Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

by Michael Connelly

  The suspect, through his attorney, denied having any part in the slaying.

  Judy Kanan, 68, was shot four times by a masked gunman in a raincoat on Jan. 29, 1985, as she followed her daily routine and arrived at a stable at the end of a cul-de-sac on Collins Street. She was there to feed six Arabian horses she owned. The killer gunned her down on the sidewalk and escaped in a stolen car that was later abandoned and set on fire.

  Police said little evidence was left behind at the shooting scene. And while the investigation stalled, the mystery of who killed Judy Kanan deepened.

  The victim was a descendant of the Waring family, which settled Agoura in the 1860s. By the 1980s, Judy Kanan and her older sister, Patricia Kanan, had parlayed inheritances and acquisitions into landholdings in Agoura worth millions of dollars.

  When she was gunned down, police acknowledged there was no shortage of potential suspects and concentrated largely on reviewing her business disputes. The killing prompted one Agoura businessman who was interviewed at the time to say: “You’re going to have half the population of Agoura as suspects. The most hated woman in Agoura got assassinated.”

  In January of this year, as the fifth anniversary of the killing approached, police said they still were no closer to solving the mystery. “I don’t have any idea who killed Judy Kanan,” Detective Phil Quartararo said at the time.

  Court records and police, however, reveal that investigators now believe the slaying was carried out by Michael Kanan and motivated by a financial dispute within the family.

  Shortly after the fifth anniversary of Judy Kanan’s death, a person who knows Michael Kanan came forward with details about the slaying. That person said he had been asked by the suspect to kill Judy Kanan.

  According to court records, the informant told police the slaying centered on a dispute between Judy Kanan and her brother, George Richard Kanan—Michael Kanan’s father—over a $2,600 loan. Coupled with that was the belief George Kanan impressed upon his son that Judy Kanan had unfairly controlled most of the family’s land, the informant said.

  “The informant indicated that George Richard Kanan hated his sister and preached this hatred to his son, Michael . . . ,” the search warrant reads in part. “George Kanan had preached to his son that Judy Kanan had stolen all of his property.”

  According to the court records, the informant said the slaying unfolded this way:

  In 1984, George Kanan signed an agreement to borrow $2,600 from his sister for unknown reasons. But by the end of the year, he believed he was going to default on the loan and thereby lose a large piece of property he owned in Agoura to her.

  “The informant stated that George Kanan was extremely upset Judy Kanan made him sign the agreement,” according to the search warrant.

  “Shortly after the loan was made, Michael Kanan approached the informant with a plan to kill Judy Kanan. . . . Michael Kanan had originally planned to kill both Judy and her sister, Pat, at their Agoura restaurant and had planned to make it look like a robbery. The plan was later changed to kill only Judy and it was to be done at the corrals where she went daily to feed her horses,” the warrant stated.

  The informant said that a few weeks before the killing, Michael Kanan showed him a handgun that would be used to kill Judy Kanan. Police and the informant believe the gun was stolen during a burglary of a car parked near Balboa Park in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. But neither the gun nor its owner has been found.

  The informant told police that in mid-January 1985 he stole a car and parked it near the stable where Judy Kanan’s horses were kept. The car was to be used as a getaway car after the killing, but the car was noticed by police Jan. 25 and impounded.

  The informant said he believed the plan would not go any further, but four days later he said he was shocked when he saw a news report on television about the slaying of Judy Kanan.

  “. . . it was done in the same manner as previously planned,” the search warrant reads. “Shortly after watching the newscast, the informant confronted Michael Kanan, who admitted to him that he had committed the murder. . . . The informant believes that Michael Kanan committed the murder because he sensed that the informant would not be able to go through with the plan.”

  Quartararo, who has been assigned to the case since its start, said Michael Kanan was questioned along with other family members in the early stages of the case, but “we never narrowed in on him.”

  About a year after the slaying, Michael Kanan became a fugitive when he jumped bail after his arrest for a commercial burglary in Van Nuys, police said. He wasn’t arrested until last month in Burbank and now is being held in the county jail without bail.

  William H. Schultz, an attorney representing Michael Kanan, denied that his client had any involvement in the Kanan slaying.

  “The charges are groundless and illogical,” Schultz said. He declined further comment.

  George Richard Kanan could not be located for comment.

  Police are confident of the informant’s story because he has furnished details about the crime that were never made public. They declined to identify him as a safety precaution.

  Acting on the informant’s story, police earlier this month searched a rental storage unit in Chatsworth used by Michael Kanan. A raincoat and gloves were found, but detectives did not find the gun.

  Meantime, Quartararo said he has corroborated some of the informant’s story, finding legal documents relating to the $2,600 loan and confirming that a stolen car was impounded by police on the Collins Street cul-de-sac four days before Judy Kanan was shot there.

  Before seeking charges against the suspect, police said they must also corroborate the informant’s version of where the gun used in the slaying came from. Because Michael Kanan was once arrested for attempting to burglarize a car near the Balboa Golf Course in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, police believe the weapon might have come from a similar burglary in that area.

