The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (36 page)

He had a large collection of ski masks, wearing a different one for each attack. Usually they were store-bought knitted masks, but sometimes they appeared to be homemade. On one occasion he wore a leather hood. Another time he wore a hood made out of army green canvas or heavy denim material which left his nose as well as his eyes and mouth exposed.

He also had a wide range of gloves, which he only took off during the sexual assault – though on one occasion he kept them on throughout. At first, the gloves were usually made of black leather, but later he wore brown gloves made out of heavy cotton with heavy stitching. Latent fingerprints have been found at the scene of the crimes, but no match has been made.

It is thought he lived in the Sacramento Area between 1976 and 1979, and frequented or lived in Rancho Cordova, possibly near Paseo Drive, up to 1976. He frequented Costa Contra County in 1979, and frequented or lived in Goleta from 1979 to 1980. Possibly he had relatives or friends living there at the time. And he frequented or lived near Ventura County or Orange County in southern California from 1980 to 1986.

As several of the neighbourhoods the suspect targeted had homes on the market or homes recently sold, he is thought to have posed as a realtor, building inspector or prospective home-buyer. He may even had studied plans of the homes where the attacks later took place.

In two cases there were two nearby homes for sale. In another case, there was a development directly opposite the victim’s house. A neighbour of another victim had put his own home up for sale. About two weeks before to the attack, the house was inspected by a prospective purchaser, who said he was transferring from Las Vegas to McClellan Air Force Base. He was described thin, blond and in his twenties with a short haircut and blue eyes. Two signs from an real estate company were in the backyard of another victim. It appeared the house had been shown earlier.

Another victim had recently bought their house. The previous owner said that, while the house was in process of being put on the market, a very unusual realtor called. He paid no attention to the interior of the house, but inspected the south and west exteriors. He asked her where her husband worked and why her daughter was not at home. She said he was extremely well-dressed, with light brown hair, a darker complexion and a medium frame.

In the vicinity of another victim, there were several newly constructed and unsold homes. There was a vacant condominium for lease near another victim’s home. The garage window at this location was opened. Yet another victim had recently moved into their house, which still bore a “SOLD” sign at the time of the attack. A neighbour of another victim had her home on the market. Another victim’s home had just been sold and the victim was planning to join her husband in the Bay Area, where he had already moved. A new home was being constructed next to the home of yet another victim.

The killer was proficient at tying ornate knots and probably engaged in bondage-oriented fantasies with his female sexual partners. He would also have collected violent pornographic material that included bondage.

The killer had access to a large collection of knives and handguns – specifically, .38, .357 Magnum and .45 Calibre handguns. He also had a large collection of flashlights.

It seems that he made a practice of parking his car some way from his intended attack. No licence plate was ever linked to the attacker. Tracker dogs followed his path down the drainage ditches, fields and park areas where he made his escape to a place where one would expect a car to be left.

However, from 1977, it is thought he drove an older VW Bug of a nondescript colour. Seen under different lighting conditions, it was variously reported as dark green, grey or silver blue. It is also thought to have wide wheels and a large, customized rear bumper. While in southern California, he seems to have had access to a white 1970s model Pontiac. A bright yellow, 1952 or 1953 Ford or Chevrolet side-step pick-up was seen parked near the scene of a rape for three days before the attack.

It is also thought that the killer had some law enforcement or military police training, and that he was possibly stationed at McClellan or Mather Air Force Base in the early to mid-1970s. He may have been a student at American River College or California State University at Sacramento in the late 1970s, possibly attending school on the GI Bill. He may have tried to get into University of California, Davis around 1979, and was possibly a student at a college in Santa Barbara or Irvine in the early 1980s.

The Southern Pacific Railroad Axeman

Between January 1911 and April 1912, a homicidal maniac slaughtered 49 victims in the states of Louisiana and Texas. Victims were viciously hacked to death with an axe while they slept. In each case, the dead were mulattoes or black members of families with mulatto members. Both the police and leaders of the African-American communities believed that the perpetrator was a dark-skinned Negro who aimed to purge their mixed-race or “tainted” blood.

