Murderer with a Badge by Edward Humes

Author:Edward Humes [Humes, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: True Crime
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-02-23T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Shortly after Dennis France started working for the police, Bill Leasure had telephoned him from jail. They hadn’t spoken in months—not since a week or so before Leasure’s arrest—but both men tried to project warmth and reassurance, picking up where they had left off, conversing about wives, jobs, and family. All the while, an LAPD tape recorder spun silently, connected to France’s phone.

Leasure apologized for waiting so long to call. He had been reluctant to phone any of his friends after being arrested, he told France, because he was afraid the police would accuse him of rounding up people and concocting a defense. So he had waited sixty days, then called a few close friends like Dennis, confident that enough time had passed to avert any suggestion that he was trying to influence potential witnesses. France said he understood.

When Detectives Arce and Petroski listened to the tape of this conversation, they recognized this claim as a blatant, if casual, lie. This was Leasure’s way of making sure his friend didn’t feel slighted: I wasn’t avoiding you, he was telling Dennis, I didn’t call anyone. But the truth was, the detectives knew, Leasure had called Irene Wong shortly after his arrest, and Officer Jon Herrington a few days later, with his request to empty out his locker. Numerous other friends had been called as well, LAPD employees among them. Leasure simply hadn’t found it necessary—or wise—to call Dennis France at that time. He only phoned the welder after France, mimicking panic, begged Betsy Mogul to have her husband call as soon as possible.

The story about waiting sixty days might have been a simple white lie, but it was uttered with conviction and sincerity, and the detectives thought a glimmer of Leasure’s supposed hidden personality, the “master manipulator,” was peeking through on that tape.

By the time a jailhouse visit was engineered between France and Leasure, the two men had talked on the phone twice. However, France turned on the tape recorder LAPD had installed on his phone for only one of those conversations, he would later claim. “I forgot,” he told Arce and Petroski.

In any case, the one telephone conversation he did record sounded innocuous enough. Leasure knew jail phones were often monitored, and he suggested France’s phone might be tapped, too. Throughout the conversation, after his apology and explanation for not calling, Leasure repeatedly stressed his innocence and accused the police of persecuting him and all his friends. At times it seemed as if Leasure was delivering a testimonial for himself. Clearly, he assumed others were listening in.

“They think I’m a bad guy, probably,” Leasure said at one point. “And they’re going to go through everything they can to try to prove it. And you know what, in the end, they’re gonna prove I’m a pretty good guy.”

“Yeah, yeah,” France said, a pillar of support. “Probably will.”

“You know, I’ve been seventeen years and never had a complaint, other than six personnel complaints against me, and they’re not, you know, neglect of duty.

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