by Jill Leovy
John Skaggs had been a redhead in his youth.
He was born in 1964 and was raised in a modest 1950s home in a Long Beach, California, subdivision that resembled those he would patrol as a cop later in Watts—one-story houses with single-car garages along streets lined with sycamores. His father was a Long Beach homicide detective, but his parents split when he was in elementary school. Skaggs was raised mostly by his mother.
Janice Skaggs was a coal miner’s daughter from Nebraska, affectionate but stern. She placed great emphasis on fortitude and self-control in public. She had three other children to raise, and not much money. All four worked from an early age to help with family expenses. Without being asked, Skaggs paid rent for his bedroom as soon as he turned eighteen.
He was the youngest child and the only boy. He had been extremely competitive even as a child, a fervent athlete, especially in baseball. Winning had always been important to John Skaggs. His mother did not discourage this. But she had made it clear that the Skaggs children were always to appear mild, sportsmanlike, and well behaved. No matter how determined they were to prevail, they were to appear easygoing and civil.
He went to California State University at Long Beach but dropped out after one year. He found sitting in a classroom unbearable. Eventually, he followed his father’s path into the police force. As Skaggs grew older, his mother’s admonition stayed with him; he remained outwardly placid and inwardly exacting. Beneath his amiable grin lurked a perfectionist of the first order. He knew what would serve and what wouldn’t. He didn’t subject his insights to much examination. He didn’t argue. He simply acted casual and bulldozed ahead.
By his forties, his thick, short-cropped hair was turning white, and the only clue that it had once been red was a tint of auburn in his eyebrows. Together with his pale blue eyes and pink complexion, it made him look like a natural blond—a beachy blond like someone who spent a lot of time in the California sun. His friends railed at the injustice. They got balder or grayer; Skaggs just got blonder. It was typical of the way good fortune seemed to follow him.
He had sharp cheekbones, a small round chin with a slight cleft, a furrow between his eyes, and big hands. His tall, rangy build hadn’t changed much since his days on the uniform side of the LAPD ranks. More luck: middle-aged LAPD detectives were supposed to get portly, but John Skaggs still looked like “someone right out of GQ magazine,” as one of his LAPD superiors put it. Skaggs occasionally put on the standard LAPD detective weight. But with the same discipline he applied to everything in his life, he cut back on eating, exercised more, and lost twenty pounds. What was hard about it? He never understood why other people had difficulty dieting.
He never called in sick. He never went to the doctor. His perfect physical condition went with the rest of it—the perfect children (a girl and a boy, naturally) and his wife, Theresa, who was as blond and beautiful as he was, the nice suburban house, the pool, the RV, the surfboards. Theresa was a legal secretary who managed a law office. As a couple they were organized, wholesome, mildly religious, and nice to each other; Skaggs had a rule against allowing antagonism of any kind to taint his family relationships. As for Theresa, she was strong-minded enough to hold her own against Skaggs’s breezy certainty. “John is John” is how she summed him up, an affectionate appraisal that comprehended how her husband’s greatest strength—his incapacity for self-doubt—was also his greatest weakness.
Skaggs’s confidence was limitless. But on paper, his career path did not seem especially distinguished. An uncle who was an LAPD deputy chief viewed him as a laggard. For years, he had faulted Skaggs’s career choices, upbraiding his nephew over the phone. Why didn’t he aspire to higher posts? Why had Skaggs allowed himself to stall out as a detective in the city’s south end?
Los Angeles’s nineteen police precincts were called divisions. It was understood that to advance, officers had to move beyond divisions to elite centralized units or administrative functions at the LAPD’s downtown headquarters, Parker Center in those days, or “PAB,” as the cops said—police administration building. Officers who stayed in the station houses were assumed to have less ambition, especially if they remained stuck in the south end.
At the level above divisions, the LAPD was divided into administrative quadrants. South Bureau was such a quadrant. It sat below an unofficial boundary—Interstate 10, the east-west freeway that stretched across the city—and encompassed the Southwest, Seventy-seventh Street, and Southeast stations. A Central Bureau division called Newton also sat mostly south of the Ten and bordered the Seventy-seventh to the north, along Florence Avenue. Together, these four stations covered the expanse of South Central.
