Norco '80

by Peter Houlahan

  On January 12, 1981, Victor Jones and the Riverside Police Department cut their losses and fired Bolasky, labeling him a “vicarious liability.” When asked by reporter James Richardson why his department had not done more to help Bolasky, “Jones said he doesn’t have the budget for psychologists or psychiatrists, so he retires officers when they have mental fatigue.” The comment demonstrated that there was at least one law enforcement agency in the Inland Empire even further behind the RSO in its attitude toward PTSD.

  Glyn Bolasky probably would have preferred a different headline to Richardson’s article that appeared in the Riverside Press-Enterprise on April 12, 1981. “The Day a Man’s Life Took a Sharp Turn—Norco Shootout Survivor Now a Washed-up Ex-Officer at 24” was an interview piece chronicling Bolasky’s fall from Norco hero to unemployment in less than a year. Accompanying the story was a photo of a thoughtful young man, arms folded, his eyes shifted off camera. In the interview, Bolasky was introspective rather than bitter, conceding that he had declined further counseling offered by the Riverside Sheriff’s Office upon his initial return. “I just didn’t understand maybe the whole scope of things,” he said. The article ended on a melancholy note. “I’m the hot potato nobody wants,” Bolasky said. “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been shot in Norco that day.”

  ON NOVEMBER 24, 1980, A DEADLY CONFLAGRATION ERUPTED JUST OFF THE Cajon Pass at a scenic overlook known as Panorama Point, just over the ridgeline from Lytle Creek Canyon. Aided by one-hundred-degree heat and dry Santa Ana winds gusting to ninety miles an hour, the flames raced down the canyons toward San Bernardino, burning at a rate of five thousand acres per hour. Firefighters never stood a chance.

  By the time the Panorama Fire was contained on December 1, it had consumed 310 homes in Waterman Canyon and the city of San Bernardino. One of those destroyed belonged to deputy Jim McPheron. Mac lost everything but his family. Among the charred wedding photos and melted Little League trophies was a framed piece of windshield with a bullet hole through it. The section was one of two cut from McPheron’s patrol unit, framed and presented to Mac and D. J. McCarty by their fellow deputies.

  It was a devastating end to a devastating year for the big, amiable deputy. After watching Evans shot in front of him, McPheron knew he had finally seen enough. Within a week, McPheron embraced the department program and sought counseling.

  One June 22, 1980, Riverside Press-Enterprise reporter Ilene Aleshire featured McPheron in an article titled “The Stresses of Crime” that focused on the emotional toll exacted by a career in law enforcement. He called the shooting in Lytle Creek the last straw. “I told the captain, ‘I’ve got a problem and I really don’t know how to deal with it. I have a lot of in-built tension, I don’t know how to release it. I’m arguing with my wife, yelling at my kid.’” McPheron was taken off patrol duty and reassigned to the Civil Processes division, serving property-seizure notices in lawsuits. After Norco and the Panorama fire, McPheron was happy to get off the streets for a while.

  D. J. McCarty had lost none of his swagger as he and deputy Mike Lenihan walked into their mandatory counseling session with psychiatrist Alice Pitman; if anything, it might have increased. McCarty didn’t need any fucking psychiatrist, and he all but let Alice Pitman know it. The two had gone from Jim Evans’s funeral straight to Pitman’s office and spoke with her together. How were they doing? Fine. Just part of the job. Did they need to take some time off? Time off for what? Either of you want additional counseling? Fuck no! McCarty was courteous but dismissive, almost smirking at the suggestion. Lenihan, as usual, was a man of few words who tended to follow D.J.’s lead. Neither was good at expressing their feelings even if they had wanted to, and neither one wanted to.

  Young, Irish cops. It was a bad combination for any psychiatrist to try to crack, even one as experienced and capable as Pitman. As she ushered them to the door at the end of the session, Pitman offered up a warning: “Your machismo is going to put you right back on the street,” she said. “And you’ll be just fine. For a while, anyhow. But a year from now you’ll be back scratching down my door.” They gave Pitman a shrug and a little salute good-bye and went on their way, Lenihan back to his darkness, D.J. back to drinking and fucking and pretending nothing was wrong.

  CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL OFFICER BILL CROWE WAS ON ROUTINE SHIFT when he pulled off the freeway to buy a soda at a local gas station. It had been about a year since Crowe was shot up at the corner of Bellegrave and Dodd. The image of Russell Harven, hair and beard whipping in wind, looking over the barrel of an AR-15 had never left him.

  Crowe pulled in behind a Volkswagen Beetle and walked toward the market while the VW idled, waiting for the next open fuel pump. As he approached the small car, the last person he expected to see behind the wheel was the man who had almost killed him in Mira Loma. With his adrenaline spiking and every defense mechanism firing off at once, Crowe drew his gun, leveled it through the window of the VW, and told the man with the long brown hair and scraggly beard not to move. When the frightened man whipped his head around, Crowe realized he had made a huge mistake. Lowering the gun and muttering an apology, Crowe went back to his patrol unit and drove away.

  With his heart still pounding and sweaty palms gripping the steering wheel, Crowe drove directly to the CHP station and told his superiors what had happened. Of all the agencies involved in Norco, the Riverside CHP had done the least to address the issue of PTSD with its officers. The department realized their mistake and ordered Crowe and Doug Earnest to seek help. For Crowe, talking with other cops involved in shootings helped and he began to move on. But Doug Earnest would never fully get over what happened at the intersection of Bellegrave and Dodd. Even decades later, the big patrolman could barely speak of it without being brought to tears.

  FOR MARY EVANS, IT HAD BEEN A PARTICULARLY CRUEL YEAR SINCE THE KILLING of her husband. Press-Enterprise reporter Sandy Pavicic interviewed Mary for a one-year anniversary article titled “Slain Deputy’s Widow Tells of a Long Year’s Nightmares, Memories.” Pavicic noted that among all the plaques, certificates, awards, and mementos in the widow’s living room honoring Jim Evans’s military and law enforcement careers, there was not a single photograph of the man Mary called the love of her life. “I took them all down and put them away,” she said. It was just too painful to see him every day. As for the honors, “I don’t pay any attention to them,” she said. “If I did I’d probably take them down.”

  Among the collection was a proclamation by the board of supervisors, recognition by the American Legion, and the California Military Cross awarded to him by his National Guard unit after posthumously promoting him to captain. Awards from other city, county, government, and citizens’ groups hung on the walls. A rocking horse bought by deputies and presented to J.B. Jr. by Chuck Hille sat in the hall, while a real horse given to the boy by a prominent local attorney stood chewing hay in a nearby corral. Absent was any recognition from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

  When it came to the fate of the three men who had murdered her husband, Mary expressed a lack of faith in a California judicial system that was widely viewed to be populated with liberal judges unwilling to enforce the recently reinstated death penalty. “People come up and say, ‘I bet you really hope those guys get the death penalty.’ I don’t count on them getting the death penalty. I hope they get it, but I don’t count on it. They’ve already taken a part of my life.”

  With the trial scheduled to begin in just four weeks, Mary Evans thought she would soon have her answer. But neither Mary nor anyone else could have foreseen that what appeared to be an open-and-shut case was about to become one of the longest and most expensive trials in American history. And by far one of its strangest.

  14

  CONTEMPT

  June 15, 1981. Vista, California.

  AT ELEVEN THIRTY IN THE EVENING OF MARCH 16, 1977, FOUR YOUNG MEN ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen knocked on the door of a prominent Riverside criminal defense at
torney named David Hennigan. Alone in the house were Hennigan’s fifty-two-year-old wife and nineteen-year-old daughter. When Mary Hennigan opened the door, the four teens announced that their car had broken down and asked to use her phone to call for assistance. Immediately sensing danger, Mary refused and shut the door.

  David Hennigan had the misfortune of arriving home at the same time. One of the teens stepped from behind a bush and aimed a shotgun at the attorney. Hennigan was marched to the door and forced to open it. Once inside, the fifty-five-year-old attorney tried to persuade the four youths to take what they wanted and get out, arguing that he was a defense attorney who often defended young men just like them. The argument abruptly ended when the kid with the shotgun fired a blast into the ceiling. David Hennigan was tied up and forced into a closet where he listened helplessly as his wife and daughter were sexually assaulted.

