New Hopes for Solving Old Killings

For six bloody years, each December delivered a grisly new record in Orange County killings, a triple-digit tally driven by the frenzy of gang and street killings. Now, finally, the pace has slowed, giving investigators a chance to reflect on the county’s peak murder years.

What they see is a mountain of unsolved cases--and an opportunity to do something about it.

“The crush of new cases always seemed to pull us away from the cases we already had,” said Frank Fitzpatrick, director of the Sheriff’s Department crime lab. “In a sense, the most immediate homicide is going to get priority. Now, though, we see things getting better.”

Fitzpatrick said the end of the county’s bankruptcy and a brighter budget outlook, accompanied by a thinning caseload, are refocusing attention on unfinished business. “There’s been a commitment made to go back to these [old unsolved] cases.”

More than 800 Orange County homicides since 1981 remain unsolved, denying justice to the dead and closure to their families. Many of those cases were in the record-breaking years of 1988 through 1993, when 938 men, women and children were killed in the county.

This year, homicides are down more than 40% from the 1993 mark.

With the welcome decline in the killing pace--and the specter of the Orange County bankruptcy receding--investigators and their bosses say they now have the time and resources to aggressively revisit the vast array of unsolved cases. The push to solve old cases is taking several forms:

* The Sheriff’s Department has proposed the creation of a team of detectives and lab criminalists devoted exclusively to “cold” homicide cases. The team would revisit witnesses and use new technology to mine old evidence for new leads. That proposal goes before the Board of Supervisors today.

* The district attorney’s office hopes to hear in early 1997 whether a state grant will pay for a new unit of prosecutors who would scour dusty case files for homicide investigations that might be resurrected with new information or, again, cutting-edge technology.

* Santa Ana police, hoping to avoid the backlogs at the sheriff’s crime lab, have hired their own firearms examiner. Hundreds of weapons confiscated on the streets are piled in a department storehouse, any one of them a potential link between killer and crime.

The proposal before the Board of Supervisors today would create a “cold case team” of two criminalists, two Sheriff’s Department detectives, a coroner’s investigator and a systems analyst. The team’s focus will be unsolved cases in the cities and unincorporated areas patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department, but officials expect the group eventually to offer its assistance in other county jurisdictions and to serve as a model for similar efforts statewide.

Sheriff’s Capt. Robert D. Kemmis said new technologies can shake loose a clue from evidence stored away for years, and even old-fashioned police work can benefit from the passing of time.

“People may not talk the first time you approach them. Maybe they won’t talk for three or four years. But then you find them again and something has changed,” Kemmis said. “Maybe they feel guilty. Maybe they have a family now and a different perspective. People change, allegiances change.”

*

The district attorney’s effort, which hinges on a grant from the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning, would work “as a complementary effort” to the Sheriff’s Department’s cold-case team, according to Assistant Dist. Atty. John Conley.

Conley said the team of prosecutors and investigators would use as a model the high-profile case earlier this year of Gerald Parker, a former Marine at the El Toro air station. Parker, already in prison for unrelated crimes, was charged in June for six killings committed by the “Bludgeon Killer” in the 1970s.

Parker was charged after some dated evidence from Orange County crime scenes was examined with a powerful new DNA process. The revelations led to the release of another marine, Kevin Lee Green, who was wrongly imprisoned 17 years for a bludgeoning attack on his pregnant wife that led to the death of their unborn child.

“Gerald Parker is a case study for what we hope to do,” Conley said. “We have technology we didn’t have 10 or 15 years ago, and evidence still frozen. For the families of murder victims, solving an old case can provide closure and, in some cases, we may still have an offender out there.”

Cold-case teams have been used elsewhere with success. A large-scale effort last year by the FBI and Los Angeles police managed to solve 33 long-standing murder cases in six months. Interviews with aging witnesses who had had a change of heart, coupled with new fingerprint and blood analysis technologies, were credited for the dramatic results.

In Orange County, the changes at the sheriff’s crime lab--which serves law enforcement agencies throughout the county--may make the most impact on cold cases, investigators agree. Santa Ana police Lt. Hugh Mooney, for example, said open homicide cases in his city require detectives with lab coats, not badges.

“If we were to double the number of people in the crime lab, then we might be able to really increase the number of murders we solve,” Mooney said, echoing sentiments heard in police stations countywide.

Fitzpatrick acknowledges that the lab, strapped for money and staff even before the bankruptcy, had been hard-pressed to handle its caseload during the county’s most murderous years.

“We failed in the past,” he said. “We’re the bottleneck in the process. We have investigators who cannot go out and arrest suspects, because we can’t give them fingerprint information. Homicides and sexual assaults get priority, but sometimes other homicides beat them out. But it’s getting better.”

The lab has doubled the number of its DNA specialists in recent months and plans to add two more firearms examiners in coming weeks, Fitzpatrick said. Those areas often yield make-or-break clues in investigations of street and gang murders.

“You’re not going to get a lot of gangbangers stepping forward to testify against each other,” Fitzpatrick said. “Technology is going to be the major investigative tactic. We hold the key to solving these types of cases, by making links between crimes and firearms that might be in somebody’s possession.”

New technologies should bolster the lab’s effectiveness too, Fitzpatrick said.

Older blood analysis procedures are being replaced by a more refined DNA test called STR, in much the way that “magnifying glasses were put aside to be replaced by high-powered microscopes,” Fitzpatrick said. The STR analysis is effective even with smaller, degraded samples, opening up the possibility of mining evidence from old cases for new leads.

