As I Saw It

by Scott, Marvin; Rather, Dan;

  * * *

  A new day dawned with flags flying at half-staff. Workers had already arrived at the ravaged McDonald’s to replace the shattered windows and hose away the bloodstains. But the scars left by the gunman’s fury would leave San Ysidro’s tight-knit community traumatized. As the many funerals were being arranged, family crisis centers were opened for residents coping with the events of the day before, and special psychologists were brought in for the town’s children, who complained of sleeplessness and nightmares.

  The McDonald’s massacre, as the shooting came to be called, touched the collective consciousness of an entire nation, and brought new urgency to the debate over gun control. Yet according to authorities close to the investigation, even more restrictive gun laws could have done nothing to divert the murderous intent of James Oliver Huberty, a man they called a “walking time bomb.”

  “It’s obvious he wanted to die,” one authority noted, “and he wanted to take a lot of people with him.”

  In the wake of the tragedy, investigators set out to learn more about Huberty and what triggered his murderous rampage. People who knew him claimed that Huberty had become unhinged at an early age, after having been abandoned by his mother and suffering from the effects of polio. After working for years as a welder, he had been laid off and eventually moved to San Ysidro, where he had trouble landing a job. When he finally got one, he was fired shortly thereafter. In a rambling letter, Huberty’s widow revealed that her husband, who had long resisted any therapeutic treatment for his anger, had called the county mental health office two days before his murderous spree.

  Failing to get an appointment, Huberty proclaimed to his wife, “Society had their chance.” Etna Huberty also revealed that her despondent husband had tried to commit suicide a year earlier, but she had managed to pry the gun out of his hand.

  Among the theories concerning what had driven Huberty to the brink was one suggesting that he had inhaled toxic fumes while working as a welder. After leaving that job, he complained that the fumes made him crazy, and the autopsy performed on his body did indeed show high levels of metal cadmium in Huberty’s blood. Months after the massacre, Etna Huberty tried to use the autopsy report in a bizarre attempt to claim that McDonald’s itself was responsible for the bloodbath. In an unsuccessful $5 million legal suit, she argued that the preservatives in the company’s burgers had reacted with the chemicals in her husband’s body to set off his murderous actions.

  Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, permanently closed the fast-food restaurant that had been attacked, and converted the site into a memorial park. She also established a $1 million survivors’ fund for those who lived through Huberty’s attack, and to assist with the victims’ funerals.

  I attended the first of many funerals for the twenty one victims. In the shadow of the Mexican hillside, where many of the victims were born, mourners came by the hundreds to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church. Among them was Mrs. Kroc, who came to comfort the families. So did the widow of the man responsible for it all: Etna Huberty, dressed in black, stood somberly in the crowd. The air was heavy, the humidity oppressive, the sky gray. Emotions were high as five caskets were lined up, one of them containing the bodies of Jackie Reyes and her infant son Carlos. The caskets were blessed with holy water, and prayers were recited.

  I was in the second pew during the mass, my eyes fixed on the five white caskets in front of me. When congregants were asked to join hands in a sign of peace, I pressed my hand into that of a teary-eyed woman next to me. A chill came over my body and my eyes became watery. At that moment, I wasn’t simply a reporter covering a tragic story. I had become one of the mourners.

  8

  THE GREENWICH MURDERS

  It had all the earmarks of a mob execution: two women shot in the head at close range, no signs of forced entry, no fingerprints found. However, while the evidence uncovered potential ties to organized crime or drug trafficking, police ended up pinning the murders on the estranged husband of one of the victims.

  38-year-old James Michael Klein was the most expedient suspect in the murders of his ex-wife Joanne Kim Klein, a 31-year-old former model, and her 28-year-old live-in Colombian maid, Martha Lema. The bodies of the two women were found in the master bedroom of Kim Klein’s five-bedroom split-level house, in the affluent suburban community of Greenwich, Connecticut—a community whose residents abhorred scandal and seeing their tony town in the news.

