by Don Lasseter
Michael Conoscenti had moved to a home with a gated entrance. Still on amicable terms with David Mahler, he had even arranged yet another meeting for him with a different porn actress. Mahler drove to Conoscenti’s address at a prearranged time, and waited outside the gate for her to appear. Never a patient man, he drummed his fingers and clenched his jaws for much longer than he thought a reasonable amount of time, and he grew angrier by the minute. When the woman still failed to appear, Mahler turned his vehicle around, put it in reverse, jammed his foot down on the accelerator, and rammed the gate. The collision did no damage to the car’s bumper, but it virtually destroyed the gate.
The noise brought Conoscenti out, shouting at Mahler. They exchanged vitriolic threats before Mahler peeled out of the driveway and vanished. Conoscenti would later tell police officers that he recognized a black woman who had been in the car with Mahler as someone he knew named Crystal. Why she would have accompanied him, Conoscenti had no idea. Her presence may have been only in his angry imagination.
The episode sparked an ongoing conflict between the two men. Michael Conoscenti repeatedly demanded that David Mahler either have the gate repaired, or cough up the money to have it done. Mahler finally agreed to send someone over to fix it. A few days later, a heavyset Hispanic man calling himself “Edmund” showed up. He poked around at the damaged gate and ineffectively attempted to bend a few metal bars back in place. Within the next two weeks, Edmund made several more appearances, sometimes accompanied by another overweight fellow in greasy overalls. They hammered, banged, and scraped at the gate, but made little visible impact. Conoscenti shook his head in disgust, and finally evicted the “repairmen.” The damage stayed.
Frustrated and angry, Michael called David again to demand a proper repair job. Mahler said he would send a handyman over named Donnie.
Donald “Donnie” Van Develde and his wife, Joni, had been renting the lower studio apartment in the Cole Crest home for about a year. In recent months, the self-proclaimed “rock star” had been enduring some lean times and even had difficulty paying his monthly rent or even buying groceries. David Mahler doled out odd jobs to him, with promises of compensation, but according to Donnie, David failed to pay up.
No one could dispute the idea that Donnie looked the part of a rock star. His lean five-ten frame, blue eyes, unkempt, shoulder-length dark hair, with greasy strings over his eyes, and numerous tattoos all enhanced the image, especially when he didn’t shave for a few days. Anyone who judged him as a pretentious dreamer, though, would be badly mistaken. Van Develde had been an onstage performer for the better part of two decades.
In 1984, Van Develde organized a rock band in Illinois and called it Enough Z’Nuff, which evolved to Enuff Z’Nuff. Achieving moderate success over the next few years, with Donnie writing, producing, and singing, the group’s best known tracks were “Fly High Michelle” and “New Thing.” In his own words on a myspace.com page, Van Develde later wrote, “I’ll start by saying my name is Donnie... .You most likely would remember me as the red-haired, lipstick [wearing], big mouthed, drugged up pretty boy that sings like the Beatles ... on MTV videos back in 1989-1990.” He liked comparing his talents not only to the Fab Four, but also to Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, and Elvis Costello.
He had met Joni on the road while performing. “We were in Ohio, opening for a band called Poison, and I met her at one of the concerts. We had some moderate success, but also a lot of very tough breaks. We had a couple of MTV hits for a while there, and I was signed with some top promoters.” He added, “We got in the middle of some political things, an internal thing with one of the labels, and were just in the wrong place, at the wrong time. We were being built up to be this next super band, but it all fell apart.”
By 2002, Donnie decided to try a solo career. It fared adequately for a while, and like so many musicians preceding him, he succumbed to the irresistible draw of the Hollywood Hills and illegal stimulants. His career began a precipitous slide. Asked if David Mahler ever provided him with drugs, he replied, “I did one line of meth with him. He really doesn’t share his drugs.” He added, “I got arrested once for crystal meth.” By 2007, he had gone through a rehab program. On medications he found himself struggling and doing menial labor in order to pay the rent.
