He creeps up behind his victim and slowly pulls out a long knife.
Grabbing the man’s head, in one fast movement, he slashes his neck from ear to ear.
As a fountain of blood pours from the wound, the killer takes out his cup.
He’s in need of sustenance.
We didn’t mention any names there, but what you just heard was pretty much how the man
nicknamed “The Skid Row Slasher” killed his victims.
As for the cup, he drained his victims and drank their blood.
Cops sometimes found the discarded cups next to the bodies.
We’ll get around to why he did that soon.
First, some background.
Not all of you are familiar with the ins and outs of what goes down in the USA.
In case you didn’t know, Skid Row is an area in downtown Los Angeles that for decades
has been a place where the homeless live, many of whom are addicted to drugs or alcohol.
As far back as the 1930s, there were at times around 10,000 homeless folks that made Skid
Row their home.
It later became a “containment zone”, meaning the homeless were contained there,
and certain organizations helped feed the desperate or put them up in a shelter.
Today, there might be 5,000 homeless folks on Skid Row on any given day, but of course,
people leave and return all the time.
Over half the crimes in downtown LA happen on Skid Row.
Murders are rare, but assaults are common.
It’s also the kind of place a killer might think they can get away with murder, seeing
that it’s almost treated like a municipal human trashcan.
That’s why in the international bestseller “Serial Killers for Beginners”, it states
in chapter IV, “Getting Away With It”: “If you want to stay out of prison, kill
a poor person, better still, a homeless person.”
Getting away with murder is what the Skid Row Slasher had in mind when he went around
almost decapitating people, sometimes sprinkling salt over his victims before imbibing a cup
of their fresh blood.
Many decades ago, the New York Times remarked on these “strange rituals.”
The first victim was David Russell, a 64-year old man who had a history of vagrancy.
We can’t tell you much about him, other than the killer had cut his throat from ear-to-ear
and stabbed him numerous times.
He was dumped on the steps of the Los Angeles public library.
The very next day, a 67-year old retiree named Benjamin Hornberg bumped into the slasher.
His throat was also cut the entire way around and he’d been stabbed all over his body.
His was discovered in a hotel.
Police suspected the murders were connected, given that both victims were murdered in a
similar way, but for some reason, the killer just stopped.
You’ll know why soon.
Late in 1974, the slasher got very busy.
It was as if he was trying to break serial killing records.
On December 1, 1974, he killed 46-year old Charles Jackson.
Jackson was a drifter known for his propensity to drink copious amounts of booze.
What piqued the curiosity of the cops was this guy had been dumped in the exact same
place as Russell had.
That, and the fact the victim’s throat had been cut, and he’d been stabbed numerous
times.
As for why he was at the library, Jackson might have been a “hobo,” but he was also
an avid reader.
For some reason, he’d left a family in Louisiana only to end up on Skid Row, subsisting mostly
on 60 cent bottles of Santa Fe red port and whatever scraps he could dig out of trashcans.
The slasher was back but finding a criminal moving in the jungle of Skid Row wasn’t
easy.
Many of the residents there hadn’t exactly had the best experiences with police, so interviewing
folks posed a problem.
After finding Jackson, cops also wondered if they had some kind of psycho on their hands.
This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill murder.
After he’d been slain, his shoes had been taken off.
His body had then been posed, meaning moved into a certain position.
Moreover, salt had been sprinkled around the body and a cup of blood – mostly empty after
being drank – lay nearby.
While criminal profiling back then was just getting off the ground, the police consulted
psychiatrists.
They were told they were dealing with a sexual sadist who got off on manipulating the dead
body, and of course, the ritualistic blood-drinking.
Before investigators had much time to read up on vampirism, they found another body.
Again, the victim had been posed, and it seemed his blood had been drunk.
He was a 47-year old native Alaskan named Moses Yakanac.
His body was found in an alleyway just a week after Jackson had been found.
Another transient made the discovery, shouting out loud, “Murder!
Murder!
God help us!”
Yakanac was also homeless and addicted to booze.
After saving a bunch of cash working in salmon canneries, he lost it all in one night, playing
cards.
54-year-old Arthur Dahlstedt came next, within just three days of the last murder.
Like other victims, he’d been helped by the Christian Union Rescue Mission, although
the words on the mission wall, “JESUS SAVES” were perhaps lost on him at the moment of
his death.
This guy had been in and out of foster homes his entire childhood, which led him towards
the street of no return.
On Skid Row, he actually let Jesus into his life again, so it came as shocking news to
the mission when they heard he’d been found slashed to death next to the Montana Hotel
on Fifth Street.
Now people were starting to get scared.
