THE BOOK OF MURDER-Matt Murphy

of the public. As he does so, he lays bare the decision making. A prosecutor goes through building a case to ensure justice is met while telling captivating tale after captivating tale of the world's worst crime. See how a prosecutor looks at and lives with the very worst crime The insider's perspective that Murphy gives on the notorious cases of Skuyler de Leon, Rodney Alcala, Dirty John Meehan, and many others is a vital read for true crime fans everywhere.

The book that we're featuring this evening is The Book of Murder, a Prosecutor's Journey through Love and Death. With my special guest, former Senior Deputy District Attorney, Orange County DA Homicide Unit and ABC Legal analyst, Matt Murphy. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Matt Murphy, Good morning, Good morning, and congratulations on your the Book of Murder.

will crush my soul. I think that it's been crushed before, so no, I'm sure they'll be loving it like I did.

whatever whatever my team did. I keep losing a lot. Anyway, from from high school, I went to UCSB, where I think I was born to go to that school, and I was surfing a bunch, and then I went up in going to San Diego for law school. And once I was in law school, it was really the first time I got academically serious. And the way it works is you you finished your first year and at the beginning of your second year, once you get your first

year of grades, and I did well. They did. The law firms and the various government agencies essentially come to recruit law students to do clerkships, and I had three that were I was really interested in. One was this Plaineiff's firm out of Santa Ana that were you know, they were crushing it, making a lot of money, like one of these brass rail law firms, and so that was, you know, in the in the eyes of a twenty three year old, that looked that looked interesting, you know,

fancy cars and all that. The FBI came in and I they their special agent who was doing those interviews. We really hit it off, and I did. I did a series of interviews with the FBI and that was really intriguing as well. But back then the policy was they wouldn't assign you where you grew up, where you went to college, or where you went to law school.

Which took out southern California for me. And I've been surfing since I was a kid, and at you know again, you know, age twenty three, I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of moving someplace where it couldn't surf every chance I had. So the third one was the Orange County Day's Office, and I was essentially I was brought in by a woman named Kathy Harper. They did two days of interviews. Her background was sexual assault, so she was a ligne prosecutor in the sexual assault unit

before they made her a manager. And I had worked I started a date ripe education program when I was at UCSB with my fraternity where we'd educate pledges for sorties and fraternities about rape and the concept day rape and alcohol and what consent means. And I'm really proud of that. It was kind of ahead of its time in retrospect, and she that caught her eye and she

offered me the spot. So I came into the Orange County DIA's office and I thought, you know, I would do three years as a deputy DA right, And I came in at the end of my first day, first day as a junior law clerk. This is the summer of nineteen ninety two. They would they put us in rits and appeals. So you're doing legal research and writing with the hope that you'll actually get to appear in

court and argue emotion. And you know, my best friend in law school, he spent that summer working in the Central Valley of California on Sprinkler system litigation, and you know, and he was hating his life and regretting its choices. And my first time in court, it was arguing over seven hundred thousand dollars in cash that was associated with the Mexican drug cartel, moving money, moving cash out in California, and I had drug dealers in the hallway, and I

had a great defense team. I went up against a fantastic judge and I was absolutely hooked. And my three year plan basically turned into twenty six years. So the way it works is they start you out in misdemeanors and you know, they they throw you to the wolves. You know, they hand you a file and say, hey, you're picking a jury in twenty minutes. Go to it and you know, you you really you sink or swim, and they throw you in front of jury's and I

had no idea what I was doing. And you and it's hard, you know, and you're up there and you don't know if you have any ability in front of a jury, and you you really get your teeth kicked in a few times, and it's it's quite an experience. And you know, I I as brutal as it was. I started a thrive on it, and so I went

through misdemeanors. I did thirty seven misdmeanor jury trials. I spent a little over a year in juvenile court doing juvenile case a lot of gang cases to I was in the juvenile gang spot for a while, but it's all there's no juries there. And then they rotate you onto what's called the felony panel. And your job on the felony panel is you just do felony jury trials. So it's generic felony. So it was like, you know, drug sales, felony, domestic violence before they started the domestic

violence unit. Fourth time DUIs, some assaults, some generic robberies, just kind of a pop prey. I tried twenty four felony jury trails in one year in that assignment. And then it's almost like the It's almost like the NFL draft, you know, like draft day for the NFL. They when the panel class is done, the heads of what are called vertical units will kind of bid for different lawyers

that are graduating from the felony panel. And so the vertical unit system in Orange County is different than almost

any other DA's office in America. What typically happens is the most DA's offices, especially in the heavy cases, they you'll have, you know, one Deputy DA will review the investigation for the filing of charges and they'll file what they think is appropriate, and then it goes to another Deputy day who will present it to the grand jury or do the preliminary hearing in front of a judge, and then it goes to another Deputy DA who assigns it to another Deputy DA for trial. So you have

this it's like an assembly line. And the way Orange County does it is for the heavy stuff, for the gang crimes, sexual assault, homicide, environmental, major fraud, major narcotics, the really specialized heavy felony units. What they do is they will they bring their deputies in and they get assigned a certain part of the county. So they'll give you a patch, they call it, so it was you'd have a certain certain cities. So I got recruited into

the sexual assault unit, and not really recruited. I got to sign that I wanted to go to gangs because that looked exciting to me. And I had had a great run on the felony panel and the supervisor's a guy named Chuck Middleton, and he said, no, it's my turn, and they he brought me into sexual assault and I spent four years there, and they assign you certain cities so you work with the same detectives and you really

get to specialize in the subject matter. So for four years I did nothing but rapists and child molester cases. And in that unit, you learned DNA and you learn you learn from the important building blocks for where I would go next. And Orange County is a population of about three million people. It's the fifth largest district Attorney's office in the United States. And I got moved into homicide.

