Agold-and-black matchbook has been at the center of a murder mystery for 17 years -- a piece of evidence that is either a smoking gun or a diversion that caused a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Months before its discovery, a security guard patrolling a downtown Los Angeles parking structure stumbled across the body of a young East Indian American business consultant. He had been stabbed 19 times, once in the heart.
Following up on a lead, Los Angeles Police Department detectives later picked up two homeless men. One of them had the half-used matchbook. Emblazoned on the front, in a mix of cursive and print lettering, was the name of a Woodland Hills restaurant: Shalimar Cuisine of India.
How had a homeless man wound up with a book of matches from an Indian restaurant 30 miles away?
To detectives, there was a logical explanation. Given the victim's heritage, he must have been carrying the Shalimar matchbook when he was set upon and robbed, and it ended up in the hands of his assailant.
The two men were charged with murder. They were found guilty and sentenced to prison for the rest of their lives.
In the years that followed, however, new details about the matchbook emerged, offering a sharply different story of how it might have traveled from the neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley to the crime-plagued streets of skid row.
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On the morning of Aug. 19, 1992, Kalpesh Vardhan pulled his Toyota Corolla into a tall parking structure on Olive and 8th streets in downtown L.A.
The oldest son of Indian immigrants, Vardhan, 23, had recently graduated from UCLA with a degree in electrical engineering. He soon started working in Los Angeles at the prestigious Andersen Consulting.
After winding his way up the parking structure, Vardhan slipped his car into a narrow space on the sixth floor. Most Anderson employees parking there took a shuttle to their office five blocks away. But Vardhan didn't catch the shuttle.
More than seven hours later, a parking lot security guard noticed a body sprawled behind parked vehicles. It looked at first like a transient sleeping.
Vardhan's body -- 5 feet, 5 inches tall and 115 pounds -- was partly concealed behind a minivan and his car. His wallet, filled with credit cards, was gone. Left behind was the broken 3-inch blade of a small steak knife.
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For two months, detectives had little to go on until they questioned a car burglar who was arrested for stealing stereos from nearby parking garages. He told them he had witnessed the assault. Looking through LAPD arrest photos, he identified two transients as the attackers.
Police went searching for the suspects and found one of them, Timothy Gantt, on skid row.
Once married with a family and home in West Covina and a job repairing photocopiers, Gantt had lost everything to a craving for alcohol and cocaine. His criminal record included convictions for burglary and car theft, but he had never been to prison.
Detectives took Gantt to a nearby police station, where he was searched.
In his front pants pocket was the matchbook. Inside the flap, detectives noticed a handwritten phone number.
Gantt, insisting that he had nothing to do with the killing, said he had been given the matchbook while hustling. He told police he bought stolen calling card numbers and used them for immigrants who went to the area to make cheap international calls home. A customer used the matchbook to write down a telephone number he wanted Gantt to call for him, he said.
"I sell numbers," he told police, "but I don't steal or rob, and I've never hurt anyone."
Police were unconvinced. Detectives showed a second witness photo lineups that included Gantt and Michael Smith, the second transient identified earlier by the car burglar. The witness identified them as two men he had seen in the parking structure on the morning of the killing.
Police collected a sample of the victim's university assignments to compare with the phone number on the matchbook. An LAPD handwriting expert declared the results "inconclusive" but noted strong similarities.
Nearly a year to the day after Vardhan died, Gantt and Smith were charged with murder.
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At the trial, the matchbook was used to bolster the testimony of the prosecution's two key witnesses.
Kevin Shorts, an accountant, testified that he was driving on the sixth floor of the garage the morning of the murder when a car blocked his path. He said he saw Smith standing beside the car talking to the driver.
Shorts testified that he saw the driver's face for two seconds when the man glanced into his rear-view mirror before taking off. In court, he identified Gantt as the driver. "I have a very good memory with faces," Shorts said.
Shorts' memory, however, had failed him earlier in the investigation when he identified someone else as one of the men he had seen; police later eliminated that man as a suspect.
