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OTHER THAN BALLARD, who was a full-time sworn officer, the members of the Open-Unsolved Unit were all volunteers. Two years ago, following a law enforcement trend that had budget-challenged police departments across the country using retired detectives to investigate cold cases, Ballard had been placed in charge of the LAPD’s previously mothballed unit. She was also its chief recruiter, which meant that she had to convince people to contribute their skills to the noble effort at least one day a week, with fifty dollars a month to cover expenses. She had finally reached a point where she was happy with the squad she had curated.
Gathered at the raft were Tom Laffont, retired FBI; Lilia Aghzafi, who had done twenty years with Vegas Metro; and Paul Masser, formerly a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office. Colleen Hatteras had never been a police officer. She had been a stay-at-home mom who got hooked on genetic genealogy and took online courses in its application to law enforcement. She was relentless at the keyboard—and at butting into the personal lives of the other members of the team, with a primary focus on Ballard. She was also a self-described empath who never shied away from expressing the feelings she pickedup from people. Ballard reluctantly put up with this because of Colleen’s case-related skills.
The newest member of the unit was Anders Persson, who was even more of an outlier than Hatteras. His law enforcement experience was limited to volunteer work with the Swedish Police Authority in his hometown of Stockholm. But Persson, just twenty-eight years old, now ran an L.A.-based software company by night and assisted the OU team by day. While Hatteras was the expert in hunting down family histories and genetic connections, Persson was the go-to guy when it came to navigating the internet and finding people who had gone to extreme lengths to avoid being found. Together, Hatteras and Persson were a formidable team that complemented those on the unit with real police and investigative experience. And while the unit and Ballard were still recovering from a major hit to their reputations, the result of an early case that had gone awry, Ballard felt the team was now humming like a well-tuned motor. The raft had room for two more volunteers, but Ballard was satisfied with what they were accomplishing. The unit cleared, on average, three cold-case murders a month. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the six thousand unsolved murder cases stored in the archive shelves behind the raft, but it was a solid start.
Ballard stepped over to the whiteboard wall to begin the meeting. Normally she would have left her suit jacket draped over her chair, but today she kept it on to hide the fact that she didn’t have her badge.
Four side-by-side boards were used to track the cases that were in some level of play. Every Monday morning, the team gathered to discuss their progress. The first board listed all cases that contained evidence to be submitted for forensic and technological analyses. This primarily meant DNA, fingerprints, and, sometimes, ballistics. The application of DNA in criminal prosecutions had not been approved by the California courts until the early 1990s, and genetic analysis had taken major strides forward in recent years. This made unsolved casesfrom the last three decades of the previous century fertile ground for review. Additionally, fingerprint databases had greatly expanded. The ballistics databases lagged behind these advances and were not as useful, but in gun cases they couldn’t be ignored.
What put sand in the gas tank of the unit’s well-tuned motor was that many of the cases were so old that the killers the team identified were already dead or incarcerated. This brought answers to still grieving families, but it felt like justice that was too little too late. And the members of the Open-Unsolved team were denied what every investigator wanted and needed at the end of a case: the opportunity to confront the evil behind the murder. This was why so-called live cases—where the killer was believed to be living and still out there—were the investigations the team rallied behind. Though the archive contained records of unsolved cases going back to the early 1900s, Ballard directed the team to work only on cases recorded since 1975.
Ballard scanned the first board to see if any new cases had been added. When not working on a current investigation, every team member was charged with pulling cases from the archive and reviewing them for possible follow-up.
“Okay, anybody add anything new to our in-play list?” she asked.
After a round-robin of negative responses from the raft, Laffont raised his hand. “I think I’ll have one to add this week,” he said. “Expecting to hear something back from Darcy today—if I’m lucky.”
Darcy Troy was the DNA tech who handled cases from the Open-Unsolved Unit. It was good to have a go-to person at the lab, but Troy was not assigned solely to OU cases. Current investigations were always a priority, and Troy had to handle DNA analysis from those cases ahead of anything that came in from the raft. Sometimes the wait was frustrating.
“What’s the case?” Ballard asked.
“A sexual assault and murder from ’91,” Laffont said. “A bad one.Not that there are any good ones, but the guy assaulted her several times before he strangled her. Ejaculated outside the body but left something behind on her clothes. Darcy took it. Last week she said she’d have something this week.”
“Good,” Ballard said. “What’s the vic’s name?”
“Shaquilla Washington,” Laffont said. “A south-end case. Didn’t get much attention in the day.”
