His curiosity piqued, the detective boarded a plane for Mississippi. On May 4, 1983, he questioned Ryan at a youth detention facility in Harrison County, Miss.
With a tape recorder running, Ryan described in a monotone how he'd taken a bus from Gulfport to Los Angeles, arriving March 6, four days before the murder. He said he'd returned to California to join the Job Corps in Sacramento. He never made it that far.
His first stop in Los Angeles was the apartment complex on Sepulveda, where he ran into Bruce. The two shared a joint. Ryan had nowhere to stay and wanted to sleep on Bruce's couch. But he was reluctant to ask, he said, because of their earlier dispute over the rent.
Ryan's mother lived in Ventura County, but he couldn't stay with her, either. He and his stepfather didn't get along. So for the next few days, he had wandered aimlessly around his old Valley neighborhood, surviving on potato chips, cigarettes and soda. He slept in carports and in a makeshift campsite in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Ryan confirmed that he had knocked on Dorka Lisker's door March 9. He wanted to use the phone and do some chores, he said. Ryan told Monsue that she invited him in and gave him a drink of water. They chatted for about 20 minutes. She had no work for him to do, Ryan said, so he left.
Asked where he was the next morning, Ryan again claimed to have checked into the motel at 11 a.m.
"Well, that's bull ... ," Monsue is heard saying on the tape. "I went to the motel. You checked in at 3 o'clock in the afternoon."
"Then it was somewhere around 3," Ryan replied. "I don't remember."
Ryan volunteered that he had stabbed someone that morning -- not Dorka Lisker, but an unidentified "black guy."
The man pulled a stiletto, Ryan said, and tried to steal his drugs and money. Ryan said he drew his own knife and stabbed the man in the shoulder.
Monsue wondered aloud why the teenager was so eager to place himself in Hollywood, 12 miles from the crime scene, right around the time Dorka was killed. Why had he lied about his check-in time? And why had he boarded a bus and headed back to Mississippi the morning after the murder?
Monsue challenged Ryan on his finances. The teenager claimed to have left Mississippi with just $52. Yet what he had described spending on food, drugs, cigarettes, bus fare and the $21-a-night motel room added up to more than that.
"Something is not jibing here," Monsue said.
