City of Dark Corners

With the sock stuffed in the girl’s mouth, I assumed the rape preceded the strangulation. But the doc, who had worked at the coroner’s office in Los Angeles and seen such cases before, said it was possible that the murderer was raping Edna while he was slowly crushing her windpipe. “It’s part of the excitement for him.”

He turned her to show me a small cross carved into the exact middle of the small of her back. It looked as if it was done with a penknife rather than resulting from some accident, and it was fresh.

“He marked her,” the doc said. “Mutilation is part of the M.O. of a lust murder.”

I had never heard the term before, I told him.

“It was first used by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1880s,” he said. “The killer receives intense sexual gratification from killing someone.”

“A nice pair of nylons always does the trick for me.”

“You cops and your black humor. Lust murderers can be much worse that this. Genital mutilation. Cannibalism. Inserting objects into the victim’s orifices. Necrophilia. This killer is only strangling with great force and cutting the victim, but you should be prepared for worse.”

I left him with the body, but the cross stuck with me. It wasn’t like a typical one found in Christian churches. With the two arms meeting in the middle, it reminded me of the simplified iron cross the Germans were using by 1918. The balkenkreuz, or beam cross. Were we looking for a war vet or a German immigrant?

Edna was a straight-A student at Phoenix Union High School, popular, a cheerleader. She was the oldest of three children. Captain McGrath assigned three of my Hat Squad colleagues to interview her friends, teachers, and steady boyfriend. He was the son of Chauncey McKellips, president of the First National Bank of Arizona and had an alibi for Thursday night. The detectives also started rounding up suspects with morals offenses and transients. Migrant farmworkers were m

ostly gone for now, the lettuce harvest complete and more than four thousand carloads shipped by rail.

A crime such as this had never happened before in Phoenix, much less in a pleasant Anglo middle-class neighborhood only a few blocks from the state capitol.

On Monday afternoon, with two hours of sleep and fueled by the sludge that passed for coffee at headquarters, I went back to the house on Twelfth Avenue and interviewed her parents in more detail. They were shattered, sleep-deprived, but cooperative. Edna’s father worked in insurance and her mother was a housewife. Neither had sensed anything unusual about their daughter, no indication she was afraid, no enemies, no strange men following her. They always closed the blinds and curtains at night. But on cool nights, Edna liked to open her bedroom window slightly and sleep under a thick comforter.

I took a careful inventory of her bedroom. It was untouched since the attack, her parents complying with my request to leave it alone. With the sun streaming in, the room became clearer. The bedclothes had been thrown off Edna and folded on the floor. With the body removed, I noted the bloodstain dried on the middle of the sheet; this was a hellish way to lose her virginity. I went through her closet and drawers, her mother trailing me. “Tell me if you see anything out of place or missing,” I said.

“I don’t see her knickers,” she said. “Edna always slept in them. She was a modest girl.” Then the tears came. “Who could do this to her?”

It took time for her to focus again. “Wait, where is Theodore?”

“Theodore?” I was thinking of a cat or a dog.

“It’s a Teddy bear she’s had since she was a little girl. He was always in the bed next to her pillow.” She fussed around the room. “He’s gone!”

The killer took trophies.

* * *

Almost a month later, on Saturday, February 9th, he killed again. Dorothy Jameson was raped and strangled in a Spanish-colonial revival house on Taylor Street, a quarter mile from the first killing. She was an only child who lived with her grandmother, who was hard of hearing. The woman didn’t discover her body until the morning when Dorothy, usually an early riser, wasn’t already up.

Some elements of the crime were identical: The sock in her mouth, nightgown pulled up, and bedding folded. He came in by an unlocked bedroom window. The second victim was a redhead, although not a natural one. Dorothy had small firm breasts and delicate, “cute girl” features like Edna Sawyer. She had the same cross carved into the small of her back.

But the evidence revealed some differences, too.

He took more care and time with the assault. The girl’s wrists were tied with rope to the headboard. The rope strands were cut to exact lengths and brought by the killer, as was the sock. Perhaps the gash he received in the first attack made him want to restrain the victim. Had he spied on the house to know the grandmother was nearly deaf, thus giving him more time for the attack? Her legs were raised and knees bent with her feet on the mattress, as if he arranged her that way after the rape. This time he didn’t have to worry about being overheard by parents and siblings.

Dorothy had a cat that slept with her. Her grandmother said she always kept her door partly open so the animal could come and go. But Dorothy’s door was closed and the cat was hiding under a chair in the living room. The killer somehow immobilized the girl, or she was a hard sleeper, then shooed away the cat and shut the door. This was the second victim whose family didn’t own a dog. Did the killer know this in advance? Of course he did. He reconnoitered his targets.

Unlike the first scene, where the ground below the window was covered with grass, the Jamieson home had a flower bed. We were able to get a clean cast of a footprint, a tennis shoe or sneaker, size eleven. Don guesstimated that the wearer was a well-built man, at least a hundred-eighty pounds.

When I went through the bedroom with Dorothy’s grandmother, a pair of the girl’s knickers was missing. So was a stuffed animal, a puppy with a red ribbon around his neck. I also went carefully through the girl’s diary, but it gave no clue that she was afraid, being stalked, or had enemies.

The postmortem was similar to the first victim. Genital bruising and bleeding, slow strangulation by a man with strong hands. It was possible she was raped and then killed. But the doc’s comment, once again, about the penetration occurring along with choking her to death stayed with me. “Maybe it’s the only way he can maintain arousal and orgasm,” he said. “Characteristic of a lust murder.”

Dorothy was another straight-A student at Phoenix Union High, a clarinet player in the band, member of the pep club, popular. She was sixteen, a year behind Edna Sawyer. Interviews with her friends indicated that she didn’t know Edna, didn’t have a boyfriend. She was hoping to attend the University of Arizona.

Once again, detectives talked to neighbors, who saw and heard nothing. They hadn’t seen any peeping Toms, and the police call logs backed that up. Another roundup of potential suspects went nowhere, either because of alibis or the most promising ones failing to break under heavy interrogation. One whacky who was familiar to us came in to confess. But he didn’t know even the basics of the crime, especially the parts we held back from the press: taking trophies, the penknife cross, and tying her hands with ropes. I sent telegrams to Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego, and El Paso, asking if they had anything similar. Nothing close came back.

As for the rope lengths and sock, they could have been purchased anywhere. The shoeprint matched a Converse, but that was available in at least a dozen or more stores. Fingerprints from the second house produced no suspects, although they did match the ones from the windowsill of the first murder. It was the same killer, not a copycat.