Posted on 01/28/2010 2:45:59 AM PST by JoeProBono
LOS ANGELES -- A convicted killer was denied parole Wednesday 47 years after he and a partner kidnapped two Los Angeles police officers and shot one to death in a case made famous by the book and movie "The Onion Field."
A California Board of Prison Terms panel found the 76-year-old Gregory Powell unsuitable for parole after a hearing at the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo. It was his 11th parole hearing....
The crime was chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh's best-selling book, "The Onion Field."
De la Garza recounted that Powell and co-defendant, Jimmy Lee Smith, kidnapped Officer Ian Campbell and his partner, Karl Hettinger, on a March night in 1963 in Hollywood after they were pulled over in a routine traffic stop. They drove north to a Bakersfield onion field where Campbell was shot five hours later but Hettinger escaped. ....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Hettinger escaped the killer (sans weapon) but was “shunned by colleagues.” Why?
IIRC because he gave up his gun.
Armas said he is a member of the Los Angeles Police Emerald Society Pipe and Drum Band, a group which honors the memory of Campbell who had a passion for playing the bagpipes. As the result of his death, Armas said the bagpipes are played at the funerals of every officer who dies in the line of duty."
I look forward to the cancer slowly eating up this guy in a long, painful death.
Looks like we have another contestant in the Which Terminal Cancer Patient Is Going To Die First Sweepstakes!
Do you think it will be:
a) Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi
b) Wife of disgraced polititian Elizabeth Edwards
c) Onion Field Killer Gregory Powell
My prediction is that all three will live another ten years at least...
Why is this guy still alive?
ping
Same reason that Charles Manson is alive. All death sentences in the United States were commuted to life with the possibility of parole when the US Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.
That was a good book.
47 years Officer Campbell and his family did not have.
Because of multiple trials, he had to testify several times, years apart, and some of the testimony took place at the scene of the crime.
At the time this movie was made, there was a simple credo in law enforcement. You never give up your gun. They might kill you, but you never give up your gun. Hettinger gave up his gun.
In the Caine Mutiny, there's a passage where Tom Keefer, who takes over as the skipper of the Caine jumps overboard because he thinks the ship is sinking after being hit by a kamikaze. Willie Keith and some of the crew extinguish the fire and rescue Keefer. Keefer talks to Willie about the one moment in your life where you're faced with a choice, and you don't have time to consider and you make that choice in an instant, and for the rest of your life you know whether you're a brave man or a coward.
We don't think like that much, anymore, so it's difficult to understand the feelings of Hettinger and the other LAPD after the incident. Today, if you survive, you did the right thing. Then, there were things more important than your life.
It was to be sure an age in which gallantry meant more. I don’t have proof or disproof at hand, but somehow it seems there would have been less of the kind of incident where a person at a traffic stop gets shot for a ball point pen, a pair of glasses, or similar glinty objects about which we are told “oh, we don’t know that it wasn’t a gun.”
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