Dirty John and Other True Stories of Outlaws and Outsiders THE ACCUSATIONS PART ONE
He kept thinking that there had been a mistake, that he’d be out in no time. That the system, set into motion by some misunderstanding or act of malice, would soon correct itself.

That was before the detective informed him of the charges, and before the article in the Ventura County Star. “Man held after woman found raped and tortured,” read the headline, and there was his name, along with a quote from a police officer: “In 19 years of police work, this has to go down as one of the most brutal attacks I have ever seen.”

The sky was beautiful that afternoon. Louis Gonzalez III remembered it felt like spring.

He was standing on the sidewalk outside the Simi Valley Montessori School, having just flown in from Las Vegas, hoping to get a look at his five-year-old son’s new kindergarten. Standing there, waiting for the door to open so he could scoop the boy up in his arms and fly him to Nevada for the weekend.

The first officer arrived on a motorcycle and headed straight for him. He did not explain the charges as he snapped on the handcuffs. As Gonzalez stood there stunned, he noticed little faces pressed against the schoolhouse glass, watching, and asked if he could be moved just a bit so his son didn’t have to see.

Soon he’d surrendered all the items that tethered him reassuringly to the rational, workaday world. The BlackBerry he used a hundred times a day. His Dolce & Gabbana watch. His credit cards and photos of his son. His leather shoes and his socks, his pressed shirt and jacket, his belt and slacks and underwear. Naked in a holding cell, he watched his things disappear into plastic bags. He stepped into a set of black-and-white-striped jail scrubs, the kind his son might wear on Halloween.

A month passed in his single-bunk cell, and then another, and he had nothing but time to reckon all he’d lost. His freedom. His son. His job. His reputation. He had to wonder how much he could endure.

The other inmates in the solitary wing of the Ventura County Jail didn’t talk about their cases, because anyone might be a snitch, but his charges were well-known on the cellblock. More than once, they warned him about what awaited if he were convicted and sent to state prison. With a sex crime on his jacket, he knew, he would be a target forever.

“Like you’re waiting for death,” he said. “Dying would probably be better.”

•

Minutes before Gonzalez’s arrest around 2:00 p.m. on February 1, 2008, Tim Geiges placed a frantic 911 call. By the account he would give consistently in years to come, he’d just returned from work and found his wife, Tracy West, naked and bound in an upstairs bedroom of their Simi Valley home in the 1900 block of Penngrove Street.

The dispatcher tried to calm him. “Sir, somebody beat your wife up?”

“Somebody tied her up, and I just got home—oh my God . . .” He was whimpering. “I just untied her head just now. She’s crying. I need somebody, please!”

He managed to say that his wife’s attacker would be at the Montessori School, a mile away.

“Who is this person?”

“Louis. Louis Gonzalez the Third.”

When paramedics arrived at the house, they found West on the bed leaning forward, crying, with purple duct tape tangled in her hair.

•

Detective David Del Marto was on the other side of town, working leads on a robbery, when he heard the radio chatter about the attack. He has level blue eyes, a graying mustache, and the faultless posture of the Army MP he once was.

He found West, thirty-three, in the emergency room of Simi Valley Hospital and followed her across the street to Safe Harbor, a forensic facility where sexual assault victims are examined and interviewed. Her appearance suggested an attack of concentrated malice. Her face was swollen, her lip gashed, her hair torn out in chunks. A cord, found tied around her neck with a slipknot, had left an angry red line, and there were burns on her stomach and ring finger.

Later, Del Marto would remember how she looked away and pulled herself into a fetal position as she talked. It was the body language he’d seen in dozens of sexual assault cases.

West was unequivocal about who had attacked her. It was Gonzalez, she said. He was her ex-boyfriend, the father of her son.

Del Marto made his voice gentle. “I need to find out what happened and what to charge him with, OK? You know he’s in custody, right? You don’t have to worry anymore about him for now.”

In a small, fragile voice that kept trailing off and lapsing into silence, West explained that she and Gonzalez, thirty, had been fighting over custody since their son’s birth. She and Geiges were raising the boy, along with their younger daughter.

