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

Seymour: “Okay, well, let’s just do this, then. Okay, I’m gonna show you ...”

Gonzalez: “I don’t want to see the video.”

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

Seymour: “I have to show it to you, brother. I want to banish this, okay? I’m taking this way far forward, okay? After that time when we saw you walking up the street.”

Gonzalez: “I was never there ...”

When Gonzalez proclaims, “I was never there,” Seymour’s tone suddenly changes from that of compassionate father confessor to fed-up inquisitor.

Gonzalez: “Can you stop the video, sir?”

Gallagher: “Stop the video.”

Seymour: “Okay.”

Gonzalez: “I’m gonna be completely honest with you guys.”

Seymour: “Okay.”

Gonzalez: “Everything I just said, I’ve just been going along with you guys, [INAUDIBLE] and that’s the honest truth.”

Seymour: “I know, and I want you to know that we’re being totally honest with you.”

Gonzalez: “I can’t. Shit, I was never there.”

“All right,” Seymour responds but then shows portions of the video again.

“I don’t want to lie to you guys,” Gonzalez tells them. “I really don’t. As much as I want to get out of here. I don’t want to. ... I want to get out of here.”

Seymour keeps pressing, insisting that Gonzalez was not lying at first to please the officers.

“It’s a very, very detailed lie,” Seymour says. “In fact, you, before we sat down and actually, you know, put this on the record, I mean, you talked about how ...”

“I was learning,” says Gonzalez.

This exchange, even without Gonzalez’s “learning” remark, would seem to undercut Seymour’s testimony that the detectives “didn’t ask him any questions, didn’t ask him to respond to anything, just told him why he was in custody” before the recorder was turned on. 

Now Seymour begins talking with a messianic urgency, and even tells Gonzalez that his fiancée told police that it was him on the surveillance tape (something she vehemently denied later). Seymour is apparently clinging to two unshakable beliefs: If they just keep saying it is Gonzalez in the video, he will eventually have to agree. And, Gonzalez’s request that the video be stopped is tantamount to an emotional confession, an all-too-human reaction revealing that he can’t bear to see himself at the scene of the crime.

“Sir,” Gonzalez says at one point, “what if I tell you what you want hear, and then after all this, you find out that that wasn’t even me on the tape?”

“If we could have found out that wasn’t you on the picture,” Seymour tells him, “you wouldn’t be here now, but that’s not the case.” 

Right-click here to download the MP3.

“Herbert,” Gallagher says after more back and forth between Seymour and Gonzalez, “do you think that if you tell us how you got the computer that you’re gonna be arrested, that you’re gonna go down for the murder, is that what you think? ’Cause if you think that, you’re wrong.”

“You didn’t have anything to do with her death,” Seymour agrees.

“Yeah,” Gonzalez tells Gallagher, “I really think so.”

Seymour sets up a tricky either/or proposition for Gonzalez: If he doesn’t admit that he is the man on the surveillance tape, the investigators will know that he is the murderer.

“If you didn’t have nothing to do with her death, then why not tell the truth about the computer? Do you see where we’re coming from?” 

At last Gonzalez gives up and once again rotely goes along with Seymour’s scenario.

But after a couple of one- and two-word answers, he stops again. “Is there any way, like, you can put me on the lie detector,” Gonzalez asks, hoping the machine will reveal that’s he’s just going along with Seymour.

“Dude, I believe in what you’re telling me,” Seymour tells him. “I’m believing you right now. I’m believing you. What I want to do is, I’m just trying to clarify everything. I’m believing you, I got no beef with that. I got none.” 

At the end of the interrogation, Seymour assures Gonzalez, “Look, if somebody else did this and we can prove it, we are going to damn sure prove it. That’s where we’re going to go from here. ... The district attorney is going to make his determination Monday morning.”

Seymour’s assurances gave Gonzalez no comfort.

“It’s obvious these detectives are going to run a frame job on me,” he said later. “I was scared shitless. All I knew was Dreamer, but it seemed like that was enough for them. That made me guilty in their eyes, ’cause I was Dreamer’s cousin, and I was short and balding.”

By the time Gonzalez finally got to talk to his fiancée by phone, Piñon told him that his mother, Ana, had retained a criminal-defense attorney, who had one message for him: Don’t speak to the police.

He was transported to Torrance Superior Court Monday morning, January 9. Late in the afternoon he was charged with murder, residential robbery, burglary and arson. With his newly hired defense lawyer, Joseph Shemaria, he pleaded not guilty, then was remanded to Twin Towers for lack of $1 million in bail. Gonzalez’s mother, he later learned, took out a second mortgage to hire Shemaria. After the retainer was paid, there were no other family assets to serve as collateral on a typical 10 percent bail bond — in this case, $100,000 up front.