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- Herausgeber: Next Chapter
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Both books in OJ Modjeska's true crime series, 'Murder By Increments', now in one volume!
A City Owned: This true story follows the investigation of the worst case of serial sex homicide in American history. As naked, strangled bodies of women begin to appear on suburban roads and freeways, police suspect the perpetrator may be one of their own. When an arrest is made in the strangling murders of two co-eds, investigators are led down a dark journey through the mazes of the human mind to unlock the door to justice.
Killing Cousins: The second book in the Murder by Increments series delves into the investigation of a mysterious and confounding serial killer. Los Angeles investigators are left empty-handed after a two-year search, but a seemingly unrelated arrest across state lines leads to shocking revelations about the suspect's abusive childhood and possible involvement in a separate string of killings in Rochester, New York. The book explores whether the suspect truly had multiple personalities or was a cunning sociopath. By the end, readers are left to make up their own minds about the enigmatic killer.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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MURDER BY INCREMENTS
The Complete Series
OJ MODJESKA
Contents
A City Owned
Foreword
I. Panic
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
II. A City Owned
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
III. Fresh Ground
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Killing Cousins
I. Bitter Soil
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
II. California Dreaming
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
III. The House Of Mirrors
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
IV. The Confession
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
V. An Ace In The Hole
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
VI. The Burning Lamp
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Postscript
About the Author
Copyright (C) 2023 O.J. Modjeska
Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter
Published 2023 by Next Chapter
Cover art by CoverMint
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.
A City Owned
MURDER BY INCREMENTS BOOK 1
In these caves I've dwelled for long
The lust for blood keeps me strong
Fly at dusk, land at dawn
Evil and darkness I bring upon
It makes no difference in my eyes
If I slay for right or wrong
Self-inflicted are their cries
In the graveyards they belong
—The Circle of Evil by Atahan Tolunay
Foreword
The criminal case dating from the late seventies which is the subject of this text is well-known, arguably even notorious. The perpetrators are familiar faces from the serial killer hall of fame. Nonetheless, I have deliberately omitted direct mention of them, or the popular name of the landmark case with which they are associated, until well into the narrative.
The reason for this will become clear to the reader in time. The celebrity of the murderers concerned should not detract from the fact that many significant details of the case are unknown, or have been forgotten—and recalling those facts from the vantage point of the present casts our understanding of the events in a rather new light. Indeed, journeying through this tale without any assumptions may deliver an experience far more contemporary and familiar than one otherwise might be expecting.
I wrote Murder by Increments after coming across some of the more obscure details of the case during studies for my criminology accreditation. At the time, I was stunned by the fact that—despite thinking I already knew what the case was about—I actually knew very little, and the facts I was learning brought to mind many of the horrors and sufferings that seem to be occurring with greater frequency in our present world.
As vile as the actions of the perpetrators were, almost as shocking were many of the responses of the police, the courts, and the psychiatrists to whom justice was entrusted. The criminal figures at the center of the story, in my view, are not its most arresting feature; instead, they were catalysts that through their actions revealed the frailties of human nature, and the outlines of a society tormented by itself. The suffering continues.
Panic
Chapter1
This story begins in a vast and pulsing metropolis, the central districts of which are today noted for cleanliness, even blandness. It is a world of high-rise glass and steel, of functional if dull design. With its collection of music stores, the Rock Walk featuring concrete handprints of rock 'n' roll luminaries, and the historic Sunset Grill made famous by the Don Henley song of the same name, it presents a thoroughly digestible version of hip to the many tourists who flock to the city every year. The principle attractions are dining, shopping and scanning the surrounds for a celebrity or a dog in a tote bag. Nobody worries about visiting at night. It does not have time for crime, or squalor. This is no stomping ground for the marginal and deviant. Those folk have mostly moved on—to somewhere, anywhere, some other place; it doesn't matter.
Twenty odd years ago, Hugh Grant was very publicly arrested after receiving a blowjob from streetwalker Divine Brown in the front of his BMW. That was just before the big clean-up: large swathes of Hollywood were commercialized and purged of “undesirables”. But native Los Angelenos who have lived in the city their whole lives will tell you the late seventies and eighties gave us Hollywood at its grotty worst.
Back then, the entire stretch of Sunset between Gardner and Western Avenue was a teeming sexual marketplace. Hollywood's east side thronged with pushers, panderers, bums and runaways. A porn cinema stood on the site of every old theatre. The detritus of the failed counterculture, drug casualties in bandannas and flared denim, migrated south from Haight Ashbury, their ideals dying gracelessly in the salty marinade of sex and drugs for profit. It was an interstitial time and place; the glamor and the production houses had gone elsewhere, the future and its juggernaut of cleansing commercial interests had not yet arrived, and in the empty space garbage collected in a steamy pile.
Hollywood circa 1977, when this story begins, was home of the desperate and damned. Any night or day of the week, cars would cruise the Boulevard, just slow enough for their occupants to size up the human wares lining the grubby pavements. The war between the cops and prostitutes simmered night after night, occasionally boiling over, then cooling off again. Right next to the Rocky and Bullwinkle statue on Sunset the city line dividing West Hollywood from the City of Los Angeles runs right through the strip. If a Hollywood cop car passed through, the women would move over to the West Hollywood side; if it was a sheriff's car they saw, they would move to the LA side. Most women preferred that side. The sheriffs were known to line the girls up against their vehicles and have them place their hands on the hood, then rap them over the knuckles with their metal flashlights.
Hollywood girls made dodging the cops into an art form. Most knew, for instance, that vice officers had Sunday and Monday off, so those were good nights to work. Some were known to call in at the station and if there was no answer, out they went on the job.
Sometimes though, no matter how clever you were, what precautions you took, you were going to get got.
