Date With the Devil (9 page)

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Authors: Don Lasseter

BOOK: Date With the Devil
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In his version of events, Mahler recalled arguing with Kristin, blaming her for instigating it. He said she refused to leave the room at checkout time; so he departed alone. Hotel records show that Mahler checked out on Friday. A manager revealed that the occupant and his guest had been asked to leave because of the disturbance they created.
In his explanation, Mahler didn't mention his previous pattern of exploding in anger and abandoning his longtime girlfriend, Stacy Tipton, several times in New York and in Hawaii. Instead, he painted himself in much gentler terms. “I didn't mean to be a—please don't get me wrong. I'm a gentleman.”
Other people expressed conflicting understandings of what had happened. Their consensus suggested that Kristin had been abandoned at the hotel after an argument with Mahler. To make matters worse, she had been left without any money or transportation back to Calabasas. She called, or tried to call, a few friends in the Newport area and in the San Fernando Valley without success. Peter Means later stated, “I had a phone message from her. She called from Newport Beach, where she was with Mahler. When I returned the call, she was no longer in the room.” Means tried to connect with Kristin on her cell phone, but he couldn't reach her.
A male friend of Kitty's, who also knew Kristin, told Kitty that he had received a call from Kristin, sobbing that she had been abandoned in Newport Beach by David. A few days later, Kitty called David and asked him how the trip to Newport with Kristin had turned out. He refused to give any details, but he acknowledged that “there had been trouble.”
Tara Rush, with whom Kristin had lived two years earlier, recalled a chilling message on her cell phone. “It was so odd. I just saw her about ten days before that. She called from Newport Beach and said she went there with some lawyer guy she had been dating. They had a fight and he left her there. Her voice was scary, like she was screaming for her life.” When Tara tried to call back, she was unable to make contact with her friend.
Eventually Kristin made her way back to Calabasas, but how she did it has remained obscured in a cloud of mystery. If Mahler knows, he hasn't divulged it. It has been suggested that she talked a cabdriver into taking her the sixty miles, on the promise that she would pay, or that someone in Calabasas would come up with the money. Peter Means doubted that.
“She never carried enough money to pay for such an exorbitant taxi fare, and she didn't have a credit card.” Her stepfather felt it would have been difficult for her to pay the fare on her own.
A hotel employee observed her with an unidentified man in the lobby after she left the room. A security officer said he saw her leave in a taxi.
If one of Kristin's friends, either in Newport Beach or the San Fernando Valley, provided either a ride or the cash to pay for commercial transportation, they haven't yet come forward. The facts may never be known.
Enraged and livid over the desertion by Mahler leaving her stranded, Kristin telephoned him the next day.
In David's sanitized version, he explained, “She called me on Saturday asking if she could have some piece to [her] car.” He explained that she had removed something from her car in Calabasas so no one could use the vehicle, and had left the component in Mahler's garage. “I said, ‘Fine, come on up.'” He didn't bother to clarify how or when Kristin had left the “piece of her car” inside his garage.
Tara Rush later described a different scenario. She said, “I saw her after she got back. It was on Saturday. She took a cab over to my place in Canoga Park.” Rush said that Kristin called the guy who had left her in Newport. They had apparently made up, because he drove over and picked her up in front of a liquor store on DeSoto and Nordhoff.
 
 
Another woman had planned to spend that weekend at Cole Crest. Stacy Tipton recalled, “I had just got this neat car, a Jeep Cherokee. But my dad didn't want me to drive it down there until some work it needed was done. When they completed it on Saturday and I was ready to go, I called David three times and he didn't return any of them. I was supposed to be there. I could go on and on about that, but I don't want to.” She wondered if her presence might have changed everything.
Kristin, David claimed, had arrived at Cole Crest late Saturday at the same time as a man named Edmund, who drove a green flatbed pickup truck. “He's a Mexican fellow, about five-eight, or maybe five-ten, overweight, about two hundred twenty pounds.” David acknowledged that he had seen Edmund before, but with Michael Conoscenti, never with Kristin. This man, said Mahler, was a drug dealer. “But he fancied himself a little more than that. He likes to think he is a ladies' man. He would ask me, ‘Oh, you need girls tonight?'”
This time, though, said Mahler, there was no offer of women. Instead, Kristin “started indicating that she wanted drugs.”
