SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

AUGUST 1989

The world of Guadalupe Apodaca, a.k.a. Isabela Luna, came to an end sometime in the days preceding September 3, 1989, when nine-year-old Alfredo Torres peered into the blown-out window of an abandoned warehouse near the corner of Ascot Avenue and East Forty-Third Street.

Roberts didn’t know the corner offhand, but anyone working cold cases could make an educated guess. South Central LA was the most glamorous and vilified ghetto in the world. It had been over a decade since John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood made South Central the hood to define hood, and no one was over it yet.

During the 1940s, thousands of southern Blacks fled poverty and Jim Crow to the West Coast. Jim Crow or no, racial housing discrimination corralled the growing Black population into ghettos, subdivided by twist ties of freeways. Deindustrialization in the seventies further shook the community’s already fragile economy.

The LAPD pioneered the country’s first SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team in the wake of the Watts Rebellion of 1965. For the first time in the nation’s history, tanks equipped with battering rams rolled down urban streets, while behind the scenes, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) aggressively targeted Black political organizations. By 1972, the Crips and Bloods fought over the same intersections the Black Panthers once patrolled.

In the mid-1980s, crack assaulted American urban centers, while the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs imposed far steeper sentences for drugs predominantly abused in low-income and minority populations. While a generation of young men was slapped with unreasonably long stays in our increasingly for-profit prison system, a vulnerable population of women was left standing shell-shocked and bare-assed on Figueroa Street.

The unlucky turned up blue in the morning. No fewer than seven serial killers and rapists prowled the same killing fields during the eighties and nineties, picking through the wreckage of the splintered community of South Los Angeles. Most had MOs that included strangulation, including Chester Turner, “Southside Slayer” Michael Hughes, “Grim Sleeper” Lonnie Franklin, Louis Craine, Ivan Hill, and “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez.

When Roberts came across the case of Guadalupe Apodaca, she knew in her bones she was looking at another serial killer.

Though only a few miles from the booming urban development of downtown, in 2012, South Los Angeles still looked much like it did in 1989. Along the wide boulevards stood rows of modest 1920s bungalows with stucco ’60s apartments crowbarred between them. The main thoroughfares featured sewing machine shops, taquerias, and hair salons with colorful hand-painted signs. Gang graffiti delineated the territories unknown to Rand McNally.

No one sullied the myriad murals of Our Lady of Guadalupe floating above the sidewalks on walls of panaderías, carnicerías, and check-cashing places. Cloaked in cerulean blue, hands in prayer, the mother of God forgives you, protects you, cries your tears for you when you’re fresh out. She’s managed to be a virgin and still have nothing left to lose.

In 1989, half a block from a mural of her namesake, Guadalupe Apodaca’s lifeless body was discovered in an abandoned garage on a cloudless morning in early September, still heavy with the heat of summer.

A few miles north in Hollywood, it was still the night before for an army of jaw-grinding wannabes and almost-weres with high waistbands and wide shoulder pads. All that easy money was supposed to trickle down from Rodeo Drive to San Pedro Avenue. Instead, the money turned into snow drifts of Colombian hoovered off the backs of toilet tanks at the Roxy, the China Club.

As you drove south, the trickle slowed to a drip. Women desperate for a drink or a fix, or just plain desperate, combed the stroll. There was no free money. It trickled straight into your hand or not at all, and you worked for every cent. Six thousand miles away, the Berlin wall teetered.

Public schools were not yet back in session when, at about ten twenty in the morning, nine-year-old Alfredo Torres kicked a half-deflated soccer ball against the wall of an abandoned commercial garage in the debris-strewn alley off Ascot Avenue and East Forty-Third. A pink metallic streamer blew by his feet, freed from the concertina wire atop the cinder-block walls of the church across the street.

Taking up an imaginary friend on a dare, Alfredo made himself keep both eyes open as he peered deeper into the banged-up shit shack, filled with food wrappers and an aluminum trash barrel on ash-strewn ground. He’d hoped to glean the shine of a nickel, a forgotten Playboy magazine, a dead rat. Instead, his eyes scanned the same familiar bags of rotting garbage, pizza boxes, lead paint peeling off the walls. He almost glanced right over the bare mattress wedged in a corner, but a flash of something pale and irregular caught his attention.

