They found him on the sidewalk, a block from his boyhood home, with a shotgun blast to his handsome face and a gruesome wound in his back.

Stephen Ballreich was hardly your ordinary murder victim, primarily because Ballreich's past had been so extraordinary. In the mid-1970s, he became Alhambra's mayor when he was only 26, enshrining him not only as Golden Boy of the San Gabriel Valley but the youngest politician of his kind in the United States.

Charismatic and quick-witted, a natural before any crowd, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Ballreich had a seemingly limitless future. Congress, a run at governor: Republican pundits believed it was all his for the asking. Carelessness, however, would cost him dearly.

Shortly after his landside re-election in 1979, the electric air that once swirled around him turned to scathing headlines against him, as activists accused him of misspending city travel funds. The District Attorney's Office declined to press charges after an investigation, but the scandal punctured Ballreich's confidence. He abruptly resigned his post, relocating for 10 years to Arkansas. He'd later brag about hobnobbing with the Clintons there.

Ballreich returned to Southern California in 1988 as a political consultant and a single dad, still dynamic as ever. Savagely killed at 41, he was never able to do what he confided to his girlfriend: seek office again.

If all this seems like a distant memory about a once-famous person, it is. On the night of Nov. 14, 1991, Stephen (Steve) Lynn Ballreich was mowed down across the street from the leafy grounds of the Ramona Convent where he once played as a child.

Some 14 years later, the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department remains stumped about who killed him. It is officially a cold case with no active suspects and no motive ever established. Several veteran homicide detectives assigned to the investigation have come and gone. One drifted into retirement feeling "haunted" by its unresolved status.

"All the leads have been exhausted," acknowledged Sheriff's homicide detective Susan Coleman. "We've been hindered by a lack of witnesses and evidence."

So much time has elapsed since his execution-style murder that a jaded sense exists today that the case is almost unsolvable. Ballreich's own mother has even stopped calling authorities for information about the case.

Adding to the cynicism is a virtual blackout imposed on information about the shooting. Neither the Alhambra Police Department, which first responded to the murder, nor the Sheriff's Department, which took over the investigation, will release the crime report. Officials say publicizing it could jeopardize what leads they have, including those they collected from the murder site, a modest, tree-lined neighborhood between Valley Boulevard and the San Bernardino Freeway.

At the top of the list of missing evidence is the murder weapon itself: a 12-gauge shotgun that cannoned two or three close-range pellet-salvos into Ballreich as he walked or jogged along the 1700 block of Marguerita Avenue.

"I ask some of the police chiefs once in a while when I am trying to be funny how the Ballreich case is coming," said Parker Williams, who served with Ballreich on the council. "You know without asking that nobody has any information ... I think it's just tragic."

While several of his longtime friends question whether the Sheriff's Department pursued the case as tenaciously it could have - especially in light of a 1989 death threat he allegedly received and his entanglement with several unstable women - it's never been a slam-dunk whodunit. Ballreich's habit of infuriating people he once impressed and his oft-murky doings made him a jigsaw-like personality excruciating for loved ones to piece together, let alone police.

Indeed, the more you dig into his existence, the more you see detectives' quandary. It wasn't so much who wanted Stephen Ballreich dead but, at times, who didn't.

'A horrible void'

Williams, like others contacted for this story, said authorities told him that Ballreich's killer probably first shot him in the back from a car, and then stood over him to fire a second round into his face. This blast penetrated his skull, blowing off the back of his head, according to the autopsy report, a copy of which has been obtained by the Pasadena Weekly.

In the days following his slaying, wild theories circulated around town that a hit man hired by an obsessed woman or jealous husband was behind it, or that it came from snowballing gambling debt. Fringe scenarios envisioned the ex-mayor targeted because of politics. Had Ballreich (pronounced Ball-ridge) been shot because he'd learned something sinister or switched allegiances?

Authorities tried tempering the speculation by suggesting it might've been a more mundane robbery or a gang assault. But people who knew Ballreich's personal history doubted it.

Besides, he was an athletic 6'2" Caucasian outfitted in a red jacket, sweatpants and sneakers when he took his last stride. It didn't fit the profile of a gangland execution, even for a suburb a short hop from East LA's deadliest neighborhoods.

