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

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.

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

Thomas Sanders

Law power: Attorney Joseph Shemaria with client Gonzalez

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More About

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

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.

Thomas Sanders

(Click to enlarge)

Law power: Attorney Joseph Shemaria with client Gonzalez

Brad Graverson/Daily Breeze

(Click to enlarge)

New suspect Milton Gallardo

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 bornin 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 right in front of his house. So when the longhaired guy pulled the gun, Gonzalez reacted instinctively to the unfolding threat: He popped the clutch and hit the gas.