Crime Wave Part 5

Stoner went in calm and slow. He told Polete that they checked out his exoneration claims. They talked to two Baldwin Park detectives. Both men said his claims were untrue. The 3/8 victim moved out of state and declined to testify, No one else was arrested or charged with those crimes. Polete admitted his guilt in '73. Both detectives said so. The 3/14 attempt rape was the most prosecutable case. The 12/16, 3/13, and 4/23 cases were not as viable. Prosecutors liked to present concise cases. He got lucky that way.

Inmate Polete said the 3/14 case was bogus. The so-called victim was bogus. He said she had a thing with one of the cops.

Stoner mentioned Inmate Polete's alleged blackouts. Stoner said he had obtained Polete's juvenile records and wanted to discuss some discrepancies.

Inmate Polete blew up. He balled his fists and yelled at Stoner and Walker. He said the interview was over. They had no right to look at his juvie file.

And: He had an alibi for the night of the murder. He was at a churchfellows.h.i.+p thing. The whole congregation would back up his claim.

The Pentecostal Church of G.o.d was across the street from Crawford's Market. Betty Jean Scales vanished en route to Crawford's.

Inmate Polete was very upset. Stoner did not ask the obvious questions: How do you recall your actions on a given night twenty-four years and eleven months ago? What made that night so auspicious or so horrible or so traumatic that you will remember every detail for the rest of your life?

Inmate Polete walked out of the room. The interview was terminated at 1:00 P.M.

6.

Bill said it hit him hard. It hit Gary Walker simultaneously.

The church and Crawford's Market. Polete's market-s.n.a.t.c.h MO. Subsequent a.s.saults at the Food King and Lucky Market. The alibi that played like an admission.

Bill said it hit him hard. He told me a story to dramatize the impact.

He worked a case years back. A body dump in Torrance. A white male victim.

They ID'd him. His roommate was a carpet layer.

They took him to lunch. The man was not a suspect.

They took him to his apartment. They wanted to talk some more. They needed his take on the victim.

They walked in the door. Bill saw a brand-new carpet on the living-room floor.

And: He knew that the man killed the victim right there. He knew that he'd find washed-out blood spots under the carpeting.

He found them. He confronted the man. The man confessed.

That was a fresh case. This was an old case. Instinctive knowledge never equals provability. Circ.u.mstantial confirmation b.u.t.tresses instinctive knowledge and increases its evidentiary value.

12/15/97:.

Bill Stoner calls the church pastor's daughter. She says she never dated Robby Polete. She never saw him with other girls. She saw him at school. She saw him at church youth groups.

12/16/97:.

Bill Stoner calls the former youth-group leader. She does not recall Robby Polete. Youth-group meetings were held at the church on Sundays, Mondays, and Thursdays. They ran from 7:30 P.M. to 9:30 P.M.

1/29/73 was a Monday. Betty Jean Scales was last seen at 8:30 P.M.

Bill checked out C&R Printing. The 1973 owner still owned the shop.

He remembered Robby Polete. Polete's dad owned a shop in Baldwin Park. Robby worked at C&R sporadically. He did his dad's loan-out jobs.

Bill went through old work sheets and time cards. He had to see if Robby worked on 1/29/73.

The work sheets and time cards only went back to 1979. The man tossed his older records to save shelf s.p.a.ce.

The dead-end metaphysic.

Bill found Lori Polete. He interviewed her. He interviewed Robby's mother and brother.

The brother didn't have much to say. He and Robby ran with different crowds. The mother said Robby couldn't have killed BettyJean. She said she had ESP. She would have known if Robby killed some woman. She almost killed herself a long time ago. She saw a preacher on a TV show. He convinced her not to do it.

Lori started out as Robby's pen pal. She thought Robby would be paroled soon. She wised up after a while. She figured out that Robby never wised up to himself. He never took responsibility for his own actions. He couldn't survive out of prison.

The dead-end metaphysic has an evidentiary upside. Complex procedures take time. Positive results can strike out of nowhere.

The sheriff's crime lab found a stain on Betty Jean's Levi's. The technician said it might be a s.e.m.e.n stain. The identification procedure is still in progress.

The dead-end metaphysic has a psychic upside.

Frightened people lose their fear over time. Guilty people divulge information injudiciously. Compliant people wise up to the people who exploit them. Tired people fold and betray their secrets.

People relinquish. Intransigent detectives wait and stay poised to listen. They hover. They eavesdrop. They prowl moral fault lines. They a.s.sume their victims' and their killers' perspectives and live their lives to stalk revelation.

