Dan Heath: Hey folks, just a quick note at the top to state the obvious, this is an episode about a homicide detective. There's some pretty grim stuff ahead, like this story I'm just about to share.

In June of 2021, a Guatemalan man living in Los Angeles named Pedro sent an ominous text to his mother and brothers.

John Lamberti: ... saying he was sorry for what he did and asking for forgiveness, but he was being really cryptic about it.

Dan: One of Pedro's family members called the police and LAPD patrol officers went over to his apartment to see what was going on.

John: He lived with his wife and her brother had recently moved into the apartment from Mexico. They went into the apartment and discovered the wife and her brother wrapped up in carpets and there was blood all over the apartment from one end to the other.

Dan: Pedro wasn't there, he'd likely left days earlier and tried to give himself some time before the bodies were discovered. He'd bought an air conditioning unit, a window unit, and then he put it on a table and pointed it towards the bodies that were rolled up in the carpet in order to bring down the temperature.

John: When we walked in the apartment, it was freezing cold. Near the bodies, there was also a note that said he found his wife having relations with her own brother and that filled him with rage and that's what caused him to snap.

Dan: That is where Homicide Detective John Lamberti's work begins.

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I'm Dan Heath and this is What It's Like To Be... In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. An FBI special agent, an NBA referee, an interior designer, we want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask John Lamberti what it's like to be a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. We'll talk about how it feels to be grilled by a defense attorney, why cold cases are harder to solve than they used to be, and whether handcuffs can really be picked as easily as we see on TV.

Stay with us.

Once John Lamberti and his partner got to the double murder scene, they quickly realized they were going to need some help.

John: We had a suspect who was on the run. He had taken his car and gone somewhere we didn't know. We knew he had his phone with him. We had a incredibly complex crime scene in the apartment with two deceased individuals and there was blood just from one end to the other. Then we had three witnesses who had really important information who only spoke Spanish and my 12th-grade Spanish is not good enough to get through a competent interview so I was going to need two really good Spanish-speaking detectives.

I was going to need a couple people to do the crime scene and then my partner and I did the work of, let's see if we can figure out where this guy is. We quickly were able to get an emergency disclosure from the phone company and figure out that he had crossed the border into Mexico two days prior. He actually had a couple day head start on us. We determined that he crossed the border in Douglas, Arizona. On my phone, I just happened to have the personal cell phone number of one of the supervising special agents at the Tucson Border Patrol office because he's my brother.

[laughter]

My brother works for the Border Patrol and so I called him up and I was like, "Hey, you want to help me catch a murderer?" "No, mom wants to know why you're not calling her." [laughter] I called him up and he connected with his counterparts on the other side of the border and helped me spread flyers and then they eventually located him because they found license plate reader hits that showed where his car was and long story short, they got him.

Dan: Pedro is in custody in Mexico. That means everything's good, right? No. It was a late Friday afternoon and John was on his way to meet his family for a camping trip when he got a call from an FBI agent letting him know the good news. Mexican authorities had Pedro, but there was a problem.

John: The Mexican government will not hold him past Monday morning without a warrant in their hand. If not, they're going to deport him to Guatemala because he's a Guatemalan national. It was 4:45 on a Friday and I had to get a complete case filed over the weekend. I don't know if you're familiar how most county government works, but the LA County District Attorney's Office shuts down on Friday and they don't open back up until Monday. You can't do anything in between.

Dan: But he was able to call in a few favors at the District Attorney's Office to help him file the case.

John: Luckily I had my laptop and a wifi hotspot and I worked basically all weekend at the campsite in my flip-flops around campfire. You can imagine like, I show up at the campsite and my family's all there and our friends are there and, "Hi everybody. Sorry. I got to go in the trailer and go to work." You can imagine how that went over with my wife, but it's one of those things that it doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it can completely take over your life and you have to just drop everything and you have to be prepared for that.

Dan: You got him?

John: Yes, we got him. He went to trial recently, actually in August and he was convicted of both murders and he's awaiting sentencing, but I believe he's going to be sentenced to 40 years to life for both murders.

Dan: On some of our episodes, I try to give context for jobs that might be unfamiliar, but look, we've all encountered a hundred homicide detectives in books and TV and film. I asked John what those depictions got wrong and he flagged how the local police and FBI are always feuding. "Quit bigfooting our case, man." He said, no, that's way overblown. They actually worked together pretty well. Another example?