  Quartararo said he has been searching through reports on crimes in the sprawling park area for the months prior to the killing but has not found a report containing a stolen gun. He asked that anyone who might have had a handgun stolen while in the park area in late 1984 or early 1985 contact police. He cited a $50,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Kanan slaying.

  “We do need to corroborate this part of the story,” Quartararo said. “If we can establish that the gun came from a car in that area as the informant said, the district attorney’s office will file the case” without having the actual weapon used in the slaying in evidence.

  CHARGES WILL NOT BE FILED IN KANAN CASE

  March 21, 1991

  Prosecutors have decided not to file charges against a man suspected in the highly publicized slaying six years ago of his aunt, a wealthy landowner and descendant of a pioneer Agoura family. However, Los Angeles police continue to identify him as the prime suspect.

  After a lengthy review by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, prosecutors decided there was insufficient evidence to charge Michael Kanan, 34, with the murder of Judy Kanan, said Sandi Gibbons, spokeswoman for the prosecutors’ office.

  Michael Kanan, through his attorney, has in the past denied any part in the killing.

  Judy Kanan, 68, a descendant of the family that settled Agoura in the 1860s, was shot four times by a masked gunman in a raincoat who approached her as she arrived at a Woodland Hills stable on Jan. 29, 1985, to feed horses she kept there.

  The killer escaped and no arrests were made. Early last year, an informant who said he was troubled by feelings of guilt contacted police and identified Michael Kanan, son of the victim’s brother, as the gunman.

  According to court records, the informant said the slaying was motivated by long-simmering family tensions brought to a head by a dispute over a $2,600 loan from Judy Kanan to Michael Kanan’s father, George Richard Kanan.

  Detectives felt no need to arrest Michael Kanan because he was already in jail for violating probatio
n terms on an unrelated burglary conviction. He is now serving a two-year prison term for the probation violation.

  After corroborating parts of the informant’s story of how the murder took place, detectives seeking a murder charge submitted the case to the district attorney late last year.

  Gibbons declined to reveal why the case was rejected, saying the investigation is continuing.

  The investigators on the case did not dispute the district attorney’s decision not to file charges.

  “It was a close call,” Lt. William Gaida said, and Michael Kanan “remains the primary suspect. We need to get additional information or evidence. We consider the informant to be reliable and we are convinced we are looking in the right direction.”

  According to court records filed during the investigation, Michael Kanan had once asked the informant to help him kill Judy Kanan, suggesting a plan that was similar to the way the actual killing occurred.

  The informant, according to the court records, said the slaying was later carried out without his involvement, and afterward Michael Kanan told him, “It’s a real trip to see something you are responsible for. . . . The bitch got what she deserved.”

  The informant also told investigators of a storage locker Michael Kanan used where police then seized a raincoat and gloves officers believe were worn during the killing.

  However, police conceded that the informant’s credibility could be questioned by a jury if the case were brought to trial now because some of the details of the crime he gave police could not be corroborated by investigators.

  The gun used in the slaying has never been found. A key part of the informant’s story was that Michael Kanan stole the gun from a car parked by a jogger in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, said Detective Phil Quartararo.

  Quartararo reviewed reports of hundreds of crimes in that area in the months before the killing without discovering one involving such a theft, he said.

  Quartararo, who has been assigned to the killing from the beginning, said he has no plans to drop the case, but the investigation has gone “as far as we may be able to go unless somebody else comes forward.”

  NOTE: Five years after prosecutors decided not to file charges against Michael Kanan, he engaged police in an armed standoff at his mother’s San Fernando Valley home. He shot and killed a dog and a horse and then fired several shots at arriving police officers. No officers were injured. After a two-hour standoff, Kanan killed himself by shooting himself in the head. He died without ever admitting he had been Judy Kanan’s killer. Police later revealed that the informant who in 1990 pointed the finger at Michael Kanan in his aunt’s death had been his own brother.

  HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE

  ‘COTTON CLUB’ CASE LED TO ARREST IN ’84 SLAYING OF PROSTITUTE

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  June 25, 1989

  FIVE YEARS AGO, June Mincher, a 245-pound prostitute with a lavender Rolls-Royce, was shot to death on a Van Nuys sidewalk by a swift and efficient killer, setting off an investigation that unearthed a bizarre cast of characters and seamy tales, but convicted no one.

  This month some of the mystery appears to be unraveling in a court hearing into another killing a world away—the world of the “Cotton Club” slaying with its Hollywood celebrities and high-finance film and cocaine deals.

  Testimony in the Cotton Club hearing, and related documents filed with the court, contain accusations that both slayings were carried out by some of the same hired killers, who boasted of their work to an informant wearing a tape recorder for investigators.

  The question of who might have hired them to kill Mincher is still open, but at least one document filed with the court quotes an informant as saying that it was the grandmother of the man who had been acquitted of the killing. An attorney for the woman, a Beverly Hills investment executive, denied the accusation. Police say they are still investigating and will not comment.

