Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (26 page)

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, Richee had a criminal past that involved arrests for theft and illegal use of weapons as well as allegations of stalking a female co-worker. That was news to hotel management. It turned out the Hampton Inn had hired the twenty-eight-year-old ten months earlier and handed him a key that opened all their guest room doors without bothering to run a criminal background check on him.

But Richee insisted he knew nothing about the crime, and police could find no forensic evidence to link him to it. So the brutal murder of Nanette Toder remained a mystery. It might have gone unsolved forever had one of Richee’s pals not gotten arrested in the spring of 1999. Eager to trade information for reduced charges, Michael Duello told police that he had recently helped Christopher Richee break into and enter a building in the area.

Based on Duello’s information, Richee was arrested and charged
with burglary. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison in March 2000. He soon pleaded guilty to an additional charge of harassing a witness in his burglary case—a woman whose car he asked friends to vandalize—and received another seven years.

But burglary was just the beginning. Christopher Richee had much more sinister secrets to hide, if his onetime pal was to be believed. Duello claimed that on December 16, 1996, Richee called him on his cell phone in a panic to say that police were following him to his home—a room in the garage of his mother’s house—to search it. There was a bloody towel in there that he needed to get rid of pronto. Could Duello slip through the window and snatch it? Duello agreed, found the towel, and tossed it into a Dumpster nearby.

He also told police that he was hanging out in Richee’s room in late December 1996 when he noticed that the machete Richee always kept in a cargo net was missing. He soon spotted the blade, but the handle was gone.

“What happened?” Duello asked, pointing to the knife.

Richee shrugged. “I was screwing around with it and the handle broke.”

Duello watched his friend warily. “Did you kill that girl?” he asked.

Richee shot him a glance. “What do you think?” he replied coyly.

“No,” said his friend.

“Stick with that,” was Richee’s answer.

Duello repeated his question.

Richee first said no, then yes, then no again, leaving Duello unnerved and at a loss about what to think.

Based on Duello’s statements, investigators decided to reexamine Christopher Richee’s role in the Nan Toder slaying. At last, the pieces began to fall into place.

Richee’s former girlfriend Jill Paoletti told police—and later testified in court—that she had been with him at his house on the evening
of December 12, 1996, when he suddenly ordered her to leave around eleven
P.M.
, claiming he had a stomachache. The police questioned her at the time, and something they said made her suspect that Richee had lied to get rid of her, then slipped out. She confronted him a few days after her conversation with the cops. Richee said sure, he left. He got hungry and went to get a burrito. That seemed odd for someone with nausea. Besides, Paoletti had never seen Richee eat late at night.

It wasn’t the only bizarre behavior he exhibited that week. Paoletti also remembered clearly that her boyfriend had shaved all the hair off his legs, pubic area, armpits, and face the first week of December that year. The only body hair he didn’t shave was on the top of his head.

Patricia Yodka, whom Richee was also sleeping with in late 1996, unbeknownst to Paoletti, told investigators and later testified that Richee sometimes asked her to lie on her back, nude, propped up on her elbows with her head tilted back. He even photographed her in the pose—the same pose in which Toder’s body was found.

Other acquaintances shared tales that left little doubt about Richee’s skill in breaking and entering. Jill Alexejun, yet another onetime girlfriend, stated that when she dated Richee in 1994, she was working as an assistant manager for the Lincoln Property Company. Richee was a maintenance technician there at the time. She often watched him change locks on apartment doors, access vacant apartments, and pick locked knobs deftly with a screwdriver. If the dead bolt was on, he used a drill. She also remembered once watching him unlock a door with a credit card.

Patrick Brennan, a friend of Richee’s from 1992, confessed that he had helped Richee break into the Hollywood Park video arcade and mini–golf course in Crestwood, where Richee was a manager, and steal thousands of dollars from the office safe. Before the robbery, Richee showed him a copy of the key armored-car drivers used to open the safe and explained that he had made the dupe by heating up
a piece of Plexiglas, sticking it in the keyhole, and then grinding it down.

In at least one robbery, Richee spray-painted graffiti to mislead police into believing gangs were behind his crime. Perhaps more alarming, friends said he viewed himself as a criminal mastermind and boasted that he could easily outsmart any dim-witted cop.

