The town’s dirtiest cop was additionally probably the most colorless, with a forgettable face and a character as imprecise as fog. At 77, he has been in lockup for 38 years, greater than twice so long as he wore a badge. He has been a tame and quiet inmate, simply as he was identified — till his seize — as a tame and quiet policeman.
At Mule Creek State Jail, he attends 12-step applications and reads fantasy novels. He has a paralegal certificates, a sister-in-law with a visitor home, and a job supply at a regulation agency if he ought to ever get out.
However the individuals with the facility to free him hold puzzling over his crimes, demanding explanations, psychological perception, the thinnest ray of daylight on his motivations. Give us one thing.
On this sequence, Christopher Goffard revisits previous crimes in Los Angeles and past, from the well-known to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the reminiscences of those that have been there.
William Leasure, killer cop, at all times disappoints. He blames “low shallowness” for his run as an outlaw within the long-ago Nineteen Eighties. He blames “felony considering” for disgracing his badge. He blames “questionable characters” and “unwise acquaintances” for main him astray. It’s as near self-examination as he comes, no less than in entrance of the parole board.
He’s stingy with contrition. He admits to the comparatively minor crimes, just like the serial theft of yachts, insurance coverage fraud and the constructing of unlawful gun silencers. He nonetheless denies the massive crimes, those that put him in jail: orchestrating the contract murders of a magnificence store worker and a jazz bassist.
The sweetness store worker was named Ann Smith. She was 41, shot with a .45 handgun at her mom’s salon in Highland Park in Could 1980.
The bassist was named Tony de los Reyes. He was 63, killed with a shotgun blast to the top within the parking zone of a Sherman Oaks lounge in September 1981.
Tony de Los Reyes in an undated photograph.
(Courtesy of Anthony de los Reyes Jr.)
The victims had the dangerous luck of being pitted towards Leasure’s associates in acrimonious divorces. In each instances, the admitted triggerman was a barely literate welder Leasure had met at a gun present.
And in each instances, the shooter would testify that Leasure — a veteran LAPD officer with an unblemished report — deliberate the killings to appear like botched holdups and drove the getaway automobile.
Leasure grew up in Wayne, Mich. with what he described as “fantastic dad and mom” and a “Beaver Cleaver” childhood. He served with the Marines in Vietnam, beloved weapons and boasted of his marksmanship.
As an accident investigator within the LAPD’s Central Visitors Division, he was referred to as Gentle Invoice. He bragged that he by no means used his service weapon and didn’t draw a use-of-force criticism in 17 years with a badge. A pleasant man, individuals agreed.
He was nearing retirement when police caught him on a stolen pleasure boat in Could 1986 and linked him to a multimillion-dollar yacht-theft ring. The scheme: steal boats from their slips up and down the coast, disguise them and rename them on the market to unsuspecting consumers.
“When he mentioned ‘Do one thing,’ you do it… I might both do it or I could possibly be killed myself.”
The LAPD launched a process power. They referred to as their workplace the Leasure Room. After they searched his Northridge residence, they discovered a stolen automobile, unlawful gun silencers and a cache of random yacht booty.
Fellow officers discovered all of it laborious to consider. Gentle Invoice? At worst, he was a slacker who didn’t like to jot down tickets and dodged radio calls. Some, nonetheless, had seen that he lived bigger than a cop wage allowed. He drove quick Corvettes and owned a number of properties, plus a 42-foot yacht referred to as Thunderbolt.
Leasure would shrug off questions by saying his spouse, Betsy Mogul, took care of him. She labored as an assistant L.A. metropolis lawyer and made $78,000 a 12 months, greater than twice his wage. Police dug by her life. How a lot did she learn about her husband’s criminality? All they discovered was a case for doable tax fraud, which she beat at trial.
Enter Dennis France, a runty cop groupie who had befriended Leasure at a Pomona gun present and preferred to go on experience alongs with him.
“Me and Invoice had executed a whole lot of issues collectively,” France would testify. “We’d purchased silencers, we’d stole boats, we’d killed individuals, we’d damaged into locations.” He mentioned Leasure was the wheelman for the killings exterior the Sherman Oaks lounge and within the Highland Park magnificence store. “Plus, he paid me and organized ‘em and set ‘em up.”
Ex-LAPD officer William Leasure enters court docket April 15, 1991, for opening statements in his trial on accusations that he arrange murders.
(Larry Bessel)
France appeared to idolize Leasure, however he additionally claimed to be frightened of him. “When he mentioned ‘Do one thing,’ you do it,” France mentioned. “I might both do it or I could possibly be killed myself.”
By France’s account, Leasure instructed him to place a sock over the barrel of the .45 that killed Ann Smith on the salon, to catch the shell casing. When the casing tumbled out anyway, Leasure docked $500 from France’s $3,500 charge.
