The Valley of the Shadow of Death Page 5

  By the end of summer in 1984, two new serial killers occupied much of RHD’s time.

  With two kills in the first half of 1984, an assailant described as having “long curly hair, bulging eyes and wide-spaced rotting teeth” would be dubbed by the media “the Walk-in Killer,” or “the Valley Intruder.” Eventually linked to at least fourteen killings in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, the perpetrator, Richard Ramirez, would come to be known as the “Night Stalker.”

  Also active by the summer of 1984 was a killer of prostitutes in South Central L.A. Eventually ten were killed, all but two African-American. The suspect was described as “black, with a dark complexion, 30 to 35 years old and 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall. He is said to have black hair, brown eyes, smooth skin, a medium build and muscular arms.” As the body toll mounted and the case went unsolved, neighborhood fear and frustration grew. Eventually a group of twelve women picketed in front of police headquarters claiming that because the victims were black prostitutes the police were not pursuing the case with proper vigor.

  This was part of a larger pattern during the early eighties, in which several different serial killers preyed upon young black women in South Central. Collectively the murders were considered the doings of the “South Side Slayer.”

  In addition to serial killings, drug and gang killings were also on the rise, particularly in South Central.

  Thus my family’s case was the latest in a spate of tragic violence to hit the region. But its extreme nature shocked even the calloused inhabitants of South Central. It quickly grabbed the attention of the press, the police, and the mayor’s office.

  As my family’s case was considered high profile, and involved multiple victims, Robbery Homicide immediately took over the investigation from the division detectives.

  * * *

  Inside my family’s home, officers from LAPD’s Newton and 77th Street Divisions had already responded to the scene. These units were the West Coast equivalents of “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” outposts of law and order surrounded by an urban war zone. If the Bronx was made infamous by arson fires and a postapocalyptic landscape, South Central was plagued by the memory of Watts, and the twin scourges of street gangs and crack cocaine.

  Located in the heart of South Central and patrolling some of L.A.’s roughest neighborhoods, officers of these divisions affected a certain bravado. They saw in their units that thin blue line protecting society from the forces of disorder and chaos. The 77th Division’s motto captures the mentality: “Violent men for a violent society.” Newton’s nickname: “Shootin’ Newton.”

  But like the battle-scarred residents of South Central, these hardened street fighters found themselves taken aback by what they saw inside. When they left the house, there were tears in their eyes.

  * * *

  Upon their arrival at the scene, members of my family were quickly whisked away, taken to nearby Newton Station for questioning. When a family member is murdered, the killer is often one of their own.

  In the squad room at the station, my sisters Joan and Crystal were placed in chairs facing different directions and told not to speak to each other. Neither knew any details, nor the extent of what occurred.

  Another sister, Daphine, sat separately at the station. Earlier in the morning she had received a call from her son Ivan, who said “something real bad happened in the house.” After Ivan’s call, Daphine had spent the morning walking around in circles and babbling. Once she composed herself enough to make a call, she phoned her older sister Mary, at work in San Diego.

  “Start praying,” Daphine told Mary: “Something awful happened.”

  Daphine then begged the Lord: “Just let them be alive. Let them be on life support. Just let me see them once before they die.”

  But when I arrived at the station, and my sisters saw my expression through a glass partition, they knew it was all over. The oldest son, and the rock of the family, had no answers. I just stood there numb, with a look of empty shock, my arms hanging helplessly at my sides.

  Seeing my face, Joan, an officer in the military Judge Advocate General’s Corps, lost control and fell to the floor.

  And the questioning by the police continued.

  And my family countered with questions of our own.

  “Why are we being treated like this?”

  “Our family isn’t like that,” Joan implored. “We don’t do things like that.”

  Crystal, an intensive care nurse who treated terminally ill cancer patients, could not stand the tension.

  For Crystal, the suffering that took place within the hospital walls was at least understandable, but this was surreal. An hour before, she walked the halls at work. Now she was interrogated, surrounded by photos of LAPD’s most wanted, stared at by killers.

  She screamed at the officers, “What’s going on in my mother’s house?!”

  When the police finally explained, Joan hyperventilated and pounded the walls.

  “Why would anybody want to do that? Shoot up some kids?”

  * * *

  When the police first responded to 126 West Fifty-Ninth Street, they noticed nothing amiss. There was no sign of forced entry. The front door was open, the screen door unlocked. The living room looked neat and undisturbed.

  As they made their way through the house, the next room, the dining room, was likewise without any signs of disruption or disorder.

  Only when they turned left from the hallway did the spell break.

  In the kitchen the body of an older woman, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, lay dead on the floor. An upside-down frying pan covered her chest. She suffered three cranial gunshot wounds. A large pool of blood radiated from her head. All wounds were through-and-through. Evidence of the close-range shots stained the kitchen’s east wall and curtains. A wad of scalp rested atop the bananas on the kitchen table.

  During the medical examiner’s on-scene inspection, a copper-jacketed expended bullet fell from the bathrobe’s folds.

  A half-finished cup of coffee sat on the kitchen counter. Beans simmered on the stove. Bullet holes dotted the east wall.

