Michael Connelly - The Closers

The streets between Vicki Landreth’s Los Feliz home and the Cahuenga Pass were misted and gray. People drove with their lights on, either because they had been driving through the night or because they thought it might help wake up the world. Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits.

He tried to push thoughts of the night before out of his mind so that he could focus only on the case. He knew the others would be moving into position now on Mariano Street in Woodland Hills and in the ListenTech sound room in the City of Industry. While Roland Mackey slept, the forces of justice were quietly closing in on him. That’s how Bosch looked at it. That was what put the wire in his blood. He still believed it was unlikely that Mackey had been the one to pull the trigger on Rebecca Verloren. But Bosch felt no doubt that Mackey provided the gun and would lead them on this day to the triggerman, whether it would be William Burkhart or someone else.

Bosch pulled into the parking lot in front of the Poquito Mas at the bottom of the hill from his house. He left the Mercedes running and got out and went to the row of newspaper boxes. He saw the face of Rebecca Verloren staring out at him through the smeared plastic window of the box. He felt a little catch in his rhythm. It didn’t matter what the story said, they were now in play.

He dropped the coins into the box and took a paper out. He repeated the process, taking a second paper. One for the files and one for Mackey. He didn’t bother reading the story until he had driven up the hill to his house. He put a pot of coffee on and read the story while standing in the kitchen. The window photo was a shot of Muriel Verloren sitting on her daughter’s bed. The room was neat and the bed perfectly made, right down to the ruffle skirting the floor. There was an inset photograph of Rebecca in the top corner. It turned out that the Daily News archives had held the same shot as the yearbook. A headline above the photo said A MOTHER’S LONG VIGIL.

The bedroom photograph was credited to Emerson Ward, the photographer apparently using her given name. Below it was a caption that read: “Muriel Verloren sits in her daughter’s bedroom. The room, like Mrs. Verloren’s grief, has been untouched by time.”

Beneath the photo and above the body of the story was what a reporter had once told Bosch was a deck headline-a fuller description of the story. It read: “HAUNTED: Muriel Verloren has waited 17 years to learn who took her daughter’s life. In a renewed effort the LAPD may be close to finding out.”

Bosch thought the deck was perfect. If and when Mackey saw it, he would feel the cold finger of fear poke him in the chest. Bosch anxiously read the story.

By McKenzie Ward, Staff Writer

Seventeen years ago this summer, a young and beautiful high-school girl named Rebecca Verloren was stolen away from her Chatsworth home and brutally murdered on Oat Mountain. The case was never solved, leaving in its wake a splintered family, haunted police officers and a community with no sense of closure from the crime.

But in a measure of hope for the victim’s mother, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched a new investigation of the case that may see results and closure for Muriel Verloren. This time out the detectives have something they didn’t in 1988: the killer’s DNA.

The LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit began the intense refocus on the Verloren case after one of the original detectives-now a Valley area commander-urged that it be reopened two years ago when the squad was formed to investigate cold cases.

“As soon as I heard we were going to start looking at cold cases I was on the phone to them,” Cmdr. Arturo Garcia said yesterday from his office in the Valley Bureau command center. “This was the case that always stuck with me. That beautiful young girl taken from her home like that. No murder in our society is acceptable, but this one hurt more than most. It haunted me all these years.”

So, too, Muriel Verloren. Rebecca’s mother has continued to live in the house on Red Mesa Way from which her 16-year-old daughter was taken. Rebecca’s bedroom remains unaltered from the night she was carried out a back door, never to return.

“I don’t want to change anything,” the tearful mother said yesterday while smoothing the spread on her daughter’s bed. “It’s my way of remaining close to her. I will never change this room and I will never leave this house.”

Det. Harry Bosch, who is assigned to the renewed investigation, told the News that there are several promising leads in the case now. The greatest aid in the case has been the technological advances made since 1988. Blood that did not belong to Rebecca Verloren was actually found inside the murder weapon. Bosch explained that the pistol’s hammer “bit” the shooter on the hand, taking a sample of blood and tissue. In 1988 it could only be analyzed, typed and preserved. Now it can be directly matched to a suspect. The challenge is finding that suspect.

“The case was thoroughly investigated previously,” Bosch said. “Hundreds of people were questioned and hundreds of leads were followed. We are backtracking on all of that but our real hope lies in the DNA. It will be the case breaker, I think.”

The detective explained that while the victim was not sexually assaulted, there were elements to the crime of a psychosexual nature. Ten years ago the state Department of Justice started a database containing DNA samples from every person convicted of a sexually related crime. The DNA from the Verloren case is in the process of being compared to those samples. Bosch believes it is likely that Rebecca Verloren’s killing was not an isolated crime.

“I think it is unlikely that this killer only committed this one crime and then led a law-abiding existence. The nature of this offense indicates to us that this person likely committed other crimes. If he was ever caught and his DNA put into a data bank, then it’s only a matter of time before we identify him.”

Rebecca was carried from her home in the dead of night on July 5, 1988. For three days police and community members searched for her. A woman riding a horse on Oat Mountain found the body secreted by a fallen tree. While the investigation revealed many things, including that Rebecca had terminated a pregnancy about six weeks before her death, the police were unable to determine who her killer was and how he got into the house.

In the years since, the crime has echoed through many lives. The victim’s parents have split up and Muriel Verloren could not say where her husband, Robert Verloren, a former Malibu restaurateur, is now located. She said the disintegration of their marriage was directly attributed to the strain and grief brought on by their daughter’s murder.

One of the original investigators on the case, Ronald Green, retired early from the department and later committed suicide. Garcia said he believes the unsolved Verloren case played a part in his former partner’s decision to end his life.

“Ronnie took things to heart, and I think this one always bothered him,” Garcia said.

And at Hillside Preparatory School, where Rebecca Verloren was a popular student, there is a daily reminder of her life and death. A plaque erected by her classmates remains affixed to the wall in the exclusive school’s main hallway.

“We don’t ever want to forget someone like Rebecca,” said Principal Gordon Stoddard, who was a teacher when Verloren was a student at the school.

One of Rebecca’s friends and classmates is now a teacher at Hillside. Bailey Koster Sable spent an evening with Rebecca just two days before she was murdered. The loss has haunted her, and she says she thinks about her friend all the time.