One of the men who lived told police he had met his attacker after the bars closed, at the Truck Stop diner near Market and Church Streets in San Francisco. The young man was drawing animal figures on a napkin. He said he was at art school studying to be a cartoonist, and the older man, who had a background in art himself, thought he was genuinely skilled. That habit of sketching the men he picked up gave the killer his name: the Doodler. Between January 1974 and the spring of 1975 he stabbed at least five gay men to death in San Francisco and beat a sixth, and police have said he may have been responsible for as many as fourteen killings and three assaults.
The first victim, Gerald Cavanagh, forty-nine, was found at Ocean Beach on January 27, 1974. Joseph Stevens, twenty-seven, was found on June 25, 1974, at the Spreckels Lake model yacht facility in Golden Gate Park, and Klaus Christmann, thirty-one, at Ocean Beach on July 7. Warren Andrews, fifty-two, a lawyer for the United States Postal Service, was found unconscious at Land's End on April 27, 1975, having been beaten with a rock and a tree branch; he never came round and died about seven weeks later, and in January 2023 police said he was probably the sixth victim. Frederick Elmer Capin, thirty-two, a nurse and Vietnam veteran, was found on May 12, 1975, stabbed through the aorta, his body apparently dragged about twenty feet across the sand; he was identified from the fingerprints the state had taken for his nursing license. Harald Gullberg, sixty-six, was also among the dead. The killings were savage enough that investigators concluded the man was driven by some kind of fury.
At the time police described the suspect as a Black man between nineteen and twenty-five, about five feet eleven to six feet tall, lanky, with smooth skin. The survivor who had spent the most time with him helped produce the first composite sketch. After it was published a woman called police anonymously with a name and a license plate number, and at least two other people gave the same name. The man was interviewed in 1976, cooperated, denied everything, and was considered a strong suspect.
Three men had survived attacks: one was described in the press as a well-known entertainer and another as a European diplomat. All three identified the same man, police later said, but none of them would testify, because doing so meant being publicly identified as gay. Without them no charge could be brought. Detectives including Rotea Gilford and Earl Sanders, who had worked the Zebra murders, stayed with the case for years.
The San Francisco Police Department has repeatedly reopened it. It released an age-progressed sketch in 2019, and on the forty-ninth anniversary of the first killing, in January 2023, it released another, raised the reward from $200,000 to $250,000, and asked the public to help identify the anonymous woman who had called in the suspect's name. Police have said the suspect is still alive and living in the Bay Area. No one has been charged.