In the fall of 2008 Detective Diane Webb of the Los Angeles Police Department was looking for the Grim Sleeper, an unidentified killer who had stopped for thirteen years and then resurfaced. Webb ran the team that kept track of the city's registered sex offenders, 5,212 of them, and she had an idea. She searched the registry for men who fit the rough description of the Grim Sleeper, and the search returned 1,500. Ninety-two of those had never given the DNA sample the law required. Webb sent officers to collect a swab from every one of them.
On October 22, 2008, one of the ninety-two walked into the LAPD's Southwest Division wearing a red long-sleeved dress shirt and slacks. He was seventy-two, an insurance adjuster for the State Compensation Insurance Fund, and he scraped the inside of his cheek four times as instructed and dropped the swab in an envelope. The officer who took it, Robert Lanigan, later told LA Weekly's Christine Pelisek that the meeting had been boring. His partner, Amber McDonnell, said the man looked professional, was pleasant to deal with, and would probably have been the last person they suspected.
He was not the Grim Sleeper. Five months later his sample came back matched to five rapes and killings from the 1970s and 1980s, every victim an elderly white woman who had been raped and strangled. His name was John Floyd Thomas Jr.
The match landed two floors above Webb's office at Parker Center, with two cold-case detectives she had never met. Richard Bengtson and Rick Jackson had spent years on the murder of Elizabeth McKeown, and the path that brought them to it had been long.
McKeown was sixty-seven, a retired school administrator. On the night of February 18, 1976, she came home from an event at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to her small apartment in the neighborhood between Fox Hills and Westchester. Later that evening a witness saw someone driving her car erratically near her home, and another heard a dragging noise from her apartment that went on for half an hour. Neither called the police. Her half-naked body was found in her own 1965 Chevelle not far from the apartment. Her great-niece, Tracy Michaels, said years later that people's wish not to get involved was the epitaph on a lot of gravesites.
It was the first homicide case of a young detective named Larry Manchester, and it became the only one of his career he never solved. Manchester remembered her as a woman who had never married; she had been in love before the Second World War, the man had jilted her, and she never formed another serious attachment. That same year Manchester read a magazine article about the new science of DNA, and on the strength of it he asked the county autopsy technicians to keep as much trace evidence from the McKeown scene as they could. It was an unusual request at the time.
In 2002 Bengtson's LAPD bosses assigned him to work on a single year, 1976, and from its unsolved files he picked McKeown's. An older lady, he said, who could have been anyone's mother or grandmother. Searching for evidence, he came upon a forgotten filing cabinet in a storage room at the county coroner's department, full of microscope slides of semen, saliva and blood from scores of murder cases between 1972 and 1978 that were in no computer system. On slides from the McKeown scene, DNA had survived for twenty-six years.
In the summer of 2003 Manchester, long retired, was paired for a round of golf with Bill Stoner, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's homicide detective, who told him about similar attacks on elderly white women in Lennox in the 1970s. Manchester called Rick Jackson, whom he had once partnered, with his theory that McKeown had been killed by a serial murderer nobody had identified. Jackson turned to Bengtson a few desks away. Bengtson had the McKeown file in front of him. The crime lab then found that the same man's DNA was at the scene of the rape and murder of Ethel Sokoloff, sixty-eight, killed in the Mid-Wilshire district around Thanksgiving of 1972. The detectives had a killer's genetic profile and no name to put to it.
Ethel Sokoloff and Elizabeth McKeown were the first two names on the complaint filed on April 2, 2009. Five more charges followed in September for women killed between September 1975 and June 1986.
Cora Perry, seventy-nine, was killed in Lennox on September 20, 1975. In April 1976 Maybelle Hudson, eighty, came home to Inglewood from choir practice and was beaten, raped and strangled in her garage. She had been widowed twice. Her great-nephew, Bob Kistner, was a rookie with the Long Beach Police Department at the time; he retired a sergeant, and when he last asked Inglewood detectives about her case, in 2006, they told him her killer was probably dead or in prison. Miriam McKinley, sixty-five, and Evalyn Bunner, fifty-six, were killed in Inglewood later in 1976, in June and October.
The seventh was the daughter of a woman who had already vanished. In 1983 Isabel Askew, eighty-five, was reported missing from her apartment on West Bonita Avenue in Claremont; more than a week later her partially nude body was found in a vineyard near Ontario International Airport. The Los Angeles Times reported that the cause of her death could not be determined because of the condition of her body, while Pelisek, citing police, reported that she had been raped. In March 1986 an eighty-three-year-old neighbor of the Askews was raped and robbed, and the next month a seventy-eight-year-old woman was attacked a few blocks north; police came to believe Thomas was responsible for both. In June 1986 Isabel's daughter, a fifty-six-year-old retired school crossing guard, was found strangled in the same apartment, lying face-up with the bedding pulled over her head. She had been sexually assaulted. Her first name appears as Adrian in the Times's 2009 reporting and as Adrienne in coverage of the 2011 plea. Thomas was never charged with Isabel Askew's death; detectives said in 2009 that they were looking at it.
