Police oppose parole for ‘Onion Field’ killer

Gregory Powell’s crime, and its complex aftermath, were chronicled a generation ago in Joseph Wambaugh’s bestselling book “The Onion Field.”

Now, as the public’s recollection of the incident begins to fade, the union that represents nearly 10,000 Los Angeles police officers says it is determined to remind people of the March 1963 kidnapping and execution of Los Angeles Police Officer Ian Campbell.

Powell, who was convicted of the crime along with an accomplice, is scheduled for a parole hearing Wednesday.

In a letter to state corrections officials Thursday, L.A. police union President Paul Weber urged the board to deny parole, calling Powell a “vicious murderer who has not yet paid his debt to society.”

Powell, 75, received the death penalty for the crime. However, when capital punishment was briefly outlawed in California, the sentence was commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

Weber insists that Powell should be forced to serve the maximum sentence and recounts details of the crime in his letter.

Two officers, Campbell and his partner, Karl Hettinger, had stopped a car carrying Powell and accomplice Jimmy Lee Smith, who had been searching for a liquor store to rob. Powell pulled a gun, stuck it in Campbell’s back, disarmed him and forced Hettinger to give up his weapon too. Then they drove north.

“Near Bakersfield, Powell spotted a gravel road and ordered Campbell to pull off the freeway,” Weber wrote. “After crossing a series of dirt roads, Officers Campbell and Hettinger were ordered out of the car into a vast field, where they stood still with their arms in the air. Then Powell asked Campbell, ‘Have you ever heard of the Little Lindbergh Law?’ and shot him.”

Hettinger began running through the field and escaped as Powell fired at him. As luck would have it, a cloud blotted out the moon, allowing the fleeing officer to take cover in bushes before he ran four miles to a farmhouse and summoned help.

Powell was captured a short time later driving back to Los Angeles. Smith was arrested the next day in a Bakersfield rooming house. He died in 2007.

Powell’s question about the Little Lindbergh Law revealed the apparent motive for the killing: Powell had believed, mistakenly, that the law made it a capital offense to kidnap the officers.

Weber said of Hettinger, who died in 1994: “The incident haunted him the rest of his life.”

andrew.blankstein@ latimes.com