Date With the Devil

by Don Lasseter

  Other team members captured the suspect.

  Bynum didn’t want to leave Hollenbeck, but her one-year trial period as a detective had expired, necessitating a change of location. “I put in for Hollywood, thinking it would be an exciting place to work. Before the deadline, I came over and introduced myself to the Robbery Detail supervisor, hoping for an opening. I was lucky. I served in the Robbery Unit first, then Gangs, and then to Homicide in 1997.”

  Maintaining her fine sense of humor and soft-spoken demeanor, Vicki earned the respect of her peers and bosses. At Bynum’s desk in the Hollywood Station, just above and to the right of her computer screen, can be seen photos of her two best pals; Bella, her “chubby Chihuahua,” and her miniature pinscher, Topaz, both acquired as gifts from her daughter.

  Ten years into her tenure as a homicide detective, Vicki Bynum heard the name Kristin Baldwin for the first time.

  CHAPTER 5

  SHOT IN THE FACE

  A confusing chain of communication triggered an investigation in LAPD’s Hollywood Station. It began late at night on May 31, 2007—sixteen days before the discovery of an unidentified body in the desert near Daggett.

  In Orange County, south of Los Angeles, an enigmatic caller to 911 stated that a murder had taken place in Hollywood on May 27. The receiving agency relayed it to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD), which forwarded the information to the Los Angeles Police Department. At one of the stations, an officer thought it sounded like a prank call and hung up. The caller persisted and tried again. From LAPD, the report was forwarded by a radio telephone operator (RTO) to the night watch at the Hollywood Station. By this time, the clock had ticked past midnight.

  At the desk in Hollywood, in the first half hour of June 1, Officer Tracey Fields received information that an unidentified male caller had said he was a witness to a homicide at a Cole Crest Drive address. The crime had occurred on Sunday, May 27. The informant said that his roommate, David Alan Mahler, shot a woman in the face and later asked for help in disposing of the body. Unwilling to identify himself, the caller left numbers where he could be reached, fell silent, and hung up.

  Officer Fields, on temporary duty answering telephones due to her advanced pregnancy, notified her watch commander, who contacted Detective Ray Conboy, on duty as the night watch detective.

  Conboy recalled the convoluted sequence. “I called the three numbers I had for the PR (person reporting). There were no answers, but I left voice mail messages on all of them giving numbers for my cellular phone and the Hollywood desk. At 0125 hours, I called my supervisor, Detective Wendi Berndt. She advised me to conduct a follow-up at the residence.”

  With twenty-eight years of experience behind her, Wendi Berndt not only had achieved admirable success, but had also retained a youthful, attractive appearance. Exceptionally bright, she had worked her way up the ladder from raw recruit to Detective III, in charge of homicide investigations in the Hollywood Station. Originally from Wichita, Kansas, Berndt had married and moved to New York, where she earned a degree in police science. In the small township of Montgomery, New York, Berndt went directly to the police chief and told him she would like to apply for a job. He promised to get back to her and kept his word a few days later. Recalling it with a laugh, Berndt said, “I got two calls. In the first one, he said, ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t take you on because we don’t know how male officers’ wives would react to their husbands working with a female.’ The second call came after what I imagined to be a discussion with their legal department. This time he said, ‘Okay, you know what? We’re going to accept you.’ I said, ‘Great. What do I do?’ I was wondering if they would send me to an academy or provide some special training. He said, ‘Just go out and get a gun and come to work.’”

  Speaking between bursts of laughter, Berndt continued. “Well, I went out and bought a .357 Magnum. And then I’m thinking, ‘I don’t believe I really want to do this.’ The whole Montgomery force at that time was about four people.” Berndt postponed her ambitions and focused on keeping a shaky marriage together. It didn’t work.

  After a painful divorce, she launched a job search in major cities, which included interviews in Los Angeles and Houston, Texas. Just prior to a trip to Kansas City, she received an offer from Houston. “Actually, I really wanted to work for the LAPD, so I turned Houston down. I came here and was accepted. Just like everyone else, I started as a recruit. Unless recruits are fired, they become a police officer and serve a period of probation.”

