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

Detective Sergeant Randy Seymour told the Weekly that he has no regrets about his conduct during the Gonzalez case. “You can’t cry over spilt milk,” he said. “My only regret is there may be other people involved that we haven’t charged yet.”

Still, Seymour said that after Gonzalez’s confession was thrown out, his personal policy now is to tape-record every interview from the moment it begins. “If I were interviewing Gonzalez today,” he said, “I would just turn the doggone tape on right from the beginning.”

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

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More About

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

Many nagging questions remainabout Gonzalez’s case. Why did Alma Dongon appear to go out of her way to implicate Herbie and Dreamer? L.A. Weekly has been unable to contact Dongon despite repeated attempts to reach her in Virginia.

Gonzalez, however, speculates that Dongon simply took the opportunity for revenge on her ex-husband.

“I got caught in the middle of their domestic problems,” he said.

The white pickup truck so crucial to Seymour’s scenario turned out to belong to a construction crew working near the murder scene. Police refused to believe the truck owner’s story that he was simply driving between two construction sites. They impounded the vehicle and kept it for many months despite his heated protests. Finally, the owner told the Weekly, it was returned to him in a trashed condition and he has been denied any compensation.

Gonzalez’s cousin, ex-convict Juan “Dreamer” Morales, was never charged with anything in connection to Cabrera’s murder.

Despite the collapse of the prosecution''s case in court, Detective Katherine Gallagher also said she has no regrets about her conduct during the Gonzalez investigation. “We just followed the evidence where it led,” she said. “Just doing our job.”

Gallagher said she still believes that Gonzalez was somehow involved in the murder, even if he didn’t rape Cabrera.

“Our biggest wish is that facing the death penalty, Gallardo will tell us who else was involved,” she said. “I think Gallardo holds the key to the whole mystery. He’ll talk someday.”

And Gallagher thinks she knows where Gallardo will lead the detectives if and when he does finally tell all: right back where they started with a guns-drawn arrest on 35th Street.

“In my mind, Mr. Gonzalez is still involved in this murder,” Gallagher said. “I think he was in that house and grabbed that computer. The elaborate story he told us fits in so many ways.”

But even the DNA match to new suspect Gallardo doesn’t quite fit the scenario Gallagher lays out. Gallardo’s public defender, Sam Leonard, told the Weekly last week that Gallardo, who lived in Hawthorne, has given a statement to the Sheriff’s Department in which he claims he had an ongoing affair with Libia Cabrera. Gallardo admitted that he was at the Manhattan Beach house that April day and said that the two had consensual sex and that Cabrera was alive and well when he left.

Gallardo has been charged with murder with special circumstances — it was committed during a rape and burglary — which would make him eligible for the death penalty if he is convicted. He is also charged with arson.

A preliminary hearing for Gallardo is scheduled for May 7 at the Airport Courthouse. He remains in jail on his car-theft conviction.

Two sources familiar with the investigation told the Weekly there may be evidence to support at least the first part of Gallardo’s story. In a portion of the surveillance videotape not yet released to the public, the sources insisted that there appears to be a nod of recognition between Gallardo, on the street, and the victim, in the backyard, before she goes into the house shortly before her murder.

“The police have said all along that they believe the killer knew the victim, and knew her schedule,” one of the sources said. “I think they’re right. They just had the wrong guy for the right theory. How else does Gallardo end up in that house at that time?”

Sheriff’s investigators, however, refused to confirm this theory.

Gonzalez, meanwhile, realizes how lucky he was to get a last-second exit from what looked like a fast-track ride to death row. And he is tortured over his own role in putting himself in that position.

“I kick myself every day,” he said not long ago. “I was one of those people who always said they would never confess to something they didn’t do. Now I know it can happen to anyone.”

Email Paul Teetor at paulteetor@verizon.net