Crime Beat (17 page)

The ad stated they would be discreet and very private. But they had rented cars, kept receipts, made long-distance phone calls, made themselves memorable to witnesses. They ran out on bills, kept stolen weapons and carried large quantities of cash. They left high-powered weapons displayed on the seats of their cars. And most of all, they talked too much.

This is how discreet and private Sean Doutre was: The day after he killed Anita Spearman, he was stopped by police in Maryville, Tenn., for a traffic violation. On the backseat of his car was a 12-gauge shotgun stolen from Spearman’s house the morning of the murder.

The case of the want-ad killers probably could have been broken with Doutre’s arrest. But when officers checked the serial number of the shotgun against a national computer index of stolen property, they drew a blank. In Palm Beach County, the murder was only a day old and the serial number of the stolen shotgun had not yet been entered in the computer’s data bank.

But Doutre did at least put investigators hard on the trail of Richard Savage. Along with the shotgun, Maryville police had found a submachine gun in Doutre’s car. The weapon automatically meant that the nearest AFT office would be called to see if anybody wanted to question Doutre.

Grant McGarrity, a Knoxville agent, visited Doutre in jail that afternoon. Doutre was talkative, volunteering that he worked for a man named Savage who was in the business of sending people out on contract murders. Of course, Doutre denied that he had committed a crime himself.

It was interesting information. McGarrity had heard of Richard Savage and was already gathering information about weapons being mailed to and from the Continental Club.

Because Doutre said nothing that incriminated himself, he was able to post bond on the weapons charge and leave Maryville. However, the stolen shotgun remained behind in the police department’s evidence lockup.

W
HILE ALL THIS
was happening, Doug Norwood, the Arkansas law student, was still scared and looking over his shoulder. Police were making little headway in their investigations of the shooting and bombing that had nearly killed him. Nor were they listening to his theory that his girlfriend’s ex-husband had put hit men on his trail.

Nevertheless, Norwood’s wariness eventually helped save him a third time, and helped break open the case. On Jan. 20, 1986, Norwood grew suspicious of a car that followed him to the university, and called the two campus detectives who were investigating the bombing.

The police stopped the car and began talking to its driver, Michael Wayne Jackson. One officer spotted the barrel of a gun protruding from beneath a sweater on the front seat. Jackson was arrested and police confiscated several guns, including a semiautomatic rifle.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” says Norwood, “that Jackson was going to spray me with that machine gun.”

Jackson proved to be as talkative as Sean Doutre. He told police that he and Savage had been hired by Larry Gray, the ex-husband of Norwood’s girlfriend, to kill Norwood. And he added that Gray had contacted them through a classified ad in
Soldier of Fortune
magazine.

T
HE NEXT BREAK
came on Feb. 5, when Sean Doutre was arrested again near Athens, Ga., simply because he had left a nearby motel without paying his long-distance phone bill. Once again, law officers listened raptly as Doutre gave details about Savage and the murder-for-hire business.

Shortly afterward, ATF agent McGarrity decided to visit a former Savage associate named Ronald Emert, who had been jailed in Knoxville on drug charges. Emert turned out to be one more key to the puzzle. In exchange for not being charged in any murder-for-hire plot, he told McGarrity about the trip he had made to Florida with Doutre to collect money from a man named Spearman. He also told McGarrity to check with the Maryville police about a shotgun that was gathering dust in their evidence closet.

Until that point, progress had been slow in Palm Beach County on the Spearman case. Robert Spearman had stopped cooperating with the sheriff’s department, and detectives were mostly waiting for a lucky break. It came after Emert’s conversation with McGarrity, who retrieved the shotgun from Maryville.

Palm Beach detectives flew to Knoxville, and Emert picked Robert Spearman’s face out of a lineup of photographs. Investigators then began to check records of long-distance phone calls, hotels, car rentals and other business receipts gathered from Doutre and others in the Savage gang.

Finally, the net was beginning to close. Law officers from West Palm Beach north to Minneapolis and west to Dallas gathered in Atlanta for a conference on the Savage gang. ATF designated it a national investigation.

“It all sounded so wild and far-fetched—but it was all coming back as true,” recalls the ATF’s Tom Stokes.

Law enforcement agencies began filing charges in the various conspiracies. Savage, Doutre, Jackson, Buckley and the others were jailed. So were many of the people who had hired them.

