Survivors’ Pain Resurfaces When ‘Cold Cases’ Heat Up

A string of arrests in old murder cases has catapulted Orange County from worst to first when it comes to solving homicides in Southern California, but instead of closure, these breakthroughs often bring more anguish for victims’ families.

Lucy Wheelock waited 25 years for police to make an arrest in the murder of her husband, who was gunned down in front of his 4-year-old stepson during a robbery inside his Santa Ana apartment. She often thought an arrest would answer questions and give her someone to blame for Larry Wheelock’s death. But watching the arrest of a suspect on television revived memories she had tried for decades to bury.

“It was frightening . . . that I was going to have to relive it all,” Wheelock recalled recently. “I remember pacing, thinking, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this right now. I’m going to fall apart.’ ”

Wheelock’s reaction is becoming increasingly familiar to grief counselors across the country whose job it is to break the news of an arrest to families.

Five years ago, telephone counselors with the national chapter of Parents of Murdered Children rarely fielded such calls. Now they handle 300 a week, making up roughly 30% of calls to the support group. The group now provides counselors with special training so that they can better help callers deal with the trauma they relive when “cold cases” are reopened.

“Most people think . . . ‘Aren’t you happy?’ But in reality it causes a great deal of anxiety. They need a lot more support,” said Executive Director Nancy Ruhe-Munch.

“When a murder first happens you’re in shock and that’s a buffer to the pain. But when the cold case squad reopens a case, you’re not in shock anymore. There’s no protection against the pain. . . . It’s raw pain that they cannot escape from.”

Wheelock’s case also underscores a dramatic improvement by investigators in Orange County, which a decade ago posted the region’s worst record in clearing homicides.

Today, Orange County police are more likely to make an arrest in a murder case than at any time since 1981, according to a Times analysis of crime records. Between 1992 and 1999, the percentage of Orange County homicides forwarded for prosecution rose from 45% to 86%, records show. By comparison, the statewide average rose from 56% to 60%. In Los Angeles County, the percentage of homicides that were cleared dipped slightly from 51% to 49%.

Detectives owe much of their success to plunging crime rates, which have given them the opportunity to review forgotten case files. At the same time, the county’s main crime lab has received a boost in funding, ending the long waits for ballistic, DNA and other tests that plague crime labs in Los Angeles and throughout the state.

The county’s trend in solving murders is most evident in Santa Ana, where a decade ago the city’s detectives all but ran from killing to killing and made arrests in only a third of them. Today, Santa Ana police are solving homicides faster than they are occurring, with nearly half of murder arrests involving old cases.

Last month, Santa Ana police arrested a former gang member turned small-town Alabama preacher in connection with a 1993 drive-by shooting. Other agencies are also cracking long-unsolved cases. In the last month, Irvine and Garden Grove police made arrests in connection with two murders dating to 1995 and 1997.

But the story of police success is also a tale about the painful journey families of murder victims must travel and how that journey continues even after a case is solved.

4-Year-Old Witness IDs Suspect at 28

Lucy Berroteran and Larry Wheelock knew each other in high school but fell in love years later after a chance encounter at a small grocery in Banning. It was November 1974. Nine months later, the couple married and moved with Lucy’s son, Jacob Scott, to an apartment in Santa Ana.

The family’s 2 1/2 months in Santa Ana were among the happiest of Lucy’s life. She watched her new husband treat Jacob like his own, and the young boy adored his stepfather. But Lucy felt a nagging sense that her contentment would not last long.

On the evening of Oct. 18, 1975, Larry Wheelock left the family’s Bristol Street apartment with Jacob in tow. The two intended to pick Lucy up from work and drive to her parents’ house for the night. But before they reached the car, two men approached.

One of the strangers produced a handgun and ordered them back inside. The two men robbed Wheelock of his wallet. A shot was fired. Wheelock fell to the floor.

The intruders fled. As Jacob looked around the room, the kitchen wall phone rang. He tried to jump for the receiver, but the phone continued to ring just out of reach.

At the restaurant, Lucy Wheelock grew anxious. Her husband was rarely late for anything. She called home. There was no answer. After several hours, she caught a ride home with a colleague and found her husband lying at the foot of the stairs. Jacob was asleep on the living room couch.

Santa Ana police searched the apartment for clues. Detectives suspected that a smudged fingerprint they found belonged to the gunman. They scoured thousands of their department’s fingerprint cards but couldn’t find a match.

There were no adult witnesses. Desperate for information, detectives questioned Jacob again and again. Eventually, with no fresh leads, they moved on to investigate new killings.

For Lucy Wheelock, the days following the murder crawled by.

“It was long and grueling for me,” she recalled. “My biggest victory was when I thought I had gone a full week without agonizing about it. I think it was a year afterward.”

Jacob tried to suppress images of the murder--of the intruders’ faces, of his stepfather lying on the apartment’s shag carpet--but the memories would stir unexpectedly.

“We would be in a McDonald’s,” his mother recalled, “and Jake would be shoving me. ‘Mom! Mom! See that guy’s shoes? The guy who shot Larry had shoes like that. Mom! Mom! See that guy’s coat? The guy who shot Larry had a coat like that.’ ”

As the years passed, Jacob and his mother moved to North Hollywood and stopped talking about the murder. But Larry was never forgotten.

Lucy Wheelock felt more powerfully than ever that she needed to know more about the slaying. Why would someone kill Larry? she asked herself. In Banning, rumors had spread that the killing was drug-related. But Lucy knew they were wrong. She couldn’t sleep at night without wondering about what Larry’s last few moments were like.