  Momentarily left alone by her attackers, Mary Hennigan bolted from the house, ran to a neighbor’s, and called police. The four intruders fled but just blocks from the scene encountered units from Riverside Police Department. As they forced their way around a unit blocking their escape, the suspects fired the shotgun at the patrol car. The officers returned fire, riddling the suspect vehicle with fifteen bullets, hitting eighteen-year-old Marvin Green in the head and sending the car crashing into a stone wall. Green and the others were quickly captured.

  Eventually, the case wound its way through the court system and all were found guilty of crimes ranging from rape and kidnapping to armed robbery and attempted murder. But in the weeks following their sentencing, a rumor began to spread through the Riverside legal and law enforcement community: During the penalty phase, Hennigan had made a plea to the court for leniency on behalf of the four teens who had attacked his wife and daughter. Although never substantiated, the rumor persisted. After all, anyone who had worked with Hennigan knew such a thing was not entirely impossible. When asked about the event, an attorney who worked at the law firm of Hennigan, Butterwick & Clepper responded, “Yeah, I can see him doing something like that.” A second agreed that it would be consistent with his personality to want to show compassion for young men who had taken a criminal turn.

  J. David Hennigan, Dave to friends and colleagues, had spent time in the public defender’s office before joining up with two fellow attorneys to launch a private civil and criminal defense practice. Hennigan was a jovial, outgoing Irishman from St. Louis who served in the Pacific Theater in World War II, earned a law degree from George Washington University, and was respected among the Riverside legal community. He had a solid understanding of the law but was not above occasional courtroom histrionics. Once, while defending a client charged with drunk driving, Hennigan drank a can of beer during his closing argument just to show that it did not impair his abilities.

  Hennigan, like defense attorney Clayton Adams, felt that the justice system was unfairly stacked against defendants, especially the poor. He believed deeply in the right of the accused to an adequate defense and fair trial. He felt that in most criminal acts, there were mitigating circumstances beyond the control of the actor, usually due to injustices inflicted upon them during childhood. His Roman Catholic faith informed him that all acts could be forgiven, all lives were redeemable, and that the death penalty was immoral. However, he was also faithful to his professional oath to uphold and obey the law, even if that included capital punishment.

  A little more than a year after the home-invasion incident, Hennigan received a call from Anthony Kline, the judicial appointment secretary for governor Jerry Brown. Kline offered Hennigan a position on the California State Superior Court. Hennigan had never put himself forward for a spot on the bench, but after thoughtful consideration, he accepted. When the Norco case came to trial two years later, the Honorable J. David Hennigan was “next in the barrel” in the case assignment rotation.

  The district attorney’s office was not thrilled that a former criminal defense attorney with relatively little judicial experience would be presiding over the trial. The case of the Norco 3 was only the second capital murder trial in Riverside County since the reinstatement of the death penalty in California and promised to be a bitterly contested, lengthy, and high-profile case. In the opinion of many within the office, there were plenty of seasoned ballbusters on the Riverside bench better suited for this type of free-for-all.

  Even less thrilled were the deputies at the RSO, who were familiar with Hennigan’s stance on the death penalty and the rumors surrounding the 1977 home-invasion trial. “A guy who asks the court to go easy on the punks who attacked his own wife and kid,” Andy Delgado said about Hennigan’s appointment. “And that’s who they assign to the trial of a bunch of fucking cop killers.”

  THE DISCONTENT ON THE PART OF THE DEPUTIES WAS NOT ENTIRELY DIRECTED at Hennigan. The attitude of law enforcement in general toward the California criminal justice system in 1980 was one of disillusionment and disgust. The system, and particularly the liberal-minded California Supreme Court led by chief justice Rose Bird, was seen by many as easy on criminals, hostile toward law enforcement, and vehemently anti–death penalty. Of the sixty-four capital cases reviewed by the Bird court, sixty-one death sentences were overturned. Bird herself voted to overturn in all sixty-four. If there is one thing judges and prosecutors have in common, it is a hatred of being overturned. Both knew the trial would be an exercise in tiptoeing through a field of legal land mines laid by the defense and intended to blow up during the appeal process.

