On the morning of July 11 , there was a solar eclipse in the sky over Los Angeles. A couple of men and their children drove up to Corral Canyon Road in Malibu, north-west of the city, to watch. Turning off at an old fire road, they headed for a vantage point at the top of a steep hill. They were too horrified by what they saw lying on the ground to pay attention to the sky. The body of a woman was lying face up, 20 yards west of the dirt road, underneath a laurel sumac shrub.
Her face was obscured by maggots streaming out of her nose, mouth, eyes and ears. Her T-shirt was hiked up to her shoulders. Around her neck was a tightly knotted bra. Police identified her by her fingerprints. She was Sherri Long, a prostitute. In the pathologist's estimation, the victim had been dead for four to seven days. When detective Fred Miller at LAPD homicide heard the story of the girl murdered in Malibu, he figured the killer he'd been hunting had struck again.
The killer had struck first on the night of June 19 Twenty-year-old Shannon Exley had called her father before she went to work and told him she was trying to get her life in order. Her last customer picked her up on Seventh sometime after midnight and drove east, across the LA river to the Girl Scout Centre on Seventh and Fickett. In the vacant lot behind it, surrounded by eucalyptus trees, no one saw his car or heard her screams.
She, too, was strangled with her own bra. The pathologist's report revealed her identity and her record of arrests for prostitution. A week later, Miller saw a teletype about a dead girl found in a freight company parking lot in Hollenbeck. A homeless man foraging for firewood in the industrial zone along the LA river had found her lying on her back underneath a big rig trailer with a bra tightly knotted around her neck.
Most of her clothing was missing; a sock, T-shirt and hypodermic syringe were lying near her body. Her fingerprints and a follow-up investigation revealed she was year-old Irene Rodriguez, who had arrived in LA in April on a Greyhound bus from El Paso, Texas, where she'd been living with her common-law husband and their four children.
