Former owner of Atherton estate with buried Mercedes collected $87,000 in insurance for it, DA says – The Mercury News
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When a neighbor heard that a Mercedes Benz was unearthed last week in the backyard of a 12,000 square-foot Atherton mansion, and the former owner had once been caught up in an insurance scam to sink his million-dollar yacht off the Golden Gate years earlier, she speculated that he buried the car for insurance money, too.
Turns out, she may be right.
Not only did Johnny Bocktune Lew, a man with a nefarious past of murder and fraud before he died in 2015, report the car stolen in 1992 from the Stanford Shopping Center, but he collected $87,000 from insurance for it, San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said Monday. The convertible Mercedes Benz was nearly new, he said.
But that still doesn’t explain why cadaver dogs continued to pick up on the scent of human blood or bones over the weekend after the Mercedes was towed away from the nearly two-acre estate on Stockbridge Avenue. Investigators found no signs of human remains while excavating the car buried with the top down and loaded with bags of cement. So what’s behind the scent?
“It’s going to be very disappointing if our investigators somehow don’t come up with an answer here. The crime lab is going to be key,” Wagstaffe told the Bay Area News Group.
The case of the buried Mercedes has all the elements of a true crime novel, Wagstaffe said. “This book has 15 chapters in it and we’ve only got two chapters. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get the other chapters, but I sure hope we do because it is an interesting story.”
When landscape crews first struck the buried Mercedes last Thursday while doing work for the home’s new owners, the discovery made international news, drew throngs of reporters as well as curious neighbors shocked that something so intriguing and possibly dastardly would happen behind the high walls that line so many Atherton streets and hide so many mansions. This is the tony town where the tech elite and sports legends raise their families and host charitable events, after all.
After crews towed the car away on Saturday and used “ground penetrating radar” to examine beneath the 5-foot hole on Sunday, they still didn’t find anything. But cadaver dogs continued to hit on the smell of human remains throughout the weekend.
The lack of a body doesn’t mean there wasn’t a crime, Wagstaffe said. “For all I know, he might have killed somebody and disposed of the body. But why wouldn’t you then get rid of the car somewhere else? It’s strange.”
Wagstaffe said he had received emails over the weekend suggesting Atherton police and county investigators give up on the case.
Lew sold the property in 2014 and died in the state of Washington in 2015. He was 77, and had not been involved with law enforcement since his sunken yacht scheme failed in the late 1990s, Wagstaffe said.
“The guy’s dead. There’s nothing to it, move on,” Wagstaffe said the emails suggested. “I ignored them.”
While one cadaver dog might make a mistake, “with multiple dogs, it seems unusual,” he said. “So I’m looking forward to seeing if they find any trace DNA or blood or anything like that around the car or with the concrete that’s in there.”
Besides, he said, the simple story of insurance fraud doesn’t add up.
The Mercedes was no more than a year or so old when Lew reported it stolen in 1992, Wagstaffe said. If he collected from insurance the amount he paid for it, “what have you gained?” he asked.
“That makes no sense to me whatsoever, unless he somehow purchased it with something phony,” he said.
Lew purchased the nearly two-acre flag lot with the newly-built French-style mansion just off Stockbridge Avenue in 1990, said Nancy Goldcamp, an agent with Coldwell Banker who told the Bay Area News Group on Monday that she first listed the home in January 1990 for $3.9 million.
She remembers Johnny Lew and his wife visiting an open house, but they didn’t buy it until after her listing had expired. The couple bought it directly from the builder later that year, she said.
“It wasn’t landscaped hardly at all,” Goldcamp said. “I think it maybe had a patio.”
A neighbor said that she had complained about “all that digging” going on at the property. The property changed hands twice more, most recently selling for $15 million in 2020. The new owners are building a granny unit and re-landscaping the backyard, which led to the subterranean discovery.
By the time Lew bought the house in 1990, he had already served time behind bars for murder.
In the 1960s, Lew was convicted of second degree murder in the shooting death of his girlfriend in Los Angeles – a conviction that was overturned after problems surfaced with evidence. In the 1970s, he served a short sentence on two counts of attempted murder, and in 1999 was charged with insurance fraud after paying what turned out to be undercover agents $50,000 in cash and jewelry to sink his yacht. At that time, according to court documents at the time, he said he was connected to a mob and had threatened to kill anyone who revealed his plot.
Is it any wonder that authorities are reluctant to give up on the investigation?
For a county that is often shadowed by bigger news stories in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, San Mateo has dealt with four cases this year that have drawn national attention.
In February, boxing legend Mike Tyson punched out a fellow passenger on a flight that landed at San Francisco International Airport. In September, a man was arrested in San Carlos for beheading his girlfriend with a samurai sword, and later that month, the district attorney’s office declined to file criminal charges in a case involving a Woodside man upset that he didn’t receive the Batmobile he had ordered for more than $200,000.
Now, the mystery of the buried Mercedes.
“We may not have the crime like the other counties around us,” Wagstaffe said. “But we’ll outdo them every day of the week in weird cases.”
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