The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  A few hours before she had been killed, Carol Dowd had been seen walking with a middle-aged white man. Her clothes were found not far from her body. Her purse was also found in the alley. It was open and some of its contents had spilled out on the ground. But nothing was missing and, for the time being, robbery was ruled out as a motive. It seemed clear that the Frankford Slasher had struck again.

  Like Jean Durkin and Theresa Sciortino, Carol Dowd had a history of mental illness. When her brother died in the late 1960s, she began hearing voices. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, she was institutionalized. Then she was released into a community-based programme and moved into an apartment, where she was raped. But lately, she had been moved into a hostel near where she had been found and seemed happy.

  During their investigation the police came across a black man named Leonard Christopher, who worked in the fish market and lived nearby. He had seen the police in that alley that night. The store had been broken into several times before and he told reporters that he thought the market was being burgled again. He concluded that they were busting someone for selling drugs or prostitution, both of which went on in the alley, and moved on. However, when the police questioned him, he admitted to knowing one of the earlier victims, Margaret Vaughan.

  Christopher claimed that he was with his girlfriend the night Carol Dowd was killed, but his girlfriend said she had been at home alone. A prostitute who initially denied seeing Christopher that night, later said that she had seen him with Carol Dowd outside a bar. Another said she had seen him coming out of the alley, sweating, with a large knife in his belt.

  When the police searched his apartment, they found clothing with blood on it. Christopher said that he had been told by his boss to clean up the blood in that alley – that’s how it had got on his clothes. Workmates and friends vouched for his good character. Even his landlord stuck up for him, though he complained that Christopher sometimes made too much noise. And it was plain that Christopher was black, not the middle-aged white man seen with other victims. Nevertheless on 5 May 1990, Christopher was arrested and charged with the murder of Carol Dowd, the abuse of a corpse, theft and possession of an instrument of a crime. He was refused bail and jailed.

  At a preliminary hearing on 20 June, the prosecution presented their case. Emma Leigh, who knew Christopher, said that she had seen him walk into the alley behind the fish market at around 1 a.m. Then she heard a woman scream. But then Leigh left with a man – a date or, perhaps, a client – in a car. Linda Washington, who also knew Christopher, said she had seen him leaving the alley, with his shirt over his arm and a large knife in a sheath hanging from his waist.

  Christopher’s defence attorney, Jack McMahon, challenged the prosecution’s case, saying that in key detail the two witnesses had contradicted each other and their testimony would never stand up at the trial. He also contested the theft charge on the grounds that, while Carol Dowd’s purse had been open, there was still money in it. The purse had simply been dropped during the attack. Nevertheless Leonard Christopher was bound over to stand trial.

  Even though Christopher had only been charged with one of the murders, the residents of Frankford breathed a sigh of relief – but not for long. While Christopher was safely locked away in the county jail on 6 September 1990, the body of 30-year-old Michelle Dehner – aka Michelle Martin – was found in a fourth-floor studio apartment on Arrott Street, not far from Frankford Avenue. She had been stabbed 23 times in the stomach and chest.

  Once again, there was no sign of forced entry. Her apartment was on the same street as the one where Theresa Sciortino had been murdered 18 months before and was only three blocks from the alley where Carol Dowd had been slain. She had even been an early suspect in the murder of Jean Durkin as, the night before Durkin died, the two of them had fought over a blanket.

  Like Jean Durkin, Theresa Sciortino and Carol Dowd, she had a history of mental instability. A hard-drinking, paranoid loner who was less than fastidious about personal hygiene, she was called “Crazy Michelle” by people in the neighbourhood, who saw her traipsing from bar to bar dressed in jeans and a sloppy sweatshirt. Considered eccentric and anti-social, she sometimes barricaded herself in her apartment or flung things out the window, endangering people below. Streetwise and single, she frequented the same bars as the other victims. When she was not selling pretzels on the street, she spent all day drinking. A blowsy blonde, she often took men home with her. She was last seen the day before her body was found leaving a Frankford Avenue bar with a middle-aged white man. There was little doubt that Michelle Martin’s death was the work of the Frankford Slasher.

