Note: The first known murder victim was
discovered on Thursday morning, October 30, 1986. A traveler
scavenging for aluminum cans spotted the partially clothed body of a
dark-haired women in her twenties, curled up in a drainage ditch in
an industrial area of Rubidoux, near Agua Mansa Road and Market
Street. The dead woman was lying on her back, her sweater and beige
culottes ripped to shreds. Her flimsy panties were pulled down
around her ankles. She had been stabbed multiple times and her chest
and face were cosmeticized with blood. Her public hairs had been
ripped from her private parts by an angry hand.
An autopsy revealed that 23-year-old Michelle
Yvette Gutierrez, of Corpus Christi, Texas, had strangulation marks
on her neck and suffered trauma to the anal and genital areas. Marks
on her breast and buttocks provided a chilling framework for the
story of her death.
Note: Another gruesome case began on December
11, 1986, when the half-clothed body of Charlotte Jean Palmer, 24,
of Anna, Illinois was found near Highway 74 and Matthews Road in
Romoland. County coroners were unable to determine the cause of her
death, because of the rapidity of putrefaction. Fear and panic
spread as more and more women began mysteriously disappearing. Over
a period of five years, from 1986 to 1991, nineteen prostitutes were
found murdered - at least three of the Riverside County victims had
their breasts severed. A forensic pathologist noted that cutting off
female breasts was a way in which serial killers can uniquely hurt
and harm the females they loathe.
Note: The serial killer's third victim was a
woman named Linda Ann Ortega. At age 37, she worked at Carl's Jr.
fast-food restaurant on Railroad Canyon Road in Lake Elsinore when
she wasn't applying her trade as a strumpet, Her record reeked of
drug arrests. Her naked body was found ravished and stabbed in a
patch of light brush off a dirt road near Franklin Street and Ridge
Road. Tailored evidence put her death at three days earlier. Her
blood contained high levels of alcohol and cocaine.
Ortega's coworkers at the fast-food restaurant
described her as a devoted single mother, struggling to raise a teen-age
son. They were surprised to find out she was a part-time prostitute.
Note: May 2, another transient fell prey to the
random slayer. Decaying molars in the lower jaw made identification
conclusive. Her name was Martha Bess Young, she was 27 years old,
and formally of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was found spread-eagle
and totally naked in a gully adjacent Franklin Street, her open eyes
staring sightlessly into infinity. She had been dead at least three
weeks.
An ex post facto examination revealed the pretty
blonde Lake Elsinore streetwalker had a high level of amphetamines
in her blood. Apparently, she had died from a toxic reaction to the
drug as she was being strangled. Once again, the genius killer left
minus-clue signs. br>
Note: naked and bludgeoned body was found
November 11, 1989 northwest of Lake Elsinore, near Temescal Canyon
Road, I-15 and Lake Street.
"Angel," as she was known on the streets, was a
derelict of drink and drugs at age 36, and she knew it. She became a
prostitute to support her two children after her divorce. Her arrest
record included jail time for prostitution and possession of drug
paraphernalia. A pathologist was able to deduce by the deep gashes
in her arms and hands, that Angel hadn't died easy; she had received
these frightful blows while attempting to ward off the lunatic,
attacking her.
Note: On Thursday morning, January 18, 1990,
Riverside County sheriff''s investigators were summoned to a scene
east of I-15 in Lake Elsinore. They arrived at 6:30 a.m., 30 minutes
after a Lake Elsinore jogger stumbled upon the nude corpse of Daria
Jane Ferguson, of Sun City. In death, she was a doll-like figurine.
Blood caked her bitten tongue. Sheriff's Sgt. Howard Rush pinpointed
the location at Grape Street, one mile south of Railroad Canyon Road.
Never married, the 105 pound victim had four children. Her arrest
record was crammed with the usual titillations of sex and drugs.
Note: Her need for narcotics and alcohol, sent
Carol Lynn Miller into the risky area of the unknown, and
interrupted the 35-year-old woman's housewifely role. Now divorced,
in late January, 1990, she vanished from the Riverside area. It was
first presumed she had left the area because of police pressure to
rid the streets of whores. Her totally nude body was discovered by
workers in an orchard on February 8, at Mt. Vernon Avenue and Pigeon
Pass Road in Highgrove. Cause of death was listed as "multiple stab
wounds to the chest, and asphyxia. A coroner said there was a wound
near Carol's right nipple.
Note: Police determined that Cheryl Coker, 33,
and married, suffered the worst death of all. Her remains were
discovered on November 6, 1990, near a dumpster enclosure about
11:40 a.m. by a man installing factory equipment in a new factory
building behind an industrial unit on Palmyrita Avenue in northeast
Riverside, adjacent where Miller was found. She was naked, and her
suffocated body was concealed under a pile of oak branches. In a
moment of unreasoning madness her attacker had severed her right
breast, which was found beside her.
