Investigator Finds Devil Is in the Details

As the district attorney’s top investigative gun, Richard Haas has a reputation for solving confounding cases. But there’s one whodunit that has haunted him for 19 years.

On a shelf in his spartan courthouse office, Haas keeps 14 3-inch-thick binders detailing the murders of Lyman and Charlene Smith, one of the most notorious cases in Ventura County history.

Methodical and meticulous, Haas toiled for a full year after Smith, a prominent attorney, and his wife, a court clerk, were bludgeoned to death with a fireplace log in their Ventura home in 1980. But every lead turned cold.

“This crime will stay in my mind forever,” said Haas, 55, a cop for 32 years and now deputy chief of the district attorney’s Bureau of Investigation. “It’s my most frustrating case.”

But from that old dead end, there is new hope.

Police in several jurisdictions are working the case hard because of new evidence, Haas said. He won’t say more for fear of warning the killer.

Yet those who know Haas well say his determination to solve the Smith slayings speaks to a doggedness that--when combined with a penetrating logic and calm demeanor--makes him one of the county’s finest sleuths.

He was selected, in fact, as investigator of the year from about 1,200 in California district attorneys’ offices in 1997, even before his legwork helped solve the tawdry Sherri Dally murder case in Ventura last year.

“He walks on water,” said Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury, who hired Haas away from the Ventura Police Department in 1980. “For as long as I can remember, he’s been my go-to guy for the most sensitive investigations. And he’s most impressive in homicides.”

It was Haas whom Bradbury called on for help when the district attorney undertook his most politically perilous investigation--when he criticized the motives of Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who shot and killed Ventura millionaire Don Scott in a misbegotten drug raid in 1992.

It was Haas whom Bradbury assigned to California’s first DNA case that led to a murder conviction in 1989.

It was Haas who worked the serial rape cases of Paul Campbell and Sean Miller, who victimized 15 women before being convicted in 1983 and 1985.

And it was Haas who worked the 1986 retrial of Theodore Frank, who murdered 2-year-old Amy Sue Seitz of Camarillo, who investigated the double-murder cases against Alan Davis in 1986 and Steven Spruill in 1990, and who helped convict Mark Scott Thornton of murdering Westlake nurse Kellie O’Sullivan in 1995.

Just last month, a Haas investigation led to the conviction of Jose Vazquez for directing the murder of a Ventura restaurant owner, Felipe Arambula, in a botched kidnapping.

But to Bradbury, Haas’ work in the Dally case is the outstanding accomplishment of a sterling career.

Brain-damaged grocery clerk Diana Haun and her lover, Michael Dally, were convicted in separate trials of murdering Dally’s homemaker wife. The Haun prosecution was considered nearly a sure thing because she left a damning trail of evidence.

Haun refused to incriminate her lover. And the circumstantial case against the swaggering Dally, the crime’s mastermind, was still admittedly dicey when Ventura police turned it over to prosecutors for review.

From there, under the hot glare of intense publicity, Haas and Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Lela Henke-Dobroth worked 15-hour days month after month to persuade a grand jury to charge Dally with murder.

“The Ventura P.D. solved the case against Diana Haun, but Richard and Lela put together the case against Dally,” Bradbury said. “My top prosecutors said it couldn’t be done, but they did it.”

Working Overtime

For Haas, the 1998 Dally conviction was a crowning moment in a career conducted behind the scenes. While honored repeatedly within his own profession, in the courtroom Haas has always been just the tall, quiet man in a dark suit and white shirt who confers with prosecutors during breaks.

In the Haun and Dally trials, the spotlight was on Henke-Dobroth and co-counsel Michael Frawley. But that didn’t mean Haas went home when the jury was dismissed at 5 p.m.

For two years, through two trials, they all worked overtime on behalf of victim Sherri Dally, a true innocent who married her high school sweetheart and stood loyally by him while he took drugs, had affairs and bought sex from prostitutes.

“We had to find all the little pieces of that huge jigsaw puzzle,” Henke-Dobroth said. “And Richard is patient beyond belief.”

They felt from the first that it was no accident that Sherri Dally’s body was dumped in a canyon along Canada Larga Road near Ventura. Haas found prostitutes Dally had taken to nearly the same spot, and one he’d offered to take there after his wife disappeared.

“That one gem went a long way toward proving Dally’s culpability,” Henke-Dobroth said. “Richard is the finest investigator I have ever met.”

