by Don Lasseter
The detectives had no way of knowing that Mahler had misstated some of the timing and left considerable gaps in the story. He continued, “I was headed down to Newport Beach to meet another client. It was dinnertime. I invited her to go with me. We went down to Newport Beach, stayed there—and I’m sorry if I’m going too fast.”
Vicki Bynum assured Mahler that he was doing fine. “What day was it you went to Newport?”
“Last week.” He said he couldn’t be certain exactly which day, but receipts in his wallet could be checked. “I stayed with her at the Island Hotel. I think it was two nights.”
“Did you check in using your name or hers?”
“Under my name.” He either lied or forgot the room had been registered under a different name. Skipping hastily past that point, Mahler said, “I found that it was too quick to ask a girl, you know. At first it was going to be dinner to meet my client ... then it turned into getting late, so we said we’d stay in the hotel room. Then the next day it was ‘Well, we’re in Newport. Let’s meet a friend.’ And things just got dragged out. It wasn’t intended to be a two-day sprawl.”
Small and Bynum listened with an occasional “uh-huh,” took notes, and let Mahler speak.
“And we got into some arguments. When I say arguments, [it reached] a point that I said, ‘I’m leaving. Are you coming?’ [She] wasn’t ready. I said, ‘Checkout time is two o’clock.’ Security had to go up to the room three times to ask her to please leave. ‘Mr. Mahler’s not paying for another night.’ And I left. I didn’t mean to be a—please don’t get the wrong idea. I’m a gentleman. I sat outside for an hour after they threw us out of the room, waiting in front with the valet, tipping him a few extra dollars to make sure that he didn’t ask that I leave.
“At a certain point, I got a phone call from Mr. Weinberg, whereby she was cursing and screaming that she was going to get another ride. I said, ‘Fine. As long as she has another ride, I’m leaving.’ And I left. She stayed. I left.”
Mahler didn’t explain how Kristi had said those things to Weinberg. Presumably, he meant that she had called him.
“Where did you go?”
“I went home. About two days later, Saturday, I got a call from her asking me if she could have—I’m so bad mechanically—some piece of her car she needed that she had left in my garage.”
A skeptical expression shadowed Tom Small’s face. He asked, “A piece to her car?”
“Yeah, a piece to her car. She had taken it off because when she left from Mr. Weinberg’s house, she apparently didn’t want some of the kids there to use her car... . I said, ‘Fine, come on up.’ And that’s how I knew Kristi.”
“So you saw her on Saturday?”
“Yes, I did. Everything seemed okay, until she started indicating that she wanted drugs. Which is something that I am—how do I phrase this? I don’t consider myself the most conservative guy in the world. I don’t want drugs around me or certainly in my home.”
Neither Bynum nor Small let it show in their expressions that statements from Norvik, Van Develde, and Moudy had painted a far different picture of drugs in the house. According to those men, he used cocaine and meth regularly. Small only uttered, “Uh-huh.”
Rushing onward, David Mahler implied that Kristi somehow arranged for a drug dealer to show up. He said, “So she had somebody come to the house. And there was some argument about how she was going to pay for the drugs. And I guess—this is absolute innuendo—so I’m not sure because it wasn’t explicitly stated, but I’m a smart guy. It sounded to me like there were sexual favors [offered] in exchange for the drugs. I was in the way, so [they wanted] me to leave.”
Another flicker of doubt showed in Tom Small’s eyes. “They wanted you to leave your own house?”
“Yes, in my house—making me obviously quite uncomfortable to the point that I’m asking them both to leave. Make sense?”
It made no sense at all to Small or Bynum, but the time had not yet come for a dispute. Instead, Small simply asked, “Who is this person who suddenly showed up?”
Haltingly, as if he had trouble recalling, Mahler seemed to be searching his memory. It came to him. The guy’s name was Edmund.
“Do you know his last name?”