  Though it was only the third murder case in Greenwich over the past quarter-century, the sensational double homicide of Klein and Lema was big news back in June of 1976. This was due in part to the fact that the community was already in the national cross-hairs for another headline murder case. The bludgeoning death of 16-year-old Martha Moxley just eight months earlier had garnered national attention when the murder was linked to two nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, widow of the late Senator Robert Kennedy. (One of these suspects, Michael Skakel, was later convicted of the crime.) Already under criticism for their poor handling of the Moxley investigation, Greenwich police now faced another national-level murder challenge—for which they knew they needed an open-and-shut case, and a suspect quickly in custody.

  They found their man in Jim Klein. The evidence against Klein was circumstantial—his only link to the crime scene was his acknowledgement that he had visited the house hours before the murders—but police built their entire case around Klein’s admission, to pin the murders solely on him.

  * * *

  After an almost three-month-long investigation in which my colleagues and I (at then-WNEW-TV Channel 5 in New York) collaborated with newspaper reporter Doug Williams of the Portchester Daily Item, we uncovered faulty police work on the part of the Greenwich Police Department in their case against Jim Klein. We found that some of the evidence against Klein had been outright falsified, and that there were inaccurate reports of criminal forensic tests, erroneous statements in evidence reporting, and inconsistencies in statements and reports by Greenwich’s Captain of Detectives—and later Chief—Thomas Keegan.

  It had begun with the initial discovery of the bodies of Kim Klein and Martha Lema. Police showed up at Kim Klein’s Perkins Road home after Kim failed to pick up her six-year-old son Jay from school. When nobody answered the door, police entered through a second-floor window, where they discovered the fully clothed bodies of the two women. Kim had been shot in the head and mouth, and Martha twice in the head. Blood was spattered everywhere. Untouched on the dresser were three $50 bills.

  Though four shots had been fired, police recovered only one shell casing, from a nine-millimeter weapon. It was theorized that the killer had retrieved the other casings but was unable to find the fourth, which was later found under Kim’s body. Despite the appearance that this may have been the work of a professional killer, the theory was vociferously denied by Captain Keegan, who already had his sights on Jim Klein.

  Klein told police he had gone to the house to discuss financial issues with Kim, from whom he had been divorced for a year and a half. He said they’d had coffee together, and quarreled when Kim asked for $200 beyond her usual alimony. Jim gave her $150 and left in a huff, cutting a finger as he slammed the trunk of his rented car. “Fuck you, lady” were his final words to his ex-wife. Hours later, she was dead.

  A private investigator found witnesses who put Jim back at his Manhattan East Side apartment around 4 p.m. Afterward, he had gone out partying with friends. Police had no evidence that he was in the house at the time of the murders, but an affidavit to the grand jury implied that he didn’t get back to New York from Connecticut until 4 a.m., when he was informed of Kim’s murder and questioned by detectives. Because whoever committed the murders would likely have been splattered with blood, detectives subsequently obtained a warrant to take some of Jim’s clothing to be tested. They also drew blood from him for forensic testing.

  In the hours and days that followed, a clearer and darker image emerged of the murder victims, suggesti
ng that they could have been targeted by someone other than Jim Klein. Kim was born in Calumet City, Illinois, a town with a wide-open, sleazy reputation quite different from the affluent suburban world of Greenwich. In telephone conversations I had with her mother, I learned that Kim had somewhat of a checkered past. She had been a prostitute and go-go dancer, and was married previously to a Mafia lawyer connected to Chicago mob kingpin Sam Giancana. She had friendships with several organized-crime figures, and at one point had been interviewed by an Illinois crime commission.

  Captain Keegan was curt with me when I called to query him about what I had learned from Kim’s mother.

  He had no response to the information and sounded annoyed, snapping at me, “We’re already aware of that.” He suggested I stay out of his investigation. He didn’t like that I appeared to be jumping ahead of him, and at one point, if I understood him correctly, he threatened to run me out of town. A couple of days later, I learned that after my conversation with him, Keegan personally placed a call to Kim’s mother.

