Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

by Michael Connelly

  From there he moved deeper into a life of drug use and thievery. He was kicked out of Hallandale High School for dealing the drug THC in the bathrooms. He was arrested selling Quaaludes to an undercover cop.

  Incarceration may have been the best thing for Schroeder, but he avoided prison and always won the second chance. That changed in 1981 when, at 17, he was sent as an adult to DeSoto Correctional Institute for burglary. In prison, he finished high school, took carpentry classes, got his tattoos, temporarily ended his addiction to drugs and, most of all, waited for his release. That came in late 1984 and he returned to his old neighborhood.

  Schroeder says he stayed clean for more than a year, working first as a gas station attendant and then using his prison-learned skills as a carpenter. When he was tempted by the old life of drugs and thievery he would carefully unfold the prison release papers he kept in his wallet.

  “Every time I was slipping I would look at my papers,” he says. “I didn’t want to go back. I looked at them and said I’d earned my freedom and paid my debt.”

  But by the end of 1985, Billy Schroeder had misplaced his papers and he started slipping. And one night a friend came by his apartment and introduced him to cocaine in the form called crack. Within 24 hours of smoking his first rock, all that Schroeder had learned was gone. So was his TV and stereo and living room furniture, all traded for crack. A week later the job was gone, too. Urges controlled Billy Schroeder again. His first break-in was into the house next door.

  Schroeder quickly became re-addicted to both drugs and burglary. The two were the all-consuming parts of his life. He could not have one without the other. He began cruising the neighborhoods of South Broward wearing a phony Florida Power & Light shirt and carrying a screwdriver.

  ON EASTER SUNDAY 1986 Gladys Jones became one of Billy Schroeder’s statistics. The revelation came to her like a cold finger running down her spine when she opened the front door of the home where she lived alone near Hollywood. Immediately she saw the doors of the dining room buffet standing open and its contents spilled on the floor. She turned to the left and saw the empty shelf in the living room, the TV gone.

  She knew right away what had happened. It came to her with the weakness in her knees and the catch in her breath. Gladys, who is in her 60s and asked that her real name not be used, turned and ran.

  It was two hours before she returned. That was after the police searchers had come and gone, the K-9 dog had come and gone, and her son-in-law had even searched the house. Gladys walked unsteadily into her home to learn what the invader had taken. She found that the floors were covered with things apparently considered by the burglar and then discarded. The jewelry boxes were dumped on the bed, Gladys’ underwear drawer had been rifled, and the Easter basket for her granddaughter was turned over on the kitchen floor.

  About halfway through this sad inventory she realized that mostly it was her peace of mind that had been taken. She asked her daughter to stay with her. She couldn’t sleep alone in the house.

  BROWARD COUNTY Sheriff’s Investigator Bill Cloud has worked burglary cases for nine years. His experience has taught him two constants: That nowadays almost all burglars break into homes to get money for drugs, and that drug-fueled burglars do very careless work—to the point of hitting homes in their own neighborhoods before moving on to other areas.

  When in early 1986 Cloud began getting a number of similar Lake Forest burglary cases dropped on his desk, he figured he had one burglar out there hitting homes at a fast pace. So he took to the neighborhood streets and culled a list of suspects’ names from the steady cast of informants he maintains.

  One of the names was Billy Schroeder’s. Cloud ran it through the crime computer and learned of Schroeder’s rap sheet. He then asked the Sheriff’s Office crime lab for a “zone run,” a comparison between Schroeder’s fingerprints and those found at burglaries in the patrol zone that included Lake Forest. It was a request that would take weeks because of the backlog of requests to the crime lab. While he was waiting, Cloud distributed fliers bearing Billy Schroeder’s 1983 mug shot to deputies and South Broward police departments. And he went out looking.