The cops could go undercover, and pretend to be johns offering a job. Then, to make matters more confusing, civilian men posing as undercover police officers was oddly not an unusual situation.
Maybe it was just a sign of the times, the perversity of the modern world, but there was another kind of craze in town apart from disco dancing. In its basic form it appeared as guys screeching down Sunset, fake sirens attached to their vehicles, screaming abuse at the hussies. Scratching the surface there was something larger and more complex going on; something approximating a subculture. The visibility of trade in fake police paraphernalia and the numbers of men who drove cars made deliberately to look like cop vehicles pointed to the existence of a class of police buffs of various shades. Markets and swap meets sold fake badges, sirens, handcuffs, cop-style ID wallets and batons. There was also a black trade in the “real” things that had been misappropriated from the force, which could be acquired for a much higher price.
Some of these “buffs” were just young guys who liked to acquire an old police vehicle for its speed and good handling. Others took things more seriously. These were men who liked to stalk crime scenes and pretend they had some legitimate business being there. They would install scanners in their cars and listen in on police calls. They might enjoy stopping motorists and hassling them about their inappropriate driving. Or they enjoyed harassing and intimidating prostitutes, pretending to offer a job and then flipping a badge just to see the look on the lady's face.
Their motivations varied. Some just did it for a laugh. Some were embittered police rejects. Some felt somehow impotent in their lives and enjoyed the feeling of authority that passing themselves off as a cop gave them.
The problem was you couldn't tell who was who. Many were perfectly harmless; some were dangerous beyond a woman's darkest imagining.
* * *
Tall, black and leggy, Yolanda took in as much as three-hundred dollars a night—in seventies money, a small fortune. After dropping out of high school she had spent a while waiting tables and washing dishes, doing what she was supposed to, respectable work for those with limited prospects. She barely made enough money to feed herself and her kid. Some of Yolanda's friends were hooking. She tried it, and handed in her notice at the restaurant shortly after. Fuck that.
Yolanda loved the money she was making on the game. She was a young woman in the prime of life, who enjoyed fashion and took pride in the way she dressed. She liked the things the good money she was making on the streets bought her: fine, sexy clothes. Nice jewelry, like her turquoise ring, set in a silver leaf clasp. She was no slob. She looked high end, more like an escort than a streetwalker.
It was just a job. She didn't plan to stay in it forever—a temporary situation, she told herself. It felt good to have enough money coming in to buy what she wanted for herself and her kid. But the job had a major downside—and there were a few, like the fact that she had already been booked for soliciting and had a criminal record at twenty-two. Gradually her whole lifestyle changed, she started using and moved in with a local pusher, and then the kid went to live with her grandmother. So she had become separated from her daughter, who had been the reason for going on the game in the first place.
On the night of 17 October 1977 these things were playing on her mind as she stepped out and headed to her beat. She wasn't feeling it and she missed her kid. In no kind of mood, she just wanted to get out there, do it, get her money and go home again.
She met her pimp along Sunset and he must have picked up her lack of enthusiasm, because he told her to haul ass and get out there before he got mad. He watched her walk off eastbound towards the intersection of Sunset and Detroit.
Ronald LaMieux ran an organ retailer in the music district of Sunset, near that same intersection. On the evening of 17 October, he and a colleague stayed late working to deadline on some auditing. At some point he was distracted by the sounds of shouting outside. He looked out the windows and saw what appeared to be a vice arrest of a tall, black prostitute happening on the street right out the front of his store. A man with dark hair and a mustache was waving a badge at the young lady and yelling.
LaMieux saw the man handcuff the woman and put her in the back of the vehicle. There was another man sitting in front in the driver's seat. Vice arrests of streetwalkers were common in that area of Sunset, and LaMieux didn't think much of it, except that the arresting officer seemed to have an unnecessarily aggressive manner.
Yolanda, sitting in handcuffs in the back of the car, was cursing her luck. Getting written up again was the last thing she needed. The cop who had arrested her, a young guy with a mustache and acne scars on his neck, told her they were going to take her down to the station, and then he had gotten into the backseat and was sitting next to her, which she thought was a bit odd. But it wasn't until she stared a little harder at the man driving the vehicle that she first sensed that something weird was going on.
She realized she knew the driver, or at least, she had met him before. He was older than the other one, with a big, hooked nose and bushy black hair, streaked with grey. Rather ugly, really. But there was something about him, Yolanda thought. She had thought so that day she first saw him. She couldn't make out his whole face, only his profile, but she was positive this was the same guy.
A few weeks earlier she had gone with her friend Deborah on an errand to see this man at his shop on Colorado Street in Glendale. He was an auto upholsterer. The place was full of foam and reels of thread and there was a sewing machine at a workbench. There were some very flash cars parked in the garage, a Merc and a Cadillac limo. The man had boasted that Frank Sinatra was one of his clients.
A face kind of like oily old leather, and that big nose—and yet Yolanda had felt strangely drawn to him. He had spoken with a soft voice, smiled in a barely-there way that just crinkled the corners of his eyes, and exuded an aura of unforced confidence. During their conversation she found herself mentioning that she could usually be found on Sunset around Highland.
Yolanda couldn't get the full details out of her friend, but she thought Deborah was selling the guy a trick list, a dossier of warm leads on johns. So he was an auto upholsterer and maybe a part-time pimp. And now here he was, a cop. This was when Yolanda started to think something was wrong.
—What's going on? You guys aren't cops are you?
The younger guy, next to her in the back seat, gave her a sharp look.
She kicked the back of the driver's seat with her high-heel.
—Hey! I know you. I've seen you before. You ain't a cop. Where are you taking me?
The driver turned briefly, and Yolanda saw his eyes. It was definitely the same guy; but his eyes were so different to the day she had spoken to him at his shop. The irises black, floating in the whites. Wordlessly they chastised her; for kicking the back of the seat, maybe just for existing. He looked angry as shit.
