Giving him another gift.
A son.
Leona had called Loyd’s parents, and the two couples drove to the restaurant together. Boone pulled up next to a white van with a round decal denoting that it was a state-owned vehicle.
Loyd opened the back door and took Cindy from Leona’s arms so she could use both hands to maneuver her way from the car. After handing Cindy to her grandmother, Loyd reached into the car, putting his left arm under Leona’s legs, moving them outside onto the pavement. He squatted down, put his right arm around her waist, and gently pulled her onto her feet. Once she felt stable, they walked toward the van.
A lady holding a blanketed bundle emerged from the vehicle. Loyd saw me first, then Boone, and finally Leona.
“Look at those blue eyes,” Loyd said. “And that strawberry blond hair.”
“And he’s smiling. Look at his dimples, Loyd,” Leona said.
“He’s precious,” admired Evelyn.
Boone couldn’t even speak. He just stared at me, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.
“We don’t have much information about him except that one of his parents loved music,” offered the social worker as she handed me to Leona. “We called him Philip while he was in foster care, but I’m sure y’all will want to give him a special new name. He’s kind of colicky, and we’ve got him on goat’s milk. Seems to agree with him better than anything else. Must’ve been plenty music around his home before, because sometimes when he won’t stop crying, if we hum or sing to him, he calms right down. We’ll check in with you in a day or two. If you have any questions or need anything, you know how to reach us. Congratulations.”
There was no mention of Baby John Doe, no mention of my parents or the train ride. There was no mention of the stairwell. Loyd’s sister-in-law, Margie, who had been instrumental in placing me with Loyd and Leona, didn’t tell them that she had pulled me from my teenage mother’s arms. She couldn’t; it was a closed adoption, and Louisiana law forbade her from saying a word about my background. Loyd and Leona had no way of knowing what I had already experienced in only three months of life. All they knew was that God had given them another gift, and they were going to cherish me.
My new family walked into Piccadilly Cafeteria for dinner and a celebration. Leona kissed me on my forehead and pulled me close to her heart.
My new parents named me Gary Loyd Stewart.
Back in San Francisco, my real name was not mentioned again. That had been forbidden by Judy’s mother. It was time for her to move on, to forget her past.
Three years later, on October 3, 1966, Leona miraculously would give birth to a baby girl, Christy Lee Stewart, after medical experts said her crushed womb would never support the birth of a child. Doctor Miller had once told her she could have children, but Leona and Loyd had long since given up on that dream. God had blessed them yet again.
21
In San Francisco, Van’s troubles were mounting, but Earl went to bat for him. Convinced that his son must have some kind of mental disorder, Earl decided that Van did not belong in prison and that perhaps a mental health care facility might be the better consequence for his actions—a place where his son could get the help he needed. He suggested that Van write to South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and ask the senator to act on his behalf. Thurmond agreed to speak with Superior Court Judge Norman Elkington, because Van was the son of a military commander. The judge would later state that he “wasn’t swayed at all by Thurmond’s letter asking that he look carefully into the case,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Thurmond, former judge and a former governor, was ignorant of a number of aspects of the case, including the fact that California’s statutory age is 18, not 16,” the article stated. “These statutory cases are usually just young love,” Thurmond’s aide, Ed Kenney, tried to explain.
Others also stood up for Van—Reverend Hubert Doran, who testified before the court that Van’s character was quite good, and Van’s high school teacher Norval Fast, who stated that Van had never seemed like a common criminal.
William Lohmus, still upset with Van for not helping him at own his court hearing, refused to testify for his old friend. William eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for driving Van and Judy to the airport the first time they ran away and was sentenced to probation—a stigma that would follow him throughout his career.
In a plea bargain orchestrated by Van’s attorney and Earl, my father was sentenced to one year of confinement for the rape of a female under eighteen years of age, which was reduced to time served and four years’ probation.
