by Jill Leovy
Corey Farell did not attend because he had been called in early to his new job with the Foothill Division in the San Fernando Valley. His new station had seen two homicides in a week, the victims a Latino man and a young black woman. The cases were problematic: none of the witnesses wanted to cooperate. But Farell kept tabs on the court proceedings by phone and notified Skaggs of the guilty verdict. This time, his text message prompted an even more laconic answer from the cop with a tie and no jacket: Rog, for “Roger that.”
THE MISSING
Jurors reported being exhausted and emotionally spent. Several were terrified of retribution. Waiting to be escorted into the courtroom for the reading of the verdict, one juror admitted his hands were shaking. Despite their appearance of stoicism, several said that they had been churning inside and choking back tears.
Some thought the defense competent, others found it hopelessly passive. Some wondered why the defense had not gone more aggressively after Midkiff. A few thought the prosecutors’ open expression of emotion during the trial was overkill. A couple of jurors said they did, indeed, feel sorry for Zeke Perlo.
Several also thought Stirling’s cross-examination of Starks and the prosecution’s closing arguments were excessive: the problems with Starks’s deceptiveness didn’t need to be belabored. Similarly, the drama of the hotel receipt was impressive, but apparently not game-changing. The reference to a “Perry Mason moment,” however, elicited a spirited discussion in the jury room when it turned out a younger juror did not know who Perry Mason was.
The Davis jurors had more disagreements and prolonged discussions. They scrutinized the physical evidence closely to arrive at the conclusion that Davis had not been shooting randomly. All said they had taken their duties seriously. “I’m not going to forget any day of this,” one said.
The defense attorneys, noting that the jurors were mostly white, had speculated that they could not relate to the circumstances of the case. But at least one juror was not as far from the ghettoside world as they thought. This was the Davis foreman, forty-four, a white man with blond hair and blue eyes who worked as an upper-level manager of a chain of local fast-food restaurants. His job often took him to Compton and other neighborhoods south of the Ten. He lived in the suburbs, but he had grown up in military housing in Washington, D.C., and attended schools that drew from the city’s black neighborhoods. He had been in many a street fight. As an adolescent, he had learned the rules of the black inner city—learned that when it came to fighting in a lawless place, “if you back down, you back down forever,” he explained.
Commenting on the Tennelle case, this juror proved more perceptive than some of the professional cops who had trailed in and out of the courtroom. He knew Midkiff had been a prostitute. He suspected, without its ever coming out at trial, that Starks had pimped her out. He was astounded by fellow jurors who couldn’t understand why Bryant was wearing what he called the “stupid hat.” “It’s to feel safe in his environment!” he said.
Speaking of Bryant, the foreman seemed to comprehend the place the struggling eighteen-year-old had occupied among his friends. Told that Bryant’s friends had thrown play punches, he nodded knowingly. They had to teach him to fight in order to risk hanging out with him, he remarked. A friend who was seen as weak could jeopardize one’s respect and status and therefore one’s safety.
Like many Angelenos, the foreman knew black-on-black homicide south of the Ten was deeply entrenched. He had picked up on Tennelle’s choice to live in the Seventy-seventh Street Division, “trying to do good, and trying to be a role model,” and realized that the killing had gotten little public attention. It bothered him.
“There is a perception that blacks are doing it to blacks, and if I’m white, it doesn’t affect me,” said the white jury foreman. His eyes flashed with sudden anger. “Well, get over it. It does.”
The story of the lives of these two ghettoside craftsmen—Tennelle and Skaggs—converging in the death of a son seemed to deserve a dramatic ending. But in truth, the trial of Derrick Starks and Devin Davis was not even very suspenseful. The case that had gone unsolved for so long proved to be about as formidable as a sand castle on the beach. As the last waves of Skaggs’s persistence washed over it, the defense crumbled.
For years, politicians on the right and left had been building the notion of “gang violence” in the public’s mind as some kind of implacable social disease, springing from a deeply rooted moral crisis or from some kind of complicated family, economic, or cultural pathology.
But the Tennelle trial suggested a different idea: that it was really not so hard to insert legal authority into the chaos of extralegal violence among the young men of South Central, and that the state’s monopoly on violence could be established fairly easily, after all.
But you had to be willing to pay the cost, to put in the effort. You had to be very persistent.
The Tennelle case wasn’t just solvable. It was friable, breaking open so dramatically in the end that, as Stirling said, a seven-year-old could have tried it. Many people had heard about what Devin Davis and Derrick Starks had done. Rumors had flown freely. The suspects themselves had talked about it. They had made little effort to cover their tracks. They had brought a young woman with them and assumed she would obey the rules and regulations and keep their secret—assumed that she would not be as brave as she turned out to be, determined to stand up, change her life, and, as she put it later, “be a testament.” They had assumed the attack would be just another barely noted, barely investigated skirmish in South Central—in short, a typical gang case—until word got back to them that they had killed a police officer’s son. The case was eminently solvable—once the right kind of pressure was applied.
In Skaggs’s hands, the murders were elevated in law to what they were in fact: atrocities that must be answered for every single time.
