A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Then Swalwell talked. As he talked, he walked up and down, gesturing with his cigarette. The more he talked, the more keyed up Brown and Parker felt, raring to go.

  He talked about Robert and Catherine Pietrusiak.

  He talked about Taylor Wright.

  He talked about Marcy Purmal.

  He talked about Gus.

  He talked about G. Daniel Walker. “This guy can fit in anywhere he wants to,” he said. “He dresses the best, he eats the best, he drives the best. He has got an uncanny ability to lay still. He is very, very smart, and he knows a lot of legal angles. He’s a very good listener, and he’s very convincing. You can walk up to him and talk to him, and he can convince you he’s not the guy you’re looking for.”

  Swalwell talked on, pacing and smoking. Tall and rangy, with his attractively pockmarked face and his blue eyes, he was mesmerizing, and nobody seemed to mind that Swalwell was taking charge. He was a cop’s cop. Parker and Brown noticed that he could talk to the FBI agents on their level, but could also talk to the two of them without making them feel like hicks. Jim Brown paid him the ultimate compliment: not badge-heavy.

  Plans were made. They would fan out over the city, concentrating on the best hotels, the best bars and restaurants. Through the Intelligence Unit at LASO, Lt. Gary Weins and Sergeant Housner of that office would disseminate the information and photographs of Walker to their Patrol, Metro, and Narcotic units. Walker’s face would become familiar to every hotel clerk, every headwaiter, every cocktail waitress in all the right places. Hope Masters’s house would be staked out, as well as her mother’s house. They would cast a net so wide, so finely woven, that not even G. Daniel Walker would be able to slip through.

  There was no time, anymore, even for a sit-down meal, only sandwiches and coffee picked up at a deli and taken into the vehicle. Lunch on the run. There was scarcely any time to enjoy the waterbeds; at 6:30 every morning Parker and Brown were already up and dressed and heading out the door.

  As there had been in Chicago, there were false leads, perhaps because they were almost too aware now, too alert. “I see Walker everywhere,” Gene Parker told his partner ruefully. “I see him at least fifty times a day.” When a dark-haired man wearing a green sweater, acting nervous, driving a cream-colored Mercedes, kept cruising up and down past Honey’s house, slowing down at the small park at the corner, then speeding off again, Brown and Parker were very suspicious. Walker was believed, just then, to be driving a Mercedes. But identifying a man in a Mercedes in Honey’s neighborhood was so formidable a challenge that the frustration came through in Jim Brown’s written report. “Many Mercedes-Benz throughout Beverly Hills, ranging from black, dark blue, dark green, and, of course, all other colors.”

  But the cream-colored Mercedes kept driving up and down, sometimes swinging around in U-turns and, at one point, seeming to follow Brown and Parker as they patrolled. Since the instructions were that no one—repeat no one—was to attempt to apprehend the suspect, Brown took the license number. When LASO Intelligence traced it to an apartment house in east L.A., the two of them, along with Barnes and Swalwell and two LAPD officers, drove out to the address.

  Swalwell was dubious. “This wouldn’t be Walker’s layout,” he said. “It’s not fancy enough, and it’s too far from the center of things.” Still, they approached cautiously. Barnes stayed in the car, at the radio. Inside the building, Parker and Brown stood to one side of the apartment door, the LAPD men on the other side. Swalwell knocked. They heard movement inside, and Swalwell knocked again, loudly. “Coming. Coming,” a voice called out. When the tenant opened the door and saw five men with guns drawn, his eyes widened. “My goodness. My goodness,” he said. He was wearing a long blue flowered silk robe and cradling a tiny poodle in one arm. When the situation was explained to him, he was very understanding, and invited everyone in for tea.