  As a patrol officer in Hollywood, Berndt inevitably encountered celebrities. She recalled being dispatched, along with paramedics, to the home of Orson Welles when he died. His amazing obesity has stuck in her mind. “He was up in a second-story bedroom. The man was huge. I’ve never in my life seen anything like the size of his ankles, like elephant legs. That memory has stayed with me all these years.”

  Berndt knew right away she wanted to be a detective and began working toward that goal. “For twenty-six of my twenty-eight years, I have been in Hollywood. I was in uniform for nine years before making D-I, the first step as a detective.” She worked cases from 1990 to 1995, and then accepted a promotion to supervisor in 1996.

  In the early-morning hours of Saturday, June 2, 2007, from her bedroom at home, Wendi Berndt spoke by telephone to Detective Conboy. He had a remarkably odd case on his hands. An anonymous report had been telephoned from another county. The unknown informant had spoken of a woman being shot by someone named David Mahler several days earlier. However, no unexplained reports had been received of a dead body or a wounded victim.

  Retrospectively discussing the case, Wendi Berndt said, “Ray called me and told me that a call had come in about a murder up at a house in the hills. He got the address and said that a suspect known to the caller had done it. I realized we didn’t have enough information to go out and kick in the door, but certainly could go there and knock. I asked Ray, ‘Can you get some more information?’”

  Conboy went into action. He recalled, “At 0145 hours, I received notification on my cellular phone that the PR’s call was transferred to the Communications Division by the Orange County Communications Center. He reported that a man killed a lady and came to his door and wanted help to dispose of the body. At 0200 hours, the Hollywood Desk called to say the PR had called the station and was on hold. I advised the desk officer to have the PR call my cellular phone.”

  At last, four minutes after two o’clock, Conboy spoke to the mysterious informant and learned that his name was Karl Norvik (pseudonym).

  Norvik’s voice throbbed with stress as he spoke of spending Saturday night, May 26, and Sunday at the house up on Cole Crest Drive. He had heard shouting and screaming coming from the bedroom of David Mahler, the leaseholder and manager. At about six twenty-five, Sunday morning, Norvik said, he had been awakened by the sounds of hard knocking on the door of his studio apartment, two levels below Mahler’s quarters. He responded and found Mahler at his door. Mahler had said, “I need to dispose of a dead body.”

  According to Norvik, Mahler led him upstairs to his bedroom, where he looked in and saw the deceased body of a white female dressed in white pants of a thin material and a halter top. It appeared to Norvik that she had been shot in the face. He left Mahler’s room and returned to his own quarters. He said that he did not help Mahler move the dead woman. Later that day, said Norvik, he left the location and went to a relative’s home in Orange County. He wanted the detective to understand that his delay in reporting the crime stemmed from a mortal fear of David Mahler.

  Now armed with salient facts, Conboy once again reached Wendi Berndt. She retrospectively said, “Ray contacted me and said he had personally talked to the informant. So I said, ‘Go ahead up to the house and knock to see if anyone is there.’”

  Berndt also contacted a sergeant in the Hollywood Gang Enforcement Detail and requested some backup for Detective Conboy. Several officers headed up to the scene. “Ray drove up to Cole Crest,
did what I asked, and called again. No one was answering the locked front gate. Now, this is all after one thirty in the morning. I said, ‘Ray, tell them to kick the door. We need to go in. You’ve got firsthand information that a murder occurred at that location.’

  “As it turned out, we didn’t have to kick the gate or the door in. A resident of the building, a man named Jeremy Moudy, came to the front entry, which is a locked gate and opened it up.”

  Jeremy Moudy had occupied the studio apartment, just below Mahler’s rooms, for a couple of years. Sometimes his girlfriend stayed overnight. A construction worker, Moudy stood well over six feet tall, with a muscular build. Handsome and youthful in appearance, at age thirty, he kept a dark mustache and short beard neatly trimmed.