Continuing with his fanciful recollection of that Saturday evening in his home, Mahler said, “There was a little bit of an altercation, which made me uncomfortable—slapping, that kind of thing.” He stated that Edmund had started slapping Kristin. It had taken place in his bedroom.
Shocked—perhaps like Claude Rains in the classic film
Casablanca
was “shocked” to see gambling in Humphrey Bogart's nightclub—Mahler said he had telephoned a couple of his friends to ask advice: Karl Norvik and Donnie Van Develde. “This is a problem. What do you think I should do? You know, I got a guy slapping a girl here. Do I get involved?”
The situation, in Mahler's tale, became too much for him. He decided to leave the premises. But first, he gave Edmund a warning to be out of there before he returned. He also ordered Kristi to take whatever property she had there and leave. Mahler made one other call before exiting the house. When Atticus King answered, Mahler yelled into the phone, “I have an emergency. Are you my friend? Go to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and meet me there!”
King replied, “I ain't goin' to the Beverly Wilshire, man. That's too far. How 'bout the Marriott by the airport?”
Mahler uncharacteristically agreed without argument. Recalling it, he said, “I left and checked in at the Marriott Hotel at the Los Angeles International Airport, early Sunday morning.”
A few of David Mahler's assertions would prove to be true. He did check in at the LAX Marriott not long after dawn on that Sunday. Among the calls he made was one to Atticus King. And Mahler's story about telephoning Donnie and Karl, both of whom were in their apartments below Mahler's, also proved factual. But the subject of their conversations turned out to be far more loathsome than the duplicitous yarn about Edmund slapping Kristin.
C
HAPTER
10
“I N
EED TO
D
ISPOSE
OF
A
D
EAD
B
ODY
”
En route to the Marriott, David Mahler left his Cole Crest residence at six twenty-one Sunday morning. He drove down, zigzagging Sunset Plaza Drive, narrowly missing rows of trash cans placed near driveways. At a nearly indiscernible intersection, he passed within a few paces of the home owned by singer Johnny Mathis. Near the bottom of the hills, he drove by a high hedge that hid the former estate of screen star Anne Baxter. Reaching the first traffic signal, at Sunset Boulevard, Mahler turned west. The quickest route for his destination would have been to make his way through Beverly Hills, enter the I-405 Freeway, and head south. About twelve miles later, he exited on Century Boulevard, where it empties into LAX, and then drove a few blocks west to the Marriott Hotel.
After letting a valet park his 2007 indigo blue Jaguar at seven o'clock that morning, he made his rendezvous with his taxi driver buddy, Atticus King. At the registration desk, Mahler checked in with a special request not to be listed under his true name. The hotel, respecting their guests' privacy, put into effect their “code blue” protocol to keep his identity confidential. Both men went up to a room on the fourth floor.
King would later express the opinion that Mahler seemed terribly upset and agitated. Perhaps to quiet his frayed nerves, Mahler contacted room service and had a $120 bottle of Rémy Martin fine champagne cognac delivered, along with food, costing in excess of $200, to which he added a generous tip.
A little later, a young woman with long, dark hair joined the two men. Her method of transportation to the Marriott would be disputed. An employee of the hotel thought Atticus King had left and returned with her in tow. A police report stated,
Atticus King brought the girl to him.
King denied it, while admitting that he often “picked up and delivered” girls at Mahler's request. In this case, though, he insisted that she arrived on her own. The woman told Mahler her price was $2,000 for the full night.
With that, the party began. Booze flowed freely, several lines of cocaine went up noses, and a meth pipe also had prodigious use.
During the course of that Sunday, May 27, all day and well into the night, hotel security staff personnel visited Mahler's room more than once. They observed the occupants—Mahler, a woman, and a rotund African-American man—appeared to be engaged in a “brawl.” The security people twice requested that the trio please reduce the noise level. But it continued. At one point, when Mahler woke up after a sex-induced nap, and the woman asked for her $2,000, Mahler exploded. He began trashing the room and attacking her. King intervened and calmed the situation down by pulling them apart. He promised the hooker that Mahler would pay her later.
Mahler reluctantly handed his bank card to King and instructed him to find an ATM, withdraw $700, and bring it back.
During the tempestuous day and night, Mahler made frequent calls from his cell phone. His whispered conversations puzzled King. After several attempts, Mahler reached Stacy Tipton in Visalia, told her that he had a serious problem, and asked if she could come to Hollywood and meet him.
