Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  Her attempts to contact prosecution witnesses were met with a level of anger and rejection she had not experienced on any case before. It was entirely understandable that people who had been kidnapped, shot at, had guns stuck in their faces, cars rammed in intersections, bullets fired through their windshields, or been ordered to get down on the fucking floor might be reluctant to speak with an investigator defending the man they believed responsible. But instead of a “sorry, but I really don’t want to talk to you,” Painter was now getting a lot of “I don’t have to talk to you, so fuck you, lady”–type hang-ups. The bank employees were under orders from Security Pacific not to speak to her, and the dozens of cops who were listed as either victims or witnesses . . . well, that was never going to happen either. With a success rate hovering just above zero, Painter spent many long moments staring at her motel room phone wondering why she should even try.

  Getting her hands on evidence or discovery documents from the DA and law enforcement was just as frustrating. With no email, internet, or cell phones in existence, getting access to these often required waiting for envelopes to arrive in the mail or crisscrossing the traffic-choked Inland Empire to pick up boxes and documents from the front desks of crime labs, sheriff’s offices, or the DA. Too often, they were not there as promised. So she had to go back. And back.

  Living out of the motel room was wearing her out. Fourteen-hour workdays and trips in her VW Bug back and forth between Riverside and Vista were fraying her nerves. She missed her home, her co-workers, her family, her friends. She missed her kid. It all came to a head one day as she was making the short drive from the motel to the jail to meet with George Smith.

  She had been feeling anxious that morning. Sitting at a stoplight, a nameless terror suddenly swept through Painter. She could hardly breathe, felt utterly paralyzed, was sure something terrible was about to happen. Somehow she managed to negotiate the VW into a convenience store parking lot and buy a Coke. Trembling, she continued on to the jail. Once locked inside the cramped interview room waiting for Smith, Jeanne fell apart. The place felt as tight as a coffin being lowered into the ground. She leapt from the chair and began to pound on the door, screaming, “Let me out! Let me out!” When they opened the door, she pushed past the guard and ran from the jail. Nobody asked her if she was okay. Nobody cared.

  Back at the motel, an alarmed Clayton Adams tried to calm her, gave her a Valium, and urged her to see a doctor. She did. They gave her a prescription for a sedative, phenobarbital, mostly to help her sleep. None of it helped very much. The attacks continued, her baseline anxiety level inching up by the day. She escaped to Riverside whenever she could, but once back in Vista, it started all over again. The trips to the courthouse became exercises in pure terror. There were no friendly faces or people she could talk to about what she was going through. Except one.

  Soon jailhouse visits with her client were more than just another stop in her busy day. The time with Smith became a refuge from the emotional storm raging within her and the animosity directed at her from without. He calmed her, purred helpful advice, and listened patiently, all the while staring back with his soulful brown eyes. He quoted scripture, prayed with her, and told her to seek comfort in the Lord Jesus Christ. She did, and along with her son, participated in a mass ocean baptism in Long Beach Harbor just as George had done with Calvary Chapel at Pirate’s Cove almost a decade before.

  George helped her with the mundane tasks of investigation work. Instead of sitting alone on her motel bed putting together evidence books, she gathered up the enormous stacks of police reports, pretrial transcripts, witness statements, and interview notes and brought them to the jail. They spent hours together organizing the mass of documents into three-ring notebooks. As long as they looked busy, the guards let her stay, but only because they had to. In the courtroom, they sat side by side, George often helping her locate specific documents on the fly as needed by Adams.

  By all accounts, George Smith could be genuinely caring, generous, and sincere in his desire to help others. But there was the other side of George that too often surfaced. It was a willingness to put those around him at great risk for little gain. In the case of the Harven brothers, they lost their freedom. For the Delgado brothers, it had cost them their lives. With Jeanne Painter, it was her career and reputation. When it came to the Harven and Delgado brothers, George Smith had already done as much damage as he could possibly do. But with Jeanne Painter, there was a lot more still to come.

