To everyone who knew them, Lyall and Leslie Herring were a happy and successful couple.
But what no one knew was the trouble brewing in their marriage that would bring about horrific consequences.
Leslie came from Guyana with her family as a child and built her American dream with persistence and hard work.
She came from a close family of many talents. Her sister is actress Asha Davis.
Their brother, Lyndon Telford, said Leslie was the rock solid one of the bunch, but always with a smile.
She had zero tolerance for nonsense, and she was the organizer. She was definitely the mother hen.
At 44 years old, Leslie worked a desk job at a home security company in Los Angeles.
Her husband of 11 years, 56-year-old Lyall Herring, was a college recruiter at Cal State Northridge.
All the women in the family would say, “Well, you know, he’s a special guy.”
While the men would say, “There’s something about this guy. He’s up to something. We just can’t put our finger on it.
He’s a smooth operator. He’s a keep your wives and girlfriends locked up kind of thing.”
The couple lived in an upscale condominium near Hollywood.
To all appearances, it was a normal lifestyle until the day when both of them mysteriously disappeared into thin air.
Leslie’s sister Asha called and said that Leslie’s job called and said that she didn’t show up for work.
For 11 years, she had never missed a day.
So the family called Lyall to find out where he and Leslie were. They couldn’t find either one of them.
Right away, Leslie’s family was alarmed. Simply picking up and leaving town without a word to anyone was not her style.
It got to the point where they thought, “Oh my god, what happened? Were they abducted? Are they dead?
They were in a ditch somewhere. Did they drown in their boat? They had a 60-foot sailboat that they used to take out.
So maybe they drowned on their boat.”
No one knew. They couldn’t find them.
Hollywood Police Department Detective Chris Gable pressed ahead with the investigation.
When he looked inside the house, it appeared very clean and very nice, except for a couple of things he noticed offhand.
There was some spilled candle wax on the kitchen counter, a pretty good amount, as if a candle had spilled over.
And what the detective was already learning about Leslie was that leaving a mess like that was not the kind of thing she would do. So that was a little unusual.
Almost two weeks after the disappearance of the couple, police got a big break in the case.
Lyall was stopped in his car by police as he crossed the Mexican border into the United States.
The police had put an alert on his vehicle and on his driver’s license. They went down to the border to speak to him.
When they asked him when he last saw his wife, he said it was Wednesday. It was now Sunday morning.
When they asked if he had tried to contact her, he said he had. When they asked if he knew where she was, he said he had no idea.
When they asked if that was normal for her not to respond, he said no. From that point moving forward, he had nothing else to say.
According to Lyall, the reason he had gone to Mexico was to search for her because that was where they had planned to go for Valentine’s Day.
Lyall later told police he owed money to some shady characters who caught up with him and cut off his dreadlocks as punishment.
Detective Gable had worked the gang unit for several years and had never heard of gang members holding someone down to shave their head and shave their goatee off. So that was a first.
But police had no reason to keep Lyall detained. He went back to his day job and the detectives went to work, slowly connecting the dots.
During their search of the home, they found a letter in Leslie’s bedside drawer. It showed that she was not happy about Lyall’s money dealings. In fact, she was furious and she wanted out of the marriage.
They also found her purse with her jewelry inside it. Something she never left home without. She wore those pieces everywhere.
So the police pulled a bunch of pictures of her wearing the jewelry at parties and on their boat.
The only time she took them off was when she went to bed and put them in the nightstand.
Inside Leslie’s purse, along with her jewelry, cops also found a receipt from a local Starbucks dated on a Tuesday night, four days after she went missing.
The police thought, “Wow, this is her purse. We’ll go to Starbucks. You’re on the video.
See what’s going on. Maybe Lyall and Leslie are doing something.”
So they went over to the Starbucks and pulled the surveillance video before it was erased.
The receipt was in Leslie’s purse, but who did they find making the purchase? It was Lyall, by himself, buying a single drink. Leslie was nowhere to be seen.
The police thought that was very suspicious. Why would that receipt be in her purse if she wasn’t there?
Cops suspected Lyall may have planted the receipt in Leslie’s purse as a misdirection.
They turned to his personal computer and cell phone to see what else they could find. What they came up with only deepened their concerns.
His online searches included things like “profile of a mass murderer,” “violent death and the soul,” and “10 common methods of suicide.”
And only days after Leslie’s disappearance, another mystery emerged. There were several calls between Leslie’s phone and Lyall’s phone.
What Lyall didn’t think is that the police would also track the cell tower usage. It showed that both phones were side by side when the calls were being made, suggesting that he was holding one phone and calling the other one.
Police were rapidly coming to the conclusion that Lyall had done something to Leslie. But they needed more evidence.
Specifically, they needed Leslie dead or alive, or else they might have no case at all.
In a typical murder case, exhibit A is a photo of a dead body, someone who has been shot, strangled, or stabbed. In a case like this, you don’t have that.
Leslie Herring had been missing for weeks and police still didn’t know her fate, but they feared the worst at the hands of her husband.
They asked Lyall to go before TV news cameras to plead for help in finding his missing wife. The cops figured it was an offer he couldn’t refuse, and it would also help shake the trees for witnesses.
Lyall went on camera and said, “Leslie, if you’re out there listening to us, please give us a call, come home, let us know what’s going on. I know we have a lot to talk about.”