  All those who had vouched for Christopher, insisting that he was a decent and friendly man, now seemed vindicated. He had been falsely accused and the real killer was still at large. Once again, the residents of Frankford took to the streets, insisting that the police catch the Slasher. On 27 October, 50 of them marched in the rain along the routes they believed the killer had taken with his victims. The Philadephia Inquirer reported that the procession went “past the fish market, behind which one body was found butchered with a knife, past a bar that four of the dead had patronized, and along Arrott Street, where the latest victim was found stabbed to death early last month”. Again, they lit candles and commemorated “the women who couldn’t be here”.

  Detectives also took to the streets again, watching for men who picked up women in bars in Frankford. They had two men under constant surveillance and leads on a third suspect. They even tracked down the owner of the shoe that had left the bloody shoe print on the floor of Theresa Sciortino’s apartment. It turned out to be one of Sciortino’s boyfriends, but he was eventually cleared as a suspect.

  The public phoned in, naming fresh suspects. Psychics were called in. A local witches’ coven was accused, but excluded.

  Calls were made for the release of Leonard Christopher. But even with the murder investigation still in full swing, on 29 November 1990, his trial in the Court of Common Pleas began. Christopher appeared in a grey suit and black horn-rimmed glasses, looking, the newspapers said, “studious” – a mile away from the public image of the demented killer who had been raping and killing women in Frankford for the last five years. Nevertheless in her opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Judith Rubino insisted that the mild-mannered Christopher was a vicious killer who used a “Rambo-style knife” to slash and kill Carol Dowd in the alley behind the fish market where he worked.

  She admitted that while she had no witnesses to the actual murder, she did have testimony that would provide sufficient circumstantial evidence to prove the defendant’s guilt. Christopher had been seen with Carol Dowd going into the alley, and a witness heard a woman scream. He had also been seen leaving the alley. Dowd had been found dead in the alley immediately afterward. He had been seen with a knife, and his clothes had blood on them. What’s more, Christopher had lied about his whereabouts that night.

  Defence attorney Jack McMahon told the jury that Christopher had no history of violence. The police were under pressure to solve the case, he said, and they had rushed to judgment. When the prosecutor objected, Judge George Ivins cautioned McMahon to stick the facts and not offer opinions. However, McMahon stuck to his guns. He pointed that there had been at least six murders before Carol Dowd’s that were so similar that they were thought to be the work of a serial killer. But Christopher had only been charged with one of the slayings. The prosecution objected to this line of reasoning as McMahon could plainly infer that, as another similar murder had occurred while his client was in custody, he could not have killed Carol Dowd. When attorneys for the prosecution and defence approached the bench, the argument became heated.

  McMahon continued by pointing out that prosecution were relying on evidence that in a stronger case would have been discarded. Their witness were, by and large, drug users and prostitutes, who had nine aliases between them and long rap sheets. Emma Leigh had even admitted to lying to the police to start wit
h. She was plainly an unreliable witness. Could any jury believe such witnesses “beyond reasonable doubt”?

  No physical evidence connected Christopher to the crime scene. No murder weapon had been found – certainly not a “Rambo-style” knife. When Christopher had been arrested less than a week after the murder, there were no marks on him – no bruises or abrasions as you would expect from a woman fighting for her life. In short, there was no reason to view Leonard Christopher as a murderer.

  However, the prosecution did have a reliable witness. It was Christopher’s boss Jaesa Phang. On the morning after the murder, Christopher had said that a white women about 45 years old had been murdered in the alley, Phang testified. Those details had not been released by the police, the prosecution maintained. Phang said that, few days later, Christopher had said: “Maybe I killed her.” Although he quickly recanted, Phang maintained that he had seemed quite serious at the time. He was also inordinately interested in the details of the crime and, when he talked about it, he mimed disembowelling the body. Christopher also claimed to have seen a white man on the street at around 1 a.m. However, no one else had reported seeing him, while others had said they had seen Christopher.

