The Case of the Courteous Killer

Chapter IV

12:14 a.m. Lieutenant Lee Jones and Sergeant Jay Allen came out from the Crime Lab. They had Sergeant McLaughlin of Latent Prints with them, and also a civilian photographer.

I showed Lieutenant Jones the Marine’s body, and also pointed out the footprints in the roped-off area. Lieutenant Jones is a big, white-haired man who looks more like an industrial executive than he does a cop. He’s calm and never in a hurry, and if he misses any scientific evidence at the scene of a crime, it isn’t there.

Before doing anything else, Lieutenant Jones had the Photo Lab man photograph the body, the footprints, and the open door of the Ford. Then, as Jay Allen began mixing plaster of Paris in a large bowl, the lieutenant bent some two-inch-wide strips of aluminum into circles of varying sizes, binding each together at the seam with Scotch tape. These were to serve as molds for the plaster of Paris. I had seen the process many times, but it always interested me.

“You get those metal strips made up special somewhere?” I asked him.

Lieutenant Jones grinned at me. “They’re the slats from old Venetian blinds. Couldn’t work better if they’d been made for the purpose.”

Carefully he set one of the rings over a footprint and pressed gently down on it until the bottom edge had been forced about an eighth of an inch into the ground. Sergeant Allen poured it half full of plaster of Paris, and scattered a few nails in it to strengthen it. As the lieutenant set a second ring over a footprint, Frank called from the drainage ditch, “Joe!”

I walked over to the edge of the ditch and saw that he was kneeling next to the dead Marine. Vance Brasher was with him, apparently to assist him in bringing up the body. Frank held up a man’s wrist watch with a gold expansion band.

“Had this gripped in his hand,” Frank said. “Must have jerked it off the suspect’s wrist. He’s wearing one of his own.”

He handed up the watch, and I examined it under my flashlight. It was a gold-filled Gruen with an engraving on its back reading, To Gig from Min, 1944. I carried it over to Lieutenant Jones.

“Ran into some luck,” I told him. “Looks like the victim grabbed this during the struggle, and the suspect didn’t realize it’d been pulled off.”

Jones looked the watch over. “Hmm. This ought to be easy to trace.”

“Got anything aside from the footprints?” I asked him.

“Little visual evidence. Looks like the killing and shooting took place here.” He pointed to the churned-up area. “Then he dragged both victims over and threw them in the ditch. He must have gotten pretty muddied up in the process. We’ll take along some samples of the mud in case you turn up a suspect with muddy clothing.”

Jones and Allen lifted the last of the footprints and told Sergeant McLaughlin he could take over. The fingerprint expert had waited because he couldn’t get to the open door of the Ford without disturbing the ground where the footprints were.

Sergeant McLaughlin went to work on the car door first, the assumption being that if the suspect had touched the car anywhere, that was the most likely place. It would have been natural for him to lay his left hand on the window sill when he pointed the gun at his victims. There was also a possibility that he had pulled open the door himself when he had ordered them out of the car.

McLaughlin is a lean, dark man who looks a little like the TV version of Boston Blackie. There is nothing gentle-looking about him, but he handles a camel’s hair brush with the tenderness of a mother powdering an infant. Dipping the brush into a round tin of silvery powder, he gently brushed the door handle. Latent Prints uses two different types of fingerprint powder: a light-colored powder for dark surfaces and a dark one for light-colored surfaces. McLaughlin used the light powder on the chrome handle, because chrome photographs black.

A clear thumbprint came into view.

After photographing it with his fingerprint camera, the sergeant stripped off a length of the special inch-and-a-half-wide Scotch tape Latent Prints has made to its own specifications and pressed it over the print. When he peeled it off again, the print came right with it. He laid the tape across a black card, cut off the protruding edges, and there was a perfect print outlined on the card in the light silvery powder. On the back of the card he wrote, John Doe, Ford Sedan, Cal. license FAX — 412, parked Nichols Canyon Rd. 300 yds. South Mulholland Dr., 2 July, 12:34 A.M. Print developed and photoed on rt. front door handle.

