The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,68
never to go to the detectives to straighten things out until after you’ve consulted an attorney.
I had already seen numerous television news reports on the murder of the exotic dancer, as Renteria had been labeled, when Menendez’s brother called me. The reports had included the police artist’s drawing of the Latin male believed to have followed her from the club. I knew that the pre-arrest media interest meant the case would likely be carried forward in the public consciousness by the television news and I might be able to get a good ride out of it. I agreed to take the case on the come line. For free. Pro bono. For the good of the system. Besides, murder cases are few and far between. I take them when I can get them. Menendez was the twelfth accused murderer I had defended. The first eleven were still in prison but none of them were on death row. I considered that a good record.
By the time I got to Menendez in a holding cell at Van Nuys Division, he had already given a statement that implicated him to the police. He had told detectives Howard Kurlen and Don Crafton that he had not followed Renteria home, as suggested by the news reports, but had been an invited guest to her apartment. He explained that earlier in the day he had won eleven hundred dollars on the California lotto and had been willing to trade some of it to Renteria for some of her attention. He said that at her apartment they had engaged in consensual sex—although he did not use those words—and that when he left she was alive and five hundred dollars in cash richer.
The holes Kurlen and Crafton punched in Menendez’s story were many. First of all, there had been no state lotto on the day of or day before the murder and the neighborhood mini-market where he said he had cashed his winning ticket had no record of paying out an eleven-hundred-dollar win to Menendez or anyone else. Additionally, no more than eighty dollars in cash was found in the victim’s apartment. And lastly, the autopsy report indicated that bruising and other damage to the interior of the victim’s vagina precluded what could be considered consensual sexual relations. The medical examiner concluded that she had been brutally raped.
No fingerprints other than the victim’s were found in the apartment. The place had been wiped clean. No semen was found in the victim’s body, indicating her rapist had used a condom or had not ejaculated during the assault. But in the bathroom off the bedroom where the attack and murder had taken place, a crime scene investigator using a black light found a small amount of semen on a pink towel hanging on a rack near the toilet. The theory that came into play was that after the rape and murder the killer had stepped into the bathroom, removed the condom and flushed it down the toilet. He had then wiped his penis with the nearby towel and then hung the towel back on the rack. When cleaning up after the crime and wiping surfaces he might have touched, he forgot about that towel.
The investigators kept the discovery of the DNA deposit and their attendant theory secret. It never made it into the media. It would become Kurlen and Crafton’s hole card.
Based on Menendez’s lies and the admission that he had been in the victim’s apartment, he was arrested on suspicion of murder and held without bail. Detectives got a search warrant, and oral swabs were collected from Menendez and sent to the lab for DNA typing and comparison to the DNA recovered from the bathroom towel.
That was about when I entered the case. As they say in my profession, by then the Titanic had already left the dock. The iceberg was out there waiting. Menendez had badly hurt himself by talking—and lying—to the detectives. Still, unaware of the DNA comparison that was under way, I saw a glimmer of light for Jesus Menendez. There was a case to be made for neutralizing his interview with detectives—which, by the way, became a full-blown confession by the time it got reported by the media. Menendez was Mexican born and had come to this country at age eight. His family spoke only Spanish at home and he had attended a school for Spanish speakers until dropping out at age fourteen. He spoke only rudimentary English, and his cognition level of the language seemed