The world wasn’t watching. The public, his superiors, and a large share of the country’s thinking classes gave only glancing notice to the battle Skaggs had devoted his life to. But Skaggs didn’t care; Skaggs turned his back to the parade.
And just as it is impossible to imagine that things in the South would not have been different if the legal system had operated differently—had black men’s lives, for example, been afforded profound value as measured by the response of legal authorities—it is impossible to imagine that the thousands of young men who died on the streets of Los Angeles County during Skaggs’s career would have done so had their killers anticipated a “John Skaggs Special” in every case.
If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs’s ceaseless vigor and determination—investigated as if one’s own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people—conditions would have been different. If the system had for years produced the very high clearance rates that Skaggs was so sure were possible—if it did not function, in the aggregate, as a “forty percenter”—the violence could not have been so routine. The victims would not have been so anonymous, and Bryant Tennelle might not have died in the nearly invisible, commonplace way in which he did.
The Tennelle case stood for all of them. Yes, certainly, sometimes, as the detectives said, the cases were what they were—a few casings on the ground and no willing witnesses. But the Tennelle case strongly suggested that many more of these murders were solvable than the dismal clearance rates suggested, the assaults as much as the homicides, and that the Monster Skaggs had been chasing his whole career could be beaten.
It was an evil thing, as the pastor had said. The Monster arose from what was meanest and most vicious in human nature. But the dark swath of misery it had cut across generations of black Americans was a shadow thrown on the wall, a shape magnified many times the size of its source because of a refusal to see the black homicide problem for what it was: a problem of human suffering caused by the absence of a state monopoly on violence.
The Monster’s so
urce was not general perversity of mind in the population that suffered. It was a weak legal apparatus that had long failed to place black injuries and the loss of black lives at the heart of its response when mobilizing the law, first in the South and later in segregated cities. The cases didn’t get solved, and year after year, assaults piled one upon another, black men got shot up and killed, no one answered for it, and no one really cared much.
Starks’s defense attorney Ezekiel Perlo had never heard of John Skaggs before the Tennelle case. He walked out of the courthouse on the last day of his trial career overpowered on every front by the evidence that had been assembled against his client and assuming that Skaggs must have been handpicked from the elite RHD unit to solve this case.
Later, when Perlo found out that that was not so—that Skaggs was a mere divisional detective who had spent his whole career in the backwater unit of Watts and whose name had been unknown to the homicide lieutenant from headquarters—he shook his head in surprise. If the police department had any sense, Skaggs “should be training people,” he said.
And then, without prompting, Perlo made the observation that is the point of this account:
“If all these cases were investigated like Tennelle,” he remarked, “there’d be no unsolved cases.”
Both Starks and Davis were sentenced to life without parole.
Afforded the privilege granted to victims’ families to speak in court, Yadira Tennelle stood up to speak at the sentencing of Devin Davis.
She bade Davis to look at her.
Then she forgave him.
But the signature image of these events was not that of Yadira standing alone and facing Davis, but rather of Wally Tennelle, alone and in tears after the reading of the Starks verdict.
It came after his colleagues had filed out of court in their suits without him. Tennelle, rather too deliberately, lingered behind, congratulated the two prosecutors in his gracious way, then putzed about for a few moments more until the courtroom was nearly empty and the hall outside quiet. The coast clear, Tennelle made his way to the slow, creaking, roaring elevators, rode down, and walked out briskly into the cool, moist afternoon.
A wind was rippling through downtown Los Angeles, and an evening mist was just beginning to drift toward the ground. It was getting late, and small knots of office workers were starting to exit buildings and trickle through the streets on their way home.
As he walked down Spring Street from the Clara Foltz Center in the cool spring air, Tennelle sought to return to business. All signs of his earlier weeping had vanished from his face. Except for a trace of that haunted look, the “homicide eyes” of all the bereaved, he was as matter-of-fact as ever, a professional man of duty, headed back to his counterterrorism training session, one of the many obligations of his job as “a detective for the City of Los Angeles.”
That city, rustled by a wet wind that evening, was incomplete. It was missing a son—for Bryant Tennelle was a native son if there ever was one, a young man who personalized all the city’s best qualities, its beauty, its practical, hardworking, enterprising spirit, its relaxed generosity, its artistic whimsy—the child of a family of municipal workers, half black, half Latino, with the name Los Angeles tattooed on his back. Bryant Tennelle would have been just fine had he made it past the rough adolescent stage in which death took him. There was too much good in him, too much of the sheer force of the Tennelle family wholesomeness in his nature, for any other outcome to be conceivable. He should have been among the movements in the drawing dusk that night—should have been out there somewhere, advancing through his life. The fact that he wasn’t stood as a reproach.
As Wally Tennelle disappeared into a city without Bryant, the gathering clouds and erratic wind had a haunted quality. They seemed to buttress Joyce Cook’s view that there should be no more candles on the streets of L.A., since too many spirits of the murdered lingered there already. Tennelle went back to his job serving a city that did not deserve him—a city that rolled on indifferently, barely seeming to notice all the people missing from the crowd.
