Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  LASO DEPUTIES JOHN VIEW AND GLENN BARTHOLOMEW REACHED BALDY Notch Road above Coldwater Canyon and waited for the remainder of their element to get into position. Both View and Bartholomew were thirty-four years old with typical SWAT credentials: previous military service and five to ten years in law enforcement before joining the Special Enforcement Bureau. Together with deputy Steve Voors, View and Bartholomew made up one of two Hunt & Kill teams reporting to sergeant Tony Wilta. View was carrying a Remington 40-X high-powered rifle with scope and bipod. Bartholomew was armed with an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun and Voors an AR-15 firing .223 ammunition. It was the same configuration of weaponry with which George Smith had armed his own team of men the day before.

  At 10:30 a.m., a sweep of Coldwater Canyon began with the main body of fifty men moving up from the base of the mountain in a southwesterly direction while the Hunt & Kill teams shadowed them from the high ground on Baldy Notch Road. At points throughout the mile-wide canyon, SWAT sharpshooters stood on craggy granite outcroppings, scoped rifles held at the ready as they scanned the landscape below for movement. View, Bartholomew, and Voors moved cautiously up the fire road, aware of just how exposed they were to anyone looking to take out another cop. An hour and a half into the sweep and one mile up Baldy Notch Road, they located fresh tracks. Whoever was wearing the boots with Vibram-type soles had been indecisive, walking back and forth at the edge of the road before going over the side.

  The three men held their position and radioed for a tracking team. Fontana PD brought up a dog and handler under armed escort, but the overnight rain had washed away the scent, making the animal of little use. Several yards down the hill, the tracks seemed to double back on themselves and then head upslope. Sergeant Wilta broke up the team, taking Voors with him and swinging low on the hillside while View and Bartholomew followed the tracks along the high ground. It took an hour and a half to cover another mile while choppers crossed overhead fighting gusty winds, their spotters scanning the hillsides. As the two men ascended the side of the ridgeline, the tracks went into a dense stand of chaparral that covered the entire crest of the domed hilltop. Soon they were fighting through virtually impenetrable brush that reached above their heads. At times visibility was less than five feet and never more than fifteen. Bartholomew and View were less concerned about being ambushed than they were about accidentally stumbling across a desperate criminal armed with an AR-15.

  At a break in the underbrush just below the crest of the ridge, Bartholomew and View paused and scanned the area in front of them. A San Bernardino Sheriff’s helicopter rose up from behind the ridge with a roar of rotor blades and held a low hover fifteen feet above the ground, whipping the brush and kicking up a cloud of dirt. View noticed the spotter standing in the open door of the chopper looking straight down.

  John Plasencia, who had been spotting on 40-King-1 with Ed Mabry during the pursuit through the canyon the day before, caught sight of a flash of blue among the green and brown brush. Pilot Terry Jagerson brought the chopper low, using the rotor blades to part the brush. They saw a man lying prone on the dirt wearing work boots, Levi’s, and a blue sweatshirt beneath a dark green hunting vest with multiple pockets. The flash of color that had given away the man’s position to Plasencia was the pair of bright blue dishwashing gloves used in the robbery that Manny had put on to keep his hands warm. Plasencia saw View and Bartholomew waving their arms to get his attention. The spotter made exaggerated pointing gestures toward the area just below the chopper. View gave Plasencia a thumbs-up and radioed the location over the LASO frequency. The two men checked their weapons one last time.

  As they advanced in a low crawl, Jagerson kept the blades of the helicopter roaring directly over their suspect, blinding him in a cloud of swirling dirt and deafening him with the chopping of the rotors. “We’ll hold here and cover him,” Jagerson radioed. “We can split if the shit hits the fan.”

  View and Bartholomew crept slowly through brush so thick they could not even see the helicopter above them. They had crested the dome of the hill and were moving to the downslope side when Bartholomew saw a flash of blue twenty feet in front of them. The wind from the rotors jerked the bushes wildly side to side, exposing the subject in brief flashes. The two men lowered their weapons and advanced a few more feet to get a clearer aim with fewer branches obstructing their line of fire. When they attained their position, Delgado was only a dozen feet away, lying on his stomach, looking up at the helicopter with his right side exposed to the Hunt & Kill team. The two deputies settled into their firing positions with View sighting the .308 just under Delgado’s armpit and Bartholomew leveling the Ithaca twelve-gauge at his torso. View gave his partner a silent nod.

