Read the Excerpt: Black Tunnel White Magic by Rick Jackson & Matthew McGough
Foreword by Michael Connelly
PERHAPS MORE THAN ANY other city, Los Angeles has always been a place defined by its murders and its killers. The list is long. The Black Dahlia, the Hillside Stranglers, the Night Stalker, the Grim Sleeper. We can’t leave out the O. J. Simpson case, the Manson Family killings, or the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
But these citations barely scratch the surface. There are many more. Murder in LA always carries with it something extra. This place is arguably the media and entertainment capital of the world. Murder here sells. It makes headlines that reach across the world in concentric circles that widen and spread.
I came to Los Angeles as a crime reporter. I knew this was a singular place to be in my profession and I wanted to catch a ride on one of those LA murders, write the hell out of it and ride the headlines for all they were worth. When young Ronald Baker, from a good family and good school, was found stabbed to death and with his throat slashed in a railroad tunnel at the edge of town, I thought I had caught my ride. The case had all the ingredients. Good kid, bad end. Throw in the occult pentagrams painted on the walls and all the questions without answers, and I thought I had caught the brass ring as a writer specializing in murder. It was a story that would be hard to shove off the front page.
From the start, the case was steeped in mystery and the unexplainable. But the police were impenetrable. The story eventually died for lack of oxygen. I left journalism and went into the business of fiction. But the investigators, they didn’t stop.
It was after I was out that I learned what I didn’t know then. About the relentless detectives who pursued the case across many years and many states. Who were undaunted, unafraid, and unstoppable.
And that’s the story you have here. You have the inside story told by Rick Jackson, the detective who lived it, and Matthew McGough, the skilled writer he’s partnered with to tell it. A perfect combination of storytelling. Ride with them now into this darkness.
The book you have here cuts through the exaggerated newspaper accounts and hysterical headlines. You’ll ride with the detectives who never took their eyes off the prize of justice, who worked diligently to decipher what was true and what was not, what was vital and what was clever deflection. You’ll find a family whose grief only grew with each passing year. This is a story that doesn’t end with convictions and sentences but has waves that draw meaning even today.
They say if you want to get the facts, read a newspaper. If you want to get the truth, read a novel. I think that’s true—it’s why I made that jump. But it’s not true all of the time. Not here, not with this story. This story gives you the truth of character in a pair of relentless detectives, in a damaged family, and in the exploration of a broken system. It offers redemption and hope in those same individuals who persevere despite the obstacles and odds.
This is a book that is surely about killers, but they don’t take the spotlight. That belongs to the detectives who worked the case, whose eyes were not jaundiced, and who steadily, methodically closed in. In them you find humanity and hope in a city where killers are often kings.
—Michael Connelly, Los Angeles
Chapter One
HOLY TERROR
(June 21 to 22, 1990)
IT HAPPENS ONCE A year. That year, it was on a Thursday morning—8:33, to be exact. It set things in motion. It altered lives. None for the better.
It was the summer solstice—the moment when Earth’s rotational axis, the imaginary line that runs between the North and South Poles, achieves its maximum tilt toward the sun. From Earth, the sun appears at its highest point in the sky. Not for another year does the Northern Hemisphere receive so much light in a single day.
It passes unnoticed by most, yet the summer solstice has been observed for millennia, since the age of Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza at least, and likely even earlier. Throughout human history, cultures around the world have granted it spiritual significance. It inspired Shakespeare, who used it for the plot of one of his most famous comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Shakespeare’s time, the summer solstice was a celebratory occasion marked by open-air feasts and renowned for its aura of magic and mystery.
That year, 1990, in Los Angeles, the summer solstice figured in a darker plot, one more akin in cruelty to a Shakespearean tragedy. The story begins late on Thursday, June 21, the night of the astronomical solstice.
Four teenagers in the San Fernando Valley, two boys and two girls, wanted a late-night thrill. The boys, Roland and Timo, were already out of high school. Amy and Melissa were younger. Amy was sixteen at the time.
Earlier that evening, they had attended a youth group meeting together. Afterward, Amy asked Roland for a ride home, although she didn’t really feel like going home. They piled into Roland’s pickup truck and instead drove to Lancers, a nearby restaurant, where they hung out and talked until after midnight.
It was Roland and Timo’s idea to go to Chatsworth Park. More specifically, up to the desolate train tunnel in the hills above Chatsworth Park. Roland had ventured into the tunnel two or three times before.
It sounded like a thrill to Amy, the way they described it. You could walk on the tracks into the tunnel, and if you were lucky, a train would pass through while you were inside. Standing tight against the wall, you’d experience an intense rush as the train whooshed past you, just a few feet away. Wait for it to pass and see if you survived.
Amy and Melissa agreed to go along. They arrived at the park around 1 or 1:30 a.m., in the early morning hours of Friday, June 22.
Although it is located within Los Angeles city limits, Chatsworth Park includes terrain that more closely resembles a rugged wilderness than any typical urban playground of sunbaked blacktop. The park is split into two sections, North and South. The railroad tracks run along and above the west side of both sections.
Down below, in Chatsworth Park’s lower elevations, are a few dusty baseball fields and picnic tables. But what makes the park so unique and alluring, and defines its landscape, are the rocky hills that loom over it, at the northwest rim of the San Fernando Valley.
The hills above Chatsworth Park are studded with colossal sandstone boulders and, apart from a few trails, covered with scrub and scattered trees. Up close, the jumble of boulders appears almost cartoonish and prehistoric, like a set for a live-action remake of The Flintstones, somewhere on the outskirts of Bedrock.
Despite the summer solstice being the day of the year with the latest sunset, it had already been dark for more than four hours by the time the teens got to the park. Compared to denser, glitzier areas of Los Angeles, such as Hollywood or Downtown LA, there was little light pollution in Chatsworth to diminish the night sky. Although the weather that night was fair and mild, it was unusually dark outside. The moon’s phase was a waning crescent, providing barely any light to see by.
The only sources of illumination the teenagers had brought on their trek to the tunnel were Roland’s and Timo’s cigarette lighters. The boys led the way to the unmarked trailhead at the base of the hills. From there, it was a bit of a climb.
Amy had never been to Chatsworth Park before that night. As she followed her friends up into the hills, she realized with some unease that they were not the only ones there. Amy spied some people dressed, strangely, in black capes. Underneath their black capes, all the rest of their clothing was also black. Amy couldn’t tell how many there were, or even whether they were male or female. She caught glimpses of the black-caped figures running and darting in the darkness from tree to tree, around and behind them. They never engaged directly or came too close, nor did they run away.
It was only then, on the heels of her brush with the shadowy caped people, that Amy learned another aspect of the tunnel’s lore, which her friends had neglected to mention. The tunnel they were about to enter, her friends explained, was very close to “the Manson ranch,” where Charles Manson and his “family” of followers lived in the summer of 1969, when they murdered actress Sharon Tate and several other innocent people. The ramshackle property, known as Spahn Movie Ranch at the time Manson lived there, was located just half a mile north of the tunnel.
The notoriety and savagery of the crimes planned at Spahn Ranch stigmatized the property to such a degree that it quickly became better known as “the Manson ranch.” The stigma was so powerful that over time the nearby railroad tunnel acquired its own unofficial nickname: “the Manson tunnel.” Whether Manson ever set foot inside the tunnel is unknown, a matter of conjecture rather than historical record.
What’s more, Amy’s friends belatedly informed her, the tunnel’s proximity to the Manson ranch had made it a place where “devil worshippers” liked to congregate. Roland had heard “weird stuff” and “Manson-type things” went on up there. This was news to Amy, who hadn’t expected to encounter anyone else at the park or the tunnel. Not people in black capes and certainly not devil worshippers. Amy felt afraid, but not enough to turn back. They were almost to the top of the path.
Amy’s fears were not unfounded. At the time, in 1990, fear of the occult was palpable and pervasive in American society. The specter of Satanism prompted so much public alarm during the 1980s and 1990s, all over the country, that the period has since been dubbed “the Satanic Panic.”
Fears were especially acute in Los Angeles, which had been traumatized by a series of high-profile, purportedly satanic killings, beginning with Manson’s in 1969. The randomness of the Manson Family’s victims and the ritualized violence he directed against them was a chilling combination that inflicted deep psychic wounds on the city, sowing the seeds for future collective paranoia.
Public fascination with Satanism and satanic possession went national during the 1970s. The 1971 novel The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty, and its subsequent film adaptation gripped mainstream popular culture. The occult and supernatural became the subject of everyday conversation as never before.
In Los Angeles, the trauma the Manson Family inflicted on the local consciousness never healed entirely. Fifteen years later, in 1984, these wounds were reopened when the Night Stalker, eventually identified as the serial killer Richard Ramirez, began murdering people across California, most in the Greater Los Angeles area.
Like Manson, Ramirez appeared to choose his victims at random, and his murders were shockingly brutal and highly ritualized. Unlike Manson, Ramirez committed all his murders himself. At many of his crime scenes, Ramirez left behind symbols of the occult, most commonly an inverted pentagram, which he considered a mark of the devil. At his first court appearance following his arrest in 1985, Ramirez held up his hand in the presence of news photographers to reveal a pentagram he’d drawn on his own palm. Ramirez’s trial in 1989 was heavily covered by the media, which only served to stoke public fear of Satan-inspired crimes—and the collective appetite for more such stories. Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder in September 1989, less than a year before the night of the teenagers’ visit to the Manson tunnel.
In 1990, murder and the fear of it were at the forefront of the public’s mind in California. This was especially true in Los Angeles. The city had just emerged from the deadliest decade in its history. More than eight thousand people were murdered in LA during the 1980s, a larger toll than the 1960s and 1970s combined. Daily, the local airwaves and newspapers were flush with reports of senseless violence and lives cut tragically short. Amy and her friends had grown up in a culture steeped in attention to evildoers.
The path the teenagers climbed eventually opened onto a flat expanse of gravel and rocky ballast, down the middle of which ran a solitary set of railroad tracks. They had reached their destination: the western portal of the tunnel.
The teens hung out along the tracks outside the tunnel for a few minutes, waiting in vain for a train to pass, before they summoned the nerve to venture inside.
Roland and Timo led the way. Amy and Melissa followed a few feet behind, side by side. There was little artificial lighting at the tunnel’s entrance and none whatsoever inside. Both boys held their cigarette lighters out in front of them at arm’s length and kept flicking them on to light their way.
It was too dark for the teens to notice the ominous words spray painted over the arched mouth of the tunnel, as if a warning not to enter: “HOLY TERROR.”
Much of the concrete entrance embankment was also covered in graffiti. Among the crudely painted tags and symbols they blindly walked past were multiple inverted pentagrams.
Inside the tunnel it was pitch-black. The tracks between the east and west portals curve slightly, enough that, approaching the midpoint, it becomes impossible to see either entrance. No natural light reaches the middle stretch of the tunnel, even in daytime.
As dark as it was, they kept going, step by tentative step. In those fleeting moments when both Roland’s and Timo’s lighters stayed lit, Amy could see at most five feet ahead of her, and to her side, one of the tunnel’s walls. Whenever the boys’ lighters faltered, she could not see anything, not even her own hand in front of her face.
Because they never stopped walking, it took them only a few minutes to make it well into the tunnel. They were more than a hundred feet in when Amy noticed something on the ground ahead of them, off to the side. In the dim flickering light, it looked to her like something or someone wrapped up in a blanket, lying against the base of the wall.
“What is that?” she asked the others. Amy and Melissa hung back while the boys, brandishing their lighters, went to take a closer look.
Timo got closest, within one or two feet, and Roland within five feet, before they realized that it was a body. They couldn’t tell whether the person was dead or still alive, but they thought they saw blood on the body. It also appeared to them the body was missing one hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” yelled Timo. He and Roland took off running, back the way they had come. Amy and Melissa ran after them, terrified, sprinting through total darkness, until they had all made it out of the tunnel.
Timo wanted to go back in and drag the body out, in case the person was still alive, but no one was willing to go with him. Roland had kept on running and was already scrambling down the hill to call an ambulance.
There were some private homes at the bottom of the hill, adjacent to Chatsworth Park. Roland ran to the nearest house and banged on its door. No one answered. At the next house, a woman came to the door but refused to open it. Roland told her that it was an emergency and to call 911, that he thought a person got hit by a train.
Two units from the Los Angeles Fire Department, a fire truck and an ambulance, were first to respond, at 1:42 a.m. Roland waved them down in front of the house the 911 call had been placed from, just outside an entrance to Chatsworth Park. Timo and one of the girls were also there, having waited with Roland until help arrived.
Inside the tunnel, the firefighters located the bloodied body of a young white male, about twenty years old. LAFD captain Lewis Bressler, the ranking firefighter at the scene, observed that the man’s throat was slit. They pronounced him dead at 2:12 a.m.
By the time the firefighters came back from the tunnel, the teenagers were gone. The engineer informed Bressler that the witnesses had hung around for about ten minutes and then left.
The first police to arrive, at 2:25 a.m., were patrol officers from the LAPD’s Devonshire Division, the local police precinct with jurisdiction over Chatsworth Park.
As was standard practice upon confirmation of a suspicious death, the first arriving patrol units set up a perimeter within Chatsworth Park, which was now presumed to be a crime scene.
Bressler briefed the officers on his findings inside the tunnel and what the reporting party, Roland, had told him. The LAFD units, having fulfilled all their responsibilities at the scene, left the park at 2:40 a.m.
It was around 3 a.m. when Peggy Moseley, an LAPD detective assigned to the Devonshire Division Homicide unit, was awakened at home by a ringing phone. Her lieutenant, Al Durrer, relayed to her what was known and called her into work. Moseley’s detective partner, Ken Crocker, received a similar call from Durrer. After the detectives, Durrer notified the LA County coroner’s office.
By 4:40 a.m., Moseley, Crocker, and Durrer had arrived at the park and assumed control of the crime scene and nascent investigation. Also at the scene by then were a photographer from the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division and a coroner’s investigator, Sandra Fitzgerald.
Moseley was familiar with Chatsworth Park and had been there before, although never in the dead of night. When Moseley first approached the tunnel, it was so dark and foggy out that she could not even see the entrance. She had to use her handheld radio to ask officers already at the mouth of the tunnel to flash a couple of light beams just so she could see where they were.
Inside the tunnel, 165 feet from the entrance, they discovered some bloodstained items on the ground: a pair of black sunglasses, an empty pack of cigarettes—Marlboro Gold 100’s—and some shards of broken glass, likely from a shattered beer bottle.
A trail of blood droplets, plainly visible with the detectives’ flashlights, ran from these items across the tracks to where the body lay, 10 feet farther in. There was a large pool of blood on the gravel railbed just south of the tracks. A few feet away, at the base of the tunnel’s south wall, a second, larger pool of blood spread from under the body. Some of the blood was still liquid, but in other areas where it was less dense, it had already begun to dry and flake.
It appeared the struggle had begun on the north side of the tracks, where blood was first drawn. The victim, perhaps attempting to get away, had moved south across the tracks. There he had received additional major wounds that caused him to bleed more profusely, resulting in the pooled blood and, ultimately, his death. Moseley and Crocker found no evidence to indicate that he had been killed somewhere else and then his body dragged or carried into the tunnel and left there.
