Los Angeles is a temptation. The chaise lounge, poolside life is everywhere. L.A. has its poverty and its struggles, but here perhaps more than any other place in the country, even the people near the bottom can, like the hired help in a mansion, reach out in almost any direction and touch a fantasy. From any one of the small stucco dwellings in Mar Vista a housewife can walk into her back yard and see the lights of twelve-room, split-level homes twinkling every night in the Hollywood Hills. Office clerks who live in hotter, smoggier Van Nuys drive to work in the city every morning over the eucalyptus shaded canyon roads of Beverly Hills. One cannot travel far on a freeway without passing a dozen Mercedes and maybe even a Bentley or two with a television personality sitting in the back seat. In Los Angeles, wealth can seem no more than a single business deal away. If you are young, you just have to hustle a little.

Hustling is everywhere. While, no doubt, the great majority of Angelenos live unpretentious, industrious lives, in a city of such magnitude there is still room for half a million on the make, people attaching themselves to fame and upward mobility by whatever means available. A liquor store owner displays glossy pictures of celebrity customers to attract those who want to buy their vodka where Dean Martin buys his. A thirteen year old girl announces proudly to a friend in a record store that her father sells John Denver his insurance. Nobody feels like a nobody.

Where there is not genuine prosperity there is often the fa\\a231ade of it. The movie industry's craft for creating illusion pervades. Apartment houses touted as "luxury" are slapped together almost faster than the bubble in a carpenter's level can settle. Although the Jacuzzi whirlpools they advertise may be roped off nearly every month for repairs, and the wallboard in the apartments may leak like paper-mâché with the first good winter rain, and though it may turn out that nearly all of the luxury budget was put into the building's fancily balustraded frontside, no one passing by on the street is the wiser and some even inside refuse to acknowledge the disappointments. It turns out the wet bars are extra, and half the Mercedes on those freeways are leased.

But somehow, the temptation never dims.

There is little wealth, real or pretended, in El Sereno, an old district on the east side of Los Angeles. The simple houses perched atop cement slabs do not vary. Their addresses belong to steeply inclined streets, narrow and winding. Many of the signs above the small grocery stores are lettered in Spanish. Milk is bought in the little half quarts.

In the early Sunday morning hours of December 11, 1966, Elbert Thompson, a post office clerk, the only black man in the Ballard Street neighborhood, was still not sleepy. He occupied himself with some late night reading. Shortly after 1:00 A.M., at last feeling drowsy, he inserted a marker rather than dog-ear the page of the library book, and after opening the bedroom window he joined his wife in bed. The air coming in from between the two closely built houses, his and the Stocktons', was crisp, freshly laundered by a fierce five day storm, and still smelled of rain and the sweet scent of vine and brush.

Above the scattered lights of the central city, only four miles distant, no one stirred in this hillside community.

But somewhere out in its darkness, someone watched. And waited.

At three in the morning, only one television set still nickered on Thompson's block. It was in the living room of the home next door. His neighbor. Henry Stockton, still up watching a late night movie, would not hear the door open slowly, nor would he pay attention to the small breeze which passed through his house.

At 3:40 A.M., Elbert Thompson awakened to a prickling sensation the residents of Southern California's thicketed hillsides never cease to dread. Lifting his head from the pillow, he saw, with horror, swirling flames a few feet outside his bedroom window. Throwing off the covers, Thompson pulled his still half-asleep wife from bed. Together they stumbled out into the cold night air to their tiny front yard where they had positioned a sprinkler and two hoses in case of just such a calamity. Each grabbed a hose, and in less than a minute they were pummeling their small house with water.

"It's not us!" Mrs. Thompson called through the smoke to her husband. She pointed to the Stockton house; it was the front bedroom of their neighbors' home that was ablaze. Thompson turned his hose toward it and shouted over his shoulder to his wife to call the fire department. He edged closer to the flames and smoke. "Henry! Are you in there, Henry?" he yelled above the din of rushing hot air and hissing tar shingles. "Just give me a sign, and I'll come in!"

