Getting public records through FOIA requests can be a long slog. Be patient, stick to your guns, and you may one day prevail.
My neurosis? Fear of losing.
There I was in a trough of despair a couple years ago, staring at a possible ugly personal and professional defeat. A fourth attorney had just turned me down, not wanting to represent me in suing the San Francisco Police Department for records in a 26-year-old murder case.
I wanted the records on an old case of mine, the 1998 daytime assassination of biker Gary Vincent Murphy. I’d once had Murphy under surveillance in a family law case. My client was the grandmother of his then six-year-old daughter. The grandmother’s daughter had dated Murphy but died of an accidental methadone overdose three months after giving birth to their daughter. Grandma wanted sole custody of the child she had raised while Murphy, a convicted methamphetamine trafficker, was in and out of prison. Grandma was impatient to find more dirt on him. But I ended up firing her as a client because of her anger and volatility.
Three months later, Murphy was murdered. Over the next decades there was never any news or word about an arrest in the case. I learned a couple years ago through public records and doing a court search that police had in fact served a search warrant in connection with Murphy’s murder. It was a returned Alameda County search warrant that gave Grandma’s name as a suspect.
I’ve always felt Grandma ran a conspiracy to have Murphy killed. I would later find that Murphy had been clean and sober for a year before his death. He was serious about trying to be a father to his little girl when a man shot him in the back at the halfway house he managed. In 26 years, police had made no arrests and kept a tight lid on the case. I had to know why.
I had to set the record straight. I had to win.
I felt pressure to win for many reasons. In year one of the pandemic, I started a podcast about the case: “The Gary Murphy Assassination.” I didn’t want to base a podcast on my opinions and speculation. I needed answers. Murphy’s daughter, Eden, was now an adult. I had spoken with her a couple times and interviewed her for the podcast. She told me that she and her family had been kept in the dark on the case all these years and that I was the only one even trying to learn the truth.
I suspect that I wanted the truth as badly as she did. I felt low-grade shame and a professional stain for having worked for the wrong client in the case. Grandma had fooled me. I had to set the record straight. I had to win.
As private investigators, we have outsized egos and perhaps a delusional sense of our ability to persuade people. I was not getting paid for my work in exposing Murphy’s killers. Winning in other cases also contributed to the pressure I put on myself. I think I should get results all the time.
This is a story of how I stayed motivated for five years to prevail in my public records request. There were strategies in play to produce the win — writing multiple Public Records Act requests to various agencies — but just as important was my attitude and what kept me going. It’s this attitude, call it faith or belief, that’s necessary on any major case.
Surround Yourself with News of Wins
Before becoming a private investigator, I worked at daily newspapers for about eight years and earned a master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley. I’ve had colleagues in both news and investigations who inspire me. We are badgers, the Davids vs. the Goliaths.
Every day I look for stories of reporter and private investigator wins. It seems someone from The Innocence Project is always freeing someone wrongfully convicted. Justice still exists. Cops catch bad guys after decades on the run: look at how they captured Whitey Bulger. Reporters for ProPublica routinely break big corruption stories.
And there are triumphs by what I call “accidental investigators” who are pressed into service. These can be regular people, like a victim’s relative, who move heaven and earth to find answers. Chris Lambert, who did the excellent Your Own Backyard podcast, about the murder of college student Kristin Smart, was a musician before he started his podcast that exposed the killer and resulted in a conviction.
In my immediate circle, there are private investigators who use public records requests all the time. Private eye Steve Mason in Arizona writes about his public records wins. My podcast producer, Brian Krans, is a fellow Berkeley J School alum who reported on scandals at the Vallejo (CA) Police Department. He also reports for KQED public radio in the Bay Area — and uses FOIA requests often.
Seeking professional development and another pep talk, I joined the National Association of Legal Investigators in January 2024 and attended their conference in Florida the next month. One speaker, private investigator Kevin McClain of Illinois, is a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act ) expert. McClain talked about fearlessly pursuing such requests, even “FOIAing the FOIA” or asking for records about how an agency handled your inquiry. His presentation filled my gas tank with strategy ideas and the inspiration to keep going.
Gathering String and Shots on Goal
My obstacle in the Murphy case was that no one had been arrested or charged; so police could use language that it was “an open and ongoing investigation” and therefore refuse to release any records. I had doubts about it being an active case because most sources were saying police had done nothing since around 2000.
