Justice denied by a clue?

By Jack Leonard

June 15, 2009 7 AM PT

Agold-and-black matchbook has been at the center of a murder mystery for 17 years -- a piece of evidence that is either a smoking gun or a diversion that caused a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Months before its discovery, a security guard patrolling a downtown Los Angeles parking structure stumbled across the body of a young East Indian American business consultant. He had been stabbed 19 times, once in the heart.

Following up on a lead, Los Angeles Police Department detectives later picked up two homeless men. One of them had the half-used matchbook. Emblazoned on the front, in a mix of cursive and print lettering, was the name of a Woodland Hills restaurant: Shalimar Cuisine of India.

How had a homeless man wound up with a book of matches from an Indian restaurant 30 miles away?

To detectives, there was a logical explanation. Given the victim’s heritage, he must have been carrying the Shalimar matchbook when he was set upon and robbed, and it ended up in the hands of his assailant.

The two men were charged with murder. They were found guilty and sentenced to prison for the rest of their lives.

In the years that followed, however, new details about the matchbook emerged, offering a sharply different story of how it might have traveled from the neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley to the crime-plagued streets of skid row.

On the morning of Aug. 19, 1992, Kalpesh Vardhan pulled his Toyota Corolla into a tall parking structure on Olive and 8th streets in downtown L.A.

The oldest son of Indian immigrants, Vardhan, 23, had recently graduated from UCLA with a degree in electrical engineering. He soon started working in Los Angeles at the prestigious Andersen Consulting.

After winding his way up the parking structure, Vardhan slipped his car into a narrow space on the sixth floor. Most Anderson employees parking there took a shuttle to their office five blocks away. But Vardhan didn’t catch the shuttle.

More than seven hours later, a parking lot security guard noticed a body sprawled behind parked vehicles. It looked at first like a transient sleeping.

Vardhan’s body -- 5 feet, 5 inches tall and 115 pounds -- was partly concealed behind a minivan and his car. His wallet, filled with credit cards, was gone. Left behind was the broken 3-inch blade of a small steak knife.

For two months, detectives had little to go on until they questioned a car burglar who was arrested for stealing stereos from nearby parking garages. He told them he had witnessed the assault. Looking through LAPD arrest photos, he identified two transients as the attackers.

Police went searching for the suspects and found one of them, Timothy Gantt, on skid row.

Once married with a family and home in West Covina and a job repairing photocopiers, Gantt had lost everything to a craving for alcohol and cocaine. His criminal record included convictions for burglary and car theft, but he had never been to prison.

Detectives took Gantt to a nearby police station, where he was searched.

In his front pants pocket was the matchbook. Inside the flap, detectives noticed a handwritten phone number.

Gantt, insisting that he had nothing to do with the killing, said he had been given the matchbook while hustling. He told police he bought stolen calling card numbers and used them for immigrants who went to the area to make cheap international calls home. A customer used the matchbook to write down a telephone number he wanted Gantt to call for him, he said.

“I sell numbers,” he told police, “but I don’t steal or rob, and I’ve never hurt anyone.”

Police were unconvinced. Detectives showed a second witness photo lineups that included Gantt and Michael Smith, the second transient identified earlier by the car burglar. The witness identified them as two men he had seen in the parking structure on the morning of the killing.

Police collected a sample of the victim’s university assignments to compare with the phone number on the matchbook. An LAPD handwriting expert declared the results “inconclusive” but noted strong similarities.

Nearly a year to the day after Vardhan died, Gantt and Smith were charged with murder.

At the trial, the matchbook was used to bolster the testimony of the prosecution’s two key witnesses.

Kevin Shorts, an accountant, testified that he was driving on the sixth floor of the garage the morning of the murder when a car blocked his path. He said he saw Smith standing beside the car talking to the driver.

Shorts testified that he saw the driver’s face for two seconds when the man glanced into his rear-view mirror before taking off. In court, he identified Gantt as the driver. “I have a very good memory with faces,” Shorts said.

Shorts’ memory, however, had failed him earlier in the investigation when he identified someone else as one of the men he had seen; police later eliminated that man as a suspect.

The second prosecution witness was David Rosemond, the car burglar who had originally tipped the detectives to Gantt and Smith. Rosemond testified that he was stealing car stereos when he saw Gantt punching Vardhan and Smith, standing nearby, possibly holding a pistol. He said he recognized them from skid row. Rosemond said he later approached the victim to see what he could steal. He said he took an ATM card near the body but later threw it away.

Police, who initially suspected a car burglar might have been responsible for the slaying, first heard Rosemond’s story when they confronted him about the killing. Rosemond told jurors he thought police initially believed he was the killer.

“They kept saying, ‘Yeah, well, you’d better tell us who or you’re going to get charged with it,’ ” he testified.

Rosemond was hardly an ideal witness. A homeless crack cocaine addict, he had spent most of the previous seven years in and out of prison for petty thefts, mostly stealing car stereos.

District attorney’s records show he was diagnosed in prison with chronic schizophrenia and a brain disorder that can impair a person’s ability to think and process information.

Defense attorneys accused Rosemond of lying and suggested he could be the killer.

But Sterling Norris, then a deputy district attorney, said it was too fanciful to believe that the defendants were victims of mistaken identity and that Gantt coincidentally had a matchbook from an Indian restaurant.

“The deceased happens to be of Indian ancestry. Now is this guy unlucky or is he not?” Norris said to jurors.