Days later, police met with Lyall’s cousin, Malcolm. He said he had talked to Lyall in front of his condo shortly after Leslie disappeared.
Lyall was very distraught. He was saying things that were really off the wall, like he said that he was going to burn in hell for what he did to Leslie.
Malcolm thought this was really strange. He needed to go and see if Leslie was okay.
When Malcolm asked to use the bathroom inside the condo, Lyall said, “Hmm, let me think about that. Nah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
From that point, Malcolm knew something was really wrong.
Inside the condo, both bathrooms had numerous towels hanging up. They were all dry, but they were very wrinkled, as if they had been crunched together to stop a flood or something.
This led to a possible 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 conclusion about Leslie’s fate. The police believed that Lyall might have drowned her that Saturday night.
That night was the last time Leslie ever took a breath of air in her life. That is what the police believed.
If that was true, there was a body somewhere.
And then, out of nowhere, a neighbor of Lyall’s came forward with an electrifying story about the night of Leslie’s disappearance that left the cops slack-jawed.
Around midnight, the neighbor saw Lyall wheeling a dolly way down the hallway to a far back elevator. On the dolly was a carpet, which he described as rolled up wide enough to contain a body.
Lyall had this crazy look on his face. He had a hoodie pulled up. He was sweating and he didn’t even acknowledge the witness.
It was hard to believe. They were talking about the same guy who was front and center at a vigil for his missing wife.
Meanwhile, cops called in some backup. A four-legged detective named Indiana Bones. She was trained to find the scent of human remains.
Cops had her check the trunk of Lyall’s old Cadillac and in the back of his SUV.
As it turned out, they got a positive hit from the cadaver dog in both of his vehicles.
The cars were parked about 200 yards apart in separate garages at the condominium complex.
The police theory was that after Lyall murdered Leslie, he took her down to his SUV and then transferred her body over to the old vintage Cadillac that he owned.
He put her body in there, drove back to his condominium. Once he figured out what he was going to do, he put the body back into the Mitsubishi and used the Mitsubishi to discard her body.
That was why they got decomposition hits in both vehicles.
Things were not looking good for Lyall, but cops did not move in on him yet. They still had no body. Without that, they would need every shred of evidence they could get to make a convincing case for murder.
The hardest part about one of these investigations is proving that the victim is no longer around.
Leaving no stone unturned, detectives put a tracking device on Lyall’s car.
They did live surveillance and GPS surveillance on Lyall in hopes that maybe he would visit the location where he may have disposed of the body, just to get that warm and fuzzy feeling that everything was okay.
Sure enough, two days later, he led them to a remote area in Griffith Park, less than three miles away from his condo, at around 6:00 in the morning.
He got out of the car. He walked into this area where there were a couple of dumpsters. He walked around there, got back in his car, and drove away.
They called in the expert to have a sniff.
They went out there with Indiana Bones and got a positive hit on a dirt mound, which was maybe 15 feet from a dumpster.
Cops got to work digging up the mound. They were only one shovel full of dirt away from cracking this case, but they found nothing.
Even the fine work of Indiana Bones could only go so far.
They couldn’t confirm that the scent was from Leslie’s body because it was Griffith Park. A lot of bodies had been dumped there over the years.
But it seemed to really sync up with everything. Perhaps Lyall had backed his Mitsubishi in there, put her body on this dirt mound, and then transferred it to the dumpster.
Those dumpsters go to the huge LA dump. And if that was the case, the police didn’t think they would ever recover her body.
It was a maddening puzzle, missing only one crucial piece.
With everything they now knew, police were still dead certain that Lyall had done away with his wife.
Was she in that carpet? Yes, absolutely.
After 14 months of an exhaustive investigation, police drove over to Lyall’s office at Cal State Northridge and they arrested him.
He was shocked that he was arrested. They told him that something had happened to his car so he would come outside, so the arrest wouldn’t happen in front of everyone.
Lyall was charged with murder. Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Sam Hulfeld handled the prosecution, but there was still that one missing element.
The obvious thing that was remarkable about this case was that there was no body. Most murders start and end with a body. Here, they had to build a case without one.
Whatever the odds against getting a conviction, the prosecution was absolutely certain of their findings. They could only hope the jury would see things the same way.
Even without Leslie’s body in this case, the amount of evidence pointing to Lyall Herring’s guilt was overwhelming.
After a three-week long trial, the jury quickly arrived at a verdict.
Lyall Herring was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
As far as the evidence being overwhelming, that was actually the comment of the trial judge who presided over the trial, made at the sentencing after the conviction.
Lyall went through plenty of effort to cover up his guilt. And according to Detective Gable, he almost succeeded.
In fact, if he had simply stayed home and read a book, Gable said there was a chance this murder may never have been solved.
He would have been much better off if he did nothing. Then the police would have had nothing to go on. It was his cover-ups that really solidified the case.
As for Leslie, she may never be found, but the police and her bereaved family still have hope that Lyall might do the right thing for once.
Finding her remains will be very important. The only person that can do that is Lyall.
Hopefully, one day he will reach out to them and want to tell them where she is.
The family still does not believe it. They still cannot believe that this has happened.
The tragedy of this whole thing is that they never found her remains.
Her life impacted them and she will always be in their hearts and souls and minds forever, forever, ever and ever and ever.
