In an effort to sift through the noise, several detectives worked the case. They listened to all kinds of reports that didn’t add up. Hearsay upon hearsay, as friends reported what friends of friends had heard on the streets. “Someone I knew from school ten years ago told me that . . .” “A person from Southwest L.A. who used to work at a grocery store said that . . .” “A girl who used to deal dope told me someone who went by the name of Keith knew the shooter.”
Information suggested the murders were retaliation for the shooting of a Jamaican drug dealer. Other sources labeled the crimes “cocaine killings” in the “Miami Vice school” of senseless violence, perpetrated by organized Cuban, Colombian, or domestic criminals based in Florida. A new drug gang known as “Third World” was also fingered for their involvement. Still others said both killers were black men with long braids. Additional reports noted that the killers still lived in the neighborhood, but had shaved their heads and now wore hats.
Names from the streets poured in as well, amorphous leads pointing to people known as Diamond, Black Tommy, Sweet Daddy, Tweedy-Bird, Eagle, Big Ant, and Scoopy. Alerts were also phoned in warning the police that a ring of individuals who had committed the murders were holed up at the Coliseum Apartment Motel. Other calls suggested the murders were a drug hit gone wrong. The killers had meant to hit a crack house on East Fifty-Ninth Street, not West Fifty-Ninth Street. The killers had meant to hit someone named “Chucky Mac” on Fifty-Ninth Place. Still others claimed the hit was retaliation for a killing that had taken place the night before. The van was not tan, it was black, the weapon used was not a rifle, but a shotgun, not a shotgun, but a machine gun.
Theories regarding me circulated as well. I was a cocaine dealer, it was claimed, and this hit might have been retaliation against me, either because I owed thousands of dollars or because I was selling bad dope. Repeatedly I had been seen at a house in Watts known for drug dealing. It was further claimed that I actually knew the killers and that was why I had remained so calm after the murders.
This information regarding me was followed up, but no evidence was ever uncovered. I explained that as an assistant coach for John Locke High School I was counseling a troubled player involved with drugs, hence my visits to the house in Watts. As to a supposed relationship between me and the unknown killers, nothing materialized. Publicly, my former teammates supported me, refusing to believe I had any involvement. “I was just talking to John Hadl [quarterback on the Los Angeles Rams],” one said, “and the thing we remembered most about Kermit was how much he loved that family.” He continued: “God, he was dedicated to his family. He seemed to be always concerned for his sisters and his mother.”
While many within the LAPD continued to question whether I held any clues to the murders, a separate investigation of me was never opened.
What about the ex-husband, others wondered. But my father, Kermit Sr., proved a dead end as well. He was driving home from the Pomona racetrack when he first heard about the killings on the radio. His alibi was strong, no evidence linked him, the relationship between my mother and father remained respectful after their separation, and Madee often babysat my father’s children through his second wife.
What about some of those active serial killers, others asked. But they too were eliminated. The evidence was dissimilar. The MO, modus operandi, did not match.
As most street crime is local—with the incidents often taking place within blocks of where the perpetrators live and hang out—detectives went door-to-door through the Florence neighborhood, interviewing my mother’s friends and neighbors.
Detectives remained troubled by the open door. When the killers’ faces were finally revealed, would they be familiar?
Again focusing the investigation locally, in the week following the killing, detectives drove the streets of South Central looking for a brown, tan, or red van.
As expended .30-caliber shell casings were found at the scene, detectives began looking into any .30-caliber weapons that had been used in a crime. The usual neighborhood channels, informants, and snitches were questioned, and came up dry.
With nearly a week passed since the killings, the trail was growing cold. The longer a case remains unsolved, the less the chance that anyone is ever caught: evidence is destroyed, witnesses disappear, memories fade.
In America, less than 65 percent of all murder cases are solved. And in Los Angeles, this case marked the latest in a spate of open homicide investigations, in what had been a particularly bloody late August. As a prominent case, in which both Mayor Tom Bradley and Chief of Police Daryl Gates held press conferences, the pressure to break it was mounting. But for the detectives working the case, it wasn’t just a matter of solving the crime to quiet the brass. The case genuinely haunted them.
Homicide detectives must become desensitized, feel detachment from their victims. They must learn to view dead bodies as evidence and bloodied homes as crime scenes, steel themselves to the point that they can literally laugh in the face of death.
But the sleeping children shot in their beds made this case different.
Over and over again detectives reworked the crime scene, hoping that multiple sets of eyes would seize upon something others had missed. Maybe that magical piece of previously undetected physical evidence would spring forth. Or maybe another viewpoint would see something in the assailant’s behavior that would reveal the motive.
Detectives stared at the autopsy photos, passed them around, went bleary-eyed meditating upon the wounds. They retraced the bullet trajectories, focused upon the houses to the east and west, reexamined the holes in the adjacent homes.
They canvassed and recanvassed: door-to-door, block by block. Hadn’t anybody seen anything? Did anybody know anything, anybody who might somehow, someway have had it in for that family?
