Date With the Devil (17 page)

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Authors: Don Lasseter

BOOK: Date With the Devil
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“It's gonna help me more than just telling you.”
“Okay. That's fine.”
Vicki Bynum threw in her instant approval. “Let's go for it.”
Mahler still wanted assurance they would portray him in the best possible light in reports to the DA. Small said, “The information will be passed along to those who need to know.”
At three minutes past four o'clock, Mahler began printing on lined paper. He reminded both detectives that they must cosign the document. They agreed. As he printed the words, he read them aloud. He wrote:
6/1/07
I, David Mahler, accused suspect or party with alleged information, without admitting any guilt & denying
all
guilt, through & by HEARSAY have reason to believe that Kristi Baldwin may be found at the following location.
Intersection of I-15 No. (above Barstow) and I-40 near hospital sign. This in no way shall be used to be incriminating Mr. Mahler as it's ... voluntary and without coercion.
However, both Detective Small and Detective Bynum acknowledge their appreciation for this information.
Mahler signed his name in cursive letters nearly two inches high. Below that, Tom Small and Vicki Bynum entered their signatures.
While writing the portion about a hospital, Mahler said, “There is a hospital right there. That was purposely part of it. Okay? It was almost like dropping someone off at a hospital.”
Small had doubts. “Okay, so she would have been noticed out in plain view and maybe treated by that hospital?”
Mahler agreed. “And possibly treated.” He added that she had not, as far as he knew, been put in a place of concealment.
The reference to a hospital would turn out to be totally untrue. The site where Kristin Baldwin's body had been dumped was nowhere near a hospital. No hospital sign could be seen within a ten-mile radius.
Tom Small wanted more. “Any chance you would be able to include where someone might look for the gun?”
“What if I provide it to you? I'm going to be out of here in an hour. Can you stop that now?”
Small said, “I can't stop you. No. That's your right.”
“Unless you charge me with something else, I guess.”
“I have nothing else.” He explained that he wanted to send someone out to pick up the weapon so it wouldn't fall into the wrong hands.
“Okay,” said Mahler. “I'm even going to tell you where this gun came from. I'd love you to go talk to him, the son of a bitch. He's a cop. On the gun it says, ‘Issued by the L.A. Police Department.' Son of a bitch shouldn't be giving out guns, should he? Sorry, I'm getting a little emotional about it. Jimenez, Robert Jimenez. You want his address? I'll give it to you.”
“Is that where the gun is?”
“No, he doesn't have it now. He's the one who left it at my house—in my opinion, intentionally.”
“Okay, then where is it?”
Once again, Mahler turned reluctant, complaining about possible self-incrimination, hesitating and asserting his innocence. Small asked if he wanted to write this information down too. Yes, Mahler said, but added, “I don't know if you're going to find it. That's gonna be tougher. You know, you guys talk to me for twenty hours, and all of a sudden I figure you are my friends. You're not my friends. You're here to get me.”
“No,” said Small. “We're here to find the facts and clear everything up.”
Mahler proceeded to deliver another long-winded spiel of personal philosophy, but Small stopped him.
“Can we get to the gun, please?”
With an agreement by all three, Mahler put pen to paper again:
6/1/07 4:26 P.M.
I David Mahler hereby admit, swear & testify that one Robert Jimenez, purported officer at law and bail recovery agent, placed a gun/revolver into Mr. Mahler's home and did not remove it despite several requests to do so and as such the gun seemingly & apparently was the item involved with an incident re; Kristi.