Mahler said he couldn’t recall it at the moment, but would be able to supply it later. Acknowledging that he had met Edmund previously, he described him as an overweight Mexican man who dealt drugs and fancied himself a “ladies’ man.” Suggesting that Edmund had once offered to bring prostitutes to Cole Crest, Mahler snorted and said, “Needless to say, that wasn’t going anywhere with me. It got to the point ...” Mahler didn’t complete the sentence. Instead, he said, “Please forgive me if I’m being a little careful.” Citing the absence of legal representation in the room, he apparently thought he was saying too much and cited the old adage “A lawyer that represents himself has a fool for a client.”
“I need to be a little careful, but I do want to make sure that I’m open enough that you can get all the facts you need,” David remarked.
Tom Small asked for a description of Kristi. Mahler said, “Well, I only spent two days with her, but she was white, about five-six, slender, blondish hair, maybe dyed.” Pointing to Bynum, he noted, “Her hair was longer than this young lady’s.” The compliment about her age didn’t impress the detective. Asked about jewelry Kristi might have worn, Mahler couldn’t recall any. He was equally vague about her clothing, remembering only that she wore white pants.
“And the last time you saw her was where?” Small inquired.
“At my house, Saturday night.” Reconsidering it for a moment, he said, “The last time I saw her was around three, Sunday morning.” With that, Mahler began spinning a tale of Edmund slapping Kristi, his own consternation and fear, and making telephone calls to ask for advice. “It was a very strange situation for me. You can imagine. I have so much expensive stuff in my house. Who is this guy? Why does he feel comfortable slapping her in front of an attorney? My licenses are plastered all over the place.” (It had all taken place in his bedroom.)
With a hint of suspicion in his voice, Small asked, “In your bedroom?”
Mahler’s vacuous answer reflected that his radar had picked up the detective’s mistrust. “Obviously, there wouldn’t be any, you know. I mean, I’m not going to indicate in any way that I was—let me rephrase that. Since it can’t be anything incriminating ... I’m not going to indicate that I was unaware of his relationship with her.”
Small and Bynum exchanged a quick glance, silently agreeing to stick with their game plan to extract as much information as possible from the suspect before challenging his evasion or outright lies. Small simply asked, “Did you leave?”
“I did. Absolutely. I went to another part of the house and spoke to Karl Norvik. I also called Donnie, who lives all the way downstairs.” Mahler denied knowing Donnie’s surname, stating that he always thought of him as Donnie.
“What did they say?”
“Both of them said that I shouldn’t be involved. As a matter of fact, Karl said, ‘You want me to take you out of here? We’ll both get in the car and leave right now, because I’m also uncomfortable. This is a weird situation.’ I didn’t want to leave my house with people I didn’t know still in there. So I said, ‘That would mean locking all the doors, putting valuables away. That takes time.’”
Both detectives knew that Karl Norvik had made the telephone report accusing David Mahler of killing Kristi. Perhaps Norvik had offered to transport Mahler away from Cole Crest on Saturday evening, but probably not in the context of Mahler’s self-serving account. Donnie’s long interview completely contradicted Mahler’s version of getting advice from him. The detectives let him continue weaving a web of self-destruction.
Mahler’s narrative took him back to an alleged confrontation with Edmund. “I turned to him and said, ‘Listen, I’m leaving. You’re going to have Donnie around. You’re going to have Karl around. By the time I get back, I expec
t and anticipate that you [will be gone]. Kristi, you know, it was nice that you came over to pick up your stuff. Time’s up. Take whatever you might have in the garage. And good luck.’ I said I was really uncomfortable with the talk about drugs. I left and checked into the Marriott Hotel, near LAX, because I know they have good rates. I stayed there Sunday and Monday.”
“You left Kristi and Edmund in your house?” It took some Academy Award acting by Tom Small not to betray his contempt. “Were you concerned?”
“Oh yeah, I was very nervous. Wait till you look at the record of my calls. I was calling every hour, thinking maybe somebody would answer the phone. I was calling Donnie, Karl, my phone. I was absolutely flipping out. I finally got Stacy. I said, ‘Stacy, this thing’s sort of wigging me out. What do you think I should do?’ She said, ‘David, I’ll come be with you.’ Stacy lives in Bakersfield. She came and we stopped at my house [briefly] on Monday.”
