[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]One week from tomorrow, it will be 5 months since the first time that Paul Bilodeau’s killer loonily mused to himself, “They’ll never catch me.”
The crazy boob may as well be in the government’s witness-protection program. He seems that insulated, isolated, invulnerable.
We know that he was a coward, a psychologically vulnerable and suffering man because of the way he snuffed out Mr. Bilodeau.
As small as our world has become through technology, isn’t it shocking that a p[art-time maniac can sneak into a business around 8 in the evening in one of the largest cities in the world, shoot to death a fairly well-known man, and stealthily vanish into foreign air, to the amazement of the Culver City Police Dept.?
If, heaven forbid, I were to cheat tomorrow night with your wife, thanks to tracking devices you and the police would know who, where and how before dawn.
But the dirty murderer of the 45-year-old City Hall-hired Project Superintendent in Fox Hills is sitting out there fiendishly laughing, as if he were Batman’s Joker.
The End and the Beginning
The cops have been working the case since Mr. Bilodeau’s lifeless body was found, stretched out near his desk in the construction site trailer that was his office, early in the morning on Saturday, Jan. 3.
A balmy man who really wanted him dead, not just maimed, had pounced on him the night before when he was at his desk after returning from dinner with his elderly — and favorite — uncle.
The truth is depressing — especially for the likable Mr. Bilodeau’s close and still-grieving family just north of Los Angeles. Single, divorced and childless in middle age, his family says he was the ideal son, sibling, cousin, nephew.
The family has raved about Mr. Bilodeau’s singular devotion to so many of its members. But even virtuous victims sometimes have corners of their lives where the blinds stay drawn.
Conversely, rancor periodically fared — not more, not less often than usual — between Mr. Bilodeau’s notion of how to construct the Fire Station and the builders’ take on it.
It has surprised some observers that in the fistful of late afternoon/early evening emails that Mr. Bilodeau fired and fired to the attention of the construction company, police, so far, have not uncovered one faint clue as to Mr. Bilodeau’s impending doom an hour or two later.
The Technical Outer Limits
Cops will tell you there are some mysterious crevices of human life that the most sophisticated technology is unable to crack.
Tragically, a solution to the cheap-shot Bilodeau assassination probably remains as distant this morning as it was when the gunshots rang through the black but vacant early evening coolness in reliably safe Fox Hills the night after New Year’s.
From the police perspective, no major streams of knowledge and information seem to have budged from the start.
Encouragingly, the case still is live. Police won’t say how close they are to running out of workable leads, but they are in dry fishing territory.
For those closest to Mr. Bilodeau in life, it feels as if the police may as well have been combing London as Los Angeles the last 5 months.
Still seems equally likely, sources tell us, that the ice-blooded killer came from a secretive compartment of the victim’s personal life or was somehow linked to F.E.I. Enterprises of Venice Boulevard, the construction outfit that is building the Fire Station.
If suspects don’t abound, at least there are a few. Like the case itself, they are very much live. There just isn’t enough evidence to tag and bring in anyone. Yet.
I do not believe any original suspect can heave relief and count himself as eliminated. Cops are not inclined to remove the black cloud of doubt from over anyone’s head.
