well police officers serve and protect as the department redefines itself.

SUNDAY: Shedding the past for an uncertain future

MONDAY: Crusader for crime’s smallest victims

TUESDAY: Diversity or division--the new struggle for equality in blue

TODAY: Homicide--a killing season

THURSDAY: The thinning blue line and the resource crisis

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The Trail of Death

Homicides citywide--and in Van Nuys--dropped in 1994, but the tendency to come in bunches tested the investigators in the tiny second-floor detective unit. Van Nuys’ clearance rate exceeded the city average but did not satisfy Detective Steve Fisk, who supervises homicide.

HOMICIDE TOTALS

Totals for city of Los Angeles 1994: 836 ****

CLEARANCE RATE

Figures for 1993 homicide cases. Cases cleared: 60.8% Cases still open: 39.2% ****

GANG-RELATED HOMICIDES

Figures for city of L.A. 1992: 430 1993: 346 1994: 370 ****

FIREARM-RELATED DEATHS

For the year 1993, all deaths that occurred due to some type of firearm. Revolver: 166 Handgun: 456 Unidentified Firearm: 319 Automatic handgun: 496 Misc./Other: 107 Source: LAPD

Researched by Abigail Goldman