  About five days after Carol Dowd’s death, Christopher told Phang that he could not sleep well because he had witnessed a murder. His speech was rambling and his manner agitated, Phang said. Christopher then said that he thought a white man was trying to kill him. The man knew that he had seen the murder and Christopher believed that he would get into his apartment and would hide in the closet.

  The prosecution presented the bloodstains in evidence. But the spots of blood found on Christopher’s trousers were too small to type at that time. A bloodstained tissue was found in the driveway next to Christopher’s apartment building. DNA analysis was in its infancy at that time and was still being challenged in many courts. But the blood was Type O, matching Dowd’s. In Christopher’s statement to the police, he said that when he was at his girlfriend’s apartment that night he had seen a white man in his 40s outside wiping his hands on what looked like a handkerchief or tissue. But this was the wrong apartment.

  The trial lasted less than two weeks. McMahon ended by emphasizing Christopher’s good character. Violence was completely out of character for him. The prosecution had no weapon, no motive, no weapon and no solid evidence.

  But Rubino asked what motive the witnesses had for lying. Some of them had been his friends, including Emma Leigh who had initially lied on his behalf to the police. There was no reason for her to change her story unless she was now telling the truth. Christopher had no alibi for that night and had lied about being with his girlfriend. She ended with a vivid description of what Carol Dowd must have gone through in her last few moments. The following day Christopher was convicted of the first-degree murder. According the Inquirer, Christopher “showed no visible reaction”. The prosecution asked for the death sentence, but Christopher was sentenced to life imprisonment. He maintained that he had been railroaded by “pipers” – that is, prostitutes pressured into testifying by the police. McMahon simply said: “The real killer may still be out there.”

  While the police considered Christopher a suspect in some of the other murders, there are other suspects as well. At least seven of the Frankford Slasher murders remain unsolved and Christopher certainly could not have done one of them as he was in jail at the time. And no one ever found the middle-aged white man seen with a number of the victims shortly before their deaths.

  The Phoenix Baseline Killer

  In 2005 and 2006, the police in Phoenix, Arizona figured they had two serial killers on their hands. The most pernicious was the so-called Baseline Killer – aka the Baseline Rapist – who committed countless crimes, including 27 murders, along Baseline Road, a long stretch of highway running east-west across southern Phoenix, and the neighbouring towns of Tempe and Mesa. The other was Serial Shooter, who was involved in 38 random shootings north of the Salt River, resulting in at least six deaths.

  The Baseline Killer sought out victims who were blue-eyed blondes, preying on them in secluded areas. He appeared to spend some time stalking his victims and initiated contact before the attack.

  The attacks began in September 2005, when two men, aged 19 and 27, were sexually assaulted at gunpoint behind a church. At the time the police did not link these crimes to the murder of 34-year-old barmaid Georgia Phompbon around midnight on 16 September. She was shot sitting in the parking lot outside her apartment block on South Boulevard Avenue after returning home from work. Later it was seen to be the work of the same man.

  Then at 9.30 p.m. on 20 September 2005, the suspect jumped through the take-out window of a fast-food restaurant on South Central Avenue, snatched an employee’s purse, then jumped out again. He then hijacked a car, forcing the mother to drive while he sexually molested her daughter in the back seat. Then he forced the mother to park and sexually assaulted her too. Later that evening, he robbed a man with an infant outside a chemist in West Baseline Road.

