QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

JULY 2022

Within the next week, I met with a couple of million-dollar-smile Long Beach cold case detectives. Detective Michael Hubble was a nice guy with Calvin Klein model looks and lots of kids. Detective Leticia Gamboa was a compact Latinx downplayed beauty who could smoke you with her liquid liner stare down. She was almost certainly the bad cop. I liked them immediately.

They showed me into an interview room. It contained only plastic chairs on either side of a table, on one side of which is what I can only describe as a white rectangular handle for an IKEA kitchen cabinet, but oversize and made for handcuffs.

We went over the dates, the articles, my notes. They couldn’t share details of the open case, but they’d give me the first interview when it closed.

I got a second drawing of Alice the next day, sent them a copy. I met up with them the next month to check in and because they needed to see the original and the postmark. They’d gone to visit Sam in prison. They resubmitted evidence, received partial results, and had been granted funding for a more expensive and conclusive Y-STR DNA test. They assured me they had enough to file, even if there was no DNA at all.

The case was back-burnered when social and political sea change hit police departments across the country as the Black Lives Matter movement challenged the inherent bias against people of color throughout the criminal justice system while a deadly pandemic put the world on hold.

Increasingly polarized political campaigns began to look like the Nuremberg rallies. Already impoverished communities turned to scorched earth. When daily life looks like a scene from The Stand, cold cases go to the bottom of the list. In a year, yet again, South LA was unrecognizable.

Under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable to reach out and at least tell Alice’s family I was investigating the story and her sister’s name had come up.

The detectives were sure. I was sure. I moved Alice Duvall to our confirmed victims spreadsheet and left a message for her sister Deborah. I answered a call from a Virginia number on an early evening in July 2020.

I gave Debbie my background and told her that I had been working on a story that involved her sister Alice. She asked to have a few days to consider whether she was ready to discuss this but called me back sooner than that. We gabbed for a bit—kids, grandkids, my family, my job. She and her husband both had lifelong military careers she couldn’t talk about. She told me whatever I imagined that meant, I was right. She’s a grandma now and trains tactical ops at Quantico.

She switched gears.

“I’ve thought on this carefully and talked to my husband and children. I’m ready to hear whatever you have to tell me about my sister Alice.”

I’d walked a few people step-by-step through their mother’s or sister’s murders, but all of them already knew their loved one had been murdered and that the killer was Sam. They didn’t know the details. Some of them wanted to know, some didn’t. I looked straight into the eyes of the ones who did and told them everything I knew. I’m not a stranger to pain, nor am I afraid of the pain of others. Thresholds vary, curiosity varies.

There are many ways to tell a story. I tell stories of this magnitude slowly. I give people a chance to say uncle, which is a tough call as a journalist. Sometimes, the element of surprise can give you an advantage. Then again, this is the relative of a murder victim, not an exclusive with Bashar al-Assad. What will the jugular get you? The last drop of blood this person has to offer?

I tried to follow the lead of a victim or their loved ones.

Debbie had been in a specialized career of some kind, judging by her fortitude, her lightning-quick calculations, and the forensics questions with which she opened when she called. Looking back, the fact that she worked for the Department of Justice was a bigger clue.

I told her everything I knew. We sat silently for a while.

Debbie took a deep breath and walked me back through her childhood in the fifties in Watts. She was the youngest and least favored daughter of a disabled mother whose failure to thrive as an infant left her without the use of one arm, among other medical problems.

Debbie loved her older sister Alice. She also loathed her sister Alice. They had different daddies, neither anywhere to be found.

Why was Alice always the golden child?

Debbie said, “I know, I know. It’s so hard to be so good, so pretty, everyone loves you too much? Yeah. It can be. I know it can be. But it makes me angry.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

Finally. Finally, I interviewed someone who didn’t say their sister had been perfect, kind, loved every animal, her smile lit up a room, beautiful inside and out, liked rainbows and pistachio ice cream. They rarely had a guess for why she had been in so much pain, but they knew she’d loved lilacs. I’d seen their crime scenes. I noticed no lilacs.

Debbie’s famous, favored, gorgeous, addicted, murdered prostitute sister pissed her off. Of course she did! Alice was that brief, bright candle. What breaks your heart more than that?

Between Alice and Debbie, there’d been a middle sister named Doris, who’d been placed with a cousin. Debbie and Doris were still close.

“Would you say your mother wasn’t present?”

“She was for Alice.”

“What’s your first memory of your mother?”

“Her pulling my hair out by the roots.”

Three years younger than Alice, Debbie was a target for her mother’s rage, which was aggravated by the regular seizures that eventually killed her at the age of twenty-six. Debbie found her mother’s body and thought she was playing the Frankenstein game, where she pretended to be dead, then came to life and chased them. She never reanimated.

Alice and Debbie went to their grandmother. They went from bonnets to pigtails to braids to foot-high afros. Alice was a fiery beauty with classic features. Debbie was a beauty as well, elegant and steely, but she’d never been at all interested in that life.

