Long Road Leads to Suspect

In ratty motels and pool halls along Beach Boulevard, they call John J.C. Stephens “The Hard Way,” a nickname hinting of a callous streak that kept him a loner among a band of thieves and speed addicts.

For the investigators who now allege he is also a cop killer, Stephens’ nickname reminds them of the four-year quest to capture the “phantom gunman” who left Garden Grove Police Officer Howard E. Dallies Jr. bleeding in the street on March 9, 1993.

“In most investigations, you get a big break, a big lead, or something,” says Lt. Kevin Raney, leader of a task force that met twice daily for the past year while working the case. “Not this one. Nothing came easy.”

Their relentless tracking down of thousands of leads--with few resulting in physical evidence--underscored their desire and determination to avenge a fallen officer.

“This shooting ripped the heart out of this department,” said Raney, a 19-year veteran of the Garden Grove police force. “We were reeling. A phantom gunman kills an officer, and we had no idea why, how it happened, or who did it. We had to find the answers, or this would keep eating at the soul of this department.”

The answers were slow in coming. Despite using a wide array of resources--everything from bloodhounds to planting an electronic bug in a prison cell--investigators were met with frustration at every turn.

In the end, the break in case came from one of Hard Way’s friends, an alibi witness who admitted lying to police about Stephens’ whereabouts at the time of Dallies’ killing.

“Once that alibi was removed, we had a clearer understanding of everything,” Raney said. “This investigation was a series of small steps, sometimes painfully small steps. That was one of the few big steps.”

Several hurdles remain, however.

The 45,000-page filing submitted by police to prosecutors relies largely on circumstantial evidence that points to Stephens. The chance of winning a conviction at trial hinges on a jury seeing the entire picture, Raney says.

“We know--this department knows--who killed Howard Dallies now,” Raney said. “Proving it in court is a different threshold. It’s been a long road. Now we want to present the story of how this officer was murdered to 12 people and let them decide.”

Task Force Restarts Search for a Killer

On a crisp March morning last year, 13 men gathered on Aldgate Avenue and, with hands stuffed in their pockets and heads hung down, they each retraced Howard Dallies’ last steps. They paused at the spot where the fatally wounded cop crumpled to the asphalt, his gun still holstered.

They were veteran homicide detectives and undercover narcotics officers, along with one street cop and three retired investigators from the Orange County district attorney’s office.

The group was assembled at the north Garden Grove site by Raney and Sgt. Mike Handfield at the order of Police Chief Stan Knee. Three years had passed since the shooting, and Knee wanted to restart the search for Dallies’ killer.

Knee hoped a fresh perspective or the promise of some new technology might help this new task force succeed where the original team had failed.

For six months after the 1993 shooting, the first task force scrambled to find the gunman while the trail was still warm. A small army of investigators from a dozen agencies worked day and night on the case, which took a variety of turns.

One early lead cost investigators valuable time. A taxi driver reported that he had picked up a suspicious dark-haired man, who emerged from the shadows to wave the cab down just blocks from the crime. Weeks were wasted before the investigators concluded that the cab driver had fabricated the entire account, Raney said.

Other leads--such as the discovery that the same weapon had been used in an earlier Santa Ana shooting--were more fruitful, but ultimately not enough to keep the 40-member investigative task force moving forward.

As the tips slowed to a trickle, the task force was dismantled, and the open case was turned over to the homicide unit.

A framed photograph of Dallies, 36, never left Knee’s desk, though. Knee says it was “unfinished business, unserved justice” that prompted him in September 1995 to have Handfield and three investigators review all 25,000 pages compiled by the first task force.

By the time the investigators gathered six months later on Aldgate Avenue, that monumental review had produced three suspect names. One of them was John “The Hard Way” Stephens.

The three names had come up repeatedly during the investigation, in phone calls from the public, in interviews with police informants, and from the hunches of patrol cops who knew the local criminal element.

But there was never any concrete evidence that would clear or confirm any of them as a prime suspect, investigators said.

That became the goal of the second task force, Raney said, to implicate or clear the three under suspicion.