For a police officer to work in any of those four stations was to be a little marginalized. They were L.A.’s poorest divisions, and they nearly always led the city in violent crime. Cops knew these places for their boxy apartments, chain-link fences, converted garages, bad dogs with no collars, and Chevy Caprices. They knew them for the men riding bicycles in street clothes, for the family-owned mortuaries, the flyers for hair braiding, the murals depicting Clorox bleach bottles, the shabby shops with exuberant names: Mantrap Nails, Sexy Donuts, Vanessa’s Positive Energy. They knew what it meant to work in such neighborhoods. Many preferred not to.
Officers who chose to work south of the Ten were respected for their toughness. But the type of policing they did was not considered a launching pad for an ambitious career. In fact, hard-core south end cops were often seen as damaged goods in the LAPD, ruined for other work by the large number of complaints they generated and the narrow arena of policing they were perceived to occupy. Skaggs’s uncle felt his nephew had limited himself by remaining in Watts.
Worst of all, in his uncle’s view, Skaggs appeared content to remain a detective. This meant he languished for years at a professional grade equal to that of the lowest-level field sergeant. It meant he had voluntarily severed himself from the proudest traditions of the department. The LAPD had long measured its worth in patrol innovations, not investigative prowess. The TV drama Adam-12 in the 1970s captured the LAPD’s emblematic self-image—clean-cut, professional men in blue uniforms zipping around in their cars answering radio calls, sirens wailing. The LAPD uniform was saturated with meaning. It was a very dark, monochromatic navy blue—almost black—a regal shade. Departmental culture required that the uniform be worn like raiment, celestially clean and pressed with mirror-bright shoes and belts. Officers put a premium on looking sleek and fit; some even had the uniform custom-tailored to cling to sculpted biceps.
Detectives weren’t part of this culture. Many workaday divisional detectives wore frumpy polo shirts and khakis. They were known for being out of shape. Homicide detectives such as Skaggs wore suits, of course. But late-night callouts kept them from getting enough sleep, so they often put on weight. Patrol officers were sometimes openly contemptuous of their plainclothes colleagues.
The structure and resource distribution of the department seemed to echo this contempt. In station houses, certain uniformed officers—gang specialists and so-called senior leads who specialized in community policing—occupied an elevated place, while detectives were consigned to backwater status, their desks placed alongside those of burglary detectives, competing for resources with curfew task forces and vice squads.
A few LAPD detectives worked in elite jobs downtown and enjoyed clout and prestige. An obvious choice for Skaggs might have been the Robbery-Homicide Division, or RHD. Housed at headquarters, RHD investigated cases deemed unusually complex or likely to draw media interest, including celebrity cases, massacres, and arson murders. RHD detectives were considered the department’s best. They enjoyed low caseloads and were instantly recognizable in their elegant business attire. Their unit had been the subject of various books and television dramas.
But RHD tended to pass on the so-called ordinary street murders that Skaggs considered his specialty. Street murders constituted the bulk of black-on-black killings. So RHD’s criteria ensured
that black victims were less likely to get elite treatment from the LAPD. This was subtly offensive to detectives such as Skaggs, who did not view these murders as lacking in complexity. The policy offended his sense of fairness, too, for it seemed to confirm the accusation that every south end officer heard routinely from residents: “You don’t care because he’s a black man!”
Skaggs, of course, didn’t say that this was why he had never applied for a promotion to RHD. In this and other matters, his innermost thoughts could only be deduced from his actions. When people suggested he go to RHD, he scoffed.
