May 2, 2007

May 2, 2007, marks the day Walter Elliot reported that his wife, Mitzi Elliot, and Johan Rilz had been killed at the Elliots’ Malibu house. The date became a reference point for the case: it appears on the first 911 recording and frames later testimony about the police timeline and the early arrival of freelance videographer Julio Muniz.

The date and the 911 call

The first 911 recording is marked 13:05 on May 2, 2007. In it, Walter Elliot reported that the two people at the house appeared dead and that help would not be able to save them. The call was the event that brought the double murder to public attention, and its recorded time gave the prosecution a fixed point from which to present its account of the case.

The call’s significance was contested. Mickey Haller had sought to keep the recordings from the jury, arguing that transcripts would be clearer and more useful; the judge allowed the audio to be played with transcripts for jurors to follow. Haller considered Elliot’s calm manner on the first call potentially damaging because jurors might interpret it as coldness. The second call, as Haller described it, presented a further difficulty: Elliot sounded annoyed and indicated that he knew and disliked the man killed alongside his wife.

Reconstructing the crime window

At trial, Detective Kinder testified that he had driven the route to the Malibu house five times and reached it on each occasion before the prosecution’s proposed murder window closed. Haller’s questioning focused on the earliest arrival among those five tests, making travel time part of the dispute over whether the proposed timeline could be sustained. The testimony links the date of the killings to a later, practical reconstruction: how quickly the route could be driven under the conditions tested.

The first media arrival

The date also anchors Julio Muniz’s account of reaching the Elliot house ahead of other local media. Muniz made his living by listening to police scanners at home and in his car, driving to reported crimes or active police situations, and selling footage to news outlets that had not arrived. On May 2, he heard a call for a homicide team and went to the address with his camera. He filmed a person seated in the back of a patrol car, whom he took to be a suspect, as well as deputies stringing crime-scene tape across the front of the property. His footage and testimony placed an independent observer at the scene soon after the police response began.