Forty minutes later, I lingered near one of the hospital’s side entrances, unable to spot any fellow journalists milling around. So, I popped open the door, figuring they might be inside. That’s when a tubby police officer whipped around the corner, telling me in an angry whisper that the gunman who’d already shot three doctors — one with a .38-caliber slug to the head — was holding two people hostage just around the bend. “Get down and go!” he said, his hand gripping a revolver.

I left, lucky only to have been chastised, and discovered the media scrum in an adjacent parking lot. It was now your basic hurry-up-and-wait while authorities tried to end the standoff with the gunman, a disgruntled patient who lived on Skid Row. They hauled him off in a squad car after several hours, and as I angled for a view of his face, an overly aggressive TV cameraman whacked me in the back of the head with his lens. But I still noticed the suspect resembled Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” serial killer who had terrorized Los Angeles the previous decade.

By nightfall, with our story for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in editing, I needed to decompress. I ripped off my nicotine patch and bought the last pack of cigarettes I’d ever smoke.

The O. J. Simpson murders would be the next crime story I’d write about, if tangentially, for the Los Angeles Times and its rival, the Los Angeles Daily News. Full-time crime reporters, as I learned, were the characters in the newsroom, often cynical, swashbuckling, and as brash as the cops with whom they interacted. I didn’t run in that herd.

It wasn’t until one day in 1998, strolling along Hollywood Boulevard, that I got stopped on the sidewalk by a guy named Jerry Schneiderman who had been both a source for stories and a bit of a fabulist.

“Did you know,” he said, “that I once had a double murderer chasing me?”

He claimed the ordeal ruined the “old” him, gutting his first marriage and leaving him forever mistrustful of strangers.

Yeah, right, I said, figuring he was either pulling my chain, as he was apt to do, or exaggerating something unverifiable.

Never was I more wrong.

Schneiderman had been a nerdy 27-year-old space-planning prodigy when his partner, a suave, charismatic fellow 12 years his senior, persuaded him into something of a real estate get-rich-quick scheme: adding construction services to their otherwise white-collar business sketching interior blueprints for Los Angeles companies big and small. In need of an experienced foreman — and a California contractor’s license — they hired a quiet, windburned applicant, sight unseen. What Schneiderman didn’t know was that both his colleagues bore secrets, one more diabolical than the other. From the ashes of financial misconduct and palace intrigue soon emerged a sequence of events out of an Elmore Leonard novel.

Then again, life in 1979 Los Angeles made for plenty of deadbolted doors and just as much paranoia. Murder rates were spiking. “White flight” was growing, as were gated communities and racial tensions between people of color and the increasingly militarized LAPD. Worse, overlapping serial killers (like “The Hillside Strangler” and “The Freeway Killer”) seemed to prowl at their leisure.

Beyond the criminality, Southern California exuded this seething aura, just like the rest of a demoralized post-Vietnam, post-Watergate United States, except amid palm trees and famous boulevards. The anchor’s rant in Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant Network, where he encouraged viewers to scream that they were “mad as hell,” felt less Hollywood drama than modern documentary. There was a noir quality to our existence that rendered even our beloved La Brea Tar Pits a shadowy expanse you didn’t want to hang around at night. A 17-year-old at the time, what I remember now are the gloomy skies and sullen adults.

Years later, I realized that Schneiderman only had a keyhole-wide understanding of the darkness that had swirled around him. For instance, he had little understanding that his partner’s execution with a powerful World War II–era rifle represented the opening salvo in a boutique murder-for-profit corporation. The ringleader of it was Howard Garrett, their vulture-faced foreman who’d decided to toss caution to the wind by cashing in on other people’s demises. In a tense meeting where Garrett blackmailed Schneiderman, threatening him and his family with their own murder contracts, Garrett warned Schneiderman that he had killed before “and gotten away with it.” He wasn’t lying.

The web of would-be assassins that ensnared Schneiderman included a bantam-sized gunman with a deadeye aim, a transgender thief, and a bisexual white supremacist crook with a grain of conscience.

But I never could’ve unearthed a drop of this 20-year-old saga without my journalism background. As such, I spent hours in the Hall of Records’s dungeon-esque basement in downtown Los Angeles, examining court filings, even though many were missing or stolen. I interviewed dozens of people swept up in Garrett’s months-long reign of terror, among them former LAPD homicide detectives who, like Schneiderman, couldn’t forget Garrett. Eventually, I connected with the lead prosecutor, who offered public documents that confirmed the outlines of this weirder-than-fiction tale.