He rubbed his eyes with his sleeve before deciding it was not a trick of the light. He was definitely looking at a naked pair of women’s legs, emerging from the space between where the mattress met the wall.

When the patrol unit showed up, they found the discarded, decomposing body of forty-three-year-old Guadalupe Apodaca, naked from the waist down, lying on her left side, hemorrhaged eyes open and staring at the scarred concrete floor. She wore only a buttercup-colored man’s shirt half-torn from her body, one tarnished silver earring, and a silver ring on her middle finger, set with a large square of turquoise. Abrasions covered her back and rear thighs. When the coroner’s investigator turned her, the curtain of dark hair that obscured her face in the first of the numbered photos fell back and revealed snow-white roots. Apodaca was no longer young, and she had the hard look of someone who probably never was. Flies alighted on her nose, mouth, and multiple contusions. Her body was a mottled canvas of injury, including a wide necklace of maroon bruising that nearly encircled her throat, crowned by a crosshatching of deep scratches.

Due to the bruising on the throat area and the fractures of the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage, the LA County coroner’s office attributed the cause of Apodaca’s death to manual strangulation. Her body also showed signs of sexual assault. Homicide detectives with LAPD’s Newton Division attempted to obtain additional insight into the murder of Apodaca, who had an arrest record that included narcotics possession, forgery, robbery, and attempted murder. Numerous witnesses were interviewed. Several plausible theories were developed. No viable suspect was identified. Within weeks, the case went cold.

Fifteen years prior, right around the corner, the kidnappers of white heiress Patty Hearst had been hunted down and shot in front of the hungry eyes of the entire nation. Guadalupe Apodaca’s invisible killer slipped into the night like a ghost.

Roberts’s approach to homicide was based on Occam’s razor. It usually is what it looks like, once you figure out what you’re looking at.

It was usually the husband.

If not, the boyfriend.

Or the wife’s boyfriend killed the husband.

It was a guy who worked for a guy in the rival gang or thought he did.

Murderers are lousy arsonists.

People are terrible liars.

You meet a lot of dummies, pick through a lot of trash, push a ton of paper.

Everyone leaves a trace.

Roberts didn’t make up that last one. Prescient French forensic scientist Edmond Locard (1877–1966) conceived of what he called “the exchange principle.” According to Locard, every contact leaves a trace. We leave a piece of ourselves behind with everything we touch. We take something with us when we go.

Locard died after the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 but before witnessing its forensic applications. In Locard’s day, the traces that unlocked the secrets of the dead included fingerprints, hair, clothing fibers, letters, receipts, whispers to spouses, gossip of neighbors, and vengeful lovers. The idea of DNA was still an embryo when Locard grasped that every cell of our beings carries a unique signature, and we always sign the guest book somehow. No one moves through the world like a haint.

Both DNA fingerprinting and digital tracking have transformed criminal investigations, but the exchange principle remains the same. DNA isn’t a panacea, particularly with many cold cases, which number over 240,000 in the United States since 1980 alone. Much of the physical evidence has long since been swallowed by history, because it either never existed or has been degraded or destroyed. For those cases to be solved, the traces of contact can resemble a more traditional investigative model. A confession or strong denial can be the crucial tipping point.

Even if all the boxes are checked, a case-to-case DNA hit on two cold case prostitute murders from the eighties is not enough to indict. Even if it were, they had to catch the bastard first and get him off the street. Find the fucker. Get him someway, anyway, into custody. Get a confirmation cheek swab. Get a confession.

This one was slippery, transient. A glance at his record and Mitzi knew he’d be barely distinguishable from the shadows in which he lurked: a ghoul.

But there are no such things as monsters.

“Who the fuck is this guy?” she asked.

Is he dead?

Is he in custody?

Is he out and about? Does he have an address?

Does he have a driver’s license? Does he have a car?

Is he still a threat?

How are we going to find him? How are we going to keep him?

The team around Roberts ran rap sheets and arrest records, pulled prison packages, and ran vehicle searches while she scanned the pages of the ever-growing stack of arrest records. The results flooding her desk shook even Roberts’s unflappable cool.