  At 8 p.m. on 3 November, a man with a moustache, dreadlocks and a fisherman’s hat walked into a lingerie shop on North 32nd Street brandishing a gun and robbed the store of $720. This provided the enduring image of the Baseline Rapist who, less than ten minutes later, abducted a woman from outside a grocery store across the street and sexually molested her in her car. The perpetrator was a black or Hispanic man, about 5 foot 10 inches tall and weighing around 170 pounds. It later became clear that he wore disguises and the dreadlocks were possibly a wig.

  On 7 November 2005 the suspect robbed four people at gunpoint inside Las Brasas, a Mexican restaurant on North 39th Street. Then he went to a Little Caesar’s Pizza restaurant next door and robbed three people there. Outside on the street he robbed four more people. Pocketing $463, he fired a round into the air as he fled.

  Later he sexually assaulted a 21-year-old woman. She told the police that the man first approached as she was tossing a bag of clothes into a donation bin in central Phoenix.

  “I thought he was just asking for a ride,” she said. “He started saying that he needed me to take him down the corner, and I was just like in shock.”

  He said he had just robbed a place. According to her description, the man was wearing a fisherman’s hat, a wig and big round plastic glasses without lenses.

  “He was telling me just to drive at the speed limit so not to cause attention,” the woman said. He told her to calm down and threatened to kill her if she tried anything stupid. Then he told her to stop the car and turn off the engine. He forced her to put the seatback down, then told her to take off her clothes. He said it would give him more time to get away. But then he started molesting her. She asked him to stop, but he would not. When he had finished, he took money from her wallet and left.

  At 6.55 p.m. on 12 December 2005, he killed 39-year-old Tina Washington, a single mother of three, behind a fast food restaurant on South 40th Street. She was a teacher at Cactus Preschool who had moved from Missouri 13 years before and was last seen waiting for a bus home. Gunfire alerted the police and a witness saw a man standing over her body with a gun drawn. She had been shot in the head.

  Tina had previously told co-workers that two African-American men wearing hooded sweatshirts had been harassing her at the bus stop recently. The day after Tina was killed a black man walked into the gas station across the street from the crime scene and claimed to be a relative of Tina Washington. He asked to see the CCTV footage from the crime scene the night before. Police described him as a person of interest at the time. They said they were looking for a 140-pound man between 5 foot 7 inches and 5 foot 9 inches wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt, black baggy pants, and possibly glasses. At 8 p.m. that day, the suspect robbed a woman on East South Mountain Avenue.

  At 7.38 p.m. on 20 February 2006, the bodies of 64-year-old Mirna Palma-Roman and 98-year-old Romelia Vargas were found in their snack truck at Lower Buckeye Road and 91st Avenue. They had been shot. Initially, pol
ice thought the killings were drug-related and only connected the crime to the Baseline Killer in July.

  On 14 March 2006, there was another double homicide. At 9 p.m. two employees of Yoshi’s Chinese restaurant at Indian School Road and 24th Street set off home together. The body of 20-year-old Liliana Sanchez-Cabrera was found in a car in the parking lot of a Burger King in the 2200 block of East Indian School Road. Employees saw the car at 5 a.m. but did not spot the body inside until 8 a.m. At 11.45 a.m. 23-year-old Chao “George” Chou was found dead about a mile away. Both had been shot in the head.

  Soon after a local businessman noticed blood in the gravel of a parking lot on North 14th Street and there were marks as if a body had been dragged across it. He called the police, who searched the area. A week later, the businessman noticed a bad smell in the area and turned up the decomposing body of Kristin Nicole Gibbons, who had been shot in the head.

  At 9 p.m. on 1 May 2006, a man in a Halloween mask abducted a woman at gunpoint outside Las Brasas restaurant and sexually assaulted her on North 32nd Street.

  One woman displayed what the police called “heroic actions” and escaped the suspect’s predations. She had just walked out of a check-cashing business when she saw a man in a mask pushing a shopping trolley. She was opening her car door when he ran up to her, pointed a gun and told her to give him a ride, the police said. He forced her to drive to a secluded area, then ordered her to make the seat lie flat and told her to take off her clothes.