Dedicated detectives go to great lengths to solve all homicides they investigate. It is often said, though, they will give special effort when one of their own is murdered. Sometimes, however, even the most determined sleuths conducting the most thorough of investigations cannot put all of the pieces of the puzzle together, even when it involves a fellow policeman.

On the morning of July 11, 1988, thirty-year-old Lester Garnier, an undercover vice cop with the San Francisco Police Department, was found shot to death in his car while off-duty. Investigators have called his murder a professional style killing and have a person of interest, but prosecutors say the evidence is insufficient to file charges.

Lester Garnier

A respected nine-year-policeman, Lester Garnier had made it his mission to clean up his native Mission District, an east-central neighborhood of San Francisco infiltrated by streetwalkers. Largely because of his arrests during his four years as of posing as a pimp, the section was slowly being weaned of the hookers.

A Mission In The Mission

Lester was not working on the evening of July 10, 1988, when he and his parents, Tony and Jean, had dinner at their home in Concord, a suburb of San Francisco thirty miles to the northeast. The family had plans to spend more of the evening together, but Lester left after receiving two phone calls, the nature of which he did not specify to his parents. Tony answered one of the phone calls from a woman.

Lester and several friends had plans to meet in San Francisco to see a late movie.  At approximately 8:45 p.m., however, he called one of them from his car phone, saying he was not going to make it but did not offer an explanation.

Lester, Jean, And Tony

At 7:30 a.m. the following morning, a groundskeeper at the Wood Creek Shopping Center in downtown Walnut Creek, six miles south of Concord, noticed a blue 1984 Chevrolet Corvette in a remote part of the complex parking lot in front of a Ross store. Such a vehicle in the affluent San Francisco East Bay suburb was not unusual, but what the groundskeeper found in the driver’s seat was: a dead man.

The car was registered to Lester Garnier who was identified as the victim. He had been shot twice at close range, once in his head and once in the right side of his chest. His hands were up as if he were in the defense position. Investigators believed it a professional style killing. The murder weapon was not found.

Lester always carried at least one gun while off duty. He had left both his nine-millimeter and .357-caliber pistols at home, but his revolver was not found at his home or at the crime scene. His wallet and police badge were in the glove compartment, but his car keys were missing. The doors were locked while the car window was rolled down.

Initial suspicion fell on the Mission District prostitutes Lester had busted. Most, however, spoke highly of him despite his arresting them and all were cleared of involvement.

Suspicion then shifted to some of Lester’s colleagues, but with prostitution remaining a focus.

Lester Is Found Murdered

On April 10, three months before Lester’s murder, he was part of a task force conducting surveillance of a Mission brothel suspected of using teenage prostitutes and said to be patronized by prominent businessmen, civic leaders, and . . . policemen. The establishment was on the block where he had grown up, but building owners Patrick Roberts and his wife Kelly Loyd were observed moving items from the facility to another structure in the Inner Richmond District, four miles away.

After a couple of days of surveillance, Lester’s partner suspected they had been seen observing the building. The purported house of ill repute was then raided.

Part Of The Raid On The Brothel

Because several San Francisco police officers were suspected of using the brothel’s services, some posited they were angry at Lester for his part in busting the prostitution ring. Speculation of their involvement in his murder was bolstered by ballistics tests determining the unfound murder weapon to be a .380 semiautomatic pistol, often carried as a backup gun by many area cops. A 1988 San Francisco Examiner article states such a weapon registered to a female San Francisco police officer was unaccounted for; a later article reports the missing weapon was registered to a federal agent working with the SFPD on special operations.

The guns of a dozen San Francisco Police Department officers suspected of having been at the brothel were tested; none matched the bullets retrieved from Lester’s body.

After no evidence was found supporting a bookmaker/FBI informant’s claims that Lester had been murdered by his fellow boys in blue after he discovered them stealing on raids such as the one on the brothel, the focus of the investigation shifted to several sightings reported near his car shortly before he is believed to have been killed.

