LAPD made such glaring errors as not interviewing an obvious witness like Lynda Hoover and not sufficiently canvassing the neighborhood near the crime scenes of Mary Lowe and Alicia Alexander because in the 1980s the department was overwhelmed by an unprecedented wave of crime. Between August 10, 1985, when Debra Jackson was killed, and November 20, 1988, when Washington was assaulted, some 3,000 murders took place in Los Angeles, many of them in South LA. The department simply did not have the manpower to keep up with the investigations it had to conduct.
“In the 1980s era in Los Angeles, we were doing 1,000 murders a year on average,” Dennis Kilcoyne would say. “The majority of work was coming from South LA. The cocaine era—it was just madness. There was a serious epidemic of black female murders in Central Los Angeles linked to a number of issues with society, primarily rock cocaine, which caused women who were most vulnerable to do things they normally probably wouldn’t have done. As a result, they were preyed upon. If we didn’t have a witness, if we didn’t have a thumbprint, if we didn’t have something solid to go on, these cases went nowhere.”
There was another factor. “It was thought at the time,” Kilcoyne would say, “that we probably had one absolute maniac going around killing multiple, multiple people. A serial killer.” This theory was not farfetched. For while Los Angeles may be the City of Angels, it had also become, after the late 1960s, the Land of the Serial Killers.
In modern Los Angeles, the most famous serial killer would be Charles Manson, who commanded his Family to murder at least ten people, probably more. The city would forever be haunted by what happened on two nights in August 1969 when Manson ordered the slaughter of actress Sharon Tate and her three friends in a rented mansion on Cielo Drive and, the next night, the equally horrific massacre of supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, all because Manson hoped to ignite a race war to fulfill a coded message he believed he received from “Helter Skelter,” a song on the Beatles’ recently-released The White Album.
But Manson only started what turned out to be a binge of serial killings. “The anxiety was almost palpable along Los Angeles’ Skid Row on Wednesday night of last week,” Time reported in February 1975. “Businessmen who work in the gleaming new office towers nearby hurried home along the Harbor Freeway. Frightened winos and derelicts crowded the dilapidated missions or dozed uneasily on hardwood chairs in the shelter of neighborhood chapels. Liquor sales were off, and the drab streets, lined with pawnshops, surplus-clothing stores and aging apartment hotels, were uncommonly empty. In the past eight weeks, seven middle-aged men, most of them down-and-outers, had been found in doorways, alleyways, and cheap hotel rooms within the one-square-mile Skid Row area, their throats slit deeply from ear to ear.”
The killer was dubbed the Skid Row Slasher. His preference was to strike on a weekend or a Wednesday. “That night,” Time continued, “the anxiety turned out to be misplaced only in geography. Once again the murderer struck, but this time some six miles from Skid Row. The eighth victim, George Frias, 45, a catering-service secretary, was found in his first-floor Hollywood apartment. …His throat, too, was slit. A ninth man, also presumed to be a victim of the Slasher, was discovered two days later less than a mile away in another Hollywood apartment.”
Not long afterward, a burglar broke into the home of William Graham. He was trying to hit Graham with a hatchet when a friend of Graham’s intervened, chasing the intruder away. The burglar next vandalized the home of actor Burt Reynolds, but, as he did, he dropped a piece of mail with his address on it. When police showed up to search his apartment, they found cufflinks belonging to George Frias, connecting the suspect, Vaughn Greenwood, to the Skid Row slashings. In time, Greenwood, a 32-year-old drifter from the Midwest, was convicted on nine counts of murder.
Before Greenwood’s capture, police released a psychological profile of the Skid Row Slasher describing him as “sexually impotent.” Sex, as it turned out, had less to do with Greenwood’s nine murders than his fascination with inexplicable ritualistic practices he carried out on his victims’ bodies. That would not be the case with Patrick Kearney, who police dubbed the Trash Bag Killer. He was sexually attracted to the young men he picked up, shot with no warning as they drove with him in his car, sexually assaulted, and dumped along a freeway. He placed each victim’s mutilated body in a trash bag before he dumped it, earning him his nickname. Arrested in May 1977, Kearney confessed to 28 murders.
Sexual obsession also motivated William Bonin, who became known as the Freeway Killer. Between May 1979 and June 1980, Bonin, 32, usually acting with an accomplice, kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered at least 21 teenage boys, often hitchhikers or schoolboys. Once he got the victim in his van, Bonin assaulted him sexually before strangling him with his own T-shirt or stabbing him to death. The victim’s nude body was then dumped along any one of LA’s freeways, from the Ventura Freeway to the Pacific Coast Highway. In June 1980, an accomplice gave him up. Bonin confessed to 21 murders. Authorities believed he committed 15 more. Charged with 12 murders, Bonin was found guilty of 10. He received the death penalty.
