A hazy LA sunrise, a dead woman.
There was “what appeared to be a body underneath a large remnant of carpet that was redish in color,” Adrian Soler, an officer with the 77th Street station, would say about what he encountered in the alley at 1017 West Gage Avenue on August 10, 1985, at 6:45 a.m. “The right hand was extended outside of the carpet from underneath. The carpet [was] leaning against a wooden fence. Also, [the area] from the hip down, of the right leg and foot, were exposed, [as was] the left foot.” When he lifted the carpet, Soler saw a woman in her late twenties fully clothed except for her shoes. “She was definitely dead,” Soler would say. “She was in a state of decomposition. Her face was bloated. Her right eye was swollen. I believe her lips were swollen and her tongue was partially exposed from her mouth.”
Soler radioed headquarters for more personnel. Antonio Lamery Lorca, one of the responding investigators, noted the body was infested with maggots. “I rolled up her blouse,” Lorca would say, “and I [saw] two possible gunshot wounds to the left chest above the breast.” (It turned out there were three.) Searching for identification, Lorca found a purse, notes written on pieces of paper, but no driver’s license or employment ID—nothing to indicate who she was. As a result, she became Jane Doe No. 59, meaning she was the fifty-ninth unidentifiable female body discovered in Los Angeles County in 1985.
Previously, a missing person’s report had been filed by Leo and Betty Anderson. The last time the couple saw their friend Debra Jackson they were trying to convince her not to go to an appointment she said she had to keep. Betty had met Debra a decade earlier, when the two said hello on the sidewalk near 98th Street and Avalon Avenue. They hit it off, becoming close friends. Over the years, Debra, originally from Ohio, had her share of problems. She became estranged from her mother and sister. She had a son and two daughters, but lost custody of them when they were seized by Child Protective Services. The circumstances of how she lost custody was painful to her. She was living with an aunt at the time. Debra did not use drugs, but her aunt’s son did. Police raided her aunt’s house, busted her cousin, and discovered Debra’s children living, social workers later said, in unsavory conditions. The children were placed in foster care.
Devastated, Debra committed herself to getting her children back. She moved in with the Andersons, who had four children of their own, where she lived on and off when she needed a place to stay. She earned a beautician certificate from a cosmetology school. Afterward, she managed a beauty shop for 18 months. When she lost that job because of a change in ownership, she landed work as a cocktail waitress at a local bar, Name of the Game. These days, she was on top of the world because, after distancing herself from her aunt and proving she could support her family, she was on the verge of regaining custody of her children. The one source of lingering consternation in her life was a romantic relationship. She had been seeing a woman about her age, but recently they had become estranged. That’s why she was at the Andersons. Her on-again-off-again relationship appeared to be off for good.
The Andersons didn’t know where Debra was going for her appointment. They just saw she was hell-bent on getting there. She had to repay a loan, she said.
“You can’t wait and pay them in the morning?” Betty asked.
“No, I have to make the payment tonight,” Debra insisted, hugging Betty as she got ready to leave.
Betty followed her to the door and watched as Debra waved goodbye and set off down the sidewalk for the bus. It was the last time Betty saw Debra alive.
When Debra did not return that night, Leo called the 77th Street station to file a missing person’s report. He was told he had to wait until the person was missing for 24 hours, which he did. Consequently, as detectives arrived back at the station after finding Jane Doe No. 59, Leo had only recently filed the report. They called him right away. Nervous, the Andersons went to the station where police ushered them into a waiting room and showed them photographs of Jane Doe No. 59. Leo confirmed the worst. Devastated, Betty could barely control her emotions as she pored over images of the friend she had said goodbye to only days ago.