Shut up, the younger guy said.
And then it happened, so quickly that Yolanda didn't even see it coming; his fist landing hard on the side of her face.
And then she knew that something was really, really wrong.
These guys weren't officers, she didn't know who or what they were, but this was some game, some kind of bad trip, and she was going to hurt, she was going to get messed up real bad.
Chapter2
On the morning of 18 October 1977 a group of LAPD officers stood near the entrance to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, where Hollywood greats rest in themed divisions called Inspiration Slope, Slumberland, Sweet Memories and Dawn of Tomorrow, surrounded by replica Michelangelo statues. Its founder, San Francisco businessman Dr. Hubert Eaton, thought normal cemeteries were ugly and depressing, and wanted to create one with a more optimistic vibe, something more in line with the needs of Hollywood. Tacky or not, Humphrey Bogart, Walt Disney, Errol Flynn and more recently Michael Jackson have all paid vast sums to be buried there.
The cause of this gathering of officers of the law was the naked, lifeless body of a young woman laying on a grass strip by the side of Forest Lawn Memorial Drive.
Someone floated the theory that the killer was making some kind of ironic statement by leaving her there. Certainly her resting place, and the apparent manner of her passing, could not be more in contrast with the grandiose vision of death behind the gates. Completely bare, face-down, the rough splay of her legs and the way her arms jutted out at sharp, unnatural angles, seemed to suggest she had been—quite literally—dumped on the ground.
Above them the drone of cars whizzing by on the Ventura Freeway bled into the gentle hum of insects. A few feet from the body, a “no loitering” sign rose up out of the dirt.
After examining the ground around, the detectives came to a different conclusion. They stood at the top of the slope and followed it down to where she lay with their eyes. Disturbance to the grass and shrubs seemed to suggest the body had been thrown from a vehicle up on the freeway. It had rolled down the slope, coming to rest near the side of the road. The location wasn't important; it was simply where she had landed after being thrown from a car, like the wrapper of a McDonald's cheeseburger.
There was only one thing left on the body: a torn rag around her neck, possibly from her own clothing, the same that she had obviously been strangled with. Turning her over, the officers immediately saw the deep indented rings around her throat: clear, sharp lines telling of a killer who had used great force, and a death of extreme suffering. The eyes were florid with petechiae, broken blood vessels.
Who was she? Where had she come from? They had so little go on. Any clothing, jewelry, or possessions that might help identify her, that may gather fragments to connect her to her killer, had been stripped away. She was like a baby exposed on a hill. She could have been anyone, from anywhere. And if she had been dumped from the freeway, they noted, she might not have even been from Los Angeles, let alone the neighborhood in which they were standing.
A tossed body always presents difficulties. A body left at the crime scene almost always has something on it or near it to connect it to the killer. In this situation there was nothing.
The coroner's investigator checked for the approximate time of death by taking the ground temperature, then inserting a probe into the body in order to gauge the temperature of the liver. After death, the body temperature falls towards the temperature of the surroundings at a rate of about one-and-a-half degrees per hour. The detectives estimated that this young woman had died late the evening before, probably between ten o'clock and midnight.
They followed the usual procedure, dividing the area into a grid that was painstakingly swept for evidence. But the officers' gut instincts had told them this search would be fruitless, and they were right. Everything that was found had been there before the body was dumped. A door-to-door in the immediate area to find out if anyone knew the victim, or had seen anything suspicious, yielded no information.
If it was her job that killed her, it was also the only thing that permitted Yolanda to be identified at all. She had a prior record of arrest for soliciting, so her fingerprints matched records held in the county's files.
Later, the autopsy would find semen traces that came from two different men inside the body. Obviously it could not be determined that even one of these deposits had come from the same individual that killed her. According to analysis of the samples however, one of the men was what is known as a “non-secretor”, that is, a person whose blood type cannot be determined from seminal fluid.
The officers didn't put much thought into considering the implications of these findings, or any others from the case. Once the mystery of Yolanda's identity was solved, they lost all interest.
Prostitutes turned up dead in Los Angeles all the time. As it was, there were too many homicides to solve already. The gang wars were in ascension and the decade was rolling towards an end which would see Los Angeles unofficially declared the murder capital of the world, and the morgues several days behind in processing bodies.
As for whores, murder was a collateral risk of the profession—a john gets too rough, there's a conflict over payment, and next thing you know, bam: dead. The common-sense view was that if they wanted to stay safe, they shouldn't have been doing it in the first place.
Case unofficially closed.
The wisdom of devoting little to no police resources to the murder of prostitutes of course rested on the assumption that men who killed whores probably weren't a threat to the mainstream community.
* * *
Yolanda's murder was never reported, so the first her friend Lois heard of it was when some of her girls, wide eyed and trembling, told her that Yolanda had been found strangled to death outside the cemetery next to the Ventura Freeway.
Lois considered them her girls in the sense that they were both her charges and her subjects. She was a sex trafficking researcher, and also ran CAT, the California Trollops Association, an advocacy organization that provided social programs and legal assistance for prostitutes.
She was an oddity in Hollywood, wandering around with her pen and notebook, observing the local life as if it were native fauna. At least, she began that way. In 1976 Lee enrolled in a PhD program in sociology, and she was preparing her dissertation focusing on street prostitution in Los Angeles.
When she began, her path forward seemed clear. She would submit to the requirements of her discipline, remain neutral and scientific, gather data for the benefit of various agencies, document the subculture, write up the results.
As time passed, things got murky. She was getting too close to her subjects. Lee began to ask herself if her future lay in research or advocacy.
