if you polled those in Ballreich’s inner-circle, the way he died seemed to them to holler the motive in capital letters— VENGEANCE!
The local Baptist church that hosted his funeral drew 150 mourners, many of them numb. Eulogies by dignitaries and officials from this gray, cliquish city where mercurial rock producer Phil Spector murdered a date in 2003 and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s mother grew up, lamented what was lost and what could have been. His landlady, who seemed to have an abiding fondness for him, praised his uniqueness. Talmadge Burke, a pillar of Alhambra’s political establishment and one of California’s longest serving politicians, was devastated, though he was as different as could be from the victim. “He loved beauty and the aesthetics of Alhambra,” Burke quipped to a local newspaper. “He [was] always helpful. He liked people of all ages. It’s difficult to say goodbye.”
Less mentioned amid the black suits and sodden tissues was the deceased’s compulsion for illicit romances and fast living, a “thrill junkie” who cleaned up beautifully in a suit and tie. Those proclivities slid with him into the grave or, perhaps, dispatched him there.
A HORRIBLE VOID
Jo Hartman, a special education teacher in Santa Maria, remembered the heartbreak of 1991, when she breezed into her apartment to notice her answering machine blinking crazily. Played back, the messages had an awful theme—the local news was all over the story of her boyfriend’s death.
Ballreich and Hartman got to know each other in tenth-grade algebra. Mischievous humor and chemistry kept them close but Hartman would not let it go further, aware of the girls who swooned for Ballreich without him even trying. One buddy compared him to actor Tom Selleck with a Marlboro Man swagger. You needed a calculator to keep up with his conquests. It was in March 1991, after a fundraiser for a Pasadena candidate that Ballreich was guiding, when romance sparked between them. There was an inevitability to it. Once involved, they laughed 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 had quarreled over money she owed him and his devil-may-care style. Hartman also recognized that Ballreich sometimes drank excessively, and had other weaknesses going way back. She was not the first to come to that conclusion. Binges and reckless abandon fueled the paradox about him, as if periodic self-destruction was programmed into his genes. Ballreich could be tender and fun loving, the star of the room, just as he could be deceitful, slippery, or a flake that stood up friends within the course of the same week.
Steven Born learned this about him in the early-1970s. They had met as volunteers for the Young Republicans doing grunt work on a San Fernando Valley congressional campaign. Born watched his friend alienate peers with sordid behavior that undercut what he said was Ballreich’s uncanny “power of persuasion.” Born and others from that era perceived a guy with an outsized personality with difficulty tapping the brakes of self-control when it came to laying wagers, hitting on attractive females, or barroom brawling.
“That was part of the problem: [Steve] could manipulate people so well,” said Born, a science teacher. “He remembered everybody’s name. He could get people to do things and work hard on campaigns, 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 legal will that he had drafted. It was strange, foreboding, and uncharacteristic. “Here was someone who didn’t plan things out,” she said. “Common sense would make you question why he was concerned about not being around.”
By fall of ‘91, the pair had started to warm up again romantically. He was sanguine about his future, telling Hartman that he wanted to “toss his hat in the political ring” a final time without specifying which race. Simultaneously, he prodded her to repay the $1,000 that he had lent her that summer, phrasing the money “imperative” for him to recoup. His last communication with her was contained in an amusing Halloween card that he mailed. Her final words to him were a phone message that went unreturned. She left it on November 14th at 6:51 p.m., roughly ninety minutes before his murderer aimed that shotgun at him. “I was in despair, beyond despair with the news,” Hartman said. “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.”
Hartman said she spoke to the police several times trying to help them apprehend the killer. Another longtime friend, who asked that their name be withheld out of safety concerns, joined the effort to winnow down suspects. This friend sent detectives a detailed, nine-page memo listing Ballreich’s friends, associates, and lovers, theorizing who might have wanted get payback on him and why. The memo, a copy of which the Pasadena Weekly has obtained, points most strongly at two women with whom he had been involved. (The Weekly does not divulge the names of people if they have not been arrested or sentenced for a crime.)
Ballreich had met one of the women when he was a twenty-something mayor and she was a petite, attractive teenager from a local high school. They dated periodically and often brazenly. The illicit relationship ignited doubts about Ballreich’s character among his older Council peers. “He screwed himself up at an early age with drinking, gambling, liking young girls,” said Barbara Messina, a former councilwoman and current Alhambra School Board member. “He had too much too soon and couldn’t handle it. [But] he’d brought the community together and started Project Pride. He could’ve charmed a snake out of a tree.”
RED FLAGS
Or, alternatively, invited vipers into his nest after he had returned home from Arkansas. According to his friend’s memo, this younger woman later studied the cello at USC, but never finished because of drug problems. She eventually married and moved to the New York area. Despite that separation, she and Ballreich continued their love affair when she visited the West Coast. Their favored hook-up spot was at a Best Western motel in Arcadia near the Santa Anita racetrack, the memo said.
In January 1989, this woman’s husband allegedly threatened to kill Ballreich if he persisted with the tryst. Ballreich, worried enough to interview bodyguards, told the friend who penned 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 despite [the] fact that she, herself, continued to be married,” the memo read. “Violently jealous…[Steve] described his continuing concern for her welfare as his ‘weakness’…”
Ballreich, Hartman said, never confided in her about any threat, but she knew about the “obsessed” cellist. A few years earlier, when she and Ballreich were still on platonic terms, she had 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. ’”
When detectives questioned this woman about her whereabouts and activities the day Ballreich died, she warned them that the next time they contacted her she would have a lawyer represent her, Hartman was told. “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.”
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