When bodies of young men continued to show up on the side of freeways after Bonin was apprehended, police realized they had a second Freeway Killer. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Randy Steven Kraft sexually assaulted and murdered nearly 70 young men. Many were Marines, underscoring a sexual preference he developed in ROTC in college. He was arrested on the evening of May 14, 1983, when he was stopped in his Toyota Celica for driving recklessly on the San Diego Freeway. Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine, was found dead in the car, having been strangled to death with his belt.
In the car, police discovered an envelope containing 47 photographs showing a variety of young men. In a number of the shots, the young man appeared to be either asleep or dead. Many young men were posed in sexually suggestive positions. As it turned out, Kraft had a predilection for documenting his encounters with the young men he picked up, which usually ended in death. After he and the victim had sex, he shot him. As the young man lay dead or dying, Kraft snapped pictures of him. Later, he labeled the pictures, using a descriptive phrase for the victim since he rarely knew his real name, and added them to his growing collection.
Kraft was charged with 16 counts of murder. His trial was repeatedly delayed, but when it occurred in 1989 he was found guilty on all counts and later sentenced to death.
That same year, on September 20, Richard Ramirez was found guilty of 13 counts of murder and five counts of attempted murder. Known as the Night Stalker, Ramirez, between April 1984 and August 1985, went on a killing spree that lasted until one of his victims, whom he had raped but not killed, caught a glimpse of the stolen car he was driving—an orange Toyota. When a teenage boy identified the car based on news reports, Ramirez was apprehended. He murdered 14 men and women, probably more. Following his trial, he was given the death penalty.
During this same era, when a series of young women between the ages of 12 and 28 began showing up dead in the hills north of Los Angeles, authorities tagged that killer the Hillside Strangler. In four months, from November 1977 until February 1978, police found the bodies of a dozen girls, each having been raped and strangled with a belt or rope. After a massive manhunt carried out by a variety of law enforcement agencies, the Hillside Strangler was apprehended. It turned out that two men working together, cousins Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, committed the crimes. Both men were found guilty in separate trials.
So in the late 1980s when LAPD detectives speculated there was another serial killer murdering young women in South LA, their theory was not only plausible but probable. For almost two decades, Los Angeles had been plagued by one serial killer after another. No other city in the United States had seen so many serial killers active in such a concentrated timeframe. Police gave this new serial killer a nickname—the Southside Slayer—and formed a task force to try to apprehend him.
Right away, the task force identified a noteworthy coincidence. “This task force recognized there was a series [of murders] that were being connected by one gun, a .25-caliber automatic,” Dennis Kilcoyne would say. “The bullet that passed through one gun was the same firearm that had killed [seven] women [and wounded one more]. So they separated a couple of detectives to look at the ‘.25-caliber’ series, separate from probably 50 to 75 other female murders.”
That’s how the murders of Debra Jackson, Henrietta Wright, Barbara Ware, Bernita Sparks, Mary Lowe, Lachrica Jefferson, and Alicia Alexander and the attempted murder of Enietra Washington became connected. These women—and Thomas Steele, as it turned out—were all shot with the same Saturday night special.
Authorities believed the women had more than a murder weapon in common. Detectives speculated most if not all were strawberries, addicts, to quote one paper, who would trade “their bodies for rock cocaine and often pay for their addiction with their lives.” The assumption may or may not have been true. The victims’ personal lives defied forming one overarching pattern, although most of the women were doing crack on the day she died. Nevertheless, detectives with the “.25-caliber” murders series, as it was informally known, paid close attention in early 1989 when developments lead them to believe their suspect had been apprehended.
“Since August of 1985 police have discovered the bodies of at least nine strawberries,” Time reported in March 1989; “each woman had been shot to death with a small-caliber handgun. Last week lawmen found a suspect in the serial killings. In a twist right out of a lurid TV movie, he turned out to be a sheriff’s deputy.” His name: Rickey Ross. (No relation to “Freeway” Ricky Ross, this Ross even spelled his first name with an “e”) Forty years old and a narcotics investigator, he had been employed by the sheriff’s department for 18 years. He had a flawless record.
But at 1:30 a.m. on February 23, two patrol officers from the 77th out in their cruiser spotted him as he sat in a Ford sedan parked on Flowers Street near the Harbor Freeway in an area favored by prostitutes. The officers approached the sedan and confronted its occupants. “Ross,” Time went on, “was accompanied by a prostitute, though he insisted that he did not know her profession. The woman said they were smoking cocaine.” When the officers searched the car, they found a loaded 9-millimeter Beretta pistol in the trunk.
