Gone at Midnight, page 26
SHOCKING NEW ANALYSIS
Dr. John Hiserodt is the owner and director of Path Lab Services, a Garden Grove-based medical reference lab that receives and processes blood tests ordered by clients, most of whom are doctors. The results of such blood tests dictate about 80 percent of the doctors’ subsequent decision-making. So accuracy is the lifeblood of Hiserodt’s professional reputation and business.
Dr. Hiserodt is a board-certified pathologist and physician, a forensic pathologist by training. He was formerly a deputy coroner in Pittsburgh, then provided medical consulting training and conducted autopsies in the private sector as an independent contractor. Between his work with the coroner’s office in Pittsburgh and his time doing independent autopsy work in California, Dr. Hiserodt estimates he has worked over 5,000 cases in his career.
He graciously agreed to an on-camera interview about the case, with which he was familiar.
Right off the bat, Hiserodt questioned the cause of death. The LAPD coroner’s department concluded that Elisa drowned. But how did they deduce that?
“In a drowning case,” Hiserodt said, “most victims have voluminous fluid in their lungs. They aspirate the water, they breathe the water, and that’s how you die; the lungs are heavy, they’re boggy, and full of water. In the Elisa Lam case, there was no water in the lungs.
“It’s a bit unusual,” he continued, “but in about 15 percent of cases, there are dry drownings, in which the person begins to aspirate the water, but the larynx spasms and closes tightly—and when that happens, no water can get [in], nothing can get in. It’s not really a drowning, it’s asphyxial death. It’s not literally drowning because there’s no water.”
So Elisa’s death was a dry drowning? I wondered.
“But in most cases of either wet or dry drownings, the person swallows the water, they’re doing everything they can to get air and so the stomach usually has a lot of water in it. In this case, there was no water in the stomach either. No water in lungs, no water in stomach.”
Jared and I looked at each other in disbelief.
“There are additional soft findings that are commonly present,” Hiserodt continued, “that can also help. One is the presence of hemorrhage in the middle ear, in the mastoid air cells. The mastoid bones are the two bones that come down behind the ears; when you look at the mastoid air cells in a drowning case, there’s usually hemorrhage present. In this case, neither the middle ear—the pitrust temple bone—nor the mastoid bones were examined. I don’t know why they were not examined, but they weren’t.”
Finally, he said, there’s another finding that can help determine drowning and that’s the sphenoid sinuses.
“In drownings,” Hiserodt explained, “the pressure of trying to breathe in water usually means you will find water in the intricate cavities behind the nose. You can dissect them and find the fluid. That wasn’t looked at either.”
In the absence of the two primary indicators of drowning, water in the lungs or stomach, you would have expected these additional factors to be looked at, Hiserodt said.
Sensing we were shocked, Hiserodt paused and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not really a drowning until you see some objective evidence supporting that conclusion.”
“How could they have concluded it was a drowning with no evidence for it?” I asked.
Hiserodt seemed reluctant to be too vicious in his critique or to promote any conspiratorial motives to the coroner.
“It seems that basically because there was no evidence of traumatic injury and she was found in a water tank, and this was enough for him to conclude she drowned.”
Hiserodt wasn’t done. There were more anomalies. He noted the fact that Elisa was found floating face-up and said this, too, was problematic.
“Typically when a person drowns in a body of water, they are found face-down. They float up because of gases produced in the body which inflate it like an innertube. When you die underwater your body tends to go into a natural fetal position—your arms and legs go down and act as a rudder, or a keel, that turns your body downward. It is unusual in a body of quiet water—with no currents or interfering animals—for her to have been face-up.”
Dr. Hiserodt expressed concern over Elisa being naked in the tank with the clothes in there with her.
“Is it possible she took them off to have less weight as she floated there?” I asked.
“That is very unusual in drownings. You are under tremendous pharmacological stress from your catecholamines [hormones]. Your adrenal glands are just releasing norepinephrine, you’re struggling like crazy, you’re panicking to get that breath of air. You’re not stopping to unbutton your blouse or take your sandals off at that moment in time—you’re trying to get out of the tank.”
