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.
The evidence
Gavin collected was turned over to a detective in the LAPD's cold-case unit,
who conducted a quick review and concluded that Lisker was guilty.
The review
turned up a previously overlooked piece of evidence: an old autopsy photo
showing a bruise on Dorka Lisker's head. It bore a wavy pattern that looked
like a shoe print. LAPD officials said a preliminary examination linked the
print to Bruce's shoes, suggesting that he had stomped on his mother's head.
In March,
Times reporters asked whether police had compared the bruise to the mystery
footprint found in the bathroom. They had not. Deputy Chief Gary Brennan said
LAPD experts would perform such an analysis.
But Brennan
said he had no doubt that Lisker was the killer.
"An
innocent man is not in prison," he said.
Fed Up With
Questions
Monsue says
he has a "fundamental rule" as an investigator: "Keep it simple,
stupid." Lisker was the obvious suspect, the detective said in an
interview, and he remains convinced of his guilt.
Monsue
denied lying to the parole board about the discovery of the missing grocery
money. He said it was his practice to document such developments in writing. He
could not explain why no report could be found, he said.
With visible
indignation, he insisted that the issue had no bearing on Lisker's guilt or
innocence.
"It's
mildly interesting to me that they are calling me a liar, OK? What does it
prove?" Monsue said. "We've got a lying, cheating, murdering son of a
bitch in prison that's making these allegations ... and you're sitting here
questioning my credibility.... That upsets me."
As for Ryan,
Monsue said he had trouble believing that the teenager would have killed
someone over $150. More important, he said, he had no evidence placing Ryan at
the crime scene.
Monsue said
he was unaware of the phone call made from the Lisker home around the time of
the murder. He said it did not necessarily implicate Ryan. He suggested that
Lisker may have tried to call Ryan's mother and accidentally misdialed.
"You've
got to keep it simple, stupid," Monsue said. "Usually, people are killed
by people close to them."
He said the
criminalist's finding that the bloody footprint in the bathroom was not
Lisker's stirred his curiosity, "but I would not draw any conclusions ...
until I did some work on it."
Monsue said
he was fed up with answering questions about his investigation.
"I've
got nothing to lose now. I've got my 30 years on, OK?.... My pension is in the
bank. But I'm getting very tired of trying to explain this over and over and
over and over."
A Stunning
Discovery
The missing
grocery money has been a recurring issue in People vs. Lisker. At the trial,
Rabichow told jurors it was not in Dorka's purse, indicating that Bruce stole
it.
Mulcahy said
the failure to find the money was a glaring weakness in the prosecution's case.
If Lisker took the money, where was it? he asked.
Years later,
Monsue told the parole board it had turned up in the attic.
The Times
learned recently that the money may have been in Dorka Lisker's purse all
along.
Three weeks
after Bruce was convicted in 1985, a court clerk named B.J. Wilson conducted a
thorough search of the purse before putting it in storage along with other
evidence.
Wilson
snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and dug through the black patent-leather
handbag. She'd pull something out, then write it down.
"If
there's a toothpick, I write 'toothpick,' " Wilson, now retired, said in
an interview. "If there's a piece of gum. I write 'gum.' "
And so she
did.
"3
emery boards, granola bar, 2 pencils, plastic bag ... ," reads her
three-page handwritten list, which The Times found on microfilm in a court
archive in downtown Los Angeles. "Red & orange magnifying glass,
cookies in plastic wrap, Kleenexes ..."
Wilson
placed an asterisk beside the last entry:
"Also
found in brn wallet compartment: 5 $20.00 bills -- 1 ten-dollar bill, 1
five-dollar bill & 5 one-dollar bills. Total $120.00." [ DOCUMENT:
Wilson's Exhibit Information Report. ]
Told of the
discovery, Rabichow said he was stunned.
"It was
my habit to look through the exhibits personally. I never introduced something
without looking through it, because you never know," he said. "Quite
honestly, I'm a little bit upset with myself."
Visiting the
Scene
When he
retired from the district attorney's office in 2003, Rabichow didn't look back.
He worked on his tennis game and wore himself out trying to keep up with his
young daughter.
Rarely did
he think of the hundreds of people he'd put behind bars during his 30 years as
a prosecutor.