When they checked out just before noon on Monday, Mahler used a credit card to pay a bill for over $3,706! During the wild night, the occupants had destroyed an expensive plasma television set. He gave the angry prostitute $700, and promised to pay her the balance later. She and King left together.
Mahler headed back to Sunset Boulevard and the Standard Hotel, where Stacy waited for him. Of course, during their two-night stay, they argued frequently. Mahler accused Stacy of standing him up on Saturday, and ignored her explanations about having work done on her new car, and that she had repeatedly tried to contact him. His nervous, erratic behavior, much more intense than usual, shocked her.
On that same Monday, they paid a brief visit to the house on Cole Crest. Later discussing it, Stacy said she did not go inside with him. In Mahler's recollection, he contradicted her. “We stopped at my house on Monday, for all of about two minutes because I needed to grab my computer. Things looked normal inside, other than there was some blood. That freaked me out, but Stacy freaked out more than me. I said, ‘Stacy, we'll deal with this later.' The blood was in my bedroom, where Edmund was slapping Kristi.”
Back at the Standard Hotel, said Mahler, Stacy was still upset and absolutely refused to go back to the house. She departed on Wednesday for Visalia.
By Thursday, May 31, Memorial Day, Mahler returned to his home. The presence of detergents and cleansers in Mahler's bedroom suggested that he attempted to clean up the blood from the crime scene.
 
 
In neighboring Orange County, Karl Norvik also thought about the blood in Mahler's house. He had agonized over a decision, crushed by fear and anguish every minute of the last four days and nights. Unable to eat, sleep, or even think clearly, he had lost weight from his slim five-nine frame.
Should I call the police? Will I endanger my own life or the lives of people I love? Will this man I've regarded as a close friend take violent revenge?
The final week of May 2007 had not been particularly warm in Southern California, but Norvik found himself soaked with perspiration brought on by anxiety. His stomach had wrenched itself into painful knots.
Damn! What to do?
In his work and his social life, Karl had found serenity, something he valued above everything else. Had that all crashed? Norvik couldn't believe the stunning events that had turned his life upside down. Would he ever be able to resume working among the glitterati of Hollywood? For more than twenty years, he had been involved in production, sound mixing, and even film editing for what he preferred to call “top industry names.” Now, a man he had trusted completely had potentially destroyed everything. How could he ever have regarded David Mahler as his best friend?
Since the early-morning hours of Sunday, May 27, Karl had avoided returning to the house on Cole Crest Drive. For several years while he had managed the home built on a sloping canyon wall, the upper floor had been his domain; while renters lived in the lower levels. But David Mahler had changed all of that when he took over.
For six years, they had enjoyed a friendly coexistence. Norvik had even trusted Mahler with investing his money, and a relative's life savings. They shared personal insights, and enjoyed the ambience of residing atop an elevated ridge among neighbors from all levels of the entertainment industry. The wannabe actors, struggling screenwriters, musicians, camera operators, artists, all the way to studio executives, lived in every conceivable type of structure from cabins to castles speckling the Hollywood Hills.
In recognition of Karl's intelligence, David had said to him more than once, “You have a mind like a steel trap. If you had chosen to become a lawyer, I wouldn't ever want to oppose you in court.”
During these last five days of living hell, Karl Norvik had endured the most troubling period of his life while staying with a relative fifty miles from Cole Crest Drive. He could only ask himself, “What was I thinking?”
The incident seemed at first like some goofy misinterpretation. Piecing events together in his mind, Norvik still couldn't believe he might be personally involved in a murder. The whole thing sounded to him like a film noir script or a complex murder novel.
It began after a Saturday evening business meeting with a colleague in the upper-floor office that Mahler and Norvik sometimes shared. At one point, while Karl and his guest studied data on two computers, David had walked in, accompanied by another man whom Norvik had never before seen. The duo lingered only a few minutes and then vanished into a separate part of the house. After another half hour, and conclusion of their transactions, Karl's guest said good night and left. Karl descended an interior staircase to his bedroom, treated himself to a couple of drinks, and took off the clothing he had adopted almost as a uniform; slim-fit black slacks and a black T-shirt. He collapsed on his bed at about eleven thirty that night and fell asleep.
