The Liskers sent the boy to a group home for troubled children near Susanville in the Sierra Nevada. He spent eighth and ninth grades there.
Returning to Los Angeles, he bounced from Birmingham High School to two continuation schools before dropping out in the spring of 1982, a month shy of his 17th birthday.
He persuaded his parents to rent him an apartment of his own -- a $210-a-month studio on Sepulveda Boulevard, about four miles from their home. They gave him a car and spending money and hoped he would straighten himself out. They were disappointed.
He smoked pot, drank heavily and shot up methamphetamine. In June 1982, he was arrested for throwing a screwdriver at a motorist during a traffic dispute. Police booked him for assault with a deadly weapon; the charge was later reduced to vandalism.
Bruce told a police officer who witnessed the altercation that he grew enraged when the other driver cut him off. According to the officer, Bruce said: "I was gonna kill that son of a bitch."
'And Then You Stab Her'
By the time Det. Andrew R. Monsue arrived at the scene of the murder, Dorka Lisker had been taken to Encino Hospital, where she died that afternoon.
A former Marine who had served in Vietnam, Monsue wore his brown hair short and had a gruff military bearing. He followed a trail of blood through the house, looking for clues.
He concluded that Dorka's assailant had beaten her with her son's Little League trophy and her husband's metal exercise bar. Then she had been stabbed in the back with a pair of steak knives, which were lying on the floor next to her body. Monsue saw bloody footprints in the front hallway, a nearby bathroom and the kitchen -- and more footprints outside the house.
Bob Lisker told detectives that the night before, he had given his wife a handful of bills -- tens and twenties mostly -- to pay for groceries. He thought it was around $150. Police searched her purse but did not find the money. They also searched Bruce. He did not have it.
Around 1 p.m., Monsue took the teenager to the Van Nuys police station for questioning. Bruce said he had gone to his parents' house that morning to borrow a jack so he could repair a shock absorber on his 1966 Mustang.
His mother didn't come out to greet him as she usually did, so he knocked on the door. No answer. He tried the doorknob. It was locked.
