LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
November 2019
The maps were codes to be cracked, and the streets were rivers, the stories they kept lying somewhere in the deep waters. I took images back to Sam, checked and rechecked, went back to the maps, to the databases, the news archives.
I wandered Sam’s old strolls, drove his routes, pictured building after building no longer there, looked for overpasses and underpasses. Sometimes I knocked on doors and talked to people. When I wasn’t in the mood, I’d take a walk on the main streets of South LA in the early evening, not turning off onto an alley or a side street with no traffic. I didn’t want to be there after dark for too long, but no one with anything interesting to say would be out much earlier. I started going to Tam’s and getting two orders of fries, extra Thousand Island for each, and a Diet Coke.
If there was an empty table, I’d go sit and read a book. Someone usually walked over to inquire who in the actual fuck I was.
If there were no empty tables, I’d approach a table with a woman sitting at it, and I’d ask if they minded.
“You a cop?”
“Nope.”
“You a realtor?”
“No. Fries?”
Usually my name—Jillian—would break the ice, because they all watched Good Day LA and were invested in the personal life of Jillian Barberie. They thought that ex-husband of hers was a snake, and she was a good girl, and did I know whatever happened with her boobs? She okay now? Boobs healthy? Got a bad deal, poor thing. Always liked her.
I suspected a large problem with cracking the LA cases was Sam often drove much farther than he remembered.
These are my original notes on the Alice confession:
8. LA, BLACK FEMALE, 1990/1991 “ALICE”
Little stated while driving his 1977 Ford F-250 camper van in approximately 1990 or 1991, he met a slender 5’7” 120 pound, approximately 40 to 45 year old black female named “Alice” in Los Angeles, California. Little stated he was with Barbara when he met her. Little stated she was very neat in appearance and he made a date with the woman at a nearby corner/bus bench at 4:00 PM that day. Little stated at the time his Probation Officer was Felicia McNeal, and that he had just gotten out of prison or off parole. Little stated he took the woman way down Central Avenue almost halfway to Dominique College. Little stated that he took the woman into the county, and that she had a square purse. Little stated he drove onto a dirt road that led to a field. Little stated the woman was wearing stockings and high heels. Little stated he strangled the woman to death and left her face up, on her side, fully clothed in the field. Little stated that the field was near an overpass. Little stated that he heard the woman was found by a guy on a bicycle that was riding across the overpass.
While I drove, I listened to the music that would have been on a radio station in 1990, 1991, cycled through some of what would have been on the news, tried to remember where I had been. Germany reunified, the Soviet Union collapsed, HW was president, we went to war with Iraq. Grunge was a new thing. I was the mistress of the prince of Brunei.
Sam probably listened to an oldies station, though he also liked pop tunes. He could have been listening to “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “U Can’t Touch This,” “Thieves in the Temple,” “O.P.P.,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
I was pretty sure I had the liquor store, the pink motel, and the bus stop. I could not find the body dump.
“Girl!”
A pretty, young Black woman with chapped lips, wearing a synthetic bob wig and a G-string bathing suit, bounced from behind a car and put her head in my window.
“The fuck? Girl, you scared the shit out of me,” I said.
“Baby, baby,” she said, regulating her volume. “You can’t be out here by yourself! You looking for some dope? I can help you.”
“I’m not looking to get high, but here.” I pulled a twenty out of my bra. I always kept folded twenties in my bra. It kept me from having to take out my purse, and I also thought it was a nice touch, stolen from my nana Anna. I held it up. “There anyone who used to work around here in the late nineties?”
“Here?”
“Around here, near here. A corner, a wall. Anyone who knew girls working back then?”
She gave me directions to where some of the old-timers hung out, and I gave her the twenty, then I gave her another, which you should never do, because word of a sucker gets around. I did it anyway.
“You tell your cop friends that we know who they sending down here all pretending like they’re working! Tell ’em we know straight off they dress too nice. Not you—why you wearing a turtleneck?”
“Really? Because it’s cold. Put some fucking pants on!”
We laughed too hard, and she waved goodbye before ducking back out of sight.