Among them was Robert Spearman, who walked out of a store on North Lake Boulevard in West Palm Beach on April 4 to find Palm Beach County Sheriff Richard Wille waiting with a warrant charging him with his wife’s murder.

T
HE WANT-AD
killers face a litany of murder, conspiracy and weapons charges in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota and Iowa.

Last month, the chapter involving Anita Spearman ended with Richard Savage’s second-degree murder conviction in a West Palm Beach courtroom. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Earlier, Sean Doutre and Robert Spearman had been found guilty of first-degree murder.

In the Doug Norwood attacks, Savage, Larry Gray, William Buckley and Dean DeLuca all pleaded guilty. Savage and Doutre have been charged in the Braun killing. The grenade attacks on Dana Free resulted in charges against Savage, Michael Wayne Jackson and Buckley. Buckley has also been charged in connection with the plane bomb in Dallas. Richard Lee Foster and Mary Alice Wolf have been convicted of conspiracies to hire the Savage gang.

Charges in other cases are still pending. So far, the guns for hire are serving prison terms ranging from five years to life.

M
EANWHILE
, the victims who escaped the gang’s deadly ineptitude are trying to return to normalcy—if that is possible.

Doug Norwood says it isn’t.

He completed law school this year and is now a prosecutor for Benton County in Arkansas. He sued
Soldier of Fortune,
claiming negligence on the magazine’s part in publishing the ad that led to attacks on him. He sought $4 million in damages but says he settled last month for an undisclosed amount of money. He still carries the .357 Magnum.

“I take elaborate security measures,” he says. “I live in a Fort Knox. I just don’t allow strangers in to talk to me and I always answer the door with my gun. I’ll probably carry it until the day I die.”

EVIL UNTIL HE DIES

PORTRAIT OF A MURDER SUSPECT

Trail to Chatsworth Street is traced through the Criminal Justice System.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

October 18, 1987

R
OLAND COMTOIS
knew the routine well.

Arrested by Los Angeles police on suspicion of burglary, he hooked his glasses in the open neck of his shirt and stared coldly at the camera. The hard set of his eyes betrayed nothing. No fear. No concern. The camera clicked, and the mug shot was taken.

For Comtois, it was simply part of life.

Today, that June 1 mug shot is part of a history that tells much about the criminal justice system and the man accused in the abduction and shooting of two Chatsworth teen-agers last month.

Wendy Masuhara, 14, was kidnapped Sept. 19, shot in the head and killed. Her body was left in an abandoned car in a canyon six miles from the presumably safe neighborhood from which she and a 13-year-old friend had been taken.

Her friend was drugged, sexually assaulted, shot and also left for dead. But she survived and provided police with the information that identified Comtois, 58, and 33-year-old Marsha Lynn Erickson, accused of being his accomplice, as suspects. Both were familiar to police and the courts.

Comtois had woven a 46-year path through police stations, courtrooms and prisons. He was a man the criminal justice system could not handle, a man it could neither rehabilitate nor protect society from.

‘Lashing Back’

“Ever since early incorrigibility,” a probation officer wrote in 1962, “he has lashed back at society with a vengeance, reaching out for what he wants with a total disregard of the rights of others. . . . His personality affect is of a man who is very matter-of-fact, cold, hostile, cynical and daring.”

Twenty-five years later, police describe Comtois as someone who beat the system—not because he has gotten away with crime, but because he has never gotten away
from
it. All told, records show Comtois has spent at least four stints in prison on convictions including attempted rape, robbery and heroin dealing.

And, after each sentence was served, he apparently returned to society only to lapse back into crime.

“It is not surprising that he was able to do this,” Leroy Orozco, a homicide detective working full-time on Comtois’ background, said last week. “His whole life has been criminal. With our justice system, people can continue to commit crimes and beat the system by continuing to get their freedom. There are people out there with worse records than he has.”

Roland Norman Comtois was born in Massachusetts, the sixth of seven children of a French Canadian couple. According to court records, Comtois’ mother died when he was 3, and he was placed in a succession of orphanages, foster homes and reform schools. As an adult, he would claim he was abused during this period, telling probation officers that he was punished for bed-wetting by being handcuffed and placed in cold showers. He would show scars on his wrists, claiming they were from being handcuffed as a child. Of one orphanage, he would say, “If I should ever run across the old guy who ran that place, I would blow his top off.”

