Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
The Killer Book of Cold Cases (2 page)
Once the passing cops were out of earshot, the quiet, dark night was suddenly shattered by gunshots. The driver of the Ford shot Phillips three times in the back as he walked back to the squad car and then fired three more shots that hit Curtis, who by then was sitting behind the wheel of the cop car. Then the man raced to his own car, and as he did, the injured and dying Phillips, a police marksman, managed to fire several shots at the perpetrator and shatter the Ford’s rear window.
Meanwhile, the teens were wandering around the oil field still looking for help, which they found in the form of a night watchman. Police were notified, and the kids blurted out their story. Once the events—their assault and robbery and the shooting of the patrolmen—were connected, an army of cops descended on the scene of the shootings. The crime investigation subsequently spread out, like ripples from a rock thrown into a quiet lake. It became the single biggest manhunt in the history of California.
A pall settled over El Segundo, and permanent heartache settled into the homes of Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis. Years later, their young children would still remember the commotion at the door that night and how their mothers had wailed with grief. One of the slain patrolmen’s kids commented that his mom always said that Daddy had gone on a long trip, and then she said he had gone on the longest trip of all, to Heaven.
The teens from the oil field were able to help an artist make a composite drawing. They described their attacker as a big man, six feet and 200 pounds, who wore his hair in the Elvis Presley-style wave of the time, but neither the description nor the drawing produced any viable leads.
Police didn’t have the investigative tools then that they have today, but the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department did have fingerprinting and a technician named Howard Speaks who did a very thorough job of trying to find prints.
Since the night had been hot and the perp might have been sweating, Speaks thought his best shot for a print was the steering wheel. His painstaking efforts paid off when he discovered and lifted a partial print off the wheel as well as two others—one from the door and another from a chrome strip inside the car. The prints were put into the California fingerprint database but failed to turn up any suspects.
Despite the massive efforts of cops on duty and volunteers from all over California and other states, no clues were found and the case gradually went cold.
Different cops have different definitions for what characterizes a cold case. Some cops mark a certain year as the cutoff, saying that any unsolved homicide that occurred prior to that date—for example, 1990—is classified as a cold case. Others may dub a case cold if a long time has elapsed since a person disappeared and the person is assumed to be a homicide victim.
And while most people think of cold cases as being only unsolved murders, that is really not true. Kidnapping, rape, and missing-person cases that have gone unsolved for a long time can also be accurately characterized as cold cases.
The case of Judge Joseph Force Crater, who vanished on the night of August 6, 1930, is a classic cold case. His wife said he received a phone call and then left the house, first commenting that he was “going to straighten those fellows out.” He was never seen again.
Though many different definitions are used for a cold case, the bottom line is that a fairly long time has passed since the start of the investigation, and the original investigators have given up and moved on to other cases. Of course, there is no time limit on what constitutes a cold case. Decades can go by. Indeed, some cold cases have been solved after thousands of years.
Certainly up there in contention as the oldest cold case of all time is that of the case of the Iceman. Two German hitchhikers discovered the “corpse”—the mummified, very well preserved remains of a male body—in 1991 in a glacier in the Ötztal Alps, which border Italy and Austria. The man was estimated to have died 5,300 years earlier and was about forty-six years old at the time.
After examining the body, scientists decided that the Iceman had probably died of hypothermia or perhaps drowned. He seemed to be armed with a dagger and a bow and arrows, because they were found strewn around his body. The only damage observed to his body was a broken-off arrowhead in his left shoulder.
Years passed before one of the hikers commented that when he first saw the Iceman, he had had a knife clutched in his right hand. Once they had this information, investigators started to consider other scenarios under which the Iceman could have died or been killed.
Further investigation revealed that the body had defensive wounds: a slash on the right hand, a cut on the forearm, and bruising on the torso. They also found blood on the dagger.
Then investigators took DNA samples from a variety of surfaces: the man’s cloak, the point of the arrow found in his body, the shaft of the arrow, and the blade of the dagger. All of those surfaces had DNA on them that did not belong to the Iceman. With that evidence, investigators postulated that the man was likely shot with an arrow from behind—from which he died of blood loss—while fighting with at least one other person.
Ultimately, then, the murder was a very, very old cold-case homicide.
Cops, of course, don’t forget their own, and a number of detectives were permanently assigned to the El Segundo case. Quite a few cops spent vacation time trying to track down the killer, but still with no luck.
As time went by, the case grew colder with no leads forthcoming. A couple of months after the killings, Doug Tuley’s wife was working in her Manhattan Beach backyard, perhaps a mile from the kill site, when she found something significant: a watch. Although the Ford from the crime spree had been abandoned not far way, she didn’t realize the watch’s importance to the murder case. Sometime after that, Tuley himself found part of a .22-caliber revolver. He did not attach any special significance to the gun, either, although he put it on a shelf instead of throwing it out.
A few years later, in 1960, Tuley’s son, Bob, discovered something else in the backyard—the gun’s rusty cylinder. It was then that the father made the connection. He knew that his house was only about a mile from the crime scene, so he called the El Segundo cops. Tuley figured that since the car had been found abandoned nearby, the killer probably had broken up the gun and tossed it in the backyard.