Police now knew Jane Doe’s identity: Debra Jackson, 29, African-American, mother of three. Following an autopsy, they had a cause of death—three gunshot wounds to the chest made by a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun—and the type of crime: homicide. There was “what appeared to be black material, which is consistent with powder, on the second wound on the chest area,” Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, the chief medical examiner and coroner for the County of Los Angeles, would say about the autopsy findings. “That would mean a close range of contact; [for] the second gunshot wound… the gun was placed to the body.” The autopsy revealed Jackson’s blood system contained alcohol and metabolized cocaine, so police also had a clue as to what she was doing in the hours before she died. What they did not know was who killed her and why.
At first, police believed Jackson was the victim of a lover’s dispute. “Miss Jackson was living with her live-in lover Darlene Square at the time,” read a law enforcement statement later included in legal proceedings. “They had been living together for the last 14 months. …Jackson told a friend, Betty Anderson, prior to the murder that she had been beaten and thrown out of her apartment that she shared with Darlene,” the reason she was staying with the Andersons. “Leo Anderson stated that he saw Darlene with a handgun during a dispute with Victim Jackson in front of his home in the past.”
Ultimately, police did not arrest Darlene Square, due to lack of evidence, and the case of Debra Jackson became another murder in the 77th Street station waiting to be solved.
Debra Jackson was not the only young woman whose body was found dumped in an alley in South LA in the mid-1980s—anything but. At that time, the community was in the grip of the start of what would be called a crack epidemic. Powered cocaine was popular in the 1970s, but, because it was expensive, its audience was limited. However, when a simple preparation method using baking soda was discovered in the late 1970s, a new, inexpensive form of cocaine was created—crack. It was priced so anyone could afford it, not just the affluent or middle class but even the urban poor. By the early 1980s, no neighborhood was more consumed by the emerging rage for crack than South LA.
“[T]he explosion of cheap, smokeable cocaine in the 1980s was a uniquely egalitarian phenomenon,” The Los Angeles Times later observed. “Anyone, even an illiterate high school dropout, could learn to cook crack on a kitchen stove, hawk it on a street corner, and be $100 richer—all in the same day.” As a result, “a bewildering roster of… dealers and suppliers helped fuel the crisis,” mostly because they were “responding to market forces.” Here was a drug that within seconds gave its user a consuming, euphoric high that disappeared after about 10 minutes, leaving the user depressed and craving another high as soon as possible. The “market forces” were obvious: Some people got hooked after one hit. With a small rock costing as little as two dollars, the potential audience was enormous.
To serve that audience, a network of drug dealers and producers soon materialized. While, by definition, that network was vague and multifarious, one name stood out at the time—“Freeway” Ricky Ross. “America’s crack epidemic began on the South Central Los Angeles streets Ross controlled with an iron fist and seemingly endless appetite for domination,” The Oakland Tribune later declared. “Within a few short years in the early and mid-1980s, crack… skyrocketed into virtually every big city in America, thanks in large part to Ross’ particular business acumen.”
A high school dropout who could have had a free ride to college on a tennis scholarship, he was so good at the sport, Ross attacked the business as it if were any commercial enterprise. “He helped build one of the biggest cocaine distribution networks this country has ever seen,” according to The Tribune, “pulling down $1 million on some good days, and often more. He wore a bulletproof vest. He carried a 9-mm handgun. He took seriously his work as a crack kingpin.” And he was lavishly rewarded, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1980s. He got the nickname “Freeway” because he bought up so much property along the Harbor Freeway in South LA. When he purchased one house in Inglewood for $250,000, he paid for it with one-dollar bills.
Part of the machine Ross assembled to manufacture and sell crack on such a large scale were the gangs. During the 1970s, the Crips, a well-organized gang founded in 1969 by Raymond Washington and Stanley Williams, established a stronghold in South LA. When the Bloods, an offshoot of the Crips, began to challenge them, a gang war broke out that ultimately served to strengthen both gangs by increasing their membership, further enhancing their influence over the community. Ross quickly saw that the Crips and the Bloods could help him produce and market drugs not just in Los Angeles but on a national level in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York City, Washington, DC, and in smaller communities in states like Ohio and North Carolina. The operation brought massive sums of money into the rival gangs, who were more than agreeable to work with Ross. “We didn’t see red or blue,” one gang member later told The Los Angeles Times, referring to the colors associated with the gangs. “We saw green.”
