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

After Gonzalez had spent 193days in custody, his so-called confession was thrown out, and he walked out of court a free man. For Gonzalez, the cracked, cigarette-butt-strewn sidewalk at the bottom of the Torrance courthouse steps seemed to glitter in the golden sunlight. He remembers that magical morning with a warm glow in his voice that returns every time he talks about it.

“Here was a brave judge who was honest, a judge who wouldn’t go along with the frame job,” he said. “Now the papers would have to tell the truth about me.”

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

Two days later he read the Daily Breeze report. The headline was innocent enough: “Suspect in MB Killing Is Freed.” However, the story made it crystal clear that police believed Gonzalez had gotten off on a technicality — and that he was still a prime suspect.

A few weeks later, Gonzalez filed a civil suit against the Sheriff’s Department, alleging that Seymour and Gallagher had made false statements to get a search warrant and used illegal interrogation tactics to get a confession.

Andre Khansari, a civil attorney who employed Gonzalez in his Marina del Rey law firm and now uses him part-time, said his release was badly tainted by the widespread perception that he had been involved in the housekeeper murder but got off because of a Miranda-warning screwup by the detectives.

“It was obviously huge for Gonzalez when the case was dismissed,” Khansari said. “But then the police just wouldn’t let go of him.”

Khansari added that he was shocked when he heard that Gonzalez was charged with murder, because he was the most professional employee among the law firm’s support staff.

“Gonzalez was the go-to guy for finding obscure documents and making copies of everything,” Khansari said. “He was a hustling guy, a happening guy with a lot going on — a couple of jobs, his music and his engagement.”

After Gonzalez was released, however, Khansari said he did not see that same spirit of energy and joy in him, as he went through a string of menial jobs. Gonzalez was even fired from a temp clerical job at IHOP after America’s Most Wanted reran its episode on the housekeeper murder — with Gonzalez pictured as the prime suspect — six months after the charges against him were dropped.

“Now he’s depressed,” Khansari said, “like a guy who’s been to war, seen some ugly stuff, came back and may never be the same. And he’s still not married.”

MC Magic, the rapper who has worked with Gonzalez in the studio and had planned to use him on his album Magic City — before the arrest derailed the deal — said the impact of the ordeal on Gonzalez was profound, even 18 months after his release from jail.

“I noticed that his confidence is not the same. He used to be a can-do kind of guy. Whatever needed to be done, Herbert would always find a way,” he said. “Now he seems weaker, less focused. The mental effects of that experience would kick any human being right in the ass.”

Gonzalez’s downward spiral cameto a screeching halt on October 5, 2007, when he got a call from the attorney handling his civil suit, John Burton of Pasadena.

“John said they had arrested someone else on the basis of a match to the DNA left on the victim,” Gonzalez said.

That day an inmate at Wasco State Prison, 25-year-old Milton Gallardo of Hawthorne — a short Latino man with a prematurely receding hairline — was charged with Cabrera’s murder on the basis of a match with the DNA sample he had to give when he entered prison on a felony car-theft conviction. The D.A.’s office did not hold a press conference to announce the arrest.

“First they get a guy, Gonzalez, and get him to confess,” Burton said. “Eventually he’s cut loose. A year later there’s a dead-bang DNA match on this horrible, horrible crime, and yet there’s no press conference. That’s a huge thing to me. I think they didn’t want it in the L.A. Times because they have a Herbie Gonzalez problem.”

Gonzalez’s civil suit won’t go to trial until November. “I think that’s the only way to really clear my name and expose what these detectives did to me,” he says.

After Gonzalez’s so-called confession was thrown out, Sheriff Lee Baca announced a review of the interrogation-recording policy for his detectives. But Baca declined to comment to the Weekly on Gonzalez’s case or his position on mandatory taping of interrogations, which, as in 42 other states, California law does not require. Captain Jim Curtis, head of the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, declined to comment on Gonzalez’s case but said his policy is still the same: He allows his detectives to decide for themselves if they are going to tape an entire interrogation or just parts of it.

“Of course we always want the best evidence available, so we encourage taping as much as possible,” Curtis said. “But we leave it up to the individual detective.”