Date With the Devil

by Don Lasseter

  One of Wambaugh’s fictional cops in Hollywood Moon describes to his colleagues a hideous double murder that ranked among the weirdest in the station’s history. It proved that bloodcurdling events can occur even when the glowing orb above is only half covered by Planet Earth’s shadow. The perpetrator, the narrator states, entered the house of a ninety-one-year-old retired screenwriter and “cut the guy’s head off” with a meat cleaver. The victim had been a blacklisted screenwriter who coauthored a movie called Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein. According to Wambaugh’s fictional detective, the killer then carried the head to a house next door, broke in, and murdered the occupant: a sixty-nine-year-old retired and recently married doctor.

  If readers think this gruesome scenario came from the author’s imagination, they underestimate the sometimes insidious nature of Hollywood. The stunning crime actually occurred in June 2004. And Wambaugh’s character does not mention that Vicki Bynum was one of the investigators!

  In real life, the murdered screenwriter, Robert Lees, had worked as a minor actor at the beginning of his career. He appeared as a bellboy in the 1932 classic Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford. The next year, Lees showed up as a dancer in another Crawford film, Dancing Lady, costarring Clark Gable.

  Unable to break out as an actor, Lees turned to screenwriting and achieved notable success. Between 1935 and 1952, he helped create scripts for thirty-seven films, including two comedies starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Afterward, he penned scores of television episodes. Unfortunately, Lees faced the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era of witch-hunting for Communists in the early 1950s. Lees invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, and found himself on an extensive roster of blacklisted writers. He continued to work under the pen name of J. E. Selby.

  Long after his retirement, and the 1982 death of his wife, Lees lived peacefully in his Hollywood bungalow. On the other side of a fence, at the back of his property, lived a retired doctor, Morley Engelson.

  In early June 2004, former U.S. Marine Keven Graff, age twenty-seven, wandered aimlessly along Selma Avenue after dark. Dirty, shoulder-length brown hair curled over his ears and forehead, and a three-day growth of beard shadowed his wide jaws. Graff came to Courtney Avenue, crossed over it, and entered Robert Lees’s yard. Convicted just a month earlier of gross lewdness in Las Vegas, Nevada, along with petty theft, resisting arrest, and possession of drugs, Graff had been released on bail. He drove his pickup to Hollywood, where he found solace in using methamphetamine and shouting quotes from the Bible to anyone who would listen.

  Graff broke into the retired screenwriter’s house, snatched a meat cleaver and a butcher knife in the kitchen, and cornered Lees in a bedroom. No one but the killer knows why he carried out the incredibly savage attack. Using the sharp instruments, he beheaded the elderly victim, sliced his penis off, and carved out his heart. Graff grabbed a belt and ran it through the severed head’s mouth until the large buckle lodged against the lips and teeth. He looped it through the throat opening, making an improvised carrying strap. Holding his bloody prize, along with the knife and cleaver, Graff exited the house, crossed the backyard, and vaulted over the wooden fence. He landed in Morley Engelson’s property.

  The retired doctor didn’t hear Graff silently climb through an open window. Having telephoned Southwest Airlines to make reservations for a planned trip with his recent bride, Engelson devoted his attention to the conversation. His wife was out at that time.

  On the other end of the line, the agent was in the middle of routinely explaining flight arrangements when she heard screaming and the sounds of a scuffle. She immediately called the LAPD (from her Arizona workplace) and Hollywood officers were dispatched to the house. Upon their arrival, they found an open window.

  Inside, the officers discovered Engelson’s nearly nude body, dressed only in white socks and a gray sweatshirt pulled up to his neck. An attempt had been made to behead and emasculate him too. It would be later theorized that the killer had heard noises outside and left before he could complete the job.

  In another bedroom, investigators recoiled at a stunning sight. On the corner of a soft white comforter, neatly covering a king-sized bed, reposed the bloodied head of Robert Lees! A round belt buckle with a raised black-and-red five-point star covered the mouth, while the leather belt extended from the throat and onto the white fabric. One of the eyes had been gouged out. Few people have ever witnessed a more sickening vision. Not even a Quentin Tarantino film would have gone this far.