She said Gonzalez ambushed her in the garage, dragged her to an upstairs bedroom, hogtied her with her clothes, singed her with matches, and assaulted her vaginally and anally with a wooden coat hanger. Then, she said, he forced a plastic bag over her head and held it tight, and she feigned unconsciousness until he left.

“He told me he was gonna kill me,” she said. “He told me that. Seven or eight different times.”

“Did he have anything with him in his hands?”

“He had a bag. Like a little mini duffel bag.”

During the attack, she said, she awoke from a blackout to find Gonzalez had placed mittens on her hands—she recalled drawstrings at the wrists—while he wore plastic gloves.

Del Marto thought this pointed to an uncommon level of sophistication—to a man who took extraordinary pains to avoid leaving fingerprints or traces of his DNA under his victim’s raking fingernails. In his report, the detective noted another detail she gave: Her attacker had worn beige-colored overalls, as if to shield his clothes from evidence.

After the interview, West left with her husband. Del Marto followed them to their home on Penngrove Street for another examination of the scene. It was a placid residential block in one of California’s safest cities. He watched for some time as she refused to leave the car and go inside.

Del Marto thought West was lucky to be alive. A twenty-three-year veteran, he knew custody cases bred a special sort of derangement, and he was confident he understood the outlines of what happened here: extreme rage mingled with extreme calculation.

•

A few hours after the arrest, Del Marto pulled the accused out of his cell. He was known as a low-key investigator who didn’t raise his voice—“the epitome of the poker face,” his supervisor called him—and this was his chance to clinch the case with a confession.

He studied Gonzalez. He saw no scratches on his face or hands, and thought: the mittens.

“What is the accusation?” Gonzalez asked.

“That you assaulted Tracy at her house.”

“That I assaulted? At what time did this take place?”

Del Marto stopped him. He had to read him his Miranda rights, a delicate business he knew could end the interview fast. Gonzalez agreed to talk anyway.

Maybe he believes he’s smarter than me, Del Marto thought. In the detective’s eyes, the guy came off as a little arrogant, a little nonchalant, considering the situation. Gonzalez had an impressive title: senior vice president for business banking at the Bank of Las Vegas. He arranged commercial real estate loans. Del Marto thought: a salesman.

This is about a custody fight, Gonzalez said. “I always just assumed that she would lie and do things to get the edge in court. I don’t know that she would go to this extent to get me in trouble. This is absurd. I mean, how can I possibly have done that?”

Gonzalez insisted he’d never been to West’s house. Didn’t even know the address.

“You work for a financial institution,” Del Marto replied. “It’s not hard to get a property profile on somebody.”

The attack could have taken as little as fifteen or twenty minutes, he said, and it was just two or three minutes from West’s house to the school where he was arrested.

“It’s perfectly feasible for it to have occurred,” Del Marto said. “Perfectly feasible.”

What about evidence at the house? Gonzalez asked.

Del Marto thought of the gloves. “Somebody probably watches CSI quite a lot.”

“Who, me?”

“You did things that reminded people of ‘Hey, they do that on CSI’ to try to prevent us from collecting evidence.”

“I didn’t do this,” Gonzalez said. “I know you think I did it, but I didn’t do it.”

“I don’t have a reason not to think you did it,” the detective replied. “Yeah, I think you did it. I do.”

Del Marto ended the interview after twenty-three minutes. He sensed he would not get a confession. He would have to build the case with other evidence. A forensics team was dusting doorknobs and plucking carpet fibers from the house. They were combing the black suit Gonzalez was arrested in, and the inside of the rented Dodge Avenger he had parked outside a hair salon near the school.

Super-criminals are fictitious, Del Marto thought. Even very careful ones leave traces.

•

If Gonzalez was presumed innocent under the law, the Ventura County Jail did not expect other inmates to honor that distinction. He was held in a segregated unit and received his meals through a slot in the heavy metal door. He wore a red-striped wristband denoting a violent offense. An hour a day, the doors opened so he could shower and make phone calls.