That all
changed one afternoon last November, when he met with two Times reporters at a
Carrows restaurant in Reseda to discuss the murder of Dorka Lisker.
Near the end
of a three-hour meeting, Rabichow slipped on reading glasses and scrutinized a
document one of the reporters had slid across the table. It was the
criminalist's report on the mystery footprint.
Rabichow was
speechless.
He flipped
through a transcript of his closing argument to the jury, also provided by the
reporters, and was reminded of what he had told jurors back in 1985: that
Lisker's footprints, and no one else's, were in the blood.
He reread
the LAPD report.
"I
don't know what to make of this," he said. "If I had known about it,
it's certainly something I would have had to explain."
He said the
finding was "clearly exculpatory evidence."
Asked who
came to mind as a potential source of the footprint, Rabichow replied without
hesitation: "Ryan."
Rabichow
left the restaurant feeling uneasy about a case he had thought he knew from every
angle. In the weeks and months that followed, he plowed through hundreds of
pages of trial testimony, police reports and other documents.
Steadily,
his misgivings grew.
He was
unsettled by the phone call placed from the Lisker home around the time of the
attack. Rabichow said he had "no doubt" that whoever dialed the
number was trying to call Ryan's mother or to act as if he was.
"It's
very troubling," he said.
Rabichow
said he now wished that Mulcahy, Lisker's defense lawyer, had been allowed to
present evidence about Ryan at trial.
"It's
never been my contention that [Ryan] wasn't the kind of person to do
this," Rabichow said. "He is the kind of person who would do this. I
wouldn't put it past him."
Still,
Rabichow remained convinced that Bruce could not have seen his mother's body
through the dining room window. A dining set and a foot-high stone planter at
the edge of the entry hall would have stood in the way. That meant Lisker had
lied about what prompted him to enter the house and could not be believed about
anything else.
Yet Rabichow
couldn't be sure about this unless he looked through the window himself. Years
earlier, he had gone to trial without visiting the crime scene, relying on
Monsue's investigation.
Times reporters
had visited the old Lisker residence twice and had arranged with the current
owner to go back again. They asked Rabichow to join them this time, and he
agreed. So on a rainy afternoon in March, he drove to Huston Street and set
foot in the house for the first time.
Using police
photos and measurements, reporters replicated the position of Dorka Lisker's
body. The planter was no longer there, so the reporters built a wooden
facsimile of
the same dimensions. They also brought an 4-by-8-foot rug to stand in for the
one that lay there 22 years earlier.
When
Rabichow agreed that the rug and the planter were in the same positions as on
the day of the murder, a reporter lay down in the spot where Dorka Lisker's
body was found.
Rabichow
walked outside and stood in front of the dining room window through which Bruce
Lisker claimed to have seen his mother. Rabichow acknowledged that he could see
the reporter's head from several vantage points. The dining set and planter
were not the obstacles he thought they would be. He could see over them.
He sighed
deeply and stood silent for a moment. He said he wished he had conducted such
an experiment before the trial.
"I
should have come out here," Rabichow said. "This is not what I
thought it would be."
'A
Bombshell'
Ronald
Raquel, the LAPD criminalist, had some unfinished business to attend to last
month. He had been asked to analyze the footprint on Dorka Lisker's head.
LAPD
officials were all but certain Bruce Lisker had made the mark in the course of
killing his mother. It seemed to eliminate any doubt about his guilt.
Now, Raquel
examined the autopsy photo and compared the purplish bruise with the wavy
pattern on the soles of Bruce's shoes.
They did not
match.
Raquel then
compared the bruise to the bloody shoe print found in the bathroom of the
Lisker home the one he had previously determined was not from Bruce Lisker's
shoes.
They looked
the same. The mystery footprint, Raquel wrote in his report, was "similar
in size and dimension" to the impression on Dorka's head.
LAPD
officials, acknowledging that the finding clashes with the case presented at
Lisker's trial, forwarded Raquel's report to the district attorney's office.
For
Rabichow, the new information was devastating. "A bombshell," he
called it.
Even after
visiting the house, he had resisted the idea that Lisker may have been wrongly
convicted. He wrestled with doubts but still insisted that the totality of the
evidence supported a guilty verdict.