The lab will soon have access also to a vastly improved state Department of Justice database indexing sex offenders, improving the odds of identifying sexual predators from body fluids found at crime scenes. By April, the database will contain detailed information about 35,000 known sex offenders, 10 times the number now indexed.

“That will be extremely valuable,” Fitzpatrick said.

The new resources will not magically erase the lab’s backlog of 3,000 unfinished work orders, which range from unwritten reports about minor cases to intense investigative work on major crimes. About 170 firearms await testing, and another 100 untested weapons were recently shipped back to Santa Ana police.

“We sent them back to make sure the cases are still active,” Fitzpatrick said. “I’d be very surprised if we were doing that in another year.”

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The backlog of firearms tests is especially troubling for police investigators working gang and street crimes, presenting them with a sort of Catch-22. The county lab gives priority to cases already set for trial, but Santa Ana’s Mooney and other detectives say they often can’t make enough of a case to reach that point without the ballistics tests and the links they forge.

To sidestep the sheriff’s crime lab backlog, Santa Ana police hired their own firearms examiner earlier this year. At the time, Police Chief Paul M. Walters cited a case in which a seized handgun gathered dust for a year at the county lab, only to be linked to a suspect in two slayings when it was eventually tested.

Santa Ana police confiscate 1,000 guns a year, more than any other agency in the county, and officials estimate that 600 of the weapons may be linked to crimes. Santa Ana investigators ship about 200 guns each year to the sheriff’s lab for testing. High-priority cases are expedited, but most of the weapons go untested for months.

Mooney said the in-house firearms lab will allow Santa Ana police to whittle down that waiting time. The stepped-up work pace probably will translate to more leads and links between crimes, he said.

Since speed is of the essence in solving most crimes, a faster turnaround on firearms tests would be more valuable than more street detectives, Mooney said. “We can always use both, of course, but the lab guys are especially valuable these days,” he said.

Santa Ana has the largest homicide unit of any Orange County city, with six murder investigators and six more who specialize in gang killings. Yet with an annual homicide toll of 70 or more, a typical investigator gets six new cases a year. In addition, the city has nearly 400 unsolved homicides the unit is still trying to crack.

Santa Ana police officials say they have enough investigators to do the job. Mooney and Capt. Dan McCoy say investigators may handle a greater caseload than their counterparts in other cities, but not so many that individual investigations suffer.

*

Just a few miles away, in the county’s wealthier cities, the problems faced by police seem minimal by comparison. Irvine police, for instance, have two full-time homicide investigators, but their city averages only 1.5 homicides a year.

“It’s the nature of the beast,” said Lt. Tom Hume of the Irvine Police Department. “Different cities have different issues to deal with, different societal ills and caseloads.”

A typical Irvine homicide is a violent spousal clash or a burglary gone awry, slayings that are inherently different from the gang killings that plague Santa Ana. Homicide scenes in Santa Ana are generally street corners and alleyways, while Irvine homicide detectives find their work takes them indoors, into homes and commercial settings.

“Gang investigation is unique; it takes expertise and knowledge of the gang culture in the city,” Hume said. “It’s very different and very difficult.”

A nod to those factors led several years ago to the creation of a countywide gang task force, a forum for shared intelligence information and concerted investigative efforts. But is that enough? Should cities with a seeming surplus of homicide investigators share those resources with less fortunate jurisdictions?

“In an ideal world, you would sacrifice your resources to the bigger picture,” Hume said. “If I was in Santa Ana I’d be all for it. But in Irvine, I think it would be difficult to get our residents to agree to sending our police to other cities.”

Money alone is apparently not the answer. Countywide, public money spent on law enforcement has risen much faster than the homicide rate, population growth and the rate of inflation.

From 1981 through 1993, the peak year for homicides, the homicide rate rose 55%. In that same period, the amount of public money spent on police and the Sheriff’s Department rose 262%.

Joseph McNamara, a former police chief in San Jose who is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, said resources are only part of the equation when it comes to solving murders.

“It’s not simply the lack of money,” McNamara said. “It is demographics. The history of crime in America has always been that the majority of crimes have been committed by young males in poor neighborhoods.”

Resources have an impact on lab technology and other homicide investigation efforts, but can police spending deter the ultimate crime before it occurs?

Police credit their collaborative anti-gang efforts with probation officers and prosecutors for the general decline in recent violent street crime, and gang-related homicides have indeed steeply decreased.

The approach streamlines the process of getting gang members to court and uses aggressive surveillance and probation enforcement to hamper gang activities.

Mooney said those tactics can head off some killings by removing the most violent gang members from the streets, but there are no guarantees when it comes to the unpredictable nature of murder.

“We go after the people that distinguish themselves, the worst of the worst, and hopefully we take them out of the game and off the street,” Mooney said. “It shuts down gang activity, but it won’t stop every murder. If someone gets it in their head to kill someone else, there’s not a lot law enforcement can do about that.”

*

Sunday: A wave of murders that pushed the county’s homicide rate to all-time highs is receding. Even more striking is the decline in juvenile and gang killings, which fueled the overall rise.

Monday: A colder, more random type of homicide is stumping investigators at a rate Orange County has never seen. Only half of murders are now being solved--a 43% drop since 1981.

Today: A lull in the killing gives police investigators hope they can begin to make a dent in a mountain of unsolved cases, where the dead have been denied justice, and their survivors still suffer the lack of closure.