Murder Suspect Caught in a Web of His Own Making

The lure of a beautiful day can be hard to resist, especially in November at the edge of the Black Hills, with winter about to smother the land under snow and ice.

Kent Anguiano succumbed to the lure one Monday, deciding to skip classes at Black Hills State University, look up his girlfriend, Mavis Two Bulls, and their 11-month-old son, Red Hawk, and head into the pine-covered hills. It was an inexpensive but fulfilling way for the family to steal time together while offering prayers and gifts to the Lakota Sioux gods.

Such trips, spiritual as much as physical, were a large part of their relationship. It was Anguiano’s spirit that attracted Two Bulls to him in the first place. A California native and onetime Orange County resident, Anguiano was a convert to her native Lakota traditions. But he embraced them wholeheartedly, earning the right to be called a pipe-carrier and to lead prayers and chants in a steam-filled sapling hut called a sweat lodge.

He was a Sundancer too. Four times he joined the ancient ritual in which the faithful, seeking divine guidance, slide wooden pegs into slits cut into their chests, then dance tethered to a pole until they collapse in exhaustion, the pegs ripping from their flesh.

The couple shared love and a son but lived apart. Anguiano, 38, had a small two-room apartment in the middle of a parking lot behind Spearfish’s Main Street. Two Bulls, 32, and the baby shared a three-room apartment at the edge of town, across from the university. Neither could afford a telephone. By the time Anguiano found Two Bulls at her apartment that November Monday last year, she was about to drive to Queen’s Wash & Dry on a corner across from the Spearfish Police Department. Anguiano went with her, planning to go for a hike after the laundry was done.

Anguiano was holding Red Hawk on his lap when two middle-aged men in street clothes came in. They introduced themselves as Costa Mesa police officers and asked if he was Kent Anguiano and whether he would answer some questions.

“They sat down, and I couldn’t believe how close they got to him,” Two Bulls said. She took Red Hawk from Anguiano and finished the laundry while the men talked. She could overhear some of it: Anguiano asking if he was under arrest and protesting, “You asked me this before, and I told you I don’t know.” The conversation became intense. Two Bulls, the laundry finished, took Red Hawk out to her Jeep to wait, struggling to keep the baby from fretting as she wept.

“I saw one of the detectives go to the door,” Two Bulls said. “He had a walkie-talkie. I went over and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

“And he said, ‘Homicide.’ ”

Within the hour, Anguiano was arrested on a California warrant accusing him of killing a man at a Costa Mesa bus stop nearly eight years earlier. Police told reporters that Anguiano walked up to Luis Lopez, 25, who had just finished a night of pool-playing in Johanna’s Bar at 19th Street and Placentia Avenue, and shot him once in the head. A rough crowd of bikers used to frequent Johanna’s, and police said Anguiano shot Lopez simply to prove that he was tough enough to kill in cold blood.

None of that, though, squares with statements collected by the police themselves, nor with perceptions of Anguiano among his friends in Orange County and in his adoptive home at the edge of South Dakota’s high plains. He was a boozer and a brawler back then. A bit of a braggart, too, but not known to carry a gun. His supporters say they believe he is simply the victim of his own unfounded boasting and of the resilience of street gossip.

“If I had ever said anything like that, it sounds stupid, but it was just to kind of be something that I’m not, just kind of joking around,” said Anguiano, who is being held in Orange County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail after pleading not guilty at his arraignment last month. A preliminary hearing is to be scheduled during a court appearance Friday.

“I’m innocent, and I think somebody took me seriously,” he said. “Several people were walking around joking. Now I see that it led to something a lot worse.”

None of his intimates in South Dakota, where he moved five years ago as part of a spiritual quest, suspected that Anguiano was running from a murder. He told of bar fights and a rough past of drinking and drug use but never of killing. Sober now, he spent his time studying for a career in drug and alcohol counseling, being with his young family and seeking spiritual peace.

“He’s not that kind of person,” said Everlander Stranger Horse, 52, a Lakota Sioux and Two Bulls’ neighbor. “He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. I’ve never seen him mad. If he did what they said he did, he could not go up there [to Sundance]. The spirits would not let him in there.”

The case against Anguiano raises two conflicting images of the same person. Is Anguiano a violent man, a stone-cold killer whose past deed has finally caught up with him? Or is he a redeemed spiritual man “walking the red road” but haunted by past weaknesses, by past lies told to satisfy the human need to be accepted?

The killing itself was quick and unwitnessed.