I was thirty three, just before my thirty fourth birthday, and I still looked like I was twelve, and I've been with somebody for five years, and I was in that, you know, sort of through my mid to late twenties, and I, you know, it's one of those one of those deals. She really wanted to get married and have kids. She was an architect, and and I just wasn't ready

to do it. And so I had one of those sort of like a standoff, you know, and my my buddy Dennis Conway calls it the old tomato, which is ultimatum. It's like marry me or I'm moving on. And I didn't really think that was gonna be a real thing. I thought that I thought, you know, we would break up for a while and get back together. And she was a really quality person. And you know, as life often does when, especially on being stupid, I learned a

learned a lesson there. She jounded up getting meeting another guy within like three months, you know, and so I got rotated. I got rotated into a homicide at the same time that I found out she'd got engaged at the new guy. And so I was like, my brain was basically a country song of of lament, and you know, how could I be so stupid sort of thing, And and look in retrospect that that wound up exactly where it should have. You know, the guy she married is

a fantastic guy. He's they're still married, they've still they had two kids. Like, she got the she got the life that she wanted. And you know, one of my best friends, I think I I think I included this in the book I'm not mistaken. His name is Greg maffay, and he's one of my buddies from high school and

he went to college with both of them. In fact, he introduced me and her and he you know that old saying, you know you know your friends because they're the ones that's stabby in the chest and not on the back right. And he came up to me and he put his arm around me, and he knew them both pretty well, and he goes, he goes, look at it this way, dude, He goes, he's just just like you, just a little better in every way. And he's like, but he's a great guy. And you know, you want

to hate the new guy. And every all of my friends that knew him in college were like, you know what, he really is a great guy. And he is. But anyway, so I my first week in homicide, I was I was you know, most of your listeners have had that experience that'd broken a heart on a Saturday night sort of thing, and I was, I was, you know, I was in that canty, can't sleep. How did I screw it up? Phase? So I was surfing a ton in the morning, just trying to clear my head a little bit.

And my first week in the unit, I'm in the water and I get out and I barely even I don't even think i'd read all the files yet on my caseload, and I got I got my first homicide call out. So because it's a vertical unit, I had the cities of Newport Beach Coast to Maso, Laguna Beach and Irvine, and I was they would have us go to the murder scenes. And your job there as a prosecutor is not to interfere and it certainly you're not

responsible for the investigation, but you're there to assist. You're there to make sure that you know, the warrants are done properly, and really your job is to ensure that the constitutional rights of any criminal defendant are scrupulously ad here too. And it also makes it easier on the detectives because they've got a you know, they've got you know, a lawyer there to help bounce legal ideas like do we you know, if this guy gave consent, for example,

do we need a search warrant? Or if this isn't his house, do we need a search warrant? Or what do you think? Do we need a search more from this car? So there's somebody that could kind of help them navigate some of the legal complexities of that. And then, of course is the DA. The way it works is I was the one who would ultimately decide when there was enough evidence in the case who to charge what to charge them with. Then it would be my job

to follow the case all the way up. So in the traditional model where one DA does the filing and another DA does the prelim, the way Orange County does it is you've got one prosecutor there that night or that afternoon with the detectives, the women and men of that department, who is learning all the facts in real time, and then you handle every aspect of it in court. You do the filing, you do the preliminary hearing, you

do the bail reviews, and you try the case. And then the detective that was with you that night at three o'clock in the morning, he or he will be sitting next to you at trial all the way through to the end of sentencing, and it is a better way to do it, I think. And no criticism on any other DA's offices anywhere, but it really when you are a DA and you see it for yourself, and you're there and you see, you know, a victim notification.

You know, like if a lot of murders happen inside homes, and a lot of murder domestic violence things, and a lot of them happened on holidays. And when you see the death notification delivered to a loved one of some poor person that's been murdered, that is dead inside that house, you see the visceral enormity of your responsibility, if that

makes sense. Yes, you understand the apoplectic grief within a family when a daughter or son learns that their mother or father has been murdered, or even the ones that really got to me is when the mom learns that their child has been killed and those and you know, the first thing I would do is I would sit down, I have a meeting. Once we filed charges with the family, I'd give them my personal cell phone number just so they knew there were people who cared. And I worked

with wonderful people I worked with. My team was, you know, and I'm biased here was the absolute best. So I had a paralegal named Dina Basham. My final investigator in the Home City unit was a man named Don Holford, who I worked with when he was a detective and then when he was the sergeant of the custom as the CP units, who's in charge of the homicide detectives. He's just one of the best humans I've ever known.

