
It was a murder mystery made
for Hollywood, as well as made in Hollywood…
Two weeks ago, on a hiking
trail in the shadow of the iconic Hollywood Sign, a decapitated
human head was found in a plastic bag.
It was a moment many have dreaded, when the Drug War raging in Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexican Border finally spilled over into Anytown USA.
The LAPD, the law enforcement agency in charge of the investigation, has apparently been too busy with local crime to realize that decapitation has become a Mexican drug cartel’s signature atrocity.
They announced that until they had a motive, the killers could be anyone.
"Without identifying the victim, and without knowing why this person was killed, and the people that's he's associated wityh, it could be anything," said Commander Andrew Smith, the officer in charge of the investigation, and chief spokeman in the case.
But that's not strictly true, Chief, is it? A lot of men kill their wives, don't they?
Very few cut their heads off.
The LAPD announced they had a 100-person crime team of detectives, criminologists and search & rescue specialists on the severed head case. Maybe they should get them all in a room somewhere to brainstorm a little. Get their thinking caps on. Ask questions. Think outside the box.
Guys, you've got a severed head case to solve. Hmm. Severed head, severed heads… Where are they seeing a lot of that sort of thing these days?
Few noticed the potentially dire consequences. Police didn’t mention it. Neither did reporters. Why?
Because there was a cover-up. Yes, but why was there a cover-up?
Ay, that's the real question, now, isn't it? This is the story of
how it went down.
Dog days in Hollywood
It
was Tuesday, the 17th of January, at 2.30
in the afternoon.
Two professional dog-watchers,
a mother and daughter, are running nine dogs in their charge
on a hiking trail which leads up to the famous Hollywood
Sign, a half-mile past the road that winds up through Bronson
Canyon Park's front gate.
The neighborhood is filled
with the homes of the rich and famous, like Brad Pitt and
Angelina Jolie, whose mansion is nearby. Many of them are
willing to pay dog-watchers to exercise their dogs for them.
And it’s a dog who steps up
to fill the hero’s role in the story. A day-long search
for human body parts hit paydirt when a golden retriever
named “Ollie” strayed from the pack—as is his wont, say
the dogwatchers—to go off and explore on his own.
"One of the dogs ran into
the brush,” walker Lauren Kornberg told local reporters.
"He was going crazy. He was digging, digging, digging...
Digging, and barking."
Ollie emerged from the bushes
carrying a round plastic grocery bag in his mouth. “He trotted
back with a shredded plastic bag, and then dropped it, and
let it roll down the hill.”
Before the bag came to rest,
something fell out that looked like a human head.
An alternate Universe
The
area where the head is lying, Bronson Canyon, dead-ends
at a rustic park that’s been used for filming movies and
TV shows for decades. It’s the home of the Bat Cave. It's
where they used to film Batman.
When they’ve stumbled into
the presence of a recently-severed head, many say they experienced
the event as unreal in the middle of an atmosphere of unreality.
For her part, Lauren Kornberg’s
reaction wasn’t shock and horror. She didn’t go ‘eeek!’
“I didn’t think anything of it,” she explained to reporters.
“I thought it was a prop.”
Her older companion disagreed,
and started scrambling down the hill. She said, “It
looked like a redhead to me.”
The women moved in for a closer
look. ""Even as we got closer, we still couldn't
say for sure whether it was ... real,” Kornberg said.
“Until my mom was literally about a foot away, face to face,
and could see bloody hair and eyeballs…”
“I heard her gasp. ‘It's real,
oh my God, it's real.’”
Police immediately closed the
park. A search for more body parts commenced.
Late the next day a coroner’s cadaver dog named Indiana
Bones found two hands and two feet.
Police got fingerprints from
one of the hands. They belonged to a missing 66-year
old Hollywood resident named Hervey Medellin.
The head was his too.
Hacking the story of the Hollywood Head
The head found
in Hollywood, or the Hollywood Head, as it inevitably came
to be called, received extensive but not very serious news
coverage.
It
made the news three days straight in U.S. papers and London
tabloids. Even Entertainment Tonight did a story.
They focused on the celebrity angle.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s
Hollywood Hills mansion was very near the spot of the gruesome
discovery. There was a rumor (erroneous) that someone from
his security detail might be involved.
The location of Medellin’s
death was unknown. But police said it did not occur inside
Medellin’s Hollywood apartment, and not inside Griffith
Park either.
