Tragedy of Errors Ends With Arrest

The retired LAPD detective was on vacation in the San Francisco Bay Area in October, fiddling with his car radio as he drove, when a few words piercing the static made a little bell clang 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 said, 15 years ago he pursued Flores as a suspect in a Sherman Oaks killing, 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. . . . I was sick to my stomach that someone else got killed.”

The story of Michael Flores, 41, shows how a man with at least six names got a break from virtually every facet of the criminal justice system over 20 years. It’s a tale that Michael Hardeman, whose 29-year-old daughter allegedly was murdered by Flores in 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?”

In the Sherman Oaks incident, Los Angeles police arrested an innocent man for the killing, and then a lieutenant squelched any investigation of Flores for a year, though detectives suspected that he was the culprit. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office twice refused police requests to prosecute Flores--once when he was imprisoned on suspicion of an unrelated rape in 1982, and 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. He was released by San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies, despite warnings that he was a parole violator.

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

On the evening of Oct. 2, 1981, Stuart Silver was in a rush as he pulled up to his hillside Sherman Oaks home, 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. 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, whom 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 that Robbs never touched the headboard, the detectives said.

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

Stuart Silver identified a police artist’s drawing of the white 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.

A few months later, a Hollywood woman described a rapist matching “Eddie’s” description. The victim--bound and gagged with her clothes and 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, a lieutenant, for permission to fly to New York and track down “Eddie.” He turned them down, saying that because an arrest had been made--of Robbs--the Silver case was closed.

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

Robbs wound up spending 15 months in County Jail until a jury acquitted him after deliberating four hours. When Stuart Silver took the witness stand at the trial, participants recall, he changed his story, admitting that Robbs had carried the 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,” said Beth Silver’s mother, Harriet Squire, who lives in the West L.A. area.

Another mother remains incensed. “We went through hell for 15 months,” said Rosie Robbs, now in her late 50s. Her son died in 1993 of a kidney disease that she says he contracted in County Jail.

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

Raised in Brooklyn as Edward James Perreira, he also had used the names Joseph Adamo, Edward Carino, Edward Caruso, Michael Caruso and Michael Flores. It is as Michael Flores that he now faces 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 Folsom state prison for raping a woman at gunpoint in front of her husband in their San Bruno home in February 1982.

When arrested in San Bruno, he was carrying a .380 Colt semiautomatic pistol that a ballistics check indicated was 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.

Landgren said he told Flores in Folsom prison, “I know you killed that girl down there.”

But the district attorney’s office in Van Nuys refused to file murder charges, reluctant to try another man for Silver’s killing. They also were concerned that Flores said he had bought the murder weapon from Robbs after the shooting--even though Robbs denied it and was in jail at the time of the supposed sale.

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

While Perreira was spending the next 10 years in state prison, 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. He concluded 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 dug out the old files--and again asked the district attorney’s office to bring murder charges.

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

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

He noted, for instance, that the carpet cleaner’s recollection of the tattooed man speaking with Silver was obtained via hypnosis--acceptable in 1982 but legally inadmissible in 1993.

“We pleaded with them,” said 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. Two years later, he met Michelle Redmond, a single mother who lived with her son Evan, 4. Described by relatives as a “health nut” with a home treadmill, she organized whirlwind bargain tours with friends, 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 from hers.

On 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 to be released, expressing fear that his parole would be revoked. The CHP confirms that Flores told arresting officers that he was a paroled felon.

Nonetheless, Flores was turned loose hours later from San Mateo County Jail, 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 violations 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.

On Oct. 5, Redmond drove with her son to the house where Flores lived. Investigators suspect Flores feared that she wanted repayment of $180 that he owed her.

Soon after, Flores emerged alone and took Redmond’s BMW, with Evan still strapped in the child seat, investigators said. Flores dropped the boy off at Redmond’s house in San Mateo, then drove off, they said.

Seeing him playing in the front yard unsupervised, neighbors asked 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 begging someone to stop beating her that afternoon.

Four days later, San Francisco police nabbed Flores as he left Macy’s in 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, being held without bail, is charged with murder in the course of robbery, making him eligible for the death penalty.

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

“He denies involvement,” said attorney Pete Goldscheider.

*

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

Hardeman says, “I’m here walking around the house, saying ‘What happened? What happened?’ ”

“Sometimes these guys just seem to skate through,” said another law enforcement official. “We all like to think these are few and far between.”

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