For her, the streetwalkers of Hollywood were not just prostitutes, but flesh and blood women. She grew to know them and love them like you would a sister, a mother or a friend. And the closer she drew, and the more they let her into their world, the angrier she got on their behalf. There was no justice at all for the women when they were subjected to violence and even death at the hands of johns and pimps. That anger spilled over again when Yolanda was killed, and the police showed little to no interest in finding out who was responsible.
Lee thought Yolanda's murderer might have been a pimp. Then again, if that was the case, there was probably some other motive. What had happened to Yolanda was so savage, so very brutal. Prostitutes were certainly casualties of pimp wars in Los Angeles, but it was more likely that they would get roughed up or have a couple of bones broken to send a message that it was time to move to another beat. Killing them was excessive and didn't really make sense. The girls were product, a source of livelihood. Even if the product belonged to someone else, destroying it was kind of an egregious transgression of professional ethics, and inviting more trouble than it was worth.
Even if the police didn't care who killed Yolanda, Lee certainly did. She didn't want any more women hurt or killed by the mystery perp. Deciding to take positive action, she went to talk with a dick she knew in the LAPD.
The officer was polite but firm.
—Miss Lee, we are snowed under here! This case can't be given higher priority than all the other homicides we're dealing with.
Lois curled her lip at the officer. She knew what that meant. That was just code for “we aren't interested in investigating.”
It was always the same: the brutality and harassment the cops inflicted on the girls—tolerated without question up above—was bad enough. When crimes were perpetrated against prostitutes, they just didn't care. The prostitute was a criminal, not a victim.
Lois knew it wouldn't occur to them that these women usually started on the game when they were no older than their own daughters, that many of them had been raped and beaten by their own fathers, so it was a good deal, really—an improvement in their fortunes—to be compensated. Or, as she put it, they didn't have to lay in the bed and wait for daddy to come in anymore, they could take control of the sexual abuse and be paid for it.
She tried badgering the detective a bit longer, but he stonewalled her and she slunk away, stewing in cynicism and resentment.
The police weren't inclined to be helpful to her anyway. She had been researching thousands of police reports filed against prostitutes which were resulting in court challenges against the LAPD. The suits were for not arresting the male customers who paid the prostitutes, and focusing their efforts largely on women. The standard police approach to prostitution in the seventies—which would persist, astonishingly, for the next four decades—consisted almost solely of making street-level arrests of prostitutes, chucking them in the slammer overnight, and adding another misdemeanor to their record. The johns, even if occasionally caught and embarrassed, rarely encountered any real penalties, and pimps were barely ever caught and prosecuted.
Lee's legal challenges to the police were certainly radical for the time—but mostly, they were a nuisance. The LAPD thought she was a pain in the ass.
Chapter3
30 October 1977 was an ordinary night at the Fish n' Chips, a humble café famed deservedly or not for authentic British style fast food. Gathered around one scratched table was a collection of the usual low-hanging Hollywood riff raff, drinking coffee and idly swapping tales of woe.
Youngblood had had a bad day, but maybe no worse than usual. He woke late, and had managed to get into a fight before his first meal. This clown that owed him money had been blowing him off for weeks with lame excuses, so he had no compunctions about throwing down and destroying the guy's elbow.
That had provided a momentary release of tension, but did not solve the immediate problem of his lack of funds, so Youngblood was still ticked off about it hours later. He didn't have a profession as such. He was more the take-what-was-going type. If asked, he described himself as a disc jockey or a bounty hunter. If jobs were coming his way, they were usually in that line of work. But he had been floating all over America, following his whim, sometimes a woman, sometimes a job. He landed in Los Angeles, and lately, he hadn't had much work, or much money.
He bought Judy Miller a coffee anyway. At fifteen years of age, five-feet-two inches and only eighty pounds, he feared she might disappear altogether if she didn't get something to eat or drink.
Judy wouldn't have called herself a prostitute. Turning a trick was something she did occasionally for food or a few dollars. It was a matter of survival, not livelihood. If guys didn't have money to pay her, she often gave it away for free. The Hollywood of the late 1970s was still caught up in the free love philosophy of the hippie era. Only now it had taken on a grubby, less elevated tenor.
On the other hand, Judy was lonely, and sometimes she just wanted to feel close to someone. There was nothing in her past to suggest she was entitled to any form of security or any sense of belonging. Judy's family were dirt poor and couldn't afford the luxury of worrying about a kid that was almost an adult. She ditched school, ran away, and like so many others before her, was seduced by Hollywood's false promises. She didn't find money, fame or even a job. What she did find was people she could relate to, people like herself, people as lost and damaged as she was.
Judy's life was shit. This was actually the best she'd ever had it.
So when Youngblood suggested he might fancy a roll in the hay, even if he couldn't pay her, she went happily with him back to his rundown hotel, The Gilbert on Wilcox.
Afterwards, he felt bad. Not guilty in the sense that he had done something wrong, but because Judy really needed money. She needed food. She was barely surviving. It was brought home to him as he watched her dress, counting the ribs in her back. She didn't even have a full set of underwear. He threw a bra at her; an old girlfriend had left it behind.
Judy was a dolorous, plain girl, with lank red hair and a long, thin face that only accented the enormous size of her eyes. She was not one he would follow across the country, but he cared for her in his way. Youngblood told Judy he would take her out for a bite to eat.
The two ambled down Sunset, a mismatched pair, her so diminutive, he tall and broad, declaiming his hard edges in his leather vest and greasy blonde ponytail. In Carney's Diner, a restaurant converted from a rail car on Sunset, Judy demolished a hot dog.
—I gotta find a john, she said.
—Are ya sure? I'll get you another one. It's good huh?
Judy looked down and pursed her lips.
—I gotta go. I gotta find a john.
Youngblood's mouth was full of his own hotdog. He put his hands up in a silent gesture of defeat. Judy walked out.