Thomas's record went back half a century, and LA Weekly's account of it, drawn from police records, explains why his name had never surfaced. He was born in Los Angeles, was raised by an aunt and a godmother after his mother died when he was twelve, and went to the city's public schools. He joined the Air Force briefly in 1956; at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada a superior described him as often late and slovenly. In 1957, at twenty, he was a county file clerk who had been dishonorably discharged from the Air Force. Police records tie him to a rape in South Los Angeles that March and an attempted rape five days later. In June he broke into a house on West 35th Place, climbed into an elderly woman's bed and ordered her to keep quiet. She screamed, and her son-in-law shot him. He made it back to his apartment, where his wife called an ambulance, and the wound led to his arrest for attempted rape. A prosecutor offered a plea deal, and in that account he was convicted only of burglary and served five years. Time magazine, reporting the same history in 2009, wrote that he was convicted of burglary and attempted rape that year, and that he was arrested a number of times between 1955 and 1978.
The burglary plea mattered. California had required sex offenders to register since 1947, but a burglary conviction carried no such duty, and for more than twenty years Thomas's name did not appear when police searched their files for rape suspects. Manchester put it simply: the ball was dropped in 1957.
Mrs. Stellern, as LA Weekly identified her, was born on April Fool's Day in 1900, a retired social worker whom her son remembered as a tough old bird. One night in February 1978 she came home to her apartment on North Madison Street in Pasadena from a lecture at Pasadena City College at about a quarter past ten. A man wearing gloves tried to strangle her, snapped her ankle, raped her and left her for dead. Her son, Gary, found her sitting on the floor in shock. She told police her attacker had very strong hands.
A neighbor who made a habit of writing down unfamiliar license plates had seen a man park, walk the neighborhood and go in and out of her courtyard, and he had noted the plate. It belonged to a forty-one-year-old salesman who lived nearby on South El Molino Avenue. In his Mustang police found dark clothing and a ski mask. Thomas married while awaiting trial, on April 5, 1978, and on August 17 a jury convicted him of rape, burglary and mayhem, the last for breaking her leg. He served five years. It was the only rape conviction on his record, and it was what put him on the list of sex offenders who owed the state a DNA sample.
The London Sunday Times reported in 2009 that the first wave of killings attributed to the Westside Rapist, which it put at seventeen women, stopped in 1978, the year the witness copied down that plate. The LAPD task force that hunted the Westside Rapist in the mid-1970s had counted twenty-two rapes and twelve murders of elderly white women across about twenty square miles around Hollywood between 1974 and 1976, the attacker often covering the women's faces with a blanket, pillow or clothing. It disbanded in 1976. Its leading suspect, a young musician named Brandon Tholmer, was convicted of raping an elderly woman that year, but his habits did not fit dozens of the unsolved cases.
Thomas came out of prison in 1983 and found work as a hospital peer counselor in Chino. On May 17, 1983, he finally registered as a sex offender, with the San Bernardino County Sheriff. Isabel Askew disappeared about three months later, about four miles from where he lived. Her daughter was killed in 1986. A son was born to Thomas and a girlfriend in March 1987; they married in April 1989 and moved back to Los Angeles, where he went to work for the State Compensation Insurance Fund. Pelisek reported that he worked in its mailroom; Time and other outlets described him as a claims adjuster there from 1989 until his arrest. The fund ran no criminal background checks on new hires until the mid-1990s, a spokeswoman told Time, and it knew nothing of his record. The London Sunday Times noted that the killings in the Claremont area stopped the year he took the job.
His colleagues liked him. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a political columnist who worked alongside him, told Time he never once saw Thomas lose his temper; he always had a smile and a kind word. When Hutchinson asked how he stayed so fit at his age, Thomas laughed and said, "Just good living." He sent coworkers emails of Bible passages for the day. After his arrest, Hutchinson told Pelisek, two female colleagues he asked could not believe the charges.
Tracy Michaels had never stopped thinking about her great-aunt. A friend helping with her memoir put her in touch with Bengtson, and on March 19, days before the break, the detective told her he might never solve the case but would never put it back in a vault. On March 27, 2009, the state Department of Justice DNA laboratory reported that Thomas's profile matched the Sokoloff evidence, and by March 31 it had been matched to four more killings. Jackson called Bengtson at home. Police confirmed that Thomas still lived in Los Angeles and was listed on the state's public sex-offender registry, and within a day undercover officers were watching his apartment in South Los Angeles, a few blocks from the scene of the 1957 attacks.
On March 31 detectives brought him to the Robbery-Homicide squad room at Parker Center and questioned him for four hours. Bengtson noticed the firm handshake first. Thomas was calm, the detective said, and at some point became a little more nervous. Jackson called Manchester in Reno and asked whether the name Elizabeth meant anything to him; afterward, Manchester said, he sobbed for several minutes. Michaels called the arrest a miracle after all those years.