  16

  ON BEHALF OF THE PEOPLE

  January 4, 1982. Vista, California.

  ON MONDAY, JANUARY 4, 1982, ALMOST TWENTY MONTHS AFTER GEORGE Smith had charged into the Security Pacific Bank screaming, “Everyone hit the fucking floor,” deputy district attorney Kevin Ruddy rose to his feet to tell a jury why the three men before them deserved to be put to death. Ruddy was careful not to overload the jury with details of the chaos of that day. In his soft-spoken, often monotone voice, he opened by introducing the jury to the accused.

  “We have a bank robbery. But how does a bank robbery begin? It has to begin with people. Ladies and gentlemen, it began with five people.” George, Chris, and Russ watched him warily. “Those three people sitting at the table who are on trial for these crimes,” he said, standing near the well-groomed young men in their suits and ties. “Their appearance is somewhat different today than it was on May 9, 1980. You will notice a photograph over by the witness stand.” He motioned to a display with three enlarged color photographs, three feet high by two feet wide, of each of the defendants taken within hours of their capture. The contrast was profound. Chris Harven, dirty and still in his wet sweatshirt and oversize blue gloves, stared emotionlessly at the camera. Russell Harven was filthy in a ripped shirt and torn jeans, with stringy hair, shoulders hunched and arms held out from his meager frame like some sort of Appalachian swamp monster. George Smith was shown being propped up to a seated position in a hospital bed by an emergency room doctor, EKG leads stuck to his skin, an IV line running into his left arm. His hair stuck out wildly, and on his round face was the expression of a man who knows all hope is gone.

  “These five people who got together to rob a bank were all friends,” Ruddy said. “They included the two sets of brothers and the brains of the operation, George Smith.”

  Although Ruddy let the events of the day provide most of the drama, he was not above a flair for the theatrical when it came to the physical evidence brought in to punctuate his case. Spread on a table was the murderous arsenal of firearms and homemade bombs. Ruddy held up the carbon-black Heckler .308. “George Smith armed himself with this, a .30-caliber military assault rifle.” He lifted the riot gun recovered from Baldy Notch Road. “Manny Delgado armed himself with this, a folding stock, twelve-gauge shotgun.” Some jurors visibly winced at the sight of the vicious-looking weapon. He showed off Billy Delgado’s unfired AR-15 and the “Shorty” AR-15 used by Russell Harven. Absent from the table was Chris Harven’s Heckler, used by Manny during the pursuit and ambush. It had never been found.

  Ruddy then lifted a case of ammunition boxes. “Obviously with lots of rifles and pistols, they need ammunition,” he said. “Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of rounds of ammunition.” With that, Ruddy turned the box over, spilling dozens of empty bullet boxes onto the table.

  Ruddy then focused on the ambush in Lytle Creek that killed Jim Evans, the one charge that could send the Norco 3 to the gas chamber. Ruddy showed a photo of Evans’s unit with the bullet holes through the windshield. “James Evans was able to extricate himself from that vehicle,” Ruddy said, picking up Evans’s .357 revolver from the table. “And James Evans took out a rather small, pitiful weapon . . . and he began to fight back with this, fight for his life. James Evans was accustomed to fighting for his life. James Evans had been a Green Beret in Vietnam.” After noting that Evans was able to wound Chris Harven, Ruddy dropped the only real surprise of the day. “He ran to the back of his car and crouched down, unl
oaded his gun, loaded it again, and stood up to fight again. And a bullet fired by Russell Harven entered James Evans at his eye and exploded in his brain and James Evans was dead.”

  At the defense table, Russ had been absently twisting and stretching a rubber band around his fingers, as he had come to do almost constantly while in the courtroom. He looked up at the mention of his name. It was the first time the prosecution had formally named their triggerman. Suddenly, Russ felt like the only dead man in the room. “Russell Harven will tell you that he was carrying this gun,” Ruddy said, lifting the “Shorty” AR with one hand, “this gun which killed James Evans.”

