Juan Chavez was born in 1966. His parents abandoned him in Mexico when he was very young and he was brought up by his grandmother, whom he said beat him; he ran away at seven. He came to the United States in 1980 and lived with a brother in Los Angeles.
Alfred Rowswell, forty-six, was found strangled in his Los Angeles flat in July 1986. His car turned up in Utah later that year, and the fingerprints on its windows were at first inconclusive. The Los Angeles press called him the ATM killer, after where he found the men he robbed.
Three years later, between September and early November 1989, Chavez killed four more men: Ruben Panis, fifty-seven, a fashion designer who had dressed Zsa Zsa Gabor among others and was found in the master bedroom of his house in the Wilshire district; Kleeman, forty-eight; Michael Allen Cates, forty-six; and Leo Hildebrand, fifty-two.
All five were adult men. An earlier version of this entry said that the dead included boys, and that is wrong.
By his own account the men picked him up. He said they drove up to him while he was walking home or to a bus stop and offered fifty dollars for sex, usually while he was out to buy drugs on Vermont Avenue between Sixth and Eighth, or near Echo Park or Elysian Park. He told police he did not go looking for them and that they came to him all the time. At their homes, as they began to undress, he would go to the bathroom to get his knife out and surprise them. He threatened them, tied their hands and feet, and strangled them with a rope or a piece of clothing; the prosecution described exercise ropes, neckties and electrical cords.
In four of the five cases he took their bank cards and made them tell him the numbers. He took cash, jewellery and electronics, and in at least two cases the victim's car.
His stated motive was that homosexual men were spreading AIDS and had to be stopped. He told police that they picked people up without telling them they were sick, that a lot of people were dying because of them, and that he had better stop them. He also said he wanted to teach them a lesson. That is his own account, given in a police interview, and is recorded as that.
Nobody connected the deaths for years. The bodies were found in different parts of Los Angeles County, the Sheriff's Department was handling two of the cases and separate divisions of the Los Angeles Police Department the other three. Detectives had a photograph of a man using one victim's cash card and circulated it in local gay bars, without result. At one point they had more than forty suspects, and hundreds of witnesses were questioned.
Two things broke it. An acquaintance identified Chavez in the photograph from the cash machine, and said Chavez had stolen that victim's car and let him drive it. Separately, in 1994, the fingerprint from Rowswell's car was matched to a prisoner in Washington state, who said he had got the car from Chavez. By then Chavez was in prison himself, and in December 1993 he confessed to the Rowswell killing and made incriminating statements about several of the others.
He was serving a life sentence plus twenty-eight years for kidnapping for ransom, imposed at Merced in 1992. One account gives that conviction as 1996 instead.
The court proceedings then took five years, because the investigation was still going on and the case was complicated. He pleaded guilty in the middle of his trial in March 1999. The deputy district attorney, Michael Duarte, said he had agreed not to seek the death penalty because the evidence in some of the cases was weak, and that the victims' families and the police were all in agreement. He also said that Chavez did not display the usual hallmarks of a serial killer: he took no souvenir from any scene, and left nothing that became a signature. The prosecution believed he may have killed others.
He was sentenced on June 22, 1999 to five consecutive terms of life without parole. He hanged himself in his cell on September 9, 1999.
One victim's surname appears as both Donald and Ronald Kleeman in the reporting, and the first victim's age as forty-five and forty-six.