  The deeper my colleagues and I probed, the more we learned about the victims and the man suspected of killing them. Kim, we were told, had boasted about her relationships with mobsters, and informed a former employer that she had written an autobiography that she claimed to be an exposé, in which she would name names. She reportedly kept the manuscript in a bedside table—but the manuscript was never found. Jim said she had once confided in him that she was blackmailing an executive she met on a train. He didn’t ask for specifics. When my colleague John Parsons asked Keegan about the blackmail account, Keegan admitted that the police had never considered it.

  Kim was also an aspiring photographer, and liked to take nature pictures. Among the personal effects the Klein family turned over to us for our investigation, however, we found a number of nude photos of an unknown woman sitting by the indoor pool, and we received an unsubstantiated report that on the day she was murdered, Kim had an appointment to photograph a man in the nude. We wanted to know why police didn’t have these photos or follow up on this report. But we never got our answer.

  While Jim Klein was no saint—he was said to be into extramarital relationships and drugs, and had quite a temper—Kim, we learned, had her own secrets to keep. She was a swinger who had relationships with men and women, and, according to her stepdaughter Debbie, “was involved with drugs, with cocaine and marijuana, and she took pills.” She threw parties in her Perkins Road home that often included drug-fests around the indoor pool. Her live-in maid, Martha Lema, was reportedly the coke connection fueling these parties. Martha had once boasted to Jim that she knew the biggest coke dealer on Long Island; and a couple of days before the murders, she had returned from Medellín, Colombia. Was Martha a drug courier in a deal gone bad? Was she the real target of the murder, and Kim simply collateral damage? Police rejected this theory as well, claiming that their investigation found no connection with either woman to drugs or organized crime. Keegan exploded in anger over reports that his department wasn’t doing an adequate investigation. He called a news conference to refute these assertions, in which he continued to deny that Kim Klein had ever had any Mafia connections, and defended the character of Martha Lema.

  * * *

  A possible break in the case came when I received a tip that an international hit man had been arrested by New York police on a weapons charge. Frank Aranio was from Medellin, Colombia, Martha Lema’s hometown, and lived in the same Queens neighborhood where she had once lived. Based on other information I had received, I reported that it was very likely that Aranio was the drug dealer Martha said she knew. On the broadcast, we called on police to run ballistic tests on Aranio’s guns to determine whether any of them could have been the weapon used to kill the two women. The Walther P38 in his possession was a nine-millimeter, the same caliber as the murder weapon. Forensic tests showed no match to the shell casing found at the murder scene, but being that a few months had passed since the murders, I noted that a professional killer could easily have changed the barrel of the gun.

  Aranio was also reported to have a green car with a black top. Curiously, on the day of the murders, witnesses reported seeing a car of that description in the driveway. Captain Keegan initially denied these reports, but the following day he admitted to me that there had been a car in witnesses’ accounts. It belonged, he said, to a contractor working at a neighbor’s home, some 200 yards away; though he offered no explanation as to why someone would park so far away—the length of two football fields—from a house where he was working.

  Three and a half months after the murders, Jim Klein traveled to Florida to visit his son Jay, who was living with Jim’s parents. Detectives followed him there, and showed up with a sealed indictment and warrant for his arrest. His bail was set at a quarter of a million dollars. Unable to pay it, Jim remained locked up for 69 days before his attorney got the bail reduced to $150,000, which his family put up. Though Jim insisted he informed police of his whereabouts when he traveled to Florida, Captain Keegan suggested he was attempting to escape prosecution.