But I was very lucky with my investigators. So in the DA's office, you also get assigned a police officer within the DA's office, a DA investigator who is your partner, and you got all those scenes together and you work the case step together. So I'd have the detective from the agency and then my own investigator, and it's we

were kind of bulletproof, you know. You put together a group of people like that, especially if you if you get good ones and you throw in a few decent judges, a decent jury vanira, which is the jury pool, and you're going to achieve justice, as corny as that sounds,

if you're dedicated to it. So back to my first day, So I've finished four years in sexual assault, so I knew those cases very well, but that you know, visiting the crime scene on a sexual assault case is not the same thing as a homicide, you know, because it's basically all the same. It's in a dark room somewhere in a house, or some poor child as being sexually abused, and you know, you don't quite get the same takeaways

as murder. So I get out of the water doing my you know, country song reel of laments in my brain, and my phone had blown up with messages. I get back to my car and I there was a murder on Newport Beach. So I'm driving down and Newport is a beautiful city. It is like I think I described it in the boat. It's like Beverly Hills by the sea. It's got all the all the money and coture of Beverly Hills, but with bikinis and surfboards. It's a it's a unique place. But there is a ton of money there,

and so what as a result the city council. The city is well well run. They're well managed, and they have a top notch It's small, but they're an excellent police department and they you know, they you know, they do it right and they devote the resources. One there's a home side. So I go to my first scene and I will, I mean, I'll never forget any of them, but this one in particular. And I've just you know,

I've seen all those TV shows. We've all seen it, like what happens with the new guy, right, what happens with the new guy and the homicide? You know, it's on TV. It's a trope. They always they they throw up, right, So I think this was going to be my my third dead body that I'd ever seen. And I'm thinking, you know, don't puke, don't puke, don't puke, right, That was what was going on in my head. And they they take me in and it's this beautiful town home, you know, and it's it's a, like I said, a

very wealthy area. And this is everything in this place is perfect, and it was. This was back when berber carpet it was a fashionable item in your house. I think now everybody's gone to hardwood floors, but back then it was white berber carpet and it was I just remember walking in and it was I remember thinking the

carpet was perfect. It was because and it was it was too white I remember thinking for all of like the the utility boots that were walking on it, because you've got you know, you've got CSI personnel, you got detectives, you got uniform cops there, you know, they're they're there are firemen that come in to ensure the person's dead.

I mean, it's like boot after boot after boot. And I just remember seeing this perfectly white carpet and then they lead me in and there was the man, my first, uh my first homicide victim, and he was on his back in the kitchen, looking up to the ceiling, you know. And you know, there's a certain look that dead people have that is it's nobody creates it in the movies. It is. It's you can just look at somebody's face and you can see, you know, you know, when they

were dead. And you know, I remember thinking, you know, am I going to do the new guy thing I've seen on TV and throw up all over the crime scene. And so it's like, okay, Murphy, don't puke, don't puke, don't puke. And I look down and immediately I notice he had a wallet chain going to his right back pocket. So he's on his back and in his left hand there was a small folding knife and it just instantly

It's like, well that that makes no sense. Why would why would a left handed guy keep his wallet in his right back pocket or if he's right handed, why would have a knife in his left hand? And it was just instantaneous, and from that point on it was like, Okay, I just got this weird sense of kind of belonging, you know, like I was. And then the detect that was walking me through it as a guy named Dave Byington who wound up in the years to come becoming

one of my best friends. And this guy was he was older than me, and he was you know, these detectives see it all and I'm like and I literally I looked like I was twelve when I was in my early thirties. And I walk in, So you got this this absolute, completely green rookie, and he got this semi grizzled, you know, detective who lived a lot of life.

And he's giving me the tour. So we walk upstairs in this house and there's bullet holes in the wall upstairs, and there's a semi circular blood smear on the on the staircase, like the staircase wall, you know, as you're walking down and then he's he's dead at the bottom of the stairs on his back that are victim, and so you start you know, it was the first time I realized that homicid scenes are just three dimensional puzzles

and you're there to put the pieces together. And so there's broken glass, there was there were these rose petals leading to the to the primary bedroom, and the bed was perfectly made, so there were some and there's candles still burning everywhere, So it was it appeared to be some sort of romantic innerlude that was interrupted in some way. We have bullet holes upstairs. There's one in the in the wall of the of the of the stairs of like the the staircase, and then there's this circular blood

smear on the wall. So you start looking at it and it's like, okay, the shooting clearly happened started up here, and looks like he's haul on ass right, He's trying to get out of the house. He had one shot in the back, he had two above his heart that went through his heart that were both embedded in the kitchen floor. He had one bullet wound in this in

his temple, and one later discovered in his mouth. And so when you count up all the holes, we had a we had two handguns that had been placed on the berber carpet right next to the body, and they're perfectly oriented like one like next to the other. They had been placed there. One was a six shot revolver that had been fired, and one was a I think it was a nine millimeter that had not. And so our six shot revolver was our murder weapon or our

homicide weapon. But there were at least eight or nine separate holes that we could account for, which means, from a legal perspective, and this is very significant, the shooter had taken time to reload and then and then I go back to the knife, and it's like, okay, well that means the shooter may have had time to put that knife in this guy's hand. And so you start putting the pieces together in sort of a half forensic,

half legal analysis kind of way. And you know, if a shooter spontaneously kills somebody, and I go into this in the book, if they want to kill, that can be a second degree murder. But if they take time to reload and they shoot, you know, potentially, you know still alive person in the heart as they're on their back and helpless. That is a first degree murder. So all of these facts come together within the legal analysis

that you're doing. And it was you know, I was hooked at the end of my first day as a junior law clerk. Now, I was hopelessly hooked, and you know, this would have been a fascinating case, but then you know, I almost don't want to spoil it for the reader. Then the this woman was a financial planner, and so it turns out that this was a romantic falling out.