As the car was light tan, he used the darker-colored silvery powder on the door itself. And when he raised a palm print, he transferred it to a white card instead of to a black one.

Conscious of me watching him, he looked up and said, “Bet a Coke these both turn out to belong to the Marine or the girl.”

“Bet,” I said. “If I lose, it’s worth it. If I win, at least I’ve got something.”

The coroner’s wagon had arrived by then, and attendants were loading the body. I walked over to Frank and asked, “Get his identification?”

“Yeah. Apparently the suspect got too rattled to rob them after the killing. Wallet was in his pocket with fifteen dollars in it. Plenty of identification, too.”

When the coroner’s wagon had pulled away, I led Frank over to the churned-up area where the victims had struggled with the suspect. I had Frank stand in the spot where high-heel marks indicated the girl had been when she was shot. I stood in the prints made by the suspect and pointed my index finger at his right shoulder. There was no way to judge how far the bullet had gone after it passed through her shoulder, because that would depend on the elevation of the gun muzzle. But at least this gave us a rough idea of the slug’s direction of flight.

Marty Wynn, Vance Brasher, Frank, and I then began going over the whole area with flashlights. I was the one who finally located the gouged-out place in the dirt where the bullet had hit the ground. It was about thirty yards beyond where the shooting had taken place. I probed into the mud with a pocket knife and came up with the slug.

“Got it,” I called to the others.

I took the slug over to Lieutenant Jones, who examined it under his light and said, “Looks like a thirty-eight. Have to weigh it to make sure. Battered a little, but I think it’s good enough for comparison tests.”

That about wound up the investigation at the scene. Arrangements were made to have the Ford brought down to the Police Building when Sergeant McLaughlin was through with it.

Meantime Marty Wynn had been making periodic radio checks with the other units. He came over from the final one with a glum look on his face.

“Checked out every parked car within a mile radius,” he said. “Looks like we shut the barn door too late.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thought we probably had. The girl had been lying there long enough for bleeding to stop.”

Frank and I climbed back into our undercover car and headed back for the office.

The next day Frank and I decided to get an early start. The night watch doesn’t begin until 5:00 p.m., and ordinarily we check in about 4:30 to read the daily bulletin, look over the message book, and read our mail, so that we’ll be all ready to go by 5:00. Today we both got to the Police Building at 2:00 P.M.

I went up to the Stat’s Office, while Frank checked with Latent Prints to see if it’d turned anything. Stat’s ran the name Gig through the moniker file and came up with fourteen possibles. I had R & I weed out the dead, those in prison, and those known to be in other parts of the country. This reduced it to three, and none of the descriptions of the three even faintly matched our suspect’s. Another dead end.

I walked over to the Crime Lab and talked to Ray Pinker. Pinker is a slim, balding man with a retiring manner. He’s widely regarded as the top criminalistics man in the country, but you’d never learn this by talking to him. He’s also about the most modest man in the country.

Pinker told me that our suspect wore an 8½-B shoe with new rubber heels, and that he probably had some kind of leg injury.

“He favors his right foot,” he said. “It wasn’t injured in the struggle, either. The right footprints when he initially approached the car are as light as the ones when he walked away.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How about the watch?”

“We could trace it through the manufacturer to the jeweler who bought it from the factory,” Pinker said. “But it might be faster to do it by legwork.” He handed me a card on which was written the symbol M-X-#.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Personal mark of the jeweler who did the engraving. Every jeweler has his own. Takes a microscope to see it. Locate the jeweler who uses that mark, and you should have the man who sold the watch.”

“Frank’ll love this,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“He’s crazy about legwork.”

Pinker smiled. “Must not be more than a couple of hundred jewelers in town.”

“Yeah,” I said. “From past experience, the one we want will be among the last ten.”

The only other information Pinker could give me was that the slug we had dug up was a .38, as Lieutenant Jones had guessed.