Now and then he could hear people going crazy in their cells, kicking their doors, screaming on and on until they had to be removed. He thought of himself as mentally sturdy, a survivor, but knew how easily anyone could crack. So he crammed every waking hour with routine. He read out-of-date newspapers and John Grisham novels and the Bible. He made a paper chess set and stood at the crack in his cell door, calling out moves to opponents down the corridor.

He listened to other inmates dwelling on the food they missed. One guy would say, “TGI Fridays, calamari,” the others would groan, and it went on like that for hours.

He learned a rule about surviving lockup: Never take a daytime nap, no matter how tired you are. Because you might not sleep that night, and you’d be left for hours in the dark of a cold cell with only your thoughts and your fear.

He found himself replaying his whole life—every house he’d lived in, every deal he’d made, every girlfriend, including West.

They’d met in a finance-class study group at the University of Nevada in summer 2001. He was a high school dropout from the Bronx who had become a confident, career-minded student who wore pinstriped suits to class. She was smart, with brown hair and pretty hazel eyes, a vegetarian in flower dresses who spoke softly. He liked her air of West Coast bohemianism.

Their relationship was brief. They had been apart for months when, by his account, she called during a sonogram appointment. Suddenly he was listening to the heartbeat of their son.

In her fourth month of pregnancy, West met Gonzalez at a Denny’s in Vegas. According to a police report, she said he became upset because she wouldn’t go back to him. She said he slapped her and punched her stomach.

Gonzalez’s version: They had gotten back together, and argued because she was seeing another man and lying about it. He admitted to breaking her windshield, but only after she “went nuts hitting him,” the police report said. He was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor domestic violence. The charge was dropped.

The family-court battle began before the boy’s first birthday—an interminable gauntlet of judges, mediators, and psychiatrists as the two argued over custody and visitation.

Gonzalez’s custody attorney, Denise Placencio, said West tried relentlessly to curtail his time with his son, accusing Gonzalez of domestic abuse and claiming the boy suffered “separation anxiety” when he was away from his mother. The campaign continued, Placencio said, after West married Geiges and moved to California with the boy.

The courts allowed Gonzalez two weekends a month with his son. He would pick him up from the Vegas airport on Friday, and they would have an intense couple of days together. They might go to the mall or the shark reef at Mandalay Bay. And then back to the airport on Sunday, a knife twisting in his stomach as he watched his five-year-old loping down the jetway, a gangly little guy with reddish hair glancing back uncertainly.

In January 2008, Gonzalez sent an email to West explaining that he wanted to see the boy’s new Montessori School in Simi Valley. He would pick him up there on February 1 and fly him back to Nevada for the weekend. He planned to take him to a Super Bowl Sunday barbecue.

West pressed for specifics. “What time are you planning on being here? Are you going to drive or fly?”

He would arrive by plane around noon, he wrote, and expected to get to the school around 2:00 p.m.

The email exchange soon descended into acrimony. All these trips to Vegas were taking a toll on their son, West wrote. “Having to tell him that he has to go despite his obvious distress, is not what I want. Having to sit with a crying child when he comes back because he doesn’t want me to leave his side, is not what I want,” she wrote. “I want a happy, healthy child. I have worked 24/7/365+ from the moment I knew of him, to do the best for him—not me.”

Gonzalez answered that he hadn’t seen these signs of distress—his son seemed happy to see him. “My focus right now is to make the best of what little time I have with him,” he wrote to West. “I’m going to be thirty-one this year. A lot has changed since you last knew me.” His whole life was his son, he wrote. “When he isn’t with me the only thing I do is wait for him.”

West replied by attacking him as a father, writing that he had “proven time and time again” that he did not put their son’s needs above his own whims. “You are just not capable,” she wrote. He had “mentally tortured” their son, she claimed, by telling him once that his plane would crash in bad weather.

If she believed he’d say that, Gonzalez replied, “then you need help.”

It was hardly the nastiest exchange Gonzalez could remember. But he found himself replaying it in his cell, his thoughts racing. His hope of a quick release now seemed remote, considering the charges. If convicted of all counts—residential burglary, kidnapping, torture, attempted murder, anal and genital penetration with a foreign object—he faced five back-to-back life sentences.