My first and most obvious Records Act request was in 2019 to the San Francisco Police Department. The request bounced around, and one day my assistant Angela Rowen got an email response from Police Legal Affairs. It contained a 2014, six-page memo on the case from a Detective Wynkoop. Wynkoop, since retired, wrote in the memo that he looked at the case in 2012 and tried in 2014 to get the San Francisco District Attorney to charge the case but the DA’s office declined. The memo talked about original detectives losing phone records and not keeping an organized case file. As a bonus to me, perhaps, the memo had failed to redact the last name of the Murphy gunman.
That memo, maybe released by mistake, would later play a crucial part in winning me the records. I now had the names of all the other law enforcement agencies involved in serving a search warrant at the gunman’s residence in Oakland in 1998.
I tried to follow up with a more detailed request for information, but police turned this down with the old “open and ongoing” explanation. But I didn’t consider the failed requests a waste of time. A records request is like a shot on goal in soccer, hockey, or lacrosse. It puts pressure on the public agency, the goal keeper. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky famously said. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” You never know what kind of funny bounce or rebound you might get.
A records request is like a shot on goal in soccer, hockey, or lacrosse. It puts pressure on the public agency, the goal keeper. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky famously said. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Another reason to send multiple requests to an agency, not to the point of annoyance, is that the personnel might change. You might get a different response from a different person tasked with handling Public Records Act requests. It’s common to have multiple agencies involved in a big criminal case.
With some new information about the case, I then began doing records requests to the other agencies in the case, including Oakland Police and the Alameda County District Attorney. As it’s sometimes known in the reporting trade, I was gathering string and creating a paper trail.
Records provided by the Alameda County District Attorney about serving the search warrant at the gunman’s house four months after the murder proved my case theory correct. A returned search warrant named the suspects: Grandma (my former client), the gunman, his getaway driver, and Grandma’s then boyfriend. I also discovered that Oakland Police and the Alameda County DA had arrested the Murphy gunman and his driver in connection with a notorious home invasion sex assault of a pregnant mother in wealthy Piedmont. The Piedmont home invasion occurred a week after the Murphy hit.
I kept gathering records about the suspects. But how to get the holy grail in the case, the San Francisco Police case file, when the department had twice denied my requests?
The San Francisco Sunshine Task Force For The Win!
Every state has its own laws on public records. In California, you have no remedy other than a lawsuit if your records request is denied. But although hiring attorneys might be an option for a news organization, it’s just not that practical for a lone private investigator.
Attorney after attorney turned me down. I’m sure it had to do with a combo of no money in it for them and they didn’t think I could win. I consulted my journalism school alumni group about finding an attorney. One member, Josh Wolf (who once spent 169 days in prison for refusing to turn over video footage of a riot), recommended I try the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. I’d never heard of it.
The SF Sunshine Task Force hears disputes in public records cases in the city. It does not have the power of a court but makes recommendations. I started researching Task Force codes and submitted petitions seeking information on the Murphy murder from San Francisco Police and the San Francisco District Attorney.
In the span of a year, I appeared four times before the Task Force. Each time, I went in person to the hearing room on the fourth floor of City Hall. The first appearance was just to determine if they would hear my case. They agreed that my petitions had standing.
I could have just called in remotely, but that’s not the way to go. I wanted the Task Force to see in my body language and hear in my voice how much the case meant to me. If releasing records came down to a coin flip, I wanted every advantage possible. Police and DA’s representatives did not attend the hearings in person. I went one time the night before testing positive with my first Covid. (I thought I had bad allergies.)
I saw language in the Sunshine Task Force codes that supported my argument for police to release the case file. The wording goes beyond the state Public Records Act. The SF Sunshine code states, a paraphrase, that when a decision has been made not to charge a person in a case, that police shall release all records in a case. It’s the code that I tried to pound each time I addressed the task force.
What set me off with the District Attorney is that before I even filed my petition, they had a representative dealing with me who claimed they once found a box of materials on the Murphy case, but then said it didn’t exist. This “transparency lawyer,” as she is termed, also claimed that she had checked with her office and could find no record whatsoever of the Murphy case and the decision not to charge anyone.