  The man in charge of dodging land mines for the prosecution just happened to have been trained as a mine warfare technician in the navy during the Vietnam War. Deputy district attorney Jay Hanks had been put on the Norco case immediately and was busy collecting evidence even before the last of the suspects had been brought off the mountain. The plan was for Hanks to cover the case until another prosecutor was freed up to take it over. However, district attorney Byron Morton quickly realized that the scope of investigation and a capital murder trial would require one of his best prosecutors and assigned Hanks the job. Hanks was a sharp and effective trial attorney but had not litigated a case in more than two years. Instead he had been working in an administrative capacity under Morton and was clearly being groomed for a bigger role in the department.

  Hanks relocated from the Midwest to California when his father, a trial judge in Illinois, retired to Riverside. His older brother Hardin “Bud” Hanks was a deputy with the RSO and had been a friend of Jim Evans. After his stint in the navy, the younger Hanks earned his undergraduate degree from UC Riverside and put himself through Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu while working as a sixth-grade schoolteacher. Hanks was admitted to the California Bar in 1974 and joined the district attorney’s office shortly thereafter. In his midthirties when assigned the Norco 3 case, Hanks had a wife and two small children and drove around in a beat-up sports car he called “the Crime Fighter.” While the heavy workload had caused Hanks to sock on some extra weight around the middle, he was still active and could hold his own in pickup basketball games with courthouse colleagues. A hard-charging prosecutor, he was nevertheless known for his good humor and quick wit inside the courtroom and out. When he learned that Christopher Harven had dubbed him “the Bad Year Blimp,” Hanks embraced the nickname and started using it himself.

  Hanks needed an additional attorney to help with the enormous amount of evidence and number of witnesses involved in prosecuting three defendants, each with forty-six felony counts against them. He chose Kevin Ruddy, a native Southern Californian who had earned his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of San Diego and joined the DA’s office in 1977. Ruddy was a six-foot-two, thirty-year-old ex-basketball player with a calm disposition and methodical approach to trial preparation that made him well suited for organizing and presenting large amounts of evidence. It was decided that Ruddy would handle the thirty-six counts committed in Riverside County including kidnapping, the bank robbery, multiple counts of attempted murder
of a police officer, and the killing of Billy Delgado under the Felony Murder Rule. Hanks would prosecute all the crimes committed in San Bernardino, including the one charge that could send the Norco 3 to the gas chamber at San Quentin: first-degree murder with special circumstances in the death of deputy James B. Evans.

  Hanks obtained the final member of his team when, days before the start of the trial, the DA’s office hired Joe Curfman away from the RSO to act as lead investigator for the prosecution. Curfman had been in charge of the Norco investigation for the Riverside Sheriff’s Office from the beginning.

  By June 1981, Riverside County had secured housing arrangements in Vista, a sleepy community just seven miles inland from Oceanside, for the four county employees working on the trial full-time. A three-bedroom house in a suburban neighborhood was rented at $1,200 a month to accommodate Hanks, Ruddy, and Curfman. In practice the house served as a crash pad for the rotating cast of attorneys, investigators, and 128 witnesses for the prosecution who would come and go as needed. The fourth county employee, defense investigator Jeanne Painter, was put up at the Vista Way Inn motel at a rate of $375 a month. The private-practice defense teams headed by Michael Lloyd and Alan Olson settled into monthly motel rentals with maid service and convenience kitchens paid for out of their own pockets and billed back to the county.

  Just days before the start of the trial, Clayton Adams abruptly resigned from the public defender’s office. George Smith immediately filed a motion to force the county to retain Adams as a private-practice defender, citing his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial. Facing the possibility of a long delay or mistrial if they assigned Smith a new attorney, the court had no choice but to give in and retain Adams for more money than he would have made working for the defender’s office. Having successfully executed the well-orchestrated bump in salary, Adams rented himself a room at the Vista Way Inn motel directly below Jeanne Painter, both courtesy of a housing allowance from the County of Riverside.