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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