You know, we don't know exactly how it went down, but they were romantically involved in some way that the operating theory was he went over to end their relationship and she previously she had a living partner who basically decided that he wanted to live the lifestyle of the gay man, and so he broke up with her. But they still lived in the same place and so they you know, they're having you know, she's she was kind of twice scorned, and so they we were still processing

the crime scene. She was like early forties, She had no criminal history, and she was financially secure, and so that we didn't think she was a flight risk with no indication that she was dangerous to anybody else. So she you know, the California law requires that, you know, she'd be given bail, so she got bailed. She bailed herself out because she had substantial financial resources, and found her ex boyfriend in the hotel that he was staying

in and they had a long talk. They'd been together for over ten years, and at some point he fell asleep, at which point she produced a tire iron that she brought in from her car, bludgeoned him to death, and then drove over to a place called the Firing Line in Huntington Beach where she rented a handgun, and she committed suicide in one of the firing lines. That was my first week in homicide, and I mean it was just, you know, I went up going into my supervisor's office

and you know, I don't know. I mean, like I have been wide eyed since the second I walked into that homicide scene. And and I'll never forget. And this is lou Rosenbloom, who wound up becoming another dear friend of mine and one of my mentors. And he just said, you think that's crazy, just wait you know, and yeah, that was my introduction to homicide. And the case all wrapped up in a week, and you know, horribly tragic for the you know, the two men who died. It's

just it's it's awful. But but for a young prosecutor man, it was I mean, the lessons start fast and furious in that unit and they really don't stop. And I went up doing seventeen years in homicide.

trial lawyer in the office. And you know, there's there's different there's different styles of trial prosecutors, and Lou's style was this was one type. It was a it was a very like irresistibly logical yet unrelenting, you know approach.

There's others. There's a man named Chris Evans, he's now super court judge, who is a you know, he was more folksy and more kind of like down to earth, and Lou was just he would do these stick coota cross examinations where I think Lou considered it a personal failure if the person didn't confess on the stand and apologize to everybody like he was. He was that good. And so it's a little bit like getting brought in if you play basketball, like Michael Jordan recruits you to

play on his team. You know, so I'm and so I'm like, I'm surrounded by these living legends in my mind. And so Lou basically he took me under his wing, like I wanted to learn how to try how to prosecute homicide cases, and Lou wanted to teach, and it just wanted to wind up being this really wonderful relationship that I mean, I owe that man so much. And I had others. There's a man named Rick King who's my supervisor and sexual assault, who was like best buddies

with Lou when they were in homicide together. So I had these, you know, like Kathy Harper who brought me in, and my another supervisor I had and sexual assault named z Anne Froberg, And it was like they were like kind of a weird combination of like my big brothers and sisters combined with being my mothers and fathers, you know, for my prosecutrol career. And Lou was Lou was a really hyper intelligent, cerebral guy who want he first of all, he's all about doing the right thing, and he is

also like he would want to figure it out. He had this insatiable thirst to try to like figure out why people would do this. So it was, you know, it was fascinating because I bring cases into Lou and Lou just kind of like stare off in a space and be like, you know, and I always knew he's gonna hit me with a nugget. When it started with you know, and you fill in the blank whatever came next, and it was always poignant and valuable, and he was just I mean, he the man was absolutely brilliant. So

I was. I learned how to do this under the tutelage of the best of the best. And when you're when it starts with the foundation of you always do the right thing. It also means that you have top cover, as they call it. You have the ability to to you know, to change your mind on a case if it's the right thing to do. And I, you know, I had a I had a case. I was just

talking to somebody about this last night. And when I was in sexual assault with Rick King, where I had a guy who was he was in line hawker h hockey coach, in line skating hockey coach, and he was coaching young boys and he was he was he sexually abused some of them, right, and but he what he was doing is he was sexually abusing one horrifically and then he attempted another one and he basically touched his leg one day and that that that kid wasn't having it,

and he immediately reported him. So I had a very substantial sexual abuse of one victim, but I had a very minor kind of attempt on another. And it's still horrific, of course. But there's the thing. In California noticed the multiple victim life enhancement, and it's like, I know he was obviously predatory, but did the actions Like was that a multiple victim life enhancement? Was that worth life in prison? Right?

You know? And this is kind of the thing that I was I was working trying to work through in my mind, and I remember, you know, running it by Rick and and and and by the way that he made it easy for me because the guy and it took us three years to get him. So by the time we got him back, I had no problem freaking filing on the life enhancement because the guy was an

absolute dick. If I can say that, I'm so sorry, but you know, I called Rick and he was he goes, you know, are you're struggling with it, he goes, good. You should struggle with it. Every prosecutor should struggle with this because the power of your ability to affect people's lives is enormous and you you know this. It is not always a black and white easy call to make, and you should struggle. It means you're doing your job. That was the philosophy the dai's office back then. It

was you always do the right thing. And so with Lou like, I had a case and I don't talk about this in the book. I had a case with a woman who was found by her I guess it was her fiance. You know, he calls nine on one. She'd been dead for several hours, right, So they show up and she had been she had bruising on her neck, and they determined the cause of death was asphyxia. And we look at his background, and this man had choked out at least two women in prior relationships. I think

