Issue 338
May 27, 2005
q New Light on a Distant Verdict by Scott Glover and Matt Lait
q The Plots Thicken by Tamara Jones
q After Final Swipe at Accusers family, Jackson Defense Rests by Steve Chawkins and Stuart Pfeifer
q Splendor in the court by Booth Moore
The following article appeared on latimes.com on May 22,
2005:
A
CASE OF DOUBT
New
Light on a Distant Verdict
The evidence
seemed overwhelming 20 years ago when Bruce Lisker was convicted of killing his
mother in a fit of rage. Was justice served?
By Scott
Glover and Matt Lait
Times Staff
Writers
On a drizzly
day in March, Phillip Rabichow stood outside a beige ranch house in Sherman
Oaks with a tape measure in his hand and an anxious look on his face.
Twenty-two
years earlier, almost to the day, a woman named Dorka Lisker had been killed in
that house. Her 17-year-old son, Bruce, was charged with the murder. He had a
drug problem and a history of fighting with his mother.
Rabichow,
then a deputy district attorney, convinced a jury that Bruce was guilty. As the
years rolled by and Lisker reached middle age in prison, Rabichow rarely gave
the case a second thought.
But in
recent months, new information had shaken his faith in the fairness of the
verdict: A bloody footprint found at the scene did not match Lisker's shoes. A
mysterious phone call made around the time of the murder raised further
questions.
Rabichow, 61
and retired, was having trouble sleeping. He replayed the trial in his head
obsessively, trying to reassure himself that he had not put an innocent man
away for life.
In his
distress, he clung to one element of his case, a piece of evidence he still
believed was irrefutable proof of Lisker's guilt. But to be sure about it, he
would have to visit the crime scene.
"This
is the critical issue of the case," Rabichow said before entering the
house. "If I was wrong about this, I would not be convinced beyond a
reasonable doubt of his guilt."
'She's Been
Stabbed!'
"Help
me, please! I need an ambulance right now. . . . Hurry!" [ AUDIO: Lisker's
911 call. ]
It was 11:26
a.m. on March 10, 1983.
"My mom
she's been stabbed!" Bruce Lisker cried into the phone. "She's been
stabbed!" [ AUDIO: 911 call back to Lisker. ]
When police
and paramedics arrived at the three-bedroom house on Huston Street, they found
Dorka, 66, lying on the floor near the front entryway. Her face was bloody, and
she had been stabbed in the back. Her skull had been crushed, her right ear
nearly severed and her right arm broken. [ DOCUMENT: Autopsy Report on Dorka
Lisker. ]
As the
paramedics worked, Bruce paced back and forth, screaming at them to take his
mother to the hospital. He was high on methamphetamine, and his hands were
covered with blood.
He became so
agitated that two police officers put him in the back of a patrol car,
handcuffed, so he wouldn't interfere.
"Do you
believe in God?" a tearful Lisker asked one of the officers. "Will
you pray for my mother?"
Baseball and
Trail Bikes
Dorka Zeman,
a blond beauty of Czech descent, married Bob Lisker in 1946. They had been
dating for about a year when another couple at a New Year's Eve party in
Hollywood playfully dared them to tie the knot.
A little
tipsy, they accepted the challenge and drove through the night to Tijuana,
where they were wed the next morning. He was 19; she was 29.
Dorka soon
became pregnant, but had a miscarriage. The couple kept trying to have a child
but eventually gave up and poured their energies into their careers his as a
lawyer, hers as a film cutter for Technicolor.
In 1964, one
of Bob's clients asked for help with a delicate matter. Her 17-year-old
daughter was pregnant. The family wanted to put the baby up for adoption.
Lisker said
he and his wife would take the child. The baby was 3 days old when they brought
him home in June 1965. They named him Bruce.
Dorka, then
49, was not "particularly enthusiastic," her husband recalled years
later. "But once the baby got home, she was delighted." She quit her
job to become a full-time mother.
Their
Sherman Oaks neighborhood was a child's paradise, with wide-open spaces for
flying model airplanes, playing baseball and riding trail bikes. Bruce splashed
in the family's backyard pool, dressed up as a tiger for Halloween and went on
Boy Scout camp-outs.
In a faded
snapshot from 1973, a grinning, blond-haired Bruce, then 8, displays a Little
League trophy he won with the San Fernando Valley Pirates.