Ballard nodded. It went without saying that the archives were disproportionately heavy with cases that hadn’t gotten much attention because they were from minority communities on the city’s south and east sides. This could in part be due to the fact that there were more murders in these communities and the detective workloads there were the heaviest in the city. But it could also be explained by a lack of commitment to those communities and an absence of empathy for the victims. Ballard had noticed neither of those deficiencies in Laffont. When he had the time to go into the archives and pull cases for review, he often looked for reports from the south side. He was white and in his late fifties and had seldom worked on the south side as an FBI agent assigned to the Los Angeles field office. He saw his efforts now as a way to partly balance the scales. Ballard respected him for that.
“Hopefully Darcy comes through with something,” Ballard said.
She continued reviewing the boards and the cases with her crew, eventually coming to the last board, which listed the cases that were most active in terms of pending arrests, prosecutions, or closures. The last case on the list belonged to Masser.
It involved the murder of a clerk at a Hollywood convenience store in 1997. A man in a ski mask entered the store, told the clerk to put all the cash in the register on the counter, and fired a shot into her chest, killing her instantly. The man then jumped into a waiting car and escaped. According to various witnesses from inside and outside the store, the getaway driver was a white woman with long black hair.The car was described as a maroon sedan, and one witness provided the first two digits of its license plate.
There was a video camera inside the store, and a review of the tape revealed that the gun was fired while the suspect was gathering the cash the clerk had put on the counter. It appeared to be an accidental discharge that shocked even the gunman; he turned and ran out of the store, leaving half the cash behind.
The license plate digits and car description eventually led investigators through motor vehicle records to a man named Donald Russell, who owned a maroon Honda Accord with a license plate beginning with those two digits. Russell was unemployed and had a history of drug-related arrests. He lived with his wife, who also had a record of drug arrests. She, however, had short blond hair. Both were questioned but denied involvement in the robbery and killing. They provided an alibi that the investigators could neither prove nor disprove. The detectives took the case to the district attorney’s office but prosecutors declined to file charges, saying there was not enough evidence to convince a jury and bring home a guilty verdict. But no further evidence was developed, and the case went cold—until Paul Masser of the Open-Unsolved Unit pulled the murder book off a shelf in the cold-case archive.
Masser reviewed the case and quickly learned that it didn’t have the traditional kind of evidence that could jump-start a cold case. There were no fingerprints or DNA from the crime scene. The bullet had been collected from the fallen clerk’s body, but it did not lend itself to modern ballistic technology because it had flattened when it hit the victim’s spine, which made it useless for comparison with bullets in NIBIN, the national ballistics database. And no weapon had ever been recovered to compare the bullet to.
Masser located the suspects, still living in Los Angeles, and learned two things that could prove useful a quarter century after the killing. The first was that the couple were no longer a couple; theyhad divorced five years after the murder. The second, which he discovered through social media, was that the now ex-wife, Maxine Russell, was a recovering addict who had recently celebrated twenty years of sobriety, according to her Facebook page.
Masser, drawing on his experience as a prosecutor, knew that the couple’s divorce meant that statutory spousal privilege was no longer in play. The rule held that a wife or husband could not testify against a spouse without that spouse’s approval. But the protection was limited to the years of the marriage, which meant there was an opportunity to pit the ex-wife against her former husband. Masser, drawing on his experience with an addicted family member in recovery, also knew that most rehab programs encouraged participants to keep journals as part of their steps toward sobriety.
With information gathered in the original investigation, Masser drew up a search warrant for the apartment where Maxine Russell now lived and convinced a judge to sign it. The warrant included all journals and documents written by the suspect as well as family photos that showed Maxine with long dark hair. On a shelf in the living room, Masser found several journals Maxine had kept over the years of her sobriety. One entry described the robbery gone wrong and another expressed Maxine’s guilt at having been involved in the taking of a life, even though she claimed it had been an accident. Additionally, a photo album found in a closet contained photos of Maxine going back to when she was a child. In many, she had long dark hair.
Maxine had been arrested two weeks ago and was still in jail, unable to afford a bond on bail set at two million dollars. The department low-keyed the arrest and it had so far escaped media attention. It was now time for Masser to move forward with the second part of the case strategy.
“I’m going to meet with John this afternoon,” Masser told the group. “We’re going to go to Maxine’s lawyer and see if she wants todeal. After two weeks, she is probably getting the idea that incarceration is not how she wants to spend the rest of her life.”
John was John Lewin, the deputy DA assigned to prosecute cases from the Open-Unsolved Unit. In the news coverage that solved cold cases often brought, the local media had dubbed him “the King of Cold Cases.”
“Has she called her ex-husband from the jail?” Ballard asked.
“Not on the recorded lines,” Masser said. “I doubt he knows she’s been arrested.”
