A New Look at Old Crimes

In the bloody years of the early 1990s, Los Angeles detectives rushed between murder scenes, scrambling to collect evidence and clues from one before they were dispatched to another. Time for follow-up on old cases was scarce.

Today, a sharp drop in homicides in some sections of the city is giving investigators the chance to review their pile of unsolved cases aided by high-tech tools--including computer databases and DNA tests--unavailable when the crimes were committed.

“The philosophy is now that we’re down in murders, now’s the time to take a look at the murders in the ‘80s and ‘90s that we didn’t have time to solve,” said LAPD Capt. Kenny Garner.

Homicides in the city have fallen from a peak of 1,092 in 1992 to 424 last year, LAPD figures show.

The decline in homicides has been seen in other areas of Southern California too, giving investigators time to examine older cases. From Ventura to Santa Ana, authorities have solved fatal stabbings, shootings and strangulations from years past by utilizing tenacity and technology.

Even in neighborhoods that have seen little falloff in homicides, such as those patrolled by the LAPD’s North Hollywood and Foothill divisions, police teams created in the last 14 months have made progress in closing murder cases that were not a priority in previous years.

Such attention to unsolved murders is a result of initiative at individual divisions and not in response to any LAPD directive, department officials said.

These efforts are yielding results.

With new technical tools, detectives are examining physical evidence from murder scenes--including fingerprints, bullet marks and genetic material--to reveal decades-old secrets.

A quarter-century after a 15-year-old Monrovia girl, Kimberly Miller, was found raped and strangled in 1974, DNA evidence led Sheriff’s Det. Joe Seeger to a suspect. Louis Burgess, 45, the boyfriend of Miller’s friend, was charged with the killing last spring while he was in a Missouri prison for another crime. Burgess pleaded not guilty to the murder charge in a West Covina court Wednesday, the district attorney’s office said.

Seeger declined to comment on the specific DNA material he found in the Miller murder, citing the upcoming trial. But he said, “If forensic evidence like semen or body fluids or blood is available, that is wonderful.”

Requests for DNA testing have flooded the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division, or SID, said Greg Matheson, assistant director of its crime lab.

“As the detectives find themselves with more time and are looking at old cases, they are requesting more work” from the lab, he said.

One of the requests came from Wilshire Division Det. Melvin Smith, who hunted for suspects without the assistance of computers and molecular biology early in his career.

Smith hopes DNA analysis can help him identify the killer of a 46-year-old man who was stabbed to death in 1981 at his Mid-City home.

“We need to find out who killed Ralph Crenshaw,” said Smith, whose drive to work takes him past the murder scene every day. “It’s something I just can’t get out of my head.”

The victim met his death inside the dwelling, but Smith believes that a drop of blood found outside in the driveway could belong to the murderer.

However, DNA analysis cannot link blood, semen or saliva to a suspect unless that suspect’s sample is available for comparison. In the Ralph Crenshaw case, the drop of blood must be stored after analysis until a suspect is identified.

Take a Number

Because lab resources are limited, DNA samples from old cases must wait while those from more recent ones are analyzed.

“Our No. 1 priority is a current case with a suspect that’s going to trial,” Matheson said. “The cold cases do have to wait their turn because we need to get the other ones done first.”

Matheson estimates that his unit, which analyzed DNA samples for about 550 cases in 1998, has a backlog of 200 cases.

Although DNA and ballistics analysis are the newest techniques for examining evidence, a fingerprint database developed in 1986 has also been instrumental in tracing suspects in old crimes.

The Automated Fingerprint Identification System scans fingerprints found at crime scenes and reduces them to basic geometric patterns. The computer compares these patterns to more than a million fingerprints on file from suspects arrested previously, looking for a match. The computer’s work is then checked for accuracy by two human experts, said Wendy Cleveland of the SID’s latent prints section.

Cleveland’s help proved crucial to Larry Burcher, an LAPD officer assigned to the North Hollywood Division’s two-man “cold case” team formed early last year.

Probing the 1981 stabbing death of Richard Tyler, 47, in his Hollywood Hills home, Burcher asked that fingerprints found at the scene be analyzed by computer.

Cleveland found a fingerprint, taken from outside the passenger door window of Tyler’s 1971 Porsche, that was considered unusable in 1988, when technicians had not yet fully utilized the computer’s capabilities. She matched the rediscovered print to Leslie Merkley, a man who had previously been arrested by Los Angeles police for robbery.

Burcher closed the case in August when he learned that Merkley, 37, died of AIDS in San Francisco in 1995. The victim’s mother was relieved to know the case had been resolved, Burcher said. “That’s what I get paid to do.”

Although novel scientific techniques have proven useful, tried and true detective work--knocking on doors and poring over paperwork--remains essential in getting to the bottom of murders, detectives said.

“It’s a matter of hitting the streets and talking to people and obtaining information from them,” said Foothill Division Det. Frank Bishop.

Foothill formed a cold case squad in October 1998, made up of one supervising detective and four patrol officers, including George Morales and John Perez. Both men, who are now detective trainees, said they have learned the value of old-fashioned legwork.

The two officers tried to locate Hugo Barraza, 49, who fled Southern California after a 1992 alleged drug-related shooting, by finding his wife and daughter. Sifting through hundreds of documents, they found an address for Barraza’s family listed in a routine crime report made when the daughter’s bicycle was stolen.

Police arrived at the home minutes after Barraza, visiting for Christmas, had left for his Florida hide-out. The detectives telephoned ahead to Miami police, who arrested Barraza when his plane landed.

Barraza plead guilty to a lesser kidnapping charge and is serving a 13-year prison sentence, Morales said. Without eyewitnesses, authorities could not make a case for homicide.

Sheriff’s detectives in San Bernardino combined science with extensive witness interviews in their investigation of 15-year-old Lucas Bielat’s death.

The teenager died of a drug overdose during a night of partying near Landers in 1996, but tests for common substances didn’t turn up anything, said Det. Mike Kleczko. With no way to determine the teenager’s cause of death, detectives moved on to fresh murder cases requiring attention.

But a new test developed by the coroner’s office identified a lethal dose of gamma hydroxy butyrate--better known as the hallucinogenic drug “Ecstasy”--in late 1997. Armed with this information, detectives spent almost a year interviewing witnesses who identified the drug supplier and manufacturer from the party. He was arrested in September 1998.

Lindley Troy Geborde, 29, was charged with murder for allegedly giving a fatal dose of a drug to a minor. He is awaiting arraignment on the charge.

Picking Up the Threads

Detectives and policing experts said progress in many unsolved homicides is still impeded by significant obstacles. “The ones that are sitting there are the ones that are the toughest,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Frank Merriman.

Locating witnesses to old crimes and prodding them to remember events accurately is the biggest challenge.

“People forget. People move,” said Eric Monkkonen, a UCLA professor who studies long-term homicide trends. “The evidence may be corrupted because it’s been shuffled around.”

Overcoming these complications can consume hundreds of hours of police time, making cold cases more expensive on average than fresh cases to investigate, he said.

But Monkkonen said spending on homicides committed years ago is justified. “The moral imperative is that we shouldn’t be signaling our lack of care about this,” he said.

“Death is so permanent that you have to do everything humanly possible to clear that case and bring closure for everyone involved,” Smith said.