Manifest Injustice (3 page)

What “number of reasons” did Sergeant Jones have? What evidence that he was “not ready to release?” The Macumber file never yielded answers to these questions. Not a single sheriff’s report—at least not a single surviving report—addressed or documented this possibility. Whatever the deputies’ theories, the investigators appeared to still have no solid clues or leads when Joyce and Tim went to their graves together at a double funeral held on Monday afternoon, May 28, in the Memory Chapel of A. L. Moore and Sons Mortuary. Two gray caskets rested end to end in a dimly lit room, draped in flowers, with more than three hundred mourners attending—including a team of plainclothes detectives, watching for a possible killer among them.

“To those who love God all things can work together for good,” the Reverend Philip A. Gangsei reminded the mourners. “Blessings can come, and usually do, from trouble and difficulty.” He knew everyone was asking why this young couple had been so brutally murdered. The young pastor could only say, “We live in a world where men’s minds sometimes become twisted.”

*   *   *

In the ensuing weeks, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office continued to search frantically but vainly for clues and leads. Sheriff Cal Boies issued a public appeal for assistance, as did Cliff Sterrenberg. “We’ll continue to check out every lead including crank calls,” Captain Ralph Edmunson vowed. “We can’t pass up one because you never know when the right tip will come in.… Neither I nor all the men who have been working this have been able to get it off our minds. None of us will rest until it’s over. Someday we’ll get the guy.”

In time, though, every tip started feeling like a crank call. A local attorney thought a former client he’d represented years before in Montana on a grand theft charge might be the killer. A man reported that he’d been getting annoying phone calls from a stranger in the middle of the night, someone talking about “the deal out on Scottsdale and Bell Road.” A priest reported a boy who was “acting abnormal” and rambling on about the double slaying. Women at bars tried to turn in ex-lovers, ex-husbands and anyone who’d done them wrong. Others thought their next-door neighbors had been acting oddly. An alcoholic ex-con fingered his brother, with whom he’d been arguing all night. A woman jailed on a drunk driving charge loudly accused her husband, who when contacted by investigators said, “She sure must be mad at me.” Another wife, deep into a custody dispute with her estranged husband, insisted that he’d killed the couple in the lovers’ lane. A disturbed young man tried to confess so he could be committed to the Arizona State Hospital and get help. Jim McKillop even had some suspicions about Cliff Sterrenberg.

In issuing his fiscal year report at the end of June 1962, some five weeks after the Scottsdale murders, Sheriff Boies could claim a generally high crime-solution rate—they’d solved 59 percent of all felony cases, more than twice the national average. During that year, they’d arrested fifteen persons in connection with ten homicides. They’d solved nine of those murder cases—all but one: the double slaying of Timothy McKillop and Joyce Sterrenberg on May 24.

*   *   *

Then, amid all the crank calls and false leads, came another tip. On August 25, three months after the Scottsdale killings, an informant advised sheriff’s investigators that a seventeen-year-old girl confined at the Maricopa County Detention Ward had told a matron a story that seemed to place her at the scene of the murders.

The tip went to the chief investigators, Sergeants Jerry Hill and Lester Jones. They tried to interview the girl, Linda Primrose, who was temporarily in the detention center over a stolen car charge, her usual domicile being the Good Shepherd Home for Girls, where she’d been placed by her mother. But Primrose wouldn’t cooperate with Hill and Jones. Despite what she’d told the matron, she now resolutely denied any knowledge of the homicides.

Hill decided to try again with another deputy sheriff, Sergeant Tom Hakes. On September 9, Hakes visited Primrose at the Good Shepherd Home and found her much more cooperative. She told him her story: On the night of May 23, she’d been picked up near her home by a man named “Ernie Salazar,” a girl known as “Terry” or “Theresa,” and two other men. They were all drinking and smoking pot, and she was skin-popping, too. While driving north on Scottsdale Road, they spotted the Sterrenberg Impala at a gas station. They followed the Impala up Scottsdale, being on their way to pick up a “stash” out in the desert. About a half mile north of Bell Road, the Impala turned onto a dirt road. Ernie drove his car past the dirt road for a tenth of a mile, then made a U-turn and came back. He pulled his car almost parallel with the Impala and stopped. He got out of his car and walked over to the Impala, where he started talking to the couple inside. Primrose heard Ernie shout some profanities, then saw him return to his car and get something from under the driver’s seat. Everyone was outside of their cars by now. Primrose heard a shot, turned, and saw the young man lying on the ground. She saw Ernie shoot the young woman—once, then again while she was lying on the ground. The girl named Terry or Theresa began to scream and yank at her own hair in a fit of sorts. Primrose pushed Terry back into Ernie’s car, and they quickly drove off.

