by Don Lasseter
“When I got out the second time, I started looking for a job with all kinds of police agencies. I tested and passed for New York PD, but had always wanted to join the FBI or LAPD, so declined on New York. I tested for the FBI successfully, but was placed on a waiting list. I finally joined the Racine PD and worked there about eighteen months while coaching high-school football in my off-duty hours.”
One of his longtime goals came up in 1983. “An offer came from the LAPD and I grabbed it. After the academy, I went to Seventy-seventh Street Division. I was doing fine, and then the FBI contacted me and gave me ten days to respond. I was in a real quandary because I really liked working for the LAPD. But I thought, ‘Hey, this is the FBI.’ So I accepted.”
Small soon found himself in Washington, D.C., and once again at Quantico. In a voice registering disillusionment, he said, “When I got into the Bureau, it was quite a bit different from working as a police officer. You don’t have the exhilaration of the job. You don’t have all the good stuff, which I really enjoyed. It was more the corporate type of law enforcement.”
The FBI sent him to Omaha, Nebraska, and then to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sorely disappointed, Small made a life-changing decision. “I reapplied with the LAPD, came back on July 1, 1985, and I’ve been here ever since.” He wore the uniform in tours at Harbor and Rampart Divisions, served in Narcotics and Fugitives Details, and earned his detective’s shield in 1993 with the Hollywood Division.
Some people might think working in the Hollywood Division would be all glamour and glitz. Not so, said Small. “The community has a dark underbelly. You do see some famous people now and then, and some of them are arrested. When I first arrived here, they had huge vice problems, some of which still exists. On the west side, you had competition among the prostitutes for street corners. On the east side, you have the transgender people and cross-dressers doing the same thing—males dressed as women. In the lower east side, gang problems exist. So Hollywood has a little bit of everything. You’ve got skaters, drugs, pornography business, and regular show business, a potpourri of people—the high end and the low end. But that’s what keeps it interesting.”
Responding to Wendi Berndt’s early call, before three o’clock that hectic Friday morning, Tom Small arrived at the Hollywood Station within forty-five minutes, and Vicki Bynum arrived at about the same time. Their boss, Wendi Berndt, contacted them by cell phone from Cole Crest. She and Detective Larry Cameron, Berndt said, would continue activities at the Cole Crest house. Meanwhile, she wanted Bynum and Small to interview Donnie Van Develde, Jeremy Moudy, and David Mahler at the station.
Donnie had been waiting nervously upstairs in the roll call room. He couldn’t believe he had been pulled into this horrific mess, and he worried that he might be charged with some crime for failing to report what he had seen.
At 4:45 A.M., a uniformed officer escorted Donnie into a small interview room on the main floor. He offered coffee, but Donnie said he would prefer plain water. Always loquacious, apparently eager to speak out and perhaps thinking the officer would be conducting the interview, Donnie said, “I’m cooperating one hundred percent.”
“Yeah, you should,” the cop replied.
“I have absolutely no problem doing that. Did Karl talk to an attorney?”
“What?”
Words spilled from Donnie’s mouth like a ruptured water pipe. “Karl talked to an attorney to find out exactly what to do about this situation, and he called me [last night] to tell me exactly what’s up and that—what exactly we have to do, and he said he would be calling me around eleven thirty or twelve, and so that’s why I stayed home ’cause I figured you guys would be coming once he did.”
Bemused, the officer asked, “Karl?”
“Yeah, he told me he would make the call. On our behalf, you know? I never—I never dealt with anything like this in my life. This is—had me in a—had me in shock. The first person I went to when I—made aware of this situation was actually David. The guy that did this actually called me on the phone and told me to go up and look in his room. I mean, like he’s a very sick guy.”
Nodding his head in the affirmative, the officer listened.
Donnie kept the fountain flowing. “And I—I just seen—I seen a hand sticking out from under the blanket. I went to Karl’s room and told him what’s going on... .”