And even if, in the future, some of the lessons of Bryant’s death are absorbed and something is learned from the John Skaggs Special that was applied to his case, those people will still be missing. The losses will still be incalculable. We will still be less than we might have been.
“All those innocent people!” Skaggs had lamented. So many of them—it was true. Bryant Tennelle murdered, and so many more. So many black men down.
EPILOGUE
After two prison transfers and a spell in solitary confinement, Derrick Starks ended up for a time at Pelican Bay State Prison near the Oregon border, a spot so remote that even his mother went months without visiting him. The prison lies alongside a desolate, windswept coastal lagoon called Lake Earl, about ten miles northeast of the small town of Crescent City. For anyone used to Los Angeles, it is a cold place. Starks spent days there alone in a cell, looking out at a concrete wall. At the base of the wall, yellow dandelions sprouted. The flowers fascinated Starks. They closed at night, opened in the morning, and turned their faces to the sun throughout the day. How did they do it? An answer came to him: “They’re alive!” His voice was freighted with awe. Starks spent most of his time alone in a cell without roommates because he was considered dangerous. He had been in various scraps and fights in prison. He said he liked to be in the cell alone—liked being in solitary confinement, in fact—because it was better than the alternative. His fellow inmates made for stressful companions. According to prison policy, he was being held in the same area as other Blocc Crips, including some men he had known in the neighborhood. He disliked this. Infighting among fellow gang members held more potential for violence than rivalry between men of different gangs, he remarked. He feared the former more.
Often, he wished he were dead. But then again, he added, glancing up at the gray Northwest sky over the prison yard, he had often wished that when he was still free; life outside had been its own kind of prison. So many neighborhoods he couldn’t go to safely, and no way to escape his gang associations. He had learned to be “down” whether he felt like shooting or not, he said—“You make it look good.” Early on, he said, an older gangster had pressed a gun in his hand and driven home the point with just one word: “Here.” He loved his family’s ancestral home near Baton Rouge. It was peaceful and far from any street violence, but his people there did not accept him. They found him too rough, too gangster, as he put it. He came back.
Starks readily admitted that he had lied on the stand. He said he did so out of desperation. He insisted on his innocence. He said that Devin Davis had committed the murder with Bobby Ray Johnson, “Gutta,” the cousin of the man in the wheelchair, and that Jessica Midkiff was there, too, and that, afterward, his friends had conspired to falsely accuse him. He had been in the ’hood at the time, he said, hanging out, but couldn’t remember what he had been doing. He said he was determined to get out of prison—somehow. He said it several times. “I will get out.” He expressed sympathy for Tennelle in court, though he remembered his name with difficulty. “Wallace?” he asked.
Starks was angry toward Skaggs. But he seemed to bear no ill will toward Phil Stirling, the prosecutor whose work had imprisoned him. He had grown to like Stirling, he admitted.
Devin Davis drew a better card. He ended up serving his life sentence at California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster, the closest prison to L.A. He opted for protective custody in prison, severing his gang ties (a status Starks, too, would later choose), and described his environment as safe and peaceful. Davis had become a Muslim and appeared much healthier in prison than during the trial. He had lost weight and was down to about 160 pounds. He did not complain about prison at all, and he appeared trim, energetic, and relaxed. He said he was taking medication regularly for his various conditions, including bipolar disorder. His eyes still wheeled around, however, and he moved jerkily and spoke quickly. Face-to-face, Davis appeared more agitate
d and unpredictable than Starks, and was much less coherent.
Davis talked of the gang fights he’d been in before prison. He defended his role. “Gotta police ourselves,” he explained. When it was suggested to him that gang members usually do not make very good police, he laughed and agreed. “Yeah, gangs shoot everyone,” he said. “If you’re black.”
Davis, too, denied involvement in the killing, but gave a different account than Starks. He said that Starks, Midkiff, and Bobby Ray Johnson had taken him in the car with them, but that he had not known of their plans and never got out. In one regard, his account harmonized with that of Starks: like Starks, he claimed that Johnson was a fourth in the car, and like him, he claimed that Johnson was the real murderer. Otherwise, their two accounts bore little resemblance. Davis said he had confessed to Skaggs purposefully. He said he had earlier agreed to take the fall for Johnson and thought that, because he was a juvenile, the sentence would be light. But for all that he insisted he was innocent, Davis said he planned no further efforts to seek release. He said he didn’t know what he would do if he got out of prison—didn’t know how he would survive. “It’s okay,” he repeated when pressed. He mentioned the Tennelles. “They lost his life, I lost mine. So it’s okay,” he said.
Skaggs continues to work for the LAPD as a homicide detective and has occasional lunches with Jessica Midkiff, who works full-time and continues to make progress toward her goals, her previous life now behind her. Frustrated with his exile to the Olympic Division, Skaggs made some efforts to get himself transferred back to South Bureau after the Tennelle case concluded. But before he succeeded, he became annoyed at what he considered a deficient administrative structure in his new bureau. It struck him as flawed—not as efficient as it should be, detrimental to certain investigative best practices.