Ghettoside (26 page)

Jessica Midkiff was Jennifer Bailey’s niece. She had a big rap sheet for prostitution, and a tattoo on her neck. Skaggs pulled up her picture. Midkiff was light-skinned and cute. The tattoo on her neck was large and garish. He nodded to himself. “I think this is my Jessica.”

It was Friday, November 30, about 3:00
P.M
. Skaggs saw the next few hours clearly. He wanted the LAPD’s best surveillance team on Midkiff immediately as he ran “a ton of clues” seeking other connections. But it didn’t quite work out that way. When he called headquarters, they balked. The SIS (Special Investigations Section) team downtown was too closely associated with RHD, someone said. Skaggs cursed to himself. He called the South Bureau surveillance team. They were assigned elsewhere. So Skaggs spent the next few hours making call after call to get someone to do surveillance and catch Jessica Midkiff. At last, South Bureau’s team was reassigned. It was always like this, he reflected.

Everything, everything, was harder than you thought it would be.

He worked late into that night, then went home and waited.

THE WITNESS

The tattoo on the side of Jessica Midkiff’s neck was an angel. It was so large it appeared to be straining to encircle her throat.

Skaggs first met her in a small detention cell in the basement of the Seventy-seventh Street station. She was twenty-two and petite, with very light skin, brown hair, a doll-like nose, and chestnut eyes that curved down at the corners. Her chin jutted slightly, and her black brows were arched and sculpted. She was in gray sweatpants and a teeny, lightweight top inappropriate for the December night. Her feet were bare. She was sniffling and sobbing with fear.

Earlier in the day the surveillance crew on the house had seen her come out and get into a car. The team followed the car and arrested her at a nearby gas station. Skaggs asked Midkiff if she knew why she was there. “No, I promise, I don’t!” she stammered. Skaggs responded in his unhurried way, as relaxed as if they were discussing plans for dinner. “Okay,” he said. “You and I are going to talk.”

But Midkiff was already talking as fast as she could. She had “anxiety,” she explained between sniffles—meaning some kind of disorder. She had recently emerged from “this program.” She’d been trying “to
do good.” “I’m not gonna lie—I was a prostitute for years—and I checked myself into the rehab for that.”

She was wide-eyed—afraid the arrest meant she was going back to jail. She wanted Skaggs to know she wasn’t holding out. “I got a bench warrant from Compton. And I’ve been taking care of it.” She was terrified of losing custody of her young daughter, she said. “It’s a big thing to me. Whatever you guys want me to do, I’ll do it!”

It would seem to have been an ideal situation. Midkiff seemed disposed to cooperate fully. But Skaggs was wary. She seemed a little
too
willing—too “cute,” he would say later. She hung on his every word and gazed up at him with big teary eyes encircled by black lashes. His first instinct was to dismiss her presentation as an act.

Skaggs had thought Midkiff might be a suspect, the knowing getaway driver, and he was geared for an adversarial interview. He had planned to corner her, to force some slip that would put her at the crime scene. He had reviewed her long rap sheet. Clearly, she was an experienced prostitute and had been interviewed by many a police officer. She’d had abundant opportunity to hone this performance.

When he first walked into the cell, he had promised Midkiff that “a very important talk we are gonna have. Huge. Very big.” Now, faced with her near hysteria, he dialed it back. He told her something had happened the previous May. “We are gonna sit down and have an easy talk, you and I.” But at the mention of May, Midkiff instantly began babbling about her ex-boyfriend. “What’s his name?” Skaggs demanded, suddenly sharp.

“Derrick,” she said.

The case Skaggs had been chasing was now chasing him. Random details were spilling out of Midkiff, and they hadn’t even sat down at a table yet. Derrick Starks clearly brought up all sorts of issues for her. She was talking fast, spinning in several directions. Skaggs barely had time to draw a breath before she had outlined all the major themes of her life:

She had been abused and had lived badly.

Derrick was among her abusers.

