Silent terror, p.12
Silent Terror, page 12
So as not to arouse suspicion by repeated purchases of single boxes, I drove to San Jose and bought a gross of them, a total of 7,200 rounds. I secreted the box in a heavily wooded area near the Berkeley side of the Bay Bridge, and every night after work I fired at imaginary targets on the water. Each muzzle burst/recoil/silencer thud/wave kick brought me closer to go, but I still didn’t know what it meant.
I found out the day before my departure.
My homemade silencer was virtually destroyed from overuse, so I drove to South San Francisco to find the pawnshop dealer who had sold me the Python, to see if he had connections who could sell me a professional replacement. The man smiled as I made my request, took a picture of saving ships from his wall and twirled the dial of the safe behind it. Within moments I was screwing a C.I.A. “Black Beauty” suppressor to the muzzle of my magnum and handing over five hundred dollars as payment. More than satisfied, I tucked the gun into my waistband, covered it with my shirttail and walked outside to my van. Seeing a coin-operated news rack filled with Chronicles, I walked over to buy one, hoping for a back-page mention along the lines of “still no clues in Richmond Ripper case.” I was about to feed the machine my fifteen cents when I noticed a poster tacked to the telephone pole beside the rack.
Banner print exclaimed “The Wages of Sin!!!” and below the words there was a crystal-clear photographic reproduction, with S.F.P.D. 9/4/74 written on the bottom. The words below that had to do with salvation through Jesus, but the picture in the middle caused me to shake so hard that it was impossible to read the exact message.
Jill Eversall’s severed head lay in the foreground in living black and white. The rest of her body was sprawled in the kitchen doorway. Beyond it, Steve Sifakis’s akimbo legs, blood-streaked walls and floor were visible. Shroud Shifter typed ugly ugly ugly ug — across my vision, then erased the line and replaced it with wrong disarray not ugly amateur disarray not ugly not bad amateurish not ugly not bad.
I ripped the poster off the pole and wadded it into a ball, then threw it into the gutter and ground the cardboard with both feet until my boots were soaked, seeing the Tahiti and Japan airline posters on Steve Sifakis’s walls and the original memory that had eluded me — Season’s lover hurling me topsy-turvy, darkness into light, similar posters on the wall as he beat me into humiliation. S.S. took on Country Joe McDonald’s voice and sang, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, stormy weather cause your pump to rust.” His voice faltered in mid-stanza, but I knew he was telling me to go out and buy a beautiful Polaroid camera to go with my magnum. Other instructions followed, not verbally, not typed, but telephatic. Only over the next fourteen hours, as I methodically accomplished each task, did they come to typeface life:
Buy the camera and film.
Go home and load all your property into your van, including the furniture you had originally planned to leave behind.
Drop off your keys with the old lady downstairs.
Buy a holster for your weapon, cut a hole in the bottom to accommodate the silencer, then clip the magnum to the springs underneath the van’s driver’s seat.
Sleep well, and take U.S. 66 east toward the Nevada line early tomorrow morning.
Dispose of all your furniture except the mattress after you are free and clear of the San Francisco area.
Keep the Polaroid close at hand.
Those duties behind me, professionally rendered and typefaced and check-marked upon completion, I drove east through lush Nevada pine forests, solo, with no Shroud Shifter as co-pilot. Traffic was non-existent, my gas tank was full, and I had three thousand, six hundred dollars in the glove compartment. The camera was an arm’s length away on the passenger seat. Mountains loomed behind the tall trees. I felt very peaceful.
Then I saw the hitchhikers.
They were a teenaged boy and girl, both long-haired and wearing Levi’s jackets, jeans and backpacks. I pulled to the side of the road and stopped, and seconds later the boy was at the passenger-side door, the girl directly behind him. With one hand I pulled up the locking button, with the other I reached under my seat for the holstered magnum.
“Thanks, mister!”
I fired three times, chest high, and from the way the boy and girl pitched backward I knew my shots had caught them both. Setting the hand brake and hitting the emergency blinker, I slid over the passenger seat and out of the van. The teenagers were lying on the gravel shoulder, dead. I looked past their bodies, saw that the shoulder dropped off in a small slope, and kicked the corpses over the side, then spread loose gravel on the blood from the exit wounds. A stopwatch with a ten-minute timer jumped into my brain, and I got my Polaroid from the van and ran down the hill with it.
