Hillside Stranglers (16 page)

To escape, Grogan now had his boat, which he took out from Long Beach every weekend he could, and he had his large collection of jazz records and his electric organ. Late at night, his head filled with corpses and the indifference of killers, he would pour himself a shot of Jameson’s, put a Duke Ellington record on the machine, and sit down at his organ to play along with the music. The driving rhythms and romantic melodies made sleep possible. He also played golf regularly at the California Country Club, enjoying the green peace of fairways and chit-chat that had no more violence in it than a solid tee shot.

At home with his wife, daughter, and son, it had long been an agreement that he would keep the details of his job to himself. Murder was not discussed. This was his wife’s wish, and he was happy to accommodate it, sure that she knew better than he what made for a tranquil domestic scene. Grogan and his wife shared a common background—they had been together since Boston—but in personality they were unalike, she quiet and religious. Around her Grogan not only did not speak of murder but tried, to the extent that he was able, to banish strong
words and phrases from his vocabulary. He did not mind splitting his life in two for her sake. On the contrary, he felt it gave him something to believe in. But once he was on the trail of Buono and Bianchi, he began to find the daily switch from war to peace more difficult.

The next day Charles Weckler flew down from San Francisco to identify his daughter’s body. Grogan was immediately drawn to this shattered father, identifying with him. He asked Mr. Weckler whether he would like to go someplace for a drink. Mr. Weckler said he would, after he telephoned his wife.

Grogan took him to the Nightwatch, a bar in Pasadena. It was early afternoon, and the place was not yet crowded. The two fathers, one twice the size of the other, sat in a corner booth and ordered doubles. Mr. Weckler told Grogan to call him Charlie.

“Charlie,” Grogan said, “we’re going to get this bastard, I promise you. I know that doesn’t help much for me to say that, but I want you to know that I am going to nail the fucking animal who killed your daughter. I don’t suppose you would have seen the
L.A
.
Times
this morning?” Charlie Weckler said he had not. Grogan told him that the
Times
had carried a story about how the police were teaming up on this case. Grogan himself had been talking to Frank Salerno of Sheriff’s Homicide that morning. Kristina had been the victim of a multiple murderer. There were several other cases that were tied in. The
Times
had listed eight, including two little girls who had been found the same day as Kristina. Grogan himself put the count at five, but there was one detective with the LAPD, Bill Williams, who wanted to include a sixth, Yolanda Washington, a black girl who had been found back on October 18. The location checked out; Williams was probably right. And another thing. Grogan was certain, as were Salerno and others, that there were two killers. But Grogan would appreciate it if Charlie wouldn’t say anything to the press about that or anything else Grogan told him about the investigation.

“I don’t want to talk to the press,” Mr. Weckler said. “I don’t intend to ever talk to the press. I know about the press. We will never talk to them.”

“Very wise idea,” Grogan said.

Mr. Weckler was a professional photographer, successful in his work. He had done features for
National Geographic
and other large-circulation publications. He knew all about publicity and knew that it would only add to his family’s tragedy. But he was happy to tell Grogan anything. His daughter had been such a quiet, serious girl. He could not imagine what had led her into the killer’s path, what had led her outside her apartment, without her car, on a Saturday night. She had not been with any of her friends.

“We’ll find out,” Grogan said. “The only thing we can think now is that somehow these guys are getting women to trust them. We think they might be posing as cops. But we don’t want the media to know that yet. If they tell everybody that, then nobody’ll trust a cop. But we may have to tell them.”

Grogan ordered more drinks. Then he brought out Kristina’s notebook from his suit pocket and handed it to Mr. Weckler. Grogan said he thought that Kristina’s family should have the notebook, and he was not going to turn it in as evidence, unless he had to. But one of Kristina’s friends might mention it, and Grogan might then be forced to discover it, so he would hang on to it for now, until he was sure it was safe to give it to the Wecklers.

Mr. Weckler thumbed through the notebook, straining to read his daughter’s handwriting in the dim light of the bar. He drained his drink. He broke down. Grogan ordered more drinks. Then Mr. Weckler, acting from some deep paternal urge, took out his pen and wrote out, slowly and carefully, at the top of each page of the notebook, “Copyright © 1977, by Kristina Weckler.”

