LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 18, 2014

In the weeks before the trial, Mitzi Roberts’s essential witnesses lobbed question after question at her, sometimes at midnight, punctuated with sobs.

In Pascagoula, Hilda Nelson and Leila McClain tried on hats. Nelson wondered what was proper in a Los Angeles courthouse, in a Los Angeles anywhere.

McClain said, “I am the queen of Antarctica if that’s where I got to go. I ain’t changing.”

In Portland, Laurie Barros practiced chin up, don’t cry. She practiced looking that piece of human garbage in the eye, practiced the mind scripts suggested by her therapist to banish the thought loops.

Don’t think about the attack. Don’t think about the heart attack, the drugs, the getting clean, the loves who were terrible at love. The kids, the kids, the kids.

Barros told Roberts she had superglued her tears down this time.

Prepping a trial was like running a bucket brigade of meticulously labeled chains of evidence while juggling witnesses with your feet. Trials were a bitch.

The prosecution’s solid team had completed their homework. Opposing counsel usually trembled at the paperwork deputy district attorney Beth Silverman hurled at them, but Michael Pentz was a good lawyer, worthy adversary, all that, no love lost between them. She’d win with what she had. He’d just make it a pain in her ass.

The real hurdle, the only thing she’d been truly worried about, had been the admission of the pattern evidence. The court had excluded four cases, but she had her three living, breathing, talking survivors who would take the stand and the cops who caught Sam in the act with Tonya Jackson.

Mike Pentz defended capital cases from the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office on the eighth floor of the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on West Temple Street. It overlooked a patch of green where the pastel multicolored benches and chairs now mostly provided brief respite for what the cops liked to call urban campers. The staggering numbers of LA’s homeless community grew in proportion and pace with the live/work lofts going up all around.

Pentz had once been a kid who struggled—an urban camper himself—decades before. It gave him the kind of supercharged compassion it took to sit next to a lot of shitbirds and know even the worst shitbird had a story. Pentz was handsome, with careworn blue eyes and a beard showing the first hints of gray. He was a surfing, sun-kissed sharp dresser.

Pentz was a true believer. When the presumption of innocence is your motivating belief, you’re in for a ride.

On the morning of August 18, 2014, twenty-five years and four days from when Audrey Nelson’s body was found in a dumpster, Pentz sat in the Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County, next to a wheelchair-ridden Samuel Little, who faced multiple murder charges with special circumstances. As Judge George G. Lomeli had said during the pretrial hearings, the People of the State of California v. Samuel Little, a.k.a. Samuel McDowell was an important case but straightforward.

Across the aisle sat Silverman. Pentz didn’t think her vitriol belonged in a courtroom.

Silverman’s world was one of good guys and bad guys. Anyone at the other table was the bad guy, even the lawyers. Especially the lawyers.

Silverman had gotten her witnesses admitted, with limitations, to establish a behavioral pattern. Pentz had the admission of third-party culpability evidence—a mark on Audrey Nelson’s neck that could have been made by a ring or a belt buckle. Nelson’ boyfriend, Jack West, had regularly beaten the shit out of her, lied to the police, and wore a ring. A shoe print found next to Guadalupe Apodaca’s body matched a scumbag named McLaughlin she ran around with and with whom she was last seen alive. His brother told the police he did it. It was what Pentz had to work with.

White-haired, in a wrinkled light-blue shirt. Sam showed up nonchalant, glassy-eyed. Pentz found him surprisingly personable when they’d met before the trial, different from this dissociated flat stare. Sam perked up when Silverman opened, leaning in to comment not on her statement but on her ass.

“Don’t stare,” said Pentz.

Sam leaned in again to complain about the detective sitting at the prosecution table, arms crossed, pressed gray suit. Bitch—she was the one who called him a rapist. A bowl of peanut M&Ms sat next to the stacks of paper in front of Mitzi Roberts.

“Don’t engage. She’ll try and get to you.”

“This going to feel like forever no matter what. This Jew slut here just getting going.”

SILVERMAN: These three cases, you’re going to hear them referred to as cold cases. They’re the cold case murders of Carol Alford, who was 41 years old at the time of her death; Audrey Nelson, who was 35 years old when she was murdered; and Guadalupe Apodaca, who was 46 years old at the time of her death.

You’re going to learn throughout the course of this trial that the victims in this case were women who had lost their way. They were women who were troubled, women who perhaps had drug addictions, women who resorted perhaps to prostitution in order to support their drug habits. You’re going to hear that because of these things, because of the lifestyle that they were engaged in, that it made them particularly vulnerable, that it made them easy targets for a calculated killer who was looking to prey on easy targets.

Silverman always led with the sticky stuff. She gave it to the jury straight. Let the years of judgments and assumptions cycle through them for a bit—those very judgments meant to be somehow magically set aside the minute a person stepped into a jury box. As if wood paneling walled out bias.

Present in the audience were a few reporters, scattered clusters of family members.