Now she was trying to change. “I’m just trying to get my life together the best way I know,” she wept. “I don’t really know how, but I’m tryin’!”

It seemed too good to be true. Skaggs remained suspicious. He had Farell take her upstairs to the interview room while he gathered his notes. In the interview room, he started off in his harshest tone.

Skaggs was not rough or threatening in interrogations. He never raised his voice. But he had a way of bearing down, of signaling impatience and resolve. His manner suggested he was comfortable with power and intended to demolish all opposition. This was true of him on duty and off. His was an easygoing personality, but not a compromising one. Corey Farell noticed this, and he thought it one of the traits that distinguished Skaggs. Some police officers felt they had to adopt a false persona at work; Skaggs, if anything, was more genuinely himself while working.

Skaggs bore down on Midkiff sternly. He sat very close to her, speaking slowly and allowing the timbre of his voice to dip. He was mildly profane. He was a homicide detective, he told her. He was going to talk to her about “some big, big shit. You gonna step up, or you gonna go down?”

“Step up,” Midkiff said instantly.

Midkiff promised to tell the detectives whatever they wanted to know. “Honest to God, I’ll do it,” but “I don’t want to go on nobody’s stand,” she added.

Before Skaggs could begin his questioning, she had laid out her objections to testifying in court without prompting. They were the usual ones. Her grandparents owned a home and could not afford to leave. “I know I messed up dealing with the wrong people—if I have to take it I’ll take it—but I don’t want my family jeopardized behind my stupidity!” she said.

Derrick Starks had been calling her from prison. She was in high anxiety about it. She broke down: “I just want to wash my hands of these people, and I can’t get rid of them!” she wept.

“Yeah we can,” Skaggs replied calmly.

This was exactly the point: getting rid of people. Seldom was it put
this way. But one of the primary reasons to have a legal system is to take certain people out of the picture. It is what justifies the immense power the police hold. If you don’t incapacitate violent actors, they keep pushing people around until someone makes them stop. When violent people are permitted to operate with impunity, they
get their way
. Advantage tilts to them. Others are forced to do their bidding.

No amount of “community” feeling or activism can eclipse this dynamic. People often assert that the solution to homicide is for the so-called community to “step up.” It is a pernicious distortion. People like Jessica Midkiff cannot be expected to stand up to killers. They need safety, not stronger moral conviction. They need some powerful outside force to sweep in and take their tormentors away. That’s what the criminal justice system is for. It was what Skaggs was for, and he knew it.

Skaggs began talking in generalities, using the same stern tone. It was the strategy he always used. He would talk with a voice full of meaning even though he was stalling. He nattered on. And with another part of his brain, he studied Midkiff. He was trying to figure out if she was lying.

Our job “is a simple one,” Skaggs rambled. “We have one thing to do every time we come to work—find the truth. That’s pretty easy. It’s difficult in the neighborhood we work in, but that’s kind of an easy concept.
Somebody got hurt. Somebody got killed
. We find out what happened to them.”

Five minutes passed. Ten. Skaggs talked in circles. Like Rick Gordon, he resorted to telling Midkiff the truth, strategically. “I’ve never met you before, I don’t know if you are putting on an act—if you’re really good at turnin’ on tears,” he told her.

Through it all, Midkiff wept and professed her willingness to cooperate. Skaggs offered her water. She said she needed a cigarette to calm her nerves. He promised to take her outside for a smoke. They were going to have a big talk, very soon, he said. He tossed out vague phrases to explain what was happening.

Skaggs seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of clichés for this purpose. He never used the word “interrogation.” “Something we need to get on the table,” he said. “Something we all have to deal with,” to “put in the right place.”

Midkiff kept interrupting. She talked about her daughter and Derrick. By the time Skaggs had worked up to reading Midkiff her Miranda rights, his attitude toward her was beginning to shift. She still seemed a likely liar. But he wasn’t seeing the usual signs. He couldn’t read her.

