The 'Onion Field' Killing: How the Murder of 1 LAPD Officer Forever Changed American Policing

For officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, the night of March 9, 1963, began like countless others. They cruised Hollywood’s side streets in an unmarked car, the city’s neon glow flickering across their windshield as they scanned for small signs of trouble: a broken taillight, an odd plate, a driver who didn’t quite fit the setting. When they pulled over a battered Ford, there was no reason to think the stop would be anything more than a quick conversation.

Instead, it became the beginning of a tragedy that would send shockwaves far beyond Los Angeles. Within hours, one officer would be dead in a lonely onion field miles from home. The other would escape physically but carry the night’s trauma for the rest of his life. Their story, later chronicled in the book and movie The Onion Field, became a landmark in American true crime and a turning point in how officers across the country were trained to survive.

Inside the Ford were Gregory Powell, a volatile ex-convict, and Jimmy Lee Smith, a recently paroled drifter. The pair had met on Los Angeles’s Skid Row after Smith’s release from prison and paired up to pull off several liquor store holdups.

As Campbell questioned Powell, the suspect stepped out of the car pointing a revolver, spun him around, and used him as a partial shield. It happened so fast that Hettinger barely had time to react. Powell demanded Hettinger’s gun as well. Campbell, hoping to prevent immediate bloodshed, instructed his partner to hand it over. As Hettinger later said, “I didn’t want to give up my weapon, but my partner had a gun in his back. He asked me to give it up several times. I did it reluctantly.” 

It was a split-second decision that officers and police trainers would analyze for decades. Powell and Smith forced both officers into their car, with Campbell driving north out of Los Angeles through the San Fernando Valley.

Powell reportedly said they planned to release the cops, but 100 miles out of Los Angeles, they pulled over near an onion field south of Bakersfield. The officers were forced out of the car, and Powell asked if they knew what the Little Lindbergh Law was. When Campbell said he did, Powell immediately shot him in the face, and then either Powell or Smith shot Campbell four additional times. 

It’s likely that Powell believed the Little Lindbergh Law, passed in the aftermath of the 1930s kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s son, made it a capital offense to kidnap a police officer. He was wrong: Kidnapping became a capital offense only if it resulted in death or injury, whether or not the victim was a police officer. Powell’s mistaken understanding of the law likely cost Campbell his life.

Hettinger was able to flee his captors, later crediting a cloud passing in front of the moon for giving him temporary cover of darkness. He hid nearby until Powell and Smith drove off, then ran several miles to a farmhouse for help. Powell was captured a few hours later driving back toward Los Angeles, and Smith was caught the next morning.

Prosecutors laid out the kidnapping, the forced drive and Campbell’s murder in stark detail. Hettinger’s descriptions in his testimony provided a chilling account of the officers’ ordeal. Campbell and Smith were convicted in 1963 and sentenced to death, but California’s legal landscape shifted repeatedly in the years that followed. During retrials, Campell’s death penalty was upheld, while Smith was sentenced to life in prison. After California abolished the death penalty in 1972, Campbell’s sentence was also reduced to life.

Despite the protests of Hettinger, law enforcement and victims’ rights advocates, Smith was paroled in 1982. He quickly ran afoul of law enforcement again, and was in and out of prisons before his death in 2007. Powell was denied parole and died at a California medical facility in 2012.

Hettinger survived that night but faced a harrowing aftermath. The Los Angeles Police Department released a memorandum deeply criticizing Hettinger’s decision to give up his gun during the initial encounter with Campbell and Scott. He was forced to repeatedly retell his account of the night, keeping the disturbing memories ever present, and developed depression and deep guilt.

Eventually, Hettinger resigned from the force after he was caught in a series of shoplifting incidents. His decline became a cautionary tale about the mental health consequences of traumatic incidents, long before such issues were widely acknowledged within law enforcement. 

After his resignation, Hettinger worked as a gardener and was later elected to serve as a legislator on the local board of supervisors. In 1985, more than two decades after the shooting, he spoke to the California parole board considering Powell’s release about the lingering effects of his experience. 

“I still get uneasy,” he said. “I still can’t sleep very well. I can still see their faces.” 

Hettinger died in 1994.

In the months after the murder, police departments across the country began reexamining the way officers handled even the simplest encounters. Campbell’s death became a stark reminder of how quickly a routine stop could turn catastrophic, and the decisions made that night were studied intensely.

One lesson soon became foundational: An officer should never surrender a weapon, no matter the threat. From that principle came broader changes—greater emphasis on maintaining distance and control during traffic stops, stricter backup procedures, and an emerging recognition of the emotional toll such incidents could take on survivors like Hettinger.

In 1973, The Onion Field, written by former LAPD sergeant Joseph Wambaugh, was published and proved to be a groundbreaking nonfiction account that examined not only the crime but the emotional and institutional aftershocks. The book became a bestseller and helped define the modern true-crime genre, much as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood had done several years earlier.

A 1979 film adaptation starring Ted Danson, James Woods and John Savage brought the story to an even wider audience. Together, the book and film ensured that the murder and the lessons drawn from it would remain embedded in American cultural memory.

More than 60 years later, the crime continues to resonate. It is remembered as a moment when a simple traffic stop revealed the vulnerabilities of modern policing and forced departments to confront the realities of officer safety, trauma and survival.