Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  Midkiff’s story was typical of south end prostitutes, that is, it was sordid, dramatic, and monotonous. Such stories always seemed to begin the same way—with a rape or molestation in childhood—and to end with an aging prostitute accepting ever-lowlier tricks to feed a drug addiction. At the end of the line harrowed-looking homeless women with missing teeth wandered the streets, offering blow jobs in alleys.

  But Midkiff was atypical in some ways. Skaggs was beginning to see this. For one thing, she was not a junkie. Midkiff was a chain-smoker and binge drinker. But observing her over the next few hours, Skaggs felt sure she was not a regular user of cocaine or methamphetamine.

  She appeared bright despite her lack of formal education. “I can tell you are not a malicious person,” she told Skaggs at one point. And she had an excellent memory.

  What Skaggs couldn’t see was that Midkiff actually was at one of those rare crossroads in life. She was telling the truth: she wanted to change, but she didn’t know how. There would be no storybook ending for her. But this interview was a turning point. It would change everything for both of them.

  “Code Four here!”

  Skaggs was back in the squad room talking to one of his bureau colleagues on the cell phone during a break, his tone light with relief. He snapped the phone shut and surveyed his colleagues hovering nearby. One was readying six-packs—photo lineups for Jessica to identify the suspects. Another prepared to take Jessica out for a cigarette.

  Prideaux also lingered. He had remained in the background, enduring spasms of anxiety as Skaggs spoke to Midkiff. By now, Prideaux knew he had made the right decision in selecting Skaggs for the case. He orbited the tall detective and waited for an opening.

  “Hey John, you need anything?” Prideaux finally asked. He spoke with forced lightness. But his voice held a deferential note. Anyone listening would have thought Skaggs, not Prideaux, the superior officer.

  “No, L.T.!” Skaggs told him. Securing Midkiff’s cooperation was game-changing, Skaggs knew he was in the home stretch.

  There is little celebrating in homicide units. Even La Barbera and his crew, long known for irreverence that bordered on inappropriateness, did not generally high-five each other or appear jubilant when they solved cases. They indulged in pranks and black humor, and they posed every year for a grisly homicide-themed Christmas card from the unit—a faux crime scene with a dead Santa, for example. But day to day, homicide remained just too depressing to permit much gaiety in their ranks. Detectives walked out of meetings with suspects, witnesses, and survivors looking somber and spent no matter how well the interviews had gone. Grim faces accompanied even the most dramatic investigative triumphs. It wasn’t an affectation, it was a natural reaction to the cloud of agony that emanated from the Monster.

  One could never feel good about solving a case. No sense of a mission accomplished could minimize the horror. Bryant’s death, no matter what the detectives did, would remain sickening and unspeakably sad to everyone who had dealt with the case, forever after.

  So although Prideaux had been waiting for weeks for this moment—waiting to see Skaggs emerge from a key interview with a look of success—he allowed himself just two words to express his feelings:

  “Good job,” he muttered.

  Skaggs reflexively dropped his voice to match Prideaux’s.

  “Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “It worked out.”

  Up until then, Skaggs had betrayed no emotion about the favorable turn the case had taken. But the tactful respect in Prideaux’s voice seemed to catch him off guard.

  Skaggs emitted a small sigh. Then he repeated his own words in a murmur, as if reassuring himself. “It worked out.”

  That evening stretched for hours. Skaggs interviewed Midkiff in detail, then drove her past the crime scene. He searched her mother’s house. He became more and more certain that she was telling the truth. He was astonished by how well she remembered the sequence of events seven months before. He tested her, pretending he didn’t know certain details so that she would supply them. He lied to her, telling her he had a conflicting statement from another occupant in the car. He wanted to see if she would improvise.

  But she was unshakable. She stuck to her story. After her initial flurries of tears and anxiety attacks, Midkiff settled down and answered each question in a sad, matter-of-fact voice. She labored to find exactly the right terms and paused frequently to remember. When she couldn’t, she said so and apologized.