Before long, the gangs were involved in other avenues of the drug trade, marketing and distributing marijuana, PCP, and amphetamines throughout Los Angeles and in urban areas across the country. As the money got bigger, drug-related gang violence exploded. The murder rate soared. Black male homicides doubled. A new phenomenon began—the “drive-by” shooting, whereby aimless bullets fired for any reason from anonymous guns hit innocent bystanders. Starting in 1985 and lasting for a decade, the number of people killed in Los Angeles hovered around 1,000 a year, three times as many as before. A palpable tension filled the city, especially South LA. “It was very scary,” neighborhood resident Lorna Hawkins later told a journalist about this time. “Bullets fly through these houses and these windows like they were nothing, because these [gang members] don’t know how to shoot. Little coward, baby-shooter killers. When the sun was going down, everybody better be somewhere in the dark, hiding. That was what it was like. It was hell.”
As the seemingly insatiable demand for crack grew, families were destroyed. The number of children placed in foster care increased dramatically. Poverty spread as crime rates surged. In South LA, if the gang members were not killing each other, the victim was often connected to some aspect of the drug trade, from a drug deal gone bad to a battle in the turf war. So when Henrietta Wright, a 34-year-old woman, was found dead in the early afternoon on August 12, 1986, she too was assumed to be a victim of the drug-fueled gang violence then ravaging the streets of Los Angeles.
It was 1:15 p.m. when Officer Donald Hrycyk arrived in the alley behind 2514 West Vernon Avenue to find a dead woman, gagged with a man’s long-sleeved shirt stuffed in her mouth. Wearing red-and-green pants and a polo shirt but no shoes, she lay near a fence. “The body, which was wrapped in a [green] blanket and covered with an old mattress,” to quote from a police document based in part on Hrycyk’s observations, “had sustained two gunshot wounds to the left breast. [I]t was [later] determined that the trajectories of the gunshot wounds were left to right, slightly front to back, and slightly downward.” Shell casings were found 140 feet from the body. Judging from the casings, the murder weapon, which police did not recover, was a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun. This style of pistol—low cost, easy to conceal, highly effective—had become so popular on the streets, not just in LA but major cities across America, that it acquired a nickname—Saturday night special.
Later, analysts determined Henrietta Wright’s blood system contained ethanol, morphine, and the powerful anti-seizure medication Dilantin. Police suspected her death was a product of the drug scene. A witness, Alicia Mahoney, claimed she saw the murder. “Miss Mahoney [said] Jimmy Lewis brought Victim Wright back to her house on 3rd Avenue and Vernon,” a law enforcement document would reveal, “and that Mr. Lewis took Victim Wright into another room, wanted [oral sex] from Miss Wright in exchange for cocaine but Wright refused. …[S]aying he would teach her [for] not doing what he said… Jimmy Lewis took Victim Wright next to the alley and shot her twice. [A friend of Lewis’] then showed up and helped Jimmy Lewis drag Victim Wright into the alley in front of a garage, remove her panties and put them in her mouth, and place a mattress on top of her.”
Two days later, Thomas Steele, 36, in town from San Diego to visit his sister, was found lying dead in the intersection of 71st Street and Halldale Avenue. He was killed by a single gunshot to the back of the head, execution style. Because of the timing and nature of the crimes, authorities believed the Steele and Wright murders were related. Both investigations soon stalled. The testimony of Mahoney, supposedly an eyewitness, was discredited, since she could not even correctly identify the article of clothing stuffed in the victim’s mouth. (Years later, DNA tests cleared Lewis.) In the end, no one was charged with the murder of Henrietta Wright and, like Debra Jackson before her, her murder took its place among the growing number of unsolved cases mounting up at LAPD.
“Yes,” the man said, “I’d like to report a murder or a dead body or something.”