I called my patrol cop friends down at Newton Division for fun and because I was in the neighborhood. I got to know them during my first ride-alongs as a journalist, and we’d stayed in touch.
“Hey, these hookers here are all over your sting. They told me to pass it on. You dress too nice! I’m around the corner. Are you working?”
“You down here? Jillian, why you gotta be a fucking idiot all the time? Call before you’re coming so we know at least, or next time I swear I’ll send a black-and-white for you.”
“No one will ever talk to me again. I can’t be seen hanging around with you riffraff.”
“Fuck you. Be safe out there. How’s Scott? Boys still givin’ ya hell?”
When I showed Rick Jackson my earnest pile of binders, he took pity on me and brought me under his illustrious wing. Jackson has been called the “godfather” of LA crime writers, and is widely referenced by James Ellroy, Joseph Wambaugh, and, of course, Michael Connelly, who based his character Harry Bosch on Jackson. He is an encyclopedia of historic LA crime.
Jackson worked the original Little case with Mitzi Roberts, and he taught me step-by-step how to puzzle through an investigation report. He walked me through what an original investigation would have looked like, coaxed from me the kinds of questions one might ask when looking through a cold case file.
“Say you don’t even have any original evidence to test for DNA. Okay, take a step back in time.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Sure. Of course. What else? What was his blood type?”
“Um.”
“You should know that.”
“I do. I do. It’s A, A positive.”
“Okay, file that. Let’s look at every line, one at a time.”
When Jackson came to LA to see Connelly, he dropped by to visit the kids, flashed them his reserve badge, checked in on my progress. He told them just gross enough but not too gross stories. He brought some buoyancy back to the frustrating hunt, encouraged me to dig deeper, follow the curiosity that got me here in the first place.
“Don’t start getting worn down now.”
We bounced around LA together. When you obviously stick out, the best thing you can do is be the coolest version of what you are. From across a football field, you could tell Jackson was a cop. He still rocked the original cop mustache, which was now snow white. He’d take out his reserve badge and wave it around. He was forthright without being threatening, and he approached everyone as if they were already buddies.
One morning, we stepped out of my mom SUV next to a tent city in South LA. A woman cooking franks on a grill asked, “You two movie stars?”
“Yeah!” replied Jackson. “It’s a porno! I know I’m an old man and you’d never guess, but it’s this big!” He held his hands out to indicate a good two feet.
“That’s right! That’s what I’m saying!” she laughed.
“It’s tucked into my sock right now so I don’t step on it!”
“Can I star in Part 2?” she shot back.
“Hey, speaking of long, how long you been in this neighborhood?” asked Jackson. A masterful transition if I’d ever heard one.
We gathered a few tidbits here and there, found a Chinese restaurant that had been around at the time Alice disappeared, and the mom still worked in the back. We stumbled on an LA treasure: Granny’s Kitchen Southern Style Soul Food. We ran through the possibilities over cornbread and short ribs.
I was certain we’d nailed the liquor store, the bus stop, and the pink motel, which was now a stucco hardware store with apartments above and tile displays out front. Centrale De Materiales, 5425 Central at Fifty-Fifth.
When I next visited Sam, I brought pictures. He told me Barbara was a pretty thing. He dressed her up like a doll. One hundred percent blind as a doll too. He tapped his finger on the second window from the street side.
“That was where that bull dyke lived who hollered at Alice. Alice was down in this alley right here. That’s why she met me at the bus stop later in the day and ducked all down in the seat so no one would see her go.”
“You said it was a motel.”
“Oh, it was always that. That’s it.”
“This is why you make me crazy.”
“Blind Barbara’s godmother’s dress shop occupied the ground floor. The neighborhood kids would steal when she had to leave Blind Barbara at the desk.”
I had the liquor store. I had the pink motel. I even had the killer.
What I did not have was a body dump, and what I really did not have was a body. He caught me by phone out on the road one day, and I had him walk me through it.
“I am in front of a pink motel,” I told Sam. “Can you imagine what that was?”
