![]() The uniforms observed the hand protruding from the plastic, but, as had Dave Bernson, decided not to venture down the slope. In less than eight minutes, two LAPD patrol units arrived on the scene. The security cop, a twenty-eight year old ex-Marine named Chris Bell, parked his unit and went to see for himself, then returned to his car and reported the find to the Westec offices. Dave recalls that he considered working his way down to the body, but then says that he remembered things like clues and evidence, and so he led his daughter back to Mulholland where they flagged down a passing Westec private security car. It never entered Dave's mind that the hand might be a movie prop or belong to a mannequin the moment he saw it he knew it was real. The nail polish was very red and seemed to gleam in the breathtakingly clear morning sun. They looked shiny and new, and Sandra was using them as a landmark to point out to Dave where she had last seen the mule deer when she saw the hand sticking out of the bags. Everything caught by the cut looked old and dusty and weathered as if it had been there for a very long time, except for the garbage bags. Sandra said, 'I wanna see where he goes!' She slid across the overlook's low wall and ran to the edge of the knoll just as the buck vanished near a cut in the slope that had caught a lot of dead brush and beer cans and newspapers and brown plastic garbage bags. It looked in their direction, its huge ears cocked forward, and then it bounded across Mulholland and the overlook's little parking lot and disappeared. See the knobs above his eyes?' The deer heard them. See the size of his ears? It's a buck, but he's already shed his horns. Sandra remembers that as she and her father reached the top of the overlook she saw the deer creeping up from the valley side of Mulholland, sniffing and listening, and she whispered to her father, 'Look, Dad!' 'Mule deer. The overlook is built into the top of a little knoll there beside Mulholland, with manicured walks and observation points and benches if you want to sit and admire what realtors like to call a 36o-degree jetliner view. That was Sandra's favorite part of the walk because she could see the valley to the north and the reservoir to the south, and just before they came to Beverly Glen Canyon they would reach the Stone Canyon overlook. They proceeded east from their home, climbing one of Mulholland's steeper grades to a high, flat stretch of road abreast Stone Canyon Reservoir. On this Saturday, Sandra Bernson saw the deer. On this particular Saturday, however, they never made it to Beatty's and they didn't complete the walk. Their typical walk would cover four miles round-trip and take almost exactly fifty minutes. ![]() Glen, where they planned to reverse course and return. ![]() They intended to walk east along Mulholland to Warren Beatty's home approximately one mile east of Beverly Both Sandra and Dave were able to tell investigators their exact departure time because it was Dave's habit to call out when their walks began so that they could time themselves. The Bernsons lived in a contemporary home on a small private road off Mulholland Drive in Sherman Oaks, approximately one mile west of Beverly Glen, and they left their home at exactly 6:42 that morning. Sandra was a fifteen-year-old honor student at the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School, and her father, Dave Bernson, was a television writer and producer of moderate success, then working as the supervising producer of a popular series on the Fox Television network. On mornings like these, she later said, it was easy to believe in magic. Sand ra Bernson later said that as she watched the small private airplanes floating into and out of Van Nuys Airport in the center of the valley that morning, she imagined them to be flying carpets. It was a day of unusual clarity, the far horizons magnified as if by some rare trick of optical law that might even allow you to see into the lives of the sleep ing millions in the valleys below. Mulholland Drive snakes, along the crest of the Santa Monicas, and, if you were walking alorig Mulholland as Sandra Bernson and her father were doing that morning, you would have been able to look south almost forty miles across the Los Angeles basin to the tip of the Long Beach Peninsula or north some thirty-five miles across the San Fernando Valley and through the Newhall Pass to the deep purples of the Santa Susana mountains and the peaks surrounding Lake Castaic. air by a breeze that burbled out of the San Gabriel Mountains and over the flat valley floor and across the high ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains. The sky above the San Fernando Valley that Saturday morning was a deep blue, wash ed clean of the dirt and chemic al par ticula tes that typic ally color L.A.
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