Six days later, Sergeant Hakes met Primrose again, along with two other deputies. During a two-hour interrogation, Primrose once more told of being at the scene of the murders and seeing “Ernie” kill Tim and Joyce. This time, the deputies took shorthand notes and transcribed her statement. Primrose offered a revised version: Now they’d initially come across the Impala in the desert, while looking for their “stash,” rather than at a gas station. Otherwise the details remained much the same, though Primrose at moments appeared somewhat confused. The interrogators kept asking this teenage addict to be precise, and she kept telling them she couldn’t remember and didn’t care:
I didn’t notice.… Like I said, I was high. No, I can’t think of her name because I don’t give a damn about her name
.

Yet she did remember the victims’ car: a white Impala with a stripe. And she remembered the murders:
We couldn’t pick up our stash because those people were there. Ernie was mad. Bang. There was a shot. When I heard the shot, I looked up. The girl was running. Bang. They came up close to her head. Bang again.

Deputy county attorney Joe Shaw did not regard this one as a crank lead. Two days after Primrose testified, he arranged for her to take a polygraph test. Shortly past noon on September 18, a team of deputies brought Primrose to John McCarthy at the Arizona Polygraph Laboratory. There he interviewed and tested her. She resisted and tried to evade, taking long, deep breaths while answering questions. Yet McCarthy offered the deputies an unequivocal conclusion: “Primrose was present at the time of the homicide and does have firsthand knowledge of the crime and other persons involved.”

Joe Shaw next arranged for Primrose to visit Dr. Milton Erickson, a prominent psychiatrist. He spoke to her for three hours on September 20, then for another hour on September 26. Again she resisted, flaring angrily at the doctor. Yet Dr. Erickson thought that what she told him confirmed her previous statements. She talked to him of being present at the murder scene. She described how she’d stood over Joyce’s body. Dr. Erickson ended up firmly convinced that she was telling the truth. He believed “she could give further good information on all subjects present at the scene of the crime.”

Another day that September, Hakes and a second officer put Primrose in a car and invited her to direct them to the scene of the murder. She took them straight there and accurately described the layout—the position of the cars and the bodies—in detail not available in the newspapers. “She led us by direction,” Hakes later testified. “She knew where she was going. She knew what the area was.”

Then came investigative roadblocks. Hours after Primrose first saw Dr. Erickson, deputies took her to the southeast section of Phoenix, where together they vainly searched for “Terry” or “Theresa,” the woman who’d pulled her hair at the murder site. Two days later, a team of investigators spent all day and night in the Deuce area, prowling the streets in an attempt to locate “Ernie,” “Terry,” and the others who populated Primrose’s story. That same night, Hakes and several colleagues spent three hours in and around the area of Second Street and Madison, Third Street and Jefferson, and Third Street and Washington. “Numerous subjects were questioned,” Hakes noted, “but very little information was obtained.”

The last line of his report: “Investigation continues.” It did not. Here the Primrose file ends. Unable to locate “Ernie” or “Terry,” the investigators didn’t follow up. They never connected “Terry” tearing her hair with the thatch of hair found at the scene. They never tested that thatch of hair.

*   *   *

As time went by, the unsolved Scottsdale lovers’ lane murders hung heavily over the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Yet the case no longer consumed the public’s attention. By early June, the story had disappeared from the local newspapers’ front pages, and then it left even the inside pages. After their encounter with Primrose, sheriff’s investigators added just a few scant reports to their own file—they had nowhere left to go. Only on anniversaries did the case recapture attention. “Year Passes Since Desert Killing of Engaged Couple; Clues Meager” read a headline in the
Arizona Republic
on May 23, 1963. His office, Sheriff Boies reported, had conducted more than three hundred investigations into leads. They had test-fired more than seven hundred pistols. They had questioned burglars, armed robbers, sex perverts and dozens of gun owners. They had given lie detector tests to all known rapists and other men with records of violent crime in the area. Yet they’d come up empty. Boies couldn’t believe that the $10,000 reward hadn’t brought the hoped-for results.