Two charges of fraud by wire had been lodged against Van in U.S. District Court in New Orleans at the same time he was facing rape charges in San Francisco. The U.S. Marshal’s office soon began following the paper trail of bad checks and forged documents he had left across the country while on the run. Marshals discovered that Van had misrepresented his identity when he had bought and subsequently sold documents to finance his adventure with Judy. In San Francisco, he was charged with document fraud and fraud by wire. Van was sentenced to three years in San Quentin State Prison. Soon, Lompoc, California, would file another charge of fraud by wire against him.
The judge honored Earl Sr.’s request and first sent Van to Atascadero State Hospital for ninety days to cure him of his obsession with Judy.
Located between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Atascadero is a maximum security facility for sexually deviant, criminally insane males. Opened in 1954, this psychiatric hospital features a security perimeter to protect the outside world from the patients, whose mental disabilities might pose a threat of danger. The thought of being perceived as “crazy” did not sit well with Van, who preferred to think of himself as intellectually superior.
At Atascadero, doctors designed an intensive regimen of electroshock therapy and drugs to exorcise Van’s pathological need for Judy. Although his senses became a little duller with each passing day, Van resisted therapy, preferring to cling to his thoughts of the beautiful blonde who had ultimately betrayed him.
Behind the halfhearted smile he gave his doctors, rage, menacing in its intensity, boiled inside him. William would later say, “If Van wasn’t crazy when he went to Atascadero, electrodes frying his brain for so long guaranteed that he was crazy when he came out.”
While Van was “being cured of his obsession,” San Pedro, California, filed another charge of fraud by wire against him.
Upon his release from Atascadero, he was sent to San Quentin State Prison.
The oldest prison in California, San Quentin is surrounded on three sides by San Francisco Bay. Built by inmates in the early 1850s, it’s the only prison in California that has an execution chamber, and all prisoners sentenced to death in the state live on Condemned Row. For those like Van, small, narrow cells with uncomfortable beds made of metal and a toilet against the wall became home. Murderers, robbers, and rapists peered out at passing guards from behind the vertical bars that kept them locked away from proper society. Prisoners, taken outside for periodic exercise, could view the hills of San Francisco from the yard—freedom, almost close enough to touch, yet so far from reach. For Van, the view was excruciating. He knew Judy was out there, somewhere in those hills, living her life without him.
For the next year and a half, he bided his time, planning how he would win her back and protecting himself as best he could. Labeled a pedophile, Van could not have had an easy time in prison, as many inmates view child rapists as suitable prey for their aggression.
He was paroled on July 12, 1965, two days before his thirty-first birthday.
It had been a little more than two years since he last saw Judy, and finally he was a free man.
22
In 1964, while Van served time in San Quentin, Rotea Gilford, a tall, thin African American man, one of the few black men who served on the San Francisco Police Department, sat at his desk in the Hall of Justice, not quite believing what he had just heard. He had jus
t earned a promotion. Never before in the history of the department had a black man been promoted to inspector in the robbery division.
The civil rights movement was in full swing and had finally resulted in the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act. Even with the act being signed into law, African Americans had to struggle to get a small foothold on the ladder of success. Rotea knew when he was first hired at the department that his climb would be a difficult one, but he dreamed of becoming a homicide investigator, of being a part of the team that tried to solve the numerous murders that plagued the city by the bay.
Rotea had moved with his family from Texas to the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the 1930s. Back then, the Fillmore was the logical place to move to if you were black. Filled with immigrants from all over the world, here a black child could fit in with the other kids. That was a little more difficult in other areas of the city, but the Fillmore was not like other neighborhoods. From its inception, it had a different pulse, a distinctive beat that could be heard every night in the jazz clubs and theaters that sprang up along its streets.
Rotea grew up on those streets in the 1940s and ’50s. He knew where he could go and where he couldn’t. His parents had told him stories about how they had not been allowed to go into the clubs and restaurants in their own neighborhood because they were people of color. In reaction, African Americans began opening their own clubs, the music that streamed from open doors so powerful that they began to attract attention. Residents from other districts around the city began to make their way to the Fillmore, drawn there by black artists such as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, who demanded respect through their talent.