  She nailed everything. Skaggs could not find any holes. Her descriptions matched everything they already knew: the direction and location of the Suburban, the description of the shooter, his clothes, the style of gun, the number of shots. Skaggs finally tried accusing her of lying. She just wept, said “Well?” and kept repeating her story.

  Skaggs had dealt with many people in his career with histories like Midkiff’s. Prostitutes tended to be among the most dysfunctional people in the street environment, their problems intractable, their unreliability profound. But later, Skaggs would say that Jessica Midkiff was the only homicide witness he had ever interviewed who told the same story at every stage of the investigation and trial without a single detail changed, or a detectable lie.

  It went against all his expectations but again confirmed Rick Gordon’s doctrine. This jittery young prostitute with her cutesy affectations, angel tattoo, and bare feet would turn out to be the best witness Skaggs ever had.

  As the night had gone on, Skaggs had extracted from Midkiff a detailed version of the broad outline she had told him at the beginning of their meeting. Midkiff said that she and Derrick Starks had spent the night before Bryant’s murder in a motel called the Desert Inn on Century Boulevard. Neither had their own apartment. They stayed in cheap motels at least four times a week, sleeping late and drifting into the next day’s activities. These usually involved hanging out with Starks’s friends, the Rollin’ Hundreds Blocc Crips. Members would “come outside and drink and party—that’s what they do,” she told Skaggs.

  Jessica had wanted to drive Starks’s black Suburban that day. She wasn’t sure of the time. But she knew it wasn’t morning—they were never up by morning. She was at the wheel when Starks got a call. He directed her to a spot on 111th Street to pick up two acquaintances wearing dark hoodies. Devin Davis was “hyped … antsy,” she said. She thought he was disturbed. But she did not get a good look. “Derrick would not let me stare at his friends too long,” she explained to Skaggs. “I would get in trouble, like, ‘Oh you wanna fuck my homeys?’ ”

  In the car, Davis taunted the quieter young man in the backseat: “You ain’t no real crippin,” he taunted. “You ain’t no real man, you ain’t ready to put in no work!” Starks was playing the same Crip song over and over on the car stereo. Davis gave her directions. They went down a side street. Starks turned down the music.

  Davis told her to stop the car. Midkiff knew she was not allowed to obey another man. She waited until Starks echoed the command, then parked. Davis said: “I’m gonna go hang up some business.”

  Midkiff turned and saw him reposition a handgun in his waistband. The teenagers hopped out. She watched them glide into the eastbound street, out of sight. She sat in front with Starks. She had believed it was just another of Starks’s outings. She had thought he was going to get girls for the two teenagers, find them weed, or buy liquor for them. But now, glimpsing the gun, she was alarmed. “What do you have me in?” she demanded. “I don’t have you in nothin’!” he snapped.

  Midkiff pleaded to be allowed to go home. Then, through the closed windows of the car, she heard—pow … pow, pow.

  Davis said, “Go go go go go!” when they jumped in the car. After Starks yanked her into the passenger seat, Davis was “amped up” and bragging. “I’m proper!” he said. Starks hushed him and turned the music up. That night, they stayed in the motel again. A few days later, Midkiff was again in the Suburban with Starks when some rivals from the vicinity of the 80s spotted them. The gang rivals chased
them, seeking retaliation. Starks crashed the car and got arrested. Midkiff gave the CHP officer an alias, using her aunt’s name.

  Midkiff’s obedience to Starks was robotic by her account. He did not trust her, she said, and did not share his plans with her. But he expected blind obedience, and he mostly got it by merely implying the violence of which Midkiff knew he was capable. “Pretty much whatever he said, it went,” Midkiff told Skaggs. “He is way bigger than what I am. He choked me out once till I damn near passed out … I’m not gonna sit there and go, Well, where the hell are we going? Because every time I get a smart mouth, I catch it. I fight back, but he is still a man and I am a small female.”

  She was five-one and weighed 113 pounds. Starks was of average height but strong and fit, with massive shoulders; he’d played football.

  She’d not known they were headed to do a shooting. But even if she knew, “I’m not gonna ask him, just because I don’t want to catch it. And I know that might be punk or whatever. But I don’t want to get beat up.”

