Dateline NBC tonight, December 17, 2010 is going to look at the investigations and questions surrounding what now appears to be the senseless murder of Ronni Chasen by Harold Smith.
The views in Hollywood are varied, here is some of what I found that the famed Beverly Hills crowd are musing about.
In the extreme you have one “unnamed source” telling Deadline, “After listening to the details of the press conference, one of my police sources familiar with the investigation questioned the credibility of the investigation and quipped, “If I’m murdered and you find my body in Beverly Hills, please drag my body to LAPD. Even if you have to leave a bloody trail.”
I will be adding some additional details in a few minutes but Date Line NBC should be interesting and our favorite Hollywood PI, John J. Nazarian will be on talking with others. The Ronni Chasen case will not be covered with the whole show as there are other interesting crimes scheduled for tonight on the program.
The Beverly Hills police held a press conference on Wednesday stating that they believe that Harold Martin Smith, a career criminal who served time in state prison, shot and killed Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen. Police announced that lab tests revealed a preliminary match between the murder weapon presumed to have killed publicist Ronni Chasen and the gun used by Howard Smith to kill himself. The Beverly Hills Police stated that Smith acted alone in killing Chasen and police don’t believe the murder was a professional hit, but rather a “robbery gone bad.” The police theory is that Smith was on his bicycle and intended to rob Chasen, but she sped off after he shot her.
The Daily Beast gives us a synopsis of facts and just how this murder might have been a random act.
Police believe Smith carried out the shooting on foot as Chasen waited for the light to turn. He could well have staked out the corner, waiting past midnight into the wee hours of Nov. 16, a weekday, when traffic is at its lightest. He would have waited for a clear stretch without other passing cars, then made his move for Chasen’s vehicle, goes the police’s theory.
Smith reportedly killed Chasen with a .38 revolver, which can take regular or hollow-point bullets. A revolver does not discharge cartridge casings, as has been endlessly speculated.
In the botched robbery, Smith unloaded five bullets at the veteran publicist, then dashed back to his seven-speed and fled the scene, police say. Chasen did not surrender her purse, jewelry, money, or car, but lurched leftward onto Whittier, where she crashed into a lamppost.
Questions were hurled back at the Beverly Hills Police Department. A black man cycled seven miles to Whittier and Sunset, a cornerstone of ivory-white Beverly Hills, and no one clocked him when police are famously alert to African-American men in the area? Not a snippet to be found on any of the security cameras at the grand homes along Sunset Boulevard? No spent cartridge casings in the street? In short, the general complaint went, a thief simply does not accost a Mercedes on the most famous boulevard in Southern California in order to rob its driver and take nothing for his efforts, all with just a bicycle for transportation.
Harold Smith, a lifelong drug and alcohol abuser who was in and out of prison for much of his adult life, was indeed crazy.
On that point, the denizens of the Harvey Apartments, the benighted rooming house worthy of a Raymond Chandler novel, on Santa Monica Boulevard near Vine Street, tend to agree.
“He was always wearing these over sized gray gardener’s gloves,” said his neighbor Robin Lyle. “I think it was some germ phobia thing of his. Even if he shook my hand, he put the glove right back on.”
John Kratzel, 60, a self described “survivor of Vietnam, the Marine Corps, and 14 foster homes” maintains a well-kept room down the hall “He was always roaming the halls trying to engage me,” said Kratzel, who added that he told Smith more than once not to come into his room. “He was troubled and he was in trouble. He had several different bikes, stolen bikes. He used to keep them next door by the Dumpster.”
A longtime employee of the Harvey said Smith had four or five bikes during the few months he lived at the Harvey. “All stolen,” he added. Smith’s favorite, and the one he kept in his room, he said, was a burgundy-colored seven-speed, which the LAPD have taken into evidence. “I saw him once on that bicycle with the banana seat and curled handlebars,” said neighbor Terri Gilpin, 46, who occasionally chatted with Smith, “and he was holding a can of soda in his right hand. And he could ride with both hands in the air.”