And while the Fillmore District was nothing like living in the South for African Americans at the time, Rotea grew up with a strong sense of what was right and wrong. And discrimination against African Americans because of their color was simply wrong in his opinion. From an early age, he set out to effect change in the mind-set of white San Franciscans. He determined that he would be the best he could be at whatever he did. Because he was tall and fit, sports became the natural way for him to express his equality. At Polytechnic High School, Rotea became a star, before moving on to San Francisco State’s football team. Excelling on and off the field, Rotea received interest from the Chicago Cardinals, but a shoulder injury crushed any hope he had of succeeding in the National Football League.
He was forced to change his focus. In college, Rotea became friends with a young civil rights activist named Willie Brown. Also from Texas, Willie had experienced discrimination, even mob violence, firsthand, and he had moved to San Francisco when he was seventeen, determined to make a difference. Willie worked hard as a janitor to pay his way through college, and Rotea respected that. He also liked that Willie had an instinctive knack for knowing how to get things done.
After college, Rotea applied for jobs that had previously been held only by whites. He worked as a toll taker on the Bay Bridge, a Muni bus driver, and a cable car conductor, but those types of civil service jobs were only the first steps. His true calling was to become a police officer. After serving with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office for two years, Rotea excitedly made the move to the SFPD in 1960.
In his early days, he was known to people on his beat as “Mr. Smiley.” Rotea worked his home court, the Fillmore District, where he was already known and trusted. In what had once been known as the “Harlem of the West,” Rotea spent much of his time settling disputes in the Westside Courts housing projects and trying to help the children who lived there realize that a much bigger world existed outside of their sometimes impoverished existence.
A tireless storyteller, Rotea often exaggerated his exploits in the Fillmore for his fellow officers, who rarely believed him but always wanted to hear his stories. As the years went on, Rotea expanded and enlarged the stories until they became bigger than life.
By 1964 Rotea had broken ground in the SFPD by earning the title of inspector. Willie Brown was also making huge strides. He had just been elected to the California Assembly. Determined men both, Rotea and Willie would go on to earn further respect and break more new ground throughout their careers.
But only Rotea’s life would one day become inextricably intertwined with a serial killer’s.
23
Much had changed in San Francisco by the time Van was released from prison in 1965. The Beatles had sparked a British Invasion the previous year, altering the face of music, and the beatniks in North Beach had moved into the Haight, followed by another counterculture movement that was flowing in from around the country: young people rebelling en masse against the conservative ideas of their parents and an escalating war in Vietnam. In 1965, United States combat troops tripled in number as America fought against the spread of communism. Unlike many of their parents, whose patriotism ran deep after surviving World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War, this generation wanted peace, not war. They arrived by the thousands, chanting antiwar slogans in the middle of a drug-fueled lovefest. The older residents of the Haight watched helplessly as the beautiful old Victorians that had been spared from the fire of 1906 were divided into low-rent apartments that housed as many of these hippies as could be crammed into the space.
As he walked through the Haight, Van would have noticed that these young people who had invaded his old stomping grounds looked scraggly. Many of the girls had long, straight hair and wore flowing dresses, and the men were dressed in tattered jeans and multicolor T-shirts. All of them appeared to be stoned as they sang songs and talked about being brothers and loving everyone. At first, Van viewed the hippies with disdain. At least the beatniks had dressed well and tried to appear educated.
“What the hell is going on around here?” he asked Anton LaVey one afternoon. Van had arrived at LaVey’s California Street residence unannounced shortly after his release from prison. LaVey, who did not usually see visitors without an appointment, made an exception in this case. “And what have you done with this place?”
