Crime Beat

setting off an investigation that unearthed a bizarre cast of characters and seamy tales, but convicted no one.
    This month some of the mystery appears to be unraveling in a court hearing into another killing a world away—the world of the “Cotton Club” slaying with its Hollywood celebrities and high-finance film and cocaine deals.
    Testimony in the Cotton Club hearing, and related documents filed with the court, contain accusations that both slayings were carried out by some of the same hired killers, who boasted of their work to an informant wearing a tape recorder for investigators.
    The question of who might have hired them to kill Mincher is still open, but at least one document filed with the court quotes an informant as saying that it was the grandmother of the man who had been acquitted of the killing. An attorney for the woman, a Beverly Hills investment executive, denied the accusation. Police say they are still investigating and will not comment.
    Mincher, who billed herself in local sex-oriented publications as a “Sexy Black & Indian Goddess” with a 56-inch bust, was shot to death May 3, 1984. Two years later, Gregory Alan Cavalli, a 24-year-old body builder from a prominent Beverly Hills family, was charged with her murder. Authorities said he drove the getaway car after a hit man killed Mincher.
    But at Cavalli’s trial, prosecutors could not produce or even name the hit man. And the chief witnesses against Cavalli included a former cocaine addict, a transsexual performer in pornographic films and a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered after her son killed her mother.
    Fast Vote for Acquittal
    At the end of a three-week trial in 1986, Cavalli walked out of the Van Nuys Courthouse a free man. It took a jury less than an hour to find him not guilty.
    But now, three years later, the Mincher murder case begins a new chapter.
    Authorities have charged two men with killing Mincher, identifying them as bodyguards who formerly worked for a security firm that the Cavalli family had hired. Detectives now say Cavalli was not the getaway driver and was not even present the night of the killing.
    The question of who ordered Mincher’s killing remains, but authorities say Cavalli is not a target of the investigation because he can’t be tried for the same crime twice.
    “Never,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Ed Entwisle. “He has been tried and that is it.”
    Investigators will not discuss whom they consider suspects. But in a summary of the investigation filed with Los Angeles Superior Court, in connection with the Cotton Club case, the key informant in the case is quoted as telling officers that one of the suspects told him that Mincher “had been bothering a wealthy Italian family and the grandmother contracted the ‘hit.’”
    Attorney Mitchell W. Egers, who represents the Cavalli family, identified “grandmother” as a reference to Mary Bowles, a partner in the Beverly Hills real-estate investment firm of Bowles & Associates. “There is no other grandmother . . . with a part in this case,” he said, denying that anyone in the family had anything to do with the Mincher killing.
    “It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s absolutely impossible,” Egers said. “It is beyond my conception that anybody in the Cavalli family would have anything to do with anything illegal, let alone a murder. They are gentle, refined people with an excellent reputation.”
    New Leads Uncovered
    New leads in the Mincher case emerged almost by accident in the last two years during the lengthy Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigation of the slaying of would-be movie producer Roy Radin.
    William Molony Mentzer, 39, of Canoga Park and Robert Ulmer Lowe, 42, of Rockville, Md., two of the alleged hit men arrested in Radin’s 1983 slaying, have also been charged with killing Mincher in 1984.
    Mentzer has pleaded not guilty, and Lowe is fighting extradition from Maryland.
    A preliminary hearing is under way in Los Angeles Superior Court into the slaying of Radin, which was dubbed the Cotton Club case because Radin was killed during a financial dispute over the making of the movie of that name.
    Although the Mincher murder is involved in the hearing, it has been overshadowed by the headline-grabbing testimony in the Radin killing, which has involved cocaine deals, limousines and accusations involving movie producer Robert Evans.
    But investigative records filed with the court and the statements