Before long,
Bruce's poor grades and rambunctious behavior began to cause friction between
him and his mother.
"I was
basically the class clown, and I got in a lot of trouble for that," he
would later explain. "I was always a real skinny kind of kid that
everybody used to overlook, and I wanted to be heard."
By his own
account, he began drinking and smoking marijuana at 10 or 11. By 13, he was
experimenting with cocaine and LSD. He stole from his parents to support his
habit.
His disputes
with his mother escalated into "semi-hysterical scenarios" in which
the two of them would scramble around the house screaming at each other,
according to a report by the California Youth Authority.
While their
arguments raged, Bob Lisker would often sit watching television with the family
dog in his lap.
"Usually,
at some point in this mother-son contest, either Bruce or his mother would
solicit Mr. Lisker's involvement, psychologically forcing him to be the judge
in a 'courtroom' game," the Youth Authority report said.
The Liskers
sent the boy to a group home for troubled children near Susanville in the
Sierra Nevada. He spent eighth and ninth grades there.
Returning to
Los Angeles, he bounced from Birmingham High School to two continuation schools
before dropping out in the spring of 1982, a month shy of his 17th birthday.
He persuaded
his parents to rent him an apartment of his own a $210-a-month studio on
Sepulveda Boulevard, about four miles from their home. They gave him a car and
spending money and hoped he would straighten himself out. They were
disappointed.
He smoked
pot, drank heavily and shot up methamphetamine. In June 1982, he was arrested
for throwing a screwdriver at a motorist during a traffic dispute.
Police
booked him for assault with a deadly weapon; the charge was later reduced to
vandalism.
Bruce told a
police officer who witnessed the altercation that he grew enraged when the
other driver cut him off. According to the officer, Bruce declared: "I was
gonna kill that son of a bitch."
'And Then
You Stab Her'
By the time
Det. Andrew R. Monsue arrived at the scene of the murder, Dorka Lisker had been
taken to Encino Hospital, where she died that afternoon.
A former
Marine who had served in Vietnam, Monsue wore his brown hair short and had a
gruff military bearing. He followed a trail of blood through the house, looking
for clues.
He concluded
that Dorka's assailant had beaten her with her son's Little League trophy and
her husband's metal exercise bar. Then she had been stabbed in the back with a
pair of steak knives, which were lying on the floor next to her body. Monsue
saw bloody footprints in the front hallway, a nearby bathroom and the kitchen
and more footprints outside the house.
Bob Lisker
told detectives that the night before, he had given his wife a handful of bills
tens and twenties mostly to pay for groceries. He thought it was around
$150. Police searched her purse but did not find the money. They also searched
Bruce. He did not have it.
Around 1
p.m., Monsue took the teenager to the Van Nuys police station for questioning.
Bruce said he had gone to his parents' house that morning to borrow a jack so
he could repair a shock absorber on his 1966 Mustang.
His mother
didn't come out to greet him as she usually did, so he knocked on the door. No
answer. He tried the doorknob. It was locked.
Lisker said
he made his way to the backyard, where he looked through a window into the
living room. He thought he could see his mother's feet on the floor in the
entry hall.
His heart
pounding, he ran to the dining room window to get a better view. From there, he
could see her head lying motionless on the floor, he said.
Panicked, he
ran to the kitchen's louvered window, an entry point he had used more than once
to sneak into the house after curfew. He said he removed the panes of glass and
climbed into the kitchen.
He ran to
the entry hall and found his mother on the floor, unconscious but alive. Trying
to help, he pulled the knives from her back. Then he grabbed two kitchen knives
and searched the house for the intruder. Then he called for an ambulance.
Monsue, who
listened quietly, thought Lisker was lying. If he had seen his mother's body
through the living room window, why hadn't he just smashed his way in? Why
would he disassemble the kitchen window instead, squandering precious seconds?
For that
matter, Monsue doubted that Lisker could have seen Dorka's body from outside
the house. Based on his own observations, he thought that the sun's glare would
have made it impossible to see through the living room window, and that furniture
and an interior stone planter would have blocked the view through the dining
room window.
Monsue had
dealt with Bruce before and didn't like him. He considered him "a
loudmouth an in-your-face little punk," he later recalled.