Investigators would soon learn that Stacy lived in Visalia, seventy miles north of Bakersfield. Mahler had either deliberately lied to keep detectives from finding her, or perhaps he had simply misspoken.
Describing the Monday house visit, Mahler said, “We were there for all of two minutes because I needed to grab my computer. Things looked normal other than, you know, there was some blood. I’m not going to lie about that. It freaked me out, but freaked out Stacy even more. I told her we would deal with it later.”
Just to see how truthful Mahler would be, Small asked, “Where was the blood?”
“It’s in my bedroom, exactly where I left [Kristi and Edmund], exactly where he started slapping her.” Forensic technicians would find considerably more blood than could have been caused by slapping someone.
At Small’s request, Mahler diagrammed on paper the house interior and indicated where he had seen the blood.
Back to Stacy’s presence, Mahler said she refused to stay in the house that night. To placate her on that Monday, they checked into the Standard Hotel, on Sunset Boulevard.
To make certain he understood Mahler’s stated sequence of events, Small asked him to reiterate how long he stayed at the Marriott and how long at the Standard. Mahler said, “Well, if you want to include Saturday night, which was late at night, I was at the Marriott Saturday night and Sunday night.”
“I thought you said—”
Mahler interrupted to alter his version. “I checked into the Marriott Sunday morning and checked out on Monday.” He knew the hotel records could be examined. He and Stacy had visited Cole Crest briefly on Monday and stayed at the Standard that night. Stacy, he said, returned to her home, up north, on Tuesday. “Before dinner I went back up to the house and tried to clean up some of the blood.” He denied finding blood anywhere else except in his bedroom.
“When you were there and saw the guy slapping her, did you see her bleeding?”
“I wouldn’t say so far as bleeding, but you could see that, you know, she got smacked.”
“Did anyone else see Edmund there in your house?”
“I think Donnie did, but Karl did not.” Mahler spun off on another tack, hinting that Edmund had sometimes supplied Donnie with drugs.
Small replied that this was irrelevant to the case. “I don’t give a crap where Donnie might have bought anything. We’re not dope cops.”
“In that case,” Mahler declared unequivocally, “Donnie bought his drugs from this guy.”
“Is he also a drug connection for you?”
“No. What? For me to get dope? No. No. I don’t do dope.”
“None at all?”
“None at all.”
Both detectives had heard statements by Jeremy Moudy and Donnie Van Develde describing David Mahler’s prolific use of drugs. They seemed quite believable, while Mahler’s credibility had started to spring serious leaks. Perhaps feeling his boat starting to sink, he tacked in the other direction. “Cocaine? Once in a while. And that’s not an admission.”
Vicki Bynum remarked, “We don’t care.” Small agreed.
Ostensibly relieved by their disinterest in his denials, Mahler shifted directions again, to Cheryl Lane. Mentioning that she was his former girlfriend, Mahler said she was due in court today and would be curious why he wasn’t there to advise her. He even wondered aloud if the detectives planned to ask if she provided sex to him to be her lawyer. They showed even less interest in that tangent than in his duplicity about narcotics.
Bynum needed clarification on the female relationships. “I’m confused about Stacy. Is she your former fiancée?”
“No, no, that’s Kitty, but she’s out of this. Stacy is someone I’ve known for twenty years.”
“So she’s a very good friend?”
“She’s a very good friend. We have consensual sexual contact at times.”
“Was she with you at the Marriott and the Standard?”
“No, no, she was not at the Marriott. I was there by myself. Well, not by myself, but not with Stacy.” Tom Small wanted to know who was there with him. Mahler stammered, “Uh, well, this gets tricky. But I’m going to let you know. A gentleman I know just like—like with Conoscenti—can arrange it that there’s company involved. I’m not going to call it ‘prostitution. ’ I know, I know, you don’t even care about that.”
Bynum made it clear that they worked major crimes, not vice.
“Okay”—Mahler nodded—“it was a prostitute that I got through another gentleman who fancies himself a pimp. His name is Atticus King. He’s a black guy, two hundred forty pounds, about five-eight. He’s a taxi driver, uh, as a guise to transporting women.”
