The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

the murders of some 50 black women on their books. No one was ever charged, but there were reams of suspects.

“We have three books of people they were interested in,” says Sergeant Cliff Shepard. The problem was the advent of crack cocaine. “It took hold all over the city. It was an explosion down here, and the murder of women suddenly increased and gangs really started taking off.”

Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On 3 August 2005, Detective Jeffrey Steinhoff, who was still working on the Berthomieux case, got a call from a Fresno County District Attorney’s Office investigator. He had in custody a 65-year-old repo man named Roger Hausmann, who had been accused of kidnapping two teenage girls. Around 15 years before, he had been a suspect in a spate of prostitute killings. The two girls who accused him of abduction said that he had boasted of going to LA to kill whores.

Interviewed in jail by LA Weekly, Hausmann denied the allegations. He said that the police had it in for him because he was a converted Jew who liked black women. But then he had little respect for women. Divorced at least three times, he referred to his exes as “hos”, calling one “Peanut Butter” because she “spread so easily”.

Despite Hausmann’s denials, Steinhoff believed that he was a strong suspect.

“Hausmann admitted that he has killed people and wrapped them in carpet in the Los Angeles area,” said Steinhoff. “One victim was covered with a carpet, one covered with a blanket, one covered with a trash bag, and three were covered with debris.”

Hausmann also got a traffic ticket in Inglewood three months before Princess Berthomieux’s death and in the kidnapping case, it was said, he exhibited violent tendencies. Hausmann had been at work, driving around Fresno looking for cars to repossess, when he offered to give the 17-year-old girlfriend of his son Dana and her 16-year-old friend a lift home. After taking them to McDonald’s, he said that he would drop off the older girl first. But the younger one did not feel safe with him and insisted on being taken home first. Hausmann lost his temper and punched her in the face, then he said that he was going to drive out on the highway and kill them both.

They tried to flee, but Hausmann pulled the younger girl back into the truck by the hair. Eventually she escaped by jumping from the vehicle, which was doing over 30 miles an hour, and suffered cuts and bruises. He was caught four days later hiding in the closet in a friend’s flat. When he refused to come out, the police Tasered him. Then, he claimed, the police had beaten him up.

He also accused the two girls of beating him up and robbing him. The older girl, he said, also made it clear that she wanted to have sex with him, even though she was under age. She was involved in a ring of prostitutes, he said, and tried to extort money from him.

A native of Santa Rosa, some 200 miles to the north of Fresno, Hausmann had a record of having sex with minors. His first wife was 15 when he married her; he was 19. Twenty years later, in 1979, he was arrested in Fresno for having sex with a minor, but escaped prosecution when he married her. According to Steinhoff, Hausmann was also arrested in Lynwood, South LA, in 1976 on suspicion of committing lewd acts against a child. He was arrested again in 1982 in Bakersfield for pimping and enticing an underage girl into prostitution.

Steinhoff also unearthed a series of weapons offences. In 1968, 1972 and 1979, Hausmann was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon; in 1971 and 1976 for exhibiting a deadly weapon; in 1981 and 1982 for carrying a loaded firearm; and in 1985 for assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles.

Then in 1991, Hausmann came to the attention of Fresno Police Department. The local sheriff’s office had set up a joint task force to investigate the deaths of 25 black women, aged 18 to 30, over a period of 13 years. Some of them were known prostitutes and their bodies were found dumped in fields, empty lots, abandoned houses and irrigation canals.

According to the police, Hausmann knew some of the women.

“He admitted that he dated some of the girls,” said Detective Doug Stokes.

A prostitute also accused him of hitting her with a steam iron and saying: “You’re harder to kill than the other ones.” A witness also said that he had heard Hausmann say: “This one is hard to kill.”

