A Tale of Two Classmates: One a Cop, One a Killer

Richard Henry and Andre Alexander were classmates at Venice High School during the late 1960s, and since then their paths have crossed a number of times, always under the same circumstances: Alexander, a career criminal, was breaking the law. Henry, a police detective, was on his trail.

This odd minuet began in 1972 when Henry first arrested Alexander for an armed residential robbery. It continued when Alexander committed a brutal triple murder, evaded arrest, and two years later killed the first female Secret Service agent to die in the line of duty. Henry’s investigation of the triple murder led to the arrest of Alexander, who received a life sentence.

While Alexander was in prison, Henry, who feared that he might one day be released, spent more than five years investigating the murder of the agent, finally putting together a case against Alexander, who was convicted of the killing and sentenced to death last month.

Alexander’s death sentence will “provide a sense of closure,” Henry says, for the families of the people he killed. But it also will provide closure for Henry, who has been tracking his former high school classmate, off and on, for almost 25 years.

In 1972, Henry was a young “boot” in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division station, just a few months out of the Police Academy, when he responded to a residential robbery call. The suspect had burst into a house, waving a pistol, and forced a woman and her son to lie on the floor as he ransacked the place. Based on information he picked up at the crime scene, Henry arrested Alexander later that night in Inglewood. He was convicted the next year and sent to prison.

“I didn’t recognize him, and he didn’t say anything to me that night,” Henry said. “In fact, he gave me a phony name when I picked him up. It wasn’t until I’d arrested him the second time, years later, that he made the high school connection.”

During the next six years, as Henry was gaining patrol experience, Alexander was making a living ripping off banks across the city as part of a counterfeit money-order ring.

After passing tens of thousands of dollars worth of counterfeit Western Union money orders, Alexander owed the counterfeiter $1,500, which was a percentage of the take, Henry said. But Alexander kept putting off the printer, who was growing increasingly impatient.

Finally, Alexander decided to keep the $1,500 for himself. So he and a partner showed up at the printer’s West Los Angeles apartment, beat him and his girlfriend and shot them execution style. They then strangled a second man who was visiting the apartment that night.

The killings were in 1978, and Alexander was a suspect from the start. An informant had told detectives about the dispute between the printer and Alexander. Later, the ringleader of the counterfeit operation tied Alexander to the slayings. But detectives had insufficient corroborating evidence to take the case to the district attorney’s office. It was consigned to the unsolved file, where it gathered dust until 1987, when Henry took over the investigation.

He had just been promoted to homicide detective in the Pacific Division and was assigned to work the unsolved cases. Of all his investigations, the triple murder case looked the most promising because he had a solid suspect. He now needed some physical evidence or another witness who could back up what the informant and the ringleader had said.

The case was about 8 years old. Seven detectives had worked on it before Henry, and re-interviewing everyone and examining all the evidence was a massive undertaking. Henry felt he was making little progress until he interviewed a relative of Alexander.

“Because of a few things she said, we figured she knew something about the murders,” Henry said. “But she denied it, so we asked her to take a polygraph test. She agreed, but right before the exam started, she admitted to the polygraph examiner that she was lying.”

Henry and his partner then interviewed the woman, and she admitted that she knew all about the triple murder and all about Alexander’s involvement. A few days after the murders, she told detectives, Alexander had been at her house. She said she overheard him on the telephone talking about why he killed a second man in addition to the printer and his girlfriend.

“He was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” the woman recalled Alexander saying. “We couldn’t take a chance of him talking.”

Henry then obtained a piece of physical evidence that doomed Alexander. The previous detectives on the case neglected to compare Alexander’s prints with one lifted from a glass, which had been filled with rum and Coke and found not far from the three bodies. Alexander compared the prints, and they were a match.

This time, the case against Alexander was a strong one. Henry also had put together a solid case against a man who helped Alexander at the murder scene. Nine years after the three killings, the district attorney’s office filed murder charges against Alexander and his partner. Henry arrested Alexander at his parents’ Inglewood home.

“At the station he said, ‘Hey, I went to high school with you,’ ” Henry recalled. “He also reminded me that I’d arrested him back in 1972. He told me he’d gone to Venice High . . . in the late 1960s. It was consistent with the years I’d been there. But I still couldn’t place him.”

Henry figured he had seen the last of Alexander, but nine months after the murder charges were filed, the Secret Service contacted him: Alexander was a suspect in another homicide--the 1980 slaying of Agent Julie Cross.

While Henry was getting the triple-murder case ready for trial, he also was “picking at the Cross case,” he said. Whenever he would interview an associate or friend or former crime partner of Alexander, he always made a point to ask if the person had information on the Cross slaying. What convinced him that Alexander was a prime suspect was a composite drawing of the two suspects that the Secret Service had shown him.

“This one drawing, the drawing of the guy who was the shooter, jumped out at me,” Henry recalled. “It looked just like Alexander.”

Julie Cross, 26, had been working as a Secret Service agent for only 10 days when she and her partner, Lloyd Bulman, were staking out a suspected counterfeiting operation near Los Angeles International Airport. They were parked on a dark side street, lined with apartments, the roar of jets drowning out the noise of passing cars.

