And I had my mission.

4

The morning after I spoke to Alexander Taylor I sat at the dining room table in my house on Woodrow Wilson Drive. I had a pot of hot coffee in the kitchen. I had filled my five-disc changer with CDs chronicling some of Art Pepper’s late work as a sideman. And I had the documents and photographs from the Angella Benton file spread in front of me.

The file was incomplete because the case was taken by RHD just as my investigation was beginning to come into focus and before many of the reports were written. It was merely a starting point. But after almost four years removed from a crime scene it was all I had. That and the list of names Alexander Taylor had given me the day before.

As I readied myself for a day of chasing down names and setting up interviews, my eyes were drawn to the small stack of newspaper clippings that had yellowed at the edges while closed in the file. I took these up and began looking through them.

Initially Angella Benton’s murder rated only a short report in the Los Angeles Times. I remembered how this had frustrated me. We needed witnesses. Not only to the crime itself but possibly to the killer’s car or getaway route. We needed to know the victim’s movements before she was attacked. It had been her birthday. Where and with whom had she spent the evening before coming home? One of the best ways to stimulate citizen reports is through news stories. Because the Times decided to run only a short that was buried in the back of the B section, we got almost no help from the public. When I called the reporter to express my frustration, I was told that polling showed that customers were tired of stories about death and tragedy. The reporter said the news hole for crimes stories was shrinking and there was nothing she could do about it. As a consolation she wrote an update for the next day’s edition which included a line about the police seeking the public’s help in the case. But the story was even shorter than the first report and was buried deeper inside the paper. We got not one call from a citizen that day.

All of that changed three days later when the story hit the front page and was the lead story for every television station in the city. I picked up the first of the stories clipped from the front page and read it once again.

REAL-LIFE SHOOT-OUT ON FILM SET

1 DEAD, 1 HURT AS COPS AND ROBBERS

INTERRUPT CELLULOID COUNTERPARTS

By Keisha Russell

Times Staff Writer

A deadly reality intruded on Hollywood fantasy Friday morning when Los Angeles police and security guards exchanged gunfire with armed robbers during a heist of $2 million in cash being used in the filming of a movie about a heist of $2 million in cash. Two bank employees were shot, one of them fatally.