Seeking Clues as the Clock Ticks

The call came in just after 2 a.m., waking Capt. Larry Robertson from a deep sleep.

He knew it could mean only one thing. Someone was dead.

Working homicide in Ventura County since the early 1980s, Robertson has had his share of late-night phone calls.

This call, however, was one of his last.

After three decades of wearing a badge, Robertson, 51, is calling it quits. But before he retires from the county Sheriff’s Department, he has some unfinished business.

Driven, some would say even compulsive, about his work, Robertson labors to make sense of the messy world of murder.

But occasionally the loose ends of a homicide case can’t be tied up into a neat package.

“Sometimes--not very often--but sometimes we’ll never know,” said Robertson, his broad forehead wrinkled as the thought gnaws at him.

He hates even to acknowledge such a notion, fearing recognition may evaporate all hope. Instead, he continues his fight, overcoming ulcers and sleeplessness. He pushes himself and his team of detectives even harder as his time winds down.

“You’ve got 23 days,” he tells his detectives working on the unsolved execution-style slaying of a female bank teller in Thousand Oaks.

The next day he tells them: “You’ve got 22 days.”

Homicide is the ultimate crime, so Robertson expects himself and his crew to give the investigations their ultimate commitment.

“I know there’s some cases that you never solve, and I’ll go to my grave thinking about them,” he said, his voice gravelly from cigarette smoking. “But this one we’re gonna crack.”

After the 2 a.m. phone call two weeks ago, Robertson shook off his drowsiness, forced himself out of bed and placed wake-up calls to his groggy team of detectives.

A 31-year-old small-time drug dealer was dead with a gunshot wound to the chest. It was time to get moving, before the leads got cold. The first 24 hours are crucial.

Robertson pulled on a conservative suit and tie and headed to the remote crime scene on Balcolm Canyon Road near Moorpark that was still shrouded in darkness.

Two of his six detectives were already bogged down with the puzzling details of a case in which a Moorpark woman and her 4-year-old child mysteriously fell to their deaths from a freeway overpass. So Robertson needed fresh legs.

“I would have typically called out Bobby Young and Dan Thompson,” he said, “but I knew they were swamped, so I pulled out the rest of the team.”

Det. Bill Gentry and Sgt. John Fitzgerald met him at the rundown house on the edge of an avocado orchard where the drug dealer was gunned down at close range.

Walking past the junker cars and into the dilapidated farmhouse, Robertson scanned a scene that has grown all too familiar over the years.

“If there’s a lot of blood spatter work that needs to be done or ballistics work, that sort of thing I can tell by looking over the scene,” he said.

The case was more straightforward than most.

Piecing it together in a few hours, the team determined that the dead man--Mark R. McGuire--was a confrontational guy with a history of drug and petty-theft convictions.

The night he died, McGuire had brought two acquaintances to the home he shared with his girlfriend. The men started arguing.

Sometime after 1 a.m., one of them leveled a shotgun at McGuire’s chest and shot him. Once.

Then they ran.

One disappeared into the orchard; the other jumped into McGuire’s beat-up El Camino and took off.

By 5 a.m.--with crime-scene technicians still sifting through evidence at McGuire’s home--deputies had picked up one of the suspects.

By late afternoon, after 14 hours of intense work, the second suspect was in custody.

Unsolved Mysteries

Most cases aren’t so simple.

Of the 47 homicides investigated by the department in the last 10 years, a dozen remain unsolved.

And those dozen weigh on Robertson’s mind. Some of them he thinks about daily. They keep him up at night, mulling over the details.

“I’m sure he keeps some of that from me,” said Janice Robertson, the detective’s wife of 30 years. “But it’s the unsolved cases--especially the cases in which he knows who did it but can’t prove it--that trouble him the most.”

Cases like that of the two young men found shot to death near Piru two years ago. Robertson said he is agonizingly close to solving it, but not close enough to make any arrests.

And there is also the mysterious January 1996 disappearance of Kathy Marie Silveri of Silver Strand Beach. Investigators believe Silveri is dead. Her body has never been found.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of those cases,” Robertson said.

And the case that troubles him the most is the April killing of bank teller Monica Lynne Leech.

Leech, 39, a mother of two, was ordered to her knees during the bank robbery. Her hands cuffed behind her back, she was shot once in the head.

“It was a senseless killing,” he said. The two men responsible are still out there somewhere.