Cops who worked south of the Ten often seemed to revel in their underdog status. They looked down on cops from other bureaus, called them flabby and soft, and considered themselves of a higher order. One of Skaggs’s colleagues picked up a word a Watts gang member used to describe his neighborhood: ghettoside. The term captured the situation nicely, mixing geography and status with the hustler’s poetic precision and perverse conceit. It was both a place and a predicament, and gave a name to that otherworldly seclusion that all the violent black pockets of the county had in common—Athens, Willowbrook, parts of Long Beach, Watts. There was a sameness to these places, and the policing that went on in them. John Skaggs was ghettoside all the way. He never bothered to explain to his uncle how he felt. If other cops didn’t see why his work mattered, why he was justified in being so very sure of himself, then Skaggs had no use for them. “It’s Skaggs’s world,” his longtime partner Chris Barling would say with a roll of his eyes.
That phrase captured many of Skaggs’s signature qualities—his dismissiveness, his self-contained optimism, his stark certainty that others sometimes took as arrogance. Most of all, it captured his internal ethos about policing, which allowed him to decide that real success was not the same as that defined by his police department, the public, society at large. To other cops, ghettoside was where patrol cars were dinged, computer keyboards sticky, workdays long, and staph infections antibiotic-resistant. To work down there was to feel a sense of futility, forgo promotions, and deal with all those stressful, dreary, depressing problems poor black people had. But to Skaggs, ghettoside was the place to be, the place where there was real work to be done. He radiated contentment as he worked its streets. He wheeled down filthy alleys in his crisp shirts and expensive ties, always rested, his sedan always freshly washed and vacuumed.
It was not because he relished difficulty that Skaggs embraced ghettoside work. He was not a lonely Marlowe and had no noir in his makeup. He was a sports enthusiast, a surfer, sunny and optimistic, a happily married family man. On weekends, he easily switched his focus to the family’s RV and his desert racing bike. Skaggs preferred Watts for other reasons: he liked to be busy, and he believed his work there mattered and should be done well. He descended into the most horrifying crevasse of American violence like a carpenter going to work, hammer in one hand, lunch pail in the other, whistling all the way. He had molded his life around an urgent problem seldom recognized, and he was unshaken—perhaps even encouraged—by the fact that so many others didn’t get it. He had a steady faith that things could improve with the right kind of effort.
That faith never left him, even after his work turned unexpectedly personal.
SCHOOL OF CATASTROPHE
Wally Tennelle was born in the coal-mining region of Jasper, Alabama, in 1954. Family lore held that an ancestor had been the illegitimate daughter of a house slave and a white plantation owner; that’s where the family got their copper brown skin and hair.
His mother Dera’s family was originally from Mississippi, but she spent her childhood in that Alabama coal country, always in near-complete segregation from whites. Wally’s father, Baron Tennelle, aspired to better things. He and Dera were high school sweethearts. They married, had two sons, and headed out west in 1963, just before John Skaggs was born, part of the second great black migration from the South. Tennelle’s father was high-energy, a hard worker and a natural salesman. In California, he parlayed a low-level job in the airline industry into a sales post. The family prospered. A third child, a daughter, was born in L.A.
From earliest childhood, Wally, the middle child, was decisive and organized, a stickler for neatness. To his mother’s surprise, he would fold all his clothes, or tidy his room, without being asked. Dera felt deprived of the opportunity to nag him as a mother was supposed to. Wally’s cleanliness sprang from an inward orderliness of spirit that would define him all his life.
Wally finished high school and decided not to go to college. Instead, he joined the Marines and set his heart on a combat post in Vietnam. It was the last days of the war. He missed the window for combat deployment when his mother—not by accident, he realized later—took too long to send him the required certificate of baptism. He took another Marine post: a position as a guard at the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica.
Three weeks after he arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica, he entered a coffee shop across the street from the embassy and made one of the snap decisions that typified his life.
The Costa Rican girl at the counter was sixteen years old. Yadira Alvarado was from a farming family. Tennelle, then eighteen, spoke no Spanish, she no English. One of her coworkers had to ask her out for him. That first night at the movies, Yadira’s thoughts were spinning. How to fill the silence? But Tennelle didn’t seem to care. At the end of the evening, he dropped her off at the bus stop at her request. The next day, two dozen red roses were waiting for her at the coffee shop. On their next date, Tennelle surprised her with a few words of Spanish. They dated three years, and by the end of their courtship, he spoke Spanish fluently. She was nineteen when they married. He was twenty-two.
