Harvey Milk had just opened his camera shop. The bar and bathhouse scenes were jumping. “A clarion call went out in the underground network that San Francisco was the place to be,” said Ron Huberman, the first openly gay investigator in San Francisco’s district attorney’s office, who arrived in 1975. He didn’t know him.” 5īy 1974, the Castro was for gay men a beautiful refuge from everywhere else. “My God,” said his wife, Andrea, when we spoke recently. The woman who found the body called to Warner Jepson, an avant-garde composer, who in turn called the police. “Over the years, however, he had moved away from the role of impersonating beautiful women and concentrated more on gay comedy.” 4 “When Stevens first appeared on stage eight years ago, he made a sensation in San Francisco as a stunning impersonator,” said the Advocate. It had once been a hot spot for the military and celebrities, wrote James Smith, but by the seventies “the high tourist attendance and…hands-off rules discouraged the gay crowd and they largely went elsewhere.” 2 (It was, clucked the Sentinel, “about as respectable as the First Methodist Church back home.”) 3 Finocchio’s was an old-time club that had been around since the early thirties. Stevens, born in Texas, was a popular female impersonator and had been named the summer replacement at Finocchio’s. The 27-year-old was the Doodler’s second victim. Police theorized that Stevens himself had driven the murderer to the park.
He was last seen the previous night, leaving the Cabaret Club on Montgomery Street in the North Beach neighborhood. Joseph Stevens, nicknamed “Jae,” had been stabbed three times there was blood in his mouth and nose. Five murdered men would become, relative to what followed, a statistical blip.Ī woman, never identified, found a body at Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park on June 25, 1974. And then, four and half years after the killings ended, San Francisco’s own Ken Horne, a ballet school dropout, was reported to the Centers for Disease Control with Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Most media outlets, just maybe, did not consider gay men sufficiently sympathetic to rate coverage. When the killings began, it had been just a year since the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees ceased classifying homosexuality as a disorder. It was, perhaps, somewhat a matter of timing. Unlike cases with similar body counts - the Zodiac Killer and David Berkowitz, for example - this one was quickly forgotten. As a veteran detective told me, “Anyone in my position who tells you otherwise, especially when there hasn’t even been an indictment, is either untrustworthy or lying.”įorty years after the fact, the story of the Doodler killings has not been even cursorily told. It’s a fool’s errand to say any single victim is definitely the work of the Doodler, or to rule out the possibility of others. (The larger figure may be due to the frequency with which gay men were murdered in those years it’s possible that several distinct cases were conflated and the Doodler given too much credit.) Five men were contemporaneously identified in the newspapers as Doodler victims, but the count shouldn’t be considered definitive. But it is far more likely there were, in fact, five or six. One encounters this figure in the era’s press accounts and books of recent vintage. To the extent the case has been written about, the Doodler has been credited with fourteen victims.
Once they were alone, the men were stabbed and their bodies left on waterfronts and in parks. 1 Amused, flattered, perhaps titillated by the attention, man after man would leave the bar with their killer for a more secluded, intimate spot.
#The tube sock killer skin#
From January 1974 to September 1975, The Doodler - or, as he was sometimes known, the Black Doodler, on account of his skin color - caught the eye of the Castro’s bar patrons by drawing caricatures and cartoons of them. “Never married,” wrote the coroner.Ĭavanaugh was the first victim in a string of homicides that, to this day, remain unsolved. He was five-foot-eight and weighed 220 pounds. A photo that ran in the San Francisco Sentinel after his death shows that he was balding. He was born in Canada on March 2, 1923, and lived in San Francisco. In his pocket was $21.12 and on his wrist a Timex.Īs befits a man initially identified as John Doe #7, very little is known about Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh wore underwear, shoes, socks, pants, a shirt and a jacket. His body was, as the coroner’s register put it, “in a supine position” and showed signs of slight rigor mortis. His left hand betrayed a defensive wound.
Gerald Earl Cavanaugh, 49, had been stabbed multiple times. on January 27, 1974, a corpse was found at the water’s edge on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.
0 kommentar(er)