His tone softened. He stopped swearing. He promised to talk to her about “big, big stuff,” not “big shit” as before. “Look at me,” he said. “We have not made any decision of what’s gonna happen to you tonight.” He read the rights to her, conversationally and easily, then got down to business.

But when Skaggs uttered the words “shooting off Western,” Midkiff seemed confused. She didn’t understand what they were talking about.

“Western?” she said. She thought that Skaggs was going to ask her about the time Starks crashed his mother’s Suburban into a pole and got arrested. That hadn’t happened on Western. He had crashed because of a car-to-car shooting, although the police report had not reflected this. Starks had also asked Midkiff to lie for him in a burglary investigation. All these episodes were in her mind. She was confused. So Skaggs clarified, focusing her on the events of May 11.

She hesitated, eyes brimming. “I don’t want to die!” she whispered. “They are going to kill my family!”

“You have a promise from me that I will not leave your family hanging,” Skaggs said.

Midkiff’s hesitation was brief. She began: “I wanted to drive his truck, I was so eager to drive his frickin’ truck—” At the memory, she suddenly laughed bitterly.

When she smiled, she had dimples in both cheeks.

More than half an hour of rambling talk had passed since Skaggs and Midkiff had first laid eyes on each other. Only now did he begin to ask his questions.

On the day Bryant Tennelle died, Midkiff had been in the Suburban
with Starks, she said. They picked up two dark-skinned teenage boys—one of whom she later identified as Devin Davis. The other she didn’t know; he was never identified.

They drove north to “the Eighties” and Starks handed one of the teenagers a gun. The boys jumped out and went around a corner. Midkiff heard gunshots. The car doors opened and the pair jumped back in. Starks yanked her over his lap into the passenger seat and took the wheel. They drove off. “I’m the man, cuz!” Devin Davis had crowed.

Skaggs wanted every detail. But eagerness was anathema to his technique. The ability to slow down when events reached fever pitch was something Nathan Kouri admired in his mentor. It distinguished him as a master interrogator, Kouri thought. “Us new guys want to go in for the kill,” he said. But Skaggs wasn’t wired like that. After Midkiff finished her initial narration, he called a break. He left Midkiff to release the crew of officers he’d assembled earlier for a search warrant. He no longer needed them.

Jessica Midkiff had been born at Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles, but her family roots were in Texas and Alabama. She was biracial, half black and half white. Her father had been one of those rare poor whites still living in South Central L.A. in the late 1980s. But like most people of mixed race in her milieu, Midkiff considered herself black.

Her parents had split while Jessica was young, and she said that an abusive stepfather had raped her repeatedly. By the time she was eleven, she was performing oral sex for cash, food, and clothes. She was turning tricks in cars by fourteen.

Prostitutes such as Midkiff are effectively slaves. But they tend to spin a narrative about their own lives that suggests more agency. Midkiff referred to various pimps over the years as “boyfriends.” Some were pimpier than others. In her mind, there existed the possibility of a man being “kind of like a pimp.” She had straight pimps who kept her with a stable of other prostitutes and appropriated all her earnings. She also had boyfriends like Derrick Starks, with whom she was paired as a couple but who also asked her to turn tricks now and then.

Her daughter’s father, who had gotten Jessica pregnant while she was a student at Washington High, had been one of the few men in her life who was not abusive and didn’t try to pimp her. But after his brother was murdered, he joined a gang and ended up in prison, she said.

While still an adolescent, Midkiff traveled as a prostitute. She worked in Los Angeles, Riverside, Las Vegas, and parts of Arizona. She worked Sunset Boulevard, peddling ten-minute intervals in cars: oral sex for $50, intercourse for $100, both for $150. She was hired by a professional football player and for pricey all-night parties, once earning $850 for a single trick. She’d also worked Figueroa Street—that dangerous bargain basement for prostitutes. You were down-and-out when you found yourself working the long murderous stretch that plunged southward along the Harbor Freeway. Years later, the thought of it still caused her to shudder. “I
hate
Figueroa,” she said.