No Proof Suggesting Colleagues Killed Lester

A woman working late at the shopping center complex observed Lester’s Corvette as it was being parked beneath a lit lamppost at approximately 10:45 p.m. on July 10.  After being parked, the car’s lights remained on. The worker believes she saw a woman who may have been wearing a wig inside the vehicle. Men in drag wearing such wigs are common in San Francisco, but the worker was certain she had seen a woman.

Shortly after the street lights had automatically switched off at 11;00, a motorist noticed two women exiting from the passenger side of the car, now sitting in the parking lot where it would be found eight-and-a-half hours later. They then walked to the driver’s side and looked in the window.

Lester And His Corvette

Approximately fifteen minutes later, a carpet layer working in a store across the street from the parking lot heard several loud sounds he dismissed as fireworks because it was less than a week after the Fourth of July. After roughly another fifteen minutes, he observed two women walking across the parking lot past Lester’s car and entering separate vehicles, one a faded blue pickup and the other either a Datsun or a Toyota with carpet or cloth covering the vehicle’s rear deck. Each woman then drove away.

One of the women appeared to be in her twenties, approximately five-feet-six-inches tall, one-hundred-ten pounds, with a medium build. The other was believed to be in her mid-thirties, taller, and with a slender build.

Under hypnosis, the motorist recalled the shorter woman had long, straight, blond hair parted down the middle. A composite based on his recollections was made; the carpet layer believes the sketch resembles the shorter of the two women he saw walking across the parking lot.

Investigators believe the phone calls to Lester’s home several hours before he was murdered were made by either this woman or the taller woman, for whom they do not have a composite. The calls could not be traced.

 

Composites Of One Of The Women

From The Front And Back

Calls made from Lester’s car phone, however, were traced to several East Bay massage parlors. Detectives determined he had frequently frequented the establishments while off-duty, but nothing was found indicating the two women seen in and near his car were associated with the parlors.

Car Phone Calls Traced

But Provide No Substantive Clues

The only physical evidence obtained from the crime scene were a few unidentified fingerprints retrieved from Lester’s car. In 2008, they provided the first major break in the twenty-year-old case when DNA matched a partial print to forty-four-year-old Catherine “Scotty” Kuntz. The print was on Lester’s car window, appearing to have been made as she touched the glass while the window was partially down.

A native of Scotland who never became an American citizen, Kuntz was imprisoned in Ocala, Florida, on drug charges, but she had lived in the San Francisco area for most of the 1980s after marrying Navy Petty Officer Greg Kuntz. At the time of Lester Garnier’s murder, she, like him, resided in Concord, and she had previously lived in several other East Bay cities, including Alameda, Martinez, and Walnut Creek, where he was murdered. She had held legitimate jobs, working at numerous restaurants and convenience stores, but she was also a methamphetamine addict, cocaine user, and hooker, although she has no record of being arrested in the Bay Area for prostitution or for any other crime. The only public record of note found of Kuntz in California is of her and Greg filing for bankruptcy in 1989.

Investigators say they have evidence suggesting Kuntz was with Officer Garnier on the evening of his murder; many believe she is the shorter of the two women seen in the parking lot leaving his car that evening, and that she is the woman in the composite. They, along with prosecutors, however, say the fingerprint is not proof of what role, if any, she had in the crime.

Authorities are tight-lipped about any potential connection between Lester Garnier and Catherine Kuntz, a woman with, at the very least, a checkered past.

Catherine “Scotty” Kuntz

In 1990, Greg and Catherine Kuntz moved from California to Norfolk, Virginia. Catherine found work at a convenience store where she befriended seventeen-year-old runaway Malinda Cooper.  On Feb. 20, 1991, Cooper shot Greg at his apartment. He survived.

After being arrested, Cooper told police Catherine Koontz had originally wanted to divorce her husband but was afraid of losing her green card status. Cooper said Kuntz, through her coworker John Murchison, offered her $15,000 of her life insurance money to kill him.