One salacious document showed that between the time when Schneiderman’s business partner was murdered and Garrett was dramatically arrested he worked on a freelance construction job at the offices of the California Association of Realtors, a trade group promoting integrity in the real estate business.

All of this digging kept me at a comfortable distance from the actual villains involved. I still craved to learn more, and with Garrett long dead, there was only one person who knew the truth about him: the triggerman who’d fired the fateful bullet into the head of Schneiderman’s feather-haired partner, Richard Kasparov.

Johnny Williams was many things: a bushy-haired man who had already admitted to killing multiple people before this, an industrious criminal alchemist, and the victim of a traumatic brain injury from tumbling out of a moving car. That pivotal event had demented him from a kid with a soaring IQ into a sociopath.

To hear him out, I typed up a letter requesting an interview, and then, probably a dozen times, stuck it in my mailbox only to retract it moments later. Williams had testified under oath, to a stupefied courtroom, that killing to him was no big deal. Years later, the parole board at Corcoran State Prison in Central California repeatedly denied his release, deeming him an ongoing threat to society.

What if my nosy questions about what landed him behind bars incensed him and he was subsequently freed? Even the internet of the early aughts made it simple to locate someone’s address. Would he pop up outside my window with a big gun, just as he had with Schneiderman’s partner, for one last slaughter? What about my family? Were Williams’s sinister memories worth it?

That one-page letter collected dust in my file cabinet for two years as I hemmed and hawed, weighing the risk, when I heard that Williams died behind bars.

Then I wrote The Darkest Glare, a nonfiction account that tried to stitch all the craziness together into a single book. I hope I did it justice without Williams.

I was confident I could handle not only the Kafkaesque twists of Schneiderman’s ordeal but also the prologue of it — the PTSD, the legal and emotional dominoes that cascaded afterward, the questions about hidden identities behind the smiles of Los Angeles contractors. And that’s all because a distracted city editor shooed me out the door to cover that hospital shooting. The best story is the one you never set out to write.

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The post Trailer for my true-crime book: “The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles” appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

To this day, the expressions remain amber in memory: the knotted foreheads of Pennsylvanians near the meltdown at the Three-Mile Island nuclear-power plant; Jimmy Carter’s clenched grin realizing circumstance would relegate him to a one-termer. How a January that began hopefully with Terry Bradshaw’s aw-shucks glee after winning a Super Bowl in Miami metastasized in November into rage and disbelief at the righteous scowl of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed “Death to America” as his followers took U.S. embassy workers hostage in Tehran.

For me, an ever-curious seventeen-year-old in the foothills of Pasadena, California, those flickering images, as well as other dismaying ones — the victims of crisscrossing serial killers, dying steel towns, Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan — seeded doubts about pretty much everything concerning the future. It was a kind of “Deer Hunter” state of mind.

So, blessed be for those unleashed Les Pauls, for thumping bass riffs, for singers going where the suited adults wouldn’t. The chrome housing of my pride-and-joy Sony stereo rarely grew cold, not as I gorged on a feast of eclectic, envelope-stretching music that painted my world the vivid colors seemingly bled out of the real one. Classic albums, melodic punk, dangerous New Wave: if you needed pretext for an album party, there was always cellophane to unwrap.

Blue-blood acts I adored — Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd — were proving they weren’t longhaired dinosaurs ducking comets named Deborah Harry, Joe Strummer, Robin Zander or David Byrne. And just as Blue Oyster Cult sang about how nature continually revealed the foolishness of man, 1979 also sped the destruction of the glittery dance ball born from Barry Gibb falsettos, at least as evinced by the anarchy of the “Anti-Disco” night at Chicago’s Comiskey Stadium after a White Sox game.

Why am I effusing about music created when Beyonce wasn’t even born, churned out by musicians with the faint ring of a dive-bar Throwback Thursday trivia contest?

In March of that year, on a rainy evening several freeways away from my bedroom poster of Jimmy Page in his white, dragon pants, a trio of wannabe assassins crouched on the deck of a suburban house in the San Fernando Valley, “America’s Suburb:” The killing in their sights would serve multiple purposes: as trance-inducing revenge for its mastermind, and as the inauguration of his murder-for-profit ring targeting real estate executives who squirreled hefty sums of cash at home.