No guilt to be presumed, assumed, or construed.
The gun was left intentionally by Robert Jimenez, labeled Prop of Police & claimed to be unregistered & unlicensed.
Mr. Mahler wishes contrition on having the gun in the house & having handled the gun several times before the alleged incident (i.e. 7 days prior) and Detectives acknowledging this statement is given to secure in the interests of public safety &
not
to evidentiary incriminate or to further promote any liability prior to 6/1/07 to David Mahler.
It is hoped by Mr. Mahler that the State recognizes his sympathy, remorse & cooperation.
This gun is located, based on hearsay, at or about 1400-1600 Sunset Plaza Drive in a large green Dumpster in a plastic bag.
During the preparation of this second document, David Mahler and Tom Small discussed each passage, while Vicki Bynum took a restroom break. They decided the weapon was a revolver, because it resembled a “cowboy gun.” The subject of liability for Jimenez came up. Mahler lamented that if the gun hadn't been left in his house, the “incident” would never have happened. He said, “I want this guy. As far as I'm concerned, if not for ever knowing him, I wouldn't be in any trouble, 'cause I've never had a gun in my house.” Mahler worried repeatedly about his culpability if investigators found the weapon. He expressed the opinion, though, that he would never be convicted of anything. “I haven't lost a case in eleven years.”
He completed the writing soon after Bynum returned, and all three of them signed it.
Bynum informed Mahler that she had learned, coming back from the restroom, that his bail bond guy had arrived. He perked up, believing he would be leaving within an hour.
He was wrong.
C
HAPTER
20
L
IES
, L
EGALITIES
, AND
L
EGWORK
Locked in a jail cell, David Mahler fumed with outrage. Frustrated, disappointed, and boiling over with anger, he couldn't believe he had been outwitted. To him, the interrogators had cheated and used deceptive tricks. He had undergone the humiliating booking process under “probable cause” rules, in violation of
California Penal Code 187 (a), murder.
After being fingerprinted and photographed, Mahler found himself once more in a dreaded cell. He would have to remain behind bars at least until the district attorney filed charges on Monday morning. And if he faced first-degree murder, there could be no bail. From expectation of leaving the Hollywood Station on Saturday evening, Mahler knew he might be in jail for months while waiting for trial.
Stacy Tipton arrived just before the interview ended, and waited near the front desk. When she finally received permission to visit Mahler, Stacy worked hard to calm him down, but she had little success. Later speaking of it, she said, “I saw him in the Hollywood Station. He was still in his street clothes, a black jersey and dark slacks. I couldn't believe all of this had happened to him.”
Directing his anger at Stacy, Mahler accused her of not being there for him in his hours of need. His slashing words seemed to blame her for failing to show up on Sunday, May 27, when the shooting had occurred in his bedroom. She stood her ground, and said, “David, I tried to call you and explain. My dad just wanted to make sure the locks and everything worked on my new car. You didn't answer your phone or call me back. You assumed I was standing you up. Instead of yelling at me for not being there, you should thank me for trying. I wanted to tell you to clean up your act and get rid of all this junk in your life. I was going to tell you if you did that, I wanted to marry you.”
In recalling it, Stacy quoted David as saying, “Why didn't you tell me this before?”
Stacy would continue to visit him.
 