  She claimed she didn’t know that someone died in the shooting. Skaggs challenged her on this point repeatedly. But in the end, her confusion convinced him.

  There were scores and scores of gunshots fired in South L.A. that barely registered in the outside world. The events of May 11 didn’t stand out for Midkiff because she considered it just another shooting of the type that happened “usually,” as she put it.

  “I know shots went off,” she told Skaggs. But “people usually can shoot a lot and not hit somebody. Especially gang-bangers.”

  The man in the wheelchair had told Gordon and Skaggs that Midkiff was “a good girl,” which she was not, in the conventional sense. But she was not a gang member. Starks viewed her as “a weak link.” He shushed Davis because he didn’t want her to know what was happening. He didn’t trust her, she said.

  He was right not to.

  Midkiff had no appetite for murder. When Skaggs told her of Bryant Tennelle’s death, she wept. “I feel bad behind it,” she said. “That’s wrong. I can see my mother thinking about me if I get laid out. Or if my child gets laid out.”

  At last, Skaggs asked her to testify in court. “I don’t even care about me anymore, I’ll do it,” Midkiff said. She began to cry again, worried her family would be killed. “They’ll do it!” she told Skaggs.

  He told her that he would be scared, too, if it were him.

  BABY MAN

  Devin Davis was seventeen in the first weeks of 2008. He was an awkward-looking kid with a large head, high round cheeks, and very round, large brown eyes. He was afflicted with ADHD and high blood pressure—a diagnosis rare in teenagers but not uncommon in South Central. He had been struck by gunfire some months before that had injured his wrist.

  Devin appeared to be constantly on the lookout for something to guffaw at, in the anxious way of teenagers who fear being left out of a joke. But Devin was not cheerful. His eyes had a plaintive expression. His affect was peevish and unhappy.

  When the probationer first uttered Devin’s moniker Baby Man to Skaggs, Skaggs was pretty sure Devin was the killer. Then Midkiff fingered his photo, identifying Devin as the “crazy boy” in the back of the Suburban, and Skaggs was certain. He intended to come right at Devin, plunging forward, as always, in the straightest possible line.

  Devin’s imprisonment gave him time to prepare. Skaggs wanted every advantage. The interrogation of Devin Davis would be the most important juncture in this most important of cases; it would be a pivotal moment in his whole career.

  Skaggs knew what he wanted from Devin—a full confession. In his mind, he had already constructed the outlines of a case built solely on the accounts of the man in the wheelchair, the probationer, and Midkiff, supported by corroborating evidence. But he knew the case would be far stronger with a confession.

  Skaggs had interrogated hundreds of murder suspects, and a striking number had confessed, at least partially. This was not entirely a tribute to Skaggs’s talent: confessions were astonishingly common in ghettoside cases. Sal La Barbera maintained he’d gotten some version of a confession on almost every case he had ever cleared. Perhaps not in the actual interrogation, but in the long waits in between—during meals, or while being processed for arrest—young men nearly always let something slip. It was relatively rare for suspects in gang cases to invoke their right to an attorney.

  Skaggs couldn’t understand why suspects confessed. But La Barbera, who ascribed sentimental motives to everyone—even murderers—had a theory. He believed it was the burden of guilt. Murder, he suggested, had a kind of existential weight; one had to be very hardened indeed not to be bested by it. Other detectives had similar notions. Brent Josephson, the old ghettoside hand from the previous generation, had a memorable story from the peak years. It involved a scoop-and-carry homicide case in a park. Assigned after the fact, with the evidence cleared away and no witnesses, Josephson was standing helplessly at the scene, thinking he didn’t have a prayer of solving the case, when he noticed a skinny Hispanic youth in the distance. Josephson called out to him, thinking the kid might have some pointers. Thunderstruck, the young man hung his head and shuffled over. “You got me,” he told Josephson, and proceeded to confess. The specter of an LAPD detective beckoning from across the park had apparently been too much for him. It was like a summons from God.

