The city’s dirtiest cop is also the most colorless, with a forgettable face and a personality as vague as fog. At 77, he has been incarcerated for 38 years, more than twice as long as he has worn the badge. He has been a docile and quiet prisoner, just as he was known as a docile and quiet policeman before his arrest.
At Muir Creek State Prison, he attended 12-step classes and read fantasy novels. He had a paralegal certificate, a sister-in-law with a hotel, and a job at a law firm if he ever got out.
But those with the power to free him remain baffled by his crimes, demanding explanations, seeking psychological insight, and demanding knowledge of his motives. Give us something.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, from the consequential to the unknown, delving into the archives and those who were on the scene memory.
William Leasure, the killer cop, is always a disappointment. He blames his experience as an outlaw in the 1980s on “low self-esteem.” He accused “criminal thinking” of tarnishing his badge. He blamed “questionable characters” and “unwise acquaintances” for leading him astray. This is as close to self-censorship as possible, at least before the parole board.
He is stingy and repentant. He pleaded guilty to relatively minor crimes such as serial thefts of yachts, insurance fraud and illegally manufacturing gun silencers. He still denies the major crimes that landed him in prison: plotting the murders of a beauty shop employee and a jazz bassist.
The beauty shop employee’s name is Ann Smith. In May 1980, at age 41, she was shot to death with a .45 pistol in her mother’s salon in Highland Park.
The bassist’s name was Tony de los Reyes. He was 63 when he was shot in the head with a shotgun in the parking lot of the Sherman Oaks Lounge in September 1981.
Tony de los Reyes in an undated photo.
(Courtesy of Anthony Kings Jr.)
The victims were down on their luck and engaged in bitter divorce proceedings with Léger’s friends. In both cases, the admitted triggerman was a barely literate welder whom Lishur met at a gun show.
In both cases, the gunman will testify that LeSueur, a veteran LAPD officer with an unblemished record, planned the killing to look like a botched robbery and drove the getaway. Car.
Leasure grew up in Wayne, Miss., in what he calls a childhood of “wonderful parents” and a “beaver cleaver.” He served in the Marines in Vietnam, loved guns and bragged about his marksmanship.
As an accident investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Traffic Division, he was known as “Gentle Bill.” He boasted that he had never fired his service weapon and had not filed a use-of-force complaint for wearing the badge in 17 years. A good man, people agree.
In May 1986, as he was about to retire, police caught him on a stolen yacht and linked him to a multi-million dollar yacht theft ring. The plan: steal boats from slipways up and down the coast, disguise and rename them, then sell them to unsuspecting buyers.
“When he says ‘do something,’ you do it… Either I do it or I get killed myself.”
The Los Angeles Police Department formed a task force. They call their office the “Leasure Room.” When they searched his Northridge home, they found a stolen car, illegal gun silencers and a bunch of random yacht loot.
The officers found it all unbelievable. Gentle Bill? Worst of all, he’s a slacker who doesn’t like writing tickets or dodging radio calls. However, some noted that his standard of living exceeded the salary allowed for police officers. He drives a fast Corvette, owns multiple properties, and owns a 42-foot yacht named Thunderbolt.
Leasure would shrug and say his wife, Betsy Mogul, took care of him. She serves as an assistant city attorney in Los Angeles and earns $78,000 a year, more than twice his salary. Police dug into her life. How much did she know about her husband’s criminal behavior? All they found was a possible case of tax fraud, which she lost at trial.
Enter Dennis France, a diminutive police henchman who befriended Léger at the Pomona gun show and enjoys riding with him.
“Bill and I did a lot of stuff together,” France testified. “We bought silencers, we stole boats, we killed people, we broke into places.” He said Leasure was the mastermind behind the killings outside the Sherman Oaks Lounge and the Highland Park Beauty Shop. “Plus, he pays me to arrange and set them up.”
On April 15, 1991, former Los Angeles Police Department officer William Leasure appeared in court to deliver opening statements in his trial on charges that he orchestrated a murder.
(Larry Bethel)
France seems to admire Lesueur, but he also claims to be afraid of him. “When he says, ‘Do something,’ you do it,” France said. “Either I do this or I get killed.”
According to France, Leasure instructed him to put a sock over the barrel of the .45 pistol that killed Ann Smith in the saloon to catch the shell casings. Regardless, when the casing fell out, Leasure deducted $500 from France’s $3,500 fee.