Alexander and another man, apparently not aware that Cross and Bulman were law enforcement officers, walked up to the car from the rear. The two men, who planned to rob the agents, drew their guns and took them by surprise. When Cross, a former San Diego police officer, spotted the two men, she drew her weapon and climbed out of the car. In an ensuing scuffle, she was disarmed. Alexander grabbed the agents’ shotgun from their car and shot Cross twice as she was diving into the car for cover.

“This was not simply a murder, it was a flat-out execution,” Henry said. “She was unarmed at this point and no threat at all.”

Bulman fought with the other suspect, lost his balance and fell to the pavement. Alexander held the shotgun six inches from Bulman’s face, fired and fled the scene.

“When he shoved the shotgun down in my face, I knew I was dead,” Bulman later testified. “And the last thing that went through my mind was I had a 2-year-old, and I thought I would never get to see him again.

“I felt the shotgun blasting down the side of my face. And then . . . I was stunned because I thought that he had just blown the side of my face off.”

It turned out that Alexander had just missed Bulman, who ran back to his car, grabbed his pistol and called for assistance. Bulman’s survival was important to the case because he was able to provide police artists with enough detail so they could create the convincing composite of Alexander.

Bulman, now retired, testified at the trial that he was emotionally shattered after the shooting.

“I had a lot of times when I was deeply depressed. I would break down and cry. I had flashbacks, a lot of flashbacks for a long period of time. . . . Probably should have talked it over more with my wife. I think a lot of the problems with my withdrawing probably may have caused our divorce.”

After the Cross shooting, Henry, who was working patrol that night, was one of the first officers on the scene. He spent the next few hours searching the area for the suspects’ vehicle.

Although he once again had crossed Alexander’s path, it was not until a decade later as a detective in the robbery-homicide division that he took over the Cross investigation and began setting his sights on Alexander.

The triple murder and the Cross killing were inextricably entwined, and Henry’s investigation of the one case helped him with the other.

Alexander’s partner in the triple slaying cooperated with prosecutors, providing important information about the Cross homicide. The case against the partner was not as strong as the case against Alexander, and prosecutors accepted his plea to three counts of second-degree murder.

Alexander eventually was convicted of the triple slaying, but the maximum penalty he faced was life in prison. He had killed the three people just a week before a state initiative restored the death penalty in California. Regular parole hearings were scheduled, and the families feared that, at worst, he would be released one day, and that, at best, they faced a lifetime of appearing at parole board hearings and reliving the murders. But if Alexander was convicted of the Cross slaying, he could be sentenced to death because the death penalty statute was in effect then.

When Henry began his investigation a decade after the Cross slaying, he had to study a mountain of material. By the time his investigation was complete, he had amassed more than 14,000 pages of investigative material and more than 40 “murder books,” compiled by all the detectives who had worked on the case. He re-interviewed more than 100 people, including neighbors, criminalists, witnesses and police officers.

The interview with Alexander’s former partner, Henry said, “opened up a sea of evidence that had been closed all these years.” Henry discovered that after the Cross slaying, Alexander had gone to a former girlfriend’s house.

“She knew that we knew Alexander had gone to her house,” Henry said. “She told us that the truth always comes to the surface. She talked, and her interview was critical for us.”

Alexander stopped by her house that night, extremely agitated, and she recalled him saying: “I had to take two people out at the airport. It was either them or me.” She watched as Alexander washed off what turned out to be the barrel of the agents’ shotgun, and she noticed that his brown leather jacket was speckled with blood.

Henry obtained a search warrant for Alexander’s parents’ Inglewood house and found the brown leather jacket he had worn 11 years earlier in the closet of his old bedroom. In one of the most dramatic moments of the investigation, police technicians brought the jacket into a darkened room and sprayed it with a chemical that would light up if it came in contact with blood.

“It was an incredible moment,” recalled Lester Kuriyama, who prosecuted Alexander for both the triple murder and the Cross homicide. “They sprayed the jacket, and it lit up and sparkled like stars in the sky.”

Too much time had passed to test the blood for DNA. Still, the fact that the jacket was covered with blood was an important piece of corroborating evidence.

Investigating two homicides, both about a decade after the slayings, was onerous, frustrating work for Henry. But Kuriyama faced an equally daunting task. He prosecuted Alexander for the triple-murder 12 years after the homicides and for the Cross slaying almost 16 years after she was killed.

“Three of our witnesses died, and the memories of a number of others became hazy,” Kuriyama said. “Laws had changed, too, so we had tremendous obstacles to overcome.

“But I have to say that the Cross case was the most satisfying of my career. A lot of people from many law enforcement agencies were intensely interested in this case. After the verdict, so many people expressed their appreciation.”

Julie Cross’ brother, Peter, is grateful that Henry stuck with the investigation for so many years and that Kuriyama presented such a compelling case.

“It is a relief for me to know that the person who did this is finally punished,” said Cross, a San Diego County deputy district attorney. “I’m grateful that the murder of my sister was never forgotten.”