  At about the same time as the excruciating discovery, a woman who had tried unsuccessfully to call Lees showed up at his house and nearly fainted upon seeing his mutilated body.

  Every detail of the macabre event had been permanently etched in the mind of Detective Vicki Bynum, even though she has wished she could use a delete key to cleanse her memory.

  “I’ll never forget that day,” she said with a grimace. “I think it was Sunday—a beautiful day. Got the call to come in and meet with Liz, another detective, who now works cold cases. We were briefed by officers, who were really creeped out. At least we had the luxury of knowing they had already gone through the house and made sure no suspect was in there. We learned the victim had been on the phone making reservations with Southwest Airlines. He and his wife were going on a trip. She, thank God, had gone out shopping. All the windows were open, and none of them had screens. The house is a lovely old bungalow type, on the west side of our division. Dr. Engelson had been playing classical music while talking on the phone.

  “Fortunately, the airline agent had already taken down his address and phone number. The psycho comes from the house where he had decapitated the first victim, and carried the head with him like a purse. He crawled through Dr. Engelson’s window while carrying that head. This poor guy is on the phone, sees this grisly sight, and gets attacked. The Southwest agent hears it and calls the police. Officers respond. There is blood outside. They look through the window and see someone lying on the hardwood floor. I get there and they are explaining this to us. We went in, very gingerly. I remember the first victim, a neighbor, had been mutilated. His penis had been severed and it was lying next to him. The assailant had also used a fireplace poker to stab him. The whole scene was as gruesome as it gets. So, in Engelson’s house, Liz and I are going through it and we get to a back bedroom. Officers on the scene hadn’t warned us. We are like, ‘What is that on the bed?’ We get closer and it’s the head of the previous victim, with the belt buckle, like a star shape, pulled tight against the mouth.” At that moment, Bynum wondered if she really wanted to stick with the job.

  Keven Graff had stolen Engelson’s car and driven to Hollywood Boulevard, where he abandoned it. Investigators found ample fingerprints at both crime scenes and they expedited computer identification. Within hours they started searching for Graff. LAPD chief William Bratton arranged for the suspect’s photo to appear on several local television stations. On Monday afternoon, an alert guard spotted him just outside the famous gate of Paramount Studios and called the police.

  It took four years to bring Graff to justice. In April 2008, he pled guilty to double murder and was sentenced to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutors welcomed the plea, concerned that a jury could have believed Graff’s attorney, who asserted that his client was “very, very mentally ill.”

  Vicki Bynum had never even considered a law enforcement career while growing up. She wound up with the LAPD almost by accident.

  A native of San Antonio, Texas, she and her two younger brothers traveled extensively as children. Their father, a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, moved approximately every three years, from one military base to another. Vicki regretted being unable to remember their time in Europe, and the birth of her first brother in Paris, but she couldn’t be expected to since those events occurred between her third and fifth birthdays.

  A third brother arrived after the family
landed in Wichita, Kansas. While he still wore diapers, the next assignment took them to Tampa, Florida. “My parents bought a beautiful home there, close to the beach, for about thirty thousand dollars.” She loved it, but hated the absence of her dad while he served in Vietnam. “When he came home, they transferred him to North Dakota. It was horrible. And they made an awful mistake by selling the Florida home.” The property’s value today would exceed a million dollars.

  She attended three years at Red River High School in Grand Forks, and nearly froze to death. Before Vicki’s senior year, her father decided to retire from the military and move to Danville, Illinois, the state where he and his wife had been born. “It was basically just a little cow town,” says Vicki. “Not much to do except drive around the cornfields and have a drinkfest now and then.” She graduated from Danville High School, which had originally opened in 1870 and counted among its alumni actors Gene Hackman, Dick Van Dyke, and Jerry Van Dyke.

