Closing a Painful Wound

For a quarter-century, no one was charged in the killing of Bucky Imler, whose charred body was found in a pickup truck that had been set ablaze at a Pomona golf course in August 1973.

Imler’s daughter, Janice Reed, long ago got over her grief, but she held onto a sliver of hope that whoever smashed his skull and set him on fire might be brought to justice. Every couple of years, she phoned Pomona homicide detectives, who told her they thought they knew who killed her father, but couldn’t get witnesses to give up the information needed to make a conviction likely.

A few years ago--she can’t remember how many--Reed stopped calling. But she never stopped hoping.

Then, while washing dishes one afternoon a couple of weeks ago, Reed, 55, saw two men walk up to her gate.

“They asked if I knew Arthur Imler,” she said. “No one ever called him Arthur, everyone knew him as Bucky. My heart started pounding.”

The men were Pomona police detectives Mike Dossey and Gregg Guenther, who told Reed that they had reopened her father’s homicide investigation and that they had new evidence.

On Tuesday, prosecutors charged Cecil Roy “Tex” Tedder--now a 51-year-old Folsom prison inmate--with killing Arthur D. Imler.

For Reed, the news eased half a lifetime of anticipation.

“I’m really happy. This is finally coming, hopefully, to an end,” she said.

Tedder had been arrested in 1973 on suspicion of the crime, but charges were never filed.

The problem, Guenther said, was that witnesses gave “incomplete statements” and police did not ask the district attorney’s office to file charges.

This year has been a slow year for murders in Pomona. Because of that, Guenther and Dossey--both of whom were in high school when Imler was killed--had time to routinely review unsolved homicide cases. In May they came across the Imler file.

“You could see in the reports they were real close, and after talking to [the retired] detectives we knew they had gotten close,” he said.

Dossey and Guenther re-interviewed witnesses, who after 25 years were willing to reveal information they had withheld in the past--details police declined to discuss before the trial.

“Over time, witnesses feel safer and are more willing to talk,” Dossey said.

The new statements were enough for the detectives to take the case to prosecutors, who charged Tedder with murder.

District attorney’s officials said homicide cases are rarely reopened after more than 10 years.

Imler was one of eight people killed in Pomona in 1973, but many remembered the spectacular crime.

“The Fire Department people, the coroners, they all remember it like yesterday,” Dossey said. “The image is something that stuck out.”

Imler, who was a 52-year-old plumber at the time, knew Tedder from drinking at the Manger bar in El Monte.

Police said they do not know what Tedder’s motive might have been for allegedly killing Imler with an unknown object and burning his body on the Mountain Meadows golf course.

But Reed said she believes that Tedder--who on the day of the slaying was scheduled to be sentenced for a bank robbery conviction--may have killed her father as part of an aborted plan to flee.

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The burned truck in which Imler was found belonged to Tedder. “He might have been trying to pretend the body was him” to throw authorities off his trail, she said.

Tedder appeared in court later that day and was sentenced. After his release, he was convicted of a 1985 murder in Nevada County. He is serving that sentence in Folsom prison and was denied parole this year, Dossey said.

Reed said that when he died, Bucky Imler was a wiry man in the same 5-feet-4 1/2-inch, 160-pound shape as his World War II Army days. He loved to strum country and western tunes on his guitar and “always made everybody laugh,” she said.

Imler served as a truck driver in Europe, Reed said. Her father began drinking after the war, and was so traumatized by what he had seen that even war movies gave him nightmares.

He came to Los Angeles and decided not to return to his boyhood home of South Fork, Pa., where he worked as a boy in the coal mines and had seen relatives perish from black lung disease. “He loved everything about California.”

When Tedder is brought from Folsom for a preliminary hearing in Pomona Municipal Court on Sept. 1, Reed plans to be there.

“I’m glad to see something’s being done,” she said. “He should never get out again.”