Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 1: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 1: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 2: Good Evening, part taxonomy Murder, part prosecutors Handbook, and part
Speaker 2: personal memoir. Matt Murphy's The Book of Murder goes through
Speaker 2: a dozen cases and his recollections of his twenty six
Speaker 2: years in the Orange County DA's office with seventeen years
Speaker 2: in the homicide unit. Refreshingly honest about the toll such
Speaker 2: work takes on one's private life, Murphy weaves his personal
Speaker 2: narrative throughout his casework in a way that humanizes the
Speaker 2: people entrusted with the duty of seeking justice on behalf
Speaker 2: of the public. As he does so, he lays bare
Speaker 2: the decision making. A prosecutor goes through building a case
Speaker 2: to ensure justice is met while telling captivating tale after
Speaker 2: captivating tale of the world's worst crime. See how a
Speaker 2: prosecutor looks at and lives with the very worst crime
Speaker 2: The insider's perspective that Murphy gives on the notorious cases
Speaker 2: of Skuyler de Leon, Rodney Alcala, Dirty John Meehan, and
Speaker 2: many others is a vital read for true crime fans everywhere.
Speaker 2: The book that we're featuring this evening is The Book
Speaker 2: of Murder, a Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death. With
Speaker 2: my special guest, former Senior Deputy District Attorney, Orange County
Speaker 2: DA Homicide Unit and ABC Legal analyst, Matt Murphy. Welcome
Speaker 2: to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.
Speaker 2: Matt Murphy, Good morning, Good morning, and congratulations on your
Speaker 2: the Book of Murder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, just came out. I mean yesterday
Speaker 3: was really the first big media day, so I you know,
Speaker 3: I sort of put myself out there a little bit.
Speaker 3: This is probably more personal than I originally thought it
Speaker 3: was going to be when I when I embarked on
Speaker 3: this this opus of mine. Yeah, it it ended in
Speaker 3: a place that I probably talked more about my my
Speaker 3: stony inner thoughts than I ever thought I would have. So,
Speaker 3: I I don't know, man, I'm a little I'm a
Speaker 3: little exposed, I think. So if people hate it, it
Speaker 3: will crush my soul. I think that it's been crushed before,
Speaker 3: so no, I'm sure they'll be loving it like I did.
Speaker 2: Let's you grew up in southern California, so just give
Speaker 2: us a little bit of background before you take us
Speaker 2: to the point where you're a Deputy DA in the
Speaker 2: Orange County DA's office and you say, in the midst
Speaker 2: of a years long winning streak, professionally, your career was
Speaker 2: on an absolute tear. But the brilliant young woman you
Speaker 2: thought you marry was marrying someone else. So tell us
Speaker 2: about your background and take us to this point in
Speaker 2: your professional and personal career.
Speaker 3: Sure, so, I'm basically I was a California kid. So
Speaker 3: I grew up in West LA and went to place
Speaker 3: called Loyola High School where I still hang out with
Speaker 3: a bunch of my buddies from high school that I'm
Speaker 3: at when I was fourteen. In fact, we have Fantasy
Speaker 3: football just started and I half of the text messages
Speaker 3: are then, you know, still making fun of me for
Speaker 3: whatever whatever my team did. I keep losing a lot. Anyway,
Speaker 3: from from high school, I went to UCSB, where I
Speaker 3: think I was born to go to that school, and
Speaker 3: I was surfing a bunch, and then I went up
Speaker 3: in going to San Diego for law school. And once
Speaker 3: I was in law school, it was really the first
Speaker 3: time I got academically serious. And the way it works
Speaker 3: is you you finished your first year and at the
Speaker 3: beginning of your second year, once you get your first
Speaker 3: year of grades, and I did well. They did. The
Speaker 3: law firms and the various government agencies essentially come to
Speaker 3: recruit law students to do clerkships, and I had three
Speaker 3: that were I was really interested in. One was this
Speaker 3: Plaineiff's firm out of Santa Ana that were you know,
Speaker 3: they were crushing it, making a lot of money, like
Speaker 3: one of these brass rail law firms, and so that was,
Speaker 3: you know, in the in the eyes of a twenty
Speaker 3: three year old, that looked that looked interesting, you know,
Speaker 3: fancy cars and all that. The FBI came in and
Speaker 3: I they their special agent who was doing those interviews.
Speaker 3: We really hit it off, and I did. I did
Speaker 3: a series of interviews with the FBI and that was
Speaker 3: really intriguing as well. But back then the policy was
Speaker 3: they wouldn't assign you where you grew up, where you
Speaker 3: went to college, or where you went to law school.
Speaker 3: Which took out southern California for me. And I've been
Speaker 3: surfing since I was a kid, and at you know again,
Speaker 3: you know, age twenty three, I couldn't wrap my head
Speaker 3: around the idea of moving someplace where it couldn't surf
Speaker 3: every chance I had. So the third one was the
Speaker 3: Orange County Day's Office, and I was essentially I was
Speaker 3: brought in by a woman named Kathy Harper. They did
Speaker 3: two days of interviews. Her background was sexual assault, so
Speaker 3: she was a ligne prosecutor in the sexual assault unit
Speaker 3: before they made her a manager. And I had worked
Speaker 3: I started a date ripe education program when I was
Speaker 3: at UCSB with my fraternity where we'd educate pledges for
Speaker 3: sorties and fraternities about rape and the concept day rape
Speaker 3: and alcohol and what consent means. And I'm really proud
Speaker 3: of that. It was kind of ahead of its time
Speaker 3: in retrospect, and she that caught her eye and she
Speaker 3: offered me the spot. So I came into the Orange
Speaker 3: County DIA's office and I thought, you know, I would
Speaker 3: do three years as a deputy DA right, And I
Speaker 3: came in at the end of my first day, first
Speaker 3: day as a junior law clerk. This is the summer
Speaker 3: of nineteen ninety two. They would they put us in
Speaker 3: rits and appeals. So you're doing legal research and writing
Speaker 3: with the hope that you'll actually get to appear in
Speaker 3: court and argue emotion. And you know, my best friend
Speaker 3: in law school, he spent that summer working in the
Speaker 3: Central Valley of California on Sprinkler system litigation, and you know,
Speaker 3: and he was hating his life and regretting its choices.
Speaker 3: And my first time in court, it was arguing over
Speaker 3: seven hundred thousand dollars in cash that was associated with
Speaker 3: the Mexican drug cartel, moving money, moving cash out in California,
Speaker 3: and I had drug dealers in the hallway, and I
Speaker 3: had a great defense team. I went up against a
Speaker 3: fantastic judge and I was absolutely hooked. And my three
Speaker 3: year plan basically turned into twenty six years. So the
Speaker 3: way it works is they start you out in misdemeanors
Speaker 3: and you know, they they throw you to the wolves.
Speaker 3: You know, they hand you a file and say, hey,
Speaker 3: you're picking a jury in twenty minutes. Go to it
Speaker 3: and you know, you you really you sink or swim,
Speaker 3: and they throw you in front of jury's and I
Speaker 3: had no idea what I was doing. And you and
Speaker 3: it's hard, you know, and you're up there and you
Speaker 3: don't know if you have any ability in front of
Speaker 3: a jury, and you you really get your teeth kicked
Speaker 3: in a few times, and it's it's quite an experience.
Speaker 3: And you know, I I as brutal as it was.
Speaker 3: I started a thrive on it, and so I went
Speaker 3: through misdemeanors. I did thirty seven misdmeanor jury trials. I
Speaker 3: spent a little over a year in juvenile court doing
Speaker 3: juvenile case a lot of gang cases to I was
Speaker 3: in the juvenile gang spot for a while, but it's
Speaker 3: all there's no juries there. And then they rotate you
Speaker 3: onto what's called the felony panel. And your job on
Speaker 3: the felony panel is you just do felony jury trials.
