Roy Haiselden

Roy Haiselden is the lawyer and business operator whose disappearance becomes a troubling strand in the investigation of Eldon H. Mate’s murder. He had been closely involved with Mate’s work and was thought to possess records missing from Mate’s apartment; then, while investigators searched for him, a civil suit brought grave allegations against him. His eventual discovery murdered beside Alice Zoghbie ends the pursuit of him as a living suspect but does not explain his role in the larger case.

Identity and Work

Haiselden represented Mate in matters connected to the doctor’s assisted deaths. Alice Zoghbie said she had known Eldon H. Mate for five years and Haiselden for somewhat less. The legal work was unusually consuming: according to Zoghbie, representing Mate had effectively killed the rest of Haiselden’s law practice, and it did not pay his bills. His livelihood instead came from laundromats, including coin-operated businesses in strip malls. Investigators found a business registration for Roy Haiselden doing business as Kleen-U-Up, Inc.; Milo Sturgis reported that Haiselden owned six laundromats, mostly in El Monte, Artesia, and Pasadena.

Haiselden had attended a conference with Mate. Milo Sturgis described him as a large man in his fifties, with a florid complexion and an especially bushy auburn toupee. That conspicuous hairpiece later becomes a means of recognizing him in television coverage and, finally, in the scene where his body is found. His public connection to Mate was not merely administrative: at a press conference after one of the trials, Haiselden praised Mate as deserving the Nobel Prize and added that, as Mate’s lawyer, he deserved a share of the prize money. The boast suggests both the intimacy of his professional involvement and an appetite for recognition of his own part in Mate’s work.

Mate’s Records and the Suspicions Around Him

After Mate’s murder, Milo Sturgis found no work records in the dead doctor’s apartment. He suspected that Haiselden, as Mate’s lawyer, might have kept the papers. Haiselden’s proximity to the work also made him a plausible source of knowledge about Mate’s appointments and home: Milo Sturgis reasoned that few people would have spent more time with Mate or been more familiar with the apartment, and speculated that Haiselden might even have had a key. These were investigative possibilities, not established facts, but the missing records gave them practical weight.

Haiselden’s absence sharpened those suspicions. He did not answer calls and could not be found, although Milo Sturgis considered him someone who should have been speaking publicly about Mate’s death. Instead of appearing in the press, he seemed to have left town. Milo Sturgis floated a more personal motive: Haiselden might have become resentful of playing second fiddle to a celebrated client, or might have become so immersed in Mate’s work that he imagined himself qualified to act as a death doctor. The theory tied Haiselden’s professional overinvolvement to the possibility of murder, but the investigation had no proof that he had killed Mate or taken part in the killing.

The search gave his disappearance a physical setting. Haiselden’s peach-colored, one-story house on Camden Avenue, west of Westwood and south of Wilshire, appeared recently vacated. There was no car in the double garage, only an old bicycle, hoses, and ordinary stored items. The kitchen sink held clean dishes, but there was no food; the mail slot contained only throwaway flyers. Most windows were barred and bolted, and the doors were secured with dead bolts. An alarm-company sticker appeared on the kitchen window, though Milo Sturgis saw no alarm leads and suspected the display might be a fake. His office was equally unresponsive: rented space over a Persian restaurant on the Miracle Mile, it remained locked during repeated visits by Milo Sturgis and other detectives, with no secretary or other occupant answering.

Allegations and a Second Possible Motive

Haiselden’s disappearance acquired another explanation when a television report identified Amber Breckenham, a manager at one of his laundromats in Baldwin Park, as the plaintiff in a civil suit against him. Breckenham alleged that she and Haiselden had had a seven-year affair. She said he claimed to be investing her money but had instead embezzled it, and also accused him of physically abusing her and psychologically intimidating her daughter, Laurette. The suit sought five million dollars, most of it in punitive damages. These were allegations in a civil case, not findings of criminal guilt.

The report complicated the murder investigation rather than resolving it. Haiselden had been absent for well over a week, and the charges offered an independent reason he might have left town. They also raised questions about the character of the man trusted by Mate and about the judgment of Mate himself. Investigators wondered whether the apparent flight marked Haiselden as a murder suspect; the same evidence could be read as evidence that he was evading a serious personal and financial scandal. By the time Alex Delaware considered seeking information about Mate’s records, no criminal charges had been lodged against Haiselden. The domestic-violence and child-abuse allegations nevertheless meant other detectives might pursue him, and the civil suit lay within a different law-enforcement jurisdiction from Alex Delaware’s usual contacts.

Death and Narrative Role

Haiselden’s absence ends not in an interview or an arrest, but in the discovery of his body beside Alice Zoghbie. The details make the scene unmistakably violent and deliberately composed. His khaki shorts had been removed and folded beside his left thigh, while his blue polo shirt remained on and had been rolled up to his nipples. His large, heavy body bore triangular cuts across the abdomen, their lines distorted by his paunch. His head lolled toward Zoghbie, as if turned toward her; the rigid reddish toupee identified him as the man seen in the news reports. His face had been extensively mutilated, and his genitals had been removed and placed on the grass between his legs.

The two bodies connect Haiselden’s death to the case’s recurring theatrical violence: both bear triangular wounds, and the positioning of Haiselden’s head toward Zoghbie makes their discovery a paired tableau rather than an isolated death. Yet the scene does not disclose who killed them or establish whether Haiselden’s earlier disappearance involved the murder of Mate. His status shifts abruptly from a lawyer whose access, ambition, and flight invite suspicion to a victim subjected to the same kind of deliberate bodily display that has marked the investigation. That reversal preserves the central uncertainty around him: he may have held crucial knowledge about Mate, but the records, motives, and choices that could have explained his part in the case remain out of reach.