LOS ANGELES _ Throughout his more than three-decade career, Detective Mark Lillienfeld built a reputation as one of the finest homicide detectives in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
The murder case of racing legend Mickey Thompson languished for years until Lillienfeld took over the investigation and saw it through to a conviction. In 2009, he helped send music producer Phil Spector to prison for the fatal shooting of actress Lana Clarkson. A recent episode of the dramatized documentary series "Murder Book" described Lillienfeld as a "closer" who "blows through cases like a tornado."
In late 2013, however, Lillienfeld's focus was on a subject far from his usual beat: a middle-aged San Fernando Valley housekeeper named Connie Romero.
Lillienfeld scoured Romero's past for any criminal history, tracked down her personal details and ran her name through confidential databases, according to law enforcement records reviewed by The Times. One evening, he drove to her Porter Ranch home and poked through a dumpster, the records say.
But Romero was no killer. Rather, prosecutors considered her the victim of a crime.
She had, in fact, suffered bruises and cuts to her face during a confrontation over dog poop months earlier in a Chatsworth neighborhood. The case was investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department, not Lillienfeld's agency. A battery charge had been filed against one of Lillienfeld's longtime acquaintances, another veteran of the county's justice system: Superior Court Judge Craig Richman.
The detective and the judge had known each other since at least 1996, when Richman was a prosecutor handling an attempted murder case Lillienfeld investigated. The detective would later visit the judge's home to get warrants signed. Lillienfeld's wife worked in Richman's courtroom, transcribing hearings as an official court reporter.
The simple dispute over dog droppings led to investigations into two respected men of the law _ a criminal trial for Richman, who was acquitted, and an internal Sheriff's Department inquiry into why Lillienfeld dug into Romero's background and whether he provided help behind the scenes to a friend in legal trouble.
