Blood on the Moon

by James Ellroy

  For perhaps the thousandth time since securing the printouts, he recapitulated all the known physical evidence pertaining to Julia Niemeyer’s murder and unsolved homicides of women in Los Angeles County: the blood that formed the words of the poem was O+. Julia Niemeyer’s blood was AB. There were no fingerprints on the envelope or single piece of paper. Interviews with residents of the Aloha Regency Apartments had yielded nothing; no one knew much about the dead woman; no one knew her to have visitors; no one recalled any strange occurrences in the building near the time of her death. The surrounding area had been thoroughly searched for the double-bladed knife believed to have been used for the mutilations–nothing even closely resembling it had been found. Lloyd’s vague hope that Julia’s killer had been connected to her through the swing parties proved futile. Experienced detectives had interviewed all the people in Joanie Pratt’s Rolodex and had come away with nothing but new insights into lust and sad knowledge of adultery. Two officers had been assigned to check bookshops specializing in poetry and feminist literature for weird male requests for “Rage in the Womb” and generally strange male behavior. All investigatory avenues were covered.

  And the unsolved homicides: The twenty-three Los Angeles County police agencies whose feed-ins composed the central computer file listed 410 of them going back to January 1968. Discounting 143 vehicular homicides, this left 267 unsolved murders. Of these 267, 79 were of women between the ages of twenty and forty, what Lloyd considered to be his killer’s perimeters of attraction–he was certain the monster liked them young.

  He looked at the map of Los Angeles County adorning the back wall of his office. There were 79 pins stuck into it, denoting the locations where 79 young women met violent death. Lloyd scrutinized the territory represented and let his intimate knowledge of L.A. and its environs work in concert with his instincts. The pinpoints covered the whole of Los Angeles County, from the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys to the far-flung beach communities that formed her southern and western perimeters. Hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Yet of the seventy-nine, forty-eight were situated in what police referred to as “white trash” suburbs–low income, high crime areas where alcoholism and drug addiction were epidemic. Statistics and his own policeman’s instinct told Lloyd that the bulk of these deaths were related to booze, dope, and infidelity. Which left thirty-one murders of young women, spread throughout middle, upper middle class, and wealthy L.A. County suburbs and municipalities; murders unsolved by nine police agencies.

  Lloyd had groaned when he had taken his last available direct action of querying those agencies for Xeroxes of their complete case files, realizing that it might take them as long as two weeks to respond. He felt powerless and beset by forces far beyond his bailiwick, imagining a city of the dead co-existing with Los Angeles in another time warp, a city where beautiful women beseeched him with terrified eyes to find their killer.

  Lloyd’s feelings of powerlessness had peaked three days before, and he had personally telephoned the top interagency liaison officers at the nine departments, demanding that the files be delivered to Parker Center within forty-eight hours. The responses of the nine officers had varied, but in the end they had acquiesced to Lloyd Hopkins’s reputation as a hot-shot homicide dick and had promised the paperwork in seventy-two hours tops.

  Lloyd looked at his watch, a Rolex chronometer marked in the twenty-four hour military time method. Seventy hours and counting down. Adding two hours for bureaucratic delay, the paperwork should arrive by noon. He bolted from his office and ran down six flights of stairs to street level. Four hours of pounding pavement with no destination in mind and a willfully shut off brain would put him at his optimal mental capabilities–which he was certain that he would need to devour the thirty-one homicide files.

  Four hours later, his mind clear from a dozen brisk circuits of the Civic Center area, Lloyd returned to Parker Center and jogged up to his office. He could see that the door to his cubicle was open and that someone had turned on the light. A lieutenant in uniform passed him in the hallway and hastily explained, “Your paperwork arrived, Lloyd. It’s in your office.”

  Lloyd nodded and peered in his doorway. His desk and both his chairs were covered with thick manila folders filled with papers still reeking of the photostatic process. He counted them, then moved his chairs, wastebasket, and filing cabinet out into the hallway, arraying the files on the floor in a circle and sitting down in the middle of them.

