For 28 years, Rick Jackson’s mission in life was investigating murders for the Los Angeles Police Department. He worked cases involving everyone from gang members, street hustlers, sex criminals and other cops to the rich and famous, including Doris Duke and O.J. Simpson.
Jackson has become well known in the world of fiction, too, lending his expertise to elite crime novelists to such an extent, he’s often called the “Godfather of L.A. Crime Writers.” Notably, he helps best-selling author Michael Connelly portray police work authentically in his Harry Bosch and “Lincoln Lawyer” novels and served as a technical consultant for Connelly’s “Bosch” Amazon Original series.
Since retiring in 2013, Jackson has lived a quiet but busy life in bucolic Danville with his second wife. During a recent visit to playwright Eugene O’Neill’s Tao House estate, a national historic site in the hills west of downtown Danville, Jackson described all the ways he never really left murder — or crime fiction — behind when he left Los Angeles.
He and Connelly shared a stage this spring at Danville’s Village Theatre, where their sold-out conversation — which touched, of course, on old crime cases — benefited the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, a nonprofit that hosts annual productions of O’Neill’s works at Tao House.
Tao House has become a favorite hiking destination for Jackson. But on this particular day, Jackson is standing, rapt, in O’Neill’s private, book-lined study.
“This is where it happens,” he said about the Nobel Prize winner, whose early 20th-century plays revolutionized American theater for their realistic portrayals of human despair. “This is where the mind’s rolling, right here where this stuff is created.”
Jackson has become an author himself. “Black Tunnel, White Magic: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal in Los Angeles” will be published next spring. It’s a non-fiction account of one of his most memorable cases: the 1990 summer-solstice killing of a UCLA student who had been exploring Wiccan practices. His body was found in an old railroad tunnel rumored to be a Manson family hang-out.
Moreover, Jackson has returned, at least part-time, to investigating murders, helping the San Mateo County Sheriff’s department clear cold cases. This new phase of his career actually began in Danville several years after he first arrived. The police chief asked if he could help clear the 1985 killing of Virginia Vincent, a 57-year-old real estate agent who was found raped and strangled in her Diablo Road apartment.
Jackson couldn’t say no. Like Connelly’s LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, Jackson began by spreading out reports from the Vincent “murder book” — as the case file is known in detective circles — on a table in the Danville station to figure out next steps.
“To be honest, at that point, I missed working cases,” he said.
Cold cases can be “time machines,” Jackson said, transporting detectives back to a different time or place. Or, as Bosch once said, “In every murder is the tale of a city.”
The Vincent investigation shocked the community because murder was — and continues to be — so rare here. Police initially explored links to other serial predators who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Golden State Killer. With Jackson’s help, police used a newer DNA technique, known as “family search,” to identify the killer as a young plumber working in the area. He died in 1997, so it will never be known how he crossed paths with Vincent or why he killed her. But even if Vincent’s family didn’t get answers to all their questions, Jackson said, they were happy to have some resolution and to know that police still cared
Connelly isn’t surprised that Jackson has returned to investigations. “For some detectives, it’s a job. For others, it’s a real mission, and missions don’t end usually,” Connelly said. “I think, if they let him, he’ll be doing this until his last day. I think he really is motivated by helping families recover. Part of that process is giving them answers.”
Connelly’s Bosch is mission-driven, too. Like Jackson, the fictional detective displays photos of victims at his desk to spur him to keep pushing for answers. But while Bosch is gruff and solitary, still nursing the pain of a traumatic childhood, Jackson is affable and enjoys connecting with different kinds of people.
“He’s told me that the key to great detective work is getting people to talk to you,” Connelly said.
Jackson’s childhood in Lakewood, south of L.A., was a happy one. He loved reading all kinds of mysteries, from Hardy Boys novels to news stories about local crimes. While working on his book, he said he came across his ninth-grade yearbook, in which a teacher wrote: “Best of luck in the detective field.”
