Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/mag&info/e_form11.zip/OVERBYTE.EXE/KIDD.DOC

Text File | 1992-09-16 | 30KB | 465 lines

                        HONEY WEST MAKES IT TO THE '90S

                                By Jean Rhodes


                   From her new office on the 13th floor of the sleek
          rose-colored marble California Plaza, Helen Kidder can look
          down on her old workplace - a seedy building on Spring
          Street which houses the overflow from Parker Center. It was
          there that she recently ended her amazing and unprecedented
          24 years as a cop - as the lieutenant in charge of the very
          same Criminal Conspiracy Section that she had first entered
          as a beginner to face the scorn, abuse and neglect of her
          male colleagues.
                   Up on the 13th floor, the subject under discussion
          at the moment is high-profile kidnapping. Kidder - a
          graceful and stylish woman with none of the expected edges
          of a career law officer except for the occasional sharpening
          of her blue eyes - now works for the most famous if not the
          largest private investigative agency in the world: Kroll
          Associates, the people currently scouring the planet for
          Saddam Hussein's hidden assets and the secret bank accounts
          of ex-Communist leaders.
                   Kidder runs the Crisis Operations Center, set up
          last year by Kroll in partnership with American
          International Group, which sells insurance against
          kidnapping, product tampering and extortion. As she
          explains, "We provide management, advice, guidance and
          expertise - but we don't negotiate or deliver ransom. There
          are probably only two dozen people in the world who know how
          to do this kind of stuff, and most of them work for Kroll."
                   One of these experts is currently on the other end
          of the telephone, a soft-spoken British veteran of one of
          his nation's military intelligence units, roused from his
          sleep in a South American hotel room to take part in a
          conference call about the Center's latest crisis. The son of
          a prominent family - an AIG client - has been snatched and
          the kidnappers have made some particularly nasty threats
          involving the victim's body parts. "We think the kidnappers
          are most likely entrepreneurs - not political terrorists -
          who probably modeled the crime on recent ones in Italy,"
          Kidder says.
                   Also involved in the conversation is Brian Jenkins,
          a wiry man with the weathered good looks of a movie cowboy.
          Jenkins, a Kroll senior managing director, is one of the
          world's leading experts on terrorism - a talent he honed at
          the RAND Corporation think tank in Santa Monica and
          exhibited almost nightly on television news programs during
          the Middle East hostage crisis. Now he is passing on a few
          hard-earned tips to his colleague on the hot seat in South
          America. "Don't forget to have the backup team bring along
          several bags of ice," Jenkins advises. "If a severed ear
          arrives, it can be kept on ice and stitched back on."
                   Kidder is asked if she could do what this British
          Kroll operative is doing: helping a distraught family make
          rational decisions in a climate of fear, anger and
          frustration. She thinks about it. "I guess the closest I've
          come to it is dealing with extortion demands from terrorist
          groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army," she says. "I
          think I know the mechanics, but I'm not sure if I'd have the
          courage."
                   Her record indicates otherwise. She was the first
          woman in the LAPD to be regularly assigned to Homicide (she
          and a subsequent female partner became the inspiration for
          TV's Cagney and Lacey); the first woman to be sent to
          Redstone Arsenal to learn how to defuse bombs; the first
          woman to act as the department's advocate inside Internal
          Affairs; the first woman to be sent to the FBI Academy for
          special training; the first woman to head up CCS. Along the
          way, she just happened to work on some of the most famous
          cases in LAPD history, from the Hillside Strangler and the
          Sunset Slayer to the Patty Hearst kidnapping and the SLA
          shoot-out.
                   Not bad for a gently-raised young woman (Catholic
          school uniforms, ballet lessons, Girl Scouts) who, at the
          age of 27, was working at a boring job in a Pasadena
          insurance company when she caught a TV show called Honey
          West, starring Anne Francis as a policewoman. "She wore a
          black raincoat over a turtleneck sweater, threw people over
          cars, ran up and down ladders," Kidder remembers. "I said,
          'My God, that looks like fun!' So I applied to the LAPD and
          took the test with 1400 other women for 21 available spots.
          Of course I didn't know about the odds at the time; I
          probably wouldn't have tried if I'd known."
                   Captain Randy Mancini, who now heads up the LAPD's
          Detective Services Division, remembers the first time he met
          Kidder - at the Van Nuys jail. "It was our first jobs out of
          the Police Academy; they always dump rookies into the jails,
          to show them the worst of what's to come. There were
          occasions when we had to restrain violent female prisoners,
          and Helen was always cheerful and competent. Even then, she
          had a strong command presence."
                   "I hated that jail job. Every day of the 14 months I
          spent there was nasty and degrading, but I never thought
          about quitting," Kidder recalls. "Because in the previous
          two months at the Police Academy, I did things I'd never
          done before. I found out that I could run like the wind, for
          example. It was the beginning of an adrenaline addiction
          that I've never gotten over."
                   There were no cops in Kidder's family when she was
          growing up, first in Santa Cruz and then in Colorado Springs
          - no kindly uncles in blue to let her play with their
          nightsticks or polish their shields. (Although in a pleasant
          touch of irony her older sister's husband was influenced by
          Helen's career to become a sheriff's deputy and is now chief
          of police in Colorado Springs.) Her father promoted a series
          of movie travelogues; her mother came a from a Nova Scotia
          seafaring family. "I was never a tomboy, never played any
          sports," she says. The middle child of three, she went to
          Pasadena City College for two years "because a friend was
          going there;" wanted to major in sociology but took
          psychology instead "because I got in the wrong line." Then,
          this being the early 1960s, she wandered around Europe for a
          year, came home with $14 and no career goals, worked briefly
          in a department store in Colorado Springs before moving back
          to Pasadena and the insurance job that made Honey West look
          so intriguing. "Don't forget, there were not that many
          career choices in those days for women without a college
          degree. I could be a secretary or a wife - that was pretty
          much it."
                   Time and subsequent success have softened some of
          the painful memories of her early years in the LAPD, but an
          undertone of sadness and anger remains - even when masked by
          Kidder's wry and gentle humor. "The worst things were the
          uniforms - those terrible Miss Moscow shoes. It was very
          hard to impress lovely young policemen in those. After the
          jail job, I went over to Criminal Conspiracy; I got that
          because I could type. My first assignment was typing a
          report on a Black Panther shooting. Those were terrible
          years: the department didn't trust or want women, but by law
          they had to have them. The only good thing was that we
          didn't know how badly we were being treated.
                   "I occasionally got to do interesting things, like
          working undercover at UCLA during possible student unrest
          after Kent State and the time when Nixon sent troops into
          Cambodia. At this point in my life, I wasn't bothered by it.
          Now, I couldn't do it; I'm now against the death penalty -
          which is odd for someone who has worked in Homicide and seen
          the worst things people do to each other.
                   "But when those rare assignments were over, it was
          back to the typewriter for little Miss Kidder. Luckily,
          there was a support group of women officers who had been on
          patrol before I got there, and who were always available to
          listen and advise."
                   Lt. Stella Matson, now an aide to Deputy Chief David
          Dotson, was a member of that support group. "There was a
          total of about 150 women in the LAPD when I joined in 1963,"
          she recalls. "It never went above that, and women never got
          past the rank of sergeant for years. There used to be
          something called the Policewomen's Association, which was
          purely a social group - they put on fashion shows and
          dances, arranged charitable events. When we became
          lieutenants, about six or seven of us formed a support group
          to help other women. I remember those dark old days: many
          times I went home in tears and spilled my guts out to my
          husband, who happened to be a sergeant."
                   A series of court cases in the early 1970s forced
          the LAPD to hire more women and open more doors to them - at
          least on paper. But down on the work floor, things stayed
          the same. As Kidder says, "For about 10 years, I believed
          everything they told me - I didn't belong there, there was
          no way I could do a good job, I was only there because they
          had to hire me. Then I woke up one morning, realized how
          hard I had worked to get where I was and how much better I
          was at my job than a lot of the men, and knew that what they
          were saying was bullshit: I did belong there."
                   What kept her from quitting during those first ten
          years? "For one thing, my family was very supportive -
          although my mother was more worried than my father, so I
          wound up not telling her every little detail about what I
          was doing. I had also been very careful all along to
          maintain my friendships outside the police force. Since I
          was usually the only woman in the office, I wasn't invited
          to go drinking or partying. I did very little socializing
          with other cops, which is still true today. So I had a life
          outside to sustain me. And then there was the money. Cops in
          Los Angeles are well-paid; you get hooked financially. I
          bought a condo, was driving a Porsche. I didn't see any
          other kind of work I was qualified for that would let me
          live that way. Plus, the job itself was lots of fun at times
          - that was the adrenaline junkie in me coming out."
                   Kidder spent her first ten years in Criminal
          Conspiracy, working on Black Panther shootings, the Patty
          Hearst kidnapping, the Symbionese Liberation Army shootout.
