Michael Connelly: Crime Beat: A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

“This one’s really bad,” the detective whispered to me.

He told me the four people dead were a mother and her three young children, all of them shot in the head, all of them in the same bed. He shook his head as if not comprehending the crime. I asked if there was any evidence pointing to who did such a horrible thing.

He nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “She did it. The mother. She killed everybody and left a note.”

He then had to walk away from me and I think I saw him wipe a tear out of his eye. And I understood in that moment some of the difficulty, danger and nobility of the job. And I knew I had something more to give Harry Bosch.

Mayhem and ennui set the tone for a week spent in the forefront of the battle against a city’s murders.

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

October 25, 1987

It has been four days since anybody has heard from or seen Walter Moody and people are thinking that something is wrong. The tenants at the South Andrews Avenue apartment building he manages say he hasn’t answered his door since Thursday. His parents can’t get him on the phone. And he didn’t call his boss Saturday when he didn’t show up for his part-time truck-driving job.

This is not like Walter, everyone agrees.

It is now 1:40 p.m., Monday, June 29. The happenstance of concern from so many places for Walter Moody results in two Fort Lauderdale police officers and a locksmith coming to his apartment door. There is a small crowd of tenants watching closely.

The three-story apartment building has a Spanish castle motif: white walls, red barrel-tile roof, round turret with small arched windows at the corner. It is a U-shaped building with a neatly kept center courtyard dominated by a shade tree reaching all the way to the roof. There are small bushes and shrubs about the courtyard, all trimmed and cared for by the manager, Walter Moody. The tenants sit on a bench beneath the shade tree and look up to the second-floor walkway where the locksmith has just opened the door to Walter’s apartment. The officers go in and find the place ransacked and the door to the master bedroom locked. They call for the locksmith to open it. And after a few moments inside, they call for the homicide squad.

George Hurthas gone home early. His sinuses are acting up and the last few days have been slow. He figures he can take the break. He is sitting on the couch and has the afternoon paper in his hands when he gets The Call.

It’s another murder. An apartment manager. No smoking gun. No such luck.

He is told where. He is told when. The how is not yet known. It is Detective Vicki Russo telling him this. She’s rolling on it, she says. And so are the others – they being all available members of the homicide squad. George Hurt, sergeant in charge of the squad, says he’s rolling too. A routine week in homicide has begun. Hurt hangs up and curses to himself. This is number 38.

Murder in Fort Lauderdale comes in all ways, times, places and circumstances. It is a crime unclassifiable in any way other than by its final result, the taking of life. For George Hurt and the homicide squad the only sure bet is that it comes and comes. This is Monday, June 29, and already there have been 38 homicides this year. There were 42 in all of 1986. The most ever was 52, back in 1981. At this rate, George Hurt is thinking he is going to need another case chart for the wall in the squad room. There could be 60 to 70 murders in Fort Lauderdale this year. That’s kind of scary. And that’s why he curses each time he gets The Call.

It is hard to account for the numbers. Economics, drugs, heat, full moons, whatever. Hurt’s squad has investigated three people shot to death in a fast-food restaurant during a Saturday morning robbery; a high-profile divorce lawyer murdered a few steps from his office elevator; a rock-and-roll singer beaten to death because he was gay. More than a dozen times the victim was either the buyer or seller of drugs when things went wrong. There have been the quiet cases that rated only a few paragraphs in the newspapers, and the big cases that drew the TV trucks with the microwave dishes.

It all adds up to 37times in six months that the squad has assembled at a scene that defied common sensibilities, the Norman Rockwell portrait of life. And now it is time to gather again. Number 38, Walter Moody, lies cold in bed, his blood four days old on the sheets and pillows, waiting for the homicide squad.

“Smell that?” says George Hurt. “They just rolled the body over in there.”

Capt. Al Van Zandt, a supervisor of the detective division, puffs on his cigar so the smell of tobacco will overcome the sickly smell of death.

The two of them are standing outside the door to Walter Moody’s apartment. Hurt didn’t have to be inside to know what the smell is; he has had years of experience with it. Going back to his stint as head of the department’s forensic unit before coming to homicide, and even back 20years to Vietnam, he says that it seems much of his life has been spent rolling bodies over.

This time he stays mostly outside the apartment with Van Zandt, content to let the forensic investigators and the assistant medical examiner do the work inside.

There are five homicide detectives working the first hours of the Walter Moody case. One of the first to arrive was Phil Mundy, the squad’s senior detective. But after surveying the murder scene and discerning that it was a “whodunit” as opposed to a “smoking gun” case, Mundy returned to the bureau to run record searches on Moody and to coordinate requests that would come from detectives at the scene. His partner, Pete Melwid, is still at the apartment building questioning tenants. So are detectives Mike Walley, Gary Ciani and Vicki Russo. Russo’s partner, Kevin Allen, is on the way, called in from a day off. When was Walter last seen? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? These are the questions the detectives are asking. In the early stages of a case, information is the only available tool.

There is a basic rule to murder investigation; as more time elapses in a case, the chances of solving it grow slimmer. So whenever possible, depending on constrictions of time, the overtime budget, fatigue and so on, Hurt puts all available hands on the initial stages of a case. “It’s called trying to figure out what is what and going from there,” he says.

The squad has a rotation system for assigning cases to lead detectives. This time partners Russo and Allen are “up.” They will be responsible for the case from start to finish. If it is not solved by the group effort in the next few hours, it will be theirs to work alone.

“I haven’t had a smoking gun yet this year,” Russo says as she starts compiling information in a notebook. “For once, I’d like a gimme – to come in and there would be a victim and over there would be the suspect.”

But it hasn’t been that way for Russo or the rest of the squad for most of this year.

While the homicide detectives corral and question the tenants and the owner of the apartment building, three forensic investigators are inside the apartment looking for fingerprints, photographing and gathering evidence. Dr. Felipe Dominguez, assistant medical examiner, is in the bedroom with the body.

Moody lies faceup on his bed and almost looks as if he is asleep. Almost but not quite. There is a stab wound on his forearm, other cuts, but it is obvious that none were fatal. And there is blood on the sheets and pillow, but the odor of death is not noticeable to anyone without Hurt’s nose for it. The killer had left on the air conditioner, slowing decomposition.