special unit now turns out every time a body is dumped in LA County.
Another weapon in the investigators’ armoury is Proposition 69, which was approved by California voters in 2004. It allows authorities to collect DNA samples from anyone convicted of a felony and from all adults arrested on suspicion of murder and sex crimes. In 2009, the law will be extended to include any person arrested on suspicion of any felony and some misdemeanours, regardless of whether they are convicted.
Meanwhile the Figueroa corridor, a 30-block span of one of South LA’s most dangerous territories that runs from Vernon Avenue to 120th Street, will continue to provide plenty of victims for the serial killers at large. It is peppered with $15-an-hour hotels, crack houses, liquor stores and used-car lots, along with Gospel, Baptist and Evangelical churches. The prostitutes lean on fences, hang out in phone booths or strut down the sidewalks, waving to catch the eye of eager Johns who drive slowly by. Some of the prostitutes are local; others come in from outside or bounce back and forth between LA and Las Vegas. Most are African-American, aged range between 14 and 50. Some are “strawberries”—a women who turn the occasional trick to feed a drug habit. Rates are low. A blow job costs $20 to $40. Oral stimulation followed by full sex costs about $50. The LAPD’s Southeast vice unit gets regular calls from residents complaining about prostitutes blowing Johns in cars outside their homes.
There is less prostitution in the area than there was in the 1980s, when the Southside Slayer was at work. Then dozens of girls could be seen hanging out on corners with their pimps. Now things have changed. Most of the women work on their own without pimps. They stand on the corners alone, away from other girls. There is less competition that way, but it also makes them more vulnerable. Some of the women carry pocket knives, screwdrivers or box cutters. Most don’t.
“These girls think they are good judges of character,” says Southeast Division Sergeant Roy Gardner. “But these guys don’t have on their foreheads that he is a serial rapist killer.”
And there are no shortage of them. The LAPD cold-case unit has gone back to processing the 1980s cases. Recently they have added another possibly related case to the list—that of 21-year-old Diane Johnson, whose partially clothed body was found by two passing motorists on 9 March 1987, in a roadway construction area west of the Harbor Freeway at 10217 South Grand Avenue. She had been strangled.
But some progress has been made. Shepard says that DNA evidence now possibly links two of the Southside Slayer victims with two suspects who are currently in custody on unrelated charges. Whether either one will ever be charged depends on the results of months, possibly years of investigation.
In November 2004, 38-year-old pizza deliveryman Chester Turner was charged with the murders of 13 women between 1987 and 1998, ten of them in the Figueroa Street area. Victims were largely homeless women, prostitutes or drug users. He sexually assaulted them before strangling them and dumping their bodies in alleys, vacant buildings or, in one case, a portable toilet. Among them was Diane Johnson. Intriguingly, cat hair was found on some of the victims, as it had been on some of the victims of the Southside Slayer.
Turner was caught after being required to supply a sample to California’s Combined DNA Index System after he was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually assaulting a 47-year-old woman in March 2002. DNA may yet help track down the killer of Princess Berthomieux—and the killers of all the other victims in South LA, Pomona and Fresco who are still at large.
Madison’s Capital City Murders
On a May evening in 1968, the body of 18-year-old Christine Rothschild was found hidden behind some shrubbery outside Sterling Hall, the mathematics building on North Carter Street in the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The discovery was made by a male student and it was thought that she had been killed that morning while out jogging. She had been stabbed 12 times in the chest.
Christine had enrolled at the University of Wisconsin the year before after having graduated with honours from Senn High School in Chicago, where she had lived in a modest home on the North Side with her father—the president of a brokerage company—her mother and her three sisters. A good student, Christine enjoyed her classes and hoped to become a journalist when she graduated. She was good-looking, with long blonde-brown hair and earned money in the summer as a model for department store catalogues.
The murder weapon was never found and, throughout the summer, one suspect after another was discounted. At one point a $5,000 reward was offered for information relating to Christine’s murder. This solicited no new leads.
Any further progress in the Rothschild case was then overtaken by events. At around 3.29 a.m. on 29 June 1969, a massive explosion rocked the Capital City campus. Two sticks of dynamite had been detonated outside the Administration Building. More than 700 windows were shattered. The blast created a four-foot crater in the reinforced concrete floor of the entranceway and the ceiling of the room underneath fell down. Fortunately, the late hour meant that the area was deserted and there were no casualties. No one claimed responsibility for the explosion and, even though the faculty offered a reward of $10,000, no one was ever arrested for the crime.
Just over a year later, on 24 August 1970, Sterling Hall—where Christine Rothschild’s body had been found —was also bombed. A 33-year-old researcher died in the blast. This time there suspects and warrants were issued, charging four men with conspiracy, sabotage and destruction of government property. Three of them were arrested and convicted of the bombing, but it has never been established if the two bombings were connected.
By then Christine Rothschild’s murder was forgotten about, except by those who were close to her. It languished in the “cold-case” file for eight years until 21 July 1976. Then memories were jogged when the charred and decomposed remains of a young woman were found by real estate assessors in a gully beside Old Sauk Pass Road some 14 miles northwest of Madison.
A post mortem revealed that the woman had been dead for at least ten days, but the corpse was in such a bad state that the cause of death could not be established. However, dental records and a fractured collarbone allowed her to be identified. She was 20-year-old Debra Bennett. She had been staying in the Cardinal Hotel downtown Madison after being evicted from her apartment. A native of Ridgeway in Iowa County, she had only been in the area a short time. This left detectives with little evidence and no suspects. Then mysteriously, three weeks after Debra’s body had been discovered, her room key was mailed back to the hotel. Tantalizing though this was, it moved the case little further ahead. There was no note with the key, no return address on the envelope, nor any other identifying marks. The murder of Debra Bennett then joined Christine Rothschild’s in the “cold case” file.
In the summer of 1978 the body of another young woman was found in a shallow grave on Woodland Road in Waunakee, a small town nine miles north of Madison. She had been killed by a blow with a blunt object to the head and had been dead for more than three days. After two days the body was identified as that of 18-year-old Julie Ann Hall, who had close ties to the University of Wisconsin. On 1 May 1978, she had got a job as a library assistant on the campus. She was last seen on a Friday night at the Main King Tap, a bar near Capital Square in Madison. Again, there was little evidence and no suspects.
Julie Speerschneider, aged 20, spent most of the evening of 27 March 1979 at the 602 Club, a bar at 602 University Avenue. Then she decided to hitch-hike to a friend’s house, but she disappeared on the way. Soon after, a man called the police and told them that he had given Julie a lift. He had recognized her from her description in the newspapers and on the media. She had been with a male companion, he said, and he had dropped off at the corner of Brearly and Johnson. He gave a detailed description of the man, but detectives were unable to identify him, even though Julie had many friends at the time of her disappearance. She had worked at the Red Caboose Day Care Center, where she was described her as friendly and reliable. Relatives and friends clubbed together to offer a reward and they even consulted a psychic in hope of finding her.
Julie Speerschneider had still not been found when, in April 1980, the dead body of Susan LeMahieu, aged 24, was discovered lying in the weeds near the Madison Arboretum. Six years before she had graduated from Madison’s East High School, though she was physically handicapped and mildly retarded. When she had gone missing on 15 December 1979, police did not suspect foul play, believing that she might have grown confused and wandered off because of her mental incapacity. Like Christine Rothschild, she had died of multiple stab wounds to the chest.
One year later, 16-year-old Charles Byrd was hiking along the Yahara River when he came across the remains of Julie Speerschneider. She had been missing for over two years and her body was so badly decomposed