          "I remember pulling Daryl Gates, who was a deputy chief
          then, down out of the line of fire," she says. "It was my
          own first time under fire. I'd heard the war stories from
          other cops - 'the last time I was under fire, the worst
          time, the time I was almost killed' - and thought 'I wonder
          how I'd behave.' One of my first thoughts during the SLA
          shootout was, 'Hey, I'm finally under fire!' Then things
          started going sideways, and I thought most about staying
          alive. The house caught on fire, ammunition inside began to
          explode, we  couldn't get close enough to put the fire out.
          I continued to work on the case after that  - there were
          lots of Patty sightings, all of them false - and then in the
          fall of 1975 I had an opportunity to go to the FBI Academy.
          On the day I was scheduled to leave, they found Patty in San
          Francisco, so I didn't get to escort her back to Los
          Angeles. I must admit that annoyed the hell out of me."
                   She had reached the equivalent of sergeant, but in
          spite of her high profile cases Kidder had been passed over
          for promotion several times. "I finally got fed up and wound
          up taking the first open job I heard about, which was in
          Homicide at Northeast Division. This was 1979, and I became
          the first woman detective in the department to be regularly
          assigned to Homicide. I hadn't really thought about what the
          job entailed: going to the coroner's office to look at
          bodies, notifying familes of murder victims, things like
          that. But solving cases was very satisfying - putting all
          the information together and building a strong case."
                   Ernest Curtsinger, now the chief of police in St.
          Petersburg, Florida, was the lieutenant in charge of
          Northeast Detectives when Kidder arrived. "I'd worked with
          Helen as partners over in CCS, so I knew she was a very
          competent, talented detective," he says. "We had another
          woman detective, Peggy York, working Juvenile at the time. I
          was convinced that she and Helen would make a perfect
          Homicide team, so I called them in and told them I wanted
          them to work together. Their eyes got very big, then they
          said, 'You're going to catch a lot of flack.' I said, 'Let
          me worry about that - you plow the ground and plow it
          right.' I didn't ask anyone's permission before I teamed
          them up, and the next day I got calls from several people
          all the way up the chain of command, asking me if I'd lost
          my mind."
                   (Lt. Stella Matson later got the same kind of
          reaction. "When I was working in North Hollywood with a
          female partner, transporting male felons, the male cops
          would look out the door and say, 'Where's your partner?' I'd
          say, 'This is my partner.' And when I assigned two female
          patrol officers to a unit in 1983, the captain of the
          division called me aside and thought I'd made a mistake.
          'Are you sure that's what you want to do?' he asked. 'Are
          they both police officers?'I asked back. 'Yes,' he said.
          'Are they getting paid for this?' 'Yes.' 'Well, I'm putting
          them together.' He didn't say not to do it, but he was
          worried. And so was I - but it had to be done.")
                   Kidder and York - now in charge of Wilshire
          Detectives and about to become a captain - worked as team
          for two years, taking on a collection of grim and grisly
          cases including the serial killings of five young women,
          some of them Sunset Strip habitues, which the press quickly
          labeled the Sunset Slayings. "In June of 1980, the bodies of
          two young girls were found near the Forest Lawn offramp of
          the Ventura Freeway," Helen recalls. "Peggy and I got the
          case, and we trotted on out there. The Burbank cops cruised
          by, looked around and were gone in a heartbeat - although it
          was probably their turf. Then another victim of the same
          killer was found headless - and her head, which turned out
          to have been frozen, was found several miles away in a box
          in somebody's driveway."
                   York and Kidder sifted through all the physical
          evidence and began to develop some good leads. "Then the
          heavies from downtown came in and took over," Helen says.
          "They asked for our help at first, but pretty soon the case
          became their property." But not before the L.A. Times did a
          story on Kidder and York which stirred up quite a duststorm.
                   "We answered all the questions honestly," recalls
          Kidder. How did they happen to become partners? "By default
          - it boiled down to the fact that none of the men here
          particularly wanted to work with us," was Helen's reply.
          That candor, plus the fact that these two beginners were
          getting the kind of publicity veteran male detectives would
          kill for, led to a rash of obscene notes in the mail, nasty
          phone calls at home and a frosty cloud of ostracism at work.
          "People I'd known forever who I thought liked me were
          hideous beyond belief," Kidder says. "It was as though we'd
          taken the key to the men's room and then refused to give it
          back."
                   "One night Helen and Peggy came in and said they
          didn't know if they could take the grief any more," recalls
          their former boss Curtsinger. "I told them, 'You're laying
          the groundwork for the next 30 or 40 years of police work
          here.'"
