For this story, reporters Katie Strang, Nathan Fenno and Zak Keefer interviewed more than 70 people and reviewed more than 10,000 pages of court filings, law enforcement documents, contemporaneous accounts and other source materials.

STOCKTON, Calif. — He drove his red Mercedes along Pershing Avenue with the top down, his wavy brown hair just long enough to flap in the wind. With his monogrammed shirts and pleated pants, Michael Blatt exuded a specific 1980s California cool rooted in the certainty that, no matter what, he would never, ever lose.

Blatt chose this place to make his mark in the world. Stockton chose him, too. In the early 1980s, the San Joaquin Valley farming and port town of about 150,000 was striving to be something more, looking for heroes who measured up to their betters in San Francisco and Sacramento. Stocktonians deified the real estate developers spinning the area’s peat dirt into gold. Alex Spanos and Fritz Grupe were civic icons who raised families in town, who had their names on parks and elementary schools and arenas.

They were Stockton’s kings. Michael Blatt would become its prince.

An Army brat, Blatt said he moved 18 times before coming to the University of the Pacific to play soccer in the mid-1960s. His ambition took root. By 21, he wanted to make a million dollars. By 24, he wanted $10 million.

After graduating from UOP in 1968, he worked in finance, but Blatt would never settle for managing other people’s money. One day, legend goes, he walked into a bank and asked for a million-dollar loan. The chairman, wearing a cowboy shirt and an oversized belt buckle, said, “You’re either crazy, full of bullsh—, or you gotta be right.”

Blatt got the loan. Within six years, he had built 4,000 apartment units. Within a decade, his company tallied $120 million worth of construction. Later, he built a subdivision he called Blatt Estates with streets named after his children.

Blatt’s hazel eyes conveyed whatever he wanted someone to see in them: warmth, wisdom, cunning, menace. He lived life on the attack, chasing the next dollar, the next opponent, with inherent aggression. Once, after a dog barked at him on a walk, Blatt threatened its owner: “If your dog bites me, I’m going to own your home.”

He married Suzanne Chausse in 1968. They had two children, but she filed for divorce in 1983 amidst rumors of his infidelity, immediately becoming an adversary. Blatt dragged the legal proceedings along for three-and-a-half years, fighting for every bit of his $28 million empire. Even the parrot Suzanne once gifted him became a point of contention. She sold her fur coat to pay legal bills and petitioned the court for money to buy the children Christmas presents. At one point, Blatt told her that he could pay a man $500 “to get rid of her.” A Black man, he specified.

She got $2.2 million paid out over 15 years.

“I never did a deal I’m not proud of,” Blatt would say later.

Court filings from Blatt’s protracted divorce showcase his trademark aggression.

Post-divorce, Blatt dated often and dated young. There were UOP sorority sisters he hired as secretaries and a rumored affair with the wife of a friend, a member of a prominent Stockton family. He would show up at parties or even his son’s soccer games with a striking new conquest, impressing his peers, most of whom were married.

Blatt’s father once told him he was born without peace of mind, and Stockton’s prince saw contentment as weakness. By the early ’80s, he was bored with real estate and eyeing different worlds to conquer. For years, he offered UOP football players summer jobs at his development company before counseling them on pro contracts and investments. In 1982, he co-founded the Sunwest Sports agency, which quickly amassed more than 50 NFL clients.

In an era when most agents were collegial, Blatt was ruthless. In Los Angeles, All-Pro wide receiver Henry Ellard earned the nickname “Holdout Henry” after repeated beefs with Rams management. Another client, Pittsburgh Steelers Pro Bowl linebacker Mike Merriweather, held out for an entire season to force a trade. Blatt advised Kelly Stouffer, a quarterback drafted No. 6 overall by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1987, to sit out his rookie season, telling the team’s owner that if he didn’t trade Stouffer, the quarterback would re-enter the draft the following spring. The Cardinals caved.

Blatt became one of the most feared — and loathed — agents in the NFL. He walked the sidelines before San Francisco 49ers games, chatting up players with beautiful young women at his side, the disdain wafting down from the owners’ box competing with the winds blowing off Candlestick Point. Back home, as the Stockton Record chronicled his agenting wins, Blatt became even more revered as the local businessman who outmaneuvered rich NFL owners.

