Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  The autopsy report also generated a third theory, especially among some Riverside and San Bernardino deputies, that the Hunt & Kill boys had shot Manny with his own gun in revenge for the death of Jim Evans. In this narrative, after firing on Delgado, SWAT had approached their wounded suspect and, finding him still alive, pried the .38 out of his hands and shot him through the heart. It was not true. A closer reading of the article or coroner’s report revealed that Manny’s heart had stopped beating somewhere between the first and last shotgun blasts to strike him. In other words, only Manny himself could have pulled the trigger of the gun that killed him. But reality was no match for the sweet satisfaction of revenge, so the rumor persisted.

  AS THE WEEKS WENT BY, ALAN OLSON BEGAN TO SEE AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE diabetes defense he had planned for Russell Harven. Russ might still be professing confusion over how he could have gotten himself involved in something like this, but his attorney believed he had the answer: The reason was Chris.

  Olson had Russ evaluated by several psychiatric professionals. The first was a clinical psychologist named Kenneth Wright who administered to Harven a battery of standardized diagnostic tests including the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. Wright’s conclusion was that Russell Harven’s intelligence was in the “superior” range and that “the potential is greater because his comprehension actually is much higher than the IQ score.” However, additional findings based on the Rorschach inkblot and Thematic Apperception Test indicated that Russ had a severely reduced ability to fantasize and expand on thoughts and an almost total lack of introspection, rendering his functional intelligence below average. Wright said the tests showed that Russ would make “a great follower” who “does not have the wherewithal emotionally to lead people.”

  A second psychologist named George Chappell concluded that Russ was “a very passive, compliant person who sort of did what he was told” and had “very little insights or imagination or thoughts about his future or the consequences of what he may be doing.” Chappell was plainspoken in his overall conclusion. “Basically, he was just a very passive guy who kind of went with the wind.”

  “The wind” in this case was most definitely his older brother, Chris. Dr. David Sheffner spent hours with Russ and interviewed family members and friends who knew both Harven brothers well. Long-time friend Bob Hennings said Russ “followed Chris blindly” and that Chris “exploited” Russ and “treated him badly.” Russ had never been able to say no to Chris, said Hennings, providing multiple examples to Sheffner. Russ’s ex-wife, Eileen, said Chris was “cruel” and abusive in general, but especially toward Russ.

  Russ was a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant in the evaluation and, when asked directly, refused to blame Chris entirely for his involvement in the crime. But his comments about their relationship were revealing. “Chris always has to have his way and he’ll do anything to get it,” Russ said. Chris “has had his way all his life, pushing me all around. If I wouldn’t have listened to him before, I wouldn’t be where I am.” Russ blamed himself as well, “because I was stupid enough to listen to him.” When asked to describe his childhood, Russ said, “Happy, I guess. I had a good time except when my brother would start tormenting me.” When they were younger and both living at home, Russ said, “I hated him.” As an adult, “I guess I didn’t like him too much.” Russ characterized his brother’s tactics at manipulation as alternately “screaming and yelling at me” and then being nice and speaking to him in a calm voice. “His reasonable act,” Russ called it.

  Sheffner termed Russ a “passive, dependent, rather non-functional individual” who most likely would never have participated in something like a bank robbery if it were not for the influence of his brother.

  Alan Olson thought this could be Russell Harven’s ticket out of the gas chamber, that he might even get a twenty-five to life from an especially sympathetic jury. All he needed was to get Russ’s trial severed from his brother’s. All three attorneys were filing for severance on behalf of their clients for various reasons, but Olson had the strongest case for getting a separate trial. Without Chris at the defense table next to him, psychiatric evaluations could be brought out more completely, specifically citing Chris as the reason Russ got involved in the crime at all. But with Chris as a co-defendant, anything that portrayed Chris as responsible for Russ’s involvement would be considered prejudicial to Chris and therefore off-limits. Olson repeatedly made motions for severance, but the court was having none of it. The Norco 3 would be tried together.