Kristin’s occasional visits to Cole Crest resulted in her meeting Donnie. One time, according to him, Kristin Baldwin drove her own car, but she came only as far as the Canyon Country Store on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. From there she called David Mahler to come down, meet her, and lead the way back up to his house. “Her car, I guess, barely made it to the top, so Mahler called me and asked if I would take a look at it. He was at the point of asking me to do every little thing in the way of odd jobs. So I cleaned her spark plugs and did a few adjustments. She was supposed to pay me twenty dollars for the repairs, but never did.”
Van Develde had grown accustomed to seeing women come and go, often staying overnight in Mahler’s upper floors of Cole Crest. “I have never socialized or hung out with David or anything like that. But there would always be this green taxi minivan sitting outside all night, sometimes for two or three days. And if any of us who lived there saw David, he would be all loopy. You’d see a black girl and this big, overweight black guy, and they would finally leave in that taxi. Sometimes that guy would sleep in the van out in front of the house.”
The few times Donnie was allowed inside David’s quarters, primarily the office, he observed drug usage. “He had this top drawer of a chest he kept opening up and pulling out some kind of pipe and smoking it, and putting it back in the drawer.” Donnie also observed business transactions. “What he does mainly for his income is ... he plays the stocks. He sits at his computer and watches it like a hawk, like he has to react in seconds. He showed me once that he had made a million bucks in one night.”
To Van Develde, Mahler’s “clients” seemed strange. “I think he’s doing some shady deals ... maybe for drugs or something like that.” The drugs Mahler acquired, though, said Donnie, probably came from elsewhere. “He usually goes somewhere to get them.” It would be speculated that the desert community around Daggett could have been Mahler’s source.
Trips to Las Vegas, several with Stacy Tipton, familiarized Mahler with the long drive intersecting the Mojave Desert. He knew of the “Y” intersection at Barstow, where Interstate 40 splits off from I-15. He might very well have also known that some of the desert communities have a reputation for covert methamphetamine labs, and a thriving market for the illicit product. It certainly wouldn’t be unreasonable to suggest that Mahler, through his contacts with drug users, might have learned some specific addresses where he could buy meth. With David Mahler’s need for drugs, not only for himself, but to warm the hearts of his numerous female guests, he could conceivably have made other trips out to areas surrounding the tiny burgh of Daggett. If so, he certainly would have also recognized the area’s potential for disposing of anything an individual would wish never to be found.
Even though David had promised to send a handyman named Donnie to repair Michael Conoscenti’s gate, it never happened. It would be Conoscenti’s problem to have it fixed.
Most broken love affairs wind up with the man and woman curtailing future contacts with each other. David Mahler, choosing to take a different course, seemed to enjoy continued visits and correspondence with his women. In the middle of May, Kitty’s telephone answering service relayed a message to her from Mahler. He asked Kitty and her current boyfriend to join him for a trip to Hawaii, and indicated that Kristin was accompanying him. Kitty laughed it off.
On Wednesday, May 23, Mahler invited Kristin to accompany him to a business meeting in Newport Beach. She still had friends in the bayside community from the time she had lived there after high school. Delighted at the opportunity to perhaps visit old pals, and to eat at any one of the great restaurants she remembered, Kristin accepted David’s offer.
In the late evening of that Wednes
day, Mahler and Kristin drove fifty miles to Newport Beach in his newer Jaguar convertible. After a business stop for several hours at a Marriott Hotel, they drove to an upscale shopping mall called Fashion Island and pulled into the entry port of the luxurious Island Hotel.
If Kristin had been concerned that he planned to take her to some “quickie” cheap motel, her doubts instantly vanished. The twenty-story Island Hotel offered refined elegance. An expansive check-in area featured dozens of light earth-toned couches and chairs enhanced with inviting pillows. A long walk through the lobby led to a man-made lagoon—a cross-shaped swimming pool offering a fireplace for evening ambience and plenty of loungers. Most of the upper-story rooms, including a lavish luxury suite, provided picturesque views over the city and the ocean beyond, all the way to Santa Catalina Island.
Later discussing the incident, David skirted the issue of whether or not he had told Kristin he planned to stay a couple of nights. A security camera in the lobby captured David and Kristin, along with a man Mahler called his client, at the check-in desk. They could be seen taking an elevator to their room after midnight.
