1. Palisadian-PostServing the Community Since 1928
Page 1 $1.50Thursday, August 6, 2015 ◆ Pacific Palisades, California
Cold Case Detective Opens Book on
Rachel Ziselman
By JACQUELINE PRIMO
Reporter
Part 5 in a Series
M
ost people have photos of their
family and loved ones on their
desks at work—LAPD Detec-
tive Luis Rivera has a photo of 11-year-old
smiling, blue-eyed, blonde-haired Rachel
Hanna Ziselman on his.
Paper-clipped beneath her photo is a
“Missing Person” bulletin featuring Rachel
from the National Missing and Unidentified
Persons System.
Rachel has been missing from Pacific
Palisades since she disappeared on the af-
ternoon of Sept. 5, 1977 while walking from
Hughes Market (now Ralphs), headed to
her home on the 1000 block of Monument.
Rivera, a detective in the Cold Case
Homicide Unit of the Robbery Homicide
Division (RHD), has had custody of her
case since 2012.
Rachel’s disappearance is one of two
missing persons cases in Rivera’s custo-
dy—alongside nearly 50 cold case homi-
cides.
Follow a maze of corridors, elevators
and stairways through the massive down-
town LAPD station (with police escort and
the right set of keys and fingerprints, of
course), and you arrive at the RHD. There,
behind multiple sets of locked doors and on
a long line of industrial shelving, Rachel
Ziselman’s case book sits among hundreds,
if not thousands, of others.
Rachel’s photo is taped to the inside
cover of the binder—a constant remind-
er that the papers, photographs, interview
notes and newspaper clippings in the book
concern a real person, and not just a name
on a shelf, Rivera told the Palisadian-Post
during an interview at the station.
“When it’s a child victim…we spare no
expense. We do the most we can,” Rivera,
52, said solemnly but with a matter-of-fact-
ness that comes from 26 years with LAPD
and the resulting awareness of how callous
people can be.
Rivera worked as a homicide detective
from 2001-2008 when he switched to cold
cases.
“The only dead bodies I see now are
pictures,” he added.
PERSONS OF INTEREST
Despite how large Rachel’s case book
is (roughly five inches thick), Rivera ac-
knowledged that investigators have very
little to go on regarding what happened to
the bubbly girl after she was last seen walk-
ing home with groceries on Monument that
sunny afternoon when she seemingly van-
ished just short of her home.
“The Bay Theatre near Monument,
according to this information, is where she
was seen and [told a witness] that she was
having difficulty carrying the grocery bag,”
Rivera said, looking at a page of notes in
the book.
Rivera said the witness saw Rachel
about 100 yards from her house, close to the
underground parking garage by the medical
building on Monument.
“Then she disappears, and that’s it.
That’s all you have,” Rivera said. “We had
a missing person and there was no evidence
of a crime, no physical evidence, other than
she’s there one minute and gone the next…
[Investigators] could never come up with
anything at all and basically that’s when the
case went cold.”
Rivera said from that point on, detec-
tives and law enforcement have been work-
ing to compile information on criminals
who are known to have been active in or
around the Palisades at the time of Rachel’s
disappearance.
“A person becomes a ‘person of inter-
est’ in this case if they were actively com-
mitting crimes against children (or young
adults) and/or suspected of kidnapping,
sexual assault or child annoying [in the area
before or after the crime]. Sometimes all of
these take place at the same time,” Rivera
said.
The Department of Justice started
tracking registered sex offenders in the
1940s, and Rivera said that testing DNA
from the ’60s and ’70s is not uncommon in
these investigations.
“In this case we don’t have any evi-
dence at the scene or witnesses [to a crime].
We rely on the probability that [Rachel] did
not leave the area of her own free will. And
since she has not been found, we have to
assume that a crime has occurred, although
we don’t know if it’s murder,” Rivera told
the Post.
One of the “persons of interest” in the
case, however, is convicted serial killer
Rodney Alcala, who Rivera said has been
a person of interest since Rachel disap-
peared (Alcala was a registered sex of-
fender at the time).
Alcala is currently serving a death row
sentence at San Quentin State Prison for,
among others murders, the kidnapping and
murder of 12-year-old Huntington Beach
resident Robin Samsoe in 1979.
A booking photo of Alcala from 2003
is among the pages of Rachel’s casebook,
along with information on dozens of other
area criminals active at the time of her dis-
appearance.
“Rodney Alcala is a person of interest
because of the Huntington Beach case,”
Rivera said in reference to Robin Samsoe’s
murder. “Although we have nothing to date
showing that he was near the scene of Ra-
chel’s disappearance.”
