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

Back in his cell he was overcome by the seriousness of the criminal charges facing him.

“All I could think about was how Blanca and my family were going to take this, and especially how my mom is going to feel,” he said. “I learned that she didn’t take it so well and that my grandma Maria had a nervous breakdown.”

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

The Sheriff’s office did not call a press conference to announce Gonzalez’s January 5 arrest. Nor did the D.A.’s office issue a press release after his arraignment to alert beach-city residents that a suspect had been charged. For the next five weeks Gonzalez sat in Twin Towers without a single news organization realizing that an arrest had been made in the notorious housekeeper-murder case.

But Daily Breeze reporter Larry Altman is an old-school type of cops-and-courts reporter known for his police sources and his tenacity. On February 16, he broke the news that a 26-year-old L.A. man named Herbert Orlando Gonzalez had been arrested for the crime. The front-page Breezestory, headlined “Mystery Clouds Slaying Arrest,” said police had been secretive about the arrest.

Now Gonzalez realized that he had a new home: the Twin Towers medical unit. “I felt like Daniel in the lion’s den,” he said. “He survived in the mouth of the lions, so I figured I could survive in the Towers for at least a few weeks until the preliminary hearing.”

But a few weeks slowly turned into months. Shemaria and Assistant District Attorney Mary Suzukawa, bitter foes from earlier courtroom wars, were unable to agree on a date for a preliminary hearing. As they squabbled and blamed each other for the delays, the hearing was postponed several times until they finally settled on March 10 — more than two months after Gonzalez was arrested.

Judge Laura Ellison presided over Gonzalez’s preliminary hearing. Seymour was the state’s star witness. His mission was to emphasize Gonzalez’s incriminating statements about being in Manhattan Beach with Juan “Dreamer” Morales on the morning of the murder — and to minimize the defendant’s vehement denials about ever being there.

On Tuesday, March 14, Judge Ellison delivered her decision from the bench: Herbert Orlando Gonzalez was bound over to stand trial for murder, robbery and residential burglary. Gonzalez’s admissions that he was the person seen on a surveillance camera video walking outside the house where Cabrera was murdered made Ellison believe that he was acting as a lookout or a getaway driver.

As the hearing ended, Shemaria asked the judge if she would consider reducing Gonzalez’s $1 million bail.

“Not even a little bit,” Ellison replied.

Gonzalez was soon transferred out of the Twin Towers medical unit and into the Old County Jail. A few visits from Piñon cheered him up a little, but the weeks and months dragged on.

As the trial date approached, the state had no more evidence than Gonzalez’s since-recanted admission to being in Manhattan Beach on the morning of the murder. “I wish I had more, but I really don’t,” Detective Gallagher told the press. “But we’re going to trial regardless.”

On Wednesday, July 19, Gonzalez was transported to Torrance Superior Court to watch Shemaria and Suzukawa pick the jury. But first, the trial judge, Cary Nishimoto, heard Gonzalez’s motion to suppress the so-called confession on the grounds that it was false, coerced and given without proper advisement of his Miranda rights.

Seymour again was the state’s key witness. Gonzalez also testified, contradicting much of what Seymour said. When the judge returned from chambers to render his decision, Gonzalez fully expected the motion to fail. “Why would the frame job stop now?” he thought.

But as the judge began to speak, he sat and listened in stunned silence.

“Based on all of the evidence presented at this hearing,” Judge Nishimoto said, “I have to say that it is very clear that there were two interrogations in this case: One was recorded, one wasn’t; one was Mirandized, one wasn’t, and that before the defendant was Mirandized, there was an extensive discussion about this case between the defendant and the detectives that was intended to and did culminate in defendant admitting the incriminating information. And for that reason, the court finds that the defendant’s statements to the police were not voluntary.”

Nishimoto went on to say, “Although the detectives testified that the defendant answered yes in response to the question, ‘Did you understand your rights, your Miranda rights?’ the tape-recording transcription shows that this question was followed by ‘No audible response.’ Not a statement that the response could not be deciphered, but no statement at all. And the detectives’ testimony in this regard is in stark contrast to the tape recording. And this goes to the issue of the defendant’s comprehension, I think, of what was happening to him at that point.”

Judge Nishimoto summed up his decision by condemning Gallagher’s implied offer of leniency if Gonzalez would just admit he took the computer: “During the recorded session, the detectives also made what appeared to be false promises of leniency to the defendant, which, according to the recorded statement, prompted the defendant to make an incriminating statement. So all in all, I think it is clear that this statement, or these statements, by the defendant, were involuntary. And I’m going to grant motion.”