When a neighbor heard {that a} Mercedes Benz was unearthed final week within the yard of a 12,000 square-foot Atherton mansion, and the previous owner had as soon as been caught up in an insurance rip-off to sink his million-dollar yacht off the Golden Gate years earlier, she speculated that he buried the automotive for insurance cash, too.
Turns out, she could also be proper.
Not solely did Johnny Bocktune Lew, a person with a nefarious previous of homicide and fraud earlier than he died in 2015, report the automotive stolen in 1992 from the Stanford Shopping Center, however he collected $87,000 from insurance for it, San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe stated Monday. The convertible Mercedes Benz was practically new, he stated.
But that also doesn’t clarify why cadaver canine continued to choose up on the scent of human blood or bones over the weekend after the Mercedes was towed away from the practically two-acre estate on Stockbridge Avenue. Investigators discovered no indicators of human stays whereas excavating the automotive buried with the highest down and loaded with luggage of cement. So what’s behind the scent?
“It’s going to be very disappointing if our investigators somehow don’t come up with an answer here. The crime lab is going to be key,” Wagstaffe instructed the Bay Area News Group.
The case of the buried Mercedes has all the weather of a real crime novel, Wagstaffe stated. “This book has 15 chapters in it and we’ve only got two chapters. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get the other chapters, but I sure hope we do because it is an interesting story.”
When panorama crews first struck the buried Mercedes final Thursday whereas doing work for the house’s new house owners, the invention made worldwide information, drew throngs of reporters in addition to curious neighbors shocked that one thing so intriguing and presumably dastardly would occur behind the excessive partitions that line so many Atherton streets and conceal so many mansions. This is the tony city the place the tech elite and sports activities legends increase their households and host charitable occasions, in spite of everything.
After crews towed the automotive away on Saturday and used “ground penetrating radar” to look at beneath the 5-foot gap on Sunday, they nonetheless didn’t discover something. But cadaver canine continued to hit on the scent of human stays all through the weekend.
The lack of a physique doesn’t imply there wasn’t against the law, Wagstaffe stated. “For all I know, he might have killed somebody and disposed of the body. But why wouldn’t you then get rid of the car somewhere else? It’s strange.”
Wagstaffe stated he had acquired emails over the weekend suggesting Atherton police and county investigators quit on the case.
Lew bought the property in 2014 and died within the state of Washington in 2015. He was 77, and had not been concerned with regulation enforcement since his sunken yacht scheme failed within the late Nineties, Wagstaffe stated.
“The guy’s dead. There’s nothing to it, move on,” Wagstaffe stated the emails instructed. “I ignored them.”
While one cadaver canine may make a mistake, “with multiple dogs, it seems unusual,” he stated. “So I’m looking forward to seeing if they find any trace DNA or blood or anything like that around the car or with the concrete that’s in there.”
Besides, he stated, the straightforward story of insurance fraud doesn’t add up.
The Mercedes was not more than a yr or so outdated when Lew reported it stolen in 1992, Wagstaffe stated. If he collected from insurance the quantity he paid for it, “what have you gained?” he requested.
“That makes no sense to me whatsoever, unless he somehow purchased it with something phony,” he stated.
Lew bought the practically two-acre flag lot with the newly-built French-style mansion simply off Stockbridge Avenue in 1990, stated Nancy Goldcamp, an agent with Coldwell Banker who instructed the Bay Area News Group on Monday that she first listed the house in January 1990 for $3.9 million.
She remembers Johnny Lew and his spouse visiting an open home, however they didn’t purchase it till after her itemizing had expired. The couple purchased it straight from the builder later that yr, she stated.
“It wasn’t landscaped hardly at all,” Goldcamp stated. “I think it maybe had a patio.”
A neighbor stated that she had complained about “all that digging” occurring on the property. The property modified palms twice extra, most not too long ago promoting for $15 million in 2020. The new house owners are constructing a granny unit and re-landscaping the yard, which led to the subterranean discovery.
By the time Lew purchased the home in 1990, he had already served time behind bars for homicide.
In the Sixties, Lew was convicted of second diploma homicide within the taking pictures demise of his girlfriend in Los Angeles – a conviction that was overturned after issues surfaced with proof. In the Seventies, he served a brief sentence on two counts of tried homicide, and in 1999 was charged with insurance fraud after paying what turned out to be undercover brokers $50,000 in money and jewellery to sink his yacht. At that point, in keeping with court docket paperwork on the time, he stated he was related to a mob and had threatened to kill anybody who revealed his plot.
Is it any marvel that authorities are reluctant to surrender on the investigation?
For a county that’s typically shadowed by larger information tales in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, San Mateo has dealt with 4 instances this yr which have drawn nationwide consideration.
In February, boxing legend Mike Tyson punched out a fellow passenger on a flight that landed at San Francisco International Airport. In September, a person was arrested in San Carlos for beheading his girlfriend with a samurai sword, and later that month, the district legal professional’s workplace declined to file prison costs in a case involving a Woodside man upset that he didn’t obtain the Batmobile he had ordered for greater than $200,000.
Now, the thriller of the buried Mercedes.
“We may not have the crime like the other counties around us,” Wagstaffe stated. “But we’ll outdo them every day of the week in weird cases.”