The 911 call came in to the LAPD dispatcher from a pay phone at 12:19 a.m. on January 10, 1987. The man’s voice was even-pitched but forceful. He had just witnessed a murder, or the dumping of a murder victim’s body, yet he sounded unnervingly calm, displaying little if any emotion.
“Where at?” the dispatcher asked.
“The address is 1346 East 56th Street. In the alley.” Pause. “The guy that dropped her off was driving a blue Dodge van. 1PZP 746.”
The dispatcher did not ask the caller how he knew the victim was a woman. If he had watched the body being dumped from a distance, as seemed to be the case, the victim could have just as easily been a male, especially in this section of South LA at this time, when gang violence was ever-present. Instead, the dispatcher wanted to make sure she got the correct license plate number.
“Okay,” she said, “are you saying ‘T’ like in ‘Tom?’”
“‘P’ like in ‘puppy,’” the caller said flatly.
“‘P’ what?”
“1PZ…”
“Like in ‘zebra?’”
“Uh huh,” the man said. “‘P…’”
“Like in ‘Tom?’”
“No. ‘P’ like in ‘puppy,’” he repeated.
“‘P’ like ‘puppy.’ Two ‘p’s?”
“Uh huh. 746.”
“What color van was it?”
“Blue and white,” the man said, deadpan.
“Did you get a look at him?”
Slight pause. “No, I didn’t see him.”
The dispatcher did not ask the obvious question—how could the caller have seen something as specific as the license plate number and not gotten a look at the man who dumped the body?—but continued establishing basic facts.
“How long ago did this happen?”
“It happened about 30 minutes ago.” For the first time, the caller slurred his words. “But I’m down the street at this bar. It happened about 30 minutes ago. And uh… You know, he like… He threw her out. And the only thing that’s hanging out… Like he threw a gas tank on top of her. …And the only thing you can see out is her feet.”
Unfazed by the man’s unnerving description, the dispatcher asked the one question she should not have, especially so soon in the conversation.
“Okay,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Huh?” the man said, flabbergasted.
“What’s your name?” she repeated.
The man laughed nervously. “I want to stay anonymous,” he said, his laughter making his words run together. “I know too many people,” he added before concluding, “Okay, then, bye bye.”
“All right,” the dispatcher said.
And before she could continue: Click.
When police from the Newton Street station entered the darkened alley, they found the fully clothed body of a young woman buried under trash. Her head and upper body were crammed into a green plastic bag. A car’s gas tank and other debris were piled on top of her. She had been killed, it was later established, by one shot to the left breast from a .25-caliber handgun. Her blood system, it was also determined, contained trace amounts of cocaine and benzols. Her name was Barbara Ware. She was 23, the mother of a seven-year-old daughter. Her father ran a store just blocks from where her body was discovered.
Within 40 minutes of receiving the 911 call, police located the Dodge van four and a half miles away from Ware’s body, at 6075 Normandie Avenue, in the parking lot of the Cosmopolitan Cathedral, a well-attended church in a neighborhood full of houses of worship. From Catholic to Baptist to Pentecostal, you couldn’t drive a handful of blocks without seeing a church. How ironic that with so many churches in it, the neighborhood had never been more dangerous, as Barbara Ware learned on this warm August night. If there was any doubt police had found the right van, a green plastic hair curler, matching the curlers still in Ware’s hair when her body was discovered, lay on the ground near the rear of the van on the passenger side.
The “registered owner of the van was the [church],” according to an LAPD document. “The hood of the van was still warm to the touch [when police arrived] and people inside the church said that they had used the van earlier in the evening. Several church members were interviewed and the van was processed for some connection to the crime. …No evidence was ever determined.”
Another dead end, another cold case. This one, though, had what most murder cases in South LA at the time did not have: an eyewitness who called in to 911 to report exactly how and where the victim’s body was dumped.
