Unholy Sacrifice

by Robert Scott

  Bob White had been one of Taylor’s wealthier clients at Dean Witter and lived in an ideal location for a kidnapping. His house was near an empty lot and there were no close neighbors. When all was ready, Justin and Taylor drove over to Walnut Creek in the Saturn, while Dawn followed behind in Justin’s pickup.

  Dressed in business suits and carrying briefcases, Taylor and Justin walked from Taylor’s black Saturn up to White’s door as Dawn kept watch from Justin’s pickup. Taylor intended to use the story, when greeting White, that he had recently made a lot of money for a neighbor of White’s. Taylor would say he was in the area and wanted to celebrate with White. Thus, the bottles of wine and cigars. Once he and Justin were inside the door, any killing would depend upon whether other people were in the house. They would keep Bob White alive long enough to sign over some checks and put them in Selina Bishop’s name. Then he would be killed.

  In the pickup truck, Dawn had handcuffs and a bucket. The bucket was in case the Helzers had to urinate. If so, they would use the bucket. They didn’t want to leave any telltale DNA evidence in Bob White’s house.

  In the end, however, all the precautions were for naught. Bob White wasn’t home, and for a very good reason. Unbeknownst to Taylor, Bob White, who was the pilot of a private jet, was thousands of miles away in San Antonio, Texas.

  Disappointed, Justin and Taylor went back to the pickup and discussed what to do next with Dawn. They discussed calling things off for the rest of the day, but Taylor was for pressing on. The next targets, number two on his list of former clients, were Ivan and Annette Stineman, and unfortunately for them, they were home that day.

  Ivan and Annette Stineman were born in the Midwest and moved to California with their parents in the 1930s. They met each other in southern California during World War II and fell in love. Ivan was serving in the coast guard. They were married in 1945 and started a family in Pico Rivera in southern California. Daughter Nancy came first, followed by Judy.

  Nancy recalled that her father was a quiet man. “He was a thinker. Even though he was caring, he wasn’t the huggy type. But I always knew he loved me. He liked to putter around the house and the yard in his spare time. He was also a good carpenter and an all-around handyman.”

  Of her mother, Nancy said, “Mom was the stronger one. They made a good team.”

  Judy recalled, “Our parents were always interested in our lives. They made sure we did our homework. They watched over us and cared how we did.”

  All of the family loved animals when the girls were growing up. They had cats, dogs and birds. They even had chipmunks and a monkey. To top it off, they all bought horses so they could go horseback riding together in the area.

  Nancy and Judy especially loved camping. They would take off in the family station wagon, and she and her sister would sleep in the back. Outdoor locales, such as Yosemite and Big Bear, became their favorite destinations. As time went on, Ivan and Annette bought a small motor home to replace the station wagon.

  Judy had fond memories of growing up in Pico Rivera. “We lived in a house that my parents built,” she said. “Both of them made the house over. Even Nancy and I helped. We were so poor in the beginning, Mom and Dad had to take out old nails from boards, straighten them out, and use them in the new construction. It took a long time to build that house and it was never truly finished.

  “It was always family time at the dinner table. We would sit around and talk about the day’s events. Especially when we went out to our cabin. Daddy liked to fish a lot.”

  Judy thought it was cute when her father began to wear a toupee when he began to bald. She said that he was laid-back and her mom was high-strung. “Mom ruled the roost. They were each half of a whole. Very in tune with each other. They loved each other very much.”

  Ivan Stineman was a supervisor in the credit card division of Chevron. There was a lot of pressure that went along with the job, and Judy said he often came home and drank Maalox for an upset stomach.

  Ivan was transferred in time to the Chevron division in northern California. He and Annette and Nancy moved to the Concord area, while Judy stayed behind in southern California. She had a boyfriend there, who would later become her husband.

