Long Beach police offer $50,000 reward for information in officer’s 1975 killing

Long Beach police are hoping the promise of a massive cash reward and new information about possible suspect vehicles can help them solve a case that has dogged the agency for years -- the 1975 slaying of Officer Franke Neal Lewis.

Standing in front of the city’s memorial to fallen police officers and firefighters, Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna said the department will offer a reward of at least $50,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for Lewis’ death on Dec. 13, 1975.

The department and Mayor Robert Garcia are also asking the City Council to add to the reward fund, possibly boosting it to $75,000.

Lewis, who was 28 at the time and married with two children, was returning home from his patrol shift that December night when he noticed a disturbance near his Cantel Street home around 3 a.m.

At least one person was attacking a man, later identified as school teacher Denis Gitschier, as he sat inside a parked car. When Lewis approached, he was shot in the face and died in his wife’s arms, according to a Los Angeles Times report on the shooting in 1975.

Lewis’ service weapon, badge and police identification were stolen and the suspect or suspects fled on foot, police said.

Investigators recovered Lewis’ badge and ID card in an abandoned Compton home in 1976, Long Beach Deputy Police Chief Dave Hendricks said, though his gun was never found. Several people of interest were interviewed over the years, but a suspect was never charged.

“It’s our hope that a witness or someone who knows anything, anything, about this case will come forward,” Luna said.

The case has been handed from detective to detective for the last four decades, and investigators were recently able to uncover descriptions of two suspicious vehicles that had been spotted in Lewis’ neighborhood the night of the shooting.

Hendricks said a mid-1970s blue four door Cadillac Fleetwood and an early ‘60s white Cadillac Fleetwood occupied by people who did not live in the neighborhood were spotted in the area that night.

Police have also resubmitted Lewis’ badge and ID card for forensic testing, but Hendricks declined to disclose the results of those tests or say when police learned the information about the suspicious vehicles. Citing the ongoing investigation, Hendricks would not say what, if any, additional information detectives had learned in recent months.

Lewis’ widow, Linda, his daughter Erica and father Carlton attended the event but declined to speak to reporters.

Gitschier, the man whom Lewis was trying to rescue when he was shot, told reporters he was rendered unconscious by the first blow during the attack and has been unable to give police a description of the shooter or shooters.

“I remember everything except something that would be helpful,” he said.

The retired teacher was driving home to Torrance that night when he became drowsy and pulled off in Long Beach to sleep. He stopped his car on Cantel Street, just a few doors down from Lewis’ home.

He has remained close with the officer’s family in the decades since the shooting, and said Tuesday that he firmly believes he would have died if Lewis had not been there.

“It’s a little bit like a serviceman that, you know, somebody jumps on a grenade and is killed. But you survived,” Gitschier said. “That’s how I’ve kind of felt for the past 40 years.”

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