The first attack took place in early January 1911, at Rayne, Louisiana, when a mother and her three children were hacked to death in their beds. In February, at Crowley, six miles to the west, all three members of the Byers family were slaughtered in identical fashion. Two weeks later, the scene shifted to Lafayette, 15 miles east of Rayne, where a family of four was massacred in the small hours of the morning.

The murders shifted 400 miles to San Antonio, Texas, where five members of the Cassaway family were butchered by the axe murderer in April. As before, the victims died in their sleep and there was no sign of robbery or other “rational” motive for the crime.

On Sunday 25 November 1911 six members of the Norbert Randall family were butchered in the their beds back in Lafayette. Each had been despatched with a single blow of the axe behind the right ear. The police arrested Clementine Bernabet, a black woman who they suspected was involved in the crime. But while she was in jail throughout the spring of 1912, the carnage continued.

The killer moved back to Crowley again in 19 January 1912, killing a mother and her three children as they slept. Just two days later, 50 miles away at Lake Charles, Louisiana, Felix Broussard, his wife and three children were slain. Again each was killed with a single blow behind the right ear. This time, the killer left a message that read: “When He maketh the inquisition for blood, He forgetteth not the cry of the humble – human five.”

Armed with this quasi-Biblical quotation, police turned their attention to a small sect named the Sacrifice Church, arresting two members. There were rumours connecting the Sacrifice Church to a voodoo cult in New Orleans and the sect’s leader, the Reverend King Harris, had spoken at a meeting in Lafayette on the night of the murder of the Randall family there. But still the killing did not stop.

On 19 February a mulatto woman and her three children were hacked to death in their sleep in Beaumont, Texas. Then on 27 March, another mulatto woman, her four children, and a male friend who staying overnight were butchered in Glidden, Texas. The police then noticed a geographical pattern in the crimes. They all took place along the Southern Pacific Railroad that ran from Louisiana to California. Since November 1911, the killings had been moving slowly westwards, striking at stops on the Southern Pacific Railroad line. Indeed the next massacre in the early hours of 12 April took place further west in San Antonio, when five members of the family of William Burton were butchered in their beds. But then the killer doubled back. Two nights later, the axe murder killed three more mulatto victims in Hempstead on another branch of the line.

Meanwhile, Clementine Bernabet surprised everyone by confessing. She admitted attending meetings of the Sacrifice Church, but that was not the inspiration for the killings. She had bought a
candja
or voodoo charm from a local witch doctor. The charm allowed Clementine and her friends to do anything they pleased and would never be found out. And what they pleased was to commit a series of axe murders. This sounded rather far-fetched and Clementine Bernabet never stood trial.

The axe murderer finally missed his mark in San Antonio on 6 August 1912, when the wife of mulatto James Dashiell was woken by an axe shearing through the flesh of her arm. Her screams woke the rest of the family and the attacker fled. All she could tell police was that her attacker was a lone man, but could not provide a useful description.

The killer had struck again, leaving the police without a single piece of solid evidence. Those who had been arrested had to be released. Informants from the Sacrifice Church pointed to the Gospel according to St Matthew, chapter seven, verse 19 in the New Testament which reads: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.” But that did not take the investigation any further forward and the killer, or killers, remained at large.

St Louis’ Slayings

An unidentified man raped and killed more than five women in the South Side of St Louis during late 1999. It is not clear whether he is the same man who went on to terrorize East St Louis on the other side of the Mississippi.

Things came to a head in October 2001 when two women were found dead in East St Louis within a day, bringing the number of women slain in the same general area in the previous two years to eight.

The first victim was 41-year-old Lolina Collins, a mother of three who had worked at a state hospital and was planning to become an elementary school teacher. Clad only in a bra, she was found with trash bags over her arms and legs. She had been strangled.

