Date With the Devil (11 page)

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Authors: Don Lasseter

BOOK: Date With the Devil
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He told the detectives that he initially suspected that some woman in Mahler's life had possibly brought some male help to beat him up. Perhaps they announced themselves as police to catch him unaware. “He asked me to go up and see what the police wanted.” Mahler told Moudy that he feared the possibility of some people being outside, thugs who might try to harm him over some bad financial deals. He had heard the commotion outside his front gate, and voices claiming to be police officers, but he had no way of verifying they were indeed from the LAPD.
“At first, I had the impression that he had come down the interior stairwell, through my apartment, planning to escape through the side door that goes outside to the exterior stairs. But then, he asked me if I would go up there and see who was at the door.
“It all seemed really strange, but because he was so scared, I couldn't turn him down.” Jeremy said he agreed to see what he could do. “I told him he couldn't go into my bedroom because my girlfriend was still asleep in there. So I climbed the stairwell, thinking that he was following behind me. But he dropped out of sight and I didn't know where he was. This whole thing had taken about five minutes, so I opened the front gate at about one fifty
A.M.
I saw several uniformed cops out there and opened the front gate and door to let them inside.”
One of the officers, Moudy said, asked where David Mahler was. “I didn't know exactly, so I told them I didn't know. It was only partly true, because he was still somewhere in the building.” The little white lie had worried Jeremy, he admitted, and it came as a relief when the cops found Mahler hiding in the closet downstairs.
“They had told me to wait in the living room. I was sitting there when a couple of officers brought him in. They took him outside right away. When I found out they captured him in my closet, I was not very happy that he had gone in there.”
Asked if he had noticed red stains on the floor of David's quarters, Jeremy said he had seen them both on the carpeting and in the garage. He had made these observations last Sunday evening when they arrived home from the weekend trip. He hadn't even thought of the stains as blood, and he certainly didn't associate them with a crime. Jeremy stated that he had heard some vicious fights between David and his female visitors on prior occasions, although none had been brought to his attention recently.
Before leaving, Moudy volunteered information about seeing a heavyset African-American guy bring women to Cole Crest in a green-and-white taxi minivan, and sometimes stay for quite a while. In regard to Mahler's profession, Moudy said he understood the landlord was an attorney who mostly dealt in stock trading.
Bynum and Small thanked Jeremy Moudy, allowed him to leave, and returned to resume the interview with Donnie Van Develde.
C
HAPTER
12
“I C
OULD
K
ILL
S
OMEBODY
R
IGHT
N
OW
”
Still in rapid spurts, Donnie Van Develde told Bynum and Small that he and his wife had lived in the Cole Crest house “about a year and a half.” He described the narrow, winding, impossible roads that must be navigated for access to the property, and complained that pizza delivery guys could never find it.
“Who else lives at that address, besides you two?”
“Well, there's Karl. I don't know his last name. There's Jeremy. I think his starts with an
M,
or something.” Almost as an afterthought, Donnie mentioned that David Mahler also lived there.
“Is he single or does he have a partner living there?”
“He doesn't have any regular girlfriend that I know of. He just has hookers and call girls and stuff like that almost every night. Parties—and all I've seen is him—just a crazed lunatic doing mass amounts of drugs and hookers and—whatever. So many women coming around, like I've never seen.”
Tom Small wondered aloud about David Mahler not having a regular girlfriend. Donnie explained, “I don't think the guy would be capable of having one. He's—he's just the most difficult person to—to know and deal with. I mean, every month, when we don't have the rent exactly on the day it is due, we're threatened with eviction, like the very next day. So the last couple of months—I'm in the music business and so I make records. And I get money in little spurts, here and there.” Donnie elaborated about his ongoing financial difficulties, noting that he hadn't even been able to buy food in recent days. “He doesn't understand or care about any of that. He's impossible to get along with.”
To Small's inquiry about Mahler's drug usage, Donnie said, “He's a cocaine addict. As far as I can see, he does nonstop cocaine, crystal meth, Xanax, and alcohol.”
Pointing out that he had never “hung out” with David, Donnie spoke of doing odd jobs for him. “He was supposed to pay me for the work, but never did. He just spends it all on women. They come by and the next thing you know he's—he acts like he's in love with them and he takes off and they go to Hawaii, or some hotel.”
Mahler had seldom allowed Donnie inside his quarters, until a few days ago, said Donnie.
“What did you see last Sunday?” Small asked.
Grimacing and gesturing with his hands, Donnie replied with a preamble about his wife planning to attend a special annual party in Ohio. “She wasn't even around when all this stuff happened. Last Sunday, he called me up to his room and I thought he wanted to pay me the money he owed for some work I had done, and I was glad because my wife had gone to Ohio and I didn't even know how I was going to survive or feed the cat and have a few bucks while she was gone.”
Hoping that Donnie would focus a little tighter, Tom Small asked, “Did he tell you he did something?”
“Yeah, on Saturday, before this awful thing, he told me he had taken a girl to a hotel somewhere near the beach. He came back without her and said she pissed him off, so he left her there without any money or anything, and he said he was going to see this other girl. He was sort of asking my advice about women and he said, ‘You know a lot about these things with girls, you know—you're in the music—you're the rock star, in the music business.' I told him that, personally, I thought he was above using the kind of women he was hanging out with, not to be falling in love with hookers.”
The detective worked patiently to keep Donnie on track. He asked what had happened on Sunday morning.
Squirming, fidgeting, and perspiring, Donnie said, “He called me on the phone about eight thirty on Sunday morning (May 27) and told me to come upstairs to his bedroom. I thought he was going to pay me.” According to Donnie, he knocked on the entry gate. A woman he knew only as Kristi buzzed him in, then opened the bedroom door. Mahler was nowhere in sight. “She said he would be right back.”
“Had you met her before?”
“I think she had been there only a few times, and we had just said ‘Hi' to each other. When I worked on the spark plugs of her car, we just talked for a minute or two.”
“How long did you talk to her this time?”
“No more than a couple of minutes, and then he came in. I didn't see him because I was facing Kristi and he was behind me. I was asking her what happened at the beach.” Mahler, Donnie said, “stormed in, screaming, in a violent rage.”
Donnie's delivery accelerated, and Detective Small asked him to slow down. He tried, but turbocharged by fear, Donnie had difficulty controlling the speed and volume of his words. Donnie said, “He goes, ‘There is nothing personal here, but I'm so pissed off... . I could kill somebody right now. This is life and death. Could you excuse us for a little while? I need to talk to her.'” The request sounded more like a belligerent demand than a courteous request.
David's demeanor had frightened Donnie and he headed for the door. “He was talking tough and said, ‘I'll call you when I'm done talking to her.' I left and went back downstairs to my apartment.”
In Donnie's recollection, the summons came about ten minutes later. “He said, ‘Come back up here and do it now!' I still hoped he would hand over the money, so I climbed back up those stairs and went into his bedroom. He had changed into a white bathrobe, which was wide open, showing that he was naked. He was out of his mind, like nobody I have ever seen, and hitting a freebase pipe and smoking crystal meth. He would put one down and pick up the other one. I saw a bunch of Xanax sitting on the dresser, and I know he had been eating a lot of those and they make him crazy. Besides that, he was drinking from a bottle of wine.”
“What about the girl?”
“She was in a pair of flimsy white shorts and I think a tank top, or maybe a halter top, sort of gold colored. She was sitting on the floor by the fireplace, with all her bags and stuff, and, like, looking pretty afraid because he is running hot and cold. He would flop down on the bed, and jump up again. As soon as I went in there, I asked him about the money and he freaked me out. I can't remember his exact words, but he would spurt out anything. Anything I said would be wrong.”
Small asked, “Did it appear to you that Kristi was going through her bags trying to get out of there?”
“Yeah, she definitely wanted out. She was crying and asking him to please take her home. He just ignored her. She asked me, ‘Do you think you could give me a ride home?' I told her that I didn't have a car. But I said that if David would let me use his, I would be glad to take her to her place. I knew that she really needed to get out of there.”
This exchange apparently made Mahler even angrier. “This time he started waving a gun around, like threatening her and threatening me, and he's, like, clicking it at my head with no bullets in it. He was scaring the hell out of both of us—talking about somebody else was coming over and he was going to kill—I don't know exactly what he was saying. I just know it was a scary situation. And he would get all crazy and he'd get up off the bed and start screaming about some situation they'd had.”
Donnie's voice sounded on the verge of panic to Tom Small. To prevent him from hyperventilating, the detective said, “Slow down, slow down. You are doing a good job, and I know it's traumatic. But take a deep breath and try to remember as many details as you can.”
“Okay,” Donnie gasped.
“Do you have any idea why he was threatening you?”
“Yeah, because—as if to imply some kind of jealous thing between me and her. You know, like telling her he thought she was going to be with me, or something like that.”
“What kind of a gun was it?”
“It looked like a—I don't know. I'm not too familiar with guns.”
“Do you know the difference between a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver?”