A decade after her husband’s death, Wheelock ordered the investigative report. Hundreds of pages arrived, replete with typos and grammatical errors but few answers. Wheelock tried again to put the ordeal behind her. She gave up on the possibility of detectives ever solving the murder.

But police had not given up. Following a call from Larry’s brother, an investigator with the district attorney’s office and a retired Santa Ana detective reviewed the file that Wheelock had ordered.

They found the smudged fingerprint and asked forensic scientists to use new technology to enhance the image. Then, they resubmitted the print to the state’s fingerprint database. In November 1999, they got a match.

The fingerprint, police concluded, belonged to a Long Beach man with a criminal record of minor thefts and drug sales. Detectives wanted to make sure they had the right man. They tracked down Jacob Scott in Northern California and showed him a photo lineup. Then 28, Scott picked Larry Donnell Paige as the gunman--the same man whose fingerprint was at the scene, according to police.

Six months later, Lucy Wheelock sat in a girlfriend’s house, watching investigators arrest Paige on television. She was stunned. She knew police were looking at the case again but never imagined they would solve it.

Wheelock was planning to leave California and set up a new life--buy a home, start a new job. Now, she suddenly realized there would be a trial to sit through. She would have to relive events she had spent 25 years trying to forget.

“I was numb,” she said. “This could not have been a worse time for this to happen to me.”

At Scott’s home, the phone rang. A detective told him about the arrest. Scott hung up and immediately thought of his stepfather.

“I was just happy for him. I was happy for my mom,” Scott recalled. “But then I quickly became concerned. . . . I thought, ‘If this guy walks away clean, you just took a big spoon and stirred up a bunch of emotions with it.’ ”

Despite the arrest, the case--and the family--still have a long way to go. Paige pleaded not guilty to the murder charge, and his trial is scheduled to start in May. Paige and his attorney declined to comment for this article.

Years in Limbo, Then Years in Court

Investigators acknowledge that the heart of their case is the smudged fingerprint as well as the eyewitness testimony of a man who was 4 years old when the murder occurred. Despite the 25-year gap between the murder and the arrest, officials said they have a strong case based on a solid piece of physical evidence.

The Wheelock case will be one of the first in this new batch of cold cases to go before a jury. Over the last two years, Santa Ana police have made arrests in 22 old cases. But only one has resulted in a jury conviction. Two other cases ended in guilty pleas, and four others were cleared when police identified suspects and discovered they were dead or already serving life prison terms. The remaining 15 are still working their way through the courts.

Orange County law enforcement officials said the biggest factor in improving their murder clearance record is the record drop in crime over the last decade.

In 1999, the county recorded 92 homicides--less than half the tally in 1993 when killings reached a peak. With fewer murders, detectives have more time to devote to each fresh case as well as the time to reopen forgotten case files.

Another factor aiding Orange County homicide detectives is improved cooperation from the public--especially in gang cases. A decade ago, these were considered to be the toughest cases to crack because fearful witnesses and neighborhoods were reluctant to provide clues.

But as crime has dropped, cooperation has improved--in helping close new homicides and old ones alike. Santa Ana police credit such a change in helping to bring murder charges against an Alabama preacher last month in connection with a deadly drive-by seven years ago. A former gang member wounded in the assault recently came forward and identified preacher Geronimo Galvan Burgos as the shooter, authorities said.

The falling crime rate has benefited law enforcement throughout California. But unlike other jurisdictions, Orange County decided a few years ago to significantly expand its central crime lab. The move has eliminated long backlogs for tests, and detectives no longer wait months before forensic scientists start analyzing crime-scene evidence.

In Los Angeles County--where the murder clearance rate has actually fallen from 58% to 49% over the last decade--investigators are not so lucky.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has a unit devoted to unsolved murders but investigators must frequently wait in line for months before the county’s crime lab can test old evidence. Even in current murder investigations, crime lab officials said they must scramble just to complete tests in time for court trials.

“We’re swamped,” said Harley Sagara, assistant director of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s crime lab. “It’s a terrible treadmill we’re on. . . . We try to do the best we can and help the investigators but there are too many to handle.”

Despite their progress, Orange County detectives are well aware that for every cold case they crack, there are hundreds more locked away in files. Countywide, the tally of unsolved homicides since 1960s stands at more than 1,000.

And investigators are frequently reminded about the families who are relying on them to solve their case. Parents and siblings of victims regularly call wanting to know if police are close to a breakthrough, said district attorney’s investigator Paul Tippin, who worked on the Wheelock case.

“We have to remember that they’re living this every day,” Tippin said. “We have to go back and keep working them. You owe it to the victim and their families. If you don’t do it, [the case] will be put on the shelf and people will forget about it.”

But the victims’ families will never forget. Many spend years burdened with the need to know who killed their loved one and why, Orange County grief counselor Christine Lopez said.

And even though an arrest forces them to relive their loss, eventually, knowing that the killer is caught often proves crucial in helping to mourn, she said.

“An unsolved crime is like an open wound. . . . It can be like giving a second death notification,” Lopez said.

“There’s a lot of unresolved anger. . . . Knowing that someone has been arrested for the murder of your loved one is important because you can put a face to the death.”

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Case Closed

In the last decade, police in Orange County have solved a significantly higher number of murder cases than in previous years. Shown are murder clearance rates: