Beautiful Loser, Tortured Killer

After getting back in touch with writer Richard Lange early last year, Haskell invited him over to the loft to meet Kalberg and Wojciak and answer some questions about the publishing trade. “We talked for an hour or so, and everybody seemed to be getting along great,” Lange remembers. “I call them ‘cryptsters’ — they were old hipsters.”

On October 5, Lange attended an event downtown at Señor Fish and saw Kalberg and Wojciak selling books at a table. “Ewa gave me this really strange look,” Lange says. “And then, all of a sudden, she grabbed me and pulled me aside and said, ‘You don’t know, do you?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ She said, ‘Pete attacked Bruce and Bruce shot him and killed him.’ She went on to tell me that Pete hadn’t been doing well the whole time that he was there. He’d been drinking a lot and kind of acting bizarre, and that the best day they ever saw him was the day that I came over. There was something about building a mandala out of power tools, drinking all the booze in the house, and I guess he might have attacked Kalberg a couple of times before that. And evidently, they kept throwing him out, but then they’d relent and let him come back” — culminating in the altercation and shooting. On the way out, Lange offered his sympathies to Kalberg, and Kalberg recounted the event a second time in florid detail.

Bruce Kalberg, in the downtown loft

Bruce Kalberg holding one of his four guns

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More About

• Bruce Kalberg
• Peter Haskell
• Beth Thompson
• Shootings
• New York Crime

“He just laid it all out, very graphically,” Lange recalls. He said Pete had come in, busted through, grabbed him around the neck, [Bruce] had a .25 Beretta, he shot him in the heart — it was pretty graphic — and Pete kind of looked down, like, ‘You got me,’ and then he was dead. Bruce was very emotional when he was saying this. He was obviously supertorn up about it. Then he started going off about how he’s got too many leukocytes in his frontal lobe, and so he sometimes has premonitions. There had been other attacks, but he knew this was coming. ...He said, ‘I’m 60 years old, and I never, ever thought I’d kill a man.’”

Lange also reports that Wojciak confided to him that when the police returned Kalberg’s guns, it sent him into a tailspin, and she had to admit him to the L.A. County Hospital/USC Medical Center psychiatric ward for a five-day stay. Police confirm having also been given this information. In any case, it wouldn’t have been Kalberg’s first visit: In the acknowledgments to his novel, Kalberg singled out “the dedicated nurses, interns and doctors of L.A. County-USC Hospital who took me from Emergency Intensive Care back to health through a long illness.” He also called for “a prayer for Elliott Smith, who died in L.A. County-USC-Emergency at the moment I was released.” (Smith died on October 21, 2003.) And in the ANP Quarterly article, Kalberg says he wrote the novel after “numerous breakdowns.”

Outside of referring to the incident as a “tragedy involving 2nd Amendment rights and a homeless man,” Kalberg declined to comment for this story. But in a Facebook post on March 14 of this year, at 12:42 a.m., since removed, he had this to say: “LAPD tells me that I must learn to love my friends & psychopathic acquaintances whom I have recently met. LAPD is OK. In the Valley of Death, pack a Roscoe.” And in another post, on March 26, at 12:13 p.m., also since removed, he wrote, “Not in jail. D.A. called it self-defense. A person cannot murder another person in their home. It is legal to use deadly force against a killer, psychopath within one’s walls. A murderer may be sweet until he/she kills another person. There is no bail because there was no crime, save your money.”

According to police, before the alleged break-in, Kalberg and Wojciak had not taken out a restraining order, and had not contacted them as a precaution, nor did they claim in official statements that Haskell was acting crazy. As noted, there was no sign of a break-in at the loft. Although Tom Stern recalls that Haskell once told him, “In a street fight, go for the voice box,” police characterize the extent of Kalberg’s injuries as “redness on the back of the neck” — an observation borne out by LAPD photos. Kalberg had no blood splatter on him, despite an autopsy report confirming powder residue inside the wound, indicating a proximity of about 18 inches or less — surprising if Haskell was straddling his chest. Detective Dugger reports that rigor mortis evidence “didn’t jibe with the time frame,” suggesting Haskell had been dead for some time prior to the 2 p.m. 911 call. He also says that Wojciak was not interviewed extensively at the scene because, “Bruce told us she had left that morning and gone to a hotel.” (Wojciak did not respond to requests for an interview for this story.)