The prosecutor and the investigator were successful, they said, partly because their traits and tendencies meshed so completely.

“She’s a real hard worker. She’s very logical. She knows her case and is very much involved in it,” Haas said. “That’s the personality I prefer to work with.”

The Dally case highlighted two of Haas’ strengths, prosecutors say: his ability to sense what has happened in a case and his talent for finding reluctant witnesses and getting them to testify.

And Haas brings the same intensity to every case, Henke-Dobroth said, recalling one from the 1980s when a homeless woman was raped beside a freeway. There were no witnesses, the victim said, except for a tanker truck driver who didn’t stop.

Using truck company manifests, Haas identified every tanker in the area at that time of day. He found the driver, corroborated the crime and helped gain a conviction.

Both of Haas’ recent bosses say he may be a better investigator than they are.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Jeff Bennett, a lawyer and former cop who headed the investigative bureau for years, said that his strategy with Haas was “to learn everything I could from him. He’s an incredible information gatherer. He’s an excellent witness. And he’s a gentleman.”

The district attorney’s current chief investigator, Gary Auer, who directed the FBI’s Ventura County office for more than a decade, said Haas was his principal competitor to head the 56-investigator bureau.

“I would consider it an honor to work with or for Richard Haas,” Auer said. “He’s remarkable.”

Defense lawyers also recognize Haas’ ability.

Describing him as “an excellent, excellent investigator,” defense lawyer Steven Andrade argued recently that his client in a murder case was clearly innocent since even Haas could not shake his story under tough questioning.

Career in Law Enforcement

Son of a butcher and a nurse, a graduate of Pasadena High School, Haas took a job as a Ventura patrol officer in 1967 shortly after graduating from Cal State Los Angeles with a degree in police science.

Within three years he made detective. He was a homicide investigator by 1975 and was honored as Ventura police officer of the year in 1977.

Hired by Bradbury in 1980, he worked sex crimes, while beginning a long stint as the investigator who rolled out when an officer was involved in a fatal shooting.

That expertise--and assignments to white-collar inquiries Bradbury kept close to the vest--helped form a bond of trust between the two.

They needed it to carry them through the Don Scott case.

Bradbury reported in March 1993 that Scott’s fatal shooting was justified. But he also found that the drug raid on Scott’s Malibu ranch was motivated by authorities’ desire to seize the $5-million estate and never should have occurred.

Eventually, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block cleared his deputies who led the raid. And he accused Bradbury of distorting facts to grab national publicity.

Block maintained that Bradbury--relying on Haas’ interviews--had falsely claimed that an informant denied he had ever identified Scott’s ranch as a source of marijuana. He noted that a key Haas interview with the informant was not tape recorded, and that the informant denied he had told Haas any such thing.

Today, Haas remembers the situation as painful, but necessary.

“They said a lot of stuff that was not true,” Haas said. “They attacked us for not having recordings on those people, and we did record. But we just ate it. I do not issue press releases.”

Bradbury acknowledges putting Haas in a difficult situation. “I don’t think any officer is ever happy investigating another cop,” the district attorney said. “Richard did it because he’s a professional, and doing it was more important than his personal feelings. . . . I think that case was one of the highlights of our careers. We did what was right.”

Haas said he has modeled his life in that sort of old-fashioned ethic.

An Ojai resident, he’s been married to wife Marcia for 35 years. They have three adult children. Haas works, spends time with his family, goes to church, and loves to ski at his condo in Mammoth Lakes.

“I live my life in the traditional manner,” he said. “Work, family, kids and responsibility.”

It is that sense of responsibility that makes it so difficult to quit on a case until it is solved. That is why the Lyman and Charlene Smith case--the one that has defied solution--weighs so heavily on the mind of this master investigator.

Smith’s appointment as a judge was expected within days when he and his wife were slain in their bed on March 13, 1980. Smith’s son found his father and stepmother at their house on High Point Drive in Ventura. Their bodies were tied, perhaps to make the crime appear to be a robbery.

A business associate of Lyman Smith’s was charged with murder, but eventually freed after prosecutors came to believe he was the wrong man.

Now investigators are pondering new evidence they think could one day lead to the killer.

Until then, on a shelf next to Haas’ desk, are binders holding notes from the case, and albums containing photographs of the crime scene.

“I can reach out and touch them,” Haas said. “They’re part of my life until I can put it to rest.”