  Vicki chose Southern Illinois University (SIU) to continue her education. She laughed when she recalled that the sports teams were known as the “Salukis,” a name chosen in 1951, after the dog breed that enjoyed royalty status in ancient Egypt. Not yet certain what profession she wanted to enter, Vicki majored in education. “I thought about being a teacher, but spent way too much time having fun in those first two years. I quit school and on a whim went with two friends to Tucson, Arizona, with the intention of completing my education. I had lived there once when my dad was stationed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. But my school plans didn’t work out.”

  A few months later, she returned to SIU, changed her major to recreation therapy, and graduated in 1979. “My goal was to work with special populations—handicapped people or veterans. But when applying for jobs, I saw a lot of raised eyebrows, like ‘recreation therapy?’ There didn’t seem to be a huge demand for that specialty.”

  Not long after receiving her degree, Vicki moved to California. “I had a boyfriend at the time and he came out here to Los Angeles. Like most stupid young girls, I followed my heart and came to L.A. The second I got here, I found that he had already discovered the beach littered with countless beautiful women. He lost interest in this little Saluki. But that was okay. Everything happens for a reason, and I always try to turn a negative into a positive.”

  With very little money saved, and no friends, Vicki went job hunting. She landed one as a recreation therapist at a downtown Los Angeles senior citizens home, in a building across the street from MacArthur Park, where some of the city’s less well-to-do population congregated. “I knew nothing about Los Angeles—had no clue. I worked there about three months and it was an interesting job. I met some fascinating people, including a person who had been in Lawrence Welk’s band, a Holocaust survivor, and a former Nazi woman. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that this was not my forte; much too depressing. People I became fond of got sick and passed away. That was kind of hard.”

  Considering a career at the Veterans Administration (VA), Vicki discovered that she would need additional education to become a registered therapist. Instead, she found employment with the city of Hermosa Beach doing clerical work for the police department. “I met another female employee, who owned a duplex right near the sand. Perfect! I am twenty-five, working for the city, living by the beach, working nights and enjoying the surfside atmosphere in the daytime. The duplex owner had a lifelong dream of becoming a police officer and talked about it all the time.

  “Some of the guys I worked around seemed pretty dumb to me,” Vicki recalled. One of them, though, made her heart flutter. He told Vicki of his floundering marriage, that he had filed for divorce, and then asked her to go out with him. She refused until the divorce would become final. He agreed; and when it came through, Vicki began dating him. At the beginning of their relationship, his participation in a notoriously gory murder case consumed a great deal of time and visibly impacted his psyche. It involved a couple of career criminals, Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, who had met in prison and jointly fantasized about raping and killing teenage girls after getting out. Following their paroles, the pair reunited, and one of them bought a van. In the summer and fall of 1979, they turned the vehicle into an abattoir. The thugs kidnapped six females, five of them ranging from ages thirteen to eighteen.

  In the back bed of the van, the savage pair raped and tortured the five teenage victims, using vise grips, pliers, and an ice pick before strangling each of them to death with wire hangers. The only adult woman, age thirty, escaped after they sexually assaulted her.

  Criminals often make the error of boasting to cronies about their conquests. One of these “pals” heard details of the horrific murders and called the police. After Bittaker and Norris were arrested, evidence collected from the van included photographs and a hideous audiotape of an eighteen-year-old girl pitifully screaming as she was tortured to death. The adult victim who escaped identified her captors and their vehicle.

  Facing potential capital punishment, Roy Norris testified against Lawrence Bittaker, accusing him of the actual killings. Found guilty, Norris received a sentence of forty-five years to life, while Bittaker was sent to San Quentin’s death row.

  The case, even though solved and adjudicated, resulted in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder with nearly everyone involved. The man Vicki dated had worked long hours on it. She wondered if it may have been a factor in the divorce. It certainly induced nightmares for years. (Vicki helped him through the trauma and eventually married him. He passed away in 1987.)