“His goal was to degrade and humiliate her as much as humanly possible before killing her” and fleeing with their son, Ventura County Assistant District Attorney Andrea Tischler wrote in court papers arguing that Gonzalez should be held without bail. He committed “some of the most extreme possible crimes against another human being,” Tischler contended, crimes “so heinous that they defy the imagination.”

The judge ruled: No bail.

•

Looking at Gonzalez through the Plexiglas for the first time, three days after his arrest, his lead defense attorney, Debra S. White, was struck by his eyes, which she described as “these dark eyes, these piercing eyes.” He looked distraught and tired and angry.

This is about the boy, Gonzalez insisted. She wants me out of his life. Nail down my alibi and get me out, he said. He recited a detailed list, mentally compiled over hours in his cell, of everybody who might have seen him around the time West said the attack occurred.

White called her sister, Leigh-Anne Salinas, her investigator on big cases. White has the clothes and looks of a lawyer in a prime-time drama. Salinas wears jeans and a T-shirt on the job. Her speech is salty and she’s at ease both in gang neighborhoods and white-collar offices.

Salinas related to Gonzalez’s businesslike, hard-edged manner—it reminded her of herself—but didn’t think a jury would like him much. She is pessimistic about human nature, and on first meeting Gonzalez suspected he might be guilty. She thought: Wow, this guy really thought this out.

If there was any chance of proving his innocence, she knew she would have to move quickly, before memories faded.

Her task: verify Gonzalez’s whereabouts in the hours preceding his arrest. West had accused Gonzalez of attacking her between 12:30 and 12:45 p.m. She knew the time, she told police, because she was about to leave to pick up her daughter early from school.

Salinas began retracing Gonzalez’s movements, starting with his arrival at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank around noon that day. She walked into Enterprise Rent-A-Car on Hollywood Way, where employees remembered Gonzalez. He was the guy who needed a child’s car seat and stepped outside for a cigarette as the paperwork was being drawn up. His receipt said 12:09 p.m.

Next, Gonzalez would have driven northwest to Simi Valley, a twenty-eight-mile trip. Salinas verified that Gonzalez was on his cell phone with another Nevada banker during the drive. They were discussing a loan, the other banker said, and Gonzalez was complaining about traffic as he approached his son’s school. Phone records confirmed this call lasted from 12:43 to 12:48 p.m.

At the Montessori School at 1776 Erringer Road, Salinas’s job proved tougher. School employees knew West—she volunteered regularly there—and Salinas sensed their reluctance to help the man accused of brutalizing her.

Salinas was polite and persistent. School workers remembered Gonzalez arriving between 12:45 and 12:50 p.m. He greeted his son and briefly toured the school. One lady joked that she felt underdressed alongside his suit and tie. They told him to return in about an hour to pick up his boy.

After leaving the school, Gonzalez said he walked to a bagel shop at an adjacent strip mall. Salinas retraced his steps and found herself inside John’s Bagel Deli. The manager, Jung Soon Shin, recalled Gonzalez coming in around 1:00 p.m. to order a tuna sandwich on a sesame bagel.

When Shin explained that she didn’t take credit cards, he patted his pockets—no cash—and promised to be back.

At the Wells Fargo a few blocks away, Salinas discovered, an assistant manager named Mercedes Saunders remembered Gonzalez coming in to make a withdrawal. They chatted, and she found him calm and pleasant. Surveillance cameras confirmed he was there from 1:14 to 1:38 p.m. They showed him waiting in line, resting his head on his palm, a bored-looking man in a dark suit.

Back at the bagel shop, Shin saw him return sometime before 2:00 p.m. with cash to buy his sandwich. She remembered him because he wasn’t a regular, and because after he left she had to fish his reusable red sandwich basket out of the trash. And because he was so nicely dressed.

Salinas called her sister. West’s story didn’t hold up, she said.

“Wow,” White said. “He actually may be innocent.”

•

Del Marto, who had been talking to many of the same witnesses, was watching a case unravel against a man he believed guilty. Had Gonzalez cunningly timed the attack between periods he knew he would be seen in public?