The next day motorist found the naked body of 33-year-old Brenda Beasley lying on the sidewalk beside a fire hydrant. A mother of four, she worked full-time at a fast food restaurant. Her ankles and wrists were bound with duct tape and she had died from a blow to the head.

Police denied that these two killings were related to the earlier murders, most of whom were found in neighbourhoods frequented by drug users and prostitutes. However, police officials in East St Louis had repeatedly turned down the offer of help from the FBI’s serial killer unit. They explained that they were under-staffed, lacked the resources, and that the murders did not seem to fit the pattern of a serial killing.

Journalist Earl Ofari Hutchinson maintained that the real reason was that the women were black, poor, and some had histories of prostitution and drug use.

“These are not the type of women that reflexively ignite police and public outrage,” he said.

However, in November 2001, the East St. Louis police finally agreed to let the FBI join the hunt.

Texas’ “Highway to Hell”

A series of serial killers seem to have been at work on the Gulf Coastal Plain since 1970. Over the three decades up to the year 2000, the FBI has filed the cases of at least 32 murdered women along the 50-mile stretch of Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston in Texas known as “America’s Highway to Hell”. The
Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes
put the number of abductions of young women along that stretch between 1982 and 1997 at 42. In the general area, there have been around 200 unsolved murders of young women and police believe that up to a dozen serial killers may be at work.

Although the murders seem to have been going on since 1971, the situation was confused because 11 police forces have jurisdiction in the area and it was only with two well-publicized crimes in 1997 that anyone spotted a pattern. On 3 April 1997 12-year-old Laura Kate Smither disappeared while jogging near her home in Friendswood, Texas, five miles west of the I–45. Over 6,000 people took part in a massive search that covered over 800 square miles. Her headless corpse was found on 20 April dumped in a pond ten miles away in Pasadena. She was naked except for one sock and a ring. A dark coloured pick-up was observed in the same area as where she was last seen and a composite sketch was issued of the person in the truck.

“We thought we lived in a really safe town,” her mother said. “And that at nine o’clock in the morning, to go for a run on a little private road, that she would be fine.”

Investigators noted some obvious similarities between Laura Smither’s murder and the abduction of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Texas, three months before. She had been riding her bike with her brother Ricky near her grandmother’s home in Arlington on 13 January 1993 when a neighbour heard a scream. In broad daylight, the neighbour saw a man pull Amber off her bike, throw her into the front seat of his black pick-up truck and drive away at high speed. She was found four miles away at the bottom of a creek bed at the Forest Hollow apartment complex on Green Oaks Boulevard a short distance west of Highway 360 in north Arlington. Her throat had been gashed numerous times and she had been sexually assaulted. Both girls’ bodies were dumped in waterways, naked except for their socks. It could not be conclusively determined if the two cases are related or not. Amber’s abduction lead to the Amber Plan, where local radio stations – initially in the Dallas area, then further afield – repeat news bulletins concerning missing children. In April 2003, President George W. Bush signed legislation making the Amber Alert system mandatory across the country. In 2006, a movie called
Amber’s Story
aired on the Lifetime channel.

On 17 August 1997, 17-year-old Jessica Lee Cain disappeared. She was last seen at Bennigan’s, a nightspot, in Clear Lake, Texas. She left the restaurant at approximately 1.30 a.m. to return to her home in Tiki Island, Texas. Her empty pick-up truck was found abandoned on the side of the I–45 between Exits Seven and Eight in La Marque near Highland Bayou Park. Several witnesses reported seeing a red Isuzu Amigo tow truck parked behind it. Her wallet was found on the seat of her truck, but her keys were missing. Jessica Cain has not been seen since.

“Before Laura Smither and Jessica Cain, each one of us was in his own little world, investigating our own individual cases,” said Lieutenant Tommy Hansen of the Galveston County Sheriff’s Department. “We would have no way of knowing that some fellow we wanted to question in one murder, and had been a top suspect, had already been questioned in a very similar murder just a few miles down the highway.”