Crime Beat

declined to comment.
    Detectives would not name the person for whom Warren worked. Los Angeles real estate records list the large, gated property where police said she cared for a patient as belonging to Miklos Rozsa, 81, a composer and three-time Academy Award winner for the musical scoring of films.
    After finishing her night’s work, Warren was leaving the cul-de-sac when she stopped at Woodrow Wilson Drive after seeing the man in the middle of the street, police said.
    Gun Pulled from Clothing
    When Warren got out and walked toward the front of the car, the man stood up and pulled a handgun out of his clothing. Police said they do not know whether the pair spoke before the man fired several times at Warren.
    Warren was hit by gunfire at least twice, including once in the head, and fell mortally wounded in the street, police said. One other shot hit the windshield of her car, which eventually rolled into an embankment on the other side of the street. Police said the gunman ran to a car parked nearby and sped away. The victim was not robbed.
    A resident called police on a car phone after seeing the woman in the street. Coffey said several residents saw parts of the crime and provided police with descriptions of the gunman, his car and the sequence of events.
    Warren was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where she died at 10:48 a.m., police said.
    As police cordoned off the area, residents gathered nearby or watched from their windows. Police said the shooting, which occurred near a corner house owned by artist David Hockney, was unusual in the quiet, affluent neighborhood.
    “Violence is getting common all over the city,” said a man who declined to give his name. “People pay a lot of money to get away from it but it doesn’t always work.”
    Times staff writer Amy Pyle contributed to this story.
    NOTE: Lucille Warren’s former boyfriend was arrested, tried and convicted of murdering her. A former probation officer, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison. Of note in the sentencing was that the killer avoided the death penalty because the judge in the case ruled that he had not been lying in wait, a special circumstance that would have made him eligible for the death penalty. The judge ruled that the lying in wait statute was drawn in regard to killers who hide and then surprise their victims. Since the killer was lying on the street in plain sight when Warren approached he was not hiding and was therefore not lying in wait.

TRUNK MUSIC
WHO SHOT VIC WEISS?
A trail gone cold.
    LOS ANGELES TIMES
    June 11, 1989
    T HE MEETING WITH Jack Kent Cooke and Jerry Buss had gone well. Vic Weiss was close to a deal that would bring University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian to Los Angeles to lead the Lakers, the team Cooke was selling to Buss.
    Briefcase in hand, the stocky but energetic Weiss, a 51-year-old sports promoter, sometime agent and businessman, left the meeting room at a Beverly Hills hotel, hopped into his Rolls-Royce and headed over the hill to his house in Encino.
    But Weiss never made it home. Three days later, on June 17, 1979, his red-and-white Rolls-Royce was spotted in the garage of a North Hollywood hotel.
    People opened the trunk and there was the body of Victor J. Weiss, hands tied behind his back. He had been killed with two gunshots to the head.
    Organized Crime Link
    Ten years later, Weiss’ killing remains unsolved and one of the San Fernando Valley’s most puzzling mysteries. Los Angeles police believe Weiss was the victim of an organized crime hit, the most difficult of murder cases to crack.
    It is a case that plunged detectives into the milieu of mobsters and informants, where they became suspicious of everyone, sometimes even fellow cops. And once they even found themselves being followed by someone they were investigating.
    Still, they were able to learn much about the secret life of Vic Weiss. They learned that while he publicly hobnobbed with legitimate names in sports and business, he privately rubbed shoulders with criminals, ran up huge debts on sports betting and skimmed off the top of laundered money he delivered to mobsters in Las Vegas.
    It is believed by police that those latter indiscretions cost Weiss his life. But who ordered the killing and who carried it out remain unknown.
    Detective Leroy Orozco, the only original investigator still assigned to the killing, says that after 21 years as a homicide detective, the Weiss case tantalizes him