The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (29 page)

Then, on a hot August day in 1987, Harrison “Marty” Graham was evicted from his north Philadelphia apartment because of the terrible smell coming from it. Before leaving he nailed the door to one of the rooms shut. The landlord’s son looked through the keyhole and called the police, who found the decomposing corpses of six women, along with parts of a seventh. Graham was also convicted, but was found to be mentally incompetent, so could not be executed.

Despite having other work to do, officers canvassed the Frankford Avenue neighbourhood for clues. A barmaid at Goldie’s told them that she had seen all the women in the bar. She believed that they had been murdered by a man who had dropped in and picked them up. She even pointed out a suspect, but could provide no evidence to substantiate her suspicions.

The police came to believe that the victims had known their killer. Jean Durkin had been homeless for five years. She was strong and streetwise. Once, when six policemen had tried to arrest Durkin, she put up such a fight that they gave up. She could not be overwhelmed easily so her killer must used have cunning, rather than strength, to put her in a vulnerable position. Helen Patent was also independent and savvy. People who knew her did not believe that she would have gone into the rail yard with a stranger. But that took the police little further.

The neighbourhood held a candlelight vigil for the dead woman and a task force was formed. Meanwhile, the killer seemed to lie low for over a year, then he struck again. On 11 November 1988, 66-year-old Margaret Vaughan was found lying in the entranceway of an apartment block in the 4900 block of Penn Street, just three blocks from where Jean Durkin had been found. Vaughan had lived in the building, but had been evicted that day for not paying the rent. She had been stabbed 29 times.

A bartender reported that Vaughan had drinking with a middle-aged white man the evening before her death. He had a round face, wore glasses and walked with an obvious limp. A police artist drew a sketch, which was circulated. But no one came forward to identify him.

On the evening of 19 January 1989, 30-year-old Theresa Sciortino was found dead in her apartment, where she lived alone, on Arrott Street, three blocks from where Margaret Vaughan had been found and a block and a half from Frankford Avenue. Lying face up in a pool of blood in the kitchen, she was naked except for a pair of white socks. The attacker had used a sharp knife to slash her 25 times in the face, arms, and chest. He left the bloodstained weapon leaning against the sink and a bloody footprint on the floor. He had also used a three-foot piece of wood to sexually assault her. The attack seems to have happened the night before. It was then that a neighbour had heard a struggle, followed by a loud thump as if a large object had been thrown to the floor. Indeed Sciortino had put up quite a struggle. All the rooms in the apartment showed signs of the disturbance and blood was spattered everywhere.

Like Durkin, Sciortino had been an inmate of several psychiatric institutions and was currently an outpatient under treatment. Like the other victims, she was seen regularly along the Frankford Avenue strip, often with male companions. One neighbour said she enjoyed “a lot of company”. She had last been seen alive at 6 p.m. in the Jolly Post at the corner of Griscom and Arrott Streets in the company of a middle-aged white man. This was shortly before her neighbour heard the scuffle in her apartment.

The medical examiner Paul Hoyer dismissed the idea that a serial killer was on the prowl, on the erroneous grounds that serial killers kill much more frequently. But detectives were convinced. All of the victims were white women. Though their ages differed dramatically, they lived similar lifestyles. They all frequented the same area and drank in the same places. All had been viciously stabbed. In each case, the killer had left little evidence and there were no witnesses. Miraculously, no one had ever noticed the killer fleeing the scene, even though he must have been covered with blood after inflicting multiple stab wounds.

Consequently, the detectives looked back in their files to see if they could find any other unsolved murders that could have been perpetrated by the same killer. They came across the case of 29-year-old Catherine Jones, whose partially clad body had been found on a sidewalk in the Northern Liberties neighbourhood of the city on 29 January 1987, frozen and covered in snow. She worked as a waitress in Frankford and had been a patron of the bars there. However, she had not been stabbed but bludgeoned to death. Her jaw had been broken and her skull crushed, so she was never officially added to the Frankford Slasher’s tally.