He read
Lisker his rights.
"Let me
tell you what I think happened," Monsue said, according to a transcript of
the interview. "You went in the house through the kitchen window.... She
surprises you there. You guys get into a big fight. You pick up the trophy off
your desk that's sitting there. You smack her in the head."
"No, I
wouldn't do that," Bruce protested.
"She
stumbles down the hallway," Monsue continued. "There's a workout
bar.... You pick that up. You smack her and break her arm. She starts
running.... You get scared. You pick her up. You drag her in there, right [by]
the front door. And then you stab her."
"You
better stop, man," Bruce said.
"How
does that sound to you?" Monsue asked.
"That
sounds like a lie," Bruce replied. "That sounds more gruesome than I
would even think of doing."
Monsue
placed Lisker under arrest.
The teenager
demanded to be given a lie-detector test. Monsue and another detective drove
him to police headquarters in downtown L.A., where a polygraph examiner
questioned him: Did you hit your mother with that trophy? Did you stab your
mother? Did you kill your mother?
Lisker
exhibited deception in answering, the examiner found.
On the ride
back to Van Nuys, Lisker asked how he did. The detectives told him he failed.
They said the examiner had never seen anyone so deceptive.
An
Unexpected Visitor
Bob Lisker
had lost his wife. Now he might lose his son too. He wanted desperately to
believe Bruce's story. But he had no answer to an obvious question: If Bruce
hadn't done it, who had?
Then the
elder Lisker remembered a conversation with his wife the night before she was
killed. Dorka told him she'd had an unexpected visitor that day, a friend of
Bruce's from the apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard. His name was Mike Ryan. He
was looking to earn money doing chores. She turned him down.
John Michael
Ryan, then 17, had been in and out of foster homes, mental institutions and
juvenile hall. He had a rap sheet dating to age 11, with convictions for theft,
trespassing and assault with a deadly weapon. A court-appointed psychologist
once described him as "impulsive and selfish, operating entirely on his
own feelings ... unpredictable."
Bruce had
met Ryan at a drug-counseling meeting in 1982. Ryan was living on the streets.
Bruce offered to let him sleep on his couch in return for half the rent.
Their
friendship revolved around getting drunk, smoking dope and listening to the
Doors, Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. To earn spending money, they occasionally
did odd jobs at the Lisker home.
The two soon
had a falling-out over Ryan's failure to pay his share of the rent. Bruce
kicked him out in January 1983 and Ryan left for Mississippi, where his father
lived.
After
Dorka's murder, Bruce and his father told Monsue about Ryan's troubled past and
his visit to the house the day before the killing.
Monsue
tracked down the teenager in Gulfport, Miss. He was once again in juvenile
hall, this time for trying to break into a woman's apartment.
At Monsue's
request, Mississippi authorities took a brief statement from Ryan as to his
whereabouts on the day of the killing. Ryan said he had checked in to a
Hollywood motel that morning. [ DOCUMENT: Statement Taken From Ryan by
Mississippi Authorities. ]
Monsue went
to the motel, the Hollywood Tropics on Sunset Boulevard. Registration records
showed that Ryan had not checked in until that afternoon.
His
curiosity piqued, the detective boarded a plane for Mississippi. On May 4,
1983, he questioned Ryan at a youth detention facility in Harrison County,
Miss.
With a tape
recorder running, Ryan described in a monotone how he'd taken a bus from
Gulfport to Los Angeles, arriving March 6, four days before the murder. He said
he'd returned to California to join the Job Corps in Sacramento. He never made
it that far.
His first
stop in Los Angeles was the apartment complex on Sepulveda, where he ran into
Bruce. The two shared a joint. Ryan had nowhere to stay and wanted to sleep on
Bruce's couch. But he was reluctant to ask, he said, because of their earlier
dispute over the rent.
Ryan's
mother lived in Ventura County, but he couldn't stay with her, either. He and
his stepfather didn't get along. So for the next few days, he had wandered
aimlessly around his old Valley neighborhood, surviving on potato chips,
cigarettes and soda. He slept in carports and in a makeshift campsite in the
Santa Monica Mountains.
Ryan
confirmed that he had knocked on Dorka Lisker's door March 9. He wanted to use
the phone and do some chores, he said. Ryan told Monsue that she invited him in
and gave him a drink of water. They chatted for about 20 minutes. She had no
work for him to do, Ryan said, so he left.