So every day, he presses his detectives. He lets them know he wants the case solved before Sept. 9, the day he retires.

The compulsion to solve a homicide has prompted Robertson and his team to work two or three days around the clock. And then to continue to push it for weeks on end.

Fueled on bad coffee and fast food, the detectives battle the clock to come up with answers to the mysteries they investigate.

“It’s the nature of the crime that pushes you to do the best you can, and if that means working ‘round the clock, you do it,” said Det. Bill Gentry, a member of the homicide squad for the last three years.

“I’ve seen [Robertson] stay out on a surveillance for 15 to 20 hours,” Gentry said. “He does whatever is needed.”

When Helen Giardina and her ailing father, Albert “Jim” Alexander, were shot to death in May while Giardina’s 4-year-old son looked on, Robertson got to the victim’s Upper Ojai home well before the sun was up.

The woman and her father were slumped in the doorway of the modest ranch home, their bodies riddled with bullets.

Robertson oversaw the technicians who were collecting blood and ballistics evidence, and offered suggestions to his investigation team.

The suspect, Miguel Garcia, told deputies who found him standing outside the house that he had just shot a demon and the devil, prosecutors said. He described the young boy, who was standing by his side outside the bloody scene, as “our savior.”

When reporters and television crews arrived, Robertson was there to run interference for his detectives, prepared to dish out a sound bite.

“It’s just sick,” Robertson told the reporters between drags on a cigarette. “It’s just sick. That’s all I can say.”

After five hours, he was still pacing outside the home and directing investigators.

“He’s been there before as an investigator,” Gentry said, “so he knows what we need.”

Robertson started work with the Sheriff’s Department in 1968 after a stint in the Army. After returning to Camarillo, where he went to high school, Robertson attended the Sheriff’s Academy and graduated among the top 10 in his class.

Because of his high score, he was allowed to bypass the usual stint at the jail and go directly to patrol. He cruised the streets for six years and then moved to narcotics.

On the narcotics squad, Robertson grew a beard and long hair to work undercover. He helped break up a marijuana smuggling operation, nabbing a ship called the Red Baron with 13 tons of marijuana. The Red Baron had been sailing up and down the coast, dropping contraband along the way.

Robertson had various other assignments but got his first taste of tackling the ultimate crime while detailed as a detective to the sex crimes unit.

It was a 1982 case that is still talked about today in local law-enforcement circles. A young woman had been raped and strangled, her body dumped near a clump of trees in the Santa Rosa Valley.

The deputies, evidence technicians and detectives who were at the scene were covered with unusual red insect bites.

Robertson got his share of bites as well, the same kind of bites he remembered getting during Army jungle warfare training more than a decade before.

“So I called an entomologist down in Orange County and asked if he could identify the bites,” Robertson said.

Entomologist James Webb identified the culprit--a tiny mite known as a chigger, which is so rare in California that it was confined to within 8 feet of where the body was dumped, he said.

Ready to Move On

When the prime suspect was apprehended, he swore he had been nowhere near the site. But the chiggers had left their mark on him too. Those distinct bites clinched the case. He is now serving life in prison for first-degree murder. “Solving that first one like that was really a feather in his cap,” said former homicide Investigator Ray Bustillos, who worked with Robertson at the time.

He worked six years as a homicide detective, an experience he called “terribly addicting,” before his advancing career sent him to perform other duties.

Then in 1994 Robertson returned, as the captain in charge of homicide, major fraud and sex crimes. “My professional dream came true,” he said.

In his windowed office, Robertson keeps a stash of antacid in his desk. Nearby are two large bound notebooks with homicide cases dating back to the 1970s.

On his wall are two prints that at first glance are a jumble of shapes and colors. After staring at the prints for a long time, an image finally emerges.

Robertson has stared at crime scenes that would make most people avert their eyes.

He has seen murder and mayhem, slain women and children, their bodies ravaged by insects or scattered by animals. And out of most of these scenes, patterns have emerged that helped tie suspects to horrific crimes.

After decades of living with such gruesome images, Robertson is ready to shift his focus. He wants to go fly-fishing.

He and his wife are planning to travel around the United States for the next two years in a mobile home. They want to move to a more idyllic place, perhaps some country house by a lake.

And if the Leech case isn’t solved before he goes, his detectives have instructions to contact him whenever something new comes up.

“Like I said, I’m sure we’re going to solve that one,” he said.