Del Marto thought there was one thing that might solve the case: the duffel bag West said Gonzalez had been carrying. Had all the items Del Marto couldn’t find—the mittens, the gloves, the overalls—been stuffed in there and discarded?

He’d looked in storm drains and sewers around West’s house. He’d searched roofs, Dumpsters, freeway shoulders, anywhere Gonzalez might have tossed it. He’d even inquired at Simi Valley mailbox companies, in case Gonzalez had been calculating enough to mail it to himself.

No sign of the bag.

The detective needed proof that it had existed, something more than West’s word. He needed a photo or video footage. He made a phone call. He made another. He waited.
PART TWO
In his single-bunk cell in the Ventura County Jail, on a concrete slab desk, Louis Gonzalez III found himself compulsively writing letters to his five-year-old son. They were a chronicle of their truncated time together. Telling him how they’d cheered for the Yankees. How his favorite toy had been a mechanical garbage truck. How he’d been a picky eater from the start, but crazy for Cheerios. He never mailed them.

He imagined his son in the cell with him, pushing around his Hot Wheels. In the silence and the isolation, his dream life had acquired surprising vividness. He could almost hear the little plastic wheels on the concrete.

He had a recurring fantasy. He saw himself in prison, ten or fifteen years from now, his conviction long since sealed, his appeals denied. His son, grown into a young man, would be his salvation, would take it upon himself to look into the case. He’d show up and say, “Mom admitted that she lied.”

•

Doubts had been gnawing at Simi Valley Police Detective David Del Marto. In elaborate detail, Tracy West had told him that Gonzalez, her ex-boyfriend, had ambushed and sexually tortured her in her home between 12:30 and 12:45 p.m. on February 1, 2008.

To test that claim, Del Marto climbed into his car. He wanted to time the route between Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, where Gonzalez had arrived about noon that day from Las Vegas, and West’s house in Simi Valley. Gonzalez was in California to pick up their son—a five-year-old he and West had been fighting over interminably—for a regular weekend visit.

Del Marto had picked a Friday just after noon for his experiment, to replicate the conditions Gonzalez would have faced. He pushed his car to 80 miles per hour. His partner held a stopwatch.

Even if Gonzalez had raced up the freeway, the detective discovered, he could not have arrived at West’s house earlier than 12:42 p.m. And witnesses confirmed he was at the Montessori School, a mile away, right around then.

Del Marto called West. Was she sure about the time?

West, by the detective’s account, replied that she had been guessing. She couldn’t be sure.

Del Marto wondered: Did Gonzalez commit the attack after he left the school and before he was seen at a nearby bank? Or perhaps after he left the bank and before he was seen buying a bagel?

The detective concluded that each scenario would have given Gonzalez a narrow window of opportunity at West’s house:

Six minutes.

Was that enough time for the attack she had described?

Enough time for Gonzalez to find her in her garage, knock her out, drag her up the stairs, put gloves on his hands and mittens on hers, and slip on protective overalls so that his suit would remain immaculate?

Enough time to strip her, tie her up, burn her with matches, sexually assault her with a coat hanger, and attempt to suffocate her with a plastic bag?

Enough time to dispose of all this evidence, along with a duffel bag she said he had carried?

Why did no one, before or after, notice that Gonzalez was nervous or out of breath?

The disarray at the house on Penngrove Street seemed to reflect the struggle West described: clumps of her hair, scissors discarded on the carpet, a spindle yanked out of the banister.

But Del Marto could find nothing to place Gonzalez there. No fingerprints, no DNA, no hair, no clothes fibers.

He remembered how West looked that day, bruised and traumatized. But the medical records seemed at odds with the sexual assault she described: They showed no internal tears or bleeding.

Maybe, Del Marto thought, the gloves, mittens, and overalls didn’t exist. Maybe they were props in a story.

He withheld judgment until he could see the footage captured by the security cameras at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas.

Getting it required weeks of calls to the Transportation Security Administration. Finally, on March 11, 2008—thirty-nine days after Gonzalez’s arrest—Del Marto and his partner were led to a private room in the bowels of Los Angeles International Airport and handed a disk.