After running ballistics tests on the gun, cops determined that it had fired the bullets that hit the two cops. Detectives checked the serial number on the gun, and then two of them traveled 1,600 miles to a Sears Roebuck store in Shreveport, Louisiana. Records showed that the gun had been purchased there three years earlier for around thirty dollars by someone who signed the name “G.D. Wilson” in wide-spaced handwriting.
Surprisingly, the young clerk remembered the man, a big guy with a pompadour who spoke in a Southern drawl and seemed anxious to leave the store quickly. But that’s as far as the cops could go, and the case went cold again. For each of the next forty-two years, it got colder until it was ice. But, of course, it had not been forgotten, particularly by cops and the families of the slain officers. It was a bleeding, open wound in their minds.
While the case went nowhere for all of those years, forensics had advanced, particularly DNA, which could be extracted from hair, blood, and semen. In Los Angeles, two people had been appointed to try to clear as many cold cases as possible using this new science. One person was Lisa Kahn, head of the District Attorney’s Forensic Science Division, and the other was David Lambkin of the Los Angeles Cold Case Division, which used DNA and computerized fingerprint and ballistic records to try to identify perpetrators.
But there was no DNA from the double cop-killing. The rape victim’s dress had semen on it, but following procedure in those days, the cops had returned the dress to the victim after they finished examining it, and the dress was long gone.
After a false lead in 2002 awakened interest in the case, investigators decided to run the partial fingerprints through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAFIS. Federal law enforcement agencies and those from every state send criminal offenders’ fingerprints to IAFIS, forming a national database of more than 40 million prints.
The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is an electronic database of DNA profiles administered through the FBI. The system lets federal, state, and local crime labs share and compare DNA profiles. Through CODIS, investigators match DNA from crime scenes with convicted offenders and with other crime scenes using computer software, just as fingerprints are matched through IAFIS.
CODIS uses two indexes: the convicted offender index, which contains profiles of convicted offenders, and the forensic index, which contains profiles from crime-scene evidence.
The real strength of CODIS lies in solving cases that have no suspects. If DNA evidence entered into CODIS matches someone in the offender index, a warrant can be obtained authorizing the collection of a sample from that offender to confirm the match. If the offender’s DNA is in the forensic index, the system allows investigators—even in different jurisdictions—to exchange information about their respective cases.
—From the National Institute of Justice
Investigators working the 1957 case had the prints cleaned up and reprocessed digitally. Then they ran the prints through the database and waited. Lt. Craig Cleary, head of El Segundo’s detective unit, was speechless when the results came in. A crime-lab analyst said there was a “hit.”
Cleary reacted the way many people would react: “I thought he was kidding. But when I asked him if he was sure he said, ‘Yes.’”
Now with a suspect, police focused on him “like stink on shit,” as one cop crudely put it. They expected to find a hardened criminal, but that’s not what they encountered. The person who matched the prints was a family man and had a successful business. Gerald Mason lived in Columbia, South Carolina. His prints were available because he had been arrested for robbery in 1956, the year before the killings. That was the only time he had been charged with a crime. But the FBI’s IAFIS wasn’t established until 1999, and Mason’s prints took a long time to make their way into the database.
The cops did not consider the prints enough to “make” their case. They needed more, said David Lambkin. “I wanted to make sure, forty-six years later, that we had a rock-solid case before arresting someone who is a successful businessman and a pillar of his community.” Lambkin wanted a case that definitely “would go to trial and end with conviction.”
To do this, the investigators found every witness they could, though a number of the people involved—including the sixteen-year-old driver of the stolen Ford—had passed away.
Cops learned that when he was arrested in Columbia, South Carolina, Mason had been living in a YMCA. They wondered if he also might have been living in one in Shreveport when he purchased the gun. Investigators found a YMCA right across the street from the Sears store.
Almost unbelievably, the YMCA had preserved all of its old registries. Police were able to find the signature of “George D. Wilson.” A handwriting expert was called in to compare the three signatures they had: the one on the form Mason signed when he was buying the gun, the one on the YMCA registration, and one they had secretly obtained on a business document. The signatures matched, all three written with neat, widespread letters that also had much the same shape.
There were questions, of course, such as why Mason had traveled from South Carolina to California. But a background check revealed that he had had some legal matters to handle for his mother about the time he would have been there.
On January 29, 2003, close to fifty years after Mason supposedly gunned down two cops, an assemblage of cops showed up at his door, along with the head of the task force, Deputy District Attorney Darren Levine, and rang the bell.
The bald-headed, 69-year-old man who opened the door was Mason, and he was stunned. He looked, Lieutenant Cleary said, “like a deer in the headlights.”
One of the investigators told him they were there to question him about the murder of two El Segundo police officers, and the blood drained from his face.
He was escorted to the local Columbia jail where he was questioned and his body examined. As a result, a decades-old mystery was solved.
As he was dying, one of the cops, Philips, fired three shots at the fleeing car. The back window was shattered and two slugs were recovered, but investigators found no trace of the third slug or where it had impacted, if it had.
When cops examined Mason, they found a round scar just below his right shoulder blade, showing that he had been hit there. The mystery of the missing bullet was solved.