From the diner, he watched her hovering at a spot in the parking lot. He felt sorry for her, just standing there alone in the dark, so small and frail, like the wind would blow her away at any moment.
But it wasn't long until somebody came. Youngblood saw him through the window of the big dark blue car; a guy with bushy hair and a big nose. He was dark-eyed, olive skinned. Maybe Puerto Rican, maybe Italian.
Judy talked to the guy through the window for a while, then walked around to the passenger side and got in the car. Youngblood watched as it motored away down Sunset, turned south and disappeared down the hill.
He felt better after that. He wiped the crumbs from the hotdog off his stubble and went home, and didn't think about Judy again for a while.
* * *
On the morning of Halloween, 31 October, Chuck Koehn walked out the front door of his home on Alta Terrace Drive in La Crescenta, in the hills north of Glendale, and got into his car. Koehn's bracing daily routine saw him leave home at four each morning to work at his electrical shop. He would return home to shower and eat breakfast at about six o'clock, before resuming the day's work.
As Koehn pulled out from the curb and quietly made his way down the street, it was still pitch dark. Had it been lighter, he might have seen the dead girl lying naked on a flowerbed near the curb, outside 2833 Alta Terrace Drive. As it was, she lay undisturbed until his return at six, when the dawn light illuminated a pale, unmistakeably human form by the side of the road.
Koehn stopped his car and refocused his eyes, making sure he was seeing what he thought he was.
It was real. A tiny, naked girl splayed on the ground in the shrubs, right by the side of the road.
Koehn did not yet know that the girl was dead. Passed out drunk? An OD victim? Either way it was utterly surreal. La Crescenta was a middle-class, family neighborhood on the northeast border of the county, far from the vice and degeneration that had gripped central Los Angeles in recent years. People moved there to get away from stuff like this.
He got out of his car and walked over to take a closer look. His stomach lurched as he sighted the deep rings around her neck, the blue tinge of her skin.
This girl was dead. This girl had been murdered.
With hands that shook clumsily over the instruments, Koehn parked his car and went around to the back yard of his house where he retrieved a tarpaulin, returned to the body site, and threw it over the dead girl.
* * *
A seasoned homicide detective with the Sherriff's Department headed a team out to La Crescenta after a caller dialled into the station, blathering about a naked dead girl by the side of a suburban road.
The guy was real worked up.
—She's just layin' there, he mumbled, his voice cracking. Just a few yards from my house!
Frank had been working homicide for several years, after transferring from major violations. He had done his penance to get where he was, completing the compulsory stint as a corrections officer assigned to all aspiring sheriffs, then landing a rookie post at the East Los Angeles station—the toughest in LA—and eventually rising to the rank of sergeant with the narcotics division at East Los Angeles.
But what he had always really wanted to be was a homicide detective. That, to him, was where the real action was. The nectar of justice. Meaningful toil. And he was known as one of the best. His was a relentless, grinding sort of energy, propelled by inquisitiveness and fondness for procedure. There was nothing flash about him.
He didn't know it yet, but he was about to become the most famous homicide cop in Los Angeles.
* * *
Koehn was a regular sort of joe in Frank's estimation. He didn't throw up any red flags. Still, you couldn't really be sure these days.
—Detective Frank Salerno, he said, shaking Koehn's hand. You put this here?
He stared down at the tarp covering an indistinct mass on the ground.
—Yeah, said Koehn, all twitchy; what was I supposed to do? There are women and kids around here, kids getting up for school.
—It's okay …
Privately, Salerno was disappointed. By covering the body with the tarp, Koehn had potentially contaminated the crime scene. But Salerno could certainly understand him doing so. The guy was freaked out. This was far outside the realm of his experience.
Nice guy, family guy. His first instinct upon seeing the body had been to get it out of sight.
Frank gingerly lifted the tarp, trying to prevent the loss of any evidence. When he looked down at the victim, he knew right away that this was not a normal murder, whatever that meant. Not a murder committed in service of some other aim, or a means to an end. This was a killing in which the experience itself was likely part of the motive.
The strangulation marks that ringed her neck were deep and clear, showing great force had been applied. The fact that there were several marks around her neck suggested the possibility that the killer had taken his time, allowing her to revive several times before the final extinguishment of life.
Fainter marks around her wrists and ankles suggested she had been bound or manacled for her ordeal.
Nasty way to go. Real nasty.
She couldn't have been more than sixteen years of age or much more than ninety pounds. Her legs were spread apart, knees raised slightly, her arms bent out at an angle and her hands tucked underneath her.
The positioning of the body looked obscene, like the dead girl had been readied for intercourse.
* * *
The conclusion that the body had been lewdly posed on purpose was one reached by some members of the press who gathered on Alta Terrace Drive that morning to get the scoop on the bizarre finding of a dead, naked teenager on a suburban street. They read an obvious sexual motive into the crime scene.
Jim Mitchell, an investigative and general-assignment reporter for KFWB Radio, arrived at the scene without any previous briefing on the situation, apart from the fact that a female murder victim had been found. Mitchell—like Salerno—was about to make his mark in the world due to his involvement with a landmark case. His coverage would play a fundamental role in bringing the murders to the attention of the public.
Mitchell was well versed in covering homicides, and had seen more than a few dead bodies in his time. He stared at the dead girl, and silently mouthed the words: what the fuck. She was just lying there, naked, in a narrow parkway, surrounded by suburban houses.
There was something almost sacrificial, religious about the entire image. Looking down at the body he was struck by the way one's eyes were first drawn to her pubis, and the arms spread almost in a gesture of supplication.
He had never, in all his experience, seen anything like it.
He turned to one of the officers.
—Suppose it could be some kind of psycho?
—Uh, yeah, said the cop drily.