At that moment, Vicki Bynum and Tom Small entered the diminutive room, where Donnie had remained standing during his rattled recitation, ignoring the three vacant chairs. Bynum said, “All right, thank you, Officer. We appreciate it.”
With a smile as he exited, the uniformed cop replied, “Sure, no problem.”
Pointing to one of the chairs that had a tiny bit more padding than the others, Bynum said, “You could sit there in the good one, if you like.”
As if he hadn’t heard, Donnie resumed his spiel. “I assumed you guys would be coming tonight or whatever, but—that’s why I stayed home, but I didn’t know you’d be coming the way you did.”
In her usual sweet, calm, melodic voice, Bynum asked, “You assumed we were coming? Why is that?”
At full pressure again, and spraying in all directions, Donnie said, “Well, Karl, my upstairs—the guy that lives up in—we’re—my wife and I are tenants and the bottom floor is our apartment. We pay rent. We don’t have any access to the upstairs house or anything like that. Karl is ... a tenant or a roommate of David Mahler, who owns the house, and Jeremy is another roommate up there. They rent rooms in David’s house so they have, like you know, maybe run of the house, you know, and everything like that. We don’t. But ... should I just tell you what I know just from—just from the beginning?”
Gesturing for the witness to sit, Tom Small said, “Yeah, why don’t we do that? You are ... ?”
Slumping into a chair, Donnie gave his full name. Small nodded, and stated the date and time, 4:45 A.M., for the recording machine. Both detectives gave Donnie their names; to which he courteously said, “Nice to meet you.” He asked them to call him Donnie.
Bynum repeated his surname, Van Develde, and inquired, “Is it a Dutch name?”
“Actually,” said Donnie, “I’m Italian. That was my stepfather’s name.”
The uniformed officer interrupted to tell both detectives that Jeremy Moudy had arrived. Realizing that it would probably take several hours to complete hearing Van Develde, and that interviewing Moudy could very likely be finished in a few minutes, they asked Donnie to stand by for a little while. He patiently agreed.
In the adjacent interview room, identical to the one in which they left Donnie, Tom Small and Vicki Bynum spoke with Jeremy Moudy. They learned that he and his girlfriend had arrived at their Cole Crest apartment late Sunday afternoon, on May 27, after a weekend trip to Bakersfield. Nothing, he said, seemed to be out of the ordinary. Both of them knew David Mahler to be the resident manager, not the owner. They did not see him that day, nor had they heard any unusual noises. Jeremy stated that he did not maintain a close relationship with David, but that the guy treated him okay. In passing, Moudy had met some of Mahler’s girlfriends. “He had lots of women in his life,” Jeremy said while shaking his head.
Speaking in calm, clear terms, Jeremy told the detectives of being awakened in the early hours of that same Friday, June 1, at about one forty-five by the sound of his cell phone buzzing, indicating a low battery. As soon as he shut down the noise, Moudy heard what sounded like someone trying to open his bedroom door, where he and his girlfriend had been sleeping. He asked who the hell was there. Mahler’s voice replied, “The police are here. I need to get out.”
Puzzled, Moudy said, he had unlocked and opened the door. Mahler stood there in “an agitated state.” He had descended the interior stairwell, normally unused, into Moudy’s quarters. Fighting off a sense of anger at the intrusion, Jeremy stepped out and carefully closed the bedroom door to block David from seeing his sleeping girlfriend.
He told the detectives that he initially suspected that so
me woman in Mahler’s life had possibly brought some male help to beat him up. Perhaps they announced themselves as police to catch him unaware. “He asked me to go up and see what the police wanted.” Mahler told Moudy that he feared the possibility of some people being outside, thugs who might try to harm him over some bad financial deals. He had heard the commotion outside his front gate, and voices claiming to be police officers, but he had no way of verifying they were indeed from the LAPD.
“At first, I had the impression that he had come down the interior stairwell, through my apartment, planning to escape through the side door that goes outside to the exterior stairs. But then, he asked me if I would go up there and see who was at the door.