  BILLY SCHROEDER worked enviable hours, usually less than five hours a day. He worked when he had to, when the cocaine ran low and his body’s craving for it ran high. He would put on the FPL shirt and cap that he had had made at a flea market T-shirt concession, and clip a can of Mace to his belt. The getup made him a meter reader. He would drive a borrowed car through neighborhoods before and after lunch—9 to 11 and 2 to 4—the best times of finding empty homes. After spotting a target house he would just knock on the front door.

  If somebody answered, Schroeder was ready with a variety of lines and would then move on. But if the knock went unanswered, he’d go around back—a meter reader doing his job—and break in after checking for alarm systems. With his screwdriver he was an expert at breaking locks and windowpanes, removing jalousie windows. He knew how to pop a sliding glass door in just the way that it would crumble into a pile of glass dust without noise enough to alert a neighbor.

  Once inside, first to consider was the refrigerator, full of all the food he had neglected while binging on crack. After a snack, he’d grab a bag or a pillowcase, and then there were all those drawers and cabinets and hiding places to find. It was a quick operation: 10, maybe 15 minutes max. Cash and jewelry, guns if there were any, and on the way out he’d grab the big stuff, a TV or a VCR or both, the hot trade items in the crack houses of South Florida. “I didn’t care about being seen by neighbors or anybody,” he says. One time he broke in the front door of a home while a woman was watering flowers across the street. He just ran when she yelled. Once while driving through Miramar he saw a lighted Christmas tree through the front window of a house. He backed his car up, broke through the front window and loaded his car with gifts from beneath the tree, going back three times for more.

  AFTER EVERY DAY of burglary, Billy headed to the crack houses west of Hollywood to trade his goods. The drug peddlers who worked the perimeters of the houses called him the “gold man” because of the jewelry he always had for trade. On a good day, he’d have loot from four or five homes.

  Schroeder kept nothing he stole, turned everything into crack and the cash he needed to pay for the hotel rooms where he binged on cocaine, crashed and hid. Detective Cloud estimates that if Schroeder stole $2 million in merchandise, his return was not much better than a dime on the dollar: a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cash and drugs.

  “Almost every single day I was robbing another family,” Schroeder says. “It started with one burglary a day to support my habit for the day. I needed $200. Then it got to be $300 and I had to rob two houses. Then it got to be $500 a day and four houses and on and on from there.

  “It got to be a game. I didn’t care about anything else. I would drive down a street and decide, Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, that’s the house I’m going to do.

  “I was living for my drug. It was my life, my future. I spent every penny I had on it.

  “And I was scared. I figured the cops were looking for me because of my prints so I was living in hotels, moving almost every day. I never came out except to rob another house or get drugs. I would stay in the room behind a chain, a deadbolt and a desk pushed up against the door.”

  THE ZONE RUN with Billy Schroeder’s fingerprints that Detective Cloud had asked for came back with several positive IDs. Cloud asked the State Attorney’s Office for a felony warrant, a request that would take several weeks to go through the legal morass. Still, Cloud was now sure who his man was. He just had to find him.

  Meanwhile, detectives in other departments—Hollywood, Hallandale, Miramar and North Miami—were learning that Schroeder was an increasingly active break-in artist.

  “It got so that I could just pick up a burglary report and be able to tell Billy had been there,” says Hallandale Detective Dermot Mangan. “When it was a daytime job with the place ransacked and food eate
n, it was usually him.

  “We were all looking for him,” recalls Cloud. “I once got word that he was going to a certain store to cash a check. I waited in there and when he saw a man in a jacket and tie he ran. He was so paranoid, anybody in a suit was a cop. That time he just happened to be right. We kept just missing him like that. At the motels, on the streets. Sometimes by minutes. It became a mission to get him.”

  GLADYS JONES spent the time after the burglary arranging for new lights to be placed outside her home, having the bushes cut away from the windows, putting steel mesh screens over every window.

  “I hate it,” she says. “The house looks awful and it makes me feel like I’m the prisoner when I’m the victim. I’m still afraid to be here by myself.”