one was an ex wife. So this guy's a choker, he's a thumper, he's a freaking a hole, if I can say that on your show. And he's got this woman. Neighbors said they heard a fight, she's got bruising on her neck, and all the objective signs are that he is that he's strangled her to death. Well, you for post mortem examinations, they do what's called a toxicology. We're in addition to looking at the strap muscles when they open up the neck, and her strap muscles were heavily bruised,

which is also consistent with strangulation. The cause of death was asphyxia, and it looked like a no brainer, so I charge them with murder. But we get the tox results back and turns out that what had happened was she had gotten a vicious argument. He did what he does, and he choked her, probably on conn and but she did not die, and she wasn't mortally injured. But what happened was she came to and was so profoundly depressed about this relationship that she was in, she went and

took an entire stomach full of sleeping pills. And when you when you people when they suicide with sleeping pills, you die of asphix. You it suppresses you breathing. A lot of people don't know that that's actually how you die. But it turns out it was a suicide, so it was. So it was one of those things where you know, I, you know, this guy absolutely deserved criminal charges on a moral sense, as far as I was concerned. He killed her, but of course he didn't actually do it. So you're

you have an ethical obligation as a prosecutor. Your fundamental job, no matter what day and day out, is you must do the right thing. It's it's maybe the only practice of law where it's like that. You never have an unreasonable client. The philosophy of the DA's office back then is always always do the right thing. And so you know, that's one where you have an ethical responsibility as a prosecutor.

As soon as you entertain a doubt as to the efficacy of your case, you're ethically nabligated to immediately go to a court room, call that case up and dismiss it. And so with a supervisor like Lou you know, I mean, it was that's the type of situation where it's like, hey, we got a we got a problem here. This is this is all the evidence that we had. And then it took a radical turn because it turns out that he didn't he did not physically kill her, and and

we wound up. I wound up giving that case to an up and coming guy I think he was in domestic violence back then, named Brahem Betai, who wound up a spiriturt judge. Now in a he's a phenomenal prosecutor and and he prosecuted that guy for the domestic violence and he wound up going to prison as he should have, so he he suffered a criminal consequence. But that that's one of the situations that you wind up with where

you have your job is justice. Your job is to do the right thing, and that means that for a prosecutor, you cannot entertain any doubt. So with a with a guy like Lou backing me, and back then the DA was a guy named Tony Lucaccas who was he was an alumni of the of the unit and he was a spiritual judge for for a long time before he became the elected DA and he got it as well.

So I had I had supervisors above me that not only understood the ethical obligations of a prosecutor, but encouraged it and and just got it like of course you're going in and you're dismissing it immediately and will handle the rest later. And they that was that was something you need. There's we're kind of in a time right now where we're seeing a lot of elected das who aren't there to do the right thing necessarily, and they're

not there to support their deputies. And I mean, I'll give you an example, not that I thought we'd get into this, but there's a guy named George Gascon who's the disc attorney of Los Angeles who treats his deputies horribly in my in my opinion, and he came in and he's he's hostile the law enforcement. He wants to prosecute police officers, but it appears almost nobody else and deputies in that office are not working for somebody who is operating under the same sort of mindset that they are.

And it is extremely difficult to do that when you know you can suffer a political consequence within your office for making what you believe to be an ethical call. And you know, he Los Angeles County is a vast county geographically, and people who cross them tend to get transferred to, you know, Lancaster, you know where they've got a two hour drive every day. You know, things like that.

And so I was really lucky when I was in homicide because you had I had supportive supervisors and people above me, and that understood the primary importance of doing the right thing.

learning how to do that. You know, you try cases against all these lawyers out there in the world, and you're trying I mean I did what I did, thirty seven mistimen er jury trials, then I did twenty four fellony jury trials on the felony panel that I did another seventeen and sexual assault and you know when you do it long enough, the judges get to know who is dedicated to learning the skills of trials right, and the word kind of gets out and you know, by

the time you get to be there's about three hundred lawyers in the Orange County DA's office at any given time, and you wind up with a very small, kind of elite group of people that have kind of, you know, risen up through the ranks to get to one of those spots. And it's a privilege, truly to be in

that unit. And they treat you, at least back when I was in the office, they treat you like a professional, like you've earned your spot, and you know, and it's just so it's so fascinating that, you know, what they do is it's like they rotate somebody in and it's like, hey, this is your area, these are your detectives. Make it work. You know, we're here to support you, and they'd get

out of the way. And for those that really wanted to be there, you know, they would, they would establish the relationships with those detectives and they you know, they would they would do what it took to make sure that the cases were properly handled and that they you know that the appellate issues weren't arising to at least

to the lowest degree possible. And they were, you know, they were dedicated to doing the job and they were treating the victims right, and they you know, they give you an opportunity to sort of you know, to stay there.

And so along the way that that eight eight, eight or nine lawyers, every one of them had had, you know, lunches with criminal offense lawyers who wanted to retire and give somebody their practice, or big civil firms that were looking for a you know, a gun slanger that could go and try some of their big cases for them. And you know, that helps in all kinds of ways. So they you know, in civil law, they they don't it's a different They get very very good and there's

a lot of really smart lawyers doing it. They get very good in motions work and the discovery process. But you know, a lot like my sister's a she's a civil litigator quote unquote, and she's I think she's only tried three or four cases, you know, at least jury trials and the course for a career. You know, I've tried I did one hundred and thirty three jury trials and probably over two hundred and fifty trials total if you count my bench troubles without a jury, So it's

a very different thing. So along the way, everybody gets offer jobs and so the people, and a lot of them take it. You know, if you got a family and you want a lifestyle that's more geared towards showing up for little league games. There's a lot of off ramps along the way. And so by the time I got to homicide, I was surrounded by essentially trial mutants.