  JUST PRIOR TO THE PRELIMINARY HEARING, A SECOND COUNT OF FIRST-DEGREE murder was added to the charges for the death of Billy Delgado. Under a doctrine known as the Felony Murder Rule, if anyone is killed during the commission of a crime, all participants in the crime are equally guilty, no matter who does the killing. To be found not guilty, the defense would have to show that either the cops or Billy himself had initiated the firefight in front of the bank. However, tests on the two guns in Billy’s possession showed the teenager never fired a single round. That meant the defense would have to convince a jury it was deputy Glyn Bolasky who had fired the first shot.

  Including this additional count of murder, the final list of charges against each of the Norco 3 stood at forty-six felony counts, including capital murder, kidnapping, arson, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and twenty-two counts of attempted murder of a police officer. With most of the preliminaries completed, the judge indicated the trial would likely start sometime in February 1981 and last six months.

  It was Christopher Harven who caused the first significant delay in the timeline. On Friday, December 19, 1980, Harven’s attorney rose to deliver arguments for a severance of Chris’s trial from that of his little brother. But before Jay Grossman could begin, Chris stood and addressed the judge. “I must at this time respectfully request a Marsden hearing to hear a motion by myself for a substitution of counsel.” Harven said he wanted Grossman jettisoned from his defense “due to the gross and shoddy nature of the negligent ineptitude in the preparation, or lack thereof, in this case.” As evidence, Chris cited “the total disregard of my present counsel shown in his inactions on important motions I requested.”

  “You are asking then that the court appoint new counsel for you?” asked judge J. David Hennigan, just appointed to hear the trial.

  “Yes, sir,” answered Chris.

  “This is the first time I heard of it,” said Grossman, “but I formally move to withdraw.”

  At Harven’s insistence, a Marsden hearing was held the following Monday so he could get his grievances against Grossman on the record. There, Chris asserted that Grossman had violated his constitutional rights. “I feel my present attorney has exchanged certain information with the district attorney.”

  The accusation sent the normally cool Grossman leaping from his chair. “That’s absolutely preposterous,” he yowled, and then gained his composure. “But I am not going to say anything further because of the attorney-client privilege.”

  By Wednesday, Chris Harven had his new attorney, a former Riverside deputy public defender name Michael Bancroft Lloyd. At thirty-one years old, Lloyd was only a few years older than his client. In fact, they had known each other as younger men. As a teenager growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, Chris frequently snuck into the park and rode the rides for free courtesy of a wider group of friends and acquaintances employed there. Lloyd was a friend of a friend who worked the Matterhorn ride and had frequently let Chris on without the required E ticket. When Chris entered the room to meet his new attorney for the first time, the two stared at each other for a moment. “You?” they said almost simultaneously.

  Lloyd had a steady gaze, a baby face, and a hairline that had already retreated to the top of his head. He was a competent if unremarkable trial attorney who had graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu just five years before and recently set up private practice on Main Street near the Riverside courthouse. Lloyd did not mind the prospe
ct of a lengthy, all-consuming trial. A high-profile case and a guaranteed $7,000 monthly income were not such bad things to have when establishing a new practice. Lloyd retained Bruce Cummins to handle the investigation duties.

  After reviewing Chris’s case, Lloyd decided he would need some mitigating circumstances to keep his client out of the gas chamber. What if, for example, his client’s motivation for robbing a bank was not just pure greed, but an attempt to defend himself and his loved ones from a catastrophe of biblical proportions?

  On Friday, March 27, 1981, Chris Harven sat down with Riverside Press-Enterprise reporter Chris Bowman for a rambling jailhouse interview. Seated beside Lloyd in the chapel of the Riverside County jail, clean-shaven with a neatly groomed mustache and sporting a shiny gold crucifix around his neck, Chris Harven first asserted his innocence and refused to talk about the incident itself. All he would say on the subject was, “I personally, and as to others involved in this case, did not murder Deputy Evans.” But he was more than happy to talk about his belief in the coming Apocalypse and how it drove him to bank robbery.