No, it was the way that Ballreich died that seemed to holler the motive - vengeance.

The local Baptist church that hosted his funeral drew 150 mourners, many of them numb. Eulogies by dignitaries from this gray, politically cliquish city lamented what was lost, what could have been. Less-mentioned was the deceased's compulsion for illicit romance and fast living. Those proclivities slid with him into the grave - or perhaps dispatched him there.

Jo Hartman remembers the heartbreak of 1991, when she breezed into her Santa Maria apartment to notice her answering machine blinking crazily. The messages sounded the same refrain. The local news was hot on the story of her boyfriend's killing.

The two had been friends since 10th-grade algebra. Mischievous humor and chemistry kept them close but Hartman wouldn't let it go further, knowing the pack of girls who swooned for Ballreich without him even trying. One buddy compared him to actor Tom Selleck with a Marlboro Man swagger.

It was in March 1991, after a fundraiser for a Pasadena candidate Ballreich was counseling, that romance kindled. They joked they were the real-life version of the movie "When Harry Met Sally."

Ballreich, twice divorced by now, talked marriage, Hartman said. She wavered. They'd quarreled over money she owed him and his just-wing-it style. Hartman also recognized that Ballreich drank a lot, as he had done for years.

She saw what others had seen. Binges and reckless abandon fueled the paradox about him, as if self-destruction was in his DNA. Ballreich could be tender and fun loving, the star of the room, just as he could be deceitful or a flake who regularly stood up friends.

Steven Born learned this about Ballreich in the early 1970s. They'd met as volunteers for the Young Republicans, doing grunt work on a congressional campaign. Born watched Ballreich alienate peers with sordid behavior that undercut what Born called his extraordinary "power of persuasion."

"That was part of the problem: He could manipulate people so well," said Born, now a science teacher in the San Fernando Valley. "He remembered everybody's name. He could get people to do things and work hard on a campaign, even for inferior candidates. He was a wonderful salesman. There was that part of him that did really care about people. Then he'd switch on the selfish part and regret it later. It was like he was telling himself he had to do that to be a good person."

In July 1991, the last time Hartman saw him alive, Ballreich unexpectedly, and for reasons still unexplained, asked her to witness a will that he'd had drafted. By the fall, the pair had started to warm up again. He was chipper about his future, so much so that he told Hartman that he wanted to "toss his hat in the political ring" a final time.

Hartman's last phone message to Ballreich went unreturned. She left it on Nov. 14 at 6:51 p.m., roughly 90 minutes before his murder.

"I was in despair, beyond despair with the news," said Hartman, a special education teacher. "At first I didn't believe it. At the reception after the funeral is when it hit me. He was really gone! It was that horrible void."

Red flags

For many, the fact that Ballreich died where he did was more than coincidence. People close to him knew he was so fond of his childhood block that he often drove from his sparsely furnished South Pasadena apartment, where he'd been living after returning from Arkansas, to exercise there. Had someone lying in wait exploited his nostalgia?

Hartman said she spoke to the police several times in efforts to aid them. Another longtime friend, who asked that their name be withheld out of safety concerns, joined in. This friend sent detectives a nine-page memo listing Ballreich's friends, associates and lovers, theorizing who might have wanted to have hurt him. The memo, a copy of which has been obtained by the Weekly, points at two women with whom he'd been involved.

Ballreich had met one of the women when he was a twentysomething mayor and she was a petite, attractive teenager from a local high school. They dated periodically and often openly. The relationship stirred doubts about Ballreich's judgment and character.

"He screwed himself up at an early age with drinking, gambling, liking young girls," said Barbara Messina, a former councilwoman who now serves as a member of the Alhambra School Board. "He had too much too soon and couldn't handle it."

According to the memo, this younger woman later studied the cello at USC, but never finished there because of drug problems. She eventually married someone else and moved to the New York area. Yet she and Ballreich continued their love affair. A Best Western Hotel in Arcadia was their favored spot, the memo said.

