Dragnet: The Case of the Courteous Killer. Richard Deming
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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