Early in February, before Cindy Hudspeth, Grogan was asked to take down the confession of one of the several men who had phoned the police or written the mayor claiming to be the killer. Most were dismissed out of hand as nut cases, but this one was so insistent that the police obliged him by booking him—the first man booked in the case. He was an actor named Ned York who had played minor roles in such television dramas as Starsky and Hutch, a cop show, and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. In “Murder Ward” Ned York had played an orderly in a lunatic asylum who dealt in drugs, in “Nightmare” a cop. He claimed to have known Kristina Weckler before murdering her and to have had an intimate friendship with a male student at the Pasadena Art Center of Design. He was a born-again Christian, separated from his wife, and his personalized automobile license read “RE 3:20,’’ a reference to Revelations 3:20, which advises, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”
“You know,’’ Grogan said, “that’s the right Biblical reference for an actor. I bet that license plate gets him a lot of free grub between roles.” Was York confessing for the publicity?
Grogan ushered Ned York, whose arm was in a sling from a dog bite and whose frantic manner meant cocaine to Grogan, into an interview room on the third floor of the Glass House. Grogan’s partner for the interview was Sergeant Sherman Oakes.
Within minutes Grogan knew that Ned York was making up his confession out of what he had learned from the media and from his own grotesque fantasies. This is one crazy motherfucker, Grogan thought, another tribute to Hollywood’s favorite pastime, cocaine. Nothing he said squared with inside information, notably not the method of strangulation: Ned was accomplishing it all with his bare hands.
He asked for a hamburger and a Coke. Grogan thought, sure enough, I will dine with him and he with me, and, beginning to feel sorry for him, brought him the hamburger and Cokes for all three men. Ned York rambled on, mixing his sorrow at being separated from his wife with his regret for the lives of his victims. He said his little friend at the Art Center had been Kristina’s boyfriend. Well, Grogan thought, he’ll really have something to be sorry for after this, the poor bastard. He’s probably never hurt anybody, but I don’t see him getting any more TV roles. He gave Ned York a cigarette.
Suddenly Sergeant Sherman Oakes, whom Grogan knew to have a quick temper, stood up and splashed his Coke and ice right into Ned York’s crotch. Grogan was surprised and confused. What in hell had this pathetic creature said that could have pissed Oakes off like that? What could make a guy angry at Ned York?
Then Grogan smelled burned cloth and saw little wisps of smoke rising from between Ned York’s legs. York had tried to set fire to his own crotch with his cigarette.
“Jesus Christ!” Grogan shouted. “Let the poor son of a bitch out of here! He hates his dick so much he wants to burn it off!”
There were not many such light moments. Cindy Hudspeth’s murder brought the count to ten, although the press still counted twelve or thirteen, unaware of the distinctive ligature marks; and her murder brought few fresh clues, heightening if possible the public’s fear and police frustration. Relations between the police and the media hit bottom. Grogan complained to anyone who would listen that reporters were not constrained by the rules of evidence and were free to print hearsay. They were interviewing witnesses, sometimes before the police could get to them, coloring witnesses’ perceptions, endangering them, sometimes misrepresenting themselves as policemen just to get interviews, using composite drawings not developed by the police. Station KABC TV had broadcast a drawing of “the fugitive” that bore no resemblance to anything then known, based on some very dubious reports. And when the Valley Daily News quoted Glendale Police Chief Duane Baker as saying that the victims had been sodomized, Grogan was equally furious with the paper and the chief and hoped neither the Wagners nor the Wecklers saw the story.
On the afternoon of February 17, Frank Salerno had received the call to go up to Angeles Crest just beyond the Glendale-Pasadena city line. The pilot of a Forest Service helicopter, who scanned the area regularly to check for fires and cars that had plunged off the road, had spotted the Datsun. Then a rescue worker noticed the nude body through an aperture on the side of the trunk where a reflector had been torn away in the plunge. By the time Salerno arrived, at three o’clock, the rescue team had already hauled the car up onto the highway, and the body lay in the coroner’s van. One look at the ligature marks told him that this was another Hillside victim, although the lines on the wrists, being unbroken, did not look to Salerno as though they had come from handcuffs this time. As for other kinds of evidence, there were none. The tire tracks and footprints on and around the turnout were too numerous to be significant.
At the morgue Salerno watched as the body was taken out of a plastic bag, blood oozing from a laceration on the scalp as attendants laid her out on a gurney. The blood dripped onto her shoulder and down her back as she was being moved. Salerno figured that the wound and some others might likely have come from the body’s being knocked around in the trunk as the Datsun went over the cliff. There was a puncture wound on the bridge of her nose; markings ran down her cheeks from the comers of her mouth, and her lipstick was smeared, indicating a gag; there were four long abrasions, ranging from ten to four inches, on the outside of her right breast and along her stomach and numerous small marks on the back of her right arm and on her shoulder. At the autopsy, Salerno watched as bits of chaparral were removed from her vagina. These might have lodged, it was agreed, during the difficult negotiation of the body up forty feet of steep cliff.