On the issue of Elisa struggling in the water, there was more that didn’t make sense to him.
“In a drowning, the first phase is panic. You do everything and anything to grab hold of things, scratching objects around her [for example, the sides of the cistern]. It’s unusual that her fingernails were not damaged in any way.”
Jared asked him about the drugs in her system. There was no evidence of a date-rape drug, but they also didn’t test for any.
“Not all labs test for all drugs,” he replied, echoing Mr. Corral. “When an autopsy says no drugs were found it means ‘no drugs that they tested for were found.’ It doesn’t mean ‘no drugs are in the blood.’ It is not possible to conclude that she was not under the influence of certain drugs.”
“Based on the information available, what do you think the cause of death is?” I asked.
Hiserodt flipped through the documents, frustrated, then sat quietly for a few moments.
“Honestly, the possibility is higher that she would have been thrown in the tank,” he replied. “It’s true, no traumatic injuries were found . . . but there are other ways you can kill someone, quietly, and then dispose of the body in a tank of water and move on with your life.
“One that comes to mind is a simple pillow on the face,” he continued. “So if you have an individual with nefarious ideas about her who was able to get her alone in a room . . . it’s possible, even likely, that several days passed [before she was put in the water tank]. Possibly someone was stalking her, got her into a room, put a pillow over her face, caused an asphyxial death, put her in the tank and left.”
This would explain why there are no signs of drowning. Elisa was already dead when she was put into the water tank.
I sighed and ran my hands through my hair. I asked about the apparent rectal injury noted in the autopsy.
“Yeah, there appears to have been pooling of blood around the anus . . .” Hiserodt took a long pause. “That bothers me a little bit. We can’t know for sure, but this could be trauma from anal sex.”
“If they had conducted a rape kit, we might know the answer to this,” I said.
Hiserodt nodded.
His answers truly shocked me. Besides a small accumulation of fluid in her pleural cavities, there is literally zero forensic evidence that Elisa drowned. In fact, the evidence points to Elisa having deceased before entering the water tank, which completely eviscerates the police narrative.
The LAPD Coroner’s Department spokesman, Ed Winter, did not respond to my query about the independent analysis of the autopsy. I was particularly hoping to speak to Yulai Wang, the forensic pathologist and Chief Medical Examiner who signed off on the Lam autopsy. However, Wang may be too busy defending himself against a civil lawsuit in which he’s accused of falsifying an autopsy. The cause of death in this case was inexplicably changed from an accident to a homicide in the autopsy report.
As we assess the problematic aspects of the Lam autopsy and try to determine why Wang might have changed Elisa’s cause of death from “undetermined” to “accidental,” it’s important to keep in mind that he is literally being sued for allegedly falsifying an autopsy.
Wang did not reply to my phone calls. The press spokeswoman for the Coroner’s Department answered a couple of my basic questions about the division of the Coroner’s and Sheriff’s departments, but when I asked her about the rape kit, I heard nothing back.
BACKLOGGED
Sadly, the fact that the rape kit was not processed is not terribly surprising. The backlog of untested rape kits has been well documented in recent years, with a 2014 study putting the estimate at 400,000 nationwide. In a 2018 Los Angeles Times article entitled “The unconscionable backlog of unprocessed rape kits in California,” the Joyful Heart Foundation conservatively estimated that statewide, California has 13,000 unprocessed sexual-assault evidence kits.
There’s such a brutal irony in that DNA testing has such a high success rate and yet is so rarely used on the cases in which it would be best utilized: sexual assaults, which often leave behind a variety of biological evidence. The failure to process rape kits is certainly one factor in why under 5 percent of rapists ever see the inside of a prison cell for their crime. In fact, only 30 rapists out of a 1,000 ever even face trial. Only 70 more are even reported.
