The Case of the Courteous Killer

Chapter III

Two nights later the lovers’ lane bandit struck again. He held up a couple in a parked car on Benedict Canyon Drive and robbed them of seventy-four dollars. There was no violence in this case, but the suspect’s description and MO were the same. The victims particularly stressed the bandit’s politeness and unassuming manner. The male victim stated that he had seriously considered attempting to grab the suspect’s gun, and felt that he could have succeeded in disarming him, but had decided not to take the risk.

The following week the suspect struck three more times, in each case using the same MO. He would approach a parked car on foot, rob the victims at gunpoint, warn them not to make any outcry, then walk away. In each case he picked couples parked out of sight of any other parked car, and a short distance from a curve. He would disappear after each, robbery by walking around the curve. None of the victims saw him enter a car.

Robbery Division kept us informed of these incidents, but as there was no further violence, the case was gradually being taken over entirely by Robbery. As Harold Green was now reported out of danger, the case became of less and less concern to Homicide Division. With Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher working on it, there was no point in tying up a Homicide team also. Frank and I became involved in a couple of murder cases and virtually forgot the bandit.

Friday, June 28th, Frank and I checked in at 4:30 p.m. Frank checked the message book while I looked in my mail box. There was nothing there but a couple of bills. “Anything?” I asked Frank.

“Captain wants to see us.”

I stuck the bills in my pocket, and we crossed the anteroom to Captain Hertel’s office. He looked up from the report he was reading and said, “Friday, Smith. Come in.”

Frank said, “Hi, Captain,” and I said, “What’s up, Skipper?” He pointed at chairs, and we seated ourselves. Captain Hertel is a solidly built man with a square, calm face and stubby gray hair cut close to his head. He waited until we had cigarettes going, then said, “About this lovers’ lane bandit. Not doing much on it, are you?”

I said, “Well, Robbery’s got a team doing all it can. The guy hasn’t killed anybody, and the boy he pistol-whipped is well on the way to recovery. Doesn’t seem much point in duplicating Robbery’s effort.”

“Yeah, I know,” the captain said. “But I had a talk with Chief Brown today. He’s concerned about this joker, and wants an all-out effort to get him.”

I hiked my eyebrows. “What’s so important about a minor stickup man?”

“You’ve questioned some of the victims,” Captain Hertel said. “And have seen Wynn’s reports on the others. What’s the one characteristic that stands out in all of them?”

I thought this over, finally said, “Well, they all describe him as polite and unassuming. He doesn’t scare anybody much.”

“That’s exactly the point,” Captain Hertel said. “Every male victim so far has stated that the guy impressed him so little, he was seriously tempted to try taking him. Remember what happened to the only one who did try it?”

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “He got a cracked skull for his trouble.”

The captain nodded. “Somebody’s going to get brave again one of these nights. The guy’s appearance and manner seem to invite resistance. I think Chief Brown’s right in his prophecy of what’s going to happen if we don’t net him fast.”

“What prophecy’s that?”

“That he’s going to kill somebody.”

5:02 p.m. We got together with Sergeant Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher of Robbery in order to outline the strategy of an all-out effort to take the lovers’ lane bandit. Chief Brown had passed down the word that we could call for whatever extra help we needed.

We were going to need a lot of it. The suspect had struck over a wide area of the Santa Monica Mountain district. Twice he had hit couples parked on Mulholland Drive, which starts west of Cahuenga Pass in the Hollywood district and follows the rim of the mountains past Beverly Hills clear to Ventura Boulevard, and the two robberies had been nearly ten miles apart. The other three robberies had each been along a different canyon road crossing Mulholland Drive.

The area of operation was too large to attempt the decoy system. The only stakeout system that had a chance of success was to cover the area with cruising undercover cars and hope one would spot him in the act. We requested and got six undercover teams from Chief Brown. The teams of Wynn and Brasher and of Frank and me brought the total to eight. We arranged to have all eight cars cruise the bandit’s area of operations from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m. nightly, the hours during which all previous robberies had taken place.

Despite these precautions, the bandit hit twice more over the weekend.