In October 1963, the sheriff’s department released to the news media copies of the four latent fingerprints they had earlier provided to the FBI, and sent flyers featuring the prints to law enforcement agencies across the country. “Double-Murder,” read the banner atop the flyer. “Information Wanted. $10,000 Reward Posted.” This, too, yielded nothing.

In May 1964, newspaper headlines recognized the second anniversary: “Still a Mystery; Sweethearts Murdered in Desert 2 Years Ago.” By then, deputies had conducted ballistics checks on more than eight hundred guns. They’d talked to yet another group of informers, mental patients and barroom drunks. They’d written jurisdictions nationwide, whenever word came of a murder in another state that resembled the Scottsdale lovers’ lane killings. “Today the case still remains open and periodically officers go over the file looking for any little detail they may have overlooked,” reported one newspaper account that May. “Every large community seems to have a murder that plagues the police. In Boston there is a strangler at large, in Los Angeles the ‘Black Dahlia’ is still unsolved. In each instance the police never close their files. They never forget and the killer or killers will never really be safe from apprehension.”

*   *   *

Less than three months later, another intriguing lead emerged. On August 13, 1964, Sergeant Ralph Anderson of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call from an Officer Shaver of the Scottsdale Police Department. Shaver was just then booking a twenty-year-old man on a charge of joyriding—a man who believed “he was the one who committed the double homicide north of Scottsdale.” The subject’s name: Ernest Valenzuela.
Ernie
.

Sergeant Anderson drove to the Scottsdale Police Department to interview Valenzuela. It turned out Valenzuela had confessed once before to the Scottsdale lovers’ lane killings. In early 1963, while serving ninety days in a Phoenix jail on a burglary charge, he’d told a fellow inmate, Richard Green, that he’d killed Joyce Sterrenberg and Tim McKillop. Green had relayed this information to authorities, who’d arranged for a psychologist to examine Valenzuela. Nothing more came of that incident, other than a note in Valenzuela’s file. Now here he was, again volunteering a confession.

Valenzuela grew worried and nervous, he explained to Sergeant Anderson, every time he heard or thought about these murders north of Scottsdale. He wanted to clear up his mind about this murder. He’d been drinking heavily and smoking marijuana that night—not unusual for him—so his memories were hazy. As he recalled, the murders took place in the desert north of Scottsdale. There were two victims, a male and a female. He killed them, he believed, because he saw this good-looking gal with this man and wanted to prove to her that he was a better man than her guy. He believed he used a .45-caliber automatic he’d borrowed from his nephew.

Sergeant Anderson, knowing the evidence, asked: Did the female attempt to run or resist? Yes, Valenzuela said. He thought she attempted to back away or run, and then he shot her.

One more thing: Valenzuela thought that “an unknown girl” was with him that night.

He stared at Sergeant Anderson, his tone even and uninflected. He was of Native American heritage—a Pima Indian—with close-cropped hair and an impassive manner. Though not big, at five foot nine and 156 pounds, he looked well muscled, in good shape. His record, just in the past year, included a string of burglaries, a grand theft auto and an assault with a deadly weapon. He’d been in and out of trouble since the age of eleven. He’d recently traveled to Oklahoma with a pistol, aiming to kill a former girlfriend who’d ratted him out on a burglary, but instead ended up being arrested for carrying a concealed deadly weapon. Sergeant Anderson, weighing all this, decided to take him to the sheriff’s office for further questioning. There, deputies made arrangements for a psychiatrist, Dr. Maier Tuchler, to interview Valenzuela.

They met the next day at 2:50
P.M.
Before beginning, Tuchler warned Valenzuela that he, though a doctor, might be subpoenaed to testify in a courtroom about this communication. Tuchler advised Valenzuela of his legal rights and explained that he didn’t have to continue with the interview if he didn’t wish to. Valenzuela said he understood and wanted to keep going. They talked for one hour, in the presence of Anderson and a second sheriff’s investigator. Five days later, Dr. Tuchler wrote a report of this encounter, addressed directly to Sheriff Cal Boies. Valenzuela, he began, is “a very dangerous and impulsive young man who is capable of homicide for justification and reasons which appear to him adequate.” Tuchler continued: