Alleged Killer Slipped Justice System Grasp

The retired LAPD detective was on vacation in the San Francisco Bay Area last October, fiddling with his car radio as he drove, when a few words piercing the static set a dark little bell clanging deep in his memory: “Michael Flores . . . arrested for murder.”

Calling the local detective on the case, Bob Horowitz asked a favor: “Just tell me if the guy you have in jail has ‘Eddie’ tattooed on one of his biceps.”

Yes, why?

Well, Horowitz explained, 15 years ago he pursued Flores as a suspect in the killing of a Sherman Oaks woman, only to be ordered off the case. “I still have nightmares about this case,” Horowitz said recently. “In my heart I knew who killed this girl, and we couldn’t . . . get it filed and take it to court. . . . I was sick to my stomach that someone else got killed.”

The story of Michael Flores, 41, is the tale of how one man with at least six names got a break from virtually every facet of the criminal justice system he tangled with in his 20-year career. It’s a tale that Michael Hardeman, whose 29-year-old daughter was allegedly killed by Flores last October, still can’t believe.

“This is a nightmare,” he said. “How do you tell your family and law-abiding citizens that law enforcement let this schmuck loose? If they made a movie about this no one would believe it.”

In the Sherman Oaks incident, the Los Angeles Police Department arrested an innocent man for the killing, and then a lieutenant squelched any investigation of Flores for a year, despite evidence that convinced detectives that Flores was guilty. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office then twice refused police requests to prosecute Flores for that killing--once when he was newly imprisoned for an unrelated rape in 1982, and then again on the eve of his parole in 1993.

And the day before he allegedly killed Michelle Redmond in San Mateo County, Flores identified himself as a paroled felon to a CHP officer who had stopped him on suspicion of drunken driving--but was released from jail by San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies anyway, despite warnings from the CHP officer that he was a parole violator.

“Everybody screwed up in this one,” a law enforcement source said.

“When you look at some people’s records,” added a detective familiar with Flores, you wonder how “they can be out and about among the rest of us.”

This is how.

*

On the evening of Oct. 2, 1981, Stuart Silver was in a rush as he pulled up to his hillside Sherman Oaks home at 7:05, hurrying to make it to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood for “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Inside, he found Beth, 26, his wife of two months, face down on their bed, wearing an open robe. Her arms were tied with a sweater, her legs with a telephone cord. She had been killed by a bullet to the head.

The room had been ransacked. Beth’s jewelry was missing and blood coated the bed and a broken glass shower door. Assigned to investigate were two seasoned homicide detectives from the LAPD’s Van Nuys division--Horowitz and Howard Landgren.

They had little to go on except for fingerprints on the brass headboard of the Silvers’ bed. Three belonged to Michael L. Robbs, 22, of Los Angeles, who Stuart Silver had recently fired from his chain of rental car agencies. A week after the killing, they arrested Robbs.

Robbs said he had helped the Silvers move into their house that summer, but Stuart Silver assured them Robbs never touched the headboard, the detectives said.

But the investigation wasn’t over. A carpet cleaner who was at the Silver house hours before the killing saw Beth Silver having coffee with a man in her kitchen. However, that man was white, and Robbs was black.

Stuart Silver identified a police artist’s drawing of that man as an employee he had fired a few months before. Although Silver could not remember his name, he recalled that “Eddie” was tattooed on his right biceps.

Great, Horowitz thought. Now we’ve got two.

A few months later, a Hollywood woman described a rapist matching “Eddie’s” description. The victim--bound and gagged with her clothes, raped at gunpoint, then robbed of her jewelry--told the detectives that she didn’t know the rapist’s name but heard that he once hung out with friends whose parents ran a funeral parlor in Brooklyn, N.Y.

As they recall it, Horowitz and Landgren asked their supervisor, Lt. Al Durr, for permission to fly to New York and track down “Eddie.” Durr turned them down, saying that because an arrest had been made and Robbs’ trial was pending, the Beth Silver case was closed.

Frustrated, Horowitz and Landgren shoved their brief file on “Eddie” into a drawer.

“If they had let us do our job when we wanted, and do it properly, we probably would have ended up filing on him,” Landgren said in a recent interview. “We kept telling [Durr] we should go back and find out who this second guy was.”

Durr, who has since retired, could not be reached for comment.

Instead, Robbs spent 15 months in county jail until a Superior Court jury acquitted him after deliberating only four hours. When he took the witness stand at the trial, participants recall, Stuart Silver changed his story, admitting that Robbs had carried the bed’s headboard while helping him and his wife move.

“If we had known he had helped move the Silvers into the house, we never would have filed on him,” Landgren said.

“The whole thing was a comedy of errors,” Beth Silver’s mother, Harriet Squire, who still lives in the West L.A. area, said ruefully in a recent interview.

