The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (22 page)

Although his car was parked just south of the Warehouse District bar, he was last seen walking north, clad in an American Indian costume. Chuck Loesch, a private detective hired by the family, believed that Jenkins intended to walk to his apartment near Dinkytown, which would involve crossing the Mississippi River.

A senior in the business school, his disappearance sparked a communitywide search. Numerous University of Minnesota students and hundreds of other volunteers scoured the area but found nothing. Then, in late February 2003, Jenkins’ body was pulled from the Mississippi River near the St Anthony Falls in downtown Minneapolis.

The medical examiner spent seven hours on the post mortem, but did not find any obvious indication of foul play. Nor was there any reason to believe that he had died from natural causes. So the exact manner of Chris’s death had been listed officially as “undetermined”. However, while the blood-alcohol level in his heart was only 0.12 percent, tests found a high level of the date-rape drug known as GHB in his system – though medical examiners maintain the body could produce this substance naturally.

At that time, the coroner did not classify the death as a crime. However, others were not so sure. One clue that it was a homicide was that Jenkins was outside without his coat, wallet or cell phone.

In November 2006, the death of Chris Jenkins was reclassified as a homicide. But police in La Crosse dismissed any connection with the drownings there and continued to consider the Wisconsin deaths as accidents.

Brown’s suspect came to her attention after he walked into the police station in St Charles, Missouri, in the late 1990s and announced that he was going to be the next Jeffrey Dahmer. Of course, neither the cops or the FBI believed him, on the grounds at if somebody says they are going to be a serial killer, they are not.

“But it’s not true,” says Brown. “We have a history of exactly that sort of thing, where they do claim it and they are it. They’re trying to practice the concept . . . people say, ‘I want to be something, so let me go out and say (I am) something, and then after a while I get comfortable with the concept, then I can be it.’”

The man was so persistent that the police even got a restraining order to stop him harassing them. However, one St Charles’ detective did take the man’s claims seriously, particularly when he revealed his obsession with a sexual fantasy of forcing young boy-next-door types underwater and watching them panic and struggle until they drowned. It was then he contacted Brown.

The private eye Chuck Loesch also came across the unidentified man when he was working on the Jenkins case. He lived in Minneapolis at the time of Jenkins’ death, just a few blocks from where he disappeared. Brown says that the man has also spent time in Wisconsin.

The man worked in a funeral parlour – the perfect job for a man fascinated with death. At night he was a part-time male prostitute and was a regular on a website called manunderwater.com for gay men who have a fetish about having sex underwater. The St Charles’ cop asked Brown to see if she could contact the man via the website.

Posing as a 15-year-old boy who had seen his own brother die in a back yard pool years before, Brown role-played with the man via the website’s message boards. She quickly noticed a sadistic bent to the man’s fantasy.

“Some people will present online as one who will share going under water, ‘You drown me then I’ll drown you’ that type of thing,” Brown says. “He’s not like that at all. He doesn’t like being drowned. He just lies about that so he’s not really sharing with you. Once you get to the fantasy with him, he wants to do all the drowning. I mean he’ll play at it one time or so to pretend that you get your turn, but it isn’t that way . . . It is more about ‘I’m holding you under the water. You’re struggling. You’re struggling. I watch the bubbles come up . . .’ That’s his whole thing. To watch you drown, to watch your eyes when you’re drowning.”

His emails were disturbing and graphic.

“He would take me under water in various forms of nudity or non-nudity, in different water settings and he would watch me struggle and die. That’s when he would have an orgasm,” Brown recalls.

The man was also cold and calculating, and Brown believes that he confines his activities to Minnesota and Wisconsin as they do not have the death penalty.

“He said he’d never kill in Missouri,” Brown recalled, “because it’s a death-penalty state.”

Meanwhile, the suspect was up to no good in the real world. He made sexual advances towards the teenage son of the owner of the funeral home and, when the father confronted him, he threatened to murder the funeral director’s entire family. When a detective interviewed him, he concluded: “The defendant is a danger to the community . . . because he goes for white males between 16 and 25 . . . spoke of bondage and putting Saran Wrap over a victim’s face . . . and has serial-killer tendencies.”

