by Jill Leovy
From antiquity, the “men fighting” problem—men killing one another to settle disputes or exact revenge in the absence of a trusted legal authority—has confounded thinking people.
It would be too sweeping to assert that lawless peoples are all alike. But it’s impossible to ignore that across historic and cultural settings, there appears to be a common palette of adaptations to lawlessness.
Loose talk and rumors are particular aggravators. Canadian Inuits fought over “chronic lying,” the Sudanese over “volatile conversation,” and Jim Crow blacks over “gossip and whispering.” Revenge and jealousy murders are standard. So are reprisals against snitches who serve a distrusted state—“touts” kneecapped in Northern Ireland, informants necklaced in South Africa. Gangs that declare an order-keeping role—like the murderous neighborhood watches of Ghana—are another sure sign that a vacuum of legitimate authority has been filled by extralegal violence. So is the habit of grabbing one’s friends from police, as people do in South African townships.
Witnesses in such contexts are scared. Men act touchy. They fixate on honor and respect—a result of lawlessness, not a cause. Petty quarrels grow lethal, and may mask deeper antagonisms. And arson, for some reason, gets a starring role—in czarist Russia, gold rush settlements in Alaska, and the sharecropping regions of the South.
In the dim early stirrings of civilization, many scholars believe, law itself was developed as a response to legal “self-help”: people’s desire to settle their own scores. Rough justice slowly gave way to organized state monopolies on violence. The low homicide rates of some modern democracies are, perhaps, an aberration in human history. They were built, as the scholar Eric Monkkonen said, not by any formal act, but “by a much longer developmental process whereby individuals willingly give up their implicit power to the state.”
There are many challenges to this viewpoint, and many variations on it. But history shows us that lawlessness is its own kind of order. Murder outbreaks, seen this way, are more than just the proliferation of discrete crimes. They are part of a whole system of interactions determined by the absence of law. European history offers a panoply of rough justice systems based on personal vengeance, blood feuds, shaming rituals, and sundry forms of retributive and clan violence. Frequent homicide was a part of this picture. High homicide rates have also been recorded among hunter-gatherer peoples and other societies without elaborate legal structures.
Tellingly, the syndrome also crops up among isolated minorities alienated from the state, frontiersmen, and occupied peoples—any place, really, where formal authority is patchy or distrusted. Thus, some Indian tribes in Canada and the U.S. have disproportionate homicide rates, as do ethnic and immigrant enclaves in Switzerland, England, Wales, and Italy. In the peaceful Netherlands, non-Dutch ethnics suffer many times the homicide rate of their Dutch compatriots. Eighteenth-century rates among settlers on the wild edge of the American colonies were almost exactly those of South Central blacks in the twenty-first century. In the town of Tira, Israel, today, Arab citizens of Israel also suffer a homicide rate similar to that of black South Central. They blame the Israeli police in terms that would sound familiar to John Skaggs: “As long as it’s Arabs killing Arabs, they just don’t care,” one resident said.
It’s like a default setting. Wherever human beings are forced to deal with each other under conditions of weak legal authority, the Monster lurks. The ancient Greeks wrote of the Furies, hideous black gorgons who held grudges and rasped, “Get him, get him, get him.” They could be subdued only by law.
To solve cases in such contexts, homicide detectives had to be schooled in folkways. They had to understand secret slang and symbolic affronts and maneuver through the endless nicknames and aliases. They had to understand people’s fear of being labeled “snitches.” They had to be able to unravel the tangle of relationships surrounding each case—that dense weave of homeys, “fiancés,” baby daddies, and road dogs.
The homicide detectives had to learn how to pull bureaucratic levers rusted shut from years of indifference, had to work fast and effectively, juggling multiple cases. Putting together a ghettoside murder case wasn’t a linear task—one clue leading to another, then another, like in all those TV shows. It required investigators to move side to side and backtrack, like spiders weaving webs. Witnesses lied, recanted, or disappeared. Their stories were usually inconsistent. Successful cases were spun from intersecting points of corroboration, not straight-line narratives.