Murchison admitted enlisting Cooper to commit the act, believing the youth would receive a lesser sentence. He was convicted of soliciting to commit murder and Cooper was convicted of attempted murder. Both served several years in prison.

Catherine Kuntz insisted she had tried to have her husband killed.  Greg Kuntz believed her, testifying on her behalf at her trial, saying he forgave her, loved her, and that he was certain she loved him. Largely based on her husband’s testimony, she was acquitted of attempted murder.

The couple moved to Florida in December 1991 but divorced in August 1992. Both remarried, with Greg moving to North Dakota, while Catherine stayed in Florida, where she was twice arrested for, but not convicted, of prostitution over the following three years. She divorced her second husband Timothy Wise in 1995, after filing domestic violence charges on which he was convicted.

Beats a Murder Rap

In 2006, Kuntz was sentenced to probation and community service for cocaine possession and was incarcerated the following year after failing a drug test and not completing her imposed charitable work. She was released in June 2008, shortly after the partial fingerprint on Lester Garnier’s car was matched to her.

After Walnut Creek, California, prosecutors deemed the print insufficient to file charges against her in relation to Lester Garnier’s murder, Catherine Kuntz was deported to her home country of Scotland. She now lives in England.

Sent Back Home

At the rosary service on the evening before Lester’s funeral, an argument ensued between a former girlfriend and another group of women, some of whom he had also previously dated. All in attendance found it intriguing that the former girlfriend, with whom he had broken up a little over a month before his murder, had dyed her streaked blond hair black. They could not help but wonder if she done so because of the two women with blond hair seen near Lester’s car.

The former girlfriend was seen by multiple people on the evening of the murder, however, having dinner with her new boyfriend at the Cliff House’s restaurant in Ocean Beach, thirty-five miles southwest of Walnut Creek, and multiple people saw them painting the town later in the evening during the time Lester was believed to have been murdered.

Lester Was A Ladies’ Man . . .

Lester Garnier was regarded as an excellent and dedicated cop, but he also had the reputation as a bit of a playboy having a wild side while off duty.

Among the ten people indicted following the bordello raid was thirty-two-year-old Patrick Miyagishima, a San Francisco Police Officer who moonlighted as a security guard in the Mission District. He was fired from the department after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor.

Miyagishima claimed Garnier, despite having arrested multiple prostitutes, had also been a customer, saying he had received services during a bachelor party they attended in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City. His claim could not be corroborated.

. . . But To What Extent?

Investigators believe Lester Garnier’s murder is a professional killing and that he knew his killers. Police say they have several theories to the motive but have not released that information.  If you have information relating to the murder of Lester Garnier, please contact the Walnut Creek, California, Police Department at (925) 943-5844. A $250,000 reward is offered for information leading to the arrest of those responsible.

Who Killed The Cop?

The most notable name of the high-paying johns found in the bordello’s records following the raid in which Lester took part three months before his murder was Roger Boas, a former mayoral and congressional candidate who had previously served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and as the city’s Chief Administrative Officer.

In October 1988, Boas was indicted on nineteen counts of statutory rape. Under a plea deal, he pled guilty to seven of the counts in exchange for the dismissal of the twelve additional counts. He was fined $100,000 and sentenced to six months of community service.

Roger Boas

Lester Garnier also had an entrepreneurial side; he sought to someday be the “Hot Dog King.”

Along with his childhood friend, Wisfe Aish, Lester planned to open a hot dog stand in San Francisco’s Financial District. Their permit was granted on July 12, 1988, the day after Lester was found murdered.

Lester May Have Become

“The Hot Dog King”

Lester was a member of the boys club of America during his youth. as one of the finalists for the “Boy of the Year” in 1976, he traveled to the white house and met with president Gerald Ford, the organization’s honorary chairman.

Young Lester Speaking To President Gerald Ford

Sources:

• San Francisco Chronicle
• San Francisco Examiner
• San Francisco Gate
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Walnut Creek Police Department