Police Investigations

The mystery surrounding last month's slayings of six Pomona residents began to unravel Thursday when police revealed that they had arrested two gang members and charged them with murder in connection with four of the shootings. For several weeks since an alleged gang rampage took the lives of apparently unconnected residents, police reported that they had no suspects, no motives and no leads.

An investigation into the slaying of a Placentia girl that baffled law enforcement officials for eight years came to an end this week when authorities charged a convicted rapist in connection with her death. Raymond J. Barthlett, 34, was arrested Friday after DNA evidence linked him to the slaying of 14-year-old Wendy Osborn. She was abducted Jan. 20, 1987, while walking to school and was later raped and killed.

The route from USC's fraternity row to the 901 Club on Figueroa Street is marked by broad painted stripes running three blocks, a symbol of the bar's importance to the social life of the campus' affluent "Greeks." The "9-Oh," as the raucous college bar is affectionately known, is where inhibitions, like IDs, are checked at the door. For one fraternity--the prestigious and well-connected Alpha Tau Omega house--it is a path well traveled.

Federal investigators are preparing to search a garbage-strewn hillside near downtown Tijuana for the graves of three people who an informant claims were buried there by former Los Angeles Police Department officers Rafael Perez and David Mack, law enforcement sources confirmed Tuesday. The search, expected to occur within days, is part of an ongoing federal investigation aimed at corroborating the allegations of 23-year-old Sonia Flores, Perez's former lover.

A photograph taken by an automated teller machine camera provides more evidence of what investigators believe is a possible link between the gunman who killed two police officers at a Holiday Inn in Torrance last month and an armed robbery last year at a real estate office in Gardena. Gardena Police Lt.

Three decomposed bodies found off a remote trail on the Morongo Indian Reservation may be three cousins missing since a shopping excursion two weeks ago, authorities said Wednesday. The bodies of two women and a man were found by deer hunters 10 miles north of Cabazon at the 4,000-foot level near Millard Canyon Road and Kitchen Creek Trail, said Sgt. Mark Lohman of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. The rugged area is 90 miles east of Los Angeles.

Two young men were shot to death early Sunday in a volley of gunfire from a military-type assault weapon at El Salvador Park--a little more than a mile from police headquarters. Ernesto Sanudo Mendez and Sammy Porras, both 21, were walking in the 1800 block of Civic Center Drive about 1:45 a.m. when they were gunned down by shots fired from a passing car. Police said it was another gang-related shooting. Residents of the Civic Center area said it was another outrage.

An evening of drinking and drugs descended into a grisly, lethal confrontation that ended in the shooting deaths of three young women in Pasadena, court documents filed in the case reveal. Filed in Pasadena Municipal Court in support of murder charges brought against two suspects, the documents are reports of investigations conducted by detectives at the murder scene and their interviews of witnesses and suspects.

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters on Tuesday led about 20 angry residents of the Imperial Courts housing project to the Los Angeles Police Commission, where they accused police of continually harassing and abusing tenants in the sprawling complex. "Please call off the dogs," the Los Angeles Democrat told commission members. "Keep them from abusing the people." Waters and the residents alleged that, since the Nov.

A Denver police officer turned up in Utah after his mysterious disappearance prompted a weeklong manhunt, and he told investigators Friday that financial and personal problems compelled him to abandon his patrol car and head west on a motorcycle. David Hayhurst, 39, who had gotten a new apartment and a job at an auto-body shop in Reno, Nev., said he decided to return home after reading a newspaper account of the manhunt and deciding: "I couldn't do this to all those good people in Denver.