Black Tunnel White Magic
A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Detective Rick Jackson, a decorated LAPD detective and a key inspiration in the development of Harry Bosch, delivers a shocking and immersive look into the one case he could never let go.
In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were assigned the case. Yet the facts made no sense. Who would have a motive to kill Ron Baker in such a grisly manner? Was the proximity to the Manson ranch related to the murder? And what about the pentagram pendant Ron wore around his neck?
Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker’s two male roommates, one Black, and one white. What emerges is at once a story of confounding betrayal and cold-hearted intentions, as well as a larger portrait of an embattled Los Angeles, a city in the grip of the Satanic Panic and grappling with questions of racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of Rodney King.
In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Rick Jackson, the now-retired police detective who helped inspire Michael Connelly’s beloved Harry Bosch, along with co-writer, Matthew McGough, take us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, piecing together the truth with each emerging clue. Black Tunnel White Magic is the true story of a murder in cold blood, deception and betrayal, and a city at the brink, set forth by the only man who could tell it.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you’re looking for the kind of true-crime read that’s so compelling, it’s almost impossible to put down, dig into this first-person account of a bizarre and baffling murder in 1990 LA. Retired LAPD detective Rick Jackson recounts every angle of the case, which began when the body of UCLA student Ronald Baker was found in a tunnel near Chatsworth Park. A tangle of odd circumstances seems to tie the case to the raging Satanic Panic, but things truly get wild when Jackson and his partner investigate Ron’s roommates, military veterans Duncan and Nathan. (Seriously, after Duncan fails a polygraph, he fakes his own kidnapping.) Things only get more heightened from there, with the city’s roiling racial tensions eventually playing a role as well. Writer Matthew McGough is an ideal collaborator here, making Jackson’s narrative clear and readable without sacrificing the clipped, concise voice that could only belong to a seasoned detective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Retired LAPD detective Jackson teams up with true crime author McGough (The Lazarus Files) to recount how Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, spent six years solving the bizarre murder of Ron Baker. The 21-year-old Baker was found dead in a Los Angeles train tunnel on the summer solstice in 1990, his throat slashed with a Marine Corps knife. Almost immediately, Baker's two roommates, Nathan Blalock and Duncan Martinez, became the sole suspects, but the case stalled after Martinez faked his own kidnapping and disappeared for 18 months. Jackson and McGough's account of the investigation, which is dotted with strange red herrings—Baker was interested in Wicca, and his family received cryptic ransom calls—unfolds like a mind-bending prestige TV crime drama, with the details liable to grip readers as tightly as they did the authors. If the final product is occasionally long-winded, and the prose more serviceable than striking, those minor flaws fail to break the story's spell as a stirring testament to Jackson and Garcia's persistence. Readers drawn to complex, slow-burn investigations will be rapt. Photos.