“It's a revolver. It's the kind that's got a little ...”
“It has a cylinder?”
“Yeah, it's got that little thing that spins. It was, like, blackish, dark, wooden handle. He set it down on the bed for a moment and I went to pick it up because I was going to, you know—because he was out of his mind, waving it and pointing at me, pointing it at her.”
“Did you see where he got the gun from, or did he have it in his hand when you came up there the second time?”
“I don't remember exactly—he might have walked into the closet and grabbed it. I don't think he had it in his hand immediately when I walked in the room.”
“Did you know he had guns in the house?”
Donnie's forehead wrinkled and the tattoos on his arms seemed to move like animated cartoons. “One time he showed me a gun before he went to Las Vegas. It freaked me out. I said, ‘This is bad news. This guy should not have a gun,' and I told my wife he had that gun, and she was like, ‘Oh, my God!'”
“Why do you think he showed it to you?”
“Because he's a big shot—just to tell me or show me how scary he is, and just to intimidate me.”
“That was weeks earlier?”
“Yeah, yeah, when he was going through this whole Cheryl thing and he was seeing the people and hearing the voices 'cause he wasn't sleeping. He was doing drugs, and he got this gun to protect himself, or whatever. He was even talking about sending a bounty hunter to take care of Cheryl—wreaking havoc on her life and scaring her to death.”
Once again trying to keep Donnie on a logical path and sequence of events, Detective Small said, “Okay, let's get back to Sunday. At some point, he puts the gun on the bed, and you made an attempt to pick it up. What were you going to do with it?”
Donnie's reply brought to mind a person running in all directions at once. “If he turned his back or if he lost attention with it—'cause he would—he had set it down and he lunged at her and he, like, almost attacked her, and he got up in her face and he's screaming at her. And I was like, like this is—I don't know what to do. This guy's a scary guy, and I see the gun sitting, and I go to pick up the gun. I was going to do whatever—to hide it. You know, put it—and hopefully, you know, he don't remember where he set it, but as soon as I go to grab it, he instantly grabbed my hand and he stopped me from picking it up.”
“And then what did he do?”
“He started clicking it at her. And clicking it at me, pulling the trigger, and the hammer is slamming down—click, click. He kept doing that, over and over. There was no bullet in it, supposedly.”
Mahler soon remedied that omission, said Donnie. Frowning and shaking his head in disbelief, the musician continued talking. “He went to this little closet and pulled out a single bullet. He put it in the gun and did one of those, like, Russian roulette things where he spun it and then let it click. And then he pointed it at Kristi, and pulled the trigger. The gun clicked. He turned and pointed it at me, and clicked it again.”
Donnie's eyes blazed with indignation. In his furious view, Mahler had crossed a forbidden barrier. “I said, ‘That's it, I'm out of here, David.' I said, you know, good-bye.”
Taking in every important detail of Donnie's harrowing account, Small asked, “He aimed it at your head?”
“He pointed it right at my face.”
In the minds of both detectives, the next comment from Donnie established a crucial turning point in the case.
He said, “I rushed out of there. As I was shutting the door, I heard the gun go off.”
“Did you go back in the room?”
“No. I just assumed that he was shooting in the air or whatever to intimidate her or scare her. At first, I thought I heard voices in there, like they were still arguing. But I just hightailed. He wouldn't even buzz me out of that front gate, so I turned and went into the garage. I got a rake and put the rake against the buzzer so it would open the gate long enough for me to grab it and get out. I ran down the steps to my apartment.”
Inside his own room, Donnie tried to ignore the ring tone of his cell phone. “He tried to call four times in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. And he tried texting me too, but I don't know how to do text messages. I didn't answer any of them because I'd had enough of him. I didn't want to go back up there. I just wanted to lock my door and hide.”
Despite his resolve to ignore the phone, Donnie said, he finally answered David's call. “I asked him what was going on, and he said he wasn't in the house anymore, that he had gone somewhere else. I said, ‘Where are you?' And he started talking about how ‘she attacked me with a knife. She came at me with a knife, and it was self-defense.' I go, ‘What do you mean, self-defense?'”
Detective Small double-checked to make certain the video recorder was capturing every word of Donnie's remarkable tale, and signaled him to continue. Mahler repeated the claim, said Donnie, about Kristin trying to stab him. “I really thought he was still upstairs just messing with me, you know? So he says, ‘Go up and check.' I said, ‘Oh sure. Yeah, right.' He told me he was over at someone's house and had just paid two hundred thousand dollars for protection. I told him, ‘I don't even understand what the hell you are talking about.' And I hung up.”

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