The police were overwhelmed at the time. In the 1980s, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office alone had the murders of some 50 black women on their books. No one was ever charged, but there were reams of suspects.
“We have three books of people they were interested in,” says Sergeant Cliff Shepard. The problem was the advent of crack cocaine. “It took hold all over the city. It was an explosion down here, and the murder of women suddenly increased and gangs really started taking off.”
Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On 3 August 2005, Detective Jeffrey Steinhoff, who was still working on the Berthomieux case, got a call from a Fresno County District Attorney’s Office investigator. He had in custody a 65-year-old repo man named Roger Hausmann, who had been accused of kidnapping two teenage girls. Around 15 years before, he had been a suspect in a spate of prostitute killings. The two girls who accused him of abduction said that he had boasted of going to LA to kill whores.
Interviewed in jail by LA Weekly, Hausmann denied the allegations. He said that the police had it in for him because he was a converted Jew who liked black women. But then he had little respect for women. Divorced at least three times, he referred to his exes as “hos”, calling one “Peanut Butter” because she “spread so easily”.
Despite Hausmann’s denials, Steinhoff believed that he was a strong suspect.
“Hausmann admitted that he has killed people and wrapped them in carpet in the Los Angeles area,” said Steinhoff. “One victim was covered with a carpet, one covered with a blanket, one covered with a trash bag, and three were covered with debris.”
Hausmann also got a traffic ticket in Inglewood three months before Princess Berthomieux’s death and in the kidnapping case, it was said, he exhibited violent tendencies. Hausmann had been at work, driving around Fresno looking for cars to repossess, when he offered to give the 17-year-old girlfriend of his son Dana and her 16-year-old friend a lift home. After taking them to McDonald’s, he said that he would drop off the older girl first. But the younger one did not feel safe with him and insisted on being taken home first. Hausmann lost his temper and punched her in the face, then he said that he was going to drive out on the highway and kill them both.
They tried to flee, but Hausmann pulled the younger girl back into the truck by the hair. Eventually she escaped by jumping from the vehicle, which was doing over 30 miles an hour, and suffered cuts and bruises. He was caught four days later hiding in the closet in a friend’s flat. When he refused to come out, the police Tasered him. Then, he claimed, the police had beaten him up.
He also accused the two girls of beating him up and robbing him. The older girl, he said, also made it clear that she wanted to have sex with him, even though she was under age. She was involved in a ring of prostitutes, he said, and tried to extort money from him.
A native of Santa Rosa, some 200 miles to the north of Fresno, Hausmann had a record of having sex with minors. His first wife was 15 when he married her; he was 19. Twenty years later, in 1979, he was arrested in Fresno for having sex with a minor, but escaped prosecution when he married her. According to Steinhoff, Hausmann was also arrested in Lynwood, South LA, in 1976 on suspicion of committing lewd acts against a child. He was arrested again in 1982 in Bakersfield for pimping and enticing an underage girl into prostitution.
Steinhoff also unearthed a series of weapons offences. In 1968, 1972 and 1979, Hausmann was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon; in 1971 and 1976 for exhibiting a deadly weapon; in 1981 and 1982 for carrying a loaded firearm; and in 1985 for assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles.
Then in 1991, Hausmann came to the attention of Fresno Police Department. The local sheriff’s office had set up a joint task force to investigate the deaths of 25 black women, aged 18 to 30, over a period of 13 years. Some of them were known prostitutes and their bodies were found dumped in fields, empty lots, abandoned houses and irrigation canals.
According to the police, Hausmann knew some of the women.
“He admitted that he dated some of the girls,” said Detective Doug Stokes.
A prostitute also accused him of hitting her with a steam iron and saying: “You’re harder to kill than the other ones.” A witness also said that he had heard Hausmann say: “This one is hard to kill.”
Hausmann claimed that the prostitute had hit him with the steam iron first. He also accused her of hitting him over the head with a bronze ashtray and stealing jewellery from him. According to Hausmann, it was a male friend who had knocked her out, tied her up and suggesting rolling her body up in a carpet and dropping her in a lake. Hausmann claimed that he had gallantly rescued the woman. In court, though, he pleaded no contest to false imprisonment and assault with a deadly weapon and served two and a half years in jail.
Detective Stokes said that of all the suspects the Fresno police task force investigated in the case of the murders of the 25 black women, Hausmann was “probably the one we looked at closest or the longest”. Nevertheless, the investigation was disbanded after ten weeks. No arrests were made. However, DNA testing was not available at time. Evidence in the cases is now being reviewed.
Released in November 1993, Hausmann’s pattern of violence continued. Stivette Street, the mother of Hausmann’s son, accused him of grabbing her by the throat when he thought he was cheating on her and beating her head against the wall on another occasion. She also said that he had kidnapped the boy and took him to Los Angeles. Another ex-wife said that he had tried to choke her when she refused to have sex with him and threatened to kill one of her friends. Again, Hausmann denies ever using violence, though he claimed to have ridden with the Hell’s Angels for eight years, but quit because they “used to talk trash about my black women”.