What police did know was one
important piece of information about the grisly find that
was somehow kept from the public, a detail which must have
been instantly-obvious to investigators at the scene, and
to any well-informed journalist.
The murder, decapitation, and
placement of the severed human head— in a spot where it
was sure to be found—was the work of one of the brutally-murderous
Mexican Drug Cartels.
Who's in the business of cutting
people's heads off these days? Ask any 14-year male.
Beheadings are their signature atrocity. Decapitation is
an almost-daily occurrence in Mexico.
Police didn’t mention it. Neither
did reporters.
Let’s Play Lead Detective
Consider the circumstances.

A human head is lying in
the shadow of the Hollywood Sign, after being
discovered by a dog belonging to a Hollywood publicist.
It’s a drug cartel's dream.
It's the ultimate narco-banner.
And it’s a circumstance that
more than hints that the murder was left intentionally-visible,
done in a way almost guaranteed to provide maximum media
exposure.
Right out in the open in the
middle of the day and in front of everybody... somebody
sent a message to somebody else.
For the next 48 hours,
police helicopters and news-station choppers would be jockeying
for space over the site.
Location location location
There
were problems with the story. For one thing—and
this is no trivial matter in highly status-conscious Los
Angeles—the
head had turned up on the wrong side of the hill.
"Griffith Park is a huge,
rugged expanse on the other side of the hill,” explained
LAPD Officer Bruce Borihahn. “Usually that’s the dumping
place for bodies.”
“This marked the first time
police could recall finding a head or other body part,”
an on-air reporter from KTLA intoned, “on the Hollywood
side of the hill.”
Hervey Medellin’s partner in
an apartment reported him missing to police on January 9,
after the resident failed to return.

Then, too, there was the background
of Hervey Medellin himself.
He was a Mexican national
with no local relatives. But he had a brother and sister
in Laredo, Texas, a city which is to drug traffickers what
Vienna is to opera buffs.
Medellin was retired. He was
a flight attendant on Mexicana Airlines for 20 years.
At the same time, he is said
to have owned what became an immediate source of concern
to many of his friends and family: an extensive and highly-valuable
art collection.
The initial reaction of several
friends and family members in Laredo was to inquire of reporters
whether the art collection had been stolen.
It was an art collection, it
would seem, which was clearly way out of reach for someone
working on a flight attendant’s salary.
The criminal hierarchy of Mexico
However,
there is an alternative scenario that I think—you can judge
for yourself— has more of a ring of the truth to it.
Hervey Medellin, a Mexican
national, resided in Hollywood for years. Before that he
spent 20 years as a flight attendant at Mexicana Airlines.
Anecdotally, when it comes
to drug smuggling, Mexicana Airlines was for many years
known as, drug-wise, Mexico’s national carrier.The reason
was simple.
While Hervey Medellin worked
at Mexicana, his boss, the airline’s owner, was a
powerful Mexican “industrialist” named Jose Serrano Segovia.
Serrano was a man with a checkered
past.
Today Serrano stands at Number
68 on the list of 100 Richest and Most Powerful Men in Mexico...
But Chilean prosecutors once
accused Serrano of being a member of the Cali Cartel. (Back
in the day, when Cali was the most powerful cartel in the
world.)
Serrano was more recently accused
in published reports of using his numerous transportation
companies (airlines, trucking companies, and railroads)
to smuggle drugs into the United States.
Moreover Jose Serrano Segovia
is a figure in the most visible drug move of the century
so far, the seizure of a St. Petersburg-based DC-9 carrying
5.5 tons of cocaine onboard which eventually led Wachovia
Bank, at the time the nation’s 4th largest, to
cease to exist.
(A closer look at Medellin’s
employer, and the criminal hierarchy in Mexico, will be
in a second story. There’s a lot to tell.)
"A gay man in Griffith Park, what'd you expect?"
Public
reaction was a mixture of fear and revulsion.
“It's like something out of
'The Godfather!' " exclaimed L.A. city council member
Tom LaBonge, who hikes in Griffith Park almost every day.
Renee Dake Wilson, who walks
her boxer-pit bull mix Sweet Pea near the park, told the
L.A. Times she’d been unnerved by the find. "I'm a
little worried,” she said. “It's a concern to have such
an event happen in your neighborhood. But I do think it's
an isolated event."
A Medellin friend named Vilma
Aguilar told KCBS-TV that Medellin often hiked through Griffith
Park, and that during one hike last year met a new
“friend.”
This will become one line of
speculation, that there was something about Griffith Park
so that travelers there could reasonably expect to face
a greater than usual chance of decapitation.
The other line of speculation
was: Medellin was gay. He lived with a man. Maybe gay men
in Hollywood regularly turn up decapitated. Who knew? Newspapers
said Medellin’s boyfriend told friends Medellin left their
home after Christmas to vacation in Tijuana.
That alone—at this point in
time—was more than passing strange. There’s a war there.
Who vacations in Tijuana?
"Go back to your homes and wait for the All Clear!"
The
LAPD understandably wanted the citizens of Los Angeles to
know that the murder was targeted, and not the act of a
serial killer. Police said they were working round the clock
to hunt down the retiree's killer.
'They did serve a search
warrant last night. They are following clues, and the case
is progressing,” Commander Andrew Smith
told reporters a few days later.
Medellin's boyfriend wasn't
convinced. The last time he heard Hervey Medellin’s voice,
he told police, was in a phone call in early January. On
January 9th he reported him missing.
That was all he knew. He said,
"I am afraid for my life.”
"The detectives continue
to make progress in investigating the case and reveal more
details as possible," said a Police Department spokesman.
While generally a safe area, "we ask visitors to be
cautious, to be walking with friends, do not go alone."
“This is an unusual occurrence,”
said Officer Rosario Herrera with the Los Angeles Police
Department. “There’s no evidence at the scene that the crime
occurred there. In fact, it looks like the head was placed
in that location.”
“There’s no reason to believe
that this is part of any kind of a series,” said Smith
in a news briefing. He noted that the canyon is well-travelled
by both cars and hikers, with picnic areas and a children's
playground. “There’s no other evidence to indicate
that this is anything besides just a single, individual
isolated occurrence.”
"A single isolatated occurence"
Since
the statement ten days ago assuring the public of the safety
of the reopened Bronson Park LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division
has said nothing publicly about the case.
Two weeks later, the
decapitation of Hervey Medellin remains unsolved,
and officially mysterious and baffling. “A motive for the
murder has not been determined,” said the L.A. Times.
“The death of Hervey Medellin,
the dismembered resident of Hollywood, remains a mystery,”
reported the Associated Press.
The discovery did reveal
something, however, but its only a mystery to people who
haven’t been paying attention: the lengths the U.S. Government
will go to suppress news it finds inconvenient in America’s
“War on Drugs.”
The fiercely-fought Drug War
in Mexico has until now been largely confined inside Mexico,
and along the U.S.-Mexico Border. But the public beheading
of Hervey Medellin is a salvo across the bow from that conflict
that landed in the U.S.
“Was it a random attack?” asked
a headline in a London tabloid. In a sub-head, the paper
supplied its own answer.
"Hollywood beheading victim
regularly hiked through park where his body parts were found.
Lived near rugged, hillside and met roommate while hiking
with his dogs."
Peddling wolf cookies to the Great Unwashed
Have
Mexican drug cartels been ruled out as suspects in the beheading?
A detective on the case refused to discuss whether drug
trafficking played any role in the murder.
“You can report that story
if you want to,” he said, “but we have nothing new to report
about any aspect of the case, other than to say that we’re
doing our investigation.”
In any even, the decapitation
is already yesterday’s news. After the initial flurry of
publicity, there have been no new stories about the Hollywood
Head mystery for at least ten days now.
Since then Pat Sajak’s admitted
hosting 'Wheel of Fortune' while drunk… A helicopter rescued
a woman from a cliff in Pasadena… And a mother got death
from a jury for killing her husband and children with a
pillow and a sword.
A Great White Shark was spotted
off Imperial Beach... Police said a woman offered sexual
favors for Chicken McNuggets… And a man was awarded $7 million
in a penis-shortening accident.
I mentioned to the police detective
I had on the phone that any list of career flight attendants
with museum quality art collections must be a short one.
Then I asked:
Could Hervey Medellin’s career
as a flight attendant have just been his ‘cover’ for a more
lucrative kind of employment?
The detective’s response was
to repeat his previous no comment.
And why not? Time is clearly
on his side.
NEXT:
More on the Hollywood Head,
Mexicana Airlines, and the Corporatization of the Drug Trade.