In his version of events, Mahler recalled arguing with Kristin, blaming her for instigating it. He said she refused to leave the room at checkout time; so he departed alone. Hotel records show that Mahler checked out on Friday. A manager revealed that the occupant and his guest had been asked to leave because of the disturbance they created.
In his explanation, Mahler didn’t mention his previous pattern of exploding in anger and abandoning his longtime girlfriend, Stacy Tipton, several times in New York and in Hawaii. Instead, he painted himself in much gentler terms. “I didn’t mean to be a—please don’t get me wrong. I’m a gentleman.”
Other people expressed conflicting understandings of what had happened. Their consensus suggested that Kristin had been abandoned at the hotel after an argument with Mahler. To make matters worse, she had been left without any money or transportation back to Calabasas. She called, or tried to call, a few friends in the Newport area and in the San Fernando Valley without success. Peter Means later stated, “I had a phone message from her. She called from Newport Beach, where she was with Mahler. When I returned the call, she was no longer in the room.” Means tried to connect with Kristin on her cell phone, but he couldn’t reach her.
A male friend of Kitty’s, who also knew Kristin, told Kitty that he had received a call from Kristin, sobbing that she had been abandoned in Newport Beach by David. A few days later, Kitty called David and asked him how the trip to Newport with Kristin had turned out. He refused to give any details, but he acknowledged that “there had been trouble.”
Tara Rush, with whom Kristin had lived two years earlier, recalled a chilling message on her cell phone. “It was so odd. I just saw her about ten days before that. She called from Newport Beach and said she went there with some lawyer guy she had been dating. They had a fight and he left her there. Her voice was scary, like she was screaming for her life.” When Tara tried to call back, she was unable to make contact with her friend.
Eventually Kristin made her way back to Calabasas, but how she did it has remained obscured in a cloud of mystery. If Mahler knows, he hasn’t divulged it. It has been suggested that she talked a cabdriver into taking her the sixty miles, on the promise that she would pay, or that someone in Calabasas would come up with the money. Peter Means doubted that.
“She never carried enough money to pay for such an exorbitant taxi fare, and she didn’t have a credit card.” Her stepfather felt it would have been difficult for her to pay the fare on her own.
A hotel employee observed her with an unidentified man in the lobby after she left the room. A security officer said he saw her leave in a taxi.
If one of Kristin’s friends, either in Newport Beach or the San Fernando Valley, provided either a ride or the cash to pay for commercial transportation, they haven’t yet come forward. The facts may never be known.
Enraged and livid over the desertion by Mahler leaving her stranded, Kristin telephoned him the next day.
In David’s sanitized version, he explained, “She called me on Saturday asking if she could have some piece to [her] car.” He explained that she had removed something from her car in Calabasas so no one could use the vehicle, and had left the component in Mahler’s garage. “I said, ‘Fine, come on up.’” He didn’t bother to clarify how or when Kristin had left the “piece of her car” inside his garage.
Tara Rush later described a different scenario. She said, “I saw her after she got back. It was on Saturday. She took a cab over to my place in Canoga Park.” Rush said that Kristin called the guy who had left her in Newport. They had apparently made up, because he drove over and picked her up in front of a liquor store on DeSoto and Nordhoff.
Another woman had planned to spend that weekend at Cole Crest. Stacy Tipton recalled, “I had just got this neat car, a Jeep Cherokee. But my dad didn’t want me to drive it down there until some work it needed was done. When they completed it on Saturday and I was ready to go, I called David three times and he didn’t return any of them. I was supposed to be there. I could go on and on about that, but I don’t want to.” She wondered if her presence might have changed everything.
Kristin, David claimed, had arrived at Cole Crest late Saturday at the same time as a man named Edmund, who drove a green flatbed pickup truck. “He’s a Mexican fellow, about five-eight, or maybe five-ten, overweight, about two hundred twenty pounds.” David acknowledged that he had seen Edmund before, but with Michael Conoscenti, never with Kristin. This man, said Mahler, was a drug dealer. “But he fancied himself a little more than that. He likes to think he is a ladies’ man. He would ask me, ‘Oh, you need girls tonight?’”
