Botched Forgery Led to LAPD Officers’ Suspensions : Police: Public defender says hunch led to discovery of faked signature. Fuhrman issue is cited for swift response.

To the trained eye, the forgery was a botched job. The signature on one document was off by about 1/16th of an inch and the other names, upon close examination, had been cleaned up not so neatly with typewriter correction fluid.

But Armando Joaquin Wood, a public defender, confesses now that he didn’t notice any of those nuances when he reviewed the official police documents charging his client with murder. Instead, it was a minor inconsistency that gave him the hunch that one of the homicide detectives had fabricated evidence and testified falsely about it under oath in court.

“He lied through his teeth,” Wood said Saturday. “And the reason he did it--and I’m convinced of it--is he never thought I’d catch him. But I did.”

Wood’s suspicions--and his insistence that a handwriting expert be allowed to review routine signed witness statements in the case--was the catalyst that led to Friday’s announcement by Police Chief Willie L. Williams: Two veteran police officers had been suspended for falsifying evidence.

Detective Andrew A. Teague, who made the Christopher Commission list of 44 “problem officers,” admitted fabricating evidence and then lying about it in court, Williams said. Detective Charles Markel knew about the frame-up but said nothing, Williams added.

As a result, murder charges have been dropped against Wood’s client and another man. Now, both the Police Department and the district attorney’s office have launched probes into as many as 100 other cases that Teague and Markel investigated.

Recounting the case Saturday, Wood said he was “stunned” that the Police Department took such decisive action against the detectives. All he expected from exposing the fabrication was to win freedom for his client, which he has, and to forward a few leads to other defense attorneys who came up against Teague.

Wood credited the department’s swift action to the public relations beating it is taking over taped conversations with former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, a witness in the high-profile O.J. Simpson murder case. Speaking to an aspiring screenwriter, Fuhrman is heard telling in excruciating detail about police brutality and framing innocent suspects.

“If it wasn’t for Fuhrman, I don’t think you and I would be having this conversation,” he said to a reporter.

Unlike the highly publicized Simpson case, which has captured the fascination of the nation, Wood’s client was implicated in one of the hundreds of prosaic murder cases that move anonymously into the maw of the Los Angeles criminal justice system each year.

The client, Girard Moody, was accused of driving north on Mission Road last Nov. 29 at 11 a.m. when a passenger, Kevin Adams, allegedly shot a 9-millimeter semiautomatic gun at a passing car, killing the other driver, Pablo Trujillo Jr.

The reason: Trujillo had apparently swerved near Moody’s vehicle.

Teague, who was then in training to be a detective, was under the supervision of Markel in the Eastside’s Hollenbeck Division during the investigation of the shooting. The detectives based the murder case against Moody and Adams on a statement obtained from a third passenger who had been sitting in the back seat of Moody’s car, said Wood and his co-counsel in the case, Alvin Nierenberg.

During a May 2 preliminary hearing, Teague testified to the veracity of that statement from the third passenger, said Wood. But it wasn’t until cross-examination by Wood that the detective also acknowledged that, during his investigation, he had obtained two other statements from Moody and Adams identifying the third passenger as the gunman.

Even before the hearing, Wood said he had a hunch about the statements by Moody and Adams. His client swore he never signed the document, although his signature appeared on both the cover page and a second sheet of police line-up pictures.

And there was an inconsistency in how the statements were organized in the so-called “murder book,” a police log of the investigation and supporting documentation. Although the alleged statement from Moody was dated Jan. 4 and had been included in the police reports, there was no entry in the detective log showing that Teague or his partner had talked to Moody that day.

“You’re damn sure there would have been something on the chronological record,” said Wood. “But there wasn’t anything.”

Suspicious, Wood said he asked Teague a series of questions during the preliminary hearing intended to trap him if he was lying about the documents. Are these statements authentic? Did Moody and Adams sign them? Are you sure you didn’t use them to coerce a case from the third passenger?

Wood said Teague answered “yes” to all of the questions, while partner Markel was looking on.

“Markel sat there, like a fat cat that ate the canary,” said Wood. “And he knows that Teague’s up there, committing perjury.”

When Moody and Adams were arraigned for the murder a couple of weeks later, Wood convinced the judge to allow Russell R. Bradford, a San Pedro handwriting expert, to review the documents.

The turning point came when Bradford asked to see the originals so he could compare the signatures of Moody and Adams.

“I talked to Markel and he said, ‘Hey, the original document you wanted to look at . . . has been destroyed,’ ” said Bradford, a 29-year veteran crime scene investigator with the Long Beach Police Department. “If you’re going to forge a document, that’s the first thing you do--destroy it.”

He looked closer at his copies and discovered a “paste-up” forgery--where the signatures for Moody and Adams had been copied from other pieces of paper, were glued onto the statements, had been freshened with correction fluid and then copied again.

One of Moody’s signatures was slightly askew, he said. And despite the detective’s use of the correction fluid, Bradford said he could still see tiny lines from the original piece of stationery sticking out of the loop of the “d” on Moody’s name.

Another giveaway: Moody had signed the police statement twice. Both signatures were identical, an impossibility if they were genuine. “Nobody signs exactly the same. But in this case, if you’re Xeroxing the signature twice . . . they’re going to look exactly the same.”

Even before Bradford could present his findings in court, however, his probing had borne fruit, said Wood. Teague and Markel filed a supplemental report to the district attorney admitting they had copied the signatures from other documents--Adams’ from a vocational school sign-in sheet and Moody’s from another police report.

Wood said the detectives also admitted using the fabricated statements as a “ruse” to get the third passenger to implicate both Moody and Adams. The charges were dropped against Adams, and based on the new information, Wood said he argued successfully in a court hearing last Tuesday to have them dropped against his client as well based on “outrageous” police misconduct and the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence. Both defense attorneys said their clients were out of jail.

“I hate to see the whole department tainted with such a broad brush that they’re all out here doing it,” Wood said about the forgery case, the latest scandal to rock the agency. “I don’t think they’re out there doing it. But Teague and Markel are definitely bad apples.”