L.A. 'SLASHER' FACES LIFE TERM: DESERET NEWS, DECEMBER 30, 1976
For two months in the winter of 1974 and 1975, someone moved through the alleys, doorways and cheap hotels of skid row in downtown Los Angeles and cut the throats of the men who slept there. When the verdict came, nearly two years later, the Deseret News in Salt Lake City gave it six paragraphs of Associated Press copy. A Superior Court jury, after six days of deliberation, had found Vaughn Greenwood, a drifter named in court as Vaughn Orrin Greenwood, guilty of nine counts of murder. The man the papers called the "Skid Row slasher" now faced life in prison instead of death.
Death had been the goal. Prosecutors said at the start that they wanted it, and then, while the trial was still under way, California's capital punishment law was declared unconstitutional underneath them. The verdicts were mixed. Greenwood was convicted of eight of the nine killings the paper attributes to the slasher, of a murder from 1964 and of one count of assault with intent to commit murder. On two more murder counts the jury could not agree, and the court clerk said a mistrial would be declared. The paper closes on the one detail every killing shared: throats slashed "from ear to ear down to the spine."
The dead were homeless men, often drunk or asleep when they were attacked; the first of the 1974 run, Charles Jackson, forty-six, was found near the Central Library on December 1. Greenwood was caught by accident. In February 1975 he tried to kill a man in Hollywood and dropped a letter addressed to himself, and it led detectives to his home. They had been hunting a long-haired blond white man. Greenwood was Black. On January 19, 1977, his birthday, the judge sentenced him to life and recommended that he never be released.
A brief wire report of a verdict, not a court record, with two small slips against the record. It calls Greenwood "the 33-year-old drifter"; born January 19, 1944, he was thirty-two at the verdict and turned thirty-three the day he was sentenced. It puts the verdict on "Wednesday," which was December 29, while the conviction is recorded as December 30, 1976. The counts themselves hold: nine first-degree murder convictions, eight of them slasher killings and one from 1964, with two counts deadlocked. While awaiting this trial he had already been convicted of two attempted murders and sentenced to thirty-two years to life.
The Deseret News printed this Associated Press story, with no staff byline, on page 2A of its December 30, 1976, issue. The scan is held in Utah Digital Newspapers by the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, whose rights field for the issue reads "No Copyright - United States," the library's finding that the item is free of copyright under U.S. law; it sets that rating issue by issue. No copyright notice was found on the story or the masthead. The citation and the rating sit under the scan.
Every word was legible and is given exactly as the Deseret News set it. The headline's quotation marks around 'slasher' do not match in print, and the paper never settled on a capital: "slasher" is lower-case in the first and fourth paragraphs and "Slasher" in the last. Both forms stand. The story is complete in a single crop.
Transcription
Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.
L.A. 'slasher' faces life term
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Vaughn Orrin Greenwood faces possible life imprisonment when he is sentenced Jan. 19 for eight of the "Skid Row slasher" murders that terrorized Los Angeles transients two years ago.
After six days of deliberations, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury Wednesday found the 33-year-old drifter guilty of nine counts of murder.
Originally, prosecutors had indicated they wanted the death penalty, but California's capital punishment law was declared unconstitutional while the trial was under way.
Greenwood was convicted of eight of the nine killings attributed to the "slasher." He was also convicted of a 1964 murder and one count of assault with intent to commit murder.
The jury failed to reach a verdict on two other murder counts, and Superior Court Clerk Steve Brown said a mistrial would be declared in those cases.
Greenwood was indicted for 11 murders, including two in 1964 and the nine "Slasher" killings between Dec. 1, 1974, and Jan. 31, 1975. All victims had their throats slashed from ear to ear down to the spine.
Notes: The headline uses a mismatched closing quotation mark after "slasher". "slasher" is lower-case in the first and fourth paragraphs and capitalised in the last; kept as printed. No words were illegible.