His heart sagged for Henry Stockton, that beefy, pleasant young man who looked so foolish on his tiny motor scooter, with his knees pointing out. The scooter could barely make it up the hill with the heavy fellow on it. He always asked the Thompsons if they needed anything at the store. Thompson had hardly ever seen Mrs. Stockton.

Within minutes, twisted overparked Ballard Street was a commotion of the red lights and sirens of Engine Company 16A. As the heavy hoses were wheeling off the trucks, Chester Willey, a seventeen-year veteran of the L.A. Fire Department, ran by himself up the front porch steps. Others rushed with axes to the side of the house, where most of the smoke was billowing. Willey found the screen on the front door closed but unlocked, and the door behind it ajar. The back door, other firemen were discovering, was closed but also unlocked.

Entering the house, Willey proceeded carefully into a living room filled with smoke, but still untouched by the flames. In the otherwise darkened room, a television set cast a diffuse glow, like headlights in a fog. Through the thick haze, Willey discerned a human form sitting eerily in front of the set. Drawing closer, he saw it to be a young, barrel-chested man, his head slumped to the side, blood trickling from his mouth. The television, Willey now observed, was merely crackling static, its screen snowy with a channel long since off the air.

Willey took hold of the man's legs -- he was too heavy to lift -- and began dragging him toward the front door. He was met at the porch by Captain Peter Pucio, and together they carried the victim onto the small front yard. The face they gazed down at on the scraggy grass had a look they had seen before. The mouth was agape; the eyelids were protuberant and purple with the blood collected behind them. There was no need to check for a pulse.

Squad cars from the Highland Park Division of the Los Angeles Police Department arrived. El Sereno is in their jurisdiction. As the sound of glass windows being shattered by firemen filtered down to the street, Sergeant Wayne Barone radioed for an ambulance. Waiting for its arrival, Barone climbed the slanted cement stairs that led to the pale yellow, one-story house. Pausing, he let his flashlight play across the body laid out on the front yard a few feet away. This was not a victim of fire. There were three holes in the left side of the head, blood matting the hair all around them. The victim's shirt unbuttoned, its flaps spread wide, Barone could also see that the man's entire upper torso was smeared with blood. A stream of it had run down and collected as a pool in the navel. And there were two more holes -- in the chest. Sergeant Barone called homicide.

When the ambulance crew arrived, they pronounced the victim dead at the scene.

As the young paramedics performed that perfunctory task out on the front lawn, the fire fighters continued to pour water into the front bedroom, nearly all of which was charred. Departmental rules require that when the cause of fire is not "obviously accidental" the engine company captain is to call arson investigators. Captain Pucio did so, and just before 5:00 A.M., Merle Pugh, senior investigator for the L.A. Fire Department's Arson Investigation Section, arrived. By that time the fire had been "knocked down" but not entirely extinguished.

Pugh had investigated over five thousand fires. He moved quickly and efficiently. As he surveyed the damage inside the house, he estimated the fire had burned for approximately half an hour before detection.

On the floor of the front bedroom closet he found a pile of ashy clothing. It was not a random pile, spread out as when clothes fall off their separate hangers, but rather a compact one. A pile, Pugh's training dictated, that had possibly been constructed by human design. Directly above it, the metal pole where the clothes once hung was grotesquely warped by a particularly intense heat. Pugh believed he had found an origin of the fire.

Several of the drawers to the dresser were open. They had been open before the fire had started, Pugh was certain, because the varnish on their interiors was blistered by the heat. On the floor at the foot of the bed was another ashy pile of clothing. Inches above it, the bed's metal frame and springs were buckled up from the floor. Again, but less markedly, the result of a greater heat. Pugh looked back at the pile of clothing in the closet. Two independent origins of fire meant the crime of arson. Whether there had actually been two in this case, Merle Pugh could not be certain. In his report, he would merely term the fire "suspicious."

