by Don Lasseter
Donnie’s voice sounded on the verge of panic to Tom Small. To prevent him from hyperventilating, the detective said, “Slow down, slow down. You are doing a good job, and I know it’s traumatic. But take a deep breath and try to remember as many details as you can.”
“Okay,” Donnie gasped.
“Do you have any idea why he was threatening you?”
“Yeah, because—as if to imply some kind of jealous thing between me and her. You know, like telling her he thought she was going to be with me, or something like that.”
“What kind of a gun was it?”
“It looked like a—I don’t know. I’m not too familiar with guns.”
“Do you know the difference between a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver?”
“It’s a revolver. It’s the kind that’s got a little ...”
“It has a cylinder?”
“Yeah, it’s got that little thing that spins. It was, like, blackish, dark, wooden handle. He set it down on the bed for a moment and I went to pick it up because I was going to, you know—because he was out of his mind, waving it and pointing at me, pointing it at her.”
“Did you see where he got the gun from, or did he have it in his hand when you came up there the second time?”
“I don’t remember exactly—he might have walked into the closet and grabbed it. I don’t think he had it in his hand immediately when I walked in the room.”
“Did you know he had guns in the house?”
Donnie’s forehead wrinkled and the tattoos on his arms seemed to move like animated cartoons. “One time he showed me a gun before he went to Las Vegas. It freaked me out. I said, ‘This is bad news. This guy should not have a gun,’ and I told my wife he had that gun, and she was like, ‘Oh, my God!’”
“Why do you think he showed it to you?”
“Because he’s a big shot—just to tell me or show me how scary he is, and just to intimidate me.”
“That was weeks earlier?”
“Yeah, yeah, when he was going through this whole Cheryl thing and he was seeing the people and hearing the voices ’cause he wasn’t sleeping. He was doing drugs, and he got this gun to protect himself, or whatever. He was even talking about sending a bounty hunter to take care of Cheryl—wreaking havoc on her life and scaring her to death.”
Once again trying to keep Donnie on a logical path and sequence of events, Detective Small said, “Okay, let’s get back to Sunday. At some point, he puts the gun on the bed, and you made an attempt to pick it up. What were you going to do with it?”
Donnie’s reply brought to mind a person running in all directions at once. “If he turned his back or if he lost attention with it—’cause he would—he had set it down and he lunged at her and he, like, almost attacked her, and he got up in her face and he’s screaming at her. And I was like, like this is—I don’t know what to do. This guy’s a scary guy, and I see the gun sitting, and I go to pick up the gun. I was going to do whatever—to hide it. You know, put it—and hopefully, you know, he don’t remember where he set it, but as soon as I go to grab it, he instantly grabbed my hand and he stopped me from picking it up.”
“And then what did he do?”
“He started clicking it at her. And clicking it at me, pulling the trigger, and the hammer is slamming down—click, click. He kept doing that, over and over. There was no bullet in it, supposedly.”
Mahler soon remedied that omission, said Donnie. Frowning and shaking his head in disbelief, the musician continued talking. “He went to this little closet and pulled out a single bullet. He put it in the gun and did one of those, like, Russian roulette things where he spun it and then let it click. And then he pointed it at Kristi, and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. He turned and pointed it at me, and clicked it again.”
Donnie’s eyes blazed with indignation. In his furious view, Mahler had crossed a forbidden barrier. “I said, ‘That’s it, I’m out of here, David.’ I said, you know, good-bye.”
Taking in every important detail of Donnie’s harrowing account, Small asked, “He aimed it at your head?”
“He pointed it right at my face.”
In the minds of both detectives, the next comment from Donnie established a crucial turning point in the case.
He said, “I rushed out of there. As I was shutting the door, I heard the gun go off.”
“Did you go back in the room?”
“No. I just assumed that he was shooting in the air or whatever to intimidate her or scare her. At first, I thought I heard voices in there, like they were still arguing. But I just hightailed. He wouldn’t even buzz me out of that front gate, so I turned and went into the garage. I got a rake and put the rake against the buzzer so it would open the gate long enough for me to grab it and get out. I ran down the steps to my apartment.”
