Between January 1974 and the early summer of 1975, six men were killed in San Francisco in attacks that the San Francisco Police Department attributes to a single unidentified man. Five of them died of stab wounds. The sixth, Warren Andrews, was assaulted in April 1975 and died weeks later; police added his name to the case only in 2022. In July 1975 two more men were attacked and survived, and at least one other man escaped an attack.
The case took its name from one of the survivors. He told police that the man he met had said he was a cartoonist and had been doodling while they talked in a late-night diner. Detectives called the unknown man the Doodler, and the name has stayed with the case for half a century.
No one has ever been charged. Police interviewed a man in January 1976 and considered him a strong suspect; the department says he is still the focus of its investigation. In 1977 police said they could not bring a case without the survivors, and the survivors would not testify. The file went quiet for decades until the department's cold case unit reopened it in 2018. Since then police have released sketches, an old dispatch recording and a series of reward offers, which now stand at $250,000.
The fullest description of the man came from a survivor who met him in July 1975. According to the police department's 2023 crime bulletin, as reported by the Bay Area Reporter and CBS News Bay Area, the two met after the bars had closed, at a diner in the Upper Market area. The young man was drawing animal figures on a napkin. He said he was attending art school and studying to be a cartoonist.
In October 1975 that survivor, who had spent more time with the suspect than anyone else police knew of, helped produce a composite sketch. Police described the man as Black, about five feet eleven inches to six feet tall, of slender build, and between about 18 and 25 years old at the time. A gay newspaper, the San Francisco Sentinel, published the sketch in November 1975, describing a man who frequented bars and restaurants in the Upper Market and Castro areas, according to the writer Elon Green, who studied the paper's coverage for a 2014 article in The Awl.
Later reports added that the man was said to sketch people he had just met. Police in 2019 said he targeted men he met at after-hours clubs and restaurants and usually sketched them first, according to an Associated Press report carried by KQED. The San Francisco Standard reported in 2026 that he was said to approach men in bars in the Castro or Polk Gulch, show them a portrait he had drawn, and tell them he was a cartoonist.
The killings began at a time when the Castro was becoming a center of gay life in the city. Harvey Milk had opened a camera shop there, and bars and bathhouses were busy. Elon Green noted that the American Psychiatric Association had stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder about a year before the first death.
Relations between the gay community and the police were poor. Green described police entrapment operations in Golden Gate Park in the period, and a case in which a jury awarded a gay man more than $260,000 after officers beat him. The department's personnel director told The Advocate in January 1975 that gay applicants would not be hired if they were covert homosexuals. In October 1975 the department's public relations director called gay men "emotionally unstable"; Harvey Milk objected, and the department withdrew the statement on October 23, 1975.
Tom Ammiano, a gay activist who later served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, told ABC7 News in 2022 that many people in the community saw no point in going to the police at the time, because, as he put it, the police had shown that their lives were not valued. A man who lived in San Francisco in the 1970s told CBS News Bay Area that people were very worried, and that being identified as gay could still cost a person his apartment.
The city's police were also stretched by other cases. ABC7 News noted in 2022 that investigators in the period were focused on the Zodiac killings, the Zebra killings and the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and that the Doodler case received less attention.
The first death attributed to the Doodler was that of Gerald Earl Cavanaugh, who was found in San Francisco early on January 27, 1974. He was 49, according to The Advocate, the Bay Area Reporter and The Awl; the Associated Press gave his age as 50.
Coroner's records cited by Elon Green showed that Cavanaugh was born in Canada in 1923 and had settled in San Francisco. He had been stabbed, and was at first listed by the coroner as an unidentified man.
His body was reported to police by a telephone caller who would not give his name. In 2019 the department released the audio of that call. In it the caller tells a dispatcher that he believes he has seen a dead person, that he did not want to get too close, and that he felt it was his duty to report it. Asked for his name, he says he does not think it is necessary. Police said in 2019 that they were still trying to identify him. Commander Greg McEachern said the caller could have been a witness or the suspect, according to the Bay Area Reporter. The anniversary of the discovery, January 27, has since become the date on which the department issues its appeals.