  “Freeze, Sheriff’s Department, hold it right there,” Bartholomew called out.

  Manny whipped his head around and began to roll onto his left side. When he did, View and Bartholomew saw the steel of the handgun in his right hand and fired their weapons. Three rounds from the .308 and three loads of #4 buck slammed into the torso of Manny Delgado. Delgado pitched forward and lay motionless, one arm tucked beneath his body. The two men waited, weapons still trained on their suspect. “Get those hands out where we can see them,” Bartholomew called out, but there was no response. When further calls to Delgado produced no movement, View crept forward with his sidearm drawn while Bartholomew covered him with the shotgun. Reaching his suspect, View handcuffed Manny and rolled the lifeless body over. A .38 revolver lay beneath the body. View retrieved the gun and handed it to Bartholomew. View then squinted up at the helicopter still hovering low overhead and held out four fingers to them. Code 4: suspect neutralized, all law enforcement personnel okay.

  Standing in the open door of 40-King-1, John Plasencia saw the signal and relayed it to Jagerson, who broadcast it over the San Bernardino radio frequency about the same time John View was radioing LASO personnel. A cheer went up at the command post and across the mountainsides of Lytle Creek Canyon. Hunt & Kill had done their job.

  SUBJECT BODY IS COOL TO THE TOUCH, PATHOLOGIST DR. IRVING ROOT NOTED as he began to remove the clothing of Manny Delgado in the San Bernardino County morgue. As he pulled at the green hunting vest saturated in blood, several shotgun pellets fell out with a clatter onto the stainless steel table. Root scooped them up and handed them over to attendant Brian Hoak along with plastic and felt shotgun wadding that had been expended through the barrel of Bartholomew’s Ithaca at such close range they penetrated Delgado’s clothing. Root noted a tattoo on the upper right arm of his subject: the initials M. D. in script with the number 13 and a heart below that, all of it encircled in scrollwork.

  Might be gang-related, sergeant Ron Durling speculated as he observed the autopsy.

  Dr. Root addressed the right side of the subject’s body peppered with buckshot. This could take a while. He began to count while examining each hole, starting with the lowest at midthigh. When he had examined the last of the punctures just north of the nipple line, Root called out the total. Sixty-two penetrating wounds from what appears to be #3 or #4 buckshot. Somebody whistled. Yeah, whoever was using that shotgun sure did a number on this one, Root said.

  Next, Root studied a two-inch-diameter hole in the right shoulder, put there by John View and his .308. Root looked for an exit wound but found none. He studied the X-rays of the body posted on the light board. High-velocity projectile with fragments dispersed throughout the thoracic region, he said. He also noted a second two-inch hole in the right side of the subject. Same gun, same thing. Hoak scribbled the information on his notepad.

  At last, Root addressed the hole in Manny Delgado’s chest, just left of midline and below the inter-nipple line. Ten millimeters in diameter, abraded and inverted around the edges, he said, indicating an entry wound. Note greasy black gunpowder residue around wound. Straight-on contact wound. Root and Hoak logrolled their subject and checked his back. Root worked a probe through the wound on the chest all the way through to an exit wound under Manny’s s
houlder blade. Through and through, no projectile found. They rolled Manny back. Root checked the X-rays. Extensive fragmentation of the left cardiac ventricle with massive blood loss, he noted. The pathologist turned to the men from the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office. Who had the .38?

  The guy on the table, Durling said.

  Well, I hate to disappoint your friends over at LASO, Root said, but they didn’t kill this guy. He killed himself.

  Root removed his gloves and scribbled the last line of the report himself.

  Cause of Death: Gunshot wound to the heart.

  12

  THE NORCO 3

  May 18, 1980. Riverside, California.