He is not
insisting anymore.
"The
bottom line is I now have reasonable doubt," he said, adding that he
welcomed further scrutiny of the case. "The truth is the truth and I
want the truth to come out."
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on washingtonpost.com on May 26, 2005:
The
Plots Thicken
At the
Michael Jackson Trial, a Confusion of Conspiracies
by Tamara
Jones
The witness
wore deep purple, with her blond hair trailing neatly down her back in a French
braid. Her voice was measured, precise. She rattled off her many degrees,
starting with the biochemistry major at UCLA. She glanced at the photograph
being entered into evidence. Yes, that was her lab. The defense attorney, an
ex-boxer in a business suit, homed in: How many escape routes were there? The
witness ticked them off. Five. At least five doors. And on the rainy night of
Feb. 24, 2003, exactly what was she doing?
Jean Louise
Seamount, it turned out, was doing what orthodontists usually do. Examining
teeth. And just how a dentist in a faux-Danish village in central California
found herself tangled in the web of a complicated conspiracy theory is part of
the jillion-piece jigsaw puzzle jurors in the criminal trial of Michael Jackson
will have to put together as soon as final arguments conclude, possibly this
week. Although the key question at hand is whether the pop star molested a
13-year-old boy, much of the three-month trial has focused on the companion
charge that Jackson conspired to hold the accuser, now 15, his mother and two
siblings captive at his Neverland Ranch.
Taking
copious notes, the jurors in Santa Maria have gone on a whirlwind mental tour
at times as exotic as one-way tickets to Brazil and as banal as a car ride to
the dentist. They have heard of secret meetings on sea cliffs and chance
encounters at Fatburger. Cameo roles have been played by Jay Leno, Tinker Bell,
Hitler and an elephant with a possible doughnut dependency.
Conspiracy
charges are so common in American courtrooms that they're known in legal
circles as "the darlings of the prosecution," useful for sending
terrorists, mobsters, drug dealers and white-collar criminals away for decades.
All it takes
is evidence that two or more people had a plan to commit a crime and took even
one step to move that plan along, says Martin Pinales, a Cincinnati attorney
and vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
"You and I can talk about robbing a bank, and that's not a crime,"
Pinales says, "but if you then go to look at the bank, get a sense of its
layout, then that moves it forward and we both can be charged with
conspiracy."
Former
federal drug agent Michael Levine, now an expert witness and trial consultant,
says that 40 years in courtrooms have convinced him that conspiracy is
"the easiest thing in the world to prove. Any prosecutor can indict a ham
sandwich for conspiracy.
"I've
probably put 5,000 people in jail. A good 75 percent of them went away on
conspiracy charges."
In People of
the State of California v. Michael Joe Jackson , though, the single count of
conspiracy has been anything but routine. Even the stage set is uniquely
Californian, swapping out the stereotype conspiracy backdrops of clam houses,
landfills and parking garages for day spas, guest cottages and Banana Republic
outlets.
"This
case is all about conspiracy," says Laurie Levenson, a Loyola University
law professor who has frequently observed the Jackson trial from the spectator
rows. The crux of Jackson's 50-witness defense is that his accusers in fact
conspired against him, fabricating the boy's account of abuse and their
captivity in an attempt to extort money from Jackson, who reportedly paid $20
million in 1993 to the family of another child who claimed he was molested by
the singer. "Which conspiracy you believe in this case really depends on
which witnesses you believe," Levenson says.
Starring in
the prosecution's lineup of more than 80 witnesses was the alleged victim's
mother, a 36-year-old divorcee who told jurors that her family had become
frequent guests of Jackson after her cancer-stricken son had expressed a wish
to meet the superstar. But the two-year friendship spiraled into a paranoid
nightmare in February and March of 2003, the woman claimed, and Jackson minions
began spiriting the family around at odd hours, warning vaguely of
"killers" out to get them and restricting them to Jackson's ranch.
By her
account, Neverland suddenly became Neverleave.
The
nefarious plot unfolded, the mother testified, in the wake of a television
documentary in which Jackson admitted sharing his bed with children -- an act
of love but not sexual intimacy, he insists. In that program, the woman's son,
then 13, appeared at Jackson's side, holding the singer's hand and nuzzling his
shoulder. The broadcast triggered police scrutiny and a storm of public
criticism.