In the matter of BettyJean Scales, white female, DOD 1/29/73: Bill Stoner will continue. Sheriff's Homicide and the El Monte PD will extend their investigation. Stoner will remain fixed on Robert Leroy Polete. He will not succ.u.mb to bias. He will retain an objective eye for leads that might subvert his opinion that Polete killed Betty Jean Scales. He stands by ready to address the California State Parole Board in the fall of '98.

He will portray Polete as a remorseless predator with good predatory years left and the will to perpetuate his rage. He will state his opinion that Polete should be kept in prison for the rest of his life. He will tell the Story of women savaged in anger and self-pity, He will pray for a receptive parole board. He will draw strength from his dead going in. Tracy Stewart. Karen Reilly. Bunny Krauch.

Killed by men known and unknown.

Add Betty Jean Scales and Geneva Hilliker Ellroy. Add me as Stoner's chronicler. Add my insurmountable debt and his professional commitment. Add the need to know and serve that drives us both. Factor in the core of s.e.x that drives us toward these women.

Bill Stoner will continue. I will continue to tell his story. Our collective dead demand it.

March, April 1998MY MOTHER'S KILLER.

I thought the pictures would wound me.

I thought they would grant my old nightmare form.

I thought I could touch the literal horror and somehow commute my life sentence.

I was mistaken. The woman refused to grant me a reprieve. Her grounds were simple: My death gave you a voice, and I need you to recognize me past your exploitation of it.

Her headstone reads GENEVA HILLIKER ELLROY, 19 15--1958. A cross denotes her Calvinist youth in a Wisconsin hick town. The file is marked "JEAN (HILLIKER) ELLROY, i87PC (UNSOLVED), DOD 6/22/58."

I begged out of the funeral. I was io years old and sensed that I could manipulate adults to my advantage. I told no one that my tears were at best cosmetic and at worst an expression of hysterical relief. I told no one that I hated my mother at the time of her murder.

She died at 43. I'm 46 now. I flew out to Los Angeles to view the file because I resemble her more every day.

The L.A. County Sheriff handled the case. I set up file logistics with Sergeant Bill Stoner and Sergeant Bill McComas of the Unsolved Unit. Their divisional mandate is to periodically review open files with an eye toward solving the crimes outright or a.s.sessing the original investigating officers' failure to do so.

Both men were gracious. Both stressed that unsolved homicides tend to remain unsolved--thirty-six-year-old riddles deepen with the pa.s.sage of time and blurring of consciousness. I told them I had no expectations of discovering a solution. I only wanted to touch the acc.u.mulated details and see where they took me.

Stoner said the photographs were grisly. I told him I could handle it.

The flight out was a blur. I ignored the meal service and the book I had brought to kill time with. Reminiscence consumed five hours--a whirl of memory and extrapolatable data.

My mother said she saw the Feds gun down John Dillinger. She was 19 and a nursing-school student fresh off the farm. My father said he had an affair with Rita Hayworth.

They loved to tell stories. They rarely let the truth impinge on a good anecdote. Their one child grew up to write horrible crime tales.

They met in '39 and divorced in '54. Their "irreconcilable differences" amounted to a love of the flesh. She majored in booze and minored in men. He guzzled Alka-Seltzer for his ulcer and chased women with an equal lack of discernment.

I found my mother in bed with strange men. My father hid his liaisons from me. I loved him more from the gate.

She had red hair. She drank Early Times bourbon and got mawkish or h.e.l.laciously p.i.s.sed off. She sent me to church and stayed home to nurse Sat.u.r.day-night hangovers.

The divorce settlement stipulated split custody: weekdays with my mother, three weekends a month with my father. He rented a cheap pad close to my weekday home. Sometimes he'd stand across the street and hold down surveillance.

At night, I'd douse the living-room lights and look out the window. That red glowing cigarette tip? Proof that he loved me.

In 1956, my mother moved us from West Hollywood to Santa Monica. I enrolled in a cut-rate private school called Children's paradise. The place was a dump site for disturbed kids of divorce. My confinement stretched from 7:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. A giant dirt playground and a swimming pool faced Wils.h.i.+re Boulevard. Every kid was guaranteed pa.s.sing grades and a poolside tan. A flurry of single moms. .h.i.t the gate at 5:10. I developed a yen for women in their late thirties.

My mother worked as a nurse at the Packard Bell electronics plant. She had a boyfriend named Hank, a fat lowlife missing one thumb. Once a week she'd take me to a drive-in double feature. She'd sip from a flask and let me gorge myself on hot dogs.

I coveted the weekends with my father. No church, sleepover studs, or liquored-up mood swings. The man embraced the lazy life, half by design, half by the default of the weak.