  After moving to Concord, Ivan became a real estate agent for a while when he retired from Chevron, while Annette continued working there. They amassed a nice little nest egg by working hard. Once Annette retired, they went camping every chance they could get and also bought time-shares in such places as Lake Tahoe and Hawaii. They also invested their money with Morgan Stanley/Dean Witter, and Taylor Helzer became their financial adviser.

  Nancy recalled, “On the rafting trip, Taylor took care of daddy. He made sure he was strapped in properly. It was a long trip on the river—about six hours, and mom was worried about the amount of time. But daddy did very well. He and Taylor seemed to get along very well.”

  On July 30, 2000, Ivan and Annette Stineman spent the afternoon at Coco’s Restaurant in Concord with their friends Harry and Irma Dillon. They talked and laughed throughout the afternoon. Harry had been a fellow member of the Elks Lodge with Ivan for four years, and they were all good friends. In fact, Irma Dillon and Annette Stineman had been friends since they were nineteen years old and both worked for Chevron in southern California.

  As they were talking, Ivan brought up the subject of an installation of HBO he had performed at his house recently. He mentioned that the young man who had done the job had taken a very long time to install the wiring. Only half-jokingly, Harry Dillon asked Ivan, “You sure he wasn’t casing the house?”

  There are some indications that Justin Helzer was the young man that Ivan was talking about, and Justin was not doing this job as part of his AT&T work schedule.

  The Stinemans and Dillons stayed at Coco’s until 3:00 P.M., and then the Stinemans went home. It was just another warm lazy Sunday afternoon in late July as far as they were concerned. Afternoon turned into evening and around 8:00 P.M. the front doorbell rang at the Stineman residence.

  Just before 8:00 P.M., on July 30, Justin and Taylor drove up in the Saturn to the Frayne Lane area in Concord. Dawn parked Justin’s pickup at the corner of Frayne and San Miguel and waited. Justin and Taylor got out of the Saturn around the corner and started walking toward the Stineman home.

  By an incredible coincidence, Alexandra Price, who had seen Dawn Godman at Debra McClanahan’s that morning, was driving home to her place on Ryan Road. Her route took her by the corner of San Miguel and Frayne Lane. She did not see Dawn waiting in Justin’s pickup there, but she noticed two strange young men walking down the sidewalk on Frayne. Price recalled later, “I saw two men walking on the left side of the street. They had dark suits on. They really looked out of place on a hot day. I thought maybe they were Mormon missionaries, though they didn’t have name tags on. Then I thought maybe I was wrong about them being Mormons. One of them was smoking a cigarette. And they had their hair in ponytails. One had dark hair and the other light-colored hair. They were about ten feet apart and not talking to each other. I kind of kept my eye on them and watched them in the rearview mirror. They were so out of place. When I got home, I talked to a friend. I said, ‘I think I just saw some hit men walking down the street.’”

  Price was not the only observer of the two strange young men on Frayne Lane. David Carter lived with his wife and children across the street from the Stineman residence. David was sitting in a rocking chair near the front plate-glass window when he saw two young men in dark suits carrying briefcases. One man had dark hair and the other one lighter hair. Both of them had their hair pulled back in ponytails.

  When the pair walked in front of the Stineman house, one of the young men stopped and seemed hesitant to go on. He looked at his feet and was apprehensive about something. David said of the men later, “My general impression was that they were trying to look more clean-cut than they really were.”

  As David watched, the light-haired man stepped in front of the dark-haired
one and put his hand on the dark-haired man’s shoulder. Then he made a gesture with his head toward the Stineman door as if to say, “Come on, let’s go.”

  Strangely enough, it was Justin Helzer signaling to Taylor Helzer that they needed to put the plan into action.

  Afraid that the young men really were religious missionaries, David Carter did not want to talk to them. He moved away from the window so they couldn’t see him.

  What exactly occurred inside the Stineman home can only be pieced together by evidence found later. What is known for certain is that Nancy Hall picked this exact moment to call her parents. Annette Stineman normally was very upbeat and chatty with her daughter. But not this time. She was sharp and abrupt, as if she’d just been interrupted in something important. She seemed stressed and rushed to Nancy, to the point of being rude. Nancy said later, “I thought something was going on at their house. But I didn’t know what.”

