The Skid Row Slasher

The anxiety was almost palpable along Los Angeles' Skid Row on Wednesday night of last week. Businessmen who work in the gleaming new office towers near by hurried home along the Harbor Freeway. Frightened winos and derelicts crowded the dilapidated missions or dozed uneasily on hardwood chairs in the shelter of neighborhood chapels. Liquor sales were off, and the drab streets, lined with pawnshops, surplus-clothing stores and aging apartment hotels, were uncommonly empty. In the past eight weeks, seven middle-aged men, most of them down-and-outers, had been found in doorways, alleyways and cheap hotel rooms within the l-sq.-mi. Skid Row area, their throats slit deeply from ear to ear--and the killer had always struck on Wednesdays or weekends. Los Angeles police call him the Slasher; some vagrants of the neighborhood have dubbed him the Head Chopper.

A Jackal. That night the anxiety turned out to be misplaced only in geography. Once again the murderer struck, but this time some six miles from Skid Row. The eighth victim, George Frias, 45, a catering-service secretary, was found in his modern first-floor Hollywood apartment on distant North Kingsley Drive, but he had worked near where the other victims were slain. His throat, too, was slit. A ninth man, also presumed to be a victim of the Slasher, was discovered two days later less than a mile away in another Hollywood apartment.

The police are searching for a 6-ft., 190-lb. man with stringy blond hair. Deputy Chief George N. Beck says that a psychiatric profile describes the killer as "a jackal ... a loner, some guy who probably lives like a hermit and only creeps out of his hole to commit these horrible crimes." The police also say that he could be a homosexual. The killer preys on defenseless men of small stature in their 40s or 50s, knocks them unconscious with blows to the head and slits their throats with a large sharp hunting knife. Then, before fleeing, he usually removes his victim's shoes and neatly arranges them at the feet of the body. The Slasher's targets include whites, blacks, Mexican Americans and one Eskimo, largely men with no known backgrounds or family ties that might help the police investigation.

Among Skid Row drinkers and drifters, rumors and suspicion of strangers and each other run high. Augustine Cruz, 58, shakily raised his plastic coffee cup at the Union Rescue Mission and rolled his bloodshot eyes as he recalled that several of the victims used to bed down with him on the library lawn where one of the murders took place: "I want this guy bad. He's already got three of my buddies. But why kill winos? What does he want?" Some of the younger men shrug it off. "Long as he doesn't bother me, I ain't got nothing against him," says Gilbert Stewart, a 27-year-old Texas black. Others are too far gone to care. But many admit that for once they are worrying about more than their next slug of Ripple.

All Praying. Hotels that cater to the area's unfortunates are keeping their doors locked 24 hours a day. A sign at the Pickwick Hotel advises, NO VISITERS ALLOWED NO MORE. At the mission, Jack McCarty, 50, shuddered: "A lot of the guys are sticking around here even during the day, talking about him all the time." Says the mission chaplain, George Caywood: "Everybody is looking at everybody else. We're all praying the Lord will help the police. These men are our friends. It really grieves us to see them so frightened." But no one could offer them any reason to hope that the Skid Row Slasher would not strike again.

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