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

But he was stopped cold.

“One car comes flying directly at me, forcing me to stop before I could get going, and two more cars come roaring up behind me chasing me down,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happening. I was scared shitless ... I thought they were gangbangers out to kill me.”

Brad Graverson/Daily Breeze

New suspect Milton Gallardo

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More About

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

The worst part about the worst day of Gonzalez’s life was that it was just getting started.

As Gonzalez gunned the Maxima and tried to maneuver around the pickup, an older, blond woman jumped out of the truck and flashed a gun and a badge. Five more guys in street clothes with guns tumbled out of another truck right behind her, rushed over to Gonzalez, reached in and yanked him out of his car. Gonzalez demanded to see their badges.

“All of a sudden everyone has a badge ... even the rock & roll guy,” he said. “But I’m still wondering why no one is in uniform.”

They handcuffed him, dragged him over to an unmarked minivan and threw him in the back. The side door slammed shut.

He was all alone on the floor of a stranger’s van.

“The windows were shut tight, I was sweating like a pig, my nose was running, I can’t breathe, I’m dizzy, I’m all fucked up and the handcuffs are killing me because of all the yanking on my hands,” he said. “All I could think of was that this can’t be happening to me in America ... El Salvador, maybe, but not America.”

He sat up on his knees and looked out the window, searching for Piñon, whom he met in junior high school when they were 13. They were both passionate about making music and were going to be married soon after Gonzalez signed his new deal to record with the L.A. rap acts MC Magic and NB Ridaz.

“I saw that older, blond lady badgering Blanca and showing her something,” he said. “It made me sick that she was being dragged into whatever crazy shit this was.”

After a few minutes, an older man slid into the front seat of the minivan. Gonzalez asked him if they really were police and why he was being arrested. But the man didn’t answer and silently drove a few blocks to a strip mall at the northeast corner of Exposition and Normandie.  

Neither the $25,000 reward nora featured episode on America’s Most Wanted produced any viable leads in the Cabrera murder mystery. The homicide detectives moved on to other cases. But in December 2005, during an L.A. Sheriff’s year-end review of cold cases, Detective Gallagher and her partner, Detective Sergeant Randy Seymour, decided to take a harder look at the only significant piece of evidence: the surveillance video.

After viewing the tape dozens of times, the detectives decided that the video told a crime story, a coordinated murder scenario that would lead them to the killer if they could just identify the short, balding Latino man outside the murder site.

They built their story around a white, circa-mid-’80s pickup truck that was videotaped going around the block outside the home several times, starting at 9 that morning and continuing into the afternoon. Then they noted the short man walking up and down the sidewalk outside the house shortly after noon, followed by Cabrera, who entered the house at 12:42 p.m.

Sixteen minutes later the short man walked down the sidewalk toward the Strand, moments before the homeowner called the fire department. This time the man was carrying a shoulder bag that could easily have held a laptop computer — the only thing the doctor reported missing from the crime scene.

The conclusion, Gallagher and Seymour said, was inescapable: Whoever was in the white truck had targeted Cabrera long before she arrived at work that day.

“We knew that the suspects had to know the victim and know her schedule,” Gallagher said.

Acting on that premise, they began interviewing neighbors of the victim in Lawndale. Eventually a woman mentioned a group of young men who lived next door to the victim. One of the men, Juan Morales, a minor-league studio musician known as Dreamer, had been to prison for repeated domestic abuse. A little checking revealed that he had gotten out of prison in January 2005, four months before Cabrera’s murder. The detectives were also told that Morales’ ex-wife, 36-year-old Alma Dongon, had fled to Virginia after he raped her at knife-point.

Sensing a credible lead, detectives Gallagher and Seymour flew to Virginia at the end of December to interview Dongon. They arrived at her home in the midafternoon on Sunday, January 1, 2006. L.A. Weekly has obtained what defense sources say is a transcript of that interview.

Seymour, who is tall, fit and athletic, was clearly the alpha dog in the interview. He took the lead in questioning Dongon, who indicated that she was fearful of her ex-husband.

Dongon casually mentioned “Herbert” for the first time on page 15 of the transcript, which is marred by notations of inaudible words and phrases. Still, the trajectory of the interview is clear. Once Gonzalez appeared on the detectives’ radar screen, he evolved over the next hour from being one of Dreamer’s many cousins — just another relative with no connection to the crime — to the prime suspect in the Cabrera murder case.