Unfinished Business

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

He knew it meant only one thing. Someone was dead.

Working homicide in Ventura County since the early 1980s, Robertson has had more than 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.

He is pushing himself and his team of detectives even harder as his time winds down.

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

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

Leech, a 39-year-old mother of two, was working at the bank April 28 when two men burst in and ordered her to her knees. They robbed the bank, cuffing Leech’s hands behind her back and shooting her in the head before fleeing.

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

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

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 team of equally groggy detectives.

A suspected 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, which was still shrouded in darkness.

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

He called on Det. Bill Gentry and Sgt. John Fitzgerald, who met him at the rundown house on the edge of an avocado orchard where the 31-year-old man was gunned down at close range.

Walking past junker cars and into the dilapidated farmhouse, Robertson scanned the crime scene--a landscape 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 was a confrontational guy with a history of drug and petty theft convictions.

The night he died, the victim 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 the victim’s chest and shot him.

Then they ran.

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

By 5 a.m.--with crime scene technicians still sifting through the home--deputies had picked up one suspect. By late afternoon, after 14 hours of intense work, a second suspect was in custody.

Most cases aren’t so simple.

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

And those dozen weigh on Robertson. There are some he thinks about daily. It’s those cases that keep him up nights, as he mulls details in his head.

“I’m sure he keeps some of that from me,” said Janice Robertson, his 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 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 the mysterious January 1996 disappearance of Kathy Marie Silveri of Silver Strand Beach. Investigators believe Silveri, a 43-year-old community activist, is dead. Her body has never been found.

And then there’s the execution of the bank teller, the case that troubles him most.

“It was a senseless killing,” he said.

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

The compulsion to solve a murder at times 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 Sheriff’s Department coffee and fast food, the detectives battle the clock to come up with answers.

“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, part of the homicide squad for the last three years.

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

In his windowed office, Robertson keeps a stash of antacid pills in his desk. Nearby are two large bound notebooks with homicide cases.

After decades of reviewing crime scenes and sifting through gruesome photos, Robertson said he 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. Then they want to move to a more idyllic place, perhaps near 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.