Though I wouldn’t piece together this entire, bizarre story until 40-plusyears later, well after I junked my corduroys and mix-tape cassettes, it got me wondering. How would the saga of an only-in-LA business partnership — devolving as it did into treachery, gore, and criminal absurdity — sound if it was told by radio-blared songs rather than the pages of the true-crime book I wrote?

My parameter: do it with through ten works released in ’79, narrowing them to either top-sellers listed by Billboard magazine or ones praised by Rolling Stone and others. My reasoning: music is a sonic reverberation on its times, often depicting the era’s gestalt better us later moored to a keyboard.

***

Once upon a time, there was a young space planner (a.k.a. interior architect) who was brilliant and nerdy. He also wrestled with the labels the city slapped on him, sometimes unsure which way was up. Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” must’ve been his jam.

To compensate for his inexperience, the space planner hired a suave, older associate to be the public face of their upstart firm, Space Matters. This man, from a wealthy West L.A. family that’d yoked high expectations on him, was equally ambitious but also more risk-taking. He sweet-talked his partner into adding hard-hat construction services to their otherwise white-collar enterprise.

“Stagflation” economy” and all, Space Matters killed it at first, landing deals from grand dame Wilshire Boulevard to the futuristic westside. Anyone been to Tom Petty’s “Century City?” They sold to insurance companies and stuffy banks, pop-psychology groups advocating nudity, weed, and primal screaming, as well as a sixties’ counterculture figure turned leasing tycoon. For strange bedfellow colleagues working out of an old mansion near L.A.’s posh “Miracle Mile,” they rolled like they were, in Police vernacular, “Walking on the Moon.”

Voyages, however, are propelled by trust and expertise, not deception camouflaged by toothy smiles. The very partner the young space planner recruited had actually cheated him out of tens of thousands of dollars, jeopardizing everything they’d built. At an ambush meeting at the glitzy Polo Lounge, the blow-dried embezzler was booted out of the promising firm. Let Joe Jackson explain how flimflams are devised. “I’m The Man.”

If this were the old Dick Clark game show, “The $20,000 Pyramid,” the grand-prize question would be why such a talented, charismatic person needed to resort to such knife-in-the-back trickery? The regrettable answer: uncontainable demons, self-shame, and, beneath the surface, paranoia that his wife, a spunky, ravishing woman much his junior, needed to be indulged, lest he lose her. She was, more or less, his “My Sharona,” as presented by The Knack.

The problem with cheaters is that they often cheat multiple suckers, with some less willing than others to answer with a lawsuit or eternal disgust. A monster, who hide behind the legitimacy of his nine-to-five, Joe Sixpack persona, put a contract out on the trickster as proof. When the first assassin he hired to take care of the matter developed cold feet and fled up north, he found himself on the execution list, becoming a “Renegade,” albeit not how Styx imagined.

Even with blinking lights he was being hunted, the older space planner — a man with two daughters, an estranged spouse still open to reconciliation, and many others who loved him — remained in LA when he should’ve booked a flight on the Concord to a remote European village. To squish down his inner torment, he hooked up that stormy night with a former secretary and rolled himself a doobie, felling “Comfortably Numb.” He just could’ve used a wall more fortified than Pink Floyd’s.

The mastermind pounced on his target’s lethargy, driving his El Camino across at least four freeways with his bottom-scraping, gaffe-prone toadies. The intent was bloodier than AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Job done, dozens of Angelenos connected to a bullet-pierced window were petrified of opening their curtain — or seeing that shark-like Chevy round their block. They knew, like Elvis Costello knew, that “Accidents Will Happen.” They just didn’t understand who picked the victims.

Nobody had more reasons to keep looking over his shoulder than our nerdy space planner. For months, he “lived” in disguise, under occasional protection of an-ex Israeli mercenary, surviving a botched showdown at the creepy La Brea Tar Pits. It’d take him decades before he could live as blithely as the good timer in Squeeze’s “Cool for Cats.”

And only then with a raging mistrust of the true L.A. behind its sunny mask.

To hear the Spotify playlist from this essay, click here! This essay was first published on Medium here.

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