  Ruddy concluded his opening holding the “Shorty” in one hand and Jim Evans’s .357 in the other. “Ladies and gentlemen, nothing can describe events better than physical evidence . . . what Jim Evans had.” He paused, holding the small revolver out for the jury to see. He then held out the wicked-looking “Shorty” AR. “And what these people had.”

  After Ruddy completed his opening, all three defense attorneys opted to defer the presentation of their opening remarks until the prosecution completed its case. It was clear from the start that the battle for the lives of the Norco 3 was to be waged on two fronts: who fired first in front of the bank, the cops or the robbers, and who shot the bullet that killed Jim Evans. Alan Olson summed up the defense’s position on both outside the courtroom after Ruddy’s opening. “All their ballistics shows is that the suspects and the cops were firing. Our ballistics prove it was the cops.”

  THE OPENING WITNESSES FOR THE PROSECUTION WERE FAMILY MEMBERS OF the accused and the dead. Ruddy’s only purpose was to establish that the three defendants and the dead Delgado brothers had all been friends and that Smith and Chris Harven owned lots and lots of guns. The ex-wives of George and Chris had both remarried since the robbery. Hanne Smith was now Hannelore Palmer, and Lani Harven had become Galena Thomas. Both appeared for the prosecution, but only because they had no choice. The defense used the opportunity to sneak in testimony from both that, in their opinion, their ex-husbands were nonviolent people. Ruddy challenged that contention on the redirect of Lani. “Mrs. Thomas, as to your opinion of George Smith being nonviolent, would it change your opinion of him if you found out that he had planned and carried out a bank robbery?”

  “I would object, Your Honor,” Clayton Adams called out. “May we approach the bench on this? I think we need to get some ground rules straightened out on how counsel is to approach character testimony. He does not seem to have a grasp on it at all.”

  The testimony of Manny Delgado’s wife, Juanita Delgado, and father, Manuel Sr., were sobering affairs, reminding everyone in the courtroom that Norco had taken its toll on more than just the police officers involved. Again, Adams used the cross-examination to lay some foundation to his claim that the police had been the aggressors and acted with excessive force. “Mrs. Delgado, I realize this is probably a little difficult for you,” Adams began. “But as far as Manny’s death goes, do you know how he died?”

  “He was shot by a SWAT team,” Juanita answered softly.

  “Do you know how many times he was shot or how many wounds were in his body?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It was over sixty, wasn’t it?”

  Alan Olson tried to establish what would be another recurring theme for the defense: blame Manny whenever possible. It was in all three defendants’ interest to paint a picture of Delgado as being completely out of control after witnessing the death of his little brother in front of the bank. When Manuel Sr. took the stand, Olson asked if his two sons had been close. Manny Sr. said they had. “What effect do you believe the witnessing of one of the death of the other would have had on the one who remained alive?” Olson asked.

  “I think it would drive him nuts,” the father of the two dead boys said.

  TWO WEEKS INTO THE TRIAL, THE FIRST IMPORTANT WITNESS TOOK THE stand. Hostage Gary Hakala’s testimony was critical to the prosecution if they were to nail down a kidnapping conviction. Other than the two murder charges, the kidnapping count was the most serious. Hakala’s testimony should have been relatively straightforward but ran into trouble on cross-examination. Hakala was already on the lookout for deceptions when Alan Olson rose to begin questioning. They first clashed over Hakala’s testimony that he had been repeatedly hit over the head with the butt of a handgun by Manny Delgado. Holding a copy of Hakala’s testimony from the preliminary hearing, Olson questioned him about why he had never mentioned being hit on the head when asked about it before.

  “I interpreted that as asking me the most important things as to what happened to me when the first man first entered the van,” explained Hakala, already getting irritated.

  “You didn’t think it was important, then, that you had been hit on the head?”

  “A lot worse things happened to me that day than being hit on the head with a gun,” Gary answered sharply.