Speaker 3: So it's generic felony. So it was like, you know,
Speaker 3: drug sales, felony, domestic violence before they started the domestic
Speaker 3: violence unit. Fourth time DUIs, some assaults, some generic robberies,
Speaker 3: just kind of a pop prey. I tried twenty four
Speaker 3: felony jury trails in one year in that assignment. And
Speaker 3: then it's almost like the It's almost like the NFL draft,
Speaker 3: you know, like draft day for the NFL. They when
Speaker 3: the panel class is done, the heads of what are
Speaker 3: called vertical units will kind of bid for different lawyers
Speaker 3: that are graduating from the felony panel. And so the
Speaker 3: vertical unit system in Orange County is different than almost
Speaker 3: any other DA's office in America. What typically happens is
Speaker 3: the most DA's offices, especially in the heavy cases, they
Speaker 3: you'll have, you know, one Deputy DA will review the
Speaker 3: investigation for the filing of charges and they'll file what
Speaker 3: they think is appropriate, and then it goes to another
Speaker 3: Deputy day who will present it to the grand jury
Speaker 3: or do the preliminary hearing in front of a judge,
Speaker 3: and then it goes to another Deputy DA who assigns
Speaker 3: it to another Deputy DA for trial. So you have
Speaker 3: this it's like an assembly line. And the way Orange
Speaker 3: County does it is for the heavy stuff, for the
Speaker 3: gang crimes, sexual assault, homicide, environmental, major fraud, major narcotics,
Speaker 3: the really specialized heavy felony units. What they do is
Speaker 3: they will they bring their deputies in and they get
Speaker 3: assigned a certain part of the county. So they'll give
Speaker 3: you a patch, they call it, so it was you'd
Speaker 3: have a certain certain cities. So I got recruited into
Speaker 3: the sexual assault unit, and not really recruited. I got
Speaker 3: to sign that I wanted to go to gangs because
Speaker 3: that looked exciting to me. And I had had a
Speaker 3: great run on the felony panel and the supervisor's a
Speaker 3: guy named Chuck Middleton, and he said, no, it's my turn,
Speaker 3: and they he brought me into sexual assault and I
Speaker 3: spent four years there, and they assign you certain cities
Speaker 3: so you work with the same detectives and you really
Speaker 3: get to specialize in the subject matter. So for four
Speaker 3: years I did nothing but rapists and child molester cases.
Speaker 3: And in that unit, you learned DNA and you learn
Speaker 3: you learn from the important building blocks for where I
Speaker 3: would go next. And Orange County is a population of
Speaker 3: about three million people. It's the fifth largest district Attorney's
Speaker 3: office in the United States. And I got moved into homicide.
Speaker 3: I was thirty three, just before my thirty fourth birthday,
Speaker 3: and I still looked like I was twelve, and I've
Speaker 3: been with somebody for five years, and I was in that,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of through my mid to late twenties,
Speaker 3: and I, you know, it's one of those one of
Speaker 3: those deals. She really wanted to get married and have kids.
Speaker 3: She was an architect, and and I just wasn't ready
Speaker 3: to do it. And so I had one of those
Speaker 3: sort of like a standoff, you know, and my my
Speaker 3: buddy Dennis Conway calls it the old tomato, which is ultimatum.
Speaker 3: It's like marry me or I'm moving on. And I
Speaker 3: didn't really think that was gonna be a real thing.
Speaker 3: I thought that I thought, you know, we would break
Speaker 3: up for a while and get back together. And she
Speaker 3: was a really quality person. And you know, as life
Speaker 3: often does when, especially on being stupid, I learned a
Speaker 3: learned a lesson there. She jounded up getting meeting another
Speaker 3: guy within like three months, you know, and so I
Speaker 3: got rotated. I got rotated into a homicide at the
Speaker 3: same time that I found out she'd got engaged at
Speaker 3: the new guy. And so I was like, my brain
Speaker 3: was basically a country song of of lament, and you know,
Speaker 3: how could I be so stupid sort of thing, And
Speaker 3: and look in retrospect that that wound up exactly where
Speaker 3: it should have. You know, the guy she married is
Speaker 3: a fantastic guy. He's they're still married, they've still they
Speaker 3: had two kids. Like, she got the she got the
Speaker 3: life that she wanted. And you know, one of my
Speaker 3: best friends, I think I I think I included this
Speaker 3: in the book I'm not mistaken. His name is Greg maffay,
Speaker 3: and he's one of my buddies from high school and
Speaker 3: he went to college with both of them. In fact,
Speaker 3: he introduced me and her and he you know that
Speaker 3: old saying, you know you know your friends because they're
Speaker 3: the ones that's stabby in the chest and not on
Speaker 3: the back right. And he came up to me and
Speaker 3: he put his arm around me, and he knew them
Speaker 3: both pretty well, and he goes, he goes, look at
Speaker 3: it this way, dude, He goes, he's just just like you,
Speaker 3: just a little better in every way. And he's like,
Speaker 3: but he's a great guy. And you know, you want
Speaker 3: to hate the new guy. And every all of my
Speaker 3: friends that knew him in college were like, you know what,
Speaker 3: he really is a great guy. And he is. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so I my first week in homicide, I was I
Speaker 3: was you know, most of your listeners have had that
Speaker 3: experience that'd broken a heart on a Saturday night sort
Speaker 3: of thing, and I was, I was, you know, I
Speaker 3: was in that canty, can't sleep. How did I screw
Speaker 3: it up? Phase? So I was surfing a ton in
Speaker 3: the morning, just trying to clear my head a little bit.
Speaker 3: And my first week in the unit, I'm in the
Speaker 3: water and I get out and I barely even I
Speaker 3: don't even think i'd read all the files yet on
Speaker 3: my caseload, and I got I got my first homicide
Speaker 3: call out. So because it's a vertical unit, I had
Speaker 3: the cities of Newport Beach Coast to Maso, Laguna Beach
Speaker 3: and Irvine, and I was they would have us go
Speaker 3: to the murder scenes. And your job there as a
Speaker 3: prosecutor is not to interfere and it certainly you're not
Speaker 3: responsible for the investigation, but you're there to assist. You're
Speaker 3: there to make sure that you know, the warrants are
Speaker 3: done properly, and really your job is to ensure that
Speaker 3: the constitutional rights of any criminal defendant are scrupulously ad
Speaker 3: here too. And it also makes it easier on the
Speaker 3: detectives because they've got a you know, they've got you know,
Speaker 3: a lawyer there to help bounce legal ideas like do
Speaker 3: we you know, if this guy gave consent, for example,
Speaker 3: do we need a search warrant? Or if this isn't
Speaker 3: his house, do we need a search warrant? Or what
Speaker 3: do you think? Do we need a search more from
Speaker 3: this car? So there's somebody that could kind of help
Speaker 3: them navigate some of the legal complexities of that. And then,
Speaker 3: of course is the DA. The way it works is
Speaker 3: I was the one who would ultimately decide when there
Speaker 3: was enough evidence in the case who to charge what
Speaker 3: to charge them with. Then it would be my job
Speaker 3: to follow the case all the way up. So in
Speaker 3: the traditional model where one DA does the filing and
Speaker 3: another DA does the prelim, the way Orange County does
Speaker 3: it is you've got one prosecutor there that night or
Speaker 3: that afternoon with the detectives, the women and men of
Speaker 3: that department, who is learning all the facts in real time,
Speaker 3: and then you handle every aspect of it in court.
Speaker 3: You do the filing, you do the preliminary hearing, you
Speaker 3: do the bail reviews, and you try the case. And
Speaker 3: then the detective that was with you that night at
Speaker 3: three o'clock in the morning, he or he will be
Speaker 3: sitting next to you at trial all the way through
Speaker 3: to the end of sentencing, and it is a better
Speaker 3: way to do it, I think. And no criticism on
Speaker 3: any other DA's offices anywhere, but it really when you
Speaker 3: are a DA and you see it for yourself, and
Speaker 3: you're there and you see, you know, a victim notification.
Speaker 3: You know, like if a lot of murders happen inside homes,
Speaker 3: and a lot of murder domestic violence things, and a
Speaker 3: lot of them happened on holidays. And when you see
Speaker 3: the death notification delivered to a loved one of some
Speaker 3: poor person that's been murdered, that is dead inside that house,
Speaker 3: you see the visceral enormity of your responsibility, if that
Speaker 3: makes sense. Yes, you understand the apoplectic grief within a
Speaker 3: family when a daughter or son learns that their mother
Speaker 3: or father has been murdered, or even the ones that
Speaker 3: really got to me is when the mom learns that
Speaker 3: their child has been killed and those and you know,
Speaker 3: the first thing I would do is I would sit down,
Speaker 3: I have a meeting. Once we filed charges with the family,
Speaker 3: I'd give them my personal cell phone number just so
Speaker 3: they knew there were people who cared. And I worked
Speaker 3: with wonderful people I worked with. My team was, you know,
Speaker 3: and I'm biased here was the absolute best. So I
Speaker 3: had a paralegal named Dina Basham. My final investigator in
Speaker 3: the Home City unit was a man named Don Holford,
Speaker 3: who I worked with when he was a detective and
Speaker 3: then when he was the sergeant of the custom as
Speaker 3: the CP units, who's in charge of the homicide detectives.
Speaker 3: He's just one of the best humans I've ever known.