Comtois’ education ended in the sixth grade and was followed by a Massachusetts record of juvenile delinquency that reached back as far as age 11. As a 17-year-old in 1947, he was convicted of breaking into a West Concord, Mass., lumber company office and received a two-year indeterminate sentence. How much time he served is unclear.

When Comtois was 23, a conviction for assault with intent to commit rape in New Bedford put him in a Massachusetts state prison for two years. A year after his release, he was arrested on a Peeping Tom charge, and his parole was revoked, records show.

In 1956, Comtois left a broken marriage and a daughter to move across the country. He subsequently got a divorce. In the next few years in Los Angeles, he remarried, fathered a son, worked as a truck driver and made enough money to buy a truck and begin a transport business.

But, by 1960, the business was failing, and he returned to crime. According to records, when he needed $3,200 to make repairs on the truck, he planned to rob a bank in Bell. The plan failed and he was convicted of attempted bank robbery.

When freed on bail awaiting sentencing, Comtois returned to his Los Angeles home to find his wife living on county assistance funds. Unable to find work while awaiting prison, he broke into an Alhambra home on an April morning in 1960, but was chased out of the house and slightly injured by a homeowner’s bullet. Comtois was charged with burglary and pleaded guilty. “I was desperate for money . . . ,” he wrote to a probation officer. “I took this spontaneous action without rational thinking.”

Criminal Impulses

The probation officer’s August 1960 evaluation of Comtois concluded, “He appears to have no control over his impulses when things don’t go his way, and consequently he resorts to criminal behavior.”

On the day his wife gave birth to a daughter, Comtois was sentenced to a year in a federal prison in California on the attempted bank robbery and burglary convictions.

Within three months of being released from prison, Comtois was jailed again, this time for the July 1961 armed robbery of a market in La Mirada. “I don’t blame somebody else for what I did,” he told a probation officer. “I was clear of mind.” Once again he pleaded guilty to the charge. It was his fifth conviction, and he was returned to prison for his longest stay, until March 11, 1969.

Two months after his release, Comtois—half his life now spent in prisons, reform schools and orphanages—was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. By 1971, his wife was seeking to end their marriage. The couple separated, according to divorce documents, after Comtois flew into a Thanksgiving Day rage, punched his fist through a door in the couple’s home near Long Beach and destroyed the china set on the table for the holiday meal.

The divorce records contain allegations that Comtois had often beaten his wife and had a violent temper that sent him into uncontrollable rages.

Another Failed Marriage

Two years later, Comtois would tell a judge that the end of his marriage and failures in attempts to earn a legitimate living had led him into another cycle of crime and a deep involvement with drugs. He was convicted of possession of heroin with intent to sell and of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He admitted he was addicted to the drug as well.

“I started selling my jewelry and other items I owned and refused to believe I was addicted,” he wrote to the judge who would sentence him. “I didn’t know which way to turn. With the loss of everything, I started borrowing from business associates and friends until I had neither left.

“When I finally accepted the fact I was addicted, I started selling drugs to satisfy my addiction.”

Comtois pleaded to be placed in a drug rehabilitation program instead of prison, but the judge sent him to prison for three more years.

Comtois was released from prison in 1977 and completed parole a year later. His activities between then and last month’s abduction in Chatsworth are now being documented by homicide detectives. “So far, I can’t find anything legitimate about him,” Detective Orozco said.

What is known is that he moved to the San Fernando Valley, possibly to be closer to his two children who lived with his ex-wife in Van Nuys.

Police said Comtois was a transient, living at an ever-changing string of addresses. He may have worked at times as a laborer, and he received a monthly disability payment for reasons unclear to police, but detectives believe he largely supported himself as a burglar and scam artist.

Some of Comtois’ activities are already on record. Deputy Dist. Atty. Bradford Stone said Comtois walked into a bank in the Valley on Nov. 5, 1983, and attempted to cash a forged check for $75,000. When the teller attempted to verify the check, Comtois grabbed it back and left.

Forgery Charge

Three years later on Nov. 7, 1986, Comtois changed the date and took the same check into a bank in North Hollywood and deposited it in his account, Stone said. During the next week he went to other banks in Los Angeles and cashed $75,000 in checks against the account. When police finally sorted it all out, he was charged March 18 of this year with grand theft and forgery.

Police say Comtois used the check scam money to buy $30,000 in gold and a new car. In January he also bought a small motor home, possibly with the same money.