John: Another persistent myth is what it's like in court. Everybody has this idea of court, that you think of court and you think of the, "I want the truth." "You can't handle the truth" thing. Everybody thinks that, right? It's a whole different world. It's not the way people expect. It's not this thrilling rapid-fire debate where lawyers are shouting "Objection," and screaming at the witnesses. No, it is painfully excruciatingly procedural. For every piece of evidence you want to introduce, there's this ritual you have to go through to lay the foundation for that piece of evidence.

You can't just say, "Here's the evidence." You have to establish exactly where it came from, who handled it, how it was preserved, down to every tiny little detail. Then juries have to sit there and take it all in and try not to fall asleep because it can get boring. Even in a case that is otherwise interesting, it can get really, really boring.

Dan: John says he's in court around twice a month and it's not easy. He's got to prepare his testimony and prepare for a grilling from defense attorneys.

John: Defense attorneys, they're a special breed and I want to make it clear. I am not one of those people who holds a grudge against defense attorneys. I truly believe every defendant deserves a competent defense, but talking about stress, a good defense attorney can turn even the most seasoned investigator into a blubbering mess. You walk in there, you feel prepared, you've got a clear story to tell. Then the defense starts their cross-examination and that all gets thrown out the window because they have a knack for making you question your own memory, your own notes, maybe even your own name, if they're good enough.

They'll start with a seemingly innocent question, something like, "Detective, wouldn't you agree that it's important to follow every protocol precisely?" Of course, you agree with that because what kind of idiot doesn't agree with a statement like that? Then they've got you explaining why you didn't collect a single hair from a filthy carpet in a rundown motel five years ago at 3:00 AM when the power was out and the bed was covered with intestines. Now suddenly that detail that you never thought would matter, it's now the centerpiece of the trial and you're up on the stand, tap dancing, trying to explain it.

They're not just trying to break down your case. They're trying to break you. They'll drill into the tiniest little inconsistencies. Maybe you describe the suspect's shoes as black in one report, but dark colored in another. That's an insignificant detail, but in court, it becomes this massive question of whether you can even be trusted. Sometimes I've found myself sitting there thinking, "Is this real life? Did I, did I actually become a detective or did I just dream the last 15 years of my life?" The worst part is even if you handle it perfectly, you keep your answers short, you stick to what you know, you still walk out of there feeling like you've just been run over by a lawnmower.

Dan: Part of what makes testifying difficult is that he's being asked to recount things with perfect accuracy that happened years ago. What he's learned on the investigative side is that even memories of events that happened moments ago are not always trustworthy.

John: Human beings are awful at memory. We're terrible. That's why I have a notebook. That's why we write down everything we do, because you learn very quickly, as even as a rookie police officer, you go out to your first call as a police officer, and you interview three witnesses who all saw the same thing. They tell you three different stories because we're not programmed to remember fine details when we're in high-pressure situations. It's just not how our brain works.

Dan: It must be such an interesting thing. You were saying you interview people and you get three different stories. I think one thing that the media has trained us to believe is if stories clash, like somebody is lying. It seems like it's far more common for people to just simply have different impressions of how things unfolded. None of them are lying but memory is fallible. Impressions are fallible. They saw things in a different order. It's your job to untangle all of that.

John: Yes. Let's not forget, sometimes they are lying.

[laughter]

Dan: That's fair.

John: I get lied to a lot to the point where it becomes second nature to question everything somebody says because people will lie to cover their tracks. They'll lie to avoid suspicion, they'll lie to protect someone else, or they might lie just because they think it might make things easier for themselves. That can really mess with your sense of what's normal. When I'm off duty, I have to consciously flip the switch that-- remind myself that most people in my day-to-day interactions are not trying to pull a fast one on me.

Dan: I was going to ask you about that. It just seems like it would be so hard to flip modes after you've spent the whole day with people trying to get away with something and then to have to go back into civilian life and be trusting and open again.

John: Yes, it is. Some people are better at it than others. I like to talk about having my bubbles and I've got my work bubble and I've got my home and family bubble. I really do try to turn it off when I leave work and be present for my family. It's not easy. You deal with the worst parts of humanity all day. There's this sort of mental residue that clings to you. I do try to do my best to leave work so that when I get home, I want to be there in the moment, not just physically, but really there, listening to my kids and laughing at something my wife says.

It's this constant effort to shift gears and shake off the weight of the job and focus on what's really important. It's not perfect and I don't always succeed at it, but I feel like I owe it to my family to try at least.