It wasn’t enough.

Blatt had long idolized Spanos, who in 1984 bought a majority stake in the San Diego Chargers. Four years later, while negotiating Stouffer’s trade to the Seahawks, Blatt learned the Nordstrom family intended to put the team up for sale. While assembling an investment for players he represented, Blatt met California real estate magnate Ken Behring. Blatt connected Behring and the Nordstroms in the summer of 1988, facilitating the sale of the Seahawks and earning Behring’s ear and trust.

Newspapers speculated the “Prince of Stockton” would soon be hired as Seahawks GM. (Tacoma News Tribune)

Blatt resigned as an agent, turning over his clients to a partner. He put $4.4 million in escrow to purchase a minority stake in the Seahawks. By the end of January 1989, team president and general manager Mike McCormack was out. Behring said he wanted a businessman in charge. Blatt took the initiative, planning changes to the Kingdome and mapping out the team’s targets in free agency. He told reporters he would build a dynasty.

One night, he slid into a seat at an upscale Seattle lounge. As always, there were beautiful women around, and as they drank and reveled, Blatt dropped the news:

“You’re sitting at a table with the new general manager of the Seahawks.”

‘Sleeping dogs’

Larry Carnegie punched his brakes on the freeway if someone followed too closely. He chided people for habits he avoided, like drinking coffee or taking aspirin. He once sued a friend over $150.

When he arrived in Stockton from Southern California in 1974 to attend UOP’s pharmacy school, Carnegie was 23 years old and married to a woman 12 years his senior with three children of her own. She worked as a grocery checker to help pay for his schooling, but just before graduation, he divorced her.

Carnegie saw where money was being made in Stockton. He pivoted to real estate and, in late 1981, a property manager recommended Carnegie to Blatt. By then Carnegie had a new wife, Karen, and the couple eventually took over the operation of a local firm, Riverboat Realty. Like Blatt, Carnegie could be charming. Like Blatt, he was also unencumbered by the need to be liked.

Carnegie brokered deals for Blatt and managed some of his apartments, but he was sometimes sloppy and feuded with tenants. It irked Blatt when people called Carnegie his “partner” on projects, as if they were on the same level. Perhaps it also annoyed Blatt that Carnegie, Karen and their young children moved into a home a block from Blatt’s mansion among the mature oaks of the tony Morada neighborhood.

In 1985, Blatt sold the Fremont Inn, with Carnegie brokering the deal. The buyers of the motel later claimed in a lawsuit against Blatt and Carnegie that the property’s books had been cooked. Blatt settled the suit in December 1986, but both men fumed about the financial fallout and blamed each other.

Blatt tried to wave off Carnegie like he was one of the mosquitoes that swarmed Stockton’s deltaways, but in February 1987, Carnegie scribbled a raging nine-page letter to Blatt threatening to expose damaging information if Blatt didn’t pay Carnegie what he thought he was owed: “I prefer to let sleeping dogs lie and move on in my life but if I have to shake you off my ankle, sleeping dogs will awaken. Some even watch with one eye open waiting, I hear.”

Carnegie repeatedly contacted Suzanne Blatt, offering dirt so that she could reopen divorce proceedings. She told Blatt and assured him she wouldn’t act on the information.

Carnegie eventually sued Blatt, demanding thousands of dollars in commissions and legal fees plus confirmation that he held stakes in two of Blatt’s properties. Blatt countersued, accusing Carnegie of negligence in the botched Fremont Inn deal. It became more than a fight over money. Blatt was used to litigation, but Carnegie made it personal, broadcasting around town that Blatt had screwed him out of commissions.

It would have been hard for Carnegie to miss the headlines trumpeting Blatt’s growing NFL influence. Carnegie told his wife that he couldn’t give the Seahawks the real story about Blatt because Blatt would know the source, but he boasted to a friend that he had “spilled some dirt on Blatt,” potentially spoiling his Seahawks prospects.