“Oh, wait a minute. Hold on. A pink motel? Yeah, on Central Avenue?”
“On Central Avenue. That’s right.”
“Do you remember my old lady, the blind girl? That was her godmother’s motel. She liked everything pink: a pink Cadillac, a pink motel, and a gift shop out in front, on Central Avenue. It was pink.”
“Did you meet one of your babies at that motel? Was she staying there?”
“She wasn’t staying there,” Sam said. “Her girlfriend was staying there. I met her right across the street, down one block, on Fifty-Fifth Street. On that corner was a liquor store. That’s where the hangout was for us. That’s where I met Alice.”
“Tell me more about Alice. Tell me all about Alice. What did she look like?”
“She’s kind of slim and tall, not real tall, but dark skin. She wore glasses and looked real neat, like a school teacher. She had nice clothes. It was a square purse she had, like a box. I met her down at that corner, and I looked at her and that was the first time I ever seen her hanging out with other people down there.”
“What made you notice Alice?”
“Oh, man. I notice her body and her purse. I seen the look, and her neck was slim like a swan. She had the coolest neck you ever wanted to lay eyes on. My God, what’s wrong with me? Me and Barbara had a late seventies Ford bubble-top van. It had a refrigerator, bed, and everything in it. And I was parked right there on the corner of Fifty-Fifth and Central. And she was standing there and our eyes met through the windshield. I got out of the van and walked over to the sidewalk. I started talking to her. Then she told me just walk…meet me over… She went across the street, which was that motel, the pink motel. It was over across the street.”
“It’s not a motel anymore, but I’m looking at it right now.”
“Her girlfriend Sweet Pea was staying there. We walked across the street to an alley somewhere back there. They had a couple chairs. People had been back there smoking and probably doing everything else back there. So she sat down on one of them chairs, and I walked up to her and I was talking to her, kissed her on the cheek and rubbed my hand over her neck. And she said, ‘Wait, we’ll have time to do all that when you come back, baby.’ I was supposed to meet her at four down the street—”
“This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded,” the automated voice interrupted.
“They was hollering and talking to each other. She went up and I left. I came back down there around four. She was sitting on that bus bench down the street almost to Slauson, on the same side of the street the motel is on. Across the street was some kind of little factory or tire building there, the railroad tracks. All right, got me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got you. I’m here. I see it.”
“A lot of stuff has changed down there. So I haven’t been down there since 2006 before I was there with them cops the other day.” He was referring to his recent drive-along with the LAPD. “Anyway, she saw me come down in my van. She gets up from the bench and waves me over. We turn into that little road across the street by the railroad tracks. She came over and jumped in the van real fast. Bent down low so nobody could see her.”
“She was hiding?”
“She didn’t want nobody to know that she was out there hustling, I guess. Because I think she had a husband or a boyfriend once. I think they were mad at each other, plus she was going around with this woman that’s a degenerate.”
“She was busy?”
“Yeah, but she was a real nice-looking Black girl. She wore glasses, had a long, slim body. She said, ‘Go down the other way. Down toward Slauson and Florence.’ I took her all the way out Central.”
“Right, right. How far did you get past Imperial?”
“Wait a minute. Listen. I turned down Florence Avenue. You got to go down past the post office. Then you make a left and a left. People out there were standing selling cocaine. I bought her a twenty-dollar piece. We went back to Central. Got back on Central and went straight up Central way down past Compton. And we turned right down… We seen a little turn off and way down over there. And that’s where it had happened. They found the body over there.”
“Way past Imperial or just past Imperial?”
“No. Past Imperial, past Rosecrans, all the way out. Past those projects, far out, way out, almost to the edge. You can see a sign. Domeroing [sic] College is out there somewhere. I pulled out there in that field right next… You can see Central Avenue from that field. There’s a field. Central Avenue was on a little bridge. There’s a little bridge there. And you turn off Central Avenue, down that little bridge, and there’s a field down there, and the weeds halfway covers, conceals your car. We were sitting down there talking. She went in the back of the van where the beds crossways, all the way in the back, where I slept at. She was smoking her rock cocaine, and I was too. I gave her sex, and she became freakish and careless and she let me play with her throat and I was getting off.”