Their first home together was a military base in Cherry Point, South Carolina. Costa Rica had a racial context different from that of the United States. Yadira had no sense that she and Wally were what was called in the States a “biracial couple” until she noticed strange looks when they went out together. It was her first lesson in what she would later sum up as “this whole thing”—race in America.
After his run in the military was over, Wally and Yadira returned to his hometown, Los Angeles, where he found work as a Kmart security guard. He got a better job with his father’s employer, United Airlines, lost it in a strike, and devised a new way to get by. He enrolled in El Camino Community College mainly for the financial aid check—he had little interest in being a student—and used the check to pay the rent and buy a lawn mower. He began working as a gardener.
Wally Tennelle would later say his decision in 1980 to become a police officer was just to earn a living. But Yadira remembers it differently. While she was still in Costa Rica, she said, Wally warned her that he wanted to be a police officer. He was giving her a chance to object. Yadira knew nothing of murder, nothing of the black asphalt war zone of South Central Los Angeles. But she probably wouldn’t have objected anyway. Years later, their eldest daughter would observe that Wally and Yadira’s mutual respect and independence were hallmarks of their very successful marriage. At home, they passed companionable hours, he more often outside, she within, each immersed in their separate occupations.
Wally and Yadira’s first house in South Los Angeles was like their marriage: orderly and idyllic. In Costa Rica, Yadira saw young women courted by charming men who revealed a domineering side after marriage. Not Wally. Many people who knew him would remark on his consistency of character: he was the same person no matter the situation. Their house was pleasant and uncluttered. They never fought. Their daughter, named Dera for Wally’s mother but known as DeeDee, knew how unlikely this sounded. But it was the truth: never had she seen her parents quarrel.
There were three children in all. After DeeDee came a son, Wallace, Jr., and then Bryant, born in September 1988. Yadira took a job in the kitchen at a Kaiser Permanente Hospital, working from 5:00 A.M. to 1:30 P.M. She remained there year after year, rising in the dark to put on her kitchen aide’s smock. To her friends, it seemed a start-up job. They urg
ed her to get her nursing degree. But Yadira loved the work, loved cooking, loved keeping busy.
The kids teased their parents for being boring. Privately, though, DeeDee had another word for them—wholesome. The word made her cringe. But it fit. They were like the Brady Bunch. Or, no, DeeDee corrected herself with a laugh: like “the Cosbys.” After all, they were black. Sort of.
Racial identity was rarely discussed in the house. Wally Tennelle had somehow managed to grow up in South Central without ever having had a brush with violence or a negative encounter with police. He had been prevented by his mother from even wearing an Afro—and almost never talked of race. His conservative views on personal responsibility and self-improvement were typical of LAPD officers. To hear Wally Tennelle talk of the African American U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a frequent LAPD critic, was to hear the same frustrated grievances aired by just about every other cop in the city. In this respect, Wally Tennelle was blue before black.
In appearance, all three children bore strong resemblances to both their parents. But they looked different from one another. DeeDee was porcelain-skinned, with a dusting of light brown freckles over her nose, huge brown eyes, full lips, and wavy brown hair. She looked so white that, alone among the family members, she deliberately mispronounced her last name as “Te-NELL” instead of “Te-NELL-ee.” That way, people would not assume she was of Italian descent.
Wally Jr. was darker-skinned, “copper tan” like his father, with clear dark eyes and dark brown hair. He spoke Spanish well and considered himself half Latino. “But if I’m in a hurry, I just say I’m black,” he said.
Bryant was lighter than his brother, not as light as DeeDee. He was tall and slim, and his smooth complexion was the envy of his brother, who battled acne. But like Wally Jr., Bryant generally identified as black on the fly. In the end, because of where they grew up, because of some unspoken comprehension of a complex racial history, and because most of the biracial kids they knew did the same, all the children considered themselves black.