By the time the FBI developed its criminal forensic database in the mid-1990s, police departments around the country were already backlogged. The continued bottlenecking has a lot to do with money. Local law-enforcement agencies cover the cost of rape kits for victims. They run between $500 and $1,500. This ends up producing a triage system where police will usually only process kits in cases they think they can solve.
CHAPTER 20
Whoever Chases Monsters
AS I MENTIONED AT THE BEGINNING of this book, from February 3 to February 12, 2013—almost the exact timeframe of the first two weeks of the investigation of Elisa’s death—an unprecedented event transpired in Los Angeles. Former police officer and naval reservist Christopher Dorner waged “asymmetric and unconventional warfare” on the LAPD in retaliation for being fired nearly five years earlier.
Dorner posted an infamous eighteen-page “manifesto” to Facebook, in which he provided lurid details of LAPD corruption, racism, and criminal activity. The accusations painted a picture of a police department in which excessive force, institutional racism and sexism, and cover-ups are common. He claimed the South Bureau divisions had white officers who had joined the force “with the sole intent to victimize minorities . . .” He said that one of the officers caught on videotape beating Rodney King was not only still employed but had risen in the ranks to be a commanding officer.
There were officers, he said, who “will let you bleed out just so they can brag to other officers that they had a 187 [code for homicide] caper the other day and can’t wait to accrue the overtime in future court subpoenas.” Dorner recalled officers taking photos of dead bodies and playing a game with officers from other divisions in which they competed for who had “the most graphic dead body of the night.”
The manifesto also detailed Dorner’s militaristic strategy for how he planned to murder dozens of cops, which he described as “a necessary evil.” He referred to himself as a jihadist who did not fear death and who could not be stopped.
After Dorner shot and killed a newly engaged couple, authorities called his rampage “domestic terrorism.” They called on the press to stop tweeting because broadcasting their moves might hinder Dorner’s arrest.
By the time police cornered Dorner in a cabin in Big Bear, the manhunt was already one of the biggest headlines in national news. During the standoff, Dorner opened fire on two officers, killing one. What happened next depends on whether you want to believe the reports of the LAPD, who are adamant that a cabin fire started unintentionally due to military tear gas cartridges. Dorner, who was barricaded inside, reportedly shot himself before his body was incinerated.
The Dorner manhunt is highly relevant to the Lam case for two reasons: One, it used a tremendous amount of resources and almost assuredly distracted all LAPD personnel, diverting attention away from other cases, including Elisa’s; and two, Dorner’s manifesto corroborates—and is corroborated by—already existing information related to LAPD corruption.
The more I looked into past claims, the more connections I began to see with the anomalies presented in this case. An unsettling pattern emerged.
THE RAMPART SCANDAL
The Rampart area reported roughly 150 murders a year occurring within a densely packed neighborhood. The LAPD CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit that policed gang activity there operated almost as an occupying army. They viewed themselves as different kinds of cops who could bend the rules.
Their slogan was: “We intimidate those who intimidate others.” They awarded each other plaques for taking down a gang member, black for dead, red for injured.
The revelations of the Rampart scandal, which Matt Lait and Scott Glover of the Los Angeles Times began publishing in 1999, exposed nothing short of a crime syndicate operating within the ranks of the LAPD.
The whistleblower who blew the lid off was former officer Rafael Perez. Prosecutors charged him with stealing an eight-pound bag of cocaine from an evidence room.
Amid Perez’s cooperation with feds, he helped corroborate a number of cases showing police corruption. This included LAPD officers serving as private paid security and confidantes to Death Row Records. Specifically, off-duty cops took large payments from Shug Knight to conceal their activities. This fueled the conspiracy theory that LAPD officers were involved in both the Tupac and Biggie assassinations.
Perez and his lawyer negotiated a proffer agreement, what’s sometimes known as a “Queen for a day” immunity deal: Perez would sing like a bird and in exchange the government would agree not to prosecute him.