In early February 1989, national news reports suggested that Behring was having second thoughts about Blatt. The owner met with Tom Flores, the respected and well-liked former Raiders coach, about running the Seahawks. Blatt projected confidence that the job was still his and dismissed rumors to the contrary. “Just call me Mike Blatt/results,” he told the Stockton Record in a Feb. 12 front-page story about his apparent ascension to the top of the Seattle organization.

Ten days later, the Seahawks announced the hiring of Flores as team president and general manager. The Record’s headline completed the public humiliation of Stockton’s prince: “Blatt booted.”

The God of East Union

James Mackey couldn’t shake the feeling of going to school with his shirt stuck to his back, wet with blood. While his mother scratched out a living cutting meat for the Navy and running a home for people with intellectual disabilities, Mackey’s older brothers abused him. One stepfather stripped him naked and beat him with an extension cord.

Football saved him, at least for a while. The game shoved aside, if only for a few hours, the insecurity and rejection. Mackey starred as a running back at East Union High School in Manteca, 10 miles from Stockton, then did the same at UOP, piling up more than 2,000 yards and earning a media guide cover as a senior in 1986. With chatter swirling about an NFL future for the “God of East Union,” football became Mackey’s tool to grab a slice of the American dream.

But he injured his knee during his senior season, and the electricity vanished. So did football after failed tryouts with the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Raiders. He told friends he received a half-million-dollar signing bonus, that he was suing the Raiders, that leaving the team was his choice. None of it was true. He felt lost. Mackey started a personal training business, The Ultimate Body, and married his college girlfriend. The business floundered, and Mackey remained involved with another woman.

He saw the men rising around him in Stockton, the developers and their affiliates — contractors and insurers, property managers and real estate agents. Those men weren’t Black, like him, didn’t come from where he came from. Mackey couldn’t walk out of a bank with a million-dollar loan, but he could attach himself to the man who did.

Blatt and his son had been among Mackey’s clients at The Ultimate Body. His wife worked as a secretary in Blatt’s office. Mackey became the night janitor and, eventually, Blatt’s sidekick. Friends warned him that Blatt used people, but riding around town with the man he called “Boss” — getting his advice on marriage, business and life — Mackey felt chosen. He got his real estate license, but his relationship with Blatt was the key to becoming more than a washed-up football star.

The boss made a generous offer in late 1987: Mackey and his wife could purchase, at cost, one of 17 units Blatt owned at a Stockton condominium complex. They could pay him rent until they had the cash to buy, then flip the unit for an easy $40,000 profit. In the meantime, Mackey would manage the complex.

There was one hangup. Blatt said he couldn’t sell the unit to Mackey until the lawsuit with Carnegie was resolved. It was the first of several conversations in which Mackey said Blatt insinuated both their lives would be improved if Carnegie wasn’t around. During one of those talks, as Mackey sensed Blatt’s frustration growing, the discussion turned to the best way to dispose of a body, which Mackey said he didn’t take seriously. But in late 1988, while showing off an expensive new cell phone to a friend, Mackey blurted out that he might have to kill someone.

In January 1989, a month before Blatt was passed over for the Seahawks job, Blatt advised Mackey on how to juggle his girlfriend and now-pregnant wife during a chat in the developer’s office. The condominium came up. So did Carnegie’s lawsuit. An agitated Mackey asked if Blatt wanted him to find someone to take care of Carnegie. Blatt said he did, but told Mackey to keep his name out of it.

Mackey, worried that his mentor might push him aside if he didn’t deliver, wanted to prove that Blatt could trust him. He met with Carl Hancock, a friend and former UOP teammate. Hancock had a child on the way, his landscaping business was failing and he snorted cocaine two to three times a week. When Mackey asked if he knew someone who could take care of Carnegie, Hancock lied, said he might and pretended to make a phone call. He later called Carnegie, posing as an affluent computer salesman named Sam who wanted to move his family to Stockton from the Bay Area. They toured several homes together.

On Feb. 27, Mackey collected a $2,000 check from Blatt at a local restaurant. The developer’s ledger listed it as a home expense. The next day, Mackey and Hancock used some of that money to buy a crossbow at a sporting goods store. They added a sleeping bag and two fishing licenses as cover for their trip to Lake Tahoe, where they planned to dump Carnegie’s body. Mackey rented a Mercury Topaz at the Stockton airport and gave the clerk his business card. Afterward, Mackey called Blatt.

Hancock, posing as Sam, made an appointment to see a ramshackle house set back from a lonely country road near farmland and orchards northwest of Stockton. He would meet Carnegie around 7 p.m.

‘A lot of sick people’

Carnegie grabbed at his shirt, blood seeping out of his chest, just as a car’s headlights illuminated the grisly scene on Tokay Colony Road. He looked up at his attacker in recognition and sneered: “You’re f—ed.”

Moments earlier, Mackey had emerged from behind a slab of drywall in the garage as Carnegie entered with Hancock, touring the home as Sam. Mackey raised the crossbow and fired. His eyes were closed. He didn’t see the bolt rip through Carnegie’s chest.

The shot didn’t kill him. Hancock and Mackey approached Carnegie with the sleeping bag, intent on smothering him, when the car pulled into the driveway. Hancock ran toward it, pretending to seek help. The car’s driver, a woman dropping off a key, quickly fled.

Mackey punched and kicked Carnegie in the head until he was unconscious. He and Hancock hoisted his limp body into the trunk of the Topaz. They panicked, scrapped the Lake Tahoe plan, and headed west, then northwest for 135 miles into Sonoma County wine country.

Driving along Highway 128 near Cloverdale, they heard sounds coming from the trunk. They assumed it was the dumbbell they brought to sink Carnegie’s body in Lake Tahoe. They stopped. Hancock opened the trunk. Carnegie was still alive. Hancock fashioned some rope into a noose and placed it around Carnegie’s neck. Mackey tugged on it from outside the driver’s side door because he didn’t want to see Carnegie’s face.

After 15 seconds, Larry Carnegie was dead. He was 38 years old. Mackey and Hancock pulled his body from the car and kicked it down an embankment.

The driver who happened on the scene on Tokay Colony Road called 911 at 7:20 p.m. When sheriff’s deputies arrived at the house, they found blood seeping into the gravel and soaking the blue sleeping bag. They called the number on the registration for Carnegie’s sedan. Within hours of receiving word that her husband was missing, Karen Carnegie gave law enforcement a suspect: “Mike Blatt is the only person in the world who hates Larry enough to want him dead.”

The next afternoon, a Cloverdale man discovered Carnegie’s body in some underbrush. Authorities found a set of keys emblazoned with his name and address in one pocket and a wad of $20 bills in another. His blazer was balled up nearby.

Blatt attended a high school basketball game the night of the murder, but Karen Carnegie was insistent. It had to be him. Investigators gradually connected dots. There was the Fremont Inn dispute, the lawsuits and the animosity. But a more compelling motive emerged: that perhaps Blatt sought revenge against Carnegie for scuttling his job with the Seahawks.

A friend of Carnegie’s told investigators that Seahawks minority owner Ken Hofmann had probed Blatt’s past and uncovered shocking information just before Carnegie was killed. Hofmann later confirmed to authorities that he paid former Watergate investigator Hal Lipset to dig into Blatt. The results of the inquiry were never shared publicly.

On March 7, Pete Rosenquist, the lead detective on the case, visited Blatt at his Morada home. The 73-minute interview was the only time Blatt would speak to authorities about Carnegie and the murder.

Blatt characterized Carnegie as an absentee employee who racked up long-distance phone charges, wrote unauthorized checks and angered tenants. He hinted that Carnegie ran with an unscrupulous crowd. He never saw Carnegie do drugs but named several of Carnegie’s friends whom he believed did. He said Carnegie was gay, painting him as homosexual at a time and in a place where that implied deviance.

The investigator pivoted to the lost Seahawks job. Blatt insisted he took himself out of the running, not wanting to relocate his teenage son to Seattle and work full-time for the team. He called Flores a “nice guy” who “can’t do the job.” Near the end of the interview, Blatt reflected on Carnegie’s death.

“A guy said to me the other day, he said, ‘Jesus, you shouldn’t feel sorry about the thing. Now you don’t have to go to court.’ And I go, ‘What are you talking about? Now I gotta go into litigation. It’s gonna be two or three years worth of …'”

“Yeah,” Rosenquist said.

