Just as in my sportswriting days, I was thinking of prospective angles for my first story while the sentencing hearing for National Guard Armory killer Scott A. Ansman was progressing — uneventfully — at the LAX Courthouse the other afternoon.
The considered wisdom was that the two pillars of the hearing were cinches to go formfully — public defender Nan Whitfield’s bid for a new trial, and a life-without-parole sentence for her client.
What, then, would be the news?
My conundrum was complicated by the fact that across two years of coverage of the dramatic events, you become acquainted with the families on both sides.
No longer was the case as sterile as, is he guilty or innocent?
You study how shocked and grieving both sides are.
One family is black and one is white — a fact that I believe never was noted in this newspaper. It was irrelevant to the story. And it only was mentioned cursorily at the Ansman hearing.
Marriage-Plus
What was mighty relevant was that Mr. Ansman, 34 years old at the time, was/is married. He was seeing Ms. Harris on the side. Two and a half months before he killed Ms. Harris, with a baseball bat, his wife, Flora, had given birth to their third child.
Even as the child was being born, according to testimony, Mr. Ansman, then a sergeant in the National Guard, a lifetime soldier, was shopping the internet for ways to dispense with the unborn child Ms. Harris was carrying. Mistakenly, he thought he was the father.
Unable to achieve that goal, the testimony was that he set out to kill Ms. Harris herself and solve the whole problem. Almost from the moment he was taken into custody, shortly after her bloody body was recovered on the gymnasium floor, word was that Mr. Ansman had been soliciting help or a hit man to do away with her. One recruit who rejected the solicitation reported him to Culver City police.
My purely personal speculation is that it was quite explainable that Mr. Ansman and Ms. Harris would come together. In a tragic way, they may have been soulmates.
Similar in age, Ms. Harris was searching for her true calling. Very early, she worked for a bank, later tried nursing and neither was fulfilling. Perhaps the adventure associated with the military would ameliorate her wanderlust.
Looking for an Anchor
And so she came to the Culver City Armory, effectively knocked on the door and Sgt. Ansman answered. We will never know whether love, serendipity or something else magnetized them toward each other.
He may have had what she wanted more than anything else — a perceived stability of career. He had been in uniform 99 percent of his adult life. This was home, thinking that he may have learned from his late father, also a military man of uniform, after leaving the U.S. Army, he felt as if he were living on the wrong planet.
He said later that she had a drug addiction. On the day of her death, she was high and her condition ignited their fatal showdown, he said, adding that he killed her in self-defense.
But he was shoveling against a tide of testimony.
At the hearing, Martha Lou Harris was simply eloquent in narrating the story of her daughter’s shortened life, as she wrestled with what could and should have been.
Dechelle Richardson, niece of the murder victim, understandably branded Mr. Ansman “evil” and “an animal,” but she took pains to declare the crime had nothing to do with their separate races.
I was also struck by the pathos in presentations by Mr. Ansman’s sister-in-law Florinda and his wife Flora.
The sisters were almost identical in repeatedly, persuasively, declaring their unquenchable fealty to this man they acknowledged was imperfect but meriting a second chance.
His wife said flatly she forgave him, which sounded like a big deal and a meaningful one.
His mother, Marilyn Ansman, who uses a walker, said “his family needs him so badly,” referring to his two brothers and his wife and children who are 2, 7 and 10.
All of this time, Mr. Ansman was sniffling — finally something besides stone-faced silence.
The judge slapped him with virtually the maximum sentence, he said, after the killer at no time showed even a sliver of remorse.
The killer was the last to speak before the judge ruled. Turns out, he said, the verdict was exactly the reverse of the truth.
He said the Culver City police lied about him because truth was not their objective. They just wanted closure. Same for prosecutor Joe Markus, who said he did not seek the death penalty because of Mr. Ansman’s long military record.
If you just wandered into the courtroom, you might have felt pity when Mr. Ansman, one by one, talked about the memorable parental moments he never will experience with each of his children.
Okay, that is legitimately sad.
But after he finished his mean-spirited diatribe, there was not a sympathetic bone left in me because the slug never once apologized to the permanently grieving Harris family, never look in the direction of his own caring family, much less the woeful Harrises.
Looked to me, as he marched off to a life in prison — to rot because of lies,” he said — like a case of justice done.
No doubt, he was the angle for my first story because crudeness always wins out.