Speaker 3: But I was very lucky with my investigators. So in
Speaker 3: the DA's office, you also get assigned a police officer
Speaker 3: within the DA's office, a DA investigator who is your partner,
Speaker 3: and you got all those scenes together and you work
Speaker 3: the case step together. So I'd have the detective from
Speaker 3: the agency and then my own investigator, and it's we
Speaker 3: were kind of bulletproof, you know. You put together a
Speaker 3: group of people like that, especially if you if you
Speaker 3: get good ones and you throw in a few decent judges,
Speaker 3: a decent jury vanira, which is the jury pool, and
Speaker 3: you're going to achieve justice, as corny as that sounds,
Speaker 3: if you're dedicated to it. So back to my first day,
Speaker 3: So I've finished four years in sexual assault, so I
Speaker 3: knew those cases very well, but that you know, visiting
Speaker 3: the crime scene on a sexual assault case is not
Speaker 3: the same thing as a homicide, you know, because it's
Speaker 3: basically all the same. It's in a dark room somewhere
Speaker 3: in a house, or some poor child as being sexually abused,
Speaker 3: and you know, you don't quite get the same takeaways
Speaker 3: as murder. So I get out of the water doing
Speaker 3: my you know, country song reel of laments in my brain,
Speaker 3: and my phone had blown up with messages. I get
Speaker 3: back to my car and I there was a murder
Speaker 3: on Newport Beach. So I'm driving down and Newport is
Speaker 3: a beautiful city. It is like I think I described
Speaker 3: it in the boat. It's like Beverly Hills by the sea.
Speaker 3: It's got all the all the money and coture of
Speaker 3: Beverly Hills, but with bikinis and surfboards. It's a it's
Speaker 3: a unique place. But there is a ton of money there,
Speaker 3: and so what as a result the city council. The
Speaker 3: city is well well run. They're well managed, and they
Speaker 3: have a top notch It's small, but they're an excellent
Speaker 3: police department and they you know, they you know, they
Speaker 3: do it right and they devote the resources. One there's
Speaker 3: a home side. So I go to my first scene
Speaker 3: and I will, I mean, I'll never forget any of them,
Speaker 3: but this one in particular. And I've just you know,
Speaker 3: I've seen all those TV shows. We've all seen it,
Speaker 3: like what happens with the new guy, right, what happens
Speaker 3: with the new guy and the homicide? You know, it's
Speaker 3: on TV. It's a trope. They always they they throw up, right,
Speaker 3: So I think this was going to be my my
Speaker 3: third dead body that I'd ever seen. And I'm thinking,
Speaker 3: you know, don't puke, don't puke, don't puke, right, That
Speaker 3: was what was going on in my head. And they
Speaker 3: they take me in and it's this beautiful town home,
Speaker 3: you know, and it's it's a, like I said, a
Speaker 3: very wealthy area. And this is everything in this place
Speaker 3: is perfect, and it was. This was back when berber
Speaker 3: carpet it was a fashionable item in your house. I
Speaker 3: think now everybody's gone to hardwood floors, but back then
Speaker 3: it was white berber carpet and it was I just
Speaker 3: remember walking in and it was I remember thinking the
Speaker 3: carpet was perfect. It was because and it was it
Speaker 3: was too white I remember thinking for all of like
Speaker 3: the the utility boots that were walking on it, because
Speaker 3: you've got you know, you've got CSI personnel, you got detectives,
Speaker 3: you got uniform cops there, you know, they're they're there
Speaker 3: are firemen that come in to ensure the person's dead.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like boot after boot after boot. And
Speaker 3: I just remember seeing this perfectly white carpet and then
Speaker 3: they lead me in and there was the man, my first,
Speaker 3: uh my first homicide victim, and he was on his
Speaker 3: back in the kitchen, looking up to the ceiling, you know.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's a certain look that dead people
Speaker 3: have that is it's nobody creates it in the movies.
Speaker 3: It is. It's you can just look at somebody's face
Speaker 3: and you can see, you know, you know, when they
Speaker 3: were dead. And you know, I remember thinking, you know,
Speaker 3: am I going to do the new guy thing I've
Speaker 3: seen on TV and throw up all over the crime scene.
Speaker 3: And so it's like, okay, Murphy, don't puke, don't puke,
Speaker 3: don't puke. And I look down and immediately I notice
Speaker 3: he had a wallet chain going to his right back pocket.
Speaker 3: So he's on his back and in his left hand
Speaker 3: there was a small folding knife and it just instantly
Speaker 3: It's like, well that that makes no sense. Why would
Speaker 3: why would a left handed guy keep his wallet in
Speaker 3: his right back pocket or if he's right handed, why
Speaker 3: would have a knife in his left hand? And it
Speaker 3: was just instantaneous, and from that point on it was like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I just got this weird sense of kind of belonging,
Speaker 3: you know, like I was. And then the detect that
Speaker 3: was walking me through it as a guy named Dave
Speaker 3: Byington who wound up in the years to come becoming
Speaker 3: one of my best friends. And this guy was he
Speaker 3: was older than me, and he was you know, these
Speaker 3: detectives see it all and I'm like and I literally
Speaker 3: I looked like I was twelve when I was in
Speaker 3: my early thirties. And I walk in, So you got
Speaker 3: this this absolute, completely green rookie, and he got this
Speaker 3: semi grizzled, you know, detective who lived a lot of life.
Speaker 3: And he's giving me the tour. So we walk upstairs
Speaker 3: in this house and there's bullet holes in the wall upstairs,
Speaker 3: and there's a semi circular blood smear on the on
Speaker 3: the staircase, like the staircase wall, you know, as you're
Speaker 3: walking down and then he's he's dead at the bottom
Speaker 3: of the stairs on his back that are victim, and
Speaker 3: so you start you know, it was the first time
Speaker 3: I realized that homicid scenes are just three dimensional puzzles
Speaker 3: and you're there to put the pieces together. And so
Speaker 3: there's broken glass, there was there were these rose petals
Speaker 3: leading to the to the primary bedroom, and the bed
Speaker 3: was perfectly made, so there were some and there's candles
Speaker 3: still burning everywhere, So it was it appeared to be
Speaker 3: some sort of romantic innerlude that was interrupted in some way.
Speaker 3: We have bullet holes upstairs. There's one in the in
Speaker 3: the wall of the of the of the stairs of
Speaker 3: like the the staircase, and then there's this circular blood
Speaker 3: smear on the wall. So you start looking at it
Speaker 3: and it's like, okay, the shooting clearly happened started up here,
Speaker 3: and looks like he's haul on ass right, He's trying
Speaker 3: to get out of the house. He had one shot
Speaker 3: in the back, he had two above his heart that
Speaker 3: went through his heart that were both embedded in the
Speaker 3: kitchen floor. He had one bullet wound in this in
Speaker 3: his temple, and one later discovered in his mouth. And
Speaker 3: so when you count up all the holes, we had
Speaker 3: a we had two handguns that had been placed on
Speaker 3: the berber carpet right next to the body, and they're
Speaker 3: perfectly oriented like one like next to the other. They
Speaker 3: had been placed there. One was a six shot revolver
Speaker 3: that had been fired, and one was a I think
Speaker 3: it was a nine millimeter that had not. And so
Speaker 3: our six shot revolver was our murder weapon or our
Speaker 3: homicide weapon. But there were at least eight or nine
Speaker 3: separate holes that we could account for, which means, from
Speaker 3: a legal perspective, and this is very significant, the shooter
Speaker 3: had taken time to reload and then and then I
Speaker 3: go back to the knife, and it's like, okay, well
Speaker 3: that means the shooter may have had time to put
Speaker 3: that knife in this guy's hand. And so you start
Speaker 3: putting the pieces together in sort of a half forensic,
Speaker 3: half legal analysis kind of way. And you know, if
Speaker 3: a shooter spontaneously kills somebody, and I go into this
Speaker 3: in the book, if they want to kill, that can
Speaker 3: be a second degree murder. But if they take time
Speaker 3: to reload and they shoot, you know, potentially, you know
Speaker 3: still alive person in the heart as they're on their
Speaker 3: back and helpless. That is a first degree murder. So
Speaker 3: all of these facts come together within the legal analysis
Speaker 3: that you're doing. And it was you know, I was
Speaker 3: hooked at the end of my first day as a
Speaker 3: junior law clerk. Now, I was hopelessly hooked, and you know,
Speaker 3: this would have been a fascinating case, but then you know,
Speaker 3: I almost don't want to spoil it for the reader.
Speaker 3: Then the this woman was a financial planner, and so
Speaker 3: it turns out that this was a romantic falling out.
