The Common Props of Life as Evidence

he Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department evidence warehouse is a graveyard of sorts. There is a macabre undertone, a cadaverous stillness caused by the nature of its stock.

Warehouse manager Peter Zavala walks slowly upon the concrete floor, through canyons separating shelves that reach toward a 35-foot ceiling--past computers and bootleg software, slot machines and a bird cage.

He pauses at a stack of furniture. “This is from a case where a little boy was killed by his grandmother, where she would stuff him under the coffee table. You remember those cases.”

You can find just about anything here: a plastic Santa or a plastic cow, a Mercedes-Benz, a headstone, money and jewels, baby strollers and more than 15,000 guns.

Among boxes, carefully marked and stored, are items of evidence, some dating from crimes committed in the 1930s. They are reminders that the search for justice in unsolved crimes can be, at best, persistent and, at worst, ineffectual.

Located in Whittier, the Central Property and Evidence Warehouse, at 55,000 square feet, is the nation’s largest for sheriff’s departments.

Zavala no longer is surprised by the fragments of people’s lives that arrive here.

“We get things from coffins to, well, we don’t take body parts or drugs here, but just about everything else you can imagine comes in at one time or another.”

Serological evidence is stored in a huge walk-in freezer, kept at subzero temperatures. Cars sit in a lot next to the warehouse. Precious items such as money and jewelry are kept in a separate vault. Drugs are not stored at the warehouse.

The Sheriff’s Department and district attorney’s office review the unresolved crimes and decide when to release evidence, Zavala says. If not returned to owners, most of the property is either auctioned or destroyed. In most cases, evidence is held for up to 120 days at sheriff’s stations for laboratory work and other investigative purposes, Zavala says. If retained, it then comes here for long-term storage.

Evidence in unresolved homicides takes longer to arrive, usually two to three years and can be held for up to 100 years, Zavala says.

(The Los Angeles Police Department stores evidence at 16 substations and four warehouses. It operates at about 95% of capacity, forcing it to get rid of property as quickly as possible. In 1985, the department entered 251,657 line items into evidence, representing about 8,118 individual bookings. For unsolved homicides, departmental policy calls for maintaining evidence for up to 65 years.)

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Sgt. John Yarbrough heads up a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department unit specializing in unsolved murders initially handled by investigators who have since moved on to different jobs, retired or died.

In his 25 years in law enforcement, Yarbrough has seen enough advances in forensics and technology to understand that there is no telling what the next 25 years will bring.

“ ‘What’s next?’ is the question I always ask,” he says.

When he started with the sheriff’s department, who knew what information might be contained in a drop of blood? Who knew that someday you would be able to feed a fingerprint into a computer and have a name pop up or that you could link a print on a piece of evidence in Los Angeles to a print in San Francisco.

Perhaps the future will bring new ways of looking at evidence, Yarbrough says. Perhaps, someday, items being stored at the warehouse will have their day in court to reveal stories now hidden away in cardboard boxes. For that reason, he favors continued preservation of evidence.

“We have one guy working on a case from 1944, and we wish we still had the physical evidence, but no one anticipated that someday it might be of use,” Yarbrough says. “We’re investigating two murders in 1958 and 1959 to see if they’re linked. We could check the DNA, but unfortunately there’s no tissue samples left. . . . I’m investigating a case from the early ‘70s right now. A guy recently surfaced as a potential suspect, but the evidence is gone.”

There are other reasons for preserving evidence, such as the approximately 2,600 items of evidence against Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who has been sentenced to death.

“Because of the appellate process, I have to keep that evidence intact for the next 15 years,” Yarbrough says. “If a new trial is ordered, I have to produce everything again.”

The “three-strikes” law also has proven helpful in solving old crimes, Yarbrough says. “A person facing a third strike, now en route to prison for the rest of his life, might now have the impetus to tell us about another murder he has knowledge about.”