Asked where
he was the next morning, Ryan again claimed to have checked in to the motel at
11 a.m.
"Well,
that's bull ... ," Monsue is heard saying on the tape. "I went to the
motel. You checked in at 3 o'clock in the afternoon."
"Then
it was somewhere around 3," Ryan replied. "I don't remember."
Ryan
volunteered that he had stabbed someone that morning not Dorka Lisker, but an
unidentified "black guy."
The man
pulled a stiletto, Ryan said, and tried to steal his drugs and money. Ryan said
he drew his own knife and stabbed the man in the shoulder. [ AUDIO: John
Michael Ryan Admits to a Stabbing in Hollywood. ]
Monsue
wondered aloud why the teenager was so eager to place himself in Hollywood, 12
miles from the crime scene, right around the time Dorka was killed. Why had he
lied about his check-in time? And why had he boarded a bus and headed back to
Mississippi the morning after the murder?
Monsue
challenged Ryan on his finances. The teenager claimed to have left Mississippi
with just $52. Yet what he had described spending on food, drugs, cigarettes,
bus fare and the $21-a-night motel room added up to more than that.
"Something
is not jibing here," Monsue said. [ AUDIO: Monsue Challenges Ryan. ]
Ryan said he
hadn't been thinking much about his brief visit to California or the murder
" 'cause I didn't do it."
"You
better be thinking a whole bunch about it," Monsue replied. "Because
your ass is gonna be back in California in jail unless I can get some straight
answers out of you."
Monsue never
got those answers. In fact, he quickly lost interest in Ryan, at least in part
because of a mistaken belief that the youth had no criminal record.
The LAPD
case file the "murder book," in which detectives document every
step in an investigation indicates that Monsue ran a records search for Ryan
using the wrong birth date.
A handwritten
note in the file reads: "John Michael Ryan, 1/24/66, No record." [
DOCUMENT: Note Showing Wrong Date of Birth. ]
A search
using Ryan's correct birth date April 24, 1966 would have revealed that he
had been convicted of robbing a teenager at knifepoint 10 months before Dorka
Lisker was killed.
It happened
in the parking lot of a Denny's restaurant in Ventura County. When the victim
asked why he should surrender his $12, Ryan allegedly replied: "I will
kill you if you don't."
Apparently
unaware of this incident and Ryan's earlier crimes, Monsue wrote him off as a
suspect.
Ryan went on
his troubled way. In 1986, he followed a woman off a commuter train in San
Francisco, grabbed her arm and threatened her with a knife.
"You
don't want to make me angry," Ryan said, according to a sworn declaration
by the victim.
When the
woman broke free, he slashed at her with the knife, causing feathers to fly
from her down jacket. Ryan was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to six
years in prison.
In 1993, he
took a sledgehammer to his stepmother's car in Florida and attacked a police
officer who responded, biting him on the thumb.
In 1996,
back in California, Ryan took his life with a combination of alcohol and
heroin. He left a note in which he thanked his roommate, gave instructions for
what to do with his belongings, and told a friend that he loved him.
"F ...
everybody else" were his parting words.
Ryan's
mother, who still lives in Ventura County, spoke with Times reporters on
condition that she not be identified. She said she did not want to be publicly
associated with her son and his crimes.
She said she
has always suspected that Mike killed Dorka Lisker. Once, she said, she
confronted him with her suspicions, and he insisted he was innocent.
She did not
believe him.
"I
think he just got backed up into a corner and needed the money and did what he
did.... He was probably on drugs," the mother said. "I feel like I'm
stabbing Mike in the back by saying so, but I really believe there may be an
innocent man in prison."
A Jailhouse
Informant
Bruce spent
the weeks after the murder in Sylmar Juvenile Hall. He was allowed outside his
cell for an hour a day, and spent it writing letters to friends. Every day at
dinnertime, a nurse gave him a tranquilizer mixed with orange juice. His
father's Sunday visits "were my salvation," he wrote years later. The
two talked about Bruce's legal defense.
"I let
my dad know again that I did not do this," he said.
At a court
hearing April 4, 1983, a judge determined that Lisker should be tried as an
adult but ordered him returned to juvenile hall.