Another mother remains incensed. “We went through hell for 15 months,” said Rosie Robbs, now in her late 50s and still angry that her son--who died in 1993 of a kidney disease she says he contracted in county jail--was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit.

“If you’re black, it’s like automatic,” she said, contending that her son was prosecuted, despite the flimsy evidence, because of his race.

After Robbs’ acquittal, the detectives won permission to head for New York and search for the mysterious “Eddie.” In February 1983, they found in NYPD records a mug shot of a convicted rapist who bore an uncanny resemblance to the artist’s drawing--and who sported a tattoo of the name “Eddie” on his right biceps.

Raised in Brooklyn as Edward James Perreira, he has also used the names Joseph Adamo, Edward Carino, Edward Caruso, Michael Caruso and Michael Flores. It is as Michael Flores--the name of a former co-worker at Silver’s company--that he is now known and is facing murder charges in San Mateo County.

He had a record of arrests for rape, sexual battery, assault and weapons offenses in New York, Florida and California. And he was right where the Los Angeles detectives wanted him--already serving a 21-year sentence at the Folsom state prison for raping a woman at gunpoint in front of her husband in their San Bruno home in February 1982.

When he was arrested in San Bruno, he was carrying the .380 Colt semiautomatic pistol that a ballistics check confirmed was the weapon used to kill Beth Silver, police records show. The detectives also found that three days after Silver was slain, Flores pawned what appeared to be her jewelry in Los Angeles, and later sold more in San Francisco.

“I know you killed that girl down there,” Landgren told Flores in a Folsom prison interview. “We’re going to file on you and make you spend your whole life in prison.”

Landgren could not keep that promise. The district attorney’s office in Van Nuys refused to file murder charges, despite the detectives pleading with them for an entire day.

Police and the district attorney’s office say that if there were records of the decision, they have been lost. But according to some of those involved, prosecutors hesitated at trying yet another man for Silver’s killing. They were concerned that Flores said he had bought the murder weapon from Robbs after Silver was shot--although Robbs denied it and was in jail at the time of the supposed sale.

“If they’d filed [charges], that girl up there would have still been alive . . . “ Landgren said recently. “Well, it’s easy to link things like that.”

*

While Perreira spent the next 10 years in state prison, Robbs died and Horowitz and Landgren retired from the LAPD. Stuart Silver moved from the house where his wife was killed, remarried and bought the Anaheim Bullfrogs, a roller-hockey team.

In the summer of 1993, Thomas Berns, a parole officer in San Mateo County, thumbed through a file on Michael Flores, due to be paroled Aug. 3 from his sentence for the San Bruno and Hollywood attacks.

He concluded, Berns said recently, that Flores remained potentially dangerous, but could not be kept behind bars unless new charges were filed. He contacted Horowitz’s successors in the Van Nuys homicide squad, who had never heard of Michael Flores but dug out the old files and asked the Van Nuys office of the district attorney to bring murder charges.

The answer was the same it had been a decade earlier--No.

“There was insufficient evidence,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Phillip Rabichow, who made the decision. “I thought it was such a horrible act that I would have loved to have filed against him--if we had the evidence.”

Still troubling, Rabichow said, was Flores’ claim that Robbs sold him the murder weapon. And the carpet cleaner’s recollection of the tattooed man speaking with Silver hours before she was killed was obtained via hypnosis--acceptable in 1982 but legally inadmissible in 1993.

“We pleaded with them,” recalled LAPD Det. Stephen Fisk. “‘At least file this case. If we lose it we lose it.’ We thought we at least had enough facts to present this to a jury and let a jury or judge decide.”

*

Flores was paroled to Redwood City, a few miles from the site of the San Bruno rape, on Aug. 3, as scheduled.

Two years later, he met Michelle Redmond, a doting single mother who lived with her 4-year-old son Evan. Described by relatives as a “health nut,” Redmond spent her time on her home treadmill or at a health club. She liked to organize whirlwind bargain tours with friends to Cabo San Lucas or the Pro Bowl, hoping to become a travel agent.

Relatives say her then-boyfriend introduced her to Flores, who rented a room in a house a few miles away from hers.

Last Oct. 4, CHP officers arrested Flores on suspicion of drunk driving on U.S. 101 in San Francisco. Redmond’s family says CHP officers told them that Flores pleaded drunkenly to be released, telling them about his criminal record and expressing fear that his parole would be revoked. The CHP confirms that Flores told arresting officers he was a paroled felon but will not give details.

The CHP officers did, however, warn deputies at the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City that Flores was a parole violator when he was booked there on suspicion of drunk driving, according to CHP Lt. Roy Huerta.

Nonetheless, Flores was turned loose hours later, with a notice to appear in court at a later date. A sheriff’s spokesman said that under current policy, drunk drivers are not held for parole violation unless they are booked on that offense by the arresting officer.

