Breaking Rank (12 page)

Whatever might have been their original motives and attitudes, the detectives had developed extraordinary empathy and compassion for “their” victims. To watch those detectives at work in Mission Valley was to conclude that Donna Gentile might just as well have been a wife, a sister, a daughter. Catching her killer, and the murderers of the other victims, had become an obsession.

Society at large should feel such concern.

Task force members determined that Ronald Elliot Porter, ex-Marine and Escondido automobile mechanic, killed Donna Gentile. Although convicted of a single second-degree murder charge (and serving twenty-seven to life), fibers, blood samples, and witnesses linked Porter to as many as fourteen additional cases.

This development, the fingering of Porter, astonished a lot of people—especially when it was learned that Gentile had been in the employ of Karen Wilkening. In fact, she had gone to one of Don Dixon's three-day
blowouts in Del Mar—and had returned to the Boulevard only one day before her death.

Brian Maurice Jones was tied to four prostitute killings, and sentenced to death on two of them.

Richard Allen Sanders was posthumously tied to several of the other cases. And fourteen more suspects were arrested in ten additional cases.

Schons, with help from SDPD personnel, cleared all police officers of any involvement in the deaths or disappearances of sex workers. Almost as important to me, personally, was that Bill Kolender was cleared completely of any wrongdoing. Today, he's the sheriff of San Diego County. And Bonnie Dumanis, deeply devoted to safe streets and justice for all, is the new district attorney.

I'd never worked vice, and had made only a handful of prostitution arrests. But I'd hassled large numbers of hookers, pimps, and johns during my days as a rookie beat cop—most of them right there on the Boulevard. I knew that prostitution was common, that it was frustrating and infuriating to homeowners and businesspeople, and to church and school and park officials. But with my task force involvement, I got a much broader and deeper education into the habits, patterns, and complexities associated with street prostitution.

The experience deepened my conviction that prostitution, like drug use, should be decriminalized.

For years, I'd predicated my decriminalization argument on familiar grounds: oldest occupation, still around, always will be . . . consenting adults . . . government out of the bedroom . . . the right of adult women to make a living of their choice . . .

I'd also argued, though with less confidence (and no empirical data), that prostitution was a “healthy outlet” for
potentially
violent men. Not the Gary Ridgways of the world, of course. But “normal” men, unlucky in love,
possessed of a normal sex drive but unable to attract women without paying for them. I figured prostitution might serve to reduce the incidence of rape and other sexual assaults among these men. Now, I'm not so sure. The task force revealed that some of the suspects, having had their performance or their equipment ridiculed, responded by murdering the woman.

But rather than outlawing a risky form of commerce that will always find a way to operate, I believe we have a moral imperative to do everything we can to make prostitution as
safe
as possible. Serial murder expert Robert Keppel has established that true serial killers keep killing until they're caught, or they die.

“Morality” seems to be the biggest sticking point between “harm reduction” public policy on the one hand, and a reckless disregard for the safety of sex industry workers (and their clients, for that matter) on the other. The issue is fraught with contradictions and controversy. Many of the arguments against decriminalization are compelling:

       
•
  
Prostitution, as it's commonly (but by no means exclusively) framed, i.e., males buying sex from females, is degrading and demeaning to women.

       
•
  
Beyond the most talked about health risks—violence, HIV, and other STDs—women who engage in high-volume vaginal sex risk major structural damage to their sexual and other organs.

       
•
  
Many women don't
choose
prostitution so much as have it chosen for them.

       
•
  
While many prostitutes don't work for pimps, those who do are exploited and otherwise mistreated, physically, emotionally, financially.

       
•
  
Significant numbers of young girls, including the occasional preteen, find their way into the trade.

Research findings are mixed. Sweden, for example, “recriminalized” prostitution in 1999, largely on political and social, not scientific grounds. Its parliament, which has reached gender parity and is committed to ending patriarchal domination of Swedish life, has officially defined
prostitution as “violence against women and children.” The new law allows for the selling but not the buying or the attempted purchase of sex. Men who get, or offer to get, sex for money can be fined between one and two thousand (American) dollars or jailed for up to six months. A prostitute who provides sex is guilty of no crime. As the Swedes conceive it, the law is designed to tip the scales of gender power, to reverse the age-old pattern of penalizing women who have been forced into or otherwise victimized by the occupation of prostitution.

