The probation officer’s August 1960 evaluation of Comtois concluded, “He appears to have no control over his impulses when things don’t go his way, and consequently he resorts to criminal behavior.”
On the day his wife gave birth to a daughter, Comtois was sentenced to a year in a federal prison in California on the attempted bank robbery and burglary convictions.
Within three months of being released from prison, Comtois was jailed again, this time for the July 1961 armed robbery of a market in La Mirada. “I don’t blame somebody else for what I did,” he told a probation officer. “I was clear of mind.” Once again he pleaded guilty to the charge. It was his fifth conviction, and he was returned to prison for his longest stay, until March 11, 1969.
Two months after his release, Comtois – half his life now spent in prisons, reform schools and orphanages – was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. By 1971, his wife was seeking to end their marriage. The couple separated, according to divorce documents, after Comtois flew into a Thanksgiving Day rage, punched his fist through a door in the couple’s home near Long Beach and destroyed the china set on the table for the holiday meal.
The divorce records contain allegations that Comtois had often beaten his wife and had a violent temper that sent him into uncontrollable rages.
Two years later, Comtois would tell a judge that the end of his marriage and failures in attempts to earn a legitimate living had led him into another cycle of crime and a deep involvement with drugs. He was convicted of possession of heroin with intent to sell and of being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. He admitted he was addicted to the drug as well.
“I started selling my jewelry and other items I owned and refused to believe I was addicted,” he wrote to the judge who would sentence him. “I didn’t know which way to turn. With the loss of everything, I started borrowing from business associates and friends until I had neither left.
“When I finally accepted the fact I was addicted, I started selling drugs to satisfy my addiction.”
Comtois pleaded to be placed in a drug rehabilitation program instead of prison, but the judge sent him to prison for three more years.
Comtois was released from prison in 1977 and completed parole a year later. His activities between then and last month’s abduction in Chatsworth are now being documented by homicide detectives. “So far, I can’t find anything legitimate about him,” Detective Orozco said.
What is known is that he moved to the San Fernando Valley, possibly to be closer to his two children who lived with his ex-wife in Van Nuys.
Police said Comtois was a transient, living at an ever-changing string of addresses. He may have worked at times as a laborer, and he received a monthly disability payment for reasons unclear to police, but detectives believe he largely supported himself as a burglar and scam artist.
Some of Comtois’ activities are already on record. Deputy Dist. Atty. Bradford Stone said Comtois walked into a bank in the Valley on Nov. 5, 1983, and attempted to cash a forged check for $75,000. When the teller attempted to verify the check, Comtois grabbed it back and left.
Three years later on Nov. 7, 1986, Comtois changed the date and took the same check into a bank in North Hollywood and deposited it in his account, Stone said. During the next week he went to other banks in Los Angeles and cashed $75,000in checks against the account. When police finally sorted it all out, he was charged March 18of this year with grand theft and forgery.
Police say Comtois used the check scam money to buy $30,000in gold and a new car. In January he also bought a small motor home, possibly with the same money.
Released after posting $1,500bail, Comtois was arrested at least two more times – in June on suspicion of burglary and in July on suspicion of driving a stolen car – before the abduction. Both times he was released on bail.
By summer, Comtois was living in the brown-striped Roadstar motor home and moving freely about the Valley. Police said he was traveling with a companion, Marsha Lynn Erickson, though investigators have not discovered how or where they met.
Erickson, police say, was a Los Angeles-born transient with a record of 12 arrests in the last decade on charges including prostitution, burglary and drug possession. None of the arrests led to prison sentences. Police and court records show that she was placed on probation for at least one conviction and into drug-treatment programs after another arrest.
Erickson’s father described her as a long-term heroin addict whose need for the drug overcame any attempts to help her. He spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
“Drugs controlled her. Drugs destroyed her,” he said. “All of her problems stemmed from drugs. It was because of the heroin that she got involved in burglary and everything else. We took her to every program you could think of, but she always went back to it.”
Erickson, who has had six children who were all put up for adoption, lived with her mother and father in their Chatsworth home in 1984 and 1985 while she took part in a drug-treatment program, her father said.
But, about two years ago, she left the home, about a mile from the Lurline Avenue spot where Wendy Masuhara and her friend would be kidnapped, unable to shake her dependency, her father said. Her parents have had no contact with her since, but now live with the growing nightmare that their daughter is suspected of involvement in murder.
“I can’t defend her because I really don’t know her anymore,” her father said. “But I do find it hard to believe she could have done anything this drastic. She was always a good kid before the drugs got her.”
Erickson should have been in jail the night the two girls were abducted, authorities said. Last March 16, her probation for a 1983 conviction involving $3,200 in forged checks was revoked after probation officers learned that she had been arrested twice for thefts in 1986.
A warrant for Erickson’s arrest was issued, but she was never picked up by police. Chet Baker, a supervisor in the county probation department’s Van Nuys office, said so many probation violation warrants are issued each year the police cannot handle them as priorities.
“The warrant goes on the computer, but other than that the police can’t spend a lot of time on it,” Baker said. “There are thousands of these warrants out at any one time in L.A. Plus, Erickson was a transient. Where were the police going to go to pick her up?”
Even after Erickson was arrested Aug. 19, she remained free, police said. When Northeast Division police arrested her on burglary charges, she gave a false name while being booked into jail. That allowed her to post bail before a fingerprint check identified her as Erickson and alerted police that she was wanted on the probation revocation warrant.
In less than a month, Wendy would be slain.
“If things had worked right,” Baker said, “Erickson would have been sitting in jail when that took place.”
Police explain the September abduction and murder as a crime of opportunity, an act of violent impulse. So far, police say, it appears that Comtois’ motor home was parked that night on Lurline Avenue near Devonshire Street by coincidence. It might have simply been the spot where Comtois stopped to fix a mechanical problem in the motor home.