Luis Lopez, a 25-year-old janitor, had recently adopted a Monday night ritual of stopping at Johanna’s Bar in Costa Mesa for a couple of beers, a shot of tequila and a few games of eight ball. But on this January 1990 night, the pool balls just weren’t dropping his way.

So sometime after midnight, Lopez took his pool cue and left alone, just as he had come in an hour earlier.

It’s unclear where Lopez was headed. He was neither a gambler nor a hustler, just a guy who shot a decent game of pool in places where that carried some cachet. He could have been going home to his camper, parked in a friend’s yard on Pomona Avenue in Santa Ana. He could have been heading to another bar, trying to scare up another game.

Wherever Lopez was going, he didn’t get far. Shortly after he left Johanna’s, someone killed him with a single .22-caliber gunshot under his left eye, fired close enough to leave gunpowder traces on his face.

Witnesses said Lopez had not argued with anyone in the bar. His cue stick, jewelry and $14 in cash were found with the body near a bus stop on Placentia Avenue. The obvious motive--robbery--didn’t fit unless the killer was scared off before the belongings could be gathered.

The police were stymied.

But then word began circulating on the street that Anguiano was claiming the killing. Police questioned Anguiano; Lawrence Fritz III, who had been drinking with him that day in the bar; and Fritz’s father, Lawrence “Bud” Fritz II. And officers began interviewing people who said Anguiano told them he had done the killing.

The prosecution centers on three statements, according to documents turned over to Anguiano’s lawyer. Two of the statements were taken within 10 months of the killing, the third was taken last March.

Two of the statements are from people now in prison. One is a homeless woman whom Anguiano said he stiffed on a drug debt and who is now serving a three-year term on drug-possession charges. The other is a man serving a three-year term on charges he sold dynamite to undercover agents. He told police in March that he would not testify but that Anguiano, warning him to stay out of trouble, had told him in 1992 “pretty much everything but the fact that he did it,” according to police statements. And he acknowledged there is friction between them because Anguiano married the man’s girlfriend while he was in prison for an earlier conviction. Anguiano and the woman have been estranged since 1992.

The third statement is from a woman with whom Anguiano had a one-night stand. She told police Anguiano was “madly in love” with her and wanted to marry her. She said that, when she rebuffed his attempts to continue seeing her, he confessed to the killing, telling her that he wanted to give her information she could use “just in case you really want to hurt me.” Anguiano, however, said he was the one who broke off the relationship and that she then pursued him.

“It’s all hearsay s--- from a bunch of drunks around town,” said Bud Fritz, 59, a longtime friend of Anguiano who said police initially suspected him and son Larry because of their notoriety in the neighborhood for boisterous partying. “Kent was a drunk, too, and he was just running his mouth saying he did it. But I don’t feel he did it.”

Anguiano was already “in” with the crowd police said he was trying to impress, Fritz said. And if he was trying to prove he was tough, he would have picked a more significant target than a stranger at a bus stop. And he would have been more apt to go after a man who beat him up with a pool cue and put him in the hospital nearly two years earlier.

“If he was going to kill anybody, he’d have gone after that guy,” Fritz said. “Kent was tough. If he was here right now and you got him mad, he’d knock the s--- out of you. But all he ever used was his fists.”

Anguiano said he recalls being in the bar early the night Lopez was killed but not late into the evening, though a bartender told police shortly after the killing that Anguiano and Larry Fritz had watched Lopez shoot pool.

“I’m not sure whether I was or not,” Anguiano said, pointing out that eight years have gone by. “I think I just slept that night. I didn’t hear anything about that incident until the next day.”

Anguiano said he thinks police charged him in the killing simply to close the books.

“Since they didn’t have anyone for the crime, they would like to blame someone and close that case up to protect their reputations,” he said. “It’s just a bad rumor that’s been passed on about me. . . . I don’t see how these people, their statements, how [police] are able to keep someone incarcerated when they have such records.”

No physical evidence links Anguiano to the scene, said Sherry A. Garrels, a Huntington Beach lawyer hired by Anguiano’s family to represent him. Police have not found the gun used in the killing, and no eyewitnesses have come forward, she said.

“Everything is hearsay,” Garrels said. “This is like a nasty gossip session. He’s the furthest thing from a murderer.”

Lt. Ron Smith, spokesman for the Costa Mesa Police Department, would not comment. Debbie Lloyd, a prosecutor in the Orange County district attorney’s office assigned to the case, did not return calls seeking comment. One police source acknowledged that the three statements against Anguiano are weak individually but said together they point to his guilt.

Jake Maurer of Newport Beach, Anguiano’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous when he became sober in 1992, said he doesn’t believe Anguiano is capable of murder.

