Bad Rap: How Aspiring Hip-hop Star Herbie Gonzalez Got Pegged as the Manhattan Beach Housekeeper Murderer
Anatomy of a false confession
First Dongon told the detectives that “Herbert” is about 5 feet 7, similar in height to the man in the video. Then she mentioned that he is balding, that he has a compact, muscular build and that he is a violent man who beats his girlfriend. “I seen her with black eyes,” she told them.
“That is false,” insisted Piñon in a recent e-mail interview, “I have never had a black eye. Why in the world would Alma have supposedly said that? Hmm ... I do not believe she ever said such things.”
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Over the course of the interview, Dongon gradually morphed from witness into avenging ex-wife, eager to implicate the abusive Dreamer and his little cousin Gonzalez in this horrific murder. “Right. Let me remind, let me tell you about these guys,” she said. “When they do something like this, they stop seeing each other for a period.”
On page 37 of the transcript, when Seymour showed Dongon the surveillance footage on his laptop and the short, balding man first appeared, she said, “Oh, my god. That does look like Herbert.”
Seymour finally said: “Okay, now, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being ‘I know for 100 percent sure that’s him,’ 1 being ‘That’s 100 percent not him,’ as you [inaudible], as you look at it, you’re telling us what you think. Where would you put that?”
“Nine 9.99,” Dongon responded.
Later Seymour asked her why Dreamer and Gonzalez would murder Cabrera. Was it a robbery gone south? “Robbery gone south,” Dongon replied. “I’m positive.”
A few pages later Seymour summed up his conclusions: “Okay, I am very confident now that Herbert is our boy; and I’m also confident that Juan is [inaudible]. He was driving that truck.”
Two days after Seymour and Gallagher left Virginia with a name for their new prime suspect, the Manhattan Beach City Council doubled the reward for information in the Cabrera murder case to $50,000. Two days after that, during a street stop by a Sheriff’s surveillance squad that had been watching the suspect and his mother’s house for 24 hours, Herbie Gonzalez was arrested.
Gonzalez knew right away where he was: The strip mall was his longtime corner hangout.
And he knew who was watching: his friends and neighbors of 25 years.
He didn’t know that a search warrant and murder arrest warrant had been issued and, at that very moment, more than a dozen armed officers were scouring the house on 36th Place in a search for the Sony VAIO laptop missing from the crime scene and the dark sweatpants with white stripes worn by the man in the video. While his mother was at work, his two little brothers, his little sister and his grandmother all waited outside the house, frightened and confused.
But Gonzalez had his own problems at the strip mall. As he stood in the same parking lot recently and remembered the arrest, Gonzalez squatted in the same spot where he’d been kept handcuffed for several hours. He stared at the ground, head down. After a few moments, he looked up to see one of his neighbors, 46-year-old Tony Grisby of 39th Street, walking through the parking lot. Grisby, who has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years, came over to greet the young man he hadn’t seen since January 5, 2006, when he was in the crowd that gathered to heckle the police.
{==PAGE_BREAK==}Grisby said he remembers the arrest well because it was so shocking. He said most people in the neighborhood knew that Gonzalez was the hardest-working guy around and that he helped his single mom work her way up from taco-cart assistant to catering-truck owner. And that he hated gangbangers.
“I came over that day ’cause I heard a ruckus and thought some bangers might be hassling Herbert,” Grisby said. “I saw they had him down on the ground, surrounded by a bunch of cops. I couldn’t watch it.”
Gonzalez was taken from his arrest to a Sheriff’s substation in Lennox, where he was immediately forced to give a DNA sample, which Seymour then hand-delivered to the crime lab. The detectives didn’t want to begin their interrogation until the DNA results came back so at first, Gonzalez says, no one told him why he was being arrested. He''d had little to eat and his flu was worsening. Later that night he got violently ill, began vomiting blood, and was transported to the Twin Towers jail downtown early Friday morning.
“They put you in these holding tanks where a hundred people are jammed in,” Gonzalez recalled. “Everyone is standing up, crammed on top of each other. People smell like piss. They’re coughing in your face, spitting everywhere, drunk, doped up, cracked up, talking crazy, touching themselves, touching you, arguing, fighting with each other. ... Half of them are totally crazy, mentally gonzo.”
After two hours Gonzalez’s holding cell was opened up. A hundred inmates poured out at the same time, all headed for the processing line.
Sick, confused and depressed, Gonzalez went to the back of the line.
And waited some more.
Naked.
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