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Also in the pockets of the backpack were Jespersen’s Danish passport along with several packages of unused 35mm film.
Jespersen’s passport showed an INS entry stamp at John F. Ke
None of the records or news stories accounted for where in the United States Jespersen had been during the five days leading up to the riots. It apparently wasn’t seen as germane to the investigation of her death.
What did seem clear was that the breakout of violence in Los Angeles was a strong pull to Jespersen and she immediately diverted, apparently driving through the night to Los Angeles in a rental car she had picked up two days earlier at San Francisco International. On Thursday morning, April 30, she presented her passport and Danish press credentials at the LAPD media office in order to get a press pass.
Bosch had spent most of 1969 and 1970 in Vietnam. He had encountered many journalists and photographers in the base camps and out in fire zones as well. In all of them, he had seen a unique form of fearlessness. Not a warrior’s fearlessness but almost a naive belief in one’s ultimate survival. It was as though they believed that their cameras and press passes were shields that would save them, no matter the circumstance.
He had known one photographer particularly well. His name was Hank Zi
As Bosch took up the Jespersen case after so many years, he wondered if A
According to a list provided by her editor in Copenhagen and contained in the RCTF investigation file, Jespersen carried a pair of Nikon 4s and a variety of lenses. Of course, her field equipment was taken and never recovered. Whatever filmed clues might have been in her cameras were long gone.
The RCTF investigators developed the canisters of film found in the pockets of her vest. Some of these black-and-white 8 x 10 prints, along with four proof sheets showing miniatures of all ninety-six shots, were in the murder book, but they offered very little in the way of evidence or investigative leads. They were simply shots of the California National Guard mustering at the Coliseum after being called into the fray in Los Angeles. Other shots were of guardsmen ma
Beyond their historic value as documentation of the riots, the photos were deemed useless to the murder investigation in 1992, and Bosch couldn’t disagree with that assessment twenty years later.
The RCTF file also contained a property report dated May 11, 1992, and detailing the recovery of the Avis rental car that Jespersen had picked up at San Francisco International before the riots. The car had been found abandoned on Crenshaw Boulevard seven blocks from the alley where her body was found. In the ten days it had been sitting there, it had been broken into and its interior stripped. The report stated that the car and its contents, or lack thereof, had no investigative value.
What it came down to was that the one piece of evidence found by Bosch within the first hour of the investigation remained the most important hope for a resolution. The bullet casing. Over the past twenty years, law enforcement technologies had grown at light speed. Things not even dreamed about then were routine now. The advent of technological applications to evidence and crime solving had led to reassessments of old unsolved crimes everywhere on the planet. Every major metropolitan police department had teams assigned to cold case investigations. Using new technologies on old cases sometimes came down to shooting fish in a barrel: DNA matches, fingerprint matches, and ballistics matches often led to slam-bang cases against culprits who had long believed they had gotten away with murder.
But sometimes it was more complicated.
One of the first moves Bosch made upon reopening case number 9212-00346 was to take the bullet casing to the Ballistics Unit for analysis and profiling. Because of the workload backup and the nonpriority status of cold case requests coming from the Open-Unsolved Unit, three months went by before Bosch got a return. The response wasn’t a panacea, an answer that would immediately solve the case, but it gave Bosch a pathway. After twenty years of no justice for A
The ballistics report gave Bosch the name Rufus Coleman, forty-one years old and a hard-core member of the Rolling 60s Crips gang. He was currently incarcerated for murder in the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin.
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It was almost noon by the time the door opened and Coleman was led in by two prison guards. He was locked with his arms behind his back into the seat across the table from Bosch. The guards warned him that they would be watching and then left the two of them staring at each other across the table.
“You a cop, right?” Coleman said. “You know what puttin’ me in a room with a cop could do to me, if one a these hacks put word ’round?”
Bosch didn’t answer. He studied the man across from him. He had seen mug shots but they only framed Coleman’s face. He knew Coleman was big—he was a known Rolling 60s enforcer—but not this big. He had a heavily muscled and sculpted physique, a neck wider than his head—including his ears. Sixteen years of pushing and lifting prison-yard iron had given him a chest that easily extended beyond his chin, and biceps-triceps vises that looked like they could crush walnuts to powder. In the mug shots, his hair had always had a stylized fade. Now his head was clean-shaven and he had used his dome as a canvas for the Lord. On either side he had blue prison-ink crosses wrapped in barbed wire. Bosch wondered if that was part of the lobbying effort with the parole board. I’m saved. It says so right here on my cranium.
“Yes, I’m a cop,” Bosch finally said. “Up from L.A.”
“Sher’ff’s or PD?”
“LAPD. My name’s Bosch. And Rufus, this is going to be the single luckiest or unluckiest day of your life. The cool thing is you’re going to get to pick which one of those days it is. Most of us, we never get the chance to choose between good luck and bad luck. One or the other of them just sort of happens. It’s fate. But this time you do, Rufus. You get to choose. Right now.”
“Yeah, how’s that? You the man with all the luck in your pockets?”