                   But it wasn't enough: the team broke up (a deal to
          become technical advisers on a new TV show called Cagney and
          Lacey, about two female homicide detectives, fell through
          when the producers offered an insultingly tiny amount of
          money) and Helen went over to work first at Burglary and
          Robbery for a short time and then for the department's own
          KGB - Internal Affairs. "I didn't like the way the
          investigators there treated their fellow officers, but I did
          get the chance to become the first woman advocate - the
          person who presents the department's case. I didn't think I
          was qualified, but Frank Patchett, the captain in charge,
          pushed me into it, kicking and screaming, my little heels
          making furrows in the linoleum. And I learned an important
          thing - that I could actually do a job for which I had no
          particular training. I'd always been fascinated by men who
          would apply for assignments for which they had no
          qualifications and then learn on the job. Now I understood,
          and decided I'd become a lieutenant." Encouraged by her more
          secure and nurturing male colleagues, like Patchett and John
          White, she scored high on all the tests and got her
          promotion - and a prime job running the Bomb Management
          Center for the 1984 Olympics.
                   "I loved that job, and would have stayed around if I
          thought I had a chance of becoming the officer in charge of
          the Bomb Squad," Kidder says now. "But I knew that was
          something the department would never do." So instead she
          went back to Criminal Conspiracy in 1987 - this time not
          typing reports but running the entire operation. As Captain
          Randy Mancini says, "The officer in charge of CCS is a
          wonderful assignment. What it boils down to is anything of a
          sensitive nature that the chief of police wants you to
          handle - arson homicides, bombings, threats against public
          officials." It also finally gave Kidder the chance to attend
          the famous bomb school at the Redstone Arsenal in
          Huntsville, Alabama. "All those early years in CCS working
          on bombing cases, everyone else got to go to Redstone but
          me," she says. "Even when I was running the Bomb Management
          Center I didn't get to go. Then, as head of CCS, I went and
          had a great time. I never actually got to defuse a bomb in
          the field. I could probably still do a simple one, but it's
          a perishable skill - you have to train every day to keep up
          with developments."
                   It was after Redstone that Kidder decided, as she
          puts it, "that I'd reached the edge of macho behavior and
          forced myself to pull back. I'd been sky-diving, white water
          river-rafting, skiing off the Cornice at Mammoth, sailing in
          South America. Now it was time to find some quieter
          pursuits."
                   It was also time for some clear thinking about her
          future. She could press onward and take the tests for
          captain, as supportive colleagues such as Deputy Chief Ron
          Frankel and Commander John White urged. "I did get caught up
          in the studying," Kidder admits. "But about halfway through,
          I realized that being a captain - working 12-hour shifts and
          being always on call -  wasn't what I wanted. I was ready to
          live on the beach and raise chickens in St. Simon's Island,
          Georgia - where I'd gone to a bomb crime scene school and
          where I could teach part-time."
                   One of her last cases at CCS turned out to be among
          her most memorable. At the Jordan Downs housing project in
          Watts, drug dealers gathered around a tree just outside the
          apartment where the Zuniga family lived. Some of the dealers
          were arrested; with their own brand of perverse logic, the
          dealers blamed the Zunigas. Early one morning in September,
          1991, someone poured a gallon of gasoline through their mail
          slot and tossed in a burning pack of matches. Inside were 18
          people, some of them visitors from Mexico. Five of them -
          two women and three small children - died in the blaze;
          others suffered serious burns. A black neighbor trying to
          help was shot and wounded by the head of the Zuniga family,
          who mistook him for one of the arsonists. Under Kidder's
          direction, CCS detectives tracked down and successfully
          prosecuted three men for murder. As Deputy Chief Frankel
          says, "Helen looked very spiffy at her retirement party, but
          my most vivid recollection of her will always be from Jordan
          Downs - out there in fireman's boots, in the middle of that
          mess, directing everybody." And Captain Randy Mancini adds,
          "That had to be the high point of her career - the way she
          conducted herself at the scene, the compassion she showed to
          the family."
                   It was just after this that something came along to
          deflect Kidder's dreams of beachcombing and chicken-raising.