Dan: What would you say is the hardest part of your job?

John: Absolutely without question, the hardest thing you have to do is a death notification.

Dan: Of the victims' families?

John: The victim's family. Walking up to someone's front door, knowing that you're about to change their life forever, that is the hardest thing that I ever have to do. You're about to tell someone that someone that they love has been murdered and there is no way to ease into that. There's no way to soften it. You can't preface it with anything. You can't tap dance around it. You remember you're meeting this person for the very first time at the worst moment of their life. Most people never have to deliver news like this, certainly not to somebody they've never met.

You try to prepare yourself, but there's really no way to be ready for that moment. You take a deep breath, you knock on the door and there on the other side of the door, some random person, maybe they're in sweatpants and slippers and eating a bowl of ice cream and watching Wheel of Fortune without a care in the world. Then you knock on their door and you completely shatter their existence. Once you deliver that news, you have to let them react. You can't rush it or try to control it. Some people go silent, they're unable to speak.

Other people scream or cry or collapse. You have to let all of that happen. It's not your job to fix it or make it better because you can't. However it goes, there's that moment of shock and then you have to give them a moment and try to absorb what you just said, even if it's clear that they're barely hearing the words. Because in those first moments, nothing you say after that initial shock is going to register. The person in front of you is in such a state of shock that they're not processing anything.

What I like to do in those situations is I find someone else who can take in the details like a neighbor or a relative or a family friend. You need a trusted third party who isn't quite as emotionally shattered. Somebody who can listen to all the routine bureaucratic things that come next and what happens with the body, how the investigation will proceed, what the immediate steps are. I use that third person as my anchor because that's the person who can remember all of this like practical information.

Dan: What was the hardest notification you ever had to do?

John: They're all really hard. I don't think any one of them stands out as being harder because that would mean that some of them are easier and none of them are easy. The only other people I can think of that have to do something like that are emergency room doctors, but even in an emergency room, the family member is there. They know something bad has happened. They've mentally prepared themselves for something like-- This is like you're knocking on somebody's door and they're just going about their day and then you just destroy them. Then you have to just move on.

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Dan: Tell me about how the job has changed over the years. Is there technology maybe that you have access to today that you wouldn't have had 10 or 15 years ago?

John: Oh my goodness. It's crazy. I was assigned to cold case investigations for a few years and I had the privilege of being able to go back into case files that are 10, 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50 or 60 years old. You really get an appreciation of how much things have changed and how different a job it is today than it was, say, 30 years ago. For example, just the proliferation of surveillance video that's everywhere. One thing everybody can relate to is the OJ Simpson trial because it was such a big deal.

In the trial, there was this big debate on the timeline of when OJ got home and when was his Bronco seen, was it seen over near the crime scene? If that happened today, the first thing I would do is start canvassing the route between the crime scene and his house and his car, if it had passed by, would have been captured a hundred times.

Dan: That's a great point. Yes.

John: I would have been able to track his movements from the crime scene to the house. I don't just focus on the cameras at the scene. We will go backwards and forwards to try to track the suspect's movements before the murder or after the murder, cell phone records. If he had a cell phone, his cell phone is constantly recording its location. I would have had that. I wouldn't have to be like the detectives back then, just relying on witness statements that may or may not be products of a decent recollection.

We talked about memory earlier, but that's all they had at that point because there was no other way to document things.

Dan: As John mentioned, he worked cold cases for a few years. These are old cases that the original investigators weren't able to solve.

John: Back in the late '90s, early 2000s, police departments started cold case units because they realized they had all of this untested biological evidence that they could test for DNA, that they didn't have the technology before. They ran the tests and they identified the DNA and they matched it to a particular suspect. They went out and picked up the suspect. Those cases are all done. They're solved. It's been 25 years or so since that has been a thing. The vast majority of untested DNA cases have been solved.

If I'm looking at a cold case from 15 years ago, well, 15 years ago, it was 2009 and we were well into the DNA era in 2009. There isn't a lot of untested DNA. If a case is cold today, it's cold for a reason other than untested DNA evidence.

Dan: One of the cold cases that stuck with John the most was a murder that happened in Hollywood more than 30 years ago.

John: In 1990, this guy named Billy Newton was found in a dumpster-- his head and his feet were found in a dumpster. The original detectives worked the case as hard as they could for years and years and years and just couldn't get to the bottom of it.