Finally, the detectives who learned their craft in those years came to know the profound grief of homicide, the most specialized knowledge of all. They knew the way the bereaved struggled to function hour by hour. They knew about good days and bad days. Good detectives said to family members, “I can’t possibly know how you feel.” The best didn’t have to say it. Years of such work endowed practitioners with an almost spiritual understanding of their craft. A detective named Rick Gordon, for example, still working in South Bureau as of this writing, had come to view the moral dimensions of his cases so profoundly that he talked of them in almost religious terms, talked as if their outcomes were predestined. Something put witnesses there, Gordon would say—something bigger than themselves. Humility was his doctrine—the ability to remain open, to let evidence speak. To discern liars but also to trust those who appeared to be lying but weren’t.
Wally Tennelle would become one of this elite, the small, unrecognized cadre of superdetectives schooled by catastrophe.
At Newton, Wally Tennelle was paired with Kelle Baitx, a gruff black-Irish midcareer man from Orange County.
Baitx and Tennelle established a division of labor. Baitx would process the crime scene. Tennelle, with his fluent Spanish, would melt away into the crowd, migrating to the fringes of the crime scene or into adjoining streets. Inevitably, he would talk to someone the patrol officers had missed, would hit upon some tidbit of information that everyone else had overlooked. Baitx thought Tennelle’s ability to canvass was uncanny. He would hardly notice his partner’s perambulations, but somehow, at the end of the day, witnesses would be flushed from the brambles.
Tennelle projected competence without being intimidating. He was compact, not tall but broad-shouldered, with guileless brown eyes and a lined forehead. The lines formed a series of arches to his hairline and lent his whole face a kindly look. Altogether, in a job that was all about people skills—finding witnesses, persuading them to talk—he excelled.
The dizzying homicide peak of 1992 was upon them. Baitx and Tennelle worked an astonishing twenty-eight cases that year, almost three times the recommended caseload. Tennelle thrived on it, loving the adrenaline, loving the hard work. Baitx noticed something else about Tennelle: when other cops went out drinking after work, Tennelle would go home to his family. Baitx and Tennelle were close, but Baitx only rarely saw Tennelle’s wife and his three young children. Baitx understood that when Tennelle wasn’t working, he preferred his home life, wanted to be with Yadira and the kids, puttering around the house. Tennelle rarely talked about work. At home, DeeDee Tennelle was hardly aware that her father was a homicide detective until once, as a child, she made a secret discovery of autopsy photos in a drawer.
CLEARANCE
John Skaggs was twenty-two when he entered the police academy in 1987, starting out as Tennelle was entering his journeyman years.
After the academy, Skaggs was assigned to the Seventy-seventh Street Division for a mandatory probation period as a patrol officer. He would spend most of the rest of his career either in South Bureau or gaming the system to try to return to a post in South Bureau. He was in his element in those violent years, a tall, athletic, red-haired officer with easy confidence and a serene temperament who immersed himself in learning the politics of street life.
Wally Tennelle had been conscripted as a young gang officer to clean up after the first great wave a decade before. Now John Skaggs was conscripted to clean up after the second. In the first three years of the 1990s, th
at savage period spanning the riots, more than six thousand people died from homicides in Los Angeles County.
In 1994, Skaggs was recruited “on loan” as an officer trainee over at South Bureau Homicide. Skaggs was not a detective. He was a P-3 then, or field training officer. This is still done in the LAPD: patrol and gang officers are recruited to fill slots as homicide detectives without the rank. The written and oral tests used to promote officers to detective emphasize general procedures and departmental policies, not the singular abilities that distinguish good homicide investigators. Those cannot be measured by formal exams, and cops who tested well often had no talent for working murders. So homicide supervisors, weary of being stuck with under performing employees, preferred to bypass the official promotion system and scout their own talent.