But nothing shed new light. Nothing suggested anything other than what they already knew, that a seemingly innocent and beloved family, an anchor of the neighborhood, had been senselessly killed. Nothing they learned could make the physical evidence tell a complicated tale. It screamed only a maddeningly simple one: four innocent victims were executed inside their home.
11
ETERNAL REST GRANT UNTO THEM
ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, exactly one week after the killings, the funeral was held for my four slain family members.
The ceremonies took place at St. Eugene’s Catholic Church at 9505 Haas Avenue. The crowd was too large to fit into Madee’s regular church at St. Columbkille. Over one thousand people attended, packing the building beyond capacity.
The ceremonies began midmorning. The sun already blazed over the congregation. The temperature would again hit triple digits.
As the police feared the family was still in danger, snipers dotted the surrounding roofs while mourners entered the church. Undercover officers with surveillance cameras were also spread throughout the immediate area, seeing if they could film anyone suspicious, catch any out-of-place behavior, or spot someone who did not belong. Undercovers also circulated throughout the church itself.
Strangers and those who did not belong were one thing. But it was the thought of those we knew that caused me the most grief. As I greeted fellow mourners I felt a queasy guilt as I could not help wondering, was I shaking the hand of a killer? Was I hugging the man who stuck the knife in my back? Were they here among us, posing as bereaved?
This tension hung over the entire funeral. The killers had simply disappeared, and yet they remained a constant presence. And this only added to both the fear and the frustration. What did they look like? At this point they were only shades, something invisible and empty. How to give them flesh and blood? Were they watching me at this moment?
For all assembled, the service did not represent closure, nor an end, but an early step into the unknown. We were in a state of disbelief. It was all unreal and unexpected: a funeral service for loved ones lost in the prime of life, surrounded by snipers and surveillance. And most devastating, the family f
aced the void as a house divided.
Inside the church it was standing room only, with mourners lining the walls, the balcony overflowing with friends, relatives, and dignitaries attending the funeral mass.
As the congregation entered, my sisters Geraldine, the mother of Damani, and Crystal both collapsed and had to be carried inside. Joan followed them into the church, dressed in her full military uniform to honor our mother, who always expressed her pride in Joan’s service.
Upon entry, each mourner was provided with a memorial brochure: “In Loving Memory of the Alexander Family.”
Eighteen pallbearers were needed to carry the coffins.
Over fifty relatives filled the front ten pews in the sweltering church.
As the organ played, my father and I wept quietly, staring at the four brown caskets. None were ever opened. Having witnessed the state of the bodies, I insisted they remain closed.
As I watched the sea of mourners dressed in black, I felt I was in a kind of blue haze, unable to focus. It was like trying to think through a fever. I knew I could not stand this any longer, and that once the services were over and the bodies laid to rest, I would begin a new phase.
Right now the heat and the crowd were claustrophobic. The suit and tie were suffocating. I couldn’t wait to rip them off.
The eulogy was delivered by Father Joe Shea, a priest at St. John Vianney Catholic in Hacienda Heights, and a longtime family friend.
Father Shea described Madee as “a compassionate, loving woman devoted to her family and church,” and “one of the kindest people any of us had ever met.” He sermonized about the tragic irony that a woman who loved her neighborhood and community, and remained despite its dangers for its betterment, was senselessly killed because of her residence. Father Shea continued that it was only through people like my mother that such neighborhoods stood any chance of survival.
Father Jules Mayer, the pastor of St. Columbkille Roman Catholic Church, where Madee was a parishioner, said she was a “kind, gentle, hard-working steady churchgoer who was very active in raising funds for the church’s elementary school.”
It was further lamented that recently she had been in such good spirits. Her youngest daughter, Dietra, was readying to marry and move out, and Madee after thirty-five years of childrearing could finally exhale, reflect on a job well done, and maybe carve out a little time for herself.
Following my mother, the other victims were eulogized as well.
Dietra was described by Father Shea as a shy woman who “loved everyone.” She had just celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday and was excited about her upcoming wedding. Coworkers from Zody’s department store, on Vermont Avenue, described her as “religious” and “family oriented,” and said “that she worked very hard and everyone liked her.”
I spoke of Dietra as “the baby” and “the princess,” and recalled the time that I served as her chauffeur on her prom night, renting a burnt-orange Cadillac limousine and wearing a suit to match.
Damani was considered to be “a miracle,” as his mother, Geraldine, had been told that she would never be able to have children. He was described as a mature boy, “an old man when he was born,” and as “old before his time.” He made an impression with his “huge hazel eyes,” which were accentuated by big Coke-bottle glasses that friends teased him “needed windshield wipers to clean.” The family remembered him above all as a trusting boy, “who loved his mom, and worried about her all the time.”
The memories of Damon could still make the mourners smile through the tears. They recalled the way he loved to wear a shirt and tie, making him look like “a little midget,” or “a little butler.” His mother remembered how he liked to watch the Christian station and had said he “wasn’t afraid to be with God.” Father Shea termed him “a friend of the young and old,” while a family friend eulogized him as “loved by everyone in the entire neighborhood [who] would visit the older people every day and report back to Ebora how everyone was doing.” Once when he had seemed afraid, his mother asked him if the movie they had recently watched had scared him. “No,” Damon said, “that movie wasn’t scary. Jaws only eats white people.”