  Courteous and calm, Jeremy invited the officers inside. He explained that he lived downstairs in a studio apartment. The leaseholder and manager, a man named David Mahler, occupied the upper floors. Just below Jeremy’s bedroom, in a subdivided unit, lived a guy named Karl Norvik. Conboy recognized that name as the mysterious caller’s. Another guy, said Jeremy, lived in the bottom apartment. While Mahler, Norvik, and the other tenant all interconnected socially, Moudy said, he kept his privacy and seldom even spoke to the other three. He did observe “a lot of women” coming and going in the upper floors occupied by Mahler. On numerous occasions, he had heard sounds of arguing upstairs, with women’s voices shrieking their anger. He had also noticed a green-and-white minivan parked in front of the garage many times.

  Explaining that a report had been received of a possible homicide at this address, the police asked Jeremy Moudy’s permission to have a look around. He offered no objections.

  As they filed into the short corridor, one of the uniformed cops, Bill Wilson, noticed a door to his left standing open. To be certain no suspect might be hiding in there, or any bodies were stowed, he aimed his flashlight beam into the area and saw that it was a garage in which two, sleek, dark-colored vehicles were parked. As he moved the circle of light back and forth, Wilson saw something else. On the floor, he spotted several stains of what appeared to be blood. He informed Sergeant Aikens and Detective Conboy.

  Following routine protocol, they initiated a “protective sweep” of the entire residence to see if any “victims down” might need physical or medical help. As they explored the living room, stairs, and master bedroom, more stains that looked like blood appeared.

  Bill Wilson and another officer descended a switchback staircase into a lower level, in which they found no one, and then into Moudy’s rooms. Jeremy had told them of his girlfriend still asleep in his bedroom. The cops courteously knocked and allowed her a few minutes to get dressed before continuing the “sweep.”

  Entering a large, deep walk-in closet inside the bedroom, Wilson observed a makeshift shelf that had been built four feet above the floor to store a pile of clothing, boxes, blankets, and a suitcase. He shined his flashlight at the stack of clothing and thought he saw something move. Reaching into the clutter, Wilson pushed some of the material aside and looked into the stricken face of a man crouched in a fetal position.

  The foiled evader’s skin turned pale and then reddened in embarrassment as he climbed down to the floor. He admitted to the officer that he was David Mahler, resident of the upper apartment.

  Bill Wilson and his companion officer escorted Mahler upstairs into the office and kept an eye on him, pending orders from a supervisor.

  At the bottom of the exterior stairs, still a few minutes before three o’clock, another pair of cops knocked on a door until they heard someone stirring inside. Donnie Van Develde opened it, stood there with saucer eyes, and almost shouted, “I know why you are here! David killed that girl. Her name was Kristi. I never saw the body, but I saw it wrapped in a blanket, and I think I saw her arm. This is bad! I didn’t have anything to do with it. David was tweaking.” The cops understood that “tweaking,” in street lexicon, meant using methamphetamine.

  Detective Conboy made another telephone call to his supervisor. “Wendi,” he said, “we’ve got blood at this location. And guess what? We also have David Mahler, the guy our informant named. He was hiding in one of the other occupants’ closet. And that’s not all. We have another renter, a guy named Donnie Van Develde, a witness who might have seen the body.”

  “Transport them to the station,” Berndt ordered. She also directed some of the officers to stay at the location, secure it, and wait for a search warrant to continue the probe. Officers escorted David Mahler and Donald “Donnie” Van Develde to a pair of patrol cars and transported them separately to the Hollywood Station. Jeremy Moudy agreed also to be interviewed at the headquarters. Wendi Berndt allowed him to drive his own car so he could leave after giving his statement.

  Everything so far pointed toward a probable killing. Berndt decided to call in two of the best detectives ever to work the Hollywood Homicide Unit.

  With the sun still at least three hours below the eastern horizon, Detective Vicki Bynum answered her phone and instinctively jumped out of bed. Thirty miles away, her partner on this case, Detective Tom Small, didn’t think twice about being summoned in predawn darkness. It came with the territory.

