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By D. Michael Bush
Albert MacKenzie was honored as the deputy district attorney of the year in Los Angeles. Presiding California Chief Justice Ron George was the featured speaker at the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys Award Banquet. Against the background noise of gunfire coming from the Los Angeles Police Department’s firing range, George praised MacKenzie as an outstanding prosecutor who leads by example.
Jerry Tredway of the California Department of Insurance presented a special award to MacKenzie for outstanding work performed in connection with insurance fraud cases.
MacKenzie spoke about several of his cases. Although one member of the audience observed that a debate instructor would have a field day criticizing MacKenzie’s delivery – and Vanity Fair magazine observed that he “may be the least charismatic prosecutor ever to walk into a courtroom,” MacKenzie completely captivated those in attendance. He discussed one of his more complicated life insurance fraud cases, referred to by those in the industry know as the Dr. Boggs case, and related how he obtained murder verdicts. As Vanity Fair pointed out, despite being “rigid as a ruler … he tends to win.”
The case, involving Richard Boggs, a Harvard-educated neurologist, was covered in the December 1995 issue of Vanity Fair. Oprah Winfrey and America’s Most Wanted also did shows devoted to the case.
Along with Dr. Boggs, the primary players were John Hawkins, a switch-hitting playboy, and his erstwhile companion, Gene Hanson.
Initially, Hanson and Hawkins developed a scheme to collect on a life insurance policy by claiming that Hanson had died of heart problems. Hawkins and Hanson had hoped that Dr. Boggs would obtain an unclaimed body from the morgue to substitute for Hanson’s body. When Boggs failed to deliver, and with the insurance policy about to lapse, another man was murdered to provide the body.
Hanson had left a will indicating he was to be cremated for religious reasons. Dr. Boggs made a 911 call and advised that his patient Gene Hanson had died of a heart attack. The body was cremated, and shortly afterwards, Hawkins received a $1 million check from Farmers Insurance.
The first break in the case occurred shortly after the claim was reported when a Farmers adjuster asked a simple question: had anybody compared the decedent with the driver’s license photo of Mr. Hanson. When this was done, the authorities knew that a murder had surely been committed, but they still did not know who was murdered.
MacKenzie credited a number of people, including investigators Jon Perkins and Chuck Gibbons, for doing the pick-and-shovel work that helped bring the case together.
MacKenzie described three EKG strips that had reportedly been taken of Hanson over a period of several years. The strips were submitted to one of the nation’s leading cardiologists, who could find nothing wrong with them. When investigator Perkins looked at the sawtooth edges, where the paper was torn, he saw that each tooth matched. Instead of three separate EKGs, they had one continuous strip of paper. The dates on the EKG strips provided by Boggs did not make sense.
Still the question remained: who was killed? A search warrant was executed on Dr. Boggs’ residence; among the items found were a whip and a phone book containing the names of John Hawkins and his alias, Wolfgang Von Snowden.
Phone records were obtained from pay phones around Dr. Boggs’s office. Tens of thousands of telephone numbers were given to Tredway. A phone call was made to Columbus, Ohio, with a subsequent connection to John Hawkins. Investigators who traveled to Columbus found a one-minute telephone call on April 16, 1988, back to a Holiday Inn in Glendale, California, which was very close to Dr. Boggs’s office.
Records showed that at 6:10 am on April 16, Wolfgang Von Snowden (aka Hawkins) had checked into the hotel. Hawkins had landed in Los Angeles the night before, on April 15, 1988, at 8:00 pm.
After analyzing records listing missing persons in the area, investigators had concluded that the victim was Ellis Greene, a tax preparer. Coincidentally, investigators settled on Greene as the murder victim on the day that would have been his birthday had he not been killed.
Greene was celebrating the end of the tax season. In fact, that evening, he had helped a woman who was crying in the parking lot because she had not been able to finish her tax return. He did not charge the woman for his help.
That night Ellis Greene drank heavily. At 11:00 pm on April 15, 1988, he was refused service at one bar. Investigators thought that he then went to another bar where he met Hawkins.
MacKenzie argued that when Hawkins arrived in Los Angeles on April 15 at 8:00 pm, Greene was alive. When Hawkins checked into the Holiday Inn on April 16 at 10:00 am, Greene was dead.
Hawkins and Boggs were found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and insurance fraud. Hanson was found guilty of first degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
One interesting footnote is that Hawkins had been involved in prior insurance fraud schemes, including a fraudulent accident in which he was a pedestrian, and a phony homeowners claim. Hawkins got the idea for this life insurance fraud by watching the classic movie “Double Indemnity,” which coincidentally, was also set in Glendale, California.
MacKenzie closed by saying that he was deeply honored to receive the award of Deputy District Attorney of the Year and credited his success to working with others. MacKenzie said that he was committed to the search for truth and the cause of justice.
© Copyright 1996 Alikim Media