Los Angeles Gets Image of Mass Murder Mecca
by Ronald Yates
For years Los Angeles has managed to collect more than its share of dubious labels: Smoggiest city, cultural wasteland, flaky, sunbaked. But none of those back-handed honors have been so bitter for Southern Californians to accept as the one currently being whispered. Los Angeles, critics and authorities say, may be the world’s mecca for mass murder. In the past 8 years alone, official records show there have been at least 6 separate cases of mass murder in or around the City of Angels that have accounted for the deaths of 121 men, women, and children. And for sheer numbers, none of the cases can match the one Los Angeles authorities are now trying to solve.
It is called the “Freeway Killer” case, and as far as authorities can tell it began 7 1/2 years ago when the body of a 20-year-old marine was found dumped along an Orange County freeway 25 miles south of Los Angeles. Since then, 43 other young men, most between the ages of 18 and 23, have been found scattered along the L.A. basin’s lattice-like freeway system. The most recent victim, still unidentified, was found Monday near the Orange County suburb of El Toro. Authorities say the youth, who like all the other victims was white, slender, and blond, was partially clothed and had been sexually molested.
What baffles police about victim number 44, however, is that the murder occurred while the man charged with 14 of the slayings was in custody and his alleged major accomplice was under surveillance. The chief suspect, a 33-year-old convicted sex-offender named William George Bonin, was arrested last month after a juvenile informant told police that Bonin had been involved in slayings dating back to May 1979. Bonin has been charged only with the murders of 14 victims, but Los Angeles sheriff’s police say he probably will be charged with at least seven others by authorities in the surrounding counties of Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside. Ten days ago, police arrested a 22-year-old laborer and amateur magician named Vernon Robert Butts who they said was Bonin ‘s main accomplice.
Butts since has been charged with six of the same murders most of which were strangulations. The fact that Bonin and Butts have been tied to only 21 of the 44 murders has led police to speculate that the two suspects may be part of a macabre murder ring. On Thursday, police in Port Huron, Michigan arrested James Michael Munro, 19, on a murder warrant charging him with one of the killings. He was being held in Port Huron for Los Angeles policemen who were enroute to question him. Police said they don’t believe Bonin is responsible for all the murders stretching back to 1972 and they definitely have ruled him out of five slayings between March 31, 1976, and Oct. 11, 1978, because he was in the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo for a sex perversion conviction then, and while authorities refuse to give details of the slayings, they say the methodology in each case is almost identical.
All of the victims apparently had been hitchhiking when they were picked up, investigators said. Almost all of the youths had been drugged with Valium, alcohol, or chloral hydrate, a substance used in knockout drops, investigators said. Most had been strangled. A few had been smothered. All had been tortured in a similar manner. “We know of 44 victims now, but there may be even more we don’t know about yet,” said the Orange County investigator. “This case is going to make people forget John Wayne Gacy who was convicted of 33 homosexual murders in the Chicago area).” Whether the Freeway Killer officially will eclipse the Gacy slayings is debatable, but one thing is certain: It certainly has shifted attention away from five other sensational murder cases in this area. Two years ago, Los Angeles was caught up in the “Hillside Strangler” murders in which all 13 victims were young women.
Two men, Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, have been charged in those murders. In 1976, Vaughn Orrin Greenwood was convicted as the “Skid Row Slasher” in nine of 12 murders of derelicts. A year ago, Bobby Joe Maxwell was charged with 10 murders as the “Skid Row Stabber,” a case in which derelicts again were the victims. In 1977, Patrick Kearney, the so-called “Trash Bag Killer,” pleaded guilty to 21 murders. Kearney, a 38-year-old homosexual, told police he had killed young men and left their dismembered bodies along Southern California highways a case similar to the “Freeway Killer.” Most recently, two other ex-convicts, Roy Norris, 32, and Lawrence Bittaker, 39, were charged with the torture murders of at least five young women aged 13 to 18. Authorities say the two men may be responsible for dozens more slayings in the Los Angeles area.
