Chasing Darkness Read Free Page B

earlier that evening and he had a criminal history with prostitutes—two pops for soliciting and a misdemeanor assault conviction eighteen months earlier when he argued with a prostitute about her services. Byrd was still on probation when Crimmens picked him up.
    A twenty-two-year-old coffee-shop barista and aspiring actor named Angel Tomaso was the last person to see Yvonne Bennett alive when she entered the alley behind his coffee shop at eleven-forty P.M . Her body was discovered at twelve-sixteen A.M . These two times created the thirty-six-minute window during which Bennett was murdered, and would prove key to the charges against Byrd being dropped.
    Though the evidence against him was largely circumstantial, Lionel Byrd confessed the crime to Crimmens and his partner at the time, a fellow Rampart detective named Nicky Munoz. This sounds more telling than it was. With the assault prior and the witnesses who saw them together, Crimmens convinced Byrd he was cooked on the murder and promised a lesser charge if Byrd confessed. When Levy viewed the confession tape, it was clear Byrd had no knowledge of the crime; Crimmens had fed him the information with leading questions. Byrd later recanted, but by then the damage was done. The confession and its supporting evidence were enough for a murder charge to be brought.
    Levy convinced me that Byrd was being given the rush with the jacked-up confession. He also convinced the judge, who threatened to toss the confession. Eight days later I found a time-coded security video placing Byrd in the Two Worlds Lounge in Hollywood at the same time Yvonne Bennett was being murdered sixteen-point-two miles away. Levy, the bartender on duty that night, and I met with the prosecutor in the judge’s chambers three days later, where, at the judge’s suggestion and in hopes of avoiding a slam-dunk acquittal, the deputy district attorney dropped the charges.
    Nothing in my files made me doubt myself. Nothing there made me feel wrong. They didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to put it together.
    Pike tamped the pages together.
    â€œHow was it you found the tape and not Crimmens and Munoz? They had the same information as you.”
    â€œCrimmens had the confession, so he was lazy. We had a list of the places Byrd claimed he was in that night, but he only knew a few of the bars by name. We had to figure out where he was by working off the descriptions.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œAll of the bars checked out except the last one. He said he stopped for a nightcap at a place like a tiki bar that had bamboo. Everyone, including me, thought it was in Silver Lake.”
    â€œBut it wasn’t.”
    â€œWe found a bar like that, but not the one he meant. It was a lesbian bar. It wasn’t a tiki place, but it was small and dark with bamboo furniture. This was the only place that came close to his description, but the bartenders denied he was there. That sealed the deal for Crimmens, but here was the tell: Byrd told Crimmens he argued with the bartender because the bartender wouldn’t let him run a tab. On the tape, he says, that guy was a prick.”
    â€œA guy.”
    â€œThe bartenders were women. All the other bars had checked out, so him getting it wrong about the bartender bothered me. Byrd had an apartment in Hollywood back then, so I looked for something closer to home. That’s where I found it, a little place between Santa Monica and Sunset. They were trying to look like the Alaskan wilderness. They had these fake totem poles behind the bar, not tiki idols. They still had the security tape, and there he was, having his drink. The time code put him in Hollywood during the window when Yvonne Bennett was murdered. The judge agreed. The DA. Everybody. That’s why they dropped the charges.”
    Maybe I was still trying to convince myself, but I didn’t see the hole. I didn’t see how Lionel Byrd could have killed her, and I didn’t see how