Times reporters had visited the old Lisker residence twice and had arranged with the current owner to go back again. They asked Rabichow to join them this time, and he agreed. So on a rainy afternoon in March, he drove to Huston Street and set foot in the house for the first time.
Using police photos and measurements, reporters replicated the position of Dorka Lisker's body. The planter was no longer there, so the reporters built a wooden facsimile of the same dimensions. They also brought a 4-by-8-foot rug to stand in for the one that lay there 22 years earlier.
When Rabichow agreed that the rug and the planter were in the same positions as on the day of the murder, a reporter lay down in the spot where Dorka Lisker's body was found.
Rabichow walked outside and stood in front of the dining room window through which Bruce Lisker claimed to have seen his mother. Rabichow acknowledged that he could see the reporter's head from several vantage points. The dining set and planter were not the obstacles he thought they would be. He could see over them.
He sighed deeply and stood silent for a moment. He said he wished he had conducted such an experiment before the trial.
"I should have come out here," Rabichow said. "This is not what I thought it would be."
'A Bombshell'
Ronald Raquel, the LAPD criminalist, had some unfinished business to attend to last month. He had been asked to analyze the footprint on Dorka Lisker's head.
LAPD officials were all but certain Bruce Lisker had made the mark in the course of killing his mother. It seemed to eliminate any doubt about his guilt.
Now, Raquel examined the autopsy photo and compared the purplish bruise with the pattern on the soles of Bruce's shoes.
They did not match.
Raquel then compared the bruise to the bloody shoe print found in the bathroom of the Lisker home -- the one he had previously determined was not from Bruce Lisker's shoes.
They looked the same. The mystery footprint, Raquel wrote in his report, was "similar in size and dimension" to the impression on Dorka's head.
LAPD officials, acknowledging that the finding clashes with the case presented at Lisker's trial, forwarded Raquel's report to the district attorney's office.
For Rabichow, the new information was devastating. "A bombshell," he called it.
Even after visiting the house, he had resisted the idea that Lisker may have been wrongly convicted. He wrestled with doubts but still insisted that the totality of the evidence supported a guilty verdict.