The homeless were almost afraid to close their eyes as they settled down for the night under
a bunch of rags and boxes.
While there were often fights between folks, there wasn’t actually that much serious
crime on Skid Row.
Now the residents were being hunted by a maniac, and many of them couldn’t put up much of
a fight.
This is how Rolling Stone put it at the time: “The men of Skid Row are vulnerable…They
carry no weapons.
Their bodies are pitiful specimens; tattered clothes cover undernourished bellies, flaccid
muscles, lepidote skin, harsh scars from the batterings of the road.”
Robert Perez was one of them.
He’d gone to Skid Row knowing he could probably find a spot to sleep without being moved on
by the cops.
He got the worst welcome imaginable, being introduced to the knife of the slasher just
days after he arrived.
This happened just over a week after Dahlstedt’s body was found.
Perez’s bloodied body was discovered beside some eugenia bushes, a spot just 50 feet from
where Jackson had been discovered.
Police couldn’t say for a fact all these murders had been the work of one person, but
given the timeframe and the mode of killing, as well as the rituals, they were as certain
as certain could be that there was one slasher.
They knew a few things now, too.
The killer had to be strong.
He’d cut the men with much ferocity, and he’s obviously held them down.
This was no half-starved waif of a man.
He was likely large and domineering.
On Skid Row, that discounted about 80 percent of men.
Cops believed they were probably looking for a reject from the hippie era, some kind of
surfer dude who’d lost his marbles after one too many LSD trips.
They were thinking, 30-ish, well-built, long, unkempt hair, probably strung out on speed.
While they were in a minority on Skid Row, these types did exist there.
Everyone was now tense.
The homeless moved around with hawkish eyes, wondering if this guy or that guy might be
the killer.
They told exaggerated stories about how he first took a victim’s manhood, and then
went to work on the rest of the body.
If being homeless wasn’t already bad enough, they were now starring in their very own slasher
movie.
They still avoided the police like the plague.
Their interactions in the past had often meant jail, and jail meant sobriety, and sobriety
meant hellish delirium tremens.
Here’s how one Skid Row resident put it: “One time I seen some goings-on between
this fellow and a girl in an alley, and the police knew I seen it.
So they asked me to rat on this other fellow.
But I wouldn’t, and they took me off to jail for being a vagrant.”
They just hoped the killer would somehow stop.
He didn’t.
A couple of weeks later, he murdered 58-year old Casimir Strawinski.
This man was riding precariously on the sharp edge of life.
He was homeless, and he was dying.
He had cancer and his skin was covered with open sores.
Since he knew he’d not be able to fight, he tried his hardest like many men to find
a place to sleep indoors.
When he couldn’t stay at the Christian mission, he slept in a group with one guy standing
guard while the others slept.
Strawinski was determined not to have his throat cut.
And then it seemed his fortune took a turn for the better.
He received a check from the government which he used to get himself a room at the Pickwick
Hotel, far from the streets where the killer lurked.
On January 8, a maid walked into his room.
The place stank.
On the bed was Mr. Strawinski.
His throat had been slashed.
Just over a week later, 46-year old Robert “Tex” Shannahan was found.
He certainly wasn’t meek, and he could have put up a fight.
In another life, he’d been a paratrooper in the Korean War.
He’d also worked on a Texas oil rig and done a number of odd jobs before drifting
into the thick mist of the American nightmare.
But he had cash to spend after doing part-time work, and that he mostly spent at the popular
Jake’s Bar.
One night he was there, and he felt terribly ill.
Something wasn’t right with his stomach.
He told his friends, “If this gets any worse, I’ll have to miss the Super Bowl.”
That was going to be played on Sunday and it was something Shannahan would never miss,
never mind how sick he felt.
But he didn’t turn up at Jake’s to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers lift the trophy.
He wasn’t at Jake’s the night after or the night after that.
His buddies just presumed he’d landed one of the rag-picking gigs out of town.
Shannahan was then discovered in his room, already in a state of smelly decomposition,
his mutilated body laying close to a wall where his Confederate flag hung.
A bayonet from the war had hung on that wall.
Now it was sticking in Shannahan’s body.
Unlike the other victims, the killer had had to stab Shannahan first before getting to
work on his throat.
This was almost certainly because Shannahan was a fighter.
Just a few day’s later, 49-year old Samuel Suarez was found in a similar state in a room
at the Barclay Hotel.
You’d think at this point there would have been a huge outcry in the media and in the
public, but it was as if nothing had happened at all.
If something like this had taken place in a nice neighborhood in Hollywood Heights,
movies about it would already be in production.
No one cared much for stories about mutilated hobos.