“But it’s a sad thing,” Blatt continued. “There’s a lot of sick people in society.”

Rosenquist spoke with Suzanne, who debunked the notion that Blatt couldn’t take the Seattle job because of their son. She also said Blatt mentioned Carnegie to her unprompted, assuring her he didn’t “knock him off,” and adding that if he were going to kill anyone, it would have been her during their divorce proceedings.

After the killing, Mackey traveled to Mexico and Southern California, including a trip to Disneyland, with his mistress. Blatt told Mackey’s wife that Mackey was researching development projects in Los Angeles.

The clerk Mackey gave his business card to when he rented the Topaz saw a composite sketch on TV and contacted the sheriff’s department on March 2. Authorities traced the rental car to LAX and found blood in the trunk. Rosenquist and another detective questioned Mackey on May 23, telling him it would be “the most important thing you’re ever gonna talk to us about in your life.” As Mackey dodged their questions, they pressed the idea that he had been used by an influential “big shot” and urged him not to take the fall because, they said, “the guy that’s responsible for this f—ing murder is not going to protect you.”

After a few hours in a holding cell, Mackey identified the 43-year-old Blatt as the mastermind and later agreed to go to Blatt’s office with a script and a concealed recording device. But once he shut the door, Mackey signaled to Blatt that he was being recorded. Blatt scribbled a note on a legal pad — “Are you wired?” Mackey nodded.

Mackey was arrested on June 1; Hancock was picked up five weeks later. They were charged with first-degree murder. Both eventually signed plea deals, agreeing to testify against Blatt and guaranteeing each man almost 17 years in prison before they would be eligible for parole.

Blatt’s alleged involvement in the crime was laid bare a short time later. NFL insider Fred Edelstein wrote in his widely read newsletter that Blatt was “very upset” and felt “stabbed … in the back” by Behring after being passed over. “There is now speculation that Carnegie, who apparently wrote a defamatory letter to Behring about Blatt, may have influenced Behring to cut Blatt out of the Seahawks future,” Edelstein wrote.

On Aug. 31, Blatt was arrested at his office on Pershing Avenue and charged with first-degree murder. During a search of Blatt’s home and office, authorities found newspaper clippings about Carnegie’s death and a handwritten note that, amid a series of computations, read: “Larry we are even!!”

‘Mad Dog’

You choose a side, Eual Blansett believed: good or evil. And if you choose wrong, he would come for you, righteousness and relentlessness in thick glasses and a weathered navy blazer. Colleagues called him “Mad Dog.”

The 46-year-old prosecutor in the San Joaquin County district attorney’s office lived with his wife and children in a modest house on the outskirts of Stockton amid orchards and fields, echoing his small-town California upbringing — Little League baseball, bylines in the local newspaper, scavenger hunts, church plays. He taught high school for a couple of years after earning a history degree from UC Davis, then took 6 a.m. bus rides into San Francisco to attend the Hastings School of Law.

He came to distrust and disdain the moneyed and powerful. The glorification of the area’s developers ate at him. He saw the rot beneath the mansions and the Mercedes-Benzes.

In 1982, he prosecuted developer Eckhard Schmitz on 47 counts of sexually abusing teenage boys. The district attorney pulled him from the case. Schmitz got probation and a suspended sentence in a plea deal, then later fled the country after being accused of paying a minor for sex. Blansett accused his boss of mishandling the prosecution.

The Blatt trial was a career-altering opportunity, perhaps even a springboard for Blansett to finally take over as district attorney. He called the murder the county’s crime of the century on a nationally televised tabloid program.

But while Blansett preached virtues of dignity and solemnity, he often lost control in the courtroom, tossing pens, pounding tables, interrupting, storming off. He would use 200 words when 10 would do. He buried juries in testimony and evidence, making it hard to sort gold from ore.

The trial was moved to Oakland, and Blatt hired Bay Area attorneys Michael Thorman and Richard Zimmer, who adopted an approach for dealing with Blansett. “You don’t piss with a skunk,” Zimmer said. “You can’t win.”

