by James Ellroy
I cashed in on serial killers myself. I consciously rejected them three novels back. They were good background fodder. They were silly literary shit from any other standpoint. I didn’t think a serial killer killed my mother and Bobbie Long. I wasn’t sure the same man offed both women. The Swarthy Man was out in public with the Blonde and my mother. His rage seemed to escalate as the night wore on. He knew Arroyo High School. He probably lived in the San Gabriel Valley. Calculating psychopaths don’t shit where they eat.
The Blonde knew the Swarthy Man. She knew he killed my mother. He probably coerced her into silence. Bobbie Long was not the Blonde. Bobbie Long was just a low-rent victim waiting to happen.
She was cheap and avaricious. She was willful. She had a bad history with men and reveled in her petty triumphs over the male gender. She had a bad fucking mouth.
Maybe she met the Swarthy Man at the track. He killed that goddamn nurse last year and his wig was still a bit loose. He took Bobbie someplace for dinner. He lured her back to his crib and promoted some pussy. Bobbie demanded payment. He balked. His wig blew all the way.
Maybe he learned from the redhead. Maybe she flipped his switch irrevocably. Maybe she drove him out of the closet and showed him that rape and consensual sex were incomplete without strangulation. Maybe he became a serial killer.
Maybe Jean and Bobbie flipped his switch the same way. Maybe he killed those two women and crawled back into some psychic black hole. Stocking strangulation was a common MO. The Swarthy Man choked my mother with a sash cord and a stocking. Bobbie Long was killed with a single ligature.
Maybe they were killed by two different men.
I stepped back from the issue. Stoner warned me not to lock into any given theory or hypothetical reconstruction.
I spent four days alone with the files. I locked myself up and focused on the reports and note slips and the pictures on my corkboards. Stoner had duplicate copies of the Long and Ellroy Blue Books. We called each other three or four times a day and discussed points of evidence and general case logic. We agreed that Jim Boss Bennett was not the Swarthy Man. He was too booze-addled and recognizably fucked up to seduce women over the course of a long evening or day at the track. Jim Boss Bennett was a stone juicehead. He chased overtly alcoholic women. He found them in rock-bottom venues. The Desert Inn was upscale by his standards. He went to beer and wine bars that served Eastside Old Tap Lager and T-Bird on the rocks. Stoner said he was probably a longtime date raper. He didn’t penetrate Margaret Telsted. He probably penetrated a dozen other women. He probably blew a few rapes from alcoholic impotence and poor strategic planning. My mother liked cheap men. She possessed egalitarian standards. Jim Boss Bennett was too raggedy-assed and pathetic for her. She dug musky male lowlife. Jim Boss Bennett ran low on musk and high on body odor. He wasn’t her type.
We discussed the two women who snitched off their ex-husbands. Woman #i was named Marian Poirier. Her pussy-hound ex was named Albert. He allegedly had affairs with Jean Ellroy and two other women at Packard-Bell Electronics.
Mrs. Poirier admitted that she had no evidence. She said her husband knew two other murdered women. She said it was “too much of a coincidence.” She didn’t name the dead women. Jack Lawton wrote her a letter and asked her to name them. Mrs. Poirier wrote back and ignored Lawton’s question. Stoner wrote the woman off. He said she sounded like a borderline fruitcake.
Woman #2 was named Shirley Ann Miller. Her ex was named Will Lenard Miller. Will allegedly killed Jean Ellroy. Will allegedly babbled, “I shouldn’t have killed her!” in his sleep one night. Will allegedly painted his two-tone Buick a few days after the snuff. Will allegedly torched a furniture warehouse in 1968.
I found a stack of notes on Will Lenard Miller. Most of them were dated 1970. I saw Charlie Guenther’s name a half-dozen times.
Guenther was Stoner’s old partner. Bill said he was living up near Sacramento. He said we should fly up and run the Miller stuff by him.
We discussed Bobbie Long and my mother. We tried to plumb a through line to connect them in life.
They worked a few miles from each other. They fled bad marriages. They were secretive and self-sufficient. They were remote and superficially outgoing.
My mother was a drunk. Bobbie gambled compulsively. Gambling bored my mother. Sex left Bobbie cold.
