The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “A weird thing happened at the funeral home just before we buried Ian. I was standing there in the mortuary with the other pallbearers, all uniformed policemen picked by the department, and remembering things about Ian, like how the only time he had cigarettes was when we got some freebies at a cigarette stop. And how he was so quiet to work with, and a big guy but gentle for a policeman. And how he tried to teach me to play the bagpipe chanter, but how it scared hell out of my little kids.

  “I didn’t know this guy Karl Hettinger very well, but I was looking at him, thinking that they shouldn’t have ordered him to be a pallbearer because he looked kind of worn out. Anyway, he must’ve heard Ian and I were neighbors or something, because he walked up to me in the funeral home and began talking to me in a pleading kind of voice. ‘I’m sorry. I’m awful sorry about Ian,’ he said. Looking me in the eye, teary, and then dropping his eyes and apologizing to me. Really, I wasn’t that close to Ian. And he sure didn’t owe me any apologies.

  “Then he started blurting things out. ‘Maybe I should’ve done something more. Maybe I should’ve grabbed the wheel and wrecked the car! I’m so sorry.’

  “Now I was getting nervous with this spooky guy. I sure didn’t want to hear all this. I just told him it was okay and don’t worry about it. I was surprised when I heard he was back on duty. He didn’t look like he was in any condition.”

  It was Grog Tollefson, the psychology student, who had remembered Ian’s casual remark about his bagpipe teacher’s funeral. Grog suggested that the police department obtain a solo piper to play “Fleurs of the Forest.” That was before he knew what the department was planning.

  At the gravesite, Grog experienced emotions other than ordinary grief and fear for one’s own mortality. It was disgust and anger at the meaningless panoply and pomp: One thousand people. Fifty motorcycles. Hundreds of uniforms. Flags. A firing squad. Police department brass hats who did not know Ian Campbell and cared no more for his death than did the rest of these ghouls. Grog was tall enough to view all of it, and his chalky ascetic face was damp and cold.

  It’s a goddamned three-ring circus, he thought, staged by professional police mourners who grieved professionally like hags at an Irish wake. And there was the cemetery with its imitations of objets d’art, and uniformed hostesses on duty, and a twenty-one dollar stone placement charge. And the vampires from the press with their shutters clicking every few seconds at Adah, and at the firing squad, and at the uniformed pallbearers. And the uniformed police chaplain, himself a cop, with his platitudes which could be mouthed at the funeral of every cop from here to hell and gone. Grog observed that the police department spends a good bit of money and takes damn good care of its dead. He wondered how they do with their living.

  Art Petoyan had an observation about a living policeman: “The thing I most remember was Chrissie and that Officer Hettinger. She holding his hand in hers. I was close enough to see. She seemed to be reassuring him. I thought it was strange.”

  Karl could not remember what he said to Chrissie that day. Chrissie was never to forget. It was the one thing which was to remain with her among the thousands of fleeting impressions of that mob scene. It wasn’t the words so much as the disoriented expression on the face of Karl Hettinger: pain drawn, eyes pleading, confused. He offered his hand and said four words: “I loved your boy.”

  Grog was sweating now, seething at all these strangers who never knew that dreamer, that professional Scotsman with his inexplicable attachment to those damned pipes. What the hell was he? Who was Ian, now lying there in that police uniform? Is that who Ian Campbell really was, a cop? And what the hell were those bagpipes really? What the hell were they that they were so much a part of his life?

  And in college, his endless, unanswerable questions: “Well, do you think Kant was wrong then when he said …” And listening, always listening, damn, it was enough to get on your nerves. Why wasn’t he opinionated like I am? Why did I always feel he was in control and I was out of control? Why did I like him so much? Him and his bloody music, his Bach, his Stravinsky. Did he really love his music? Was it just her who made him think he loved his music? And her: Why is she so correct, so courteous, so cordial that she scares me? Why is she sitting there now so sphinx like? She’s not some fanatical religionist. She’s not tranquilized. So how is she doing it? Look at Adah, demolished, one step from hysteria, and Adah sedated by that Armenian doctor. It was easy at this moment to rage at all of them.