  As the officers made their way through the house, three more bodies were found in the northwest bedroom.

  A woman in her twenties lay slumped in her bed, also shot three times. One bullet went through her chin, another penetrated her right cheek, the third to the right side of her chest near the armpit. Two bullets exited the body, one lodged in the rib cage. Bullet holes pierced the bedroom’s west wall. Blood spatter stained it.

  A young teenage boy was found lying on the floor covered in his bedclothes. He suffered one gunshot wound to the right side of his forehead. The bullet exited through the back of his skull and lodged into the floor beneath his head.

  A little boy lay in bed under the covers. Shot once in the back of the head, the bullet exited his left temple before coming to rest in the mattress.

  * * *

  The initial examination of the bodies concluded, the emergency response team prepared gurneys to take them to the morgue, where they would be identified and formal autopsies performed.

  Following the removal of the deceased, a latent fingerprint examiner attempted to lift prints from within the house. In the northwest bedroom, where Dietra, Damani, and Damon had slept, the technician took powder, dusted with a fingerprint brush, and where prints developed, placed tape over the print and then transferred it to a card. A total of seventeen prints were taken from the room, including a nearly full palm print recovered from a red storage trunk.

  The fingerprint examiner also dusted the southwest bedroom, where Neal and Ivan had slept, and from which she recovered three prints. One was taken from my mother’s bedroom, which stood between the other two on the west side of the house.

  Ninhydrin, a chemical that reacts and turns purple when it detects the chemicals found in fingerprints, was sprayed on the rough wood of the back door. No prints were revealed.

  In addition to the prints, crime scene tech
nicians recovered several expended bullets and bullet fragments from inside and outside the house. Besides the rounds found under the sleeping children’s heads, bullet fragments were also recovered from the driveway and house to the west, at 132 West Fifty-Ninth Street. These went through the wall of the northwest bedroom, behind the bed where Dietra had slept. Other expended rounds came from the area outside the kitchen, embedded in 122 West Fifty-Ninth Street, the blue house to the east. These projectiles had ripped through the kitchen walls and window.

  A total of seven expended shell casings were recovered from the kitchen and northwest bedroom. Some of the shell casings bore the head stamp “RP-30 Carbine,” while others were stamped “WCC 83.” The manufacturers of the casings were Winchester and Remington Peters. The expended casings were ejected from a semiautomatic rifle, indicating a minimum of seven shots fired from such a weapon.

  On the front porch a light blue jacket lay crumpled up, just to the left of the front door. The jacket was photographed and taken into evidence.

  7

  THE HUNDRED-YEAR DRIVE

  FOLLOWING THE QUESTIONING, we were all released from Newton Station.

  As we walked in silence, I had the queasy feeling that the police believed I was somehow involved, doubted that I had provided them with all that I knew. Whether it was my street instinct, or my experience as a probation officer, from the way they questioned me, looked at me, I could just tell. I was both interviewed as a victim, and interrogated as a suspect. I would be watched. I was a “person of interest,” or “POI.”

  I kept replaying how my sisters looked at me in the police station, then collapsed when they saw I was clueless. Now I prayed that they too didn’t distrust me.

  Since the crime occurred we had been separated and not allowed to speak with one another. I had to talk to everyone, try to reassure them, figure out what happened. Most important, we needed a plan to protect ourselves against further harm. But before we could meet up, the police told me that someone would need to identify the bodies.

  So I drove to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office on North Mission Road, east of downtown.

  Although it was just midmorning, the day already felt endless. As I drove north on the Harbor Freeway, I kept telling myself that none of this could possibly be real, that somehow a great mistake had grown out of control. I knew it wasn’t a dream, but I kept holding out hope that somehow everyone was wrong.

  But there were my family’s screams, the hundreds of onlookers, the yellow crime scene tape, and those gurneys.

  As I drove, I saw nothing other than cars, concrete, and the sun. I drove inside a tunnel, unaware of anything around me. Only when I exited the freeway did I realize I’d been driving for the last half hour.

  As I pulled up to the coroner’s office, as much as I dreaded the task ahead, it still offered a fleeting hope, a last chance to reverse fate. I didn’t really believe it, but the slightest flicker remained: somehow the bodies would not actually be there. “There’s been a big mistake, Mr. Alexander. You won’t be needed here anymore. There are no bodies for you to identify.”

  But then the bags appeared. And the coverings were pulled back. Numb. For the record I identified the remains.

  And as I did, I felt not only sorrow, but rage, self-hatred. The family protector failed to protect. I overslept. I was late. I could have saved them.

  But no time for that. From the morgue I had another task.

  I called UCLA and spoke with head football coach Terry Donahue. My youngest brother, Kirk, and my son, Kelton, both played as defensive backs for the Bruins. I told Coach Donahue to get them into his office, that I had some sad news to deliver.

  He offered me his condolences and said he had already heard. He said neither Kelton nor Kirk knew.

  He asked me if I wanted him to tell them.

  “No,” I said, this was news only I could personally deliver.

