Reagan Martin - Young, Queer, and Dead: A Biography of San Franciscos Most Overlooked Serial Killer, The Doodler

Young, Queer, and Dead

A Biography of San Francisco's Most Overlooked Serial Killer, The Doodler

Reagan Martin

Absolute Crime Press

ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA

Copyright 2019 by Minute Help, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Prologue

S an Francisco, California , the city by the bay. It conjures up images of The Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, Pier 39 and Fishermans Wharf. Its a city rich in history and culture, with top rated museums, cable cars, trendy shops and boutiques and the famed Chinatown District.

The city was nearly devastated in 1908 by the great San Francisco earthquake, which toppled buildings and ruptured gas lines, igniting hundreds of fires that burned out of control. With water mains destroyed, the fires burned for days, leaving the city in ruins. But San Franciscans quickly rebuilt, and the city has become one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

But San Francisco, like all major cities, also has history that tourists arent readily aware of. Dark and evil predators have called The Bay Area home, and used it to commit some of the most heinous crimes in history.

In 1895 Theo Durrant, a young, good-looking medical student, brutally raped and murdered two young girls, hiding their butchered bodies in The Emmanuel Baptist Church. Quickly tried and convicted of both murders, Theo Durrant was hung at San Quentin Prison on January 7, 1898.

In September of 1921, film star Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle was falsely accused of savagely raping and subsequently causing the death of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe in a downtown San Francisco hotel. Arbuckle was never convicted of this crime, but the scandal was enough to ruin his career for good.

The Durrant and Arbuckle cases were considered crimes of the century, and kept San Franciscans glued to their newspapers and eager for more. But by the time the mid-twentieth century rolled around, the city was dealing with a different breed of killer, the likes of which it had never seen before. So bizarre and unusual was this new type of criminal that law enforcement officers would coin a new phrase specifically to identify them; serial killers.

San Franciscos introduction to serial killers began in the 1960s with The Zodiac Killer, a phantom psychopath who murdered brutally, and indiscriminately, and left the city in a near state of panic. The Zodiac shot, stabbed, and maimed his victims, all the while taunting the police with bizarre letters and highly intricate cryptograms. And he has never been caught.

By the time the 1970s arrived, and while The Zodiac was still causing mayhem, San Francisco found itself dealing with another series of crimes attributed to this new breed of serial killer.

The Zebra Killings, a series of grotesque acts of violence, terrified the city and caused wide scale panic. Perpetrated against men, women and children, the crimes were committed by a group of radicals who stabbed, shot and hacked their victims to death.

But The Zodiac and Zebra were not the only killers roaming San Francisco at the time. Another dark and evil entity stalked the citys streets, committing crimes every bit as vicious and gruesome as any that came before him. This killer targeted the gay community, and his name was The Doodler.

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The Beginning

I t all began in January 1974, when San Francisco police, responding to an urgent call, discovered the murdered body of what, at first glance, appeared to be a young female. Upon closer examination, however, it soon became apparent that this victim was not a woman, but a man made up to look like one.

The crime scene was horrific, the room splattered and drenched in blood, the body slashed and horribly mutilated. Investigators soon discovered that the victim was a known transvestite who frequented the areas gay bars and clubs. He was also a regular at the citys popular gay bath houses, where men could go to pick up strangers for sex. While investigating the death, police learned that the victim had last been seen at a gay bar in the company of a young white male with light brown hair. But further investigation failed to produce any witnesses who knew who the young man was. Police continued to visit the different gay establishments and question people further, but information and clues were scarce, and the case soon went cold.

Within months, however, the badly mutilated bodies of four more transvestites would be discovered, sliced, stabbed, and butchered in a grotesque manner. Obviously connected, the police theorized that they were dealing with a sick and twisted psycho who had a deep hatred for cross-dressing drag queens. All of the victims were homosexual and well-known customers of the Bay Area gay establishments. None of them had been hesitant to pick up lovers on the spur of the moment, a fact that hampered the investigation from the start. When police would question one of the mens known lovers, they would invariably be given the names of several more the victim was known to be intimate with. As for the strangers he may have picked up, no one had a clue as to who they might be, nor how many of them there were.