' . . . chance favors only the prepared mind.'

The LAPD set out to catch one serial killer, and inadvertently caught a different one.

How LAPD's "Closers" Nabbed the Westside Rapist

The police were using a DNA dragnet to find the Grim Sleeper. In so doing, they caught John Floyd Thomas aka The Westside Rapist.

Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.

Harlow Shapley (astronomer)

The big break in the case came because a detective took special care to collect and preserve trace evidence in case forensic science ever began using DNA to solve crimes. He did this long before such evidence had ever been used in court.

Then a crucial coincidence occurred, the kind of thing that would give Harry Bosch pause: It was 1976, and Manchester saw a magazine article about the science of DNA technology. “It was something pretty new,” Manchester says today. In fact, most cops then relied on crime-scene analysis as rudimentary as grade-school math: spraying Luminol to locate fingerprints, and identifying blood types and groups.

Influenced by the fascinating magazine piece, Manchester did something odd for those times: He insisted that the Los Angeles County autopsy technicians save as much human detritus and trace evidence found at the McKeown crime scene as possible. His unusual request would prove instrumental in solving the dust-gathering case, retrieved from a police evidence shelf by Bengtson and his partner Vivian Flores three decades later.

This is another serial killer who does not fit the popular image. Time and again on TV and in movies we’ve seen a cop or a profiler harangue their boss or other authority figure:

This guy is out there. He’s killed before. He will kill again, and he will keep on killing until somebody stops him.

The cinematic predator either won’t stop because he is arrogant or he can’t stop because he has an overwhelming compulsion to kill. An orgy of violence builds until the brave and brilliant hero (or heroine) finally brings the killer to justice.

Yet, in the last decade we’ve seen something completely different. Killers like the Grim Sleeper, BTK, or the Golden State Killer all have gone on long hiatuses or stopped killing completely.

"So, why can't journalists fictionalize no more than screenwriters?"

That's the impertinent question Steve Sailer asks in the wake of the media coverage of Christopher Dorner's rampage.

How movies and videogames are more accurate about recent history than the newspapers

RTWT

Sailer raises an important point about the myopia of newpaper people:

You might think that exploring the ties between rogue cops and some of the most notorious murders of the 1990s (Biggie and Tupac) would be a good way to sell newspapers, but selling newspapers has long been a lower priority than Shaping the Narrative.

For decades, newspapers could sell papers, grow profits, and shape the narrative without breaking a sweat. They owed their privileged position to the decline in competition and the rise of local monopolies. (See here.)

Now, that era of easy living has passed but no one in charge knows how to operate in a challenging environment. The problem is made worse by the power of the guild and the agency problem.

You have to wonder-- does this suggest that there is an opportunity for some enterprising iconoclast who is willing to flaunt the tired conventions and lame narratives?

Related:

I wrote about the LAPD and the MSM narrative here:

LAPD

Worse than Jayson Blair

Daryl Gates , RIP

The L. A. Times does its usual sloppy and biased job. Patterico, as he often does, helps us out by setiing them straight.

L.A. Times Editors Spit on Gates’s Memory and Botch the Facts in the Process

The LAPD officer who writes as Jack Dunphy offers a view from inside the force.

The Los Angeles Times Smears Memory of Former LAPD Chief Gates

A couple of old posts are relevent here.

LAPD

Worse than Jayson Blair

Worse than Jayson Blair

Patterico points to these two articles on LAPD corruption, the murder of Biggie Smalls, and the L. A. Times.

The Front Page Magazine piece seems to pull no punches in going after the LAT:

the once venerable paper faces a scandal of Jayson Blair proportions, one that may topple key players-including a Pulitzer Prize winner-and permanently sully its reputation.

But I have to disagree. When compared to the actions of the LAT, the Jayson Blair scandal pales in comparison. Blair lied, but he lied about matters of slight consequence. It was a grubby little inside baseball affair that served, mainly, to let Andrew Sullivan even some scores. The LAT stands accused of covering up for a murderous mélange of gangster cops, gansta rappers, and just plain gangsters.

The Rolling Stone piece lets Randall Sullivan update his reporting in LAbyrinth (a highly, highly recommended book). The civil case brought by Voletta Wallace is turning over rocks and Sullivan is taking careful inventory of what scuttles out from underneath.