The order
went unheeded.
Three days
later, sheriff's deputies moved him to the Los Angeles County men's jail. He
was placed in a "segregation" area for inmates who would be at risk
in the general population youthful offenders and informants, among others.
Years later,
it was revealed that Los Angeles prosecutors had formed a corrupt alliance with
jailhouse informants. The snitches would claim their cellmates had confessed to
the charges against them. Then they would testify about the confessions in
exchange for reductions in their own charges or early release from jail.
Prosecutors
had reason to suspect that many of the confessions were bogus, but used them in
as many as 250 cases from 1979 to 1988, a grand jury investigation found.
The scandal
led to a dramatic reduction in the use of jailhouse informants and a state law
requiring that juries be instructed to view their testimony with suspicion.
That would come later, however.
Within days
of Lisker's arrival in the County Jail, two inmates reported that he had
confessed to them. The authorities dismissed them as liars.
Soon after,
a third informant came forward.
Robert
Donald Hughes, then 29, was a career criminal serving time for burglary,
vehicle theft and other offenses. He was also a practiced snitch. [ DOCUMENT:
Hughes' Rap Sheet ] In a previous murder case, he had sworn that the accused
confessed to him in jail. The man ultimately pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
In the
spring of 1983, Hughes was transferred to the County Jail from state prison so
he could give similar testimony in another murder case.
He wound up
in the cell next to Lisker's.
One day,
Bruce heard a scraping sound from the other side of the common wall. It was
Hughes, digging a hole with a metal object.
Lisker said
Hughes, speaking through the tiny opening, befriended him by posing as a
concerned Christian and offering to help him prove his innocence.
Lisker said
he told Hughes all about his case and let him read copies of police reports,
pushing the rolled-up documents through the hole in the wall. Hughes contacted
police, saying he had information to share.
Monsue went
to the jail to interview him July 6, 1983. Hughes told the detective that
Lisker had admitted to bludgeoning his mother after she caught him rifling
through her purse a scenario that mirrored the facts laid out in police
reports.
Hughes
offered to testify against Lisker in return for a reduction in his sentence.
Rabichow, the prosecutor, agreed.
Lisker's
defense soon suffered another setback.
His
attorney, Dennis E. Mulcahy, hoped to convince the jury that someone else had
committed the crime: Mike Ryan. But first, Mulcahy would have to show that
there was a solid basis for the theory more than "mere suspicion."
In arguments
before Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Richard G. Kolostian, Mulcahy pointed out
that Ryan had been at the Lisker home the day before the killing. He emphasized
that the grocery money missing from Dorka's purse had never been recovered,
suggesting that Ryan might have made off with it.
But he
failed to mention that Ryan had lied to Monsue about his whereabouts at the
time of the killing. Nor did he tell the judge that Ryan had spontaneously
admitted stabbing someone that morning.
Mulcahy, now
a Superior Court commissioner, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Rabichow
argued in court that Mulcahy had failed to meet his burden of proof. The judge
agreed, and granted the prosecutor's motion to exclude any mention of Ryan.
The jury
would not hear a word about him.
Manipulative,
Volatile
Five days
into the trial, Kolostian said he would consider allowing Lisker to serve a
juvenile sentence if he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Lisker would be
released at age 25.
Mulcahy
urged him to do it. Bruce resisted. Then Bob Johnson, a lawyer and family
friend, spoke to him.
"He got
right in my face and said I had to take the deal. 'They are going to convict
you of first-degree murder if you don't,' " Bruce recalled.
Lisker
relented. The judge halted the trial and dismissed the jury. As part of the
plea bargain, several psychologists examined Bruce to determine his suitability
for a juvenile sentence.
Abandoning
his claim of innocence, he told them that he had indeed killed his mother. In
one of the interviews, he blamed Satan: "I fell to what he wanted me to
do.... It was so stupid."
Lisker later
disavowed the confession, saying he admitted guilt thinking he would lose the
plea bargain otherwise.
In their
reports to the judge, the psychologists described him as manipulative and
volatile.
"Bruce
has an extremely difficult time controlling his aggressive impulses, especially
in emotionally charged situations," wrote one psychologist. "He is
demanding, self-centered, impulsive and has a low tolerance for
frustration."