Del Marto slid it into his laptop. He watched bodies shuffle through the security line in Vegas, taking off shoes, placing luggage on the conveyor belt. The detective trained his eyes on the screen for one thing in particular: the duffel bag West said was in Gonzalez’s possession.

Of all the people who said they saw Gonzalez that day, West was the only one who remembered it. She said she’d heard him zipping and unzipping it during the attack. The airline said he hadn’t checked bags when he flew to California. Had he carried the duffel bag onboard?

If he could find an image of that, Del Marto thought, it just might prove the case against him.

Three cameras captured Gonzalez walking through the metal detector wearing a black suit, gray shirt, and patterned tie. On each angle, Del Marto froze the frame and leaned forward. Each time, he saw the same thing. Gonzalez’s hands were empty.

Del Marto turned to his partner. “I don’t know how he could have done this,” he said.

•

The preliminary hearing in State vs. Gonzalez, to determine whether he should face trial, was weeks away, and Del Marto was expected to testify on West’s behalf so she wouldn’t have to. The detective did something rare in his twenty-three-year career: He called the prosecutor to say that he was uncomfortable testifying in his own case.

Ventura County prosecutors were not deterred by this, nor by the absence of corroborating evidence. They intended to put West on the stand to tell her story. There, she would face a defense team that had lined up ten alibi witnesses and was preparing to portray her as a pathological liar.

On April 21, 2008, the day before the hearing was to begin, prosecutors learned that West was in the hospital. They had obtained a note in what appeared to be West’s handwriting.

“The DA asking me to relive my horror of Louis Gonzalez attack is more than I can bear. For them it is a case. For me it is my life shattered,” read the note. “I died of Rx overdose—suicide.”

Later, in family court, West would say she did not remember writing the note and blamed the hospitalization on drugs her psychiatrist prescribed.

At 5:26 p.m. on April 22, prosecutor Andrea Tischler sent defense attorneys a brief email: With West unavailable to testify, they were dropping the case. For now.

Jay Leiderman, one of Gonzalez’s defense attorneys, hurried to the jail. To save a few minutes, he met his client through Plexiglas rather than face-to-face. Gonzalez was accustomed to odd-hours visits from the lawyer, but this time Leiderman’s tie was loose, and he was smiling.

“You’re going home tomorrow,” he said.

Gonzalez’s father, a retiree who had been watching his house outside Las Vegas and picking up his mail, was there to greet him when he walked out the next day. So was Gonzalez’s mother, his brother, his sister, and his aunts, sweeping him up in a crush of family. After eighty-three days in a solitary cell, things felt wrong. All these people in one place, all this open air, made him dizzy.

He had his freedom. Now he wanted a French dip. Then he wanted to get as far away from Ventura County as possible and start figuring out how to reclaim everything else he’d lost: his son, his job, his name.

•

The job turned out to be the easiest. The Bank of Las Vegas valued his abilities, and three weeks after his release he put on one of the double-vented suits he’d had retailored to fit a frame that had shed ten pounds in lockup.

He pushed open the bank door and crossed the lobby toward his office, bracing himself for the questions, the strained expressions.

Lou, hey, welcome back. . . . So . . .

He got used to telling the story. He left out the worst details. It was all about the custody case, he said. She wanted me gone.

No one came out and said anything directly, but he sensed people were wary. Some clients avoided him. The woman he was dating before his arrest never called again. He felt a lingering mistrust. As if people figured some of it must be true—that he had hired a crack legal team and bought his way out of trouble. He knew certain things reinforced this perception: His accuser was walking free, after all, and retained custody of his son.

How come your ex isn’t in jail? people kept asking.

He didn’t have a good answer.

Soon after his return to work, he was sitting at a Cheesecake Factory in Vegas with two loan brokers and an underwriter. The lunch meeting passed in a blur of acute anxiety. His mind was on a restraining order West had filed in California, restating her claim that he attacked her and asking the court to keep him away from their son. He thought about how prosecutors might, at any moment, choose to refile charges. How tenuous freedom felt.

He was sure everyone at the table could sense his panic, that he was blowing it, fidgeting, speaking too quickly. Mercifully, the check came.

