ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 8, 1996 TAG: 9601110005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: EL MONTE, CALIF.
SOURCE: MICHAEL FLEEMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
A cab brought 10-year-old Lee Ellroy to his rental house on Maple Avenue after he spent the weekend with his father. The yard was crawling with cops. The boy had watched ``Dragnet.'' He knew the score.
His mother was dead.
And he wasn't sure he was sad.
Lee Ellroy forced himself to cry. But he also knew he'd be leaving Geneva Ellroy's care and all that entailed - her alcoholism, her mood swings, the occasional beating - to go live with his accountant father.
That was 37 years ago. Lee Ellroy would grow up and himself become an alcoholic, as well as a drug abuser, a petty criminal and, eventually, the best-selling author of taut, dark, violent police novels under the name James Ellroy.
Over the years, Ellroy talked tough about his mother's strangulation in 1958. Like the rogue cops of ``L.A. Confidential'' and ``The Big Nowhere,'' Ellroy would say his mother got ``whacked'' or refer to her death as ``the Geneva snuff.''
No more.
An author never afraid to shock, Ellroy is working on a project that may surprise his fans most of all: a book honoring his mother.
In writing ``My Dark Places,'' due out in the fall, Ellroy is at last coming to terms with Geneva Ellroy, her death and how his emotionally turbulent life was shaped by her.
But the book is just part of it. Ellroy wants to accomplish what police have failed to do for nearly four decades: find the killer.
Ellroy recruited retired sheriff's homicide Detective William Stoner. They are reviewing old files, re-interviewing witnesses and looking at the evidence, including the blue-and-white floral print dress his mother wore the night she was killed at age 43.
``Time stood still,'' said Ellroy, recalling the day he opened the evidence envelope in a sheriff's warehouse. ``I remembered that dress.''
The last year has been full of such moments, one confrontation after another with a past that has come alive in black-and-white crime-scene photographs and neatly typed reports.
Ellroy is living out, in some ways, his ``Black Dahlia'' novel, a fictionalized account of Los Angeles' most famous unsolved case, the murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose body was cut in half and dumped in a vacant lot. Ellroy's book involved a detective obsessed with finding a beautiful woman's killer, a case, Ellroy said, that ``haunted me.''
Like the Dahlia murderer, Geneva Ellroy's killer probably will never be found - not alive, anyway. ``Popping this guy is next to impossible,'' Ellroy acknowledges. Too many years have passed. Too many people have died or are too old to remember important details.
But the emotional journey is yielding more than Ellroy ever could have expected.
``I'm coming to the realization that I have been running from this woman for many years,'' Ellroy said over coffee recently at the El Monte restaurant where his mother was seen the night of her murder. ``I always had to prove that she didn't ruin me, or I could walk from it. But you don't walk from things like this.''
As he sat in a booth over breakfast at the restaurant, now a Mexican place called Valenzuela's, his thoughts flowed in the same rat-a-tat style as his books.
The search for Geneva Ellroy's killer started last year when a friend asked Ellroy if he wanted to see the police file on his mother.
After talking to his wife, who encouraged him to ``confront my mother,'' Ellroy opened the accordion file that held case number Z-483-362.
``I made the jump,'' he said.
There were witness statements, the homicide report, the autopsy report and photos of Geneva Ellroy, her half-nude body crumpled on the ground, her skin eaten by bugs.
There are two composite sketches of a dark-haired suspect - Ellroy calls him Swarthy Man - and numerous booking photos of sex offenders and drunks from the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Geneva Ellroy was not the stuff of '50s TV moms. She was a divorced woman raising a son on her own. Ellroy remembers her drinking - she preferred Early Times bourbon - her nights out in El Monte's second-class bars, and her hangovers. She'd bring men home, Ellroy said frankly. She hit Ellroy once when he said he'd rather live with his father. She worked for an aviation company on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles. She had a hairdresser with a French name.
Otherwise, Ellroy didn't know much about his mother.
``She was a secretive woman,'' Ellroy said.
And a loner. The rental house in El Monte didn't have a telephone. Ellroy didn't know if his mother had any close friends. The next-door landlady was called on to identify her body.
That summer Saturday night, Geneva Ellroy wore a lined jacket that matched her sleeveless dress, a string of imitation pearls and a ring with a large fake pearl.
El Monte, 15 miles east of Los Angeles, in those days was her kind of town. It was a great pickup spot for smooth-talking guys looking for lonely divorcees, Ellroy said. Valley Boulevard, the main thoroughfare, was lined with clubs and restaurants where Las Vegas' falling stars performed on their way to show-business oblivion.
The Desert Inn was one of those clubs. It was owned by a man named Ellis Outlaw, a bookie. It had booths with vinyl seats, a bar and a black entertainer whose name and act have been long lost to history.
At about 11 p.m., Geneva Ellroy entered the club and had drinks with two people. One was Swarthy Man, who had been with her earlier at Stan's Drive-In, a burger joint nearby.
The other was a woman with a ponytail. Nobody knew her name. Ellroy calls her the Blonde. She never came forward. She may have been a friend, maybe a co-worker of Geneva Ellroy's at Pachmayr Corp.'s aviation division in Los Angeles.
Geneva Ellroy and Swarthy Man left the Desert Inn, together, about midnight. They were back at Stan's about two hours later.
``The woman appeared to have been drunk and was very jovial,'' said a police report based on an interview with a Stan's carhop. But the man appeared ``reserved and bored.''
At 2:45 a.m., after Geneva Ellroy had a late-night snack of chili, they left the drive-in.
Her body was found eight hours later by Little League coaches. It was lying beneath the oleanders alongside Kings Road, a popular lovers' lane next to the football stadium at Arroyo High School.
She had been struck six times. The cause of death was asphyxiation. It appeared she may have been raped.
During a recent visit to the crime scene, where the oleanders have long since been chopped down, Ellroy and Stoner suggested the assailant raped Geneva Ellroy when she refused to have sex, then killed her in a panic.
They also suspect the killer murdered another woman in the same way around that time. That case, too, is unsolved.
The keys to the case, they say, are the Blonde and Swarthy Man. Ellroy wants desperately to find them, especially the man.
``I want to know who he is,'' Ellroy said. ``I want to understand, if possible, the psychological forces that shaped him.''
One lead went cold. A possible suspect, a dark-haired, high-cheekboned man, died in 1979.
Still, the author keeps looking. He set up a toll-free number for tips. Stoner will track down leads.
Ellroy, for now, is back home in Kansas City, writing. His outline is finished, save for the last eight chapters.
``It's one ending if we find him,'' Ellroy said, ``and one if we don't.''
LENGTH: Long : 146 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Author James Ellroy (right) is working with Elby CNBMonte (Calif.) sheriff's homicide detective William Stoner in the
hope of solving his mother's 1958 murder. 2. Ellroy and Stoner point
out some details on evidence photos taken at the scene of Ellroy's
mother's murder almost four decades ago. color. 3. Below is an
undated handout sketch of ``The Swarthy Man,'' a suspect in Geneva
Ellroy's murder.