That’s where Smith ended his misery with a bullet to his skull with a .38 revolver on Dec. 1 at 6 p.m., when police arrived to question him. It was the same gun that police say is a ballistics match with the one used to kill Chasen.
About two weeks before Smith took his life, he showed up excitedly outside Robin Lyle’s door. He had received “a few thousand dollars” from a lawsuit filed on his behalf by personal injury law firm of Larry H. Parker, though he complained about the lawyers “taking most of it.”
Michael Baden, the chief pathologist for the New York State Police, never doubted that Chasen’s murder did not require a trained hit man. But the Beverly Hills Police Department’s press conference, he said, raised more questions than it settled: “What is the provenance of the gun?” asked Baden. “When did he get the gun? Was it a hot gun someone wanted to get rid of? Were there other fingerprints on the weapon? And most importantly, did the bike have trace evidence on it?
That said, “trace evidence,” in the words of one police source, was found at the intersection of Sunset and Whittier, referring to the shattered glass of Chasen’s passenger window. The source also clarified that the investigators were not suggesting that Smith accosted Chasen’s Mercedes on his bicycle—but rather on foot.
The blowback from “the industry” was fast and fierce: from the friends and clients of Chasen to her fellow publicists, and even the local newspapers, websites, and bloggers who had run with the assumption that a professional assassin or mob hit man was the killer. “I don’t believe it for one minute,” Kathie Berlin, longtime Chasen friend and fellow publicist, told KNBC. “And not one person I’ve talked to believes it. You’re going to shoot someone in the heart five times from a bicycle and then just ride off?” Chasen’s friend, the film producer Lili Fini Zanuck, was nonplussed: “Anyone watching CSI can do better. It’s from an SUV?! It’s from a bike?!” she said. “What the fuck?”
While “the industry” scoffs at the police’s resolution of Chasen murder, Hollywood’s tourist industry has found a way to embrace the tragedy. The Starline bus tour, which features the homes of the stars, now drives by Sunset and Whittier, with its bullhorn announcing the intersection as the famed murder site of Ronni Chasen.
Los Angeles police say a man believed to be connected to the slaying of publicist Ronni Chasen shot himself to death at a Hollywood hotel as Beverly Hills police served a search warrant. Well not exactly a “Hollywood Hotel” as most of us “assume” that are not in Hollyweird. It was actually a Hollywood apartment building called the Harvey Apartments at 5600 block of Santa Monica Boulevard, near Western Avenue The Harvey Apartments are home to a diverse mix of tenants who pay month-to-month rents. The man moved into the building some months ago but was evicted per Brandon Harrison who spoke to multiple media outlets last night.
Then we have the dueling banjos explanation that goes from a “suspect” to only “a person of interest”.
Here are the facts as reported by multiple news outlets working the crowd and alleged “inside sources”.
The man — who apparently went by the first name Harold — was described as a tall, thin black man in his 40s. Neighbors giving news interviews on camera described “Harold” as being “very strange”, Neighbors described him as unusual, perhaps mentally unstable. Harold owned a bicycle that he kept with him including keeping it in his apartment and talked about it when he engaged in small talk with neighbors. Harold described himself to other residents as an ex-convict who served two stints in state prison, the most recent for weapons and drug convictions. Harold said he would never go back to prison, according to neighbor Brandon Harrison “He told me several times, `If it ever came back down to me going to prison, I would die first,’ ‘ Harold also bragged all the time that he was the one who killed the publicist, and he was always talking about how he was going to get paid $10,000 for it.” However Harold also said he was supposed to be getting $10,000, either for a job he did or from a lawsuit. Another neighbor, Terri Gilpin, told KTLA News that on several occasions, Harold said he had a gun and threatened to use it. “He would talk crazy stuff. He kept always bragging about having a gun.”.