Perez had a guilty conscience. Ghosts from his past plagued his dreams. And what he began to tell federal agents shocked them and rattled the LAPD to its core. Perez didn’t just discuss the crimes he was involved in; he implicated a disturbingly large percentage of the LAPD in a criminal conspiracy that had operated just under the surface for years.
The disclosures started with a haunting story about how he and his partner, Nino Durden, had shot and paralyzed a young, unarmed black man, Philip Ovando, during a stakeout. They had planted a .22 caliber rifle next to his bleeding body, which Perez said was common practice. In fact, CRASH officers regularly carried spare firearms specifically to be used if a suspect needed to be framed. If any of this sounds familiar it’s because it’s almost exactly what Chris Dorner reported in his “manifesto.”
Based on their false testimony, the innocent man Perez and Durden had brutally paralyzed received twenty-three years in prison while they received commendations.
But within a week of his confession, a judge issued a writ of habeas corpus, releasing Ovando from prison. He ultimately settled with the LAPD for $15 million dollars, the largest settlement in city history.
Perez wasn’t done, though. LAPD officers and detectives within the CRASH division, and in other departments, he said, regularly stole drugs and cash from evidence lockers; they planted evidence on gang members; they conspired to shakedown drug dealers; they tortured suspects during interrogations, sometimes killing them; and they tampered with the crime scenes and doctored evidence to conceal and cover up their activity. The CRASH unit began to look more like a “criminal gang in uniform,” just as corrupt and violent as the very gangs they were tasked with policing.
Plaintive lawyers used Perez’s testimony to overturn over 100 cases. At least seventy cops were dismissed and charged in the Rampart scandal, including one who was arrested at the hospital where his wife was giving birth. Perez insisted as much as 90 percent of the CRASH division engaged in the misconduct he described.
Meanwhile, during this period of time, LAPD supervisors overlooked the criminal activity, allowing prosecutors to score major convictions in court based on doctored evidence and perjured testimony. The Rampart scandal showed the extent to which the entire criminal justice system was mired in corruption.
Before he was sentenced for the drug-related charges, Perez stood before the judge and gave a tearful statement:
“In the Rampart CRASH unit . . . I succumbed to the seductress of power . . . Whoever chases monsters,” he concluded, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.”
But ultimately the Rampart scandal, an unprecedented police cover-up of corruption, was itself covered up and resulted in very little actual reform or “house cleaning” within the LAPD or the D.A.’s office.
Understanding the endemic corruption of the LAPD and, specifically, the CRASH division at the turn of the millennium may seem off-topic but there is actually an important connection. And it goes beyond the credible supposition that such corruption still goes on within the ranks.
The CRASH division is where Detective Wallace Tennelle got his chops. One of the lead detectives on the Elisa Lam case earned his mettle on the force as a CRASH detective in the late 1980s, during its heyday. As we began to assess various claims of criminal conspiracy and/or gross negligence within the ranks of the LAPD, the historical foundation of the lead detective’s police work in the Elisa Lam case must be considered.
“DARK ALLIANCE”: CIA AND LAPD DRUG TRAFFICKING
Over a decade before the Rampart scandal, another major expose revealed corruption in the LAPD. This scandal is not only considered one of the biggest in Los Angeles history, it involves the CIA, FBI, and DoJ and may be one of the most nefarious conspiracies in modern U.S. history. The CIA drug-trafficking scandal, exposed in 1995 after intrepid reporter Gary Webb published one of the first major pieces of online investigative journalism. He developed his work into a book called Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
Webb exposed a criminal cartel of Contra rebels in Nicaragua who ran a massive crack cocaine trafficking ring with the protection and cooperation of the CIA and the LAPD. Again, the CRASH division (Tennelle’s initial home as a detective) played a major role in policing what was considered the “most active rock cocaine area on earth.” Ultimately, the LAPD was forced to “quietly disband . . .” its thirty-two-member anti-crack task force in South Central Los Angeles. Prior to that they had found thirty one-gallon garbage cans of cocaine.