A former manager of Richee’s recalled him describing cruel pranks from his boyhood that included tearing the wings off birds and killing cats. And Duello wasn’t the only one who remembered Richee’s machete. Several former girlfriends confirmed that he kept the weapon in his bedroom at all times.

A chilling picture began to emerge of an arrogant, calculating psychopath who had systematically planned the brutal thrill killing of a complete stranger simply because he thought he could get away with it.

The O. J. Simpson case had saturated American media throughout the year before Nan Toder was murdered, and Richee had apparently learned enough about crime scene investigation from the television reports to know that shaving off his body hair and wearing gloves would reduce the risk of leaving traces of his DNA behind. He left the hair on his head to avoid attracting attention. He even knew enough about DNA to snatch a towel used by another guest ahead of time and plant it at the crime scene.

Investigators concluded that Richee realized he had only a few days to commit his crime before the upgraded locking system would make it impossible. He spotted Toder and checked to ensure that she would be a guest in the hotel for several nights. When he knew she was out of her room, he rigged the dead bolt on the door connecting 227 with 229 so that it would appear locked to Toder. Then he used the hotel’s computer to confirm that 229 was empty minutes before
entering room 227 to hack Nan Toder to death, most likely wearing only gloves to prevent fingerprints and a shower cap to avoid leaving any of his hair at the scene.

After the murder, he likely got dressed in room 229, then quickly jimmied the lock on the outside of room 227 before escaping through a door at the end of the hallway, where he had already deactivated the alarm. During one of his numerous forays into the room the morning Toder’s body was discovered, he managed to genuinely re-lock the dead bolt on the adjoining room door. His two fatal mistakes were leaving a machete print in blood on the bed and failing to notice the huge suitcase that Nan Toder had shoved against her room’s exterior door, because the door was in a darkened recess beyond the bathroom.

Christopher Richee was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 2002. In 2005, he won an appeal on the grounds that the trial court erred in allowing the prosecution to bring in information about his burglaries. His lawyers claimed that this unduly prejudiced the jury against him and prevented him from receiving a fair trial. The court decided there was no double jeopardy issue, so he was retried for Toder’s murder in 2006. That time he pleaded guilty despite having proclaimed his innocence in writing. Why? Because a guilty plea prevented another life sentence. The sentencing judge gave him a forty-year prison term and credited him with six years served. As of the writing of this book, Richee could conceivably be released from prison in ten years.

In the spring of 2003, Sol and Lin Toder settled their multimillion-dollar civil lawsuit against the hotel and devoted the entire sum to lobbying states to pass Nan’s Law statutes, which require hotel owners to run criminal background checks on all potential employees who would have access to guest room keys.

A few weeks after Toder’s murder, John-Campbell Barmmer was shocked to get a bill in the mail from the Hampton Inn for his late employee’s hotel stay. Naturally, he refused to pay it.

To outsiders, the Spiro family might have looked as though they had it all. A sprawling four-bedroom house with a swimming pool in posh Rancho Santa Fe, California. Horseback-riding lessons for the kids. Cocktail parties and country club memberships for the parents. But when the oldest Spiro child failed to turn up for a riding lesson, the neighbors began to get worried. No one had seen the Spiros for three days, which seemed odd. The kids were usually out skateboarding, and the mother was always at the club playing tennis or bridge. Finally, on November 5, 1992, some friends ventured up the drive and peeked in the window. They could see the youngest child clearly, lying motionless on her bed.

Police who responded to their 911 call found the house quiet and locked. Firemen had to break down a door to gain entry. Moving from room to room, they soon located all three Spiro children—sixteen-year-old Sara, fourteen-year-old Adam, and eleven-year-old Dina—lying in their beds, each dead from gunshot wounds to the head. Their mother, forty-one-year-old Gail, was dead in the master bedroom. She, too, had been shot in the head. The medical examiner put the date of death at about three days earlier—November 1 or 2.

The patriarch of the clan, British-born Ian Spiro, was nowhere to be found.