  Grog knew that years before, Chrissie had brought her husband’s body here and that she had given this plot of earth to Adah for Ian’s burial beside his father. There were two flat stone markers: William Campbell, M.D. (1898–1944), and Ian James Campbell (1931–1963). And next to Ian an unused plot, conspicuous in the crowded graveyard. And Grog imagined how it must have been when Chrissie offered Ian’s plot to Adah and how Chrissie must have looked: unruffled, controlled. And how she must have been inside: not breathing, heart hammering, until Adah said, “Yes. All right. I guess so. I don’t care.” And how Chrissie must have closed her eyes, and secretly: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  The only still-unused plot of ground was not beside Dr. Campbell. It was beside Ian. Grog never had to ask. He knew who owned that unused plot of ground. And who would one day lie next to him.

  So you’re not fooling me with that relentless impassive expression, thought Grog, his shirt soaking against his chest. I know who he was to you, your young lord. Your sun, yes, s-u-n. And what’s left now? Adah has the kids and she’s young. She’ll marry again. But you, what’ve you got? What is this Gaelic, Calvinistic, monstrous ethic that’s holding you up? I don’t understand it. I don’t. And what …

  The wail. Clear and piercing. Eerily distant at first. But then, like cold wind slashing through the crowd, cascading down on those who really knew him.

  Art Petoyan said: “It was like a déjà vu experience. I thought of Piper Major Aitken’s funeral with Ian standing beside me. I knew it was coming but still I started trembling when I heard it. Back, back, up on the hillside he was. That solo piper. That solitary piper. Playing that ancient plaintive dirge for clansmen killed in battle, ‘Fleurs of the Forest.’ And I was shivering all over, and I noticed the hairs on the back of my hands were moving, swaying. I looked at her. She sat there erect, looking straight ahead. Adah of course was totally destroyed even before the piper started. She was almost collapsed across her brother’s arm. But though I was worrying about Adah’s condition I took my eyes away. I had to look over at the other chair, at her, sitting there, straight, impassive, motionless.”

  Wayne Ferber was standing at the grave looking at Ian’s wristwatch which Adah had given him. He was thinking of Ian’s killers. “I thought how the Ian I’d always remember couldn’t even have believed there were people like that. Then I saw the wreath shaped like an anchor. It was sent by an old limping sailor, who looked like Popeye. I thought of us as children, playing in Hancock Park. Of how he was. Never frivolous. How even his kid games had to have an end, a conclusion, a point. He’d insist on it. And now I thought: Is there a point to it, Ian? Maybe you know at last. Then I heard those pipes.…”

  Grog Tollefson’s eyes were raw and burning, and he looked around and saw the effect of the pipes on those who really knew.

  Well, Ian, he thought finally. Well, my friend, we got to them with that one. We got a little of you into this mad carnival.

  Now his cheeks were wet and he found himself swallowing hard. He stole a look, one last secret look, at Chrissie Campbell. Still she was motionless. Without expression. Staring. Straight ahead.

  TEN

  Outrage and horror” was the phrase most often used by police spokesmen. And it hardly described the police climate. For this was 1963, before the revolutionary assassinations of policemen. Despite their cynicism, American policemen are Americans. Perhaps a gendarme or poliziòtto would only have been deeply angered by the gratuitous act in the onion field. But an American policeman was
horrified. There had always been rules in the game. One had to have a good reason to kill a cop, such as eluding capture. Smith and Powell had already won that night. In killing Ian Campbell they had scoffed at fair play, scorned the rules of the game. This was the thing an American policeman could not bear.

  The young red-faced vice officer at Wilshire Station had been a policeman less than three years, but he had learned certain fundamental truths about policemen. Policemen thoroughly believed that no man-caused calamity happens by chance, that there is always a step that should have been taken, would have been taken, if the sufferer had been alert, cautious, brave, aggressive—in short, if he’d been like a prototype policeman. They saw themselves as the most dynamic of men, the ones who could take positive action in any of life’s bizarre and paralyzing moments.