Jackson studied criminal justice at San Jose State University, but returned to L.A. to join its legendary police department in 1974. As a then-rookie detective, he was dispatched to the infamous drug house on Laurel Canyon’s Wonderland Avenue in 1981, where four people had been savagely beaten to death. The investigation into the so-called Wonderland murders eventually ensnared a cast of colorful characters, including 1970s porn star John Holmes, Liberace’s boyfriend Scott Thorson and a Hollywood nightclub owner with organized crime connections.
Jackson’s job was to secure the crime scene, so he didn’t see the gory tableau there. But he saw many other crime scenes, as he worked his way up to LAPD’s elite robbery homicide division and the major crimes unit. He helped with the investigation of four officers charged with beating Rodney King, worked on the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and interviewed Elizabeth Taylor after suspicions arose over the death of her friend, tobacco heiress Doris Duke. In 2001, Jackson was recruited to LAPD’s newly formed Cold Case Homicide unit, using DNA and other then-new forensic technologies to clear its backlog of thousands of unsolved murders.
But in his off hours, Jackson became good friends with a who’s who of crime writers, including Joseph Wambaugh and James Ellroy, who picked his brain for advice and ideas. Ellroy, of “L.A. Confidential” fame, even loosely based the protagonist of a novella in his “Destination: Morgue!” on Jackson’s career.
Jackson and Connelly first encountered each other in L.A., when Connelly was a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times pestering him for comment. Jackson didn’t have time for reporters, but they reconnected in the mid-aughts, after Connelly had become a best-selling novelist and sought out Jackson for help with a Bosch book. A character named Det. Rick Jackson has made appearances in some of Connelly’s Bosch mysteries, while the real-life Jackson vets his friend’s books for accuracy and authenticity, suggesting, for example, that his LAPD detectives never refer to suspects as “perps.”
“That’s an East Coast thing,” Jackson said.
After Jackson and his first wife divorced, a case brought him to the Bay Area — and a reconnection with Debbie Halliday, a friend from middle school. They fell in love, and after he retired, Jackson moved to her home in Danville.
The Tao House connection came later — through O’Neill Foundation co-president, Dan McGovern, a UCLA law school friend of David Ogden, the late L.A. attorney who was one of Connelly’s models for “Lincoln Lawyer” Mickey Haller.
The world of crime – and fiction – is all interconnected.
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Retired LAPD Detective Rick Jackson’s first book, “Black Tunnel, White Magic,” is expected to be published in the spring 2025.
Best-selling author Michael Connelly has written 39 novels, including last year’s “Resurrection Walk,” which features “Lincoln Lawyer” Mickey Haller and his half-brother, LAPD detective-turned-private investigator Harry Bosch. Connelly’s 40th book, “The Waiting,” featuring Bosch and LAPD Detective Renee Ballard, is due out Nov. 5. Find more details at www.michaelconnelly.com.
Stream “Bosch” and the first two seasons of its spinoff, “Bosch: Legacy,” on Amazon Prime; a third season of the latter is in production. Stream the first two seasons of “The Lincoln Lawyer” (2022) on Netflix; a third season is on its way.
Prefer podcasts? Delve into the Wonderland story via Jackson and Connelly’s podcast, “The Wonderland Murders and the Secret History of Hollywood,” on Audible. A four-part documentary based on the podcast is tentatively scheduled to stream on MGM+ in the fall. Jackson and Connelly also revisit one of Jackson’s most memorable cases, a 1987 killing outside a popular Hollywood nightclub, in “The Telltale Bullet,” Season 1 of the podcast “Murder Book.”
Channel Jackson’s enthusiasm for Danville’s famous playwright at the Eugene O’Neill Foundation’s annual festival in September. The program will showcase a production of O’Neill’s epic tragedy, “Mourning Becomes Electra,” Sept. 14-29 in the courtyard of O’Neill’s former home, Tao House, and in the Old Barn nearby. Find more details at https://eugeneoneill.org.