“So, were you using cocaine at the hotel with King and the hooker he brought?”
“No.”
“Were you high on cocaine at the Island Hotel in Newport Beach?”
Mahler confessed that he “partook a little bit.” Small asked how much. “It was enough for me to enjoy myself and have champagne with strawberries.” He claimed the client who met him there, and whose name he would never divulge, had given him the cocaine.
Small asked Mahler to reconstruct what happened in the few hours preceding his arrest. He replied that he had gone out with a few friends for Chinese food, returned home, got on the Internet, and made some cell phone calls. “And bada-bing, I started hearing banging on the front gate. And I’m thinking, someone’s out there, and it’s not Karl. I had just spoken to him. This leads me to a text message I had received, threatening me. It said, ‘If you don’t comply, you are the one going down. If you don’t pay us ...’”
Given the opportunity to explain, Mahler told a long story about someone who had borrowed $13,000 and hadn’t paid it back. Kristin had mentioned knowing a person who could help collect it without going too far illegally. “The guy comes over. I give him a few bucks to do the job. The next thing you know, I’m [being] called every single freaking day for more money.”
“What’s the person’s name who owes you the money?”
Mahler acted reluctant to reveal it, but he said, “Now you’re getting into serious business because he’s a [police] officer. I don’t know how much you want to despair [sic] his department. You know what? I will give you the name, because I’m so mad that he hasn’t paid me. It’s Robert Jimenez. Do you know him? Well, there you have it.”
The interviewers needed more details. Mahler said it was an extremely complicated matter and rambled on for several minutes. He said he had posted bail for Cheryl on a felony count. “I was on the hook for thirty thousand. Cheryl and I weren’t even seeing one another anymore and it was too much money [to lose]. And she did wind up skipping bail. That’s when I hired Jimenez for seven hundred dollars to bring her in. But he did a bad job. He failed to do anything right. But he comes over the next day, demanding money.”
“When is all of this?”
“About a month ago. He started making threats, showing me a pistol.” Jimenez, Mahler said, had coerced him into making a loan of $7,000. Kristin, Mahler purported, had then put him in contact
with someone named Rick, who, for a fee, would persuade Jimenez to return the money. Rick had shown up at Cole Crest on Saturday night, just before Edmund made his appearance.
Mahler threw in another twist. He claimed that Kristi had called Rick to come and pick her up in Newport Beach and take her back to her home, but he had apparently let her down. “While they were in my house, they were bickering about it. I was in the middle of a dangerous mess. He started talking to me about wanting twenty-five thousand dollars. It was blackmail, extortion in my mind.”
It became apparent to the detectives that Mahler’s convoluted story of financial intrigue and threats was designed to throw them off the track and make them believe he feared for his life. Thus, when the officers showed up at Cole Crest the previous night, he had hidden in Jeremy Moudy’s closet. How much of it was true, or what portions were fabricated, bore little relevance to the investigation of Karl Norvik’s allegations that David Mahler had shot a woman named Kristin. Still, they dutifully took notes and kept open minds.
Mahler again mentioned that he had contacted Stacy and had asked her to come be with him. “We have plans to go out to breakfast together tomorrow morning.” He expressed surprise that she hadn’t arrived yet at the Hollywood Station.
CHAPTER 17
CLINGING TO PAST LOVE
The interview of David Mahler by Tom Small and Vicki Bynum had consumed nearly two hours, and it would last seven more. As it progressed, Stacy Tipton drove her red Jeep Cherokee from Visalia to Hollywood, about two hundred miles.
Mahler had reached her by cell phone after his arrest and asked her to come down. She had no idea what had happened to cause the police to pick him up, but she assumed it was either on a drug charge or related to some financial shenanigan. Or maybe he had slapped around one of his girlfriends. It probably had something to do with the blood found in his house. He had seemed nervous and edgy during her visit on Monday, less than a week ago. The idea of sleeping in a house with someone’s blood on the carpet had freaked her out. So they had stayed at the Standard Hotel.