  All Skaggs knew was that, as common as confessions were, you couldn’t count on getting one. Many gang members were interrogation experts. They knew the cops’ methods. Older men in particular had the edge on the very young cops the South L.A. divisions attracted. These suspects had cunning and strategy. And just like the cops, they were smooth liars. So although there were those who refused to talk, or bailed midinterview, the more common scenario was a tense tit for tat in which suspects offered detectives bits of information in exchange for finding out what the police knew.

  This approach was not as irrational as it seemed. Without an attorney present, gang suspects could get a sense not just of what the police were thinking, but also of what was happening on the streets. If your homeys had snitched, you wanted to know it. If it was in your best interests to snitch on them first, you wanted to know that, too. The cops were only part of the equation. The willingness of gang suspects to be interrogated demonstrated, again, how such men inhabited two legal structures—a formal one and an informal one. They had to negotiate both, and the LAPD interrogation room was a space to explore their options, play one side against the other.

  There was possibly another reason suspects submitted to being interrogated: it was interesting. Few people can resist talking about something that really interests them with someone who shares that interest. For all these reasons, suspects talked. South end homicide interrogations by Skaggs’s era lacked the brute terrorism of the old LAPD, and they were sometimes almost cordial. But they were nearly always elliptical games of cat and mouse in which the mouse was as curious as the cat. Skaggs was expecting that Devin would agree to talk a little. But that didn’t mean he would get what he wanted.

  On the afternoon of January 14, Corey Farell and a young detective named Vince Carreon picked up Devin from Challenger Youth Camp in northern Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley at the foot of the Mojave Desert and drove him back through the desert to the Seventy-seventh Street station, his hands cuffed in front of his body for the long journey.

  When he arrived, Skaggs looked him over. Devin wore a blue jumpsuit and his hair was scruffy, in the manner of young men too long in jail without a haircut. He was dark-skinned, just as Midkiff remembered. His manner was petulant and anxious. Farell had told him nothing.

  Skaggs wanted to secure an advantage over Devin from the start. He had devised a couple of ruses, driving Devin past the crime scene, suggesting to him that the police had evidence that didn’t exist, including a fictitious video that Skaggs claimed had been shot by a security camera. The goal was “just to freak him out,” he said later. He also wanted a read on Devin. By provoki
ng an emotional reaction, Skaggs hoped to gather a sense of his state of mind, and to infer from that his susceptibility to questioning.

  As they drove, Skaggs studied the teenager. Devin seemed immature for his age. He gave the impression of suffering from a mental or social disability. “Kinda weird,” Skaggs thought. It was easy to see what the young probationer had suggested about Devin—that he had problems making friends. If Devin had been your average high school student somewhere else, he might have been just another misfit. But Skaggs thought Devin “a little bit on the tough side, not just on the dumb side.” He had “a look.” To Skaggs, suspects fell across a spectrum. Some were very violent, some less so. And some were so unused to violence that it left them badly shaken. Skaggs had dealt with suspects who started babbling the instant they sat, spinning defenses and “fronting out” their friends. But Devin’s composure suggested that he would not crack easily.

  They returned to the station house and climbed the back stairs to an interview room. Skaggs gave Devin a soda and asked if he wanted lunch. Devin said no. It was 2:30 P.M.

  Over and over, through years of little rooms, cans of soda, mismatched chairs, and Styrofoam cups, Skaggs had felt his way through scores of interviews like this, learning through repetition. Skaggs used relatively little profanity and kept calm.

  He sought, above all, to assure suspects that it was okay to talk—that if they would just tell the truth, it would be all right. Beyond that, it was pure improvisation. The interrogator had to think fast and react quickly, “reading” the suspect while appearing not to, shifting tactics as dynamics changed.

  Sometimes Skaggs sought to break down suspects. Other times he tried to build them up. He would subtly insult them—“Do you take medication for psych problems?” And they would hasten to defend themselves. Or he would flatter them—“Dang! You still okay? I’ve heard your name on the street!” And they would puff up and start bragging. One of his favorite methods was to act distracted or bored until they became desperate for a reaction.