Speaker 3: You know, we don't know exactly how it went down,
Speaker 3: but they were romantically involved in some way that the
Speaker 3: operating theory was he went over to end their relationship
Speaker 3: and she previously she had a living partner who basically
Speaker 3: decided that he wanted to live the lifestyle of the
Speaker 3: gay man, and so he broke up with her. But
Speaker 3: they still lived in the same place and so they
Speaker 3: you know, they're having you know, she's she was kind
Speaker 3: of twice scorned, and so they we were still processing
Speaker 3: the crime scene. She was like early forties, She had
Speaker 3: no criminal history, and she was financially secure, and so
Speaker 3: that we didn't think she was a flight risk with
Speaker 3: no indication that she was dangerous to anybody else. So
Speaker 3: she you know, the California law requires that, you know,
Speaker 3: she'd be given bail, so she got bailed. She bailed
Speaker 3: herself out because she had substantial financial resources, and found
Speaker 3: her ex boyfriend in the hotel that he was staying
Speaker 3: in and they had a long talk. They'd been together
Speaker 3: for over ten years, and at some point he fell asleep,
Speaker 3: at which point she produced a tire iron that she
Speaker 3: brought in from her car, bludgeoned him to death, and
Speaker 3: then drove over to a place called the Firing Line
Speaker 3: in Huntington Beach where she rented a handgun, and she
Speaker 3: committed suicide in one of the firing lines. That was
Speaker 3: my first week in homicide, and I mean it was just,
Speaker 3: you know, I went up going into my supervisor's office
Speaker 3: and you know, I don't know. I mean, like I
Speaker 3: have been wide eyed since the second I walked into
Speaker 3: that homicide scene. And and I'll never forget. And this
Speaker 3: is lou Rosenbloom, who wound up becoming another dear friend
Speaker 3: of mine and one of my mentors. And he just said,
Speaker 3: you think that's crazy, just wait you know, and yeah,
Speaker 3: that was my introduction to homicide. And the case all
Speaker 3: wrapped up in a week, and you know, horribly tragic
Speaker 3: for the you know, the two men who died. It's
Speaker 3: just it's it's awful. But but for a young prosecutor man,
Speaker 3: it was I mean, the lessons start fast and furious
Speaker 3: in that unit and they really don't stop. And I
Speaker 3: went up doing seventeen years in homicide.
Speaker 2: Let's do this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. Now, you talked about Lou Rosenbloom and being
Speaker 2: a mentor. Let's talk about some of the some of
Speaker 2: that mentoring and what you did learn from Lou, essentially,
Speaker 2: but also touching on some of the famous cases that
Speaker 2: you were involved in with infamous killers like Skylar de Leon,
Speaker 2: Rodney al Kala, and the Dirty John Meehan.
Speaker 3: So Lou, you know, he assigned me that spot. And
Speaker 3: my predecessor was a woman named Debbie Lloyd, who was
Speaker 3: a legend in her own right. So Lou, just to
Speaker 3: give you a little background, Lou was when he was
Speaker 3: a line prosecutor in the Homicidi Lou Rosenblum tried sixty
Speaker 3: seven murder cases in twelve years and he won them all.
Speaker 3: So when I was a baby, da everybody used to say, hey,
Speaker 3: go watch Lou Rosenbloom and trial because he's the best
Speaker 3: trial lawyer in the office. And you know, there's there's
Speaker 3: different there's different styles of trial prosecutors, and Lou's style
Speaker 3: was this was one type. It was a it was
Speaker 3: a very like irresistibly logical yet unrelenting, you know approach.
Speaker 3: There's others. There's a man named Chris Evans, he's now
Speaker 3: super court judge, who is a you know, he was
Speaker 3: more folksy and more kind of like down to earth,
Speaker 3: and Lou was just he would do these stick coota
Speaker 3: cross examinations where I think Lou considered it a personal
Speaker 3: failure if the person didn't confess on the stand and
Speaker 3: apologize to everybody like he was. He was that good.
Speaker 3: And so it's a little bit like getting brought in
Speaker 3: if you play basketball, like Michael Jordan recruits you to
Speaker 3: play on his team. You know, so I'm and so
Speaker 3: I'm like, I'm surrounded by these living legends in my mind.
Speaker 3: And so Lou basically he took me under his wing,
Speaker 3: like I wanted to learn how to try how to
Speaker 3: prosecute homicide cases, and Lou wanted to teach, and it
Speaker 3: just wanted to wind up being this really wonderful relationship
Speaker 3: that I mean, I owe that man so much. And
Speaker 3: I had others. There's a man named Rick King who's
Speaker 3: my supervisor and sexual assault, who was like best buddies
Speaker 3: with Lou when they were in homicide together. So I
Speaker 3: had these, you know, like Kathy Harper who brought me in,
Speaker 3: and my another supervisor I had and sexual assault named
Speaker 3: z Anne Froberg, And it was like they were like
Speaker 3: kind of a weird combination of like my big brothers
Speaker 3: and sisters combined with being my mothers and fathers, you know,
Speaker 3: for my prosecutrol career. And Lou was Lou was a
Speaker 3: really hyper intelligent, cerebral guy who want he first of all,
Speaker 3: he's all about doing the right thing, and he is
Speaker 3: also like he would want to figure it out. He
Speaker 3: had this insatiable thirst to try to like figure out
Speaker 3: why people would do this. So it was, you know,
Speaker 3: it was fascinating because I bring cases into Lou and
Speaker 3: Lou just kind of like stare off in a space
Speaker 3: and be like, you know, and I always knew he's
Speaker 3: gonna hit me with a nugget. When it started with
Speaker 3: you know, and you fill in the blank whatever came next,
Speaker 3: and it was always poignant and valuable, and he was
Speaker 3: just I mean, he the man was absolutely brilliant. So
Speaker 3: I was. I learned how to do this under the
Speaker 3: tutelage of the best of the best. And when you're
Speaker 3: when it starts with the foundation of you always do
Speaker 3: the right thing. It also means that you have top cover,
Speaker 3: as they call it. You have the ability to to
Speaker 3: you know, to change your mind on a case if
Speaker 3: it's the right thing to do. And I, you know,
Speaker 3: I had a I had a case. I was just
Speaker 3: talking to somebody about this last night. And when I
Speaker 3: was in sexual assault with Rick King, where I had
Speaker 3: a guy who was he was in line hawker h
Speaker 3: hockey coach, in line skating hockey coach, and he was
Speaker 3: coaching young boys and he was he was he sexually
Speaker 3: abused some of them, right, and but he what he
Speaker 3: was doing is he was sexually abusing one horrifically and
Speaker 3: then he attempted another one and he basically touched his
Speaker 3: leg one day and that that that kid wasn't having it,
Speaker 3: and he immediately reported him. So I had a very
Speaker 3: substantial sexual abuse of one victim, but I had a
Speaker 3: very minor kind of attempt on another. And it's still horrific,
Speaker 3: of course. But there's the thing. In California noticed the
Speaker 3: multiple victim life enhancement, and it's like, I know he
Speaker 3: was obviously predatory, but did the actions Like was that
Speaker 3: a multiple victim life enhancement? Was that worth life in prison? Right?
Speaker 3: You know? And this is kind of the thing that
Speaker 3: I was I was working trying to work through in
Speaker 3: my mind, and I remember, you know, running it by
Speaker 3: Rick and and and and by the way that he
Speaker 3: made it easy for me because the guy and it
Speaker 3: took us three years to get him. So by the
Speaker 3: time we got him back, I had no problem freaking
Speaker 3: filing on the life enhancement because the guy was an
Speaker 3: absolute dick. If I can say that, I'm so sorry,
Speaker 3: but you know, I called Rick and he was he goes,
Speaker 3: you know, are you're struggling with it, he goes, good.
Speaker 3: You should struggle with it. Every prosecutor should struggle with
Speaker 3: this because the power of your ability to affect people's
Speaker 3: lives is enormous and you you know this. It is
Speaker 3: not always a black and white easy call to make,
Speaker 3: and you should struggle. It means you're doing your job.
Speaker 3: That was the philosophy the dai's office back then. It
Speaker 3: was you always do the right thing. And so with
Speaker 3: Lou like, I had a case and I don't talk
Speaker 3: about this in the book. I had a case with
Speaker 3: a woman who was found by her I guess it
Speaker 3: was her fiance. You know, he calls nine on one.
Speaker 3: She'd been dead for several hours, right, So they show
Speaker 3: up and she had been she had bruising on her neck,
Speaker 3: and they determined the cause of death was asphyxia. And
Speaker 3: we look at his background, and this man had choked
Speaker 3: out at least two women in prior relationships. I think
Speaker 3: one was an ex wife. So this guy's a choker,
Speaker 3: he's a thumper, he's a freaking a hole, if I
Speaker 3: can say that on your show. And he's got this woman.
Speaker 3: Neighbors said they heard a fight, she's got bruising on
Speaker 3: her neck, and all the objective signs are that he
Speaker 3: is that he's strangled her to death. Well, you for
Speaker 3: post mortem examinations, they do what's called a toxicology. We're
Speaker 3: in addition to looking at the strap muscles when they
Speaker 3: open up the neck, and her strap muscles were heavily bruised,
Speaker 3: which is also consistent with strangulation. The cause of death
Speaker 3: was asphyxia, and it looked like a no brainer, so
Speaker 3: I charge them with murder. But we get the tox
Speaker 3: results back and turns out that what had happened was
Speaker 3: she had gotten a vicious argument. He did what he does,
Speaker 3: and he choked her, probably on conn and but she
Speaker 3: did not die, and she wasn't mortally injured. But what
Speaker 3: happened was she came to and was so profoundly depressed
Speaker 3: about this relationship that she was in, she went and
Speaker 3: took an entire stomach full of sleeping pills. And when
Speaker 3: you when you people when they suicide with sleeping pills,
Speaker 3: you die of asphix. You it suppresses you breathing. A lot
Speaker 3: of people don't know that that's actually how you die.