They never met in life. All our through lines read like speculative fiction.
I spent some time with Bobbie. I turned off the living room lights and stretched out on the couch with pictures of her and my mother. I was close to a wall switch. I could think in the dark and tap the lights to look at Bobbie and Jean.
I resented Bobbie. I didn’t want her to distract me from my mother. I held my mother’s picture to keep Bobbie in her place. Bobbie was a tangential victim.
Bobbie storms to the front of the coffee line. Bobbie gambles herself into debt and rags a friend for playing cards. Gambling was a chickenshit obsession. The big thrill was the risk of self-annihilation and the shot at transcendence through money. Sex obsession was love six times or six thousand times removed. Both compulsions mortified. Both compulsions destroyed. Gambling was always about self-abnegation and money. Sex was a stupid glandular disposition and sometimes the route to big bad love.
Jean and Bobbie were sad and lonely. Jean and Bobbie were up on the same high ledge. You could sift through all the disparate bits of data in their files and say that they were the same woman.
I didn’t believe it. Bobbie was looking to score. Jean was looking to hide and get out of herself and maybe give herself up for something weird or new or better.
Bobbie Long was not our real focus. She was a possible or probable related murder victim and a possible or probable lead on the Swarthy Man’s deteriorating psyche. There were no Long case eyewitnesses. Bobbie’s friends were mid-50-ish in 1959 and were probably all dead now. The Swarthy Man was probably dead. He was probably a hard-living bar habitué. He probably smoked. He probably drank whisky or pure grain spirits. He might have bellied up from cancer in 1982. He might be hooked up to an oxygen mask in scenic La Puente.
I sat in the dark and held the two Identi-Kit portraits. I turned on the lights and looked at them once in a while. I violated Stoner’s rule and reconstructed the Swarthy Man.
Bill saw him as a smooth-talking salesman. I saw him as a slick blue-collar guy. He did odd jobs for extra money. He worked weekend gigs out of his beat-up ’55 or ’56 Olds. He carried a toolbox in the backseat. It contained a length of sash cord.
He was 38 or 39. He liked women older than him. They knew the score on one hand and fell for cheap romance on the other. He hated them as much as he liked them. He never asked himself why this was so.
He met women in bars and nightclubs. He beat a few women up over the years. They said things or did things that got under his skin. He took a few women the hard way. He came on scary and convinced them to give it up before he took it by force. He was fastidious. He was cautious. He could turn on the charm.
He lived in the San Gabriel Valley. He liked the nightspots. He liked the construction-boom scope of the place. He daydreamed a lot. He thought about hurting women. He never asked himself why he was thinking such flat-out crazy shit.
He killed that nurse in June ’58. The Blonde kept her mouth shut. He lived scared for six weeks, six months or a year. His fear fizzled out. He chased women and fucked women and beat up women once in a blue moon.
He aged. His sex drive abated. He quit chasing, fucking and beating up women. He thought about that nurse he killed way back when. He felt no remorse. He never killed another woman. He wasn’t a raging psycho. Things never spun out of control like they did that night with the nurse.
Or:
He picked up Bobbie Long at Santa Anita. The nurse was seven months dead. He picked up a few women in the meantime. He didn’t hurt them. He figured the nurse was some freak accident.
He screwed Bobbie Long. She said something or did something. He throttled
her and dumped her body. He lived scared for a long fucking time. He was afraid of the cops and the gas chamber and afraid of himself. He lived with the fear. He grew old with it. He never killed another woman.
I called Stoner and pitched my reconstructions. He found the first one plausible and dismissed the second one. He said you don’t kill two women and just stop there. I disagreed. I told Bill he was unduly tied to cop empiricism. I said the San Gabriel Valley was this deus ex machina. The people who flocked there flocked there for unconscious reasons that superseded the conscious application of logic and made anything possible. The region defined the crime. The region was the crime. You had two sex killings and one or two sex killers eschewing standard sex-killer behavior. The region explained it all. The unconscious San Gabriel Valley migration explained every absurd and murderous act that went down there. Our job was to pinpoint three people within that migration.
