The driver was Gregory Powell. He and his partner, both armed robbers, got the drop on the cops, took their guns and drove them out into the Central Valley, where Powell -- mistakenly believing the kidnapping was a capital offense -- shot officer Ian Campbell dead in the middle of a desolate onion field. The other officer, Karl Hettinger, managed to sprint off as the gunmen blazed away into the darkness.
Powell, 75, the only one of four men involved in that long-ago night who is still alive, had his parole denied Wednesday for the 11th time.
CA Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation
Gregory Powell has come up for parole every two years, but a history of refusing to cooperate with prison counseling and vocational programs -- and the nature of the murder itself -- have kept him in prison.
Despite the passage of time and the relative lack of current interest in the case, passions still burn hot among those most affected. The parole hearing reunited some of the same people and organizations that launched a petition drive and legal fight when Powell first came up for parole in 1982.
John Mancino, who was instrumental in that 1982 campaign, this week again sent a letter to the parole board opposing Powell's release. "This guy had a long history of violence before he kidnapped and shot that police officer," Mancino said. "That doesn't change with the passage of time."
Campbell's murder and its aftermath were chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh's 1973 best seller "The Onion Field," a book that helped propel the growing "true crime" genre in literary nonfiction and managed to cast an aura of evil around something so bucolic as a rural onion field.
In some ways, "The Onion Field" reflected the cultural divide of that era, in which the law-and-order-embracing "silent majority" felt threatened by the challenges of angry, and anti-establishment, youth. But the book also stepped beyond the divide and cast cops in a more complex light, susceptible to such debilitating problems as post-traumatic stress in a police force culture that revered tough guy stoicism.
"I suspected that it might resonate because it was not so much about the crime itself as it was the aftermath," Wambaugh said. "I refer to the marathon manipulation of an inept judicial system and, more importantly, the near destruction of the surviving officer, Karl Hettinger, by the ignorance and cruelty he suffered at the hands of LAPD brass. It was they who instilled in him overwhelming guilt that nearly drove him to suicide."
Charles Coletta, who teaches popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, places "The Onion Field" in a literary nonfiction arc that largely began in 1966 with Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," which is about the 1959 murder of a Kansas family by two robbers.
"'Onion Field' showed the gritty, gruesome, emotionally intense side of police work that was often ignored in the 'Dragnet' era of the 'super cop,'" Coletta said. And it didn't hurt that Wambaugh, already the best-selling author of the police novels "The New Centurions" and "The Blue Knight," was also a Los Angeles police sergeant.
"I think the fact that he was a cop gave his book an air of credibility [for] the public, who saw this as an insider's view of the system," Coletta said.
"The Onion Field" was published a year before Vincent Bugliosi's best-selling "Helter Skelter," about the Manson family murders in 1969, and is "on nearly the same level of cultural significance as 'Serpico,'" Coletta said, referring to Peter Maas' 1973 biography of Frank Serpico, the New York policeman who fought police corruption. All three of those books were eventually turned into movies, with "The Onion Field" helping launch the careers of James Woods, as Powell, and Ted Danson, as Campbell.
Wambaugh sees his book as different from the other two, in that "Serpico" was particularly about East Coast corruption and "Helter Skelter" tended to "exemplify all that was wrong with the hippie generation. And it seemed that the public perception of loony L.A. was the perfect setting for it."
Wambaugh also had Capote's "In Cold Blood" in mind as he worked. He had met Capote during an appearance on "The Tonight Show" and told him about the killing and aftermath. Capote told Wambaugh that he wished he could write the story.
"Then I knew I would write it," Wambaugh said. "I tried to emulate some of the techniques he used."
Powell and his partner, Jimmy Lee Smith, were convicted of murder six months after the killing and sentenced to death, but appeals, a retrial and other legal maneuvers dragged the case out for more than a decade. Both death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment after California's death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in 1972.
Smith was paroled in 1982, but he returned to prison often on drug-related parole violations before dying of a heart attack in 2007 after being picked up for yet another drug infraction.
Hettinger, the other cop, never overcame the trauma of that night or his misplaced guilt, since he believed he could have saved Campbell's life. He began drinking heavily and lost his badge in 1972 after committing a series of petty crimes, including shoplifting cigars. He eventually moved to Kern County to work on a friend's farm near where his partner had been killed, then turned to local politics, becoming a Kern County supervisor. He died of cirrhosis in 1994.
"Perhaps that guilt did finally kill him," Wambaugh said, adding that death by cirrhosis was "an indication to me that he never really did escape the onion field."
Powell, like Smith, was also scheduled for early release in 1982, but a large public outpouring of opposition, including a 31,500-signature petition, and doubts over Powell's mental stability led the parole board to rescind his release. Powell has come up for parole every two years, but a history of refusing to cooperate with prison counseling and vocational programs -- and the nature of the murder itself -- have kept him in prison.
California Deputy District Attorney Alexis De la Garza told The Associated Press that the latest parole denial will last three years.
Despite the public opposition, notice of Wednesday's parole hearing received scant news coverage, in part because the case -- unlike the Manson murders -- has largely fallen out of public view. Had it happened in today's cable-driven news environment, Coletta said, it would likely become part of popular culture.
"It doesn't seem to be one of those old cases that keeps coming up in pop culture," Coletta said. "I can only imagine that if the crimes happened today ... it would be all over 24-hour cable news channels. Nancy Grace would have a field day."
