Date With the Devil

by Don Lasseter

  Berndt later commented, “He was very secretive. I almost think he had a sex thing going on there. He wouldn’t let us come in or look at anything. We didn’t have a warrant, so we had to go along with his wishes. He did come through, though. His technician came out at about two o’clock that afternoon. He even gave us the hard drive.” Berndt sent the apparatus to the crime scene investigation (CSI) lab to see if anything useful had been recorded.

  CHAPTER 14

  “I BELIEVED I WAS A DEAD MAN”

  Inside the tiny interview room, still an hour before dawn, Vicki Bynum and Tom Small listened as Donnie Van Develde provided more frenetic answers to their questions. Still shaking and spurting his words, he said, “David scared the hell out of me. From what I’ve seen—and the characters he associates with—and him telling me things like—like that he hired this guy to kidnap—to grab this Cheryl out of her work and—like a bounty hunter or some crap like that—and he was just a psycho over this other chick.”

  Once again trying to drag an orderly statement from Donnie, Small asked, “After you talked with Karl Norvik, did you remain in the house?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I didn’t know what else to do.” Donnie said the presence of his wife intensified the problems. “I said to her, ‘I can’t explain, but there’s some bad, bad, bad things going on.’ And she just assumed that I had got myself mixed up in something stupid, you know—because she always thinks I’m—she thinks I’m an idiot. She started screaming at me and yelling at me that she and her girlfriend were going out. And I just needed to stay there, ’cause Karl had told me to sit tight.”

  “Karl advised you to stay there?”

  “Oh yeah—don’t do anything. I said, ‘Don’t we got to call the police? David said it was self-defense.’ But then I seen after another day or two goes by, there’s no police coming, that obviously that’s not what—you know? And I knew that (self-defense) was a bullshit story, anyway. Obviously, he’s an attorney and knew how to handle it in a different way.”

  Small asked, “Okay, so you remain in the house and your wife comes home. Did you tell her anything at all about what you saw?”

  “No. No, no. All I told her was that Dave is off the handle, and I’m really worried about—”

  “You didn’t tell her about seeing a dead girl up in Mahler’s room?”

  “No, no. I couldn’t tell her that. I ended up having a screaming fight with her. She knew something was up and kept at me about it. ‘Are you guys partying?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not partying with him. I’m just trying ...’ That’s my relationship with my wife. It’s really stressful. She’s just constantly on me, but in any case we were having a screaming match, ’cause she just wouldn’t stop. I kept telling her maybe she should just go stay with her girlfriend because David was off the deep end.”

  To the detectives, it didn’t make sense that Van Develde wouldn’t tell his wife what had happened. It might convince her of the potential danger to both of them. Small put the question to him.

  Donnie tried to explain. “I—if you knew her, nothing ugly like this has ever been in her life. You know? I’m the ugliest thing that she’s ever known. I don’t want her to be—she would just instantly freak out. She’d be scared to death. I’ve been a wreck all week.”

  Still skeptical, Small inquired again why Van Develde neither told his wife nor called the police. Donnie, clearly embarrassed, replied, “It’s just—this is the most screwed-up thing I’ve ever been dealt in my whole life. I wanted to protect my wife. I know David. From what I’ve seen, and from what Karl told me, I would think David would think nothing of eliminating any witness or anything like that.”

  “Why did you remain in the house the whole time?”

  “I have nowhere else to go. I don’t really have much family anymore. I don’t have any friends I can stay with. The only people I know out here have wives, and stuff like that. They live in little places. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “And your wife still doesn’t know what happened?”

  “All she knows is that something bad is up. Just before she went out tonight, Karl called me and said, ‘Listen, we got to call the police. I’m going to call them.’ I asked him if he was sure. He said, like, yes, absolutely. He had talked to a lawyer. And he said David had called him to say he was leaving—that he was moving out. He’s going to be taking off.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “No. He said, ‘If I was you, I’d vamoose. I’d get the hell out [of] there because shit’s going to be going down. I’m calling the police tonight.’”