           She had first met Brian Jenkins when he was at RAND. When
          Jenkins moved over to head the Los Angeles office of Kroll
          Associates - begun in 1972 by a former Manhattan prosecutor
          and printing executive, Jules Kroll, and known as "Wall
          Street's Private Eye" because of its expertise in helping
          clients defend against hostile takeovers - they stayed in
          contact. And when Jenkins called late in 1991 to offer her a
          job, Helen was ready. "They told me I'd spend half my time
          running the Crisis Operations Center and the other half
          managing cases," she says. "It didn't take much hard selling
          to convince me. The chance to have carpets on the floor,
          office furniture that matches, my own computer - that did
          the trick. When I left the LAPD, detectives were buying film
          out of their own pocket and paying to have it processed. I
          haven't drunk coffee out of a styrofoam cup since I got
          here."
                   As head of Kroll's Crisis Operations Center, Kidder
          supervises a team of experts like the one in charge of the
          latest kidnapping - people with collective experience that
          covers the brutal history of the last three decades. "I
          haven't met most of the guys - and it is all guys - on the
          team as yet, but I talk regularly to them on the phone," she
          says. "I think their view of me is that I have a hand
          grenade in one hand and the pin in my teeth. From what I can
          see so far, they're more worried that I'm an American than a
          woman. The Brits tend to think they own this field."
                   The call to the South American team member capped a
          typical working day for Kidder at Kroll, a day that also
          included:
                   - Some calls regarding a financial fraud case in
          what she will call only "a nearby state. Some people paid
          large start-up fees to a guy who promised to get them loans
          from a big Southern California bank. He took their money and
          disappeared; now they're suing the bank. We're trying to
          find out if there's any conspiracy or misrepresentation
          among the plaintiffs, which involves hiring a team of
          sub-contractors to look into their lives."
                   - Working with Kroll researchers on an asset search
          case involving an international businessman getting
          divorced. "He says he has only $10 million; his wife - our
          client - says there's a lot more. Just by getting into a few
          databases and checking public records, in a few hours we've
          found another $5 million." The husband had tried to confuse
          things by switching around some letters in his name - no
          match for the Kroll staff, who have already tracked down
          hundreds of millions sequestered by Jean-Claude Duvalier and
          Emelda Marcos.
                   - Soothing and updating a woman supervisor at a
          large American company who has been getting some obscene
          mail. "The company hired us to find out who's sending it,
          and we're working with handriting analysts and a
          psychologist to develop leads."
                   - Advising another large company on how to handle
          some  sizeable layoffs. "We suggest ways to do it smoothly,
          as painlessly as possible. We also give advice on
          compensation packages and confidentiality agreements, and
          how to make sure that employees don't take things home."
                   "It's great to be stretched and excited by my job
          again," Kidder says as the day winds down. "Toward the end
          at the LAPD, I would catch myself watching the clock
          starting at 10:15 a.m. Here, I can look up and find it's
          6:15 without knowing the day's over." A beeper keeps her in
          constant touch: "Make sure to leave the international
          dialing code when you call the beeper," says a message on
          her home phone.
                   When the day at Kroll does end, she heads for her
          huge duplex condo in Pasadena - "It's precisely across the
          street from where I lived when I was in college, so I've
          come full circle" - handsomely decorated Italian-style in
          gold and marble. Examples of her current hobbies abound:
          topiary ("I started small, in pots"), growing herbs to use
          in her frequent outburts of cooking, a recent collection of
          antique silverware acquired at local flea markets. She
          shares the place with two cats. "I never in my wildest
          dreams expected to reach this age and be single," she says.
          "I had some long-term relationships which I used to be
          embarassed about, but they lasted longer than a lot of
          marriages I've known. I regret very much not having
          children. But I'm not sure if I could have done all the
          things I've done if I'd had kids. It would have been hard to
          say, 'Mommy's just off to bomb school, children.' In those
          days, not all men were supportive of this kind of behavior -
          especially cops. What they wanted was somebody to support
          them."
                   So being single is part of her legacy from the LAPD
          - along with a chronic bad back caused by having to carry a
          gun, ammunition and handcuffs in a purse over her shoulder
          all those years.
                   Just after Kidder left the department (Daryl Gates
          was a surprise guest at her retirement party, making an
          impromptu speech about her exemplary career), the search
          committee to find a new police chief called her in and asked
          what she thought they should be looking for. She tends to
          downplay the incident with a laugh: "It was the first time
          anybody had asked my opinion about anything to do with the
          LAPD!" But it's not hard to imagine another scenario - where
          someone who had spent 24 years succeeding in the toughest
          jobs the department had to offer, someone with all the
          investigative and management skills you could ask for, would
          herself be on the short list for that top job. Then again,
          Honey West would probably have turned it down in favor of
          Kroll...


                                   ENDS

Copyright (C) 1992 by OVERBYTE