Cindy Hudspeth’s roommate on Garfield identified the body; she had reported Cindy missing the morning of the 17th. Salerno did his best to comfort Cindy’s mother, who lived alone in Echo Park and had long been divorced from Cindy’s father. She and everyone else Salerno could find described Cindy as a sweet, hardworking, ambitious girl; she had hoped to go to college in Northern California at Humboldt State or at Sonoma State, away from the frenzied congestion of Los Angeles. Bartenders and other waitresses at the Robin Hood Inn and the Red Vest in Glendale, where Cindy had worked part-time, said that she had been friendly, efficient, and rather naive for a twenty-year-old Californian. She had been much liked by the customers, many of whom would request that she wait on them. Her boss at Glendale Community College, where she worked nights answering the phone in the adult education section, said that she was “just the kind of girl you would always want around.” She had loved disco dancing, had won several dance contests, and was planning to give dancing lessons: she had had business cards printed up. But she had not been able to decide where to give the lessons; she was afraid to bring strangers to her apartment. She had been, like everyone else, worried about the Strangler but had felt safer now that she had a new car. She had been planning a holiday in Mexico with friends.
No one had any idea how Cindy, a cautious, conservative young woman, had met up with the Strangler. She had left her apartment between four-thirty and five, after paying her rent, and would normally have turned west on Colorado Street on the way to the college on Glendale Avenue. Somewhere between her apartment and the college, she had been abducted.
One possible witness did contact the police. Janice Ackers said that on Thursday night she had driven off the westbound Foothill Freeway onto the Angeles Crest Highway northbound into the mountains. At first there had been no cars behind her, but then through her mirror she had noticed a car coming up behind her very fast with a second car following it. As she stopped to make a left turn, the first car, a small reddish-orange sedan, sped past her on her right and the driver had stared at her through his window. He had a wild, strange look in his eyes, Mrs. Ackers said, and he had a full beard. Then the second car passed, about eight car lengths behind. She watched the two cars speed up the hill, the second car gaining on the first. She did not notice anything about the second driver or about his car. T
he incident had occurred at about nine o’clock.
If Mrs. Ackers could be believed, and she appeared rational, this was yet another confirmation of what Salerno had deduced from the moment he had seen the position of Judy Miller’s body, that two men were involved. The time and location and the color of the lead car checked out.
But the information did not fill Salerno with a rush of optimism. From talking to Bob Grogan he knew that Beulah Stofer had not seen a beard on either man. It had been nearly three months since Lauren Wagner’s death, long enough to grow a beard, but Salerno was conscious of how little, really, he had learned since his own involvement had begun with Judy Miller. He and Grogan met often at the Code 7 bar or at more out-of-the-way places to exchange information and, after sufficient drink, to commiserate. They felt as did the new chief of the LAPD, Daryl Gates, who had been reduced to giving press conferences apologizing for the lack of progress, saying that he hated to look at himself in the mirror when he shaved. “I come to you with empty hands,” Gates would report to an increasingly hostile press.
Grogan and Salerno agreed that the fact that Cindy Hudspeth and Kristina Weckler had lived across the street from each other, although they had not known each other, meant that the killers probably lived in Glendale; this explained the remoteness of many of the dump sites. As for physical evidence, the bit of fiber on Judy Miller’s eye had led nowhere: a polyester fiber, origin unclear. The marks on Lauren Wagner’s palms were almost certainly electrical burns. How they had got there no one could tell, but they indicated torture, as did the puncture marks on Kristina Weckler, who clearly had not been taking drugs. Some fibers had also been found sticking to the adhesive on Lauren’s hands—again untraceable—along with some animal hairs that appeared to have come from cats. The Wagners had no cats. As for eyewitnesses, Salerno now had Janice Ackers. He had discounted Pam Pelletier but believed Markust Camden and had kept in touch with him, interviewing him again in February, finding his story consistent. Grogan had Beulah.
“I must have visited her thirty times so far,” Grogan said. “I never ate so many cookies in my life. But I can’t get her to admit she was outside and saw everything closer up than she says.”
He had gotten Beulah to agree to hypnosis, but it had not worked. Every time she looked as though she was about to go under, she had been overcome by an asthma attack. Another neighbor, Evelyn Wall, also admitted seeing the abduction. She lived right next door to Beulah and had said that she had heard a man “hollering” that night. Evelyn Wall’s recollection was at first vaguer than Beulah’s, but under hypnosis Mrs. Wall said that she had gone outside to see what the noise was about, hiding behind the corner of her house. She had seen two large figures and a small figure in a big car that had been light on the top and dark underneath and another, smaller car, with no one in it. As the big car had driven off, one of the large figures had pushed down on the head of the smaller figure. Later that night she had gone out to check on the smaller car and had found the interior light burning but no one in it.