  To suppose that a policeman’s vicious murder was inescapable from the moment that little Ford made the wrong turn on Carlos Avenue was inimical to the very essence of the concept of dynamic man.

  The ranking Los Angeles Police Department officer who went to Bakersfield the night of the killing was Inspector John W. Powers.

  John Powers was greatly admired by Pierce Brooks and indeed by most policemen. Some twenty years before, when he was a young detective, he had been involved in a sensational shootout wherein he was wounded and had earned the nickname “Two Gun Johnny.” He’d lived up to that name. Even now; when he was a police administrator whose most hazardous task was driving to his office on Los Angeles freeways, John Powers wore two guns on his lean hips. It did not matter that many of his administrative colleagues left their guns in lockers or desk drawers. John Powers never was without both of his guns under the coat of his business suit. He was said to be the Patton of the Los Angeles force. He was tall like the general, with white wavy hair and eyebrows like crow’s wings. And Inspector Powers had the Patton charisma with the line policemen, would talk their language at rollcalls, would brief stakeout squads and robbery teams in regard to shooting. A good clean bandit-killing pleased him as it does most policemen. He was known as a cop’s cop.

  What John Powers said carried much weight with the street cop. He had been one of them somewhere back in the old days, they were sure of it. And they were sure he wouldn’t kiss anybody’s behind. He talked like a real man.

  Just five days after the murder of Ian Campbell, John Powers drafted what would be called by many policemen the Hettinger Memorandum. Actually it was Patrol Bureau Memorandum Number 11. The subject was: “Rollcall Training—Officer’s Survival.” It was considered so urgent that no officer in uniform or plainclothes was excused from rollcalls, and the division commanders were instructed to assure that every man was apprised of it:

  The brutal gangland style execution of Officer Ian James Campbell underlines a basic premise of law enforcement. You cannot make deals with vicious criminals, such as kidnappers, suspects who have seized hostages, or those who assault police officers with deadly weapons.

  Officer Campbell will not have died in vain if his death causes each member of the department objectively to evaluate his personal role as a policeman and the objectives of the department as a whole.… Just as the armed forces protect the nation from external enemies, local police departments protect their communities from internal criminals every bit as vicious as our enemies from without. The police are engaged in a hot war. There are no truces, and there is no hope of an armistice. The enemy abides by no rules of civilized warfare.

  The individual officer, when taking his oath of office, enters a sacred trust to protect his community to the best of his ability, laying down his life if necessary.

  All men return to dust. The manner of a man’s living and dying is of paramount importance. Although some moderns have attempted to sap the strength and ideals of this nation by slogans such as, “I’d rather be red than dead,” there are situations more intolerable than death.

  John Powers’s lesson number one of the rollcall lesson plan was read once by the red-faced vice officer, three times by Karl Hettinger:

  Surrender is no guarantee of an officer’s safety or the safety of others, including that of his partner and other brother officers. The decision to place these lives and his own in the hands of a depraved criminal is not one to be made lightly.

  In lesson two, Powers became specific in his recommendations to officers who find themselves suddenly covered by a gunman. Some of the suggestions are to tell a nonexistent policeman behind the suspect not to shoot, hoping the suspect might turn around to look, or to pretend to faint to get near the suspect’s feet and trip him, or to jab a pencil through the suspect’s jugular vein.

  Perhaps the entire memorandum is summed up in lesson four, where officers are advised that, “If shot, all wounds are not fatal.” And that, “A strong religious faith gives you calmness and strength in the face of deadly peril.” And, once again, that, “Surrender is no guarantee of safety for anyone.”