While detectives were reviewing the Catherine Jones case, a foot patrol called to investigate a burglary stumbled across the naked body of 46-year-old Carol Dowd at 2 a.m. on 29 April 1990 in an alley behind Newman’s Sea Food market at 4511 Frankford Avenue. Like Catherine Jones, she had been beaten around the face and head. And like the Slasher victims, she had also been stabbed 36 times to the chest, back, face and neck. She also had cuts to her hands, showing she had tried to fend off her attacker. As in earlier murders, her torso had been cut open and her intestines spilled out of the long wound. One report also says that her left nipple was removed. The medical examiner determined that Carol Dowd had been murdered between midnight and 1.40 a.m.

A few hours before she had been killed, Carol Dowd had been seen walking with a middle-aged white man. Her clothes were found not far from her body. Her purse was also found in the alley. It was open and some of its contents had spilled out on the ground. But nothing was missing and, for the time being, robbery was ruled out as a motive. It seemed clear that the Frankford Slasher had struck again.

Like Jean Durkin and Theresa Sciortino, Carol Dowd had a history of mental illness. When her brother died in the late 1960s, she began hearing voices. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, she was institutionalized. Then she was released into a community-based programme and moved into an apartment, where she was raped. But lately, she had been moved into a hostel near where she had been found and seemed happy.

During their investigation the police came across a black man named Leonard Christopher, who worked in the fish market and lived nearby. He had seen the police in that alley that night. The store had been broken into several times before and he told reporters that he thought the market was being burgled again. He concluded that they were busting someone for selling drugs or prostitution, both of which went on in the alley, and moved on. However, when the police questioned him, he admitted to knowing one of the earlier victims, Margaret Vaughan.

Christopher claimed that he was with his girlfriend the night Carol Dowd was killed, but his girlfriend said she had been at home alone. A prostitute who initially denied seeing Christopher that night, later said that she had seen him with Carol Dowd outside a bar. Another said she had seen him coming out of the alley, sweating, with a large knife in his belt.

When the police searched his apartment, they found clothing with blood on it. Christopher said that he had been told by his boss to clean up the blood in that alley – that’s how it had got on his clothes. Workmates and friends vouched for his good character. Even his landlord stuck up for him, though he complained that Christopher sometimes made too much noise. And it was plain that Christopher was black, not the middle-aged white man seen with other victims. Nevertheless on 5 May 1990, Christopher was arrested and charged with the murder of Carol Dowd, the abuse of a corpse, theft and possession of an instrument of a crime. He was refused bail and jailed.

At a preliminary hearing on 20 June, the prosecution presented their case. Emma Leigh, who knew Christopher, said that she had seen him walk into the alley behind the fish market at around 1 a.m. Then she heard a woman scream. But then Leigh left with a man – a date or, perhaps, a client – in a car. Linda Washington, who also knew Christopher, said she had seen him leaving the alley, with his shirt over his arm and a large knife in a sheath hanging from his waist.

Christopher’s defence attorney, Jack McMahon, challenged the prosecution’s case, saying that in key detail the two witnesses had contradicted each other and their testimony would never stand up at the trial. He also contested the theft charge on the grounds that, while Carol Dowd’s purse had been open, there was still money in it. The purse had simply been dropped during the attack. Nevertheless Leonard Christopher was bound over to stand trial.

Even though Christopher had only been charged with one of the murders, the residents of Frankford breathed a sigh of relief – but not for long. While Christopher was safely locked away in the county jail on 6 September 1990, the body of 30-year-old Michelle Dehner – aka Michelle Martin – was found in a fourth-floor studio apartment on Arrott Street, not far from Frankford Avenue. She had been stabbed 23 times in the stomach and chest.

Once again, there was no sign of forced entry. Her apartment was on the same street as the one where Theresa Sciortino had been murdered 18 months before and was only three blocks from the alley where Carol Dowd had been slain. She had even been an early suspect in the murder of Jean Durkin as, the night before Durkin died, the two of them had fought over a blanket.

