Vaughn Orrin Greenwood was born in 1943 and by his twenties was living on and around skid row in downtown Los Angeles, an area of missions, cheap hotels and several thousand homeless men.
He killed two men there in 1964 and was not caught. Between December 1, 1974, and January 29, 1975, he killed nine more: David Russell, Charles Jackson, Benjamin Hornberg, David Perez, Clyde Hay, Arthur Dahlstedt, Frank Reed, Samuel Suarez and George Frias. All had their throats cut. Around several of the bodies he left arrangements of salt, and in some cases a cup or paper container of the victim's blood, which produced the newspaper name for the case and a good deal of speculation about ritual. The Los Angeles press called him the Skid Row Slasher.
The victims were transient men whose deaths were not, at first, connected, and the police response was later widely criticised. What changed it was the last two, Frias and Reed, who were killed indoors in Hollywood rather than on the street, and one of whom was an acquaintance of a well-known actor, at which point the story became front-page news across the city.
He was caught after an attack on two men in a house in Hollywood on February 3, 1975, when he left behind items traceable to him. He was arrested days later. He was convicted in January 1977 of nine murders and sentenced to life, and the two 1964 killings were established as his afterwards.
He is not well known even in Los Angeles. Eleven men died and the case is remembered, when it is remembered, for the salt.