Kolchak: The Night Stalker: A Black and Evil Truth (14 page)

“We’ve taken this precaution because from his MO he is a night crawler and we’re going to need this stuff to spot him. So far, there have been no reports of any activity by him during the daytime.

“We’ve got his car, the white Chevy, but that’s no guarantee he hasn’t stolen another one. There have been several thefts in the past 48 hours. God knows if he’s responsible for any of them. We’ve got to assume the worst and that he’s got wheels and is still highly mobile.

“We’ve marked off certain areas, mostly around Casino Center and along the Strip and these are being patrolled at night by plainclothesmen in unmarked cars.”

“What about the roadblocks?” asked Lane.

“Well, we’ve asked for help from the highway patrol but, as you know, they’re desperately understaffed. The most they can muster on twelve-hour shifts is about twenty men for the whole county.”

“All right,” said Lane. “Have them block off all the main arteries–Interstate 15, the Tonopah Highway and the Boulder Highway. I’ll activate the jeep posse and get as many as possible armed and out on some of the bigger main roads in a radius of, say, three to three and a half miles from the center of town.” He got up and pointed to one of the maps.

“We can have them cover points on Craig and Sunset roads to the north and south, and on Rainbow and Nellis boulevards to the east and west. They have radios and can be used to close the net if this guy is spotted and gets through our primary police lines. And they’re good over rough terrain, even at night. They can follow tracks and go places in those jeeps he could only go on foot if he makes a break and runs off the regular roads somewhere along the line.

“I think that’s about as close as we can get, what with checking all incoming and outgoing travelers–as close as we can get to sealing off this town. I’d hate to resort to a general curfew but let’s start cracking down on the kids under eighteen. If necessary, we can cut the midnight curfew on Friday and Saturday back to ten o’clock.”

“Good,” said Butcher. “Let’s do it and give that news out to the media people now. Best the ranks of kids are thinned out after dark as much as possible. We’ve had two girls disappear in the past few days and both are under twenty-one. I’d hate to see any more drop from sight.”

Bernie spoke up. “Has anything turned up on those girls that our people missed?”

“Nothing,” came the answer. And there’d been no calls from anyone who’d reported seeing Carolyn Riegel since she’d disappeared. But the PD and the sheriff’s office were busy checking out all sorts of false reports as to the sightings of Skorzeny in every part of town from Charleston Heights to College Park.

They also knew by now, Lorna Frontiere, of the UP wire service, had produced nearly a month’s worth of stories on the “Mystery Murderer of Las Vegas” which went out to all parts of the country, and someone at the meeting, I forget exactly who, mentioned that the publicity was doing the town no good.

“Memorial Day weekend is just six days off,” Butcher observed, “counting Friday as the day they should really start rolling in here. All those tourists are just going to make this thing that much harder.”

“I would hope to hell that we’ll have him long before that!” Lane shot back. “We’ve already had one hell of a local recession since the stocks took that nosedive and if this goes on much longer, people are going to start staying away from here in droves. I haven’t heard too much about cancellations from the hotel people, but the big boys on the Strip are getting anxious and my phone has been ringing for three days. They want action and they want it now!

“The situation is bad enough, but if we can grab this nut before the big weekend and let the world know we’ve got him in custody–nailed to the jailhouse wall, so to speak–I think we’ll come out of this thing all right. But we’ve got to work fast, now that we’ve got all this stuff from Bernie to go on. Officially, to all outsiders, this guy’s still classified as an ordinary maniac,” he chuckled ruefully, “if any homicidal killer can be classified as ordinary.”

Then came out one of those slips of the tongue that every newsman worth his salt dreams about.

“What’s been done about the victims down at the morgue?” asked Butcher. (It was a euphemistic reference to The Willows because, as I pointed out earlier, Las Vegas doesn’t really have a morgue.)

Paine looked inordinately pleased with himself and by now everyone had shifted and paced about so much that I was off to one side and just out of sight.

“Everything’s been handled very nicely. The Hughes girl had no other relatives other than the ex-husband in Desplaines, so we had her cremated. The same goes for the Hanochek woman. As for Mrs. Reynolds, her husband flew out here two days ago. We had a little talk with him and persuaded him to hold a closed-casket funeral at The Willows and it went off quietly. Then she was cremated at our suggestion. No one’s turned up to claim Hemphill, so I think we can get rid of him tomorrow. We had some plastic work done on the Branden girl’s neck to make the punctures look like a bad slash that was sewed up by a doctor. We shipped her body to her old man in Florida.”

