Hillside Stranglers (20 page)

No one had any idea how Cindy, a cautious, conservative young woman, had met up with the Strangler. She had left her apartment between four-thirty and five, after paying her rent, and would normally have turned west on Colorado Street on the way to the college on Glendale Avenue. Somewhere between her apartment and the college, she had been abducted.

One possible witness did contact the police. Janice Ackers said that on Thursday night she had driven off the westbound Foothill Freeway onto the Angeles Crest Highway northbound
into the mountains. At first there had been no cars behind her, but then through her mirror she had noticed a car coming up behind her very fast with a second car following it. As she stopped to make a left turn, the first car, a small reddish-orange sedan, sped past her on her right and the driver had stared at her through his window. He had a wild, strange look in his eyes, Mrs. Ackers said, and he had a full beard. Then the second car passed, about eight car lengths behind. She watched the two cars speed up the hill, the second car gaining on the first. She did not notice anything about the second driver or about his car. The incident had occurred at about nine o’clock.

If Mrs. Ackers could be believed, and she appeared rational, this was yet another confirmation of what Salerno had deduced from the moment he had seen the position of Judy Miller’s body, that two men were involved. The time and location and the color of the lead car checked out.

But the information did not fill Salerno with a rush of optimism. From talking to Bob Grogan he knew that Beulah Stofer had not seen a beard on either man. It had been nearly three months since Lauren Wagner’s death, long enough to grow a beard, but Salerno was conscious of how little, really, he had learned since his own involvement had begun with Judy Miller. He and Grogan met often at the Code 7 bar or at more out-of-the-way places to exchange information and, after sufficient drink, to commiserate. They felt as did the new chief of the LAPD, Daryl Gates, who had been reduced to giving press conferences apologizing for the lack of progress, saying that he hated to look at himself in the mirror when he shaved. “I come to you with empty hands,” Gates would report to an increasingly hostile press.

Grogan and Salerno agreed that the fact that Cindy Hudspeth and Kristina Weckler had lived across the street from each other, although they had not known each other, meant that the killers probably lived in Glendale; this explained the remoteness of many of the dump sites. As for physical evidence, the bit of fiber on Judy Miller’s eye had led nowhere: a polyester fiber, origin unclear. The marks on Lauren Wagner’s palms were almost certainly electrical burns. How they had got there
no one could tell, but they indicated torture, as did the puncture marks on Kristina Weckler, who clearly had not been taking drugs. Some fibers had also been found sticking to the adhesive on Lauren’s hands—again untraceable—along with some animal hairs that appeared to have come from cats. The Wagners had no cats. As for eyewitnesses, Salerno now had Janice Ackers. He had discounted Pam Pelletier but believed Markust Camden and had kept in touch with him, interviewing him again in February, finding his story consistent. Grogan had Beulah.

“I must have visited her thirty times so far,” Grogan said. “I never ate so many cookies in my life. But I can’t get her to admit she was outside and saw everything closer up than she says.”

He had gotten Beulah to agree to hypnosis, but it had not worked. Every time she looked as though she was about to go under, she had been overcome by an asthma attack. Another neighbor, Evelyn Wall, also admitted seeing the abduction. She lived right next door to Beulah and had said that she had heard a man “hollering” that night. Evelyn Wall’s recollection was at first vaguer than Beulah’s, but under hypnosis Mrs. Wall said that she had gone outside to see what the noise was about, hiding behind the corner of her house. She had seen two large figures and a small figure in a big car that had been light on the top and dark underneath and another, smaller car, with no one in it. As the big car had driven off, one of the large figures had pushed down on the head of the smaller figure. Later that night she had gone out to check on the smaller car and had found the interior light burning but no one in it.

A third witness claimed to have been driving past and to have seen two men pulling a girl into their car. But this witness would be useless. “He’s the only guy I know has a certificate from the state saying he’s not crazy,” Grogan said. He was a convicted murderer who had been declared cured of insanity by the Atascadero state hospital for the criminally insane. He would not make a good impression in court.