A third witness claimed to have been driving past and to have seen two men pulling a girl into their car. But this witness would be useless. “He’s the only guy I know has a certificate from the state saying he’s not crazy,” Grogan said. He was a convicted murderer who had been declared cured of insanity by the Atascadero state hospital for the criminally insane. He would not make a good impression in court.
Grogan and Salerno agreed that their biggest breakthrough was probably having the fingerprints from the phone booth and the apartment on Tamarind: one set matched. None had been found in Cindy Hudspeth’s car, except her own, other than what might be a palmprint or a footprint on the outside of the trunk lid.
The biggest of many missing pieces was the site of the murders themselves, or possibly the several sites. The size of the city, both in population and in geography, was working against Salerno and Grogan and the others. The task force made things worse by pulling the files on every unsolved murder of a female during the past couple of years, even from places as far away as Bakersfield. The numerous municipalities, each with its own police force, which made up the greater Los Angeles area also fouled things up: Salerno and Grogan were sure that many multiple murders were never identified as such because a killing done in one town might never be correlated with one committed in another. And just as the freeway system had made Los Angeles the bank robbery capital of the nation, the city of the quick getaway, so it was plain that the Stranglers were taking advantage of the freeways, covering far more territory than would have been possible in, say, New York or Boston, sketching the arterial form of the city in the geographical pattern of their abductions and dumpings.
‘‘I’m going to write a goddam novel,” Grogan said. “It’ll outsell Joe Wambaugh. I’m going to call it I Hope My Mother Is Never Murdered in Los Angeles.”
When psychiatrists began offering theoretical portraits of the killer or killers, Grogan and Salerno paid attention, although their experience with psychiatrists in court had not inspired confidence in that profession. When they agreed with a psychiatric diagnosis, they invariably found that they had already arrived at the same conclusions themselves, without the obfuscations of a technical vocabulary. And in court every psychiatrist saying one thing was contradicted by another saying the opposite, so what was the use of them except to confuse a jury?
Now in interviews with the press, psychiatrists suggested that the Strangler was white, in his late twenties or early thirties, and single, separated, or divorced—in any case not living with a woman. He was of average intelligence, unemployed or existing on odd jobs, not one to stay with a job too long. He had probably been in trouble with the law before. He was passive, cold, and manipulative—all at once. He was the product of a broken family whose childhood was marked by cruelty and brutality, particularly at the hands of women. Early signs of trouble were chronic bedwetting, cruelty to animals, arson, vandalism, and poor relationships with other children. It was generally agreed that the strangling itself was the sexual kick. Murder might, however, be only foreplay, with sex coming afterward. One psychiatrist asserted that sex murderers usually do not perform normal intercourse under any circumstances.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA and director of that university’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, told the Times that this was a man living on the fringes of society whom no one would suspect. He liked danger but believed himself invincible. “It would be most unlikely,” Dr. West said, “to find this done by more than one person. Homosexuals murder by teams . . . but this type is most always the work of a single person. If not, then the relation between the two would be extremely unusual—a folie à deux [a psychiatric condition in which two persons usually related share the same delusions and act out the same psychosis].” Another psychiatrist reasoned that “the killer may not have had much dating experience.” Dr. West suggested that a woman confronting the Strangler try to “blind him if you can. Stick a sharp object into his eyes.”
But Grogan and Salerno knew that this advice was useless, since there were two Stranglers. They weighed the accumulated wisdom of the psychiatric profession, thought the idea that the killers might be related a possibility worth considering, but found little enlightenment in the constantly repeated idea that such killers hated their mothers. What else was new? That was the standard explanation for every screwed-up male, as predictable as ham on rye. “Gee,” Grogan said, “all we got to do now is find a white male who hates his mother. Can’t be many of those around!”
Psychics offered themselves to the LAPD for a fee or for the publicity. Fortunately, in Grogan’s view, the LAPD had never stooped to hiring a psychic as other police departments around the country had done. Psychics simply hung around an investigation until the evidence was in and then took credit for solving the crime. Any homicide detective who believed in psychics ought to resign and join the priesthood or produce movies.
A private detective fr
om Berlin wrote saying that he could and would solve the case for the price of air fare to Los Angeles. Grogan could never get the German’s polysyllabic name straight, but he kept writing, so Grogan began referring to him as Dr. Shickelgruber. “Anything from Dr. Shickelgruber today?” Grogan would ask when he arrived at the office. One day Grogan was sitting at his desk talking to Charlie Weckler on the phone, trying to reassure him that the investigation was progressing when it was not, when another officer came up and announced that Dr. Shickelgruber had arrived from Berlin. He was waiting outside.
“You’re shitting me,” Grogan said. No indeed, the German detective wanted to talk to the principal investigators. He would solve the case.
Grogan, figuring he had better be polite to a man who had flown all that way at his own expense, ushered Dr. Shickelgruber into an interviewing room. Unfortunately the German spoke no English, so Grogan summoned the only German-speaking officer on the force. Dr. Shickelgruber requested a blackboard.
On the board he wrote in German:
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