  At eleven o’clock on March 8, Swalwell was notified by Deputy Ted Hoffman of the West Hollywood Night Detective Unit that Robert McRae, a desk clerk at the Holiday Inn at 1755 Highland Avenue in Hollywood, had identified a photo of Walker as being of the person who’d checked in approximately a week and a half before. When Swalwell and a handful of detectives, including Brown and Parker, interviewed Mr. McRae, the clerk accurately described Walker’s manner of conversation and dress, and said the man had made many phone calls right after he checked in. When the officers asked Joseph Abdenour, the manager, if they could see his records, he was very cooperative and brought them all out. But in checking all registrations for February and early March, the officers did not recognize any names Walker might have used, or any phone numbers on the call-out slips that would match with Hope Masters’s phone number, or with her mother’s.

  It was Friday, March 9. Parker and Brown had just returned to their room at the Mayfair when Lieutenant Barnes knocked loudly. “Something’s going on at Homicide,” Barnes told them.

  At the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, Parker, Brown, and Barnes, along with Swalwell, Babcock, and Tucker and a handful of L.A. men, listened as Lt. Joe Antonoff briefed them on his call from Fran Ashlock, who had been notified by Bankamericard that William T. Ashlock’s Bankamericard had been presented for use at the London Shop in the Sheraton–Universal Hotel.

  Swalwell nodded. A place called the London Shop, in a Sheraton Hotel, sounded very much like Walker, along with the bravado of flaunting the card of a dead man whose name was in all the papers. They raced out into the Friday afternoon traffic on the jammed-up freeway and, when they finally reached the Sheraton, they sifted quickly, quietly through the lobby, the dining room, the bar. Swalwell spoke in a low, urgent voice to Evans Hall, the hotel’s security chief, then scanned the guest register: William T. Ashlock, 1102. “See the left-handed slant?” Swalwell said to Parker. “That’s Walker.”

  The Sheraton lobby was swarming with people. Swalwell was told, nervously, that Gov. Ronald Reagan was due to arrive anytime, for a dinner. “Do you think there’ll be any shooting?” the Sheraton people asked Swalwell as they approached 1102. He gave them his cool blue gaze. “There might be,” he said. “Please get the hell out of here.”

  Swalwell knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. He took the passkey Evans Hall had given him and eased it, silently, into the lock. He turned the key, then thrust the door forward with his right knee, opening it in one sudden rush.

  There was no one in the room. There was no luggage, no clothing, no personal items except for a can of hair spray in the bathroom.

  It was 6:25 P.M.

  Michael Moore, the salesman in the London Shop, said the customer had been in around four o’clock, buying a leather jacket. Michael Moore had written up the sale, then told the man he’d have to check on the card and he’d send the coat up to his room. “Fine,” the customer had said. He shopped around for a few minutes, then left the shop.

  Nine armed officers, along with Evans Hall and James Briscoe, Fran Ashlock’s own investigator, roamed through the entire hotel again—the shops and bars, the dining room, the outside and the underground parking areas. The hotel security people put a double lock on the door of 1102, with their guards standing watch on that floor. A little before midnight, Swalwell and the other men gave it up. The room, after all, was empty. Walker was gone.

  For a while, Swalwell felt discouraged. Even for a daredevil like Walker, a two-hour miss was a close call, and it seemed likely that Walker might already have made himself scarce in L.A. He was known to like cities—interesting cities—so the word went out to police departments in both directions, San Francisco and San Diego, and Swalwell and Parker headed back to the Mayfair, talking about Walker. All the clothes had been gone from the room; that was a bad sign. But Walker had been calling Hope Masters regularly; he seemed to like talking with her. That was a good sign.

  Walker’s second tape was left in Hope’s mailbox on the Drive. When he called to tell Hope it was there, Gene Tinch alerted the police, but when they got to the house, there was no one
around. Van and Gene drove up and got the tape and brought it back to Honey’s house.

  “This tape may be listened to by her attorney and members of her family to be helpful in the formation of her defense,” Walker began, going on to say he was “a non-American national” who had been in the continental United States for “approximately forty-some days.” He said he had entered the country illegally, on matters that concerned several foreign governments.

  Walker said he had never heard of Hope Masters, had never met Hope Masters, or had any knowledge that Hope Masters existed until he’d had a four-hour lunch with Bill Ashlock on Friday, February 23, when Bill showed him her picture. “Ashlock was really taken with this woman he was dating,” Walker observed.