Silverman laid out the blueprint of Sam’s killings, broke down the DNA science, and talked about the Cold Case Special Section. She addressed the importance of evolving DNA science to cold cases in general.

Silverman talked with her hands as if already physically pushing the case to its conclusion from the starting line. She wove together story and science.

DNA was Silverman’s magic bullet, the great equalizer. As a prosecutor, she was taught to represent not the victims but the community. Silverman knew differently. She was there for the victims. Sometimes she was the only one, with DNA her only eyewitness.

SILVERMAN: What you’re going to hear is DNA revolutionized police work in this country.

Silverman broke down the three murders sequentially, explained the witnesses who would be called, demystified the DNA analysts. She didn’t want the jury getting the thousand-yard stare. She established an MO. A pattern. A story.

SILVERMAN: The first victim is Carol Alford. Her body was found on July 13 of 1987, in an alley that you can see here in this photograph to the rear of 848 East 27th Street, in South Los Angeles. She was nude except for a blue t-shirt that was pulled up over her bra.

And here is where the circumstances are going to repeat themselves:

1. She’s not wearing any type of underwear, and no underwear was found at the crime scene or in the vicinity.
2. She’s not wearing any pants or skirt or shorts, no undergarments at all, and none of those were found anywhere in the vicinity of this crime scene.
3. There was no identification or personal belongings.
4. There were drag marks in the dirt that were leading up to her body, indicating that this is what is referred to sometimes as a “body dump.” What that means is that she was likely murdered at one location, and then transported and dumped at a second location.

Sam yawned as Silverman talked about chains and stains and wet brains. He perked up at the mention of strangulation but just as quickly slumped back into a snarl when Silverman said “blunt-force trauma.”

SILVERMAN: You’ll also learn about the strangulation process, in terms of the amount of force that has to be applied to the neck; the fact that the pressure to the neck has to be kept constant, otherwise the person will regain consciousness; and how long it takes for someone to lose consciousness with constant pressure to the neck; as well as how long you have to apply constant pressure of a certain amount to the neck before the person will expire. It’s not a quick dying process.

She then went on to establish the pattern she’d repeat over and over again throughout the trial:

SILVERMAN: All of the victims, as I mentioned, were vulnerable targets.

1. All of them, as you can see from the photographs, were left undressed from the waist down, which is, of course, suggestive of sexual assault.
2. No identification was found at the crime scene for any of these victims.
3. No pants or underwear was left, a skirt, bottom, anything of the sort.
4. All of them were strangled to death. All of them appeared to be manual strangulation.
5. All of them had cocaine in their system at the time of autopsy.
6. All of them appeared to be body dumps, in isolated locations.

Silverman told the jury what to expect from the surviving victims. The dead victims could not talk, but the living ones could testify to Samuel Little’s violent behavior. Roberts had told the victims day after day they’d be taking their power back, using their voices for the voiceless.

SILVERMAN: Now, the charges in this case. This won’t be complicated. It’s the charge of murder.

While DNA was admittedly a sea change for the criminal justice system, Pentz didn’t believe in magic bullets. DNA fingerprinting was a profound forensic tool but not a substitute for critical thinking or an excuse to stop thinking, period. He acknowledged the horrors of the crimes, the emotions and anger they provoked, but brought it back to the evidence being circumstantial, brought it back to the possible third parties.

PENTZ: You’re going to hear an instruction, and by now you probably know, the statements that I make to you, and all of the statements that the prosecutor just made to you, are simply not evidence.

The only thing that you’re asked to do as jurors is to hear what is said on that witness stand, and to review the documents that are actually placed in your hands as part of the evidence.

Much of the evidence you’re going to hear in this case, just like the bulk of the statement that you just heard from counsel, will be about incidents that have nothing to do with the charges Mr. Little faces.

Roberts stepped out to take a call from Tim Marcia. Leila McClain sobbed into his phone. From what Roberts could discern, a black-and-white had arrived for them at the airport.

McClain had pitched a hissy. She wasn’t getting in that fucking thing, no way. They out of their damn minds? Marcia had gone to meet them at the airport to do damage control.

Turned out the orca had been the least of it. While the cops and professional witnesses were at the Doubletree getting a complimentary warm cookie, the DA had drop-kicked McClain, Nelson, and Barros into a shithole meth den hotel called the Kawada. The hallways smelled of stale smoke, the bedspreads were stained, the carpets blackened with burns.

“I have not been a whore for years, and I have never felt more like a whore.”

“Bowlegs,” said Roberts. “Take a breath, and put Tim on the fucking phone.”

Roberts told him to take them to the Doubletree with everyone else, and then she called Gary Hearnsberger, the head deputy at the district attorney’s office, himself and swore to almost beat Bowlegs.

“You’re making my Black victims stay at the fucking Kawada? This is fucking bullshit!”

He finally conceded when she put it that way.

The next day, when McClain went in for her pretrial interview, Hearnsberger popped in to say he was real sorry. He didn’t know the Kawada was a dump.

“You ever heard that saying birds of a feather?” McClain asked him. “That sure the hell ain’t my nest.”