“So when you say you gave her sex, Mr. Sam, are you talking about—did you actually have intercourse with her?”
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t. I was getting off by just my ultimate desire.”
“So you were touching her throat, and you were touching yourself, correct?”
“Yeah. I sat down on the floor, leaning against the bed, both of us. She laid back, and she laid her head back on the bed and let me feel her throat. She was putting her hands around my penis and she was jacking my dick off. She was jacking my dick off, and I squeezed her neck, and I had a climax like that. I strangled her there.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Let me see. Yeah. Well, when I was kissing her—I kissed her mouth. No, she didn’t say nothing. After I kissed her mouth and was holding her throat and choking her, the only thing she did was struggle in my arms. She squirmed around and pulled at my hands. We were looking into each other’s eyes and I was loving that. I did that until her eyes got large as a peppermint candy, staring up at me. I stared down at her, and I bent down and kissed her again. She was looking desperate for air. I couldn’t stop. Afterward, I shook her and looked at her and pushed her chest in and out, but she didn’t breathe no more. The air came in and out of her chest as I pushed on it. I could hear it coming in and out of her chest, but she couldn’t breathe. Like a drowning person, you push their chest, but she was gone. I just put my arms around her and hugged her. I held her for a long time and looked at her hair. Then I had—”
“This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.”
“I just did what I wanted to do to her. I ran my hands through her hair and smelled her hair, smelled her body, looked at her. She no longer was there, so she didn’t know I was doing all that. I kept holding her, and then I took her out of the van and laid her on the side so I wouldn’t run over her. And I eased out away from her body, and it was laying there where I left it by the side of that dirt road right off of Central Avenue. You can look over that little bridge. I nudged her down the hill.”
“Right.”
“I read about that in the paper,” said Sam.
“That was in the paper?” I asked. That was what I needed.
I was right. It was neither of the overpasses on Central. He’d described the drive the same way dozens of times, and each time, he had forgotten taking a turn. One curious comment tipped me off. As I kept asking him about it and he got progressively annoyed, one day he said, “All the way down Central to the beach.”
The Pacific Ocean is generally “the beach” around here. It’s as west as you can get without falling off the edge of the continent. But Central Avenue ran north-south, not east-west. There was no beach anywhere near Central. Maybe he meant Century Boulevard and the college was Loyola. Maybe he was just deranged. Or maybe he’d taken a turn.
As I widened the search parameters, I found this:
Los Angeles Times
12 June 1991
A man walking with his wife and child near the Metro Rail Blue Line in Long Beach stumbled across the body of a woman Monday night, and detectives believe that she died elsewhere and that her body was dumped near the tracks.
The man, whose name was not released, was walking his bicycle, accompanied by his wife and small child, when he stumbled across the woman’s body near the Metro Rail Blue Line tracks about 500 feet south of the dead end of Dominguez Street about 7:30 p.m. Monday, Police Detective Roy Hamand said.
The man notified sheriff’s deputies, who provide security for the Metro Rail, and deputies called Long Beach police, he said. There were no visible signs of trauma on the woman, who appeared to be 20 to 30 years old. She may have been dead for up to 24 hours when she was found, he said. The woman was fully clothed but had no shoes, purse, money or identification.
The beach was the town of Long Beach.
If you swung onto the second overpass on Central, it was just a quick hop from State Route 91 to Interstate 710 to a turnoff that led to a street called Dominguez. All along the route were signs for California State University, Dominguez.
I ordered historic aerials of the area from the early nineties, and they differed very little.
Dominguez Street reached a dead end in an industrial area, stacked with shipping containers. A train trestle ran over the freeway, and on the other side was a snarl of overpasses, one of which overlooked the exact area next to the freeway. On it, was a bike path.
I found a second article:
Woman’s body found near Blue Line tracks
Newspaper June 11, 1991 | Daily Breeze (Torrance, CA) Author: UPI MetroWire | Page: B4 | Section: NEWS
A man walking with his wife and child near the Metro Rail Blue Line in Long Beach stumbled across the body of a woman Monday night and detectives believe she died elsewhere and her body was dumped near the tracks.