As I listened to the kind words over the departed, I agonized not only over the deceased, but over the fact that much of the surviving family had begun to question me, holding me in some way responsible for their pain. It made it impossible to feel any sense of healing or closeness at the service. At a time when we most needed to come together, the suspicions and ill feelings made the tragic day unbearable.
As the service concluded, Ivan walked out of the church and began sobbing, “Damani’s dead, Damani’s dead, Damani’s dead.”
Though relatives tried to console him as he exited, his distress ignited additional cries from the crowded church anteroom.
Father Shea, who had earlier tried to soothe the congregants, now slipped into a voice of despair.
“We’re not going to be able to see their smiles or touch their hands anymore,” he lamented.
“In the face of evil, human wisdom is bankrupt.”
* * *
Following the two-hour service, the mourners drive west on Slauson Avenue to the Holy Cross Cemetery in nearby Culver City. I know the cemetery well, having served at hundreds of funerals as an altar boy in the 1950s. We enter through a wrought-iron gate, drive beside a large ornate cross.
In California’s Mexican period the land had been used for cattle grazing and belonged to the Rancho La Ballona, before being sold to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which chose the land because of its “rolling hills, peaks and valleys.”
Opened in 1939, the Roman Catholic cemetery covers more than two hundred acres and has become a tourist attraction, famous as a resting spot of celebrities. Bing Crosby, Jimmy Durante, Rita Hayworth, Bela Lugosi, and other heroes of Hollywood lie in “the Grotto,” up the hill and in the cemetery’s southwest corner.
Today, our family procession travels the low hills of Holy Cross, and then buries our four relatives on a gentle slope on the cemetery’s northwest side.
Through the proceedings the mourners do what they can to stay cool, fanning themselves, or seeking shade under the scattered trees. By midafternoon the temperature hits one hundred.
The priest makes a final prayer for mercy, then the sign of the cross over each of the bodies.
He speaks for the final time:
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord.
And let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace.
Amen.
May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God rest in peace.
Amen.
After the burial, three metal grave markers are placed in a row in the grass. Damon and Damani each have their own plate, while my sister and mother rest together beneath one. The graves are set in the same plot with the nuns with whom Madee spent her working hours.
Behind the cemetery walls, single-family bungalows stretch for miles. Palm trees intermittently spike the foreground. In the distance downtown Los Angeles and the Hollywood Hills disappear into the late summer smog.
As the ceremony concludes, I stare at the graves.
Ebora Bonds Alexander: April 5, 1925–August 31, 1984
Dietra Louis Alexander: August 15, 1960–August 31, 1984
Damon Andre (Butler) Bonner: January 19, 1976–August 31, 1984
Damani Osei Garner-Alexander: July 11, 1971–August 31, 1984
12
ALONE
FOLLOWING THE SERVICES, I went home to Hollywood and changed my clothes.
Finally, the day was over. It was a kind of torture, a drawn-out moan. Mourning the dead, and always looking over my shoulder, paranoid, fearing the unknown. At least things would change now. I would force them to.
I took off the dark suit I had worn for the funeral services and put on an oversized T-shirt and jeans, tennis shoes, and a baseball hat. I wanted to look like the pe
ople in the old neighborhood. I wanted to fit in with South Central, as by night I planned to disappear into its streets and back alleys for as long as it took. I would descend into the urban wilderness to pierce its shadow world, decode its rumors, gossip, and chatter. The secret had to be broken. And no one else was on the trail.
I also packed into my car some other things I thought I might need: a carbine, an M-16, and a .380 automatic with an extended clip.
I would also cease to be Kermit Alexander, instead taking on a doppelganger, or second self. Going forward I would live a double existence, Kermit Alexander, working as an advertising representative by day, and Kermit’s friend, the family avenger, prowling by night. This nonreality was my new reality, and instead of trying to resist it, I simply embraced it. I would assume the mantle of the old swamp-hunting great-grandfather of lore.
And it really wasn’t a stretch, for that morning of August 31, 1984, was a cleaving point in my life. That morning the killers did not just take my family, they killed me. Any Kermit who lived before that day died that morning. All that he carried with him, trust, joy, hope, went with his relatives to their graves.
As I walked the streets, I refused to give my name, identifying myself only as a friend of the football player who recently lost his family. I hid my identity to protect my siblings as well as my wife and two children. I rented cars and slept in cheap motels so that no one would know who I was or follow me home. Not knowing who was after us, or why, I didn’t want to ignite more killings. I just wanted to make sure that whoever they were, I got them before they got me. It was also a mission of vengeance.
During these times I lived like a vampire, sleeping or sleepwalking through the day, coming alive at dusk.
My anger was channeled, but not in a good way. Control fell victim to rage. I had invented a double, a kind of split personality to absorb and express my anger. The same way that football let me vent on the field, this primal character allowed for an indulgent release on the streets. I sought therapy through violence. It was a sacred rage, born of a cause.
The Valley of the Shadow of Death Page 8