"Morning, George," Pugh said as he emerged from the house, flipping shut his notepad.

George Greene, coroner's investigator, nodded from where he knelt, yawned, and turned back to the body on the front lawn. The victim, now identified by his neighbor, Elbert Thompson, as Henry Stockton, was a Caucasian appearing to be in his late twenties. He was wearing a tan and white plaid shirt and khaki slacks, no underwear. In one pants pocket was a ring with fifteen keys on it and two sweepstake tickets. In the other a ten dollar bill.

Greene found five bullet wounds: one in the left temple, one just above the left tip of the nose, one near the left sideburn, and two in the upper right portion of the chest. One of those was directly into the breastbone, but the other was seemingly high and wide of its mark, near the collarbone.

Only around the head wounds was what is called "tattooing" -- a pattern of small black dots caused by unburned gunpowder which, spraying out of a gun barrel, penetrates the skin around the wound. The confined (one to one and a half inches in diameter) as opposed to dispersed markings unmistakably indicated that the muzzle of the gun was nearly touching the victim's head when fired. Greene could not determine the sequence of the bullets. But from the absence of any signs of struggle in the living room and the presence of tattooing only around the head wounds, one could have speculated that the killer had come up on Henry Stockton, catching him unawares as he watched TV, fired three shots into the head, killing Stockton instantaneously, then stepped to the other side of the room and, as if taking target practice, pumped two more bullets into the slumped body. The first one was not very accurate, the second much better. There were, indeed, murderers of such mentality in this world; that sequence of events, although speculative, was grimly plausible.

At 5:35 A.M., Highland Park homicide detectives Joe F. Aguirre and R.J. Duretto made their way through the small crowd of policemen, firemen, and onlooking neighbors to the house at 2723 Ballard Street. Sergeant Aguirre, a man with dark luminous eyes, his black hair and mustache flecked with grey, stood with open notebook on the sagging front veranda, asking his questions of the firemen and police officers who were first to arrive at the scene. Because both the front and the back doors had been found unlocked and all the windows had been latched and unbroken, forcible entry appeared unlikely.

The critical step in police work -- preserving the crime scene untouched for the experts (detectives, fingerprint specialists, blood analysts, etc.) -- had been difficult in this case. Learning of the number of men who had already trudged through the house dragging hoses behind them, Aguirre jammed a second piece of gum in his mouth and shook his head.

While the police photographer he brought along snapped pictures of the body still out on the lawn, he went hunting for clues inside. On a flimsy TV tray next to the chair where the victim was found was an empty quart bottle of beer, no glass. It was a brand that Aguirre had never heard of -- Old Timers Lager.

Also on the TV tray, ironically within reach of the victim, was Henry Stockton's own life insurance policy.

In the smaller back bedroom Aguirre found a disarray of toys and a small boy's clothing. In the living room, where the shooting had apparently taken place, the detective began taking detailed notes: the splatters of blood on the overstuffed chair Stockton had been sitting on, the streaks of it on the wall behind, a pair of woman's black gloves on the adjacent couch. On the floor was the strangest of the items: a white kitchen towel with a circle of blood on it -- not a spot (i.e., filled in), but a circle.

Because there were no apparent signs of struggle, the LAPD neglected to take blood samples to determine if any belonged to someone other than the victim.

Rather oddly, there were five boxes of personal papers sitting on the dining room table. Aguirre rummaged through them and discovered two items of interest. One was a marriage certificate indicating Henry Stockton had married a Sandra Darcy Stockton on October 1, 1966, only ten weeks earlier. Because the last name on the certificate was the same, Aguirre assumed, correctly, that they had previously divorced and then remarried. The other item that caught Aguirre's eye was a receipt from Pachmayr Gun Works in Los Angeles. Receipt number: C886031. Type of weapon: Hi Standard .22 caliber Sentinel model revolver. Serial number: 757762. Description: blue anodized, two-inch barrel; white grips. Date of sale: June 27, 1966.

