Retired LAPD detective still works cold cases

Retired Los Angeles Police Division detective Rick Jackson contained in the Tao Home on the Eugene O’Neill Nationwide Historic Web site in Danville, Calif., on Friday, March 22, 2024. Jackson is doing a fundraiser on behalf of the Tao Home/the Eugene O’Neill Basis on April 5. (Dai Sugano/Bay Space Information Group)

For 28 years, Rick Jackson’s mission in life was investigating murders for the Los Angeles Police Division. He labored instances involving everybody from gang members, avenue hustlers, intercourse criminals and different cops to the wealthy and well-known, together with Doris Duke and O.J. Simpson.

Jackson has turn out to be well-known on the planet of fiction, too, lending his experience to elite crime novelists to such an extent, he’s typically known as the “Godfather of L.A. Crime Writers.” Notably, he helps best-selling writer Michael Connelly painting police work authentically in his Harry Bosch and “Lincoln Lawyer” novels and served as a technical guide for Connelly’s “Bosch” Amazon Authentic collection.

Since retiring in 2013, Jackson has lived a quiet however busy life in bucolic Danville together with his second spouse. Throughout a current go to to playwright Eugene O’Neill’s Tao Home property, a nationwide historic website within the hills west of downtown Danville, Jackson described all of the methods he by no means actually left homicide — or crime fiction — behind when he left Los Angeles.

He and Connelly shared a stage this spring at Danville’s Village Theatre, the place their sold-out dialog — which touched, in fact, on previous crime instances — benefited the Eugene O’Neill Basis, a nonprofit that hosts annual productions of O’Neill’s works at Tao Home.

Tao Home has turn out to be a favourite mountaineering vacation spot for Jackson. However on this explicit day, Jackson is standing, rapt, in O’Neill’s personal, book-lined research.

“That is the place it occurs,” he mentioned in regards to the Nobel Prize winner, whose early Twentieth-century performs revolutionized American theater for his or her life like portrayals of human despair. “That is the place the thoughts’s rolling, proper right here the place these things is created.”

Jackson has turn out to be an writer himself. “Black Tunnel, White Magic: A True Story of Homicide and Betrayal in Los Angeles” will probably be revealed subsequent spring. It’s a non-fiction account of considered one of his most memorable instances: the 1990 summer-solstice killing of a UCLA pupil who had been exploring Wiccan practices. His physique was present in an previous railroad tunnel rumored to be a Manson household haunt.

Furthermore, Jackson has returned, not less than part-time, to investigating murders, serving to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s division clear chilly instances. This new section of his profession really started in Danville a number of years after he first arrived. The police chief requested if he might assist clear the 1985 killing of Virginia Vincent, a 57-year-old actual property agent who was discovered raped and strangled in her Diablo Highway house.

Jackson couldn’t say no. Like Connelly’s LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, Jackson started by spreading out stories from the Vincent “homicide ebook” — because the case file is understood in detective circles — on a desk within the Danville station to determine subsequent steps.

“To be trustworthy, at that time, I missed working instances,” he mentioned.

Chilly instances will be “time machines,” Jackson mentioned, transporting detectives again to a special time or place. Or, as Bosch as soon as mentioned, “In each homicide is the story of a metropolis.”

The Vincent investigation shocked the group as a result of homicide was — and continues to be — so uncommon right here. Police initially explored hyperlinks to different serial predators who terrorized the Bay Space within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, together with the Golden State Killer. With Jackson’s assist, police used a more moderen DNA method, referred to as “household search,” to establish the killer as a younger plumber working within the space. He died in 1997, so it should by no means be identified how he crossed paths with Vincent or why he killed her. However even when Vincent’s household didn’t get solutions to all their questions, Jackson mentioned, they had been joyful to have some decision and to know that police nonetheless cared

Connelly isn’t stunned that Jackson has returned to investigations. “For some detectives, it’s a job. For others, it’s an actual mission, and missions don’t finish normally,” Connelly mentioned. “I believe, in the event that they let him, he’ll be doing this till his final day. I believe he actually is motivated by serving to households recuperate. A part of that course of is giving them solutions.”

Connelly’s Bosch is mission-driven, too. Like Jackson, the fictional detective shows pictures of victims at his desk to spur him to maintain pushing for solutions. However whereas Bosch is gruff and solitary, nonetheless nursing the ache of a traumatic childhood, Jackson is affable and enjoys connecting with totally different varieties of individuals.

“He’s informed me that the important thing to nice detective work is getting individuals to speak to you,” Connelly mentioned.

Jackson’s childhood in Lakewood, south of L.A., was a cheerful one. He liked studying all types of mysteries, from Hardy Boys novels to information tales about native crimes. Whereas engaged on his ebook, he mentioned he got here throughout his ninth-grade yearbook, through which a trainer wrote: “Better of luck within the detective discipline.”