Well, there it was. All neat and tidy. Now, I thought, if only the two girls were found alive, everything would be just fine. The distraught parents could be “persuaded” not to ask too many questions and it would be certain that some believable explanation would be found if they were discovered dead in the same way as the first five; some explanation that would be readily accepted by the survivors, none of whom, I was certain, would be thinking about demanding a copy of the coroner’s report. (Not that it would have done them much good, since I later found out the reports had been altered.)

The county commissioners, whose function was, in part, to supervise these “dedicated lawmen,” would prove no problem. They were all pretty much of the same persuasion, punched out of the same cookie cutter. The D.A. had a brother on the commission, and the sheriff, a cousin. The same applied to the city commissioners. One of them was related by marriage to both the D.A. and the sheriff, and also a top-ranking state senator. Between Laine and Paine (Inc.) they had one relative and two other solid connections on County General’s board of trustees and they could be effective in silencing any comment from the pathology department should anyone down there decide to start blabbing. They had already quietly removed McManus and Netski and both had left town.

All in the name of what? Suppressing a panic? Saving the tourist industry of Las Vegas? Or just a little election time insurance and the sheer pleasure of exercising power?

It’s a well-known fact that periodically some columnist in a newspaper or some magazine writes a new expose on “Sin City USA: Las Vegas,” dredging up all the old Mafia stories and mixing in a little prostitution for spice–as if there weren’t Mafiosi and prostitutes operating everywhere else in the country. And every time this happens the hotel-casino operators get burned a little bit more. New scars over old, even though a number of them are as straight as doctors and as sober as judges. But through it all, they remain for the most part private citizens. What these exposes really do (when they’re done right) is hurt the local politicos. They can make them look very foolish, when, as Paine put it, they seem unable to “handle” their jobs.

Now, Paine, more than all the rest, knows the value of good publicity. He never misses and opportunity to be quoted on almost any issue that is in any way newsworthy, no matter how trivial, from the “intended vulgarity” at the end of the first act of “Hair” to the “drug-oriented advocacy of certain popular rock songs.” In fact, he manages to get quoted on something almost daily in the local press and almost four times a week on the air. And every time some well-known entertainer gets drunk and flies off the handle in public in Las Vegas, D.A. Paine is right on hand through the auspices of network television to express the desire to look into said entertainer’s connections with the “underworld.” And not that his malapropisms stop him from getting all this publicity. Oh, he gets his “tang tungled” in excess verbiage, but the media all over the country laps it up and it feeds his ever-expanding ego.

He will hold forth on how pornography drives “secret masturbators” to go out in the dead of night and rape helpless twelve-year-olds” even though almost the entire body of scientific evidence now available in this country contradicts him. And the papers carry it verbatim.

In the nearly eleven months of fiscal 1969-1970, Paine had made the Daily News 283 times, 250 of them on the front page. (I checked the files to make sure of this.) Only God and our “librarian” know how many times he has made the local columns on both papers. Why, his “Pot is ROT!” signs on all local bus stop benches actually made all three big national news magazines. Oh, no indeed! If for no other reason, as far as I could see, Paine (and his “associates”) would have to wrap this thing up in a neat little bundle for the sake of his own self-aggrandizement he had already started by (A) clamping down on the free press, and (B) getting rid of the bodies and (C) falsifying the coroner’s reports.

Why, he might even be governor someday.

While a crazed killer roamed the streets of Las Vegas at will, Paine actually found time to compose and distribute a campaign handbill that, among other things, informed the citizens of Clark County that he was “weary of paying taxes just to support flower children with social disease, college anarchists, welfare hoboes and long haired, bisexual love people.” And, in addition to all this, he kept up his activities as the president of the most exclusive stag film club in town while simultaneously ordering a crackdown on publicly patronized “adult entertainment” film houses.

I know, I know, It’s more digression. But there it was. A crazed killer on the loose. An election year in Las Vegas. And the Devil takes the hindmost.

CHAPTER 15

To make up for that last tirade, I’ll cut this part short by saying I left when the meeting broke up and made my report to Vincenzo.

Luck was running as usual and nothing turned up that night or on Friday night.

During the entire weekend the only stories we could come up with were “POLICE REPORT PROGRESS IN TRACING KILLER” and a lot of copy detailing those efforts that weren’t censored. But this lack of news had the opposite effect from what our city-hall geniuses intended. There actually started to be a small rumble from the general public, and on a weekend no less! They were getting nervous. How long, they wanted to know, was this stupid manhunt going to continue?

