In 1984, the field of criminology was transformed permanently when Alec Jeffreys, an Oxford-educated scientist on the faculty of the University of Leicester, discovered DNA fingerprinting. On September 10, as he studied film images of DNA in his lab, Jeffreys, identifying certain similarities and differences in DNA samples taken from one family, made the startling observation that each family member had a unique DNA code. This meant, by extension, that in the general population each person would have a unique DNA code in much the way a fingerprint is unique. The implication of Jeffreys’ discovery was far-reaching. For while only a finger or a thumb can leave a fingerprint, a DNA fingerprint can be obtained from a wide range of sources—blood, saliva, semen, any bodily fluid. Consequently, the universe of evidence gathering could be vastly expanded, making it easier to identify perpetrators and solve crimes.
In 1986, British police employed DNA fingerprinting in two separate but related cases involving the rape and murder of a schoolgirl. With Jeffreys himself conducting the DNA testing, police proved one man, who had been arrested, was not guilty of raping and murdering the two schoolgirls because his DNA fingerprint did not match the DNA evidence left by the attacker at the two crime scenes. Now that they had the DNA fingerprint of the as-yet-unidentified man who did commit the crimes, police studied DNA samples obtained from a large pool of potential suspects until they found a match. Police arrested the suspect, who confessed to the crimes. It was the first time anywhere police solved a crime using DNA fingerprinting.
In the wake of such an unqualified—and much publicized—success, DNA profiling was viewed as a technology that could fundamentally alter law enforcement. Four years later, a more advanced form of profiling, Single Focus Probe, allowed researchers to obtain DNA evidence from smaller samples. Until now, much of the DNA lab work had been conducted by Jeffreys, but, with such revolutionary advances in DNA studies being achieved, a whole industry began to emerge.
By 1994, researchers had found ways to use DNA profiling on degraded or older material. In 1995, as the accuracy rate of DNA profiling hit one in 50 million, a number that would continue to improve, the Forensic Science Service in Great Britain established a DNA database, the world’s first, which allowed police to take DNA evidence from a crime scene and compare it to a database’s catalogue of DNA samples obtained from individuals who had been arrested. The matches began to occur at such an astonishing rate, it became obvious that this high-tech crime tool, DNA fingerprinting, would be a pivotal part of the future of criminology.
Naturally, in the United States, law enforcement agencies were monitoring the research being conducted by Alec Jeffreys and criminologists in Great Britain. Police departments in major cities like Houston, Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles made their best efforts to stay current with the rapidly evolving technology. In LA, when DNA testing became commercially available after 1995, the department began to use it. Within a handful of years, it was a widely accepted tool in criminal investigation. In 2002, Chief Bratton established a cold case unit so that DNA technology could be used not only on current cases but also on unsolved cases from the past.
In late 2003, Cliff Shepard, a cold case detective, sent DNA samples to the lab from a case that had haunted him for years. On February 3, 1998, a security guard found the body of Paula Vance behind a store in downtown LA. She had been raped and strangled. The brutal assault of the 41-year-old woman had been captured on a surveillance video camera. Shepard studied the videotape, and, while he clearly identified the victim, he could not isolate even one decipherable image of the attacker. It was, however, that blurry figure on a grainy videotape that Shepard could not forget. Finding Vance’s killer was a priority for him. He hoped his new assignment with the cold case unit would provide leads previously unavailable to him.
When the lab results came back, Shepard learned that DNA evidence taken from Vance’s body matched that of a convict serving an eight-year sentence for a rape he committed in March 2002. The no-contest conviction required the perpetrator to submit DNA samples that became a part of California’s statewide DNA database. The convict was Chester Dewayne Turner, a native of Arkansas who grew up with his mother in LA. A Lock High School dropout, he had once worked for three years as a Domino’s pizza deliveryman.
In addition to the 2002 rape, the DNA of Vance’s perpetrator also connected him to the 1996 murder of Mildred Beasley, a 45-year-old woman whose body was found in bushes alongside the Harbor Freeway. Like Vance, Beasley had been raped and strangled. Sensing a pattern, Shepard systemically submitted DNA evidence from cold case files—about 100 in all—to see if the perpetrator’s DNA in any of those cases matched Turner’s. It was like hitting the jackpot over and over. About once a month, a match came back from the lab connecting Turner to a murder.
Eventually, Turner was linked to at least 14 murders between 1987 and 1998. In almost all, he raped his victim before strangling her to death. Many of the murders occurred along a 30-block section of Figueroa Street in South LA so notorious for drug dealing and prostitution that police dubbed it the Figueroa Corridor. In October 2004, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley charged Turner with the murder of ten women, Paula Vance among them. It had been six years since her vicious murder, but Cliff Shepard finally had what he wanted—a suspect in custody charged with her homicide.
Since the location of the murders and the killer’s method of operation corresponded with the profile of the Southside Slayer, some in the media and law enforcement concluded another mystery had been solved: Chester Turner was the Southside Slayer. In time, Turner would be found guilty of all ten murders and the death of a fetus carried by one of his victims. So, by 2004 when Turner was indicted, if not before as Shepard conducted his investigation, law enforcement believed the Southside Slayer had been apprehended. They were stunned, then, when the murders of women matching the crime profile of those associated with the Southside Slayer continued in and around South LA.
“I saw a completely nude black female lying just north of the driveway,” Daniel Paul Milchovich, a police officer with the City of Inglewood, a community directly bordering South LA, would say about the discovery he made at 12:48 p.m. on March 9, 2002. “The driveway was part of the address of 8121 South Van Ness Boulevard,” between 82nd and 83rd streets. The body, reported to police by a passerby, was hidden in shrubbery near the driveway off the rear alley. Authorities pronounced the victim dead at the scene, concluding she had been choked to death. Blood was detected in her anal region, meaning she may have been sexually assaulted. Since she was nude with no identification, she became Jane Doe No. 15 for 2002.
