LA Forensics: The Actor's Secret
A Brutal End to the Dream
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On April 10, 1990, a neighbor noticed a foul odor coming from Finch’s apartment and called police.
Twenty minutes later an apartment manager opened the locked door for police. A swarm of flies and the stench of rotting flesh greeted their nostrils as they quickly moved through the one-bedroom apartment to find the culprit: a dead adult male on a bed completely covered with a green blanket. A pillow had been placed on top of the man’s face beneath the blanket.
And that’s not all. He had been stabbed twice in the chest and his throat had been slit. On a desk close to the bed they found a butcher knife with a 6-inch blade and a latex glove with a dark stain. The body was in advanced stages of decomposition. The neat and orderly apartment had been ransacked.
“The fact that the body was covered up made me think that this suspect did not want to look into the face or the eyes of the victim after he had killed him. He wanted to ransack for whatever he was looking for,” said LAPD Detective Ernesto Basset who responded to the scene. “We suspected there were monies and other things that he wanted to take. And, in doing this, obviously he would be there for a while moving around the apartment, which we felt he was familiar with at the time.
“Now I would say there was a funny twist to this because we subsequently found out that after he had killed the victim, he slashed his throat. So you start to think, now, what was the purpose of that? Did he kill him, slash his throat, cover him up? Or did he stab him and then come back later for whatever reason and possibly slashed his throat?