The hitchhikers were lying in soft dirt at the bottom, joined in a jigsaw-puzzle posture — her head on the rear crook of his right leg, their fingertips crossed at divergent angles. The bodies reminded me of signal flags sending the word disarray in semafore, and I almost forgot caution in my desire to make them perfect.
But I didn’t. First I checked his chest and back, then hers, and when I saw a back exit wound on the girl and rips on her pack next to it, with no marks on the outside, I knew the spent slugs were inside. With my stopwatch reading 1:37 elapsed, I pulled down the zipper and tore through panties and blouses until my fingers hit hot steel. I put the rounds in my shirt pocket and let them burn, then furiously kicked a shallow grave out of the dirt surrounding the three of us.
6:04 elapsed.
I wiped the girl’s backpack free of fingerprints with my sleeve, then stripped the two corpses and threw their clothes and packs into the grave.
7:46 elapsed.
With the lovers nude, I placed the girl on her back and spread her legs; the boy I positioned on top of her. When the simulated intercourse was perfect, I snapped my first picture, watched the camera expel the blank print paper and waited.
9:14 elapsed
Photographic perfection imprinted itself, and weirdly, preternaturally, I knew the image was a clue to my fixations with blonds, Lauri the hooker, and things much, much older.
10:00 elapsed, alarms sounding, the realization that Shroud Shifter and I had finally merged as one. I covered the bodies with loose dirt and arranged heavy branches over the plot to hold them down.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick.
Giving myself commemorative bonus seconds, I put the snapshot in my pocket; saw that the blood on my collar was no more than the amount caused by a shaving cut; realized that next time I should steal money and possibly credit cards. When it was time to go, I obliterated my footprints by walking sideways over them on my way up the hill. At the top, the landscape was absolutely still. My van looked new in the fall sunlight, and on impulse I named it the “Deathmobile,” then drove away.
III
Crimes of Opportunity; Nightmare Assaults (1974–1978)
From Boss Detective magazine, December 28, 1974 issue:
CAMPERS’ PET MAKES GRISLY DISCOVERY SEX SLAYER SOUGHT!
Without the keen nose of Buford, a three-year-old basset hound, the bodies of Karen Roget and Todd Millard, missing since Thanksgiving Day, might never have been found. Buford, who belongs to Mr. and Mrs. J. Bradley Streep of Sacramento, California, was frolicking off his leash near a campground adjacent to U.S. 66 outside Hastings, Nevada, when, according to Mr. Streep, “He started yapping like crazy and started to dig in the dirt. When he came up with that first bone, I almost dropped my cookies!”
The bone was human, and Mr. Streep (who briefly attended chiropractic college some years before) recognized it as such and ran for the campground and his C.B. Meanwhile, while his owner contacted the authorities, Buford continued to dig, and soon unearthed the skeletal remains of two bodies, along with their clothing and backpacks containing ID, spare clothing and a collapsible tent. The keen-snouted hound was happily munching on a footbone when Mr. Streep returned with Lewis County Sheriff’s Deputy J. V. McClain, who gasped at the positions of the skeletons.
“The bodies were arranged in a... uh... posture suggesting sexual intercourse,” Deputy McClain told Boss Detective correspondent Robert Rice. “Even though decomposition was complete, you could tell what the killer had done.”
Shocked though he was, Deputy McClain radioed for reinforcements and checked the clothing lying underneath the bodies in their grave. After discovering driver’s licenses belonging to Sacramento residents Todd Thomas Millard, 17, and Karen Nancy Roget, 16, he recalled a missing-persons bulletin on the two. “They were last seen in Hastings on November 24, Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “Almost a month ago, and from the condition of the bodies I knew they were dead that long.”
The Lewis County coroner soon arrived and deduced the means of death. “From rips and bloodstains on their clothing and backpacks, it is safe to assume that the two were shot.”
A team of late-arriving officers made a search of the area but could not find expended bullets, and the scene was roped off while the remains of the teenagers were removed and technicians looked for other clues. The Streeps and Buford continued on their vacation, with hearty kudos from Lewis County authorities, who immediately launched an investigation. Three days later Sheriff Roger D. Norman told reporters:
“We have few clues in the vicious murders of Todd Millard and Karen Roget. The time that elapsed between the killings and the discovery of the bodies has hindered us severely. We have not been able to turn up any witnesses, and the known associates of the deceased have provided us with no real leads. We have, however, ruled out robbery as a motive, and we are now centering our efforts on combing the files of known sex deviates.”
