by Jeff Rice
He turned to McManus. “Start the gross work on the internal organs. I’m going to phone the D.A.” Then, looking at both men, he added, “Don’t talk about this–not to anyone,” and he rushed to McManus’ nearby office to inform the district attorney of his unexpected findings.
• • •
It took some considerable prying to discover what I’ve just related. In light of the later revelations of Dr. Mokurji, I know my guesswork was accurate. I got some of my information from McManus who was later quietly dismissed and who left town. Some of it came from my own (later) observations.
The D.A. must have had a fit when Regenhaus reported the body had no marks except for a slight abrasion on each of her heels where she had presumably been dragged from sight. A later and more complete report added to this that her larynx had not been crushed; thus strangulation was ruled out as a cause of death.
Then, of course, there were the two “holes” in the girl’s neck. That, and the fact there was virtually no blood in her entire vascular system. Cheryl Ann Hughes had been very efficiently drained of all ten pints of her blood; apparently without much struggle and with no noise. If fright at whatever fate had overtaken her did not stop her heart–and there were no indications of this–then the shock induced by this massive blood loss certainly did. And in less than a minute’s time, according to Regenhaus.
The D.A. did some quick thinking and put through a conference call to both the sheriff and the police chief. When he had them on the line he gave Regenhaus an extension and they discussed how to handle the unexplainable occurrence. The four men decided on a press blackout and that the cause of death would be marked “officially undetermined and under investigation.”
Murder, of course, was the assumption. The time of death was fixed at approximately 3:00–3:15 A.M. Her whereabouts were known at 2:30 and it was later established she had walked home and that time factor figured.
Her low-heeled shoes were only slightly scraped indicating they had come off in the struggle–if indeed there had been a struggle. They gave no sign of an attempt of Cheryl Ann to kick her assailant into releasing her.
Not one soul, including those whose bedrooms fronted on the alley, heard anything out of the ordinary.
In short, whoever or whatever killed Miss Hughes must have been terribly strong to so quickly immobilize her. It was assumed–in the absence of further evidence–that her attacker or attackers were male, over six feet tall, and weighed more than 200 pounds.
A bigger mystery is how ten pints of blood could have been so rapidly drained through two such small apertures.
With nothing to go on but the coroner’s report, police were at a loss for suspects, and a subsequent check of her background turned up nothing but a divorced and remarried ex-husband in Desplaines, Iowa who was “shocked” and “saddened” but who could offer little worth noting.
“Yes,” he said, “she had tended to be a somewhat headstrong girl… always clamoring for the bright lights and glamour; interested in becoming a dancer or an actress… careless in her choice of male companions but a friendly girl with no known enemies who would wish her ill–certainly, not dead.”
CHAPTER 2
Nine days later, the second body was discovered. It was found by Bud Jacobs, a Nevada Power Company inspector at 11:00 A.M. Monday, May 4, in a gully, fifteen feet off West Charleston Boulevard, near Power Station Six.
Bonnie Reynolds: Casbar Casino cocktail waitress (swing-shift). Native Nevadan originally from Pioche: twenty-seven, divorced, mother of two boys (Bobby, seven, and Kenny, four). Five feet seven, one hundred and twenty pounds. Brunette. Thin. Friendly according to coworkers. Ex-husband a career mechanic–a six-stripe sergeant in the air force recently transferred from Nellis AFB in Las Vegas to Edwards AFB in Calif. Reported in a state of collapse over the news.
Bonnie Reynolds. Torn fingernails. Bruises on her face. (Later it was discovered by Regenhaus that her third and fifth cervical vertebrae were displaced.) Two small, round puncture wounds were discovered just below the left ear. And, as I found out later, she was drained as dry as a corpse on a mortician’s table.
This one, the police figured, had been “taken for a ride” and tried to get out–too late. This one had fought, possibly without Miss Hughes’ amateur karate skill, but less frantically. Her clothes were torn but no sign of sexual molestation was evident. There were no footprints.