By Monday, the twenty-fourth, there were piles of letters in our office with complaints, demands for a re-call and several sure-fire suggestions on how to trap the “fiendish slayer of innocents,” a phrase I lifted from one sweet (assumed) little old lady saloonkeeper and (confirmed) ex-cooch dancer of the preprohibition era. But it seemed the killer had either managed to sneak out of town or had gone underground to drink his stolen blood in peace and safety. And there was still no word on the two missing girls.

There were, however, frequent reports of the “tall man,” Skorzeny, being sighted in all parts of Las Vegas from Huntridge to the Stardust Golf Course. Every single report had to be checked out and all turned out to be false alarm–calls from frightened housewives and cranks and kids who thought they’d have some fun putting on the “fuzz.” These latter ones were dealt with severely.

Tuesday came and was fast waning with still no progress in sight. The jeep posse had been relieved of picket duty Monday morning and there was another briefing scheduled, this time in the combined-forces HQ in the sheriff’s office at 8:30 P.M.

CHAPTER 16

TUESDAY, MAY 25, 1970

NIGHT

Bernie sat there looking glum. He may have had more authority now–a nominal leadership of sorts in the operation–but the meeting still appeared to be dominated by would-be politicians in perpetuity, no lawmen.

Paine started in. “I think the time has come, gentlemen, to decide whether or not to continue with this farce any longer. It’s my best guess our bird has flown the coop. There hasn’t been a ripple since Thursday night.

“I say let’s tell the press we have reason to believe he’s slipped through to California and throw it on Ev Younger’s shoulders. That way we’ll only look bad for missing his escape. Hell, Scotland Yard, the police forces of three cities in Canada and that fancy organization .. uh whatzit, Innerpol? Whatever. They all let him slip through their fingers. Let someone else get stuck with the bag.”

“And,” Butcher aped, “we would also be able to assure the people in town that Las Vegas is now free from danger and…”

“Don’t be such idiots,” Lane snapped. “It won’t wash and we all know it. We’ve still got our deal with the papers and we’re not exactly being crucified by the wire services.

“I say we continue the surveillance and hope he makes some kind of move in the next twenty-four hours so we can wrap this thing up once and for all. In fact, it’s our only hope. We can’t clamp a lid on this town just before one of our biggest holiday weekends.”

Why the sweat about the loss of a few frightened tourists? Hey, they’d stayed in town during our cab wars when shotguns were being fired out car windows and that was a helluva lot more dangerous to the average vacationer than this situation.

No, damnit! “The boys” were still playing politics. But suddenly their decision was made for them. Combined forces HQ got a radio report that the suspect had been spotted near an apartment building at Rexford and Ellen just south of Oakey. A patrol car was tracking him. About thirty seconds later came another report. ID confirmed. Positive visual contact. He was driving, of all things, a taxicab, heading across Oakey and north on Houssels. The cab, of course, was stolen and a later check revealed it has been snatched right off the company’s lot only the night before.

The prowl car reported the cab was just cruising. It had just pulled past him when he noticed the driver’s face and checked the eight-by-ten photo next to him on the seat. Apparently, Skorzeny hadn’t noticed the prowl care which was moving at about twenty miles an hour behind him about half a block away with its headlights out.

Orders were issued immediately. Two units were called up to seal off Rexford and Houssels at Oakey, another to close off Park Paseo at Las Vegas Boulevard and Sixth Street. More units were ordered to blockade Fifth Place and Sixth Street at Oakey, and Sweeney and Griffith at Sixth. This effectively closed off a four-by-six block area of upper-middle-class homes ranging in worth from $35,000 to $80,000 in a neighborhood built up mostly in the past twelve years. With variations in design caused by different builders in the course of the years, all but two of the homes were single level and most were stucco with gravel or rock roofs.

The chopper was launched and took little more than forty seconds to come buzzing like an angry dragonfly over the designated area. It arrived just as the cab turned east on Sweeney between Houssels and Fifth Place. It was now moving a bare five miles an hour and for all intents and purposes might have been a driver on call looking for an address.

As the cab turned onto Sweeney the car at Rexford was pulled off duty and told to stand by. The cars on Park Paseo at Las Vegas Boulevard and Sixth moved up to face each other at Fifth Place.