Rivera confirmed that he and his part-
ner, Detective Veronica Conrado, have
possession of a photo that was taken at the
Village Green a few weeks before Rachel
disappeared. Rivera, who collected the pho-
to from its owner in April of this year, said
the photo’s owner claims the photo may
have been taken by “someone who’s incar-
cerated right now.”
The photo has been sent out to the DNA
lab and criminologists to be tested for fin-
gerprints and swabbed for DNA.
“It may turn out to have no prints or
anything,” Rivera acknowledged.
Former Palisadian Lisa Sutton be-
lieves the photo taken of her and friend Lin-
da Frasier on the Village Green in 1979,
when they were teenagers, may have been
taken by Rodney Alcala—who was known
for passing himself off as a photographer as
a way to lure young women to go with him.
This possibility prompted Sutton to contact
LAPD in April and hand over the photo for
analysis.
“The photograph that was released to
the police will have to be examined before
we can determine if [Alcala] is the person
who took the photo and gave it to the wit-
ness,” Rivera said of Sutton’s suspicion.
“We have no positive identification
from the witness at this time.”
Rivera confirmed that information on
Alcala has been in Rachel’s casebook since
1977, including newspaper clippings.
Now that Sutton claims she may have
encountered Alcala in the Palisades short-
ly before Rachel’s disappearance, Rivera
said he wants to interview Alcala and get
access to the hundreds of photos that were
found in a Seattle storage locker (under Al-
cala’s name) in July of 1979 to see if the
photos contain any images of Rachel or the
Palisades. The photos are currently in the
possession of the Huntington Beach Police
Department.
“I don’t know what [Alcala] will say,
since he has been convicted and sentenced
in the murder case from Huntington Beach,”
said Rivera, who is trying to get an inter-
view with Alcala at San Quentin.
“He is in custody and there are legal
steps I have to take to be able to interview
him. Ultimately, it’s up to him. Since a wit-
ness places someone believed to look like
Alcala near the scene, I have to follow the
lead to its conclusion,” he added.
Alcala was never interviewed about
Rachel, Rivera said. And while detectives
are looking into all possibilities, including
that Rachel was killed, she is officially list-
ed as a missing person.
“In order for us to classify this as a ho-
micide, we have to have credible informa-
tion that it was a homicide. You hear all the
time about kids who get snatched and 30
years later are found,” Rivera said.
“How can we classify something into
homicide without evidence?”
The DNA databank includes samples
from Rachel’s deceased parents, which
could be used to identify any physical re-
mains that may be found. The databank also
includes the DNA of convicted criminals.
All the case needs now is physical evi-
dence to link one to the other.
Still, while Rachel Ziselman has been
missing for 38 years, neither her family
nor her hometown of Pacific Palisades has
given up hope that she will either be safely
returned, or that a criminal will be brought
to justice.
Detective Luis Rivera, LAPD Cold Case
Homicide Unit RHD, holds up a photo of
11-year-old Palisadian Rachel Ziselman,
who disappeared on September 5, 1977
while on her way home from Hughes
Market in Pacific Palisades.
Photo: Logan Lemmon
Palisadians Aleksandar Pavlović and Rick Brissen, Ralphs employees and amateur
sleuths who have been looking into Rachel Ziselman’s disappearance, stand at the
intersection of Sunset and Monument near where Rachel was last seen.
Rich Schmitt/Staff Photographer
Detective Rivera points at a sketched map of Monument St. in Pacific Palisades, indicating where Rachel
was last seen on Sept. 5, 1977 and its proximity to her home, about 100 yards away. Rachel has never been
seen since and no clues have ever been found regarding her disappearance. Photo: Logan Lemmon
A photograph of a smiling Rachel Ziselman is paper-clipped in front of a Missing
Person bulletin issued after her disappearance from the Palisades on Sept. 5, 1977.
Detective Rivera keeps both tacked to the walls of his cubicle in the downtown LAPD
building. Photo: Logan Lemmon
Detective Rivera sits with Rachel Ziselman’s case book during an interview with the Palisadian-Post. The
book contains newspaper clippings and information on known criminals who were active in the area at
the time of her disappearance. Photo: Logan Lemmon
Update
Since the Post ran parts 1-4
of the series on Rachel’s disap-
pearance, a person who lived in
the Palisades at the time said she
saw groceries on the ground and
sidewalk near the parking garage
on Monument on the day Rachel
went missing.
LAPD Detective Luis Rivera
said this story sounded familiar,
but without having the grocery
bag to test for DNA or finger-
prints (the grocery bag was never
found), investigators still have no
physical evidence to go on.