I went down to 314 and found Frank waiting there. “Anything from Latent Prints?” I asked.

He shook his head gloomily. “The thumbprint was the Marine’s. The palm print was the girl’s. McLaughlin says you owe him a Coke.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Stat’s and R & I couldn’t turn anything, either. Guess we’d better try C.I.I.”

We got off a teletype to George Brereton at C.I.I. up in Sacramento, giving all the information we had on the suspect. When this was off, Frank said, “What now?”

“Let’s get over to the hospital and talk to Nancy Meere,” I said. “Then we’ve got a little chore to do.”

“Yeah?”

I showed him the card bearing the jeweler’s symbol and told him what Ray Pinker had said.

“Legwork,” Frank groaned.

“What’s your beef?” I asked. “You could be worse off.”

“Huh?”

“You could have been a postman.”

3:11 p.m. We drove over to County Hospital and talked to Nancy Meere. The girl’s wound was not serious, and the hospital authorities said she would be able to go home in a few days. She was unable to tell us any more about the suspect than she had at the scene of the crime.

By then it was nearly check-in time for the night watch. We stopped for a cup of coffee and then checked into Homicide at 4:30 p.m. I logged in while Frank read the message book. There was a note for us to meet Captain Hertel in Chief Brown’s office.

We left the squad room and went down the hall to Room 311. Chief of Detectives Thad Brown had Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher in his office, as well as Captain Hertel. The chief was seated behind his desk, leaning back in his swivel chair. He was talking to Hertel, who was seated at the end of the desk next to him. Wynn and Brasher were on our left, seated in chairs.

Thaddeus Franklin Brown has been a policeman for over thirty years. For nine of them he was head of Homicide. Now he’s Deputy Chief of Police, in charge of the 653 officers and 39 civilian personnel of the Detective Bureau. He’s solidly built, with a straight gaze, a broad forehead, and a strong jaw.

When we came in, he looked at us through dark-rimmed glasses and said, “Friday, Smith.” He nodded toward chairs. “Sit down.”

We sat, and Chief Brown said, “You at all close to this lovers’ lane bandit, Friday?”

“Not within a country mile,” I told him. “We’ve run everything we know about him through Stat’s Office and R & I, but they haven’t been able to make him. We’re waiting for a kickback from George Brereton at C.I.I. now. If that washes out, we’ve got one lead.” I told him about the watch.

“Not much to go on,” the chief said, with a shake of his head. “It may have been a stolen watch.”

“Not likely,” Marty Wynn said. “He’s been careful so far to take nothing but money.”

“Well, get on it, anyway,” Chief Brown said. “And continue with your rolling stakeout. Afraid if you don’t get him tonight, your stakeout’s not going to net anything, though.”

I said, “What do you mean, sir?”

“Garcia up in S.I.D. has been working with some of the robbery victims all day, drawing a composite. We’re giving it to the papers in the morning.”

“Oh?” I said.

“That’s why I’ve called you all together. To let you know what you’re in for. We’re asking the papers to make the story page-one. Full description of the suspect, composite picture, MO — the works. Along with a warning to the public not to park in isolated spots.”

“That’ll tear it,” I said ruefully. “He’ll crawl in a hole and pull it in after him.”

“Yeah,” Chief Brown said. “But we can’t fool with the lives of innocent people. This man’s dangerous. Now that he’s killed once, he won’t hesitate to kill again.”

What he said was true. This was a type of problem that frequently confronts the police: the choice between effective strategy and the safety of the public. Wide publicity about the lovers’ lane bandit would make the task of catching him immeasurably harder. But since it might also save some lives, there was really no choice. Policemen are expected to risk their lives, if necessary, in the apprehension of criminals. They accept this as part of their duty. But they can’t risk the lives of private citizens, no matter how much it disturbs their plans to net a criminal.

It’s better to risk letting a criminal get away with the crimes he’s already committed than to catch him at the expense of more innocent lives.