The police then issued a warrant, but when they tried to arrest the man he drove into their squad car and led them on an hour-long car chase. He was jailed for seven months for resisting arrest. The problem was that he was in jail at the time of Jared Dion’s death. Nevertheless Brown believes that he was involved in the four earlier deaths, or that someone with a similar tendency is out there at work.

“There are more serial killers out there than we know about,” Brown says. The La Crosse fatalities are not necessarily all the victims of the same killer. “It could be one guy who maybe killed two of them.”

The detective in St Charles agrees and would like a chance to investigate.

“I think if I had all those cases, he’d be a great lead to eliminate,” he said.

When
Stuff
magazine told the police in La Crosse police of Brown’s suspect, Captain Mitch Brohmer said that he knew nothing about him. Caroline Kelly, a detective with the Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation, admitted that the state police, as well as the local department, had not heard of him.

A former FBI profiler told
Stuff
that, at 40 years old, Brown’s suspect “has probably done more than just watch. If I had to vote, I’m voting killer.”

While Brown concedes that the man from St Charles may not be the killer in the La Crosse drownings, his existence demonstrates that such a killer may exist.

Los Angeles’ South Side Slayer

Homicide Detective Jeffrey Steinhoff was moved by the death of Princess Berthomieux. On 9 March 2002, her naked body was found dumped in bushes in an alley in the 8100 block of South Van Ness Avenue in Inglewood. She had been strangled. In her short life the runaway from Hawthorne had been in and out of foster homes. The 14-year-old was working as a prostitute when she was killed. There were no further clues to her murderer and she seemed destined to be just one of the dozens of young women in her profession who died at an unknown hand in that area of Los Angeles.

For over two years the case remained cold. But in December 2004, the sheriff’s crime lab linked traces of the DNA found on her body to those taken from the bodies of two other slain women. The first was 26-year-old Mary Lowe who was found on 1 November 1987 in an alley in the 8900 block of South Hobart Boulevard. Last seen at a Halloween party at a club the night before, she had been shot in the chest. In 1979, she had been arrested for prostitution though, at the time of her death, she was working as a receptionist and was living at home with her parents. The second was 35-year-old Valerie McCorvey. Like Princess Berthomieux, she had been strangled. Her body was found on 11 July 2003, dumped near the corner of 108th Street and Denver Avenue.

Valerie McCorvey had dropped out of high school and by her late teens she had a drug habit. She went into rehab and at one time she had a job helping other addicts kick the habit. But the lure of drugs was too powerful, even though she had strong family ties to her father, who had divorced from her mother, and her aunt Mary Taylor. Four months before she died, Valerie left a message on her aunt’s answering machine, saying she was okay. She was found just one block away from her regular hang-out on Figueroa Street. She had been sexually assaulted, though she was still wearing her familiar brown pants and blue leotard.

Initially the police thought an ex-boyfriend was responsible as he was less than forthcoming when they interviewed him. But then the DNA evidence connected her to the murderer of Princess Berthomieux and Mary Lowe.

The following year, another match was made to DNA found on the body of an earlier victim. This was 25-year-old Bernita Sparks, whose body was found on 16 April 1987, covered with garbage, inside a dustbin in an alley in the 9400 block of South Western Avenue. The night before, she had told her mother that she was going out to buy a packet of cigarettes. She was found fully clothed and had no arrests for prostitution. There was evidence that she had been sexually assaulted. She had also suffered blunt-force trauma to the head, been strangled and shot in the chest. The bullet came from the same .25-calibre handgun that had shot Mary Lowe. Ballistics linked the bullets with six other handgun killings in the 1980s.

Twenty-nine-year cocktail waitress Debra Jackson was last seen leaving a friend’s home in Lynwood to take a bus back to her apartment in South-Central. A few days later, on 10 August 1985, her decomposing body was found fully clothed and covered with a carpet in an alley in the 100 block of West Gage Avenue, west of South Vermont Avenue. She had been shot twice in the chest.

A year later, 35-year-old Henrietta Wright was also killed by two shots to the chest. On 12 August 1986, her body was found in the 2500 block of West Vernon Avenue. She was fully clothed, though her shoes were missing. Her body wrapped in a blanket and covered with a mattress. In 1982, Wright had been arrested for prostitution at 47th Street and Figueroa Street in 1982. Again she had been sexually assaulted.