Joseph Stevens, known as Jae, was 27. He was found in San Francisco on June 25, 1974. He was born in Texas, according to The Awl. He had been stabbed.
His sister, who had performed alongside him, spoke to ABC7 News in 2022. She said the renewed public interest gave her hope: for years, she said, the case had gone unnoticed, and the attention suggested that investigators were getting closer.
Klaus Christmann was 31. He was found in San Francisco on July 7, 1974. He was a German national with a wife and two children in Germany, according to The Awl, and had been in San Francisco for about three months. He was buried in Bamberg, Germany.
After Christmann's death, the Sentinel reported later in July 1974 that police believed the first three killings were connected, according to Green.
The killings came within an unusual run of unsolved deaths of gay men in the city. Elon Green counted 21 unsolved killings of gay men in San Francisco in roughly a year and a half by May 1976, not all of them connected to the Doodler. Inspector Dan Cunningham, who reopened the case in 2018, said that 16 gay men were killed in San Francisco over 18 months in the period, according to the Bay Area Reporter.
Green found that a police sergeant who wrote a column for the Sentinel argued in July 1974 that killings with what he called "gay overtones" were a very small share of the city's homicides. Inspector Rotea Gilford, who was assigned to the case, later said witnesses were reluctant because they did not want to be exposed as homosexuals. Inspector Frank McCoy appealed through the press for anyone who had been attacked to come forward.
Warren Andrews was 52, according to the Bay Area Reporter and The Advocate. He was assaulted in San Francisco on April 27, 1975, and died weeks later; in 2022 the department put his death at about seven weeks after the assault, according to ABC10.
Andrews was not stabbed, and for decades his death was not counted among the Doodler cases. In January 2022 the department said that a new investigation suggested he may have been the sixth victim.
Frederick Elmer Capin was 32. He was found in San Francisco on May 12, 1975. He had died of stab wounds. He was a Vietnam veteran with family in Washington state, according to The Awl.
Harald Gullberg was 66, the oldest of the six. He was found in San Francisco on June 4, 1975. He was born in Sweden and had become a naturalized United States citizen in 1955, according to The Awl. When he was found, the coroner listed him as an unidentified man. He had been stabbed.
In a 2019 news conference, Commander McEachern said the five killings police then linked were connected by their similarities. In its written releases the department has said that all six victims are believed to have been gay white men, a pattern that shaped every later stage of the investigation.
At least three men survived encounters with the man police sought. Two were attacked in July 1975, within about two weeks of each other, according to the department's 2023 bulletin, and police concluded that those attacks were connected to the killings. Dan Cunningham told The San Francisco Standard in 2026 that the two sets of crimes had never been definitively connected, though he saw strong parallels, and that he felt fairly confident the man police interviewed was the man who attacked the two survivors.
A third man left the city and stopped responding to police, according to the Bay Area Reporter. Each gave police a description, and one of those descriptions produced the original sketch. ABC7 News reported in 2022 that two of the survivors were still alive and did not want to be associated with the case.
Soon after the first sketch was released, a woman called the police department twice in 10 days and gave a name and a vehicle license plate number, according to the department's 2023 bulletin as quoted by The Advocate. She did not identify herself. At least two other people gave police the same name.
Homicide investigators interviewed that man in January 1976 and considered him a strong suspect. The department's 2023 bulletin says he is still the focus of the investigation. He has not been charged. ABC10 reported in 2022 that the department described him as a potential suspect named by several San Francisco residents in January 1976.
Separately, the Sentinel reported in January 1976 that a man who resembled the sketch had been arrested in a Tenderloin bar on a weapons charge. Inspector Gilford told the paper the man was one of many suspects being checked, according to Green.