Thomas was held on $1 million bail. Bengtson told Time that the death penalty could not apply to the 1970s killings because they predated its reinstatement in California in 1978. At a news conference on April 30, 2009, police announced that charges were coming in three Inglewood cases and that detectives were combing files back to the 1950s for links to at least twenty-five more cases in Hollywood, West Los Angeles and the Wilshire area. Bengtson predicted that Thomas would prove to be Los Angeles's most prolific serial killer, and LA Weekly reported that police believed he might be responsible for as many as thirty-four of the rapes and murders attributed to the Westside Rapist. In many of those old cases the DNA had degraded or the evidence had been thrown away. Bengtson had received more than forty calls from people who believed their relatives or friends were among his victims.
Later estimates varied. LA Weekly wrote in 2011 that police believed about thirty women had been raped, strangled or both by him; City News Service reported that he was suspected in at least two dozen more killings in Los Angeles County and in scores of unsolved rapes; the Associated Press quoted detectives who put the number of further killings at ten to fifteen. None of those cases was charged, and they remain police suspicions, not court findings.
On September 23, 2009, Thomas pleaded not guilty to all seven murder counts. The charges were the work of cold-case investigators from the LAPD, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Inglewood Police Department, and officials said they had DNA linking him to every one.
On April 1, 2011, at seventy-four, he changed his plea to guilty on all seven counts of first-degree murder and admitted special-circumstance allegations of multiple murder, murder during rape or attempted rape, and murder during burglary or attempted burglary. The plea spared him a possible death sentence. Deputy District Attorney Rachel Moser Greene called the deal an act of pragmatism rather than an act of mercy: capital punishment had not been legal in California when all but one of the killings he admitted were committed, and at his age, she said, he would probably die in prison before his appeals ran out. It gave the families, she said, certainty and finality. Greene read a statement from Adrienne Askew's granddaughter, who asked whether the deaths of a mother and daughter could be coincidence and said Thomas had preyed on the elderly and vulnerable for more than fifty years; it said he deserved execution and that life without parole seemed too lenient. Tracy Michaels told the court that her great-aunt had been beloved, and that Thomas had stalked her, raped her, strangled her, put her body in the trunk of her car and walked away for thirty-five years. Michaels had lived with her great-aunt as a teenager and had flown in from Austin, Texas. "He has been my worst nightmare," she said. "For me the death penalty would've been too easy." She asked Superior Court Judge George G. Lomeli to remove any comfort from his life.
He was sentenced the same day, his hands manacled to a waist chain, holding sheets of paper up to hide his face from a photographer. The district attorney's office, as quoted by the Associated Press, and City News Service described seven life terms, one of them without the possibility of parole; later summaries describe seven consecutive terms of life without parole. Both versions include at least one term of life without the possibility of parole. Reference listings place him at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton. The search that caught him, as Pelisek wrote, had been meant for someone else.
1956: John Floyd Thomas Jr. joins the Air Force briefly.
March 1957: police records tie him to a rape in South Los Angeles and an attempted rape five days later.
June 1957: he breaks into a house on West 35th Place and is shot by the elderly occupant's son-in-law; convicted of burglary (burglary and attempted rape in Time's account), he serves five years.
About Thanksgiving 1972: Ethel Sokoloff, sixty-eight, is raped and murdered in the Mid-Wilshire district.
September 20, 1975: Cora Perry, seventy-nine, is killed in Lennox.
February 18, 1976: Elizabeth McKeown, sixty-seven, is killed after coming home from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; her body is found in her own car.
April 1976: Maybelle Hudson, eighty, is beaten, raped and strangled in her garage in Inglewood.
June 1976: Miriam McKinley, sixty-five, is killed in Inglewood.
October 1976: Evalyn Bunner, fifty-six, is killed in Inglewood.
February 1978: Mrs. Stellern, a retired social worker, is raped and left for dead in her Pasadena apartment.
April 5, 1978: Thomas marries while awaiting trial.
August 17, 1978: a jury convicts him of rape, burglary and mayhem in the Pasadena attack; he serves five years.
May 17, 1983: out of prison, he registers as a sex offender with the San Bernardino County Sheriff.
1983: Isabel Askew, eighty-five, disappears from her Claremont apartment and is later found dead; Thomas is never charged with her death.
June 1986: Isabel Askew's daughter, fifty-six, is found strangled in the same apartment.
April 1989: he marries and moves back to Los Angeles, where he goes to work for the State Compensation Insurance Fund.
2002: Detective Richard Bengtson takes up the McKeown case and finds slides on which DNA from the scene has survived.
October 22, 2008: Thomas gives a DNA swab at the LAPD's Southwest Division.
March 27, 2009: the state DNA laboratory matches his profile to the Sokoloff evidence; by March 31 it is matched to four more killings.
March 31, 2009: detectives question him for four hours at Parker Center, and he is arrested.
April 2, 2009: a complaint is filed charging him with the murders of Ethel Sokoloff and Elizabeth McKeown.
April 30, 2009: police announce that more charges are coming and that detectives are checking at least twenty-five more cases.
September 2009: five more murder charges are filed.
September 23, 2009: he pleads not guilty to all seven murder counts.
April 1, 2011: at seventy-four, he pleads guilty to seven counts of first-degree murder and is sentenced the same day to life terms that include at least one without the possibility of parole.