LaVey laughed. The house was undergoing a transformation similar to what LaVey was experiencing. As his philosophic explorations had expanded further into the dark side, the decor in the house had become more and more ritualistic. Skulls, writhing demons, and skeletons had been placed strategically in various rooms for maximum effect. But it was the organ in the main ritual chamber that drew Van’s attention.
Van stayed for only a few minutes, long enough to hear LaVey’s take on what was happening in the Haight and to learn that LaVey was writing a book, a bible of sorts. He couldn’t wait to tell William, but his old friend seemed disinterested when my father called. William had not yet gotten over Van’s refusal to testify for him.
Disgruntled by the brush-off, Van headed to the Avenue Theatre, hoping to find a job. LaVey had described the stage house and pipe organ there, and he wanted to see it. From the moment my father entered the theater, he was hooked.
Built in 1927, the theater’s marquee—avenue—announced to everyone that this was the place to be on San Bruno Avenue. A glass-enclosed ticket booth faced the street, where people stood in line to gain entrance to the darkened theater. On Tuesday and Wednesday nights, silent movies were featured, accompanied by a Wurlitzer playing in the background. Organist Robert Vaughn, known around San Francisco for the sweet sounds he could pull from the instrument, often accompanied the silent movies. While most people came to watch the films, Van attended to hear Vaughn play, hoping to one day get his turn on that beautiful instrument.
Van would eventually befriend Rick Marshall, the manager of the theater, a strange fellow who wore cheap clothes that were always too small. Like Van, Marshall was an avid reader and loved antiques, old films, and plays. Marshall enjoyed reciting Keats and Shakespeare. He also loved the theater’s ten-ton Wurlitzer, and after he heard Van play the massive organ, he sometimes let my father sit in when Vaughn was not available.
While music might have come back into Van’s lif
e soon after he was released from prison, Judy had not, and Van was determined to rectify that situation. But Judy was not the same girl he had once known. Her impetuousness had caused her too much heartache, and she had learned her lessons. After nine months spent in a youth correctional facility, she had finally been returned to Verda’s custody. On February 3, 1964, at the age of sixteen, she enrolled in high school in San Francisco, and some sense of normalcy returned to her life. Verda and her husband divorced the following year, and Judy moved with her mother to Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco.
It was there that Van found her.
Having tracked down her mother’s number in a telephone listing, he called from a pay phone at a nearby shopping center.
“Hi, it’s me,” Van said when Judy answered the phone.
At the sound of his voice, my mother froze.
“Please come talk to me,” Van said. “I miss you. I’m sorry for what happened. I’ll get the baby back. I promise. I love you, Judy. Please. I’m right across the street.”
Judy collected her wits and took a deep breath. “I would not even cross a street to see you,” she said. “I never want to hear your voice again. And if I ever see you again, it would be too soon!”
“Judy, please. I love you.”
Judy hung up the phone, and for the first time in her life, she felt her own strength. A sense of power flowed through her. A fearlessness.
She was finally free.
Van was heartbroken. Livid. But there was nothing he could do. He returned to his bedroom on Noe Street to brood.
When he could stare at those walls no longer, my father immersed himself in his music and in the readily available psychotropic drugs being passed from person to person in Haight-Ashbury, escaping for a time from his pain.
By the middle of the decade, music in the San Francisco area was evolving as groups like the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and Jefferson Airplane, whose signature psychedelic sound would embody the hippie movement, moved into Haight-Ashbury and honed their skills in local clubs, the same clubs where my father had honed his a decade before. Van listened with interest as the doo-wop sound of the fifties turned grittier, dirtier, and more instrument-oriented. Loud guitars replaced harmonies, and lyrics about sex and drugs gave teenagers permission. On the flip side, folk groups like the Mamas and the Papas and the Youngbloods would gain the same audience through lyrics about love and peace. Even John Lennon and Yoko Ono would visit the Haight, finding inspiration in the revolution against the establishment that was occurring there.
The Most Dangerous Animal of All Page 12