  Mincher, who billed herself in local sex-oriented publications as a “Sexy Black & Indian Goddess” with a 56-inch bust, was shot to death May 3, 1984. Two years later, Gregory Alan Cavalli, a 24-year-old body builder from a prominent Beverly Hills family, was charged with her murder. Authorities said he drove the getaway car after a hit man killed Mincher.

  But at Cavalli’s trial, prosecutors could not produce or even name the hit man. And the chief witnesses against Cavalli included a former cocaine addict, a transsexual performer in pornographic films and a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered after her son killed her mother.

  Fast Vote for Acquittal

  At the end of a three-week trial in 1986, Cavalli walked out of the Van Nuys Courthouse a free man. It took a jury less than an hour to find him not guilty.

  But now, three years later, the Mincher murder case begins a new chapter.

  Authorities have charged two men with killing Mincher, identifying them as bodyguards who formerly worked for a security firm that the Cavalli family had hired. Detectives now say Cavalli was not the getaway driver and was not even present the night of the killing.

  The question of who ordered Mincher’s killing remains, but authorities say Cavalli is not a target of the investigation because he can’t be tried for the same crime twice.

  “Never,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Ed Entwisle. “He has been tried and that is it.”

  Investigators will not discuss whom they consider suspects. But in a summary of the investigation filed with Los Angeles Superior Court, in connection with the Cotton Club case, the key informant in the case is quoted as telling officers that one of the suspects told him that Mincher “had been bothering a wealthy Italian family and the grandmother contracted the ‘hit.’”

  Attorney Mitchell W. Egers, who represents the Cavalli family, identified “grandmother” as a reference to Mary Bowles, a partner in the Beverly Hills real-estate investment firm of Bowles & Associates. “There is no other grandmother . . . with a part in this case,” he said, denying that anyone in the family had anything to do with the Mincher killing.

  “It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s absolutely impossible,” Egers said. “It is beyond my conception that anybody in the Cavalli family would have anything to do with anything illegal, let alone a murder. They are gentle, refined people with an excellent reputation.”

  New Leads Uncovered

  New leads in the Mincher case emerged almost by accident in the last two years during the lengthy Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigation of the slaying of would-be movie producer Roy Radin.

  William Molony Mentzer, 39, of Canoga Park and Robert Ulmer Lowe, 42, of Rockville, Md., two of the alleged hit men arrested in Radin’s 1983 slaying, have also been charged with killing Mincher in 1984.

  Mentzer has pleaded not guilty, and Lowe is fighting extradition from Maryland.

  A preliminary hearing is under way in Los Angeles Superior Court into the slaying of Radin, which was dubbed the Cotton Club case because Radin was killed during a financial dispute over the making of the movie of that name.

  Although the Mincher murder is involved in the hearing, it has been overshadowed by the headline-grabbing testimony in the Radin killing, which has involved cocaine deals, limousines and accusations involving movie producer Robert Evans.

  But investigative records filed with the court and the statements of prosecutors and detectives about the Mincher case weave a portrait of an investigation that was started and stopped two different times before the present inquiry began.

  According to stories told by friends and associates at the time of her death, June Mincher, 29, parlayed advertisements in underground newspapers offering sexual services into a lucrative lifestyle. Friends told investigators that she had spent at least $20,000 on cosmetic surgery to alter her face and hips and enlarge her bust. She drove a lavender Rolls-Royce and carried as much as $12,000 in a case beneath her wig.

  In the summer of 1983, according to testimony at Cavalli’s trial, Cavalli began calling Mincher after seeing her ad in
an underground newspaper. The telephone relationship lasted several months, with the two talking for several hours on some days. Cavalli wanted to meet Mincher but she declined. Finally, he went to her West Hollywood apartment and broke down the door.

  Cavalli discovered that Mincher weighed 60 or 70 pounds more than she appeared to in the picture in her advertisement, and he ended the relationship.

  Angered by the rejection, Mincher then began to harass Cavalli; his father, Richard Cavalli; and other relatives, including Bowles, with repeated threatening phone calls. Mincher was suspected by authorities of firebombing Greg Cavalli’s car in late 1983 and setting fire to his father’s military-surplus store in Santa Monica in 1984.

  The Cavalli family spent $200,000 on private security guards to protect them from Mincher, according to trial testimony, and Gregory Cavalli moved to Phoenix to get away from her.

  On May 3, 1984, Mincher had just left an apartment in the 6800 block of Sepulveda Boulevard with a friend when she was shot seven times in the head. She died instantly. The friend was shot in the chest but survived. The gunman ran to a waiting car, which sped away.

  Los Angeles police began investigating Cavalli’s possible involvement in the slaying within three hours of the shooting, according to court records. Though two witnesses identified Cavalli as the driver of the getaway car, investigators could not identify the gunman. The investigation stalled and was shelved two months later.

  As is routine with unsolved killings, the case was reopened by two new investigators the following year. According to police records, they immediately focused on the more than six bodyguards who had been provided to the Cavalli family by a Studio City firm, A. Michael Pascal & Associates. The detectives got the names but could not locate and interview all of the men because they had left Pascal.