Flores, who had been fired from his job as an inspector at a computer parts plant and had his car repossessed, was eager to leave town after the arrest, according to investigators and friends of Redmond.

On Oct. 5, Redmond drove with her son to the nearby house where Flores lived. Investigators suspect Flores feared she wanted repayment of about $180 he owed her. Authorities say that minutes after Redmond entered the house, Flores emerged alone and took Redmond’s BMW, with Evan still strapped in the child seat. Flores dropped the boy off at Redmond’s house in San Mateo, then drove off, they said.

Seeing Evan playing in the front yard unsupervised, neighbors asked him where his mother was.

“She’s sick,” the boy said.

That night, police found Redmond’s corpse, her head beaten in with a hammer, in a hallway of the house where Flores lived. Neighbors said they heard a woman screaming for help and begging someone to stop beating her that afternoon.

Four days later, San Francisco police nabbed Flores as he left Macy’s on San Francisco’s Union Square.

As fate would have it, Horowitz and his wife were visiting their daughter in the Bay Area that day.

San Mateo County Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Foiles said Flores, now being held without bail at San Mateo County Jail, is charged with murder in the course of robbery, which makes him liable for the death penalty.

Foiles would not comment on whether Redmond was raped or bound with her own clothing, but Flores’ defense attorney says there is “very little similarity” between the Redmond killing and the rapes on Flores’ record.

“He denies involvement,” said attorney Pete Goldscheider, calling all evidence against Flores so far “circumstantial.”

*

Officials up and down the state privately trade accusations over who, in the words of one, “dropped the ball” in the Flores case.

Hardeman says he’s at a loss to figure out where exactly things went wrong. “I’m here walking around the house, saying ‘What happened? What happened?’ ”

He’s not alone. “Sometimes these guys just seem to skate through,” said one law enforcement official involved with the case. “We all like to think these are few and far between. Maybe with all these new laws, this wouldn’t happen.”

However the blame is shared within the system, there is plenty left over for Flores, say those close to the case.

“He’s just scum, that’s all he is,” Landgren said. “He never should have gotten out of prison.”

“I just hope they’ve got a good case against him now.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Criminal Record That Spans 20 Years

Michael Flores, who is charged with murder in San Mateo County and twice escaped being charged with murder in Los Angeles, did not begin to run up his lengthy criminal record until after his discharge from the Marine Corps.

Born Edward Perreira, the eldest son of a Brooklyn firefighter, he attended Brooklyn Catholic schools and dropped out of high school for a two-year stint in the Marines, according to New York Police Department records.

In the Marines, he later told a New York probation interviewer, he began smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol. After an honorable discharge, he studied sociology and psychology at Brooklyn College in the mid-1970s, when his troubles with the law began.

A partial list includes:

April 1976: Arrested on suspicion of three separate rapes and sexual assaults in Brooklyn, in which the victims were all bound with their own clothes. Pleads guilty to rape and is sentenced to five years in state prison. Serves 36 months.

November 1979: Arrested in New York on suspicion of possessing an illegal handgun. Disposition unclear.

January 1980: Now using his aunt’s last name of Carino, is arrested on suspicion of two sexual batteries in Pasco County, Fla. Convicted of assault in each case, sentenced to 60 days in jail.

October 1980: Arrested on suspicion of rape, again in Pasco County under the name of Carino. Disposition unclear.

Oct. 2, 1981: Beth Silver is killed.

Jan. 31, 1982: Using the name Edward Caruso, identified as a suspect in a Hollywood rape in which the victim was bound with her clothes and raped at gunpoint. No charges filed.

Feb. 9, 1982: Robs his then-girlfriend of $1,000 at gunpoint in Hollywood, later pleads guilty and an eight-month sentence is tacked onto his sentence for the following:

Feb. 28, 1982: Now using the name of an old co-worker, Michael Flores, he binds an ex-employer and his wife with their own clothes in their San Bruno home, rapes the woman at gunpoint and steals their car. Convicted and sentenced to 21 years in state prison with a preset parole date.

Aug. 3, 1993: Under the name Michael Flores, is paroled from state prison to Redwood City.

Nov. 17, 1994: Pleads no contest to drunk driving charges and spends an undetermined time in jail. Probation officer places him on Antabuse, an alcohol-aversion drug.

Oct. 4, 1995: Pulled over on suspicion of drunken driving on 101 Freeway in San Francisco, but released by sheriff’s deputies despite a CHP warning that he is a paroled felon.

Oct. 5, 1995: Michelle Redmond beaten to death.

Oct. 9, 1995: Following intense dragnet, arrested as he prepares to leave Macy’s on San Francisco’s Union Square, where he was attempting to exchange clothes for money.

Source: Court records and police, prosecutors and corrections officials.