by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Exactly one century ago, the Halloween patrol was ready to hit the streets. And with fifteen extra officers on duty that night, no crime would go unpunished.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Forty-eight hours before he was murdered, Percy Williams was living large on the last night of September, 1890.
The favorite son of a former Attorney General of California, Williams was all of 26 years old, wealthy, married, with an infant already in the ground, since the previous February—but here he was at the Palace, Stockton’s premier bordello, cozying up to madam Dora Russell on El Dorado Street…only several blocks from the mansion where his young wife Bessie slept alone in their cold marital bed.
Cradling the rose quartz pendulum in the palm of my hand, I gingerly picked my way across the dusty, uneven terrain of Sanger’s Bethel Cemetery, my darting eyes peeled for gopher holes. It was a beautiful day for a séance in a deserted country graveyard: a breezy, cloudless summer afternoon, unseasonably cool for the middle of a Central California July. And yet my palm was sweaty, sticking to the pendulum, and I felt oddly self-conscious.
Forty-nine feet was all she had. From the moment he put two bullets in her boyfriend’s brain, Pauline Grass had only 49 steps left to take.
A balmy summer night out on the town in Alex’s new auto, cruising the countryside under a full, white-hot moon, slipping out to that secluded spot by Haig Tusoosian’s vineyards. Climbing into the backseat to christen upholstery so new it squeaked, and steaming up the glass in a heady potpourri of sweat, smeared lipstick, and Alex’s aftershave. Losing herself in his kiss…
That first night opened the door … to what, exactly, she wasn’t quite sure. But that was the night it all began—the rappings on the walls, the floorboards that creaked under invisible feet.
Blood saturated every surface: splattered across the walls, soaking through the bedsheets. Arterial spray darkening from ruby to rust, placing the precise time of the murder-suicide some twelve hours prior. The nude forms of a young man and woman faced one another on the bed, their expressions serene despite the gaping mess of their flayed throats. Hers had been cut just above the clavicle, his severed at the Adam’s apple. A bone-handled razor lay at his side, slick with clotted crimson.
And there she was.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours after nine-year-old Esther Lee Lewis went missing on her walk to the school bus the morning of Tuesday, March 11, 1947, there she was. They found her beneath a weeping willow in a dry creek bed near the Kings River, blanketed in blackberry vines—dress torn, skull crushed.
It always begins with a girl—usually nameless, always dead.
How she died doesn’t matter so much as the fact that she met a violent fate because she made a perceived mistake of some kind: her clothes were too tight, she went out alone at night, or caught a ride with the wrong stranger.
In 1973, a Florida jury convicted Gerard John Schaefer of two counts of murder in the first degree. He insisted on his innocence, yet he named missing person cases and unsolved murders that should have been added to the list of twenty-eight deaths where he was suspected. On top of that, Schaefer was a law enforcement officer.
Forty-two years ago, a gardener working in a Bakersfield back yard spotted blood creeping under his client’s door. Police discovered the beaten and stabbed body of Tommy Tarver, owner of an exclusive beauty salon.