Speaker 3: But it turns out it was a suicide, so it was.
Speaker 3: So it was one of those things where you know, I,
Speaker 3: you know, this guy absolutely deserved criminal charges on a
Speaker 3: moral sense, as far as I was concerned. He killed her,
Speaker 3: but of course he didn't actually do it. So you're
Speaker 3: you have an ethical obligation as a prosecutor. Your fundamental job,
Speaker 3: no matter what day and day out, is you must
Speaker 3: do the right thing. It's it's maybe the only practice
Speaker 3: of law where it's like that. You never have an
Speaker 3: unreasonable client. The philosophy of the DA's office back then
Speaker 3: is always always do the right thing. And so you know,
Speaker 3: that's one where you have an ethical responsibility as a prosecutor.
Speaker 3: As soon as you entertain a doubt as to the
Speaker 3: efficacy of your case, you're ethically nabligated to immediately go
Speaker 3: to a court room, call that case up and dismiss it.
Speaker 3: And so with a supervisor like Lou you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: it was that's the type of situation where it's like, hey,
Speaker 3: we got a we got a problem here. This is
Speaker 3: this is all the evidence that we had. And then
Speaker 3: it took a radical turn because it turns out that
Speaker 3: he didn't he did not physically kill her, and and
Speaker 3: we wound up. I wound up giving that case to
Speaker 3: an up and coming guy I think he was in
Speaker 3: domestic violence back then, named Brahem Betai, who wound up
Speaker 3: a spiriturt judge. Now in a he's a phenomenal prosecutor
Speaker 3: and and he prosecuted that guy for the domestic violence
Speaker 3: and he wound up going to prison as he should have,
Speaker 3: so he he suffered a criminal consequence. But that that's
Speaker 3: one of the situations that you wind up with where
Speaker 3: you have your job is justice. Your job is to
Speaker 3: do the right thing, and that means that for a prosecutor,
Speaker 3: you cannot entertain any doubt. So with a with a
Speaker 3: guy like Lou backing me, and back then the DA
Speaker 3: was a guy named Tony Lucaccas who was he was
Speaker 3: an alumni of the of the unit and he was
Speaker 3: a spiritual judge for for a long time before he
Speaker 3: became the elected DA and he got it as well.
Speaker 3: So I had I had supervisors above me that not
Speaker 3: only understood the ethical obligations of a prosecutor, but encouraged
Speaker 3: it and and just got it like of course you're
Speaker 3: going in and you're dismissing it immediately and will handle
Speaker 3: the rest later. And they that was that was something
Speaker 3: you need. There's we're kind of in a time right
Speaker 3: now where we're seeing a lot of elected das who
Speaker 3: aren't there to do the right thing necessarily, and they're
Speaker 3: not there to support their deputies. And I mean, I'll
Speaker 3: give you an example, not that I thought we'd get
Speaker 3: into this, but there's a guy named George Gascon who's
Speaker 3: the disc attorney of Los Angeles who treats his deputies
Speaker 3: horribly in my in my opinion, and he came in
Speaker 3: and he's he's hostile the law enforcement. He wants to
Speaker 3: prosecute police officers, but it appears almost nobody else and
Speaker 3: deputies in that office are not working for somebody who
Speaker 3: is operating under the same sort of mindset that they are.
Speaker 3: And it is extremely difficult to do that when you
Speaker 3: know you can suffer a political consequence within your office
Speaker 3: for making what you believe to be an ethical call.
Speaker 3: And you know, he Los Angeles County is a vast
Speaker 3: county geographically, and people who cross them tend to get
Speaker 3: transferred to, you know, Lancaster, you know where they've got
Speaker 3: a two hour drive every day. You know, things like that.
Speaker 3: And so I was really lucky when I was in
Speaker 3: homicide because you had I had supportive supervisors and people
Speaker 3: above me, and that understood the primary importance of doing
Speaker 3: the right thing.
Speaker 2: You write that senior Deputy DA's virtually all received lucrative
Speaker 2: offers to go into private practice, and the homicide unit
Speaker 2: was composed entirely of attorneys who had turned down money
Speaker 2: in exchange for something else. And then you write about
Speaker 2: that something else that you realize that it's just not
Speaker 2: about catching bad guys, it's more importantly dealing with the
Speaker 2: family and helping them through the brutal process of the
Speaker 2: court system.
Speaker 3: That's right. So with the population of three million people
Speaker 3: in Orange County, there's only eight or nine homicide prosecutors.
Speaker 3: Back in those days, that office was really it was
Speaker 3: a trial office. They wanted you to become as proficient
Speaker 3: in the craft of trying criminal jury trials as you
Speaker 3: possibly could. So that was kind of the ethos and
Speaker 3: the people that So you go through misdemeanors, then you
Speaker 3: go to the panel, then you go through a primary
Speaker 3: vertical unit. So the people that were really dedicated to
Speaker 3: learning how to do that. You know, you try cases
Speaker 3: against all these lawyers out there in the world, and
Speaker 3: you're trying I mean I did what I did, thirty
Speaker 3: seven mistimen er jury trials, then I did twenty four
Speaker 3: fellony jury trials on the felony panel that I did
Speaker 3: another seventeen and sexual assault and you know when you
Speaker 3: do it long enough, the judges get to know who
Speaker 3: is dedicated to learning the skills of trials right, and
Speaker 3: the word kind of gets out and you know, by
Speaker 3: the time you get to be there's about three hundred
Speaker 3: lawyers in the Orange County DA's office at any given time,
Speaker 3: and you wind up with a very small, kind of
Speaker 3: elite group of people that have kind of, you know,
Speaker 3: risen up through the ranks to get to one of
Speaker 3: those spots. And it's a privilege, truly to be in
Speaker 3: that unit. And they treat you, at least back when
Speaker 3: I was in the office, they treat you like a professional,
Speaker 3: like you've earned your spot, and you know, and it's
Speaker 3: just so it's so fascinating that, you know, what they
Speaker 3: do is it's like they rotate somebody in and it's like, hey,
Speaker 3: this is your area, these are your detectives. Make it work.
Speaker 3: You know, we're here to support you, and they'd get
Speaker 3: out of the way. And for those that really wanted
Speaker 3: to be there, you know, they would, they would establish
Speaker 3: the relationships with those detectives and they you know, they
Speaker 3: would they would do what it took to make sure
Speaker 3: that the cases were properly handled and that they you
Speaker 3: know that the appellate issues weren't arising to at least
Speaker 3: to the lowest degree possible. And they were, you know,
Speaker 3: they were dedicated to doing the job and they were
Speaker 3: treating the victims right, and they you know, they give
Speaker 3: you an opportunity to sort of you know, to stay there.
Speaker 3: And so along the way that that eight eight, eight
Speaker 3: or nine lawyers, every one of them had had, you know,
Speaker 3: lunches with criminal offense lawyers who wanted to retire and
Speaker 3: give somebody their practice, or big civil firms that were
Speaker 3: looking for a you know, a gun slanger that could
Speaker 3: go and try some of their big cases for them.
Speaker 3: And you know, that helps in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 3: So they you know, in civil law, they they don't
Speaker 3: it's a different They get very very good and there's
Speaker 3: a lot of really smart lawyers doing it. They get
Speaker 3: very good in motions work and the discovery process. But
Speaker 3: you know, a lot like my sister's a she's a
Speaker 3: civil litigator quote unquote, and she's I think she's only
Speaker 3: tried three or four cases, you know, at least jury
Speaker 3: trials and the course for a career. You know, I've
Speaker 3: tried I did one hundred and thirty three jury trials
Speaker 3: and probably over two hundred and fifty trials total if
Speaker 3: you count my bench troubles without a jury, So it's
Speaker 3: a very different thing. So along the way, everybody gets
Speaker 3: offer jobs and so the people, and a lot of
Speaker 3: them take it. You know, if you got a family
Speaker 3: and you want a lifestyle that's more geared towards showing
Speaker 3: up for little league games. There's a lot of off
Speaker 3: ramps along the way. And so by the time I
Speaker 3: got to homicide, I was surrounded by essentially trial mutants.