  Each folder was marked on the front with the victim’s last name, first name, and date of death. Lloyd divided them first into region, then into year, never looking at the photographs that he knew were clipped to the first page. Starting with Fullmer, Elaine D; D.O.D. 3/9/68, Pasadena P.D., and ending with Deverson, Linda Holly; D.O.D. 6/14/82, Santa Monica P.D., he selected all the paperwork outside the L.A.P.D. and placed it to one side. This accounted for eighteen files. He looked at the thirteen L.A.P.D. files. Their front markings were slightly more detailed than those of the other departments; each victim’s age and race were listed immediately below her name. Of the thirteen murdered women, seven were listed as black and Hispanic. Lloyd put these folders aside and double-checked his first instincts, letting his mind go blank for a full minute before returning to conscious thought. He decided he was right; his killer preferred white women. This left six L.A.P.D. files and eighteen from other agencies, twenty-four in total. Averting his eyes from the front page photos, Lloyd scanned the interagency files for mention of race. Eight of the victims were listed as being non-Caucasian.

  Which left sixteen folders.

  Lloyd decided to make a collage of photographs before reading the complete files. Again willing a blank mind, he slipped the snapshots out of their folders face down in chronological order. “Talk to me,” he said aloud, turning the photographs over.

  When six of the snapshots smiled up at him he felt his mind begin to lurch forward convulsively, grasping at the horrific knowledge that he was assimilating. He flipped over the remaining photos and felt the logic of terror grip him like a blood-spattered vice.

  The dead women were all of a kind, almost kinlike in the Anglo-Saxon planes of their faces; all posessed demure, feminine hairstyles; all were wholesome-looking in the spirit of more traditional times. Lloyd whispered the single word that summed up his constituency of the dead, “Innocent, innocent, innocent.” He surveyed the photographs a dozen more times, picking up details–strands of pearls and high school rings on chains, the absence of make-up, shoulders and necks clad in sweaters and anachronistic formal wear. That the women had been killed by one monster for the destruction of the innocence they heralded so splendidly was beyond question.

  With trembling hands Lloyd read through the folders, partaking of death’s communion served up by strangulation, gunshot, decapitation, forced ingestion of caustic fluids, bludgeoning, gas, drug overdose, poisoning, and suicide. Disparate methods that would eliminate police awareness of mass murder. The one common denominator: no clues. No physical evidence. Women chosen for slaughter because of the way they looked. Julia Niemeyer killed sixteen times over, and how many more in different places? Innocence was the epidemic of youth.

  Lloyd read through the folders again, coming out of his trance with the realization that he had been sitting on the floor for three hours and that he was drenched in sweat. As he got to his feet and stretched his painfully cramped legs, he felt the big horror overtake him: The killer’s genius was unfathomable. There were no clues. The Niemeyer trail was dead cold. The other trails were colder. There was nothing he could do.

  There was always something he could do.

  Lloyd got a roll of masking tape from his desk and began taping the photographs along the walls of his office. When the smiling faces of dead women stared down at him from all directions he said to himself, “Finis. Morte. Cold City. Muerto. Dead.”

  Then he closed his eyes and read the vital statistics page in each folder, forcing himself to think only region. This accom
plished, he got out his notebook and pen and wrote:

  Central Los Angeles:

  1. Elaine Marburg, D.O.D. 11/24/69

  2. Patricia Petrelli, D.O.D. 5/20/75

  3. Karlen LaPelley, D.O.D. 2/14/71

  4. Caroline Werner, D.O.D. 11/9/79

  5. Cynthia Gilroy, D.O.D. 12/5/71

  Valley and Foothill Communities:

  1. Elaine Fullmer, D.O.D. 3/9/68

  2. Jeanette Willkie, D.O.D. 4/15/73

  3. Mary Wardell, D.O.D. 1/6/74

  Hollywood - West Hollywood:

  1. Laurette Powell, D.O.D. 6/10/78

  2. Carla Castleberry, D.O.D. 6/10/80

  3. Trudy Miller, D.O.D. 12/12/68

  4. Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77

  5. Marcia Renwick, D.O.D. 6/10/81

  Bev Hills - Santa Monica - Beach Communities:

  1. Monica Martin, D.O.D. 9/21/74

  2. Jennifer Szabo, D.O.D. 9/3/72

  3. Linda Deverson, D.O.D. 6/14/82

  Willing himself to think only modus operandi, Lloyd read through the Vital Statistics page a second time, coming away with three bludgeonings, two dismemberments, one horseback riding accident that was seriously considered as a homicide, two deaths by gunshot, two stabbings, four suicides attributed to different means, one poisoning, and one drug overdose-gassing that was labeled “murder-suicide?” by a baffled records clerk.