It was not surprising that John Skaggs would be tapped. He was the kind of energetic young officer who typically did well in homicide units. But when asked to work South Bureau Homicide, the combined squad that then covered Southwest, Southeast, and the Seventy-seventh, Skaggs resisted. He did not want to work as a homicide detective, even temporarily. He loved his hard-charging job as a gang officer. Detectives were washouts. But it would have looked bad to refuse.
Years later, asked why he had known from his first days as a homicide detective that he never wanted to do anything else, Skaggs gave a curious answer. He did not say he loved investigating homicides. He simply said that when one discovers one is good at a task at which few others excel, one has no choice.
“I could do it,” Skaggs said when pressed. “I could do it. Who else can?”
Skaggs’s father had always said little about his choices. Now he had just one comment for the son who set out to follow his own path to homicide work: “Be careful,” he told Skaggs. “Because nothing else matters after working murders.” Only later would Skaggs comprehend the full weight of this remark.
Skaggs was paired with a training officer. But the high workload broke down the usual conventions, and Skaggs, though often an acting detective, was often relegated to working on his own. He solved his first case. Then the next. Each taught him a little more.
Early on, he was given a six-month-old “cold case” and asked to see if he could breathe new life into it. (In those days, “cold” could mean a case only weeks old.) The victim was Leo Massey, a workingman who had stopped by a liquor store on his way home from work. He was panhandled for beer by another black man. Massey refused the panhandler, who attacked him as he walked out. The panhandler shot Massey through the leg and Massey bled to death.
Massey was a father and husband. By the time Skaggs got the case, Massey’s wife, Glory, was furious. She had heard rumors about the killer within days. Everyone seemed to know who did it. Everyone except the police, that is. Glory Massey had no doubt in her mind that if Leo had been white instead of black, the police would have solved his murder.
Skaggs met her in the bureau’s office at the Crenshaw Mall. Massey had developed piercing back pain from grief. She was angry. She believed the authorities didn’t care, and she feared that one of her teenage sons—or some other young man from their neighborhood—would be tempted to retaliate. Now here was yet another LAPD detective claiming interest in the case. Massey was losing patience with it—these people called themselves professionals, yet they allowed teenage boys to do their work for them, to seek justice where the state had failed to secure it.
She sized up Skaggs. Great, another tall white LAPD cop—“nine foot eight or something!” Massey said later—and she was determined not to be intimidated. She brought her face as close as she could to his despite her own small stature. It meant looking almost straight up at him. Then she let him have it, all her pent-up frustration. “He’s just another fuckin’ black man now, right?” Massey screamed at Skaggs. “Just another fuckin’ black man down!”
Skaggs didn’t protest. He just listened.
When she ran out of breath, he began asking questions. Later, he came to see her again. He called, and came again, checking up on her, asking about her children.
Glory was not the only one who sensed that many people knew the killer. “Everybody knows” was one of the most common phrases voiced about homicides in South Central. Lots of people had heard about the shooting, and some recognized the suspect, who was a regular around the neighborhood. But even when Skaggs pressed, they offered conflicting names. “Jamal,” some said. “Jabar,” said others. No one seemed to know who the violent panhandler really was or where he lived.
Skaggs walked and knocked, asked and asked. He ended up searching a garage where a man who fit the panhandler’s description was “staying.” He noticed a fingerprint on a mirror and got lucky. His longtime partner Chris Barling would later observe how often it seemed that Skaggs made his own luck. Skaggs yanked at the mirror, and a driver’s license with the man’s picture, birth date, and full name—Jabbar Stroud—dropped from behind it. It remained only to have the witnesses confirm it.
Skaggs drove Glory Massey to the trial himself and warned her to leave the chambers before gruesome photos were displayed. She had grown to like him, and he her. He was so unperturbed by her initial rage that he didn’t remember it afterward. By then he was long used to being admonished as a callous white racist cop. He had already heard many versions of “another black man down.” It was part of the job—an enduring theme of ghettoside work—and he shrugged it off. They always thought he didn’t care.