Bill listened to my pitch and got specific. He said we needed to comb my mother’s file and start looking for old witnesses. We had to run DMV checks and criminal records checks. We had to evaluate the 1958 investigation. We had to trace my mother’s steps from her cradle to her grave. Homicide jobs veered off in weird directions most of the time. We had to stay on top of our information and always stand ready to jump.
I said I was ready now.
Bill told me to turn off the lights and go back to work.
21
Ward Hallinen was 83. I saw him and remembered him immediately.
He gave me a candy bar at the El Monte Station. He always sat to the left of his partner. My father admired his suits.
His blue eyes took me back. I remembered his eyes and nothing else about him. He was frail now. His skin was covered with red-and-pink lesions. He was 46 or 47 in 1958.
He met us outside his house. It was a faux-ranch job enclosed by shade trees. A nice stretch of land adjoined it. I saw a barn and two horses grazing.
Stoner introduced me. We shook hands. I said something like, “How are you, Mr. Hallinen?” My memory was running at warp speed. I wanted to ignite his memory. Stoner said he might be senile. He might not remember the Jean Ellroy case.
We walked inside and sat down in the kitchen. Stoner placed our file on a free chair. I looked at Hallinen. He looked at me. I mentioned the candy bar moment. He said he didn’t recall it.
He apologized for his bad memory. Stoner made a crack about his own advanced age and failing faculties. Hallinen asked him how old he was. Bill said, “Fifty-four.” Hallinen laughed and slapped his knees.
Stoner mentioned some old Sheriff’s Homicide men. Hallinen said Jack Lawton, Harry Andre and Claude Everley were dead. Blackie McGowan was dead. Captain Etzel and Ray Hopkinson were dead. Ned Lovretovich was still up and about. He retired a long time ago himself. He wasn’t sure of the date. He did some private security work and started breeding race horses. He’d notched a lot of pension time. He’d milked LA. County for a nice piece of change.
Stoner laughed. I laughed. Hallinen’s wife walked in. Stoner and I stood up. Frances Traeger Hallinen told us to sit down.
She looked fit and alert. She was old Sheriff Traeger’s daughter. She sat down and tossed out some names.
Stoner tossed out some names. Hallinen tossed out a few. The names sparked little stories. I took a little cop nostalgia tour.
I recognized a few names. A hundred deputies dropped notes in the Ellroy and Long files. I tried to picture Jim Wahlke and Blackie McGowan.
Frances Hallinen brought up the Finch-Tregoff case. I said I followed it as a youngster. Ward Hallinen said it was his biggest case ever. I mentioned a few details. He didn’t recall them.
Frances Hallinen excused herself and walked outside. Bill opened up the file. I pointed to the horses outside and segued to the Bobbie Long case and Santa Anita. Hallinen shut his eyes. I saw him fighting to bring it all back. He said he remembered going out to the track. He couldn’t dredge up anything more specific.
Bill showed him the Arroyo High photos. I ran a concurrent crime scene narration. Hallinen stared at the pictures. He screwed up his face and fought. He said he thought he remembered the case. He said he thought he had a very good suspect.
I mentioned Jim Boss Bennett and the ’62 lineup. Bill got out a stack of Jim Boss Bennett mug shots. Hallinen said he didn’t recall the lineup. He stared at the mug shots for a good three minutes.
His face contorted. He held the pictures and clamped one hand down on the kitchen table. He dug his feet into the floor. He was fighting his incapacity full-bore.
He smiled and said he couldn’t place the man. Bill handed him the Ellroy Blue Book and asked him to flip through the reports.
Hallinen read the dead body report and the autopsy report. He read the transcribed witness statements. He read slowly. He said he remembered a few other cases he worked with Jack Lawton. He said the stenographer’s name was familiar. He said he remembered the old El Monte police chief.
He stared at the crime scene photos. He said he knew he was there. He gave me a look that said, That’s your mother—how can you look at these pictures?
Bill asked him if he kept his old case notebooks. Hallinen said he tossed them out a few years ago. He said he was sorry. He wanted to help. His mind wouldn’t let him.
I gave Bill the cutoff sign. We packed up the file and said our goodbyes. Hallinen apologized again. I laid out a time-gets-us-all rap. It sounded patronizing.
Hallinen said he was sorry he didn’t nail the bastard. I said he was up against a very cunning victim. I thanked him for his hard work and kindness.