Dr. John Hiserodt is the owner and director of Path Lab Services, a Garden Grove-based medical reference lab that receives and processes blood tests ordered by clients, most of whom are doctors. The results of such blood tests dictate about 80 percent of the doctors’ subsequent decision-making. So accuracy is the lifeblood of Hiserodt’s professional reputation and business.
Dr. Hiserodt is a board-certified pathologist and physician, a forensic pathologist by training. He was formerly a deputy coroner in Pittsburgh, then provided medical consulting training and conducted autopsies in the private sector as an independent contractor. Between his work with the coroner’s office in Pittsburgh and his time doing independent autopsy work in California, Dr. Hiserodt estimates he has worked over 5,000 cases in his career.
He graciously agreed to an on-camera interview about the case, with which he was familiar.
Right off the bat, Hiserodt questioned the cause of death. The LAPD coroner’s department concluded that Elisa drowned. But how did they deduce that?
“In a drowning case,” Hiserodt said, “most victims have voluminous fluid in their lungs. They aspirate the water, they breathe the water, and that’s how you die; the lungs are heavy, they’re boggy, and full of water. In the Elisa Lam case, there was no water in the lungs.
“It’s a bit unusual,” he continued, “but in about 15 percent of cases, there are dry drownings, in which the person begins to aspirate the water, but the larynx spasms and closes tightly—and when that happens, no water can get [in], nothing can get in. It’s not really a drowning, it’s asphyxial death. It’s not literally drowning because there’s no water.”
So Elisa’s death was a dry drowning? I wondered.
“But in most cases of either wet or dry drownings, the person swallows the water, they’re doing everything they can to get air and so the stomach usually has a lot of water in it. In this case, there was no water in the stomach either. No water in lungs, no water in stomach.”
Jared and I looked at each other in disbelief.
“There are additional soft findings that are commonly present,” Hiserodt continued, “that can also help. One is the presence of hemorrhage in the middle ear, in the mastoid air cells. The mastoid bones are the two bones that come down behind the ears; when you look at the mastoid air cells in a drowning case, there’s usually hemorrhage present. In this case, neither the middle ear—the pitrust temple bone—nor the mastoid bones were examined. I don’t know why they were not examined, but they weren’t.”
Finally, he said, there’s another finding that can help determine drowning and that’s the sphenoid sinuses.
“In drownings,” Hiserodt explained, “the pressure of trying to breathe in water usually means you will find water in the intricate cavities behind the nose. You can dissect them and find the fluid. That wasn’t looked at either.”
In the absence of the two primary indicators of drowning, water in the lungs or stomach, you would have expected these additional factors to be looked at, Hiserodt said.
Sensing we were shocked, Hiserodt paused and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not really a drowning until you see some objective evidence supporting that conclusion.”
“How could they have concluded it was a drowning with no evidence for it?” I asked.
Hiserodt seemed reluctant to be too vicious in his critique or to promote any conspiratorial motives to the coroner.
“It seems that basically because there was no evidence of traumatic injury and she was found in a water tank, and this was enough for him to conclude she drowned.”
Hiserodt wasn’t done. There were more anomalies. He noted the fact that Elisa was found floating face-up and said this, too, was problematic.
“Typically when a person drowns in a body of water, they are found face-down. They float up because of gases produced in the body which inflate it like an innertube. When you die underwater your body tends to go into a natural fetal position—your arms and legs go down and act as a rudder, or a keel, that turns your body downward. It is unusual in a body of quiet water—with no currents or interfering animals—for her to have been face-up.”
Dr. Hiserodt expressed concern over Elisa being naked in the tank with the clothes in there with her.
“Is it possible she took them off to have less weight as she floated there?” I asked.
“That is very unusual in drownings. You are under tremendous pharmacological stress from your catecholamines [hormones]. Your adrenal glands are just releasing norepinephrine, you’re struggling like crazy, you’re panicking to get that breath of air. You’re not stopping to unbutton your blouse or take your sandals off at that moment in time—you’re trying to get out of the tank.”
On the issue of Elisa struggling in the water, there was more that didn’t make sense to him.
“In a drowning, the first phase is panic. You do everything and anything to grab hold of things, scratching objects around her [for example, the sides of the cistern]. It’s unusual that her fingernails were not damaged in any way.”
Jared asked him about the drugs in her system. There was no evidence of a date-rape drug, but they also didn’t test for any.
“Not all labs test for all drugs,” he replied, echoing Mr. Corral. “When an autopsy says no drugs were found it means ‘no drugs that they tested for were found.’ It doesn’t mean ‘no drugs are in the blood.’ It is not possible to conclude that she was not under the influence of certain drugs.”
“Based on the information available, what do you think the cause of death is?” I asked.
Hiserodt flipped through the documents, frustrated, then sat quietly for a few moments.
“Honestly, the possibility is higher that she would have been thrown in the tank,” he replied. “It’s true, no traumatic injuries were found . . . but there are other ways you can kill someone, quietly, and then dispose of the body in a tank of water and move on with your life.
“One that comes to mind is a simple pillow on the face,” he continued. “So if you have an individual with nefarious ideas about her who was able to get her alone in a room . . . it’s possible, even likely, that several days passed [before she was put in the water tank]. Possibly someone was stalking her, got her into a room, put a pillow over her face, caused an asphyxial death, put her in the tank and left.”
This would explain why there are no signs of drowning. Elisa was already dead when she was put into the water tank.
I sighed and ran my hands through my hair. I asked about the apparent rectal injury noted in the autopsy.
“Yeah, there appears to have been pooling of blood around the anus . . .” Hiserodt took a long pause. “That bothers me a little bit. We can’t know for sure, but this could be trauma from anal sex.”
“If they had conducted a rape kit, we might know the answer to this,” I said.
Hiserodt nodded.
His answers truly shocked me. Besides a small accumulation of fluid in her pleural cavities, there is literally zero forensic evidence that Elisa drowned. In fact, the evidence points to Elisa having deceased before entering the water tank, which completely eviscerates the police narrative.
The LAPD Coroner’s Department spokesman, Ed Winter, did not respond to my query about the independent analysis of the autopsy. I was particularly hoping to speak to Yulai Wang, the forensic pathologist and Chief Medical Examiner who signed off on the Lam autopsy. However, Wang may be too busy defending himself against a civil lawsuit in which he’s accused of falsifying an autopsy. The cause of death in this case was inexplicably changed from an accident to a homicide in the autopsy report.
As we assess the problematic aspects of the Lam autopsy and try to determine why Wang might have changed Elisa’s cause of death from “undetermined” to “accidental,” it’s important to keep in mind that he is literally being sued for allegedly falsifying an autopsy.
Wang did not reply to my phone calls. The press spokeswoman for the Coroner’s Department answered a couple of my basic questions about the division of the Coroner’s and Sheriff’s departments, but when I asked her about the rape kit, I heard nothing back.
BACKLOGGED
Sadly, the fact that the rape kit was not processed is not terribly surprising. The backlog of untested rape kits has been well documented in recent years, with a 2014 study putting the estimate at 400,000 nationwide. In a 2018 Los Angeles Times article entitled “The unconscionable backlog of unprocessed rape kits in California,” the Joyful Heart Foundation conservatively estimated that statewide, California has 13,000 unprocessed sexual-assault evidence kits.
There’s such a brutal irony in that DNA testing has such a high success rate and yet is so rarely used on the cases in which it would be best utilized: sexual assaults, which often leave behind a variety of biological evidence. The failure to process rape kits is certainly one factor in why under 5 percent of rapists ever see the inside of a prison cell for their crime. In fact, only 30 rapists out of a 1,000 ever even face trial. Only 70 more are even reported.
By the time the FBI developed its criminal forensic database in the mid-1990s, police departments around the country were already backlogged. The continued bottlenecking has a lot to do with money. Local law-enforcement agencies cover the cost of rape kits for victims. They run between $500 and $1,500. This ends up producing a triage system where police will usually only process kits in cases they think they can solve.
CHAPTER 20
Whoever Chases Monsters
AS I MENTIONED AT THE BEGINNING of this book, from February 3 to February 12, 2013—almost the exact timeframe of the first two weeks of the investigation of Elisa’s death—an unprecedented event transpired in Los Angeles. Former police officer and naval reservist Christopher Dorner waged “asymmetric and unconventional warfare” on the LAPD in retaliation for being fired nearly five years earlier.
Dorner posted an infamous eighteen-page “manifesto” to Facebook, in which he provided lurid details of LAPD corruption, racism, and criminal activity. The accusations painted a picture of a police department in which excessive force, institutional racism and sexism, and cover-ups are common. He claimed the South Bureau divisions had white officers who had joined the force “with the sole intent to victimize minorities . . .” He said that one of the officers caught on videotape beating Rodney King was not only still employed but had risen in the ranks to be a commanding officer.
There were officers, he said, who “will let you bleed out just so they can brag to other officers that they had a 187 [code for homicide] caper the other day and can’t wait to accrue the overtime in future court subpoenas.” Dorner recalled officers taking photos of dead bodies and playing a game with officers from other divisions in which they competed for who had “the most graphic dead body of the night.”
The manifesto also detailed Dorner’s militaristic strategy for how he planned to murder dozens of cops, which he described as “a necessary evil.” He referred to himself as a jihadist who did not fear death and who could not be stopped.
After Dorner shot and killed a newly engaged couple, authorities called his rampage “domestic terrorism.” They called on the press to stop tweeting because broadcasting their moves might hinder Dorner’s arrest.
By the time police cornered Dorner in a cabin in Big Bear, the manhunt was already one of the biggest headlines in national news. During the standoff, Dorner opened fire on two officers, killing one. What happened next depends on whether you want to believe the reports of the LAPD, who are adamant that a cabin fire started unintentionally due to military tear gas cartridges. Dorner, who was barricaded inside, reportedly shot himself before his body was incinerated.
The Dorner manhunt is highly relevant to the Lam case for two reasons: One, it used a tremendous amount of resources and almost assuredly distracted all LAPD personnel, diverting attention away from other cases, including Elisa’s; and two, Dorner’s manifesto corroborates—and is corroborated by—already existing information related to LAPD corruption.
The more I looked into past claims, the more connections I began to see with the anomalies presented in this case. An unsettling pattern emerged.
THE RAMPART SCANDAL
The Rampart area reported roughly 150 murders a year occurring within a densely packed neighborhood. The LAPD CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit that policed gang activity there operated almost as an occupying army. They viewed themselves as different kinds of cops who could bend the rules.
Their slogan was: “We intimidate those who intimidate others.” They awarded each other plaques for taking down a gang member, black for dead, red for injured.
The revelations of the Rampart scandal, which Matt Lait and Scott Glover of the Los Angeles Times began publishing in 1999, exposed nothing short of a crime syndicate operating within the ranks of the LAPD.
The whistleblower who blew the lid off was former officer Rafael Perez. Prosecutors charged him with stealing an eight-pound bag of cocaine from an evidence room.
Amid Perez’s cooperation with feds, he helped corroborate a number of cases showing police corruption. This included LAPD officers serving as private paid security and confidantes to Death Row Records. Specifically, off-duty cops took large payments from Shug Knight to conceal their activities. This fueled the conspiracy theory that LAPD officers were involved in both the Tupac and Biggie assassinations.
Perez and his lawyer negotiated a proffer agreement, what’s sometimes known as a “Queen for a day” immunity deal: Perez would sing like a bird and in exchange the government would agree not to prosecute him.