During evidentiary hearings, Blansett had plenty to be pissed about. Judge Frank Kim ruled Blatt’s Seahawks humiliation inadmissible, tossed the “Black man” threat due to marital privilege and barred the use of the “Larry we are even!!” note found in Blatt’s office.

Blansett responded to all this by questioning Kim’s impartiality and badgering his own witnesses. He put Behring on the stand away from the jury in a last-ditch attempt to bring the Seahawks into the trial. They bickered over a telephone call between Behring and Blatt that Mackey claimed to have overheard, where Blatt allegedly exploded at Behring about the looming Flores hire. Finally, an exasperated Blansett announced to the judge that Behring was lying.

“My respect for you is so little that you’re like a spoiled kid who is probably losing the case and you’re grasping for things and making accusations against somebody,” Behring sputtered in response, “and I wish there was some way I could get back at someone who calls me a liar.”

Blansett threw his pen in disgust.

The prosecutor framed Blatt as a ruthless businessman, and he played the caricature. He watched the theatrics through aviator-style glasses, wearing stylish suits with his hair slicked back. He spent the trial in Oakland’s North County Jail but didn’t lack for visitors. His ex-wife stopped by, as did one of Behring’s secretaries, an ex-girlfriend, his current girlfriend and an exotic dancer named LaDonna, a visit arranged by Behring lieutenant John Loar. “I believe she just flashed him,” Loar later testified.

Without the glitz of the Seahawks angle or the inflammatory anecdote from Blatt’s ex-wife, Blansett’s case largely rested on Mackey, who wore a smart sport coat and slacks as he entered the courtroom. Blatt fixed Mackey with a stare during his testimony, but Mackey looked straight ahead, seemingly detached.

He told the jury that Blatt manipulated him into killing Carnegie. Blatt had been a confidant and mentor; Mackey didn’t want to let him down. He testified that Blatt originally suggested dumping Carnegie’s body in Utah and, the day before the murder, handed him a $2,000 check. He said he was rattled the day after the murder, when he placed a 13-minute phone call to Blatt and described the killing — omitting key details — before saying he needed to get out of town.

The defense assailed Mackey as a serial fabulist, someone who dodged taxes, overstated income on loan paperwork, deceived his wife and lied to authorities when first questioned about the murder. “Mr. Mackey,” Zimmer asked, “have you ever told the truth in your entire life?”

On Oct. 31, 1990, the jury entered the windowless, third-floor courtroom in downtown Oakland and told Kim that after 14 days of deliberation, they were deadlocked. Nine voted to convict Blatt of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Three voted to acquit. Blatt returned to jail.

Blansett was emboldened. Three-fourths of the jury wanted to convict. At a new trial, with a friendlier judge, he would see justice served.

‘If she opens her mouth again, shoot her’

When challenged, Michael Blatt’s instinct had always been scorched earth. Threats. Holdouts. Lawsuits. In the first trial, Blatt’s legal team avoided getting in the mud with Blansett, nibbling at the prosecution’s case and succeeding by not losing. But with everything at stake, including a potential death sentence, would Blatt again leave his fate to an approach so antithetical to his identity?

For the second trial, the notorious womanizer entrusted his future to two female attorneys from Emeryville. Penny Cooper and Cris Arguedas were among the most gifted and unrelenting criminal defense attorneys in California. They had represented everyone from Hells Angels to high-profile white-collar clients, and they crafted a strategy more in line with Blatt’s persona, cunning and calculated. To start, they dressed him in casual sweaters, sensible glasses and penny loafers, an attempt to soften Blatt’s image from playboy to 40-something father. Then, they worked to focus the jury on someone else: Eual Blansett.

They wanted Mad Dog unleashed. From the first day, they directed a torrent of objections and interruptions at the prosecutor, immediately getting under his skin. Blansett took the bait, storming out of the courtroom during Cooper’s opening statement and comparing Arguedas to a chihuahua. He called them “clowns” and “sleazes.” One of Blatt’s friends told a journalist that Blansett described the women as “dykes.”

They kept attacking. Blansett couldn’t help himself:

“She’d better stop that or I’m going to throw this glass of water in her face.”

“Doesn’t she ever shut her mouth?”