  He said he would pull them out of the team meeting.

  The drive from the morgue to UCLA took forever, more brutal traffic. I needed to get back and talk to Ivan and Neal, find out what really happened inside that house. I needed to help my sisters.

  Hoping for answers while stuck on the freeway, I searched the radio. Over and again, “no motive,” “the police are remaining tight-lipped,” “no indication that it was gang-related,” “all we know is that two gunmen burst into the home and opened fire.” A man who lived on the block stated, “I heard the shots, then I heard things falling. I saw one male leave, then another one.” A woman who lived next door said she saw a pair flee on foot, “one carrying what appeared to be a machine gun.” Both neighbors spoke only upon guarantee of anonymity, unwilling to give their names for fear of retaliation. Retaliation from whom? I wanted to scream. Who the hell shoots sleeping children?

  And my mother’s neighbors kept asking the same question, as they mourned their fallen friend. “They were the nicest people you would ever want to know, they’ve been there for years, she was a beautiful woman,” said one. “Very holy family, she was a very Christian lady,” said another.

  Then word that the Reverend Jules Mayer of Madee’s church, St. Columbkille, had administered the last rites. Mayer described our family as “very kind, gentle, quiet people.”

  I couldn’t believe the cruel irony. My first waking thought, I couldn’t wait to drive over and tell Madee the good news about my job with UCLA football. Now I drove to meet the UCLA football coach to tell his players, my son and brother, of the crisis.

  The day already felt like one unending drive.

  From my home in Hollywood to West Fifty-Ninth, from West Fifty-Ninth to Newton Station, from Newton Station to the Coroner’s Office, and from the Coroner’s Office to UCLA.

  And it continued.

  From UCLA in Westwood, I learned that I had to drive to the airport to pick up my brother Gordon. So I headed south on the 405 to Los Angeles International Airport. Gordon was an Army airplane mechanic, stationed up north in Monterey. He had just received the news and was flying home.

  As I continued south, I listened to more coverage on the radio.

  “Right now we cannot eliminate any possible motives, from disgruntled friends to anything as outlandish as you might think,” a police spokesman said. “We are hindered,” he continued, “by the absence of evidence left by the suspects.”

  The words of one of the detectives at the station kept haunting me. He said the crime just didn’t seem like the typical gangland drug killings that had plagued the area recently. Something was different about this one. “It just seemed personal.”

  At times I almost lulled myself into thinking I was simply listening to the news, another violent day in the neighborhood. Like any other motorist that day I was just taking in the horrors of modern urban life. Surely they must be talking about somebody else. These things happened to other people.

  Then it would pierce, and reality would scream: this is my mother, inside her home. A horror movie had become my life.

  And then I heard the deep, reassuring voice of my friend Tom Bradley coming over the radio, issuing a statement. I turned up the volume. Maybe the mayor knew something.

  “I was sorry to learn of the personal tragedy in Kermit Alexander’s family today,” he began. “The LAPD is investigating and we hope to make some determination regarding the motive and suspects. I express my heartfelt condolences to Kermit Alexander.”

  Reassuring voice. Nothing reassuring.

  The newscast continued, the reporter’s voice returning: “The Alexander massacre is just the latest tragedy to shake South Central Los Angeles in a two-week wave of rising violence.”

  Cut back to the mayor: “The latest series of shootings have caused us great concern. We want everybody to know that the police department is responding, that they do have a plan, that they have gone into action. And we believe that their actions are going to result in control of these series of shootings.”

  Bradley concluded by expressing his alarm
“at the increasing mayhem,” announcing there would be a police crackdown, with additional officers from the department’s Metropolitan Division stationed in the area to combat the problem.

  Again. Nothing.

  As the drive continued, the repeated newscasts were too surreal to grasp, but too real to deny.

  As with Kirk and Kelton, I dreaded meeting Gordon. I knew that he too would blame himself for his absence. The curse of the Alexanders: a code of honor without mercy. If a family member is wronged, someone in the family is at fault, someone failed, let them down. Four were dead. Someone must pay.

  I also feared Gordon might lose it. He had a volatile temper. He was just another person that I would have to watch.

  As I pulled into the airport, I was met by the press. What did I know? Was there anything I could say to shed some light on the mystery?

  Not a thing.

  I told the reporters, “I don’t have anything that would explain it. I’m the oldest in the family and when anything happens that might be a problem, I’m the one my mother would get in touch with. She didn’t express any worries to me.”

  As I spoke with the press, Gordon arrived. We hugged and the tears fell.

  We composed ourselves and finished with the reporters.

  “As a mother, she was terrific,” I said. “She believed in her religion, her family, and everything else was secondary.”

  Gordon got the last word: “She was the strongest woman I ever met.”

  * * *

  As we drove from the airport back to my sister Daphine’s house in South Central, Gordon and I listened to more news coverage. Mixed with continued statements of shock over the murders were stories on the sudden rash of deadly violence that had hit the neighborhood since the Olympics. Many expressed the opinion that our case—a daylight home-invasion quadruple homicide—sounded a call for action, a desperate plea.