  JUST EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE NORCO BANK ROBBERY, AT 8:32 IN THE MORNING, the earth began to shake beneath the Cascade Range sixty miles northeast of Portland, Oregon. Within seconds, there was an explosion with the force of 1,500 Hiroshima atomic bombs, and an area of mountainside the size of Manhattan gave way in the largest landslide in recorded history. The mass of rock, dirt, and vegetation traveled fourteen miles at speeds of 150 miles per hour, burying everything in its way to a depth of 145 feet. Through the gaping wound left in the earth, a fiery demon rose up from the depths and broke through the surface, letting loose a dragon’s breath of glowing gas and rock superheated to almost 700 degrees that raced across the landscape at 400 miles per hour. Almost instantly, every living thing within eight miles—cattle, wolves, grizzly bears, salmon, human beings—vaporized without a trace. Entire lakes evaporated. Four billion board feet of timber was left lying flat, all of the scorched, felled tree trunks pointing north in an orderly fashion. Rushing down the mountain behind it all came 46 billion gallons of meltwater sweeping up debris into a lethal slurry that overflowed rivers, tore bridges from their moorings, and erased miles of roadway in all directions.

  But the monster was not done yet. Moments later, the earth shook again, and the mountain exploded a second time, sending a plume of 540 million tons of ash fifteen miles straight up into the sky, breaking through to the stratosphere within minutes. Inside the choking black cloud, lightning flashed while below the earth vomited rivers of molten rock. Within hours, ash began to bury Moscow, Idaho, and fell like tiny ghosts on Missoula, Montana. Three hundred miles away in Spokane, Washington, the streetlights went on as the midday sun turned to total darkness. Alone on a mountainside, trapped in the pitch black of a postapocalyptic wasteland, a man turned on his video camera to record what he was sure would be the final moments of his life. “Oh dear God,” he gasped. “This is hell on earth.”

  Inside the Riverside County jail, one thousand miles south of Mount St. Helens, murmurs began among the inmates of a great catastrophe unlike anything the world had ever seen. A man stood looking through the bars of his cell, wondering if he would die there when California fell into the sea, as it surely would any day now. For Christopher Harven, the Jupiter Effect had come early. A few feet away, another man stared at a bare lightbulb, calculating how long it would take before Jesus lifted him up to meet his Lord in the sky. For George Wayne Smith, the Rapture was arriving right on schedule. Sitting on the edge of a metal bunk, a third young man eyed the other two with resentment and disgust. It’s just a fucking volcano, thought Russell Harven.

  While his brother and George were busy indulging in smug self-satisfaction over the fulfillment of their apocalyptic beliefs, Russ was focused on the real crisis facing them: the gas chamber at San Quentin. At a hearing four days earlier, the district attorney had formally requested the death penalty on a charge of first-degree murder with “special circumstances.” The prosecutors had offered up a buffet of special circumstances from which to choose: evading arrest, killing a police officer on duty, lying in wait, homicide during the commission of a felony. Considering they had clearly committed all four of those acts, any one of which would send them to death row, Russ was fairly confident that’s exactly where they were headed.

  Through a family friend, Russ’s parents were referred to an Orange County defense attorney named Alan Olson. Olson agreed to have the court assign him to represent their youngest son despite having relatively little experience in serious criminal cases. Russ soon developed confidence in his thin, soft-spoken, and unassuming attorney, a former army captain in his early thirties with a wife and four children. Olson and Russ had something else in common, in addition to the effort to save Russ from the gas chamber: Both were diabetics, Olson having been diagnosed just two years before.

  Olson had already begun pondering a “diabetes defense” for Harven, in which his client could not be held accountable due to being in a diabetic shock from lack of food at the time of the crime. Failing that, he would argue Harven should be spared the death penalty because his diabetic condition was, in fact, already a death sentence. To this end, Olson started referring to Russ’s type of diabetes as “the terminal kind.” Olson went so far as to opine to the press that his client might even die before standing trial.

  Olson found his client to be cooperative and eager to please but mostly disinterested in his own defense. To Russ, the trial was nothing more than a charade with a foregone conclusion. He had fucked up and there was nothing he could do about it now. Olson summarized his client’s feeling to reporters. “He was there, but it got completely out of hand. It was the worst mistake of his life.” Olson added that his client “has expressed a lot of remorse.” That was true, but Russell Harven’s remorse was mostly for what he had done to his own life, not for what they did to Jim Evans. That fact that he might have been responsible for the murder of another human being was not something Russ wanted to contemplate. So he didn’t.