Jackson,
once the world's best-selling recording artist, was in financial straits, the
prosecution suggested, producing an accountant who calculated that he was
millions of dollars in debt and faced possible bankruptcy. The beleaguered
singer began producing a rebuttal video, which would be sold to Fox for several
million dollars. The mother told jurors that she and her children were
pressured to appear in the rebuttal and lavish scripted praise on Jackson.
Wherever they went, she said, the family members were followed by a
"positive PR crew" filming their every move. She expected them all to
be abducted by hot-air balloon. Where they might land, she didn't speculate.
Concerned by
Jackson's statements in the documentary, social workers from Los Angeles County
tracked the family down. The mother invited them to Neverland. They insisted on
meeting elsewhere. During the interview, mother and children described Jackson
as a beloved father figure and insisted that nothing improper had ever
happened. No one said anything about being held hostage, the social workers
testified. The meeting took place Feb. 20, 2003. The social workers left; the
family returned to the ranch.
Jackson
began molesting the boy beginning on or after Feb. 21, the indictment alleges.
More than a month later, the family happened to run into the same social
workers going to lunch at a Fatburger in Los Angeles. They chatted, the social
workers testified, and once again the mother gave no indication that anything
was amiss.
As proof of
the alleged conspiracy by Jackson to hold the teen captive, District Attorney
Tom Sneddon produced a security log from the gates of Neverland, noting a
handwritten entry one day relaying instructions from property manager Joe Marcus
that the boy and his brother were "not to leave the property.
"But
leave they did, by chauffeured Neverland limo in the wee hours of a March
morning. Once home in East Los Angeles, the woman became convinced that
Neverland operatives were watching her every move.
She was
right.
Jackson's
attorney at the time, Mark Geragos, admitted under oath that he had grown
suspicious of the family and had hired a private investigator to tell him
"where they are, what they're doing and who they're meeting with."
The alleged
conspiracy had just spawned a counter-conspiracy.
That
scenario, outlined by the defense team over the past three weeks, portrays
Jackson not as manipulator but manipulated, not as predator but as the victim
of a family of grifters so intent on a celebrity "shakedown" that the
children were given acting lessons to prepare for their roles.
"My
concern was they were going to meet with a lawyer or sell a story to the
tabloids," Geragos said, noting that the mother did in fact contact the
attorney who negotiated the 1993 settlement against a purported victim of
molestation. He declined to pursue the case.
Testifying
for the defense, the property manager offered various explanations about his
directive in the security log, saying initially that it was because the accuser
and his younger brother had been joyriding in Jackson's vehicles without
permission and he didn't want guards to blithely wave them through the gates,
not realizing a couple of adolescents were behind the tinted windows. Marcus
said another possibility was that the boys' mother wasn't at Neverland that
day, and no young guests are allowed off the grounds without adult supervision.
Defense
lawyer Thomas Mesereau Jr. chiseled away at the accusers' credibility and
character:
If her
family were being held against its will at Neverland, then why didn't the
mother summon help at the spa where she had ranch employees take her for $125
in waxing services? And why did she claim under oath that it was "not a
body wax! Just a leg wax!" even though the waxer testified to the contrary
and produced an invoice listing lip, brow, face and bikini line services, as
well?
Couldn't she
also have appealed to orthodontist Seamount or her dental assistant, Tiffany,
after being dropped off by a Neverland driver at an appointment to have the
boys' braces removed, a $750 after-hours procedure that Jackson ended up paying
for? And what about her distraught testimony about being a virtual prisoner of
her well-appointed guest cottage (Unit 4, also a favorite of Marlon Brando's),
unable even to determine what time it was?
Playing a
19-minute video tour of Neverland for jurors, the defense pointed out at least
22 clocks on the grounds, including two in Unit 4 and a gigantic working
topiary clockface on the gentle hill where Jackson's mansion perches.
