Christine Pelisek - The Grim Sleeper: The Lost Women of South Central

This book is based on police reports, court documents, autopsy reports, and interviews with detectives, family members, and other sources.

The names of certain individuals in this book have been changed to protect their privacy, and the author has reconstructed dialogue to the best of her recollection.

Copyright 2017 by Christine Pelisek

First Counterpoint hardcover edition: June 2017

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-61902-773-2

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Jacket design by Natalia Mosquera

Book design by Tabitha Lahr

COUNTERPOINT

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Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents, Mary and Joe Pelisek

and

To the women of South Central: Debra, Henrietta, Barbara,

Bernita, Mary, Lachrica, Monique, Princess, Valerie, Janecia, Sharon, Georgia Mae, Inez, Rolenia, Laura, and Enietra

2006

19851988

19892010

Prologue

Winters List

So many celebrities have passed through the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, youd think the city of stars would have located it in a better part of town. Instead the next-to-final resting place for the likes of John Belushi, Whitney Houston, and Michael Jackson is at the end of a rundown row of auto-body shops and cheap taco joints, two miles east of downtown.

On a cold morning in January of 2006, I parked Maude Jr., my beat-up red 94 Toyota Tercel, in the office lot and headed into the coroners investigative division hoping for my next big headline. Once inside the wood-paneled lobby, I buzzed the reception desk.

Im here to see Assistant Chief Winter, I told the receptionist.

Five minutes later, she let me in.

I didnt need directions to the office of Ed Winter. As a crime reporter for the L.A. Weekly , an alternative paper modeled on New Yorks Village Voice , I had been there many times, following up on gang murders, robberies gone awry, organized crime hits, and the like. The unluckiest victims always wound up here. So did the bodies of departed Hollywood celebrities and has-beens. With more than fifty dead people a day passing through the busiest coroners office in the U.S., there was usually a story to be told, if Winter was in the mood to tell it.

Winter, the coroners media liaison, was a former cop who served in a Los Angeles suburb as a SWAT team member and undercover narcotics officer.

I started pestering him shortly after he was hired in 2003. He was brought in to help rehabilitate the coroners office, which had been shaken by a series of scandals, including a rat infestation at the long-term storage crypt in which rodents had chewed into some of the body bags and gnawed on some of the corpses. Winters experience and laid-back personality won him the position of official spokesman whenever a celebrity died. By the time I walked into his life with my chicken-scratch-filled reporters notebook, he was a seasoned pro who had handled the hanging suicide of onetime child actor Jonathan Brandis; the strange death of Robert Pastorelli, who played portly painter Eldin Bernecky on Murphy Brown ; and the death of Super Freak singer Rick James.

Winters first day on the job catapulted him into one of the citys biggest murder mysteries: the death of 40-year-old Lana Clarkson, the B-list actress and House of Blues nightclub hostess found fatally shot in the Alhambra mansion of much-heralded but nonetheless oddball music producer Phil Spector. Winter learned quickly how important it was to choose his words carefully because they would appear the next day in print and could define a celebritys life after death.

On this January day, he sat behind his scarred wooden desk and stared intently at his computer screen. His eyes shifted briefly to a mini replica of the Harley-Davidson he rode on the weekends. Then, he waved me to a seat.

What brings you here today? he asked. There was a hint of a smirk on his face as he rubbed his fingers over his salt-and-pepper goatee. It seemed something was up.

Just checking in. Anything interesting going on? I asked casually, gesturing to an autopsy report on his desk.

No, he said flatly, and he slid the report into the top drawer. I smiled and reached across his desk to retrieve a butterscotch candy from a glass bowl. It was going to be one of those cat-and-mouse days.

As a crime reporter, I regularly popped by to see Winter. When I was on the hunt for an autopsy report or digging up information about a cause of death, he was the first person I called. Winter not only provided the information I was looking for, but when he was in the mood, he also gave me valuable investigative tips that only a veteran cop could know and understand as vital to doing a thorough job. And when he was in a really forthcoming mood, he would offer me a Starbucks iced coffee from his mini fridge.

It didnt appear that this day would be a Starbucks day.

Did you have many deaths over the weekend? I began, slowly.

Winter plucked a sheet of paper from his top desk drawer and gave me a quick rundown of the latest fatalities. He read them off like a high-school teacher calling out names on an attendance sheet. Two Hispanic families were killed in separate car accidents on the Interstate 5 Freeway near Norwalk, a suburban city seventeen miles southeast of downtown. An elderly black man had been found rotting on his couch in Northridge, an affluent neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. His death went unnoticed for a month until the sickening sweet smell of decomposition reached the next-door neighbor, who called police.

There were at least six African American and Hispanic men, all under the age of 25, on the list. All shot in drive-bys, car-to-car gun battles, or street confrontations. In some of those cases, the last question the victim heard before being shot was, Where are you from? It wasnt a question about geography but about gang affiliation, and in Los Angeles in 2006, that simple question was synonymous with death. Although the murder rate in Los Angeles County was much lower than in the 80s and 90s, gang-related homicides were an ever-present danger.

Its just another typical weekend in Los Angeles, Winter said sardonically as he tucked the list back inside his desk drawer. As you can tell, weve been very, very busy.

Anything else? I asked, knowing full well gang-related deaths wouldnt electrify my editor, not in a city like Los Angeles where gang crime is as common as massage parlors and palm trees.

Winter put down his coffee cup and sent me a stern look. I wondered if I should make my way out.