When Salerno looked at the positioning of the body, his mind, with its forensic conditioning, moved in a different direction. The girl looked like she had been deliberately posed like that. But it was much more likely that the body had fallen onto the ground in that position, because it had been dropped by two people: one carrying the girl by her arms, the other with his hooked under her legs. Her hands had caught under her as she hit the ground. There were no drag marks on the body, nor on the ice plant that covered the curb. This told Salerno that two individuals had dumped the body.
Something else made him think there were two people involved. A portion of the ice plant, opposite the victim's feet, had been disturbed, folded back away from the curb. Salerno thought maybe one of the men, carrying the girl's legs, had pushed the plant back with his feet.
He asked Koehn if he remembered if the ice plant had been bent like that the previous day. Koehn was confident it hadn't been. Woulda noticed that, he said. He and his neighbors were the house-proud sort.
Leaning in closer, Salerno noticed something very small on the victim's eyelid. A piece of fluff; some kind of fiber. Its significance as yet was a mystery, but in line with regular procedure, he removed it with a set of tweezers and bagged it as evidence.
Later, as he reflected on the day, he concluded that the thing that most disturbed him about the scene was what he guessed had Charles Koehn so rattled. And if it was your own neighborhood, you sure would be rattled.
Alta Terrace Drive was a cul-de-sac at one end, the other joining with La Crescenta Boulevard. Just a little higher up the hill was thickly wooded and dim, an ideal place to hide a body if you wanted to.
The killer, or killers, had made no effort to hide the body. They had wanted it to be found. They had wanted to scare people.
Chapter4
Days passed, and nobody reported the girl missing. A notice was placed in the Herald Examiner with an artist's sketch, in hopes somebody would come forward with information. Nobody did.
Meanwhile the coroner's investigation indicated that the victim had been strangled to death at around midnight, some six hours or so before she was found.
She had been raped and sodomized. Traces of an adhesive were found on the girl's face, indicating the use of a tape as a gag. All this underlined the possibility of an attack by a sexual sadist, by some kind of “psycho” on the loose, as Mitchell had put it.
But there remained the possibility that this victim, like Yolanda, was a prostitute, and the evidence of gagging and binding was part of a consensual sex game between her and a john, and the girl had been killed for unrelated reasons. Bondage was hardly an unusual request made of prostitutes. There was no sense at this time that the two cases were related, despite the similarities of MO. They were being handled by separate units. But the thinking about this case amongst detectives was, at the early stages, moving in the same direction: the victim was a street person who had fallen foul of her chosen lifestyle.
Salerno thought it likely that since nobody had come forward to assist in the identification, the victim was a runaway, one of the many drawn to Hollywood each year. Her youth and starved condition suggested the same conclusion. They arrived in an endless stream, usually escaping some sort of abusive or desperate situation at home, searching for something—fame or wealth, significance—and invariably found that nobody gave a damn about them or their problems. From there, the inevitable slide into crime, drugs, prostitution. Judy's parents may not have come forward because they were far away, in another county or even state. Perhaps they weren't looking for her. Perhaps she had no parents.
So, following his nose, Salerno went down to Hollywood Boulevard after hours, in his civvies, and began showing the artist's sketch to the locals. The kinds of people Salerno was hoping to extract information from were addicts, pushers, bikers and prostitutes: not the most forthcoming with police. A man much like Charles Koehn, a father of three boys who liked football and fishing, he didn't care to spend his free time mingling with the denizens of Hollywood, but cracking a case was all about developing trust and rapport with witnesses; so out he went, always speaking to folks respectfully, maintaining a dialed down approach. In his favour, his presentation hardly screamed “cop”. Bespectacled, with thoughtful eyes, a vaguely patrician bearing, and dressed in dorky sport casuals, he could have instead passed for a teacher or a librarian. His “witnesses” probably mistook him for a tourist who had got lost in the wrong part of town.
He kept hearing the same name: Judy. They said she was a runaway, just like he thought. A couple of them mentioned this Judy often hung out at the Fish n' Chips restaurant on the Boulevard. Salerno headed there next.
At a table in the corner sat a big meaty guy with a stringy blonde ponytail. Tattoos, denim jacket with the arms torn off. On the streets they called him Youngblood, but he gave the detective his real name: Markust Camden.
He nodded when shown the picture.
—Yeah, I seen her. Right here, a few days, maybe a week ago. What's this all about?
Salerno explained that if this was the same girl, she was dead—murdered in fact—whilst omitting as many details as possible. He wanted Markust to walk him through exactly what happened the last time he saw her.
Markust's eyes widened almost imperceptibly when he heard this news. Then he was straight back to poker face.
—Well, not much. Let's see, it was Monday. There was a group of us sitting right there at that table. I bought her a coffee. She left around nine or ten. That was it.
To Salerno, Camden seemed cagey. And he had an edge of barely concealed nervousness about him. But Frank's gut told him this was the type of witness he placed in a particular category: probably not directly involved, but not one-hundred percent truthful either.
The reason for that was Camden's eyes. They were tinged with fear, worry, maybe a kind of existential dread. This was a sad man, a feeling man. Judy's killer struck him as a very different type: someone cold, calculating. Lacking in fear.
Salerno sincerely doubted that this was the guy, but he also felt that maybe he knew more than he was telling. He gave him his card and asked him to call him if he thought of anything else.
Camden, of course, had every reason to be cagey. If Judy had been murdered that night after he had sex with her, that would probably make him a suspect. With all the dramas he had in his life, he didn't need one more.
* * *
After more evenings scouring the streets of Hollywood for information, Salerno was finally able to track down Judy Miller's parents. They were not far away; camped out, in fact, at the Hollywood Vine, a rundown hotel in the old theatre district, practically a stone's throw from the Fish n' Chips. Despite her proximity, Judy had not cared to return home, and they had apparently not cared to find her.