Later that day, ballistics experts determined Ross’ handgun matched bullets used to murder two strawberries back in October and November 1988. The women were killed in a neighborhood often traveled by Ross for his job. Two days later, Ross was charged with three counts of murder. “[I]nvestigators,” The Los Angeles Times noted, are “explor[ing] whether Ross can be linked to additional prostitute killings.” Specifically, the “.25-caliber” detectives had come to believe Ross was their man too.
There was only one problem. When the experts had performed ballistics tests on Ross’ Beretta, they got the results wrong. “[N]ew ballistics tests,” The Los Angeles Times reported on May 15, 1989, “cast doubt on earlier forensics evidence linking Ross’ gun to the slayings of three South-Central Los Angeles prostitutes.” Ross was immediately released from jail. But the “.25-caliber” detectives didn’t care. They remained fixated on Ross as their prime suspect. They were so sure he was the killer they stopped looking at other, more likely, suspects. No doubt this tunnel vision contributed to a decision made by police brass around this time to disband the Southside Slayer Task Force.
While police squandered opportunities because they were preoccupied with the wrong suspect, a long-simmering resentment within the South Los Angeles community toward LAPD increased significantly. Since 1978, LAPD’s police chief was Daryl F. Gates, a hard-edged, in-your-face polarizing figure who had a tenuous relationship with the African-American community. He was viewed by many to be so pro-cop that he isolated himself from ordinary citizens, the very people he was charged to protect. The inventor of the SWAT team, Gates championed a police organization nicknamed CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). A police unit with the goal of fighting gang-related violence and the drug trade, CRASH soon devolved so severely that its own members were engaged in the illegal activities they were supposed to fight—drug trafficking, racketeering, prostitution, even murder.
That CRASH cops were participating in the drug business was known throughout South LA, which only worsened the relationship between police and the community. In South LA, more often than not, the cop was seen not as the protector but as the enemy. By the end of the 1980s, instances of police brutality had increased by 33 percent under Gates. If you were a black man in LA at the time, you were as likely to be a victim of the police as you were the streets. The resentment of LAPD by the black community was graphically reflected in Ice-T’s vitriolic protest song “Cop Killer,” written in 1990 and released two years later on Body Count. With lines like “I’m a cop killer, better you than me,” the song captured the groundswell of anger and resentment growing among residents of South LA.
If there was any doubt that LAPD under Gates was a violent, confrontational police force, all you had to do was witness the beating of Rodney King by five officers caught on videotape on March 3, 1991. Pulled over on the Foothill Freeway, King, once he had gotten out of his car, was knocked to the ground, tasered, kicked, and beaten nonstop with billysticks for well over a minute. Officers claimed he was out of control on PCP, but the videotape showed no evidence of that. When the tape was broadcast on television, it sparked national outrage, resulting in the indictment of the officers.
On April 29, 1992, when a predominantly white jury acquitted all five officers on assault charges and three of the five on using excessive force, a fury in the African-American community erupted, starting in South LA. At the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, a group of irate black protesters sparked what became known as the LA riots when they pillaged cars and local businesses and then assaulted an unsuspecting white truck driver named Reginald Denny. Lasting six days, the riots lead to looting, arson, and general public unrest. Fifty-three people were killed, thousands injured. The riots began 11 blocks from West 81st Street, where police had once staked out the neighborhood looking for Enietra Washington’s attacker. In the wake of such profound civil unrest, the hunt for that suspect, also believed to be connected to a series of murders, appeared to wane.
On June 28, 1992, as a direct result of the riots, Daryl Gates resigned as police chief. His management style and belief system had created a department that produced officers capable of an incident like the Rodney King beating, which triggered a chain of events culminating in the riots. Gates had no choice but to step down. For the next ten years, the department seemed adrift. It would not gain focus until late 2002 when Mayor James Hahn chose as his new police chief the former chief of the police departments in both Boston and New York City, William J. Bratton.
“Bratton is a brilliant police thinker and strategist,” says attorney Edward W. Hayes, a longtime Bratton observer. “Adept at managing strong personalities, he has been successful at increasing coordination between parts of a police department and finding trends in crime. Boston police department would give him the Medal of Honor. In New York, he revolutionized crime-fighting by having commanders from specific areas meet daily with commanders from adjoining neighborhoods until they got a more complete picture of crime patterns that needed to be handled. In Los Angeles, he would take over an undermanned police department and make it more efficient, tackling the gang problem directly. He has always believed a police force must be supported by the community, which was still a volatile issue when he arrived in LA in the late fall of 2002.”