Monday, July 1st, at 11:26 p.m., Frank and I were cruising along Nichols Canyon Road in a 1955 Chevrolet undercover car. There had been a hard summer rain earlier, unusual for this time of year, but now the night was clear and warm.

Dozens of couples were parked alongside the road, taking advantage of the nice weather.

Frank said, “This would be a good night for him to hit. For us, I mean.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Rain softened up the ground. Might leave some footprints.”

I grunted. “Way things are going, we better bring in more than footprints soon. Captain’s getting a little short of patience.”

“Well, we’re doing the best we can,” Frank said. “It’s a pretty big area.”

Up ahead our lights picked out a new Ford sedan parked alongside the road. As we neared it, I noticed that the door on the right-hand side hung wide open, and that no one seemed to be sitting in the car.

“Slow it down,” I said to Frank.

He braked to a crawl as we passed the Ford. I peered in and saw that both the front and rear seats were empty. I motioned Frank to pull up on the shoulder in front of it.

I lifted a flashlight from the glove compartment as we got out of the car. We walked back, staying on the concrete, and I flashed the light into the car’s interior. It was still empty.

I walked around behind the car and shined the light on the ground near the open door. There were clear impressions of both a man’s and a woman’s shoes, showing where they had stepped to the wet ground from the car. A churned-up area, halfway between the car and a drainage ditch that paralleled the road a few yards away, suggested that some kind of struggle had taken place. A man’s footprints led away from this spot around the front of the car onto the concrete.

I walked over to the edge of the drainage ditch, being careful not to disturb any of the footprints. The ditch was only about three feet deep, and had a bare trickle of water in it. When I turned my light downward, I saw that it also contained something else.

“Frank,” I called softly. “Chief Brown was right.”

“Huh?” Frank said.

“He finally got around to killing somebody. Two of them.”

Frank came over to the edge of the drainage ditch, carefully stepping in my footprints, and gazed down at the two figures lying there. The man seemed to be about twenty-five. He wore a Marine uniform with sergeant’s stripes. He lay on his back, his eyes gazing sightlessly straight upward. The top of his head had literally been beaten fiat. It was nothing but a red, pulpy mass. Even at the distance of several feet, there was no question that he was dead.

The girl lay on her side, half across his chest. She was a slim redhead of about twenty. She wore a white-and-green summer dress, and the top right corner of it was stained with blood. I slid down into the ditch and felt the girl’s pulse.

I called up to Frank, “She’s still alive. Get an ambulance rolling.”

He moved away toward the undercover car, while I bent over the girl to give her a closer examination. The bullet seemed to have passed entirely through her shoulder, and though she had shed considerable blood, both the entry and exit wounds had now stopped bleeding. She was unconscious, but breathing regularly.

The first rule of first aid is to do nothing that isn’t necessary. Making injured persons “more comfortable” as often as not only aggravates the injury. Since the girl’s bleeding had stopped of its own accord, there was nothing I could do for her until the ambulance arrived. I left her where she was.

Frank came back to the car just as I climbed to the top of the ditch.

“I radioed for an ambulance,” he said. “Also got the other seven cars blocking all roads out of the area. Maybe we can still net him.”

“Doubt it,” I told him. “The girl’s wound isn’t bleeding. This must have happened some time ago if her blood is beginning to clot. Call for the Crime Lab?”

“Yeah. And Latent Prints, just in case he touched the car.”

Walking back onto the road, I scraped some of the mud from my feet off on the concrete. Sirens began to sound in the distance. The sound grew in volume, its direction indicating the vehicles were coming up the freeway.

The first vehicle to the scene was a black-and-white squad car. I motioned the driver to park on the far side of the road. When the two uniformed officers got out of the car, I took them over to the Ford and pointed out the footprints made by the victims and the suspect.

“Happen to have a rope in your car?” I asked one of the officers. A rope is not standard equipment in squad cars, but many officers furnish their own equipment for their personal convenience.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got one.”

“Then I want this area roped off,” I instructed. “Be a million people around here to trample over the evidence before long.”