The struggle must have taken place about the middle of the road and the body literally flung fifteen feet to where it came to rest in a crumpled heap; lying face down, legs together in skin-tight bell-bottomed hip-huggers, left arm outstretched, palm down; right arm doubled at an unnatural angle under the body across the waist and groin; face turned back toward the lights of town staring with dead eyes for help that never came.
The first death was duly reported in large, blue headlines by the newssheet “down the street,” an afternoon paper that goes to press around noon.
I blew what could have been a scoop. Well, I didn’t exactly blow it alone. I had help from our front office. Daily News policy dictates that money must be saved at every turn–salaries especially. And, in one way, that meant clearing out the newsroom by midnight. The earliest birds on the News rarely filtered in before 9:00 A.M.
We put out a home (6:30 A.M.) edition that deadlines at about 10:00 P.M. and the presses roll around midnight. Our early morning edition deadlines around 5:00 P.M., prints up at 7:00 or 8:00, and hits the newsstands around 10:30 P.M., in time to catch show-goers on the Strip between shows as they race from one plastic and chrome pleasure dome to another.
Notice that I keep talking in the present tense. It’s hard to turn off old habits after nearly seven years. Oh well, the digression is natural. I’m not exactly sober right now. I wasn’t always a drunk. Not until this thing at least.
Anyhow, we carried the story in the lower half of our front page in seventy-two-point Futura Medium, indicative of unusual restraint on our city editor’s part. As incredibly stupid as it seemed to me ten days later, I picked up the story of the Hughes girl during my usual sounds of the PD and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, and didn’t even pause once to ask why the cause of death was listed as “undetermined” even though I’d been told about the autopsy. Perhaps living in Las Vegas for a decade–almost–had somewhat dulled my reporter’s instincts. Or perhaps I was just careless. It happens.
Or maybe it was the town itself. Whether you take the FBI’s point of view or the sociologist’s instead, dead bodies do not really make news–to other Las Vegans.
The FBI believes any town that has 163,000 persons in a general area-wide population of 490,000 that has as many deaths–murders, manslaughters and suicides–as Las Vegas has; it’s a very unhealthy place indeed.
From the standpoint of the sociologists considering “social interaction,” the picture is hardly as bleak. “Interaction” can be anything from one pedestrian bumping into another to conversation, copulation or killing. Common sense dictates that there were more opportunities to rub shoulders with large numbers of people in a large city than in a small rural community. While small in terms of resident population, Las Vegas played host to nearly twenty million visitors last year, about the same number as those who visited New York City. That’s a lot of people interacting “socially” and, ofttimes, not so socially.
Then consider that the tourists are bent on having a good time in unfamiliar surroundings. They’re often in Las Vegas on a binge or on that last fling before the final fall, the overdose, or the pistol pointed at the head. Then you begin to understand why a woman “found neatly folded in a garbage can some thirty feet into the alley, between Eighth and Ninth streets off Bridger Avenue” didn’t excite more than a passing comment and a few raised eyebrows.
Yeah! Maybe you can understand it. I can’t, and I never will.
My fine newshound’s instinct became aroused in time. On the evening of the second day after Cheryl Ann Hughes was discovered, my instincts were in
sufficient tune to provoke my first argument on the subject with Tony Vincenzo, our city editor and my staunchest critic.
CHAPTER 3
MONDAY, APRIL 27, 1970
Tony Vincenzo is a small, dried-out Brooklyn-born Sicilian of such commanding presence and warmth that for years he has been totally disregarded by the Cosa Nostra, the Knights of Columbus and the Italian-American club.
Vincenzo of the rapier wit: “Where else would you put a ‘discard’ but in a trash can?”
Vincenzo didn’t think it was worth speculation even though a police cover-up was as plain as flies in a pail of milk.
By the end of the fourth day, after getting my fill of cold stares from Chief Butcher, Sheriff Reese Lane and the D.A. himself, I knew something was up. Fortunately, I still had friends among the undertaking trade who would, for a generous stipend, look the other way while I performed some mild necrophilic investigations.