Speaker 3: These you know, my colleagues were fierce and talented and brilliant,
Speaker 3: and in my mind, they were nothing short of superhero
Speaker 3: And I always, I always felt like very honored to
Speaker 3: be among that group. And I read about that in
Speaker 3: the book. I mean, it's some of the best people
Speaker 3: I've ever known. And and some of them, you know, were,
Speaker 3: you know, even more impressive in my mind. A couple
Speaker 3: of my good buddies were you know, they were able
Speaker 3: to pull off being a phenomenal trial prosecutor in the
Speaker 3: homicide unit and also a great dad and devoted husband.
Speaker 3: And there's a couple of my couple of my good
Speaker 3: friends both now superior court judges who somehow managed to
Speaker 3: balance it, and I just didn't have the bandwidth to
Speaker 3: pull that off. So I, you know, to to be
Speaker 3: able to operate at that level, I made the decision,
Speaker 3: and I talked about this in the book that I
Speaker 3: was just going to get kind of going to give
Speaker 3: up on romance for a while and just dedicate myself
Speaker 3: completely to my work.
Speaker 2: That uses as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages. Now,
Speaker 2: let's talk about at least the outline of this incredible
Speaker 2: crime in this case, the Kathy Torres case and you,
Speaker 2: which features what you say is consider an obsessed detective
Speaker 2: Darren Wyatt. But also we mentioned Lou Rosenbloom, and he
Speaker 2: was your primary mentor. You said, so let's talk about
Speaker 2: how you become involved in this case and how Lou
Speaker 2: Rosenbloom becomes involved.
Speaker 3: So Lou, you know, he was I think Lou's fifteen
Speaker 3: years older than me thereabouts. So Lou, you know, you
Speaker 3: hit a point. You know, Lou, after he did his
Speaker 3: trial lawyer, you know, he went into management and then
Speaker 3: he became the head of homicide and eventually, you know
Speaker 3: that County retirement starts looking pretty good. And they you know,
Speaker 3: Lou had retired and he went into private practice. And
Speaker 3: so there was about five years into my time in homicide,
Speaker 3: I volunteered to be one of the two cold case deputies,
Speaker 3: so I would in addition to my cities, I had
Speaker 3: sort of the run of the county any city in
Speaker 3: the county that had a you know, an unsolved case,
Speaker 3: which by the way, is every city in America has
Speaker 3: at least one unsolved murder. Wow, and some of them
Speaker 3: have many unsolved murders. And so with a you know,
Speaker 3: a population of three million people in the patchwork of
Speaker 3: cities that exists in Orange County, you know, there was
Speaker 3: there was some really interesting stuff out there. So this
Speaker 3: was out of the city of Placentia, so it's off
Speaker 3: my patch, out of my sort of out of my beat.
Speaker 3: But there was a police officer that I had gotten
Speaker 3: to know. He was in an ois at one point,
Speaker 3: which is an officer in bulb shooting, and I came
Speaker 3: to know Darren Wyatt, and Darren's very well known. So
Speaker 3: Darren was one of the detectives at Placentia that came
Speaker 3: in after the nineteen ninety four murder of Kathy torres
Speaker 3: So in that case, it's a it's a beautiful young
Speaker 3: woman who is at calcually at Fullerton. She's an honor student.
Speaker 3: She's living at home with her parents, and she'd had
Speaker 3: this on again, off again relationship with a man named
Speaker 3: Sam Lopez who lived across the street in Man. I
Speaker 3: mean they were kids when they first started dating, and
Speaker 3: they and her sister married his brother, and so it
Speaker 3: was very sort of inner familial thing, but Sam was
Speaker 3: a friggin hothead. They were sort of in an off
Speaker 3: time and they were each dating other people, and basically
Speaker 3: Kathy disappeared and she was found a week later in
Speaker 3: the trunk of her car. She'd been stabbed dozens of times,
Speaker 3: her throat had been cut, her wrists had been slashed,
Speaker 3: and significantly, there was arterial spurting on the lid of
Speaker 3: her trunk. So she was found in the trunk of
Speaker 3: her car, and it appeared that there was blood droplets
Speaker 3: on the trunk, and that's really legally significant. It's like
Speaker 3: that three dimensional puzzle we were talking about, because that
Speaker 3: means that her heart was still beating when she into
Speaker 3: the trunk, which means from a legal perspective, she was
Speaker 3: still alive, which means anybody that helped put her in
Speaker 3: the trunk was therefore a principle to the crime of murder, right,
Speaker 3: if that makes sense. Right. So, anyway, the case gets
Speaker 3: investigated back in ninety four, and it was not that
Speaker 3: thoroughly investigated, frankly, and they made some mistakes, and they
Speaker 3: brought the case in for filing against the boyfriend that
Speaker 3: everybody suspected, but there was no there was no evidence
Speaker 3: really connecting him to it. He had an alibi and
Speaker 3: he said he's with his cousin, Javier, and there was
Speaker 3: another another guy that backed up the at least part
Speaker 3: of their albi, and they just kind of stuck to
Speaker 3: this story. And then da who reviewed it back then,
Speaker 3: thought there wasn't enough evidence. And then it was submitted
Speaker 3: again a couple of years later, and again I think
Speaker 3: that that case was refused two or three times. I
Speaker 3: can't remember how many. But so Darren, he'd been working
Speaker 3: on the case for years. It wound up culminating in
Speaker 3: kind of a heated exchange where they, you know, they
Speaker 3: really did not think the case was ever going to
Speaker 3: be filed, and they told them, you know, basically like
Speaker 3: don't bring it back. You know, there isn't enough evidence here.
Speaker 3: So Darren teamed up with my old investigator, Larry Montgomery,
Speaker 3: who was assigned to me and his specialty was cold cases,
Speaker 3: and Larry was josh Mankoodz at NBC called him the
Speaker 3: evidence whisperer, and he's again just brilliant. So these are
Speaker 3: two men. You know, there are people I respect as much,
Speaker 3: but there is nobody I respect more I think than
Speaker 3: Darren Whyatt and Larry Montgomery. And they basically, you know,
Speaker 3: they were like two dogs with a bone, and they kept,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of coming back saying, hey, look let's
Speaker 3: look at this thing, Let's look at that. And we
Speaker 3: Darren went back and he he reprocessed a fingerprint that
Speaker 3: had been found on the trunk of the car. And
Speaker 3: remember the our main suspect, Sam Lopez is alibi was
Speaker 3: his cousin Jabber. And they go in there and they
Speaker 3: had discovered Hobbier's DNA on the on the quarter panel
Speaker 3: of her car, mixed with a drop of Kathy's blood.
Speaker 3: And back then it's a thing called substrate DNA. This
Speaker 3: was a big defense that you know, theoretically you can
Speaker 3: touch a surface leave DNA and then somebody else could
Speaker 3: come along later and bleed on it. And it's kind
Speaker 3: of an absurd defense because of what is known as
Speaker 3: genetic masking. But I won't get into that. But back
Speaker 3: you know, this is there. This is the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 3: so this is like right after OJ right, and like
Speaker 3: nobody really interested DNA worked back then, and it was
Speaker 3: still what they called RFLP, which is those old gels
Speaker 3: with the you know, the gray and the black markers,
Speaker 3: you know, those square markers, you know, and genetic science
Speaker 3: has in a forensic context has you know, we went
Speaker 3: from the Right Brothers to the Space age, you know,
Speaker 3: with the with the with the current like cofiler and
Speaker 3: profiler play kids, and it's just it's so sophisticated now.
Speaker 3: And I had done so many DNA cases between sexual
Speaker 3: assault and homicide, and you know, we got I wasn't
Speaker 3: as impressed as the deputies back in the mid nineties
Speaker 3: that substrate DNA was such a good defense for Hobber
Speaker 3: and he and he had a story. He's like, hey, yeah,
Speaker 3: like right before she went missing, we were at Norwalk
Speaker 3: Records and I got something out of her trunk and anyway,
Speaker 3: they submitted the fingerprint that nobody back in the day
Speaker 3: had had bothered the check and it was Javier's fingerprint.
Speaker 3: So now we have Javier's fingerprint in an upward oriented
Speaker 3: position on the trunk, and we have his DNA mixed
Speaker 3: with her blood on the quarter panel. And it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, it's that's starting to look better and better
Speaker 3: to me. And so a new set of eyes. So
Speaker 3: I decided to file the case. And this is a
Speaker 3: bereaved family who I still communicate with. There. You know
Speaker 3: that her mother was just she's such like such a
Speaker 3: dignified woman, but she's so broken hearted at the at
Speaker 3: the murder of her beautiful daughter. And the type of
Speaker 3: grief that a family goes through is hard to describe
Speaker 3: unless somebody has experienced it, and it is, you know,
Speaker 3: And I've had conversations. I'm in New York right now,
Speaker 3: and I spend a lot of time here doing the
Speaker 3: media stuff. I had dinner with somebody I know out
Speaker 3: here a couple of years ago, and and she said
Speaker 3: that I remember, She's like, oh, yeah, you know, I
Speaker 3: would just I would be able to move on words
Speaker 3: like that, you know, And she had four kids, and
Speaker 3: it's like, no, you wouldn't you have no idea what
Speaker 3: these people go through. You have no idea what a
Speaker 3: family endures when they have When a mother loses a
Speaker 3: child to murder, it is the worst thing a human
Speaker 3: being can experience, and the idea of getting justice becomes
Speaker 3: incredibly important. And you can't, of course, you can't bring
Speaker 3: their loved one back, but you can as a criminal prosecutor.