The family of four—Judy's mother and father, and two little boys—were living in a single room littered with spoiled food and dirty diapers. A stench of sour milk, mold and feces hung in the air.
Given that their living conditions resembled a middle-eastern war zone, Salerno was not so surprised at their impassive response to the news of their daughter's death. Mr. Miller just nodded.
A father of three boys himself, Frank could never grasp how parents could be unmoved when something so terrible happened to their child. But it was easy to be judgmental from a position of privilege. Life for the Millers was obviously easy come, easy go. Judy's absence from their lives, and now her death, meant they had one less mouth to feed.
Mr. Miller identified Judy from the coroner's pictures, which for Salerno was the only positive from the whole encounter. The identity of the victim was now known, and that part of his job was done. In truth, he hoped he would never again have to dwell again upon the wretched life and death of Judith Lynn Miller.
Salerno had reasonable cause for such optimism. No immediate connection was drawn between the earlier murder victim found near the cemetery and this one. A somewhat competitive and antagonistic atmosphere prevailed over relations between the Sheriff's Department and the LAPD, and even if they had cared to compare notes on cases, information sharing was not a strong point. Sheriff's detectives tended to look down on the LAPD officers, who did not need to submit to the same rigorous standards of training and experience. Salerno's baptism of fire working as a jail warden for his first year was the baseline requirement for all sheriffs. The LAPD resented this impugning of their status, and countered that their officers had better street nous to manage tough crime. The divide fostered by these schoolyard squabbles meant that collaboration to solve cases crossing jurisdictions was a tall order.
In any case, even if the police had recognized the links in MO between the murders, taken as a whole—amongst the many homicides perpetrated against street people—they would still have appeared to be random events. Such people tended to come to untimely and vicious ends at the very hands of the company they kept, and nothing was deemed too unusual about it.
All those assumptions, however, were about to unravel.
Chapter5
Lissa was a professional dancer, but waitressing was how she had been paying the bills while she muddled through a strange, transitional period in her life.
She had spent much of the last year feeling under the weather, and for the time being, she wasn't rehearsing or performing with the LA Knockers. They were a distinctly weird local dance troupe that matched camp, outlandish disco fashions and moves with cabaret comedy. “Comic gags and shiny glutes”, as a newspaper review called it.
Lissa had formed the group with girlfriends and fellow dancers Jennifer Stace and Yana Nirvana. They were increasingly popular at the clubs around Los Angeles, and Lissa was both proud and a little wistful watching their growing success. But dancers had to be fit and trim, and Lissa had recently developed hypoglycemia and put on weight. Adequate sleep and careful nutrition had been her priorities of late, and soon she would be starting anew, flying to San Francisco where she had been admitted to a performing arts school. All told, Los Angeles hadn't been doing it for her lately. She expected the change of scene in San Francisco and a return to meaningful pursuits would give her a much-needed boost.
On 5 November Lissa was finishing up her shift waitressing at the Healthfaire Restaurant on Vine, one of the many trendy vegetarian eateries that had sprung up around LA in recent years.
She planned on getting home quickly. In a couple of days she was catching her flight, and she still had to pack and clear out her apartment. Nothing was on her mind that night except the fact that she was dog tired, and she had a lot to do. She got into her green Beetle and drove off Vine onto Highland, turned right at Franklin, and continued on towards the Hollywood Freeway underpass.
Somewhere along Franklin she became vaguely aware that what looked like a cop car, white on the top and dark on the bottom, was travelling behind her. It was at some distance though, and these were well-worn roadways, so Lissa didn't think she was being tailed.
She turned into Argyle Avenue—and the car followed right behind her. At the junction of Dix Street, near her apartment block, she noticed the cop car flashing its beams. She pulled up and turned off the ignition.
As Lissa gathered up her handbag and some items from the car, two uniformed officers approached in the darkness. One of them fixed the glare of his flashlight on her through the driver side window, and with a slight wave of his index finger, motioned for her to roll it down.
—Police officers, ma'am. License please.
Lissa couldn't quite make out the man's face with the beam of his torch in her eyes. She squinted as she rummaged in her purse for her license, wondering what she had done to get pulled over. When she found it she gave it to the man, who now kindly averted his flashlight from her face and turned it on the license, inspecting it thoughtfully.
She now saw that he was a young man, probably in his mid-twenties. Short dark hair and a mustache. He had stereotypically handsome, if slightly sharp, features, marred only by a cluster of very visible acne scars around his neck and lower cheeks. Intensely blue eyes.
Lissa demanded to know what this was all about. She hadn't done anything wrong. She was a good driver. She was pretty sure she never ran a red light or anything like that.
But the man ignored her question entirely, as if she had never spoken at all. He just passed the license to the other one, the older man. He was rough looking, about as ugly as the other one was handsome, with a curly black shock of hair.
The older guy peered at Lissa's license under his flashlight. Then the two glanced at each other, as if exchanging some silent assent.
—Step out of the car please, said the younger one, quiet but firm.
Lissa objected. They had to tell her what the hell this was all about. This was a bunch of crap! She hadn't done anything wrong.
—We ask the questions, ma'am. But since you asked so politely, there's been some trouble over near Vine and Highland. A robbery. Your car was seen leaving the scene.
Lissa, aghast, struggled to explain: that was where she worked, she had just left her waitressing job over at the Healthfaire right now, she sure as hell didn't have anything to do with no robbery, and she was in a hurry to get home because she had a plane to catch.
The young cop pleasantly assured her that they would call her manager and straighten everything out. But in the meantime she was going to have to accompany them to the police station.
Lissa didn't see that she had much choice but to do what the cop asked. She could either stay put with them hanging outside her window all night, or get out. But something was telling her not to.