The camera
also lingered on Jackson's million-volume library, where evil and ludicrous
collide, a history of Hitler's SS sharing shelf space with a collection of
Three Stooges scripts. A quick glimpse of Jackson's private zoo showed
giraffes, alpacas and an elephant -- the same doughnut-munching one Elizabeth
Taylor gave her friend Jackson? With the ailing Taylor scratched from the
defense witness list, there was no way the jurors would ever know.
There were
other things they would be left to wonder about, too, dangling bits of
testimony about characters they would never meet and subplots that were never
resolved. ("Do you know a man who goes by the name Johnny in the
Sky?" one puzzled witness was asked.) Those who took the stand cannot fill
in the blanks outside the courtroom. Even the dentist, in this place of rich
irony, is under a gag order.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on latimes.com on May 26, 2005:
After
Final Swipe at Accuser's Family, Jackson Defense Rests
Comedian
Chris Tucker is the last celebrity witness called to rebut molestation charges.
By Steve
Chawkins and Stuart Pfeifer
Times Staff
Writers
SANTA MARIA,
Calif. Michael Jackson's attorneys on Wednesday wrapped up a child-molestation
defense that was peppered with sometimes amusing appearances from friendly
celebrities, but driven by a relentless assault on the pop star's teenage
accuser and his family.
Witnesses
portrayed the mother as a shark who faked her alleged imprisonment at Jackson's
Neverland ranch in order to bilk him with a lawsuit, and her two sons as
wine-swilling hooligans trained to tell a carefully scripted tale of abuse.
The
defense's final witness, comic Chris Tucker, testified Wednesday in Santa Barbara
County Superior Court that the mother was so bizarrely effusive toward him that
she seemed "possessed." Alarmed about the family's relationship with
Jackson, his friend, Tucker told him, "Mike, something ain't right."
By focusing
on the boy's mother, whose name The Times is withholding to protect her son's
identity, the defense drew attention from the charges that Jackson had molested
her son four times and got him drunk in order to seduce him.
"They
were seeking to discredit the mother and make everyone forget about the alleged
molestation that's at the core of the case," said Jean Rosenbluth, a
former prosecutor who teaches law at USC.
The strategy
also allowed defense attorneys to streamline their presentation, putting on 50
witnesses in three weeks, compared with the prosecution's 85 witnesses over
nine weeks. As the trial winds down, speed is important, experts said.
"I
think this jury looks tired," said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola
Law School. "Unless you have something new and important to tell them,
they may end up holding it against you."
The defense
also exploited the mother's confused behavior on the stand as a prosecution
witness. At one point, a defense witness was asked whether one action of the
mother was "normal."
"For
her, it was," the witness replied sardonically. Many in the courtroom
including several jurors snickered.
Jackson is
accused of molesting the 13-year-old recovering cancer patient at Neverland in
2003, plying him with alcohol and conspiring to hold his family against their
will so they would take part in a video tribute to refute a British TV
documentary, in which Jackson divulged his fondness for nonsexual sleepovers
with young boys. Prosecutors say Jackson molested the boy four times in the
weeks after the damaging broadcast.
The
46-year-old singer also has been charged with attempted molestation.
After a
rebuttal by the prosecution and closing arguments, the case is expected to go
to the eight-woman, four-man jury sometime next week. If convicted of all
charges, Jackson could face more than 20 years in prison.
Jackson's
lawyers kicked off their case with two witnesses who many legal analysts said
did more harm than good choreographer Wade Robson and unemployed roulette
dealer Brett Barnes. Both young men were close friends of Jackson as children.
They
testified that Jackson never touched them inappropriately, contradicting
prosecution witnesses who suggested that Jackson had sexual relationships with
them.
Under sharp
cross-examination, Barnes conceded he and Jackson slept together night after
night while he accompanied the singer on tours through South America and Europe
in the early 1990s.
And although
Barnes insisted there was nothing sexual about the sleepovers, prosecutors were
able to underscore once again that Jackson enjoyed sharing his bed with
children.
If those
admissions hurt the defense case, Jackson's lawyers swiftly shifted the jury's
attention to a string of witnesses who skewered the accuser and his mother.
At least
three witnesses, including Jackson's cousin, said the boy and his younger
brother the only eyewitness to two of the alleged molestations would raid
Neverland's wine cellar and browse pornography without any help from Jackson. Prosecutors
said the pop star used the alcohol and adult magazines to groom the boy for
abuse.