  Pierce Brooks had mixed emotions when Inspector Powers consulted him about the memorandum he was about to write. On the one hand, Brooks subscribed to the unwritten police commandment about not second-guessing a field situation where you were not present. On the other hand, he was too much policeman not to believe in the dynamic man concept. Campbell’s death had to have been preventable. Powers was right. But in his final reports some weeks later he softened his appraisal of the officers’ conduct. He couldn’t go so far as the Powers memorandum and imply that Campbell and Hettinger were almost—he hated even to think the word—cowards. So he finally concluded that Karl had merely used poor judgment in surrendering his weapon, and that once surrendered, it was too late on the ride up to use any of the fancy tricks recommended in the memorandum. He wished Powers would have waited before releasing the order. Brooks by now had come to know Hettinger, knew that the murder had disturbed him, but not how much. Still, he thought that the Powers memorandum could cause the young policeman to feel some guilt. Then he dismissed the thought. He was too much policeman to believe very strongly in other than physical trauma. He had been too often frustrated by defense psychiatrists.

  “I’ve read the order,” said the young red-faced vice officer to his sergeant. “And personally, I don’t like it. We’ve been telling robbery victims for years not to try something as stupid as drawing, or shooting it out with a guy who had the drop on you. Now we’re throwing it out the window as far as policemen are concerned.”

  “They call that typical police overreaction,” said a second vice cop, an older policeman who was reading a racing scratch sheet trying to pick a daily double.

  “The department’s writing general policy because of one specific isolated case,” the young vice cop argued. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m not saying I disagree with you,” said the big sergeant to the younger officer. “In fact, I more or less agree. But you have to understand what’s happening in the department. Policemen are … are …”

  “Outraged.”

  “Yes, outraged. We’ve never had an officer taken to an onion field and tormented and needled at the very end and …”

  “Look,” said the red-faced vice cop, “I understand that. Christ, I feel the same, but I think the department’s making a bad mistake with this Hettinger Memorandum. I’m gonna say so when we go the patrol rollcall tonight.”

  “Now just a minute,” said the sergeant, “the captain said the whole damn station has to go and hear this memorandum, that’s all. Just listen to it. You’re still free to do as you like in a combat situation. It’s not handed down from a mountain.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s on the watch commander’s desk upstairs. Read it. It was handed down from a mountain.”

  “Well, I don’t see any sense of you or me popping off about it.”

  “Listen to this,” said the young vice officer, his face not just ruddy now, but flaming, his voice cracking with emotion as he thought of standing at the crowded rollcall and d
aring to dispute the order of Inspector Powers. “These are articles I clipped. It says that this is the fourth kidnap of policemen in Los Angeles County in the past four weeks.” Then the vice cop began heatedly reading:

  On February 24, officers Albert Gastaldo and Loren Harvey spotted a woman parked alone in a car. She told them she was waiting for her husband. The officers remained nearby. Soon a man appeared, his arms buried in packages. The police ordered him to drop the packages. The man complied, but when packages fell, a sawed-off shotgun remained. He disarmed both officers. The officers were released unharmed.

  On March 1, Whittier police officers Arthur Schroll and Richard Brunmier made a routine field check on an auto containing two men. The men drew guns, took the officers to an isolated section where road work was in progress and handcuffed them to a piece of heavy equipment. The men, both robbery suspects, escaped with the officers’ revolvers.

  On March 9, Inglewood police officers Arthur Franzman and Douglas Webb signaled a lone male driver to pull over to the curb in a routine traffic violation. The man got the drop on the officers, took their revolvers and made them drive to Inglewood Park Cemetery where he ordered them to lie down. The man later was identified as a bandit who held up a café and escaped with twenty-seven hundred dollars.

  “So what’s the point?” asked the sergeant.

  “The point is that this kind of thing’s been going on since time immemorial and right here in the L.A. area, and in fact on the same night Campbell and Hettinger were snatched. Now all of a sudden because one set of maniacs blows up a cop we’re gonna say Campbell and Hettinger did it wrong and change our whole policy. Campbell and Hettinger must’ve known about these recent kidnappings. They must’ve figured their case was no different. They were gonna be taken somewhere, maybe handcuffed, and that’d be it.”

  “I think you better keep your articles in your pocket,” said the older vice cop. “Once our leaders make up their minds there’s no changing them. If they say Campbell and Hettinger done wrong then that’s it. If they wanna tell us how to do it right, fine, I’ll listen, then I’ll do what I think best anyways. So who’s gonna be hurt by their chickenshit special orders and rollcall training?”