Woodsmen and climbers in the northern edge of the state around the mountainous ranges were asked to report anything unusual. They spotted a number of campfires, but all proved to be legitimate. One climber was feared missing and police units rushed to the scene, suspecting foul play, but he showed up unharmed three days later.
In the southern part of the state police helicopters skirted much of the area between Death Valley on the Nevada border and the San Bernardino Mountains, sighting nothing out of the ordinary except the wreckage of a private plane lost a year earlier. At Barstow on the Mojave Desert an abandoned car was found containing the bleached body of a young man. Excitement mounted until it was learned that the unidentified male had been no older than eighteen and had probably been Mexican.
On July 18 the body of a woman believed to be in her early fifties was discovered in a roadside gully midway between Yuba City and Sacramento. She had been dead about ten days and the body was badly decomposed and almost totally dehydrated. Maggots had eaten away most of the brain. Yet the cause of death was readily apparent from the crushed skull and broken bones, injuries typical of a hitand-run victim on fast roads. An autopsy revealed only that the woman had been a heavy drinker and smoker and had suffered from arthritis. Local police listed the death as a probable vehicular homicide on or about July 8, and sent a routine report to the Sheriff’s Office in Sacramento. A check was made through Missing Persons to see if anyone answering the woman’s description had been reported missing. None had, and because the original report stated vehicular homicide it was not until much later that the terrible significance of the date was seen.
The unthinkable, at least for the authorities, occurred on July 19, a wet and thoroughly miserable day in much of northern California. On that afternoon an elderly woman was savagely attacked in her home and literally hacked to death. When police arrived they found blood everywhere in the room and an axe next to the body. Then their eyes widened in genuine concern. On the woman’s right hand the index finger had been cut off. A quick search showed it was missing. The area was sealed off and by nightfall the house looked like a Hollywood set, with bright lights and various police cars and every law-enforcement official in the state seemingly there, including Sheriff James Oates and Lieutenant John Spanner of Hillside. The woman had lived less than thirty miles from Willows State Hospital.
Sheriff Oates grabbed Spanner in back of the house where they could be alone for a moment. “Mungo,” he said through clenched teeth. “I knew it’d come to this, I knew he’d kill again.” He caught Spanner’s surprised look. “I mean when we didn’t catch him the first few days,” he said hastily. “The bastard’s kill-crazy, that’s what it is all right.” Spanner wasn’t so sure. “Let’s check the axe with Willows. See if it could’ve come from there,” he said thoughtfully. He looked perplexed, uneasy, and Oates asked him why. By now the sheriff was ready to listen to anything.
“It’s the finger,” Spanner told him. “I don’t understand it. With the finger off, everybody knows it’s Mungo, just the same as if he wrote his signature.”
“All these nuts are ego maniacs, ain’t they?” Oates asked plaintively. “Remember that little blond gal in Daly City that told all her friends she was the killer they were looking for? And what about all the nuts who do something dumb to get caught so they can tell everybody how many they killed?” He rubbed his nose. “They’re all the same.”
“I don’t think Mungo’s like that,” said Spanner. “He seems to know exactly what he’s doing. And he’s been smart enough to outwit us so far.” Oates frowned, not needing to be reminded of that fact. “I think he wants very much to stay anonymous, to get lost in the crowd. It’s his only chance.”
Oates shrugged. “So how do you explain this?”
“I can’t. That’s the point—it doesn’t fit.”
“It don’t have to fit if he’s a nut.”
Spanner smiled wearily. “He may be a nut in the homicidal sense but they have their own logic. They plan things out like the rest of us, sometimes a lot better.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re not going to get away with saying that because he’s crazy he’s bound to act irrationally. From what he’s managed so far, I’d say it’s about the opposite.” He looked directly at Oates. “Anyway, why take the finger at all? Assuming he doesn’t want the publicity.”
“That’s easy. To get the ring, same as last time.”
“What ring?”
“The ring she must’ve been wearing on her—” He stopped, puzzled, as though an unexpected thought had struck him.
“Exactly,” said Spanner, nodding. “Women don’t wear rings on the right index finger. Some young girls might, but not an old woman like this. They wear them on the left hand, and if anything’s on the right it’s on the ring finger, not the index.”
The sheriff swore loudly.
“When I saw the hands before,” continued Spanner, “she had just a plain wedding band, where it should be. So she didn’t go in much for rings.”
“Then why chop the finger off?” asked the sheriff helplessly.
“I don’t know,” said Spanner quietly. Then with sudden urgency: “Check out the axe. And if I were you I’d talk to the neighbors and relatives. Might be more here than we know.”
“What about you?”
“Me?” Spanner laughed. “I’m going home unless that axe came from Willows. This is out of my jurisdiction.” He sounded relieved. “It’s all yours, Jim.”
The sheriff groaned and uttered an obscenity, not an easy thing to do at the same time.