  Now out on bail, Jim fell deeper and deeper into depression. His legal team and private investigator Walter Smith found inconsistencies and false information in police affidavits, which they claimed constituted an attempt by the police to solidify their case against Jim. In one police document it was stated that, “Based on the way the women were shot, it is likely and probable that the murderer would have been splattered with blood.” There was no such mention of that in the affidavit signed by Keegan. He would later admit that the statement was “an unfortunate choice of words.” Unfortunate indeed, argued Klein’s legal team—particularly after the FBI lab in Washington only found traces of blood on a pair of Jim’s trousers, and in an amount so minute, they couldn’t determine whose blood it was. The report was inconclusive; it could well have been from the finger Jim had cut while slamming the trunk of his car.

  Other tests also failed to prove any guilt. Most notable was the test meant to determine if Jim Klein had recently fired a gun. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did a chemical analysis of swabs taken from the suspect’s hand, and reported that chemists found 3.5 micrograms of barium on one of the swabs. This seemed like positive news for the case police were building against him, until Walter Smith and Jim’s attorney David Wise studied the findings and found that the amount wasn’t 3.5 micrograms, but 0.325 micrograms, an amount of barium too miniscule to have been the result of gunfire.

  In yet another discrepancy, Detective Stephen Carroll showed Jim’s daughter a sketch of a gun that could have been similar to the murder weapon, and asked her if it resembled any of the three weapons legally owned by her father.

  “It looked like nothing I described,” she told me. Yet in Captain Keegan’s report, he stated that she concurred that one of Jim’s guns did resemble an automatic or semi-automatic pistol.

  * * *

  Seventeen detectives and investigators were assigned to the Greenwich murder case, but in the end the case against Jim Klein was full of discrepancies, mistakes and, according to witnesses themselves, complete reversals of fact. No murder weapon was ever found; no fingerprints were discovered; not a single witness placed Jim Klein at the scene at the time of the murders. The only solid evidence police had was Jim’s own acknowledgement that he had been in the house that day. Despite these negatives, however, Captain Keegan was ready to go to trial.

  “At this point,” he declared, expressing his confidence that Jim would be found guilty, “we have no evidence that anyone else is responsible.”

  But he would never have the opportunity to prosecute his case to the fullest. Jim Klein, believing he was being framed and would die in prison, became so despondent that he committed suicide, leaving two notes beside an empty bottle of sleeping pills.

  “I hope everyone will forgive me for taking this drastic step,” he began. “The only ones who are going to be happy about this are the Greenwich Police and the State of Con
necticut. If I can be granted a last wish,” he added, “it is that they do not get off lightly. I just can’t take the pressure anymore. Knowing that a state is dedicated to putting me away for life…has driven me crazy.”

  In a bizarre turn of events, within weeks after the suicide, Jim’s uncle, Stanley Adler, who had just given a lawyer $10,000 to help clear his nephew’s name, was found shot to death in his mattress store. Police called the murder an attempted robbery, though almost $200 was found in his wallet.

  John Parsons, Doug Williams and I felt we had built a strong case showing that people other than Jim Klein had committed the murders in Greenwich. The criminologists and legal experts with whom we conferred were of the opinion that the state’s case against Jim Klein was weak at best, and called the case’s police work “sloppy.” Investigator Walter Smith, who had worked on 43 murder cases, said he was confident that, had Jim gone to trial, he would have been found innocent. As an added element, I called psychic Dorothy Allison, who had previously worked with police in helping to solve crimes. My conversation with her was uncanny. Dorothy was not at all familiar with the case, but as we were speaking on the phone, she began to rattle off tidbits of descriptive information of which she could not have had any direct knowledge. She agreed to meet with Kim Klein’s stepdaughter Debbie, who held a personal belonging of her stepmother’s during their conversation. Dorothy came up with more of the dark background of both Jim and Kim Klein. She had visions of Kim talking with a man on a train about collaborating on a book, and claimed to see a tall, dark figure in the room where the women were murdered. Interesting stuff—but nothing conclusive as to who might have committed the crime. The segment, which we filmed, was dramatic and would have made for good television—but I chose not to use it on the air, for fear that police would claim that a psychic had been our source for information, and dismiss our conclusions. What we uncovered in our investigation was substantial and stood alone.