Dan: John picked up the case and he did what any of us would do. He Googled it and the case had its own Wikipedia page.

John: Then there were a couple of podcasters who were interested in the case because this guy, he lived in West Hollywood and he was a member of the LGBTQ community. These podcasters also live in West Hollywood and they were interested in the case and that came up in my Google search. I reached out to them.

Dan: You reached out to the podcasters?

John: Yes.

Dan: This is like the plot of a TV show. This is great.

John: I reached out to them and said, "Hey, if you guys are talking about this case, it's at a dead end, I'd be interested in talking to you guys." They'd started a tip line.

Dan: They got a tip that suggested maybe the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was responsible. Someone had seen someone who looked like Dahmer with Newton the night of the murder. Turns out it was not Jeffrey Dahmer, but a documentary filmmaker was also interested in the case. She'd hired a researcher to help her.

John: He, through a very long chain of events, was able to make a connection that identified a possible suspect that had never been identified before. They got in touch with me. I looked at this guy and he was in prison in Oklahoma for killing two people in Oklahoma. We went out to Oklahoma, my partner and I went to the prison in Oklahoma and interviewed this person and ultimately got a confession and solved the case after 32 years.

Dan: You got a confession?

John: Yes.

Dan: Tell me about that conversation.

John: It was probably the most intense conversation I ever had. Afterwards, I had to catch my breath. The person who was responsible for this murder in 1990, they were in their early 20s, was a man who was working in the gay adult porn industry as an actor. Also on the side was an active skinhead. If you know anything about skinheads, like gay and skinhead don't go together.

Dan: Yes.

John: This guy was living this double life. Then he eventually moved to Oklahoma. He did a couple of murders in Oklahoma and that's when he got caught and sentenced to life in Oklahoma. In prison, he transitioned into a she.

Dan: There are a lot of twists and turns in this story.

John: If you Google it, this story was on the cover of the LA Times in February of '23. It was pretty crazy. This person had transitioned into a-- was now a woman and had also become an Orthodox Jew. She was a gay porn actor, transgender, Nazi, Orthodox Jew. She was wearing a knitted pink yarmulke.

Dan: And swastika tattoos. [crosstalk]

John: And swastika tattoos, but she eventually confessed.

Dan: Did you have the goods or were you just fishing?

John: I was on a bluff, and not even a bluff. I just basically said, "Look, you're the best suspect that's come up in this case in 32 years." They just stopped and shut down and took about another 15 minutes and then eventually admitted to it.

Dan: John was able to corroborate the confession by aligning facts that police knew about the case with things the confessor would not have been able to know unless they committed the murder. John was stunned.

John: I walked into the restroom in the prison on our way out and I had to splash cold water on my face. My knees were buckling. That was really intense because I thought that the best thing I was going to get was some lies that I could then prove wrong. There's a saying in this business that, the next best thing to a confession is a provable lie. I thought I was going to get some provable lies. The fact that I walked out of there and she had admitted to doing this just made my head spin.

Dan: The fact that you went all the way to Oklahoma just on intuition on some early evidence, but it doesn't sound like there was a lot of evidence.

John: No, it was-- This guy, Clark Williams, who was the researcher for the filmmaker when he brought this suspect up and I started looking into their life and I said, "Oh, this actually might be really good," because this person had a very serious history of violence was in Los Angeles at the time was in the same industry as our victim. There were just a lot of things that matched up and his name was not in the case file at all. I would have been derelict in my duty if I hadn't gone to Oklahoma and interviewed this person because there were so many things that were compelling.

Even if they had nothing to do with it, I still would have had to check it off the list. Yes, we travel all over the country all the time to interview people, track down leads. It's one of the perks because I get to keep the frequent flyer miles.

Dan: John, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. First, what's a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? What does it mean?

John: This isn't particular to homicide detectives per se, but it'd be particular to policing in California at least. That is 415.

Dan: 415.

John: 415 is the California penal code for challenging someone to a fight or disturbing the peace, but it's used as a general term for somebody who is agitated or upset or emotional or somebody who might be prone to an outburst. It's anything from, "Oh yes, we don't want to talk to that guy right now. He's totally 415," or, "Don't talk to a detective so-and-so, they're having a bad day. He's all 415. You don't want to talk to him." It's sort of like this adjective that we use to describe people who are just hotheaded or, might be prone to an outburst or being difficult.