Three murdered white guys, one black guy, two Chicanos, all down on their luck, were
about as newsworthy as a cat stuck in a tree in Orange County.
Not one person went to the cops asking why they hadn’t caught this guy yet.
Not a solitary newspaper ratcheted up the hyperbole folks were used to when so-called
respectable folks were murdered.
Then something made people take notice.
Just a week or so later, 45-year-old George Frias was found with his throat cut.
He was a different kettle of fish, holding down a full-time job as a clerk at the L.A.
Hilton Hotel.
Frias had rubbed shoulders with well-off people.
He’d walked in the hallowed hallways of the Hilton.
Now there was a connection to normal folks.
Police then put a sketch together of the man they suspected was behind all these bloody
crimes.
The picture was of a white male with long hair, about 30 years old, at least six-feet
tall and damn strong.
He was still that surfer dude.
Psychological profilers told police that this man had a lot of daddy issues.
He was a loner who’d been beaten in childhood, and it seemed he now wanted revenge on middle-aged
men - symbols of his father.
The profilers said he spent all of his time alone, except for when he “creeps out of
his hole to commit these horrible crimes.”
They added that he was a “sexually impotent coward, venting his own feeling of worthlessness
on hapless derelicts and down-and-outers.”
It was also thought he had the ability to make people feel at ease, and that’s when
he sprung with his sharpened blade.
They were basically looking for a smooth-talking Patrick Swayze in the film Point Break, which
came out years later.
The cops couldn’t have been further off the mark.
Two days after they found Frias, they discovered the body of 34-year old Clyde Hays.
Now this killer was really making a fool of the cops.
It was as if he wanted to be caught.
He also knew he was certainly no washed-up surfer.
The public was also now wagging its many tongues and talking about this ghastly killer.
That was because Hays was a white-collar worker whose comfortable life was a million miles
from the lives of Skid Row’s forsaken hobos.
He was murdered in his house in Hollywood, but the mutilations and blood fetish pointed
towards the Skid Row slasher.
It was only then that police created a “Slasher Task Force”.
The lead detective told the media, “We’re putting every available resource at our command
to solve this thing.”
Three days later, a man named William Graham thought he saw someone prowling outside his
Hollywood home.
He didn’t think much of it until a man flew into his living room and struck him with a
hatchet.
Luckily, his friend came to the rescue.
He fought with the hatchet-man, and both of them ended up going through a window.
The perpetrator ran for it but later dropped a letter addressed to himself close to where
the actor Burt Reynolds lived.
On the name of the letter was Vaughn Greenwood.
He was 31 years old.
Greenwood was taken into custody for the assault and burglary, and guess what, there were no
more murders while he was in jail.
Police looked at this guy and wondered if he could be the killer.
The thing was, he was black with short hair, a far cry from a white hulk with messy, long
hair.
This man had left school when he was just a kid.
He’d certainly had problems with adults, running away from a foster home in Pennsylvania
when he was in his early teens.
From there, he’d drifted around the US doing farm work, and ended up in California.
As for the reason of that ten-year break we mentioned at the start.
He’d robbed a 70-year-old guy named Mance Porter, slashing his throat and stabbing him.
For that, Greenwood received a hefty prison sentence for aggravated battery.
Ok, but what about the blood drinking?
What about the body posing?
What was wrong with this guy?
We’ll likely never know.
He died in a California prison in 2020.
You might have to do that if you want to understand why he did what he did, because little has
been said about his motives.
You can’t metaphorically swing a cat in the internet without hitting the killer of
the same era, Charles Manson, but the life and crimes of the Skid Row Slasher has received
about as much attention as Manson’s choice of footwear.
Some folks said Greenwood must have been part of a Satanic cult, but they were likely pulling
at too many straws.
He might have made the choice to act like Count Dracula with table manners, but as crazy
as that is, his crimes gather dust in the busy neglected basement of serial killer lore.
One of Tex’s buddies who often drank with him at Jake’s Bar later talked to Rolling
Stone.
Tex might have been a nobody to the public, but he was a good friend to people that knew
him.
His buddy said, “I do miss ole Tex.
I been thinking about going to Texas and looking up his folks–tell ’em what a hell of a
guy he was.
I guess I would like to get away from here for a while.”
Even the cops didn’t want to work on Skid Row.
To the sensitive ones, it reminded them of everything that was wrong in the USA.
One of the Skid Row Slasher detectives once lamented, “That was probably the most detested
assignment in the department.
If you work Skid Row, you’ll always remember that humanity has a depressing aspect to it.”
Now you need to watch “I Went Homeless For 72 Hours (REAL CHALLENGE).”
Or, have a look at “Hotel Where People Keep Dying.”