In the second week of July the weather throughout the upper half of the state had become sufficiently hot to cause comment and general irritability, nowhere more than above San Francisco and extending up past the Clear Lake region. Here the air just sat still for days, hardly rustling the leaves, and people found good excuses to sit still with it. In a small rural community about forty miles from Willows State Hospital, the community where Sara Bishop had lived and died, a makeshift auction was being held on the lawn of a large two-story frame house that had recently been repainted. For many years the house belonged to an elderly spinster who had died six weeks earlier, leaving it to a favorite nephew who was now conducting the auction in lethargic fashion.
On the lawn were several dozen pieces of furniture of varying sizes and shapes. Some were eminently worthless beyond the strictly functional, others approached antiquity and were the only things that aroused any kind of spirited bidding by the small crowd on that afternoon. Along with the furniture, ranged in uneven rows on the newly cut grass, were dozens of cartons of pots and pans, ancient tools, bedspreads, curtain rods, books, old 78-rpm phonograph records, and assorted bric-a-brac. At one end were baskets of children’s toys, mostly broken, and shopping bags of weather-beaten clothing. At the other end of the rows of general merchandise were numerous standing lamps with fabric shades and a huge birdcage. About the only common denominator among the items was the nephew’s desire to be rid of them.
While his aunt was alive, all had graced her home. She had been raised in the town, moving to the frame house when she was still a young lady. Beaux had courted her on its front steps or in its parlor and been finally rejected; others had come once and rejected her. Dreams had been born there, and plans made. Not all came true. When her father died she took care of her mother, first as a companion, then as a nurse. She was their only child, a fact she was never allowed to forget. She was fifty-two when her mother died, and too old for children of her own. She had performed her duties with honor and virtue, and as the years passed she remained alone in the house she loved, reading her books and listening to her records and feeding her birds. She let the grass grow around the house, and collected cast-off toys, which she gave to the town’s needy children.
The spinster was known by all the townspeople to have a good heart. She would visit the sick and cry at funerals and comfort the bereaved. That she loved children was obvious, that she at times also loved thei
r mothers was something she kept to herself and safely at a distance.
When the spinster was fifty-four years old she met Sara Bishop and her shy, withdrawn boy. She felt a deep sadness for Sara and saw in the young mother much of the suffering she herself had endured for so many years. Her feeling quickly turned to love, not passionately sexual but quiet and responsive and selfless. Sara soon returned the feeling, finding a strange comfort in the other woman. Perhaps once a month they would cling together in bed, talking quietly of sorrow as desperate women do and giving strength to each other’s bruised psyche. At such times Sara would often tell the spinster that theirs was the only relationship in which she had ever found any peace. The spinster would smile sadly, knowing that such peace came from their mutual loneliness.
Though she had little money to spare, the woman gave Sara sewing jobs whenever she could. She would also give the boy small gifts. She was frightened by Sara’s attitude toward the boy, and for a long time she tried to shut her eyes to her friend’s increasingly strange behavior. The spinster was a passive woman, taught to sit and wait. Taking action was unfamiliar to her, she had no experience at it. She was also very religious, and the idea of coming between a mother and her child was repugnant to everything she had been taught to believe.
Yet the day came when she could shut her eyes no longer, and she quietly told Sara of her fears for both mother and son. Sara, feeling betrayed once again, ordered the woman from her home and vowed never to talk to her again. Before she left that last time the spinster gave the boy a little wallet with a picture of his mother inside, taken some months earlier.
Within a year Sara Bishop was dead. When the police took the boy away, the only possession he had on him was the little wallet with the picture of his mother.
The older woman was grief-stricken at the double tragedy. With the remarkable courage she had shown all her life, she put aside her sorrow and did what she could. Aided by neighbors, she took to her home some of the dead woman’s possessions, paying what she considered a fair price. The money was sent to the institution where the boy was placed, to be held for him until such time as he could make use of it.
For a long while the spinster left the boxes unopened in a darkened room, never going near them. Eventually she rummaged through the contents bit by bit, finally coming to a box of books. In one book, written by someone named Caryl Chessman, she found a sheaf of papers folded neatly in half. Putting on her glasses, she slowly began to read of the life of her friend Sara Bishop. The tears quickly came, and long before she finished the last page she was crying inconsolably.
Over the next dozen years she read the pages many times, never without tears. Each time she would place them back in the book where she had first found them. To her they seemed somehow to belong in that book and nowhere else. Someday, she often told herself, she would give them to the boy.
The spinster never visited the boy in the institution. She felt she would not be able to control her sorrow and would do him no good. She wasn’t even sure if he would remember or recognize her. But she left his mother’s pages in the book for him. When she died the pages were still there.
Now on this hot day, after several hours of desultory bidding, the only items left on the lawn were a worn tufted couch of uncertain origin and two cartons of kitchen utensils and books. The nephew paid a neighbor to haul away the couch in his truck. The two cartons were stored in the shed behind the house and quickly forgotten.
Far from the bucolic scene but at roughly the same time, two men in Fresno were supervising the installation of a neon sign over their new diner. They were brothers, simple men trying to make a living in the fast-food business. They knew nothing of Sara Bishop or her boy, or of the town in which she died, or even of Willows State Hospital. They had, however, heard of Harry Owens. In fact, one of them had killed him.