In July 1977 Inspector Gilford said a suspect had been questioned over about a year and had talked freely but would not confess, according to Green. United Press International reported that police were fairly certain they knew who was responsible, but that a case would need the survivors' testimony. The Associated Press reported the same year that the suspect could not be charged because the three survivors were reluctant to testify. Police said two of the survivors would not testify.
Harvey Milk, then a gay rights advocate, told the Associated Press: "I can understand their position. I respect the pressure society has put on them." He added that they had to stay in the closet. Milk was elected to the Board of Supervisors a few months later, and was assassinated a little over a year after the interview.
The week after Gilford's remarks, the Sentinel reported that police had the suspect's license plate number and had spoken with a psychiatrist who said a patient had admitted the killings during treatment, according to Green. No arrest followed. In 2019 the department said it was looking for an East Bay psychiatrist who may have treated the suspect in the 1970s, according to the Associated Press and CBS News Bay Area. Dan Cunningham told The San Francisco Standard in 2026 that he had not been able to find the psychiatrist or anyone who knew him.
The count has never been settled. Detectives in the 1970s believed the Doodler killed at least five men and possibly as many as 14 between January 1974 and 1975, according to the Bay Area Reporter and ABC7 News. The Bay Area Reporter and The Advocate have since reported that he may have killed as many as 16.
Elon Green concluded in 2014 that five or six was far more likely than 14, and suggested the larger figure came from separate cases being run together. He also noted that some other deaths of gay men in the period were unsolved and could not be ruled in or out.
When the case was reopened in 2018, Cunningham said he was looking at five killings but could not yet connect them to the Doodler. In 2022 police added Warren Andrews, bringing the number the department attributes to the Doodler to six.
The department's 2019 statements put the five killings it then linked between January 1974 and June 1975.
After 1977 the case largely disappeared from the news. Green found that a gay newspaper, the Crusader, reported in August 1978 that police were "nowhere" on the killings, and that coverage almost stopped after that. The novelist Armistead Maupin mentioned the Doodler in Tales of the City in 1978. Within a few years the killings were overshadowed by the AIDS epidemic.
When Green asked the department about the case in 2014, a spokesperson said it did not discuss open investigations.
Inspector Dan Cunningham of the department's Homicide Detail reopened the case in 2018. In June 2018 he said he was investigating five killings and was trying to find the three survivors. He hoped the department's crime lab could recover DNA from evidence collected at two of the scenes, in the wake of the April 2018 arrest in the Golden State Killer case, which DNA had solved.
Cunningham told the Bay Area Reporter on June 24, 2018, that police were still working out what testing could be done and did not yet have a suspect formally confirmed. A department spokesman said there were no new developments. The department said on June 21, 2018, that an age-progressed sketch had been made but would not yet be released.
Cunningham also re-interviewed the man first questioned in the 1970s. He told The San Francisco Standard in 2026 that he brought the man in for questioning after reopening the case, and that a few years later he happened to see him while getting coffee. The two recognized each other but did not speak. Cunningham said the man was still a person of interest.
On February 6, 2019, the department held a news conference at police headquarters. It announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the suspect, released an age-progressed version of the 1975 sketch, and played the 1974 call reporting Gerald Cavanaugh's death. Investigators said they believed the same man was responsible for the assaults and the five killings.
Commander McEachern said the case had gripped the gay community and San Francisco in the 1970s, and that the department wanted justice for the victims. He said the team looked at cases it believed were solvable, and cases in which victims had never had justice. He said the department had submitted DNA samples from some of the scenes and was awaiting results. A person of interest interviewed at the time of the killings remained one, he said, but he would not say whether that man resembled the sketches.
Cleve Jones, the gay rights activist, told the Associated Press that the image of a stranger handing over a sketch of a man he had just drawn in a club was hard to forget.
On January 27, 2022, the anniversary of the first killing, the department said a new investigation suggested that Warren Andrews may have been the sixth victim. It doubled the reward to $200,000 and reissued the suspect sketch. It said it believed others may have survived attacks by the same man, or may have information about him, and asked them to come forward.
On January 24, 2023, the department released a new age-progressed sketch and raised the reward from $200,000 to $250,000, for information leading to the suspect's identification, arrest and conviction. It repeated that Andrews was believed to be the sixth victim. For the first time, it asked the public to help identify the woman who had called police twice in 1975 with a name and a license plate, and asked the two other people who had given the same name to come forward again. The cold case investigators named on the bulletin were Tom Newland, Dominic Celaya, Daniel Dedet and Daniel Cunningham.
In June 2026, with the $250,000 reward still on offer as part of a cold case review, Cunningham, who leads the department's cold case unit, told The San Francisco Standard that he believed the suspect was alive, in his 70s and living in the East Bay. "Once this person was made aware that they were a suspect in these murders, the murders stopped," he said. As of June 2026, no one had been charged with any of the killings. The department asks anyone with information to call its 24-hour tip line, and says tipsters may remain anonymous.
No court has heard any evidence in the case, and every link between the six deaths rests on police judgment. The killings are attributed by the San Francisco Police Department to one unidentified man; that man has not been identified in any public charge.
Whether the July 1975 attacks on the two survivors were committed by the same man as the killings has not been proven. The department's bulletins treat them as connected; Inspector Cunningham said in 2026 that the connection had never been definitively made.
The total number of victims is uncertain. The department attributes six; 1970s detectives spoke of as many as 14, and later reports of 16. Elon Green, drawing on coroner's records and the coverage of the time, doubted the higher figures.
Warren Andrews's place among the victims is a police judgment from 2022, framed in the department's words as a death that "may" belong to the case.
The 1977 report that a psychiatrist had told police a patient admitted the killings appeared in the Sentinel and was not confirmed by police at the time. The psychiatrist has not been found.
The identity of the man who reported the first body in 1974 is unknown. Police have said he could have been a witness or the suspect.
January 27, 1974: Gerald Cavanaugh, 49, is found dead in San Francisco; an anonymous caller reports the body.
June 25, 1974: Joseph "Jae" Stevens, 27, is found dead in San Francisco.
July 7, 1974: Klaus Christmann, 31, is found dead in San Francisco.
July 1974: the Sentinel reports that police believe the first three killings are connected.
April 27, 1975: Warren Andrews, 52, is assaulted in San Francisco; he dies several weeks later.
May 12, 1975: Frederick Capin, 32, is found dead in San Francisco.
June 4, 1975: Harald Gullberg, 66, is found dead in San Francisco.
July 1975: two men are attacked within about two weeks and survive; one had met the attacker in a late-night diner.
October 1975: a survivor helps produce a composite sketch.
October 23, 1975: the police department withdraws its public relations director's remark about gay men after Harvey Milk objects.
November 1975: the Sentinel publishes the sketch.
After the sketch is released: an anonymous woman calls police twice in 10 days with a name and a license plate.
January 1976: homicide investigators interview the man named; he becomes a strong suspect.
July 1977: police say they cannot bring a charge without the survivors, who will not testify; Harvey Milk says he understands their position.
August 1978: the Crusader reports police are "nowhere" on the killings.
December 2014: The Awl publishes Elon Green's account of the killings; the department declines to discuss the open case.
2018: Inspector Dan Cunningham reopens the case.
June 21, 2018: the department says an age-progressed sketch has been made.
February 6, 2019: the department announces a $100,000 reward, releases the age-progressed sketch and plays the 1974 call.
January 27, 2022: the department names Warren Andrews as a possible sixth victim and doubles the reward to $200,000.
January 24, 2023: a new age-progressed sketch is released, the reward rises to $250,000, and police ask the 1975 caller to come forward.
June 2026: the appeal is renewed; Cunningham says he believes the suspect is alive and living in the East Bay. No one has been charged.