Early in 1958, my mother began a.s.sembling a big lie. This is not a revisionist memory--I recall detecting mendacity in the moment. She said we needed a change of scenery. She said I needed to live in a house, not an apartment. She said she knew about a place in El Monte, a San Gabriel Valley town twelve miles east of L.A. proper.

We drove out there. El Monte was a downscale suburb populated by white s.h.i.+tkickers and pachucos with duck's-a.s.s haircuts.

Most streets were unpaved. Most people parked on their lawns. Our prospective house: a redwood job surrounded by half-dead banana trees.

I said I didn't like El Monte. My mother told me to give it time. We hauled our belongings out early in February.

I traded up academically: Children's Paradise to Anne Le Gore Elementary School. The move baffled and infuriated my father. Why would a (tenuously) middle-cla.s.s white woman with a good job thirty-odd miles away relocate to a town like El Monte? The rush-hour commute: at least ninety minutes each way. "I want my son to live in a house": pure nonsense. My father thought my mother was running. From a man or to a man. He said he was going to hire detectives to find out.

I settled into El Monte. My mother upgraded the custody agreement: I could see my father all four weekends a month. He picked me up every Friday night. It took a cab ride and three bus transfers to get us to his pad, just south of Hollywood.

I tried to enjoy El Monte. I smoked a reefer with a Mexican kid and ate myself sick on ice cream. My stint at Children's Paradise left me deficient in arithmetic. My teacher called my mother up to comment. They hit it off and went out on several dates.

I turned 10. My mother told me I could choose who I wanted to live with. I told her I wanted to live with my father.

She slapped me. I called her a drunk and a wh.o.r.e. She slapped me again and raged against my father's hold on me.

I became a sounding board.

My father called my mother a lush and a tramp. My mother called my father a weakling and a parasite. She threatened to slap injunctions on him and push him out of my life.

School adjourned for summer vacation on Friday, June 20. My father whisked me off for a visit.

That weekend is etched in hyper-focus. I remember seeing The Vikings at the Fox-Wils.h.i.+re Theatre. I remember a spaghetti dinner at Yaconelli's Restaurant. I remember a TV fight card. I remember the bus ride back to El Monte as long and hot.

My father put me in a cab at the depot and waited for a bus back to L.A. The cab dropped me at my house.

I saw three black-and-white police cars. I saw my neighbor Mrs. Kryzcki on the sidewalk. I saw four plainclothes cops--and instinctively recognized them as such.

Mrs. Kryzcki said, "That's the boy."

A cop took me aside. "Son, your mother's been killed."

I didn't cry. A press photographer hustled me to Mr. Kryzcki's toolshed and posed me with an awl in my hand.

My wife found a copy of that photograph last year. It's been published several times, in conjunction with my work. The second picture the man took has previously never seen print.

I'm at the workbench, sawing at a piece of wood. I'm grimacing ear to ear, showing off for the cops and reporters.

They most likely chalked my clowning up to shock. They couldn't know that that shock was instantly compromised.

The police reconstructed the crime.

My mother went out drinking Sat.u.r.day night. She was seen at the Desert Inn bar in El Monte with a dark-haired white man and a blonde woman. My mother and the man left the bar around io P.M.

A group of Little Leaguers discovered the body. My mother had been strangled at an unknown location and dumped into some bushes next to the athletic field at Arroyo High School, a mile and a half from the Desert Inn.

She clawed her a.s.sailant's face b.l.o.o.d.y. The killer had pulled off one of her stockings and tied it loosely around her neck postmortem.

I went to live with my father. I forced some tears out that Sunday--and none since.

My flight landed early. L.A. looked surreal, and inimical to the myth town of my books.

I checked in at the hotel and called Sergeant Stoner. We made plans to meet the following day. He gave me directions to the Homicide Bureau; earthquake tremors had ravaged the old facility and necessitated a move.

Sergeant McComas wouldn't be there. He was recuperating from open-heart surgery, a cla.s.sic police-work by-product.

I told Stoner I'd pop for lunch. He warned me that the file might kill my appet.i.te.

I ate a big room-service dinner. Dusk hit--I looked out my window and imagined it was 1950-something.

I set my novel Clandestine in 1951. It's a chronologically altered, heavily fictionalized account of my mother's murder. The story details a young cop's obsession: linking the death of a woman he had a one-night stand with to the killing of a redheaded nurse in El Monte. The supporting cast includes a 9-year-Old boy very much like I was at that age.

I gave the killer my father's superficial attributes and juxtaposed them against a psychopathic bent. I have never understood my motive for doing this.