The question wasn’t where he’d been hiding all these years. He hadn’t. He’d been killing in plain sight.

Samuel Little’s arrest history began in 1956 (juvenile records being expunged), when he was first arrested for burglarizing a furniture warehouse. Over the next six decades, he was repeatedly arrested in Ohio, Maryland, Florida, Maine, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, California…the list went on.

The charges included burglary, breaking and entering, assault and battery, assault with the intent to rob, assault with a firearm, armed robbery, assault on a police officer, solicitation of prostitution, driving under the influence, shoplifting, theft, grand theft, possession of marijuana, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, resisting arrest, battery, false imprisonment, assault with great bodily injury, robbery, rape, and sodomy.

She did the math. For all this, Sam had served just ten years altogether.

Roberts knew she had to start with the MO, look to the cases in Sam’s history that most closely resembled the two murders in the white binders in front of her. Assault, rape, murder.

Roberts gave no fucks about this repeat offender robbing a ninety-nine-cent store, other than the fact that it placed him in a certain location on a certain date, especially if that place was behind bars. For patterns, she looked to the violence.

On September 11, 1976, Sam was arrested in Sunset Hills, Missouri, for the rape, sodomy, assault with great body injury, and robbery of Pamela K. Smith. Smith had shown up hysterical on a stranger’s doorstep after escaping Sam’s car and running nearly naked through the night, her face and throat bruised and beaten, her hands bound behind her with cloth and electrical cord. Sam had strangled, bitten, beaten, and sodomized her. He was convicted of the lesser charge of assault with attempt to ravish and served a total of three months.

Roberts read it again. Surely it was a typo and he had served three years, not three months. But no. This fucker truly served less time for rape and attempted murder than for his first offense, breaking and entering.

On September 12, 1982, the nude, strangled body of twenty-six-year-old Patricia Mount was found in a field in Alachua County, Florida. Eyewitnesses later identified Sam as the man last seen leaving a tavern in Gainesville with Mount, who had a mental disability and lived at a nearby assisted-care facility, in his brown Pinto station wagon with wood paneling. Hairs found on the victim were similar to Sam’s. He was tried for Mount’s murder, even admitted to being at the tavern at the night in question, but due to the lack of definitive physical evidence, the jury acquitted.

On October 4, 1982, the skeletal remains of twenty-two-year-old Melinda LaPree were found by a groundskeeper in the Gautier Family Cemetery near Pascagoula, Mississippi, a month after she had been reported missing by her boyfriend. A disarticulated hyoid bone and fractured cricoid cartilage indicated strangulation. Again, eyewitnesses identified Sam as the man with whom she had been seen getting into a brown Pinto station wagon. Two Black prostitutes by the names of Hilda Nelson and Leila McClain were interviewed in the course of the investigation, revealing that Sam had brutally assaulted and strangled each of the women the previous year, but they had miraculously escaped. Authorities had brazenly ignored the reports until young, white LaPree turned up. Sam was arrested, but the charges were ultimately dismissed by a grand jury for lack of evidence. The testimony of Nelson and McClain was never heard.

On October 25, 1984, in San Diego, California, Sam was caught by uniformed patrol officers in the act of beating and strangling Tonya Jackson in the back seat of his black Thunderbird. He was charged with rape, assault with great bodily injury, and sexual battery. Sam waived his rights, and the police report quoted him as saying to the arresting officers, “That bitch didn’t give me my money’s worth. She’s going to give it to me or else.” He’d met her at a downtown gay bar, offered her twenty dollars for sex, and driven her to the same deserted, trash-strewn overlook at which he’d assaulted Laurie Barros not a month before, on September 27, 1984.

“I told her I wanted more,” he stated. “But she refused. I told her she wasn’t going anywhere until I got my pussy. I grabbed her in self-defense. She deserved it. She tried to cheat me.” He denied raping her and said he had just kicked the shit out of her. He also repeatedly asked the officers, “How’s the bitch? Is she going to make it?”

The SDPD connected Jackson’s attack with that of Barros, who had played dead and lived to tell the tale after being assaulted, strangled, and left by the side of the road. The cases were tried together, with the added charges of false imprisonment, assault with great bodily injury, and sexual battery. Sam pled guilty to two counts of assault with great bodily injury and one count of false imprisonment.