The victim was slightly built and had curly brown hair. He was dressed in blue jeans, a red short-sleeved shirt with a white undershirt, and white British Knights tennis shoes. His pockets appeared undisturbed. All of his clothing was soaked in blood. He lay on his left side, with his back against the concrete tunnel wall. Both of his legs were bent behind him at the knee, rather unnaturally, with his ankles against the wall. His right ankle appeared possibly fractured. There were also oily, grimy stains on his clothes and skin, consistent with him having come into contact with the nearby tracks and railroad ties.
Fitzgerald observed no obvious trauma to the dead man’s face, and his eyes appeared normal and relatively clear. Across his throat, he had an extremely deep open wound that went all the way through his windpipe, leaving it exposed. In his torso were multiple deep open wounds that appeared to be stab wounds. All the injuries would be fully documented later, in an autopsy conducted by the medical examiner, but Fitzgerald noted that the apparent stab wounds were scattered across the victim’s chest, back, buttocks, and extremities. A portion of his intestines protruded from one particularly grievous wound to the right side of his abdomen. There were also very severe cuts to his left hand and fingers, likely defensive wounds sustained while attempting to fend off his killer.
When the coroner’s personnel turned the victim over, they discovered under his body a second empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes. Two rusty pieces of barbed wire were also found beside the victim, one near his head and another near his feet. Neither were bloodstained or in contact with the body. No marks were observed on the victim’s wrists or ankles to indicate that he had been bound at any point with barbed wire. Its presence at the crime scene appeared to be random and unconnected to the present case, detritus that was already at the location before the murder occurred there.
The same could be said for the extensive graffiti behind the body on the south tunnel wall, the backdrop for many of the crime scene photographs taken that night. Even 175 feet inside the tunnel, where ordinarily it was pitch-black and only passing trains were supposed to be, its walls were covered with spray-painted messages. The graffiti was artless, foot-tall block letters applied with white spray paint, which stood out against the dark, sooty concrete wall. The most legible graffiti closest to the body read “DROP ACID NOT BOMBS” and “FUCK REAGAN!!” None of the graffiti appeared fresh.
A thorough search of the tunnel turned up no knife or any other weapons. No wallet was found on the body or nearby. The only item of personal property on the victim was a black string necklace around his neck. The necklace had a circular pendant, made of metal, in the shape of an upright pentagram.
Given the peculiar murder location, the tunnel’s well-known association with occult activities, and the deficit of other clues the detectives had to go on, the possibility that the murder was some sort of ritualistic killing or human sacrifice could not be ruled out. The pentagram pendant around the victim’s neck did not prove his murder was occult related, but it also hardly disproved it.
The body was removed from the tunnel at 5:45 a.m., shortly after sunrise on Friday morning, June 22, and transported to the morgue downtown. In her report, completed the following day, coroner’s investigator Fitzgerald noted, “This tunnel is known to be a location frequented by transients and drug abusers, according to detectives at the scene.”
Of the unknown young man, Fitzgerald wrote, “The decedent was not found to be carrying any form of identification…He was assigned John Doe #135 for purposes of identification…His next of kin remains unknown at the time of this report.”
Discover the Book
Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker’s two male roommates, one Black, and one white. What emerges is at once a story of confounding betrayal and cold-hearted intentions, as well as a larger portrait of an embattled Los Angeles, a city in the grip of the Satanic Panic and grappling with questions of racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of Rodney King.
n straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Rick Jackson, the now-retired police detective who helped inspire Michael Connelly’s beloved Harry Bosch, along with co-writer, Matthew McGough, take us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, piecing together the truth with each emerging clue. Black Tunnel White Magic is the true story of a murder in cold blood, deception and betrayal, and a city at the brink, set forth by the only man who could tell it.
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