The car at Oakey and Fifth Place started to crawl north on an intercept course with the cab. Units at Sweeney and Griffith moved forward one block to Fifth Place and the spare car on Oakey was ordered to nip around Sixth Street and come up on Bracken to Fifth Place.

Skorzeny was now “contained” on Fifth Place in an area just under three blocks long with exits only on Sweeney and Park Paseo. He slowly turned north on Fifth Place.

The units converged with the Braken unit pulling onto Fifth Place and moving up to parallel the first unit which had followed Skorzeny down Houssels. Meanwhile, the Griffith unit raced around to Park Paseo to replace the car that had moved forward to Fifth Place. A backup unit on regular patrol on Las Vegas Boulevard was ordered to block Park Paseo at the boulevard intersection.

Skorzeny was almost directly in front of number 1313, a pink, stucco structure on the east side of the street. Like the others, it had a white-gravel roof. One bedroom window and one den window faced the street with a carport on its southwest corner and a circular driveway in front.

Skorzeny had now stopped. From the radio messages that crackled over our receiver it was obvious he’d spotted the patrol cars.

All this time the chopper hovered overhead, the thpthp-thp-thp of its rotors causing the curious residents in several homes to come to their windows. The patrol cars had edged to within 100 feet of the cab from both ends of the street

[What follows in this report was garnered “after the fact” by a lengthy debriefing near sunrise the following morning. J.R.]

Skorzeny turned off his engine and killed his headlights. Then he bolted out of the passenger side of the cab toward the carport of 1313, dodging between a two-door hardtop and a pickup truck. He came to the stucco-backed wall of the carport and ripped the knees of his trousers climbing over the truck’s bumper. He found a sturdy wooden gate set into a wood and fiberglass fence at the edge of the carport. He came upon the gate locked from the other side, backed off a few feet, and slammed into it with his shoulder just as the first police officers hit the driveway.

Skorzeny found himself in an area about seven-feet wide and eighteen feet long. To his right, garbage cans. To his left, the water tower to the house’s air conditioner. Ahead of him another wooden gate, locked from the other side. With a swipe of his hand he scattered the garbage cans and lunged at the second gate as the first two officers came within six feet of him, pistols drawn. The nearest one bellowed, “Police! Freeze, mister!” but Skorzeny, carried by the force of his leap, had plunged through the gate and stumbled on the single concrete step that led to the backyard, a bricked-over affair with a large, kidney-shaped pool.

He landed face down and started to rise as the first cop grabbed his legs. He kicked out and the second cop leaped over him and shoved his Highway Patrolman Magnum against Skorzeny’s temple.

“Just hold it right there, mister, or I’ll blow your head off.”

Later, the officer who confided that statement to me added, “The s.o.b. just stiffened and then relaxed. It put us off guard. We had him rolled over on his back and were just getting the cuffs out when he moved like a rattler striking. He grabbed my gun, which threw me off balance. He kicked my partner in the groin and grabbed my shirt, pulling me over him.

“My gun went off twice and I’d swear at least one slug hit him square in the chest. But he just hung on, like a vise, scrambled to his feet and dragged me along with him. Hell, I’m no midget. I weigh almost 220. Then he slammed me one across the side of the head open handed, and I went out like a light.”

Two other officers piled in at this point, the first tripping over the cop on the ground clutching his groin. The second jumped over both of them and made a running tackle at Skorzeny, knocking him head first over the diving board. When the uninjured cop got to his feet he ran over and piled on top of the two figures who were rolling on the rough brick surface of the yard. One cop was on his stomach with Skorzeny lying atop him ramming the cop’s head repeatedly into the bricks. The other cop was straddling Skorzeny and pistol-whipping him across the back of his skull.

Skorzeny made a half-successful leap to get free, but the last pistol-blow staggered him and he landed, twisting, in the pool, sinking straight to the bottom. By now the pool was surrounded with officers, two holding shotguns and several more with pistols trained on the pool. The only man still out of action was the one who was knocked unconscious, Stanley J. Wilson. He had been dragged to safety in the garbage-strewn passageway.

An unidentified cop leaped into the pool to drag Skorzeny out and the water started to splash over the edge. Although they couldn’t see clearly, the cops watched horrified as Skorzeny wrapped his spider-like arms and legs around the cop and calmly proceeded to drown him. They couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting one of their own men, so two more dropped their guns and jumped in. The water was now splashing over the pool coping and into the brick drainage holes.