“That way,” Mr. Weckler choked out, “nobody can steal Kristina’s work. At least her work can be safe.”

Jesus Christ, Grogan thought, if I could find those murdering bastards right now, I’d kill them with my own bare hands.

“I wish I were a more religious man,” Mr. Weckler said.

“Well,” Grogan said, “I never had much luck with the church myself.” He decided he had to try cheering Charlie up a bit, futile though the effort would be. Maybe he needed to try
to cheer himself up. He went on: “I remember when I was in the sixth grade back in Boston, about 1946 it was, I had to serve a high mass for Cardinal Cushing, remember that bastard? ‘
In nomine Domine
. . . ’ ” He imitated Cardinal Cushing’s Boston accent, even more nasal and flat than his own. “Anyway, it was this high mass for Rose Kennedy, you know? That’s right, the President’s mother, for Christ’s sake. Of course, the Kennedys were a big deal in Boston even then. Old Joe. Anyway, it’s a fucking historical event there, and here I am serving for the cardinal, and I did pretty good, got the Latin right, didn’t spill the wine, didn’t fall down genuflecting with the big book or anything. So afterwards, what do you know, the old bastard, the cardinal reaches into his scarlet robes and pulls out a twenty-dollar bill and gives it to me. Listen, that was a lot of money in those days. So what I did was, I ran right out and bought myself the best baseball glove I could find, a real thoroughbred mitt. And a ball, too. So I ran right home and showed the ball and glove to my father, I was so proud. So you know what my father did? I’ll tell you what. He beat the living shit out of me, that’s what he did. He said, ‘Don’t lie to me, Bobby, I know you stole that ball and glove. You expect me to believe Cardinal Cushing gave you twenty bucks? How stupid do you think I am? That son of a bitch never gave nothing to nobody!’ ”

Grogan laughed. “So you see, Charlie, I never had much luck myself with the church at all.”

Mr. Weckler managed a smile and a small laugh. He reached across the table, took Grogan’s hand, squeezed it, and looked into his big red face. Then he handed Grogan back Kristina’s notebook.

The next day Jane King’s body turned up, looking like a doll lost in April and found again in November. She had been discovered by a highway worker who was clearing brush on the Los Feliz offramp of the Golden State Freeway. Dudley Varney was assigned to be the primary investigator on Jane King. From the size of the maggots which completely covered her face, the coroner determined that she had been dead for about two weeks. Her pubic hair had grown out to about an eighth of an inch.

The LAPD announced that a special task force had been formed, which the media quickly termed the Hillside Strangler Task Force, headed by Lieutenant Ed Henderson of the LAPD but consisting of officers from the Sheriff’s Department and the Glendale Police Department as well. On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, the
Times
reported that Jane King’s murder might be linked to as many as ten others, saying that the police would not reveal the common method of strangulation; but on the following day the paper suggested that the strongest links seemed to exist among four victims: Yolanda Washington, Judy Miller, Lissa Kastin, and Kristina Weckler. Their age, where they were found, their nudity, and that they had been sexually molested seemed to connect them. Jane King had been older and it was not clear whether she had been raped.

Each day the newspapers and television offered varying reports, adding and subtracting victims from the Hillside list, increasing the public’s confusion and alarm but, it must be said, accurately reflecting the confused state of the investigation. Thirty officers were now making up the task force. Grogan, Salerno, Varney, and Williams had most of the responsibility and would have preferred to have had all of it, sensing that the greater the manpower, the greater the chance for foul-ups. But the task force was soon flooded with phone calls and clues, almost all of which turned out to be worthless, and dozens of officers were needed to handle them. Eventually the task force grew to a hundred officers, and they would put together over twelve thousand “clue packages,” labeled envelopes containing all the information on a given lead. When the task force added a computer called PATRIC (for Pattern Recognition and Information Correlation), Grogan said, “Holy God, that’s all we need. I’ll tell you what that goddam computer is. It’s nothing but a fifty-thousand-dollar filing cabinet.”