As the policemen were getting the rope from the squad car, a Buick convertible pulled off on the shoulder behind them. A tall, lean man wearing horn-rimmed glasses got out and walked over to me. Simultaneously, an ambulance rolled to a stop.

“Accident?” the lean man asked me.

“No, sir,” I said. “Police business.”

“You a detective?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

I turned toward the ambulance, and the lean man started around the front of the Ford. I changed direction and caught his arm just as he raised a foot to step off the concrete. “Sorry, sir,” I said. “Have to ask you to go back to your car.”

Shaking off my hand, he stared down his nose at me. “Your badge doesn’t give you the right to manhandle private citizens, Officer.”

“No, sir,” I said. “Just go back to your car, please.”

The ambulance attendant and the driver had gotten out of the ambulance meantime, and Frank was leading them in a wide arc around the rear of the Ford toward the drainage ditch. The two uniformed policemen came over and began roping off the area. Another car parked across the road, and Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher got out of it. The lean bystander started to follow the ambulance attendants.

I said to Vance, “Get that joker to go back to his car and move on,” then turned to Marty Wynn. “Any luck?”

He shook his head. “Got every road out of here blocked off, and the boys are checking every parked car. We don’t even know that he was driving a car, though, do we?”

The lean man’s voice came to us, high and indignant. “Listen, Officer, this is a public road and I’m a taxpayer. Don’t forget I pay your salary.”

The ambulance attendant and driver came from the direction of the drainage ditch, carrying a stretcher. When they reached the road, the taxpayer leaned forward and peered avidly at the girl on the stretcher. “She dead?” he asked.

Nobody answered him. The litter bearers set down their burden on the road, and while one cut away the cloth over the wound to put on an emergency bandage, the other began to start a bottle of blood plasma.

Vance came over and said to me, “How many taxpayers you figure Los Angeles has, Joe?”

I shrugged. “One out of every three population, maybe. Half to three quarters of a million.”

“I been on the force twelve years. How much you figure my salary’s cost each individual taxpayer?”

I grinned at him. “Nickel, maybe. Dime at tops.”

Vance walked back to the lean taxpayer and dropped a dime in his breast pocket. “Now we’re even,” he said. “Go climb in your car and move on before I run you in for hampering a police investigation.”

The man started to open his mouth, then changed his mind when he saw the glitter in Vance’s eyes. Stiffly he crossed to his car, got in and drove off.

The girl on the stretcher stirred, and suddenly her eyes opened. She stared up confusedly at the attendant bandaging her shoulder.

“You’re all right, now, miss,” he said soothingly. “We’ll have you at the hospital soon.”

“Nick,” she whispered. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The attendant didn’t say anything.

“All right if I talk to her?” I asked him.

“For a minute,” he said. “She’s lost a lot of blood. Want to get her in and pump some back into her as soon as possible.”

Stooping next to the stretcher, I said, “I’m a police officer, miss. Feel up to talking?”

“Is Nick dead?” she asked in a low voice.

“The Marine?” I sidestepped. “Is his name Nick?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Nick Grotto. Where is he?”

“They’ll get to him as soon as they take care of you, miss. Want to tell us your name?”

“Nancy,” she said. “Nancy Meere.”

Glancing up, I saw that Frank was entering the name in his notebook, while Vance Brasher held a flashlight for him.

“Address?”

“Eleven-twenty-two-one Calvert. That’s in North Hollywood.”

“Yes, ma’am. Now, want to tell us what happened?”

“The man beat him with a gun,” she whispered. “Nick shouldn’t have tried to grab it. He hit Nick with it, and when Nick fell to his knees and grabbed the man’s legs for support, he hit him again. He kept hitting him and hitting him. When I tried to stop him, he shot me.”

“What did the man look like?” I asked.

“He looked — well, nice. Sort of friendly and polite. He didn’t even scare me until he hit Nick. Please, mister, is Nick dead?” She started to cry.

The attendant said, “We’d better get her in now,” and I stood up.

We watched as they loaded her into the ambulance and drove off.