A
pre-sentencing report from the California Youth Authority said that Lisker was "unmotivated
for change" and "displayed little in the way of convincing regret or
remorse."
Confronted
with those conclusions, Kolostian changed his mind and ruled that Lisker would
have to serve time as an adult and could face 16 years to life in prison.
"I
can't see how the Youth Authority will do the job," Kolostian said.
"I had no idea how deep his problem is."
Lisker was
allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and take his chances before a jury once
again.
'Convincing'
Evidence
The second
trial unfolded in a sixth-floor courtroom in the Van Nuys courthouse in the
fall of 1985. Rabichow depicted the murder of Dorka Lisker as an act of
spontaneous rage, followed by cold calculation.
Desperate
for drugs, Bruce drove to his parents' home and asked his mother for money, the
prosecutor said. She told him no. Moments later, she caught him taking the
grocery money from her purse and fought with him, tearing his plaid flannel
shirt.
Lisker went
to the kitchen, got a pair of steak knives and plunged them into her back.
Realizing that she was still alive, he grabbed the Little League trophy and
smashed it against her head. Then he pummeled her with the exercise bar.
As his
mother lay dying, he carried out an elaborate cover-up. He wiped his fingerprints
and her blood from the trophy and the exercise bar. He ran outside and removed
the glass panes from the kitchen window to fit the story he'd concocted. He
placed a rope around his mother's neck, a detail he thought would suggest a
cult killing.
Then he
phoned for help.
The
prosecutor insisted that Bruce could not have seen his mother through the
windows at the back of the house, as he claimed. Police photos showed that
furniture and glare from the sun would have blocked his view, he said.
"He
couldn't think of everything," Rabichow said. "That is the most
condemning lie that he told."
Further
proof of his guilt, the prosecutor said, was that all of the bloody footprints
in the house matched Bruce's shoes.
"Only
his footprint is in the blood," Rabichow said.
If Lisker's
story was true, he asked, "why isn't there an intruder's footprint
somewhere?"
Mulcahy
attacked the prosecution's case on several fronts. He said there was no
evidence that Bruce wiped his fingerprints from the trophy or the exercise bar
or did anything else to cover up a crime.
He
challenged Rabichow's assertion that Lisker couldn't have seen his mother's
body through the windows. The police photos were taken the day after the
killing, he said, when the sun was brighter and the glare more pronounced.
Through
patient questioning, Mulcahy pinned Hughes down to an account of the confession
that he hoped would strain credulity.
Hughes said
Lisker confessed during their very first conversation through the hole in the
wall before they even knew each other's names.
In his
closing argument, Mulcahy asked jurors to imagine that they were in the
business of selling cars and that Hughes had come in looking to buy one on
credit.
"Would
you give Robert Hughes a loan?" he asked.
After
deliberating four days, the jury convicted Lisker of second-degree murder. He
was escorted to a holding pen, where he threw up into a trash can.
Several
jurors cried that day outside the courtroom. "He just didn't strike us as
a hardened criminal," said one. "But the evidence was
convincing."
'I'm Not a
Killer'
For a skinny
kid who stands 5 feet 6, prison can be brutal. Soon after his conviction, Bruce
endured a beating at the hands of a burly inmate at a juvenile facility in
Ontario. He earned respect by fighting back and refusing to inform on his
assailant. He told staff members he had suffered two black eyes falling out of
bed.
He learned
to say little and keep to himself. He studied computer programming and trained
to be a paralegal. He went to church, attended 12-step alcohol and drug
programs, and dabbled in poetry.
In a poem
about Monsue, he wrote:
An idiot
simpleton who jumped to conclusions;
Unable to
reason, "If not the boy, who then?"
When he
turned 25, Bruce was transferred to adult prison first San Quentin, then Mule
Creek, a concrete fortress about an hour's drive south of Sacramento where he
has spent the last 15 years.
Early on, he
hoped higher courts would overturn his conviction. But his appeals were
dismissed. Then he hoped to gain his freedom through parole.
In 1992,
when he first became eligible, he admitted killing his mother and expressed
remorse before the parole board.
"I was
addicted to drugs and alcohol heavily. I stole money from my parents and I had
no qualms about doing so. I was on a downward path, heading down a dead-end
street, and it culminated in my murdering my mother," Bruce said.
"A
spoiled brat," interjected one parole commissioner.