These you know, my colleagues were fierce and talented and brilliant, and in my mind, they were nothing short of superhero And I always, I always felt like very honored to be among that group. And I read about that in the book. I mean, it's some of the best people I've ever known. And and some of them, you know, were,

you know, even more impressive in my mind. A couple of my good buddies were you know, they were able to pull off being a phenomenal trial prosecutor in the homicide unit and also a great dad and devoted husband. And there's a couple of my couple of my good friends both now superior court judges who somehow managed to balance it, and I just didn't have the bandwidth to

pull that off. So I, you know, to to be able to operate at that level, I made the decision, and I talked about this in the book that I was just going to get kind of going to give up on romance for a while and just dedicate myself completely to my work.

Lou had retired and he went into private practice. And so there was about five years into my time in homicide, I volunteered to be one of the two cold case deputies, so I would in addition to my cities, I had sort of the run of the county any city in the county that had a you know, an unsolved case, which by the way, is every city in America has at least one unsolved murder. Wow, and some of them

have many unsolved murders. And so with a you know, a population of three million people in the patchwork of cities that exists in Orange County, you know, there was there was some really interesting stuff out there. So this was out of the city of Placentia, so it's off my patch, out of my sort of out of my beat. But there was a police officer that I had gotten to know. He was in an ois at one point, which is an officer in bulb shooting, and I came

to know Darren Wyatt, and Darren's very well known. So Darren was one of the detectives at Placentia that came in after the nineteen ninety four murder of Kathy torres So in that case, it's a it's a beautiful young woman who is at calcually at Fullerton. She's an honor student. She's living at home with her parents, and she'd had this on again, off again relationship with a man named

Sam Lopez who lived across the street in Man. I mean they were kids when they first started dating, and they and her sister married his brother, and so it was very sort of inner familial thing, but Sam was a friggin hothead. They were sort of in an off time and they were each dating other people, and basically Kathy disappeared and she was found a week later in

the trunk of her car. She'd been stabbed dozens of times, her throat had been cut, her wrists had been slashed, and significantly, there was arterial spurting on the lid of her trunk. So she was found in the trunk of her car, and it appeared that there was blood droplets

on the trunk, and that's really legally significant. It's like that three dimensional puzzle we were talking about, because that means that her heart was still beating when she into the trunk, which means from a legal perspective, she was still alive, which means anybody that helped put her in the trunk was therefore a principle to the crime of murder, right,

if that makes sense. Right. So, anyway, the case gets investigated back in ninety four, and it was not that thoroughly investigated, frankly, and they made some mistakes, and they brought the case in for filing against the boyfriend that everybody suspected, but there was no there was no evidence really connecting him to it. He had an alibi and he said he's with his cousin, Javier, and there was another another guy that backed up the at least part of their albi, and they just kind of stuck to

this story. And then da who reviewed it back then, thought there wasn't enough evidence. And then it was submitted again a couple of years later, and again I think that that case was refused two or three times. I can't remember how many. But so Darren, he'd been working on the case for years. It wound up culminating in kind of a heated exchange where they, you know, they really did not think the case was ever going to be filed, and they told them, you know, basically like

don't bring it back. You know, there isn't enough evidence here. So Darren teamed up with my old investigator, Larry Montgomery, who was assigned to me and his specialty was cold cases, and Larry was josh Mankoodz at NBC called him the evidence whisperer, and he's again just brilliant. So these are two men. You know, there are people I respect as much, but there is nobody I respect more I think than

Darren Whyatt and Larry Montgomery. And they basically, you know, they were like two dogs with a bone, and they kept, you know, sort of coming back saying, hey, look let's look at this thing, Let's look at that. And we Darren went back and he he reprocessed a fingerprint that had been found on the trunk of the car. And remember the our main suspect, Sam Lopez is alibi was

his cousin Jabber. And they go in there and they had discovered Hobbier's DNA on the on the quarter panel of her car, mixed with a drop of Kathy's blood. And back then it's a thing called substrate DNA. This was a big defense that you know, theoretically you can touch a surface leave DNA and then somebody else could come along later and bleed on it. And it's kind of an absurd defense because of what is known as genetic masking. But I won't get into that. But back

you know, this is there. This is the mid nineteen nineties, so this is like right after OJ right, and like nobody really interested DNA worked back then, and it was still what they called RFLP, which is those old gels with the you know, the gray and the black markers, you know, those square markers, you know, and genetic science has in a forensic context has you know, we went from the Right Brothers to the Space age, you know, with the with the with the current like cofiler and

profiler play kids, and it's just it's so sophisticated now. And I had done so many DNA cases between sexual assault and homicide, and you know, we got I wasn't as impressed as the deputies back in the mid nineties that substrate DNA was such a good defense for Hobber

and he and he had a story. He's like, hey, yeah, like right before she went missing, we were at Norwalk Records and I got something out of her trunk and anyway, they submitted the fingerprint that nobody back in the day had had bothered the check and it was Javier's fingerprint. So now we have Javier's fingerprint in an upward oriented position on the trunk, and we have his DNA mixed with her blood on the quarter panel. And it's like, you know, it's that's starting to look better and better

to me. And so a new set of eyes. So I decided to file the case. And this is a bereaved family who I still communicate with. There. You know that her mother was just she's such like such a dignified woman, but she's so broken hearted at the at the murder of her beautiful daughter. And the type of grief that a family goes through is hard to describe unless somebody has experienced it, and it is, you know,

