L.A. murder mystery follows tangled trail
A victim remains unidentified for years as police in Los Angeles and Maywood unknowingly probe the case separately.
Late one night in 2003, a body was found in a scorched minivan along a Watts riverbank. The remains lay blackened and twisted in the front seat. The only recognizable parts were a Mexican cowboy-style belt buckle, a bracelet and a wad of cash in the back pocket that had somehow been spared by the blaze.
Los Angeles Police Det. Mark Hahn couldn't begin to identify the dead man, let alone figure out what happened to him.
Thus began the four-year-long saga of the man whom Hahn dubbed Juan Doe based on the victim's taste in belt buckles, which seemed to suggest roots in Mexico.
It was a case in which "everything that could go wrong is going to go wrong," said Sal LaBarbera, who heads the Watts homicide squad in the LAPD's South Bureau.
Medical examiners determined this much: The corpse belonged to a heavyset man who had been shot to death, and the killers appeared to have doused the stolen minivan with gasoline and left his body to burn.
Hahn had one enticing clue: The bracelet recovered from the burned corpse was embossed with three initials -- SRU or possibly SRV.
Colleagues describe Hahn as a "Joe Friday" sort of cop with a relentless streak. He requested every report of a missing person whose initials matched all possible combinations of those letters from the state Department of Justice's database, and also from a similar database in Mexico.
Someone out there, he figured, must be missing a heavyset man with a vaquero's belt who had never come home.
The search produced scores of possible matches, but only one fit -- Salvador Rodriguez. But this Salvador Rodriguez had been arrested after the body was found.
Months passed. Dental and DNA tests yielded no hits. The belt buckle sat in a cabinet near Hahn's desk. He still ruminated on the mystery.
Then, earlier this year, the phone in Hahn's unit rang.
"My husband died four years ago," a woman said. "And you are handling the case."
"We are?" LaBarbera remembered thinking.
Later, it clicked. She meant Juan Doe. His real name was Salvador Rodriguez Vega, just as the bracelet suggested.
He was 33 and a native of Durango, Mexico. On paper, he was a gardener. But investigators said that, in reality, he had been a successful underworld middleman, working for Mexican drug importers and making, perhaps, six figures a year.
A man of several aliases, he had left his wife for his brother's widow and had families with both women.
