Arrest Made in ’83 Killing

More than 20 years after a Puente Hills landfill supervisor disappeared, leaving behind only a bloodstain in the dirt, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies have arrested one of his employees on suspicion of murder.

Acting on information from an unnamed informant, prosecutors charged John Alcantara, 50, with murder Friday in the death of Robert Bennett, whose body has never been found. Alcantara was being held in lieu of $1-million bail.

“I am so happy that this man is finally behind bars,” Bennett’s widow, Berva, said Friday. “I just hope he stays there.”

Bennett, then 51, disappeared Feb. 16, 1983, after a work site dispute with Alcantara, according to Sheriff’s Homicide Capt. Ray Peavy.

“What we believed happened was that he pulled a gun on Mr. Bennett and shot him,” Peavy said.

Peavy said Alcantara apparently then dismembered Bennett’s body, tossed it into a sanitation truck and dumped the remains in the Puente Hills landfill. Despite sifting through thousands of tons of refuse during the days that followed Bennett’s disappearance, detectives never found his remains. His pickup was found later at the Puente Hills Mall.

Peavy said Alcantara was a suspect from the outset.

“There had been an incident at the workplace and Mr. Bennett took him off to talk to him about his behavior,” Peavy said. “Then [Bennett] didn’t come home that evening.”

Bennett’s wife told a reporter a few days later that her husband was always prompt, and when he was 15 minutes late, she began worrying.

“I first thought he had an accident or got stuck on the freeway or had car problems,” she said. “So many things go through your mind.”

Despite their suspicions about Alcantara, detectives didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him until Thursday, after an informant came forward to say he had witnessed at least part of the crime, Peavy said. The homicide captain did not provide any details and did not say why the informant had waited so long to provide the information.

Berva Bennett, who now lives near Salem, Ore., said she had been contacted by detectives in recent weeks, and they told her they might soon make an arrest.

“I knew it was coming,” the widow said Friday. “I just didn’t know when.”

She said she and her late husband met on a blind date in Iowa more than 50 years ago, when he was in the Navy. She said that when he got out of the service, they dated for two months and then got married.

“We decided we loved each other, and that was it,” she said. “He was a very loving father and a good husband. I’ll never understand why the Lord let that bad man take him away.”