Bad Rap: How Aspiring Hip-hop Star Herbie Gonzalez Got Pegged as the Manhattan Beach Housekeeper Murderer

Thomas Sanders

Scene of the nightmare: Herbie Gonzalez, back at the strip-mall parking lot where he was kept handcuffed for hours.

Thomas Sanders

Gonzalez in his bedroom-closet music studio

Related Content

• Manhattan Beach Cops' Hit-and-Run Career Fiasco
  January 19, 2012
• Flat White at Two Guns Espresso
  January 24, 2012
• One-Time Use of a Leaf Blower in Manhattan Beach Could Land You in Jail
  September 16, 2011
• 30 Scoops in 30 Days: Delicieuse (Day 15)
  June 21, 2011
• 30 Scoops in 30 Days: Manhattan Beach Creamery (Day 14)
  June 20, 2011

More About

• Randy Seymour
• Herbie Gonzalez
• Herbert Orlando Gonzalez
• Murder and Homicide
• Crime

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.

Thomas Sanders

(Click to enlarge)

Scene of the nightmare: Herbie Gonzalez, back at the strip-mall parking lot where he was kept handcuffed for hours.

Thomas Sanders

(Click to enlarge)

Gonzalez in his bedroom-closet music studio

(Click to enlarge)

Who is this man? Surveillance tape scenes from the day of the murder

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.

Now Herbie was paying full attention.

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 shit.”

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.