In January 1989, this woman's husband allegedly threatened to kill Ballreich if he persisted with the affair, the memo states. Ballreich, worried enough to inquire about bodyguards, told the friend who wrote that memo that the woman was in town at the beginning of November 1991 and that he had seen her.

"Obsessed with Steve, extremely possessive, constantly looking for Steve's suspected infidelities," the memo read.

Hartman said Ballreich never told her about any threat, but she knew about the woman. A few years earlier, when she and Ballreich were just friends, she'd called him about playing tennis. He abruptly told her he couldn't and hung up. Hartman's phone soon rang and Ballreich put the woman on the line.

"She said, 'This is so and so and I'd like you never to call Steve again,'" Hartman recalled. "She said, 'He's my fiancé and I want you out of my life.' It was almost like Steve was intimidated. I said Steve's happiness is important to me and if I'm upsetting that, I won't call again. She slammed the phone in my ear. Steve called the next night to say he was horribly sorry. I told him, 'Steve, what are you doing? This was a red flag.'"

Hartman said detectives told her that when they questioned the woman about her whereabouts and other activity the day Ballreich died, she warned them that the next time they called she'd have her lawyer represent her.

"As soon as she said that, they stopped. To me that would've been pay dirt," Hartman said. "They should have been running this down. I'm not blaming the police. I thought it was one of those hard-to-solve cases. But there was a real suspect and the Sheriff's Department didn't follow through."

Both Hartman and the friend who wrote the memo said they asked detectives if a crime show like "America's Most Wanted" would air a segment on the case to generate leads. The friends said the idea went nowhere because detectives told them that producers of those shows didn't feel Ballreich was a sympathetic-enough victim.

Ballreich's friends also informed detectives that someone had plundered his South Pasadena apartment after his murder. Hartman, who had her own key, said she went to retrieve his will on Nov. 16 and it was gone. When she returned the next day, it had reappeared. In the memo to police, Ballreich's other friend reported 10 items missing from his place. Among there were a gold watch, two rings, a Bible with his daughter's name in it, a pair of negligees and, curiously, his address book.

"His apartment wasn't taped off," Hartman said. "There was no yellow [police] tape.

The Sheriff Department's Coleman defended how Ballreich's apartment was secured, saying "the appropriate avenues" were maintained. She would not elaborate on the items that were allegedly taken.

Sheriff's Department officials also refused to specify what tips from Ballreich's friends they've used. Neither would they confirm whether a volatile, older woman from the political world who Ballreich had slept with had passed their polygraph test under interrogation.

"There were several friends, several associates and several acquaintances who were interviewed by us, but no one has been identified as the suspect," Coleman said. "There are many things that could have happened, and maybe even the thing you expected least. You just can't have guesses. You have to have facts."

As with all unsolved murders, detectives have reviewed Ballreich's case within the last five years. Coleman said they didn't find anything had been overlooked.

Project Pride

Ballreich's mother, Jean, said she's lost track of the hunt for her son's killer. For three years after it happened, she said she stayed in touch with authorities from her home in Prescott, Ariz. A devout Christian twice widowed, she moved to the Southwest in 1980 to ease her asthma.

"At first, I really, really wanted to know," she said. "I would keep calling the Sheriff's Department, and the detective said, 'As long as I'm here,' they would pursue it. There are many things about it that are hard to understand.

"But it won't bring [Steve] back. God knows all things, and he knows what happened. If I could talk to whoever did this, I would just say I forgive you, not because I didn't love my son, but because God will."

She and Stephen's father, Barney, had once foreseen great things for him. From an early age, Stephen schmoozed neighbors on his paper route, had terrific writing and speaking abilities and possessed a magnetism everybody recognized. Crimping those talents, his mother said, was a manic-depressive streak and pigheadedness from an early age that he was destined for life in politics and only politics.

The family's Beverly Hills-based jewelry business disinterested him. Ballreich's father died suddenly when he was about 12.

"From the time he was born, a lot of his problem was being too high or too low. I couldn't convince a lot of people about that," Jean Ballreich said. "Emotionally, he was unstable. If he hadn't been that way, he might've been the governor of California. I would've loved it if he'd gone into TV."