Meanwhile, bereaved family and friends mourn Todd and Karen, and pray for the police to find the fiend who killed them.
From True Life Sleuth, March 1975 issue:
FIEND OR FIENDS STALKING NEVADA/UTAH ROADWAYS! CRIMES CONNECTED?
Police continue to be baffled by a rash of fiendishly clever, seemingly random killings throughout Utah and Nevada. Since New Year’s, four young men, all runaways from wealthy homes, have been found murdered. The common denominators have been robbery as the presumed sole motive, the affluence of the victims and their “runaway” status. Aside from those factors, the killings differ so markedly that investigating agencies are not sure whether the crimes are connected. The four dead are:
Randall Hosford, 18, discovered in a culvert outside Carson City, Nevada, on January 2. The youth was a “remittance man” living off stipends from his wealthy Northern California family, and was known to roam the western states by thumb, always carrying credit cards and large amounts of cash. His wallet had been picked clean when police discovered his strangled body, and the current disposition of the investigation into his murder is — no clues.
Lee Richard Webb, 20, of Las Vegas. The son of a casino owner, young Webb was last seen hitchhiking outside Las Vegas on January 19. His body was found a week later, in the desert forty miles from the gambling mecca. The youth had been robbed and strangled. Disposition — no clues.
Coleman Loring, 19, and his friend Ralph De Santis, 21, the sons of wealthy Moab, Utah, mining contractors, found bound together, robbed and shot through the hearts in a cave outside Moab on January 26. No expended shells were found, although the large entry and exit wounds point to a large-caliber murder weapon. The boys were hitching to Las Vegas for a weekend of gambling, and were known to be carrying over two thousand dollars in cash. Disposition — no clues.
Postcript: At press time, our Carson City correspondent reports this flash bulletin:
Police have recovered credit cards belonging to the late Randall Hosford. An unidentified man (who has been cleared as a murder suspect) told C.C.P.D. detectives that he met a “tall, nondescript man in his late twenties” named “Shifter” in a bar, and the man sold him the cards for a hundred dollars apiece, promising that they were “stone cold.” The C.C.P.D. as yet has no line on “Shifter,” and the man he sold the cards to has been charged with receiving, stolen goods.
From the Have You Seen These People? column of True Life Sleuth magazine, June 1975 issue:
Editor’s Note— Normally, this feature displays Motor Vehicle Department photographs of people reported missing, but since all of the people listed are either below the minimum age required for a license in their state, or do not possess a license, we are running their physical stats and last-known whereabouts only. We at True Life Sleuth wish to alert the proper authorities to the fact that these five people disappeared from two adjoining states within an eight-week period.
Everett Bigelow, white male, of Provo, Utah. Last seen in Provo on 3/4/75. Age — 71, height — 5'11", weight — 155 lbs. Gray hair, blue eyes, slight build. Known to frequent beer bars, no identifying marks or tattoos.
Hazel Leffler, white female, age 67, of Bostang, Utah. Last seen talking to unidentified white male outside Bostang shopping center on March 11. Dyed black hair, brown eyes, 5'6", 170 lbs. Build — portly. Wears glasses and uses a cane to walk.
Wendy Grace Sanderson, 14, and her neighbor Carl Sudequist, 16, both of Putnamville, Nevada. Last seen together at a picnic area near Putnamville on 4/9/75. Both Caucasian. The girl is described as 4'6", 88 lbs., blond hair, green eyes; the boy as 5'8", 140, brown hair and eyes. At last sighting, both youths were wearing the navy blue uniforms of Saint Mary’s School, Putnamville.
Gregory Hall, 37, of South Las Vegas, Nevada. White male, 6'1", 190 lbs., brown hair, blue eyes. Last seen hitchhiking near Northern Utah/Nevada border on April 30, 1975. Recently paroled from the Nevada State Prison, and now on record as a possible parole absconder. (Prison photos to appear in the next issue of True Life Sleuth to feature Have You Seen These People?)
