A Trail of Death : Is Serial Killer Behind Slaying of 29 Women, Mostly Streetwalkers, in the County?

Sisterhood on the street:

On El Cajon Boulevard, inside Room 34 of a run-down motel, Patty is explaining the danger of getting into a car with a stranger. A prostitute since she was 15, she is nervous and animated, eager to slide into her next heroin fix.

The door opens and in walks Vicki, also a prostitute. She bums a cigarette. She overhears the conversation about all the women being found dead in San Diego County. Suddenly she bursts into tears, shaking her head. She cries out: “Sara’s dead. Sara’s dead.”

Twenty-nine women, including Sara F. Thornton, have been found dead since June, 1985. Most of them lived on the street, and Lt. Bill Baxter of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department homicide detail thinks many of the slayings fit the pattern of a serial killer.

He believes one man is killing San Diego prostitutes.

San Diego city police don’t buy his theory, but Baxter is pushing ahead. He is sending his homicide files to the FBI for analysis. He has set up a special team of investigators to work the cases. And he has sent his men to Seattle to compare notes with the Green River task force, where officials believe one man may be responsible for killing as many as 46 women, many of them prostitutes.

Common Denominators in a Dozen Slayings

Baxter sees common denominators in a dozen of the San Diego slayings. The victims lived a transient street life style, most of them involved in prostitution and drugs. Most of them were strangled, found nude and dumped in isolated parts of the county. Most of them were white and in their 20s.

And many are believed to have been picked up off city streets like El Cajon Boulevard, killed, then the bodies discarded along remote areas off Interstate 8 headed east.

“There are significant similarities,” he said. “And when you have five or seven that match, you can call it a serial killer.”

Prostitution, because of its milieu of drugs, strange men and the street scene, is inherently a dangerous profession, one that can lead women into violence. But what is different here, Baxter contends, is that one assailant may be preying upon that vulnerability.

Lt. Phil Jarvis, Baxter’s counterpart at the city Police Department, remains a skeptic.

“I haven’t seen anything that convinces me a single individual is doing these,” Jarvis said. “As many reasons as there are in the universe, that’s how many reasons there are to kill somebody.”

Victims’ Families Growing Impatient

Baxter is unmoved. Families of the victims are growing impatient. He has studied five cases and identified a clear pattern. He has reviewed nine other cases and found more comparisons.

Of the five, four were white, strangled and found nude since May in areas off I-8. All five of the women had prior police contacts for drugs and prostitution, Baxter said.

They were:

- Sara F. Thornton, 36. Found Sept. 25 by a passer-by in Alpine. Dumped about a week earlier, her cause of death has not yet been determined. She had two tattoos: one a rose; the other simply, “No Regrets.”

- Sally Ann Moorman-Field, 19. Found Sept. 20 on Sunrise Highway east of Pine Valley. She had been dead four to five weeks.

- Anna Lucilla Varela, 32. Found June 22 by two firemen jogging near Sunrise Highway and Old Highway 80. She had been dead more than a week. A Latina with a young son, she had shoulder-length brown hair and a tattoo of an angel on her arm.

- Rhonda Lynn Hollis, 21. Found May 10 by joggers in Bonita. The mother of two children, she was strangled and had been stabbed six times in the chest. She was wearing black-mesh stockings, shorts, a T-shirt, pink nail polish, eye makeup and a pendant that read “Foxy Lady.” A belt and a rope were wrapped around her hands, legs and neck.

- Donna Gentile, 23. Found June 23, 1985, along Sunrise Highway in the Pine Valley-Mt. Laguna area. A small woman from Pennsylvania, with brown hair and hazel eyes, she had once testified against police officers in a disciplinary case. She worried about her own safety, and she said in a recording taped shortly before she disappeared: “I could turn up dead anytime.”

Anytime a prostitute rides off in a strange man’s car, death can be around the corner.

Melanie is tall and slender and walks with a limp. A friend, whom Melanie calls a “sister,” thinks she knows who is killing the prostitutes. She thinks it’s a white man with balding gray hair in a blue Camaro. Melanie carries a small hunting knife in her belt.

“Three or four months ago, I thought this one dude I met was going to be real cool,” she says. “But after I got in his car, he pulled out this knife so big. So I went along. I didn’t fight back. I showed fear. I made sure he was real pleased because that’s the only way you’re going to make it. I asked him later why he didn’t kill me. He said he liked my attitude.”

Baxter and Jarvis meet regularly. They discuss ongoing investigations and compare evidence. While Jarvis does not concede a serial killer, he credits Baxter for airing the possibility. “The greater purpose is to save lives,” Jarvis said.

Jarvis is considering adding two of his own homicides to Baxter’s list when the Sheriff’s Department sends its files to the FBI’s crime lab in Quantico, Va.

Sophie Glover, 37, was found in August, 1986, in the 2200 block of Madison Avenue, her body laid out on a grassy area next to the curb and covered with a green blanket. Debra Stanford was found in February, 1986, lying against a van parked near 30th Street and El Cajon Boulevard.

Jarvis noted that both women were found nude and strangled, and that both had prostitution records. He said Stanford was covered with gonorrhea sores all over her body, including her face. “The possibility exists that somebody killed her because he got a disease from her,” Jarvis said.

Baxter ticks off several reasons why a serial killer might target prostitutes: A man could have contracted syphilis, herpes or AIDS from a prostitute. His wallet could have been stolen during a trick. He could see himself as “doing society a favor” by ridding the streets of hookers.

The two lieutenants agree that most of the women, dumped in the county’s jurisdiction, were picked up in the city.

“Given the choice, if you just murdered somebody at 40th and El Cajon Boulevard, you would much rather prefer that the body be found later on Sunrise Highway,” Jarvis said.

‘Looking Backward’

It was this summer that Baxter began “looking backward” at similarities in the killings. After spotting trends in the five most obvious case, he then identified nine other cases with common traits.

Of those nine women, three have not been positively identified. But because the victims appear to be young and transient, Baxter won’t exclude them.

Of the remaining six, five had prior police contacts for prostitution and drugs, four were white and found nude, and two were strangled. “We have to look seriously at these too,” he said.

Later this month, Baxter hopes to complete reports for the FBI detailing minutiae in each of the cases. The data will then be forwarded to the bureau’s lab in Virginia and entered in the computers of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Under VICAP, evidence in the San Diego slayings can be studied by computer for more overlapping characteristics, compared to other possible serial cases in the country. Then a psychological profile of a potential suspect can be drawn.

The program is designed to help spot serial killers, particularly to match characteristics of certain crimes with those in other cities. The bureau also can design a psychological profile of a suspect, so detailed as to include the man’s approximate age, race, marital status, educational level, career and social skills and behavior.

“The profile is not magical,” said an FBI spokesman in Quantico, who asked not to be identified. “But lots of times it offers very good direction. Theoretically, it can curtail someone’s criminal career.”

The program was begun in 1985, and last year the center drafted more than 600 psychological profiles. Because of the demand (the FBI said there were more than 20,000 homicides last year in the United States), it could be several months before a detailed profile is obtained. It could be even longer before it is learned that the San Diego killings match a similar crime spree elsewhere.

Trip to Washington

To speed the search, Baxter sent two investigators to King County, Wash., to meet with members of a police task force working on the so-called Green River slayings.

In the Seattle area, the bodies of 37 women have been found, and nine other women remain missing. A large number of them are known prostitutes, others were connected to prostitution and some had loose ties with the street life style, officials said. The killings began in July, 1982, and stopped, abruptly, in February, 1984--more than a year before the slayings began in San Diego.

No arrests have been made in the Green River cases, despite two FBI psychological profiles and the development over the years of more than 2,000 potential suspects. But Green River task force spokesman Dick Larson discounts any tie to San Diego.

“We are routinely contacted by jurisdictions who think they have a serial killer in their town,” Larson said. “There are similar cases all over the United States, and even into Canada, of prostitutes being killed, strangled, dumped.

“Some experts even tell us there can be up to 50 serial killers operating in the United States at any given time. And they change their methods all the time, going from killing prostitutes to killing schoolchildren to killing nuns or housewives.”

Prostitutes are particularly vulnerable.

“Nowadays, before I get in a car, I talk to them to see what frame of mind they’re in,” says Patches, a chubby blonde back on the pavement after a three-year hiatus for jail time and probation. “I ask about their lives, what kind of work they do, and if they have kids or a wife. I try to make sure they feel just as vulnerable out here as I do.”

“I don’t just hop into cars anymore,” says Dana, a big woman with wild black hair. “Now I squat down next to the driver’s window and we talk for a long time.”

“I am totally confused,” says Vicki, the daughter of drug addicts and a child of the street for less than a year. “I am frightened.”

San Diego has one alleged serial killer facing trial now. David Allen Lucas, a former Spring Valley carpet cleaner, was charged in two separate cases with killing six women and a child and attempting to kill a seventh woman, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Dan Williams. “They all had similar markings, similar modus operandi, “ Williams said. “While there were some differences in each of them, one thing stood out: Their throats were cut.”

Lucas has not yet gone to trial. But he has been arrested, a fact not lost on relatives of some of the victims in the current slayings.

William J. Brewer returned to St. Joseph, Mo., a couple of years ago, after his marriage to Theresa Brewer began to unravel. He met her while stationed in San Diego with the Navy. He said he left her when she turned to drugs, and later learned that she was involved in prostitution as well.

She was found Aug. 4, 1986, dumped off Interstate 8 near La Posta. Two motorists found the body of the 26-year-old woman. She was wearing a tank top, blue short skirt, black ankle-high leather shoes and large gold earrings. A toxicology examination found cocaine in her body. The cause of death was listed as “probable strangulation.”

“Times got hard for her,” said her husband. “She needed money. She told me she was worried. She called me once and told me to get her out of San Diego. And I have always wondered who would hurt her. She was so sweet.”

Daughter Frightened

Carolyn Sandoval of Oceanside said her daughter, Melissa White, was “frightened all the time.” Twenty-two years old, Melissa was found dead last New Year’s Eve, her nude body dumped near Pala. She was strangled. Officials said she had had prior police contacts for prostitution and drugs. She had light brown hair and green eyes, and her mother said Melissa was “very attractive, very pretty.”

“Unfortunately,” Sandoval said, “my daughter became deeply involved in drugs. I know she knew prostitutes. Some of them were her friends.”

One friend was Jodell Jenkins, 28, whose listed address was the Welcome Inn Motel in Encinitas. Her nude body was found June 30, 1986, in Valley Center.

Rose Varela of Lakeside said her daughter, Anna Lucilla, also had a friend, Sally Ann Moorman-Field. Varela said Sally telephoned for her daughter just three weeks after Anna was killed. Varela told Sally that Anna had died. Now she has learned that Sally has been killed too.

Yet Varela wants to disbelieve the serial-killer theory because “I don’t think one person can do that much.”

“I wish I could talk to the mothers of these other women,” she said. “Maybe we could get our heads together and find out who hurt our daughters.”

For several days now, Linda has been missing. She normally works longs hours selling her body on El Cajon Boulevard. Her unexpected absence is new cause for concern.

“She always gives me $5 to share my room here,” says Patty. “She comes in and out, always working. She said she was worried about the killings, that she was scared. But she said she wasn’t going to stop jumping in cars.

“It worries me.”