At 9:15 a.m. on April 16, 1987, Officer Donald Hrycyk responded to the scene of another potential murder, this one at the rear of the parking lot behind 9414 Western Avenue. “I saw what appeared to be a foot that had a grey sock on it,” Hrycyk would say, describing what he witnessed as he peered into a Dumpster beside a furniture store. Looking closely, he realized that underneath a large wooden board, there in the pile of trash, lay the body of a woman. She wore pants and a shirt, both of which were unbuttoned, but no panties or bra. Since she had no identification, she became Jane Doe No. 25 for 1987.
When her family contacted police because she had gone missing, Jane Doe turned out to be Bernita Sparks, a 26-year-old woman who just last night had told her mother she was going to the corner to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. An autopsy revealed that a bullet, fired from a .25-caliber handgun, pierced her heart. She had also been choked and struck in the back of the head with a blunt object.
Police had no murder weapon and little evidence connecting Sparks to a suspect, so they developed any lead they could. One came from a police informant. “Somebody by the name of Bodine told [the informant] that he shot Victim Sparks,” to quote from a law enforcement document, “and two of his boys moved the victim’s body across the street and put Sparks in the trash Dumpster.” An eyewitness confirmed this information. “A witness,” the document would continue, “told police that she saw the victim and three male blacks in a struggle in the early morning hours of April 16th of 1987. She said she recognized one of the men as Bodine. She saw Bodine giving orders to the other two male blacks dragging the victim down the street.”
Despite the lead, no arrest was made, and eventually Bernita Sparks became another name on another murder book at the 77th Street station.
There was “a female lying facedown behind the plants and against the wall,” Officer Jack H. Schonely would recall about what a bystander pointed out to him at 10:15 a.m. on November 1, 1987, in the rear alley of 8927 South Hobart Boulevard. The body “was stuffed [there], very well concealed.” She wore a blouse, jacket, and pants that were partially unzipped. Police identified the woman as Mary Lowe, a 26-year-old receptionist who lived in the neighborhood. She died “of a gunshot wound to the chest,” Los Angeles County chief medical examiner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran would say, “and this particular bullet went through the right side of the heart. This [was] an intermediate-range wound… The gun [was] less than two feet away from her body.”
The night before, October 31, Lowe—an attractive, vivacious woman with a winning smile—told her mother, Betty, she was going to a Halloween party. At the moment, a thunderstorm was passing over, a rarity in Los Angeles, and Betty implored her daughter not to go out in such bad weather. But Mary was headstrong. Helpless, her mother could only watch as her daughter walked out the door.
Lowe attended the party, held at the Love Trap Bar, where she drank and smoked crack. Eventually, when she left the party, a friend spotted her getting into a car driven by a young black man. The car was so distinctive the friend could not forget its make and model. The last time she was seen alive, Mary Lowe was driving off in an orange Ford Pinto.
The first cases of AIDS in the United States were recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Los Angeles when five gay men were documented as having contracted Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Because the disease was detected in gay men, it was initially called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), but, by 1982, after it was found in heterosexual populations of Haitians, hemophiliacs, and heroin users, it was renamed AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). Soon, it was established that the HIV virus that causes AIDS is transmitted through bodily fluids like blood, semen, and vaginal fluids, which meant that it could spread through certain segments of the heterosexual world. If you were a drug user who shared a needle with an infected person, you were at high risk of acquiring the virus. In the last half of the 1980s, as crack gave way to an even more pervasive drug epidemic that wreaked havoc on neighborhoods like South LA, AIDS spread quickly.
At the same time, many young women hooked on drugs turned to prostitution to support their habit. They often ended up living in the rundown, ramshackle two- and three-story apartment buildings that permeated South LA, especially along thoroughfares like Western Avenue. One such building was on the corner of 81st Street and Western. It was so notorious that neighbors called it New Jack City. “It was just that bad,” a neighborhood resident says. “All sorts of drug dealing and gangbanging and prostitution came out of that building.”