Speaker 3: You can make sure that the person who did it
Speaker 3: doesn't get away with it, and that is incredibly important.
Speaker 3: You know. I met the Torres family and she had
Speaker 3: that Her brother was a guy named Marty Torres, who
Speaker 3: was a core clerk who I instantly liked, and her
Speaker 3: sister Tina, and like there, she had such a wonderful family.
Speaker 3: And you meet people like that and it's just it
Speaker 3: breaks your heart. And you know, this case got refused
Speaker 3: a million times, but fifteen years had gone by and
Speaker 3: I thought, you know, I think we have enough. I
Speaker 3: think I think we can win this, and so I
Speaker 3: just I made the decision to file it. And it's
Speaker 3: a bit like Russian roulette. Every time you file a case,
Speaker 3: you don't know who's going to walk in the door,
Speaker 3: and it's either it could be some crumpy dude who
Speaker 3: you know who with thick glasses who smells weird. I
Speaker 3: think I put that in the book, or or you
Speaker 3: could the lawyer who walks in the courtroom could be
Speaker 3: an ace. And you're almost like, it's almost like Vegas.
Speaker 3: It's like, please don't be here for my case. Please
Speaker 3: don't because there everybody knows everybody you know in the
Speaker 3: in the criminal criminal justice world of Orange County. And basically,
Speaker 3: long story short, the best lawyer I'd ever seen in
Speaker 3: the courtroom wound up. He got hired by the family
Speaker 3: and I had to go up against lou Rosenbloom, an
Speaker 3: absolute genius, and it was the absolute worst draw. He
Speaker 3: was brought in by a woman named Jennifer Keller, who
Speaker 3: is a fantastic lawyer in her own right and an
Speaker 3: absolute brilliant trial strategist. And she just represented Kevin Spacey
Speaker 3: here in New York and acquitted him. I mean, she
Speaker 3: is phenomenal. So I'm up against that duo like two
Speaker 3: of the best lawyers I've ever seen. Man. That was
Speaker 3: That was probably the most difficult trial I ever did.
Speaker 3: Basically we wound up after we filed, we submitted Kathy's
Speaker 3: genes that were on her body in the trunk, thinking,
Speaker 3: you know, we got Javier on the outside and we
Speaker 3: got this goofy story, maybe we can get some more.
Speaker 3: Let's look at her genes, like where would somebody carry
Speaker 3: carry her if he was helping put her in the trunk.
Speaker 3: And you know, we're still hoping to get Sam's DNA
Speaker 3: the boyfriend, but he locked himself in that he was
Speaker 3: with Abvier that night, and sure enough, man, we swabbed
Speaker 3: the back of her jeans and we got Javier's DNA
Speaker 3: on the back of her jeans, and that changed everything
Speaker 3: because that meant Javier was helping somebody load her into
Speaker 3: the trunk and there's only one person it could have been,
Speaker 3: and it was Sam Lopez. So we we charged them
Speaker 3: both because Javier that made him a principle because of
Speaker 3: those that arterial bleeding. You know, we went to work
Speaker 3: and that trial was was just an unbelievable experience. I
Speaker 3: watched lou Rosenbland do stuff from that that were it
Speaker 3: was so effective. He's one of the only lawyers that
Speaker 3: did devastating things in a courn that I did not anticipate.
Speaker 3: I mean, after I you know, every when I first started,
Speaker 3: every lawyer, everything they did was something I didn't anticipate
Speaker 3: because I didn't I didn't know. I didn't know anything yet.
Speaker 3: But I mean, he was so good and at the
Speaker 3: at the end, you know, the it came down to
Speaker 3: Sam's interview. He gave this interview where you know, they
Speaker 3: he was in an interview, remember the Central Police Department,
Speaker 3: and this was a woman that he had dated on
Speaker 3: and off. It was his sister in law. And he
Speaker 3: went in and he played the role of totally innocent
Speaker 3: guy and that you know, there was about forty minutes
Speaker 3: that went on into that interview before he even asked
Speaker 3: how she died. And they brought him in and said, hey,
Speaker 3: we found Kathy. And he was like he basically thought
Speaker 3: to himself, how would an innocent person act? And he
Speaker 3: played that. He played that role where he basically just
Speaker 3: went in and was like nonchalant and like ho ham
Speaker 3: And they took a break and he got like a
Speaker 3: smudge on his hat, like and he's like, oh man,
Speaker 3: and he's checking the walls and like it's to be
Speaker 3: this is this has got to be like four by
Speaker 3: four construction in here. Like he's talking to himself, he's
Speaker 3: reading the ingredients on a coke can, and he's like, huh.
Speaker 3: And I pretend like, in the real world, the hot
Speaker 3: headed boyfriend of a woman that he was in love
Speaker 3: with and had been forever wouldn't have been acting like that.
Speaker 3: He would have been he would have been demanding answers.
Speaker 3: And when they said, you know, hey, she was murdered,
Speaker 3: he was like huh yeah, and they're like, yeah, we
Speaker 3: thought you would have had got more of a reaction
Speaker 3: out of you, buddy, like somebody murdered your your ex girlfriend,
Speaker 3: your sister in lawn and really you didn't even ask
Speaker 3: for forty minutes you know how she died, And that
Speaker 3: wound up being being the thing. So I went through
Speaker 3: that interview line by line, and at the end of
Speaker 3: the day the jury convicted him and a first degree murder.
Speaker 3: Actually he's up for parole here pretty soon again. But yeah,
Speaker 3: that was that was quite an experience. I had to
Speaker 3: go toe to toe and lou and I walked into
Speaker 3: that trial. I think we were and I I added
Speaker 3: it up for the book. I can't rememb I think
Speaker 3: we were. Between the two of us stuff point, we'd
Speaker 3: tried one hundred and four murder trials and neither of
Speaker 3: us have lost one and one of us was going
Speaker 3: to walk out with our record intact and the other
Speaker 3: was going to walk out with the with an L
Speaker 3: and that was live. Thankfully.
Speaker 2: You say there was some genius at sentencing, innovative move
Speaker 2: tell us about yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So essentially, the way it works in the BPT
Speaker 3: life for hearing. So he's going to get life under
Speaker 3: California law, but based on the Criminal Statutes of nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety four, which is how you have to sentence, he
Speaker 3: was going to get parole hearing within you know, X
Speaker 3: amount of years. And the first thing the pro board
Speaker 3: looks for is have you accepted responsibility? And that's and
Speaker 3: so on. The one of the things that a lot
Speaker 3: of life are prisoners, guys that are out there doing murders.
Speaker 3: They did it, they were convicted of it, but they
Speaker 3: denied it all through the trial and they figure, screw you,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to admit it. And so they come
Speaker 3: into their hearings and they refused to admit it, and
Speaker 3: that that counts against them because there they've expressed no remorse.
Speaker 3: And it's this was just brilliant. Lou waived the appellate
Speaker 3: rights because it took us so long to get that
Speaker 3: case to trial. He had a parole hearing coming up,
Speaker 3: and he then apologized. He admitted it, and he apologized
Speaker 3: to the Torres family. And it was absolute brilliance because
Speaker 3: now his lawyers at these parole hearings can come in
Speaker 3: and say, this is the only homicide, frigging murder defendant
Speaker 3: you guys are going to see on the board of
Speaker 3: prison terms who admitted everything and apologized to the family.
Speaker 3: At sensing, I mean it was it was a genius
Speaker 3: because that it virtually guarantees that he will get paroled.
Speaker 3: He will because his lawyer was a genius. And what
Speaker 3: you see typically is I mean you almost never see that.
Speaker 3: You see people saying we're going to file every appeal
Speaker 3: and that's fine, that's you know, kind of a lawyer's
Speaker 3: job in a way. But Lou he always he he's
Speaker 3: always kind of as intellectually a step ahead of everybody.
Speaker 3: And I was absolutely shocked that that happen. And then
Speaker 3: you know, it's just like I was sitting at council table.
Speaker 3: I remember thinking, son of a bitch, did it again?
Speaker 3: Like that is absolutely brilliant because it guarantees he will
Speaker 3: be released. You know, at some point he will be released.
