Herbert Gonzalez:  

Bad Rap: How Aspiring Hip-hop Star Herbie Gonzalez Got Pegged as the Manhattan Beach Housekeeper Murderer Anatomy of a false confession By Paul Teetor published: April 10, 2008 Herbie Gonzalez glanced in his rearview mirror as he turned right from Normandie onto 35th Street. Sick with the flu, he barely noticed the white Dodge Ram lurking in the crosstown traffic behind him. The pickup truck followed Gonzalez onto 35th and stalked his blue Nissan Maxima as it headed east. Driving with his fiancée, rap lyricist and composer Blanca Piñon, Gonzalez pulled over to check out a bungalow with a For Sale sign out front, a possible home for the soon-to-be-married couple. The truck made a move to pass, then suddenly swerved and squealed to a stop next to the Maxima, wedged in so close that it blocked Gonzalez from getting out. The longhaired white guy in the pickup leaned across the cab, stuck his head out the passenger-side window and gave Gonzalez a crazy-eyes stare, slurring his words like he was in a hurry: “Hey dude, you know what time it is?” The rock & roll look didn’t bother Gonzalez, a 26-year-old rapper and law clerk with a receding hairline and a recording deal in the works, but the warp-speed words were all wrong. “When some stranger asks you if you know what time it is in my neighborhood, it usually means you’re about to be robbed,” he said. “Like, time for you to give me your things... Gonzalez and Piñon were parked at the geographical heart of a bipolar neighborhood, a residential area defined by its borders, with the University of Southern California to the east and the area formerly known as South-Central to the south. On this day, January 5, 2006, they had good reason to be wary: It was the morning after the now-legendary 2006 Rose Bowl, when Vince “Forever” Young and his posse of Texas Longhorn all-Americans snatched the National Championship from Matt “Sex Machine” Leinart, Reggie “Pimp my Crib” Bush and USC supercoach Pete Carroll with a last-second touchdown. The neighborhood had a nasty hangover — a concrete cocktail of disorderly drunks, depressed USC fans and die-hard partiers who refused to let this marathon New Year’s holiday weekend stagger to a merciful end. So when the longhaired guy shouted out, Gonzalez kept his window up, his door locked and his mouth shut. But the driver jumped out of the truck and came right at him, screaming something unintelligible but clearly hostile. He was tall and thick, early-to-mid-30s, greasy black hair parted in the middle and spilling down onto broad, buff shoulders. He wore long black basketball shorts that hung down to his knees, high-top black sneakers and a black wife-beater set off by a bunch of jailhouse tats on big, bulging biceps. “He looked like he had just left an all-night rave,” Gonzalez recalled, as he stood in the same spot on 35th almost two years later. “A lot of times partied-out college students wander into this neighborhood and ask for directions to the 110 or the 405.” Gonzalez was just one block from home, and the last thing he needed this morning was some wacko white stranger asking stupid questions and getting up in his grill. After a week of being sick and eating almost nothing, all he wanted to do was get some chicken soup from his mother’s catering truck at the corner of Slauson and McKinley, his original destination. So he looked hard at the rock & roll guy for a second, shrugged through the window and shifted into first gear. “I don’t know what this crazy guy wants, but I know he doesn’t really want the time,” Gonzalez said. “Maybe he wants to rob me to pay for drugs.” Before he hit the gas, Gonzalez took one more look out his side window. Now the guy was waving a gun. A big gun. “It wasn’t any old .22 or Saturday-night special,” he said. “He started banging on the windshield and screaming something about me getting out of the car.” The news spread through Manhattan Beach like a teenager’s IM late Monday afternoon, April 11, 2005: Someone has been raped, strangled and burned to death in one of those expensive houses down by the ocean. The attack happened five minutes away from the Manhattan Beach police station and 30 seconds from the Strand, the thick concrete ribbon that runs parallel to the ocean, overlooks the meticulously groomed beach and serves as a community boardwalk. The murder house was a modest duplex shoehorned into a millionaire’s row of new-money faux-Mediterranean McMansions. And even though the killing happened in the middle of a weekday in the most populated section of Manhattan Beach, no one, not even the downstairs homeowner, heard or saw a thing. The lurid details revealed over the next few days made the murder even scarier to the high-toned, high-income, security-conscious residents of the fourth-whitest city in Los Angeles County. Libia Cabrera, a married 39-year-old housekeeper from Lawndale — 5 miles