The Killer Book of Cold Cases
Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
Copyright © 2012 by Tom Philbin
Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Dawn Adams
Cover images © spxChrom/istockphoto.com, livingimages/istockphoto.com, redhumv/istockphoto.com
Internal images © Bloomington Police Force, p. 118; Chris Humphrey, p. 51; El
Segundo Police Department, p. 3, 4, 11; Federal Bureau of Investigation, p. 91, 97, 105, 187, 194; John Robinson Task Force, p. 58, 60; New York Police Department, p. 26; Public Domain, p. 19, 27, 37, 66, 68, 76, 113, 125, 136, 146, 156, 161, 201, 202; United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, p. 88
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Philbin, Tom
The killer book of cold cases : incredible stories, facts, and trivia from the most baffling true crime cases of all time / Tom Philbin.
p. cm.
1. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Case studies. 2. Crime—Case studies.
I. Title.
HV6515.P483 2012
364.10973—dc23
Printed and bound in Canada.
WC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Whatever Happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
The Cold Case That Chills My Heart
More Cold Cases: A Capsule Guide
How Criminal Investigations Go Wrong
Most crimes are simple to solve. It is clear who the perp is and why he or she committed the crime. Cops call those cases grounders, but that’s not the kind of story you will find in this book.
The Killer Book of Cold Cases
rounds up some of the most baffling cases of all time. Many have never been solved.
One of the cases you’ll read about is the disappearance of a prominent New York judge, Joseph Crater, in 1930. Crater had dinner in New York City with a lawyer friend. After dinner, Crater bid his friend good-bye on a New York City street and was never seen again. People were so gripped by the case that for years, Crater’s name became synonymous for someone who disappears. If someone didn’t show up at a particular event, someone else was sure to say, “He did a Crater.” The case remains unsolved, but in this book I provide a reasonable explanation of what might have happened.
Most of the stories in this book are typical cold cases that have gone unsolved for a long time. One is a case that I call “Ice Cold,” in which two cops were gunned down one night in a little town in California. The case went cold—ice cold—for more than fifty years and then, astonishingly, was solved.
Then there’s the case of the Mad Bomber, who drove New Yorkers half crazy in the fifties by planting bombs all over the city.
Or the serial rapist who prowled Bloomington, Illinois, for four years. Not only was the case itself baffling, but so was the identity of the perp.
You’ll also read how the murders of two young girls in little English villages stymied investigators for four years until the father of one of the suspects suggested that they use that new thing called DNA testing to try to find the killer.
A variety of crimes are covered, from murder to kidnapping to rape, and as in the other
Killer
tomes, this book offers a wide variety of trivia related to the crimes and cold cases in general. You’ll find Q & A’s, Notable Quotables, “Who Am I?” quizzes, and other trivia sections throughout each chapter.
In addition, a special section, “How Criminal Investigations Go Wrong,” details how all kinds of cases remain unsolved and sometimes grow cold because investigators—from the first officers at the crime scene to the guys in the lab—screwed up.
Thanks very much for being fans of the
Killer
books. I hope you enjoy this one as much as the others.
Tom Philbin
It all started one sweltering night, July 21, 1957, when two teenage couples, returning from a night out in a 1949 Ford, decided to stop at a lovers’ lane in an oil field in Hawthorne, California. “Oil field” doesn’t sound romantic, but in the darkness, the lovers could feast their eyes on the Pacific Ocean, and on the far coastline, they could see glittering lights. The lane had been used by many couples, so the teenagers had no reason to feel fear that night.
In his book
Cold Case Homicides
, a text for professional cold-case investigators, Richard Walton says, “The practical application of the phrase and of the concept of ‘cold-case’ homicide had been coined by the news media of the Metro Dade region of Florida.”
It started with the unsolved murder of a twelve-year-old girl in that area in the early 1980s. The murder drew so much media attention that the authorities assigned a team of a sergeant and two detectives to the case, and they succeeded in solving it. The team continued to work on unsolved cases, calling themselves the extremely dry “Pending Case Squad,” but a Miami reporter dubbed them “the Cold Case Squad.” Walton says the term “cold case” had been used before, such as in Western book or movie when a trail goes “cold.”
And although the term wasn’t used in law enforcement until the 1980s, police had similar squads working cases before that. For example, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has had the “Unsolved Unit” of its Homicide Bureau investigating cold cases since the 1970s.
But there was plenty to fear. At one point, the teens saw a hulking, shadowy figure approach the car on the driver’s side, and just like that, a gun was shoved in the window.
The sixteen-year-old driver said later, “I thought it was a prank of some sort. But it wasn’t, and then I thought he was going to kill us. But he said he wouldn’t.”
The stranger ordered the terrified kids to strip to their underwear, give him their watches and cash, and get in the backseat of the car. They did. He broke out some surgical and duct tape, and taped their mouths shut and their eyes sightless. Then he took one of the fifteen-year-old girls to the front seat of the car and raped her.
After that, he ordered all four terrified and crying kids out of the car and marched them toward the nearby woods. As he did so, he said, “I think I’m going to kill you.” Once they reached the woods, he told the teens to lie down.
They waited to be shot, but the next thing they knew, they heard him getting into the Ford, closing the door, and speeding away. The kids wandered around, looking for help.
The man drove about five miles to the junction of Sepulveda Boulevard and Rosecrans Avenue in El Segundo. The light was red. He stopped, and then perhaps eager to get as far as he could away from the scene of the rape and robbery, he went through the red light.
But someone else was around. Sitting on a side road in a black-and-white police car were two young patrolmen, Richard Phillips, twenty-eight years old, and rookie Milton Curtis, twenty-five years old. They had watched the car as it came to a stop at the red light, and then they saw the driver run the light.
Immediately, they pursued the car and pulled it over, making one of the most dangerous acts a policeman can do—a traffic stop. The reason traffic stops are so dangerous is that the patrolman never knows who he will encounter. The driver could be a murderer, an escaped convict, or, in this case, a man who had just committed a number of felonies including rape, assault, armed robbery, vehicular theft, and kidnapping. Someone, in other words, who could be very dangerous.
The man was ordered to get out of the car, and he did. One of the cops, Phillips, shined his flashlight into the car while the other wrote out the ticket. Playing his flashlight beam across the backseat, Phillips saw a yellow dress, a slip, and a sport shirt strewn over the seat.
As the young officers went about their business, another cop car passed by and slowed down to make sure everything was all right. Curtis looked up from writing the ticket and waved the ticket book at the passing officers, a signal that everything was under control.