The teenager demanded to be given a lie-detector test. Monsue and another detective drove him to police headquarters in downtown L.A., where a polygraph examiner questioned him: Did you hit your mother with that trophy? Did you stab your mother? Did you kill your mother?
Lisker exhibited deception in answering, the examiner found.
On the ride back to Van Nuys, Lisker asked how he did. The detectives told him he failed. They said the examiner had never seen anyone so deceptive.
An Unexpected Visitor
Bob Lisker had lost his wife. Now he might lose his son too. He wanted desperately to believe Bruce's story. But he had no answer to an obvious question: If Bruce hadn't done it, who had?
Then the elder Lisker remembered a conversation with his wife the night before she was killed. Dorka told him she'd had an unexpected visitor that day, a friend of Bruce's from the apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard. His name was Mike Ryan. He was looking to earn money doing chores. She turned him down.
John Michael Ryan, then 17, had been in and out of foster homes, mental institutions and juvenile hall. He had a rap sheet dating to age 11, with convictions for theft, trespassing and assault with a deadly weapon. A court-appointed psychologist once described him as "impulsive and selfish, operating entirely on his own feelings ... unpredictable."
Bruce had met Ryan at a drug-counseling meeting in 1982. Ryan was living on the streets. Bruce offered to let him sleep on his couch in return for half the rent.
Their friendship revolved around getting drunk, smoking dope and listening to the Doors, Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin. To earn spending money, they occasionally did odd jobs at the Lisker home.
The two soon had a falling-out over Ryan's failure to pay his share of the rent. Bruce kicked him out in January 1983 and Ryan left for Mississippi, where his father lived.
After Dorka's murder, Bruce and his father told Monsue about Ryan's troubled past and his visit to the house the day before the killing.
Monsue tracked down the teenager in Gulfport, Miss. He was in juvenile hall again, this time for trying to break into a woman's apartment.
At Monsue's request, Mississippi authorities took a brief statement from Ryan as to his whereabouts on the day of the killing. Ryan said he had checked into a Hollywood motel that morning.
Monsue went to the motel, the Hollywood Tropics on Sunset Boulevard. Registration records showed that Ryan had not checked in until that afternoon.