  Turning to chronology, Lloyd read over the dates of death that he had written next to his list of victims, gaining his first make on the killer’s methodology. With the exception of a twenty-five month hiatus between Patricia Petrelli, D.O.D. 5/20/75 and Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77, and a seventeen-month gap between Laurette Powell, D.O.D. 6/10/78 and Caroline Werner, D.O.D. 11/9/79, his killer performed his executions at intervals of between six months to fifteen months which, Lloyd concluded, was why he was able to elude capture for so long. The murders were undoubtedly brilliantly executed and based on intimate knowledge gleaned from long-term surveillance. And, he reasoned further, those longer hiatuses probably contained victims that could be attributed to lost files and computer errors–every police agency was susceptible to a large paperwork margin of error.

  Lloyd closed his eyes and imagined time warps within time warps within time warps; wondering how far back the killings went–all police departments in Los Angeles County threw out their unsolved files after fifteen years, giving him zero access to information predating January, 1968.

  It was then that his mind pulsated into perfect focus, and as he whispered “The forest for the trees,” Lloyd looked at his list of Hollywood–West Hollywood homicides and felt his skin start to tingle. Four “suicide” killings had taken place on the identical date of June 10th; in 1977, ’78, ’80 and ’81. It was the one indicator that pointed to obsessive, pathological behavior out of his killer’s ice-water restraint norm.

  Lloyd grabbed the four folders and read them from cover to cover, once, then twice. When he finished, he turned off the light in his cubicle and sat back and flew with what he had learned.

  On Thursday evening, June 10th, 1977, residents of the apartment building at 1167 Larrabee Avenue, West Hollywood, smelled gas coming from the upstairs unit rented by Angela Marie Stimka, a twenty-seven year old cocktail waitress. Said residents summoned a deputy sheriff who lived in the building, and the deputy kicked in Angela Stimka’s door, turned off the wall heater from which the gas was emanating and discovered Angela Stimka, dead and bloated on her bedroom floor. He carried her body outside and called the West Hollywood Sheriffs substation, and within minutes a team of detectives had combed the apartment and had come up with a suicide note that cited the breakup of a long-term love affair as Angela Stimka’s reason for wanting to die. Handwriting experts examined Angela Stimka’s diary and the suicide note, and decided that both were written by the same person. The death was labeled a suicide, and the case was closed.

  On June 10th of the following year, a sheriff’s patrol car was summoned to a small house on Westbourne Drive in West Hollywood. Neighbors had complained of uncharacteristically loud stereo noise coming from the dwelling, and one old lady told the deputies that she was certain that something was “drastically wrong.” When no one answered the officers’ persistent knocking, they climbed in through a half opened window and discovered the owner of the house, thirty-one year old Laurette Powell, dead in a large wicker chair, the arms of the chair, her bathrobe, and the floor in front of her soaked with blood that had exploded out of the artery-deep gashes on both of her wrists. An empty prescription bottle of Nembutal lay on a nightstand a few feet away, and a razor-sharp kitchen cleaver was resting in the dead woman’s lap. There was no suicide note, but homicide detectives, noting the hesitation marks on both wrists and the fact that Laurette Powell was a long time holder of several Nembutal prescriptions, quickly classified her death as a suicide. Case closed.

  Lloyd’s wheel turned silently. He knew that the Westbourne Drive and Larrabee Avenue addresses were a scant two blocks apart, and that the Tropicana Motel gun-in-mouth “suicide” of Carla Castleberry on 6/10/80 was less than a half mile from the first two crime scenes. He shook his head in disgust; any cop with half a brain and ten cents worth of experience should know that women never kill themselves with guns–the statistics on female gunshot suicides were nonexistant.

