Brentwood’s Other Double Murder

So you think it’s all wrapped up and done with, that big Brentwood double murder case. Not so.

The original Brentwood double homicide, its victims 10 years dead, the public’s memory of it gone for almost as long, is playing its coda in a downtown courtroom.

O.J. Simpson was still hurtling through airports, and the Menendez brothers weren’t old enough to drive when this crime was the Brentwood killings, the “orphan” murders, sons killing parents for hate and profit.

September 25, 1985, Gerald and Vera Woodman were parking the Mercedes beneath their Brentwood condo after a post-Yom Kippur family dinner when two men--one in a black, hooded sweatshirt described as a Ninja costume--walked up. One opened fire with a .38.

The Herald Examiner was the town’s afternoon newspaper then, renowned for headlines that could tempt you into dropping a quarter into the news rack slot. This was one of its best: “Brentwood Ninja Yom Kippur Murders.”

The story pushed just about every middle-class L.A. button: a placid, prosperous part of town; deadly black-clad warriors; the holiest holiday on the Jewish calendar--and murder.

Six men, including two sets of brothers, were eventually arrested. Five pleaded guilty or were convicted. Two brothers were hired hit men, and two were the victims’ elder sons, accused of hiring killers to solve two problems: cash flow that their mother’s $506,000 insurance policy would take care of, and a hatred of their father that only death would resolve.

The last of the six, Neil Woodman, now 51 and in jail since March 1986, is on trial for the second time; a jury deadlocked in 1993.

This is a very big city, but its coincidences, when they arise, are cinematic.

The last defendant in the original Brentwood double murders sits in Department 104, next door to 103, where Judge Ito presided over the other Brentwood double murder case. Neil Woodman and O.J. Simpson rode the same prisoners’ elevator to their ninth-floor court dates. And Neil Woodman’s parents, and O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife and her friend, all died outside Brentwood condos not two blocks apart.

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The building has the unmistakable handiwork of L.A.’s multi-culti architecture: stucco walls supporting a Mansard roof faced with shake shingles. Take the footbridge over the man-made streams, ride the elevator to the second floor, and there is Bob Levy Jr.’s condo, right across from where the Woodmans lived.

Impossible for him to believe it’s been 10 years, impossible that the matter isn’t settled yet. He was just about the only tenant who slept through the gunfire that night, and now he’s one of the few who remember it.

In September 1985, the Night Stalker had just been caught, and “Dynasty,” the prime-time soap, was still pulling ‘em in.

Martial arts was hot. Kids were karate-ing everything, and when one eyewitness described a killer--in black, hooded sweatshirt, worn to hide the man’s distinctive white hair--as “dressed like a Ninja warrior,” it stuck. Det. Richard E. Crotsley “can go out today and say, ‘I was one of the detectives on the Ninja case,’ and everyone remembers. If I said ‘Gerald and Vera Woodman murdered in a subterranean garage,’ nobody remembers.”

Our memories keep many calendars. One is of the deaths that break through barriers of horror and precedent.

Eula Love in 1979, a black woman shot to death by police as she went at them with a knife after a man was sent to turn off her gas, changed police/community amities forever.

Sarai Ribicoff put Venice--playful, feckless Venice--on the murder map in 1980. The niece of a U.S. senator, a newspaper editorial writer, handed over her wallet outside a chic Venice restaurant and got shot to death anyway.

Karen Toshima’s death in 1988 annexed Westwood into L.A.’s more violent demographics, after she was slain in gang cross-fire outside a Westwood movie theater.

Each is a milestone, an object lesson. The grasping, rancorous Woodmans taught us again that money guarantees nothing, least of all family love. Gerald Woodman humiliated his family, called his 5-year-old daughter “Ugly.” Neil Woodman hired guards to keep his father away from his son’s bar mitzvah. When he and brother Stewart arrived at their parents’ funeral, a relative screamed, “Murderers! How dare you come to this gathering?”

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Ten years after, most witnesses could still be found, chief among them Stewart Woodman, brought from prison to testify against Neil, part of his deal to avoid the death penalty. Still, the case was old enough that Crotsley’s retired partner, Jack Holder, now a private investigator, was touting the blessings of AARP membership during a recess.

By 1993 this case had cost the county $1.2 million including defense lawyer fees, for the Woodman plastics fortune was long gone. And this erstwhile hot ticket had been punched years ago. Other crimes have eclipsed it. Even the Menendezes did their own shooting.

A trio of elderly court watchers exchanged glances Monday and left Department 104, their Windbreakers rustling as they went to look for a more engrossing true-crime case now playing in the courthouse multiplex.