Crimes of the Times

The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched. 

In 1984, soul legend Marvin Gaye was in the grip of a cocaine habit and living with his father, a hard-drinking Pentecostal preacher with whom he had a lifetime of bad blood. One day, Gaye gave his father a gun and told him it was to protect the house. Some would see an elaborate plan to orchestrate suicide by his father’s hand.

When retired art teacher Joseph Gatto was shot to death inside his Silver Lake home in 2013, the LAPD theorized that a fleeing car burglar might be the killer. The victim’s son, a prominent California legislator, found that story increasingly hard to believe.

Iva Toguri was a Los Angeles native who became trapped in Japan during World War II. When she returned home, the U.S. government put her on trial as a traitor for her wartime broadcasts. Her name became synonymous with a myth, her conviction fueled by lies and political pressure.  

Aimee Semple McPherson built a religious empire in Los Angeles and became one of the most influential evangelists in America. When she vanished from a California beach and reappeared weeks later with an unbelievable story, the scandal that followed threatened to destroy everything she had built.

On today’s episode, we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, a promising presidential candidate at the time of his murder. Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten. In that collective amnesia, conspiracy theories have flourished.

Orange County’s most prolific mass shooter admits his guilt, but a series of explosive hearings uncovers a longstanding jailhouse snitch operation that taints many other cases. Jailers plead the 5th, the judge makes a startling ruling, and a victim’s husband forms an unlikely friendship with the killer’s crusading defense attorney.

In 2012, the judge presiding over Orange County’s worst mass-shooter case gave a seemingly simple order. He told the Sheriff’s Department to reveal information about a mysterious jailhouse informant. When defense attorney Scott Sanders probed deeper, he announced that he had discovered a wide-ranging and illegal cell-block informant operation—and a conspiracy to cover it up.

In the final episode of this four part series, we’ll talk to historian William J. Mann about his new book on the Dahlia case, which points to the same long-forgotten suspect whose name has been linked to a Zodiac cipher.

Were the Black Dahlia and Zodiac murders the work of the same man? A new theory argues a disturbed World War II veteran was responsible. In this episode, a former FBI profiler explores the psychology behind both cases, examining where they overlap and where they diverge.

Marvin Margolis was a promising early suspect in the Black Dahlia murder, but he managed to slip through the cracks. So who was this man of many pseudonyms? In this episode, we’ll explore what Margolis did during and after the Dahlia investigation, and a key piece of evidence that potentially links both the Dahlia and Zodiac cases.

The identity of the Zodiac Killer has remained a mystery for decades, but new developments may finally point to an answer. At the center is the infamous Z13 cipher, a 13-character code sent to the San Francisco Chronicle that has long defied experts. Self-taught codebreaker Alex Baber used artificial intelligence and exhaustive analysis to narrow millions of possibilities down to a single name. As...

On this season of Crimes of the Times, Los Angeles Times journalist Christopher Goffard explores criminal cases that have left a mark on California history. This season’s stories include new developments in the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases, the snitch scandal that rocked Orange County, the plight of the Japanese American woman known as Tokyo Rose, and the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

Attorney Frank Carson spent decades defending the accused in California's Central Valley. He made powerful enemies among law enforcement. When they put him on trial for murder, he insisted he was being framed. He was acquitted after a lengthy trial, but his widow says the ordeal destroyed his health and hastened his death. As part of a malicious prosecution lawsuit, the man who once served as the...

In 1986, 29-year-old Sherri Rasmussen was just starting her married life when she was brutally murdered in her Van Nuys home. The LAPD called it a “burglary gone bad,” ignoring red flags pointing to one of their own for years. Detective Stephanie Lazarus might have gotten away with it if she hadn’t left behind a key piece of evidence.

When a helicopter crash killed actor Vic Morrow and two children on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie , the filmmakers called it an unforeseeable accident. An LA County Sheriff’s detective saw something else: broken laws, reckless risks, and an A-list director who ignored warnings.

On the summer solstice in 1990, a UCLA student with an interest in the occult was stabbed to death in a railway tunnel in the San Fernando Valley. Rumors of ritual violence swirled in the era of the so-called Satanic Panic. Police investigating the murder of Ronald Baker found his killers knew him well. One of them had even carried his casket.

When 21-year old college dropout Christopher Boyce got a job as a clerk at the TRW Defense and Space Systems complex in Redondo Beach, he was given access to some of the country’s biggest government secrets. And under a Robin Hood-like ethos, he and his childhood pal Andrew Daulton Lee began sharing those secrets with the Soviet Union. Their story lived on in the 1985 film “The Falcon and the Snow...

When comic John Belushi died of a speedball overdose at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, it wasn’t clear there had been a crime—until the National Enquirer got involved. This episode follows the tabloid reporter who hunted down Belushi’s dealer, coaxed a confession, and transformed a drug overdose into a homicide investigation.

James Sexton endures weeks of solitary confinement in federal prison, as prosecutors finally gear up to take Lee Baca to trial. Baca’s lawyers claim he has Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s late 2016, and the recent presidential race has made the FBI unpopular in liberal Los Angeles. Sexton testifies for the government and is released early, a humbled man, to begin rebuilding his life. The jury deadlocks...

The feds interview Baca’s flinty #2 man and heir apparent, Paul Tanaka, who professes ignorance about who gave the order to hide Anthony Brown. In 2013, as the FBI probe enters its fifth year, feds finally get a chance to grill Baca. He touts his achievements as a reformer but admits he resents that the FBI excluded him from the jail probe and snuck in the cell phone. His answers are evasive and r...

James Sexton thinks Operation Pandora’s Box is behind him. When he reports a superior officer for misconduct, he is branded a snitch and treated as a pariah. Ostracized and scared, he does what he once thought unthinkable: he begins feeding information about the Sheriff’s Department to the FBI, and tells a grand jury about the scheme to hide Anthony Brown. In the U.S. Attorney’s first major thrust...

When Lee Baca took over the LA County Sheriff’s Department in 1998, he inherited a scandal-plagued agency. He built a reputation as a progressive reformer, and his jail-education programs were celebrated. But the feds notice that investigations into his agency always seem to evaporate when he gets involved. By 2011, he is 70 years old and has run the department for 13 years. Furious about the FBI’...

After an inmate sucker-punches James Sexton, he defies the jail’s unwritten rules by failing to exact violent retribution, and finds himself ostracized by his peers. But he becomes an expert in the antiquated jail computer system and eventually wins promotion to an elite jail-intelligence unit. Leah Marx has a cell phone smuggled to inmate-informant Anthony Brown, part of the FBI’s increasingly am...

A young FBI agent named Leah Marx arrives in Los Angeles and receives a tip in 2010 about brutal conditions at Men’s Central Jail downtown. Such complaints have gone nowhere for years, since they pit the allegations of inmates against the word of jail deputies. But she finds informants, including a wily bank robber, Anthony Brown, who is facing life in prison and is willing to help. She reflects o...