All three were locals, career criminals and drug users, investigators said. Stephens ran with a group called Public Enemies No. 1, a ragtag band of car and motorcycle thieves. Dealing and dosing on methamphetamine, they bounced between motels and crash pads along Beach Boulevard, police said.

Because of a gray Kawasaki motorcycle they believe the gunman ditched after he killed Dallies, police were fairly certain that the killer had strong local ties.

The motorcycle was found on a Garden Grove street about a quarter mile from the crime scene. Nearby residents, some awakened by the gunfire, said a motorcycle zoomed by just after the shooting. A residue of gun powder was found on the bike, but no fingerprints.

The motorcycle had been stolen six days earlier on another nearby street--suggesting to detectives that the gunman was no stranger to the north Garden Grove neighborhood.

Ruling Out the Other Suspects

Technicians used data in the computer in Dallies’ patrol car to plot out the chase leading up to the shooting. It was short, reaching almost 60 mph, and wound through small, local residential streets. This, too, suggested the gunman was someone who knew the area, Raney says.

The first suspect was a motorcycle thief who had a habit of “cold-plating”--swapping license tags to cloak his crimes. The stolen Kawasaki that Dallies pulled over had been cold-plated.

Investigators were enthused when informants told them that this suspect had missed an appointment to deliver a stolen motorcycle the same day as the shooting. But the thief had no history of violence.

“He did not seem like someone who could shoot a cop in cold blood and drive off,” Raney said. “But we heard he was bragging that he had done this.”

To resolve the matter, an undercover cop befriended the thief and arranged to meet him at a Riverside motel, Raney said. Police rigged a hidden VCR in the motel room to make it appear that an episode on the unsolved killing was being rerun on “America’s Most Wanted.”

The hope was the thief would see the show and boast of being the killer. But the plan soured when the thief noticed a police helicopter in the area, and bolted for the desert.

Days later, he was arrested on drug charges, and eventually cleared of Dallies’ killing, Raney said. He declined to be more specific.

The second suspect turned out to be a relative of Stephens, said Raney, declining to further identify him. Like “Hard Way,” the second suspect has a hair-trigger temper and a history of violence, Raney said.

Even more than Stephens, he has shown guile and cunning during his years of crime--enough perhaps to pull off a cop killing without making serious missteps.

The relative was in his 30s at the time of the shooting, Raney said, just a few years younger than Dallies, and his face is weathered and creased by a life of drug use and street life.

Dallies’ dying words were used to describe his assailant as “male, white, young.” It seemed unlikely, investigators said, that the only eyewitness to the shooting, Dallies himself, would describe this second suspect as “young.”

Also, this second suspect had dark hair, which contradicted testimony from another potential witness.

The man who used the same gun to wound Santa Ana security guard Rene Carpio in January 1993 was described by Carpio as white, in his early 20s, with light hair, a pocked face, and about 5 feet 8.

Not only had ballistics tests confirmed that the same gun was used in both shootings, but the incidents were similar in their calculated brutality. The gunman in both cases fired at close range, and kept shooting.

“People usually shoot to avoid capture,” he said. “This person was different. This was a killer.”

The killer was also calm as he made his escape, according to a young couple sitting in a car about 150 yards away. They saw the motorcycle speed past them, followed by a patrol car.

They watched as the patrol car’s overhead lights came on and the motorcycle rider pulled over. They heard the shots, but had little else to tell investigators, Raney said.

Working with a hypnotist, the couple later recalled the type of helmet worn by the motorcyclist, but not much more. “They were really upset by this,” Raney said. “Seeing this had a big impact on them.”

When the sketch of Carpio’s attacker was released in the weeks after Dallies’ shooting, it generated a flood of phone calls.

Stephens’ name and that of the first suspect popped up repeatedly, often enough that the original task force questioned and arrested both men on charges unrelated to the shooting. They hoped to rattle them, goad them into contradicting themselves, or make them panic. But both had alibis.

