Vaughn Orrin Greenwood was caught by accident. In early February 1975, in Hollywood, he tried to kill a man named William Graham, and at the scene he dropped a letter he had addressed to himself. It led detectives to his home, where they found the cufflinks of one of the men they believed he had killed. He was arrested on February 3, 1975. Police had been looking for a white man in his late twenties or early thirties, about six feet tall with long blond hair and possibly deformed. Greenwood was a thirty-one-year-old Black man.
He was born on January 19, 1944. The first killings attributed to him came in November 1964, when two transient men were killed on and around skid row in downtown Los Angeles. A ten-year gap followed: in 1966 he was convicted of a knifing assault in Chicago and spent five and a half years in prison before returning to California.
On December 1, 1974, Charles Jackson, forty-six, was found with his throat cut near the Central Library, and over the next two months nine men died. The victims were homeless men, killed in alleys, doorways and cheap hotels, often drunk or asleep, their throats slashed from ear to ear. Some bodies were posed and sprinkled with salt, and cups of blood were left beside them, with signs the killer had drunk some of it. The details led to talk of Satanism, which the investigator K. V. Lanning disputed. The press called the killer the Skid Row Slasher. Accounts of who died differ; one list names David Russell, sixty-four, Benjamin Hornberg, sixty-seven, Charles Jackson, Moses Yakanac, forty-seven, Arthur Dahlstedt, fifty-four, David Perez, forty-two, Casimir Strawinski, fifty-eight, Robert Shannahan, forty-six, Samuel Suarez, forty-nine, George Friar, forty-five, Clyde Hays, thirty-four, and Mance Porter, seventy. William Graham and Kenneth Richer survived attacks attributed to him.
While he awaited trial for murder he was convicted of the attacks on Graham and Richer and sentenced to thirty-two years to life. On December 30, 1976, he was convicted of nine counts of first-degree murder, including eight of the Slasher killings; the jurors could not agree on two others, and a mistrial was declared on those counts. On January 19, 1977, his thirty-third birthday, he was sentenced to life in prison, the judge recommending that he never be released because his presence in any community would be a menace.
He spent the rest of his life in prison and died on December 18, 2020, at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, at seventy-six. The cause of death was not made public.