Hausmann claimed that the prostitute had hit him with the steam iron first. He also accused her of hitting him over the head with a bronze ashtray and stealing jewellery from him. According to Hausmann, it was a male friend who had knocked her out, tied her up and suggesting rolling her body up in a carpet and dropping her in a lake. Hausmann claimed that he had gallantly rescued the woman. In court, though, he pleaded no contest to false imprisonment and assault with a deadly weapon and served two and a half years in jail.

Detective Stokes said that of all the suspects the Fresno police task force investigated in the case of the murders of the 25 black women, Hausmann was “probably the one we looked at closest or the longest”. Nevertheless, the investigation was disbanded after ten weeks. No arrests were made. However, DNA testing was not available at time. Evidence in the cases is now being reviewed.

Released in November 1993, Hausmann’s pattern of violence continued. Stivette Street, the mother of Hausmann’s son, accused him of grabbing her by the throat when he thought he was cheating on her and beating her head against the wall on another occasion. She also said that he had kidnapped the boy and took him to Los Angeles. Another ex-wife said that he had tried to choke her when she refused to have sex with him and threatened to kill one of her friends. Again, Hausmann denies ever using violence, though he claimed to have ridden with the Hell’s Angels for eight years, but quit because they “used to talk trash about my black women”.

He also claimed to have been a drug dealer and a pimp, both in Fresno and LA. He boasted to LA Weekly that he hung out at now-defunct restaurant at Florence Avenue and Figueroa Street. His stable of girls worked out of bars and hotels along the Miracle Mile and in Beverly Hills. From 1960 to 1995, he sold cocaine out of a “rock house” on 19th Street in LA and in Fresno. But then he became a Christian and, he says, flushed two kilos of cocaine “still in the Medellin Cartel wrappers” down the lavatory. That year, he was arrested once again for assault with a firearm and Steinhoff maintains that his arrest record shows that he travelled frequently between Fresno and Los Angeles.

In his defence Hausmann maintains that he had been beaten and victimized by the Fresno police because he stopped supplying the cops with drugs. One local officer also called him a “nigger-lover Jew-boy slave” because of his predilection for black women. In May 2003 he claims he was molested by the police and dropped on his head in the street when he tried to repossess a pick-up truck legally. The police failed to come to his aid, he said, when he was hit over the head with a large kitchen pot and robbed. The police laughed at him when he turned up at the station to report the matter and complained to a judge about his treatment.

Steinhoff sought a court order to take a DNA sample from Hausmann as a suspect.

“There is a link between each of the homicides,” Steinhoff wrote in his affidavit. “Based on my training and experience, I believe that Hausmann is a suspect in these homicides. Hausmann admitted that he killed people and wrapped them in carpet in the Los Angeles area.”

However, when a sample of Hausmann’s saliva was tested it did not match the DNA taken from the body of Princess Berthomieux.

LA County coroner’s office has now set up a special serial homicide team consisting of a criminologist, two pathologists and four investigators specially trained by the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit who study serial killers, their traits and profiles. The coroner’s office also hooked up to the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), a computer database that seeks to identify similarities in violent crimes that have been committed by the same violent offenders.

Using the latest computer techniques, investigators have begun sorting through 800 autopsy and investigative reports involving the deaths of women in Los Angeles since 2002. They made separate lists of those who had been dumped in fields, alleys or on the sides of roads. Some women had been strangled or stabbed. Others had been bound and gagged. In some cases their bodies had been covered with plastic bags. Some had been prostitutes; others drug users—quite often both. They came up with a list of 38 that could possibly be the victim of a serial killer or killers. Then the FBI came in, concentrating on the first 18 cases involving African- Americans.

“Nobody had ever looked at them all because of the sheer number we get,” said Captain Ed Winter, head of the coroner’s serial homicide team. “When you start looking at them, there are similarities. There is no one else tracking this. The goal of this unit is to track possible serial-related homicides and supply law enforcement with data to help solve the murders.”

The list was circulated to police agencies in the area and detectives were asked to investigate whether there were any similarities between cases on the list and those they were working on. An investigator from the coroner’s