 
Dead tired after more than fourteen hours on the job, Vicki Bynum and Tom Small still had enough energy to feel a sense of triumph and attend to a few more details. They had laid out their game plan in advance, and played it perfectly. Less experienced detectives might have withered under the difficult challenge of interrogating a smug lawyer suspected of a homicide, or prying any useful information from him. And to elicit incriminating statements might have seemed impossible. Yet, Bynum and Small had turned Mahler's complacent arrogance into an advantage. So determined to wiggle his way out of a tight spot, and overconfident that he could outsmart a couple of cops, David Mahler had spilled more information than might be expected from uneducated street thugs. His glib effort to cast all of the information as “hearsay” turned out to be an inept failure. Bynum and Small's adherence to the rules of proper interview techniques, with no promises, had produced not only laudable results, but had been accomplished with the highest level of professionalism.
Tom Small would later say, “The thing about Mahler is, he thinks he can negotiate his way out of anything. He has a long pattern of doing that with everyone. It's what he can get out of it. He wants you to think he's got something on you so you owe him. That's the way he works. People around him know that and some of them have been sucked in by it before and don't want to owe him, so they stop having anything to do with him.”
If there had been any doubt of Mahler's credibility, the interview had crushed it. He had been caught in at least a dozen misleading statements:
• Initially, Mahler said he hadn't seen Kristin from the time they met until a week or two ago.
• At first he insisted that he didn't know Kristin's last name, then later gave it.
• His tale of Edmund slapping Kristin was disputed by Donnie Van Develde's story.
• He said he registered at the Island Hotel in his own name.
• “I don't want drugs around me or in my house” was patently false.
• His denial of summoning Donnie to his room was belied by Van Develde.
• His assertions of calling Van Develde and Norvik for “advice” was untrue.
• Stacy lived in Visalia, not Bakersfield.
• More claims of not using drugs faded into admissions of frequent usage.
• He said he had not used any prostitutes lately, but actually had paid for one at the Marriott.
• “There have never been guns in my house” was a lie.
• He insisted he had last seen Kristin at 3:00
A.M.
Sunday. Donnie said she was there at 6:00
A.M.
More probable lies became evident to Small and Bynum. Some of the deception lay in information that Mahler had provided by framing personal knowledge as “hearsay.” Both detectives believed that he had shot Kristin to death and dumped her body somewhere. In addition, he had personally disposed of the gun in a trash bin at a construction site on Sunset Plaza Drive, probably when he drove from Cole Crest to the LAX Marriott on early Sunday morning, May 27. At the point where the street intersects with Sunset Boulevard, he doubtlessly had made a stop behind a Chinese restaurant and ditched Kristin's identification documents in a trash bin at one end of the parking lot.
Subsequent investigation of Mahler's statements would reveal even more duplicity. In a discussion about the interview, months later, the detectives explained how they could contain themselves during the arduous interview.
Small said, “I was acting the whole time, because I either wanted to strangle this guy, beat the hell out of him, or laugh.”
Bynum confided, “It was a grueling nine hours. It was hard. A lot of people would have given up.”
Small agreed. “They would have. But the whole thing was—the motivation for us was—did we have maybe a slim chance to find her alive? Do we have a chance? If there was any hope, and she was near a hospital sign, like he said, even though we doubted it, we had to take the chance. That's why we persisted. Otherwise, we would have booked his ass a lot sooner.”
Before ending their long tours on that Saturday, Bynum and Small wanted to find a photo of Kristin Baldwin. They left messages with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and similar county departments in Hawaii, but none of these contacts would result in obtaining photos. Small tried one more source. Wondering if Kristin had ever been jailed, he accessed computer records and hit the jackpot. The DUI incident in Ventura County, a couple of years earlier, produced a mug shot, plus the recording of fingerprints, full name, and other information. Now the detectives had not only a photo, but they knew her name was Kristin Frances Means, aka Baldwin, with a birth date of May 6, 1969. So she had vanished from Mahler's Cole Crest house exactly three weeks after her thirty-eighth birthday.
 