Purchaser: Sandra Darcy Stockton.

Police officers who had seen the victim had all guessed his wounds to have been made by .22 caliber bullets.

A quick, second look at Henry Stockton's insurance policy revealed that the beneficiary was also the wife, Sandra Stockton.

The widow's gun receipt in the dining room, the insurance policy in the living room naming the widow as beneficiary -- it was all too pat. Someone, it would seem, had left an intentional trail that led suggestively to the victim's spouse. But as Aguirre began mulling over theories, his questions led him only to greater puzzlement. If Stockton's murderer had been trying to throw suspicion in the direction of the wife, whose whereabouts this morning were still unknown, why had he (or she) set the house on fire? That would only destroy the very documents that directed the suspicion towards her.

On the other hand, the fire had been set in a bedroom, and the gun receipt, insurance policy, and victim had been found in the living and dining rooms, where the fire had not yet even touched. Was it then not possible that the murderer had been even more subtle than Aguirre had first considered? Had a clever killer set the fire only to make it appear there had been no frame-up, gambling that the fire would be extinguished before the flames consumed the house and the documents with it?

Aguirre radioed his watch commander to send fingerprint experts. After giving officers at the scene instructions to "seal" the house, he loaded up the back seat of a squad car with the five boxes of papers (along with the insurance policy), and took them down to Highland Park headquarters.

It had been a year and a half since Vicky Stowe had last seen her childhood friend, Sandra Stockton. Since that time, it had only been a Christmas card from Sandra, not quite a year ago. With her own husband, a marine, having just shipped off to Vietnam, it was a pleasant surprise for Vicky when her old friend telephoned her on December 2 and suggested they spend the following weekend together. Henry had to work Saturday, December 10, Sandra had explained. How would it be if she and Kyle, their four-year-old son, came out to Twentynine Palms for the weekend? Twentynine Palms was only one hundred and forty miles east of Los Angeles.

"Terrific," Vicky said. "Tell Kyle we'll take him horseback riding." There were stables for the enlisted men's families at the Marine base.

When the two women met Friday evening, Vicky was stunned by Sandra's new appearance. From having once looked like a matronly bookkeeper, the metamorphosis was almost total.

All her life Sandra had had a considerable weight problem, exacerbated as an adult by her taste for epicurean meals and her ability to cook them. Only five feet, two inches tall, she had bulged to a round, jointless looking two hundred pounds just after her first marriage to Henry. Now she was down to a plump but shapely 125 pounds. Health spas and singles bars were twenty-six-year-old Sandra's explanation, which she offered with a laugh.

Even more dramatically, her pilgrimishly simple, blue-eyed face had been made over with carefully brushed mascara and glistening pink lipstick, the heavy-rimmed glasses were gone and replaced by contacts, the once unremarkable teeth newly capped. Sandra's tumbleweed brown hair was now teased and dyed a striking blond -- like that of a convent runaway having overdone her months of freedom as a cigarette girl.

It was astonishing, Vicky thought. If she had met Sandra under any situation other than this prearranged one, she probably would not have even recognized her. It was not the same person.

The good news this Christmas, Sandra told a staring Vicky, was that she and Henry were happily back together again.

Saturday, while Vicky's children and Kyle, a bouncy youngster with soft curly hair, played outside, Vicky and Sandra sat on the back porch steps and recalled their own school days with wistful laughter.

"Remember the first time you stayed overnight?" Sandra smiled kiddingly. "You couldn't believe mom read us The Prophet every night like it was the Bible. Wow, you gave me this look like, 'but they don't teach Kahlil Gibran in Sunday schools. Oh-oh, maybe this family's really a secret cult of some kind.'"

Vicky rocked her shoulder affectionately against Sandra's, accepting the needling.

Early Sunday morning, as Vicky fixed breakfast, the phone rang.