On 14 August 1986, the body of 36-year-old Thomas Steele, a resident of San Diego, was found dumped in the road near 71st Street and Halldale Avenue in Los Angeles. He was fully clothed and had been shot once behind the right ear. He seems to have been in L.A. for the day to visit his sister and detectives believe that his death was drug related, but in 1978 he had been arrested in Sacramento on prostitution and pimping charges. He was the only male victim.

The body of 23-year-old Barbara Ware was found fully clothed in an alley in the 1300 block of East 56th Street on 10 January 1987. A plastic bag was draped over her head and upper torso, and she was covered with rubbish. Five years before, she had been arrested for prostitution.

Lachrica Jefferson, aged 22, was found by LA County Sheriff’s deputies in an alley in the 2000 block of West 102nd Street in Lennox on 30 January 1988. She died from two gunshots to the chest and was fully clothed.

The body of 17-year-old Alicia Alexander was found naked in an alley in the 1700 block of 43rd Street at Western Avenue on 11 September 1988. Again she died from two gunshots to the chest and was covered with a mattress.

There were now ten related victims. The police had to ask themselves: was there a serial killer on the loose? If there was, they were going to have a hard time catching him. The DNA matched none on any criminal database and the investigation ground to a halt.

The 1980s cases were lodged with the LAPD’s cold-case unit hat was formed in 2001 and had begun to work its way through more than 9,000 unsolved murders. But with the current Berthomieux and McCorvey cases now under investigation, it seemed that the same killer had been going about his business unimpeded for 18 years.

At the time, the early killings were thought to be the work of the “Southside Slayer” who was credited with at least 14 murders between September 1983 and May 1987 and had never been caught. The victims had been black women, largely prostitutes. They had been tortured with superficial cuts before being strangled or stabbed. As in the case of Bernita Sparks he exhibited a “pattern of overkill”. Again bodies were dumped in alleyways, on residential streets and in schoolyards. At least three others are considered possible victims, and three women managed to survive the predations of the slayer.

The first on the list attributed to the slayer was Loletha Prevot, whose body was found in Los Angeles on 4 September 1983. Then on 1 January 1984 the body of Patricia Coleman was dumped in Inglewood. The third victim, Sheila Burton – aka Sheila Burris – was found on 18 November. Then the murder rate increased. Frankie Bell was killed on New Year’s Day 1985. The mutilated body of Patricia Dennis was found on 11 February. On 20 March Sheily Wilson was murdered in Inglewood. Lillian Stoval joined the list on the 23rd. Patsy Webb was murdered on 15 April and Cathy Gustavson on 28 July. Only one victim survived, but she suffered a vicious beating that left her in a coma.

On 6 August the slayer’s next intended victim managed to escape by jumping from his moving car. She told detectives that her attacker was a black man in his early thirties, who wore a baseball cap and had a moustache. His description and sketch were circulated, but brought no new leads. Nor did their publication discourage the attacker. On 15 August, the body of Gail Ficklin was found. On 6 November the killer moved a little further south to dump Gayle Rouselle’s body in Gardena, but on 7 November he returned to his regular stamping grounds to dump Myrtle Collier’s corpse in LA proper. Twenty-three-year-old Nesia McElrath’s body was found on 19 December. Three days later the mutilated corpse of Elizabeth Landcraft was found. Then on 26 December, Gidget Castro’s body was found to the east in Commerce.

On 5 January 1986, the Southside Slayer despatched Tammy Scretchings. Then on 10 January, a 27-year-old prostitute was viciously beaten. A male acquaintance who tried to protect her was stabbed. Their descriptions of the man matched that given by the women who had leapt from his car on 6 August.

On 11 February, Lorna Reed’s body was found in San Dimas, 30 miles to the east of Inglewood in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. On 26 May, the body of known prostitute Verna Williams was found in the stairwell of a Los Angeles elementary school, and on 3 November Trina Chaney’s body was found in Watts. It was then that those killings officially attributed to the Southside Slayer stopped, though in January 1988 police added to the list Carolyn Barney. She had been killed on 29 May 1987.