  “You can go into the Bible, into Revelations, and find out how it’s going to end,” he told Bowman. “It seems like the natural disasters talked about in the Bible are lining up. Earthquakes, floods, the drought in Africa, Mount St. Helens.” When did he think the day of reckoning would come? Bowman wanted to know. “One might come to the conclusion that it could happen today. It could happen tomorrow.” “Remember that comet we had?” Harven continued, referring to Kohoutek eight years earlier. “The Bible says that anytime a comet goes across, an empire falls. That one went right across North America. I think it’s pretty well known that North America is an empire, regardless of the fact that Canada and Mexico consider themselves independent.”

  Leaning back in his chair with arms folded confidently across his chest, Harven told Bowman, “It starts in Revelations 17 . . . The whore of Babylon is going to be destroyed. I believe they are talking about the United States. What other country has, shall we say, led the world to moral decay? Before Armageddon happens, the world will go through years of trials and tribulations. Many will die. At that time, Jesus Christ will return.”

  Harven then veered into his array of secular doomsday scenarios. “We’re going to have a strange alignment of the planets in ’82 or ’83, which we haven’t had since, I think, 1804. This, probably, definitely, will mean traumatic effects on the earth. It’s called ‘The Jupiter Effect’ and it will affect tides, earthquakes, volcanoes. We’re also into a very unusual sunspot.” He went on, speaking in soft, measured tones. “We’re getting into a dangerous nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, and I think that’s what it’s going to be that happens to us—a super Pearl Harbor.”

  Bowman asked about the pit he and Smith dug in the backyard. “Like you’re sitting in your front room and a missile is on the way, film at eleven. We were going to go down there and sit it out rather than fry.” “We always thought that it could happen any day,” he added. “We had laid in months of stored food, lamps, oil, clothes, camping equipment, guns and ammunition for that day.” Why so many guns? “To protect myself from marauders. You’ve got food. Nobody else has got food . . .”

  In the article, which ran on the front page of the Sunday-edition County section, Harven stated he was “strong-willed” and confident about the outcome of the trial, despite the specter of death hanging over it. “Death does not frighten me,” he said. “Why should it? You’d have to be faithless to be afraid of dying.”

  Chris Harven was not done with pretrial surprises. On June 8, 1981, just one week before the scheduled start of the trial, Chris and his most faithful visitor, Olivia Estrada, were married in what amounted to no more than a filing of paperwork at the county administrative building. The union went unnoticed by the press.

  AS THE PROCESS OF GETTING THE CASE TO TRIAL LIMPED FORWARD, THE DEFENSE attorneys continued their fight for a change of venue out of the Inland Empire. With all the press coverage, they contended, it would not possible to find an impartial jury there.

  The judge agreed, moving the trial site from Riverside to San Diego County, to be held at the California superior court in the small town of Vista, seventy miles to the south. Prosecutors were not pleased. With a long trial ahead, this would mean regular two-hour commutes and long stretches in hotels away from family and office. Scheduling witnesses would be a nightmare, if they could get them to make the trip down there at all, which was exactly what the defense wanted. Their request for an additional six months to prepare for the trial was granted. When told by a reporter that the lead prosecutor had called the delay “excessive” and “not the right thing to do,” Adams snapped, “I don’t care what the D.A. thinks.”

  AFTER SIX MONTHS OF INCARCERATION AT THE RIVERSIDE COUNTY JAIL, THE Norco 3 finally had enough of the deputies running the place. On December 11, 1980, all three defendants filed separate affidavits to the superior court alleging harassment, bogus cell searches in the middle of the night, intentional sleep deprivation, and other offenses Chris Harven termed the equivalent of “torture.” “The deputies congregate outside in the hall, talking loudly, ratcheting their handcuffs, shinning lights into our faces, and rattling the door until we are visibly awake.” As a result, Chris said, he was so exhausted that he frequently fell asleep during court appearances.

  Smith and Harven said the deputies were putting their lives at risk by keeping them in “the snitch tank” segregation cells and spreading rumors that they had either abandoned or ratted out Manny Delgado to the SWAT teams in Lytle Creek. They did this, Chris said, “to build up rumors against us so physical harm will result to us if we go to prison. If they couldn’t kill us before, they want to make sure their rumors to the inmates will.”