“Right from the beginning, these guys were in the mix of suspects,” Raney said. “Stephens’ name kept coming up, from street snitches and phone tips and citizens. We knew we had to look harder.”

Witness Cracks

In their zeal to crack the case, many of the investigators came down hard on people close to the suspects, Raney concedes. Grieving and frustrated, the detectives used strong words and intimidation tactics to wrangle the truth out of people, he said.

They especially hammered on Stephens’ lone alibi witness, Raney said. The investigators will say little about the witness--a public identification might put the person’s life in jeopardy, they say--but they are candid about their early failures to rattle this witness.

No matter how the investigators tried to trip up the alibi witness, the person remained unshaken. That changed, however, when a task force member began playing good cop in an otherwise bad cop interrogation.

Boyd Underwood is a former investigator for the district attorney’s office and a onetime Anaheim cop. Instead of badgering, Underwood was sympathetic and fatherly, offering a chance to set things straight, to do the right thing.

When the alibi witness cracked in August 1996, the reborn task force was re-energized. For the first time, Raney said, they had a breakthrough and information that directly exposed a lie by a key suspect about his whereabouts during the shooting.

The witness finally admitted that Stephens came home in the early morning hours, not the night before, as the witness had earlier insisted. Clearly agitated, Stephens immediately dyed his blondish hair black, the witness recalled.

If Stephens was racing to dye his hair while Dallies was still in surgery at UCI Medical Center in Orange shortly after the 3 a.m. shooting, the investigators felt strongly he must be the shooter--especially since he also matched the description of Carpio’s attacker.

Underwood’s interviews with the flip-flop witness also produced another potentially important bit of information: The gun that killed Howard Dallies was supposedly melted to slag and buried in the backyard of a Midway City house.

Detectives got a search warrant that allowed them to dig up the yard of the house in the 15000 block of Jackson Street. For two days, a city bulldozer, a team of U.S. Marine land mine specialists, and volunteers sifted through 795 tons of dirt for some trace of the weapon.

“At the end, we had a swimming pool-sized hole and no gun,” Raney said. “The gun is out there somewhere and we have never stopped looking for it. Finding it would be key to the whole case.”

Cell Bugged

Without the gun, investigators knew their best chance to build a case against Stephens would be his own words. Part way through a seven-year sentence in Ironwood Prison in Blythe, after a December 1993 conviction for shooting a homeowner during a residential robbery, Stephens refused to speak to police.

Raney said the task force decided to try an almost unheard of tactic--bugging a state prison cell.

“The challenge was to do this in way that would not be detected,” Raney said. “Remember, these guys spend 23 hours a day in these very small areas. They know every inch and they are very aware of any change in routine.”

The task force began to sprinkle information among Stephens’ associates and family members, hoping the word would reach Ironwood Prison and trigger a discussion about the Dallies slaying, Raney said.

Stephens’ relative, the former suspect, was in a Nevada prison at the time. Investigators managed to have him freed for an “eight-hour, intense interview” about the Dallies shooting. The relative told police he was grappling with the decision whether to talk to them about the cop slaying, but, in the end, kept his silence, Raney said. “He gave us riddles and anecdotes, that’s about it,” Raney said.

They left the interview with mutual pledges to keep the meeting secret. Police were confident--and hopeful--that the relative would do just the opposite. They wanted news of the rendezvous to reach Stephens.

The scheme came to naught when one of Stephens’ fellow inmates, poking around the cell, spotted something unusual. Frustrated investigators could only listen as their prime suspect, speaking directly into the device, muttered, “Nice try.”

The next sound was the device being crushed.

The investigators were, again, devastated. Instead of taking a taped confession to prosecutors, they would have to present a web of circumstantial evidence buttressed by questionable witnesses.

The case seemed to be as good as it was going to get, but is that good enough?

Raney says he feels confident that a jury can see the “1,000 pieces to this puzzle” and the face of the killer they create.

But he also knows it won’t be easy. The Hard Way has been the only way in this investigation.

“We know who did it,” Raney said. “Now, we just want justice. We want closure. We want to see this end.”