◆ SpookStack

* Brooks, 10-year-old. schoolgirl, was, . lured into an auto, raped and mur- ay Southern California policé officers last ni mad butcher murder of Elizabeth Short, 22, other unsolved San Diego sex Officers in the border city: im-' mediately feared that San Diego's, sadistic woman killer, already ‘be- lieved responsible for at least Seven unsolved murders, was’ on the prow! again. . For 15 years, police and psychol- ogists have agreed that the killer Was a sexual sadist whose crimes ; inoreased in brutality. By studying the records of un- solved’ cases, they conjectured that Miss Short: who worked and lived in San Diego, could well be the mad Killer's ‘latest victim—in the most brutal crime of them all, The string of unsolved crimes, began in Feb,, 1981, when Virginia dered. Her body, trussed in a gun- ny-sack, was found months later, On April 25 of the same year, thie. body of Dolly Bibbens, attrac- fe, well-to-do widow, was found, her apartment. She had been ously beaten after: first being Two weeks later, Hazel Brad-. | Shaw, beautiful. 22-year-old tele- : Phone: operator, was-found mur- ean a crimes, ing of seven San Diego women, ght noted the striking similarity between the; , Whose body was found here Wednesday, and: deréd in the Indian Village, Balboa Fark. She had been stabbed 17 While still investigating these three murders, police were called to the apartment of Maud Det- wiler, attractive divorcee. She, too, had been raped and sadisti- |. cally slain, There was a thiee year lull be- fore the sex fiend struck again, ‘Then, on the morning of March 4, 1984, police found Mrs. Wesley Adams dead, the victim of 4-killer following a similar pattern to the first three crimes. : - A month later, San Diego was, shocked by one of the shost baf- fling of all, sex crime cases. Hang- ing from a tree on Black Moun- tain was the nude body of pretty Louise Teuber, 17-year-old clerk. A Tope around her. neck was tied to the limbs of two trees, but an autopsy indicated she had’ been raped and ‘murdered élse-. where, before being tied to the trees. Before the ‘summer ended, the Sadist struck again. - Celia Cota, 16-year-old high School’ beauty, was murdered just: before she entered her home after . attending a movie. ; She had been raped several -timeés, tortured and.strangled. So incensed was San Diego that the entire police administration was replaced, but still no clues to the mad slayer were found. Next, and perhaps most specta- cular in the series, was the brutal murder of Miss Ruth Muir, River- side YWCA secretary, and daugh- ter of a prominent Phoenix ‘bank- er. Visiting her vacationing parents { in La Jolla, Miss Muir walked, along the moon-lit shore of La Jolla on the night of Sept. 2, 1936, She had paused behind a lover's bench, near the Casa Manana Hotel, when the killer set upon er. Police said they had never | known a murder in which the. victim’s head was so hysterically beater. She, too, had been raped, and slashed. But the most vicious killing pf ail—and perhaps No. 8 in the: 'Berles—was the murder of Mi gt Short, whose mutilated and }i-' rsected body ‘was discovered hi Wednesday,