And I've had conversations. I'm in New York right now, and I spend a lot of time here doing the media stuff. I had dinner with somebody I know out here a couple of years ago, and and she said that I remember, She's like, oh, yeah, you know, I would just I would be able to move on words like that, you know, And she had four kids, and it's like, no, you wouldn't you have no idea what

these people go through. You have no idea what a family endures when they have When a mother loses a child to murder, it is the worst thing a human being can experience, and the idea of getting justice becomes incredibly important. And you can't, of course, you can't bring their loved one back, but you can as a criminal prosecutor. You can make sure that the person who did it doesn't get away with it, and that is incredibly important.

You know. I met the Torres family and she had that Her brother was a guy named Marty Torres, who was a core clerk who I instantly liked, and her sister Tina, and like there, she had such a wonderful family. And you meet people like that and it's just it breaks your heart. And you know, this case got refused a million times, but fifteen years had gone by and I thought, you know, I think we have enough. I think I think we can win this, and so I just I made the decision to file it. And it's

a bit like Russian roulette. Every time you file a case, you don't know who's going to walk in the door, and it's either it could be some crumpy dude who you know who with thick glasses who smells weird. I think I put that in the book, or or you could the lawyer who walks in the courtroom could be an ace. And you're almost like, it's almost like Vegas. It's like, please don't be here for my case. Please don't because there everybody knows everybody you know in the

in the criminal criminal justice world of Orange County. And basically, long story short, the best lawyer I'd ever seen in the courtroom wound up. He got hired by the family and I had to go up against lou Rosenbloom, an absolute genius, and it was the absolute worst draw. He was brought in by a woman named Jennifer Keller, who is a fantastic lawyer in her own right and an absolute brilliant trial strategist. And she just represented Kevin Spacey here in New York and acquitted him. I mean, she

is phenomenal. So I'm up against that duo like two of the best lawyers I've ever seen. Man. That was That was probably the most difficult trial I ever did. Basically we wound up after we filed, we submitted Kathy's genes that were on her body in the trunk, thinking, you know, we got Javier on the outside and we got this goofy story, maybe we can get some more. Let's look at her genes, like where would somebody carry carry her if he was helping put her in the trunk.

And you know, we're still hoping to get Sam's DNA the boyfriend, but he locked himself in that he was with Abvier that night, and sure enough, man, we swabbed the back of her jeans and we got Javier's DNA on the back of her jeans, and that changed everything because that meant Javier was helping somebody load her into the trunk and there's only one person it could have been, and it was Sam Lopez. So we we charged them both because Javier that made him a principle because of

those that arterial bleeding. You know, we went to work and that trial was was just an unbelievable experience. I watched lou Rosenbland do stuff from that that were it was so effective. He's one of the only lawyers that did devastating things in a courn that I did not anticipate. I mean, after I you know, every when I first started, every lawyer, everything they did was something I didn't anticipate because I didn't I didn't know. I didn't know anything yet.

But I mean, he was so good and at the at the end, you know, the it came down to Sam's interview. He gave this interview where you know, they he was in an interview, remember the Central Police Department, and this was a woman that he had dated on and off. It was his sister in law. And he went in and he played the role of totally innocent guy and that you know, there was about forty minutes that went on into that interview before he even asked how she died. And they brought him in and said, hey,

we found Kathy. And he was like he basically thought to himself, how would an innocent person act? And he played that. He played that role where he basically just went in and was like nonchalant and like ho ham And they took a break and he got like a smudge on his hat, like and he's like, oh man, and he's checking the walls and like it's to be this is this has got to be like four by

four construction in here. Like he's talking to himself, he's reading the ingredients on a coke can, and he's like, huh. And I pretend like, in the real world, the hot headed boyfriend of a woman that he was in love with and had been forever wouldn't have been acting like that. He would have been he would have been demanding answers.

And when they said, you know, hey, she was murdered, he was like huh yeah, and they're like, yeah, we thought you would have had got more of a reaction out of you, buddy, like somebody murdered your your ex girlfriend, your sister in lawn and really you didn't even ask for forty minutes you know how she died, And that wound up being being the thing. So I went through that interview line by line, and at the end of the day the jury convicted him and a first degree murder.

Actually he's up for parole here pretty soon again. But yeah, that was that was quite an experience. I had to go toe to toe and lou and I walked into that trial. I think we were and I I added it up for the book. I can't rememb I think we were. Between the two of us stuff point, we'd tried one hundred and four murder trials and neither of us have lost one and one of us was going to walk out with our record intact and the other was going to walk out with the with an L

and that was live. Thankfully.

They did it, they were convicted of it, but they denied it all through the trial and they figure, screw you, I'm not going to admit it. And so they come into their hearings and they refused to admit it, and that that counts against them because there they've expressed no remorse. And it's this was just brilliant. Lou waived the appellate rights because it took us so long to get that case to trial. He had a parole hearing coming up, and he then apologized. He admitted it, and he apologized

to the Torres family. And it was absolute brilliance because now his lawyers at these parole hearings can come in and say, this is the only homicide, frigging murder defendant you guys are going to see on the board of prison terms who admitted everything and apologized to the family. At sensing, I mean it was it was a genius because that it virtually guarantees that he will get paroled. He will because his lawyer was a genius. And what you see typically is I mean you almost never see that.