The sense that the police—and the larger city—didn’t care was not just a cliché. It was the lived experience of South L.A.’s black residents, quantified by data. Society had changed a great deal during the civil rights movement and the decades that followed it. Criminal justice had changed, too. But the speed and certainty of adequate punishment for the murderers of black men remained a weak point.
Historically, the nation had never been very good at punishing murderers, no matter the victim. In nineteenth-century New York only about a tenth of all murders resulted in a conviction. Less than half did in Philadelphia and Chicago at the end of that century. These patterns probably continued well into the twentieth century. In Los Angeles, for example, a suspiciously large percentage of homicides—more than a quarter of them—were not even counted for purposes of criminal investigation in the 1920s and 1930s. Some were probably killings by police. Other cases seem to have been shelved due to dead or absolved suspects. Standards were clearly different: a 1925 Los Angeles Times article applauded two killers who had hunted down a mugger after the fact, noting approvingly that police did not think the act merited arrest. The killers “had merely taken the law into their own hands,” the paper opined.
In subsequent decades, officials claimed to solve homicide cases at very high rates. But California prison rolls tell a different story. During the 1960s, the number of people sent to prison for criminal homicide was less than half the number of homicides. The disparity grew more pronounced during the 1970s, when there were three times more people killed than killers convicted and imprisoned. There seems to be no other conclusion but that thousands of murders went unpunished.
Federally reported clearance rates—the rate of cases solved per crimes committed—are inflated, partly because they combine arrests with cases LAPD cops called “cleared other,” investigations declared closed although no one has been prosecuted. Cases could be “cleared” because the suspects were dead, sometimes killed in revenge murders. Even with this inflation, by the 1990s, the reported rate for urban areas had fallen to about 50 percent. Not surprisingly, a Los Angeles Times investigation found that the real rate was even lower. The study, based on case-by-case analysis of 9,400 Los Angeles County cases in the early nineties, concluded suspects were convicted of manslaughter or murder in only about one in three killings. Clearance rates varied by race, with cases involving black and Hispanic victims somewhat less likely to be solved than those involving white victims. Killers of whites received the harshest penalties. These findings echoed those of other
research into “victim discounting.” Death penalty studies, for example, have found that the race of defendants matters less than the race of victims. People who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death; people who kill blacks get lighter penalties.
The pattern persisted after the crime drop. From 1994 to 2006, a suspect was arrested in 38 percent of the 2,677 killings involving black male victims in the city of Los Angeles, according to the police department’s own data. Even with “cleared others” included in the count, solve rates remain less than half. In L.A. County, a much larger area, similar patterns prevailed. The result was that unsolved homicides in South L.A. numbered in the thousands—an average of more than 40 per square mile piled up during the decade and a half between the late 1980s and early 2000s.
Maiming people offered even better odds. There were about four or five injury shootings for every fatal one in South Los Angeles. A waggish colleague of Skaggs called these shootings—which injured but did not kill their victims—almocides, for “almost homicides.” High-crime precincts were racked by them. Some thirty almocides occurred each month in the nine square miles of the Southeast Division in the early 2000s, for instance. People—disproportionately black men—were left paralyzed, comatose, brain injured, or forced to spend the rest of their lives using colostomy bags. Officially, some 40 percent of these aggravated assaults were “cleared.” But half of those were not arrests. They were “cleared others,” usually because victims refused to testify. Among “category one” assaults in Watts in 2004, for example—serious injury cases—only about 17 percent ended with an assailant convicted.
The atmosphere this created was in the air Glory Massey breathed. Beneath the most serious unsolved and unprosecuted assaults thrummed an ocean of lesser crimes, often unreported ones. People were punched and kicked. Cars were shot up. Apartments were ransacked. Molotov cocktails were thrown into houses—a legal act for all practical purposes: overburdened fire department investigators recorded hundreds of arsons a year in Los Angeles in the late 2000s.