  Olson paused. “Mr. Hakala, if you would like to stop and take a break at any time during this cross-examination, please say so.”

  “Keep going,” Hakala said, glaring at Olson.

  Olson and Hakala would have other flare-ups, but they were just a sideshow to what was the most important part of the questioning for the defense: Who exactly kidnapped Gary in the parking lot of the Brea Mall? Olson asked Hakala if the prosecution had ever shown him a photo of Manny Delgado. Hakala said yes. “Do you know what that photograph depicted?” Olson asked.

  “It was a dead man,” Gary answered, referring to the autopsy photo he had been shown.

  “Who did you tell Mr. Hanks it was?”

  “I told him it was the first man that had entered my van,” Hakala said, positively identifying Manny as the ringleader and his main tormentor that day.

  Olson motioned to the three defendants in the courtroom. “Do you recall testifying to the effect that you had seen photographs of all of these men from Mr. Hanks before the preliminary hearing?”

  “I have seen photographs of these men.”

  “And did you tell Mr. Hanks at that time, when he showed you those photographs, that these were not the men?”

  “These men that are in the courtroom today are not the men that initially picked me up,” Hakala confirmed with 100 percent conviction.

  “None of them?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Showing you People’s 19, do you recognize this man?” Olson said, holding up the arrest photo of a scruffy, rain-soaked Russell Harven.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he one of the ones who grabbed your van?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Yes.”

  Russell Harven had admitted on tape that he and the Delgado brothers carried out the kidnapping and carjacking, but now Ruddy could only look on as the prosecution’s only witness to the act definitively ruled out Harven.

  When asked what one of the missing two men looked like, Gary said, “I remember him being young and of Mexican American descent.” However, when shown an autopsy photo of Billy Delgado following the incident, Gary had said, no way, definitely not the same guy.

  Olson then held up photos of the two getaway cars. “Can you say with certainty that neither this car which appears to be a blue Z/28 nor this car which appears to be a blue Matador were there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have no doubt about that?”

  “No.”

  Olson then got right to the matter, referring in part to a rather harmless interview Hakala had given to the trashy tabloid the National Enquirer in exchange for $500, money Hakala said barely covered the replacement of the shattered windshield of his van. “Do you recall in any of your interviews, either to the National Enquirer, the police, the FBI, or anyone else, ever telling anyone that you still feared for your life because you thought or were sure that one man got away?”

  “I can tell you that right now.”

  “You can tell me what right now?”


  “That I believe that there is still a man out there.”

  With that, Hakala had handed the defense what no prosecutor ever wants introduced into a trial: the missing-man theory. Kevin Ruddy chose not to question Hakala on redirect about his emphatic assertion that there was a sixth man involved in the crime.

  Hakala’s insistence on sticking to his story said a lot about who he was and all he had gone through as a child. He had not survived being orphaned at an early age and then raised as an outsider on the high plains of Wyoming by being tentative or unsure of himself. Gary Hakala was tough and more than a little stubborn. He knew what he had seen that day, goddamnit, and it wasn’t Billy Delgado and it wasn’t Russell Harven. As far as Gary was concerned, there must have been others involved, and that was that. Gary was simply telling the truth as best he knew it.

  During the testimony of bank witnesses a few days before, the defense brought out a curious, but seemingly unimportant, detail that was now starting to make a lot more sense. Several witnesses stated they had heard the bandits call out the name “Jerry” multiple times during the robbery. Customer James Kirkland said he heard one of them shout, “Jerry, let’s go, let’s go.” Others heard “Jerry, get the money,” or “Hurry up, Jerry.” Gary Hakala offered that he had heard the names “Arthur” and “Tony” used inside the van.

  Ruddy was not overly concerned; it wouldn’t be the first time criminals used fake names during a holdup. But with the missing-man theory now in play, it was clear where the defense had been headed in bringing out all the mentions of “Jerry.” It would be another few months before the issue became central to one of the strangest twists in a trial that was already becoming stranger by the day.