I recently saw a list of 20 serial killers and their zodiac signs. The author provided stats for how many were Gemini or Virgo and noted (with relief) those signs that were linked to none.
She clearly didn't know that her list was vastly incomplete by several thousand killers. But that's no surprise. Most people are unaware of serial killers who've gotten little to no media attention. But that's changing.
The intense fascination with true crime over the past several years has launched searches for older cases that made little splash in their day. This is especially true for narratives about offenders who weren't called serial killers because law enforcement did not yet use the phrase.
In Seattle's Lost Serial Killer, longtime homicide detective Cloyd Steiger looks at a series of murders in Renton, a Seattle suburb. Before Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway cut a deadly swath through this area, another killer acted out. Thanks to the highly publicized Boston Strangler case during the 1960s, we knew what it meant that a single killer could be responsible for multiple successive murders, but we didn't yet have the behavioral label that distinguished them. Still, they were out there.
Steiger was a homicide detective with the Seattle Police Department for two decades of his 36-year career. Currently, he's the chief criminal investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's Homicide Investigations Tracking System (HITS) and a member of the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases. Previously, he published Homicide: The View from Inside the Yellow Tape. It's clear from the careful details and the abundance of photos in his current book that he likes to—and can—provide an insider's perspective.
This book is more police procedural than mystery since the killer is named in the title. It was a difficult tale to tell, since most of those involved have died, and the cache of documents was slim. Steiger provides everything he found, including some fresh interviews.
The series of murders began in December 1969 with the discovery of the body of a young woman dumped in the woods. Carol Erickson, 19, had recently graduated from high school. She'd just left a local library to go home. Her attacker came up behind her in the woods, stabbed her in the back, and raped her.
Nine months later, Joanne Zulauf, 17, stumbled into the killer's web when she went for a walk. She was struck on the head, then strangled. Her watch was missing.
The normally peaceful Puget Sound community was still reeling when two 6-year-old boys, Scott Andrews and Bradley Lyons, were beaten, strangled, and stabbed to death in April 1971. All of the victims had items of clothing removed. The only items of evidence were footprints and a discarded hunting knife.
Steiger includes photos of the crime scenes and also shows a sense of what this area was like 50 years ago. We get glimpses of the officers puzzling over these disturbing events as each phase of the investigation unfolds. A name etched onto the knife provided an important clue, but not before a mentally unstable man, John Chance, confessed to killing the two boys.
Although it's clear from the title that Chance is not the killer, he seems to know things about the crime scene that suggest he'd had a hand in it. If there's any mystery in this narrative, it's here.
This happened long before research psychologists had supplied details about false confessions and people like Chance, who accept guilt for anything. The cops had to figure out for themselves whether his confession was credible. Fortunately, they were also following the hard evidence, which soon eclipsed (but didn't erase) the puzzle of John Chance.
The knife with the name traced back to 20-year-old Gary Gene Grant. We get plenty of details about his surprisingly quick confession. However, he didn't provide key aspects of the crimes.
Steiger effectively conveys the interrogators' frustration over trying to guide him without feeding him the facts they need him to say. Anyone could have read what he said in the newspapers. They get enough, though, to charge him with all four murders.
Grant appears to have been a random killer, motivated by some sexual deviance he won't confirm. Not a calculating predator, he acted on an opportunity and probably would have continued had he not been caught. He checks many of the boxes when we think of serial killers, but he's also an anomaly.
The strength of the book is Steiger's description of how these small-town detectives with little experience of murder, let alone serial murder, conducted the investigation. They made mistakes, including some serious ones. But they were working in the dark, so to speak, and they did manage to end what could have been a longer murder streak. Fans of true crime will enjoy the investigative steps, the photos, and the detecting dilemmas that Steiger depicts. They'll likely want more such stories from him.