Annals of the Crime

By Ray Kennedy

THE ONION FIELD by JOSEPH WAMBAUGH 427 pages. Delacorte. $8.95.

As Detective Sergeant Joe Wambaugh revealed in two bestselling novels, The New Centurions and The Blue Knight, the life of a Los Angeles police officer is tough. Now it is even tougher for Wambaugh, the celebrity cop. Prisoners keep asking for his autograph. The guys at the precinct are forever drilling him about which character in what book is actually who in real life. That is perhaps one reason why Wambaugh this time chose a "factual novel" -real names and all -in the manner of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

The Onion Field is the anatomy of an infamous 1963 Los Angeles cop killing. The facts are arresting enough: Gregory Powell, an ex-con, and Jimmy Smith, a gun-shy black junkie looking for a fast buck and a quick escape from his "batty" accomplice, wheeled off on a stickup spree -and kept getting lost somewhere among the freeways. This oddest of couples -Powell wearing a joke-shop disguise, Smith petrified that the pistol stuck in his belt might go off and destroy his manhood -made one U-turn too many and were stopped by a pair of plainclothesmen.

Caught off guard by the panicky suspects, Detectives Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger were disarmed and taken at gunpoint to a desolate onion field and shot. Campbell, a strapping exMarine, died almost instantly. Hettinger escaped. But he suffered a more lingering fate thereafter. Overcome with remorse and scorned by police brass for not putting up more of a fight ("If shot," the entire department was reminded at a roll call, "all wounds are not fatal"), he deteriorated into a haunted, hollow-eyed hulk who only now, ten years later, seems on the mend.

Hettinger's decline, Wambaugh suggests, parallels the erosion of justice in a case that dragged through the courts for more than seven years after the killers were finally caught. Mowed by technicalities and changes in the laws of admissible evidence, their trial amassed 45,000 pages of transcript, the longest in California court history. Wambaugh's narrative tends to plod whenever he plays the tireless gumshoe, hauling in facts that are, in the clarion cry of the myriad lawyers on the case, irrelevant and immaterial.

Detective Wambaugh is thorough. But he leaves, in fact, few clues as to his prime motive for re-creating what he calls "the most maddening case of any detective's life." One clue is buried midway in the book when Wambaugh tells of a certain "young vice officer" who strongly opposes the department's do-or-die dictum on survival as suicidal. However, that anonymous cop, who undoubtedly is Wambaugh, refuses to challenge his superiors at the time because "he lacked that kind of courage and he knew it." Now, with the courage of a rich cop who stays on the beat only for "kicks," Wambaugh apparently has written a book to clear his own conscience as well as to help a tormented fellow officer.

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