Task Force members were dubious when the DA representative claimed zero records of the case and no recall of a decision not to charge. Police were also dragging their feet, saying they didn’t have to release anything, had staffing difficulties, old records were slow to be digitized, etc.
But I had my ace in the hole. Remember that memo police might have accidentally released to me five years ago? In it the former detective stated that he had meetings with the DA’s office about the case, that the case reached a top prosecutor, and that the prosecutor opted not to charge, claiming falsely that it was a “one-witness case.”
Since the DA claimed no records, that detective memo became the proof that supported my argument. The Task Force, in a unanimous vote, sided with me for police to release the records because the DA had opted not to charge. Still, the Task Force does not have the authority of a court, and police don’t have to follow its recommendations.
The Case File Is Released
On a late June night after dinner, I checked emails on a laptop in my home office. There was an email from San Francisco Police. I didn’t think much of it because with the Task Force hearings, for about a year, emails flew all the time between me and the various agencies. This email directed me to a public records portal. I couldn’t log in because my password manager kept putting in an old password.
A couple days later, I entered a new password. Voila! Police had given me about 310 pages on the Murphy murder case file. They indicated there would be about 500 more pages coming to me. I felt an elation I had not felt in years, genuine gratitude and relief.
The case file confirmed a few things. First, it was a mess. There were no typed summaries or organized sections for evidence. There weren’t even page numbers. Second, I was right about all the players and Grandma’s role as the ringleader. Her then boyfriend, an ex-con, was a cutout who had solicited the ex-con gunman and equally violent getaway driver. And third, the original detectives had quit on the case. They lost phone records and took a five-week break just a couple weeks after starting the case.
Police did have good ballistics evidence, some phone records, and the detailed testimony of an informant who knew all of the players and their roles in the hit. There was also a witness next to Murphy the day he died. That witness picked the gunman out of a photo lineup.
Grandma had fled to Canada for six years after ordering the hit on Murphy. She was interviewed three times by police, but no notes of her interviews are in the file. She was never charged. The case file mentions the gunman calling her the night of the Murphy murder and her calling the halfway house two months before Murphy was shot there. Grandma has dementia now and still lives in a pricey home in the Oakland hills.
Police had given me about 310 pages on the Murphy murder case file. They indicated there would be about 500 more pages coming to me. I felt an elation I had not felt in years, genuine gratitude and relief.
The Murphy gunman is a free man since about 2014. He was charged with being an ex-felon in possession of a handgun after police found weapons at his house when they served the search warrant. He took a 25-year-sentence in about 2001 but did half that time and was released. He at one point ran a cleaning business and now lives in suburb about 40 miles east of San Francisco.
The Murphy getaway driver got 93 years for the Piedmont home invasion and sex assault on the pregnant woman. He got a harsh sentence because he was convicted of several other armed robberies that he did right after the Murphy hit. Grandma and her boyfriend were never charged in the Murphy case.
I have not cleared up all the mystery around Murphy’s death. I speculate that the original detectives stopped in about 2001 when it became clear the Murphy killer and accomplice were going down for the Piedmont case and the gun charges. The second detective who took over the case in 2012 did his best to resuscitate it but met a wall of disinterest at the DA’s office.
Murphy himself was a mysterious character with three felony drug convictions. Did his background in the criminal justice system have something that police and the DA’s office didn’t want public?
I haven’t been in touch again yet with Murphy’s daughter. Episode 5 of my podcast on the case is out October 1.
When I started this project, I envisioned police on TV news cuffing and stuffing Grandma and the gunman into patrol cars. That will never happen. In the micro sense, I’m proud that I obtained the police reports, especially since all the attorneys declined to help me. But in the broader perspective, I’m disappointed with the criminal justice system: too often, the status of a victim affects how a case is investigated and prosecuted. Murphy was never a sympathetic victim, at least in the eyes of authorities and the media.
Still, a personal victory counts as a win. It all started with a stubborn belief in myself and knowing that I was right.
About the author:
Mike Spencer owns Spencer Legal Investigations in Walnut Creek, CA. He’s the author of Private Eye Confidential, Stories From A Real P.I. (published by 99: The Press) and is on X at @SpencerPI.
Listen to his podcast, The Gary Murphy Assassination, a San Francisco Cold Case, here.