The young one told her to drop her bag on the ground, pushed her against the side of her car, and frisked her while the old cop started rifling through her bag. Now, perhaps a measure of her growing alarm, Lissa acquiescently told the men that she would happily accompany them to the station, but it wouldn't do them any good because she had nothing to tell.
—Be quiet, said the younger one. Stop making a scene. You'll wake up the neighborhood, and you're only making things worse for yourself.
His voice was low, but he was getting angry. Lissa noticed something weird about his eyes. The glittering blue of them, now, perhaps due to a deprivation of light internal or external, were black.
They bundled her into the back of their black and white “patrol car”, closed the door behind her, and nobody ever saw her alive again.
* * *
The next evening, the manager of the Healthfaire Restaurant headed in to work and opened for business as usual.
He was a little concerned when Lissa didn't arrive for the start of her shift. She was very conscientious, and would have called in if she were sick or was going to be late for some reason.
As the hours passed, with no sign of Lissa and no word from her, this mild unease grew into worry. He put a call through to Lissa's home number, which went unanswered, and then to Lissa's father, Bernard Kastin, who was listed as the emergency contact on her employment record.
Bernard thought the manager was right to be concerned. But he also questioned whether Lissa had skipped out on the job because she would be leaving LA soon anyway, even if that really was not like her. Maybe she was short on time with her preparations for San Francisco.
He decided to head over to Lissa's apartment. As he was driving to the complex, he heard a news report on the radio about the body of a young woman found in Glendale.
The woman was described as in her twenties, with long curly dark hair. A sick feeling came over Bernard. His gut told him that his daughter was dead, but his mind pushed it away. Everything would be fine, he told himself. It was just a coincidence. That girl they found, she just looked similar to his daughter, but his daughter would be alive and well when he got to the apartment.
There, the building manager buzzed Bernard in.
The bed was made. An open suitcase, partly packed for her flight to San Francisco, was on the floor. It looked like she had never been home the night before.
Now in a full-blown panic, Bernard Kastin called the Glendale Police Department and spoke with Dave O'Connor from the homicide division. He explained that he had heard a description of a body found in Glendale on the radio that sounded like his daughter, and that Lissa had gone missing. Bernard provided enough details about Lissa's physical appearance that the police thought it a reasonable likelihood that this was the girl they had found.
O'Connor brought Bernard Kastin to the morgue, where a closed-circuit camera had been set up, so identification of bodies would be less traumatic for the relatives of victims.
Bernard didn't want to look at the screen, but he did immediately, his eyes drawn there without his permission. There was Lissa. Her dark hair falling in large curls over her shoulders, the way it always did. The familiar shape of her slightly roman nose, the gentle rise of her cheeks. But her lips were a narrow pale smudge, the eyes tastefully shut so as not to betray their total lack of animation, and then, clearly, the deep dark blue rings around her neck.
So strange. Lissa, and yet not Lissa.
O'Connor didn't even need Bernard to confirm the identification. All composure deserting him, he collapsed in wracking sobs.
* * *
Lissa Kastin's body had been found by a jogger next to the golf grounds of the Chevy Chase Country Club in Glendale. The jogger's eye caught something unusual at the bottom of a ravine rolling away from the side of Chevy Chase Drive. Peering down he saw a clearly dead naked woman lying against a guy wire that marked the borders of the golf course at the bottom of the slope.
Now, a completely different police unit again would be processing the scene.
The detectives from the Glendale PD quickly formed the view that the body had most likely been dropped from Chevy Chase Drive, and had rolled downhill. There was a three-foot guard rail blocking the road from the ravine. Near the golf course fence at the bottom of the embankment there was a deep drainage ditch. Perhaps the killer, or killers, had been aiming the body into the ditch. Instead it had rolled all the way down the embankment, and came to rest against the wire. Either way, the detectives' thinking was leaning towards two individuals having been involved, due to the difficulty of hoisting that body over the three-foot guard rail.
* * *
Finally something was working in favor of authorities making the connection; appreciating the probability that this murder was not the result of an isolated incident. Lissa Kastin's murder was deemed newsworthy, and reporting in the papers was extensive. She was a “nice girl”, well-educated, from a good family, and she was found dead in staunchly middle-class Glendale, the neighborhood whose dull conservatism had inspired Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
When Salerno heard that a young woman had been found naked and strangled in a ravine off Chevy Chase Drive, his ears pricked and he decided to pay an immediate visit to the Glendale PD.
After pooling information with the Glendale detectives, he began to see some clear links to the Miller murder. Like Judy, Lissa had been found nude, and had been strangled by ligature. While Lissa had been found in Glendale, six or seven miles from where Judy had been discovered, in a sprawling city linked by the freeway system, that was actually close. Midway between the two locations was Hollywood, with further connections between the murders revealed in the fact that it appeared both girls had been abducted there.
Lissa's car was eventually found half a block away from her apartment. It was unlocked. The Glendale detectives found a key to the car's hood, but not the ignition, inside Lissa's apartment; and the apartment had been secured. Lissa had last been seen leaving the Healthfaire restaurant about nine the evening before she was found.
It was strange that Lissa's car had been found a ways from her apartment, not in the complex. It looked like she had been abducted from her car before she even made it home.
Why would she pull over before she reached her destination? Possibly because she knew her killer.
The other possibility was that the killer was someone in a position to make her pull over.
Cops, or guys posing as cops.
* * *
After visiting the site, Salerno agreed with the Glendale officers that it would have taken two men to hoist Kastin's lifeless body over the guardrail. The next step was to visit the Coroner's office and compare the bodies of Miller and Kastin. This would help either refute or confirm his suspicions that they were the work of the same perps.
Salerno was the methodical type. He had called prior and asked to have Judy and Lissa placed side by side for the visual examination. He wanted a quick visual read on any links between the MO.