The killers took the Thanksgiving holiday off, but early Tuesday morning, November 29, Grogan was called again to examine a body in the hills of Glendale, this time in the Mount Washington area. Again the location, a steep, twisting little street called Cliff Drive, was difficult to find, but the body itself could not have been missed by anyone driving down to work
that morning. She was on her back. The upper part of the body was lying in some brush, but the legs stuck out onto the pavement. Grogan noticed first her long red hair and the paleness of her redhead’s skin. The five-point ligature marks told him immediately that Kristina Weckler’s killers had murdered again. And there was another link to Kristina, along with the nudity and the proximate nature of the location. This girl’s hands, which appeared to have been wrapped in some sort of tape, adhesive still sticking to her skin, bore strange lesions on their palms, dark bluish-green double lines. Grogan looked closely at her palms and could not figure out the lesions. They looked somewhat like burns, but it was impossible to tell how they had been made. What did seem likely was that the lines, which were about an inch and a half long, and the tape tracings on her hands indicated that the girl had been tortured, in some way as yet mysterious. The lines, like the puncture marks on Kristina Weckler’s inner arms, suggested that the killers were refining and elaborating their methods. Grogan figured that they were getting bored with simple rape and strangulation. He was certain that when the killers were ready to act again, they would entertain themselves with a new twist of some kind, a torture, a method of abduction or execution, something.

Grogan noticed nothing else on the body except a shiny, sticky substance, through which a column of ants marched, on one of her breasts. It could be saliva or possibly semen, what the police called “peeker tracks.” But tests on semen found on or in the other bodies had revealed nothing except the blood type of the victims. Ordinarily an antigen was secreted along with semen, as with saliva and other bodily fluids; the substance could be analyzed to determine the blood type of a rapist. But twenty percent of males were nonsecretors of the antigen, so that sort of identification, always chancy because of the quick deterioration of bodily secretions when exposed to air, was often useless. The laboratory would also try to analyze the marks on the palms and the adhesive on the hands. There was nothing else to go on.

Later that day, the girl’s parents identified her. She was Lauren Rae Wagner, eighteen, a student at a business college
in the San Fernando Valley, where she had lived in a house on Lemona Street, near Sepulveda Boulevard, with her parents, two sisters, and a brother. Grogan spared Joe and Judy Wagner the direct sight of their daughter’s body, permitting them to view it on closed-circuit television at the morgue. That night Grogan went to visit the Wagners at their house.

Grogan sensed immediately that this family would never recover from the murder. Their closeness would help them endure it, perhaps, but that very closeness made the loss all the more intolerable. When he arrived, he found their house lit up outside by swarming television crews, Joe Wagner on the front steps trying to answer reporters’ questions.

“Mr. Wagner, why do you think your daughter was abducted?” a reporter asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied, his voice quavering. “I guess because she was a girl.”

Grogan urged Mr. Wagner inside, telling him he did not have to talk to these people. He told the reporters to go home. Couldn’t they leave the family in peace? But they hovered around for hours.

Joe Wagner did most of the talking for the family. He said that the night before, Lauren had said she would be home by nine o’clock. She was not the sort of girl you had to set a curfew for; she was always home when she said she would be, and never after midnight. The family had gone to bed, and he had not noticed her missing until the morning. Then he had looked out the window and seen her car parked across the street, and when he looked in the car, he had found the door on the driver’s side ajar and the interior light burning. He immediately started questioning neighbors, and Beulah Stofer, who lived across the street in the house in front of which Lauren’s car was parked, told him that last night, at about nine o’clock, she had seen Lauren’s car pull over, followed by another car, driven by two men. The other car had drawn up beside her. The men had gotten out and there had been some sort of an argument. Then, Beulah Stofer had said, Lauren had gotten into the other car and driven off with the men.

“Why didn’t this woman contact you or the police?” Grogan asked.

“She said she wasn’t sure it was Lauren. I don’t know.”

Grogan questioned the Wagners about their daughter. She had been a wonderful girl, they said. She was so loving and giving. She had cooked the family Thanksgiving dinner last week. She made clothes for her sisters. She was already working on Christmas presents, dresses for her sisters and a pantsuit for her mother. She was so helpful, but she liked to be independent. She had worked at a Taco Bell at night, but a robbery there made her quit. She worked two nights a week at a dime store. She always wanted to help out if she could.