He was suspect number one until he turned up three days later seventy miles north in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park’s remote Coachwhip
Canyon, slumped over the wheel of his white Ford Explorer. The doors were locked and the keys were inside. An autopsy showed that forty-six-year-old Spiro had died of cyanide poisoning.

To call Ian Spiro a colorful character might be an understatement. When the family moved to San Diego County from southern France a year earlier, Spiro told the locals he was an international commodities broker. But if you believed the stories buzzing around Rancho Santa Fe, the eccentric Englishman was actually a spy with ties to the CIA, Great Britain’s MI-5, Israel’s Mossad, and some of the Arab world’s most feared terrorists.

Rumor had it that Spiro, a longtime resident of Beirut, played a role in negotiations with Lebanese extremists for the release of American and British hostages in the 1980s. By some reports, he introduced negotiator-turned-hostage Terry Waite to the Shiites who eventually kidnapped him. Others said Oliver North mentioned Spiro in his notebooks and suggested him as a go-between in Lebanon during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Could the murders be payback for some shadowy covert action? Were they a government-sanctioned assassination? An underworld hit? The case seemed to combine all the elements of a good murder mystery—wealth, glamour, and intrigue. It captivated everyone from local gossips to London newspaper reporters.

Soon plotlines worthy of a Jason Bourne blockbuster sprang up. According to one, Arab terrorists bent on revenge finally caught up with the Spiro clan. Another had renegades within Israeli intelligence bumping them off. A third pinned the slaughters on Japan’s deadly Yakuza Mafia as retribution for some shady Spiro business deals in the Far East. Yet a fourth claimed the family was eliminated by high-ranking U.S. ops because Spiro was hiding incriminating documents that proved Department of Justice misconduct. A rumor even flitted
around for a while about a dark-haired stranger with a foreign accent barging into the Spiro house hold a few days before the murders, then departing abruptly when he learned Ian wasn’t home.

But while conspiracy theorists speculated wildly on which sinister ghost had risen out of Spiro’s murky spy past to haunt him, another less glamorous possibility began to emerge.

The lead came from unexpected quarters. During the many police interviews with Rancho Santa Fe residents who knew the Spiros, someone mentioned that the family had a house keeper. Detectives managed to locate the woman, eighteen-year-old Paula Rojas, and asked if she had noticed anything unusual in the family’s behavior. Yes, she said.

In broken English, she told them that her husband drove her to work at seven
A.M.
on the morning of November 2, as always. No sooner did she walk in than she bumped into a disheveled and dazed Ian Spiro, standing in the kitchen wearing a red bathrobe.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

Rojas said that Mrs. Spiro had asked her to work that day. Spiro told her the family wasn’t there and her services wouldn’t be needed. There were some “problems,” he mumbled vaguely.

Flustered, the maid explained that her husband had left and now she had no ride home. Spiro said he would drive her home, then ushered her out of the main house and into a guest house to wait while he got dressed. A short time later, he drove Rojas back to the migrant camp where she spent weekends. It was the last she had seen or heard of the Spiro family.

Around the same time that Rojas’s story came to light, investigators poring over mounds of documents in Spiro’s office unearthed troubles that had little to do with cloak-and-dagger politics. Despite his family’s lavish lifestyle, Ian Spiro was flat broke. He hadn’t paid his rent or even his grocery bills in months. Hundreds of lottery tickets were stashed near a Ouija board, suggesting that he had been trying
to conjure spirits to pick winning numbers. Though there were notes on countless business schemes, Spiro’s main enterprise seemed to be providing 900 numbers for dating services, psychics, and chat lines that advertised on late night television. His business, Home Media Promotions, earned a small amount from every call placed, but records showed Spiro was spending far more to advertise than he was collecting.

At one time, Ian Spiro had been a prosperous entrepreneur. But those days were evidently gone. The catalyst for his downward spiral seemed to be a plan to export Porsches to Japan. He had made money on the first shipment but sank huge profits into the second, which vanished mysteriously en route. Japanese police suspected the Yakuza were to blame but could do little to help Spiro recoup his losses. Since then, the man had been taking more and more desperate measures to stay afloat, luring new investors into his schemes and then paying the furious existing ones with their capital.