  Chris offered that the only solution was to keep them out of any facility operated by the Riverside County Sheriff. “By the nature of the alleged crime, we are subject to harassment at every level. The deputies feel animosity to us above what they usually feel as a result and do anything to discomfort us. They get ‘even’ every day. It is ludicrous to expect them to act any other way.” George Smith had a more succinct way of describing the untenable nature of the relationship. “You have handed them an ice cream cone—us—and told them not to lick it.”

  In truth, George, Chris, and Russ found the young jailers more annoying than threatening. It was the older deputies, the ones out working the streets, who were the most menacing. Those guys might not have had control over their day-to-day lives, but they spent a lot of time at the county jail hauling in prisoners and doing the substantial amount of paperwork that goes with any arrest. As a result, the Norco 3 were constantly coming face-to-face with men they had tried to kill. Many of them had taken bullets through their windshields; some still carried lead in their bodies. All of them had known Jim Evans.

  When these deputies passed the segregation cells, they would often stop to stare at the three cop killers. Some told them flat out that they would kill them if they could. But mostly they just stared, their eyes saying it already. Among all the deputies, there was one who George Smith singled out by name in his declaration as particularly threatening, and who could sometimes be found lurking in the shadows outside their cell for no apparent reason. That deputy was Andy Delgado. “Deputy Delgado comes here by himself or with his friends,” Smith wrote. “He does not work at the jail. He comes to look at the monkey. He tells his friends, Smith’s the leader, a fact not in evidence. Delgado shot me, a fact not in evidence. But he comes here with death and malice in his heart, a fact in evidence.”

  13

  BRICKS IN THE WALL

  May 13, 1980. Riverside, California.

  IT WAS A SUNNY DAY, LATE SUMMER, JUST MONTHS AFTER THEY HAD BEEN married. Jim Evans pulled the pickup off Van Buren Boulevard into the grounds of the Riverside National Cemetery. “What are we doing here, Jim?” Mary Evans asked her new husband. He smiled, the tan Stetson perched on his head. “Jim?” sh
e asked again.

  He drove in the main gate, winding through the beautifully manicured grounds of Lemay Boulevard, Eisenhower Circle, Normandy Drive. He stopped the truck and they got out. “This is where you’re going to bury me,” he told her, standing among the military grave markers. He squinted up into a bright blue sky at an aircraft roaring overhead on approach to March Air Reserve Base, just over the highway. “With those planes going over me.”

  TWO HELICOPTERS FLEW OVER RIVERSIDE NATIONAL CEMETERY. MARY EVANS watched behind dark glasses as Baker-1 and a chopper from the DEA cut in low over Jim’s flag-draped coffin in aerial salute and then arced high into the gloomy and overcast sky. In her arms, four-and-a-half-month-old Jim Jr. began to fuss from all the noise. Mary held him close.

  She let her eyes settle over the crowd of mourners, hundreds of them and more still arriving even as the graveside service was underway. Around her now, almost one thousand law enforcement officers from fifty agencies throughout the state stood at attention in their dress uniforms. Nearby, fifty members of Jim’s Fourth Battalion, 160th Infantry Regiment of the National Guard, were lined up, the edges of their hands touching their silver helmets in frozen salute.

  Along with the baby, there were Mary’s children from her previous marriage. Jim’s parents, sister, and two brothers, all in from Texas, were still in stunned disbelief bordering on denial. Seated nearby were Julie Kay and Dallas, Jim’s children from a previous marriage, along with his ex-wife.

  Earlier, mourners had filled the six-hundred-seat pews of the Spanish-style St. Catherine’s Church, stood along the side aisles and narthex, and spilled out onto the steps and lawn of the church. Along with all the cops and soldiers in their class A uniforms were friends, co-workers, and plain folk who had come in contact with deputy Jim Evans in one way or another through the years, teenagers in jeans and T-shirts, college students, office workers from the RSO, their babysitter Josie and her extended family. Municipal transit workers from Mary’s department arrived, some of the bus drivers still in uniform with their ticket punchers dangling on chains about their waist.