Ok we have a “Harold” who had been evicted from the apartments, owned a bicycle which he loved so much that he kept it in his apartment and talked about it when he engaged in small talk with neighbors. He was very strange and even the neighbors thought he was so unusual that he might be “mentally unstable”. Yea this sounds like a guy who could ride his bicycle fast enough to catch up with a Mercedes and shoot so well as to leave a clean crime scene and get away on his bicycle fast enough not to be caught. UPDATE: “Harold walked with a “shuffle” so he could not have even ran from the murder scene, can we say RED HERRING. Does the police feel a tad stupid today?
Inside sources, up to four of them none of which were named, told media that; “The man had been under surveillance for some time and when police officers approached him in the lobby of the apartment building, he backed up and refused their orders to raise his hands then he pulled out a pistol and shot himself in the head, the sources said. He died at the scene. Police investigating the suspect’s suicide collected a bicycle from the dead man’s apartment as evidence. Police did not reveal what they think his role in the murder was, whether he was the trigger man or an accomplice. Cough Cough, really????
A leaked coroner’s report raised more questions, including whether the gunman was a hired killer. News media got a look at a copy of the initial coroner’s report, which said one bullet was recovered from her back while at the hospital and is possibly a 9mm hollow-point. Chasen received three apparent wounds to the right-side breast/chest area and two apparent gunshot wounds to the right shoulder. The report has now been put under a security hold. You think????
Detectives suspect the gunfire came from an SUV or a truck pulling alongside her car, and say it appears the shooter was an expert marksman.
“Normally they turn that gun sideways and this is something that’s done with some skill,” said former L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept. homicide detective Gil Carrillo. “I’ll be honest with you: I’ve carried a gun for 38 years and had to qualify quarterly. I don’t know that I could shoot and hit that mass like that.” Carrillo was a homicide detective for more than 20 years in Los Angeles. “My gut tells me that somebody contracted someone else to kill the victim,” Carrillo said.
Detectives have previously stated they believe the incident was not a random act of violence. Here’s a clip from an email Deadline obtained:
“My police source stated that it’s not clear that Chasen knew her shooter, only that she ‘may have known her shooter.’ Deadline goes on to say that; “The important information here is that if someone is being surprised by a shooter, they’d be shot through the shoulder or the back and then the bullet would enter the chest. It’s significant that Chasen was shot on the right breast plate in a cluster, indicating that she’d turned towards her shooter. Something occurred that prompted her to turn towards her shooter. The police source added that because the shooter had such a steady hand, it indicated that they were an expert in firearms.
However what the news reported ONLY once and never again is what caught my attention and that is the security cameras at the corner of Whittier Drive and Sunset Boulevard where the shooting occurred were not working that night, so they had to gather security footage from the homes on Whilshire Blvd. Who is responsible for those cameras? UPDATE The security cameras has not worked for two years because of budget cuts. Those rich people are going to love that finding of where their tax dollars are NOT going.
Chasen was shot five times in the chest at close range through the passenger window of her late-model Mercedes-Benz E-350 as she made a left turn onto Whittier from Sunset, at about 12:30 a.m. Nov. 16.
Beverly Hills Mayor Jimmy Delshad two weeks ago said police had determined Chasen was the intended target of the shooting.
After the shooting death of Chasen police have been investigating whether it was a hit or some other type of attack.
Chasen a high profile publicist in Hollywood previously served as vice president of publicity at MGM studios.
Chasen’s death was the third homicide in Beverly Hills this year. The neighborhood had no homicides last year.
The location has been called the Bermuda Triangle of Beverly Hills because it’s near the area where Howard Hughes survived a plane crash in 1946 and Bugsy Siegel was gunned down on the street.
I see screen writers already working on a script called the “Beverly Hills Bermuda Triangle.”
As soon as John J. Nazarian gets back from his latest client related trip we will contact him and ask him his opinion on all of the happenings from last night.
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