Murders Los Angeles County

ON A MILD SUNDAY last summer, a string of "popping sounds" drifted through the lazy night air of Beverly Hills around 10 o'clock. "I didn't think anything of it," said Tom Zlotow, a neighbor who soon learned that the noises he'd heard from the house right behind his were echoes of the most sensational crime in the history of Beverly Hills. "I didn't even think it could be gunfire, especially around here."

Actor Robert Blake and his bodyguard were arrested Thursday in the shooting death of Blake's wife last May outside a restaurant in Studio City. The 68-year-old actor, best known for his role as a detective in the television series "Baretta," was in custody on suspicion of murder and could face the death penalty, police said. He had been questioned earlier about the slaying of Bonny Lee Bakley, but authorities Thursday said for the first time that he had been a suspect from the start.

It's been almost a year, but Benjamin Markowitz still has trouble believing his childhood friends could have kidnapped and killed his younger brother. "In my worst nightmares, I never would have thought that that would have happened," Markowitz, 23, said last week in an interview. It was a brazen crime that stunned the West Valley, where most of the young suspects had grown up. They'd played baseball together on the well-groomed fields of a private league.

Efren Saldivar, the respiratory therapist who once told Glendale police that he killed dozens of hospital patients with injections of paralyzing drugs, is expected to plead guilty today to six murder counts and other charges in a plea bargain that will spare him the death penalty. Families of the victims were notified by authorities Monday night that Saldivar, 32, had agreed to enter the plea this morning before Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito.

Dag Drollet had been trying to extricate himself from his love affair with a "spoiled, unstable" Cheyenne Brando, trying to distance himself from the "unhappy" Brando family, when he was shot and killed in the den of Marlon Brando's Los Angeles compound in May, his father and stepfather say. Just before the 26-year-old Drollet accompanied the pregnant Cheyenne Brando to Los Angeles from Tahiti, Jacques Drollet said, he told his son, "Dag, stop this life with Cheyenne because she's not balanced .

After a jury favoring acquittal failed to reach a unanimous verdict, a judge declared a mistrial Wednesday for Gregory Diles, a former bodyguard accused of participating in the 1981 Laurel Canyon murders. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe "reluctantly" excused the panel after each agreed with the foreman that further deliberations would not be fruitful. The jury had deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal.

The Menendez family estate, once valued at up to $14 million, is virtually depleted, it was disclosed Tuesday at Lyle and Erik Menendez's murder trial. Shrunken by taxes, legal fees and other costs, Jose and Kitty Menendez's estate is worth no more than $800,000--and has debts at least that high, defense lawyer Leslie Abramson said in court. Probate records are sealed and the defense had kept financial figures secret throughout the trial.

The preliminary results of an autopsy performed on actor Robert Blake's wife were sealed Monday at the request of Los Angeles police because her killer remains at large, a spokesman for the county coroner's office said. Police were concerned that their investigation would be hurt if the autopsy results became public, said Scott Carrier, the coroner's spokesman.

Coroner's investigators unearthed skeletal remains Wednesday from a shallow grave in Canyon Country, where the man who killed the wife of Los Lobos singer Cesar Rosas had led authorities. Forensic experts said they will conduct an autopsy and compare dental records today to determine whether the bones are those of Sandra Rosas, who was murdered by her half-brother Gabriel Gomez.

Saying that his crimes showed "great violence and sophistication," a judge sentenced former Glendale arson investigator John Leonard Orr to life in prison without the possibility of parole Thursday for setting a fire that killed four people at a South Pasadena hardware store. Superior Court Judge Robert J.

Despite her tearful request for leniency, a Long Beach woman was sentenced Monday to 25 years to life in prison for murdering her 3-year-old daughter and hiding the dismembered body in a block of concrete. "I did not kill my daughter and I didn't hurt her," Rakeisha Lanette Scott, who in April was convicted of murder, said in Los Angeles Superior Court. "I ask you not to sentence me for something I didn't do. Please help me." But Judge Michael E.

Calling him a vicious murderer, a judge Monday sentenced 16-year-old Michael Hrayr Demirdjian to a lifetime behind bars for bludgeoning two teenage boys on a La Crescenta playground. "Sir, you've committed a crime like a man, and now you'll be treated and punished as a man," Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Coen said. Demirdjian received two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole for killing Christopher McCulloch, 13, and Blaine Talmo Jr., 14.

After proclaiming his innocence for more than a year, a 26-year-old Simi Valley man pleaded guilty Monday to shaking his infant son to death. Brian Trelatsky faces a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life in prison. He had been scheduled to stand trial this week on a charge of child abuse causing death, which carries a penalty of 25 years to life in prison. But before jury selection began, he offered to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder, and prosecutors accepted.

They stack up at the LAPD's 77th Street station: unsolved homicides with few leads and, all too often, witnesses who won't come forward. So, along with bereaved families, detectives Friday made a public appeal for information on six unsolved murder cases from the last 14 months. The result was a strangely arresting moment in one of the city's busiest police precincts--the scene of 85 homicides last year alone.

Three men were killed and a woman was wounded in Lincoln Heights when a gunman opened fire Tuesday outside a New Year's party, heightening fears in a neighborhood that has been hit by increasing gang violence. "Whoever shot these guys really wanted them dead, judging by the way it happened," Los Angeles Police Det. Rodrigo Amador said of the slayings. All of the men were shot in the upper body, possibly several times, with a large-caliber weapon. Killed in the 5:30 a.m.

Four men were charged with first-degree murder Wednesday in the shooting death of a 15-year-old Francis Polytechnic High School student earlier this month. Prosecutors allege that Juan Manuel Chavez, 21, of Pacoima shot freshman Santiago Polanco of Sun Valley on Dec. 13 as he walked with friends in the 8300 block of Sharp Avenue in Sun Valley, a few blocks from campus.

It was such a grown-up crime, police say, with such a childlike motive. A 12-year-old boy with a .22-caliber revolver entered Jung (Sam) Woo's Monrovia bike shop on Thursday just after school let out, the time of day when youngsters usually flocked there to replace a spoke or patch a tire. According to authorities, the armed youngster was not interested in pillaging the cash drawer. When he fired a single shot into the head of the store's popular owner, police say, the boy wanted a new bicycle.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office said Sunday that a preliminary autopsy of model Linda Sobek's body does not support the account of her death given by photographer Charles E. Rathbun, who says he accidentally ran over the former football cheerleader during a photo session in the desert. "Thus far, findings are not consistent with injuries caused by an automobile," coroner's spokesman C.

Jeffrey Duvardo told his parents he was a CIA operative who would be killed if he didn't come up with $50,000 to complete a multimillion-dollar arms deal. The couple believed their 44-year-old son, lending him $30,000 from their meager retirement fund. Four months later, Don and Mary Ann Duvardo were dead.

About 250 residents gathered Thursday night at St. Andrews Recreation Center in South Los Angeles, where 13-year-old Marquese Rashad Prude was shot to death Nov. 28. Many of the angry residents demanded that city officials bring the killers, who have not been identified, to justice. "We have clues . . ., Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas told the crowd. "We are going to turn up the heat. Everybody expects something to happen on this."