  “Have you seen David at all after the event up there in his room?”

  “No, I have not seen him since then.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “He called me the next day and asked me, ‘What’s up? How is she doing?’ I said, ‘David, what the fuck, man?’ Excuse my language. I asked him where he was and what he was going to do. But he put some other guy on the phone for a few seconds. He just said, ‘Hi, Donnie’ in a real weird voice.”

  In hesitant, sputtering, disjointed words, Van Develde expressed the opinion that David Mahler intended, by putting someone else on the phone, to send a warning, a mortal threat not to speak of the event, or to call the police. “The actual words weren’t said, but I know he meant that if I said anything, I was a dead man—that he had hired someone to protect him and to take care of anyone who threatened him.”

  “All right,” said Small. “Now, the whole time, from Sunday until this morning, as far as you know, that body had been lying up there? Or is that body out of there?”

  “No. I have no idea. I assumed that David had handled it, or something. Karl implied something about him having it taken care of, or whatever. It’s been freaking me out. I didn’t smell anything and—oh God! It’s really the most unbelievable—I can’t even believe it’s real.”

  Answering a few more questions, Van Develde launched another rambling account of meeting someone David had brought to the house several days before the shooting. The individual had been introduced as “the cleaner.” This had confused Donnie. “A cleaner? What the hell is a ‘cleaner’? I’m a cleaner too. I’m cleaning the walls and railings, you know? That’s really been messing with my mind.” He had finally decided that this person must be a hit man.

  On that theme, Donnie wondered, “Did David plan to kill somebody? Maybe there was someone else he needed to get rid of. David told me he had guns, and that scared me. He said he had three of them, including a rifle. I never seen any of them, except the one he was waving in my face.”

  “You say Mahler told you he was a lawyer?”

  “Yeah. He told me the other day that he represented a guy that ran over someone with his car, then backed over him again and killed him, and then robbed him. David said he got the guy off with only three days in jail. And that made me sick too.”

  “When he was up there, waving that gun around and pointing it at you and the woman, you said he was wearing a bathrobe?”

  “Yes.”

  “What color was it?”

  “White, and it had monograms on it. Like the kind you see at hotels.”

  Spinning off again on a tangent, and unaware that Mahler occupied a cell on another floor of the Hollywood Station, Van Develde said, “This isn’t right. David shouldn’t be walking around the streets. I don’t think he is at all remorseful. I think he’s out getting high and staying in nice hotels, getting girls.”

  Pulling him back to answer specific questions, Small heard Donnie speak of Atticus King, the green-and-white taxi, and King’s frequent visits to Cole Crest, in which he brought prostitutes.

  Nearly ready to conclude the interview, Bynum needed to inquire about one more subject. “I need to ask you something. Don’t be offended. Please be honest. Have you ever been arrested?”

  “Yeah, a couple of times for little minor things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I got arrested for crystal meth.”


  “Okay. So, do you still use drugs?”

  “Not regularly. I got off methadone this year. I’m on medication called Suboxone.”

  “Did you ever get high with David?”

  “I did one line of crystal meth with him, once. He really didn’t share his drugs.”

  Bynum explained, “We know this is traumatic for you, but we’re just trying to understand why you never called the police about a murder. If you were getting high with him, and that made you feel a certain loyalty, you need to be honest with us about it.”

  “No, that’s not it at all. I have no—no loyalty or anything to David. I’m just purely afraid of him. I’m not his friend. He’s not my friend, you know.”

  Bynum probed another sensitive area. “Are you afraid your wife is going to leave you? Were you trying to avoid that by placating her and not telling what you were doing with David?”