  The fourth “suicide,” Marcia Renwick, 818 North Sycamore, was the non sequitur, Lloyd surmised; the most recent June 10th murder, four miles east of the first three, in the L.A.P.D.’s Hollywood Division. Occurring a full year after the Carla Castleberry homicide, the Renwick pill overdose had the feel of an unimaginative impulse killing.

  Lloyd turned his attention to the file of the most recent victim before Julia Niemeyer. He winced as he read the Coroner’s report on Linda Deverson, D.O.D. 6/14/82; chopped to pieces with a two-edged fire axe. Blinding memories of Julia swaying from her bedroom ceiling beam combined with his new knowledge to convince him that somehow, for some god-awful, hellish reason, his killer’s insanity was peaking.

  Lloyd lowered his head and sent up a prayer to his seldom-sought lip-service God. “Please let me get him. Please let me get him before he hurts anyone else.”

  Thoughts of God were paramount in Lloyd’s mind as he walked down the hall and knocked on the door of his immediate superior, Lieutenant Fred Gaffaney. Knowing that the lieutenant was a hard-ass, born-again Christian who held grandstanding, maverick cops in pious contempt, he decided to invoke the diety heavily in his plea for investigatory power. Gaffaney grudgingly had given him a free rein on his caseload, with the implicit proviso that he not beg favors; since he was about to plead for men, money, and media play, he wanted to pitch the lieutenant from a standpoint of mutual religiosity.

  “Enter!” Gaffaney called out in answer to the knock.

  Lloyd walked in the open door and sat down in a folding chair in front of the lieutenant’s desk. Gaffaney looked up from the papers he was shuffling and fingered his cross-and-flag lapel pin.

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  Lloyd cleared his throat and tried to affect a humble look. “Sir, as you know, I’ve been working full time on the Niemeyer killing.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “And, sir, it’s a stone cold washout.”

  “Then stick with it. I have faith in you.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s funny that you mentioned faith.” Lloyd waited for Gaffaney to tell him to continue. When all he got was a silent deadpan, he went on. “This case has been a testing of my own faith, sir. I’ve never been much of a believer in God, but the way that I’ve been stumbling into evidence has me questioning my beliefs. I—”

  The lieutenant cut him off with a chopped hand gesture. “I go to church on Sunday and to prayer meetings three times a week. I put God out of my mind when I clip on my holster. You want something. Tell me what it is, and we’ll discuss it.”

  Lloyd went red and forced a stammer. “Sir, I… I…”

  Gaffaney leaned back
in his chair and ran his hands over his iron grey crew-cut. “Hopkins, you haven’t called a superior officer ‘Sir’ since you were a rookie. You’re the most notorious pussy hound in Robbery-Homicide, and you don’t give a rat’s ass about God. What do you want?”

  Lloyd laughed. “Shall I cut the shit?”

  “Please do.”

  “All right. In the course of my investigation into the Niemeyer killing I’ve come across solid, instinctive evidence that points to at least sixteen other murders of young women, dating back fifteen years. The M.O.s varied, but the victims were all of a certain physical type. I’ve gotten complete case files on these homicides, and chronological consistencies and other factors have convinced me that all sixteen women were killed by the same man, the man who killed Julia Niemeyer. The last two killings have been particularly brutal. I think we’re dealing with a brilliant psychopathic intellect, and unless we direct a massive effort toward his capture he’ll kill with impunity until the day he dies. I want a dozen experienced homicide dicks full time; I want liasions set up with every department in the county; I want permission to recruit uniformed officers for the shit work, and authority to grant them unlimited overtime. I want a full-scale media blitz–I’ve got a feeling that this animal is close to exploding, and I want to push him a little. I—”

  Gaffaney raised both hands in interruption. “Do you have any hard physical evidence,” he asked, “any witnesses, any notations from detectives within the L.A.P.D. or other department that lend credence to your mass murder theory?”