  Now and then, detectives find it a little inconvenient to be called out.

  In real life, as well as in whodunit movies or novels, humor becomes an essential element of psychological survival for homicide detectives. They believe the old axiom that laughter is the best medicine. Often, in recalling grim events, they lighten it up with hilarious asides. Wendi Berndt, Vicki Bynum, and Tom Small were no exceptions. Discussing the opening stages of the David Mahler case and the early-morning call-outs, they couldn’t resist telling a story about one of their colleagues.

  Berndt started it by saying, “As a supervisor, I’ve heard every excuse in the world for not coming to work today. One time when I was in a grocery store, my phone rings. I was too busy to pick up and it went to voice mail. A little later I listened to it, and one of my detectives didn’t want to come to work. The voice mail message said, in a pitifully croaky voice, ‘Hey, I’m really sick. Gotta stay in bed. I’m just really, really sick.’

  “A little bit later, my phone rang again and I accessed this second call. He had accidentally done something to have his phone redial after the first call. And he didn’t know it. So what I hear is a recording of him having a wild romp with his girlfriend, ‘Yahoo, oohhh, ohhh.’

  Laughing so hard she could hardly talk, Bynum added, “We heard someone say, ‘Spank the monkey.’”

  Also chuckling, Small tossed in, “You can tell he is running all through the house.”

  Berndt said, “So the next day, everybody is gathered around, and the three of us are asking him, ‘Are you feeling better?’ I said, ‘Just after I heard from you, I got another message and I can’t figure out who made the call.’ I played the second message. We are all circled around my cell phone and he is listening carefully. And when he heard ‘spank the monkey,’ he knew he was busted.”

  Small said, “We have this binder we call ‘The Stupid Book.’ It is a record of all the dumb things detectives have done, all the way back to the 1980s. So I ask him to explain ‘spank the monkey.’ He came up with the biggest BS story I’ve ever heard. He told us, ‘Well, I was at my girlfriend’s and we just got this brand-new TV set. She’s got a kid and we call him ‘the monkey.’ And I was playing with him—like, ‘Come here, I’m going to spank the monkey.’”

  Small made certain this explanation landed in The Stupid Book.

  Neither Detectives Vicki Bynum nor Tom Small claimed to be sick when Berndt summoned them to Hollywood long before dawn on that June morning.

  Night watch Detective Conboy’s shift would soon be ending, so Berndt dispatched Detective Larry Cameron, another member of her Homicide Unit, to relieve him. Berndt also left the station to join Cameron at the scene. To her, it was important to supervise an investigation in person, not from a desk. As soon as the expedited search warrant was a
pproved, the hunt intensified.

  As Cameron and other officers looked for a possible murder victim and any associated evidence, Berndt not only observed and directed—she also participated. Later speaking of it, she said, “There was no noticeable odor. If a body had been there since Sunday, we should have been able to detect a smell.”

  Something else struck Berndt about David Mahler’s living quarters. “There was trash, dirty food, and unwashed dishes. It was not a clean place. So when we saw quite a few bottles of detergents and cleaning fluids, we knew something was weird. The obvious came to mind. It looked like someone was trying to clean up a bloody crime scene.”

  CHAPTER 6

  STRANGE PATTERNS

  A location in the Hollywood Hills’ western edge became the epicenter for a remarkable synchronicity of events and dates involving the sons of two world-famous entertainers, a kid from the USSR, and, eventually, a man named David Mahler. One celebrity son was kidnapped and the other one murdered. Fate would draw all of these individuals from widely divergent geographical locations to a tight circle of real estate within Los Angeles’s world of movies and mayhem. To Vicki Bynum and her partner, Detective Tom Small, one of the men would become a source of deep consternation.

  On December 8, 1963, while the nation still grieved over President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and reeled in shock at the televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, a different crime unfolded in California. It victimized Frank Sinatra’s only son, Frank Jr. Coincidentally, the iconic singer-actor had sought to establish a social relationship with Kennedy.