Nigel Cawthorne - The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

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.

Three other killings were thought to have been the work of the Southside Slayer, but were not officially on the list. There was 22-year-old Loretta Jones, whose body was dumped in an alley on 15 April 1986. She had no criminal record. Three weeks later, an unidentified white woman, aged between 25 and 30, was found in a dumpster. She had been strangled. Then on 24 July, the body of 22-year-old Canoscha Griffin was found in the grounds of a local high school. She had been stabbed.

By early 1988, police were backing off their initial body count, when Charles Mosley was convicted for one of the 1986 murders. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Ricky Ross was arrested in connection with the slayings. He was cleared, but his career was ruined by the press coverage. Then the cases of Sheila Burton, Gail Ficklin, Nesia McElrath, Gidget Castro and Caroline Barney were “closed” with the arrest of two other serial killers thought to be responsible. However, these and other suspects were cleared of the remaining 15 cases, leaving at least one vicious killer still at large—and probably two.

During the lull between 1987, when the police had first closed the Southside Slayer’s victim list and 2002 murder of Princess Berthomieux, the killer may have simply moved his operation to Pomona, California, just five miles from San Dimas where the Southside Slayer dumped the body of Lorna Reed in 1986. In the early 1990s, a serial killer was murdering African-American prostitutes there. In 1993 alone, four women who worked Holt Avenue, the local hooker strip, were found dead. The deaths of three more women over the next two years were thought to be the work of the Pomona Strangler. Although the police were reluctant to attribute them to a serial killer, in April 1994 the FBI were called in, but could do little to help.

The police were overwhelmed at the time. In the 1980s, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s office alone had the murders of some 50 black women on their books. No one was ever charged, but there were reams of suspects.

“We have three books of people they were interested in,” says Sergeant Cliff Shepard. The problem was the advent of crack cocaine. “It took hold all over the city. It was an explosion down here, and the murder of women suddenly increased and gangs really started taking off.”

Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On 3 August 2005, Detective Jeffrey Steinhoff, who was still working on the Berthomieux case, got a call from a Fresno County District Attorney’s Office investigator. He had in custody a 65-year-old repo man named Roger Hausmann, who had been accused of kidnapping two teenage girls. Around 15 years before, he had been a suspect in a spate of prostitute killings. The two girls who accused him of abduction said that he had boasted of going to LA to kill whores.