It is more than a little puzzling that our crime-obsessed cable channels have ignored this case and the on-going litigation. They have hours to devote to Aruba, Natalie Holloway, Michael Jackson, and Robert Blake. Yet they have no interest in this juicy story.

One reason for the silence is the role played by Johnny Cochran in the scandals and in the media. He was deeply involved in parts of the cover-up (the Kevin Gaines shooting) and played the race card to buffalo the city into dropping its investigation into Gaines, Death Row Records, and Suge Knoght. Cochran was also a friend and colleague of Dan Abrams and Nancy Grace at Court TV.

Another reason for the media's failure is that the story does not fit their template. The Smalls murder and the real Ramparts scandals upset their simplistic formula of old LAPD=bad and Reno-sanctioned reforms=good. I discussed that aspect here last year.

A final factor is the MSM's pathological reluctance to admit mistakes. Taking a hard look at the LAPD scandals in light of the new information would reveal that the media got it very wrong the first time.

Off to OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam

LAPD

When i was growing up, the LAPD represented the best of the best when it came to law enforcement. Now, it's image is probably something along the lines of "corrupt white men using their power to oppress brown people."

That formulation is a paraphrase of James Ellroy whose novels play on that theme like a nine year old plays a drum-- loudly, incessantly, without subtlety or reflection.

A decade of headlines seemed to confirm the image:
--- The OJ Simpson Trial
---Rodney king
---The LA Riots
---Ramparts CRASH Scandal
---The shooting of an off-duty black police officer by a white cop.

Anyone who want to know the story beyond the headlines ought to read two book: Lou Cannon's Official Negligence and Randall Sullivan's LAbyrinth. They are eye-opening. It's a little like that old comedy bit, "everything you know, is wrong."

Far from being the corrupt department of Ellroy's nightmares, both writers agree that Chief Parker reformed it in the 1950s and made the LAPD an honest, efficient force that probably was the finest in the world by the 1960s. Parker was undoubtedly a prejudiced hard-ass with a drinking problem and a genius for PR. But as Lou Cannon writes, "while advancing through the ranks during the most violent and corrupt period in the department's history, Parker was never touched by any scandal."

Daryl Gates was chief when the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots shook the city and he received most of the blame for the LAPD's failures. But both writers agree that the these incidents were exploited by multiple players with their own agendas. Cannon notes, "mayor [Tom Bradley] had decided that the King incident had handed him an opportunity to oust a police chief he lacked the authority to fire, and the mayor's aides fed a flow of disparaging information about Gates to the media, some of it demonstrably false." One of those aids was Mark Fabiani who "was orchestrating the effort to "turn up the heat" on the chief and pressure him to resign." Inside the LAPD there were senior officers who hoped to succeed Gates and had no problem making the department look bad in order to clear the way. Lawyers like Johnny Cochran were happy to stir the pot because it lined their pockets.

The Ramparts "scandal" is an even more disturbing story. When authorities closed in on a dirty cop-- Rafael Perez-- he spun a tale of wide-spread corruption and abuse by the special anti-gang CRASH unit in Ramparts division.

The media and politicians had a field day with the lurid allegations. It was a perfect scandal- anti-LAPD, anti-Gates, tinged with racism, proof of deep, systemic corruption.

The only problem is that Perez made nearly all of it up out of whole cloth to cover his own criminality. As the New Yorker put it:

In creating and, to some degree, directing the course of the Rampart scandal, Rafael Perez may have overtly lied or withheld the whole truth, and he may have protected his friends and settled old scores by implicating his enemies. Few now believe that the wrongdoing was as widespread as Perez once suggested—of the seventy officers eventually implicated by Perez, five were fired by the department and eight more resigned. What has been verified in Perez's allegations is nowhere near as serious as the crimes that he himself confessed to.

Ramparts is just an example of the excesses that can grow out of the media's love for sensation and their anti-authority bias. The initial headlines promise more than later stories can confirm.

Beyond the interests of accurate history, there is an Iraqi connection. The stories coming out of the military prisons have the potential to be a Baghdad Ramparts. Anti-military reporters will have an interest in finding systemic abuses; the perpetrators have an interest in shifting the guilt to their superiors. Reporters want exclusives to big stories and therefore, have a bias against undercutting a source who will point the finger at high-ranking officers.

One more example of reader beware.