“It all seemed really strange, but because he was so scared, I couldn’t turn him down.” Jeremy said he agreed to see what he could do. “I told him he couldn’t go into my bedroom because my girlfriend was still asleep in there. So I climbed the stairwell, thinking that he was following behind me. But he dropped out of sight and I didn’t know where he was. This whole thing had taken about five minutes, so I opened the front gate at about one fifty A.M. I saw several uniformed cops out there and opened the front gate and door to let them inside.”
One of the officers, Moudy said, asked where David Mahler was. “I didn’t know exactly, so I told them I didn’t know. It was only partly true, because he was still somewhere in the building.” The little white lie had worried Jeremy, he admitted, and it came as a relief when the cops found Mahler hiding in the closet downstairs.
“They had told me to wait in the living room. I was sitting there when a couple of officers brought him in. They took him outside right away. When I found out they captured him in my closet, I was not very happy that he had gone in there.”
Asked if he had noticed red stains on the floor of David’s quarters, Jeremy said he had seen them both on the carpeting and in the garage. He had made these observations last Sunday evening when they arrived home from the weekend trip. He hadn’t even thought of the stains as blood, and he certainly didn’t associate them with a crime. Jeremy stated that he had heard some vicious fights between David and his female visitors on prior occasions, although none had been brought to his attention recently.
Before leaving, Moudy volunteered information about seeing a heavyset African-American guy bring women to Cole Crest in a green-and-white taxi minivan, and sometimes stay for quite a while. In regard to Mahler’s profession, Moudy said he understood the landlord was an attorney who mostly dealt in stock trading.
Bynum and Small thanked Jeremy Moudy, allowed him to leave, and returned to resume the interview with Donnie Van Develde.
CHAPTER 12
“I COULD KILL SOMEBODY RIGHT NOW”
Still in rapid spurts, Donnie Van Develde told Bynum and Small that he and his wife had lived in the Cole Crest house “about a year and a half.” He described the narrow, winding, impossible roads that must be navigated for access to the property, and complained that pizza delivery guys could never find it.
“Who else lives at that address, besides you two?”
“Well, there’s Karl. I don’t know his last name. There’s Jeremy. I think his starts with an M, or something.” Almost as an afterthought, Donnie mentioned that David Mahler also lived there.
“Is he single or does he have a partner living there?”
“He doesn’t have any regular girlfriend that I know of. He just has hookers and call girls and stuff like that almost every night. Parties—and all I’ve seen is him—just a crazed lunatic doing mass amounts of drugs and hookers and—whatever. So many women coming around, like I’ve never seen.”
Tom Small wondered aloud about David Mahler not having a regular girlfriend. Donnie explained, “I don’t think the guy would be capable of having one. He’s—he’s just the most difficult person to—to know and deal with. I mean, every month, when we don’t have the rent exactly on the day it is due, we’re threatened with eviction, like the very next day. So the last couple of months—I’m in the music business and so I make records. And I get money in little spurts, here and there.” Donnie elaborated about his ongoing financial difficulties, noting that he hadn’t even been able to buy food in recent days. “He doesn’t understand or care about any of that. He’s impossible to get along with.”
To Small’s inquiry about Mahler’s drug usage, Donnie said, “He’s a cocaine addict. As far as I can see, he does nonstop cocaine, crystal meth, Xanax, and alcohol.”
Pointing out that he had never “hung out” with David, Donnie spoke of doing odd jobs for him. “He was supposed to pay me for the work, but never did. He just spends it all on women. They come by and the next thing you know he’s—he acts like he’s in love with them and he takes off and they go to Hawaii, or some hotel.”
Mahler had seldom allowed Donnie inside his quarters, until a few days ago, said Donnie.
“What did you see last Sunday?” Small asked.