Sometime in the early-morning hours of Sunday, shrill, piercing voices snapped him into full consciousness. He later described it as “loud, screaming profanities, which basically escalated to a much more vitriolic and heated level. I heard a woman screaming and Mahler's very recognizable loud voice.” Reluctant to repeat the exact language, Norvik described it as including “the
B
word, the
C
word, and the
F
word ... just a string of very, very hateful profanities.” At first, Karl wondered if the stranger he had seen with Mahler was involved, but finally decided that only two people were yelling at each other. Most of the shouted invectives, he realized, came from David Mahler. He could not recognize the woman's voice.
This scenario had been played out more than once in recent months. “I had heard, in past occasions, when a woman had been over at the house in the company of Mahler, very heated arguments and it almost seemed as if ‘here we go again,' to put it bluntly.”
Even though Norvik attempted to block out the annoying clamor by hugging a pillow over his head, he clearly heard another noise interrupt the barrage of yelling and cursing. He interpreted it as a loud thump. “It first sounded like a heavy piece of furniture had been thrown.” With his own bedroom situated below Mahler's sleeping quarters, the sound came from overhead. He visualized either someone jumping on someone else, or perhaps a chest of drawers toppled to the floor.
A welcome period of calm followed, almost allowing Karl to exhale and go back to sleep. But before ten minutes elapsed, another audible thud resonated from the floor above. This one, he later recalled, “sounded more like a body thump ... something that weighed well over one hundred pounds.” It seemed to emanate from near a fireplace in the bedroom above.
Another brief period of quiet ended with something that brought to Karl's mind images of movement. “I heard a dragging noise, as if furniture, or possibly a body, was being pulled across the floor.” It came intermittently, “Like a pull and a stop, another dragging, and stop.”
This noise, too, came to an end. At last, Karl thought,
It's all over.
Never in his life had he been more mistaken. Just as he closed his eyes, a thunderous pounding on his door tensed every muscle in his body. “It was very, very insistent and nonstop banging.” He leaped out of bed and slipped into his trousers and shirt. Glancing at his cell phone display, he noted the time: 6:25
A.M.
Nerves taut, he opened the door a crack and peered out onto the stairway landing. David Mahler stood there, dressed in a dark suit.
“What's going on?” Karl asked, trying to sound impatient but managing only a nervous whisper.
David bellowed, “I have a major emergency!”
“What is it?”
With no hesitation, David Mahler spit the words out in a loud slur: “I need to dispose of a dead body.”
Norvik felt himself start to tremble. Not from the chill morning air, but from shock. To him, Mahler's indistinct speech, dilated pupils, and face drained of color made him appear to be drunk. “Even his eyes looked gray rather than their usual brown.”
By now, Karl Norvik's mind had developed a scenario. The thump he had heard overhead must have been the woman who had been screaming at Mahler. If there was a dead body up there, it had to be her. From his years of friendship with Mahler, Norvik knew that drugs were commonly used when female visitors came, so the possibility of a drug-induced death flitted through his mind. He asked Mahler, point-blank, “Did she overdose?”
Mahler's mute answer came only in the negative shaking of his head.
Stepping over to a staircase, Karl asked, “What happened?”
Both men moved tentatively up a couple of steps. Before they reached the entry to David's rooms, Mahler announced, “I shot her near the balcony.”
Staggered by the frank admission, Norvik felt like he couldn't breathe. Later speaking of it, he explained, “I was just floored, shocked, in awe beyond consciousness. I walked up about three or four more stairs so I could take a seat on the landing. I needed to sit down and speak with him.” But no conversation took place. Instead, Norvik glanced into the open doorway leading into Mahler's bedroom, and felt sick. “I saw a corpse with a big bullet hole in the left side of her face, lying diagonally to the corner of his bed.”
The image would stay with Karl Norvik forever. The woman lay on her back, with arms stretched out, palms up, and long blond hair extending from her head as if she had been dragged. He didn't think he had ever seen her before, but couldn't be certain. “It was rather hard to tell, especially when someone has been shot in the face. The hole was about the size of a quarter. Some of the blood had coagulated and there were streaks of it [that] had run over the nose to the other cheek. But it wasn't flowing out. She wore what looked to be like a gold halter top, very small and skimpy, and it was kinda hiked up.” The garment's odd position further convinced Karl Norvik that she had been dragged across the floor. “It looked like she was wearing some kind of white thin cotton pants, and I could see a panty line because they were that sheer.”

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