Like Jean Durkin, Theresa Sciortino and Carol Dowd, she had a history of mental instability. A hard-drinking, paranoid loner who was less than fastidious about personal hygiene, she was called “Crazy Michelle” by people in the neighbourhood, who saw her traipsing from bar to bar dressed in jeans and a sloppy sweatshirt. Considered eccentric and anti-social, she sometimes barricaded herself in her apartment or flung things out the window, endangering people below. Streetwise and single, she frequented the same bars as the other victims. When she was not selling pretzels on the street, she spent all day drinking. A blowsy blonde, she often took men home with her. She was last seen the day before her body was found leaving a Frankford Avenue bar with a middle-aged white man. There was little doubt that Michelle Martin’s death was the work of the Frankford Slasher.

All those who had vouched for Christopher, insisting that he was a decent and friendly man, now seemed vindicated. He had been falsely accused and the real killer was still at large. Once again, the residents of Frankford took to the streets, insisting that the police catch the Slasher. On 27 October, 50 of them marched in the rain along the routes they believed the killer had taken with his victims. The
Philadephia Inquirer
reported that the procession went “past the fish market, behind which one body was found butchered with a knife, past a bar that four of the dead had patronized, and along Arrott Street, where the latest victim was found stabbed to death early last month”. Again, they lit candles and commemorated “the women who couldn’t be here”.

Detectives also took to the streets again, watching for men who picked up women in bars in Frankford. They had two men under constant surveillance and leads on a third suspect. They even tracked down the owner of the shoe that had left the bloody shoe print on the floor of Theresa Sciortino’s apartment. It turned out to be one of Sciortino’s boyfriends, but he was eventually cleared as a suspect.

The public phoned in, naming fresh suspects. Psychics were called in. A local witches’ coven was accused, but excluded.

Calls were made for the release of Leonard Christopher. But even with the murder investigation still in full swing, on 29 November 1990, his trial in the Court of Common Pleas began. Christopher appeared in a grey suit and black horn-rimmed glasses, looking, the newspapers said, “studious” – a mile away from the public image of the demented killer who had been raping and killing women in Frankford for the last five years. Nevertheless in her opening statement, Assistant District Attorney Judith Rubino insisted that the mild-mannered Christopher was a vicious killer who used a “Rambo-style knife” to slash and kill Carol Dowd in the alley behind the fish market where he worked.

She admitted that while she had no witnesses to the actual murder, she did have testimony that would provide sufficient circumstantial evidence to prove the defendant’s guilt. Christopher had been seen with Carol Dowd going into the alley, and a witness heard a woman scream. He had also been seen leaving the alley. Dowd had been found dead in the alley immediately afterward. He had been seen with a knife, and his clothes had blood on them. What’s more, Christopher had lied about his whereabouts that night.

Defence attorney Jack McMahon told the jury that Christopher had no history of violence. The police were under pressure to solve the case, he said, and they had rushed to judgment. When the prosecutor objected, Judge George Ivins cautioned McMahon to stick the facts and not offer opinions. However, McMahon stuck to his guns. He pointed that there had been at least six murders before Carol Dowd’s that were so similar that they were thought to be the work of a serial killer. But Christopher had only been charged with one of the slayings. The prosecution objected to this line of reasoning as McMahon could plainly infer that, as another similar murder had occurred while his client was in custody, he could not have killed Carol Dowd. When attorneys for the prosecution and defence approached the bench, the argument became heated.

McMahon continued by pointing out that prosecution were relying on evidence that in a stronger case would have been discarded. Their witness were, by and large, drug users and prostitutes, who had nine aliases between them and long rap sheets. Emma Leigh had even admitted to lying to the police to start with. She was plainly an unreliable witness. Could any jury believe such witnesses “beyond reasonable doubt”?

No physical evidence connected Christopher to the crime scene. No murder weapon had been found – certainly not a “Rambo-style” knife. When Christopher had been arrested less than a week after the murder, there were no marks on him – no bruises or abrasions as you would expect from a woman fighting for her life. In short, there was no reason to view Leonard Christopher as a murderer.