City of Dark Corners

The national press had caught the story, labeling the perpetrator as the “Fiend of Phoenix” but “University Park Strangler” stuck locally. Part of me wondered if it was because people in other parts of the city used the moniker as an incantation to keep the killer there and safely out of their neighborhoods.

Captain McGrath worked out a plan to focus marked police cars on the fringes of University Park, to “give him a sense of safety” inside the neighborhood itself. At the same time, members of the Hat Squad and patrolmen in plain clothes stationed themselves around University Park in parked cars, commandeered delivery trucks, and one empty rental house with good views of the street.

Everybody worked in pairs. Pump-action shotguns and Thompson submachine guns were issued. McGrath kept me with him at our new headquarters, which probably made sense because officers could use call boxes to notify us of the situation. But I wanted to be on the street. We were all in position as the sun went down.

Yet nothing happened that night.

Just after sunrise two days later, Wednesday, a homeowner at Thirteenth Avenue and Polk Street called. A girl was on his front yard, half dressed, not moving. By the time I got there, the street was crowded with people, police cars, and an ambulance. But she was long dead. Her head was turned at an angle, cherry-red hair swept back, eyes staring at us reproachfully. On her stomach with her blouse off, I made an immediate check: The cross was carved in the small of her back.

“Goddamn it!”

Muldoon knelt down and put his big arm around me. “Easy, lad. We all feel that way, too. But civilians are around.”

It was the only time I ever lost my composure on the job.

As the girl was sent off for the postmortem, we fanned out to interview everyone within two blocks of the body dump. Nobody saw anything. Not even the milkmen who were out that early.

More information allowed us to sort out the basics. She was likely Grace Chambers, sixteen, who never came home from the movies the night before. Her parents felt it was safe for her to see the pictures at the Rialto with her steady boyfriend, Ben Chapman. It was her birthday, and they also wanted to reward her for perfect grades this year. They felt safe because they lived in the Las Palmas neighborhood, north of McDowell Road, miles from University Park.

When neither Grace nor Ben came home by nine on Tuesday night, as agreed, her parents notified the police. Because of the letdown the night before, headquarters was short-staffed, the desk sergeant made a report and said he would send a car to interview the parents—but somehow it never happened. A fight in the Deuce distracted the patrolmen on duty. As McGrath said sourly, “The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”

Ben Chapman, seventeen, varsity athlete, choir member, was the prime suspect. That certainty, borne of desperate policemen, wasn’t dimmed when Ben’s ’28 Buick was found parked outside the Arizona Citrus Growers warehouse on Jackson Street an hour later. But it was not to be. Two hours after Grace’s body was identified by her parents, Ben Chapman was found bludgeoned to death out in the county, inside an orange grove. Mexican farmworkers discovered him. He was beaten badly. Don guessed a baseball bat. His hands were tied behind his back with rope.

As in the prior cases, Grace had been viciously raped and strangled, her underwear taken. But the killer had more time with her: She was not only tied up with a rope, but also with barbed wire. Her body had multiple cigarette burns. Her bottom had been whipped with a belt or whip, hard enough to leave bruises and bloody welts.

The pathologist guessed she was first bound with rope, perhaps at the same time as her boyfriend. He was a well-built young man, so it raised the possibility the two had been forced to give in at gunpoint. Then the killer made Grace tie up Ben, and she was restrained by the killer. As always with victims, they held out hope: “This is only a robbery. He’ll let us go if we do what he asks.”

The fingerprint tech went over Ben’s car, and the latents were sent off to the FBI. Victoria took photos of both scenes.

Here the evidence petered out into our speculation. Did the killer take them both somewhere and force the boyfriend to watch as he tortured and raped Grace? Then what? Beat Ben

to death before her eyes, finish her off, and leave her in University Park? Then dump his body outside the city limits? Quite a night’s work and plenty of risks of being discovered, but possible. Frenchy raised the possibility of two killers, one following the other, who drove Ben’s car. Then both could make a quick escape.

The heat came quickly, from the city commission, the chamber of commerce, the newspapers, and two sets of well-connected parents. It came from inside headquarters, too. Three members of the fifteen-man Hat Squad had daughters around the age of the strangler’s victims. Senior patrolmen and sergeants, too. And those weren’t shy about voicing frustration and recriminations.

On Thursday, a typed letter came, addressed to the Chief of Police Matlock:

The Phoenix Police can’t solve the greatest crime ever to hit our city. Doesn’t speak well for your new city hall and police headquarters building.

It’s me, you clowns. I’ll get your tiresome little hidden tricks out of the way: I take their knickers and stuffed toys. I use a sock to keep them quiet. I carve my brand in their backs. I used barbed wire on the latest girl.

Believe me now? I am HIM.

You thought you had me all figured out. So predictable, you flatfoots. But I nabbed two lovers this time and had my way with both of them. Took them to my lair, isn’t that what the reporters will call it?

Made him watch while I did things to her. Nice and slow. Made her watch while I did things to him while he cried and pleaded, then killed him. Then it was only us. I was naked and bloody. She was screaming and begging right to the end. Nobody could hear her. I delivered her body to the neighborhood like the morning newspaper.

Speaking of THAT…I’m sending a copy of this letter to the papers and radio stations.

I’ll kill again and you can’t stop me. It will be worse every time.

Given the specifics, this letter was definitely from the killer. The paper contained no fingerprints. Chief of Police Matlock succeeded in getting every news outlet to spike the letter. The one exception was the Los Angeles Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst. It printed the letter in full, headlined: FIEND OF PHOENIX SPEAKS!

We didn’t have time to deal with the reporters. This was the donkey work of being a detective. In addition to making another run at the neighbors around where Grace’s body was dumped, the farmworkers who found Ben, and family members, we spoke to everyone conceivably involved. Ticket girls, ushers, concession-stand workers, and the manager at the movie theater. Identified the last ones to see them alive and correlated these witnesses against the same for the previous victims.

Yet it produced no suspicious matches. People at the movies that night came forward, but they didn’t notice anything or anyone unusual. Again: Teachers and friends at Phoenix Union High were interviewed. We tried, unsuccessfully, to match the barbed wire that had been used to wrap around Grace Chambers’s wrists.

Tips came in by the scores, and we had to run each one down to its inevitable dead end. Then turn it over to another detective for another try. Four goofies and hopheads came forward to confess. None possessed the information we held back from the newspaper reports, but that still meant hours in the new interview room, plus printing them to compare against the existing evidence.