According to
the boys' mother, Jackson's staff members bullied her into staying at the Santa
Ynez Valley ranch in 2003, drilling her 10 times daily on the glowing
statements she was to make on the star's "rebuttal video."
But several
defense witnesses from nearby communities testified the family freely went on
jaunts to town for beauty and dental treatments. A Solvang orthodontist
testified that the mother, during a visit to remove her sons' braces, never
alerted her that she was being held captive, never asked to use a phone, and
didn't try slipping out a back door while a driver from Neverland waited in the
lobby.
Similarly,
the former owner of a Los Olivos health spa said the mother expressed no fears
while getting a leg-waxing and other treatments at Jackson's expense.
The mother's
credibility took further hits from a paralegal who helped the woman
successfully sue J.C. Penney Co. for alleged abuse during a 1998 shoplifting
arrest. The bruised woman confided that she had been beaten not by security
guards but by her ex-husband, Mary Holzer testified.
Holzer said
the woman threatened to have her brother-in-law, a gang member, kill her unless
she kept quiet.
Before the
trial started, jurors were read a star-studded list of more than 400 potential
defense witnesses, including Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder,
Deepak Chopra and other luminaries who would stand up for Jackson. Most weren't
called, but those who appeared served a dual purpose: They disputed prosecution
testimony and also conveyed the image of Jackson as a show-business legend with
many talented, widely admired friends.
The biggest
celebrity to appear was "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno, but he turned
out to be something of a dud for defense lawyers.
Leno said
Jackson's accuser left several phone messages saying he was a big fan and
asking for a return call. But the boy never asked him for money, derailing the
defense contention that the family aimed to shake down Leno before turning to
Jackson.
On
Wednesday, however, Chris Tucker offered testimony suggesting that he was being
set up by the family before they attached themselves to Jackson.
Torn between
sympathy for the ailing boy he met at a benefit and concern about the family's
motives, Tucker gave them $1,500, flew them to a Raiders football game in
Oakland, and allowed them to attend his brother's wedding to which, he said,
"they kind of invited themselves."
He described
Jackson's accuser as "smart and cunning," and said the boy's brother
was not to be trusted.
"I
almost had to check his pockets before he left the house," Tucker
testified.
But it was
the mother who triggered Tucker's most serious worries. He testified that he
was put off by her lavish praise for him and his fiancee, Azja Pryor. When he
told the mother he would help the family out by giving her his used truck, he
testified that "she started frantically crying and her eyes were red. She was
shaking like she was possessed."
When Santa
Barbara County Dist. Atty. Tom Sneddon suggested she was simply grateful,
Tucker insisted she had serious emotional problems.
"I meet
a lot of people," he told the prosecutor, "and I know the difference."
Pryor, a
Hollywood casting assistant, testified that the mother, whom she got to know
through Tucker, had expressed eagerness to take part in the rebuttal video and
sounded well when she called from the shoot. Pryor also said the mother invited
her to tag along with Jackson and her family on a holiday trip to Carnaval in
Brazil.
The mother
had testified that the Brazil trip, which never happened, was part of Jackson's
plan to have her and her children disappear.
Former child
actor Macaulay Culkin also played a leading role for the defense.
Culkin, too,
rejected prosecution claims that Jackson had molested him perhaps in his
sleep, prosecutor Ron Zonen suggested either at Neverland or during their
trips abroad. The actor testified that life at Neverland was such intense,
nonstop fun that he would flop for the night wherever he happened to get tired,
whether it was on the floor of the video arcade or in Jackson's bed.
At 24,
Culkin still has the hangdog look and easy manner of the boy he was when he
starred in the movie "Home Alone." Those familiar qualities may have
helped him connect with the jury, according to many observers.
Perhaps even
more important, Culkin gave jurors some sympathetic insights into Jackson. He
said that despite their age difference, the two became close friends because
each knew what it was like to have his childhood cut short by show business.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on calendarlive.com on May 24, 2005:
Splendor
in the court
Two designers
work long hours creating the clothes Michael Jackson wears at his trial.