  Meanwhile, her friend at the duplex convinced Vicki to accompany her to an LAPD recruitment drive. “We drove up to the academy. They have a program for interested candidates where they work out with you and get you in shape to take the test. I went along only to observe, but someone convinced me to apply. They said that since I had a college degree, I probably wouldn’t have to take the written exam, kind of like army recruiters. So, just for the heck of it, I took the physical and passed. The degree did help by eliminating the need for a written test and starting me at a better salary.”

  Hired in 1981, Vicki Bynum started as a patrol officer in the beach community of Venice, adjacent to Santa Monica. Police work, she said, was like wearing many hats. “Out on the streets, you are not just a cop. You are a teacher, a psychiatrist, and a protector. I became fascinated with it. The job was fun, exciting, and well paid. So I pretty much fell into it by accident.”

  One of the first training officers assigned to rookie Bynum was Charlie Beck. He would later become LAPD chief in November 2009. This enabled her to say, with that incandescent twinkle in her eyes and a charming smile, “Now I can call him Chief Charlie.”

  The city of Venice had originally been designed and named to emulate the famous Italian site on the Adriatic Sea. But the canals in California’s Venice had long since dried up, turned into receptacles for trash, and were finally paved over. The city’s wide stretch of sand and palm trees earned the sobriquet “Muscle Beach” in the 1950s. Over the decades, a series of amusement parks sprang up on oceanfront piers, the last one, in 1958, called Pacific Ocean Park. But they all failed and vanished. Notable musicians, from Lawrence Welk to Spade Cooley and even the Doors, performed for television from local venues. Venice Beach’s famed boardwalk, with its eclectic lineup of merchants, still attracts throngs of visitors throughout the year. For the most part, the community is safe, but some of the rougher edges are plagued by crime.

  “Venice was an eye-opening experience,” Vicki Bynum recalled. “I was assigned the night watch, and stupid me, I rode my bike to work all the way from Hermosa Beach, about ten miles. I was very much in shape at the time. But my training officer scolded me and put a stop to that because he said it was too dangerous.”

  After three years in the beach area, the brass reassigned Bynum to LAPD’s Communications Division downtown. “It was really disappointing to do desk work after being a gunslinger out on the streets. Right before the 1984 Olympics in L.A.,
they pushed us out because they needed a lot of cops on the street.” She found herself working skid row, patrol at first and then vice, from 1984 to 1988. After that came an administration assignment, to ease the strain on the widowed mother. Another patrol job came next in the Hollenbeck Division, which contains some tough areas in East L.A. “I got tired of that because there were big fights every night.” Another move took her undercover for five years in the vice squad, in which Bynum participated in the arrest of the notorious Heidi Fleiss, known as the “Hollywood Madam,” who allegedly provided prostitutes for the rich and famous.

  More undercover work followed in the Rampart Division West, of downtown Los Angeles. “We tackled slumlords, drug dealers and gangs. Jeans and tennis shoes were my uniform.”

  Finally Bynum took the test to become a detective and aced it. She worked Hollenbeck again, partnered with Tom Herman. He later headed up the investigation of Rebecca Salcedo and her two cousins, Alvaro and Jose Quezada, who conspired to kill Rebecca’s husband, Bruce Cleland (Honeymoon with a Killer, Kensington, 2009).

  Regarding Detective Herman, Bynum laughed. “He was kind of a cowboy type, like George Jones, and always wore his jeans too tight. In one of my last days working with him, a request came for units to assist in a perimeter. Some suspects had been pinpointed in a specific area, and they needed officers to cover different points. Tom and I somehow got separated. A helicopter gave instructions from overhead. I heard its radio saying, ‘Female detective, female detective, suspect running your way.’ I look around and I’m all alone. The guy came right toward me and almost ran into me. I start chasing him, running. The chopper overhead. I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ I’m yelling at this guy, ‘You had better stop. I don’t want to shoot you.’ I wasn’t going to, but I figured I’d better scare him. In this high, little-girl voice I’m yelling, ‘I’m going to shoot you. You better lay down.’ I turn around. ‘Where’s Tom?’ I had lost him. For years afterward, I kidded him, and said the reason he wasn’t able to keep up was because his jeans were too tight. He couldn’t run.”