  Before they met for lunch, he said, he’d never met Ashlock but had “observed him from a distance and up somewhat close” and had compiled a dossier that included not only Bill’s family background—schooling, military, and employment record; salary and taxes paid; his marriage, children, and his separation, but also less vital statistics, such as the fact that when Bill and Fran sold their Winthrop Avenue house, Fran had received $3,668.02 from the sale; Bill had taken the piano, a love seat, a couple of rattan chairs, a coffee table, a dining room set, a tool cabinet and workbench.

  Walker said he’d approached Ashlock, in the guise of a free-lance writer, in order to develop “a fast friendship, rather detailed friendship” that would then lead to a friendship with Bill’s Checkmate partner, Richard Miller, so that eventually Walker could work with Miller on government projects, making films abroad.

  When Bill invited him to the ranch, Walker said he accepted gladly, and drove up—on Saturday. He saw Hope Masters for the first time when she leaned out of the bathroom window, her hair in large curlers.

  In the living room, with wine and cheese, Walker found Hope “very gracious; a sophisticated person … quite delightful,” though it unnerved him, at first, that she couldn’t seem to sit still.

  Walker described the afternoon in detail—getting the horse, strolling down to the river, Hope kidding him “rather brazenly” about his astrological sign. “She had accepted the identity that I had told her, who I happened to be, and Ashlock was very happy, I was very happy, and I believe that Hope Masters was having a delightful afternoon.”

  After the trip to the market, where Hope picked up a child with a runny nose, and after buying beer, gin, and vodka, Hope changed clothes and sat in the living room, barefoot, drinking and chatting. “She loved to pull her feet up under her when she was sitting on the sofa. She was a delightful woman to observe. It was obvious that she had a cultured background.… I had no problem sitting there talking to Hope, and I somehow got to know her rather well, through her relating various experiences with both her husbands and children, what her life had been somewhat like.”

  Hope ate very little at dinner, dozed briefly on the sofa, then went into the bedroom. Walker said he’d stayed a little longer, then left the ranch at 11:30 or 11:40 P.M. after arranging to come back Sunday for more pictures. The ranch gate was locked, but he remembered the combination: “thirty-ought-six, like the rifle.” On the pathway he saw a young man with long hair and a mustache, wearing ranch clothes, who seemed to belong there, although later he wondered.

  When he returned on Sunday morning at 9:45 or 9:50, everything seemed normal as he parked his car. But as he was closing his car door:

  “I heard screams from inside the house. The screams were obviously a woman’s screams, obviously coming from Hope Masters. So without any hesitation I dashed into the house through the little side rear door that I had entered, that goes through like a mud room and into the kitchen and as I entered the house, everything was obviously the way it had been the night before.

  “I dashed into the living room and Ashlock was on the sofa. Half on the sofa and half on the coffee table. He was—his face and upper torso had—was on the cushion part of the sofa where you would normally sit; his legs from the lower thigh to almost the ankle were stretched on the coffee table, and his feet were hanging off the coffee table.… There was still the smell of death in that room.

  “Hope Masters was still screaming. She was in the front bedroom.… I entered the room … she was screaming, crying, she was nude. Her hair was a complete mess. Her hands were bound at the wrist and behind her back, and her ankles were bound. It was impossible to determine from what she was saying what had happened. She was incoherent.”

  As he untied Hope, Walker noticed that her slacks and underpants were at the foot of the other bed, and the rest of the clothes he remembered her wearing from the night before were in the adjacent bathroom. Walker said Hope “was blurting out the fact that she’d been raped, that somebody had been hired to kill her and her children, and that for some reason, a male person had not killed her.”

  Walker found no one when he searched the house. “I wasn’t certain what had happened. All I know was that Ashlock was dead on the sofa and that Hope Masters was tied up in such a position that she couldn’t have tied herself. That there’d been a tremendous tragedy occurred in that home.”