While this was going on, the homeowner, a contractor named Ford, had come to his poolside sliding door armed with a shotgun and turned on the pool light and the patio lights. He slid open the door, saw what was going on and stood there with his mouth hanging open.

It was getting difficult to see exactly what was going on in the pool and a fourth officer jumped in as one came up with the unconscious form of the first cop. While others pulled the half-drowned man from the pool, three more wrestled Skorzeny to the surface and dragged him to the steps at the shallow end of the pool. He wasn’t struggling any longer. Nor was he breathing with any apparent difficulty. The biggest of the three cops later admitted to punching him as hard as he could in the stomach and Skorzeny doubled over. Another half-dragged him , still on his feet, shirt torn, jacket ripped, out of the pool and put a handcuff on his left wrist.

Skorzeny pulled his arm away from the cop and, suddenly straightening, elbow-jabbed him in the gut, sending him sprawling and rolling back into the pool. Skorzeny turned toward the back fence and was now between the pool and a small palm tree. Before him were two advancing officers, pistols leveled. Behind him two more circled the pool. Skorzeny lunged forward and all fired simultaneously. The noise was deafening. Lights in neighboring houses began to go on.

Skorzeny’s body twitched and bucked as the heavy slugs ripped through his body. His forward momentum carried him into the officers ahead of him and he half-crawled, half-staggered to the southeast corner of the yard where another gate was set into the fiberglass fencing. Two more officers, across the pool, cut loose with their pistols, emptying them into this writing body which danced like a puppet. Another cop fired two shots from his pump-action shotgun and Skorzeny was lifted clean off his feet and slammed against the gate, sagging to the ground.

En masse from both ends of the pool they advanced, when he gave out with a terrible hissing snarl and started to rise once more. All movement ceased as the cops, to a man, stood frozen in their tracks. Skorzeny stood there like some hideous caricature, his shredding clothing and skin hanging like limp rags from his scarecrow form. His flesh was ripped in several places and he was oozing something that looked like watered-down blood. It was pinkish and transparent. He stood there like a living nightmare. Then he straightened and raised the fist with the cuff still dangling from it like a charm bracelet.

“Fools!” he shrieked. “You can’t kill me. You can’t even hurt me.”

Overhead, the copter hovered, the copilot giving a blow-by-blow description of the fight over the radio. The police on the ground were paralyzed. Nearly thirty shots had been fired (the bullets later tallied in reports turned in by the participating officers) and their quarry was still as strong as ever. He’d been hit repeatedly in the head and legs, so a bulletproof vest wasn’t the answer. And at distances sometimes as little as five feet, they could hardly have missed. They’d seen him hit.

They stood frozen in an eerie tableau as the still roiling pool water threw weird reflections all over the yard.

Then Skorzeny did the most frightening thing of all. He smiled. A red-rimmed, hideous grin revealing fangs that “would have done justice to a Doberman Pinscher.”

He kicked the gate off its hinges and plunged out to the easement behind the fence, its three-foot high growth of weeks tangling in his legs. To his right was a low fence that gave onto an empty lot leading to Sixth Street. He vaulted over and headed out toward the street. He had already crossed the sidewalk and was heading north toward Franklin Avenue before the first officers reached the easement.

Since all the available patrol cars had been pulled into Fifth Place, and there was only one man who’d been able to think quickly enough to radio what was happening–the chopper’s copilot–there was a delay of almost a full minute before the ground units started to backtrack and head for Sixth and Franklin.

Meanwhile, the chopped, its infrared Homans camera continuing to record the unbelievable scene below, followed the scarecrow figure of Skorzeny as he dashed past on Franklin. The copilot aimed a bullhorn at him and shouted “Halt! Police! You are surrounded! You can’t get away!”

Skorzeny continued to move at an astounding pace, racing halfway past John S. Park Elementary School before the first patrol car caught sight of him as it tore down Franklin with its sirens shattering the once-peaceful night. He rounded the corner at Tenth and Franklin, jumped across a lawn and headed east again. Somewhere along the line he stopped and ducked behind a car or tree because the prowl car passed by him and reached the T-end at Eleventh Street without sighting him. The prowl car skidded to a halt sideways, effectively blocking that end of the street. The driver radioed his position, called for a backup unit to block off the other end. Then he and his partner left the car, his partner carrying the shotgun while he took the south side of the street, his Magnum drawn and ready. Slowly, working both sides of the sidewalkless street, they advanced and had reached perhaps 100 yards into the street when the backup unit careened to a tire-burning halt at the opposite end.