You see people saying we're going to file every appeal and that's fine, that's you know, kind of a lawyer's job in a way. But Lou he always he he's always kind of as intellectually a step ahead of everybody. And I was absolutely shocked that that happen. And then you know, it's just like I was sitting at council table. I remember thinking, son of a bitch, did it again? Like that is absolutely brilliant because it guarantees he will be released. You know, at some point he will be released.

The family will, their hearts will break. They're going to fight it. You know. I'll do everything I can to keep that guy in for what he did, and especially when you put that family through. But you know, especially in state of California, eventually they will parole him, hopefully hopefully not yet, you know, and that's that will be as a direct result of the you know, the brilliance of his lawyer.

went up with this. You know, the buyer of the boat was a child actor named Skuyler de Leon who appeared in The Power Rangers. You know, he showed up with documents saying that he'd purchased the boat. They were signed by Tom and Jackie Hawks and they paid cash and we had kind of a crazy story, but we didn't have We had no real proof at that point, at least of you know, of foul play. And we

did two forendsic workups of their yacht. There was no there's no blood, there was no broken items, there was nothing indicating that anything violent had happened on the boat. And my lead detective was Dave Byington, the same guy that took me into the kitchen in that Newport Peach home. And that case wound up being absolutely wild. You know, I talked about this in the book, and yeah, this Skylar de Leone is a genuine psychopath. And then with

Riding i'cala, he's known as the dating Game killer. He was a serial killer active in the nineteen seventies who kidnapped him almost murdered an eight year old girl named Tali Shapiro in nineteen sixty eight in Hollywood, and she was in a coma for thirty two days. There's a heroic police officer, Officer Camacho, who kicked the door in and saved the day. But I'll call it escaped. And it was like this devil's choice he had to make, like save the dying little girl or catch the bad guy.

And he did the right thing. He saved the dying little girl. Well, i'll call it turns up. Three years later, four years later, maybe in Vermont working at an all girls summer camp. He moved to New York, changed his name. He graduated from UCLA Film School before this, and then he went and he went to NYU Film School, studied under Roman Polanski of all things. And he was They caught him, they extradited him. He was sentenced to life and he was paroled after thirty four months and stayed

prison for that crime. And after he was paroled, depending on who we you know, who you talk to. But the lead detective is a guy in Craig Robson who's now a Supreme Court judge as well, is one of the smartest people I know. You know he when you do the math on it and you figure out, you know where where I'll call it was, you know who,

how much time he had, how prolific he was. He estimates he killed one hundred people after his paroled from a life sentence, and he was finally arrested for kidnapping, raping, and murdering a twelve year old girl I was hunting to beach named Robin Samso. But the case got reversed once by the California Supreme Court. He was retried since to death again. Then I went to the ninth circuit

that reversed it again, and it came down. That's when it landed on my desk, and I teamed up with a woman who I love, named Genus Satriano, with a man named Steve Cooley, who's the former DA of LA, who was wonderful, and they we did it together, and

we went up prosecuting. After we got the Robin Samso thing, we started getting cold case hits out of Los Angeles, so we prosecuted him for the murders of four women and one girl, so five victims, and then he got you know, he was charged with I think just two in New York, but there's five murders that I know he committed out here, and then there was another one in Wyoming. He was cleared to one in Marin certainly did two in San Diego, although he's never charged for those.

Like this is a man who was a monster. Yes, you know, like a lot of good psychopaths, he insisted on representing himself, which is one of the things they love to do. So yeah, I had to deal with him interpersonally for about six months that come in and we talk, and you know, you have to treat him yet, you know, for some foremost you have to treat Canmo defendants fairly as a prosecutor, and he's representing himself, so

you know I had to. I had, you know, I had to treat him fairly and make sure the process was fair. So I had to go deal with him daily, and honestly, it was a fascinating experience. It really was. You know, he's he's the he's an evil human being, I mean, if you can even call a human. But it was it was a sort of a seminal experience in my life. It was really something. And at the

end he was sentenced to out the third time. We convicted him of all five murders for you know, one of them, Robin Samso for the third time, and then he went and he died a lonely death in California medical facility outside of Sacramento. Eventually died just a couple of years ago, and the world instantly became a better place as soon as he did.

mortar and They're super nice. It's available on Audible, there's a Kindle version. It all just came out, you know, in the last couple of days. So I'm also doing I'm doing a book signing here in New York at the Shakespeare and Company Friday at six o'clock borrow. I'm going to be in Indianapolis Barnes and Noble on Saturday this week, which is what the twenty first, and then I'm doing a live event in San Diego on the twenty third. I'll be in Newport Beach Barnes and Noble

at Fashion Island. But we're still trying to dial in a date that I'm heading up to Salt Lake City, and I'm going to be posting all these dates as they as they come forward. I'm hoping to make it down, believe it or not, to Shreveport, Louisiana at some point. Potentially we might just do it in New Orleans. So we're the stops on the book tour are sort of

still we're still putting them together. Yeah, I will. I would love to sign anybody's book, And if you want to sign copy and you don't want to come to what Barnes and Noble someplace. You can get them at pages of bookstore dot com. Oh, that's great. Thank you so much.