The Vicodin Thieves. Chip Jacobs
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skipped a breath hearing that he had been killed, let alone in an execution-style butchery that terrified the neighborhood. Stephen Ballreich was hardly your ordinary murder victim, his history had been so extraordinary in the concrete suburbia normally ruled by stiff, paunchy men from older generations. When he assumed Alhambra’s mayoral seat in 1977 at the age of twenty-six in post-Watergate America, it slingshot him to instant celebrity as America’s youngest mayor and Golden Boy of the San Gabriel Valley.
Charismatic and hard charging, a natural before any crowd, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Ballreich had a seemingly limitless future. Congress, a run at governor: Republican pundits believed it was all his for the asking. Carelessness, however, would cost him his chance to shine on a bigger stage.
Shortly after his landside re-election in 1978, the electricity that had once distinguished him curdled into scathing headlines against him, as activists accused him of misspending about $2,700 of city travel funds on a trip to Washington, D.C. the previous year. The District Attorney’s office declined to press charges, but the scandal punctured Ballreich’s confidence, if not his mystique as a prodigy that others should have seen coming. He abruptly resigned his post, relocating for ten years to Arkansas, where he would later brag about hobnobbing with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Ballreich returned to Southern California in 1988 as a political consultant and a single dad, still dynamic as ever, though no prodigal son. Savagely killed at forty-one, he was never able to do what he confided to his girlfriend: seek office again to fulfill the promise so many saw in him.
A COLD RED SCENT
If all this seems like a distant memory about a once-famous person, it is. Stephen (Steve) Lynn Ballreich was mowed down across the street from the leafy grounds of the Ramona Convent where he once played as an outgoing kid around 8:00 p.m. on November 14th, 1991, months after the American military ousted Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.
Some fourteen years later, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department remains stumped about who murdered him in such a public fashion. It is officially a cold case with no active suspects and no motive ever established. Several veteran homicide detectives assigned to investigate it have come and gone. One drifted into a retirement on the East Coast feeling “haunted” by its unresolved status, a source said. “All the leads have been exhausted,” acknowledged Sheriff’s homicide detective Susan Coleman. “We’ve been hindered by a lack of witnesses and evidence.”
So much time has elapsed that a jaded sense exists today that the case is practically unsolvable. Even Ballreich’s own mother has stopped calling officials for updates. Adding to the cynicism is the virtual information blackout imposed by authorities. Neither the Alhambra Police Department, which first responded to the shooting, nor the Sheriff’s Department that took over the investigation will release the crime report. They say publicizing it could jeopardize what leads they have, including clues lifted from the murder site, a modest, tree-lined block between Valley Boulevard and the San Bernardino Freeway.
At the top of the missing evidence is the murder weapon itself: a twelve gauge shotgun that cannoned two or three close-range pellet-salvos into Ballreich as he walked or jogged in the 1700 block of Marguerita Avenue during the primetime television hour. Another crucial item that authorities failed to locate, at least initially, was an address book kept at his apartment.
“I ask some of the police chiefs once in a while when I am trying to be funny how the Ballreich case is coming,” said former Councilman Parker Williams, who served with him at City Hall in the 1970s and was later prosecuted in a bribery scandal. “You know without asking that nobody has any information…I think it’s just tragic.”
While several of Ballreich’s longtime friends question whether the Sheriff’s Department pursued the case as tenaciously or competently as it could have—especially in light of a newly disclosed 1989 death threat he allegedly received and his entanglement with possessive women—it has never been a slam-dunk whodunit. Ballreich’s habit of infuriating people he once impressed, gambling fever and oft-murky doings made him a jigsaw-like personality excruciating for police to piece together.
The more you dig into his existence, the more you appreciate the detectives’ quandary. It wasn’t so much who wanted Stephen Ballreich dead but, at times, who didn’t?
Williams, like others, said authorities told him that Ballreich’s killer probably first shot him in the back from a slowing car, and then stood over him as he lay supine on the sidewalk to bury a second round into his face. The point-blank force from it penetrated his skull, blowing off the back, according to the autopsy report, a copy of which the Pasadena Weekly obtained.
In the days following the bloodshed, wild theories circulated around town that a hit man commissioned by an obsessed woman, jealous husband, or incensed father had masterminded it, or that it had tumbled from a snowballing debt. Fringe scenarios envisioned the ex-mayor, with a slightly receding hairline and a trademark blond moustache, was targeted because of politics. Had someone put out a contract on Ballreich because he had learned something sinister or switched allegiances? “Obviously, because of his political activity, we’re having to check that out,” Curt Royer, a Sheriff’s sergeant who had become one of the lead investigators, told the Los Angeles Times.
For many, the fact that he perished where he did was more than a gut-wrenching coincidence. People close to him knew that he was so fond of his childhood block that he often drove from his sparsely furnished South Pasadena apartment, where he had been living upon his return from Arkansas, to jog there after work. Someone out to knock him off, who appreciated Ballreich’s sentimental attachment, could have easily exploited it. Authorities tried tempering the rabid speculation about that and similar theories by suggesting it might have been a more mundane robbery or a gang assault responsible.
Again, those acquainted with Ballreich’s background doubt it was a crime of opportunity. Besides, he was an athletic 6’1”, 239-pound Caucasian outfitted in a red jacket, sweatpants, and sneakers when he took his last stride. He did not fit the profile of someone a gang would hurt, even for a suburb a short hop from East L.A.’s deadliest barrios.
Ballreich’s behavior in the months leading up to his demise, on the other hand, paint a picture of a man frantic for cash and eager to commit to paper where his assets would go should he perish. Shortly before he did, Ballreich evidently spread $5,000 cash on the floor of his apartment. On the Wednesday he was murdered, one source said, an occupant from his apartment complex saw him peel out in his car in a rush to get to a meeting spot.
Overall, if you polled those in Ballreich’s inner-circle, the way he died seemed to them to holler the motive in capital letters— VENGEANCE!
The local Baptist church that hosted his funeral drew 150 mourners, many of them numb. Eulogies by dignitaries and officials from this gray, cliquish city where mercurial rock producer Phil Spector murdered a date in 2003 and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s mother grew up, lamented what was lost and what could have been. His landlady, who seemed to have an abiding fondness for him, praised his uniqueness. Talmadge Burke, a pillar of Alhambra’s political establishment and one of California’s longest serving politicians, was devastated, though he was as different as could be from the victim. “He loved beauty and the aesthetics of Alhambra,” Burke quipped to a local newspaper. “He [was] always helpful. He liked people of all ages. It’s difficult to say goodbye.”
Less mentioned amid the black suits and sodden tissues was the deceased’s compulsion for illicit romances and fast living, a “thrill junkie” who cleaned up beautifully in a suit and tie. Those proclivities slid with him into the grave or, perhaps, dispatched him there.
A HORRIBLE VOID
Jo Hartman, a special education teacher in Santa Maria, remembered the heartbreak of 1991, when she breezed into her apartment to notice her answering machine blinking crazily. Played back, the messages had an awful theme—the local news was all over the story of her boyfriend’s death.
Ballreich and Hartman got to know each other in tenth-grade algebra. Mischievous humor and chemistry kept them close but Hartman would not let it go further, aware of the girls who swooned for Ballreich without him even trying. One buddy