Among its occasional occupants was Lachrica Jefferson, a 22-year-old drug addict who stayed there with her sister when she had no other place to go. To support her habit, Lachrica traded sex for drugs. Police had a slang term for the type of prostitute who was just as happy to get drugs as cash in exchange for sex—a “strawberry.”
At 9:50 a.m. on January 20, 1988, Jon Thorne, a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, discovered the fully clothed body of a young woman underneath a worn-out mattress beside a cinderblock wall in the north alley of 2049 West 102nd Place. Because he found a crack pipe nearby, he assumed she died from an overdose. As Thorne examined the body, he noticed an odd detail. A napkin was lying over her face. Looking more carefully, he saw something was written on it. One word: “AIDS.”
With no identification, this victim became Jane Doe No. 9. Only later, when she was taken to the coroner’s office, did authorities realize she had been shot twice in the left chest. She did not overdose; she was murdered. An autopsy established that her blood system contained alcohol, cocaine, and cocaine metabolite. There was also this: At the time of her death, Jane Doe No. 9 was pregnant.
When Lachrica’s sister realized she was missing, she went to police and ultimately identified Jane Doe No. 9 as being Lachrica. Living in the house next to New Jack City, Donna Harris knew Lachrica, not so much as a friend, since Donna didn’t use drugs, but as someone she saw on the street and spoke to. Donna was better friends with Lachrica’s sister. After the death, Donna heard that police believed Lachrica knew the person who killed her. One day, Donna was talking about the murder with Lonnie.
“Yeah, and there was an AIDS sign on her,” Lonnie said.
Donna was taken aback. She had spoken at length with Lachrica’s sister who didn’t mention anything as inflammatory as an AIDS sign being left on Lachrica’s body.
“I just talked to her sister, Lonnie,” Donna said, “and there wasn’t no AIDS sign stuck on her. You always coming up with something.”
Donna was incensed. Lonnie had not lived on 81st Street that long—just a handful of years—but he was always trying to appear as if he knew more about what was happening in the neighborhood than anyone else.
Lonnie wouldn’t back down. “Yes, it was on her,” he said. “It was a sign stuck on her that said she had AIDS.”
The two argued back and forth. “You always think you know everything,” Donna kept saying.
But Lonnie wouldn’t back off. Finally, Donna let it go. She could not understand why Lonnie was so insistent. His passion struck her as abnormal. There was also a disturbing fact that Donna could not have known. Lachrica’s sister wasn’t aware of the napkin with the word “AIDS” written on it found on Lachrica’s body because police had not released that piece of information—not to the family, much less to the public.
“The victim had been dead for a while,” Carlos de la Ricca, an LAPD detective, would say. “There were signs of early decomposition.” He was talking about what he saw at 3:45 p.m. on September 11, 1988, when he arrived in the alley behind 1720 West 43rd Place, two blocks from the Southwest Division station. Two paramedics were working on a lifeless body. Not that there was much to do. Eyes sunk in, mouth open, tongue bulging, the young woman was obviously dead. A sweatshirt was tied around her neck. Being nude with no identification, she became Jane Doe No. 59 for 1988.
Once an autopsy was performed, the coroner concluded that the victim suffered a single gunshot to the chest at close range and ligature damage to the neck. If Jane Doe No. 59 had not been choked to death, the gunshot would have killed her. When her family filed a missing person’s report, Jane Doe No. 59 was identified as Alicia Alexander, a 17-year-old whose father nicknamed her “Monique.” Several days earlier, she had asked her father if he wanted anything since she was going to buy a soda at the liquor store on the corner of 68th Street and Normandie Avenue. He said he didn’t.
Eyewitnesses later reported seeing the girl being picked up on Normandie by a man in an orange hatchback. “She got in a car with somebody,” Alicia’s brother Donnell would later tell a reporter. “That’s what was told to [the family]. She supposedly got into [an] orange-colored hatchback. …She was tough. It was possible she might have not known him.” Ten months earlier, Mary Lowe was found dead in the same vicinity after driving off with a man in an orange Ford Pinto, famous, of course, for being a hatchback.