In exchange for helping solve the Lesueur case, France received immunity from the DA’s office — a deal that forever angered the detectives who investigated the case. The police imprisoned Frans in a bugged prison, hoping to get Lesueur to incriminate himself. The cautious Lesueur was thwarted by writing his remarks on a piece of paper and then erasing them. this plan.
France goes in again, this time with a tiny camera on the ceiling. The key moment comes when he asks Leasure what he did with the gun in “Avenue 60,” referring to the location of the beauty shop murders.
Leasure wrote a word on a piece of paper. Seeing the hidden camera, he held it up to the glass.
“He’s very good at presenting himself as a gentle, meek guy… and you say, ‘Nice guy, totally colorless.'” You have no idea what his character is like.
“Melted,” it said.
He wrote another note: “Throw away anything illegal.”
At Leasure’s trial in 1991, charged with two counts of murder and facing the death penalty, defense attorneys tried in vain to find an innocent explanation for the notes. They attacked France as a liar and ordered Leshoure to save himself.
Leasure is not, on the face of it, a plausible killer, and explaining his motivations is tricky. It is said that the money obtained from killing people is only a few thousand yuan. Prosecutor James Koller portrayed Legere as a veteran police officer tired of writing traffic tickets and hungry for excitement. He turned to murder “almost for the thrill of it – to get away with it”.
An estranged spouse has been found guilty of inciting a killing. The first jury in Leasure’s trial deadlocked and a second jury was being selected when he entered a no contest plea to two counts of second-degree murder. He has 15 years left to live. He claimed to be concerned about rising anti-police sentiment since the beating of Rodney King eight months ago, and the case cast a pall over the sparsely attended trial where he was present.
Prosecutors called Lishur “the most corrupt police officer in the history of the city of Los Angeles.”
Leasure calls himself “the nicest, quietest, gentlest person you’ll ever meet.”
Addison “Bud” Arce was one of the LAPD detectives who opened the case. Now retired, he testified against him at parole hearings. He thinks Leasure could have gotten away with it years ago if he’d just confessed. But something in his nature stopped him.
“If he went in and apologized, he would be eliminated,” Arce said. “Even more so now, when they parole anyone for any reason.”
Instead, year after year, Leasure sat before the parole board and painted himself as a man kidnapped by the railroad who accepted guilty pleas to a murder he had nothing to do with. He had an air of bewildered harmlessness. When the questions became acute and his memory for details deteriorated, he blamed “brain damage” from cholesterol medication.
“I have self-esteem issues,” Leasure told the board in 2021. I thought that by impressing others, they would like me and I would feel good about myself. Through self-help and recovery, I learned everything that was wrong with me.
Former Los Angeles Police Department officer William Leasure is incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California.
(Brian Vanderbrugge/Los Angeles Times)
He had a happy childhood, but even so, “I had self-esteem issues. As a Marine, I had self-esteem issues. As a police officer, I had self-esteem issues. His marriage to the city attorney didn’t It worked. His wife’s close friends, judges and lawyers all considered him beneath her, and at one point he almost broke up with her, “which affected my self-esteem. “
“The information I got from you today is that you have some self-esteem issues,” Commissioner Michele Minor said.
He continues to deny murder. He was asked about his notes on Melting.
“There was never such a note,” Leasure insisted. “It doesn’t exist.”
Anthony de los Reyes Jr., 81, the son of the murdered jazz musician, testified at eight or nine hearings to ensure his father was not forgotten.
“He was very good at presenting himself as a gentle, docile person,” Reyes said. “You say, ‘Nice guy, totally colorless.’ You don’t even know his character. He hasn’t changed since I first had the pleasure of meeting him.”
“This man is a born liar, and every word he speaks has the same monotone tone.
“There’s no emotion. Absolutely nothing.
This ritual has been performed 13 times before the parole board. The board twice determined Leasure was safe to release, but Gov. Gavin Newsom overturned the decision both times. The governor found he lacked “insight into his criminal conduct and causative factors.”
Leasure declined an interview request from The Times and made his case again in September. Arce, a retired detective, hoped to be there to remind the board of directors about the details of Léger’s crimes.
He called him “this cowardly LAPD cop” and “Walter Mitty.” He, like everyone else, had spent a lot of time thinking about the motives of the meek police officer who moonlighted as a killer, but they remained vague. It’s hard to believe it’s just money. He believes Léger likely arranged the murder so that people owed him a favor. He likes it.
“It’s confusing,” said Arce, now 79. I can’t tell you.