Perez had a guilty conscience. Ghosts from his past plagued his dreams. And what he began to tell federal agents shocked them and rattled the LAPD to its core. Perez didn’t just discuss the crimes he was involved in; he implicated a disturbingly large percentage of the LAPD in a criminal conspiracy that had operated just under the surface for years.
The disclosures started with a haunting story about how he and his partner, Nino Durden, had shot and paralyzed a young, unarmed black man, Philip Ovando, during a stakeout. They had planted a .22 caliber rifle next to his bleeding body, which Perez said was common practice. In fact, CRASH officers regularly carried spare firearms specifically to be used if a suspect needed to be framed. If any of this sounds familiar it’s because it’s almost exactly what Chris Dorner reported in his “manifesto.”
Based on their false testimony, the innocent man Perez and Durden had brutally paralyzed received twenty-three years in prison while they received commendations.
But within a week of his confession, a judge issued a writ of habeas corpus, releasing Ovando from prison. He ultimately settled with the LAPD for $15 million dollars, the largest settlement in city history.
Perez wasn’t done, though. LAPD officers and detectives within the CRASH division, and in other departments, he said, regularly stole drugs and cash from evidence lockers; they planted evidence on gang members; they conspired to shakedown drug dealers; they tortured suspects during interrogations, sometimes killing them; and they tampered with the crime scenes and doctored evidence to conceal and cover up their activity. The CRASH unit began to look more like a “criminal gang in uniform,” just as corrupt and violent as the very gangs they were tasked with policing.
Plaintive lawyers used Perez’s testimony to overturn over 100 cases. At least seventy cops were dismissed and charged in the Rampart scandal, including one who was arrested at the hospital where his wife was giving birth. Perez insisted as much as 90 percent of the CRASH division engaged in the misconduct he described.
Meanwhile, during this period of time, LAPD supervisors overlooked the criminal activity, allowing prosecutors to score major convictions in court based on doctored evidence and perjured testimony. The Rampart scandal showed the extent to which the entire criminal justice system was mired in corruption.
Before he was sentenced for the drug-related charges, Perez stood before the judge and gave a tearful statement:
“In the Rampart CRASH unit . . . I succumbed to the seductress of power . . . Whoever chases monsters,” he concluded, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself.”
But ultimately the Rampart scandal, an unprecedented police cover-up of corruption, was itself covered up and resulted in very little actual reform or “house cleaning” within the LAPD or the D.A.’s office.
Understanding the endemic corruption of the LAPD and, specifically, the CRASH division at the turn of the millennium may seem off-topic but there is actually an important connection. And it goes beyond the credible supposition that such corruption still goes on within the ranks.
The CRASH division is where Detective Wallace Tennelle got his chops. One of the lead detectives on the Elisa Lam case earned his mettle on the force as a CRASH detective in the late 1980s, during its heyday. As we began to assess various claims of criminal conspiracy and/or gross negligence within the ranks of the LAPD, the historical foundation of the lead detective’s police work in the Elisa Lam case must be considered.
“DARK ALLIANCE”: CIA AND LAPD DRUG TRAFFICKING
Over a decade before the Rampart scandal, another major expose revealed corruption in the LAPD. This scandal is not only considered one of the biggest in Los Angeles history, it involves the CIA, FBI, and DoJ and may be one of the most nefarious conspiracies in modern U.S. history. The CIA drug-trafficking scandal, exposed in 1995 after intrepid reporter Gary Webb published one of the first major pieces of online investigative journalism. He developed his work into a book called Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.
Webb exposed a criminal cartel of Contra rebels in Nicaragua who ran a massive crack cocaine trafficking ring with the protection and cooperation of the CIA and the LAPD. Again, the CRASH division (Tennelle’s initial home as a detective) played a major role in policing what was considered the “most active rock cocaine area on earth.” Ultimately, the LAPD was forced to “quietly disband . . .” its thirty-two-member anti-crack task force in South Central Los Angeles. Prior to that they had found thirty one-gallon garbage cans of cocaine.