One matronly Republican Party volunteer remembers meeting Ballreich when he was a gung-ho teenager with a cast on his leg stuffing mailers for a conservative candidate. Republicans Ronald Reagan and former US Sen. Barry Goldwater were his icons. He quoted Thomas Jefferson the way some teenagers quote rock songs, though Stephen was a Beatles fan entranced with the White Album. He collected political pins, assembling an impressive collection.

Despite obvious brains, his grades were average, his mother said. After graduating from Alhambra High School, he attended different colleges without earning a degree.

To make money - and he always seemed to be scrambling for it - Ballreich owned a Burbank restaurant named the Pizza Pantry. He did seasonal campaign work for local Republicans as well, and may have taken odd jobs under the alias "Richard Aldridge," sources said.

He married young, but the union was stormy, and he and his first wife, Cindy divorced. She did not respond to requests for comment.

"He wasn't a follow-througher unless it was something he wanted to do," Jean Ballreich said. "Politics ruined his marriage. He gave Cindy a bad time. He did so many contradictory things."

It was in 1974 when Ballreich blindsided the Alhambra Establishment by unseating incumbent Councilman T. D'Arcy Quinn. He used hustle and chutzpah to win, staying up until 4 a.m. on Election Day dropping campaign fliers on doorsteps. When he took the mayor's seat three years later, he was suburbia's boy wonder. The local Jaycees named him one of California's "five most successful young men."

Ballreich's signature initiative was Project Pride, a community cleanup regimen. Local TV stations did segments showing him painting over graffiti with ex-gang members.

At about this time, Williams said he introduced Ballreich to noted political consultant Stuart Spencer, who'd later advise President Reagan. Spencer, Williams said, thought Ballreich had a sparkling career ahead if he pushed aside distractions.

A record 75 percent of voters in his district re-elected him. Politically, it was as good as it got. Three months after his victory party a citizen's group called All We Can Afford accused him of misspending and failing to report about $2,650 in travel expenses.

A District Attorney's inquiry netted no formal charges. Prosecutors never turned up any proof that Ballreich had intentionally broken Alhambra's then-vague travel rules. Ballreich took it hard, nonetheless, and summarily quit the council - a decision he said later that he regretted.

From there, the city's chastened political prince picked up his things and hotfooted it to Arkansas.

Dreaming grandly

Ballreich stayed in the South most of the 1980s, doing what nobody is quite certain. He told everybody different stories, maybe to cover his tracks, maybe to cover his shame over blowing his chance.

He lived in a house that his mother purchased in a lake-edged resort town called Heber Springs, in Arkansas' north-central Ozark Mountains. He also spent time in Little Rock, apparently doing campaign work for state Democrats. Interspersing that was a job as a radio talk-show host, even if no one remembers the station or the show's format.

Born visited him in Heber Springs in 1988. As usual, Ballreich didn't show up to their agreed meeting place, so Born asked a local where he could find the town's big radio personality.

"The guy laughed," Born recalled. "He said, 'Steve fries fish for a living.' I thought typical Steve."

Wherever his paycheck came from, Ballreich spoke constantly about associating with then-Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary. Depending on who you ask, he either worked for Clinton, advised him or socialized with him.

There certainly were striking similarities between the two men. Both were political junkies, professionally ambitious, magnetic one-on-one and, often, goodtime charlies.

"If you were in a crowded room with Bill Clinton, he'd talk to you like you were the only one there, and Steve was the same way," said Glenn Thornhill, who knew Ballreich from the Young Republicans. "Steve said he knew Bill and Hillary and hung around in the same circles. Who knows? It could've been bull. But I can see why Steve liked him: Clinton was a successful Steve Ballreich."

While in Arkansas, Ballreich had a daughter, Noelle. One source said he wed the mother in a shotgun marriage that did not last very long. Before he died, he admitted he'd been an absentee father and at least the girl wouldn't be influenced by him.

Arkansas' weather and cultural climate helped propel him back to Southern California. He returned poor, but with his love of politics intact. He stayed with friends at first, until he had enough money to rent.