“Alice loved singing. I used to tell her, excuse my French, ‘Shut the hell up.’”

“That’s French? Not in my house.”

“She loved Chaka Khan. One time, I met Chaka Khan. I told her, I said, ‘My sister is no longer living, but she loved you. That’s all she did was sing your songs, and I had to tell her, ‘Shut up, because you ain’t Chaka Khan.’ Chaka Khan was laughing. She says, ‘Well, I hope she’s in heaven singing my songs.’ I said, ‘I know she is.’”

Alice ironed her clothes every day.

“Neat as a pin. Wild as the wind.” Debbie said, “That would be something like the lyrics she’d write. She was a songwriter. That’s what she wanted. She wrote so many songs.”

By the time they were in Washington High School, Alice, Doris, and Debbie danced on Soul Train in clothes their grandmother made. “Was it as fun as it looked?” I asked.

“It sure was. It was that fun! I can take you on a full ride. A Soul Train ride. Yep.”

“You guys were teenagers?”

“I’m going to say Alice was eighteen, Doris was seventeen, I was sixteen. Oh, and it was fun. It was so much fun, meeting different people and entertainers. These kids to this day don’t know what they’re missing—the camaraderie. Don Cornelius was a bandit to be around. He was just a mean dude anyway. But the people on the show for the most part, all we wanted to do was dance together and have fun.”

Debbie remembered Marvin Gaye, the O’Jays, the Whispers, Chaka Khan…

Debbie sent me an old clip of Alice dancing the famous Soul Train line in yellow bell-bottoms and a red halter shirt. She did a high kick at the end, her hands up in what looks like a boxing guard. It was the first time I had seen any of Sam’s victims alive and in motion. She danced to the O’Jays, “For the Love of Money.”

“Alice held a lot of her feelings in. She always had that sadness. She really never talked to me. She thought of me as the baby. We went out one time, first time I ever went out with my sister. She used to hang around that entertainment crowd. To me, that entertainment crowd just looked seedy.”

Alice got into that free kind of life that tightens around you like a finger trap.

“She took me to the Comedy Club. That’s comedy? She introduced me to this older guy. I was nineteen? Yeah, because I just graduated, and I was starting to work. He had to be in his fifties. He says, ‘You know who I am?’ I said, ‘No, and I really don’t care.’ He says, ‘Well, I’m Richard Pryor’s manager.’ ‘You’re not Richard Pryor, so why should I care?’ He says, ‘Oh, you’re so cute. I want you to be my eye candy.’”

Debbie took a taxi home then and there. She didn’t go back. Alice stayed.

I asked Debbie if there could have been something that happened to Alice as a kid to make her so angry. Teachers or preachers or coaches or cousins…?

Debbie didn’t rule it out, but she didn’t think so, because there hadn’t been a marked personality change. Alice came as she was.

“I am very tuned into people. I can read you like a book when I meet you. I know whether to walk on or stay there. Like I know you’re good people. If Alice was hurt, I would have known.”

“Alice did not have that same intuitive gift.”

“No, she did not.”

“Did that scare you?”

“I wasn’t scared. I was angry. I think the drugs were a solution to what she was dealing with on a daily basis. I think she got into it accidentally, hanging out with different groups of people. My understanding is, once you get that first high, you want to get even higher and higher. I got married and we moved overseas. I didn’t know how bad it was until my aunt called. I came home for her. I got her into my car, and we talked, and I said, ‘Why are you living your life like this? You don’t have to do this. If you want to, I will buy you and Tony a ticket to Germany, and you can get yourself together. You don’t have to be on these streets. I’m asking you to change your life.’”

Debbie offered Alice a ticket out, but she needed to get her own passport. Debbie even left instructions exactly how.

When Debbie left, she knew it was the last time she’d see Alice. She’d been wearing all black, which she almost never did, when she got the call. No detectives ever contacted her. She came home for the funeral, then went back to Germany. She called her aunt a couple of times a month asking after any news. Did the cops have any leads? Who had done this thing to her sister? They called the cops for a year or so but gave up when they never heard back. Never heard another word until I’d reached out.

“I raised my children to be aware that there’s drugs out there. There’s people that take advantage of you, so forth and so on. They know everything, for the most part, that happened to their aunt.”

She rattled off what sounded like four amazing kids with four terrific jobs, all serving in the public sector.

“They are all good, productive citizens. It’s all I hoped for them. The thing that finally settled my mind was, she doesn’t have to deal with the craziness and hurt that she was going through all her life. The things that were happening to her. You can’t live that life for that long, and then think you’re going to get out of it. Some women, I guess.”

“Very few.”

“Very few. I didn’t think she was coming out of that. You know what just came to mind? Alice and I was walking. And she looked at me and she says, ‘You know, little sister, I had a dream about Jesus.’ She was never like that. I thought: she is not going to be on this planet long. I tried to get as much life out of her as I could at the time. I knew Alice wouldn’t ever be sixty years old. I knew that much.”