"Yes,"
Bruce agreed. "I was."
Lisker now
says he told board members what he thought they wanted to hear. He was denied
parole.
After that,
Lisker said, he decided he would never again accept blame for a crime he didn't
commit. He said he declined to appear at his parole hearings in 1993, 1996 and
1998. In 1999, he attended and read a statement proclaiming his innocence.
With a
$150,000 inheritance from his father, who died in 1995, he hired new attorneys
and private investigators and set out to clear his name. He established a
website www.freebruce.org to drum up support and donations.
Lisker, now
39, said during an interview at Mule Creek that he understands why Monsue
suspected him at first. But Monsue and, later, Rabichow developed tunnel
vision, he said, closing their minds to evidence that contradicted their
theory.
"It's a
Chinese proverb that everybody pushes a falling fence," he said. "I
wasn't an angel. But I'm not a killer."
Curious
About a Call
During
Bruce's years in prison, Monsue was on a journey of his own a slow rise
through the ranks of the LAPD. There was a stubborn persistence to his career
arc. He took the oral exam for supervising detective 54 times before he was
selected for the position.
A
self-described "dinosaur," he occasionally bruised feelings with his
bristly demeanor. In 1999, a citizen complained that Monsue jabbed a finger in
his face. His supervisor counseled him to tone down his "mannerisms."
Later that year, he was reprimanded for displaying a coffee mug with a profanity
on it.
An African
American female sergeant complained that he made racially insensitive remarks,
and that the LAPD punished her for objecting. The woman quoted Monsue as saying
that "the white man is at a disadvantage" because of affirmative
action. He denied it. In 2002, the city settled the case for $1.25 million.
Monsue
reached the rank of lieutenant, overseeing 45 detectives in the LAPD's Central
Division, a position he still holds.
Every few
years, he would be notified of a parole hearing for Lisker and given the
opportunity to submit a statement. In an odd way, this grinding of the
bureaucracy kept the two men connected, aware of each other.
One day in
2000, Lisker was searching his prison file when he came across a letter Monsue
had written to the parole board two years earlier.
In the
letter, Monsue said that a final nagging question about the case what
happened to the cash missing from Dorka Lisker's purse? had been resolved.
New owners of the house on Huston Street had discovered the money in an attic
above Bruce's old bedroom.
"This
revelation confirmed our initial theory that Mr. Lisker had in fact robbed his
mother," the detective wrote. "He has clearly demonstrated what he is
capable of and should never be released to prey on anyone else in the
future." [ DOCUMENT: Det. Monsue's Letter to Parole Board. ]
Lisker
thought there was something suspicious about Monsue's claim. He asked his
private investigator, Paul Ingels, to look into it.
Ingels
searched real estate records and located the owner Monsue had referred to. His
name was Morton P. Borenstein, and he was a lawyer.
Borenstein
told Ingels that he and his wife, Beatrice, had never found any money in the
attic. Nor, he said, had they ever discussed the issue with Monsue or anyone
else from the LAPD. At Ingels' request, Borenstein signed a sworn statement to
this effect. [DOCUMENT: Borenstein's Declaration (Page 2) ]
Lisker
believed he now had hard evidence that Monsue was dishonest. Energized, he and
his defense team pressed on.
A year
later, Lisker made what he considered a major breakthrough.
He had
always been curious about a phone call made from his parents' home around the
time of the murder. At 10:22 a.m., billing records showed, someone dialed a
number that neither Bruce nor his father could recognize.
Lisker was
reviewing his copy of the LAPD case file on a spring day in 2001 when he made a
connection. The mystery number was nearly identical to the number for Mike
Ryan's mother in Ventura County. Her number was in the file because Monsue had
called to interview her about her son in the early days of the investigation.
The two
seven-digit numbers were the same except for the final digit. The Ventura
County area code had not been dialed. Nevertheless, it appeared that someone
had tried to call Ryan's mother around the time of the murder.
"I
finally found it," Lisker wrote to one of his lawyers. "It just
fits."
Lisker spent
the next two years working on another legal appeal the longest of long shots.
In 2003, he filed a habeas corpus petition, contending that he was wrongfully
convicted. He included the new information about the phone call and Monsue's
letter. The petition is now before a federal magistrate.
