After 22 Years, Boxing Promoter’s Murder Unsolved but Unforgotten

Carol Steindler-Ferris and her sister Bobbie Beatty have waited a long time for a miracle, and now, on the 22nd anniversary of their father’s murder, they may have one.

Using new technology, police matched a fingerprint lifted from the door of the gold Cadillac in which boxing promoter Howie Steindler was found dead.

The print led Mike Mejia, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, to other promising leads. Mejia notified the family and, together, they persuaded the Los Angeles City Council to offer a reward.

Suddenly, a case that many except the still-grieving family had forgotten, was commanding publicity again, the sort of publicity that Mejia believes could finally bring justice.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that you don’t think about it,” said Beatty, an Oxnard resident. “That you don’t wonder about it.”

Beatty, who has survived breast cancer, frequently volunteers with cancer-awareness projects. She says she has adopted her father’s philosophy: “It’s nice to be important, but more important to be nice.” Memories of the slaying haunt her.

Steindler-Ferris, though encouraged by the recent turn of events, still mourns for her loss that night, she said.

“My father was always there for me in every way--mentally and physically and monetarily, every way you can think,” she said, surrounded in her Chatsworth home with carefully preserved memorabilia from her father’s career. “I was so devastated. I just felt so empty. He was such a big part of my life and my son’s life.”

Searching for a Clue

Telling her son was the hardest thing she’s ever done, said the husky-voiced, energetic blonde who, at her then 14-year-old son’s urging, took on the management of Steindler’s Los Angeles gym after his death.

“My son, my little son, said, ‘You gotta take the gym. You gotta do this for grandpa. I’ll help you,’ ” she recalled with a tearful smile.

Steindler--Ferris took on the task because she believed she would find the answer there.

“I went down there to find the murderers,” she said.

For 10 years she kept a foot in two worlds--one in which she was a Little League mother, and the other in which she was a licensed boxing manager--hoping to find a hint or a clue.

After years of lighting memorial candles, Steindler-Ferris and her son, former Mets and Cardinals relief pitcher Mark Davis, are still waiting for the missing pieces of the puzzle that will lead to the killer.

“I’m just hoping that somebody with the minutest bit of information will come forward so I can get some closure,” Steindler-Ferris said.

At the family’s request, and with Mejia’s support, the Los Angeles City Council recently approved a $25,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the baffling case.

On March 9, 1977, Howie Steindler closed up his Main Street Gym, where champions such as Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis once trained.

The fiery Steindler, on whom the Burgess Meredith character in a series of “Rocky” movies was based, drove to his Encino home where his wife, Ann, waited inside.

A witness reported seeing Steindler in front of his home involved in an argument with two men who punched him several times, forced him into the back seat of his car and drove away.

A Man Who Would Fight Back

Steindler, who was 72, was later found beaten and suffocated in the abandoned car near the Laurel Canyon Boulevard onramp of the eastbound Ventura Freeway.

Steindler-Ferris remembers details of that night, right down to the purple pants and top she wore.

“He was really a feisty person, and I thought he’d gotten into an altercation with someone and they probably arrested him,” she said. “Murder never crossed my mind. I mean never. Even death never crossed my mind.”

Coincidentally, Steindler’s friend, LAPD Sgt. Marv Engquist, had dropped in on Steindler at the gym the afternoon before the killing. But Steindler was too busy to do more than wave hello.

By 8 p.m., Engquist, a major crimes investigator in the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division, was called to the scene where Steindler’s body was found.

Steindler, who had been in boxing for more than 50 years, finally managed a champion in 1977 with World Boxing Council featherweight Danny “Little Red” Lopez.

For more than 30 years, beginning in 1951, denizens of the boxing world frequented Steindler’s skid row gym, the site of numerous TV and film location shots before it was torn down in November 1984.

More than 1,000 people overflowed Steindler’s funeral service at Hollywood Cemetery Chapel, where former boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson gave the eulogy.

At the time of the slaying, police distributed 5,000 handbills in mailboxes and on parked cars and even placed newspaper ads to find witnesses to Steindler’s abduction-killing.

Nine months after the crime, Steindler’s widow received his wallet--containing his personal papers, credit cards and car key--in the mail, postmarked Encino. Several hundred dollars in cash he was known to have been carrying was missing. There was nothing else. Ann Steindler died in 1987, not knowing who killed her husband.

Because of damage to Steindler’s Cadillac, police believed then, as they do now, that he was the victim of a bump-and-rob, in which a victim’s car is rear-ended, and the victim is robbed after pulling over to exchange information.

“An elderly man driving a Cadillac may have looked vulnerable,” Engquist said recently, as he recalled his investigation.

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Steindler-Ferris thinks her father would have resisted.

“I know he put up a fight--maybe too much of a fight,” she said. “Knowing his nature, he would not go easy.”

Police at the time queried local pawn shops for items stolen from Steindler that night, including a watch and a unique diamond ring, one of only two of that design made. It was 14-karat gold, with a diamond inset and a boxing glove. A gold necklace and a second ring were also stolen. The items were never recovered.

Mejia searched through old police files for clues and found that two similar and also unsolved murders were committed within about three months of Steindler’s death. Charles Eugene Smith was robbed, shot to death and left in his car on the Hollywood Freeway. A second victim, garment district businessman James Arakawa, was also robbed and killed within blocks of the gym.

Some of the people involved in Steindler’s murder may have been involved in those killings, Mejia said.

The recent fingerprint match belonged to a parking attendant from The Redwood restaurant in Los Angeles that Steindler was known to frequent.

The attendant wasn’t involved in the murder, but helped lead Mejia and his partner, Dennis Kilcoyne, to potential suspects.

“We feel that we’re talking to the people who have knowledge or were involved, but short of any physical evidence, we can’t proceed,” Mejia said.

The possible suspects, who are currently serving extended prison terms, were known to hang out at the Waldorf and Belmont bars near the gym. They were arrested at the time of Steindler’s killing for similar crimes. Composite drawings from witness descriptions in the three cases are nearly identical.

Engquist, who retired from the LAPD in 1991 after 25 years of service, and now teaches in the Cerritos College criminal justice department, still thinks someone, perhaps unwittingly, holds the key to this mystery.

“Any case can be solved if you just have enough information,” he said. “And in this case, we just didn’t have enough information.”

So police are again appealing to the public for help.

“If they heard anyone telling about this particular crime, give us a call,” Mejia said. “I know it’s a long time ago.”

Steindler-Ferris hopes the reward will help jar someone’s memory--or conscience.

“A lot of people are afraid to come forward and I can’t blame them,” she said. “They don’t want to get involved. But they have to sit back and remember: This could happen to you.”