  Wildly shaking his head in the negative, Donnie Van Develde said, “No. It is getting pretty rough—our relationship, with me being in the music business and not making a lot of money right now. And she’s not very happy. But I just didn’t want her to know about what David did, so she wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Six years. I met her on the road when my group was opening for a band called Poison. We had some moderate success, but we’ve also had a lot of tough breaks.”

  “How long have you lived in David’s place?”

  “About a year and a half.”

  The two detectives thanked Van Develde for his cooperation and started to rise. He felt the need to explain his reluctance to notify anyone after the shooting. “I mean—I swear to God, I would have come—I would have called the police right away, immediately, except for the fact that I’ve been under the impression that I’m a dead man if I did that. I thought I was just protecting my wife and myself.”

  “Did you not have faith in the police helping to protect you?”

  “From what I was told by Karl, that wouldn’t matter. David would find a way to get revenge.”

  Bynum sat back down and said, “Hey, Donnie, real quick. Help me describe the female victim better. What length is her hair?”

  “Shoulder length.”

  “Okay,” said Bynum sweetly. “Listen—and you won’t offend me—I’m five-four. Is she my height, you think?”

  Donnie nodded an “uh-huh.”

  “And I’m not as thin as I used to be. Is she thinner than me?”

  “She was very thin. I’d say she weighed maybe one hundred fifteen pounds.”

  “How about eye color? And her hair was blond?”

  “I don’t remember the color of her eyes, but her hair was lighter than yours, kinda streaked blond. My wife thought she was really pretty.” He said he couldn’t remember any jewelry she might have worn.

  At last, after spending more than two hours with Donnie Van Develde, Detectives Bynum and Small allowed him to leave.

  They called a uniformed officer to bring David Mahler from the tank.

  CHAPTER 15

  CONFRONTING EVIL

  Fuming, pouting, angry, worried, and fidgeting while sitting in the Hollywood Station holding tank, David Mahler couldn’t believe he had been arrested. How dare they? He was a lawyer and knew his rights. Sure, they had found him hidden inside a closet at his own home, but this was certainly no crime.

  While he still had possession of his cell phone, David had called Stacy up in Visalia. She promised to come right away to be with him during this ordeal.

  Vicki Bynum later commented about David Mahler’s summoning of Stacy Tipton. “She was afraid of him. When we let him make some phone calls, he reached her, and he was screaming at her, insisting that she come to Hollywood right now. She drove down from Visalia in panic. He is extremely demanding of everybody. Anyone he called, he expected them to help, probably because he had something on them. Everything is an obligatory contract with him.”

  After enduring several hours of idle stagnation in a cell, waiting for the inevitable interrogation by detectives, Mahler impatiently wondered what was taking so long.

  To make matters worse, a series of sharp spasms made his back feel as if he had suffered a terrible beating. He yelled for someone to help him, complaining of debilitating pain. An officer responded and escorted him to the interview room, which Donnie Van Develde had left just moments earlier. Within a few moments, an emergency medical technician (EMT) checked him out, gave him some aspirin, and left. The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) captain, with the EMT, asked Mahler if he felt better and then asked him to sign a form indicating no further need of medical attention. Mahler said he felt okay and signed it.

  Detectives Bynum and Small needed a few minutes to reorganize themselves and regain a sense of order after the cat-herding interview with Donnie Van Develde. He had tried his best to be cooperative and respectful, but his scattergun delivery had required infinite patience to understand and to summarize in a written report.

  Now they faced a distinctly contrasting challenge with David Mahler. Both detectives realized the need for an entirely different approach to questioning him. “With Mahler, because he was an attorney, we came up with a game plan of how to approach him,” Bynum recalled.

  Tom Small explained, “At the beginning of the interview, we figured he would be surveilling us at the same time we would be checking him out. We wanted first to gauge him and find out where his head’s at. And to keep it level, we decided to avoid being adversarial, up to a point. We also wanted him to believe that we didn’t yet know we had a murder—that we just wanted to talk about a missing girl. Because he was in custody, being handcuffed when brought into the interview room, we took precautions and carefully informed him of Miranda.”