In trade for serving to to nail Leasure, France bought immunity from the D.A.’s workplace — a deal that may endlessly enrage detectives on the case. Police despatched France right into a bugged jail in hopes of getting Leasure to incriminate himself, a scheme the cautious Leasure foiled by writing his remarks on a chunk of paper, then erasing them.
France went in once more, and this time there was a tiny digicam within the ceiling. The pivotal second got here when he requested Leasure what he had executed with the gun from “Avenue 60,” a reference to the situation of the sweetness store homicide.
Leasure wrote a phrase on a chunk of paper. In sight of the hidden digicam, he held it as much as the glass.
“He’s fairly adept at presenting himself as a light and meek human being… You’d say, ‘Good man, completely colorless.’ You wouldn’t even know his character.”
“Melted,” it mentioned.
He wrote one other observe: “Dump every little thing unlawful.”
Protection attorneys struggled mightily, and unsuccessfully, to search out an harmless clarification for the notes when Leasure went on trial in 1991, charged with two counts of homicide and dealing with the loss of life penalty. They attacked France as a liar who had fingered Leasure to avoid wasting himself.
By appearances, Leasure was not a believable hit man, and explaining his motives was tough. The cash mentioned to be exchanged for the killings was just some thousand {dollars}. The prosecutor, James Koller, settled on a portrait of Leasure as a veteran cop who had grown uninterested in writing visitors tickets and was hungry for pleasure. He turned to homicide “virtually for the joys — to get away with it.”
The estranged spouses who solicited the killings had already been convicted. In Leasure’s trial, the primary jury deadlocked and a second was being picked when he pleaded no contest to 2 counts of second-degree homicide. He bought 15 years to life. He claimed to concern the anti-police sentiment that had been rising because the beating of Rodney King eight months earlier, a case which had overshadowed his sparsely-attended trial.
The prosecutor referred to as Leasure “probably the most corrupt policeman within the metropolis of Los Angeles in its historical past.”
Leasure referred to as himself “the nicest, quietest, mildest man you’ll ever need to meet.”
Addison “Bud” Arce is likely one of the LAPD detectives who constructed the case towards Leasure. Now retired, he testifies towards him at parole hearings. He thinks Leasure might have walked free years in the past, if he would have simply come clear. However one thing in his nature prevents him.
“If he went in and did mea culpas, he would have been out,” Arce says. “Extra so now, after they parole anyone for absolutely anything.”
As an alternative, 12 months after 12 months, Leasure sits earlier than the parole board and portrays himself as a person who was railroaded, who copped a plea to murders he had nothing to do with. He tasks an air of befuddled harmlessness. When the questioning grows sharp and his reminiscence for particulars fails, he blames “mind injury” from his ldl cholesterol drugs.
“I had shallowness points,” Leasure advised the board in 2021. “I had greed points. I believed that by impressing others, that they want me, and I’d be ok with myself. And I discovered all that was mistaken by self-help and restoration.”
Ex-LAPD officer William Leasure is incarcerated at Mule Creek State Jail in Ione, Calif.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Occasions)
He had a cheerful childhood, however even then, “I had shallowness points. And as a Marine, I had shallowness points. As a police officer, I had shallowness points.” His marriage to a metropolis prosecutor didn’t assist. His spouse’s fancy associates, the judges and attorneys, thought he was beneath her. At one level, he virtually broke up along with her, “and it affected my shallowness.”
“What I’ve gotten from you in the present day is you had some shallowness points,” mentioned commissioner Michele Minor.
He continued to disclaim the murders. He was requested in regards to the “Melted” observe.
“There is no such thing as a such observe ever,” Leasure insisted. “It doesn’t exist.”
Anthony de los Reyes Jr., 81, the son of the murdered jazz musician, has testified at eight or 9 of the hearings, to ensure his father shouldn’t be forgotten.
“He’s fairly adept at presenting himself as a light and meek human being,” Reyes mentioned. “You’d say, ‘Good man, completely colorless.’ You wouldn’t even know his character. He hasn’t modified from the primary time I had the displeasure of assembly him.
“The person’s a born liar, and he says every little thing in the identical monotone.
“No emotion. Completely none.”
The ritual has performed out earlier than the parole board 13 instances. Twice, the board determined Leasure was protected to launch, and each instances Gov. Gavin Newsom reversed the choice. The governor discovered he lacked “perception into his criminality and the causative components.”
Leasure, who turned down an interview request from The Occasions, will get to make his case once more in September. Arce, the retired detective, expects to be there to remind the board of the small print of Leasure’s crimes.
He calls him “this little milquetoast LAPD cop” and “Walter Mitty.” He has spent as a lot time as anybody pondering the motives of the meek officer who moonlighted as a success man, and so they stay fuzzy. It’s laborious to consider it was simply cash. Most likely, he thinks, Leasure organized murders so that folks would owe him; he preferred that.
“It’s complicated,” mentioned Arce, now 79. “Individuals have requested me over time, ‘What sort of man is that this?’ I can’t inform you.”
