In early May last year, a sixteen-year-old girl named Martha Puebla testified in a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles about a pair of murders that were allegedly committed by her ex-boyfriend, a reputed gang member named Jose (Peps) Ledesma. Within days, on May 12th, Puebla herself was shot to death near her front door, in the Los Angeles suburb of Sun Valley. Several months later, police arrested Juan Catalan, who was then twenty-four years old, for her murder. The police theorized that Catalan committed the crime at the instigation of Ledesma and of Catalan’s brother Mario, who had been accused of aiding Ledesma in the earlier murders. The charge made Juan Catalan eligible for the death penalty.
From the start, Catalan insisted on his innocence.“The police tried to get him to confess, but he wouldn’t do it,” his lawyer, Todd Melnik, said last week. “He kept asking them to give him a lie-detector test.” Catalan told his lawyer that he had a straightforward alibi for the evening that Puebla was shot. He said that he was with his six-year-old daughter at Dodger Stadium, watching the home team lose to the Atlanta Braves, 11-4. Melnik set out to verify his client’s story.
“I subpoenaed the Dodger Vision tapes, which show shots of the crowd, and I also got the Fox Sports broadcast of the game,” Melnik said. “I knew where Juan was sitting, and in some of the shots I could tell that the seats were occupied, but you couldn’t tell it was him sitting there.” Melnik picked up another lead, however, through his negotiations to obtain the tapes from the Dodgers. He learned that on the evening of May 12th the HBO comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” had been shooting scenes in the ballpark. In that episode, which aired earlier this year, Larry David, the star of the show, attends a Dodgers game with a prostitute. (David doesn’t hire her for sex but, rather, to sit with him in his car so that he can travel in the car-pool lane on his way to the game.) Melnik asked if he could examine the HBO footage, too.
“It sounded very cool because my life is so lacking in anything interesting,” David said last week. “It did seem like kind of a lame story, but I told the lawyer, ‘Go ahead, go crazy. Look at anything you want.’ And we hooked him up with everything from the stadium, all the footage we shot that night.” On the day that Melnik came in to see the tapes, David at first left him to watch on his own, but later he stuck his head in the editing room, where the lawyer was examining the footage.
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