On March 12, Raffi Djabourian, a deputy medical examiner, conducted an autopsy and concluded Jane Doe’s cause of death was asphyxia due to strangulation. The doctor also noted blunt force bruising, suggesting she had been beaten. Toxicology reports revealed she had no alcohol or drugs in her blood system. Since decomposition had not set in, she had probably been dead for less than 24 hours. Eventually, law enforcement identified her as Princess Berthomieux, whose foster family reported her missing on December 21, 2001. For her young age—she was just 15—she had lived a troubled life. Her birth father was so abusive that her autopsy revealed scars on her buttocks caused by old cigarette burns. Child Protective Services removed her from her home when she was young and placed her in what ended up being a succession of foster homes. Once she was old enough to start running away, she did. She also turned to drugs, paying for them with sex. On a night not long before December 21, when she told her foster mother she was going out, her mother tried to stop her but couldn’t. She was going to visit friends in the neighborhood, Princess said. Her foster mother never heard from her again.
On July 11, 2003, at 7:00 a.m., officers from LAPD’s Southeast Division responded to a report called in by a crossing guard who found a body in the entrance to an alley at the rear of 556 West 108th Street near Denker Avenue. When Mark Lee Hahn arrived to join officers already there, he saw a fully clothed woman lying on her side. “The top of her body suit was pulled down, exposing her breasts,” a law enforcement document based in part on Hahn’s observations would reveal, “and you can see that her pants were also pulled down, exposing her lower torso.”
Three days later, Darryl Garber, a deputy medical examiner, performed an autopsy on the body and, observing severe abrasions on her neck, concluded she died from “ligature strangulation.” More than likely, the murder weapon was the necktie she was wearing that night. The victim was Valerie McCorvey, a 35-year-old mother with a violent romantic history. Because of that past, police initially considered Robert Nobles, her former common-law husband, as a prime suspect. “Nobles threatened to kill Victim McCorvey over a child custody issue,” according to a law enforcement document, “and these threats were [substantiated in] domestic violence reports from 1998 in Inglewood and a 2000 LAPD threat report. …Victim McCorvey told the police that Nobles called her [at that time] and said that… someone is going to come up dead.”
On July 15, because she had “come up dead,” Nobles called an LAPD detective to discuss the matter. He “told the detective that he heard about Victim McCorvey’s strangulation death from her great aunt,” the law enforcement document would continue. “At the time of that call, he mentioned the method of death which had not yet been released to anybody. Nobles went on to say that he was not the one who did it.” Despite his claims of innocence, police considered him a suspect until investigators made a stunning discovery. DNA evidence recovered from McCorvey’s body failed to match Nobles’ but did match samples left by the attacker on the bodies of Princess Berthomieux and, in a twist that was completely unexpected, Mary Lowe. A person who had direct bodily contact with McCorvey in her final hours had also been physical with a murder victim from last year and one from 16 years ago.
On New Year’s Day in 2007, in the middle of the afternoon, a homeless man collecting cans made an unsettling discovery in a Dumpster in the alley behind 9508 Western Avenue—a large black trash bag containing, he could hardly believe it, a dead body. The homeless man called in his gruesome find to police. A half-dozen or more officers from the 77th were already there when Detective Eric Crosson arrived at 2:49 p.m. He noted the plastic bag sealed with a zip tie. The bag had a small tear in it. “I saw what appeared to be a human hand with red painted fingernails,” Crosson would remember. There in the Dumpster, on top of the mound of garbage and the trash bag containing a dead body, was a dried-out Christmas tree.
Authorities decided to take the entire Dumpster to the coroner’s office, where a criminalist removed the trash bag containing the body, which turned out to be nude. She had been shot once in the back. Blood from her wound had been smeared all over her back. Since the body was nude, police recovered little evidence. They found no shell casings or related items at the crime scene. They did, however, have the zip tie.
On January 3, Lisa Scheinen, a deputy medical examiner, performed an autopsy on the body. The gunshot wound to the back, made by a bullet from a .25-caliber handgun, could have been fatal, but the victim also suffered asphyxia, probably from manual strangulation. In short, if the attacker had not choked her to death, he shot her in the back for good measure. She suffered no defensive wounds, meaning she had not struggled with her assailant. Her blood system contained marijuana, cocaine, and a metabolite of cocaine.
When her family called police to report her missing, she was identified as Janecia Peters, a 25-year-old single mother. Recently, she had been searching for a place to live with her four-year-old son. On December 31, she was seen at a local motel. That same day, when she called her mother, with whom her son was staying during the holidays, she sounded elated. “I got a place,” Janecia told her mother. It was the last time LaVerne Peters spoke to her daughter.
Police considered Peters’ boyfriend a prime suspect. “LAPD detectives interviewed an individual by the name of Wilbert Hicks,” a law enforcement document would state. “Parole records showed that Hicks called his parole officer on January 1st and told him he was upset because his girlfriend was found in a plastic trash bag, shot in the back, in a trash container… Hicks claimed he knew this information from Victim Peters’ murder from [another woman]. Hicks also said he received information from two gang members that his girl had been shot in the back and put in a Dumpster. …Another individual… told LA County Sheriff’s detectives that Hicks told her that he did it. Hicks told [her] that he shot Victim Peters in the vehicle, wrapped her up, and dumped her in the trash.”