Bill and I drove back to Orange County. We discussed our future plans all the way. Bill said we’d be fighting a failed-memory onslaught. We’d be talking to people who were middle-aged in 1958. We’d be sifting through memory gaps and chronologically skewed recollections. Old people concocted things unconsciously. They wanted to please and impress. They wanted to prove their mental solvency.
I mentioned Hallinen’s notebooks. Bill said our file was short on supplemental reports. Hallinen and Lawton worked the case all summer. They probably filled up six notebooks. We had to reconstruct their initial investigation. They could have interviewed the Swarthy Man and never snapped to him as a suspect. I asked Bill if Jack Lawton was married. Bill said he was. Two of his sons worked as deputies for a while. Jack used to work with his old partner Billy Farrington. Billy would know if Jack’s wife was still alive. He could contact her and see if she kept Jack’s notebooks.
I called the notebooks a long shot. Bill agreed. I said it all came back to the Blonde. She knew the Swarthy Man. She knew he killed Jean Ellroy. She never came forward. She was afraid of reprisals or she had something to hide. I said she probably shot her mouth off anyway. She told people what happened. She bragged about her closeness to murder or phrased the story as a cautionary lesson. Time passed. Her fear abated. She told people. Two people or six people or a dozen people knew the story or elements of the story.
Bill said we had to take our case public. I said the Blonde told people who told people who told people. Bill said I was the fucking publicity scrounger supreme. I said we should install a toll-free tip line at my pad. Bill said he’d call the phone company and set it up.
We discussed the Long case. Bill said we had to call the Coroner’s Office and see if they kept the semen samples they took from Bobbie Long and my mother. He knew a lab that ran DNA tests for $2,000. They could conclusively determine if Bobbie Long and my mother had sex with the same man.
I asked Bill to prioritize the Long case. He said it rated low. A random pickup killed Bobbie Long. My mother probably knew the Blonde and the Swarthy Man. She probably knew at least one of them before that night.
I mentioned the Swarthy Man’s car and the IBM punch cards in the file. It looked like the cops only checked car registrations for the San Gabriel Valley. Lavonne Chambers pinpointed a ’55 or ’56 Olds. I figured the cops would check registrations for the whole fucking state. Bill
said the punch-card run was confusing. Homicide jobs were full of weird inconsistencies.
I said it all came back to the Blonde. Bill said, “Cherchez la femme.” We flew up to Sacramento the next morning. We flew up behind some bad news.
Bill called the Coroner’s Office. They said they tossed our semen slides. They tossed out old evidence routinely. They needed space to store new evidence.
We rented a car and drove to Charlie Guenther’s house. Bill called Guenther last night and told him we were coming. He asked him some preliminary questions. Guenther said the case was vaguely familiar. He said the file might revive his memory.
We brought the file. I brought 50 potential questions.
Guenther was friendly. He came across 65 going on 40. He looked good. He had gray-white hair and blue eyes like Ward Hallinen. He ran an O. J. Simpson hate riff in place of standard hellos. He jumped to our case fast.
Bill ran the key points by him. Guenther said he remembered it now. He got called in with his partner Duane Rasure. Some woman snitched off her ex-husband. They checked the guy out. They didn’t confirm or refute his guilt.
We sat down at a coffee table. I emptied the Will Lenard Miller envelope. It contained three photographs of Will Lenard Miller; reports from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; copies of Will Lenard Miller’s 1957, 1958 and 1959 income tax returns; income tax withholding statements from 1957, 1958 and 1959; a finance company bill dated 5/17/65; an Orange County Sheriff’s Department to El Monte PD teletype dated 9/4/70; a house escrow agreement signed by Will and Shirley Miller— dated 1/9/57; an investigatory checklist in Charlie Guenther’s handwriting; a note sheet detailing Will Lenard Miller’s criminal record—with two bad check charges in ’67 and ’69 and a credit card forgery in ’70; a lawyer’s letter dated 11/3/64—detailing alleged injuries that Will Lenard Miller suffered while working at the C. K. Adams Machine Shop on 3/26/62; an Orange County Municipal Court Probation Order dated 11/22/67; and polygraph report on Will Lenard Miller—dated 9/15/70.