Bruce also
filed a complaint against Monsue with the LAPD. He accused the detective of
lying to the parole board, failing to investigate Ryan's potential culpability
and soliciting perjured testimony from Hughes. [ DOCUMENT: Lisker's Complaint.
]
"I was
pretty sure they'd blow it off," he said.
Comparing
Footprints
Lisker's
complaint landed on the desk of Sgt. Jim Gavin, a barrel-chested Irishman with
a ruddy complexion and thinning reddish hair. He was skeptical at first. But he
was not the sort to ignore a complaint, even one from a prisoner.
During the
Rampart corruption scandal, when many officers' recollections were conveniently
hazy, Gavin came forward with information suggesting that a colleague was lying
about a shooting. As a peer mentor for the LAPD, he has taught leadership
skills to junior officers.
Gavin, 39,
read the transcript of Lisker's trial and listened to Monsue's taped interviews
with Bruce and with Ryan. He spent hours poring over documents compiled by
Lisker's defense team. He twice went to Mule Creek Prison to interview Lisker.
He was
troubled by Monsue's claim that the long-missing grocery money had been found
in the attic above Lisker's old bedroom. A homicide detective would be expected
to document such a development in writing. Gavin could find no evidence that
Monsue had done so.
Gavin
contacted Borenstein, who again said he could not remember finding any money in
the attic, much less contacting Monsue about it.
Gavin dug
deeper. He asked an LAPD criminalist to compare footprints from the crime scene
with the shoes Lisker wore that day.
No such
analysis had been done during the original investigation. At the trial,
Rabichow relied on Monsue's testimony that the bloody footprints
"resembled quite closely" the treads of Lisker's size-8 sport shoes.
Now, for the
first time, the prints would be subjected to expert analysis. Criminalist
Ronald J. Raquel peered through a magnifying glass at a police photo of one of
the footprints, found in a bathroom near the kitchen.
His
conclusion: It was definitely not made by Lisker's shoes. [ DOCUMENT: Raquel's
Report. ]
Gavin turned
his attention to Ryan. He tracked down several of Ryan's old friends from the
apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard. Gavin learned that Bruce had boasted to Ryan
that his parents were rich and that his father owned a stamp collection worth
more than $100,000.
One of the
friends was dying of AIDS. Gavin flew to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to interview
him. The man said that before Dorka's murder, some of Bruce's friends had
planned to rob the Liskers and had cased the home. Ingels, the private
investigator, told Gavin he had information that Ryan had been in that group.
Was it
possible an innocent man had been convicted? Gavin wondered. He was determined
to find out, but his superiors had other ideas, he said. Supportive at first,
they had grown impatient as his investigation dragged on into 2004.
His job was
to look into complaints of police misconduct, they said, not to reinvestigate
decades-old homicides. Gavin said he was told to limit his inquiry to Monsue's
letter and wrap it up quickly.
"I was
told to shut it down," he said. "I was told I was done."
Gavin
followed orders and turned in an abbreviated report. He wrote, but did not
submit, a longer report. The title page read: "The Case of Bruce Lisker:
Did a faulty investigation by an LAPD officer lead to Lisker's murder
conviction?"
Without
telling his superiors, Gavin also gave Ingels a copy of the criminalist's
report on the bloody footprint.
"He
told me that he was probably going to catch some heat for doing that,"
Ingels said. "But he said: 'I'm OK with that.' "
Claims
Dismissed
Last July,
Lisker found in his prison mail a letter on LAPD stationery. It was the
department's response to his complaint. An investigation had found no merit to
his allegation that Monsue lied to the parole board, wrote Capt. James A.
Rubert, the detective's immediate superior.
As for
Lisker's broader claims that Ryan was the real killer and that Hughes had
lied on the witness stand those had already been addressed by the courts,
Rubert wrote. No further investigation was warranted.
Lisker said
he was disappointed but not surprised. Ingels, a former Pomona policeman, was
furious. He called Gavin, who told him that he had been ordered to stop
investigating. Ingels wrote Police Chief William J. Bratton, accusing Gavin's
bosses of a cover-up.
In response,
the department launched a fresh investigation into Monsue's conduct and that of
Gavin's superiors.
Gavin is
also under investigation for revealing confidential information about the
case. In February, he was transferred from Internal Affairs to the department's
training facility in Sylmar.