Alfred Rowswell, forty-six, was found strangled in his Los Angeles apartment in July 1986. Whoever killed him had tied him up, taken what he wanted from the apartment and driven away in Rowswell's car, which turned up later that year in Utah. Fingerprints lifted from the car matched nobody detectives could find, and cigarette butts from the scene were too dry by the time anyone tried to type the saliva on them. The case went cold for eight years.
Three years after Rowswell, between September and November 1989, four more men were found strangled in their homes in Los Angeles County. Ruben Panis, fifty-seven, was 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. Donald Kleeman was forty-eight; some reporting gives his first name as Ronald. Michael Allen Cates, forty-six, was killed in October after offering a young man a ride home from West Hollywood. Leo Hildebrand, fifty-two, an elementary school teacher, was killed in his home in Alhambra in November. Each had been tied, robbed and strangled, with exercise rope, neckties or electrical cord.
Nobody linked the deaths for years. The bodies lay in three different cities, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had two of the cases and separate divisions of the Los Angeles Police Department had the other three. Detectives had a surveillance photograph of a young man using one victim's bank card at a cash machine and circulated it in gay bars, without result. At one point they had more than forty suspects, and hundreds of witnesses were questioned. The newspapers called the killer the ATM killer.
The man in the photograph was Juan Chavez. He was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1965; some accounts give 1966. His parents left him and his half-brother on their grandmother's doorstep when he was very young. He said she beat him, and one account has her hitting him with a pipe when he was a teenager, after which the two boys lived on the streets around Juárez before crossing into the United States. Chavez settled in Los Angeles, where he lived with a brother, Cruz, and also used the name Job Rocha.
By his own account, the men picked him up. He told detectives they drove up to him as he walked home or waited at a bus stop and offered him fifty dollars for sex, usually while he was out buying drugs on Vermont Avenue between Sixth and Eighth streets, or near Echo Park or Elysian Park. He said he did not look for them and that they came to him all the time. At their homes, as they began to undress, he went to the bathroom, took out his knife and surprised them. He threatened them, tied their hands and feet, and made them give him the numbers for their bank cards before he strangled them. The prosecution said he let himself be picked up at places frequented by gay Latino men. He took cash, jewelry and electronics, and in at least two cases the victim's car.
His explanation was that gay men were spreading AIDS. 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. Investigators who later wrote about the case read it differently: in four of the five killings he went straight for the bank cards, and in their view the money was the point. Both the motive he gave and the one they inferred are in the record, and neither was ever tested at trial.
The Rowswell fingerprints broke first. They were eventually matched to a man named Sergio Rodriguez, who was serving time in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla, Washington, and a team of LAPD detectives flew up to question him. Rodriguez admitted driving the car to Utah and abandoning it when it gave out, and said he had bought it cheaply from a man called Job Rocha, who also went by Juan Chavez. Shown the photographs from the cash machine, he identified Juan Chavez and his brother Cruz. Separately, an acquaintance picked Chavez out of the same photograph and said Chavez had stolen a victim's car and let him drive it.
By then Chavez was already in prison. In 1992 he had been convicted of kidnapping and robbery in unrelated cases and sentenced to life plus twenty-eight years, and he was at Folsom State Prison when detectives interviewed him. In December 1993 he confessed to killing Rowswell and made statements incriminating himself in the four 1989 deaths. With two brothers in the frame, detectives turned to the physical evidence to make sure one was not covering for the other. He was charged with the five murders in November 1994.
The case took five more years to reach a courtroom. His defense tried to have the prison interviews thrown out, arguing that he had talked only because detectives promised to leave his brother alone, and that problems with the tape recorder made the record of what he said unreliable. His lawyers also looked at arguing that head injuries from his grandmother's beatings had shaped his violence.
None of it came to trial. Jury selection had begun, and he was about a week and a half into the proceedings in Los Angeles Superior Court in March 1999, when he had his attorney stop the trial and pleaded guilty to all five murders and related burglary charges. Deputy District Attorney Michael Duarte had agreed not to seek the death penalty. The evidence in some of the cases was weak, he explained; one or two were strong enough to win, but the result would probably have been the same as the deal. "The victims' families and the police were all in agreement with this one," he told the Los Angeles Times. Duarte also said Chavez lacked the usual hallmarks of a serial killer: he took no souvenirs and left no signature. Detectives believed he had killed more men than he admitted, although a 1986 killing once linked to the series was left out of it.
Judge Jacqueline Connor sentenced him to five consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole, and ordered $10,000 in restitution. He made no statement, and none of the victims' families were in the courtroom. The wire report of the day dates the sentencing June 21, 1999; a later account gives June 22.
On September 9, 1999, less than three months later, he hanged himself in his cell at Folsom.
The count did not end with him. In July 1990, eight months after Leo Hildebrand's death, Lynn Penn, sixty, was strangled in his apartment in Los Angeles County, and a cigarette butt found there went into an evidence file. In 2013 prosecutors in California began collecting genetic profiles from prisoners who had died in custody, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney's sex crimes chief, Carol Burke, took samples from several. One matched the Penn evidence to Chavez. No one could be charged, but the case was closed. "We solved one case, so to me that's rewarding and worth my time," Burke said.
Two figures differ between sources and are left as they stand: Rowswell's age appears as both forty-five and forty-six, and Kleeman's first name as both Donald and Ronald.