If he lived cheaply, he dreamed grandly. Ballreich in early 1989 hooked arms with failed Alhambra Council candidate Allen Co in a bid to boost voting rates and political participation within the city's growing Asian-American community. It was a prescient move; Asian-Americans today comprise 60 percent of the town's population. Ballreich told reporters he was stunned by the level of prejudice among whites and the surge of Asian businesses since he'd left, and that someone had to usher in the future.

Co, who later served on the South El Monte Council, did not return phone calls.

Ballreich's energies crackled elsewhere. In 1988, he and Merrill Francis, a longtime Alhambra lawyer and civic leader, launched a political consulting business called Pegasus. Their gimmick was that Francis was a Democrat, Ballreich the Republican, with a wealth of campaign experience between them. Together only a few years, they mostly ran local council and school board races, branching out to manage then-Councilman Michael Blanco's losing bid for California insurance commissioner.

Francis said he has difficulty recollecting Ballreich's murder because it coincided with the deaths of his first wife and his mother. But some memories haven't dimmed.

"Steve was very approachable and there was an excitement about him. He made a strong impression," Francis said. "He was a natural risk-taker, too. He'd bet beyond his paying capability. One time he put up the pink slip on his car on a prize fight. What I'm seeing is that he was a like a piece of quartz shining through many facets."

Francis, now 72, spoke at Ballreich's funeral and tried assisting police. He doesn't subscribe to what he calls conspiracy theories that the murder was politically motivated.

"That scuttlebutt didn't mean anything," he said. "But there is disappointment there hasn't been retribution for whoever killed him."

Ballreich's affection for Clinton did not dip when he hit California. He told many that he would not only back him – he would raise money for him. But if he was on the Clinton team, it's news to some of the former president's key advisers.

Los Angeles lawyer John Emerson, who was involved with Clinton's 1992 campaign to win California, said he didn't know who Ballreich was. Linda Dixon, assistant manager for volunteer and visitor services for the Clinton Foundation, parroted the same line.

"I've been with President Clinton 23 years and I've never heard his name before," Dixon said. "I'm only speaking for myself."

Ballreich's Young Republicans chums kept in contact with him to the end. Over drinks, they razzed him about how a dyed-in-the-wool conservative could support Clinton. They noticed that while he was still the impulsive, womanizing guy he'd been before, he had a more serious bent to him, a sort of world-weariness.

Different stories

Ballreich's death was quick, brutish and seemingly well orchestrated. Residents who heard the shots summoned Alhambra police. Witnesses said they'd seen a dark, 1970s-era Camaro fleeing the scene. Nothing apparently ever came of that lead.

In the immediate aftermath, fear clenched Marguerita Avenue. The nearby elementary school - the same one that Ballreich attended in the 1960s - went into lockdown after someone reported a prowler lurking. It was not the last suspicious sighting, not with a murderer running loose.

Police discovered Ballreich lying face up with what the coroner's office said was "massive open head trauma." The second wound came from a shot that struck him in the upper left side of his back and exited through his chest leaving a roughly seven-inch gash. Either of these gunshot wounds was lethal.

The autopsy report said three salvos were fired, but only described two of them. Ballreich, it said, appeared to have been "walking on the sidewalk" when he was killed. This may be critical. While he was an avid runner, Ballreich was wearing underpants but not an athletic supporter at the time he died. Some have wondered whether he was meeting somebody that night.

No drugs were detected in his system. Overall, the autopsy determined that Ballreich had been healthy. He still carried his driver's license from Arkansas.

Detectives mulled the possibility that street gangs had been involved. Four days before Ballreich's mur-der, a 20-year-old gang member had been killed about a mile away.

Detectives also interviewed members of the Lincoln Club, a Republican political action committee that Ballreich volunteered at and advised.

Ultimately, police discounted both those possibilities.

So who then killed him? As enigmatically as Ballreich lived, he died the same way. It wasn't lost on old acquaintances like Thornhill.

"One of my friends ran into an Alhambra policeman, and the cop said, 'We don't know who did it. Steve Ballreich told so many different stories to so many different people we could be talking to the responsible person and we wouldn't even have a clue.'"