Case of the Slain Fortuneteller Holds Detective Spellbound

Tim Vu knows he shouldn’t take the job home with him, but when you’re a detective working the kind of murder case he’s on, it’s hard not to. Especially when seasoned detectives from other departments want to know what’s going on.

“This is one of those cases you go into homicide for,” Vu says.

What he means is that murders often have a familiar plot line -- the domestic dispute that goes haywire, the gang grievance that gets settled on the street. But nowhere in his seven years as a detective in the Westminster Police Department had he run across the kind handed to him two weeks ago.

For any detective who thrives on putting pieces together and immersing himself in the world of the victims, the stabbing deaths of Ha Jade Smith and her daughter, Anita Nhi Vo, present a tantalizing puzzle. The investigation has introduced Vu, 34, to a part of Asian culture he didn’t know as well as he thought and to characters he never expected to be relying on for help in cracking a double-murder case.

Like, the witches who have contacted him. And the warlock. And the psychic.

They’ve emerged because Smith, 52, was identified in the days after her death as a fortuneteller. Vu is convinced she also was a witch -- meaning she would have been seen by some potential patrons as capable of casting spells. Paying someone to cast a spell could cost as much as $15,000, he says, adding another potential motive for a killer who might have known Smith had that kind of cash in her home or, possibly, was unhappy about a spell that didn’t work.

Mind you, Vu isn’t touting either of those as a definitive theory. That’s because there’s also the matter of the white paint that covered both victims’ heads and hands. Vu is trying to determine what that means -- or even, he says, if it might be a red herring. “Is it something the suspects did just to throw us off?” he asks, rhetorically. “That’s in the back of our minds.”

What he’s telling me, as we’re talking on his day off Friday, is that all of these clues -- or non-clues -- swirl around in his brain. “You walk in and there are these bodies in the house,” he says. “Your job is to basically work your way backward to find out what happened to them.”

No matter where the trail leads, it already has taken Vu, who emigrated from Vietnam with his family in 1975, on a journey through his own people’s culture.

While he’s learned a bit more about witchcraft and ritual killings, he says it’s mostly been the subject of fortunetelling that has involved him “and how that plays a role in the Asian community. I was under the belief that somehow it was kind of taboo, that people didn’t want other people to know they see a fortuneteller.”

Instead, he learned, that for some, “It’s a societal norm. It’s not seen as unusual.”

I ask if, as a Vietnamese man, he’d been unaware of that. “I knew it existed, but what I’ve come to find out in talking to [fortunetelling] customers, is that they get it almost like therapy.”

And so while Vu would describe himself as part of a younger generation of Vietnamese who have assimilated into American culture, the investigation also led him to the past. “I understand Asian culture to a certain degree,” he says, “but some of what we’re talking about is, I guess, old country.” In other words, while seeing fortunetellers isn’t an anomaly in Vietnamese culture, neither is it thought of as a modern-day tradition.

In that same vein, Vu says, an older man who once taught in Vietnam has given him “quite an education on certain cultural aspects and how that may apply to the significance of white paint. And that’s something I did not know about.”

Experts told The Times last week that white can signify mourning or rites of passage, but said it had no obvious meaning in a double-murder case.

Vu believes Smith and her daughter, a 23-year-old Orange Coast College student, were not random victims. But he’s still thrashing about as to whether the motive was money or jewelry believed to be in the home, which was ransacked, or something more personal.

“This case is unique,” Vu says. “I haven’t come across anybody else who’s had a case in which the victims’ heads and hands were covered in paint. I’ve had calls from colleagues in other departments too. They feel kind of fascinated by that. It’s just not something that happens.”

That interest must add to the pressure of solving it. Pressure is always there in double-murders, and while Vu comes across as a cool-headed cop, he concedes that this case has approached the 24/7 level of perpetual thought. “It’s hard to separate these cases when you walk out the door that day and just forget about them,” he says, “because you’re constantly thinking about your next move and how you’re going to play this thing out.”

Sounds like a heartburn formula for a man who wants to maintain a private life with his wife and two young children. “Some days,” Vu says, “it’s very challenging to try and keep it in perspective. At the end of the day, you still have a personal life and you try your best to separate the two, but sometimes it’s difficult, because you get so consumed with your work that you sometimes forget you need to leave some of that at work.”

The case is 2 weeks old but Vu doesn’t think the investigation is flagging. Anyone with information can phone police at (714) 898-3315, Ext. 529.

Vu knows he has a high-profile whodunit on his hands. He says he has a gut feeling he’ll crack it. And yes, he concedes that without the white paint and the fortunetelling angles, the case “probably goes down as just another unfortunate double-homicide, home-invasion robbery that you investigate.”

But those angles are there. So, in what is bad news for who did it, this case won’t go away.

“The fortunetelling and the witchcraft are interesting,” Vu says, “but the bottom line is: We have two people murdered in their home. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do, to find out who killed this mom and daughter.

“The other stuff that comes with it might help explain the motive down the road, but our goal is to find out who did this heinous crime and arrest them.”

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Dana Parsons’ can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com.