Norris, a celebrated prosecutor who had convicted serial killer William Bonin a decade earlier, urged the jury to compare the numbers from the matchbook with the numbers written by Vardhan.

Defense attorney Donald Calabria accused the prosecutor of using the matchbook as a form of racial profiling. The victim was a nonsmoker, and authorities had found no one who had seen him with the matchbook or been able to connect him to the restaurant. Furthermore, the phone number belonged to a man in Bangladesh -- not India -- who told police he did not know the victim.

“They’ve gone so far that it is really, really scary,” Calabria told jurors.

Neither Gantt nor Smith testified, and the jury never heard Gantt’s explanation of how he came to be carrying the matchbook.

Several jurors, some of whom spoke on condition that their names not be used, said they vigorously debated the evidence. Although skeptical of the car burglar, they said they found the accountant’s testimony and the matchbook evidence compelling. One juror carefully compared Vardhan’s handwriting against the matchbook numbers.

“That was very significant for all of us,” said another juror.

“It looked damning,” yet another recalled.

Gantt’s attorney had not anticipated the prosecutor’s being allowed to use the matchbook and the handwriting expert at the trial. Immediately after the verdicts, he sought his own forensic expert, who concluded that Vardhan probably did not write the numbers on the matchbook.

But the new opinion was not enough to overturn the conviction. On May 25, 1994, Gantt and Smith were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Gantt began to spend as much time as he could in prison law libraries, working on his case.

“I felt . . . I had been done so wrong,” he said. “I had to fight. No one else was fighting for me.”

He examined documents that a former appellate attorney had found in the prosecutor’s file. Prosecutors are required to give the defense information that might help their case, but Gantt said he had never seen the records before.

Authorities knew by the last day of trial that the owner of the Bangladeshi phone number had a son who worked as a waiter at the Shalimar restaurant. The records showed that a district attorney’s investigator had interviewed the waiter and that neither the waiter nor his father in Bangladesh knew the victim or recognized him from a photograph.

Though the waiter told authorities that the handwriting on the matchbook was not his and that he never visited the downtown area where Gantt lived, the new evidence raised doubts about the prosecution’s theory. Why would the victim have been carrying a matchbook with the Bangladeshi home phone number of someone he didn’t know?

In 1999, Gantt wrote a new appeal arguing that the prosecutor withheld evidence that would have helped him.

More than five years later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor.

Describing the case as “relatively weak,” the court ruled that the Shalimar waiter’s statement that he did not know the victim undercut the prosecutor’s theory that Vardhan was carrying the matchbook when he was attacked.

Norris, the prosecutor, insisted that he had turned over the records to Gantt’s attorney. A federal judge ruled that he had not and ordered Gantt released or given a new trial. Because Smith was not part of the same appeal, the decision did not apply to his case.

Last year, Los Angeles County prosecutors sought to try Gantt again.

Both the prosecution and defense returned to the matchbook in an effort to support their cases.

Prosecutors spoke to the victim’s younger brother, who said family members often picked up matchbooks for his mother to use to light incense at home. Also, a friend was prepared to testify that Vardhan might have gone to the Shalimar because he visited Indian restaurants to find caterers for an Indian student association at UCLA.

Investigators for both sides interviewed the Shalimar Cuisine waiter, Ferdous Khan, who by then, 14 years later, had become the restaurant’s manager.

Khan no longer denied ever visiting downtown L.A. He said he used to purchase food once or twice a week from a produce market downtown. But he said he did not remember writing his parents’ phone number in a matchbook.

Gantt’s new defense attorneys, Bruce Karey and Cosmo Taormina, sent an example of Khan’s writing to another handwriting expert along with a photocopy of the matchbook, which had been destroyed years earlier along with other exhibits from the trial. The expert said the writing on the matchbook did not match the victim’s but could be Khan’s.

Then, three days into the retrial, the prosecution was dealt a fatal blow.

Rosemond, the car burglar and key witness at the first trial, retracted his statements just before he was to testify, saying he was uncertain about his identification of Gantt.

The case was dismissed, leaving Gantt a free man.

The truth about the matchbook, however, remains murky.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Grace, who worked on the second trial, said that the case hinged on Rosemond’s testimony but that the matchbook also pointed to Gantt’s guilt.

“It definitely doesn’t tend toward his innocence,” Grace said.

No one believes that Khan, the restaurant manager, had anything to do with the killing. In a recent interview, Khan, 43, repeated that he did not know the victim and never made calls to Bangladesh from pay phones on skid row.

He said he didn’t think he wrote the phone number on the matchbook but also said that it could be his handwriting. Kahn, a smoker, suggested that he could have been carrying the matchbook while shopping downtown and dropped it without realizing it, leaving it for someone else to pick up. He did not recall giving it to Gantt.

Smith, 49, is serving his life sentence at Salinas Valley State Prison. In a 2007 interview, he told district attorney’s investigators that he was innocent.

His attorney, Gigi Gordon, is preparing to file legal papers seeking his release.

“Without the matchbook, [prosecutors] never could have convicted either of them,” Gordon said. “No one’s ever got to the truth of the matchbook. And now, so much dirt and dust has gone by that there’s no way to get there.”

Meanwhile, Gantt, 63, continues to insist that he is innocent and has filed a lawsuit against the police and prosecutors, accusing them of using false testimony to win a conviction.

“The only honest thing was the matchbook,” he said, “and they took that honest thing and used it against me.”

jack.leonard@latimes.com