Rarely did he think of the hundreds of people he'd put behind bars during his 30 years as a prosecutor.
That all changed one afternoon in November, when he met with two Times reporters at a Carrows restaurant in Reseda to discuss the murder of Dorka Lisker.
Near the end of a three-hour meeting, Rabichow slipped on reading glasses and scrutinized a document one of the reporters had slid across the table. It was the criminalist's report on the mystery footprint.
Rabichow was speechless.
He flipped through a transcript of his closing argument to the jury, also provided by the reporters, and was reminded of what he had told jurors back in 1985: that Lisker's footprints, and no one else's, were in the blood.
He reread the LAPD report.
"I don't know what to make of this," he said. "If I had known about it, it's certainly something I would have had to explain."
He said the finding was "clearly exculpatory evidence."
Asked who came to mind as a potential source of the footprint, Rabichow replied without hesitation: "Ryan."
Rabichow left the restaurant feeling uneasy about a case he had thought he knew from every angle. In the weeks and months that followed, he plowed through hundreds of pages of trial testimony, police reports and other documents.
Steadily, his misgivings grew.
He was unsettled by the phone call placed from the Lisker home around the time of the attack. Rabichow said he had "no doubt" that whoever dialed the number was trying to call Ryan's mother -- or to act as if he was.
"It's very troubling," he said.
Rabichow said he now wished that Mulcahy, Lisker's defense lawyer, had been allowed to present evidence about Ryan at trial.
"It's never been my contention that [Ryan] wasn't the kind of person to do this," Rabichow said. "He is the kind of person who would do this. I wouldn't put it past him."
Still, Rabichow remained convinced that Bruce could not have seen his mother's head through the dining room window. A dining set and a foot-high stone planter at the edge of the entry hall would have stood in the way. That meant Lisker had lied about what prompted him to enter the house and could not be believed about anything else.
Yet Rabichow couldn't be sure about this unless he looked through the window himself. Years earlier, he had gone to trial without visiting the crime scene, relying on Monsue's investigation.