It was Sandra's father, Ted Bingham, asking to speak with his daughter. Vicky handed over the phone. In a moment, Sandra sank back against the refrigerator. She turned pale, and the hand holding the receiver began to tremble. In another minute she hung up and, in a restrained voice, managed to get out, "Henry's dead."

Motioning Vicky away, she reeled toward the bathroom. For several minutes, Vicky, helpless, heard the sobbing. When Sandra emerged, she seemed in a daze. Vicky steered her to the living room couch and gave her a tranquilizer.

It was all very confusing, Sandra stammered. Her parents had received a call from Betty Stockton, Henry's mother. She had been so hysterical, the Binghams had barely been able to understand her sentences. The circumstances were still unclear, but one fact was not mistaken -- Henry had been shot dead.

"How in God's name do I tell Kyle?" Sandra asked Vicky, pressing her fingertips to her eyes. They decided it would best be done at home.

"We better take him horseback riding like we promised," Sandra said.

She stared at the floor. "Yeah, that's what we'll do," she said, almost defiantly.

For twenty minutes, while Sandra stood by herself near the tack room, Vicky led her horse around the small track, first with her own children, then with Kyle.

Vicky insisted on driving Sandra and Kyle back to Los Angeles, and at 11:30 they all left in Sandra's red Rambler. Devil winds whipped the arid land. Even in winter the temperature in that stretch of California desert was in the eighties, and in the flat distance the sagebrush appeared to shimmer. The ride to Los Angeles passed in near total silence.

At noon that Sunday, detectives Aguirre and Duretto went to the County Coroner's Office in the drab fetid basement of the old Hall of Justice in the Civic Center near downtown Los Angeles. There they watched the autopsy on the body of Henry Stockton, which was being performed by Dr. Thomas Noguchi. The Japanese-born surgeon was then Deputy Medical Examiner and would soon become Coroner of Los Angeles County, an office that would bring him notoriety through such cases as the Robert Kennedy assassination, the Manson murders, and the so-called "SLA shoot-out."

Any one of the five bullet wounds, Noguchi advised the detectives, could have been, in and of itself, fatal. All five slugs, deformed from having hit bone, were recovered from the body, but the sequence of their firing could not be determined. There were no burns on Stockton's body and there was no evidence of smoke inhalation. The blood sample showed an alcohol content of .10 percent, what Noguchi would describe as "under the influence" but not "drunk." The detectives recalled that there had been nearly a dozen empty quart bottles of beer in the Stockton house. Had Henry Stockton drunk them all, sometime earlier perhaps? Or had someone else been there drinking with him?

Sandra, Kyle, and Vicky arrived at the Bingham residence in Downey, a suburb of Los Angeles, at 2:30 P.M. Sandra had fallen into her mother's arms at the doorway, weeping. By the time detectives Aguirre and Duretto sat down alone with Sandra a little after 3:00 P.M. in the living room, she had composed herself.

A common police practice during initial interviews is not to give out all the known facts at once. If the party has knowledge of certain facts which only a person involved in the crime could have, his relating these facts is evidence of guilt. But even if the party is innocent, investigators try to minimize the possibility of various pieces of information wending their way through office lunches and cocktail parties back to the culpable person. At the beginning of the conversation with Sandra, Aguirre made references to Henry's possibly "dying as a result of the fire." Later, he implied that suicide had not been ruled out. Eventually, out of simple decency, he related what they knew thus far about his death. Henry had been shot five times. Sandra cast her eyes to the floor and sucked in a deep breath.

Although needing a cigarette, Sandra answered the detectives' questions calmly, quietly.

Her marriage to Henry had been a troubled one in its early years, she explained, though it seemed recently that matters were improving. The problem had always been Henry's unassertiveness, his lack of ambition. A few years earlier, it had become too much for Sandra, and in April of 1965, after nearly five years of marriage, she had left him. The divorce decree (filed for in June of 1965) became final August 2, 1966, two months before their remarriage.