Barros identified him from a lineup, during which she asked him to say, “Swallow for me. I love it when you swallow.” She later told police that she knew it was him immediately. She just wanted to make him say it.

From his prison package, Roberts learned that Sam received a four-year prison sentence. He served only eighteen months and was paroled on February 1, 1987. He traveled the one hundred and twenty-five miles north to his old stomping grounds of Los Angeles, where he shacked back up with his long-term girlfriend and continued his rampage of theft by day, murder by night.

She flipped through Sam’s mug shots, watched his face turn from posturing child to dandy in a shark skin suit, to wilder and disheveled, to white-haired, scabrous, and transient. Every time, he got out.

How in the actual fuck could this have happened?

How this happened is that a judge in Missouri thought three months was an appropriate sentence for rape and assault. How it happened is that law enforcement officials in Mississippi in the eighties didn’t believe it was possible to commit a crime against a Black prostitute. How it happened was, in a tradition of many serial killers before him, certainly the ones who had operated on Roberts’s beat, he chose to dispose of victims society already thought were trash.

Roberts turned to the murder book on the case that had been linked to Guadalupe Apodaca through DNA. The second binder was that of Audrey Nelson, born August 27, 1953, found by a transient in a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant on East Seventh Street on the morning of August 14, 1989. The high school photo of a beautiful if somewhat bewildered blond was unrecognizable as the emaciated, broken body curled in a fetal position on her left side in the dumpster, nude from the waist down, wearing only a red sweatshirt, pushed up around the top of her torso. Detectives had interviewed her boyfriend, Jack West, a.k.a. Jack Winston, a.k.a. Preston Everett, who gave conflicting statements and was known to regularly beat Nelson. They’d been together for many years, and he was responsible for the burn scars covering half her body, which she told the doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital had been an accident after they took her off the ventilator. There wasn’t enough evidence, and the case quickly went cold.

In the crime scene photos. Nelson’s short brown hair was matted to her face, her body a roadmap of beatings, burns, abrasions, drag marks, and stark, black tattoos. On the knuckles of the left fist curled next to her face were stamped the letters T-R-U-E. The next angle revealed their counterpart: L-O-V-E. There was also a tarantula on the side of her neck, a heart on her breastbone, and a cryptic symbol on her hand, an arrow at its center.

Roberts saw hope buried in all this carnage: Audrey Nelson had not made it, but there were living victims.

Prosecutors perform narrative somersaults to create empathy for invisible victims, who are reduced to the two dimensions of photographs and microscopic epithelial cells in a marked tube. But nothing told a story better than a warm human. Jurors turned their heads from gruesome crime scene photographs, hands clasped over their mouths. It’s much harder to turn from eyes with light still behind them. The living victims from Mississippi and San Diego could be Roberts’s ace in the hole: Hilda Nelson, Leila McClain, Laurie Barros, and Tonya Jackson.

Roberts and Amador resubmitted the decades-old physical evidence for additional testing, flawless in their procedure, aware every delicate thread of preserved evidence would be scrutinized. Roberts spent days with a phone glued to her ear, talking to investigators in Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Louisiana, along with the LA Sheriff’s Department, Long Beach Police Department, and San Diego Police Department. She tracked Samuel Little a.k.a. McDowell across the country, running near-constant offline searches with the National Crime Information Center, a catchall database of police record searches by name. Since he was a drifter and drug user, Sam’s name was run by some cop or other every day it seemed. The problem was that the hits showed up a day or three or a week after Sam was ten miles down the road, who knew in which direction.

Sam was a phantom with no address, no registered car, no credit card. Roberts’s urgency mounted daily as she pushed against her ass-chafing lieutenant’s threat to release a wanted flyer. Her greased pig might see it and slide into the shadows forever. Or he’d have his story all cooked up when they did finally nab him, and they’d never get a confession.

One morning, same drill, she caught Sam’s name in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, where a detective named Brett Young had run Sam after having seen him outside a local homeless shelter with some prostitutes and finding a crack pipe in his pocket.