And, to a sheriff’s detective in the courtroom: “If she opens her mouth again, shoot her.”

Blansett got the Seahawks angle admitted for the second trial and pushed a distinct theory: that Blatt learned of the handshake agreement between Seahawks ownership and Flores and urged Mackey to follow through with the plan to kill Carnegie. A series of big names testified, including then-New York Jets coach Bruce Coslet. Two weeks before Carnegie’s murder, Coslet sent Blatt, his former UOP roommate and the best man in his wedding, a note — “I had the feeling you needed to be cheered up” — along with an old picture of them partying with UCLA cheerleaders. Blansett alleged the note was in response to news that Flores, not Blatt, would get the top job with the Seahawks; Coslet maintained that he wrote it after Blatt confided that he couldn’t hire Coslet to coach the team.

In late February 1992, six and a half months into the trial, Arguedas stood near Blansett in a hallway outside the courtroom while he chatted with a witness. In Blansett’s version, he asked Arguedas to move twice and, when she didn’t, he “very gently backed her up.” She tumbled to the floor and screamed. Arguedas claimed Blansett shoved her; Blansett said she fell on her own.

As the trial trudged into its seventh month, jury members couldn’t hide their boredom with Blansett’s deluge of witnesses. The motive remained cloudy, leaving the case to rest, once again, on Mackey’s credibility. Cooper methodically exposed his evasions, half-truths and outright lies. In a final flourish, Cooper introduced a jailhouse letter from Mackey to his girlfriend. “Just like Houdini, I’ll get out of this like everything else,” he had written. “I’m going to come out of this smelling like a rose.”

On May 12, 1992, after 20 days of deliberations, the jury returned to the courtroom and told the judge they were deadlocked. This time, the vote was 11-1 for acquittal. Cooper and Arguedas’ strategy of focusing the jury on Blansett had worked. One juror called the DA “borderline … almost psycho.”

Three weeks later, after the San Joaquin County district attorney decided against a third trial, Blatt left jail a free man. He was pale with gray streaks in his hair after two years in custody. Some might have emerged from the ordeal changed, even chastened. Not Blatt.

“When the hostages came back from Iran or POWs from Vietnam, you couldn’t feel what they felt,” he told reporters. “So for me to explain what it feels like is almost like a woman trying to explain childbirth. She can explain it, but you really don’t understand.”

‘I thought you were going to arrest me’

As Paul Holes drove east across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge over the San Francisco Bay on a warm night in 2014, the thought washed over him: I’ve got him. Holes turned up his radio and let himself believe he’d cracked a case that had consumed him for years.

Earlier that afternoon, Holes, the chief of forensic services for the Contra Costa County sheriff’s department, sat in a car across the street from a trattoria in Sausalito, a town north of San Francisco. He and other law enforcement officers watched as Michael Blatt and his son enjoyed an al fresco lunch with Sausalito’s police chief.

After the second mistrial, Blatt left Stockton. He married Cathy Bremner, a former UOP cheerleader who stood by him during both trials, and they started a family. In 2004, the 58-year-old Blatt was mentioned in a newspaper story as one of the “fabulous fathers” who installed swing sets at a Sausalito nursery school.

He resumed his brazen deal-making, converting a beloved historic hotel into a boutique recovery center that charged upwards of $48,000 a month per client. The city accused him of circumventing zoning laws and hired lawyers to fight the project, but Blatt prevailed. Again. Residents of another Bay Area town who opposed a different development were unnerved by Blatt’s preternatural calm during contentious community meetings, when he would stand in the back, arms crossed, looking confident, like the battle had already been won.

Blatt had been settled in Sausalito for roughly two decades when he drew Holes’ interest, but not for the murder of Larry Carnegie.

During a 10-year period beginning in 1976, the Golden State Killer terrorized California, murdering 13 people and raping dozens of women. GSK was calculating and athletic, breaking into homes and fleeing without leaving much more than his size-9 footprint. Victims remembered his frenzied breathing, high-pitched voice and another key trait: He had a very small penis.