By Booth
Moore, Times Staff Writer
They are the
men behind the Man in the Mirror. For nearly 20 years, L.A.-based costume
designers Michael Bush and Dennis Tompkins have quietly designed most of
Michael Jackson's personal and concert tour wardrobes, tens of thousands of
pieces.
They created
the war-torn black shirt and pants he wore in the "Man in the Mirror"
video and the rhinestone-encrusted American flag jacket he wore during a
Washington, D.C., concert to support the victims of Sept. 11. And, since
February, they have been outfitting Jackson for what could be his most
important performance yet in a Santa Maria courtroom.
Each day,
Bush wakes at 3 a.m. to drive the day's outfit typically a colorful print
vest and a suit with military details from his home studio in Los Feliz up
the 101 Freeway to Neverland Ranch. There, between 6 and 7 a.m., he dresses
Jackson, who always says "Thank you" and gives him a hug, Bush says.
The designer returns by midafternoon, in time to help Tompkins put the
finishing touches on the next day's look. Tompkins makes most of Jackson's costumes with a single fitting. The
pair create his courtroom wardrobe using the "Michael mannequin,"
built to the singer's exact dimensions.
Perhaps what
they are most proud of is that Jackson has never worn the same thing twice.
"We
have two or three tailors around town making jackets because can't make them
fast enough," Bush says, sitting in his workroom next to a pair of
Jackson's crystal-covered ankle boots.
They try to
get to sleep by 9 p.m., but sometimes they're up till 11. "And we
photograph everything. That, we learned out of fear because we would make
something for Michael and he would call us later to ask for a double.
Maybe an
outfit goes to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland or Madame Tussaud's
in London, and he wants one to keep for himself."
Jackson, who
is facing charges of child molestation, has been criticized in this paper and
elsewhere for his flamboyant courtroom attire reactions the designers say are
unfair. "If anybody else wore it, there wouldn't be any comment,"
says the silver-haired Tompkins.
"The
other day on TV, Bruce Willis had on a bright orange suit. Robin Williams wears
suits with threads hanging off them and red ties. But nobody comments because
of who they are. If Michael Jackson showed up at court in a funeral suit, an
Armani, people would wonder what he is hiding."
And the pajamas?
"He was in the hospital that day. And what does everyone wear in the
hospital? Pajamas," says Bush. "I understand the judicial pinstripe
mentality," he goes on. "But that is a part of life Michael has never
experienced. So we had to figure out how he could still be Michael Jackson and
fit into that mold."
They began
this latest wardrobe project as they had the others with research. "We
buy every magazine in the world men's, women's, children's, interior design,
anything with visual images," Bush says. "Then we all sit
spread-eagle on the floor looking for ideas. Dennis gets out his sketchpad and
pencil and starts sketching. It's collaborative. [Jackson] is very open to suggestions."
The pop
star's directive is always a demanding one: "This is what the world's
wearing; top it."
"We
started with the white suit, and everyone went crazy," Bush says,
referring to the outfit Jackson wore on the first day of his trial. "So we
went to dark suits, the navy blues, the blacks, the gray pinstripes, then we
put the red double-breasted blazer on him well, the world stopped.
The red coat
got half a page in all the papers."
The vests
that have become conversation pieces during the trial are made from silk from
India, jacquards from Europe and faux reptile fabric from
downtown L.A. Some
have rhinestones down the front, others brass buttons.
Jackson
loves military details, Bush says. "Uniforms demand attention. They have
clean lines, and they fit almost like dance clothes. They are like a second
skin."
Jackson is a
frequent customer of British Collectibles Ltd., a shop in Santa Monica.
"With all the fine enamel work, British medals are almost like
jewelry," says Tompkins. So over the years, the designers too have amassed
a large collection of uniforms, helmets and books on military regalia all in
the name of research.
Rather than
a political statement, the armbands made from gold wire ribbon and sewn onto
the right sleeves of Jackson's jackets are meant to act as a visual pull, Bush
says.
"Showtime"
is a word that the designing duo uses often. "When we get together with
Michael, it's showtime," Bush says, with a glint in his eyes. Apparently
some of their ideas are too over the top, even for Jackson. "He's pulling
back and saying 'No, no, no,' and we're going, 'Yes, yes, yes.' And then I get
to Carpinteria in the morning and wonder
if it's too
much. We are used to making dance clothes," Bush says with a grin.