"I had yelled at him a lot," Sandra admitted, her voice soft and tired. "But he never argued back, not to me, not to anybody." She put out her cigarette, and looking at Aguirre a moment, she verbalized the detectives' problem simply: "Nobody would want to kill Henry."

Aguirre probed for the facts relevant to the previous few days. What about the trip to Twentynine Palms? She had arrived there Friday evening, Sandra told him, having left directly from work at Harshaw Chemical in the City of Commerce that afternoon, stopping only to pick her son up from the babysitter. Because Henry had insisted on knowing that she arrived safely, she had called her mother from Twentynine Palms, and her mother relayed the message to Henry. As far as she knew. Henry had worked on Saturday and was planning on being home Sunday when she got back from her trip.

The sergeant asked Sandra for the names of Henry's friends. Jake Fields, she said, a Bobby someone, she gave them a few more. Most of them hung out at a bar called Lucky's. Aguirre asked Sandra if he might take her address book for a few days -- perhaps there were other people she could not recall offhand who might know something. She dug a thick blue book out of her purse for them.

"We found a receipt in the house," Aguirre told Sandra, "indicating you bought a .22 caliber revolver last summer. Do you know where the gun is now, Mrs. Stockton?"

Sandra looked up, a little taken aback by the question. She explained that she had not really paid for the gun, but that it had been bought for her as a present by a man named Dick Scott. He was one of many fellows whom she had dated casually during her separation from Henry. She had met Dick Scott, she said, at a singles bar called the Stardust. They talked about going to the desert once to target shoot. Later she had discovered the gun did not work properly and she returned it to Scott, who promised to have it repaired. But she had not seen him or the gun since. When asked where Dick Scott could be located, Sandra could remember only that he sold insurance and lived somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. He was tall, on the handsome side, and he drove a blue Chrysler, 1965, she recalled vaguely.

The detectives thanked Sandra for her cooperation and asked if she would send her friend in for a few minutes.

"Are you Vicky Stowe?" Aguirre asked as the other woman came through the door.

"Yes, I am. I'm Sandra's alibi."

If that were an attempt at levity, Aguirre thought to himself, it was in bad taste.

He asked Vicky about the weekend visit, and her version corroborated what Sandra had told him. After the brief, ten-minute interview with Mrs. Stowe, Aguirre called Sandra in again and asked if she would be willing to take a lie detector test.

"Yes, of course," Sandra said with a puzzled look.

The test was not needed yet, Aguirre told her, and most likely it never would be. (Often detectives ask people if they will submit to a polygraph examination only to see what their reaction to the request will be.) Aguirre then asked Sandra to come down to the police station and give them an exemplar of her fingerprints. A normal procedure, he explained, in order to identify and separate hers from any others that might be found in the house. That same afternoon, Harold Tanney, a civilian fingerprint expert employed in the Latent Prints Section, Scientific Investigation Division (SID) of the LAPD, was back at the home on Ballard Street, photographing and "lifting" latent prints (i.e., dusting surfaces with a powder to "develop" the print, applying a transparent tape to the then visible print, and lifting the tape which bears the print onto a card with a contrasting background).

Sandra got her coat and accompanied the officers to the Downey Police station. Holding her arms tightly to her sides, her cheeks puffed slightly like a child who has been unjustly punished, Sandra became flustered as she looked around the station room.

"Does this mean I'm going to be arrested?" she asked.

"No, of course not," Aguirre assured her, gently guiding her to the table where there were ink pads and examplar cards.

As one of the Downey policemen took Sandra's finger and began moving it down toward the ink pad, Sandra's eyes shot up toward the ceiling, out of focus. "Oh, my God," she muttered. Her knees sagged beneath her, and she began to fall backward. The officer at her side caught her and eased her down to a sitting position on the floor. Her eyes were closed, her mouth lolled open.

Aguirre knelt beside her and called for a glass of water. Sandra's eyes came open and looked directly at him, then over his shoulder and beyond him. Aguirre held her hand. Five minutes later, they finally took her prints.