He also claimed to have been a drug dealer and a pimp, both in Fresno and LA. He boasted to LA Weekly that he hung out at now-defunct restaurant at Florence Avenue and Figueroa Street. His stable of girls worked out of bars and hotels along the Miracle Mile and in Beverly Hills. From 1960 to 1995, he sold cocaine out of a “rock house” on 19th Street in LA and in Fresno. But then he became a Christian and, he says, flushed two kilos of cocaine “still in the Medellin Cartel wrappers” down the lavatory. That year, he was arrested once again for assault with a firearm and Steinhoff maintains that his arrest record shows that he travelled frequently between Fresno and Los Angeles.
In his defence Hausmann maintains that he had been beaten and victimized by the Fresno police because he stopped supplying the cops with drugs. One local officer also called him a “nigger-lover Jew-boy slave” because of his predilection for black women. In May 2003 he claims he was molested by the police and dropped on his head in the street when he tried to repossess a pick-up truck legally. The police failed to come to his aid, he said, when he was hit over the head with a large kitchen pot and robbed. The police laughed at him when he turned up at the station to report the matter and complained to a judge about his treatment.
Steinhoff sought a court order to take a DNA sample from Hausmann as a suspect.
“There is a link between each of the homicides,” Steinhoff wrote in his affidavit. “Based on my training and experience, I believe that Hausmann is a suspect in these homicides. Hausmann admitted that he killed people and wrapped them in carpet in the Los Angeles area.”
However, when a sample of Hausmann’s saliva was tested it did not match the DNA taken from the body of Princess Berthomieux.
LA County coroner’s office has now set up a special serial homicide team consisting of a criminologist, two pathologists and four investigators specially trained by the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit who study serial killers, their traits and profiles. The coroner’s office also hooked up to the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), a computer database that seeks to identify similarities in violent crimes that have been committed by the same violent offenders.
Using the latest computer techniques, investigators have begun sorting through 800 autopsy and investigative r
eports involving the deaths of women in Los Angeles since 2002. They made separate lists of those who had been dumped in fields, alleys or on the sides of roads. Some women had been strangled or stabbed. Others had been bound and gagged. In some cases their bodies had been covered with plastic bags. Some had been prostitutes; others drug users—quite often both. They came up with a list of 38 that could possibly be the victim of a serial killer or killers. Then the FBI came in, concentrating on the first 18 cases involving African-Americans.
“Nobody had ever looked at them all because of the sheer number we get,” said Captain Ed Winter, head of the coroner’s serial homicide team. “When you start looking at them, there are similarities. There is no one else tracking this. The goal of this unit is to track possible serial-related homicides and supply law enforcement with data to help solve the murders.”
The list was circulated to police agencies in the area and detectives were asked to investigate whether there were any similarities between cases on the list and those they were working on. An investigator from the coroner’s special unit now turns out every time a body is dumped in LA County.
Another weapon in the investigators’ armoury is Proposition 69, which was approved by California voters in 2004. It allows authorities to collect DNA samples from anyone convicted of a felony and from all adults arrested on suspicion of murder and sex crimes. In 2009, the law will be extended to include any person arrested on suspicion of any felony and some misdemeanours, regardless of whether they are convicted.
Meanwhile the Figueroa corridor, a 30-block span of one of South LA’s most dangerous territories that runs from Vernon Avenue to 120th Street, will continue to provide plenty of victims for the serial killers at large. It is peppered with $15-an-hour hotels, crack houses, liquor stores and used-car lots, along with Gospel, Baptist and Evangelical churches. The prostitutes lean on fences, hang out in phone booths or strut down the sidewalks, waving to catch the eye of eager Johns who drive slowly by. Some of the prostitutes are local; others come in from outside or bounce back and forth between LA and Las Vegas. Most are African-American, aged range between 14 and 50. Some are “strawberries”—a women who turn the occasional trick to feed a drug habit. Rates are low. A blow job costs $20 to $40. Oral stimulation followed by full sex costs about $50. The LAPD’s Southeast vice unit gets regular calls from residents complaining about prostitutes blowing Johns in cars outside their homes.
There is less prostitution in the area than there was in the 1980s, when the Southside Slayer was at work. Then dozens of girls could be seen hanging out on corners with their pimps. Now things have changed. Most of the women work on their own without pimps. They stand on the corners alone, away from other girls. There is less competition that way, but it also makes them more vulnerable. Some of the women carry pocket knives, screwdrivers or box cutters. Most don’t.
“These girls think they are good judges of character,” says Southeast Division Sergeant Roy Gardner. “But these guys don’t have on their foreheads that he is a serial rapist killer.”
And there are no shortage of them. The LAPD cold-case unit has gone back to processing the 1980s cases. Recently they have added another possibly related case to the list—that of 21-year-old Diane Johnson, whose partially clothed body was found by two passing motorists on 9 March 1987, in a roadway construction area west of the Harbor Freeway at 10217 South Grand Avenue. She had been strangled.
But some progress has been made. Shepard says that DNA evidence now possibly links two of the Southside Slayer victims with two suspects who are currently in custody on unrelated charges. Whether either one will ever be charged depends on the results of months, possibly years of investigation.