Released after posting $1,500 bail, Comtois was arrested at least two more times—in June on suspicion of burglary and in July on suspicion of driving a stolen car—before the abduction. Both times he was released on bail.

By summer, Comtois was living in the brown-striped Roadstar motor home and moving freely about the Valley. Police said he was traveling with a companion, Marsha Lynn Erickson, though investigators have not discovered how or where they met.

Erickson, police say, was a Los Angeles-born transient with a record of 12 arrests in the last decade on charges including prostitution, burglary and drug possession. None of the arrests led to prison sentences. Police and court records show that she was placed on probation for at least one conviction and into drug-treatment programs after another arrest.

Erickson’s father described her as a long-term heroin addict whose need for the drug overcame any attempts to help her. He spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

Companion Used Drugs

“Drugs controlled her. Drugs destroyed her,” he said. “All of her problems stemmed from drugs. It was because of the heroin that she got involved in burglary and everything else. We took her to every program you could think of, but she always went back to it.”

Erickson, who has had six children who were all put up for adoption, lived with her mother and father in their Chatsworth home in 1984 and 1985 while she took part in a drug-treatment program, her father said.

But, about two years ago, she left the home, about a mile from the Lurline Avenue spot where Wendy Masuhara and her friend would be kidnapped, unable to shake her dependency, her father said. Her parents have had no contact with her since, but now live with the growing nightmare that their daughter is suspected of involvement in murder.

“I can’t defend her because I really don’t know her anymore,” her father said. “But I do find it hard to believe she could have done anything this drastic. She was always a good kid before the drugs got her.”

Erickson should have been in jail the night the two girls were abducted, authorities said. Last March 16, her probation for a 1983 conviction involving $3,200 in forged checks was revoked after probation officers learned that she had been arrested twice for thefts in 1986.

A warrant for Erickson’s arrest was issued, but she was never picked up by police. Chet Baker, a supervisor in the county probation department’s Van Nuys office, said so many probation violation warrants are issued each year the police cannot handle them as priorities.

“The warrant goes on the computer, but other than that the police can’t spend a lot of time on it,” Baker said. “There are thousands of these warrants out at any one time in L.A. Plus, Erickson was a transient. Where were the police going to go to pick her up?”

Even after Erickson was arrested Aug. 19, she remained free, police said. When Northeast Division police arrested her on burglary charges, she gave a false name while being booked into jail. That allowed her to post bail before a fingerprint check identified her as Erickson and alerted police that she was wanted on the probation revocation warrant.

Month from Slaying

In less than a month, Wendy would be slain.

“If things had worked right,” Baker said, “Erickson would have been sitting in jail when that took place.”

Police explain the September abduction and murder as a crime of opportunity, an act of violent impulse. So far, police say, it appears that Comtois’ motor home was parked that night on Lurline Avenue near Devonshire Street by coincidence. It might have simply been the spot where Comtois stopped to fix a mechanical problem in the motor home.

“Your guess is as good as mine as to why they did it,” said Harold Lynn, the deputy district attorney who will prosecute Comtois and Erickson. “We don’t believe they marked these particular victims for this. They just happened to be the ones that were there.”

Wendy and her friend had just finished an evening of watching television at her family’s home on Lurline when Wendy decided to walk her friend to her home about a block away. But, parked in their path, police said, they found Roland Comtois’ motor home. Police said the girls were lured inside it when Erickson asked them for help.

Comtois, who police say shot the girls, was shot by officers and captured four days after the abduction. He is recovering but was arraigned last week on several charges in connection with the Chatsworth abduction and slaying, including murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, forcing sex acts on the surviving girl and injecting her with cocaine. He pleaded not guilty. Erickson is still at large.

The suspects could receive life imprisonment or the death penalty if convicted. But, prosecutors say, the fact that Comtois was even in a position to block the path of Wendy and her friend raised questions that some in the criminal justice system find disturbing.

Lynn, the prosecutor, said the reality of the criminal justice system is that it is not rehabilitative.

‘Evil Until He Dies’

“The theory of rehabilitation is a pie-in-the-sky dream,” he said. “You take a guy like Comtois, and he is evil from day one, and he is going to be evil until he dies. His record speaks for itself.”

Prof. Ernest Kamm, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, Los Angeles, said a flaw in the way society tries to deal with someone like Comtois is in the presumption “that at one time the person was habilitated.”