  If Russ was passive, regretful, and fatalistic in the face of his current situation, his older brother was none of those things. The last of the three to be released from the hospital, the slug from Jim Evans’s .38 still lodged in his chest, Christopher Harven arrived at his initial court hearing appearing relaxed and confident, cracking jokes to his grim-faced captors as he was hustled into the building under heavy security. Guards with automatic rifles were placed around the courthouse and, once again, Riverside Police helicopter Baker-1 circled above him. Unshaven and unwashed since his capture, shackled at the ankles with his hands cuffed behind his back and secured to a leather strap, Chris nevertheless appeared defiant, his rugged good looks somehow enhanced by his outlaw status. When asked in the courthouse if he needed anything, Chris said, “Well, I have a lot of phone calls to make.” He was told he would get only one.

  Chris’s court appearance was in sharp contrast to that of Russ and George Smith’s the day before. Russ had stared in curiosity at waiting reporters and federal marshals, still looking every bit the ragged, bearded, scowling fugitive cop killer. Most there interpreted it as a hate-filled glare. Smith appeared utterly defeated, head bowed, eyes downcast, one foot wearing a green bathroom slipper and the other bare. Blood stained the cuffs of his orange prison jumpsuit where the ankle chains cut into his flesh with each forced step. Both looked distraught as the thirteen-page complaint against them was read aloud. At the conclusion, they were rushed out of the building and whisked off by heavily armed deputies in waiting vehicles.

  Riverside attorney Jay Grossman had been assigned by the court to represent Chris Harven. An experienced and skillful criminal defense attorney, Grossman had recently gained some attention defending necrophiliac “Trash Bag Killer” Patrick Kearney in the slayings of an estimated forty-three young men and boys. But Chris had issues with the guy from the start. Unlike Russ, Chris had taken an interest in his own defense and soon became familiar with the lexicon of the law, speaking of “demurrers,” “severances,” and “Marsden hearings.” In Harven’s eyes, Grossman was dismissive of his suggestions, did not make enough trips to the jail to meet with him, and put too much focus on negotiating a plea rather than mounting a defense. Still, they pressed ahead for the time being.

  RELEASED FROM THEIR RESPECTIVE HOSPITALS AND REUNITED IN THE SEGREGATION unit of the Riverside County
jail, the three Norco bank robbers soon reverted to their interpersonal hierarchy. At the bottom of the ladder was Russ, alternately screamed at or disregarded by the other two. George returned to the book of Revelation and the Rapture, God’s ultimate jailbreak. He was as convinced as ever in the Second Coming predictions of Calvary pastor Chuck Smith as foretold in The Late Great Planet Earth. Just hang in there, he told his fellow inmates, Jesus is going to bust us out of here soon. With no other hope to hang on to, Chris and Russ did their best to believe.

  Their stepfather, Walt Harven, was a pragmatic and practical man who knew his two boys were lost to him forever. By the time he slipped into a Riverside County jail visiting booth for the first time, he was resigned to their fate and saw no reason to reprimand them for what they had done. Speaking in a calm and matter-of-fact tone, Walt met with his youngest boy first. The conversation was disjointed and awkward, with Walt relaying mundane details of family members and activity around the Harven home. Russ responded with religious non sequiturs, desperately seeking to salvage some approval from the father he had disappointed for the last time.

  “You’re lucky to get Olson through his brother,” Walt said at one point.

  “Yeah, well, you know, Chris and me, we figure Jesus Christ has got to have some plans for us. There were a bunch of times when they could have killed us, but they didn’t. We figure Jesus Christ is watching over us for something. They say when the Tribulations start, the righteous will come and set the prisoners free to fight the godless. And that’s us.”

  “Very good,” Walt said flatly, with all the enthusiasm of a man whose son had just told him he was going out to see a movie. There was a long, uneasy silence before Walt shifted back to small talk. “We got all kinds of mail from the relatives. The Purcells, Jim and Rose, both called . . .”