Don Solis was released from San Quentin in 1968 after serving sixteen years for murder and armed robbery. He considered himself lucky. He could have been sent to the Green Room like Caryl Chessman. He had been there when Chessman was executed, he was there for Barbara Graham’s death and almost a hundred others. In his sixteen years he had seen men die in prison fights, go mad, commit suicide, bleed to death while others watched. He saw brutality beyond anything he experienced in the war, and it all finally sickened him. Now at age fifty-five, a little heavier and a lot smarter, he wanted only to be left in peace and to make a lot of money, this time legitimately. With his brother Lester as his partner, he was doing all right.
When Lester got out of prison in 1962 after a ten-year stretch for armed robbery and accessory, he drifted back to Fresno. Always the follower, he worked at odd jobs until Don came out. They had no money and no plans. Johnny Messick, who was in on the Overland Pacific job, had disappeared after his release in 1960. Hank Green had been killed in 1954 by a fellow inmate. Carl Hansun, who started the whole thing, had been gone since the robbery. Harry Owens was dead of course. Don still thought hard of Harry, though he wished he hadn’t killed him and thereby wasted those years.
Two weeks after his return Don Solis was contacted by a local lawyer, who had a $10,000 check waiting for him. It was no joke, the check was his to do with as he pleased. No, the lawyer couldn’t tell where the money came from; he was paid only to pass on the certified check that had arrived in the mail.
Shortly thereafter the Solis brothers bought a diner in Fresno with the money. They did well. Five years later they bought a bigger place and put up a bigger sign. By July 1973 Don Solis no longer thought about the original $10,000. The future looked bright.
On July 22, three days after the brutal axe murder, a second elderly woman was killed in the same savage manner, this time with a large butcher’s knife. Again the index finger was missing. But from the left hand.
Her house was ten miles from the first killing, and both were within a thirty-mile radius of Willows. Panic immediately gripped the area. People stayed off the streets at night, admitted no strangers to their homes. Windows were locked, doors barred, guns kept loaded and ready. Women refused to stay home alone during the day, and many banded together with friends for protection or visited distant relatives. In other households men refused to go to work and leave their families. During that week millions of dollars were lost in unearned wages and unproduced goods and services.
By then the police were no longer in the dark, at least not entirely. The axe found at the first murder site had been checked with the Willows Hospital authorities. It definitely did not belong there. Where it did belong, and where it had been kept for many years, was in the woodshed of the murder victim. Neighbors identified it by the initials the frugal owner had scratched into the wood handle. Apparently the killer had gone to the unlocked woodshed looking for a handy weapon, perhaps he had even known of the axe.
Relatives verified that the woman, living alone in the house, had often hired handymen to help around the place. These were usually locals who were unemployable for one reason or another; most had drinking problems, some were of unsavory reputation. During the past year five or six had been seen on the property. Police set about finding and questioning each one. There was no particular urgency to their quest since they still believed the killing was the work of the maniac, who had gone to the shed looking for anything and found the axe.
After the second murder the urgency suddenly increased. Sheriff Oates called Spanner in Hillside, told him about the new killing and the missing finger. “It’s from the left hand this time, for chrissake. What the hell’s going on, John? Are we all nuts?”
Spanner laughed mirthlessly. “Maybe someone’s trying to make it look that way.”
“He’s doing a damn good job of it,” Oates growled over the phone.
Spanner agreed. After a moment he grew serious. “I don’t think Mungo’s the one you’re looking for. It’s not his style. Somebody’s using him as a cover-up, that’s why the fingers are missing. He read about it in the papers.”
“But why the lef
t hand?” Oates demanded.
“He might be just too dumb to remember. Or too careless, or drunk. The important thing is, he picks his shots and seems to know the layout. And he grabs whatever weapon’s handy.”
The sheriff grunted. The word suddenly stirred something in the back of his mind. “We’re checking on some handymen the old lady used around the house.” He paused. “You think there might be something in it?”
“Might be.” Then: “Look for a connection, Jim. Somebody who knew both women and knew his way around. Chances are he’s your man.”
“What about a motive?” Oates objected. “Without a motive we’re back to a nut like Mungo.”
“Not quite.” Spanner, unseen, shook his head. “These killings are too methodical, too planned for that. Whoever it is, he’s not mad, just very angry. Get your connection and you’ll find your motive.”
By the evening of the twenty-third police learned that the second victim had also employed an occasional handyman. Neighbors remembered one some months earlier who had argued with the woman over the number of hours he worked. They didn’t know his name, but the description given police matched that of one of the men known to the earlier victim. He was quickly called in for questioning, and this time the police were too short-tempered for any further evasions.
Within hours the man confessed to both murders. A forty-five-year-old uneducated laborer with a history of alcoholism and a long record of arrests for disorderly conduct, he had harbored a grudge against both women. When the escaped mental patient wasn’t promptly caught he decided to kill them. Cutting off the fingers was meant to throw suspicion on Vincent Mungo but on the second job he got the hands mixed up. Both times he had been half drunk.
By Reason of Insanity Page 10