to the east of Manhattan Beach but a world away culturally and economically — had shown up for work in the upper unit at 120 28th Street on her regular twice-a-week schedule. Within 16 minutes she was sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed in the neck. She was left lying naked on the floor in a pool of blood, her mouth gagged and her hands tied behind her back with a shoelace. Her torn panties and burnt bra were found lying nearby. The killer tied a string of sheets, towels and blankets extending 13 feet from her body to a wall heater. He fled as the flames began to turn his crime scene into a homemade funeral pyre. The homeowner living downstairs discovered the fire in time to save most of the structure. But when firefighters found Cabrera’s body in the back bedroom upstairs, she was burned so badly that she was unrecognizable. Cabrera, a native of Colombia, emigrated to the United States in 1992. She had just passed her English as a Second Language exam and was one month from earning American citizenship. Friends and family described her as a salt-of-the-earth type without an enemy in the world, a hard worker and loving wife who was living every immigrant’s American dream of legal employment and cultural assimilation. This was the city’s first arson-murder in 20 years and the only Manhattan Beach murder in 2005. Despite a quick and intensive response by the Manhattan Beach Police Department and, within hours of the murder, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the killer avoided capture in the critical first 48 hours, when law enforcement statistically stands the best chance of solving a case. Within days, the downstairs homeowner along with Cabrera’s employer, a doctor living in the upstairs unit where the murder was committed, were eliminated as suspects. Within weeks the killer’s trail went cold. As the no-news-is-bad-news weeks went by, an inconvenient question was debated on the Strand: Is there really a psycho surf killer floating around the beach cities of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo? Or was this a transplanted case of violence-in-the-hood that had somehow trailed Cabrera here from her home in Lawndale? Early on, police said they had recovered enough male DNA from the victim’s body to match it to a suspect. But within weeks Sheriff’s detectives were left with only one other significant piece of evidence: a surveillance videotape recorded from the lower unit at 120 28th Street that showed a short, mid-20s Hispanic-looking male with a receding hairline, wearing dark sweatpants with a white stripe down each side. The video caught him walking back and forth on the sidewalk outside the house right before and after the estimated time of the murder. “He takes three or four looks toward the building,” Sheriff’s Detective Katherine Gallagher told the press. “We don’t know who he is or what he’s doing. The family didn’t recognize him.” Police quickly put out a flier with a sketch of the suspect based on the video, and they released the surveillance footage to local TV. On May 17, 2005, the Manhattan Beach City Council approved a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer. “We aren’t at a standstill,” Detective Gallagher told the press. “There’s still a lot of work to do. It would help if someone identified him.” Herbert Orlando Gonzalez was born in El Salvador in 1979, just before that country’s civil war. After his biological father abandoned the family, Gonzalez came to America with his mother, Ana, in 1982. He grew up in Los Angeles on 36th Place, in a jigsaw-puzzle neighborhood of classic California front-porch bungalows, 1950s-style Craftsman cottages and a few modern student apartments. Some of the houses, like the Gonzalez bungalow on 36th Place, are kept shining and immaculate inside and out. Gonzalez’s yard, full of lemon, lime and guava trees, is trimmed, watered and raked daily, and the grass is cut sharp as a putting green. But other homes nearby are rundown eyesores, marred by old mattresses tossed out on the sidewalk and front yards littered with rusted-out washers, burned-out dryers and ratty old cars. All the homes, however, have one thing in common: tall fences and gates, with thick steel bars on the doors and windows. The Gonzalez home even has a lock on its mailbox. At 5 feet 6 and 140 pounds, Gonzalez was physically tough enough to become a starting defensive back on the Manual Arts High School football team in 1995 and ’96. But he is also a self-confessed mama’s boy. He rarely strays far from his family and spends most of his time on his music. Although cited and released once for possessing a marijuana blunt, he had never been arrested — a notable accomplishment for any young man in this neighborhood. Over the years, Gonzalez had seen plenty of street violence from his porch, including several drive-by murders righ...Expand for more