The man who telephone the police said: "I went to
a dumpster enclosure in the parking lot behind the building looking
for a piece of wood to use as a brace. I saw a foot sticking out
from some tree trimmings near the gates to the enclosure. At first,
I thought the foot and leg belonged to a plastic mannequin. I
reached down and touched the toe. Then, I realized it wasn't plastic."
There were many old trees in the neighborhood and
police went in search of one with newly cut branches, in hopes that
someone might have seen a man cutting the trimmings and would be
able to provide them with a description. No such tree was found. No
one in the neighborhood saw a stranger lurking about.
Note: on December 21, 1990. Not far from the
last murder scene, in a dumpster enclosure at the rear of an
industrial complex on Iowa Avenue, a man emptying trash was startled
by the sight of Susan Melissa Sternfeld's nude and strangled body.
She was barely 27.
A few crumbs of information were gathered. Susan
was a resident of Riverside. She had worked successfully as a model
and in the cosmetics, clothing business.
Note: According to the pathologist who performed
the autopsy on victim No. 13, Kathleen Leslie Milne, a divorced
woman of 42, "she was rendered unconscious by several blows to the
head, then strangled." Her lifeless body was unceremoniously dumped
amid discarded beer cans and old tires. The pathologist theorized
that the flesh abrasion on the pretty brunette's right thigh had
been caused by forcible removal of her panties. Police were stymied.
Clues led nowhere.
Also known on the streets as Carol Kathleen
Swenson and Kathy Pluckett, a passing motorist spotted her corpse
northwest of Lake Elsinore, less than a mile from where Angel's body
was found. She had been dead less than 24 hours, a pathologist said.
Note: Cherie Michelle Payseur was destined to
become victim No. 14. At age 24, she had attended California School
for the Deaf in Riverside. Never married, she had one child out of
wedlock. To support herself and her child, Cherie worked
periodically as a cleaning woman. To support her drug habit, she
became a woman of easy virtue.
On the muggy morning of April 27, 1991, a
homeless man looking for aluminum cans stumbled upon her bare body
at the rear of the Concourse Bowling Center on Arlington Avenue in
Riverside. Poor Cherie had become yet another piece of the puzzle of
murdered prostitutes. The handle from a toilet plunger protruded
from her vagina.
Note: Her naked body was found by a trucker near
the intersection of Sampson Avenue and Delilah Street, south of
Highway 91. Authorities found Kelly's corpse still warm. It had been
barely 43 days since the death of Sherry Ann Latham.
Note: The body discovered off a dirt road near a
barren construction site in the Tiscany Hills section of Lake
Elsinore was found by a building contractor around 1 p.m. September
13, 1991. Her background and the modus operandi was similar to other
victims with one exception. For 30-year-old Catherine McDonald, of
Riverside, the distinction of being the killer's only black victim
was only more "horrible news" and added another dimension to the
killer's many perversions.
The corpse had evidently died in a paroxysms of
pain, her curvaceous form all twisted, her arms akimbo, eyes staring
wide open into oblivion. This, the 17th in a series of murders
dating back to 1986, sent Riverside County further into paralyzing
shock.
Note: A passing motorist spotted the girl's nude
corpse in a patch of matted undergrowth on the dirt shoulder of a
heavily trafficked intersection in Mira Loma northwest of Riverside.
It was October 30, the day before Halloween, and , oddly, the fifth
anniversary of the day Michelle Yvette Guttierrez, the first victim
found. According to the motorist who discovered the body, he was
headed for work, around 7:15 a.m., when he turned from Country
Village Road onto Granite Hill Drive, a two-lane frontage street
that parallel Highway 60. He said he spotted the body across the
street from a heavily used park-and-ride lot adjacent the Country
Village senior housing development south of the Riverside-San
Bernardino boundary line.
"At first I thought it was a mannequin," he said,
"but at closer inspection I realized it was the corpse of a woman."
His heart beating a wild tattoo, he hurried to a phone and called
the police. Within minutes, Riverside County's sheriff's
investigator Henry Sawicki and a string of task force officers
arrived and fanned the area for clues.
Delliah Wallace was a 35-year-old Riverside
resident with a history of arrests for drug abuse and harlotry. A
mother of five, her street name was Delilah Zamora.
Note: At 1:20 p.m. just two days before
Christmas, 1991, emergency calls began coming in on Riverside's
Sheriff's Office lines in rapid-fire order. The dispatcher fielded
the first one - a call from a worker in an orange grove near the
intersection of Jefferson Street and Victoria Avenue, a half-mile
from the Riverside police station. Even as the unidentified caller
was talking, patrol units were being rushed to the scene where body
No. 19 was found.
The lawmen who found the bare-naked body of 39-year-old
Eleanore Ojeda Casares were no strangers to the grim realities of
their work. The violent deaths of local prostitutes had practically
become an everyday fact of life in their profession. It was the same
old story; the woman had a history of prostitution and drugs. She,
like most of the others, had been killed near a holiday, which some
lawmen considered held a hidden meaning while others felt it was a
coincidence.