Inside his own room, Donnie tried to ignore the ring tone of his cell phone. “He tried to call four times in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. And he tried texting me too, but I don’t know how to do text messages. I didn’t answer any of them because I’d had enough of him. I didn’t want to go back up there. I just wanted to lock my door and hide.”
Despite his resolve to ignore the phone, Donnie said, he finally answered David’s call. “I asked him what was going on, and he said he wasn’t in the house anymore, that he had gone somewhere else. I said, ‘Where are you?’ And he started talking about how ‘she attacked me with a knife. She came at me with a knife, and it was self-defense.’ I go, ‘What do you mean, self-defense?’”
Detective Small double-checked to make certain the video recorder was capturing every word of Donnie’s remarkable tale, and signaled him to continue. Mahler repeated the claim, said Donnie, about Kristin trying to stab him. “I really thought he was still upstairs just messing with me, you know? So he says, ‘Go up and check.’ I said, ‘Oh sure. Yeah, right.’ He told me he was over at someone’s house and had just paid two hundred thousand dollars for protection. I told him, ‘I don’t even understand what the hell you are talking about.’ And I hung up.”
“What time was this taking place?”
“About nine thirty.”
“So all of this took place in about a forty-five-minute time span?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, did you find out if he was upstairs or had really gone somewhere?”
“At first, I wasn’t sure. I called him again about ten minutes later and asked him if he had actually left. He said he had. I asked him, ‘Are you serious? You shot her and then you just ran away?’ He started twisting things around, like accusing me of arguing with her, trying to imply, like you know, pinning it on me.”
Now, Donnie said, he was really confused. “So what I did is go upstairs and—I was freaking out. I didn’t know what—I had to see what was going on. I got up there and rang the bell, wondering again if he was actually at his own place. But nobody answers. So I went around—you can go around the side where the garbage cans are and it’s his garage window. I can go over the railing and the window was open, and I can step from the railing up through that window. When I got into the garage, I could see one of his Jaguars was gone, and I started thinking he told me the truth.”
Inside the house, said Donnie, he made his way to the bedroom door. “I knocked and waited, but nobody answered. After I did it again, and heard nothing, I opened the door to his room. I didn’t see anybody. The lights were off. Then I looked down and seen the bedspread laying on the floor. At first, I didn’t think much about it, but I took a closer look. And, wow, it looked like something was under there.
“I didn’t actually go in the room, but leaned over a little farther, and at the very top, I could see her hand. There was her hand sticking out. And—oh, my God, I got sick to my stomach. I just—I just—stood there about thirty seconds, and the hand wasn’t moving, never moved. The bedspread was over the rest of her body. I knew right then that he really did kill her.”
Vicki Bynum had listened carefully to the par
t about David Mahler suggesting that Kristin had attacked him with a knife. She asked Donnie, “Did you see any knife in the room?”
“No.”
“Did you see a knife anywhere near her hand?”
“No, there was no knife.”
“When you were talking to her earlier, was there any knife in sight, anywhere in the room?”
“No, no. There was no knife. That was a lie. I just didn’t—didn’t believe him when he said the girl attacked him with a knife and it was self-defense.”
Tom Small inquired, “Did you pull the bedspread back and look at her?”
A horrified expression creased Donnie’s face. “No, absolutely not. I ... no way I could do that. I didn’t. I got sick to my stomach. I was in shock.”
Donnie’s wife returned home late Sunday night, he said, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her what had happened. “I’ve been in shock for the last few days. My wife doesn’t even know what’s wrong with me. She knows something is up, but I haven’t told her, just for her own safety. I don’t know what to do.”
“So what did you do when you left that bedroom?”
“I went back to my own apartment to have a cigarette and I heard Karl go out on his balcony above me. I go out on my balcony and I can see him up there. I go, ‘Karl, Karl,’ and he comes and looks over his railing down at me. I go, ‘Listen, man, something terrible has happened. David has just shot and killed a girl.’ I’m saying it quietly. He’s like, ‘What?’ I go, ‘He shot and killed a girl in his room.’ He goes, ‘All right, come on up.’”
Donnie spoke of joining Karl in his room. They shared some vodka to ease their ragged nerves while Donnie told Norvik the details of what he had seen and suggested they call the police. “He goes, ‘I’ve known this guy a long time and he’s scary. Considering the way he does things, going to the police is not the thing to do.’ So I asked him, ‘Then what are we going to do? There’s a dead body, you know.’ He started trying to make out some story to keep us out of it. I go back downstairs ’cause he was drinking and maybe not thinking straight. But pretty soon, he starts kicking on the floor above me, and asked me to come back up there.”
Back in his neighbor’s room, said Donnie, Norvik admitted already knowing about the killing. “Karl said, ‘He shot her in the face.’ I go, ‘What? You knew?’ He said, “Yeah, I already knew, before you did.’” According to Donnie, David Mahler had telephoned Norvik immediately after the shooting and admitted doing it. Norvik had gone up to Donnie’s bedroom door and actually looked at the corpse.
Tom Small and Vicki Bynum wanted clarification, and Donnie Van Develde did his best. From his statements, it appeared that Karl Norvik had been summoned upstairs within a couple of minutes after Donnie heard the gunshot, and had seen Kristin’s body before it was covered up. The shroud, placed after Norvik returned to his room, had left only a hand exposed, the one Donnie had seen.
Donnie repeated Norvik’s words: “I saw the corpse shot right through the face. Shot in cold blood. Dead.”
Donnie described his own reaction to that admission. “I just threw up. I threw my guts up.”
Asked by the detectives what he did next, Donnie said he ran back to his apartment and tried to telephone his wife to prevent her from coming home and getting involved in the horror, and to protect her. “I’m scared for my life. I’m scared for my wife’s life.”
CHAPTER 13
BLOOD—BUT NO BODY
While Detectives Bynum and Small conducted the interviews, other officers and technicians, under the direction of Supervisor Wendi Berndt, intensified the investigation.
The sun still hadn’t peeked over the eastern summit of the Hollywood Hills on June 1 when Berndt contacted the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office to ask if any unidentified bodies—Jane Does—had been discovered in the last few days. A lieutenant checked the log and replied that no extant bodies bore the slightest resemblance to the information Berndt had given.
She made more calls to the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) Missing Persons Units, but no reports turned up in correlation to this incident.
At the house on Cole Crest Drive, forensic experts meticulously examined every room in search of evidence related to the alleged shooting of a woman. Wendi Berndt later recalled, “We went through the entire house in search of a hidden body. I wondered if it might be buried down in the canyon somewhere. So we brought in a cadaver dog, but it didn’t help. That was the important thing, to find out whether or not the victim was still there.”
Bill Wilson, one of the officers among the team that had first arrived and had been invited inside by Jeremy Moudy, had spotted what appeared to be bloodstains leading to and inside the garage.
Other investigators had noted an assortment of cleaning fluids, along with sponges and scrubbing pads, in the master bedroom, on the fireplace mantel, and on the floor. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that someone had been trying desperately to clean the place, probably in an effort to eradicate blood.
LAPD criminalist Wubayehu Tsega answered Berndt’s summons to help with the investigation. Tsega’s colleagues had trouble pronouncing the Ethiopian native’s name, but he took it with good humor. His eight years of experience on the job had earned respect from peers and the brass as well. Along with another criminalist, Raphael Garcia, he arrived at Cole Crest shortly after noon and began collecting samples of “biological fluids.” According to Tsega, this could include saliva, semen, perspiration, urine, or any other fluid from the human body—but in this case, it meant primarily blood.
Beginning in the garage, Tsega inspected the areas around two Jaguar convertibles. One of them, a new 2007 XK model, indigo blue, was parked on the far side. Detective Cameron had already checked the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records for both cars. The XK had been registered in the name of David Mahler. The other, a black 1999 XK8, sat close to the door leading into the house. It surprised the detective to learn that it was registered to David Gold, not Mahler. This would later be cleared up by Mahler’s sister, who explained that he sometimes conducted business under the “David Gold” alias. But she didn’t say why.
Tsega had been advised of blood spots on the garage floor and on the 1999 Jaguar. He traced the sanguine trail all the way from the master bedroom, up two short landings of stairs, and into the garage. The droplets ended within a few feet of the side entry door.
Checking reports of blood on the Jaguar’s rear bumper and trunk lid, Tsega meticulously used cotton swabs, similar to Q-tips, to moisten the stains and lift samples. He opened the trunk lid and found more stains that appeared to be blood. In addition to collecting those samples, he made tape lifts of the trunk carpeting and the car’s interior to collect any possible hair or other clues of a body having been transported.
To the investigators, it appeared that a body had been carried and dragged from the bedroom, up the short staircases, and into the garage. Because the trail stopped just inside the side entry door, it looked like the Jaguar may have been backed into the garage and the body loaded into the trunk. It may have been wrapped in the bedspread shroud to prevent leaving hair or secretions in the trunk.
Carefully packaging and marking the collected specimens, Tsega placed the evidence in an ice chest for transportation to the LAPD Scientific Investigation Division (SID).
In Mahler’s bedroom, the bright red wall-to-wall carpeting at first just appeared to be dirty, as if it hadn’t been vacuumed in a long time. But closer inspection by Tsega and Garcia revealed that an amazing volume of blood had soaked the carpet. They cut sections of it, peeled them back, and revealed signs of soaking all the way through to the padding underneath. If someone had suffered a gunshot wound in that room, as two witnesses had reported, the victim must have completely bled out. The logical inference would lead the investigators to believe the body must have been on that floor for many hours.
Wendi Berndt remained at the house to supervise and assure nothing would
be overlooked. Following Berndt’s instructions, one member of the team began photographing the scene and each item of potential evidence. He took a shot of Wubayehu Tsega inspecting the 1999 Jaguar’s rear bumper and the blood spot on it. In the bedroom, the photographer captured images of the unmade bed, cluttered floor, various bottles of cleaning liquids near the fireplace, discolorations on the red carpet, and the sliced-up sections that revealed massive bloodstains.
Later commenting on the search inside Cole Crest, Berndt said, “Once I walked through, I had no doubt this was a crime scene. Based on the blood and the initial witness statements, I was convinced we had a murder. Karl Norvik had said he saw a body and knew that David Mahler shot her. Also, Norvik and Donnie Develde had spoken of Mahler wanting help to get rid of a body. The blood evidence backed it all up. In my mind, a woman had been murdered. I just didn’t know where the body was. I believed we had to handle it as a worst-case scenario.”
Another team of search dogs showed up, requested by Berndt. A cadaver dog from the coroner’s office had found nothing. This pair, from the downtown L.A. Metro Division, handled by Officers Miller and Almarez, sniffed through the entire house, looking for guns. They had no better luck than the earlier four-legged detective.
Shortly after lunch, Wendi Berndt stepped outside, in front of the garage door, and glanced over at the neighboring house on the west side. She spotted something that could have important repercussions. Berndt later said, “Up in that area, with a lot of the higher-end houses of the Hollywood Hills, many homes have security video cameras mounted outside. They enable the resident to see what’s going on without going out to personally check. That’s one of the things we always look for. And this camera was right under the overhanging eave, in plain sight.”
Along with one of the detectives, Berndt pushed the neighbor’s doorbell button. The occupant spoke to them over a speaker system. “The guy wouldn’t let anybody in. We explained to him that we were investigating a crime, and needed to know if his security video camera had recorded any activity at the Mahler house.” The neighbor acknowledged that his system operated 24-7, and that he would make the tapes available to the police. But he insisted that he would have his own technician upload them from a central computer.