  Bynum and Small both knew that the interview with David Mahler would be a challenge. They had already been on the job nearly five hours. His interview would last more than nine exhaustive hours. They were playing a verbal chess game with a self-confident, hubristic man accustomed to dominating everyone around him. They realized it would be a confrontation with intelligence, avarice, and evil.

  CHAPTER 16

  WEB OF SELF-DESTRUCTION

  The long session with David Mahler opened on a note of relaxed informality. Bynum suggested he take the more comfortable chair and offered some water. Dressed in a cotton long-sleeved, pullover black jersey and dark slacks, Mahler accepted the seating arrangement and a drink. In a distinctive, clipped New Jersey accent, he suggested the detectives might need some ID, which he had in his wallet, but complained that it had been taken away from him. “I don’t know what this is all about yet, but there may be documentation in my wallet that I can show you.” Vicki Bynum replied with a genial smile that it would be taken care of. He kept talking. “I have to say again, and I said it earlier, I understand the process—being a lawyer for eighteen years.”

  In less than thirty seconds, Mahler had wanted them to understand his importance and ability to deal with people of lower status.

  “Right,” Bynum replied with deliberate saccharine.

  Mahler responded in kind. “Your attitude I must commend. I’m not—at least at this moment—yet charged with anything. I’m not a criminal yet. If that happens and then you take a dislike to a criminal, that’s different. But thank you for treating me as a human being until then.”

  Tom Small, unsmiling, said, “No problem.”

  Extending an arm across the table, Mahler said, “Now I can shake your hand, I suppose.”

  “Certainly,” said Small. “By the way, I’m Detective Small. This is Detective Bynum. We work the Hollywood Detective Unit. And I’ve got some information that came to us that we would like to share with you, and also see what your side of it would be.” Mahler nodded his understanding. “Being that you are an attorney, you understand the legalities here, right?”

  Mahler kept his voice low and calm. “Yes. Please, please understand that it’s my profession. If I come�
��I’m trying to work with you. I’m not usually on this side. If anything I say comes off a little too legalese, or if—”

  “If I don’t understand it, I’ll ask you,” Small interrupted.

  Sounding a little apologetic, Mahler muttered, “Sometimes I have a tendency to come off a little harsh. That’s just my training... . I’m going to try to be as humble as possible.”

  “Okay,” said Small. “Well, if you don’t get harsh, I don’t get harsh. How about that?”

  “You have a deal.”

  “That will be fine, and we can be gentleman to gentleman, or gentleman to lady. That’s the way we prefer it. Try to keep it as professional as possible.”

  Mahler commented that he had the right to a lawyer, since he was under custodial interrogation, under California law, but he volunteered, “I’m waiving it. However, I’d like to keep some notes.” Small agreed, and provided him with paper and a pen.

  To be absolutely certain of no misunderstandings, Tom Small read the Miranda advisory again to Mahler, to which the suspect expressed full understanding. “With that in mind,” Small asked, “are we going to talk?”

  Giving an affirmative reply, Mahler noted that if things took “a twist,” he could always stop the interview and request legal representation.

  Jumping right to the point, Small said that information had been called in regarding a missing person. “She might be known as Kristi. Does that ring a bell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, what’s Kristi’s story?”

  “I hardly know Kristi, to be honest with you. I don’t even know her last name.”

  “How did you come to meet her?”

  “She was introduced to me through a gentleman named Michael Conoscenti last September. I remember that timing because I had just broken up with my fiancée, and Michael felt it would be a good idea. After that, I hadn’t seen Kristi for—God, until last week or two weeks ago. How that came about was she moved in with a gentleman named Sheldon Weinberg, one of my clients. He called and needed some documents delivered to me, because I’m helping him with a federal legal case.” Kristi, said Mahler, had brought the papers to his home. “At that time, I spent another two or three hours with her.”