Grogan and Salerno agreed that their biggest breakthrough was probably having the fingerprints from the phone booth and
the apartment on Tamarind: one set matched. None had been found in Cindy Hudspeth’s car, except her own, other than what might be a palmprint or a footprint on the outside of the trunk lid.

The biggest of many missing pieces was the site of the murders themselves, or possibly the several sites. The size of the city, both in population and in geography, was working against Salerno and Grogan and the others. The task force made things worse by pulling the files on every unsolved murder of a female during the past couple of years, even from places as far away as Bakersfield. The numerous municipalities, each with its own police force, which made up the greater Los Angeles area also fouled things up: Salerno and Grogan were sure that many multiple murders were never identified as such because a killing done in one town might never be correlated with one committed in another. And just as the freeway system had made Los Angeles the bank robbery capital of the nation, the city of the quick getaway, so it was plain that the Stranglers were taking advantage of the freeways, covering far more territory than would have been possible in, say, New York or Boston, sketching the arterial form of the city in the geographical pattern of their abductions and dumpings.

‘‘I’m going to write a goddam novel,” Grogan said. “It’ll outsell Joe Wambaugh. I’m going to call it
I Hope My Mother Is Never Murdered in Los Angeles.
”

When psychiatrists began offering theoretical portraits of the killer or killers, Grogan and Salerno paid attention, although their experience with psychiatrists in court had not inspired confidence in that profession. When they agreed with a psychiatric diagnosis, they invariably found that they had already arrived at the same conclusions themselves, without the obfuscations of a technical vocabulary. And in court every psychiatrist saying one thing was contradicted by another saying the opposite, so what was the use of them except to confuse a jury?

Now in interviews with the press, psychiatrists suggested that the Strangler was white, in his late twenties or early thirties, and single, separated, or divorced—in any case not living
with a woman. He was of average intelligence, unemployed or existing on odd jobs, not one to stay with a job too long. He had probably been in trouble with the law before. He was passive, cold, and manipulative—all at once. He was the product of a broken family whose childhood was marked by cruelty and brutality, particularly at the hands of women. Early signs of trouble were chronic bedwetting, cruelty to animals, arson, vandalism, and poor relationships with other children. It was generally agreed that the strangling itself was the sexual kick. Murder might, however, be only foreplay, with sex coming afterward. One psychiatrist asserted that sex murderers usually do not perform normal intercourse under any circumstances.

Dr. Louis Jolyon West, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA and director of that university’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, told the
Times
that this was a man living on the fringes of society whom no one would suspect. He liked danger but believed himself invincible. “It would be most unlikely,” Dr. West said, “to find this done by more than one person. Homosexuals murder by teams . . . but this type is most always the work of a single person. If not, then the relation between the two would be extremely unusual—a
folie à deux
[a psychiatric condition in which two persons usually related share the same delusions and act out the same psychosis].” Another psychiatrist reasoned that “the killer may not have had much dating experience.” Dr. West suggested that a woman confronting the Strangler try to “blind him if you can. Stick a sharp object into his eyes.”

But Grogan and Salerno knew that this advice was useless, since there were two Stranglers. They weighed the accumulated wisdom of the psychiatric profession, thought the idea that the killers might be related a possibility worth considering, but found little enlightenment in the constantly repeated idea that such killers hated their mothers. What else was new? That was the standard explanation for every screwed-up male, as predictable as ham on rye. “Gee,” Grogan said, “all we got to do now is find a white male who hates his mother. Can’t be many of those around!”

Psychics offered themselves to the LAPD for a fee or for
the publicity. Fortunately, in Grogan’s view, the LAPD had never stooped to hiring a psychic as other police departments around the country had done. Psychics simply hung around an investigation until the evidence was in and then took credit for solving the crime. Any homicide detective who believed in psychics ought to resign and join the priesthood or produce movies.