  One night long after the burglary, Gladys was dressing for an evening out when she reached into her jewelry box for a certain gold necklace. It was gone, one of the belongings she hadn’t noticed missing after the burglary. The discovery brought the whole thing, the intrusion, the loss, the anger, all back down on her. Most of all it rekindled the fear.

  Gladys started counting the days left until her retirement from her office job in two years. That would be when she would put her house up for sale and move away from South Florida. But, still, at night, she would lie awake in bed and listen. . . . She would return from outings, unlock the door, stand there and listen. . . .

  Often when home alone, she found herself asking, did I just hear a noise out there or is it my imagination? The legacy of fear that Billy Schroeder left behind will remain with her always, she says.

  Billy Schroeder could have gotten away. On one job, in North Dade, he hit the jackpot—a pile of jewelry that he converted to bags of cash and crack.

  “I ended up with $20,000 cash in my hands,” he recalls. “I said to my girlfriend, ‘Let’s get out of here. I have the money now, let’s go to a rehab center and get off this.’”

  They decided on New Jersey, even got the airline tickets. But on the way to the airport, Billy and his girlfriend went to a friend’s house to say good-bye. And they celebrated the good-bye with one more rock. Within a few hours Billy checked into a Hilton suite with a bag full of rocks. Within days the jackpot money was gone.

  Schroeder wouldn’t get another chance to get away. His habit was growing and costing him close to $1,000 a day. He was breaking into more homes each day and the risks were getting greater while he was getting sloppier. He even stopped wearing his phony FPL uniform.

  On Feb. 26, 1987, Davie Police got a call about a possible burglary in process. Officers went to the home and saw an open window, and a screen leaning against the outside wall. The screen was the giveaway. A few minutes later the cops entered the house and found a burglar hiding in a bathroom shower stall. He said his name was William Burns.

  As the Davie officers were booking the burglar into the county jail, a sheriff’s deputy booking his own prisoner looked over at Burns and recognized him as the man on the wanted fliers Detective Cloud had been circulating for almost a year.

  “You’re not William Burns,” the deputy said, and the long crime spree of Billy Schroeder was over.

  THE COPS who wanted to speak to Schroeder had to take turns. It took two days for the elusive burglar to come out of his cocaine intoxication and figure out he was in jail, but when he did, he considered his lot—the fingerprints, the evidence, his past record—and simply said, “Let’s go. I want it behind me.”

  Schroeder sat handcuffed and shackled in the backseats of several detectives’ cars as they drove through neighborhoods of South Florida. It took him three weeks to go over the territory, pointing out the houses he remembered being in. The detectives matched Schroeder’s recollections against their own burglary reports. All told, Cloud says they cleared close to 350 burglaries. And there are perhaps dozens of others Schroeder can’t remember.

  Of the millions of dollars in property that Schroeder stole, nothing was recovered. “It’s gone forever,” Cloud says.

  Schroeder was charged with 13 burglaries. (It would take years to prosecute him if he were charged in all his burglaries.) On May 21, he tearfully pleaded guilty to the charges in a plea agreement that could leave him facing as many as 20 years in prison.

  “I want to get this behind me,” he told the judge. “I have to look to the future.”

  While waiting for that future, he has been kept in the east wing of the North Broward Detention Complex, home to all inmates undergoing drug counseling and detoxification. Schroeder takes part in the jail’s “New Life” programs, works in the laundry and volunteers to speak to visiting groups of teenagers about the dangers of drugs.

  He seems resigned to a lengthy stint in prison. And he seems genuinely repentant. Still, he can only gain by this contrition and therefore his sincerity is open to question.

  But he cries when he talks about the time more than a year ago that he smoked that first rock. And he cries when he talks about the families he stole from. He says maybe someday he will make restitution, a possibility that is, in reality, laughable.

  “I just want to do something,” he says. “I think about all the families I robbed and I know I’ve got to do something for them.”

