The Toll of California’s ‘Freeway Killer’: 41 and Counting
by Larry Eichel
On the day after Christmas, 1972, the body of Edward Moore, a 20-year-old Marine, was found, along a freeway exit ramp 25 miles southeast of Los Angeles. He had been strangled. The count of bodies began that day; It has continued for 7 ½ years. Sixteen corpses have turned up in the last eight months, 30 since April 1978. The naked body of the most recent victim, truck driver Steven Jay Wells, 18, was found June 3 in a lot behind a gas station, a few miles from where it all began. He was the 41st. The deaths of Moore, Wells, and 39 other young men and boys are part of the biggest unsolved murder case in America: the case of the “Freeway Killer.”
Some of the 41 murders are different, leading some law enforcement authorities to believe there is more than one killer. But the similarities are overwhelming. The victims have been white men, mostly between ages 16 and 23 with slight builds. Many had long blond hair, giving them the stereotypical look of California surfers. Recently, the victims have been getting younger: one was 12 years old. The bodies almost always have been found near freeways, hence the name Freeway Killer. Since there is no evidence of any struggles, it is believed the murderer does his business elsewhere, then dumps his victims along the road. With one exception, the victims were hitchhiking when they disappeared. Nearly every victim either lived in or was passing through Orange County or the city of Long Beach.
Most of them strangled, a few garroted. The bodies usually were discovered naked. When they were clothed, one shoe or just a shoelace was missing. Many have been sexually assaulted. Some, particularly the early victims, were mutilated and impaled on branches and surveyors’ stakes. In several cases, some parts of the victims’ bodies have been severed. On June 12, police in Los Angeles arrested a 32-year-old truck driver with a record of past sexual offenses as a suspect in one of the 41 murders. Police say they arrested the suspect, William G. Bonin of Downey, California in Hollywood after he picked up a youth in a van and had begun performing a sexual act with him in the rear of the van. In all, 110 formal charges were filed against Bonin, who was suspected of committing the 31st murder.
Police said they were “looking into” his possible connection with other freeway killings, but the dates of his imprisonment on previous sex crimes indicate he could not have committed all the murders. Until Bonin’s arrest, the most remarkable aspect of the case was that hardly anyone seemed to care that one of the great mass murderers in American history was, and possibly still is, roaming the streets of Southern California. The case has received amazingly little attention from the news media and from law enforcement officials, even though, the Freeway Killer already has killed far more people than the fabled Boston Strangler, New York’s Son of Sam, or Los Angeles’ Hillside Strangler.
The reason for the seeming lack of news coverage is that most of the killings have taken place in Orange County, a sprawling, largely residential area southeast of Los Angeles. The reason for the seeming lack of interest by law enforcement officials is that the Freeway Killer has dumped his victims in 16 different cities, towns, and unincorporated areas, covering an area more than 90 miles long and 60 miles wide. Each community has its police department, and those departments are not used to cooperating with each other. One of the few people to study all the freeway killings has been Dr. Albert Rosenstein, a leading Orange County forensic psychologist whose studies have led him to form several theories about the killer and about how a coordinated investigation might succeed in tracking him down. Two key clues have surfaced so far, the doctor said.
One is the presence of chloral hydrate, Valium, and Tylenol with codeine in the bloodstream of many victims. The other is a two-year hiatus in the killings during 1976 and 1977, followed by a period in which the murders took place primarily on weekends. Those clues when put together, suggest that the killer, whom Rosenstein calls a mentally disturbed sex offender, was arrested for a nonfatal sex offense and then confined in a mental institution in 1976 and 1977, probably Patton State Hospital near San Bernardino. Assuming his treatment there had some effect, this theory would explain why the more recent murders, the 30 after the hiatus, generally have been less grisly than the first 11. It also would explain an otherwise inexplicable group of killings near San Bernardino, many miles inland from where most of the bodies were found.
“The guy who’s doing these murders is crazy,” Rosenstein said. “The chance that he’s been a mental patient at one time, or another is very high. And the only place in Southern California where mentally disturbed sex offenders are sent is Patton State Hospital.” Before the arrest of Bonin, Rosenstein offered this profile of the Freeway Killer, based on the information available to him: The Killer is a strong, clever white man in his late 20s or early 30s. If he were not strong, he could not handle the bodies. If he were not clever, he would have been caught already. If he were not white, he could not have picked up so many white youths. If he were not in his 20s or 30s, he would not be this kind of murdering sex offender, past studies have shown.
As a result of some traumatic sexual experience as a child, the killer has developed into a bisexual, but he never has become comfortable with the homosexual side of his personality. He cruises the streets in a van, looking for young, white hitchhikers who attract him physically. He picks them up and offers them a drink, an alcoholic beverage laced with a drug. Once his victims are drugged, he assaults them sexually in the back of the van. “After he’s done that, he finds what he’s done so repugnant that he feels he has to commit acts of sexual mutilation on their bodies after he has killed them.” Once he has finished with his victims, he drives along and shoves the body out of the moving van, a practice which explains why the bodies are discovered so quickly and why the van has not been identified. With Bonin in custody, law enforcement authorities will wait to see whether the killings stop.