  Annette abruptly said to Nancy, “We have company!” and hung up the phone.

  Meanwhile, out in the pickup, Dawn Godman was sitting in the cab and smoking one cigarette after another. After a while, she thought that some people nearby were watching her. She was right. Rise Bradfield-Minder was looking for a friend to come to her house on Frayne Lane. She noticed a vehicle that was parked at the corner of San Miguel and thought it might be her friend. Rise went out to investigate and realized it wasn’t her friend’s vehicle. It was a pickup truck parked at an odd angle that nearly blocked traffic at the corner.

  Bradfield-Minder went outside to smoke a cigarette and became aware of a silhouette of a woman inside the vehicle. The woman was smoking as well and flicking her cigarette butts out the window onto the street next to the pickup’s door. The woman seemed to be agitated or angry. She smoked a lot and seemed jittery.

  When Bradfield-Minder’s friend arrived, they stood out on the front lawn and discussed the strange woman in the pickup. They wondered what she could be doing. Was she waiting for someone, or was she a lookout for some illegal activity going on? To Bradfield-Minder’s eyes, the woman looked very agitated.

  Bradfield-Minder and her friend discussed secretly photographing the pickup or even calling the police. Before they could reach a decision, a white van pulled out from a house on Frayne Lane and drove up to the pickup. [It was Stinemans’ van stolen by Taylor and Justin. The Stinemans were being held captive in the back of the van.] Bradfield-Minder could see the silhouette of a man in the van. He had a ponytail. This person spoke to the woman in the pickup and she heard the woman say, “Did you get it?”

  Bradfield-Minder couldn’t hear the reply. As the van began to drive away, Bradfield-Minder heard the woman in the pickup say, “I’m right behind you.”

  But the strange woman in the pickup wasn’t right behind them. Instead, she got out of her pickup and walked up to Bradfield-Minder and her friend. Without any preamble, the woman said, “I watched you watching me. A friend of mine was buying some weed from some shady people. I was the backup.”

  Momentarily stunned, all Bradfield-Minder could think to say was “Why are you hanging out with shady people?”

  The strange woman answered, “It was a last resort.”

  Then she walked back to her pickup, got in and drove away.

  Bradfield-Minder more than ever thought of calling the police, but in the end she didn’t.

  The Helzer brothers probably thought that they were unobserved as they took the Stinemans into their residence on Saddlewood Court. Little did they know that next-door neighbor Kaye Shaman was watching them from her window. She saw an elderly man and elderly woman being escorted by Taylor and Justin into their house. She noticed that the man had on a white rumpled shirt and wore gold-rimmed glasses. His eyes looked huge to her behind his glasses. She also noticed that he was taking exceptionally small steps as he walked toward the house. He seemed to be shuffling his feet, as if reluctant to enter.

  The elderly woman even made eye contact with Shaman, or so she thought. Shaman couldn’t read the woman’s expression. She thought the elderly couple were the boy’s grandparents.

  When Ivan and Annette Stineman were brought into the house on Saddlewood Court, they were handcuffed and forced to sit on the couch. Everything that happened next was related later by Dawn Godman. According to her, Justin sat in a chair with a loaded gun across from the Stinemans. Then he placed the gun on the floor as if daring the Stinemans to make a move.

  According to Dawn, Justin was totally silent, but Taylor wouldn’t shut up. He had been cranked up on meth for a week. Taylor told Dawn, “Things went really well. I know what I have to do next.”

  Taylor turned toward the Stinemans and asked if they were comfortable or needed anything. They didn’t respond to being comfortable, but said they didn’t need anything. Dawn noticed that the Stinemans were calm at this point.