Speaker 3: The family will, their hearts will break. They're going to
Speaker 3: fight it. You know. I'll do everything I can to
Speaker 3: keep that guy in for what he did, and especially
Speaker 3: when you put that family through. But you know, especially
Speaker 3: in state of California, eventually they will parole him, hopefully
Speaker 3: hopefully not yet, you know, and that's that will be
Speaker 3: as a direct result of the you know, the brilliance
Speaker 3: of his lawyer.
Speaker 2: In this book, you also touch on and we don't
Speaker 2: certainly don't have enough time to explore these cases. But
Speaker 2: for people that will have the privilege of reading this book,
Speaker 2: you talk about Skyler de Leon and the murder of
Speaker 2: the Hawk's family, and Rodney al Kala and Dirty John Meehan.
Speaker 2: But your interaction with each and one of each one
Speaker 2: of these infamous characters.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, So that same detective I was telling you
Speaker 3: about earlier, Dave Byington. So he's the what's called the CAAP,
Speaker 3: the Crime against Search, the Crimes against Person sergeant at
Speaker 3: the Newport Peach Police Department. So he's in charge of
Speaker 3: the homicide detectives. He wound up when Tom and Jackie Hawks,
Speaker 3: they were a couple that were trying to sell their
Speaker 3: yacht in Newport Peach and essentially they went out for
Speaker 3: a sea trial and were never seen again. So we
Speaker 3: went up with this. You know, the buyer of the
Speaker 3: boat was a child actor named Skuyler de Leon who
Speaker 3: appeared in The Power Rangers. You know, he showed up
Speaker 3: with documents saying that he'd purchased the boat. They were
Speaker 3: signed by Tom and Jackie Hawks and they paid cash
Speaker 3: and we had kind of a crazy story, but we
Speaker 3: didn't have We had no real proof at that point,
Speaker 3: at least of you know, of foul play. And we
Speaker 3: did two forendsic workups of their yacht. There was no
Speaker 3: there's no blood, there was no broken items, there was
Speaker 3: nothing indicating that anything violent had happened on the boat.
Speaker 3: And my lead detective was Dave Byington, the same guy
Speaker 3: that took me into the kitchen in that Newport Peach home.
Speaker 3: And that case wound up being absolutely wild. You know,
Speaker 3: I talked about this in the book, and yeah, this
Speaker 3: Skylar de Leone is a genuine psychopath. And then with
Speaker 3: Riding i'cala, he's known as the dating Game killer. He
Speaker 3: was a serial killer active in the nineteen seventies who
Speaker 3: kidnapped him almost murdered an eight year old girl named
Speaker 3: Tali Shapiro in nineteen sixty eight in Hollywood, and she
Speaker 3: was in a coma for thirty two days. There's a
Speaker 3: heroic police officer, Officer Camacho, who kicked the door in
Speaker 3: and saved the day. But I'll call it escaped. And
Speaker 3: it was like this devil's choice he had to make,
Speaker 3: like save the dying little girl or catch the bad guy.
Speaker 3: And he did the right thing. He saved the dying
Speaker 3: little girl. Well, i'll call it turns up. Three years later,
Speaker 3: four years later, maybe in Vermont working at an all
Speaker 3: girls summer camp. He moved to New York, changed his name.
Speaker 3: He graduated from UCLA Film School before this, and then
Speaker 3: he went and he went to NYU Film School, studied
Speaker 3: under Roman Polanski of all things. And he was They
Speaker 3: caught him, they extradited him. He was sentenced to life
Speaker 3: and he was paroled after thirty four months and stayed
Speaker 3: prison for that crime. And after he was paroled, depending
Speaker 3: on who we you know, who you talk to. But
Speaker 3: the lead detective is a guy in Craig Robson who's
Speaker 3: now a Supreme Court judge as well, is one of
Speaker 3: the smartest people I know. You know he when you
Speaker 3: do the math on it and you figure out, you
Speaker 3: know where where I'll call it was, you know who,
Speaker 3: how much time he had, how prolific he was. He
Speaker 3: estimates he killed one hundred people after his paroled from
Speaker 3: a life sentence, and he was finally arrested for kidnapping, raping,
Speaker 3: and murdering a twelve year old girl I was hunting
Speaker 3: to beach named Robin Samso. But the case got reversed
Speaker 3: once by the California Supreme Court. He was retried since
Speaker 3: to death again. Then I went to the ninth circuit
Speaker 3: that reversed it again, and it came down. That's when
Speaker 3: it landed on my desk, and I teamed up with
Speaker 3: a woman who I love, named Genus Satriano, with a
Speaker 3: man named Steve Cooley, who's the former DA of LA,
Speaker 3: who was wonderful, and they we did it together, and
Speaker 3: we went up prosecuting. After we got the Robin Samso thing,
Speaker 3: we started getting cold case hits out of Los Angeles,
Speaker 3: so we prosecuted him for the murders of four women
Speaker 3: and one girl, so five victims, and then he got
Speaker 3: you know, he was charged with I think just two
Speaker 3: in New York, but there's five murders that I know
Speaker 3: he committed out here, and then there was another one
Speaker 3: in Wyoming. He was cleared to one in Marin certainly
Speaker 3: did two in San Diego, although he's never charged for those.
Speaker 3: Like this is a man who was a monster. Yes,
Speaker 3: you know, like a lot of good psychopaths, he insisted
Speaker 3: on representing himself, which is one of the things they
Speaker 3: love to do. So yeah, I had to deal with
Speaker 3: him interpersonally for about six months that come in and
Speaker 3: we talk, and you know, you have to treat him yet,
Speaker 3: you know, for some foremost you have to treat Canmo
Speaker 3: defendants fairly as a prosecutor, and he's representing himself, so
Speaker 3: you know I had to. I had, you know, I
Speaker 3: had to treat him fairly and make sure the process
Speaker 3: was fair. So I had to go deal with him daily,
Speaker 3: and honestly, it was a fascinating experience. It really was.
Speaker 3: You know, he's he's the he's an evil human being,
Speaker 3: I mean, if you can even call a human. But
Speaker 3: it was it was a sort of a seminal experience
Speaker 3: in my life. It was really something. And at the
Speaker 3: end he was sentenced to out the third time. We
Speaker 3: convicted him of all five murders for you know, one
Speaker 3: of them, Robin Samso for the third time, and then
Speaker 3: he went and he died a lonely death in California
Speaker 3: medical facility outside of Sacramento. Eventually died just a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago, and the world instantly became a better
Speaker 3: place as soon as he did.
Speaker 2: As as an extraordinary book, and I want to thank
Speaker 2: you so much for coming on and talking about the
Speaker 2: Book of Murder, a prosecutor's journey through love and death.
Speaker 2: For those that might want to check out this book,
Speaker 2: can you tell us about your website and do you
Speaker 2: do any social media?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you can follow me at Matt Murphy Law
Speaker 3: on Instagram and then it's available on Amazon, Disney Books, Barnes,
Speaker 3: and Noble. But also I teamed up with a local
Speaker 3: bookstore in Manhattan Beach where I live called Pages. So
Speaker 3: their website is Pages Bookstore dot com and you can
Speaker 3: buy signed copies through them, and they're just like Amazon.
Speaker 3: They'll get it in the mail and ship it out
Speaker 3: the same day. I mean they'll they'll mail it immediately.
Speaker 3: And it kind of helps my local little brick and
Speaker 3: mortar and They're super nice. It's available on Audible, there's
Speaker 3: a Kindle version. It all just came out, you know,
Speaker 3: in the last couple of days. So I'm also doing
Speaker 3: I'm doing a book signing here in New York at
Speaker 3: the Shakespeare and Company Friday at six o'clock borrow. I'm
Speaker 3: going to be in Indianapolis Barnes and Noble on Saturday
Speaker 3: this week, which is what the twenty first, and then
Speaker 3: I'm doing a live event in San Diego on the
Speaker 3: twenty third. I'll be in Newport Beach Barnes and Noble
Speaker 3: at Fashion Island. But we're still trying to dial in
Speaker 3: a date that I'm heading up to Salt Lake City,
Speaker 3: and I'm going to be posting all these dates as
Speaker 3: they as they come forward. I'm hoping to make it down,
Speaker 3: believe it or not, to Shreveport, Louisiana at some point.
Speaker 3: Potentially we might just do it in New Orleans. So
Speaker 3: we're the stops on the book tour are sort of
Speaker 3: still we're still putting them together. Yeah, I will. I
Speaker 3: would love to sign anybody's book, And if you want
Speaker 3: to sign copy and you don't want to come to
Speaker 3: what Barnes and Noble someplace. You can get them at
Speaker 3: pages of bookstore dot com. Oh, that's great. Thank you
Speaker 3: so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much Matt Murphy for coming on to
Speaker 2: talking about the book of Murder prosecutors Journey through Love
Speaker 2: and Death. Thank you so much for this interview. Thank
Speaker 2: you so much, and you have a great evening. Thanks Dan,
Speaker 2: good night,