“Kent was hanging out with these people, and he had an unhealthy relationship with his ex-wife,” Maurer said. “He told me in 1992 that he was being framed for a murder.”

Maurer said he dismissed Anguiano’s claim then as the boasting of a drunk not yet comfortable with sobriety. It’s a common reaction, he said. Alcoholics beginning recovery often exaggerate the events that brought them to that point.

“He would get angry, but never an irate anger,” Maurer said. Killing “does not go along with the guy I know. He’s not that personality. I think he’s being framed.”

While Anguiano was sitting in the Lawrence County Jail in South Dakota, he received a letter informing him that his career as a college student had been put on hold.

Citing Black Hills State University’s policy “to suspend students whom we have reasonable cause to believe may become a danger to our community,” officials dropped him from his classes. In turn, he lost his federal education grants, his work-study job and his two-room apartment. Unable to post bail, he has been jailed for nearly three months, separated from his fiancee and their son.

Anguiano was returned to Orange County by an arrest warrant. But he was summoned to South Dakota in the first place by a dream.

“I had some dreams of some old people, spirits who came to me,” said Anguiano, who is part Aztec and who has been adopted by a Lakota Sioux spiritual guide. “They said we need to come out there and pray.”

Anguiano moved first to Vermillion, in the southeast corner of the state, and nine months later to Spearfish after he was accepted at Black Hills State to study human services, hoping to work as a drug and alcohol counselor for Native Americans.

He met Two Bulls three years ago while she was guest-lecturing on Lakota Sioux traditions in one of his classes. She said she was attracted to Anguiano because of the intensity of his spiritual nature. One of their first dates was an outing to a dead tree on a hillside where bald eagles--sacred in Lakota tradition--liked to roost. On the way home, she said, he burst into tears at the sight of a mangled deer beside the road.

The depth of his beliefs, she and other friends say, is genuine.

“I don’t think Kent was trying to give people a goody-two-shoes image,” said Mary Harris, one of his professors at Black Hills State who also has taught music courses in prisons. “If so, he deserves an Oscar. I don’t think he was working me. It was a genuine desire to find something for the first time in his life.”

Legia Spicer, the college’s director of United Ministries who used Anguiano as a guest lecturer, said she and Anguiano had regular, intense conversations about the nature of faith and the common threads among disparate beliefs.

“I know nothing about his past, but he’s a very good example of a person who is walking a straight road now,” Spicer said. Despite Anguiano’s poverty--he lived on the $50 a week from his work-study job--he often helped others in worse straits, she said. “We saw it not just in his talk but in his actions.”

Two of his staunchest advocates are Two Bulls and 66-year-old former Republican state legislator and hotel owner Beverly Halling. Halling met the couple last year through their mutual interest in spiritualism.

Halling’s husband died of cancer a week before Anguiano’s arrest, and his case has since become her cause. She paid $1,000 on her own and is raising more money in $50 and $100 donations from her friends--most of whom don’t know Anguiano--to hire a private investigator in Orange County.

Halling acknowledges that her involvement has helped her channel grief over her husband’s death. But she said she is also motivated by concern for Anguiano and Two Bulls and outraged that law enforcement officials can destroy someone’s life with “a bunch of lies.”

“I think God probably sent this to me on purpose,” Halling said. “I’m totally consumed.”

Halling’s house has become headquarters for Two Bulls as she tries to keep abreast of developments in Costa Mesa. Anguiano calls collect every few days from the jail, and the couple are in regular contact with attorney Garrels.

On a recent day, Two Bulls sat at Halling’s round dining-room table as a January thaw melted snow and ice outside and spilled sunshine inside. Red Hawk, wriggling on his mother’s lap, played with Two Bulls’ earring as she reminisced about the family spending time together in nature.

On one trek last summer, she recalled, the couple climbed Crow’s Peak, a sacred spot overlooking Spearfish. They took turns carrying Red Hawk, then 6 months old. When they crested the peak, they shared an orange, careful to leave a slice on the ground as they recited a prayer of thanks and ended with mitaku oyasin, recalling the interconnections of all people. The trip took seven hours.

“My legs were killing me, it was so far,” Two Bulls recalled. “But it was beautiful.”

It was just such a journey, she said, that the couple was planning on that day in November when Anguiano was arrested. It was a week before their son’s first birthday, and they wanted to walk with him in Spearfish Canyon to soak up the warmth of the day and bask a bit in their own familial glow.

Instead, Anguiano found himself buried by the past.

Also contributing to this story was Times librarian Sheila A. Kern.