I first saw what was left of Cheryl Ann Hughes late Wednesday afternoon, April 29, in the cold room of The Willows, one of our town’s “leading” undertaking establishments. At first, I, too, in my untrained way, saw nothing remarkable about the reasonably attractive young woman who had been neatly opened by the coroner’s scalpel and then, just as neatly, stitched closed. It is usually best when examining four-day-old corpses to take as impersonal an attitude as possible. So I didn’t really look at her face until I was through inspecting the body and was replacing the sheet.
Then I saw the two little holes.
At first I couldn’t figure out what they night be. Largely, because I didn’t try. They didn’t register at all until I was sliding her back into her icy little nook. Then, some little ghost of a thought flitted through my mind and without thinking I pulled her back out and took a second look. I called in my well-bribed contact man and asked him what the holes were.
“Funny, I never noticed those,” he said.
Bullshit! He’s a professional and he’d notice something like that right away. From his deliberately obtuse manner and his sudden myopia I gathered I was really onto something…but what? A girl who died under mysterious circumstances. A murder. No clues. No motive. But not just written off. Oh no! Written off and swept under the rug by the very people who should have been running around in a sweat trying to solve the crime.
With my usual tact, I managed to receive a “first warning” from Vincenzo before the week was out: “Quit bugging the PD. When something breaks, they’ll let us know. Meanwhile, use your head and lay off. Whatever they’re up to, they don’t want any help from amateur bloodhounds like you. And neither does the boss.”
Marvelous! Vincenzo never ceases to amaze me. I have never figured out just why he became a newsman, and I use that term loosely. He’s been one since ’46 and has never had the ambition or curiosity to look outside to see if it was raining. We have locked horns so many times I’ve lost count. Ant it’s sad because he is basically a decent, honest, hard-working man. But he plods! He toes the mark. He never crosses the line or the publisher, even if it means a scoop. I suppose some of this is unfair because, all in all, he has been a friend at times. OK. I’m unfair. But I can still smell out a story. Vincenzo’s sinuses are perpetually blocked. He has all the news sense of a tree stump.
The night before the second victim, Bonnie Reynolds, was discovered. I sniffed out the startling information from a County General intern that the Hughes girl “didn’t bleed at all during the autopsy. All corpses bleed.”
I was just formulating my “crazy theory” when Mrs. Reynolds was found and was alert for new developments on the Hughes thing when the call came in over the police radio.
• • •
MONDAY, MAY 4, 1970
I got there probably less than fifteen minutes after the first squad car. I got a good look–if anything like the sight of Bonnie Reynolds’ crumpled form could be called a “good” look. Of course, having to write it up before the autopsy, I was in no position to know that she, too, was found drained of every drop of blood. Nor could I, with any grain of common sense, openly speculate on that, especially since I hadn’t been given any clearance to report the speculations and rumors about the first death.
Vincenzo made one mistake. He let me print the fact that there were two puncture marks in her neck even though he wouldn’t let me link that fact with the similar marks on Miss Hughes. The public wasn’t treated to that little bit of information until Carol Hanochek was found, clad in a see-through shortie nightgown and panties, the following Monday morning around nine, on the kitchen floor of her ground-level apartment on Ida Street, behind the Bird of Paradise Hotel.
• • •
MONDAY, MAY 11, 1970
Carol Hanochek was crumpled up in a corner between the stove and the kitchen wall. Her roommate, Sandi Jensen, a brokerage house receptionist between jobs, had gotten up, wandered into the kitchen and discovered Carol whom she thought had fainted or fallen. She spent a few anxious minutes trying to revive her, not noticing the neat puncture marks under her right jaw. Finally, she summoned an ambulance and the crew, knowing a “dead one” on sight, made no further attempt to find the cause, but notified the sheriff’s office.