A private detective from Berlin wrote saying that he could and would solve the case for the price of air fare to Los Angeles. Grogan could never get the German’s polysyllabic name straight, but he kept writing, so Grogan began referring to him as Dr. Shickelgruber. “Anything from Dr. Shickelgruber today?” Grogan would ask when he arrived at the office. One day Grogan was sitting at his desk talking to Charlie Weckler on the phone, trying to reassure him that the investigation was progressing when it was not, when another officer came up and announced that Dr. Shickelgruber had arrived from Berlin. He was waiting outside.

“You’re shitting me,” Grogan said. No indeed, the German detective wanted to talk to the principal investigators. He would solve the case.

Grogan, figuring he had better be polite to a man who had flown all that way at his own expense, ushered Dr. Shickelgruber into an interviewing room. Unfortunately the German spoke no English, so Grogan summoned the only German-speaking officer on the force. Dr. Shickelgruber requested a blackboard.

On the board he wrote in German:

Two Italians

(Brothers)

Aged about thirty-five.

Grogan thanked Dr. Shickelgruber and saw that he was driven to the airport. His Italian-family theory impressed no one.

In April Grogan was dispatched to Boston to bring to Los
Angeles a prisoner, George Shamshack, who had implicated himself and another man in two Los Angeles killings still promoted by the press as Hillside Strangler cases. Grogan knew that neither of these women had been killed by the Stranglers—the m.o. did not fit—but he did not mind the trip to Boston, where he visited his mother and brother. He read the
Newsweek
of April 10 with rueful amusement: “A break in the case? . . . the cops are cautiously optimistic that at least two of the puzzling murders are solved. That would still leave eleven unsolved cases.” Oh well, Grogan thought, let them keep counting.

By the summer of 1978 the investigation was having its effect on Grogan’s family life. He had become caught up in cases before, but nothing like this, and there was no end in sight. He stuck to the agreement not to discuss his work at home, but he had been home hardly at all for months and could think and talk of nothing else. He had practically become a member of the Wagner family, visiting them often, eating with them, trying to keep them from cracking. Lauren’s sister was angry at Grogan for not telling her all the horrible details of what had been done to Lauren, but it was Joe Wagner, an earnest, rather naive man, who bothered Grogan the most. He took Joe Wagner to play golf and had long conversations about Lauren’s death with him at his house. Grogan sensed that he was helping Joe, offering him faith at least in the integrity and concern of the police, but this father seemed unable to assimilate what had been done to his daughter. Such acts were beyond his comprehension, beyond what his religious faith and his belief in fellow human beings permitted him to accept. One evening as Grogan was leaving the Wagners, Joe took him aside in the hallway and said:

“Bob, I’ve got to ask you something. Please tell me. What is sodomy?”

Grogan was astonished. He did not want to answer. “Just bad sex, Joe,” he said. “You know. Sex with hate.”

With Charlie Weckler the conversations were freer though equally difficult. Charlie was dealing with his despair by means of anger. He had developed a stutter since his daughter’s murder
and sometimes became speechless with fury, clinging to Grogan as his one hope for vengeance. He would fly down from Sausalito, Grogan would take him to play golf, and then the two men would drink together at the Nightwatch, cursing the Stranglers, modern life, the press, Los Angeles. Charlie had heard that a national television network was planning a program about murders of prostitutes, using the Hillside Strangler case as an example of such homicides, and he told Grogan that he was suing the network to stop the program, because his daughter had not been a prostitute and treating the case that way would blacken her memory.

After a session at the Nightwatch, Grogan would pour Charlie onto the plane in the morning, and then in a few days they would start talking on the phone again: “At least you care, Bob. You really care. At least someone cares.” And Charlie would fly down for more golf and drinks and talk. The two men developed a friendship born in death that would not falter. Charlie Weckler knew that Bob Grogan was devoting his life to solving Kristina’s murder. At one point Grogan dreamed up the idea of an exhibition of Kristina’s drawings and paintings at the Art Center of Design, the proceeds to go toward a scholarship in her name. He hoped that maybe the killers or one of them would show up, and he stationed undercover police all over the gallery and had photographs of everyone taken. The exhibition was a success but it trapped no one. Everyone in the photographs could be identified as either the parent of a student, a student, a patron of the center, or a police officer.