 
Early Sunday morning, a team of searchers, including a helicopter, swept over the desert region near Barstow, concentrating on the intersection of I-15 with I-40. No hospital sign could be found anywhere in the vicinity. Nothing turned up to even hint that an injured or dead woman had been dropped off. A check with all the local medical centers was equally disappointing. Mahler's self-serving claims of Kristi being left near a hospital, where she could have possibly received treatment, proved completely false—more lies. They were probably efforts on his part to curry favor with the detectives by creating an image of his compassion. If so, he seriously misjudged Bynum and Small.
Other officers were deployed that day to drive the entire twisting three-mile labyrinth of Sunset Plaza Drive and hunt for the trash bin in which the gun had been discarded, according to Mahler's “hearsay.” Hours of digging through all types of refuse produced nothing. They experienced the same results after rummaging through several trash barrels close to the Chinese restaurant. If Mahler had told the truth, either some “Dumpster diver” had beaten them to the weapon and the documents, or everything had been transported and buried at a disposal site. Neither the gun nor the identification papers would ever be found.
 
 
After a day of rest on Sunday, Tom Small, Vicki Bynum, and Wendi Berndt's homicide team resumed the investigation early on Monday morning, June 4.
Bynum arrived at the LAX Marriott by 6:00
A.M.
and spoke to David Grant, director of loss prevention for the hotel, and security director Ken Van Meter. Both of them clearly remembered David Mahler's stay. At Bynam's request, they provided records of it. He had checked in at 6:57
A.M.
on May 27, and left the next day at approximately 11.51
A.M.
, resulting in being required to pay for two nights. A total of $3,706.38 had been charged to Mahler's credit card. The room rate of $250 plus taxes per night accounted for a portion of it. Other assessments included two vehicles left in the valet's custody, room service charges of $415, a fee for smoking in a nonsmoking room, and several bottles of liquor. The cost had skyrocketed by an additional fee of $2,200 for the destruction of a wide-screen television set. Bynum marveled at Mahler's extravagance. She knew he had also paid $700 to a hooker, and probably paid Atticus King for his services. All of this took place after probably shooting a woman to death just a few hours earlier. The callous self-indulgence gnawed at the detective's stomach.
She also wondered if his choice of a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport signaled his thoughts of fleeing the country.
The hotel employee explained the procedure of allowing Mahler to check in under their “code blue” policy. “On occasion we have guests who want to remain anonymous for whatever reason, such as they don't want to receive incoming phone calls or if somebody were to call the hotel and ask for them by name. No one would know they were registered. And the reason we enter it as code blue is so the folks in security and other hotel personnel would be able to get in contact with the guest in case of emergency.”
Security records indicated that Mahler's room had been visited several times by hotel officers, who requested that the occupants please reduce the noise level and stop disturbing other guests.
Bynum verified that the two vehicles handled by the valet parking service had been a 2007 dark blue Jaguar and a green-and-white van marked as a taxi. The license numbers matched information showing they were the ones driven by David Mahler and Atticus King.
 
 
While Vicki Bynum visited one hotel, Tom Small made a longer trip to another one. He drove to Newport Beach and arrived at the Island Hotel, just before seven o'clock that morning.
Small initially contacted desk manager Greg Squires and showed him the recent mug shot of Mahler taken at the Hollywood Station during the booking process. Squires's face lit up with recognition, not so much from Mahler's May visit to the hotel, but from last night's television news program that had covered the arrest. The desk manager escorted Small to an office, where the detective met security officer Jonathon Thompson, who described his duties as assisting guests with hospitality services, in addition to being responsible for safety and security of patrons, as well as staff. Both employees recalled that Mahler had arrived quite late on May 24 in a “blue expensive vehicle.” He had been accompanied by a “thin, blond girl.” They also had observed the couple teaming up with a husky, bald man, who arrived in a separate car.
Another matter had stuck in the officer's memory for a very sound reason. He said that Mahler and the girl with him had a “violent altercation” in their room. Security personnel had made several visits up there to quiet the situation, and Mahler had trashed the room. As a result, Mahler and his friend had been asked to leave the hotel.
Small asked to have a look at tapes made by hotel security cameras on or about May 24. The trio reviewed the videos and found a segment that Small had hoped for. Grainy color images showed David Mahler with a woman, presumably Kristin, at the check-in desk. An inviting bowl of apples could be seen on the countertop. A burly, balding man wearing a Hawaiian shirt entered the scene. The trio appeared to have a conversation with the check-in clerk in the silent tape. Then, as they walked into the expansive lobby, Mahler put his left arm around the woman's shoulders in what appeared to be a show of affection. All three of them went to an elevator and entered it.
Hotel records showed that Mahler had checked in at twelve thirty, Thursday morning, but not under his own name. The room had been assigned to someone named George Goldberg (pseudonym), who had presented a gift certificate issued by a local automobile dealer. It covered the cost of the room for one night.
It didn't take Small long to find that Goldberg was a businessman who lived a short distance from the hotel. In a subsequent interview, Goldberg would acknowledge an arrangement to meet Mahler at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel on the evening of Wednesday, May 23. Goldberg had arrived at about seven thirty to entertain another man, a client of Mahler's. Three hours later, at about ten thirty, Mahler showed up, accompanied by a woman he called Kristi.
Describing himself as Mahler's commodities broker, Goldberg estimated he and David had been linked in that business for about six months. They had conducted at least two or three transactions per week, by telephone, during that time.

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