HALLOWEEN 1993Betty Sue Harris wanted to be a better person. She had survived a cancer scare and a couple of trips to the Los Angeles County Jail. All that mattered to her now was getting turned around so that she could spend more time with her three children.
That didn’t keep her from turning a trick or two. The motivations were simple. Money for rent, money for drugs – not necessarily in that order. Eventually, she would turn away from the life.
Maybe she could go back to school at Mt. San Antonio College. Maybe she could go back to being a secretary.
Harris knew how to type. All she needed to get by was $500 or $600 a month – that wasn’t too much to ask. It’s just that jobs are hard to come by when you’ve done time and your address is a no-tell hot sheet charging hourly rates on Holt Avenue in Pomona.
Turning tricks wasn’t easy work either. Almost 40 years old, Betty stood 5-foot-8-inches tall and weighed over 150 pounds. She competed for work with younger and prettier girls who shared her addiction to rock cocaine.
The west end of Holt Avenue where Betty Sue worked, and the surrounding neighborhood of Pomona, were built up in the mid 1960s as a refuge from the urban blight, crime and riots that plagued South Central Los Angeles 25 miles to the west. The hope behind this suburban utopia faded and the neighborhoods slowly decayed into a collection of cheap hotels, rundown housing projects and weather-beaten trailer parks.
Summers were dusty, hot and shade less; winters cold and foggy. The 1991 closing of the General Dynamics plant, which employed many of the city’s residents, didn’t help lighten the mood. In 1992, the three-day riot following a not guilty verdict for four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King spread east to Pomona spawning looting and sporadic arsons.
Originally the eastern portion of Rancho San Jose, a Mexican land grant from the 1830s, Pomona took its name from the Roman goddess of fruits and nuts. Vineyards flourished in the 1880s. Soon the area became dominated by citrus and fruit orchards.
The town became an incubator of sorts for the technological revolution of the early 20th Century. It was the first town in the west to supply alternating current electricity to businesses and homeowners, the first to install a semi-automatic telephone switchboard and among the first locations in the country to offer direct dial telephone service.
Massive churches were built; the town flourished. Rail lines coursed through, and when the automobile came into vogue, major highways linking the southwest with the rest of the United States made the town part of their corridor.
After World War II, a housing boom revitalized the community. General Dynamics, a prime defense contractor during the Cold War, moved in and put much of the town on its payroll. General Telephone employed the rest.
Slowly the vineyards vanished and the orange groves dwindled. The payrolls of General Dynamics and General Telephone began to shrink and the wealthier residents either died or moved on to tonier neighboring suburbs like La Verne, Diamond Bar and Claremont.
In the 1980s crack cocaine moved in and street gangs took over. They named their neighborhoods. “Ghost Town” covered the north, Cherryville and “Trey-Five-Seven” (as in the 357 Magnum revolver) were the middle of town. “Trece” or “Pomona Sur” to the south was primarily Latino gang territory. The neighborhood bordering the abandoned General Dynamics plant was where the prostitutes and drug dealers plied their trade. It earned a moniker all its own: “Sin Town.” Despite her misgivings and dreams of a better life, Harris fit right in.
In 1988 Betty Sue pleaded with a municipal court judge to give her one more chance. Locked up for a probation violation on a simple trespassing charge, Harris begged for the opportunity to make up lost time.
“I’ve been doing a lot of researching since I’ve been locked up,” Harris wrote in a March 24, 1988 letter to the court. “I’ve been through a lot of counseling and I’ve been working and going to school.
“I’m determined that my life is going to be much better and happier. I will go back to work and my life will be straighten (sic) out. I owe that to my children and myself. I have not been in any trouble and Only (sic) God knows if I can make it on the inside, I can make it on the outside also.”
* * *
Ivan Hill had been on the inside too -- for his entire adult life. As a teenager he had been sent to state prison for his role in a 1979 robbery and murder.
It was a botch job. The robbery occurred in the small town of Glendora, just minutes north of Pomona. A quiet suburb, Glendora seems stuck in a time warp. Tree-lined streets lead to a well preserved downtown populated with candy stores and malt shops. Storied Route 66, which linked Los Angeles and Chicago runs right through the center of town.
That small town atmosphere may have enticed Hill and his buddies Michael Benton and Venson Myers into making an easy score. The three men entered the town liquor store, stole money and cigarettes then shot the store clerk and a customer.
The customer, Thomas Leavell, a Glendora resident, died after being in a coma for 27 days.
Responding to a tip in the case, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Hill, Benton and Myers. The trio were convicted and sent to state prison. Hill did his time in Blythe, a desolate outpost in the desert on the California/Arizona border.
Thirteen years into his sentence, Hill, 30, was released. Even though he was on parole, he was free to roam his old stomping grounds. Hill got a car and returned to the Pomona neighborhoods he knew best.
SUNDOWN * * *
Halloween 1993 fell on a Sunday. Sin Town would have been busy with out-of-town customers making their way through to the annual top fuel funny car races at the Pomona drag strip. Through the course of the preceding week, temperatures had been unseasonably warm in the 90s and 100s. Wildfires raged in communities from Malibu on the coast to Banning in the desert.
Santa Ana Winds, blowing as hard as 25 miles per hour, stoked the fires and littered the sky with ash. Raymond Chandler’s quote about the winds that roar down through the canyons each fall is clichéd but appropriate.
“(The Santa Anas),” Chandler wrote, “curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen.”
Just after midnight on the 31st, with the Santa Anas blowing, and a full moon high in the night sky, actor River Phoenix snorted drugs with friends in the bathroom of the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard. He collapsed on the sidewalk outside the club, went into convulsions and died.
Throughout the morning, television and radio broadcasts were filled with news of the actor’s untimely death. Later in the day, 30,000 fans traveled to the Los Angeles Coliseum and saw the San Diego Chargers defeat the Los Angeles Raiders 30-23. The highlight of the game was a 102-yard touchdown run by Charger Donald Frank.
At sundown the sky turned bright orange, the mountains lost their color and loomed black on the horizon. The moon, which had been full the night before, rose nearly full just after sunset.
Around 9 p.m., in Pasadena, 20 miles northwest of Pomona, Blood gang members ambushed a group of middle school trick-or-treaters on their way home from a birthday party. Three teenagers were killed. The killers fled, leaving the mother of one of the victims to find her son dead on the sidewalk a block from home.
Throughout the day and into the night, traffic sped through “Sin Town.” Cars rolled down Mission Boulevard and Holt Avenue and out of Pomona. Somewhere along the line Betty Sue Harris stepped into Ivan Hill’s car.
Like River Phoenix and the three teenagers shot to death in Pasadena, Betty Sue’s life was about to end. Ivan Hill was about to be reborn as the man detectives and the press would call “The 60 Freeway Slayer.”