Editor’s note— any Information regarding the current whereabouts of the above-listed people should be directed to the Utah State Police, Nevada State Police and the Missing Persons Hotline of True Life Sleuth — Toll Free 1-800-MISSING.
From True Crime Detective, July 1975 issue:
DEMONIC DEATH FOR DEAF & DUMB DISHWASHER!
Dateline — Salt Lake City, Utah, June 16, 1975:
The body of a deaf and dumb Salt Lake City youth was discovered on the salt flats surrounding the Great Salt Lake early this morning. The victim, Robert Masskie, 18, worked as a dishwasher at Colonial Joe’s Restaurant, Salt Lake City, and had just cashed his two-week paycheck. No money was found on his person, and at this early hour of the investigation police are assuming robbery as the motive. Coworkers of the friendly handicapped lad expressed shock at his death, and fry cook Martin Plunkett, 27, said, “Bobby was an inveterate hitchhiker, and that’s dangerous. Please tell your readers to be careful and not hitchhike.”
Sound advice. There are no clues as yet, but we will update the investigation’s progress in next month’s issue of True Crime Detective.
From Boss Detective magazine’s “Missing!” feature, December 1975 issue:
Last seen 10/30/75 on I-95 on the outskirts of Ogden, Utah, “talking to a tall young white male” who may be the owner of a late-model grayish van.
Kenneth Neufeld, 41, white male, 6'0", 175, brown hair and eyes, Marine Corps tattoo on right forearm.
Cynthia Neufeld, 39, white female, 5'4", 130, blond hair, brown eyes, no identifying marks.
Reported missing on 12/1/75 by their teenaged children. Their abandoned vehicle was discovered in woods outside Ogden, 12/4/ 75. Extensive search of area yielded no clues. Photographs of Mr. & Mrs. Neufeld available from Missing Persons Bureau, Ogden Police Department, and from Utah State Police. Direct all queries and information regarding Mr. & Mrs. Neufeld to those agencies.
From Boss Detective, April, 1977 issue:
ZODIAC KILLER PROWLING COLORADO? KILLINGS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS LINKED? RITUAL MARKINGS WORK OF COMIC-BOOK CULT?
Aspen, Colorado, is a year-round mecca for young people seeking good times, and it is the undisputed winter “party capital” of the United States, renowned for its skiing and ski-lodge bonhomie. Young people come to Aspen to cut loose and get away from the grind of college and jobs. You can bargain on a good lime in Aspen, but since January 1976, eight college students have gotten more than they bargained for — they disappeared from the face of the earth. The eight are:
Cindy Keneally, 72, of Chicago, Illinois, last seen 1/18/76;
George Keneally, 20, of Chicago, her husband, last seen 1/18/76;
Gustavo Torres, 23, of Sao Paulo, Brazil, last seen 1/26/76;
Mills Jensen, 24, of Aspen, last seen 3/1/76;
Craig Richardson, 17, of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, last seen 4/1/76;
Maria Kaltenborn, 21, of Akron, Ohio, last seen 6/2/76;
John Kaltenborn, 22, Maria’s husband, last seen 6/2/76;
Timothy Bay, 16, of Glenwood Springs, last seen 8/18/76.
Police investigating the disappearances were (at first) quick to point out the transient nature of pleasure spas like Aspen, and last year, in the spring of ’76, when the number of vanished people stood at five, they pooh-poohed the idea of massive foul play. But then, during the spring of ’76 thaw, melted snowbanks yielded the mutilated bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Keneally and Mr. Torres, and they knew a fiend was on the prowl.
The subzero temperatures that had prevailed all winter preserved the bodies to gruesome effect. Mr. & Mrs. Keneally were nude and arranged in an explicitly sexual posture, and Mr. Torres (who disappeared eight days after the Keneallys) was positioned a few feet away. All three victims died from slashed throats and were marked about the torsos with “S.S.”
Authorities thought at first that the markings indicated a Nazi killer — “S.S.” being the initials of Hitler’s secret police. But then that theory was dropped in favor of attributing the murders to the “Zodiac” killer, a mass murderer active in Northern California in the late ’60’s-early ’70’s. The “S.S.” body markings were aslant, so that they resembled “Z’s”; and the Zodiac killer (who sent messages to San Francisco-area police stating that he was “claiming slaves for my afterlife”) sometimes marked his victims that way.