  Dawn and Taylor went into his bedroom and talked about how to access the Stinemans’ accounts. They agreed that they had to ask the Stinemans about their normal habits so that their daughters would not become suspicious by their absence. They decided to do this by taking Ivan and Annette into separate rooms. Taylor also came up with questions about their financial affairs and statement accounts, and Dawn wrote them down. After all the questions were written down, Taylor took Ivan into one bedroom and Dawn took Annette into a room that was used as an office. Each was then asked questions outside of the presence of the other about their finances, so that they could not give each other code words or false numbers, or make up stories together. Then Taylor and Dawn compared their answers outside the presence of the Stinemans.

  Since the answers seemed to be similar, they ascertained that the Stinemans weren’t lying to them. Taylor and Dawn discussed the logistics of what needed to be done next.

  Taylor went back to the living room, and according to Dawn, he told the Stinemans, “I’m in trouble and I need a lot of money. People are after me and I need to get out of the country.”

  He told the Stinemans that they were going to have to sign over some checks to him and he would leave them handcuffed to a mattress once he and the others were gone. Once they were safe, he told them, he would call the police, three days later, and the police would come and rescue them.

  Annette spoke up and told Taylor that with so much time going by, she was worried that she would soil herself. Dawn listened to Annette’s tone of voice and concluded that she knew that Taylor was lying. It appeared to Dawn that Annette already knew that she and Ivan would be killed, no matter what happened.

  Taylor said he was sorry if she soiled herself, but he couldn’t help that. Then he brought a mattress into the living room and told the Stinemans to lay down on it and get some rest. He would talk to them again in the morning.

  Justin stayed in the living room all night to guard the Stinemans. Taylor and Dawn went to her bedroom and began looking at the Stinemans’ stock portfolio. They spent a long time analyzing it.

  The next morning, Monday, July 31, Taylor had Dawn pretend on the phone she was Annette Stineman. Even though it was only 6:30 A.M., he had her call the Dean Witter office. George Calhoun was already there because he had to be in the office for the opening of Wall Street on Eastern Standard Time.

  Calhoun remembered the conversation very well. He said later, “I received a call from a woman who claimed to be Annette Stineman. I was already in the office and the woman said that she wanted to have her accounts with us liquidated. It was because of a medical emergency. Her voice sounded like an elderly woman.”

  All of this seemed very abnormal to Calhoun, and he asked, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Then he said, “Her tone of voice was nervous. There was an obvious level of tension. She responded to all of my questions very hastily. Supposedly there was a medical emergency on the East Coast. She was supposed to fly out there.

  “What she was asking was to liquidate long-term investments. Mutual funds. It would be hit with penalties and taxes.”

  Calhoun
looked up Annette Stineman’s net worth. Her IRA before liquidation came to $167,000.

  Calhoun brought in Greg Matthias, who was now Annette and Ivan’s principal financial agent at Dean Witter. He and Matthias agreed there was something fishy about all of this. But Matthias thought that Taylor Helzer was working for some other company now, and Annette Stineman wanted to move her account there, and was too embarrassed to just come right out and say it, hence the made-up story about a medical emergency.

  The woman caller by now was very nervous. She abruptly ended her call to Calhoun by saying, “I’ve got to catch a plane. It’s an emergency. Take care of the trades. I have to go.”

  Having to take care of a client’s wishes, and since the client on the phone knew privileged information, the trades started going through by 1:00 P.M. at Dean Witter. Once they were sold, they all went into a money market fund after three days. Personal checks could then be written against the full value of the money market funds.

  Taylor and Dawn went back to wake up Ivan and Annette. Taylor took Ivan to make a call from a phone booth to cancel some appointments and leave a message for daughter Nancy so that she wouldn’t worry.

  Dawn went out to get coffee from a nearby Starbucks for Ivan and Taylor and herself. Polite as always, Ivan thanked her for it.

  The lies to the Stinemans now took on a new form. To make Annette less worried about soiling herself, Dawn told the Stinemans she would stay with them for two days while Taylor and Justin made their escape. Once she knew that they were safely out of the country, she would take off. They would be on their own for one day before she called the police to rescue them.