This time, though, said Mahler, there was no offer of women. Instead, Kristin “started indicating that she wanted drugs.”
Continuing with his fanciful recollection of that Saturday evening in his home, Mahler said, “There was a little bit of an altercation, which made me uncomfortable—slapping, that kind of thing.” He stated that Edmund had started slapping Kristin. It had taken place in his bedroom.
Shocked—perhaps like Claude Rains in the classic film Casablanca was “shocked” to see gambling in Humphrey Bogart’s nightclub—Mahler said he had telephoned a couple of his friends to ask advice: Karl Norvik and Donnie Van Develde. “This is a problem. What do you think I should do? You know, I got a guy slapping a girl here. Do I get involved?”
The situation, in Mahler’s tale, became too much for him. He decided to leave the premises. But first, he gave Edmund a warning to be out of there before he returned. He also ordered Kristi to take whatever property she had there and leave. Mahler made one other call before exiting the house. When Atticus King answered, Mahler yelled into the phone, “I have an emergency. Are you my friend? Go to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and meet me there!”
King replied, “I ain’t goin’ to the Beverly Wilshire, man. That’s too far. How ’bout the Marriott by the airport?”
Mahler uncharacteristically agreed without argument. Recalling it, he said, “I left and checked in at the Marriott Hotel at the Los Angeles International Airport, early Sunday morning.”
A few of David Mahler’s assertions would prove to be true. He did check in at the LAX Marriott not long after dawn on that Sunday. Among the calls he made was one to Atticus King. And Mahler’s story about telephoning Donnie and Karl, both of whom were in their apartments below Mahler’s, also proved factual. But the subject of their conversations turned out to be far more loathsome than the duplicitous yarn about Edmund slapping Kristin.
CHAPTER 10
“I NEED TO DISPOSE OF A DEAD BODY”
En route to the Marriott, David Mahler left his Cole Crest residence at six twenty-one Sunday morning. He drove down, zigzagging Sunset Plaza Drive, narrowly missing rows of trash cans placed near driveways. At a nearly indiscernible intersection, he passed within a few paces of the home owned by singer Johnny Mat
his. Near the bottom of the hills, he drove by a high hedge that hid the former estate of screen star Anne Baxter. Reaching the first traffic signal, at Sunset Boulevard, Mahler turned west. The quickest route for his destination would have been to make his way through Beverly Hills, enter the I-405 Freeway, and head south. About twelve miles later, he exited on Century Boulevard, where it empties into LAX, and then drove a few blocks west to the Marriott Hotel.
After letting a valet park his 2007 indigo blue Jaguar at seven o’clock that morning, he made his rendezvous with his taxi driver buddy, Atticus King. At the registration desk, Mahler checked in with a special request not to be listed under his true name. The hotel, respecting their guests’ privacy, put into effect their “code blue” protocol to keep his identity confidential. Both men went up to a room on the fourth floor.
King would later express the opinion that Mahler seemed terribly upset and agitated. Perhaps to quiet his frayed nerves, Mahler contacted room service and had a $120 bottle of Rémy Martin fine champagne cognac delivered, along with food, costing in excess of $200, to which he added a generous tip.
A little later, a young woman with long, dark hair joined the two men. Her method of transportation to the Marriott would be disputed. An employee of the hotel thought Atticus King had left and returned with her in tow. A police report stated, Atticus King brought the girl to him. King denied it, while admitting that he often “picked up and delivered” girls at Mahler’s request. In this case, though, he insisted that she arrived on her own. The woman told Mahler her price was $2,000 for the full night.
With that, the party began. Booze flowed freely, several lines of cocaine went up noses, and a meth pipe also had prodigious use.
During the course of that Sunday, May 27, all day and well into the night, hotel security staff personnel visited Mahler’s room more than once. They observed the occupants—Mahler, a woman, and a rotund African-American man—appeared to be engaged in a “brawl.” The security people twice requested that the trio please reduce the noise level. But it continued. At one point, when Mahler woke up after a sex-induced nap, and the woman asked for her $2,000, Mahler exploded. He began trashing the room and attacking her. King intervened and calmed the situation down by pulling them apart. He promised the hooker that Mahler would pay her later.
