Tracing a Handgun Requires Time, Luck

On April 16, 1974, in a peaceful neighborhood in San Francisco, a stranger walked up behind Nick Shields, 23, who was loading a secondhand rug in his station wagon. Without a word, the stranger shot Nick Shields dead.

The weapon he used was a handgun, one of an estimated 40 million to 60 million in circulation in America.

The numbers suggest not only the uncertainty of how many there really might be, but also the near impossibility of finding the current owner of most of them. This one, typically, passed from hand to hand.

Gun Was Traced

By remarkable detective work and a measure of luck, police were able to trace the gun that killed Nick Shields. It had also killed six others before him in a wave of 14 apparently random murders over a 6-month period--the “Zebra killings,” as the police code-named them. Their motives were never explained.

Some children, playing in a lot near where Shields was killed, happened to find the pistol and gave it to the police. Ballistics identified it as the murder weapon and the hunt for its owner began.

The gun was a 7.65-millimeter Beretta with a three-inch barrel, serial number A47469. A Washington computer tracked it to an Italian manufacturer who had shipped it to a New York firearms importer in 1968.

Sold and Resold

The importer had sold it to a J.C. Penney Co. purchasing outlet in North Carolina, which had placed it in a Tacoma, Wash., store. There it was sold to its first private owner, its sale duly recorded. Police were not surprised to discover, six years after the sale, that the buyer no longer lived in Tacoma.

A search of his name on West Coast driver’s licenses located the man’s mother in Santa Barbara. She said her son now lived at a religious commune near San Francisco.

The son told the police that, yes, he had bought the gun, bought it, he said, “on impulse.” He said he had never fired it and eventually had sold it to his roommate.

The roommate turned out to be a convicted drug felon. He was using an alias so the police broadcast his picture on television without saying why he was wanted. The man’s mother recognized him and phoned. Police questioned people his mother named as close friends and followed one lead to Hawaii.

Trail Seemed to End

They found the man they were looking for in Maui. He told them he had sold the gun for $20 to a man named St. Andre. He said St. Andre had told him someone had stolen the gun from him back in San Francisco, but that he knew who the thief was.

Police found the thief in San Bruno, Calif. The thief told them he had sold the gun to a San Francisco dentist. The dentist said he had sold it to a local Samoan he knew only as Moo Moo. The police found Moo Moo.

Moo Moo claimed that he had pawned the gun for $25 in 1973 and later reclaimed it. That checked out. Then, said Moo Moo, he had tossed the gun into a street trash basket because carrying it made him “nervous.” No trash collectors reported finding a gun. Before Moo Moo could be questioned further he died of a heart attack.

The trail seemed to have hit a dead end.

Led to Convictions

By happenstance, however, a tipster residing at the time in the county jail, unaware of the gun search, told the police he had bought a 7.65-millimeter Beretta with a three-inch barrel from “a big Samoan guy named Moo Moo” and had sold it to a man who turned out to be one of Moo Moo’s co-workers and one of four suspects in the Zebra killings.

In 1976, the four stood trial for those murders.

The handgun that had killed Nick Shields and six others, traced to the workplace of the accused, was strong evidence toward their conviction.

From its manufacture in Italy to the Zebra killings six years later, the little gun had passed through two countries, five states, a pawnshop, and the hands of eight known owners, at least one a drug dealer, one a thief, one, at last, a murderer.