Grimacing and gesturing with his hands, Donnie replied with a preamble about his wife planning to attend a special annual party in Ohio. “She wasn’t even around when all this stuff happened. Last Sunday, he called me up to his room and I thought he wanted to pay me the money he owed for some work I had done, and I was glad because my wife had gone to Ohio and I didn’t even know how I was going to survive or feed the cat and have a few bucks while she was gone.”
Hoping that Donnie would focus a little tighter, Tom Small asked, “Did he tell you he did something?”
“Yeah, on Saturday, before this awful thing, he told me he had taken a girl to a hotel somewhere near the beach. He came back without her and said she pissed him off, so he left her there without any money or anything, and he said he was going to see this other girl. He was sort of asking my advice about women and he said, ‘You know a lot about these things with girls, you know—you’re in the music—you’re the rock star, in the music business.’ I told him that, personally, I thought he was above using the kind of women he was hanging out with, not to be falling in love with hookers.”
The detective worked patiently to keep Donnie on track. He asked what had happened on Sunday morning.
Squirming, fidgeting, and perspiring, Donnie said, “He called me on the phone about eight thirty on Sunday morning (May 27) and told me to come upstairs to his bedroom. I thought he was going to pay me.” According to Donnie, he knocked on the entry gate. A woman he knew only as Kristi buzzed him in, then opened the bedroom door. Mahler was nowhere in sight. “She said he would be right back.”
“Had you met her before?”
“I think she had been there only a few times, and we had just said ‘Hi’ to each other. When I worked on the spark plugs of her car, we just talked for a minute or two.”
“How long did you talk to her this time?”
“No more than a couple of minutes, and then he came in. I didn’t see him because I was facing Kristi and he was behind me. I was asking her what happened at the beach.” Mahler, Donnie said, “stormed in, screaming, in a violent rage.”
Donnie’s delivery accelerated, and Detective Small asked him to slow down. He tried, but turbocharged by fear, Donnie had difficulty controlling the speed and volume of his words. Donnie said, “He goes, ‘There is nothing personal here, but I’m so pissed off... . I could kill somebody right now. This is life and death. Could you excuse us for a little while? I need to talk to her.’” The request sounded more like a belligerent demand than a courteous request.
David’s demeanor had frightened Donnie and he headed for the door. “He was talking tough and said, ‘I’ll call you when I’m done talking to her.’ I left and went back downstairs to my apartment.”
In Donnie’s recollection, the summons came about ten minutes later. “He said, ‘Come back up here and do it now!’ I still hoped he would hand over the money, so I climbed back up those stairs and went into his bedroom. He had changed into a white bathrobe, which was wide open, showing that he was naked. He was out of his min
d, like nobody I have ever seen, and hitting a freebase pipe and smoking crystal meth. He would put one down and pick up the other one. I saw a bunch of Xanax sitting on the dresser, and I know he had been eating a lot of those and they make him crazy. Besides that, he was drinking from a bottle of wine.”
“What about the girl?”
“She was in a pair of flimsy white shorts and I think a tank top, or maybe a halter top, sort of gold colored. She was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, with all her bags and stuff, and, like, looking pretty afraid because he is running hot and cold. He would flop down on the bed, and jump up again. As soon as I went in there, I asked him about the money and he freaked me out. I can’t remember his exact words, but he would spurt out anything. Anything I said would be wrong.”
Small asked, “Did it appear to you that Kristi was going through her bags trying to get out of there?”
“Yeah, she definitely wanted out. She was crying and asking him to please take her home. He just ignored her. She asked me, ‘Do you think you could give me a ride home?’ I told her that I didn’t have a car. But I said that if David would let me use his, I would be glad to take her to her place. I knew that she really needed to get out of there.”
This exchange apparently made Mahler even angrier. “This time he started waving a gun around, like threatening her and threatening me, and he’s, like, clicking it at my head with no bullets in it. He was scaring the hell out of both of us—talking about somebody else was coming over and he was going to kill—I don’t know exactly what he was saying. I just know it was a scary situation. And he would get all crazy and he’d get up off the bed and start screaming about some situation they’d had.”