Michael Connelly Discusses Kanan Murder at Agoura Hills OCOB

Author Michael Connelly, best known for his crime thrillers starring detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, added a stop in Agoura Hills to his recent book tour promoting his new best seller “Dark Sacred Night”. Fans who attended the sold-out One City One Book (OCOB) program also got to hear how an unsolved crime related to Agoura Hills helped the former Los Angeles Times journalist launch his career.

One of Connelly’s early assignments in 1990 as an investigative reporter was a follow up article to the unsolved Judy Kanan murder that occurred in 1985. (Kanan Road, extending from Oak Park to Malibu through Agoura Hills was named for her pioneering family that helped settled the area in the 1860s.) The large family owned many of Agoura Hills’s retail centers, which Judy Kanan and her sister managed, when she was killed tending her horses in nearby Woodland Hills. A tough-minded, disliked businesswoman, Kanan was buried at Pierce Brothers-Valley Oaks Memorial Park cemetery in Westlake Village that she had once sued. At her graveside, the priest implored God to "give our sister Judy a peaceful rest."

“As an enterprising reporter looking for stories, it was one of the bigger scoops of my career,” Connelly told the audience, describing how he found an unsealed search warrant for Kanan’s nephew, 34-year-old Michael Kanan, in a file at Van Nuys courthouse five years after the murder. “The unsolved case had a lot of twists and turns that a good novel has,” he added.

Program moderator, Acorn Managing Editor John Loesing, read an excerpt from Connelly’s “Crime Beat”, a collection of articles he published in 2005 that included the Kanan article:

When she was gunned down, police acknowledged there was no shortage of potential suspects and concentrated largely on reviewing her business disputes. The killing prompted one Agoura businessman who was interviewed at the time to say: "You're going to have half the population of Agoura as suspects. The most hated woman in Agoura got assassinated."

Connelly learned through interviewing residents and her family that Kanan was a local character people seemed to love or hate and she received plenty of both. “She was a tough business woman but she was also known for having a soft heart, like with her horses, which were actually involved in how she got killed—a perpetrator preying upon someone’s vulnerabilities. Those are the aspects you think about when writing a novel.” (The nephew had killed himself before the warrant could be issued but it was believed his motivation was a family debt.)

“My press pass gave me access to the world I really wanted to write about,” Connelly said, was his bridge to novel writing and creating his successful Harry Bosch character, based on his relationships with LAPD detectives. The first book in the series “The Black Echo” was published in 1992 and won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. “My books aren’t about how detectives gather DNA, they’re about the evolution of characters and the world of darkness they work in.”

Connelly also arranged for the audience to meet the female detective who is steering the Bosch series in a new direction. Joining him onstage was LAPD cold case detective Mitzi Roberts, the inspiration for his female detective Renee Ballard introduced in his previous book, “The Late Show”. Roberts has appeared in the “Bosch” series, now in its fourth year on Amazon Prime TV. Connelly described Roberts as having a fierceness toward what’s right and what’s wrong and respects how she blazed her way through a tough, male dominated career. Unlike Bosch’s character based on several detectives, Ballard’s character is based solely on Roberts. She recently helped crack the decades-old Sam Little serial killer case. Roberts explained to the audience why she rises to the challenge of detective work, “Cold cases leave families behind. That’s why I do it--for them.”

Michael Connelly told fans a reporter’s best stories usually come from something awful that’s happened. The OCOB program had to be rescheduled twice because of the Borderline Bar and Grill shooting and the Woolsey Fire. The Agoura Hills’s community is continuing to recover from the shocking events that took lives and properties, including the area’s historic Paramount Ranch. “For Agoura Hills, Michael Connelly sharing his talent and spending so much time with residents after the recent crises is a hard story to top for our One City One Book program,” said Amy Brink, director of community services for the city, who organized the event for the community. The event was sponsored by City of Agoura Hills, the Agoura Hills Library, Friends of the Agoura Hills Library, and the Cultural Arts Council.