  Like many a jail inmate, Schroeder says he has got Jesus with him now. He tries to keep his sleeve over the “Get High” tattoo and regrets the day he got it. He says he wants another chance. That’s the bottom line: another chance. But deep down, he knows it might be too late for Billy Schroeder.

  “I’m hoping to someday get another shot at society,” he says. “I don’t want to be thrown completely away.”

  Billy Schroeder turned his back on society but now hopes it won’t do the same to him. He seeks sympathy for the devil, so to speak. But it is hard to come by.

  “I like Billy Schroeder,” says Detective Bill Cloud. “But I have no sympathy for him. I have sympathy for the people he stole from. They have to put up with the feelings of intrusion and their losses for the rest of their lives. They worked all their lives so they can have some of these possessions, and somebody breaks in and it’s all gone.”

  Those sentiments are echoed like the clanging of a jail door: “He was destroying people with what he did,” Detective Dermot Mangan says. “He has got to pay something for that.”

  “It’s sad,” says burglary victim Gladys Jones. “Sure the kid needs help. But the people he hurt also need something. When I think of what I’ve been through and that I’m only one of the hundreds of people he did this to, I still feel very angry and hurt.”

  Lawyer Norman Elliott Kent, who was appointed to defend Schroeder after he confessed to his crimes, declines to use pat arguments like drugs made Schroeder do it, he’s a product of his environment, he deserves a break and so on. Much of that is valid, but somewhere along the line Billy Schroeder made a choice. There is responsibility somewhere.

  “Billy was a drug addict and drug money burns quickly,” Kent says. “And for all that he managed to steal, there is nothing left but hurt victims and a troubled defendant. All Billy has to show for it is his empty pockets, his drug addiction and a jail term. If there is a lesson in all of this, that is it: to let people know what can happen. His message is that in the end everybody loses.”

  IT’S MORNING in the east wing and a small group of high school students are gathered in the multi-purpose room for a tour of the jail. With all the banging of the heavy doors, sharp clacking of electronic locks and echoes bouncing off the steel and concrete, the students have to lean forward to hear the speaker.

  The speaker is an inmate here, a young man with a prematurely aged face. He is here to tell them that he is a loser who found out how to win, how to make it the right way too late. Don’t be like me, he wants to tell them.

  “Hello, my name is Bill,” he begins. “And I’m a drug abuser.

  “I started doing drugs when I was 11 years old. And pretty soon after that I started going through people’s windows. I hurt a lot of people. And here I am. . . .
”

  LYING IN WAIT

  AMBUSH SHOOTING

  Nurse killed trying to aid man on street.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  February 23, 1989

  A PRIVATE NURSE who stopped her car in the hills above Studio City and apparently got out to help a man lying in the street was fatally shot Wednesday when the man stood up and pulled a gun, Los Angeles police said.

  No arrest was made in the ambush killing of 40-year-old Lucille Marie Warren at Montcalm Avenue and Woodrow Wilson Drive in an exclusive neighborhood of hillside homes.

  Warren was shot at 6:45 a.m. while on her way home to Inglewood, police said. She had left a house on Montcalm where she worked as a night nurse.

  Investigators said there were indications that she was the specific target of the fatal attack and may even have known her killer. Detectives are investigating whether Warren, who was divorced and lived with her two teen-age children, was involved in any personal disputes that could have led to the shooting.

  “This doesn’t appear to be a random encounter,” said homicide Detective Mike Coffey.

  Motive Unknown

  While the motive for the shooting was unknown, police said, the killer may have been in the street because he knew that Warren was approaching and would stop if she thought someone needed help.

  “She was a nurse,” said Lt. Ron LaRue. “If you knew she was a nurse, you could find a way to make her stop. The suspect was lying in the street and she stopped.”

  Warren had been working at the home in the Montcalm cul-de-sac at least two months, police said. Officials of a Van Nuys-based registry of nurses, through which police said Warren was referred to jobs, declined to comment.