Jodie Samuels was a 15-year-old Black/African American girl living in Los Angeles when she was attacked on the morning of May 17, 1984. At about 6:45 a.m., she was on or near 23rd Street and Longwood when a neighbor, Harold Ray, heard her screaming outside. Ray recognized Jodie’s voice as she shouted for the man confronting her to get away and called for someone to contact police. A male voice was heard ordering her to come back.
Moments later, Ray heard two gunshots.
When Ray opened his door, he saw a man getting into an older Ford Mustang, described as a 1964 or 1965 model that appeared black or dark gray and had primer spots. He described the man as light-complexioned, with a longer-than-average neck, and roughly five feet eight or nine inches tall. Jodie’s mother, Dorothy Samuels, also heard the gunfire and came outside to find her daughter lying wounded in the street. Jodie’s white purse was gone, leading investigators to regard the shooting as connected to a robbery. Although the attack occurred on May 17, the California Supreme Court’s later account of the case states that Jodie survived for three days before dying from her injuries, placing her death approximately on May 20, 1984.
The shooting quickly became linked to another violent attack that had occurred about an hour earlier. At approximately 5:30 that same morning, Willa Gerber was jogging from her home on Whitworth Avenue toward Beverly Hills when an older Mustang passed her, turned around, and stopped. Kevin Bernard Haley got out holding a gun and ordered Gerber into the car. She resisted, and during the struggle she was knocked to the pavement. Haley pointed the gun at her face and pulled the trigger, but Gerber heard only a click. She managed to run away, eventually jumping over a fence, but Haley pursued her in the car and fired, striking her twice. Gerber survived.
The connection between the two shootings became especially important when investigators compared the evidence. A bullet recovered in the investigation of Gerber’s shooting was examined alongside a bullet removed from Jodie’s body during her autopsy. A Los Angeles firearms examiner concluded that the two bullets had been fired from the same gun. That finding strongly suggested that the person responsible for Gerber’s shooting was also responsible for the gunfire that killed Jodie.
Kevin Haley and his older brother, Reginald Haley, later became the focus of a much broader Los Angeles police investigation into a series of burglaries, robberies, sexual assaults and killings. Police suspected the brothers of participating in an extensive crime spree that stretched across several Los Angeles neighborhoods. Kevin was arrested on an unrelated burglary charge on September 28, 1984 and questioned about the murder of another woman, Delores Clement. He denied involvement and was released, but fingerprints taken during that investigation were later matched to prints recovered from Clement’s residence. Detectives obtained a warrant and arrested Kevin again at his Los Angeles home on October 9, 1984. During subsequent questioning, he admitted killing Clement and gave investigators a detailed account of that crime.
As detectives examined other unsolved attacks, Kevin and Reginald Haley were considered suspects in Jodie’s killing. The case against Kevin contained significant circumstantial evidence because Gerber identified him as the gunman in the earlier shooting, and ballistics evidence established that the same firearm was used against both Gerber and Jodie. Investigators also believed the attack fit within the larger pattern of robberies and violent offenses attributed to the brothers. Police publicly suspected the Haleys of involvement in numerous crimes, including several killings, dozens of sexual assaults and hundreds of burglaries. Kevin eventually admitted committing multiple rapes and burglaries, although those admissions did not amount to a confession to Jodie’s murder.
The most serious weakness in the case was eyewitness identification. Harold Ray, the neighbor who saw the fleeing man after Jodie was shot, was shown Kevin Haley in a live lineup on October 18, 1984 but did not identify him as the gunman. When Ray later saw Haley in court, he said the man he had seen on the morning of the shooting appeared considerably lighter in complexion. That uncertainty made it difficult for prosecutors to turn the ballistics connection and surrounding circumstances into a murder conviction.
Jodie’s killing nevertheless became part of the prosecution’s presentation against Kevin Haley. During the penalty phase of Haley’s trial for the murder of Delores Clement, prosecutors introduced the circumstances of Jodie’s shooting as evidence of additional violent criminal activity. Jurors heard about her screams, the fleeing Mustang, the missing purse and the firearms comparison linking her shooting to the attack on Gerber. Haley was ultimately convicted of murdering, raping, sodomizing, robbing and burglarizing Clement and received a death sentence. He was also prosecuted in connection with other killings and violent crimes, while Reginald Haley was convicted of numerous robberies, kidnappings, burglaries and sexual offenses and received a lengthy prison sentence.
Contemporary reporting indicated that prosecutors intended to try Kevin Haley separately for Jodie’s murder, but the available record does not show that he was ever convicted of killing her. Later accounts state that the proposed prosecution did not ultimately produce a murder conviction because the weapon was never recovered and the eyewitness could not positively identify Haley. Although Kevin Haley was arrested, charged and convicted in other murders and violent offenses, there is no established conviction specifically holding him legally responsible for Jodie Samuels’s death. The case therefore remained tied to him through the same-gun evidence, the closely timed Gerber attack and the larger investigation into the Haley brothers, but without a final murder verdict resolving who killed Jodie.