Tompkins
points to a baby blue brocade vest that's in the running for a courtroom
outfit. "Sometimes I look at things we do and I think that I would wear
them," he says. "But we can't afford our clothes." Rather than
keeping the designers on retainer, Jackson pays for items individually.
And Bush and
Tompkins do have other clients.
A former ice
dancer, Tompkins started his career in Hollywood as a cutter and fitter working
in the costume department at ABC on shows such as "General Hospital."
During the summer of 1985, while on hiatus from the network, he got a call to
work on "Captain EO," the science fiction short directed by Francis
Ford Coppola and produced by George Lucas. "I didn't want to do it, but
Michael [Bush] said it was a great opportunity."
John Napier
was the designer on the project, but Tompkins was the mechanic who turned his
sketches into three-dimensional garments. During the filming at Laird
International Studio in Culver City, Jackson took note of Tompkins' talent,
especially for making pants cut for dancers. "When he tried them, he said,
'I can dance in these; I can move in these!'"
Tompkins
remembers. It was the beginning of a long relationship.
Bush, who
grew up in Ohio and worked in Las Vegas as a bartender and blackjack dealer
before moving to L.A. in the 1980s, joined the "Captain EO"
production soon after Tompkins. "When I first told my mom I got the job,
she asked me who Michael Jackson was."
After
"Captain EO" wrapped, the pair began building costumes for Jackson's
music videos. "It turned into a weekly job, a daily job and an hourly job.
Then there were about five or 10 years when we exclusively touched Michael. We
lost all our other clients," Bush says.
The chrome
robot outfit Jackson wore during the 1996 HIStory World Tour was a challenge.
"We made a cast for the chest that breaks away onstage to reveal his dance
clothes underneath," Tompkins said. For the 1992 Dangerous World Tour,
they crafted 18-karat gold leg pieces.
Though
Jackson's clothes appear extravagant, price is an issue, Bush says. "He's a businessman. A lot of people
assume money means nothing to him, but that's not true." Over the years,
the designers have used wool, silk, canvas, ripstop nylon, silver, gold,
British regalia, police badges, even car parts from the Pomona Swap Meet. They
made a jacket with closures crafted from V-8 hood ornaments and another
festooned with badges from European race car clubs. "He kept us so busy
that every time we touched
something, we wondered if we needed it, if it could be turned into
something," Bush says.
Jackson once
called in the middle of the night with a question: "What's the one thing
that every man, woman and child in the world knows?" Bush says he asked.
Mickey Mouse was the first thing that came to Bush's mind. But eating utensils
were what Jackson was thinking. "He said, 'How are you going to make that
into clothing for me?' "
The result
was a jacket with knives, forks and spoons hanging from the front like fringe.
"Michael calls it his dinner jacket," Bush says.
"That's
the humor, the human side that no one knows."
As the pair
bring out Jackson's tour books for show-and-tell, ticking off his likes
(corduroy) and dislikes (being touched too much), they lament being known only
for working with the music legend.
"We
will go into a job interview and they'll say, 'We don't need military clothes,'
" Bush says. "But we can do so much more."
They have
designed costumes for Britney Spears, including the red jumpsuit with a
sprayed-on look that she donned in the "Oops I Did It Again"
video. ("She had to use a whole
can of baby powder to get into it," Tompkins recalls.) They created the
leather evening gown that Denzel Washington's wife, Pauletta, wore to the
Golden Globes in 2001. They also made a coat out of fish skin for Elizabeth
Taylor to wear to her 60th birthday party at Disneyland.
And in the
corner of their studio is a crystal-covered gown that debuted on a model at a
charity fashion show earlier this month. "It's about 17 pounds. We sewed
each crystal on one by one with fishing line," Bush says. "That's
[also] the kind of detail Michael demands."
Even as the
designers ponder a future that may not include the King of Pop (they have
launched a line of vests similar to Jackson's under the name Vested Interest),
they can't stop talking about him.
"Nowadays
there's not much of a demand for costumes because things in movies and TV are
store-bought," Bush says. "That's why we have been so gifted with
Michael. Because it is always showtime."
* * * * *