In 2013, Holes was analyzing a diagram of a housing community that had been left near the site of a 1978 GSK attack in Danville. It suggested the serial killer may have been in construction or development. Holes consulted an engineer, who identified the diagram as originating from Stockton. A private investigator and a public prosecutor in Stockton suggested Holes look into Blatt. Suzanne had hired the investigator during the divorce, worried her house was bugged. She told the investigator that she thought Blatt had a birth defect because of his penis size and said Blatt threatened her not to tell anyone.

Holes liked Blatt as a GSK suspect for reasons beyond the unsubstantiated claim about his anatomy. Blatt was an athlete with a military background — he served in the National Guard — and had connections to several areas where GSK’s killings and rapes had occurred. He owned a plane, which allowed him to travel freely, and had the same blood type as GSK.

Holes interviewed one of GSK’s Stockton victims, a woman who recounted a meeting she had with Blatt and Larry Carnegie in which Blatt would not speak directly to her, relaying all of his communications through Carnegie. At the time, the woman chalked up his behavior to misogyny; she later wondered if he had been trying to conceal his voice.

Which explains why Holes sat in an unmarked Ford Taurus across the street from the Sausalito trattoria in 2014. A county investigator posed as a staff member at the upscale eatery. Blatt ate his lunch and chatted with the police chief, unaware that his dinner plate, fork, drinking glass and teacup had been confiscated for DNA analysis. When Holes returned to his office, he put in a rush order, certain the evidence would identify Blatt as GSK.

A few days later, a DNA analyst popped into Holes’ office with the results: Blatt’s DNA was not a match.

Holes visited Blatt at his Sausalito home anyway, asking to speak based on his suspicions that GSK was involved in real estate development. The two men sat at a large dining table. Blatt was guarded at first but loosened up. When they were finished, Blatt walked Holes outside. Halfway down the sloping driveway, Blatt turned to the investigator, shook his hand and chuckled.

“You know, Paul,” he said, “I thought you were going to arrest me.”

Four years later, a DNA sample and genealogical research identified Joseph DeAngelo, a former police officer living in Sacramento County, as GSK. The case inspired books, television series and podcasts, becoming an essential part of the true-crime canon. The murder of Larry Carnegie, meanwhile, has received scant attention since the trials.

After Blatt left Stockton, the saga faded, as if swallowed up by the city’s tule fog. Two hung juries did little to change the belief among many that Blatt got away with murder, but he had spent two-plus years in jail, so Stockton moved on.

Karen Carnegie moved to Danville with her three kids and remarried. In parole hearings for James Mackey and Carl Hancock, Karen detailed the “countless nightmares” she and her daughters endured in the wake of the murder.

Before his release from prison in 2019, Hancock insisted that Carnegie’s death was a “murder for hire” commissioned by Blatt. He completed substance-abuse recovery programs and reckoned with his actions. “I took away dreams,” Hancock said at a parole hearing. He now lives in Southern California and did not respond to multiple interview requests.

While in prison, Mackey earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Released in 2017, he worked for state-funded community health programs, earned a doctorate’s degree from UOP and now works as a liaison between social workers and community organizations. Mackey did not respond to multiple interview requests. His wife, who answered the door to the couple’s bungalow about 15 miles south of Stockton, declined to speak.

Eual Blansett retired in 2006. He wrote commentaries on Scripture and released a collection of his poems, described as an “attempt to make some sense of some of the senselessness of life.” He also declined to comment.

Almost everyone connected to the murder and its aftermath receded into quiet lives. Not Blatt. He flirted with buying into a CFL team, the BC Lions. He endorsed political candidates in Sausalito, hobnobbed at the local yacht club and toured Portugal with town officials as part of a cultural exchange program. A photo posted in July 2022 showed him sitting between a tourism official and a local politician, the Cascais surf crashing behind them.

Blatt, 80, eventually relocated to Savannah, Ga., where he and Cathy live in a gated community with a golf course, miles of trails, a spa and a sushi restaurant. He did not respond to numerous interview requests.

Blatt was a person of interest to law enforcement on at least one other occasion.

In 2007, he and a friend in Sausalito had a falling out, culminating in a heated argument. A short time later, the friend returned home and found two items, one on his back deck and another on the hood of his Porsche. Rattled, he called police.

They were 17-inch arrows.