Dan: That's so good. What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

John: This is going to sound crazy, but it is my notebook. It is basic. It is unapologetically analog and I'm otherwise all in on technology. I've tried taking notes digitally, but I've yet to find a good substitute for a pen and paper. I don't have to turn it on. I don't have to make sure it's charged. I don't have to make sure it's connected to wifi. It can't shut down and reboot on me randomly. You just open it up and you go. Everything lives in my notebook. All the details from my crime scene, notes from my witness interviews, observations that I made.

It's where you capture the raw data of the story as it's unfolding. It is with me every step of the way. I don't go anywhere without my notebook.

Dan: What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

John: I knew this question was coming. I actually brought a prop and I'm going to make the sound.

Dan: Oh, this is awesome.

John: I'm going to make the sound. Then the game is if you can figure out what it is.

Dan: Okay.

John: Ready?

Dan: Give that to me again. Handcuffs?

John: Yes. It's the sound of the ratchets clicking on a pair of handcuffs. Say you've been looking at a suspect for months or maybe even years and you're building a case and you finally have enough to make that arrest. I'm not always present when the cuffs go on because we have apprehension teams that go out and do that. That is a sound that is universal to policing, no matter where you are in the world. When you hear it, you know at least for that moment that everything's okay. Everything's under control.

Dan: You have like a positive ripple of emotions when you hear that?

John: Yes, for sure because it signifies a lot of things. It can signify the end of an investigation. It can signify-- and this applies more to patrol officers, but you get somebody who doesn't want to get arrested and they're fighting with you and you have to fight to get them into handcuffs. Those handcuffs clicking on, that's the moment where everything is under control because they can't fight anymore.

Dan: It's closure. Literally and figuratively.

John: Literally it's closure. It just can bring a moment of peace, and you know that, at least for that moment, everything's going to be okay.

Dan: By the way, just a tangent on handcuffs. It seems like in every TV or film depiction of handcuffs, you can pick them with like a paper clip or, any kind-- Can you pick handcuffs?

John: Yes. [laughs] They're pretty easy.

Dan: Are they really?

John: Yes.

Dan: Okay. That's true.

John: That's why we-- so most handcuffs, they have a double lock mechanism so you could push a little button in and double lock them. That makes it a little more secure. Even with that, no, they're not sophisticated. There's one handcuff key. That's the same key for every pair of handcuffs in the world.

Dan: It seems like there's a business opportunity there to have a non-pickable handcuff. Entrepreneurs who are listening, there you go. It's your million-dollar ticket.

John: Hit me up, I'll give you some design ideas.

Dan: What is an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

John: For me, I call it the aha moment, is that it's a part of the job that I will never get tired of. It's that instant where everything suddenly clicks. It could be when you identify a suspect, or when you find the evidence that places a particular suspect at the scene, or you do a really powerful witness interview, and that witness finally gives you a piece that cracks everything open. There's nothing else like it in this job. It's an endorphin rush. It's that split second where all the hours, like all the dead ends, all the chasing leads, have all led to this breakthrough.

Of course, it's usually followed up by hours or even days of more follow-up work, documenting and corroborating every detail, but that one moment makes it all worth it. It's the actual high point, and it's that moment that reminds you why you keep pushing forward case after case after case.

Dan: John Lamberti is a homicide detective with the LAPD. John also works as a story advisor for crime dramas and thrillers. He's got a website, CrimeCraft Story Advisors. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. Talking to John got me thinking about the separation between our work selves and our home selves. Sometimes there's not a huge separation between the two. I'm thinking of the life insurance agent from a few episodes back. My impression was that his work self and home self were pretty similar, but sometimes there's a chasm.

You hear sometimes about Hollywood performers who are entertainers and clowns on stage, but really different at home, quiet, reclusive. People with different sides to their personalities might need that split in their lives. If you like hot tea and you like iced tea, it doesn't really make sense to compromise and drink lukewarm tea all day. You want to keep hot, hot, and cold, cold, and have both. My read was that that's true of John, that he loves the challenge and the thrill of solving cases and nabbing bad guys, but he also wants to keep Detective John at a certain distance from Family John.

Both can coexist in their, as he said, respective bubbles. Tracking down video camera feeds, interviewing witnesses, chasing clues, enduring the gauntlet of cross-examination, and snapping the handcuffs on someone who's done the unspeakable. Folks, that's what it's like to be a homicide detective. A shout out to Jake Breeden, the man behind the lukewarm tea analogy that has stuck in my memory for 18 years. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. Take care.