How is the Swedish model working? If there's a research-based answer I haven't found it. What we do know is that very few arrests have been made under the law since it became effective on January 1, 1999. Further, there is evidence that while street prostitution has been reduced significantly (in Stockholm the numbers of street hookers have gone from three hundred to one hundred) there's been a dramatic
increase
in apartment and hotel room coupling for dollars. Still, illegal. For the man.

Other countries, such as England, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, have decriminalized indoor prostitution, citing the safety of sex workers as the primary reason. In Canada, it remains illegal to engage, on either end of the transaction, in street prostitution. It is also unlawful to operate a “bawdy house.” But a sex worker may legally provide sex for money in a private dwelling.

Trading street for indoor prostitution does not answer the moral or political objections of sex industry opponents. Nor does it mean that sex workers are completely safe from misogynists or sociopaths. But when one considers the M.O. of serial killers like Pickton, Armstrong, Yates, Ridgway, and many others, each of whom abducted his victims from the streets, sex in a room offers far greater safety for sex workers.

One approach for lawmakers: decriminalize home, apartment, and hotel room prostitution. License and tax third-party owners and managers (
aka
pimps and madams), as well as sex workers. Collect business and license fees, using the revenue to offset the costs of (1) inspection and enforcement, (2) health examinations for all sex workers, and (3) outreach services to assist those who want to leave the trade, or to resist pandering (the encouragement of another to become a prostitute) in the first place. And maintain laws against soliciting or purchasing sex on the streets.

It's not as if we don't know how a transition from streets to indoor prostitution would work. It's all around us. Do you have an alternative weekly newspaper? Check its last pages. Scantily clad women (and more than a few men in G-strings) offering themselves, body and, well, body—for a price. And don't think sex for dollars is not going on in all those adult nightclubs. As the new chief in town, I dressed in my grubbies one night, pulled a baseball cap down low, and accompanied one of my Seattle vice cops into a neighborhood club that featured table dancing (more aptly called chair humping). My partner bought a dance and demonstrated the “challenges” of proper law enforcement. A moment later another dancer approached a patron (client?) seated next to me. Three dances later he zipped up, then lit up, and she ambled over to the next guy, sixty bucks richer.

Making indoor sex-for-sale legal would not eliminate street prostitution. But fewer kids would show up for show-and-tell with semen-filled rubbers. And far fewer of America's sisters and daughters would be beaten, abducted, murdered.

*
I was one of those foot-dragging deputy chiefs, assigned at the time to Field Ops. My argument? Officer safety. We were severely understaffed in patrol, being “nickled and dimed” by Investigations: If four detectives went off to some nebulous task force, I'd have to give up four patrol cops to replace them. I regret my initial opposition to the DA's proposal. In fact, I'm ashamed of it.

CHAPTER 4

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: THE COWARD'S WAY OUT

O
FFICER
K
IMBERLY
T
ONAHILL, THE
bottom third of her heart sheared off by a .9mm slug, is dead before she hits the ground. Officer Timothy Ruopp, shot in the legs and in the head, lies mortally wounded in Mercy Hospital. Patrol officers swarm the eucalyptus grove next to the parking lot of Grape Street Park. Police canines sniff their way through the damp brush. A black-and-white SDPD chopper hovers overhead, its blazing light helping in the search for the shooter.

Joselito Cinco, wanted for unlawful possession of a firearm, had bragged to friends, “I'm going to kill the next cop who stops me.” That next cop was Ruopp, an ordained minister with four young children, a shy smile, and a slight lisp. He had stopped Cinco to write him a ticket (for furnishing alcohol to a couple of teenage girls) when the suspect pulled a semiautomatic pistol and opened fire. The cops never had a chance. Both officers' guns were still holstered when their backup arrived.