Breaking Rank
Page 7
“We’ve thrown a lot at you,” said Michaels when he finished tracing events, personal bios, rap sheets, relationships. Links. “It’s got to be a little mind-boggling. Do you have any questions at this point?” Everyone in the room was poised to hear the interloper’s reaction to what they’d been secretly working on for years.
“Yeah. You’re talking about a man I used to work for, another I’m now working for. What makes you think I’m not ‘tight’ with them?”
“We’ve checked,” said Michaels. “You’ve got a reputation for putting integrity first.” I wasn’t flattered.
Miller said, “You can see why we’re careful to keep this information absolutely confidential.” I understood, but what did they want from me? Miller answered before I could ask. “We need more investigators from the PD, Norm. We figured if you knew why they’re needed you’d be more willing to cough them up.”
“What kind of people, Internal Affairs?” It had occurred to me that the task force had become hopelessly entangled in the “misconduct” cases, with their real or imagined “linkages.” This would account for the lack of tangible progress in solving the serial murders. Burgreen and I had discussed the subject several times. My deputy chiefs were agitating to take our guys out of Mission Valley. They wanted them back in Homicide and Vice. Now it was clear: several of the task force cops, under-equipped by training and experience, had wound up handling high-level Internal Affairs cases—at the expense of the prostitute murder cases.
Michaels answered. “Well, IA types would help. And we do need more detectives to work the homicides.”
“Let me think about it.” I was responsible for allocating and distributing cops throughout the department. I needed a lot more information about the structure and operating methods of the task force to even consider adding more people at that point.
Sitting in the corner this whole time was Bonnie Dumanis, a deputy DA who, I learned that morning, was preparing to take over the day-to-day lead from Michaels (who would soon be presenting information from Chart No. 2 to the county grand jury—either as criminal matters or in keeping with the grand jury’s role in California as protector of “good government”). Dumanis approached me as soon as the meeting adjourned. “Let’s go to lunch.”
“Well, I’m really . . .”
“We have to talk. Today. Before you make any decisions.”
We took separate cars, met at a downtown restaurant. “The guys may trust you,” she said, as soon as the waiter walked off with our order. “But I don’t. Not as far as I can toss you.”
“Why not?” As the PD’s second in command, I wasn’t used to being addressed so bluntly.
“Because I don’t know you. Simple as that. You’ve got to earn my trust.”
As soon as I got back to my office I called Miller. “I can’t justify adding a single body until I’m satisfied the task force is properly and efficiently organized. And staffed with the right people. I just don’t have that feeling at the moment.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. I’ve got similar concerns.”
“How about I go down there, spend some time looking at the operation?” We were being eaten alive in the press. We had to get to the bottom of things, find out whether our cops were killing hookers. And whether police officials, past or present, were involved in shady practices. “I’ll read the cases, interview the detectives, your lawyers, see what kind of changes are needed.” I especially wanted to talk with Chuck Rogers, who was by then a municipal court judge. As a deputy DA he’d preceded Michaels on the task force.
“Sounds like a plan,” said Miller. I pictured Dumanis, smiled at her reaction to my presence in the thick of her task force’s clandestine operations.
“Good. But I need to talk to Burgreen. Today, Ed. Right now.” It was absurd that his name was on that chart. “Unless you have an official objection, I’m going to tell him everything. Everything.”
He paused. “Yeah, do it. Please do.”
The afternoon of the day I’d been instructed to talk to no one about my visit to Mission Valley, “not even Bobby,” I walked into Burgreen’s office and talked. If it had been me on the receiving end of the news I would have been apoplectic. But if my boss was the slightest bit upset, he didn’t let on. He blessed my “management audit” of the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force.
Within a week, I’d interviewed about a quarter of the task force personnel, and had read through maybe a tenth of the case files. This initial examination confirmed that the task force was indeed poorly organized, especially in light of its “mission creep” into official misconduct, and badly understaffed.
We made a decision to call on the attorney general for help with the “misconduct” cases, effectively taking them out of the hands of local government. California’s AG dispatched a crackerjack attorney, Gary Schons, to oversee these investigations—including any bleed-over onto Chart No. 1.
Next, we needed to select additional bona fide homicide pros to complement those already working the serial killings. I interviewed a dozen or so current and former members of SDPD Homicide, including some aces who had retired in recent years. Known for their expertise in scene reconstruction, forensic trace-evidence (especially blood, DNA, and fibers), suspect interrogation, and analytical reasoning, these experts provided names of individuals who’d be able to help our overworked charges in Mission Valley. In vetting potential new members, I realized that a couple of the experts I had consulted would, themselves, make excellent additions to the task force, even though they were now ranking officers. I assigned them to detective work. A total of six new people.
At that point in the investigation we were pretty sure we had several, separate series. The most common modus operandi: Suspects would hook up with a prostitute on El Cajon Boulevard, a six-lane artery stretching from north of Balboa Park east to the La Mesa city limits. They’d drive their unsuspecting prey to an outlying area, have sex, or not, strangle them to death (the most common method of prostitute killings), then dump their bodies in the mountains or foothills of East County.
It was the case of Donna Gentile, seven years earlier, that had aroused suspicions of police officer involvement. Gentile, an attractive, well-spoken twenty-two-year-old who worked the Boulevard, had spoken to the press in 1985. Her picture had appeared on the front page of the newspaper, she’d been interviewed on TV. Michaels had presented her to the grand jury where she testified that certain vice cops and patrol officers were “overly friendly” with several of the “girls,” and that some of them had extorted prostitutes for sex. At least one of those prostitutes had turned up dead, and another had gone missing.
With an internal investigation of Gentile’s assertions underway, a nude body was found at dawn, June 23, 1985, just off the Sunrise Highway east of Pine Valley. The victim had been beaten and strangled. Pea gravel had been shoved down her throat while she was still alive (her lungs contained aspirated gravel). A warning, perhaps by a police officer to other prostitutes to keep their mouths shut? The body was that of Donna Gentile.
Even though cops were eventually cleared of that murder, several officers, the result of IA findings, had been disciplined or constructively terminated (meaning they quit before they could be fired) for “inappropriate” behavior with prostitutes. Still, the original task force members couldn’t shake the feeling that police officers might be involved in other cases. Murder cases.
It was not an unreasonable assumption, given the rabid anti-prostitute attitudes of a few twisted cops.
I’ve heard some police officers refer to prostitute slayings (or to the slayings of blacks) as “misdemeanor murders,” employing an unofficial code for them: NHI, no humans involved.
“Sex workers,” as many in the trade prefer to be called, are vilified, stigmatized, and written off. They’re immoral. They engage in sinful, illegal activity. They have no self-esteem, no self-discipline. They don’t really “work,” yet they haul in tax-free dollars. They’re dirty.
They use drugs (wouldn’t you?).
Dehumanizing or demonizing sex workers makes it easier to ignore them when they go missing or are found dead. I wonder how these officers of the law would respond to the murders of forty teachers? Forty homemakers? Forty ER nurses?
Judge Rogers told me in his chambers that the original task force members felt their own PD “just didn’t care about the deaths of hookers.” Kolender had been chief when Ed Miller approached him with a proposal to put together the prostitute-killer task force. (It was, in fact, the DA who first discerned, or at least acted upon, a pattern of serial homicides in our city.) Kolender, urged by his deputy chiefs to reject Miller’s proposal, stalled the DA for some time.* When he finally agreed to assign people, he limited the commitment to the four detectives.
I spent two months in the hermetically sealed headquarters of the task force. Not once did I hear an “NHI” reference or an anti—sex worker sentiment. These officers genuinely cared about the victims, and their anguished friends and family members. From conversations with true crime writer Ann Rule, the same can be said for those detectives who worked the Green River killings. (Rule’s book on the subject, Green River, Running Red [2004] has been praised, aptly so, for rendering the stories of each and every one of Gary Ridgway’s known victims with respect and sensitivity.)
Whatever might have been their original motives and attitudes, the detectives had developed extraordinary empathy and compassion for “their” victims. To watch those detectives at work in Mission Valley was to conclude that Donna Gentile might just as well have been a wife, a sister, a daughter. Catching her killer, and the murderers of the other victims, had become an obsession.
Society at large should feel such concern.
Task force members determined that Ronald Elliot Porter, ex-Marine and Escondido automobile mechanic, killed Donna Gentile. Although convicted of a single second-degree murder charge (and serving twenty-seven to life), fibers, blood samples, and witnesses linked Porter to as many as fourteen additional cases.
This development, the fingering of Porter, astonished a lot of people—especially when it was learned that Gentile had been in the employ of Karen Wilkening. In fact, she had gone to one of Don Dixon’s three-day blowouts in Del Mar—and had returned to the Boulevard only one day before her death.
Brian Maurice Jones was tied to four prostitute killings, and sentenced to death on two of them.
Richard Allen Sanders was posthumously tied to several of the other cases. And fourteen more suspects were arrested in ten additional cases.
Schons, with help from SDPD personnel, cleared all police officers of any involvement in the deaths or disappearances of sex workers. Almost as important to me, personally, was that Bill Kolender was cleared completely of any wrongdoing. Today, he’s the sheriff of San Diego County. And Bonnie Dumanis, deeply devoted to safe streets and justice for all, is the new district attorney.
I’d never worked vice, and had made only a handful of prostitution arrests. But I’d hassled large numbers of hookers, pimps, and johns during my days as a rookie beat cop—most of them right there on the Boulevard. I knew that prostitution was common, that it was frustrating and infuriating to homeowners and businesspeople, and to church and school and park officials. But with my task force involvement, I got a much broader and deeper education into the habits, patterns, and complexities associated with street prostitution.
The experience deepened my conviction that prostitution, like drug use, should be decriminalized.
For years, I’d predicated my decriminalization argument on familiar grounds: oldest occupation, still around, always will be . . . consenting adults . . . government out of the bedroom . . . the right of adult women to make a living of their choice . . .
I’d also argued, though with less confidence (and no empirical data), that prostitution was a “healthy outlet” for potentially violent men. Not the Gary Ridgways of the world, of course. But “normal” men, unlucky in love, possessed of a normal sex drive but unable to attract women without paying for them. I figured prostitution might serve to reduce the incidence of rape and other sexual assaults among these men. Now, I’m not so sure. The task force revealed that some of the suspects, having had their performance or their equipment ridiculed, responded by murdering the woman.
But rather than outlawing a risky form of commerce that will always find a way to operate, I believe we have a moral imperative to do everything we can to make prostitution as safe as possible. Serial murder expert Robert Keppel has established that true serial killers keep killing until they’re caught, or they die.
“Morality” seems to be the biggest sticking point between “harm reduction” public policy on the one hand, and a reckless disregard for the safety of sex industry workers (and their clients, for that matter) on the other. The issue is fraught with contradictions and controversy. Many of the arguments against decriminalization are compelling:
•Prostitution, as it’s commonly (but by no means exclusively) framed, i.e., males buying sex from females, is degrading and demeaning to women.
•Beyond the most talked about health risks—violence, HIV, and other STDs—women who engage in high-volume vaginal sex risk major structural damage to their sexual and other organs.
•Many women don’t choose prostitution so much as have it chosen for them.
•While many prostitutes don’t work for pimps, those who do are exploited and otherwise mistreated, physically, emotionally, financially.
•Significant numbers of young girls, including the occasional preteen, find their way into the trade.
Research findings are mixed. Sweden, for example, “recriminalized” prostitution in 1999, largely on political and social, not scientific grounds. Its parliament, which has reached gender parity and is committed to ending patriarchal domination of Swedish life, has officially defined prostitution as “violence against women and children.” The new law allows for the selling but not the buying or the attempted purchase of sex. Men who get, or offer to get, sex for money can be fined between one and two thousand (American) dollars or jailed for up to six months. A prostitute who provides sex is guilty of no crime. As the Swedes conceive it, the law is designed to tip the scales of gender power, to reverse the age-old pattern of penalizing women who have been forced into or otherwise victimized by the occupation of prostitution.
How is the Swedish model working? If there’s a research-based answer I haven’t found it. What we do know is that very few arrests have been made under the law since it became effective on January 1, 1999. Further, there is evidence that while street prostitution has been reduced significantly (in Stockholm the numbers of street hookers have gone from three hundred to one hundred) there’s been a dramatic increase in apartment and hotel room coupling for dollars. Still, illegal. For the man.
Other countries, such as England, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, have decriminalized indoor prostitution, citing the safety of sex workers as the primary reason. In Canada, it remains illegal to engage, on either end of the transaction, in street prostitution. It is also unlawful to operate a “bawdy house.” But a sex worker may legally provide sex for money in a private dwelling.
Trading street for indoor prostitution does not answer the moral or political objections of sex industry opponents. Nor does it mean that sex workers are completely safe from misogynists or sociopaths. But when one considers the M.O. of serial killers like Pickton, Armstrong, Yates, Ridgway, and many others, each of whom abducted his victims from the streets, sex in a room offers far greater safety for sex workers.
One approach for lawmakers: decriminalize home, apartment, and hotel room prostitution. License and tax third-party owners and managers (aka pimps and madams), as well as sex workers. Collect business and license fees, using the revenue to offset the costs of (1) inspection and enforcement, (2) health examinations for all sex workers, and (3) outreach services to assist those who want to leave the trade, or to resist pandering (the enc
ouragement of another to become a prostitute) in the first place. And maintain laws against soliciting or purchasing sex on the streets.
It’s not as if we don’t know how a transition from streets to indoor prostitution would work. It’s all around us. Do you have an alternative weekly newspaper? Check its last pages. Scantily clad women (and more than a few men in G-strings) offering themselves, body and, well, body—for a price. And don’t think sex for dollars is not going on in all those adult nightclubs. As the new chief in town, I dressed in my grubbies one night, pulled a baseball cap down low, and accompanied one of my Seattle vice cops into a neighborhood club that featured table dancing (more aptly called chair humping). My partner bought a dance and demonstrated the “challenges” of proper law enforcement. A moment later another dancer approached a patron (client?) seated next to me. Three dances later he zipped up, then lit up, and she ambled over to the next guy, sixty bucks richer.
Making indoor sex-for-sale legal would not eliminate street prostitution. But fewer kids would show up for show-and-tell with semen-filled rubbers. And far fewer of America’s sisters and daughters would be beaten, abducted, murdered.
* I was one of those foot-dragging deputy chiefs, assigned at the time to Field Ops. My argument? Officer safety. We were severely understaffed in patrol, being “nickled and dimed” by Investigations: If four detectives went off to some nebulous task force, I’d have to give up four patrol cops to replace them. I regret my initial opposition to the DA’s proposal. In fact, I’m ashamed of it.
CHAPTER 4
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: THE COWARD’S WAY OUT