Carol, a swing-shift cocktail waitress in the Bird of Paradise’s show lounge had gotten home (guesswork, here) around 2:15–2:30, poured herself a glass of milk, and had opened the back door of the kitchen for reasons unknown. (Fingerprints were later found on the outside knob that, while smudged, didn’t belong to either girl.)
She had opened the door, and died. Suddenly, quietly, without disturbing her sleeping roommate only a few feet away.
Like Cheryl Ann Hughes, Carol was a blond, twenty-three, and just a bit over five foot five, though somewhat chunkier, weighing in at 130 or thereabouts. Like Cheryl Ann, she lived within walking distance of her job and had no car. Unlike either of the first two victims, Carol Hanochek had never been married and had never (Regenhaus’ examination later revealed) borne children. She was described by co-workers and the lounge’s bar manager to be gregarious, efficient and “straight,” with no steady boyfriends and no record of any trouble either at work or (to their knowledge) in her private life.
Something of a pattern had started to form and it was ugly. Young girls, all engaged in casino-oriented jobs and all working after dark, were dead. All were seen more or less frequently with men, none of whom were then (or later) very good suspects.
I was certain it was the work of one individual and assumed him to be a male, well over 200 pounds (he would need size and strength to accomplish his gruesome tasks quickly and silently) and definitely of doubtful emotional stability.
I also decided he was a white man. I’ll explain that in a minute. I further decided that the individual involved got some kind of twisted sexual thrill from the killings, and the way they were performed.
None of the three women died from heart failure, burst blood vessels, crushed larynxes or broken necks. There were few bruises except just under the throat in both the first and third cases, indicating little if any struggle. Discount the badly bruised body of Bonnie Reynolds in this context because the bruises did not kill her (though it was revealed in her autopsy her right arm was dislocated, most likely in the fight).
No. They all died, Regenhaus said (later) from “shock induced by massive loss of blood.’
How the blood was lost was where my theory differed from the professional investigators’. And why I must now digress once more to tell something of myself and my background. It will be dull but brief.
My given name is Karel but no one has ever managed to spell it correctly, hence the use of “Carl.” In the course of my work I’ve been called worse names. I’m forty-seven, a second-generation American, old enough to get “blooded” in Europe by almost two years of combat (most of it behind a typewriter) and lucky enough to have a trick knee left over from that war to miss out on that little “police action” in Korea. I managed to graduate from Columbia University with a B.A. in journalism in 19
48 without any distinction unless being near the bottom of my class qualifies in that respect.
My grandparents were immigrants. Pop grew up a hesitant agnostic and superstitious. Mom was a believer in people. My grandmother was a shadow figure in my life as she died of heart failure two years after Pop was born. I was closest to my grandpop, Anton, a cabinetmaker from Rumania with a penchant for telling his young grandson endless folktales in the dark of night. But always with a grain of salt included, or a few historical facts as footnotes, such as his disclosure to me that there really was a “Count Dracula,” a fifteenth-century warlord known as “the Impaler” because he used to pin his enemies to the ground with stakes for entertainment. It was said he often drank the blood of his victims at dinner, his cup a human skull. These were the fairy tales of my childhood. They led me to the movie house on Saturdays and kept me up half the night afterwards. Then I grew up and forgot all about my fairy tales when Adolph Hitler proved to the world that wholesale horror could never be safely tucked away between the covers of a work of fiction.
Out of this kind of background, plus a slight knowledge of abnormal psychology acquired along the way from college to newspapering, I developed my initial theory, to wit: we had a nut running around who had taken all that bloodsucking stuff in movies too seriously. At least (I thought then) he had taken it enough to heart to use some kind of instrument to puncture the carotid arteries of three women will somehow keeping them absolutely still and quiet. Somehow this character managed to draw off ten to twelve pints of blood from each victim and, after due consideration, I surmised that, in his twisted logic, he drank the blood. This, as you will discover later, is not such a fantastic idea as you might think. And, he was very neat. Not a trace of blood was ever found except on Bonnie, around her abrasions.