Young hung up the phone without a goodbye to Roberts, strode straight to his car, and raced to the shelter. Must have been the new guy, she thought. That was a trick Rick Jackson had taught her: call and ask for whoever just made detective. You might just surf a wave of enthusiasm.

When Young called back, his tone was dejected, but only momentarily. He’d discovered the drifter had drifted again, two days before.

“I’m not done,” he said. “If you’ll allow me.”

Young alerted law enforcement in the area. Detectives on the case gleaned Sam received disability benefits directly to a Walmart card.

Anything with numbers or magnetic stripes can be tracked.

Roberts called Walmart customer service. An automated message asked for a PIN.

Fuck.

“If you can’t remember your PIN, enter your Social Security number and date of birth, followed by the pound sign,” the automated voice told her.

Those, she had.

“For your last five transactions, press 1. You will be charged one dollar.”

Roberts had him two days running in Louisville, Kentucky, same liquor store.

She checked again to make sure. Checked a third time, just to charge him the extra dollar for fun.

Within three hours, federal marshals in Louisville apprehended a bedraggled Sam, three steps from the door of Wayfair Homeless Shelter, a block from the liquor store where he’d last used the card. They took him into custody on an outstanding narcotics warrant.

They had him. The rub was they had a probable serial killer with a case-to-case match but not an indictment. They had actually only arrested and were holding him on a pissant narcotics warrant from when he’d skipped out on a drug diversion program in LA. They had him off the streets, but could they keep him?

Sam invoked his right to counsel, though not before he told officers he was a “braggadocio kingpin.” They noted he never asked why they were there.

After a brief stay in Texas for yet another warrant, he limped out to meet LAPD’s Fugitive Warrant Division detectives Chris Ratcliff and Jorge Morales, now missing one toe due to diabetes.

“Texas justice,” said Ratcliff before calling Roberts from the TGI Fridays at the airport to say they had him in custody.

A curvy young woman hustled by.

“Look at that ass. I would like to get me some of that. Get in between those legs, and lick that pussy,” Sam told the detectives.

“Bet she was thinking the same thing, buddy.”

When they reached the gate, Sam crossed his arms, demanded peanut M&Ms, and refused to get on the plane. Ratcliff traded some candy for a scene in public.

When the plane touched down on California soil, Sam smiled as he finished the last of the candy, the corners of his lips crusted with green shards of sugar. They left him in jail in Wasco and handed the ball back to Roberts with condolences.

Sam staunchly maintained his innocence.

Roberts and Amador presented the case to deputy district attorney Beth Silverman with freshly screened evidence and the confirmation swab. Silverman is one of the country’s most successful prosecutors of high-profile complex homicide cases, including notorious and egregious serial killers and rapists like the Grim Sleeper, the Southside Slayer, Chester Turner, and Latece Brown.

Silverman always closed wearing red. The evisceration of fools was game night for her. Her face only softened for the victims, when she was out of sight of the crowd. She’d gone to school for journalism, had once imagined herself a foreign correspondent in war zones. Instead, she became a soldier in a never-ending war against indomitable enemies—injustice, violence. Silverman dominated the battles at least.

“Not enough,” said Silverman.

She ran a hand through her chestnut mane and dropped her palm to the paper stack.

“In twenty years, I’ve never seen a rap sheet like this—never. I want to file. I can’t file with this. I can’t. Get me more victims.”

She paced.

“I need pattern evidence. Get me the living victims, see if they’ll testify. Walking. Talking. People.”

They’d all known the notoriously handsy head prosecutor Gary Hearnsberger would almost certainly need more than two hookers with matching DNA profiles on their corpses.

While Roberts doggedly built the case, her longtime partner and friend Amador held a slightly differing opinion on what constituted a hard day’s work. Tall and handsome, with a charm school education, he was more of a skater. The mounting tension breached the divider separating their cubicles until they blew. Their shouting match in the records room rattled the shelves.

All parties thought a change of pace wise. Roberts’s old buddy Rick Jackson got in the car for the next lap as she brought him up to speed while entering each case into the ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) system. They couldn’t hang on to the monster forever. She’d exhausted the other options. She and Jackson were going to have to pound some pavement.