Don’t worry, Lou, the underwriter told him afterward. You were fine.

•

Getting to see his son proved tougher. He missed his sixth birthday. A custody judge withheld visitation, concerned Gonzalez might still face criminal charges. Another complication was West’s restraining order, which hung over him for months after his release, until she withdrew it just as his legal team was preparing to attack it in court.

A judge awarded him $55,000 for legal fees he incurred fighting it, though West’s subsequent declaration of bankruptcy made it doubtful he’d ever recover the money.

He was finally allowed to see his son—eight months after his arrest. It was a brief visit at the office of a family reunification specialist.

Soon after, on his day off, Del Marto gave a deposition to the family law attorney Gonzalez had enlisted to fight for full custody. All of the physical evidence had been processed, the detective said, and none of it implicated Gonzalez.

“Based on my investigation, I see no reason why he should not be able to see his son.”

•

Winning back his name was hardest of all. Removing every trace of the taint would be impossible. Stories persist on the Internet. Once, a date told him she had googled him, and he had to explain.

Leiderman, one of his defense lawyers, thought it was not enough that the government dropped charges. He wanted the criminal justice system to recognize Gonzalez’s innocence affirmatively.

There is such a thing as a declaration of factual innocence, he explained to Gonzalez. A judge can grant it. It is exceedingly rare—so rare that many cops and lawyers go a career without seeing one. It means not just that prosecutors couldn’t make a case against you but that you didn’t do the crime.

The case remained on the docket of Ventura County Superior Court Judge Patricia Murphy, who had earlier ordered Gonzalez held without bail. Leiderman petitioned the judge, trying not to get his client’s hopes up. He laid out the case, pointing out the holes in West’s story and the numerous alibi witnesses.

Prosecutors did not want Gonzalez declared innocent. They knew a jury wouldn’t convict him but said they couldn’t be positive of his innocence. James Ellison, Ventura County’s chief assistant district attorney, later explained their reasoning: The attack West described was “improbable, but it wasn’t physically impossible.”

In January 2009, nearly a year after Gonzalez’s arrest, Leiderman called him excitedly: The judge had sided with them. Gonzalez was soon holding a certified copy of the judge’s order declaring him factually innocent.

He drove to the bank and put it in a safe-deposit box. He figured he would need it if he wanted to continue in banking, where the blot on his record would otherwise scare off future employers. It would help in his fight to win custody of his son.

But it hardly made him whole. It made it even more illogical, in his view, that West was free.

•

Asked why West hadn’t been charged with filing a false police report, Ellison, the Ventura County prosecutor, gave this explanation: “We could not say with 100 percent certainty that Tracy West was lying.”

To Gonzalez’s attorneys, who have argued vehemently for West’s arrest, the state’s decision not to charge her criminally violates the most basic moral arithmetic.

Leiderman said he thinks the district attorney’s office is embarrassed and wants the case to disappear. “No one wanted to believe a woman would make something like this up,” he said.

Gonzalez sued West for malicious prosecution, and her insurance carrier settled the case on confidential terms. He did not sue Del Marto or his department. He doesn’t blame the detective.

Del Marto can’t say for sure what happened in that upstairs bedroom. He ruled out the possibility that West’s husband, Tim Geiges, inflicted the wounds on her; his cell phone records proved he was elsewhere as she lay tied up.

Now and then, he found himself thinking of something he discovered on West’s computer. It was a link to a sexual-bondage website that West had recently visited, Del Marto said. When he asked about it, she replied that a friend had sent it as a joke, the detective said.

The site featured men and women in elaborate restraints, and a depiction of a double-loop slipknot with a little eyelet on one end. To Del Marto, it resembled the knotted cord a nurse had removed from West’s bruised neck on February 1, 2008.

The detective tried to imagine West hating her son’s father enough to injure herself in such a methodical way. Tying the cord around her own neck, cutting off clumps of her hair, battering her own face, burning her own skin . . . and the other things. His mind strained at the effort.

He’d seen people give themselves a scratch or bruise to impersonate victims, but nothing like this. “My God,” he said, “to this extent?”

Del Marto said prosecutors asked him whether a case could be made against her. His reply: Not without her confession. He prepared to confront her with the inconsistencies in her story. He planned to give her a lie detector test. He couldn’t force her to cooperate, however.

“She stopped answering my phone calls,” he said.

His supervisor praised his detective work, but Del Marto found the outcome unsatisfying. No one punished was a bad way to leave it.

When the department received the expungement order from the court, the recordkeepers dutifully deleted Gonzalez’s name from the computers. They gathered up the evidence Del Marto had amassed in Case No. 08-04893—the warrants, the interview reports, the forensic results, the painstaking timelines—and began shredding.

•

As the custody battle staggered on, hearing by hearing, Las Vegas family court Judge Bill Henderson wrestled aloud with the implications of the criminal case. He didn’t believe Gonzalez attacked West. But must he conclude, he asked, that she made it all up? Perhaps someone else attacked her?

No, testified John Paglini, the court-appointed psychologist who had interviewed West four times: Either Gonzalez attacked her, or she lied.

“She could have said, ‘On February first I was attacked by somebody, I don’t know who it was,’ but she picked this guy out, and she was very definite,” Paglini told the court. “It couldn’t be somebody else. She said, ‘I heard his voice, I saw his face.’?”

Asked about the events of that day during a deposition, West invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

When she failed to show up for a hearing in the summer of 2009, Gonzalez was granted temporary custody of their son, but the case continued.

West’s voice was soft, at times barely above a whisper, when she took the stand last June. Her straight, dark hair fell to her shoulders. She held her hands demurely in her lap, a still presence with an air of vulnerability.

She deserved her son, she said. She talked about how close he was to his little sister, how they belonged together in California, and her voice broke.

Her lawyer asked her about February 1, 2008. This time she did not plead the Fifth. Instead, she steadfastly insisted Gonzalez attacked her.

“Did you do it to yourself?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Did you have somebody do it to you on purpose?”

“Absolutely not.”

In her closing argument, Gonzalez’s custody attorney, Denise Placencio, said West had been trying to divide father and son for years—attempting to change the boy’s surname, moving him from Nevada to California, offering Gonzalez money to relinquish parental rights.

“The last resort was to frame Mr. Gonzalez and put him in jail,” she said.

The judge concluded that West’s insistence on Gonzalez’s guilt “with no rational basis” was an attempt to remove the boy from his father’s life.

“She continues to maintain that he’s guilty of this heinous crime, and he’s not,” the judge said. “The court finds if mom is allowed to maintain primary physical custody, she’s more likely to continue with this.” She appeared to be a good mother otherwise, he said, and it was with “a heavy heart” that he awarded custody to the father.

The judge was not, however, prepared to accept the psychologist’s either-or view of the case—that if Gonzalez didn’t do it, she made it up.

What West believed about February 1, 2008, “remains unclear,” and the possibility that she suffered a “delusion” had not been ruled out, the judge said.

West would stay in her son’s life. She moved back to Nevada.

•

On Fridays and Sundays, Gonzalez and West exchange custody at a McDonald’s or Starbucks. If possible, he waits in the car and sends his mother in to do it.

Sometimes Gonzalez wonders how much worse things might have gone.

What if he had grabbed breakfast in Las Vegas before boarding his flight? He wouldn’t have needed that bagel in Simi Valley, so he wouldn’t have gone to the bank for cash, and wouldn’t have been caught on security cameras.

His alibi evaporates and he’s in prison for life.

At the end of the day his mind automatically replays his movements, hour by hour, because it was his ability to do that that saved him. After his release he developed the habit of meticulously documenting his whereabouts, eliminating time gaps that might leave him vulnerable.

If he’s in an airport or a 7-Eleven, he makes sure the surveillance cameras get a good look at his face. Anytime he can swipe his credit card and sign his name, even to buy a pack of gum, he does it.

He fills his wallet with receipts and the world with a conspicuous trail.

He feels most vulnerable when he is asleep, when, for six or eight hours a night, no cameras are watching, no witnesses are marking his presence, and no one but Louis Gonzalez III can say with certainty where he is.