The man, whose name was not released, found the clothed body about 500 feet south of the dead end of Dominguez Street about 7:30 p.m. Monday, detective Roy Hamand said.
There were no visible signs of trauma on the woman, who appeared to be 20 to 30 years old, Hamand said. She may have been dead for up to 24 hours when she was found, he said.
The woman was wearing a light blue body suit, a black skirt printed with brown flowers and a red blouse printed with black flowers. But she wore no shoes, had no purse, money or identification on her, Hamand said.
Her one piece of jewelry was a small gold seashell earring in her left ear. Her right earlobe looked as if it had been pierced at one point, but the hole had been torn and then healed, he said.
There was evidence that the woman had been dragged on her back, but not through the brush where the body was found, Hamand said.
An autopsy and toxicology tests will be conducted. Investigators were trying to identify her through fingerprints, he said. The man notified Sheriff’s deputies who called Long Beach police, Hamand said.
It was already dark. I called our friend Justin at the gym. He was just finishing training. Justin is a former U.S. Marine combat veteran with PTSD and hearing loss from an IED explosion in Afghanistan. He’d been a heavy artillery operator—the guy on the top of the Humvee with the giant weapon. He was thrown, and that had saved him. His platoonmates in the vehicle hadn’t been as lucky.
Justin was also a Black guy who looked like a superhero. When I had to drive into South LA at night, I swung by the gym and took him along if he had the time.
I told him I needed him. I called his wife and apologized for keeping him out late. She was a bombshell blond hairstylist concerned for my safety and always game to loan out her man and reheat the lasagna. She told us to be careful and to please consider letting her give me a few highlights next time we were over. They’d brighten me up! I might not like to be obvious, but maybe I could consider a little brightness?
Justin and I exited the 710 South into a neighborhood of neat, single family houses with chain-link fences. We turned off the main street and wound through an industrial area, punctuated with swaths of undeveloped land. The sounds of trains and trucks floated over our heads—a city of highways in the sky.
Sam called.
“I’m in Long Beach!” I told him. “I am looking at one other overpass that I found in an article.”
“What year was that?” Sam asked.
“1991.”
“They found a body in Long Beach in 1991?”
“Long Beach and an overpass, with a bike path. Do you remember what Alice was wearing?”
The automated voice chimed in before he could reply. “This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.”
“She was wearing a dress.”
“Did it have any kind of—”
“Oh my God,” Sam interrupted. “Oh Lord. Oh Lord. I might’ve too. I might’ve drove completely to Long Beach. Oh man, oh man. You know what? You may have found her because I may have drove to Long Beach without knowing it because… Yeah. Oh my God. You did a good job, baby.”
When Justin and I crawled the last bit to reach the patch of green on the side of the freeway, I hoped everything sharp I kneeled on was a thorn, not a needle. Though disoriented in the dark, the freeway streaked with light and the barreling trucks too close, the incline toward the street looked right. Sam had told me he’d given her a kick from the brush into the clearing and that she’d rolled nearly into the street and he’d felt bad about that. Dominguez Street, the dead end, the brush, the incline, the overpass, the bike path, the articles. I had enough.
When I got home, I crouched over the oversize historic aerial photograph, uncapped a Sharpie, and drew an X. I called Rick Jackson. He agreed—we had enough. He called a buddy of his at the Long Beach PD.
Twenty minutes later, he called back.
“The case is still open. The cold case matches all your details. The victim was identified at the time. Sit down. Her name was Alice Denise Duvall. I dub you an honorary member of the Detective’s Club. You solved a murder, kiddo.”
Alice Denise Duvall. Born June 23, 1956, died June 10, 1991. Someone had uploaded her photo onto Ancestry.com, a portrait from when she must have been five or six, in a white pinafore and matching bonnet, a dark bow around her neck, prim as a princess, hands folded in her lap, ankles crossed. Alice.