In November 2004, 38-year-old pizza deliveryman Chester Turner was charged with the murders of 13 women between 1987 and 1998, ten of them in the Figueroa Street area. Victims were largely homeless women, prostitutes or drug users. He sexually assaulted them before strangling them and dumping their bodies in alleys, vacant buildings or, in one case, a portable toilet. Among them was Diane Johnson. Intriguingly, cat hair was found on some of the victims, as it had been on some of the victims of the Southside Slayer.
Turner was caught after being required to supply a sample to California’s Combined DNA Index System after he was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually assaulting a 47-year-old woman in March 2002. DNA may yet help track down the killer of Princess Berthomieux—and the killers of all the other victims in South LA, Pomona and Fresco who are still at large.
Madison’s Capital City Murders
On a May evening in 1968, the body of 18-year-old Christine Rothschild was found hidden behind some shrubbery outside Sterling Hall, the mathematics building on North Carter Street in the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The discovery was made by a male student and it was thought that she had been killed that morning while out jogging. She had been stabbed 12 times in the chest.
Christine had enrolled at the University of Wisconsin the year before after having graduated with honours from Senn High School in Chicago, where she had lived in a modest home on the North Side with her father—the president of a brokerage company—her mother and her three sisters. A good student, Christine enjoyed her classes and hoped to become a journalist when she graduated. She was good-looking, with long blonde-brown hair and earned money in the summer as a model for department store catalogues.
The murder weapon was never found and, throughout the summer, one suspect after another was discounted. At one point a $5,000 reward was offered for information relating to Christine’s murder. This solicited no new leads.
Any further progress in the Rothschild case was then overtaken by events. At around 3.29 a.m. on 29 June 1969, a massive explosion rocked the Capital City campus. Two sticks of dynamite had been detonated outside the Administration Building. More than 700 windows were shattered. The blast created a four-foot crater in the reinforced concrete floor of the entranceway and the ceiling of the room underneath fell down. Fortunately, the late hour meant that the area was deserted and there were no casualties. No one claimed responsibility for the explosion and, even though the faculty offered a reward of $10,000, no one was ever arrested for the crime.
Just over a year later, on 24 August 1970, Sterling Hall—where Christine Rothschild’s body had been found—was also bombed. A 33-year-old researcher died in the blast. This time there suspects and warrants were issued, charging four men with conspiracy, sabotage and destruction of government property. Three of them were arrested and convicted of the bombing, but it has never been established if the two bombings were connected.
By then Christine Rothschild’s murder was forgotten about, except by those who were close to her. It languished in the “cold-case” file for eight years until 21 July 1976. Then memories were jogged when the charred and decomposed remains of a young woman were found by real estate assessors in a gully beside Old Sauk Pass Road some 14 miles northwest of Madison.
A post mortem revealed that the woman had been dead for at least ten days, but the corpse was in such a bad state that the cause of death could not be established. However, dental records and a fractured collarbone allowed her to be identified. She was 20-year-old Debra Bennett. She had been staying in the Cardinal Hotel downtown Madison after being evicted from her apartment. A native of Ridgeway in Iowa County, she had only been in the area a short time. This left detectives with little evidence and no suspects. Then mysteriously, three weeks after Debra’s body had been discovered, her room key was mailed back to the hotel. Tantalizing though this was, it moved the case little further ahead. There was no note with the key, no return address on the envelope, nor any other identifying marks. The murder of Debra Bennett then joined Christine Rothschild’s in the “cold case” file.
In the summer of 1978 the body of another young woman was found in a shallow grave on Woodland Road in Waunakee, a small town nine miles north of Madison. She had been killed by a blow with a blunt object to the
head and had been dead for more than three days. After two days the body was identified as that of 18-year-old Julie Ann Hall, who had close ties to the University of Wisconsin. On 1 May 1978, she had got a job as a library assistant on the campus. She was last seen on a Friday night at the Main King Tap, a bar near Capital Square in Madison. Again, there was little evidence and no suspects.
Julie Speerschneider, aged 20, spent most of the evening of 27 March 1979 at the 602 Club, a bar at 602 University Avenue. Then she decided to hitch-hike to a friend’s house, but she disappeared on the way. Soon after, a man called the police and told them that he had given Julie a lift. He had recognized her from her description in the newspapers and on the media. She had been with a male companion, he said, and he had dropped off at the corner of Brearly and Johnson. He gave a detailed description of the man, but detectives were unable to identify him, even though Julie had many friends at the time of her disappearance. She had worked at the Red Caboose Day Care Center, where she was described her as friendly and reliable. Relatives and friends clubbed together to offer a reward and they even consulted a psychic in hope of finding her.
Julie Speerschneider had still not been found when, in April 1980, the dead body of Susan LeMahieu, aged 24, was discovered lying in the weeds near the Madison Arboretum. Six years before she had graduated from Madison’s East High School, though she was physically handicapped and mildly retarded. When she had gone missing on 15 December 1979, police did not suspect foul play, believing that she might have grown confused and wandered off because of her mental incapacity. Like Christine Rothschild, she had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest.
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