  He went across the orange grove and knocked on the caretaker’s door, and walked up to the barn, but no one was around. Hope Masters was still screaming, so loudly he could hear her from outside, so he went back in to talk with her.

  “She told me that she had been awakened in the middle of the night. That there was an intruder. That the man—uh, uh—was tearing the clothes off her. She jumped up out of the bed, went screaming for Bill Ashlock’s assistance. When she got to the sofa … she proceeded to touch him, and he just kind of rolled away, he fell aside, and when she looked at her arms, she had blood all over her arms. And the man—the intruder—proceeded to tell her that Ashlock was dead and he took her back into the bedroom and proceeded to rape her, and talk, and somewhere in this long conversation that—that took place during the—uh—time that I was away from the ranch, the man alluded to the fact that he had been hired to kill Hope Masters and her two older children.”

  Walker explained why he hadn’t called the police.

  “I operate on the basis that I have no contact with domestic police. My identity is not to be known. My intent and purposes within the United States are definitely not to be known, and I’m obviously breaking the laws of the United States of America, and probably in the state of California, in the type of proposal that I was going to make to Richard Miller and William T. Ashlock, and had they accepted, they would have been breaking the laws. My entry into the United States is illegal; I travel under false identity papers. I had material in my possession—documentation, film, tape recordings, photographs—that just simply could not fall into the custody and control of the inspection of any type of authorities.”

  Although Walker considered Hope’s story “rather fantastic,” he agreed to drive her back to Los Angeles. But she began screaming that she couldn’t pass through the room with the body, and because he was afraid someone would hear, and call the police, “and I would be desperately and hopelessly involved in a situation I was trying to stay out of,” he’d placed Bill’s body onto a white cotton pad, a sheet, and a bedspread, face down, shrouded the linens around the body, and dragged the bundle across the living room, through the kitchen and into the rear bedroom. Back in the living room, he put another spread over the bloody sofa and changed the pillowcase on the pillow on the sofa—the one Hope had used when she dozed—and put the pillow into the bedroom with the body.

  He checked Hope’s purse “to make sure there was no weapon,” then put her in his car and returned to the house to remove his fingerprints. He picked up the ball of adhesive tape he’d removed from Hope and a couple of other items; using his handkerchief, he wiped the coffee table and doorknobs and latches on the linen cupboard.

  As they drove south, Hope gave more details of the night, describing the planned “bloodbath.”

  They reached the Drive between 4:00 and 4:30 Sunday afternoon, with Hope giving him
directions, and found the maid vacuuming, the children out. Hope told a story about a car accident, with Bill staying up north to get the car repaired.

  Walker said Hope called her mother and, shortly after, her mother called back. Hope told her about an accident at the ranch.

  Even when the children returned, Hope was worried how long she would be safe, for the man who had raped her and killed Bill had warned her not to call the police. Around 6:00, Hope got a phone call. When she hung up she was “very white, very frightened,” saying to Walker, “It was him. It was him.” The caller had told her he knew she was back, he warned her not to call anyone, and he asked about the stranger who was with her. “Hope was a very frightened girl,” Walker declared. “And it was obvious she was in some sort of trouble.”

  By now, Walker said, he believed her story. “I found the woman the day before to be delightful, sophisticated, gregarious, the type of person you make an easy friendship with and now, in a time of need, I found her to be no less of an intriguing type of person that anyone would have helped.”

  Walker thought of sending “some of my people” to the ranch to dispose of the body, the sofa, everything. But he stayed the night at her house for two reasons: to protect her and also because, “as long as I was near her, I did have some control over what she was going to do and what she was going to say.”

  He made a quick trip to the bus stop with the maid, and returned to find Hope in the bedroom with the children, the door locked, “quaking and frightened and somewhat out of her mind.” Another call came from the killer, then Hope went to bed, while Walker stayed in the living room, by the balcony door. When he heard “strange noises” outside and went out to investigate, he saw two men walking. Not smoking, not talking, just walking, “apparently interested in Hope Masters’ house,” until they drifted off into the darkness.